Filmmakers on Film: Global Perspectives 9781839024887, 1839024887

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Notes on contributors
Preface for the book Filmmakers on Film Lúcia Nagib
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A proposal for approaching Film Theory and filmmakers André Rui Graça, Eduardo Tulio Baggio and Manuela Penafria
Part I
FILMMAKERS ON FILM: SETTING THE FIELD
Chapter 1 From the concept of author to the concept of filmmaker Eduardo Tulio Baggio
Chapter 2 The invisibility of things: The role of the researcher in Filmmakers on Film approach from the perspective of Karim Aïnouz’s films and interviews Marcelo Carvalho
Chapter 3 The spectator and the filmmaking process: Reflections based on case studies André Rui Graça and Manuela Penafria
Part II
POETICS AND FILMMAKING PROCESSES
Chapter 4 The dark light of poetry: Víctor Gaviria’s poetics of childhood Liliana Galindo Orrego
Chapter 5 Music in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s feature films: An analysis of the creative process Rodrigo Carreiro and Breno Alvarenga
Chapter 6 Films on filmmaking: Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami’s auto-commentaries in Scénario du Film PASSION (1982) AND 10 ON TEN (2004) Karel Pletinck
Chapter 7 Andy Warhol’s legacy and the representation of the body in contemporary cinema Edson Pereira da Costa Júnior
Chapter 8 Madame Cinéma: Agnès Varda, or a portrait of the artist as an AGELESS WOMAN Fátima Chinita
Chapter 9 The struggles and rise of the Dalit protagonists: Cinematic REPRESENTATIONS IN THE TAMIL FILMS OF THE DIRECTOR PA. RANJITH Amutha Manavalan
Chapter 10 From photographic servitude to cinematic emancipation: The POETICS OF MAYA DEREN Amresh Sinha
Chapter 11 ESTABLISHING REALITY: MODE OF PRODUCTION AND SURREALISM in the cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan Sezen Gürüf Başekim
Part III
FILMS AND FILMMAKERS’ WRITINGS AS ACTS OF THEORY
Chapter 12 Reflecting on a public debate and its aftermath: Jiang Hao, his writings in the 1980s and his film practices in the 1990s Lingling Yao
Chapter 13 Alexander Kluge’s ‘film in the mind of the spectator’: Or after-(dialectical)-images in News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital James Hellings
Chapter 14 The multi-image: Cinematic collage as revelation and revolution Chris Gerrard
Chapter 15 Seeing through the kaleidoscope: Wim Wenders and his collaborators in Lisbon Story and Inventing Peace: A dialogue on perception Olivier Delers
Chapter 16 Chantal Akerman’s words and images: The avant-garde of theory and filmmaking André Rui Graça
Chapter 17 ‘Sculpting everyday life’ and the lake as a metaphor: Towards a documentary filmmaking history Manuela Penafria
Chapter 18 To contest the deafness of the gaze: The miseducation of the senses and the unreliable reality in Lucrecia Martel’s films Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha
Notes
Bibliographic references
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

FILMMAKERS ON FILM

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FILMMAKERS ON FILM

Global Perspectives

Edited by André Rui Graça Eduardo Tulio Baggio Manuela Penafria

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © André Rui Graça, Eduardo Tulio Baggio, Manuela Penafria, 2023 André Rui Graça, Eduardo Tulio Baggio, Manuela Penafria have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Pattadis/Adobe Stock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8390-2487-0 ePDF: 978-1-8390-2489-4 eBook: 978-1-8390-2488-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Notes on contributors viii Preface for the book Filmmakers on Filmxiii Lúcia Nagib Acknowledgementsxv Introduction1 A PROPOSAL FOR APPROACHING FILM THEORY AND FILMMAKERS 1 André Rui Graça, Eduardo Tulio Baggio and Manuela Penafria Part I FILMMAKERS ON FILM: SETTING THE FIELD Chapter 1 FROM THE CONCEPT OF AUTHOR TO THE CONCEPT OF FILMMAKER Eduardo Tulio Baggio Chapter 2 THE INVISIBILITY OF THINGS: THE ROLE OF THE RESEARCHER IN FILMMAKERS ON FILM APPROACH FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF KARIM AÏNOUZ’S FILMS AND INTERVIEWS Marcelo Carvalho Chapter 3 THE SPECTATOR AND THE FILMMAKING PROCESS: REFLECTIONS BASED ON CASE STUDIES André Rui Graça and Manuela Penafria

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Part II POETICS AND FILMMAKING PROCESSES Chapter 4 THE DARK LIGHT OF POETRY: VÍCTOR GAVIRIA’S POETICS OF CHILDHOOD Liliana Galindo Orrego Chapter 5 MUSIC IN KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO’S FEATURE FILMS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS Rodrigo Carreiro and Breno Alvarenga

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Chapter 6 FILMS ON FILMMAKING: JEAN-LUC GODARD AND ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S AUTO-COMMENTARIES IN SCÉNARIO DU FILM PASSION (1982) AND 10 ON TEN (2004) Karel Pletinck Chapter 7 ANDY WARHOL’S LEGACY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA Edson Pereira da Costa Júnior Chapter 8 MADAME CINÉMA: AGNÈS VARDA, OR A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN AGELESS WOMAN Fátima Chinita Chapter 9 THE STRUGGLES AND RISE OF THE DALIT PROTAGONISTS: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS IN THE TAMIL FILMS OF THE DIRECTOR PA. RANJITH Amutha Manavalan Chapter 10 FROM PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVITUDE TO CINEMATIC EMANCIPATION: THE POETICS OF MAYA DEREN Amresh Sinha Chapter 11 ESTABLISHING REALITY: MODE OF PRODUCTION AND SURREALISM IN THE CINEMA OF NURI BILGE CEYLAN Sezen Gürüf Başekim

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Part III FILMS AND FILMMAKERS’ WRITINGS AS ACTS OF THEORY Chapter 12 REFLECTING ON A PUBLIC DEBATE AND ITS AFTERMATH: JIANG HAO, HIS WRITINGS IN THE 1980S AND HIS FILM PRACTICES IN THE 1990S Lingling Yao Chapter 13 ALEXANDER KLUGE’S ‘FILM IN THE MIND OF THE SPECTATOR’: OR AFTER-(DIALECTICAL)-IMAGES IN NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY: MARX – EISENSTEIN – CAPITAL

James Hellings

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Chapter 14 THE MULTI-IMAGE: CINEMATIC COLLAGE AS REVELATION AND REVOLUTION Chris Gerrard Chapter 15 SEEING THROUGH THE KALEIDOSCOPE: WIM WENDERS AND HIS COLLABORATORS IN LISBON STORY AND INVENTING PEACE: A DIALOGUE ON PERCEPTION

Olivier Delers

Chapter 16 CHANTAL AKERMAN’S WORDS AND IMAGES: THE AVANT-GARDE OF THEORY AND FILMMAKING André Rui Graça Chapter 17 ‘SCULPTING EVERYDAY LIFE’ AND THE LAKE AS A METAPHOR: TOWARDS A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING HISTORY Manuela Penafria Chapter 18 TO CONTEST THE DEAFNESS OF THE GAZE: THE MISEDUCATION OF THE SENSES AND THE UNRELIABLE REALITY IN LUCRECIA MARTEL’S FILMS Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha

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Notes196 Bibliographic references 226 Filmography243 Index246

CONTRIBUTORS The Editors André Rui Graça is a lecturer and researcher at Lusófona University, Portugal. He holds a PhD in Film Studies from University College London and is the author of Portuguese Cinema (1960–2010): Consumption, Circulation and Commerce (Boydell and Brewer, 2021). André Graça has presented his work internationally and has published frequently, in both academic and extra-academic contexts, about Portuguese cinema, cultural policies, the relationship between creative industries and economics, and film theory. In 2016 and 2017, he co-edited, along with Manuela Penafria, Eduardo Baggio and Denize Araújo, three books on the Filmmakers on Film theoretical approach. He has presented his work in various points of the world (New York University, Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, Oxford University; UNICAMP, New University of Lisbon, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, among others) and published in peer-reviewed journals. He has also co-edited a special issue of Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication (2022) and Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image (2020). André Rui Graça also holds an MBA and works as a management and strategy consultant. Eduardo Tulio Baggio is a professor of the undergraduate in Cinema and Audiovisual and of the master in Cinema and Video Arts, both at Paraná State University. He has a doctorate in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP. He is a member of the group ‘Filmmakers on film’ of the SOCINE-Brazilian Society of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies and the AIM-Portuguese Association of the Moving Image Researchers. He is one of the organizers of the books Teoria dos Cineastas, Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. In 2022 he published the book Documentário: filmes para salas de cinema com janelas. He also is a documentary filmmaker, and his films include The Soul of Motion (2020) and João & Maria (2016). Along with André Rui Graça and Manuela Penafria he has been working on Filmmakers on Film approach since 2015. Manuela Penafria is Associate Professor at the University of Beira Interior (UBI, Portugal) where she teaches BA and MA students in Cinema. She is member of the editorial board of scientific journals in Portugal and Brazil, as well as member of the scientific committees of various events. Also, she is member of the Advisory Board of AIM-Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers, where she is one of the coordinating members of the Work Group Filmmakers on Film. She wrote two pedagogical dossiers for the Portuguese National Cinema Plan and

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collaborated in film literacy activities in a Middle school. She is co-editor of the journal DOC On-line, dedicated to documentary cinema. She, along with André Rui Graça and Eduardo Tulio Baggio, has been working on Filmmakers on Film approach since 2015.

The Contributors Amresh Sinha teaches film at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. He has taught Film and Media Studies in various institutions, including New York University, The New School, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, etc. He is the co-editor of the anthology, Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Films (2011), published by Wallflower/Columbia University Press. His publications are in Cinema e Outras Artes IV, BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of RE:SOUND 2019, Film and Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, Review of Education/ Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Films, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory, etc. Amutha Manavalan is senior Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communications and Media Studies, St. Joseph’s University. She is presently juggling between being Coordinator of the BA Visual Communication programme for undergraduates at the Institute along with teaching Key Concepts in Political Thoughts, Critical Thinking, Media Laws and Storytelling besides being a regular speaker at various academic forums. Her other interests are cinema, travelling, advertising, education, art and décor. Breno Alvarenga is a PhD student in the field of Film Studies at Fluminense Federal University (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and has a Master Degree in Social Communication at Pernambuco Federal University (Recife, Brazil). His research interests include script and sound studies. Currently, he is investigating the relationship between sound and memory in queer autobiographical films. Chris Gerrard is a video artist and film historian, focusing on how experimental aesthetics can facilitate knowledge exchange and political change. His practical work focuses on collage, archival footage and cinema history, and has been shown at galleries worldwide. Recently, he established the Digital Media Arts course at the University for the Creative Arts, Institute for Creativity and Innovation in Xiamen, China. Edson Costa Júnior is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Campinas State University, Arts Institute, with a grant from FAPESP (21/02448-5). He has a doctorate in Media and Audiovisual Processes from the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo (USP), with funding from FAPESP, and was a visiting student researcher at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. He

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completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Fine Arts at USP with a grant from the National Postdoctoral Program/CAPES. His research focuses on body, world cinemas and film aesthetics. He has published essays in Comparative Cinema and several Brazilian journals. Fátima Chinita holds a PhD in Artistic Studies (specializing in Cinema), an MA in Communication Sciences, and two BA’s, respectively in Portuguese and Anglo-Saxon Literature / Language, and Cinema (Editing). She is the equivalent of an Associate Professor at the Theatre and Film School of the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon and a senior researcher at ICNOVA in Lisbon, both in Portugal. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Linnaeus University, in Sweden, and LabCom – Communication and Arts, in Portugal, where she conducted research on Intermediality and Multimodality. She has already published two articles on Agnès Varda, in the UK and Germany, and guest-edited a special issue of the journal Ekphrasis-Images, Cinema, Theory, Media on the subject of ‘The Essay Film as Self-representational Mode’ (2021). James Hellings is Lecturer in Art at Reading School of Art, University of Reading. James has research interests in Marxian-inflected histories and theories of modern and contemporary art, focusing on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière. James’ first monograph, Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, and reviewed in Art Monthly. James’ forthcoming second monograph, Adorno and Film: Thinking in Images, is under contract with Bloomsbury. James’ book explores contemporary artists’ film and moving image work in relation to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, together with more recent writings on film and the image. Karel Pletinck studied philosophy and theatre, film and literature studies at the University of Antwerp, Freie Universität Berlin and Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is currently finalizing a PhD thesis concerning the legacy of revelationist aesthetics in post-war modernism in film at the Research Centre for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp). His focus is on the persistence of Romantic aesthetics, mediated by literary praxes such as Symbolism and Surrealism, and French literary criticism, in film aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century. Liliana Galindo Orrego holds a PhD in Modern Languages and Literatures from Johns Hopkins University. She holds an MA in Literature from the National University of Colombia. Her areas of interest are late-twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Latin American poetry and cinema, as well as the intersection between art, history and philosophy during this period. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on contemporary Colombian poetry and cinema, with special attention to the works of José Manuel Arango and Víctor Gaviria. She has recently published an article on Alejo Carpentier, and an article on Lucrecia Martel’s Zama will be published in 2023.

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Lingling Yao teaches in the School of Foreign Studies at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing, China. She received her doctoral degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Her research interests focus on Chinese visual culture, gender and women’s studies. She has published in Chinese and English on contemporary Chinese women’s cultural production in journals such as Frontiers of Literary Theory and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Marcelo Carvalho is Vice Coordinator and Associate Professor of the Postgraduate Program in Communication and Languages at the Tuiuti University of Paraná (PPGCOM/UTP). He is the leader of the Research Group Desdobramentos Simbólicos do Espaço Urbano nas Narrativas Audiovisuais (Grudes, PPGCOM/ UTP). He has PhD and Master’s degree from the Postgraduate Program in Communication and Culture of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGCOM-UFRJ). Carvalho is the specialist in Art and Philosophy from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He graduated in Social Communication (in Cinema and Journalism) from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). He is co-director and co-writer of the medium-length film Chão de Estrelas. Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha is a film researcher and programmer specializing in Latin American cinema. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Campinas State University and was Visiting Fellow at the KU Leuven, Comenius University in Bratislava and the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. She is the author of Espaços em Conflito. Ensaios sobre a Cidade no Cinema Argentino Contemporâneo (2019) and A Experiência do Cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Resíduos do Tempo e Sons à Beira da Piscina (2014. Translation into Spanish: 2020), and co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel (2022). She currently works as a project manager at the Cultural Section of the Embassy of Brazil in London. Olivier Delers is Professor of French at the University of Richmond (USA). He co-edited Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter (Bloomsbury, 2021) and is the author of several essays on Wenders, two among them include ‘European Utopias and Heterotopias in Wim Wenders’ Pina’ and ‘Voyages aux péritextes de la peinture et du cinéma avec Edward Hopper et Wim Wenders’. Rodrigo Carreiro is Full Professor at the Post-Graduate Program in Social Communication at Pernambuco Federal University (Recife, Brazil). He has a research grant from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, and has been a visiting lecturer at Fluminense Federal University (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). His research interests include sound studies, stylistics and popular film genres, having published more than forty essays and five books, mainly on film sound studies, horror and mystery films, film stylistics and spaghetti western.

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Sezen Gürüf Başekim graduated in 2001 from Hacettepe University, Department of Educational Sciences. Between 2002 and 2003, she took language and film courses in London. In 2008, she was awarded a master’s degree from Gazi University with a dissertation entitled Subjectivity in Contemporary Cinema about the formation of subjectivity in Hollywood films made in the 2000s. In 2015, Başekim was awarded her PhD from Gazi University with the thesis Nostalgia in Turkish Cinema (2000– 2011), in which she investigates nostalgia in popular films from a historical and social standpoint, and also how nostalgia works as an ideology in film. Since then, she has been an assistant professor at Kastamonu University, where she teaches courses on film theory, the history of Turkish cinema, scriptwriting, and film and video production.

PREFACE FOR THE BOOK FILMMAKERS ON FILM Lúcia Nagib

Filmmakers on Film asks a difficult but crucial question: who or, more precisely, what is the filmmaker? Is it the god-like (male) figure whose signature is imprinted on every aspect of a film, regardless of the number of collaborators involved? Is it the renowned director offering platitudes to the hungry press at film festivals? Or is it the technical team whose practical decisions and savoir faire do not usually count as serious theorizing? The answer is all and none of the above. In fact, this book’s great contribution is to shift the focus from single individuals to the thought entrenched in the act of filmmaking, whoever the directors or authors may be. So many of us are used to thinking of filmmakers post-film, that is, once the complete work has been distributed and showcased through various outlets, and the starring crew and cast offer anecdotes of their experience to both attract the audiences and distract them from the unglamorous labour behind it. Thus we tend to forget that the hard and elaborate thinking behind a film starts much earlier, in the months or more often years in which the various departments – scriptwriting, art design, cinematography, lighting, sound design, acting, editing, colour grading, mixing and of course directing  – remain in frantic conversation through a plethora of activities and documents, including letters, scripts, auditions, interviews, drawings, spreadsheets, storyboards, all of which are a source of theory, if looked at through the specialist lens this book is now offering us. Film theory in recent times has evolved in various and exciting directions. ‘Film-philosophy’ is nowadays spelt with a hyphen to signify the way film creates new theories, as well as being their object. Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Noël Carrol, Vivien Sobchak, Slavoj Žižek and Steven Shaviro are just a few of the recent philosophers who drew on cinema to revolutionize their discipline. The genres of video essay, videographic criticism and essay film are sheer theory in the form of images and sounds. As well as evidencing the intricate web of ideas embedded in each image and sound, seeing film ‘as’ theory serves to demythologize the latter, turning it into the impure form Bazin had championed, in his vision of cinema as a hybrid of theatre and literature for the masses. Intermedial studies have done a great favour to cinema by exposing its mixed fabric, which includes literature and associated theory. It is no surprise that this book frequently borders on intermediality, for example, by responding to Colombian filmmaker Víctor Gaviria’s poetic impulses, or identifying Brazilian

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Kléber Mendonça Filho’s ‘melomania’, that is, his personal music choices in his films. Few would doubt that Godard’s films are as much theory as cinema, not least for their constant literary allusions and the director’s taste for writing before, during and after making them; in this book, he attends in the company of Kiarostami whose multimedia reflexivity went as far as changing cinema into animated painting in his posthumous 24 Frames (2017). In fact filmmakers across history and geography have been attempting to propose theories for their films and those of others. Eisenstein and his comrades in the former Soviet Union formulated the montage theory, a formalist way of thinking film that resorted to the structure of poetry, music, theatre and other arts. Decades later, the early critics (and future cinéastes) of the Cahiers du Cinéma created a ‘politique des auteurs’ which went on to become the most influential theory of authorship in film history. No wonder the first chapter of this book is devoted to the concept of cinematic authorship through a historical flashback, and it is Eisenstein’s unfinished project to film Marx’s The Capital that inspires the chapter on the related work of German philosopher-cum-filmmaker Alexander Kluge. As much as films, any films, are archives of other films, filmmakers’ prototexts are an endless source of theoretical gemstones for expert excavation. Turkish Nuri Bilge Ceylan and German Wim Wenders are heirs of a long-standing lineage of filmmaking writers and philosophers of the likes of Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Bergman and Bresson, and are thus duly represented in this book. But we should not underestimate the role of women in expanding and democratizing both the concept of ‘filmmaker’ and the filmmaking activity as a theoretical act, first and foremost with the intervention of Laura Mulvey who, with the help of psychoanalysis, deconstructed the ideology inherent in the visual pleasures provided by dominant American cinema. Riddles of the Sphinx, directed by her and Peter Wollen in 1977, is perhaps the most eloquent example of filmmaking as theory. Women are in fact a prominent presence in this volume, including Agnès Varda, Maya Deren and, of course, Chantal Akerman, whose Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) has been crowned by the 2022 Sight & Sound poll as the greatest film of all times, which is the very first time a woman, and a resolute feminist at that, has achieved such a recognition. Though marked by a strong Portuguese-Brazilian cinephilic alliance, supported by the Association of the Moving Image Researchers (AIM) in Portugal, and the Brazilian Society of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies (SOCINE), this collection stands out for its truly global breadth, bringing together and celebrating the thought of filmmakers from India to Turkey, from Germany to China, from paper to screen and back into a substantial book – an admirable feat, and an indispensable read for film experts and lovers alike.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the LabCom-Communication and Arts Research Center at the University of Beira Interior (UBI, Portugal) that has been supporting many activities related to the Filmmakers on Film approach. Special thanks are due to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury who first encouraged the call for chapters for this book. We would also like to thank Professor Lee Grieveson for all his support. We are truly grateful to all the authors that have been working under Filmmakers on Film approach at AIM-Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers, at SOCINE-Brazilian Society for Film and Audiovisual Studies and to the cinema researchers from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain. Also to all the authors in this book that believed in our proposal and worked patiently with us we give them a warm thank you. We are most grateful to Rebecca Barden and Veidehi Hans at Bloomsbury/BFI for believing and supporting this book.

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Introduction A P R O P O S A L F O R A P P R OAC H I N G F I L M T H E O RY AND FILMMAKERS

André Rui Graça, Eduardo Tulio Baggio and Manuela Penafria

Filmmakers’ reflection about their own films or about cinema has been a constant in the history of the cinematographic art. Yet, filmmakers have been either sidelined in critical discussions on film or have had little relevance within Film Theory and, therefore, in film analysis  – fields that have leaned towards theoretical hooks derived from other areas. Psychoanalysis, cognitive theory or other constructions borrowed from Social Sciences have been the inspirations that exerted greater influence in Film Theory and thus the mindsets that defined its development and history. To a great extent, Film Theory sees cinema through the prisms of, at least, one of these areas. The Filmmakers on Film approach intends to bring to the fore a proposal that complements the current trends in Film Theory  – a theoretical exercise that relocates the place of the filmmaker in the discussion. Right from the outset, it should be underscored that the concept of filmmaker, in our view, applies to anyone involved in the creative process of filmmaking (such as producers, editors, sound designers, among others), and not just directors. The Filmmakers on Film approach, that this book will showcase in many ways, shapes and forms, balances existing academic references with books, articles, interviews or any written texts by the filmmakers themselves – such as manifestos, statements, letters, among others. These writings that may include surprising texts  – such as letters that a director sent to their editor or the plans for a film that never got complete – according to the Filmmakers on Film approach are the primordial sources to develop and expand Film Theory. Our goal with this book and this approach is to highlight and to frame filmmakers’ thoughts and poetics. However, these proposals should not be mistaken by a mere set of analyses of filmmakers’ interviews and writings. The main purpose is to present and operationalize a systematic approach for Film Theory and refresh it. Therefore, in the perspective brought about by this book, direct sources are fundamental and key to understand and think the sound and the moving image, as well as the broader screen culture realm. Texts written by the filmmakers’ own hand or interviews are of course important items to consider,

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but there are other elements that speak volumes and ought to be explored. Films, essays (in any format), planifications, drafts, screenplay, edit notes, among other possibilities, all fall into the category of potential sources. By the same token, the approach proposed is fitting not only to address questions related to Film Theory, but also to tackle other situations that had previously been overlooked, such as unfinished films. This approach originally stems from the book Les Théories des Cinéastes (2002), and the article ‘Un Film Peut-Il Être un Acte de Théorie?’ (2008),1 both by Jacques Aumont, who called attention to the richness of the filmmakers’ insights concerning cinema. Aumont pointed out that some filmmakers have really developed a theory. Our stance on this matter is more nuanced, though. We encourage researchers to consider filmmakers as a source of both information and inspiration, and, under the designation of the Filmmakers on Film approach, bring filmmakers’ thought and poetics to the fore, in a reasoning that flows through and within Film Theory. Filmmakers on Film is a designation based on the premise that filmmakers have been quite keen on dedicating a lot of effort to understanding their art. Though this endeavour may not be, in some cases, a fully formed theory, it surely is a valuable and necessary way of thinking and understanding cinema. That is why it should be clearly integrated in Film Theory, as a way to promote reciprocity (as in a pendular movement) between it and the filmmakers. Indeed, the Filmmakers on Film proposal fills the gap between an approach that claims the death of the author and the auteur theory. The chapters gathered in this book are the result of a call for papers. The outcome should be seen as a project meant to bring a renewed breadth to the understanding of cinema – a project in which the researcher is invited to discuss cinema and propose new concepts or insights as a result of a close reading of the filmmakers’ writings. Although this may not be a completely new approach, its newness consists in being a systematic approach that shortens the distance between a kind of film theory that neglects filmmakers’ thought and poetics and one interested in the filmmakers’ intentionality (even though pursuing questions centrally related to intentionality of filmmakers is not our aim). Working with the Filmmakers on Film approach opens pathways to address and elaborate on Film Theory, goes along with some disperse recent research in which filmmakers are closely heard – such as in the book edited by Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson, Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood (2017) – and provides a good use to an increasing number of books that collect interviews of various filmmakers or books signed by the filmmakers. For instance, ‘Conversations with Filmmakers Series’ by the University Press of Mississippi gathers ‘interviews with the world’s most celebrated filmmakers’. This is a series that started in 1998 with two books: Quentin Tarantino Interviews edited by Gerald Peary, and Jean-Luc Godard Interviews edited by David Sterritt. ‘A Critical Cinema – Interviews with Independent Filmmakers Series’ by the University of California Press has been publishing interviews edited by Scott MacDonald, since 1988. The latest book from this series is A Critical Cinema 5  – Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, from 2006. Also, the Last Interview Series by Penguin

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Random House divulges the very last interviews with famous and iconic persons in the show business, television and major literary authors. Outside the series there are also a number of publications with interviews that have the potential to be integrated by Film Theory, such as Conversation avec Manoel de Oliveira (Conversations with Manoel de Oliveira) edited by Jacques Parsi and Antoine de Baecque, 1996, that is the transcription of a conversation with one of the most acclaimed Portuguese filmmakers, Manoel de Oliveira. These are, perhaps, the most visible collections. In this book’s chapters, the readers will come across several other books and where they may find interviews. Last but certainly not least, books written by filmmakers themselves are of major importance to this approach. Here we find a spring of literature as well, with gems that go from a well-known book such as Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses his Art (1985) to Patricio Guzmán’s relatively discreet Filmar lo que no se Ve: Una Manera de Hacer Documentales, Métodos Artículos, Reseñas (Filming What Cannot be Seen: A Way of Shooting Documentaries, Methods, Articles and Notes), from 2013. We would like to emphasize, for the sake of context, that the Filmmakers on Film approach has been in active development in the Portuguese-speaking sphere for a while now. We have been working together on this approach since 2015, discussing its field of action and promoting its strengths. In addition to articles in scientific journals three books that we consider milestones for the collective development of this approach were published, in open access, by LabCom Books: Vol. 1: Ver, Ouvir e Ler os Cineastas (Seeing, Listening and Reading the Filmmakers), 2016; Vol. 2: Propostas para a Teoria do Cinema (Proposals for Film Theory), 2016; and Vol. 3 Revisitar a Teoria do Cinema (Revisiting Film Theory), 2017.2 Chapters from these books expose quite abundantly the possibilities for researching under the Filmmakers on Film approach. Chapters include: the creative processes of many filmmakers; the crossing and comparing of the creative processes between two filmmakers; a return to classical and canonical filmmakers such as Pasolini and Dreyer, through a renewed interest in their written reflections and interviews, from which it is possible to bring new light for the reinterpretation of their films. Also, the books included unavoidable names such as Agnès Varda and Eisenstein. Filmmakers such as these have deserved the attention of academia and cinephile circuits for decades and it has become increasingly difficult to find new angles to tackle them and their works. Filmmakers on Film may be that new angle that puts academia closer to the understanding of techniques and procedures, as well as cinema concepts coming from actors, editors, cinematographers, etc. In addition, contemporary and young filmmakers, such as art directors, are the object of attention, especially when it comes to their conceptions about film. Indeed, we propose to focus on sometimes overlooked roles in the cinematic creative processes. Thus, more attention to these functions may come as a consequence, which, in turn, will provide more material and promote further enquiries. Film restoration was also a topic raised in the three books. It is another example of a field within film studies that proved to be pertinent for the Filmmakers on Film approach, thereby expanding its frontiers a bit further. By the same token,

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the ways in which filmmakers influence each other, along with conceptions and ways of tackling significant issues for Film Theory – such as the eternal binomial art/industry or long -time discussed concepts as truth or reality – were issues also explored. Interestingly, feminist theory proved to be fruitful through the prism of the Filmmakers on Film approach. Addressing and coming closer to women filmmakers proved to be an alternative to the borrowing of stances and notions from Marxism, psychoanalysis or critical theory. Finally, a good example of the operationalization of the Filmmakers on Film approach is an essay written during the ‘Filmmakers on film’ course, part of the syllabus of the MA in Cinema at the University of Beira Interior (UBI). The well-known expression ‘mise-en-scène’ was provided with a conceptual update: ‘mise-en-regard’. This new expression came up after a long period of reading and discussing the interviews of French director Céline Sciamma. Later on his MA dissertation at UBI, in 2021, Daniel Oliveira applied this alternative expression to the analysis of films from Céline Sciamma, Andrew Haigh and Dee Rees.3 As a field with potential to expand, the Filmmakers on Film has been a work in progress in various fora, involving several people. In addition to the publication of books and articles in periodicals, it has received strong support and adherence from Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish academics, having achieved a relatively stable recognition as a suitable and refreshing approach to study cinema. Since 2015 there is a working group dedicated to this Film Theory proposal at AIMPortuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Likewise, SOCINE, the Brazilian Society for Film and Audiovisual Studies, also had a working group devoted to the development of the Filmmakers on Film approach that ran from 2016 to 2022. Finally, since 2020, the University of Beira Interior has been organizing symposia, along with Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain) in which academics and filmmakers are invited to participate and discuss the filmmakers’ creative processes. Despite its advantages and methods, the Filmmakers on Film approach does come with its difficulties. We consider that the main obstacles lie in the alluring effect that the filmmakers’ discourse may produce in some researchers that do not keep the necessary distance to maintain clear perspective – a trap that may potentially lead to a positivist reception and interpretation of the sources. To complicate things, there is a common misunderstanding: the straightforward assumption that filmmakers do inherently have a theory. They may or may not have it. Should this question arise, the researcher should firstly (and separately) present a well-grounded definition for ‘theory’. Then, they should verify if any given filmmaker effectively has one. In any case, if a filmmaker has a theory, the more obvious place to find it would be in their films (the primordial medium of expression), not in written or spoken words. In line with what we have stated so far, our main question is that Film Theory may benefit from the input of filmmakers, whether they have a concrete, systematic theory or not. Having established that we seek to promote Film Theory, what kind of Film Theory would then this be? On the one hand, if working with the Filmmakers on Film approach has as its main goal the production of Film

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Theory based on the above-mentioned premises, then an old ontological question arises: ‘what is cinema?’ It is our belief that the pursuit of answers to this openended question is still worthwhile. On the other hand, can we consider that the researchers’ outputs are a palimpsest – in that they appropriate part of an alreadyexisting discourse and proceed to an overwriting, or rewriting of the ‘theory’ of a filmmaker? Boundaries, and thus answers, to that question (and others) are yet to be defined and discussed. Regardless of that, rather than an overlap, the goal is complementarity and the ability to connect the dots left sparse in the filmmakers’ notes in order to propose new logical and coherent readings and understandings about films or subjects. This book is, we hope, one more step for this theoretical proposition. Being a curated collection of texts that expand the field of Film Theory, this book under the designation of Filmmakers on Film is a systematic approach that considers the filmmakers’ thoughts and poetics as primary sources to discuss cinema. For this book, the editors included a range of texts that reflect eclecticism, stressing possibilities for further research in different contexts. Each chapter brings forward a filmmaker that authors engage with. This book has a wide scope, with authors from various countries and continents – United States, UK, India, China, Portugal, Brazil, Belgium (among others) – a fact that reflects the broad and global reach of this approach. Also, the chapters address a wide range of both canonical and less known filmmakers. The filmmakers included within the scope of this book are from non-English-speaking as well as from English-speaking countries. Indeed, the adjective ‘global’ in the title of this book stands for more than one meaning: not just the provenance of the authors of this book or the filmmakers addressed. First, we truly believe that the approach in this book can be applied to almost any kind of filmmaking and/or filmmakers. Second, ‘global’ also encapsulates our wish for a more comprehensive and holistic Film Theory. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 entitled ‘Filmmakers on Film: Setting the Field’ brings forward chapters that address three core aspects for this approach: the importance of the use of the noun ‘filmmaker’, the relationship between filmmaker and the researcher and, finally, the importance of the spectator not only as a receptor but also as part of the filmmaking process. Eduardo Tulio Baggio in the first chapter entitled ‘From the Concept of Author to the Concept of Filmmaker’ covers the question of the distance between ‘auteur theory’ and Filmmakers on Film approach that brings forward the concept of the ‘filmmaker’. In Chapter 2, Marcelo Carvalho’s ‘The Invisibility of Things: The Role of the Researcher in Filmmakers on Film Approach from the Perspective of Karim Aïnouz’s Films and Interviews’ shares his own experience seeking to do scientific research, and dealing with a one of the most relevant contemporary Brazilian filmmakers. To close Part 1, Chapter 3 ‘The Spectator and the Filmmaking Process: Reflections based on Case Studies’ written by André Rui Graça and Manuela

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Penafria discusses the figure of the spectator as seen through the eyes of different filmmakers and confronts that view with the ‘institutional’ conception of the spectator. Filmmakers on Film incites a reflection that is strongly rooted in the filmmaking creative process. So Part 2 unites a series of chapters that deal with ‘Poetics and Filmmaking Processes’ to focus on the cinematographic praxis. As Liliana Galindo Orrego puts it: ‘A poetics is both what a filmmaker considers to be his or her art and the making of it.’ So in Chapter 4 ‘The Dark Light of Poetry: Víctor Gaviria’s Poetics of Childhood’, Liliana Galindo Orrego grasps the concept of voluntad realista (will towards realism) by Colombian filmmaker Víctor Gaviria and carries out a close reading of it along with an interpretation of how children perceive and imagine their world from four of his shorts on childhood. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Music in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Feature Films: An Analysis of the Creative Process’ by Rodrigo Carreiro and Breno Alvarenga, deals with the contemporary Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho and focuses on the musical score and soundtrack of his films. ‘Films on Filmmaking: Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami’s Autocommentaires in Scénario du Film Passion (1982) and 10 on Ten (2004)’ by Karel Pletinck, is Chapter 6 that puts the reader in full contact with the commentaries by Godard and Kiarostami about their own artwork. This piece of writing is followed by Edson Pereira da Costa Júnior’s Chapter 7 ‘Andy Warhol’s Legacy and the Representation of the Body in Contemporary Cinema’. This chapter discusses the way the North American James Benning, the Portuguese Pedro Costa and the Spanish Albert Serra, despite their different ethical and aesthetic programmes, retake and reformulate precepts from Andy Warhol’s sixties cinema. Fátima Chinita writes Chapter 8, ‘Madame Cinéma: Agnès Varda, or a Portrait of the Artist as an Ageless Woman’, engages with Varda’s ‘selfcinewriting process’ and provides an original and different take on yet another canonical filmmaker. Chapter 9, ‘The Struggles and Rise of the Dalit Protagonists: Cinematic Representations in the Tamil Films of the Director Pa. Ranjith’, by Amutha Manavalan, provides a critical overview of Indian director Pa. Ranjith whose onscreen representations are a new identification which stands apart from their usual stereotypical representations in society of the Dalit caste. Amresh Sinha, in Chapter 10, entitled ‘From Photographic Servitude to Cinematic Emancipation: The Poetics of Maya Deren’ addresses a canonical North American filmmaker to critically examine her famous article ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’ in relation to her most well-known film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). To close Part 2 Chapter 11, written by Sezen Gürüf Başekim and entitled ‘Establishing Reality: Mode of Production and Surrealism in the Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, is a close reading of the filmmaker’s scriptwriting, directing and editing processes.

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Part 3, ‘Films and Filmmakers Writings as Acts of Theory’, derives its inspiration from the text by Jacques Aumont (‘Un film peut-il être un acte de théorie?’). In this part we have gathered chapters that propose to discuss concepts – having the filmmaker and films as inspiration – and thus take steps towards the possibility of contributing to the deepening of Film Theory. Chapter 12, entitled ‘Reflecting on a Public Debate and Its Aftermath: Jiang Hao, His Writings in the 1980s and His Film Practices in the 1990s’, by Lingling Yao takes a deep look into the consequences of the evolution of Jiang Hao’s cinema conception and film practice. In Chapter 13 ‘Alexander Kluge’s “Film in the Mind of the Spectator” or After(dialectical)-images in News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx  – Eisenstein  – Capital’, James Hellings positions the German Alexander Kluge’s film images as after-images, which is to claim that they are best encountered as poetic/political images operating between Adorno’s conceptualization of after-images and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images. Chris Gerrard’s Chapter 14, ‘The Multi-image: Cinematic Collage as Revelation and Revolution’, discusses the expression ‘multi-image’  – a category of film technique which includes split-screen, superimposition and collage – to argue that the expression is not only a tool to represent and deconstruct the world, but also an ongoing experimentation in film practice and also a relevant expression for Film Theory. In Chapter 15 ‘Seeing through the Kaleidoscope: Wim Wenders and His Collaborators in Lisbon Story and Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception’, Olivier Delers follows Wenders allowing his creative vision exposed in his films to be in dialogue with the book written in conversation with the philosopher Mary Zournazi, Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception (2013). ‘Chantal Akerman’s Words and Images: The Avant-garde of Theory and Filmmaking’ is Chapter 16 by André Rui Graça which brings to the fore how the Belgian filmmaker, through her practice and reflections, redesigned paradigms and left a deep mark in both Film Theory and cinephilia. In Chapter 17, ‘“Sculpting Everyday Life” and the Lake as a Metaphor: Towards a Documentary Filmmaking History’, Manuela Penafria intakes the expression ‘sculpting everyday life’ by the Portuguese-French filmmaker Mariana Otero and the metaphor concerning documentary filmmakers’ ways of addressing reality proposed by the Brazilian Cao Guimarães to discuss a vision for the historical evolution of documentary filmmaking. To close the book, Chapter 18, ‘To Contest the Deafness of the Gaze: The Miseducation of the Senses and the Unreliable Reality in Lucrecia Martel’s Films’ by Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, underlines the idiosyncrasies of Martel’s cinema and how they mirror the mind of their creative director. Film Theory has proven to be a rich and multifaceted field of study, offering insights into the ways in which films communicate. Scholars have grappled with questions of meaning, representation and the role of film in society, and the field has continued to evolve and expand as new technologies and cultural contexts

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have emerged. Whether examining the formal elements of a film or delving into its cultural and historical context, Film Theory offers a diverse and illuminating array of approaches for understanding and interpreting the medium. As we move forward, it is certain that it will continue to be a vital and dynamic area of study. This book aims to provide a unique perspective on Film Theory by exploring the thoughts and poetics of filmmakers themselves. These chapters will delve into artistic vision and intent, in order to provide a deeper understanding of the creative process and the ways in which films and filmmakers shape our understanding of the world. As we continue to explore the world of film, we believe that the insights and perspectives of filmmakers should be regarded as an essential part of the conversation, helping us to better understand and appreciate the art of cinema. Thus, this book on Film Theory based on the thoughts and poetics of filmmakers can be an excellent guide for all those who want to look at filmmaking from a different angle and, in so doing, reach new depths and expand horizons.

Part I FILMMAKERS ON FILM: S ETTING THE F IELD

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Chapter 1 F R OM T H E C O N C E P T O F AU T HO R T O THE CONCEPT OF FILMMAKER Eduardo Tulio Baggio

The concept of author and the consequent idea of authorship have enormous relevance in cinema studies and other fields, especially as one of the paradigms of modern art. The purpose of this chapter is to resume the discussion about the concept of author in cinema through a historical approach that allows the perception of the differences and changes it has gone through, as well as to emphasize its natural link with the idea of authorship. Such approach is divided into three parts: the first focuses on the authorial thought that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century from the propositions of filmmakers and critics, thus emphasizing the origin of such thought in filmmakers’ circles; the second part points out the ideas arising from cinema criticism that became known as politique des auteurs; the third deals with the Author Theory and its crisis. Then, in a fourth part, a different conceptual proposal is presented, which deals with the concept of the filmmaker and its relationship with the creative process. The aim is to return to a line that goes through the concept of author, the idea of authorship and a certain contextual disconnection that surrounds them; and, in an analogous perspective, though emphasizing the differences, to propose a line that connects the concept of filmmaker and the creative process, highlighting the importance of the contextual connection for these.

The concept of author before the politique des auteurs In 1948, Alexandre Astruc published his famous article The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo, in which he stated: ‘The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.’1 The approximation of the act of creation in cinema with the act of creation in literature aimed not only to reinforce a kind of artistic legitimation of cinema, but mainly to narrow the role of a central artist in the field of cinema, as it was already recognized in literature and in other art forms. This text became a landmark and will be taken up again in the section that specifically concerns the politique des auteurs.

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However, despite becoming a landmark, Astruc’s authorial affirmation was not novel, not even in the field of cinema, a late artistic language compared to others. The question of authorship had already been posed before by some art critics and, notably, by some filmmakers who also thought and wrote about cinema. Germaine Dulac was innovative in this way, for in 1921 she reported in an article part of a conversation she had with David W. Griffith, to whom she asked the following question: ‘Do you feel the director must be the sole author of a film?’ She then transposed Griffith’s answer: ‘I buy an idea, but I transform it, I cut it out myself.’ Dulac followed up her reasoning by saying that ‘every cinematic work that has value in its sensitivity and power must be the result of a single will’.2 She further compared the activity of an author in cinema to that of a painter: ‘One would not impose on a painter a drawing whose lines had already been traced by a workman and just ask him to fill in the colors of already drawn forms.’ It is not by chance that the painting was the reference, given the recognition of its authorial character, which already existed at the time. Dulac ended the argument by saying: ‘like in all great works of art, individuality is the mark of a great cinematographic work’.3 In a very direct way, the filmmaker also made clear, in an interview in 1923, the idea of the centrality of a person in the cinematographic creation, which would become a mainstay in the concept of author in cinema: ‘I believe that a work of cinema should be born out of a jolt of emotion, the vision of a single person for whom cinema is the only possible means of expression. The director must be the writer and the writer the director.’4 Thus, in the early 1920s, Germaine Dulac presented very elaborate ideas on an authorial proposal for the activity of film directors, but she was not the only one. Jean Epstein, also in 1921, sought to bring cinema closer to literature, especially in its modern form, something that, as mentioned, Alexandre Astruc would resume twenty-seven years later. Such approximation with literature was interesting for Epstein’s reflections because it added a powerful artistic sense to cinema together with its original status of modernity, while allowing to move cinema away from the idea of filmed theatre: ‘Modern literature and cinema are equally enemies of theater. Any attempt to reconcile them is pointless. Like two different religions, two aesthetics cannot live side by side without coming into conflict.’5 Some years later, in 1928, Epstein presented a conception of the author in cinema, stating that for the work to be photogenic it was necessary to have a personal sensibility, to which he added: This is the role of the author of a film, commonly called a film director. Of course a landscape filmed by one of the forty or four hundred directors devoid of personality whom God sent to plague the cinema as He once sent the locusts into Egypt looks exactly like this same landscape filmed by any other of these filmmaking locusts.6

Radical in comparing most directors to a biblical plague, Epstein singled out a few who would have true authorial abilities: ‘But this landscape or this fragment of drama staged by someone like Gance will look nothing like what would be seen

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through the eyes and heart of a Griffith or a L’Herbier. This is how the personalities of certain men, the soul, and, finally, poetry erupted into the cinema.’7 Abel Gance, a distinguished director whom Epstein separated from the swarm of locusts, also reflected on the authorial issue in the same period. In an article from 1927 he pointed to a differentiation that would also become guidance for the concept of author in cinema: ‘There is cinema and there is the art of cinema which has not yet created its neologism’ [Translation mine].8 In other words, Gance understood that cinema existed as a whole, but that there was also a specific art of cinema that was yet to develop its language, its artistic specificity, an idea that would be taken up again by Alexandre Astruc more than twenty years later. However, while in cinema the notion of authorship and the concept of author began to gather momentum in the 1920s and 1930s, in other art forms doubts and questions were already emerging. The individualistic characteristic of the authorial denomination and its consequent demarcation of a work linked to an individual seemed to bother, for example, the famous painter Paul Klee who, in 1920, highlighted the creation process and its relations when comparing the works of art with the genesis, that is, with creation: ‘The work of art, too, is first of all genesis; it is never experienced purely as a result.’9 Despite being radical, Klee’s proposal brings a very relevant perspective to our proposal by also shifting the focus to the creation process and, consequently, to the several people who participate in these filmmaking processes.

The politique des auteurs The aforementioned article by Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo, was originally published in L’écran français no. 144, on 30 March 1948. In addition to its content, the context of its publication, in a French film criticism magazine in the post-Second World War period, helps to explain its importance. It was the right place and the right moment to influence the young men who would soon become critics and later filmmakers, and who composed part of the initial group of writers of the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine, founded three years after the publication of Astruc’s article. Soon, this text ended up serving as a kind of bridge between the thoughts on authorship in cinema that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, dealt with in the previous section, and the politique des auteurs. Astruc’s ideas were forged within a vision of film criticism and, because of this, had a large influence over the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma. As already discussed, Astruc stated that cinema was gradually becoming a language, that is, it began to have a frequent and systematized use of its own expressive aspects, just as one does in an essay or novel.10 This affirmation was the basis for an artistic and intellectual autonomy of the cinema to be achieved. Astruc was trying to delimit such autonomy and, consequently, to affirm the figure of the author as the guarantor of this unequivocal assumption – at least for part of the films – that cinema is an artistic language capable of thinking the world through a personal perspective.

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In this way, Astruc was simultaneously substantiating arguments in favour of the artistic value of cinema as an independent art and also the proposal that the director/author would be the absolutely central figure of this artistic construction from an approximation with the notion of authorship coming from literature: ‘Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing.’11 Based on these arguments by Astruc, a few years later, in 1954, another text that would become fundamental in the debates on cinema authorship was published in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 31. In A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, the only film critic at the time, François Truffaut, questioned what was called the ‘Tradition of Quality’ from French films of the time, which were generally ‘scriptwriters’ films’ rather than from ‘men of the cinema’. Truffaut said he did not believe ‘in a peaceful coexistence between the Tradition of Quality and a cinema d’auteur’.12 In other words, authorship would have to assert itself in the cinematographic art in face of the type of cinema he considered literary and based on the script. In that sense, Truffaut left the approximation with literature proposed by Astruc, which was based on the artistic and authorial meaning of literary writing, and started to question a type of cinema that he understood as barely connected to the most characteristic and intense characteristics of film language. The following year, Truffaut would return to this argument, in a text about the film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Jacques Becker, 1955). Already in the title, the critic brought the expression that would give name to what he and his colleagues were proposing, the article, published in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 44, was called: Ali Baba et la Politique des auteurs (Ali Baba and the Politique des auteurs). In this text, Truffaut said: ‘Had Ali Baba failed, I would still have defended him in accordance with the Politique des auteurs that I and my fellow critics practice. All based on Giraudoux’s beautiful formula: “there is no work, there are only authors”’ [Translation mine].13 The authorial affirmation through the lenses of the politique des auteurs was being consolidated with great eloquence. Two years passed before André Bazin published an article with an absolutely straightforward title, La Politique des auteurs, in the same Cahiers du Cinéma, this time no. 70 from 1957. Right at the beginning of the text, Bazin said that people believed that Cahiers du Cinéma ‘practise the “politique des auteurs”’14 and that it would be useless to try to argue otherwise. He explained the internal dynamic of the magazine by which the contributor who had the most appreciation for the work of a director wrote about that director’s films and thus ‘rightly or wrongly, they always see in their favourite directors the manifestation of the same specific qualities’.15 The critic then made his opinions on the politique des auteurs quite clear: ‘I beg to differ with those of my colleagues who are the most firmly convinced that the politique des auteurs is well founded, but this in no way compromises the general policy of the magazine.’16 We can note that André Bazin, one of the creators and central person of the magazine that took on the politique des auteurs, had a series of doubts, to the point of saying that the policy had led its advocates to have made a number of mistakes. However, in the end he justified it by saying that they were only specific mistakes and that the general result was fruitful.

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In this text, Bazin used the concept of copy or plagiarism, which emerged in the nineteenth century, as a counterpoint to an author’s originality, but he relativized the individualization of this authorial personality in cinema, at least when compared to arts such as painting. Bazin quoted his colleague from Cahiers, Jacques Rivette, who said that ‘an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person’.17 This simple and straightforward definition interested him, so Bazin proposed to adopt it. Later, he elaborated a definition from Rivette’s consideration when he said: ‘The politique des auteurs consists, in short, of choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference, and then of assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next.’18 That is, in this sense, an author in cinema would be the director who has a central role in creation and leaves his personal artistic marks in several of his films. Bazin sought to give examples and, to do so, opposed authors to metteurs en scène: ‘Nicholas Ray is an auteur, John Huston is supposed to be only a metteurs-en-scene; Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini are auteurs, Rene Clement is only a great metteurs-en-scene, and so on.’19 Bazin attempted to balance between confirming the politique des auteurs as proposed by his younger and more radical colleagues and, simultaneously, questioning some of its aspects, as when he stated that certain quality films escaped the test between authors and metteurs en scène. In this sense, in the conclusion of his article, he said that the politique des auteurs was an ‘essential critical truth’ which cinema needed more than other arts, since ‘an act of true artistic creation is more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere’. However, he pointed out that ‘its exclusive practice leads to another danger: the negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its auteur’.20 For this study, based on the Filmmakers on Film approach, the idea is to incorporate and not run away from the uncertain and vulnerable characteristic of the act of creation in cinema, as well as not to deny the film, because it is here considered that both are fundamental elements for us to understand cinema in a more inclusive, dialogic and coherent way that is consistent with our time.

The Auteur Theory The term politique des auteurs was transposed by Andrew Sarris in 1962 into Auteur Theory, a term that mixes French and English and thus indicates its origin in French criticism and its then new place of debate, the Anglo-Saxon academic field. In his article, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, Sarris lists three premises for Auteur Theory: the first is the ‘technical competence’ of a director, the second is ‘the distinguishable personality of the director’ and the third premise ‘is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art’.21 According to Edward Buscombe, even though Cahiers du Cinéma and its predecessor La Revue du cinéma ‘were committed to the line that the cinema was an art of personal expression’,22 the cult of personality that emerged from the politique des auteurs came with Andrew Sarris, ‘for it is Sarris who pushes to extremes arguments which in Cahiers were often only implicit’.23 However, Sarris

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revised in 1968, at least in part, such a radicalization of the idea of the Auteur Theory: ‘Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography.’24 Meanwhile, important theorists have put the concept of author in check, even if the focus was not specifically cinema. In 1967, Roland Barthes published his famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’  – a year later Sarris would publish his revision, which may have been influenced by Barthes. According to him: ‘The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the “human person”.’25 This contextualization proposed by Barthes helps us understand that there was a tendency to search for the affirmation of an idea of authorship, which also allows us to understand why this idea emerged just when cinema was entering its phase of modernist affirmation. Staging a more nuanced debate, Barthes stated the following: ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.’26 In other words, besides the tendency towards the idea of authorship, there was, according to Barthes, also a desire to seek a safe haven that would leave authors, critics and researchers alike at ease. Two years after the publication of Barthes’ text, Michel Foucault proposed a concept to overcome the idea of author as an individual affirmation linked to a kind of divine spark. In a debate promoted by the French Society of Philosophy, Foucault gave a lecture entitled ‘What Is an Author?’ which was later published as an article. In this text he presents the concept of ‘author-function’ and what kind of texts would have this function: A private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarly, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society.27

In this regard, Foucault proposed that what makes an individual recognized as an author ‘are projections, in terms always more or less psycho· logical, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice’.28 Foucault presented four traces to characterize the author-function, there is no space to discuss them now, but it is essential to emphasize that the ‘author-function’, according to him, ‘is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures’ and that ‘does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual’.29 The discussion on the idea of author in art, and particularly in cinema, can be extended to other considerations and even other points of analysis, such as the issues of authenticity or independence, which are very common in the confrontation with the Studio System. Robert Stam sought to condense the ideas

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about the author in cinema when he said: ‘Auteurism was in this sense a palimpsest of influences, combining romantic expressive notions of the artist, modernistformalist notions of stylistic discontinuity and fragmentation, and a “protopostmodern” fondness for “lower” arts and genres.’30 These theorists, among others, have recognized, to a greater or lesser extent, the problem that is the contextual disconnection of the notion of author (context in a broad sense – historical, social, economic, cultural, etc.). Such decontextualization was explicit when Sarris wrote: ‘If directors and other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography.’31 To this assertion, Pauline Kael, in her article ‘Circles and Squares’, specifically focused on refuting Sarris’ arguments, stated emphatically: ‘May I suggest that if, in order to judge movies, the auteur critics must wrench the directors from their historical environments (which is, to put it mildly, impossible) so that they can concentrate on the detection of that “élan”, they are reducing aesthetics to a form of idiocy.’32 Kael pointed out many problems with Sarris’ propositions and built a fundamental counterpoint, even saying about Sarris’ ideas: ‘Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots.’33 In this way, Pauline Kael made it clear that she understood Andrew Sarris’ proposals as centralizing and exclusionary. She proposed something more plural: ‘I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic.’34 Pauline Kael’s critiques and her proposal of plurality and flexibility matter a lot for the concept of filmmaker that will be presented later. Such criticism may also have echoed and played a role in the revisions of the Auteur Theory concept, such as the ones made by Edward Buscombe, who pointed out inconsistencies between the proposal of French critics, notably André Bazin, and Sarris’ statements, as when he said about the latter: ‘He therefore does precisely what Bazin said should not be done: he uses individuality as a test of cultural value.’35 The problem of individualization in the figure of a director/author and his alleged genius character would be debated again, even if by authors who defended the Auteur Theory, such as Peter Wollen. In his text The Auteur Theory (1969), Wollen resumes the differentiation of author and metteur en scène: ‘The work of the auteur has a semantic dimension, it is not purely formal; the work of the metteur en scène, on the other hand, does not go beyond the realm of performance, of transposing into the special complex of cinematic codes and channels a pre-existing text: a scenario, a book or a play.’36 Wollen also highlighted the idea of linking the moments of construction of film signification, being that in the case of an author it would be constructed a posteriori, while in the case of a metteur en scène it would be constructed a priori. But the theorist also left doubts: ‘In concrete cases, of course, this distinction is not always clear-cut.’37 With this curious assumption, Wollen seemed to demonstrate that he was not interested in an uncritical canonization of authors, which may have been the aim of Andrew Sarris. In 1972, a few years after Barthes announced ‘the death of the author’ and Foucault introduced the idea of the ‘author-function’, Peter Wollen included in

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the third edition of his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a conclusion in which he made a famous dissociation: ‘But Fuller or Hawks or Hitchcock, the directors, are quite separate from “Fuller” or “Hawks” or “Hitchcock”, the structures named after them, and should not be methodologically confused.’38 In other words, Wollen was dealing, in a way, with Michel Foucault’s ‘author-function’, but without quoting him directly. Wollen would complement this by saying: ‘The situation in the cinema, where the director’s primary task is often one of co-ordination and rationalisation, is very different from that in the other arts, where there is a much more direct relationship between artist and work.’39 Thus, he was leaving an open door for ideas about creative relationships in a film to be developed that came from other people involved in filmmaking and not just the director. The debate on author and authorship in cinema has continued and continues to this day. Just to name a few prominent publications on the subject, John Caughie published a compilation book of texts called Theories of Authorship (1981),40 which contained some of the texts discussed here. In 1999, the book A Companion to Film Theory was published, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam, of which the second chapter is Authorship, by James Naremore. From this work, it is important to highlight the following excerpt: ‘And yet the discourse on the director-as-author has always been problematic – not only because of the industrial basis of the film medium, but also because the film director emerged as a creative type at the very moment when authorship in general was becoming an embattled concept.’41 John Caughie also returned to the subject in 2008, with the chapter ‘Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory’ from the book The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, from which I quote the first lines to point out some paths for the debate on the concept of filmmaker that will follow: ‘Returning to auteurism and authorship after a decent interval, I am struck by two contradictory perceptions: first, that the auteur seems to have disappeared from the centre of theoretical debate in Film Studies; second, that this disappearance may in fact be an illusion and that the grave to which we consigned him – and, by implication, her – is, in fact, empty.’42 The grave is not empty and this is due to the fact that we cannot dissociate a film from one or more people. Unlike the creation of a videogame, for example, which can be identified with a company or a brand, in cinema we are used to relating films to people, notably the directors. As Tito Cardoso e Cunha states in his text Teorias dos Cineastas versus Teoria do Autor (Theories of Filmmakers versus Author Theory): ‘In summary, the critical strategy to impose the recognition of cinema as an art involves the recognition of the author quality of those who make it’ [Translation mine].43 Thus, there was a symbiosis that left strong traces between the artistic validation of cinema and the authorial statement of the directors.

The concept of filmmaker When we leave the concept of author, discussed so far, and start thinking about the concept of filmmaker, we find a term that is less debated until today. The concept of author, despite the variety of conceptions and critics that we have seen, has

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kept over the years a few points of convergence, most notably: the construction of a personal filmic work with original and recognizable marks; the characteristics of centrality in the artistic creation; and the perception that the context has little influence in the artistic achievements. In other words, even nowadays, the cinema author is still a person who, supposedly, makes several films with originality and sequentially –a person who centrally controls the filmmaking process and obtains results that depend much more on themselves than on everything around them. The proposal of filmmaker that I present here brings different points of interest, most notably: the marks in the films come from specific domains for different activities, including the coordination domain operated by the person who directs the film, but not exclusively this one; the process of artistic creation is understood as a text and not as a closed work, that is, it is considered as creation networks braided in a group, in a collaborative way; more than individual inner meanings, films convey contextual traces. In other words, the filmmaker is a person who exercises some creative activity in a collaborative way in the making of the film, acts in the texture of a kind of creation network and contributes towards certain contextual marks to identify certain films beyond individual imprints. Therefore, the filmmaker is part of a collective that develops an artistic creation process that dialogues with a context. The first of these points – the concept of the filmmaker as part of a collective – is perhaps the easiest to argue, since it has already been mentioned several times, including by supporters of the politique des auteurs, like André Bazin, and of Auteur Theory, like Andrew Sarris and Peter Wollen, when they mentioned the intrinsic character of teamwork in cinema, even if they defended the absolute predominance of the director/author. In this sense, as has been argued through the Filmmakers on Film approach for some years now, the concept of filmmaker is wider than the concept of author. So, if for the Auteur Theory the author must necessarily be the director, in the Filmmakers on Film approach the filmmaker can be any of the ‘people involved in the production of a film who have creative activities’ [Translation mine].44 That is, it is in this essence that the differences between the proposals I am addressing will emerge, since, according to the Filmmakers on Film approach, if a filmmaker can be a cinematographer, a costume designer, a screenwriter, an actor, among others, its affiliation cannot be linked to a notion like that of authorship, where all the originality and the aesthetic marks of a film or a set of films are attributed to a particular individual. Therefore, instead of authorship, we must think about creation processes. Evidently, the concept of creation was important to the Auteur Theory, as highlighted by James Naremore, who in commenting on Sarris’s work, ‘like all the other auteurists’, said: ‘Their interest in creative agency still has relevance and ought to be taken seriously by anyone who thinks of the movies as an art.’45 However, this is not creation in a singular or isolated way, nor it is the act of creation as proposed by Gilles Deleuze, because Deleuze referred to ‘ideas in cinema’ in a broader way.46 In the words of Cíntia Langie, we can assume ‘the idea that creation is in a mixture of things and that it goes beyond what is predictable. This blending of things is prior to the artists’ will, overcomes conventions and detectable formulas

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and connects with a certain spirit of the time. The creation is shared’ [Translation mine].47 Assuming the principle of sharing and the spirit of a time, in the sense of context, becomes fundamental to think about the creation process. The proposal here, perhaps inspired in Roland Barthes’ counter-position between work and text,48 is to think in the tessitura or, according to Cecilia Salles, to understand the creation process as networks of creation, with various lines and points of contact between them: ‘This vision of the creation process places us in a full relational field, without a vocation for the isolation of its components, demanding, therefore, permanent attention to contextualizations and activation of the relations that maintain it as a complex system’ [Translation mine].49 The creation process, in this way, has its genesis in several actions by several people. In this sense and seeking ideas from Italo Calvino, Salles states: ‘To discuss art from the point of view of its creative movement is to believe that the artwork consists of an infinite chain of aggregation of ideas, that is, in an infinite series of approaches to achieve it (Calvino, 1990)’ [Translation mine].50 In other words, referring to Calvino, Salles takes up, to a large extent, Barthes’ considerations in The Death of the Author: ‘A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, (…)’.51 In this way, both suggest the multiplicity of origins of an artistic work – whatever the artistic language may be  – and of the dialogues necessary for its constitution. Thus, the concept of filmmaker here proposed from the Filmmakers on Film approach is in line with the proposal of Salles and Barthes in the sense of expanding the concept of author, leaving the individual anointed as genius and going to the various voices and gestures that are in dialogue during the creative process. Of course, it should be noted that Barthes’ proposal goes beyond the creative process – when he spoke of ‘multiple writings’, he was referring not only to those involved in artistic making, but also to the entire contextual environment of the work, which brings us to the next point. Discussing context is the most difficult aspect here, both because the term may not be the most appropriate and because there is a huge range of possibilities. However, even in texts that focus on authorship, sometimes the importance of context was highlighted, as when Bazin stated: ‘So there can be no definitive criticism of genius or talent which does not first take into consideration the social determinism, the historical combination of circumstances and the technical background which to a large extent determine it.’52 Thus, it is important to emphasize that for the line of thought I present here (filmmaker – creative process – context), it is fundamental to consider what has already been deeply debated via Cultural Studies regarding the contextualist perspective, including in Film Studies. As James Naremore points out, the late 1960s and 1970s saw a shift in academic film criticism: ‘Screen theory as a whole was indebted to the program outlined in “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, a 1968 Cahiers du Cinéma manifesto by Pierre Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, which marked a turn away from auteurism.’53 Bearing in mind this change and also the fierce criticism of authorism, which has been touched upon earlier, Naremore said: ‘French auteurism as a historical movement may be dead (its greatest influence lasted roughly two decades), but

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so are the tedious debates about the death of the author.’ Then he ponders that ‘residual “auteur theory” in its various manifestations still affects our view of film history’54 and the question that emerges from these considerations is the following: how to resume ideas linked, albeit residually, to Auteur Theory without falling into the errors of individualism, artistic hierarchical centrality and contextual disconnection? The answer that I propose and that I have tried to present here is to think of a concept distinct from that of the author, although historically and conceptually linked to it, which is the concept of filmmaker. In a few words, the proposal is that this line, which starts with the filmmaker, approaches the creation process and considers the context, allowing us to think of the artists in a more diverse, inclusive and even fair manner; to think of the artistic creation process in a broader way and better understand the various activities that involve the creation of the film; and to think of artists less with the pretension of genius, of individual merit, and more according to the time, the society and the culture in which they have lived.

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Chapter 2 T H E I N V I SI B I L I T Y O F T H I N G S : T H E R O L E O F T H E R E SE A R C H E R I N F I L M M A K E R S ON

F I L M A P P R OAC H F R OM T H E P E R SP E C T I V E O F KA R I M A Ï N OU Z ’ S F I L M S A N D I N T E RV I EWS Marcelo Carvalho

In this text, as an exercise, I propose an unveiling of my own work to investigate what I do as a researcher within the scope of the Filmmakers on Film approach.1 I want to put myself to the test, by presenting not the conclusions of research about the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, but a hybrid text that blends aspects of the essay and the work report. I have a vivid interest in the filmic work of Aïnouz, about whom I have already written and given lectures. But this time I would like to revisit my own relationship with his work, my subjective motivations, the academic impasses and the solutions encountered. Thus, my aim is not only to consider the problems that concern the filmmaker and his films, but also to think about the role of the researcher within the Filmmakers on Film approach through the procedures enacted by the praxis of a research in progress. I find in the films of Aïnouz some stylistic movements that mobilize me affectively. As I write this text, my interest primarily turns to three of his films: the short Seams (1993) and the feature films I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You (2009, codirected with Marcelo Gomes) and Diego Velázquez ou Le Réalisme Sauvage (2015). The three films reveal (or suggest) a strong correspondence between spatial wanderings and mental digressions. The two dimensions of wandering – on the one hand, material and objective, on the other, immaterial and psychological – interest me for reasons beyond cinema. But what I bring into play here necessarily leads me to question the search itself: in the end, how do I understand the act of investigation within the Filmmakers on Film approach, what have I sought in the research and what are the conditions of this search? Until now, Karim Aïnouz has not been interested in writing about his experience with cinema. Not having a text by the filmmaker’s own hand, his films are my privileged source of research, while interviews fill a secondary but not irrelevant role. Working with theoretical texts written by Aïnouz would necessarily

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lead the research to adopt other strategies of approximation. As a result, all my argumentations and conclusions refer to research that takes into consideration his films and interviews that I had access to. In the text Teoria dos Cineastas Versus Teoria do Autor [Filmmakers on Film Versus Auteur Theory], Tito Cardoso Cunha2 resorts to the traditional demarcation of the author as the agent of an intentional act that expresses his identity as a mark in an artistic work, which would create an immediate relation between the author and his manifest expression in the work. Cunha investigates in his text the differentiation between the Filmmakers on Film approach and Auteur Theory, while observing, however, how the Filmmakers on Film approach would escape the central concern contained in the texts by Andrew Harris and in the Politique des Auteurs of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, and concluding that ‘the notion of auteur has no relevance for the filmmakers on film approach’.3 This text will not discuss, in depth, the question of the author, his prominence in the research, his ‘death’ or suspension,4 except through a specific point of view. This discussion was undertaken in the first chapter of this book and, based on this, we can conceptually consider Karim Aïnouz as a filmmaker. Although I refer to him nominally as the creator of a certain set of films – the films by Karim Aïnouz – the notion of author lost much of its meaning during the research. And this occurred because I did not seek to guarantee the set of films studied based on a notion of thematic and formal coherence, or as an expression of a unique and untransferable personality, which are traditional parameters for recognizing an author. In contrast, I was interested in the rational and intuitional motivations, the reasons and the reveries that interfered in the production of the films and, lastly, that which I will later identify as a heterogeneous background of creation, as an idea and as the thought of the filmmaker, in addition to a dimension that I have defined as unthinkable. Thus, despite the relevance of the problem of authorship in the cinema, I propose with this text not to focus on the figure of the filmmaker as such (whether they be author or director), but to pay attention to the process of thought formation in the filmic environment. In any case, due to the strength of a convention that refers (not only) to the Politique des Auteurs,5 I took the name Karin Aïnouz as that of a unifier of collective creation. Although one cannot deny the preponderant role of the person Karin Aïnouz for the general determination of what we see in the films, this name also arises as the ultimate depository of the (more or less expressly creative) work of a series of agents (photographers, producers, screenwriters, actors, editors, etc.) who effectively contributed to the production of the films. Authorship is the resulting efforts of a legion. * The ancient Greeks had a name for a sudden sensation of wonder regarding something that was never absent, but that until then had not been truly noticed: thauma, a kind of unexpected and overwhelming enchantment. At the beginning of a hot night, as I left the cinema after watching Love for Sale (2006), a film by

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Karim Aïnouz, I was struck by this wonder. Something in the world had changed, and it was not the same as before. I immediately began to walk randomly, people passing by going who knows where, perhaps to their homes, and me feeling fragmented, amazed by everything and, at the same time, nothing. Shortly beforehand, Hermila, the film’s protagonist, was wandering aimlessly through the night in her hometown, the small Iguatu in the state of Ceará, where she had encounters that were fortuitous or destined not to develop. She had returned from São Paulo with her baby child, and at that point, already separated from her husband. Without any money or prospects, Hermila offered her own body as a prize for a raffle. Her aim was to leave, to depart once again, now to a ‘more distant place’ from where she was. Her stay in Iguatu would only be a break between two trips. And I, in my directionless walk in the midst of the controlled chaos of a big city, said to myself: how wondrous all of this seems to me, our little everyday dramas, my wandering. * Let us return to the insistent question: in the end, what would a researcher look for within the Filmmakers on Film approach? The question is complex because the process of creation seems to encompass unequal territories. On one level, it would be necessary to identify a multiform dimension that would contain diffuse intuitions, inspirations, recollections and feelings that would embody states of mind of every order. Not all of these elements are rationalizable. It is not a welldetermined domain, but a crossroads where everything is moving, each element rapidly gaining or losing preponderance, mixing and generating mental drifts. It concerns a heterogeneous, multiform and hybrid background, which is difficult to map and which has been present since the initial conception, the explosive insight, the ultimate creative determinations of a film. Much of this heterogeneous background of creation will always remain inaccessible to the interested researcher, and even to the filmmaker, whether because it is presented unconsciously, or because it is expressed irrationally. This should not surprise us – creation, and not just artistic creation, will always have something that escapes rationalization. Nonetheless, something of this heterogeneous background emerges and reveals itself in the films and interviews given by the filmmaker. In an interview with the website Omelete about Love for Sale, Karim Aïnouz, while commenting on Hermila’s migration in the film, lets something escape, verbalizes a concern with his own wandering that is reflected in his work: ‘Of course there are relations with my own personal life, me, Karim, there. I left home at 16 years old, then I went back, left again, got it? Not having a home is a concern in my life’.6 Or even, speaking of the tendency in his films for mobility, Aïnouz confesses in an interview about Futuro Beach: ‘The other day they said to me: “all of your films end with roads, with the exception of Madame Satã”. And it’s true, isn’t it? It wasn’t something I thought about much.’7 The movements, the wanderings and the general sense of mobility of his films seem to express a concern with spatial displacement. But the

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intensity and relevance of this for Karim Aïnouz are something that we will likely never come to know for certain. On another level, we can imagine that, in addition to this heterogeneous background, ‘ideas’ arise based upon which more or less comprehensive formulations are constructed that partially delimit and guide the creative process. In ‘What is the Creative Act?’, Gilles Deleuze tells us that ‘an idea is very simple. It is not a concept; it is not philosophy. Even if one may be able to draw a concept from every idea’.8 Thus, an idea is not a statement (énoncé), and even though complex statements (énoncés) are developed from it, they do not exhaust the idea to which they refer. The idea escapes languages and the communicative function,9 remaining among the statements (énoncés) that attempt to define it and the things that it addresses. Nonetheless, the idea has inclinations, and having ideas in cinema is something that specifically concerns cinema. A spatial movement (a trip in search of the legacy of the painter Diego Velázquez) corresponds to a state of mental drift (lamenting a lost love in offscreen narration): we could thus formulate a possible statement (énoncé) behind Aïnouz’s aforementioned Diego Velázquez ou Le Réalisme Sauvage. The statement (énoncé) of the idea presents the problem of the film, but the formulation of the problem, as rigorous as it may be, does not exhaust it, nor does it resolve it. ‘Maybe what characterizes me as a director is the fact that my films talk about things that are necessary for me, but also for the World. Issues that I need to raise for the World.’10 Or furthermore: ‘This film [Futuro Beach, 2014] was the need to talk about fear and courage. That’s why I think that my films are always guided by necessary, not only important, issues and that I urgently need to talk about them.’11 It was necessary and urgent for Aïnouz to talk about ‘fear’ and ‘courage’, but how can one redraw the line that leads from their originating chaotic territory (the heterogeneous background of creation) to their concretization in the film? * If the idea conducts film production in an ideally conscious movement, the hybrid and unequal set that composes the heterogeneous background of creation tends to emerge at times, even unbeknownst to the filmmaker. A film is an open field, and even after the final cut, there will always be something in the image ready to extrapolate the limit of what was planned. To access the marks left by this heterogeneous background, it may be necessary for the researcher to approach the film with a supplemental perspective, by going beyond the analytical gaze, a more fluid and speculative perspective that seeks the traces of intuitions, inspirations and mental drifts inscribed in the image, constructing the film’s guiding possible statements (énoncés) of the idea with these traces. But how can one access these traces? I had the films. But I also had the interviews given to the press by Karim Aïnouz. Given close to the film releases, the interviews with which I worked are more geared towards publicity than to the elucidation of questions that might interest me. Nonetheless, I found in them what I had already identified in the films, albeit

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in a transversal and peripheral manner: the taste for filming trips, migrations, flights and wanderings, and finally, for including special displacements in the trajectory of the characters. The interviews given by filmmakers can be channels to access what was hidden during the film production process, a whole universe of buried motivations. But the interviews are not a guaranteed path in the direction of the truth, sometimes not even of a truth. There would be a whole nebulous space to be considered.12 Let us think of a standard situation in which an interviewer is before someone who will be interviewed. In the situation, there are two connecting domains, two processes of subjectivation going through the primary functions of both interviewer and interviewee. In an interview, a question elicits a reply – not any reply, but only those that will match the question asked. The reply, for its part, induces twists in the next question, etc. That is, there is a whole series of passages, exchanges and crossings between interviewer and interviewee that suggests the construction of implied processes of subjectivation. A second fact is found in the dimension of the unexpected and of the improvised. Evidently, interviewees can always prepare themselves in advance, but even in the interviews in which they know all the themes that will be explored, the question of performance becomes prominent, the performance of one who will see oneself challenged to give an answer. For their part, the interviewers will also need to perform in response to the reactions of the interviewees, in a challenger’s performance. But the performances of the interviewees and of the interviewers do not exhaust the question of the imponderable. To the inscrutable dimension present in the heterogeneous background of creation is added the very inaccessibility of the past as it is. With psychological recollection, we do not only recall something from the past, but also recreate it in a comprehensible rearrangement in the present.13 Even past moments prone to be recovered by a rationalizing discourse are susceptible to the most varied reconstructions: layers of unintentional deceptions, of present delirium over what occurred and all sorts of deviations, transversalities and flights – or even a deliberate will to mislead the interviewer. The interview, thus, becomes an effort of retroactive composition, an opportunity for the filmmaker to put into practice expedients that seek to give meaning and coherence to artistic creation through the a posteriori elaboration of a discourse that adheres to the narrative surrounding the film. This discourse, with all the hesitations of a speech, created through the effort of recalling both the a priori motivations of the film and what was accomplished in the filming and editing strongly refers to the very moment of the interview. * The film production process, from the script to the final cut, can take months or years, particularly for feature films. Maintaining the spark of the initial idea is, in itself, a struggle. It concerns, at times, sustaining only the general atmosphere that served as inspiration. In an interview, Aïnouz confirms the difficulty of maintaining

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the original idea of the film, which periodically needs to be resuscitated at the beginning of every production phase: ‘I think the film is reborn at every moment. It [Love for Sale] was reborn during the sound editing – we did not mess with the images, but there were various sound elements that transformed the film.’14 The whole film production process is subject to chance. The moment of filming is the most critical, which is when a series of incidents can determine the final result. Noël Burch used to highlight the emergence of chance in the modern cinemas of the post-war period, which led to think of it as an element to be used in the film in a structural way.15 There would be a history of the guiding idea in every film, a history that would be difficult to determine, and that would include both the aesthetic deviations and the changes in what was originally imagined caused, for example, by production or budget problems. Something of the original idea tends to be transformed, to be lost or even to be broken. Such is the despair of Guido Anselmi, the character who is Federico Fellini’s alter ego in the metalinguistic 8½ (1963). Anselmi, who would have incarnated Fellini’s own creative crisis, simply lost the élan that justified the production of the film. * Up to here, I have delved into the difficulties in accessing the idea and, mainly, what I have been calling the heterogeneous background of creation. It does not concern disconsidering the importance of the interviews for the research in the light of the Filmmakers on Film approach or discouraging the search for what makes up this heterogeneous background, on the contrary. But how to proceed from here? The visceral critique by Friedrich Nietzsche of truth as an inaccessible realm is well known.16 It is not my intention to start a discussion about the consequences of Nietzsche’s position, but only to point out the unviability of a project that intended to encompass truth as such, notably when it concerns truth as a process of artistic creation. But the affirmation of a heterogeneous background of creation and of the idea seems to me necessary in order to take account of a process that is in part unfathomable, in part rationalizable. What I consider important to highlight is that both dimensions are inscribed in the films and arise in the interviews, and the researcher would investigate them not to constitute ‘the’ truth about the film or about the filmmaker, but to construct a discourse with argumentative consistence that refers to the film and/or to the filmmaker’s declarations. For this reason, I have substituted the question ‘what would Karim Aïnouz have been thinking in making his films?’ with ‘what could I think, keeping in mind what I encounter in the films and in the interviews, about the creative impulse set in motion by Karim Aïnouz?’ It so happens that what has been thought, as Michel Foucault asserts with respect to the Cartesian cogito, does not arise from a rationality given a priori: thought unveils ‘an unthought which it contains entirely’17 as a very condition of the act of thinking. The unthought is the power of the outside (dehors) that forces the act of thinking – and a heterogeneous background of creation, a territory in part unfathomable and full of social, historical and political crossings, is constituted

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as its privileged place. Precisely, the unthought reverberates the question of the outside of thought as an exteriority (which is neither spatial nor psychological) that forces thought itself to be constituted, a theme that Foucault takes from Maurice Blanchot.18 Thus, in line with Foucault, it would be necessary not to confide in the search for that which was effectively thought by the filmmaker, which would end up in a misleading access and in an imposing posture towards the understanding of the creative process, besides being constituted as a nod to the most totalizing truth about a territory of uncertainties. On the other hand, even the thinkable (a possibility of realization) would still refer to thought as representation, that is, as a copy of what could have been thought by Karim Aïnouz in his films. Ultimately, we would be closer to the unthinkable, but this would establish a radical distance between the filmmaker and the researcher. Thus, reconsidering the Foucaultian unthought, I resorted to the un-thinkable as a creation based on an indefinite field that, embracing the accidents and ambiguities of the images, would allow me to connect to both the idea and the heterogeneous background of creation in the film. * In the text Un Film Peut-Il Être un Acte de Théorie? (Can a Film Be a Theoretical Act?), Jacques Aumont19 incisively questions the possibility of films communicating theories. The problem would be that of the non-equivalence between cinema and theoretical practice – between images and sounds, on the one hand, and language on the other – the linguistic apparatus being the support par excellence for the abstraction proper to theories. Aumont finds it difficult to reconcile the audiovisual devices of the cinema and the elaboration of theories, specifically regarding the speculative capacity and the need to maintain the coherence of the arguments. But mostly, films would not be conducive for offering explanations to the problems explored, and that is why they would not be capable of being supports for theories and, standing in the middle, they could at the most be theoretical acts – or rather, poetic acts. Penafria et al.20 agree with Aumont in that film cannot be constituted as a theory in the strict sense, but they recall that Aumont himself admits that, being an act of thought, film can evoke a theory, since it is a hypothetical model that allows the viewer (and the researcher) the possibility of choosing one of the hypotheses that it presents to understand the problem. Thus, not complying with ‘the requirements of “theory”, it is possible to theorize based on the film’.21 Resorting to the distinction made by Pier Paolo Pasolini22 between film (the particular, concrete work, which we see on the screen) and cinema (the general term to which films refer), the film would tend to the cinema, guaranteeing the latter existence and possibility of access. In this sense, the film, not being theory, would make possible the theorization on the part of the researcher. More than conveying ideas in their films, filmmakers have ideas with images, sounds and words.23 They are cinematic ideas in the extent to which the images,

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sounds and words are created for the films.24 That is enough and the interviews that filmmakers give are supplemental. The creative performance of filmmakers is in the production of films, in the long way between the script and the final cut, and it is not their task to make theories about their works or about the cinema, although nothing hinders them from writing based on their experiences. The list of filmmakers who have written theories is not big in comparison to those who have never asserted their work: Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini are a few of them. Others have written stand-alone and more or less theoretical texts, such as Glauber Rocha, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. * The formula is not new: what the filmmaker wanted to say with the film is the film itself. Evidently, there is always the possibility of discussing – with the filmmakers themselves in an interview or even in an informal conversation – their intentions, their aims, the ideas that guided the films and even something that arises from the heterogeneous background of creation and that somehow can be framed in a speech act. But, if there is something like a cinematic thought of the filmmaker – except for the case of filmmakers who write theoretical texts  – this thought is not in the film, it is the film itself in all its irreducible spatiotemporal complexity, even though many of the elements that arise on the screen have entered the film unbeknownst to the creator,25 which in turn renders term ‘thought’, at least in this case, as dubious.26 The film as the realized thought of the filmmaker would be the third level of creation, produced based on ideas and indebted to what we have identified as a heterogeneous background of creation. But if the thought of the filmmakers, their films, does not need complementation, or an exogenous intervention that elucidates it, what would befit the researcher in the scope of the Filmmakers on Film approach? The answer, according to Deleuze,27 would be in the transference of blocks of movement/duration into concepts that are appropriate to the film28: that is, in thinking the un-thinkable, in a process of creation based on the film – and, concomitantly, based on the heterogeneous background of creation and on the guiding ideas of the film  – not exactly dealing with what the filmmaker would have effectively thought during the production of the work, but striving for a demonstration.29 Precisely, it would be up to researchers to demonstrate through the films, though the materialized thought of the filmmakers, how their very digressions, their propositions or even their theories would be related to the films or to the filmmakers. Because the work of research, being a work of creation, would in no way be random. Everything must occur according to a strict correspondence with the films in a sort of palimpsest among different domains: the thought expressed in an academic text about the film as thought.30 In other words, it is the task of the researcher in the Filmmakers on Film approach to forge a path that includes working with the field of ‘film theory based on the filmmakers’.31 Evidently, it is not the task of researchers to write the theories for the filmmakers, especially because, besides all of the other aforementioned problems, to be

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concerned with reconstituting what has been thought by filmmakers is something dubious as a possibility. And filmmakers already possess their own thinking apparatus – their films. On the other hand, researchers do not necessarily need to write stricto sensu theories about the films or about the works of the researched filmmakers. While this may be possible, developing theories based on the practice of directors and on questions raised in their work depends on the researchers, not on the filmmakers, who as a rule did not even consider such a use of their films. The question lies in the pertinence of making such a theory or not, which would have to count on all of the scientific rigor required by practice. On the other hand, the film does not need to give life to a theory, it does not clamour for the theory that elucidates it, nor does the creative gesture of the filmmaker need conceptualizations. It would be up to the researcher in the light of the Filmmakers on Film approach to follow a sinuous path, at times parallel to the work of the filmmaker, other times converging with it, primarily taking it to the consolidated theories of the social sciences and humanities, building a discourse that is connected and in accordance with the films, which in turn is in agreement with the films, but obeys its own laws as the academic text that it is.

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Chapter 3 T H E SP E C TAT O R A N D T H E F I L M M A K I N G P R O C E S S : R E F L E C T IO N S BA SE D O N C A SE ST U D I E S André Rui Graça and Manuela Penafria

‘Who is the spectator?’ ‘What are the spectator’s place and role in the filmmaking process?’ ‘What are the effects on the spectator during and after the screening experience?’ ‘What is their participation in the film?’ ‘How do they make a comprehensive understanding of the film?’ ‘How do filmmakers include them in their creative process?’ ‘How do filmmakers envision the spectators?’ These are some questions that film studies may ask, articulate and theorize through complementary and opposing perspectives. To a large extent, we can argue that these questions (along with the quest to answer them) encompass film history. Notions such as ‘public’, ‘audience’ and ‘spectator’ have been used either as synonyms or conceptualized separately. From an academic standpoint, everything concerning these concepts has been placed inside the polarized (and polarizing) field of spectatorship. However, it seems that the filmmakers have not yet, in a systematic way, been called to contribute to the construction and advance of spectatorship in the field of film studies. Indeed, film dictionaries (Aumont and Marie 2006; Blandford, Grant and Hillier 2001; Hayward, 2001; Journot 2006; Kuhn and Westwell 2012; Livingstone and Plantinga 2009; Roy 1999) provide a view of the spectator as an abstract entity – one that can be explained according to tenets laid by new, speculative, scientific academic areas. The stronger one is, arguably, psychoanalysis, and cognitive theory is a close second – the latter being interested in the conscious state and supposedly active role of the spectator. Studied as an autonomous entity or in the context of the screening conditions, the interest in the spectator, from a historical perspective, only gains real traction in the 1970s, when psychoanalysis, popularized by Screen, becomes central to film studies and film theory. Fátima Chinita (2013) helps clarify how this process unfolded and thus how the spectator has been regarded. To this author, there are different ‘theoretical attitudes towards the interaction of the abstract spectator with the film’.1 Namely, an affective commitment (that includes books like Edgar Morin, Le Cinéma ou L´Homme Imaginaire (1956) and L´Homme Ordinaire du Cinéma, by Jean-Louis Schefer in which the spectator is considered in their imaginary, intimate and subjective dimension2); a grammatical inscription (all the studies

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that consider the spectator have resort to film language, like the 180º rule or the P.O.V.); an emotional relationship (the psychoanalytical approach); an interpretive stance (e.g. studies aligned with the cognitive approach that are interested in knowing how spectators make sense of the film); and an ideological resistance (an understanding of the spectator according to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘distancing effect’ of the active spectator). We can read between the lines of this systematization provided by Chinita that, in this extensive theoretical debate, filmmakers seem to have been sidelined. Instead, it has been traditionally assumed that they are predominantly interested in finding ways to influence the spectator, with little to no concern regarding the theoretical discussion about the filmmaker as a dynamic or complex entity. Granted, there are many valuable authors that feed several lines of questioning on the subject of the spectator, and thus various strands of discussion around this abstract entity. However, for the sake of argument, we shall consider film literature as an institutional way of regarding the spectators, since areas that have place inside academia are summoned to them.3 In this chapter, we are interested in debating the spectator according to the filmmakers, through their verbal or written thoughts. This way, we will be able to contribute to ongoing debates in Film Theory through the mapping and the structuring of the notion of the spectator via a dialogical approach between two different stances: what we may call the ‘institutional notion of spectator’ and the ‘the spectator as conceived by the filmmakers’. The discourse of several filmmakers that have mentioned the spectator or shown interest in the role of this figure in their creative process will be our focus. To that end, we will invoke Portuguese contemporary filmmakers4 such as Teresa Villaverde, Claúdia Varejão, Pedro Costa, Paulo Rocha and Manoel de Oliveira. These filmmakers are not methodologically chosen case studies, but rather starting points that will allow us to establish the premise we want to put forward and build the bridge with other filmmakers, such as the Latin-Americans Patricio Guzmán and Tomás Gutierrez Aléa. Our main goal is to find general conceptual traits that are common to the variety of voices represented in this chapter and proceed to the stabilization of the notion of spectator according to filmmakers  – along with a clearer view of how these conceptualized spectators are an integral part of cinema and filmmaking practice. In other words, ultimately, we seek to understand in what ways the filmmakers can help redefine and/or reinforce the concept of the spectator – whether in its own terms or in dialogue with pre-existing schools of thought that have dominated the field of spectatorship (and that eventually found difficulties in progressing philosophically and conceptually). Our starting point is that filmmakers also have something to say about the figure of what/who the spectator is, as well as to the way they relate subjectively to their inherent condition as spectators. Resorting to several cases, we will see how the cinema made by certain filmmakers corresponds to their vision of who the spectator is and what are their distinguishing features, faculties, motivations and interests.

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The spectator as conceived by the filmmakers We will now focus on the concept of the spectator and dissect its ramifications through the prism of the words (and works) of some filmmakers. Indeed, there is a dimension of subjectivity in art and its phenomenology. This means that, although it is possible to stabilize concepts through overlapping key ideas, there is always a component of divergence. Only then is it possible to revisit the concepts; it is in the wealth of details that the justification for carrying out a theoretical exercise that exposes the multiplicity of perspectives one same idea can encapsulate lies. As we shall see, there are several ways to conceptualize the spectator and humanize them – namely through the attribution of certain faculties. The views of filmmakers on this matter (which somehow meet the notions already mentioned, and sometimes come closer to certain hypotheses proposed by different schools of thought) are as idiosyncratic and essayistic as they can be innovative. On the one hand, we can acknowledge that the discourse of some filmmakers echoes classical conceptions of spectatorship; on the other hand, we can recognize that the way a certain filmmaker gets involved with the idea of spectator happens in a completely different context than that of spectatorship, therefore opening up its scope, which, in turn, represents great theoretical potential. From among the set of filmmakers that we will analyse, we will be able to divide filmmakers who see the spectator from an identity standpoint (Pedro Costa and Paulo Rocha), sectioned (Manoel de Oliveira), reminiscent (Gutiérrez Aléa and Patrizio Guzmán) or even those who do not, explicitly, include any (known) reflection about the spectator in their creative process (Teresa Villaverde and Cláudia Varejão). It is important to note that the categories that we will develop in detail are not watertight and that they refer to a contextualized and integrated analysis of the filmmakers in question and their works. Furthermore, it is important to realize that the filmmakers themselves also establish a different kind of relationship with the audience at different stages of their life and career. However, it could be argued that filmmakers show a tendency in identifying certain characteristics or qualities in the spectator and react towards them. Likewise, it will be interesting to note how, in all these approaches, the concept of spectator goes far beyond the idea of​​ ‘moviegoer’ and the traditional framework of ‘spectatorship’. It is also worth noting that, while there are filmmakers who repeatedly meditate on the spectator, there are others who are more contained or evasive about this subject, leaving few hints that, nonetheless, allow us to infer positions. We will start with Manoel de Oliveira since his thoughts will help us contextualize others. The Portuguese iconic filmmaker maintained a complicated, sometimes contradictory, relationship with the spectator. It is understandable and perhaps not unusual for someone who has gone through so many stages of the history of cinema (both in Portugal and abroad) as Manoel de Oliveira. In statements to Diário de Notícias, in 2011, Oliveira said: I do not even like the word spectator. Or rather, the word I like. I do not like the public, the word ‘public’ is what I do not like very much. Because public are

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Filmmakers on Film the seats in the cinema; the seats are public. The people who sit in those seats are people, true people, and each one is different from the others. Each one is an authentic being, and, therefore, not everyone will be able to understand or sensitive enough to grasp a symphony, or any work, whatever it may be. (…) Each one feels in their own way.5

In this assertion, Oliveira encapsulates three ideas that help frame the spectator concept and reinforce some important aspects: the spectator (human being) and the audience (as a number, or measure of accounting) are distinct concepts and must remain as such; resistance to the idealization of a ‘type’ or ‘model’ spectator, as proposed by screen theory and cognitive theory; notion that the spectator is, fundamentally, a sensitive entity. It is interesting to note that this reflection by the centenary filmmaker, on the one hand, presents traces of an opinion that came into being almost half a century before (the tendency to individualize the characteristics of the spectator), as it deviates from other phases in which his vision of the audience and the viewer was less moderate. In 1963, Oliveira’s stance was as follows: ‘The public is always the last to understand things, although it is the one that directly or indirectly benefits the most. It looks dull and insensitive. It is, above all, slow.’6 Still, in the same spirit, the director suggested that foreign audiences are better at assimilating the complexity of Portuguese cinema. It is worth highlighting that, at this stage, Oliveira speaks of the audience and not of the spectator. In 1995, Oliveira wrote: The public: that “informal mass” that ignored the great painters of the time, as happened with Klee, Van Gogh, Cézanne and many others, some of them starved to buy paint because it was essential for them to paint. The public that today fills museums around the world, yesterday applauded Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and others like them.7

Also in 1995, he told Jorge Leitão Ramos that ‘if the spectator brings nothing, he takes nothing’.8 In addition to what has already been mentioned, it seems obvious that Oliveira always maintains the idea that each spectator is unique and that, in this entity, there are all the possible social, cultural, behavioural and temperamental differences that exist in life. In 1999, Oliveira is categorical: ‘The spectator is indispensable to the work of art. S/he is the one who finishes it. They are the one who put a full stop in the sentence’.9 At first glance, this last statement brings Oliveira closer to a screen theory perspective, in which the spectator is activated and is the main responsible for the production of meaning. However, in the context of an opinion expressed several times, it is important to frame Oliveira’s statement as being uttered by someone who has always rejected universalist, general views concerning the spectator. It is important to mention that Oliveira’s creative process was aligned with this entire concept around the spectator. As Nelson Araújo often suggests: ‘The spectator sees a film by Manoel de Oliveira as an exercise in mental complexity that seduces us into a game of interpretive construction mobilized by filmic elasticity.’10

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The specificity and peculiarity of the spectator are definitively established when Oliveira suggests that ‘the first spectator is the director’.11 As we will see, even if we are to take Oliveira’s proposal we know that different filmmakers establish different degrees of abstraction (and, therefore, of relationship) with films (including their own). We will see how the potential of Oliveira’s thought illuminates other filmmakers’ views. Teresa Villaverde and Pedro Costa share some common traits. One needs to take into account stylistic and discursive nuances to understand clearly their differences. Pedro Costa, a filmmaker known for the innovation of his formal approach to filmmaking, has come to stand out as a filmmaker for communities (or minorities). His work with the Cape Verdean community in Portugal has been the core of his production in recent years. However, there is also a relationship between Costa and this community, as if the films were for the people who inhabit the images (more than for an anonymous audience). Here we can find a bridge of dialogue with the idea of ​​‘film community’, as proposed by César Guimarães: ‘The advent of the community as an invention of the common can only happen under the possibility of the unexpected appearance of cinematic forms yet to be created.’12 Thus, film communities are the different processes that give cinematic visibility to all those who find themselves under the condition of being without a voice in the current distribution of voices in a particular political scene. In 2009, when asked by Vasco Câmara about what he brought to the Fontaínhas community (‘those with whom he found a chance as a family’, in Câmara’s words), Costa replied: ‘[I wanted] to give them cinema. Cinema gives them a lot of things, it just does not give them money, with me.’13 Later, in the same interview, Costa clarifies: ‘My cinema belongs to them [the community of Fontaínhas, with whom he has worked for years] completely, I work only, now, with their memory. Before, I had memory, more sets, wardrobe, extras, actors, dogs, cats  …’ More than a spectator conception, Costa brings to the table a version of the idea (adapted to his reality) that cinema supposedly does not belong to the director, nor the spectators, but to specific recipients. Cinema does not depend on these recipients; it belongs to them. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to say that Costa’s creative process is subordinated to the premises of his ‘model spectator’, to which he is committed. Let us now turn our attention to the following meditation by Costa: People are increasingly alone. People who still have some interest in what we call cinema are seeing the whole thing slipping away. People come to me, more abroad than they do here in Portugal; there is a meeting in a place … but I do not know what they want to tell me, maybe it is still possible to do a lot with very little, or with so much intensity. Maybe a heavy connotation is associated with me. Because of the neighborhood [Fontaínhas]. Or maybe I was the one who transmitted a secret side.14

Therefore, we can see in these words (as in the case of Oliveira) a division regarding the type of spectators. In this case, we even find a hierarchy: there are spectators to whom the film belongs (the director’s entourage), others to whom the film is

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addressed (a community), the supporting moviegoers and, finally, the remaining spectators (about whom nothing is said about). This thought conveyed by Costa abruptly converges with the discussion about the ‘ownership’ of the film, which is widely explored, albeit from a very different angle, by screen theory. While traditional film theory debates whether the spectator effectively manages to possess a film through the production of meaning or whether it is the film that compels them, Costa brings an identity variable to this equation. Here is an example of an angle that has escaped spectatorship and that, with time, has become increasingly relevant. Teresa Villaverde, a filmmaker from the same generation as Pedro Costa, admits not only that cinema made in Portugal is ‘obscure’ (to use her term), but also that the creative process takes place in isolation. In other words, unlike Oliveira or Costa, it means that Villaverde does not establish any kind of commitment or intentional relationship with hypothetical spectators. Recognizing that she disregards the Portuguese audience to the detriment of the foreign, even the audience of film societies, Villaverde makes an act of contrition in the interview she gave to René Alan and Helder Moreira.15 Although the filmmaker thinks it is important to reach the public, when asked about the subject, she also assumes: ‘I do not think the strategy is to change the way we think and create; we must remain true to our will, finding a way to get closer to the public.’16 Shortly thereafter, she acknowledges the decades-long divorce between filmmakers and the public. This brings us to a point in the discourse where both opinions and behaviour do not match: if the public has already been rejecting the approach of certain filmmakers, it will be difficult to expect different results in a solipsistic creative method, where the filmmaker remains faithful to premises that have had little acceptance. In a different tone, in an interview given to Diário de Notícias, in 2002, Villaverde confessed: ‘I like to watch films once with an audience and then never see them again. But after many years you can see it again. There are things that I no longer remember and I see them as if I were a normal spectator. When I made this film, I did not know anything about how to make a film.’17 Although elaborated in a less articulated way, this thought leads us to Oliveira’s idea that whoever does the film, they are always the ‘first spectator’. However, it covers Oliveira’s meditation with another layer, related to the spectator’s ability to abstraction from the film. This suggests that over time (and even with the number of views) there is plasticity in the spectator’s faculties of perception and information processing that allows them to be not a spectator, but a spectator at every moment of their life. This suggestion allows us to articulate the idea that the spectator is a role or a condition (as formulated by Screen theory), in line with the perspective of cultural studies. According to this view, the spectator is as much a position/circumstance as it is a person. This debate around the filmmaker-spectator leads us to what Chinita wrote about David Lynch: ‘[A] refusal to interpret the meaning of the films themselves, (…) paves the way for others to do so. It invites hermeneutics, creating channels of communication between the films and their seer(s).’18 This posture presents itself as a third way: a director-spectator who seeks to establish with his film work a neutral relationship regarding the interpretation and issues associated with it.

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The director Claúdia Varejão seems to share (with nuances) Villaverde’s stance: I do not remember much about people. In other words, I do not think about the audience very much. I do not think about how a movie will be seen when I’m making it. I’m very engaged with what I’m doing. Like a child playing with Lego: she is not thinking if her father is going to see the garage entrance to that house she designed there; she did it and does not care. The moment he appears, he is confronted with the diversity of views on what he created. At that moment I am confronted and there is nothing I can do. Sometimes I learn, other times I am surprised.19

Admitting that the creative process is created outside of a model-spectator, Varejão concludes: ‘During the process, I do not think about the gaze of the other. At the time of return and this clash: sometimes it is good, other times it is indifferent. Or not, I don’t know. It depends, it varies a lot.’20 These statements are, once again, in line with the proposition put forth by Oliveira that the director is the first spectator. It is at the time of its exhibition that eyes and gazes meet and, there, everything is possible. Resisting universalisms related to the spectator’s persona, Varejão deliberately and voluntarily lends herself to the possibility of any hermeneutical outcome or reception: ‘For me, the experience of watching a film in the theater is irreplaceable, as well as sharing it with other people in a physical space created for this consecration. It is for this goal that I work for, step by step, in all the decisions I make throughout the long process of making a film.’21 Even though she claims that her creative process is not influenced by a notion of the spectator, it is, however, shaped by the possibility of sharing it and by cinephile ideals. Indeed, it is not strange to consider this question when Varejão is the first to admit that she lives cinema with great enthusiasm, as a spectator, to the point where it interferes with the creative process: ‘I do not see much, because I influence myself. If I am close to making a movie, I cannot see any other.’22 One of the most emblematic directors of the new Latin American cinemas (specifically the new Cuban cinema), Tomás Gutierrez Aléa, encapsulated in his film Memórias del Subdesarollo (1968), much of what spectatorship would later express in text. Heavily influenced by neo-realism, Aléa divided his career between fiction and documentary. In both, he consistently explored the importance of memory. Without memory, Aléa’s cinema would not exist, neither physically nor subjectively. Even for the Cuban revolutionary paradigm, the filmmaker was considered daring. His entire 1968 film reproduces and amplifies various elements put into practice by the various new waves. As Stephen Hart argues, while most films associated with Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano are politically revolutionary, Aléa was a pioneer in formal innovation.23 Sérgio, the protagonist, is presented as a spectator. Using binoculars and taking advantage of an elevated position, Sérgio (diegetically) and Aléa (concretely) direct our gaze to different places in Havana. As the film’s title itself suggests that time is an intrinsic component of the film’s experience.24 Using the filmic equivalent of

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James Joyce’s stream of consciousness, Aléa ensures that, after the initial sequence of the film in which Sérgio positions himself as a spectator and comments on Havana, the unfolding of the film takes place in the subjectivity of the protagonist’s reminiscent labyrinth. Hence, ‘Memories of the Underdevelopment’ is an essay on human memory, the experience of time and the experience of experience. Inhabiting what Hart called the ‘space of time between the past and the present’25 the images in Aléa’s film describe various degrees of complexity between different dimensions of time that, as in the remembrance process, arise repeatedly, slightly altered, non-linearly and without a fixed point of reference about what is past and present (because, in ‘Memories of the Underdevelopment’, the past is made present and the present is thus made a continuous process). Implicitly, Aléa’s film reminds us of the mechanisms of memory and makes us aware of them. For Aléa, the spectator is, much more than a voyeur, a complex being. Thus, memory and its processes are essential to understand (rather than see) cinema; more than art that records a time that is passing, cinema, in Aléa, is the work of creating interrupted, shuffled, incomplete time in need of organization. In this sense, for Aléa, the model-spectator is the concrete (not theorized) human being. It is the human experience that shapes his cinema and not the other way around. In other words, Aléa makes us see what we are, without pretending to be more or less than that. Also, for Patricio Guzmán, there is an intrinsic relationship between spectator and memory. However, Guzmán differs from Aléa, who works with memory as a subjective and sensitive process. For the Chilean director, his work revolves around a sense of Ricoeurian ‘duty of memory’, documentation and historical truth. His cinematic practice is inseparable from the events of a turbulent, socially divided Chile, where memory is more precarious than certain. More than deconstructing the problems that occurred in Chile during the 1973–90 dictatorship, Guzmán is interested in rebuilding all the traces that the military regime tried to erase and that left the country on the brink of amnesia. Although it is Guzmán himself who says that it is necessary to be parsimonious in the reconstruction (in the sense of reconstitution),26 there is a large area where present and past are confused – not through reconstitution, but through the recovery of what time has left dispersed. Hence, Guzmán points to what he knows how to do best: ‘Reconstructions work well when they are imaginative, subtle, metaphorical.’27 According to James Cisneros, ‘The figure of memory stands between the despoiled archives and an overabundance of images. This presents the challenge of forging a memory strategy that neither redraws linear continuities of history and tradition nor contributes to today’s global visual culture, but that nevertheless produces contemporary images of that past conception of history.’28 The same author concludes: ‘Like the specter, whose visible invisibility is yet to come, Memoria obstinada and Mémoire des apparences figure a memory that remains to be seen.’29 Despite his long and acclaimed career, Guzmán writes: ‘I still have not found a set of definitive norms for filming, editing and sounding a documentary.’30 Moreover, the filmmaker asks rhetorically: ‘If reality is chaos, how can you select what you

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want to film?’ Hence, the ‘point of view’, which ‘organizes chaos’, is fundamental.31 A close reading of this filmmaker’s oeuvre gives us the answer regarding his case. As already mentioned, Guzmán is a filmmaker that works with memory. He pursues what is not yet seen, or which cannot be seen due to its subjectivity. His creative process, however, follows the premises of auteur cinema, as he himself claims, because ‘a poetic vision of the world drives us’.32 For example, his editing model, as reported in his documentary manual, is very close to Oliveira’s concept that the director is the first spectator (even more so than the editor). However, Guzmán’s films imply that, for the filmmaker, the spectator is someone who produces meaning beyond the viewing of a work that tries, as far as possible, to present a linear structure – someone who manages to make the junction between metaphor and speech to imagine what is not in the image. For Guzmán, the spectator is passive in receiving stimuli, but active in terms of their processing, therefore being able to create (or re-create) a meaning greater than the sum of the parts. This overview through the words and works of filmmakers reveals that it is possible for the Filmmakers on Film approach to contribute to the definition of concepts, such as spectator. Filmmakers have been trying to tell us something. In many cases, more than their spectators, it is clear that they have been listening to what the academia has said about cinema. However, their cosmovision, sensitivity and experience have amplified and adapted the theoretical contributions that came to them. In other cases, as we have seen, the theoretical potential of a filmmakers’ discourse is such that it treads on terra incognita, thus deserving extra attention. The concept of spectator remains open and, if we follow the path of the classical theory of spectatorship, an endless labyrinth. More relevant than stabilizing concepts and defining monolithic theories (as proponents of screen theory, cultural studies and cognitive theory have tried to do in the past) is to consider and live with the conclusion that the spectator is a multifaceted reality and never an abstract concept, which makes it prone to be seen and revised by as many eyes as those that conceive cinema. Ultimately, and invoking once more Chinita’s historical account of the institutional, theoretical attitudes towards the spectator, this chapter is meant as an encouragement gesture towards the addition of a new theoretical stance on the entity of the spectator to the roll of those already existing.

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Part II P OETICS AND F ILMMAKING P ROCESSES

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Chapter 4 T H E DA R K L IG H T O F P O E T RY: V ÍC T O R G AV I R IA’ S P O E T IC S O F C H I L D HO O D Liliana Galindo Orrego

Introduction Colombian poet and filmmaker Víctor Gaviria is known for his four feature films Rodrigo D: No Future/Rodrigo D: No Futuro (1990), The Rose Seller/La Vendedora de Rosas (1998), Additions and Subtractions/Sumas y Restas (2004) and The Animal’s Wife/La Mujer del Animal (2016). The national and international attention these four films have received in comparison to his other productions (shorts, medium-length films, documentaries, poetry and essays) has created an image of Gaviria’s cinema as one of violence and realistic impulse. Gaviria himself has spoken of what he calls voluntad realista (will towards realism or realistic intention).1 However, when Gaviria directed Rodrigo D, he had already made a diverse collection of around twenty films and published books of poetry and essays. We can understand many traits of Gaviria’s cinematographic vision by analysing his major films individually. That said, if we don’t also take into account his early films and his texts, we risk creating a conception of his cinema that, if not incorrect, is at least incomplete. Realistic intention is a concept that requires unpacking, as it simultaneously refers to artistic, literary and cinematographic movements from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and Latin America, and it can also be understood more loosely as a concept that has to do with resemblance of reality in the representation of social structures. When trying to understand this concept of realistic intention, we must also consider that, from his first films and texts, Gaviria has manifested an interest in what he calls ‘poetry’. Finally, I want to highlight the word voluntad (will). With it, Gaviria expresses a desire of realism but also establishes a distance with a specific movement. Literary realism from the nineteenth century is associated with positivism and the will to portray the social world in an objective fashion. This objectivity is connected to the importance of sight as the primary sense through which we perceive the world, and to the idea of visual observations as being scientific or

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empirical in nature.2 If we consider not only European literary realism, but also notions of realism in film and in Latin American contexts as in Italian Verismo and Neorealism, and Latin American Cinema Novo (New Cinema) and Tercer Cine (Third Cinema), we can see representations of violence and poverty in post-war Europe and in twentieth-century Latin American societies undergoing industrialization. As Gaviria himself has said, his cinema is indebted to Italian neorealism, both in its rendering of everyday life and in its work with nonprofessional actors, that is, in the way in which the film is produced. Luis DunoGottberg also draws connections between Gaviria’s work and the New Latin American Cinema, especially Cinema Novo and Tercer Cine. In his essay, DunoGottberg3 explains three aspects of this connection: (1) a desire to mobilize the spectator’s consciousness, (2) the representation of marginalized subjects, and (3) a realistic intention. Duno-Gottberg mentions these convergences, but he also explains how Gaviria’s cinema diverges from these movements, as the filmmaker ‘has a humbler attitude in the creative process and in his relationship with social and political processes’.4 Also, Gaviria echoes Glauber Rocha’s ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’ in texts such as ‘Las latas en el fondo del río’5 and ‘Carta abierta a los cineastas colombianos’6 in which he defends the representation of ordinary people and their ways of speaking, without the aestheticization he finds in television and some films. These connections between Víctor Gaviria’s cinema, neorealism and the New Latin American Cinema are related to the idea that his films belong to the concept of pornomiseria.7 We can better understand this concept with the film Vampires of Poverty/Agarrando pueblo (1978) by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, in which a homeless man is followed (and even chased) by the camera through the streets of Cali, Colombia. The film is a critique of the way in which some films objectify homeless people for an audience that would presumably find pleasure in this depiction of extreme poverty. More than defending Gaviria’s work from this accusation, I want to reflect on the importance of what he calls ‘poetry’ in his films and the way in which children appear not as objects that the camera understands and possesses, but rather as subjects who perceive the world (not only through their eyes, but also through other senses). In Gaviria’s work, the camera accompanies children without pretending to have their vision and without portraying them as completely different ‘others’. This chapter is devoted to understanding Gaviria’s poetics as a connection between his realistic impulse and what he calls ‘poetry’, the definition of which has to do with being undefinable, but that can be found in the approximation to other people’s ways of perceiving and talking, and in the modes of narration Gaviria chooses. I will focus on Gavira’s texts, in which he approaches, without defining, what he experiences and thinks of as poetry, and in which he explains the kind of realism he wants to achieve. I will focus on four of his earliest films that have not been as studied as his feature-length ones: Buscando Tréboles (1979 and 1980),8 La Lupa del Fin del Mundo (1980),9 El Vagón Rojo (1981)10 and Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés (1987).11 I will do this to call critical attention to these works, and also to argue that the images of and from the perspective of children are key to understanding Gaviria’s cinematographic poetics.

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A poetics of childhood: Vision and time Assessing the complete works of Víctor Gaviria is extremely difficult. So far, he has made approximately thirty films, including shorts, medium-length films, documentaries  – about people and places, but also about the production of his own films – and four feature-length films. He also started writing poetry before making films – his first book of poetry, En la Ciudad Alguien También Perplejo,12 was published in 1978 – and has published books of essays and chronicles, such as El Pelaíto que no Duró Nada (1991)13 and El Campo al Fin de Cuentas No Es Tan Verde (1982).14 His statements regarding his poetics and notions of cinema can be found in his master class Cine y Realidad15 but also in many interviews, both published in journals and magazines and recorded for television or internet videos. This brief panorama shows Gaviria’s notions of and reflections on cinema are disseminated in many texts and registers, making it difficult to delineate a corpus. This is exacerbated by the fact that we are not only dealing with an abundance of texts, but also with their limited availability. The impossibility of systematizing and delimitating Gaviria’s reflections on cinema has key causes. On the one hand, they appeared in interviews and on TV shows that, while reaching a broader audience beyond academia, paradoxically are not made accessible through archives or libraries in the same way formally published books or films are. On the other hand, this difficulty comes from Gaviria’s resistance to adhering to specific movements, dogmas or ways of making cinema. Nevertheless, we have access to many of his films and texts, and we can also find selections of his statements in books such as Víctor Gaviria en Palabras16 and Detrás de Cámaras.17 In the first one we learn about Gaviria’s beginnings as a filmmaker and the circumstantial and theoretical relation of his cinema to poetry. Gaviria says he started making films by accident: When I was studying psychology and writing poetry for Acuarimántima, a magazine from Medellin specializing in poetry, I received a gift that my sister sent me from Chicago: a little camera. It was a Super 8; and since it was cheap, I started filming images in the streets, in solitary neighbourhoods, where grass and surprising bushes grew, and from the train cars, I only captured images because the camera didn’t have sound. One day, I went with a friend, also a poet, to a public educational institution for blind children and adolescents. It was a house so big and full of light that it was astonishing to see how these children learned to orient themselves through the hallways, how to use the stairs, how to dress and make their beds. In sum, it was surprising to see them learn to be kids like any other.18

In addition to Gaviria’s description of his beginnings as a filmmaker as something accidental, I am also interested in how the contingency of his means (a Super 8 with no sound) is connected to the development of a certain aesthetic and kind of narration that will change over the years, but which will remain loyal to some of their initial traits. Also, the role of material conditions and chance in his

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works may illuminate the storylines of his early and later films, as action and the characters’ will might even be described as subordinated to chance, coincidence and the contexts in which the characters are immersed. Furthermore, the fact that Gaviria says that he was a poet and that he visited the institute for blind and deaf children (Institución Educativa Francisco Luis Hernández Betancur) with another poet friend is not merely circumstantial, but gives us an image of a young man filming the city through the eyes of a poet. The short about the children in this institute is the first of Gaviria’s films: Buscando Tréboles. Gaviria would say later that he himself is indebted to the New German Cinema (especially Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) that was popularized in movie clubs in the 1970s and 1980s in Medellín. When talking about this short, which won the first award at the First Super 8 Film Festival in Medellin in 1979, Gaviria said that the Super 8 was the school for many young filmmakers of the time and that this was a very ‘herzognian’ film about blind children. This connection with Herzog and the New German Cinema is not only thematic. It also involves the narrative structure and production: ‘It was a little movie we made very easily, like children … like Herzog, but at the same time it had very pretty things; a totally associative montage, absence of narration, only images after images.’19 Since this very first film, Gaviria is interested in narration that pays attention not only to action and its unity, but also, and more attentively, to what he calls ‘dead time’: those situations in which nothing really happens – at least not in an Aristotelian sense of action  – but that make everyday time and life. He also emphasizes that he felt like a kid doing this film, even though he was not, of course, the same as the children he was filming. This subtle comparison between the children and himself links his early films with a way of perceiving the world aimlessly, without a clear narrative, moral or political goal. It also stresses the novelty of this cinema and the idea – indebted, among others, to New German Cinema – that film is an art that can be made by young people. Buscando Tréboles is connected to Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés, a mediumlength film made in 1987 about children from the same institute, even though the kids, of course, are not the same in both films. Looking at these two films together helps us understand Gaviria’s notion of action considering his attentiveness to children. Firstly, Buscando Tréboles has a subtitle: ‘a visual poem’. But Gaviria refers to it as a ‘documentary short’ too.20 Los Cuentos de Campo Valdes can also be considered a documentary that portrays the everyday life of blind children living in the institute and, more specifically, an ordinary day in their life. What kind of documentary would these two films be? How are poetry and the documentary form interwoven in them, especially in Buscando Tréboles? What does this interweaving tell us about the connections between Gaviria’s realistic and poetic intentions? In fact, Gaviria made Buscando Tréboles twice: in 1979 and again in 1980. Both versions are very similar, but they also have important differences. As Gaviria recounts, after he made the film in 1979, he showed it to some friends at a party and one of them – Javier Betancur, who would later be his producer – said that they should make it again with 35 mm. Betancur financed it and included Ivo Romani as the director of photography.21 Even though both versions have similar

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edition and montage, the images are different. The first version is silent and has more images of trees, plants and buildings. These silent Super 8 images highlight what the spectator cannot know, even when they are supposed to be able to see, while the children are not. That is to say, in this first version we may realize more that we do not have a better vision than them, as we can only see but cannot hear what they say or read, nor can we touch, smell or taste what they do. In the second version, we have instead a series of moving images accompanied by different sounds: music, the sound of objects touching each other, and the voices (casual conversations and laughs) from the children and one of the teachers. However, in neither of these two versions, nor in Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés, do we have a voiceover explaining the life in the institute, nor do we witness interviews of the children, the employees or the families. The 1980 version of Buscando Tréboles starts with a scene of two children in a classroom looking at a ruler very closely, while the camera approaches them until we have a medium close-up shot of the two of them, while an extradiegetic music plays. We then cut to a medium close-up shot of another child who seems to be in the same room, writing on what looks like a typewriter, until he indirectly looks up to the camera. At this point, the music continues and we read the name of the short before we cut to a shot of a dark hallway at the end of which we glimpse a window through which light enters and the short’s subtitle appears: Visual Poem About Blind Children/Poema Visual Sobre Niños No Videntes. After this, with the same music, there is a series of moving images: the hands of a child reading, what could be a group photo of the children in the institution, a wall with the shadow of a tree, and a child sitting on a chair by a window and looking at a piece of paper while playing with it.22 This opening shows us what Gaviria means by ‘associative montage’. It also tells us that the lack of narration is not a deficiency of the film, but an attempt to approach the children in their everyday activities without imposing a specific purpose or end to their actions. The camera does not pretend to have the children’s point of view or to understand them scientifically as children who are completely different from others, but it rather approaches them and stays by their side, without asking questions or giving explanations to the spectator. The camera dwells on how some of the children perceive their world, especially when they are ‘looking for clovers’ (Buscando Tréboles) using their touch and smell. This activity, which gives the short its name, is a multisensorial and purposeless one from a utilitarian point of view. It also emphasizes that even though we can see the children doing this and other activities, we cannot perceive (touch and smell, or even see) what and how they are perceiving. The short, however, shows them as they do things that any other kid would do: reading, playing or swimming in a pool. We may think we have a privileged vision of the children. Indeed, we get to see long shots of the beautiful big house full of light, plants, hallways and balconies. But those images at once remind us of what the children cannot see, and call our attention to everything we cannot perceive with our other senses when watching a film. This is even more conspicuous when we see shots of the children’s hands reading braille. We may realize that, even if we could touch the text that the

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child is touching, we wouldn’t be able to see what he sees. In the sequence of the child reading, we see images of his hands on the braille interspersed with images of another kid playing with a little monkey. We also listen to the extradiegetic music and to an intensified sound of the fingers touching the braille writing. The spectator can see and hear something that the child cannot, but, on the other hand, since the boy doesn’t read out loud, we don’t get to know what he is reading. The sequence is ambiguous: we don’t know if the images of the kid playing with the monkey correspond to what the other kid is reading or if they are two images of two different everyday activities. In Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés, Víctor Gaviria revisits in a different way the everyday life of the children living in this institute. This time Gaviria makes a medium-length documentary film in which, instead of the music he uses in the second version of Buscando Tréboles, all the sounds belong to the world filmed, mainly children’s and teachers’ voices, objects, water and musical instruments. The film is structured in segments separated by intertitles, most of which are phrases that the children themselves say during the day. This structure, however, does not mean that the film has a unity of action or a single protagonist; it is the recording of a day at the institute, from the moment the children wake up to the time they go to bed, sleep and dream. Like in the first short, the camera doesn’t pretend to occupy the children’s point of view, but it is placed at a lower level and it records the children doing different activities. Even though it is clear that the children are blind, the film does not make of that blindness a condition that predetermines everything they do or are. As we listen to their conversations with each other and with their teachers, we also witness quotidian happiness, jokes, problems and fears, and we learn they are not just blind children. Some of them are only partially blind, and all of them interact with each other through games and conversations, just like any other children. In his essay ‘Del documental y sus habitantes’ (On Documentary and Its Dwellers) Gaviria provides us with a better idea of what he considers the nature of the documentary form. Before defining the genre, Gaviria talks about journalism and anthropology as discourses about the ‘Other’ that differ from documentary. Gaviria shows how what he considers to be the spirit and potential of documentary differs from journalism and anthropology. He plays with the expression of ‘news coverage’ to show that, often, when journalists cover a piece of news, they actually conceal the people and the circumstances of the stories from the reader or viewer: ‘Journalism covers it [the event], as they say, the reporter stages the event and puts themselves on the foreground in front of the camera and the spectator, while, on the background, the chaotic reality is organized and concealed in the guise of a piece of news.’23 Gaviria’s concern about journalism is echoed in his master class Cine y Realidad, in which he declares a necessity to delve into Colombian history. He claims that he aimed to achieve this in Sumas y Restas, not in order to repeat or portray the facts that we already know – i.e. politics, economics, the armed conflict or drug trafficking – but to delve into the everyday lives of people and to be able to understand the multiplicity of causes and situations. This is connected to what he finds problematic in anthropology, namely, the attention to

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other cultures and societies that purportedly differ from the researcher’s and the reader’s. Other cultures ‘are [supposed to be] the only ones that call attention’.24 Gaviria explains that with Sumas y Restas he wanted to investigate some of the deep causes and consequences of drug trafficking in Medellín, uncovering the historical circumstances of his own culture. I would like to stress, however, that Víctor Gaviria does not argue that documentaries should be a scientific document through which both filmmaker and spectator are able to fully understand their worlds. The uncovering of those circumstances is less the revelation of a truth about a person or a community than it is a shaking off our prejudice and an opening towards the possibility of seeing other people’s lives, even if  – and especially if  – we don’t end up with a clear image or idea of what these lives are or represent. In this sense, for Gaviria, documentaries seem to be capable of showing people, without objectifying them, but letting them be in their own time and rhythm. Gaviria’s films embrace both what he calls ‘dead time’ and chance, which he thinks of not as something that has to be controlled and limited, but instead as an asset for the film. Gaviria himself and his films suggest that we cannot possess our time and much less another person’s time. There is an uncertainty in everyday life that, for him, documentaries can embrace and capture. This feeling is only intensified when the people presented in a documentary are children. Gaviria speaks beautifully about the uncertainty we feel when watching a child playing, as we don’t fully understand what they are doing and there’s always the uncertainty of what could happen to them while they play, an uncertainty that may increase when the children playing are blind. Gaviria finally suggests that this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing and controlling their actions, is precisely what turns the people we are watching into characters, instead of objects of our understanding or will. We thus arrive to the main question of this chapter: what is the relationship between documentary and poetry for Víctor Gaviria, and what do these two films, Buscando Tréboles and Los Cuentos de Campo de Valdés, have to say about this relationship in their attention to childhood? In many texts and interviews, Gaviria talks about the importance of reality and poetry in his work. As I mentioned above, when talking about his beginnings as filmmaker, Gaviria highlights the fact that at that time he was writing poetry with a group of poets in Medellín and that he visited the institute for blind and deaf children with a poet friend. Furthermore, Gaviria says that, when doing his films, he was probably ‘trying to receive the current of inconceivable words that have the dark light of poetry, and that don’t belong to anyone, to any particular artist, but that are repeated by everyone, that are original every night, every afternoon’.25 His films attempt to make visible an ‘impersonal language’, ‘present in the words pronounced by children and adolescents from poor neighbourhoods of Medellín’.26 Accordingly, for Gaviria, poetry is not the expression of a subjectivity that has managed to escape the world. Instead, it is (or it has to do with) the light of a world and the words of a language that does not belong to anyone. Poetry involves a close attention to the world’s images and sounds, one that goes beyond the realm of the obvious while trying to listen to what lies beneath words, to what their dark light illuminates. In its turn,

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the light of the world changes every second and is different every day. For Gaviria, ‘this change of lights is poetry. But it is more than that. It is only this: dim lights and bright lights’.27 Poetry is indeed related to multisensorial and moving images encompassing not only what we perceive but mainly a way of perceiving. It is or it has to do with attention itself: opening our senses and minds to a world that we not only contemplate but in which we are also immersed. As I said, for Gaviria documentaries are not scientific or totalizing representations of societies. In fact, when he speaks about his feature-length films with Carlos Jáuregui, he defines his realistic intention as the will to ‘understand reality as nonmanipulable, as fragmentary, as non-having a stable and totalizing meaning, but that nevertheless has things to say’.28 Gaviria says that his practice of realism is ‘neither a costumbrista or gruesome narration, nor a documentary one’.29 However, this assertion is framed in a common idea of documentary as ‘objectivity, desire to imitate, simplification and lack of complexity’.30 Documentary, however, as we have seen, is much more than this aspiration to objectivity. Gaviria himself plays with the limits between fiction and documentary in both his early documentaries and later feature-length films. Two of his other early shorts, La Lupa del Fin del Mundo and El Vagón Rojo, are works of fiction. In the former, a group of boys in a school in Medellin are concerned about rumours they have heard about the end of the world, and they read the Bible using a magnifying glass (la lupa) to see the letters and have a better understanding of what the end of the world might look like. The action, however, is not reduced to or centred in this event. Instead, we learn about the boys’ lives in this religious school, where a priest teacher punishes one of them by making him stay all day in a room resembling a small cell. In El Vagón Rojo, three boys visit an old train station. The youngest boy, who is rejected by the other two, intentionally locks the others in a patio and enters one of the train cars. There he finds a woman with two daughters, all of whom seem to be part of the boy’s imagination. Then, the film ends. Like La Lupa del Fin del Mundo, this short does not focus on a single action – and the action itself could be insignificant – but it is also about the boys’ friendship and conversations. Even in these two fictional shorts, we don’t have big or centred actions, but an attention to everyday life with its temporalities and conversations that almost never lead to a climax or a telos. Víctor Gaviria argues that ‘the concept of everyday life is Italian Neorealism’s fundamental contribution to cinema’.31 Cesare Zavattini’s idea that film is the only art that can make us contemporaries of other people means to Gaviria that cinema has the possibility of ‘making us share the inclusive time of everyday life in which everyone is witness to everyone else’.32 This idea of sharing time is related to the attentiveness to the time of other people, which is in its turn full of ‘dead time’: the time in which nothing important happens except for life itself. As in Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés, time can be just a day in the lives of these children and is structured by the phrases that the kids say during the day. It is made of different episodes that don’t need to be organized in a narrative line, but that are rather connected by the flux of life and time. It is in that sense that language, as we have seen in Gaviria’s statements, is not a neutral medium through which a meaning is expressed, nor is it an identity trait of a group of people. Language is

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a ‘dark light’ that simultaneously reveals and hides stories, ways of perceiving the world, memories and lives. Gaviria’s attention to the world is therefore not only a way of seeing (the eye of a camera following children and staying with them) but also a way of listening. In these shorts, like in The Musicians/Los Músicos (1985), Dwellers of Night/Los Habitantes de la Noche (1983) or Old Guard/La Vieja Guardia (1984), Gaviria dwells in the ways of speaking of different people, not to make a costumbrista portrayal of them as in a cultural encyclopaedia, but to find the stories and lives in their words. Gaviria will go on to say that his method of script writing involves talking with and interviewing many people, including the actors, who narrate their stories: ‘The structure and order of these narrations have to do with orality.’33 The resulting script is not a rigid text that the actors would read, memorize and utter. It is a ‘letter that expresses the intentions behind a journey’,34 which changes over the shooting of the film and that is permeable to what the actors say when they are presented with the situation or conversation they have to act.

Conclusion: On poetics and poetry A filmmaker’s poetics is not necessarily connected to poetry. However, the two words have clearly the same root (poiesis), which has to do with a transformative action. A poetics is both what a filmmaker considers to be his or her art and the making of it. In Víctor Gaviria’s case, his poetics can be traced in his films, in his statements and in films about the production of some of his other films. This multiplicity of instances in which we find his poetics attests to his constant reflection on what he does and proves in that way that theory and practice cannot be ever completely severed from each other. Also, in Víctor Gaviria’s poetics of cinema, poetry plays a foundational role. The concept, however, is not limited to a literary genre. It is instead a transversal way of looking and understanding the world in which seeing is not limited only to sight, but rather dwells in other senses and in what we cannot see clearly or directly. In this sense, his (poetic) concept of poetry as ‘dark light’ is an apparent oxymoron that speaks to the artificiality of certain oppositions like seeing and not seeing, darkness and light, objectivity and subjectivity. For Gaviria, and in Gaviria’s cinema, the dark light of poetry does not obscure what could be shown in a transparent and luminous way. It instead honours the ever-changing nature of everyday life, its darkness and uncertainties. Since poetry is more a spirit, a certain disposition, than a particular literary genre, it is present not only in Gaviria’s books or in his films in which something beautiful or transcendental happens, but also in the quotidian, in the prosaic and even in narration. In the same way, for Gaviria, documentary is not only a cinematographic genre. It is also a way of looking and embracing uncertainty that can exist in fiction films such as Rodrigo D and La Vendedora de Rosas. Documentary, then, is not considered a scientific and objective portrayal of reality, but a way of surrendering to contingency and dispersion. Moreover, documentary and voluntad realista in Gaviria’s films do not prevent him from showing what

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exceeds objectivity and what is closer to particular ways of perception and imagination. At the end of El Vagón Rojo, for instance, there is a scene in which we can see what is probably only a part of the boy’s imagination, which reminds us of Monica’s hallucinations about her grandmother in La Vendedora de Rosas. In this way, Gaviria’s will towards realism breaks a conception of reality as an object that we can fully see, comprehend and represent on the screen. It embraces not only uncertainty and imagination, but also the director’s own memories, as in La Lupa del Fin del Mundo. These memories, however, are not the expression of a pure subjectivity detached from the world, but are interconnected with other people, and shifting perceptions and points of views. Even though not all of Gaviria’s films are about children or adolescents, the attentiveness to their ways of perceiving and acting is at the core of his poetics. Children are not idealized as innocent and pure creatures. They appear in different social and economic contexts and they are all different. Childhood, understood not as an abstract concept, but as multiple experiences (that also change when looked at by an adult), can be a theme, but it is also a spirit, a way of perceiving, thinking and acting, that is never a single way, but more of an intention, an opening and a disposition. From this spirit or poetics of childhood emerges an ethical approach to the world and to other people, in which the film not only tries to be by the children’s side without speaking for them or pretending to have their vision, but also listens and attends to what they say, allowing the film’s own narrative and structure to be contaminated by them. In this way, cinema, for Gaviria, is both a personal and poetic work and a collective art, one that suggests that the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, the other and the self, might also be artificial. And that poetry might (only) be collective.

Chapter 5 M U SIC I N K L E B E R M E N D O N Ç A F I L HO’ S F E AT U R E F I L M S : A N A NA LYSI S O F T H E C R E AT I V E P R O C E S S Rodrigo Carreiro and Breno Alvarenga

Kleber Mendonça Filho is currently one of the most celebrated contemporary filmmakers. Active for three decades, the Brazilian director alternates his career with other activities related to the audiovisual universe. He worked as a film critic between 1991 and 2012 and as a curator for alternative cinemas since 1998. Besides that, he has been producing film festivals since 2008. As a filmmaker, Mendonça Filho has been active for more than twenty years: after the release of Caged In, a short film produced in 1997, he made six other short films and four feature films – one documentary (Critic, 2008) and three fictional features (Neighbouring Sounds, Aquarius and Bacurau). He has gathered more than 120 awards for his movies at festivals worldwide, including the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019.1 It is his work as a director that this chapter intends to explore. More specifically, we will analyse the use of music in the film features to demonstrate how, based on a personal musical taste, Kleber Mendonça Filho creates the sound style of his films and assigns to the music track the role of a storyteller. For the purpose set out in this chapter, we will look more closely at scenes, characters and plot of his three features, combined with statements from interviews granted by him and his creative partners. Among the characteristics of his style are: (1) the predominant use of preexisting popular songs, building intertextuality effects between lyric poetry and aspects of the plot and dramatic action; (2) the discreet, although recurring, use of incidental instrumental music; (3) the demarcation of a hybrid identity policy, which values musical genres and popular musical expressions from the region where he was born and still lives – Northeast Brazil – while establishing a dialogue with international pop, particularly from the 1970s and 1980s (the period of his teenagerhood), which highlights a vital component of nostalgia in his films; and (4) the tendency to personally control the musicality of the movies, selecting songs starting from the script writing process up until the editing phase. These characteristics are all associated with the concept of mélomania, conceived by Claudia Gorbman.2 The author coined the term to refer to directors who are personally involved in selecting and placing the music in their films. Mélomania

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has been rising since the early 1960s, in the wake of the authorism movement.3 One of the most important consequences of the conceptual advance of authorism on the audiovisual industry’s practices was the concentration of creative power in the director’s hands.4 Referring to Hollywood production in the 1960s, Julie Hubbert summarizes the rise of music lovers: This new ‘film school generation’ was given an unprecedented amount of artistic license by the studios, a change that produced an ‘auteur’ style of filmmaking (…). For some directors, music was a crucial aspect of their personal cinematic style.5

Since then, mélomania has advanced thanks to the technological facilities available since the 1990s – particularly, the adoption of digital music recording, storage, circulation and consumption techniques, associated with the expansion of the World Wide Web, and the emergence of social media. Mélomane directors have become more numerous  – among them are names like Edgar Wright, Cameron Crowe, Danny Boyle and, last but not least, Quentin Tarantino. One of our intentions in this chapter is to reflect on how Mendonça Filho, just like these directors, uses mélomania as an initial stage for modulating his films’ musical style. The choice of timbres, textures, rhythms, musical genres, poetic metrics and even complex forms of intertextual interaction between the plot of the films and the lyrics or titles of certain songs becomes part of the creative process of the mélomane directors and a fundamental aspect of their style, as say Claudia Gorbman: For such directors, songs or scoring are certainly more than something perforce added to the final cut; music participates forcefully in what used to be called in the simpler days of auteurism, the director’s worldview.6

An unusual aspect that commonly unites most of the mélomane directors is their prominence to songs that pre-exist the film. This phenomenon often happens because the director considers how each song may affect each scene since the preproduction stages, usually including this information on the script. Since the 1990s, this practice has increasingly turned to pop songs. Musical preferences may vary from film to film and from director to director, but the stylistic approach remains the same: the director personally selects songs he considers appropriate for the film’s specific moments. A music supervisor can assist him, but this professional is often more concerned with negotiating the rights to use the director’s choices. Precisely as in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films, in which the professional who performs this function, Gustavo Montenegro, receives credit for Music Licensing activity, instead of Music Supervising. When Mendonça Filho started directing films in the mid-1990s, he found a scenario in which mélomania was consolidated. There was still an extra factor driving him into this stylistic practice in Brazil: the use of pre-existing songs is historically widespread as it is cheaper than original compositions. The 1990s were

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also when the digitizing process of music and cinema production chains began to occur rapidly. All these factors combined allowed the directors to take over the musical selection of their films. Mendonça Filho did this in all the films he directed. He confirms and details the creative process related to mélomania. When talking about the songs that are part of Bacurau7 (2019), Mendonça Filho explains that the creative process of choosing songs starts in the scriptwriting process and only ends during the editing stage: There is an incredible moment in the editing process – Juliano [Dornelles] likes it too – which is to navigate through Apple Music or Spotify listening to things and thinking about the film. That’s how “Hoje”, by Taiguara, was selected for Aquarius, and so “Não identificado” [for Bacurau]. (…) Then there was this beautiful song [“Não identificado”, sung by Gal Costa], which talks about a flying saucer, about the sky of a small country town!8

An essential partner for Kleber Mendonça Filho in this music aspect is the musician Hélder Aragão, who professionally signs as DJ Dolores. He was responsible for the musical main theme in Neighbouring Sounds (2012), the director’s first fictional feature film. Aragão says he had to learn how to integrate with Mendonça Filho’s creative process: Kleber is a very special guy. He is one of those few guys who dominates every detail of the process. Unlike other directors, I usually send him some themes, and he uses them wherever he likes. I don’t get involved in the film editing, the placement [of music themes], where it will fit in. It is his work method, and it works very well.9 (Floro 2013)

This working method, which was established in the director’s first short film, has been improved over the years. Still, the creative process remains similar and starts already during the scriptwriting, which mentions songs that should sound at certain moments of the film’s final cut. Bacurau’s script is, according to Mendonça Filho and co-director Juliano Dornelles, full of mentions about pre-selected songs (Albuquerque 2019). Bacurau’s production launched an update on the creative process developed by Mendonça Filho. Contrary to what had happened in his short films, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius (2016), original music gained a little more space on his third feature film’s soundtrack. Bacurau mixes popular songs with orchestral and electronic themes, composed by the brothers Mateus Alves and Tomaz Alves Souza. Up until this film, the predominance of pre-existing songs was evident, with few occasional moments accompanied by electronic musical vignettes (which were composed by Brazilian musicians who lived around the neighbourhood, like Hélder Aragão and Cláudio Nascimento). In Aquarius, the soundtrack is composed of eighteen popular songs – a number higher than the average of tracks present in feature films in which soundtracks

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are composed of pre-existing songs, ‘compilation scores’ as Julie Hubbert10 calls them. There are seventeen songs in the film’s diegesis – that is, they are listened to and chosen by the characters themselves. In some parts of these situations, the songs are played, singed or mentioned in the dialogue lines by Clara (Sônia Braga), the middle-aged woman who stars in the plot as a retiree who fights against a company that wants to tear down the small vintage building where she lives to build a modern skyscraper. In a remarkable scene, which echoes the film’s themes in multiple layers (the resistance to globalization driven by a sense of latent nostalgia), we testify a kind of music battle, in which Clara duels against visitors sent by the construction company, who hold a party in the apartment just above. Both sides progressively increase the volume of the chosen songs. Clara selects the track ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ (Queen), while the invaders of the retired nostalgic space choose ‘Meu Som é Pau’ (My Sound is Heavy, by Aviões do Forró), a popular hit famous amongst lower classes in Northeast Brazil. She plays her song from a vinyl player, and they play theirs from a digital device. In choosing these two songs, a policy of taste and cultural value that simultaneously reflects the director’s ideology is expressed  – and his creation process, which recurrently includes relations between plot and songs – and the aesthetic clashes of social classes.11 It is essential to note that the director’s musical taste guides the entire process of selecting songs, and taste, as Bourdieu (1979) taught us, is not a simple individual question but a matter of social power and dominance. Mendonça Filho admits being a fan of tropicália,12 a musical genre present in all of his feature films. Besides, he includes different songs by the British band Queen in his feature films (which play twice in Aquarius and once in Neighbouring Sounds), reinforcing the mélomania as an important pattern of his creative process. These choices echo Claudia Gorbman’s thesis: ‘For many filmmakers, music is a platform for the idiosyncratic expression of taste, and thus it conveys not only meaning in terms of plot and theme, but meaning as the authorial signature itself.’13 For us, in particular, we are interested in not only this insertion of auteur marks on his films but also the ‘effect on the viewer and the effectiveness of his actions’.14 For instance, by sharing his musical affections with their characters, Mendonça Filho is able to complexify them. In the aforementioned Aquarius scene, the director builds a social locus for the character Clara, invites movie spectators to share it and criticizes the space’s invaders, literally and metaphorically, through musical selection. This operation is intentional. Mendonça Filho has already reaffirmed in interviews the importance of using the musical score as an element of resistance to social classes’ cultural affirmation. ‘We are talking about moments when films put songs that are part of popular culture, as in the case of Aquarius. There are many films that simply waste it and disrespect this resource.’15 This aspect is evident in all the director’s films. For example, repente and ciranda, which are folk musical expressions from Pernambuco – the region where Kleber was born and continues to live – take part in many of his short films, including the most famous, Recife Frio (Cold Tropics, 2009), but also in his feature films. Nelson Ferreira, a legendary composer from Pernambuco, is heard in Bacurau through the musical

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composition ‘Entre as Hortências’ (Between the Flowers). Brazilian popular music (MPB) and tropicália, essentially Brazilian fusion rhythms, have great importance in Aquarius and Bacurau. Lastly, it is interesting to notice how this cultural statement is also explored in the composition of original themes. Mateus Alves16 explains that, for Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça and Juliano Dornelles would have asked him to base the creation of the main theme on the song ‘Bichos da Noite’ (Animals of the Night) by Sérgio Ricardo – a choice made still in the script’s writing process as the primary reference and starting point for the score. That kind of instruction permeates all the relations between songs and plot in the creation process of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s work.

A matter of music In Neighbouring Sounds, Mendonça Filho admits that the film’s soundtracking process was one of the most crucial production stages. He assesses that the soundtrack’s importance in the film is more significant than usually.17 The sound effects try to reproduce what would be the soundscape of a middle-class neighbourhood in the city of Recife, capital of Pernambuco: traffic noise, children’s conversations, dogs barking, sirens. As part of this sound patchwork, some popular songs are also heard in these environments. For example, in one of the scenes, the housewife Bia (Maeve Jinkins) listens to the song ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. After a long cleaning of the apartment, the character smokes marijuana and rests on the sofa to the music. As we have already seen, the British band Queen is immensely appreciated by Mendonça Filho, who decides to share his musical taste with the character. A second song that sounds diegetically in the film is ‘Charles, Anjo 45’ (Charles, Angel 45) written by Jorge Ben Jor and sung by Caetano Veloso. In Neighbouring Sounds, we follow the daily routine of some private security guards who watch the streets of a middle-class neighbourhood in the city of Recife, with the apparent intention of reducing thefts and robberies common in that neighbourhood. However, for Clodoaldo, one of the security guards, everything is just a pretext for the setup of Francisco’s murder plan, a wealthy former mill owner who supposedly killed Clodoaldo’s father. The lyrics for ‘Charles, Anjo 45’ seem, interestingly, to predict some events of the plot, and the narrative relation between lyrics and plot is a recurrent pattern in the director’s creative process. In the words of Jorge Ben Jor, Charles is a courageous man who guaranteed the safety of the shantytown in which he lived (‘Charles, angel 45/Protector of the weak/And of the oppressed/ Robin Hood of the slum’18). However, one day he was arrested, and the shantytown became an unsafe place again (‘He unintentionally went on vacation/In a penal colony/So the suckers rascals/Took advantage of it/And a tremendous mess/Was set up in our slum’19). Clodoaldo clearly relates to Charles’ story: both are the peacekeepers of the place where they are. Moreover, in the lyrics of the song, Charles is compared to

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Robin Hood. Clodoaldo could also be identified as Robin Hood since Francisco’s homicide is an act of revenge for the injustices practised by this landowner. During some land disputes, Francisco had killed some peasants, including Clodoaldo’s father. Thus, the lyrics of the song acts as a sub-script, providing extra information for the narrative, as Kathryn Kalinak points out: Songs can draw an audience’s conscious attention more directly than background music and thus establish meaning more quickly and efficiently; songs have access to language, specifically lyrics, which can be a very explicit means of transmitting meaning.20

As already mentioned, the director’s second feature film, Aquarius (2016), is the one that uses popular songs most strikingly. More than merely creating atmospheres or commenting aspects of the plot, the song takes on the role of developing the character of Clara, who was once a music critic. Her tastes and processes of listening to the songs, shown in detail, reveal essential aspects of the character’s personality and help us understand her struggle against the demolition of the building she lives in. The director admits that these scenes’ decoupage was made precisely to demonstrate how music has for her some personal value, both aesthetic and nostalgic. Thus, most songs come on scenes by the character herself and listened to by her very carefully. In one of the first scenes, Clara receives a journalist and a photographer at her apartment, where they interview her. The song ‘Dois Navegantes’ (Two Sailors, 1974) by the Brazilian folk rock band Ave Sangria, plays in the background. Clara, with the album cover in hands, comments how the vinyl record still sounds good. Later, she gets up and picks up John Lennon’s Double Fantasy (1980), revealing that she acquired it in a thrift store in another city and that the record contained a Los Angeles Times essay inside it, dated November 1980. ‘This disc – this very object I am holding – becomes a special object, do you understand me?’ she says. The journalist seems to ignore Clara and asks her if she agrees with the increasing use of digital media. Clara refuses to answer that and, pointing to the record, comments: ‘This is like a message in a bottle.’ This scene clarifies the importance of music in the character’s inner life. Also, it allows us to infer that she shares this same passion with the director, who has already commented in interviews how he sees songs in a film as a possibility of creating a time machine,21 underlining the importance of nostalgia in musical choices. This scene exposes a critical aspect of the director’s theory on film. When the character emphasizes the sound quality of the record she is listening to, she also shows her affection for how the songs sound in that analogue medium, with imperfections being a time mark with affective meaning.22 Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward write that the ‘(…) vinyl retains attractiveness as a tactile definitive thing and thus it retains a possibility of intimate connection with humans. It is an “organic” object in a world increasingly facilitated by all kinds of artificial intelligence’.23

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In the aforementioned scene, Clara also draws attention to the circulation of the object that contains the music: the record was probably acquired by someone in Los Angeles, transferred to Porto Alegre and later came to her possession in Recife. A transnational item mixes experiences of individuals who do not know each other: ‘the quality in an object that makes our relationship to it like a relationship with another human being’.24 Clara realizes the object’s ability to ‘speak to us of the past’.25 Mendonça Filho explains that these qualities of vinyl were respected during the filming of Aquarius: ‘We recorded many songs live, with a microphone at the location, aimed at her record player, in order to enhance the noise, the friction in the grooves of the records. I didn’t want a clean sound.’26 The character processes of musical listening are evident, also, in other scenes. In a sequence ahead, we hear the song ‘O Quintal do Vizinho’ (The Neighbour’s Backyard, by Roberto Carlos) playing. Some noises and crackles from the analogue medium accompany the melody, while Clara closes her eyes and mumbles the lyrics27 in front of the vinyl player. She smiles, closes her eyes, embraces herself: There is attention dedicated to the listening of that song. She dances through the room. It is a scene that involves the delicacy of the touch and physical rituals: the climbing on the bench to reach the top of the recording’s shelf, fingers touching the surface of the vinyl, the right way of positioning the needle on a groove in the record, the volume increase and, lastly, the body gaining the space through dance. In another scene, in which she listens to ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, the volume increase generates new materiality: the speakers vibrate as if being pushed by the ‘body’ of the music. Again, Clara expresses herself by dancing, moving and singing along. Thus, we can infer that the whole process of listening to selected tracks of the vinyl records establishes the opportunity (spatial and temporal) for Clara to feel the music, allowing her body to react to musical affections. It is interesting to point out that, in both scenes described, the character had unwanted feelings: in the first one, she seemed discouraged after being rejected by a man, and in the second one, she was angry at the noise coming from a party upstairs. The choice to listen to the two songs and how she conducts this process indicates attempts to soothe her mood. Giuliano Obici argues that a song is capable of creating sound territories around affections and protecting us from chaos, evoking a sense of home: ‘It serves to protect us, to create a subjective place, a safe territory. In terms of sounds, the song establishes a state of protection and tranquility.’28 This is noticeable in both scenes: if external situations caused her discomfort, listening to those songs made Clara protect herself; through the melodies of the songs, she creates affectionate environments that calm her down and put her in a pleasant state of mind, and it is all possibly provided by a relation with affective memories (since the songs were released in the 1960s and 1970s). ‘In an uncomfortable situation, suddenly hearing a melody that announces another state, in addition to the undesirable state, makes the melody thread become an escape line.’29 Therefore, Clara provides a process of listening to music that takes her away from an unwanted mental place, creating a new affective territory – possibly

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established by a relationship between sound affection and memories. Mendonça Filho explains that the intention was for the character to decide how and when the songs would affect her: In the film, the number of songs and the singers and bands she likes are established by Clara’s actions because these choices are omnipresent and placed by herself, in her record player, in an almost cynical way for the other characters. She is a narrative DJ, someone who plays music, giving me the opportunity to make the soundtrack something organic.30

In Clara’s case, we can identify a very consolidated musical taste. The first part of the film – which takes place in the 1980s – introduces us to some songs that are part of this repertoire, as is the case of songs by Queen and Gilberto Gil (a musical taste that, as we have seen, is shared by the film’s director and is a big part of his mélomania). Thirty-six years later, Clara listens again to both Queen and Gilberto Gil – the song is ‘Pai e Mãe’ (Father and Mother). The musical taste can comment on someone’s identity aspects through the permanence of specific artists and songs: ‘Music can be used as a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, a technology for spinning the apparently continuous tale of who one is.’31 It is possible to notice this with Clara’s resistance to listening to contemporary music. Her emotional return to past songs as an expressive agency instrument could establish a connection with the resistance to abandoning the building where she lives since her youth. As previously indicated, there is a reterritorialization in a safe, affectionate place, an attempt to return to the past that is a more pleasant place than the present. The relationship between Clara and music highlights aspects such as nostalgia, memory, preservation, attachment and privilege  – traits of the character’s personality essential for us to empathize with her and understand her acts of resistance. Lastly, in Bacurau (2019), the film that Mendonça Filho co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, three popular songs merit attention. The first one, ‘Não Identificado’ (Not Identified), written by Caetano Veloso and sung by Gal Costa, is heard in the opening scene and, as already admitted by Mendonça Filho, was chosen after the film was already edited. The reason for this choice was the content of the song’s lyrics: the fact that the song has the verses ‘My passion will shine in the night/In the sky of a country town’32 creates an interesting interrelation with the opening shot – a recurrent trace of the creative process – in which we observe the village of Bacurau from the point of view of a satellite. Moreover, throughout the movie, the inhabitants of Bacurau are observed by outsiders by a drone designed in the form of a flying saucer, a fact that relates to the last verses of the song: ‘I will record it on a flying saucer/I am going to write a love song/That looks like an unidentified object’.33 A second song is ‘Bichos da Noite’ (Animals of the Night) by Sérgio Ricardo, which we will discuss later. However, it is ‘Réquiem para Matraga’ (Requiem for Matraga, by songwriter Geraldo Vandré) that plays a critical role in the movie. The song was composed

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for a previous feature film, A Hora e a Vez de Augusto Matraga (The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga, Roberto Santos, 1965). Based on the eponymous short story written by Guimarães Rosa, the 1965 film tells the story of the selftitled character, a violent man who, after being considered dead, finds salvation in religion and comes to regret his previous actions. However, upon meeting a criminal called Joãozinho Bem-Bem, he perceives malice and coldness in him. He decides to kill Joãozinho to avoid the continuous spread of violence in his neighbourhood. There is a similarity between this narrative and the story of Bacurau: the inhabitants of the village also recognize in the outsiders an unprecedented evil and, by killing them, they prevent their brutal acts from being carried out. The verses of the song by Geraldo Vandré conclude: ‘If someone has to die/May it be to improve things.’34 These lyrics seem to justify the violent acts of Augusto Matraga and the residents of Bacurau, as they both see homicide as the only way to make goodness reign again.

Final thoughts The use of original music themes specifically composed for his films is uncommon in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s features. There are several reasons for this. First, scoring is often more expensive than using a compilation score, which is problematic for low-budget films. Second, popular music allows the creative process to be initiated and conducted, to a large extent, during pre-production, which ensures a greater degree of creative control. Third, the technique is historically popular amongst Brazilian filmmakers. The massive use of intertextuality as the director’s narrative resource is also notorious, as seen in scenes already mentioned in this chapter. The use of the poetry of some songs to comment on aspects of the film’s narratives consists of a recurring narrative feature in the work of the Brazilian director. Kleber Mendonça Filho has worked with different musicians throughout his career as a director. In Neighbouring Sounds, Hélder Aragão created the incidental score, consisting of drones35 and small electronic vignettes, always derived from a theme called ‘Setúbal’ (name of a region in Recife where the director lived for many years, and where the action of the film takes place). The percussive and repetitive theme is performed right in the first scene of the feature. It helps building an unsettling atmosphere, which gives the impression that something is off, that something terrible is lurking within the characters, which will be confirmed throughout the plot. Of all three fictional features made by the Brazilian director, Aquarius is the most dominated by pre-existing songs. After all, the central character is herself a nostalgic mélomane, as the director himself. Therefore, there are several dialogues in the film about singers, records, tapes and songs, which often elevate the soundtrack’s importance to the narrative foreground. Even presenting eighteen songs in the soundtrack, there is room for the inclusion of three original themes,

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orchestrated by Mateus Alves. They are brief, discreet, and they sound in the film’s more reflective and quiet moments. Bacurau contemplates the most generous use of original music in a film by Mendonça Filho; this is the only film feature that had the original soundtrack released as an album. Altogether, there are eleven instrumental themes. The pair of composers said in an interview36 that they divided the work based on a simple concept: as the plot of the film is divided into two antagonistic groups of characters (the residents of the village of Bacurau, in rural Northeast Brazil, and the foreigners who pursue them), each of the brothers was responsible for creating themes for one of the groups. Thus, Mateus built regional melodies performed with an orchestra and were only heard in the scenes starring the Brazilians; Tomás composed electronic drones that score the sequences with foreigners. Several of these themes had melodies and harmonies inspired by the song ‘Bichos da Noite’, as instructed previously by the two directors. In turn, the popular music has lyrics that directly echoes aspects of the plot, even quoting the animal that inspired the original title of the film37: ‘It is late in the night/It is the hours of the bacurau/(…) A forgotten hunter/Takes a look from a high terrace/(…) Someone sobs and laments/This whole world is so bad.’38 The main theme was built around the same melodic progression as Sérgio Ricardo’s song, and the instrumentation of the themes also emulates the original arrangement of the song. The music analysis in the three fictional feature films directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho allows us to reach meaningful conclusions about his creative process. First, it demonstrates his mélomania as a director, personally selecting most of the songs during the scriptwriting process, although leaving room for changes during the editing phase. His creative process also reveals that popular songs are very accentuated, while original music is very discreet. Intertextuality, expressed mainly in the apparent relationship between the lyrics of the chosen songs and aspects of the films’ dramatic action, marks a recurring dramaturgical resource in the director’s work. Finally, it is also evident that there is a policy of taste and value behind musical choices, including the valorization of regional poetry (in particular, the music of folk manifestations) and the preference for artists who embody the idea of mixing tradition and modernity aspects, such as Ave Sangria, Gilberto Gil, Queen and Cabaret Voltaire. The fact that Mendonça Filho lived his childhood and youth during the time of the release of most of the chosen songs also confirms a vital component of memory and nostalgia in his creative process – and this element can undoubtedly be extended to other aspects, not necessarily musical, of his cinematic style.

Chapter 6 F I L M S O N F I L M M A K I N G : J E A N - LU C G O DA R D A N D   A B BA S K IA R O STA M I’ S AU T O - C OM M E N TA R I E S I N   S C É NA R I O DU F I L M PAS S I ON ( 1 9 8 2 ) A N D 1 0 ON T E N ( 2 0 0 4 ) Karel Pletinck

At a significant moment in their respective careers, Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami made a film accompanying the feature they had just finished, Passion (1982) and Ten (2002), respectively. In the accompanying works in question, which have a strong documentary touch, they comment on these films, the development of their oeuvre and what cinema is in general. These auto-commentaries can be considered examples of the Filmmakers on Film, Baggio and Penafria 2015) in praxis. This chapter discusses several of Godard and Kiarostami’s  – sometimes quite uncommon – reflections on cinema, while furthermore providing a historical framework in which these auto-commentaries are likely to be grounded. Unlike Scénario du Film Passion (Script of the film Passion), which has not received much critical attention, Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten has been widely praised. This reception is significant in that it acknowledges the ingenuity of the film, while at the same time categorizing it as ‘only’ a successful masterclass, a ‘lesson in cinema’ as Kiarostami terms it, conceptualized and filmed by the author ‘on the cuff ’. Given that Kiarostami and Godard address the spectator directly in their auto-commentaries, one might forget to pay attention to the aesthetic singularity of these works and how they interact with and comment on the previous features. Consequently, the precise functioning of these commentaries remains obscure. Instead of proclaiming a total vision on cinema, which Kiarostami could have elucidated by referring to his other films, 10 on Ten endeavours to interrogate the essence of cinema, a question triggered by the director’s recent ‘digital’ turn of which Ten is the first deliberately conceived product. Likewise, Godard relies on video in Scénario du Film Passion to retrospectively trace how Passion came into being.1 Where Godard opts for a rather genetic approach, Kiarostami offers a synthetic analysis. Both attempt an eminent interrogation of the art they are working in. Such interrogation is renewed and facilitated by the technical evolution of the medium  – the introduction of video and digital cinema, respectively  – which allows them to discover new features and possibilities and, in Kiarostami’s

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case, to allegedly go back to the medium’s origins. As we will soon see, they both defend the thesis that cinema is primarily about the ‘discovery of reality’ through the camera, an instrument they take to be uniquely suited to this purpose. Scénario du Film Passion and 10 on Ten should be framed within this ‘revelationist’ aesthetics. This ontological approach is not entirely detached from what was happening in the world at the time. Although Passion is a less overtly political film (especially compared with Godard’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s), the film is informed by the growing protest of the trade union Solidarność (Solidarity) in socialist Poland. Kiarostami’s Ten, which addresses the suppression of woman in the Iranian patriarchal society, on the other hand, is probably his most political film. The interrogation of the medium ‘cinema’ is thus not only informed by its technological evolution, but is also inscribed in the socio-political context at the time of the making of these films. Both aspects urged Godard and Kiarostami to reconsider their understanding of, and relation to, ‘what cinema is’. This is what happens – at least partially – in Scénario du Film Passion and 10 on Ten, which I propose to read as forms of ‘auto-criticism’, not only of their previous features, but of what Kiarostami and Godard consider to be the underlying principle of their oeuvre. Without resulting in a definitive theory of cinema, this principle is laid bare and reflected upon. As their poetics constitute an ongoing reflection on the problem that cinema is, a perpetually critical attitude is inevitable.

Immanent and objective criticism in Scénario du Film Passion and 10 on Ten That cinema is not only about showing but also about interrogating the conditions of showing is a judgement immanent to Godard’s and Kiarostami’s praxis, which situates them in a broader aesthetic history, traced back by French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to the theory of literature of Early German Romanticism (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1988). Since then, they assert, ‘the author can no longer be an author without also being a critic, theoretician, or poetician’, while simultaneously ‘the work cannot operate itself without its autoconstruction’ (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1988: 112). Already as a film critic, Godard adhered to this idea, stating that his definition of Romanticism implies that ‘every work contains  … its proper commentary’ (Godard republished in Albera 2011: 137).2 The requirement of immanent criticism must be placed in the perspective of a Romantic heritage understood as a questioning of the limits of the respective art form, i.e. of what it essentially is. Accordingly, reflexivity is inherently tied to the interrogation of the medium. This is made clear in Passion as Jerzy (Radziwilowicz), one of the main characters, is shooting a film, Passion, during which he confronts many of the problems Godard addresses in Scénario du Film Passion (questions of seeing, of light and the constraints of the film industry). But it is also the case for an allegedly ‘neo-realist’ filmmaker like Kiarostami, in whose work – starting from some of the early shorts, such as Orderly or Disorderly (1981), and more explicitly in a feature like Through the Olive Trees (1993) – a kind of naïve documentary style and reflexive praxes go hand in hand.

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However, in the commentaries to Passion and Ten something different is at stake. These films are not about reflexivity in the work, an inherent commentary, but instead about, what one could name, reflexivity made exterior as self-criticism. The authors become their own critic in works that clearly attach to previous ones and that therefore could be called ‘auto-commentaries’ or, more exactly, forms of ‘auto-criticism’.3 The latter term may cause confusion as criticism tends to be understood as the utterance of mere subjective value judgements (‘it is a good or bad film’) based on a pre-established set of rules (concerning acting, lighting and narrative development, for instance), which ‘good’ cinema should conform to. Kiarostami mentions in 10 on Ten how a critic dismissed Ten because ‘he believed that nothing would remain when the dialogue was cut out’, implicitly stating that it therefore was not genuine cinema. He responds by questioning whether the ‘genuine cinema’ that this critic seems to presuppose actually conforms to what cinema essentially is. Although Kiarostami does not respond directly to this question, in 10 on Ten he defends the thesis that the aesthetics of Ten is aimed at ‘unveiling’ reality. In other words, Ten can be understood as a particular answer to the general problem that cinema is. What Kiarostami and Godard aim at in their auto-commentaries may be clarified by recalling the understanding of art criticism in Early German Romanticism, as it reconfigured the relation between the (interior) reflection inhabiting the work of art and the exterior reflection on the artwork.4 Inasmuch as this criticism is not conceived as a subjective and exterior judgement of taste, but as the unfolding of the reflection inhabiting the work of art, it is believed to be immanent and objective. It concerns a criticism that does not contend itself with the exterior shell of the artwork but aims at its core, its skeleton, its guiding principle – a criticism, in short, aimed at revealing ‘the secret intentions that [the artist] pursues silently’ (Schlegel 1980: 144–5). Hence, a rather peculiar status is conferred to criticism as, instead of being a parasitic praxis, it brings the artwork ‘to consciousness and to knowledge of itself ’ (Benjamin cited in Gasché 2002: 72). Because each genuine work of art ‘knows more than it says, and wants more than it knows’ (Schlegel 1980: 154), the critic’s unfolding of what remains unsaid and unknown makes the criticism partake in the work. From this perspective, one can understand that Schlegel called his review of Goethe’s landmark novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–96) the ‘Übermeister’ (Benjamin 1974: 67). Accordingly, Scénario du Film Passion and 10 on Ten, which for this reason deserve their place in the filmography of Godard and Kiarostami next to Passion and Ten, are inherently entwined with these features as they elaborate upon the reflexivity that inhabits them.

Scénario du Film Passion – The director and his double For the moment, this hypothesis is only an operative one, a lever to unearth the theory of these filmmakers, offering another way of seeing these works, while at once stating that not the entire auto-commentaries correspond to this high ideal of what criticism should be. Nevertheless, at crucial moments in Godard’s and

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Kiarostami’s auto-commentaries, exactly this furthering of the work seems to be the case. When asked about his ‘absence as a critic’ some years before, Godard replied: ‘I want to go on with that, but with movies, not with pen and paper. Trying to be a critic, not a regular reviewer’ (Sterritt 1998: 102). In Scénario du Film Passion Godard says, for instance, that Passion is ‘entirely made up out of double images’. He thus lays bare the structuring principle of the film, its skeleton, which is essential to its understanding. In what follows, he develops this generative idea in two broad, distinctive ways – one concerning the unfolding of the film’s structure, another concerning the self-reflexivity of the major characters. Scénario du Film Passion retrospectively traces the genesis of Passion. Godard is sitting in front of a white screen brooding over the themes of the film to come while mumbling ‘work and love’, ‘love and work’, ‘the love for work’, ‘the hate for work’ and so on, thus expanding an initial opposition (the working title for the film was Passion: Love and Work) into a structure, which gradually encompasses places (the factory, the film set) and characters (the boss, the filmmaker). Due to this branching out, the film’s storyline cannot easily be summarized.5 However, following Godard’s genetic analysis of the film in Scénario du Film Passion, one gradually comes to see this underlying pattern of oppositions. At one side, there is the film set where Jerzy (Radziwilowicz) is filming tableaux vivants of several famous paintings for his film Passion while reflecting upon what art is about. The film industry, with its longing for stories, impedes every opportunity to ‘flesh out’ his vision, and at the end of the film Jerzy abruptly leaves for his home country, Poland. The social upheaval there is mirrored in the film back in France as Isabelle (Huppert), a factory worker sacked by her boss (Michel Piccoli), organizes a strike. These layers of the film are connected through the principle of love, as Jerzy has an affair with both Isabelle and Hanna (Schygulla), the wife of Michel. ‘Geographically there is the boss and the wife, Godard says in Scénario du Film Passion, the former possesses the factory, the latter the hotel. Both the factory and the hotel are situated in a ‘rather unimportant place, a provincial area’, where, by contrast, a ‘big film production takes place’ treating ‘major themes of humanity: love, money, war’ (Scénario du Film Passion). After having sketched this structure, Godard shows a scene from Passion in which several of the main protagonists, such as the boss, the filmmaker and Hanna, can be observed. What at first glance appears as an unstructured sequence, Godard demonstrates as being a sophisticated constellation of the oppositions underlying the film. The immanent structure of Passion is thus clarified through an act of auto-criticism. The duality central to the film manifests itself, according to Godard, in another way. With regard to the self-reflexive structure of the film, Jerzy could be singled out as Godard’s double given that he is making a film Passion, too. ‘Jerzy’, Godard says, ‘is looking for himself ’ and thus is ‘doubled’. Somewhat earlier, Godard speaks – ambiguously yet not without significance  – of ‘the path of exile’, the fictional director and himself experience as outsiders in cinema, which is described as ‘its own turn on itself ’ (Scénario du Film Passion). The logic of oppositions that Godard stated to be the structuring principle of this film gets an idealist turn, in that the figure becomes synonym with self-reflection: the

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self which is looking for itself. This reflexivity is also applied to Isabelle (‘Isabelle too will be double’, Godard mumbles with an oblique smile) as she ‘wrestles against suicide after being sacked’ (Scénario du Film Passion). That the condition of the artist mirrors the condition of the worker in that they are both suppressed by capitalism is shown in two mirroring images of Jerzy wrestling with a giant man with wings (figuring in the Delacroix painting, La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange (The Fight of the Angel with Jacob)) and of Isabelle who tries to prevent her boss, Michel, from entering the factory.6 On a narrative level, this struggle is comprised in his search for another kind of cinema and her attempt to organize a general strike at the factory, respectively. This duality gets one further, yet rather significant, twist in the Scénario as Godard merges the image of Jerzy walking on set and fighting with the angel and Isabelle strolling at the side of a lake after having been sacked, with the image of himself sitting before the screen on which the same images are projected. In accordance with the aforementioned conception of art criticism, Scénario du Film Passion uses images of Passion to make visible the reflexive structure not only of the film itself, but also of the relation the Scénario has towards the film. By superimposing scenes from Passion and himself before the screen, the underlying reflexive structure of the film is – as it were – enacted by the commentary. The duality that underlies the film appears into the image as an image of reflection.

10 on Ten – The absence of the director Unlike some of his earlier films in which Kiarostami staged himself, Ten notoriously revolves around the absence of the director. The film takes place entirely in a car, to the dashboard of which two small digital video cameras are attached’, filming the driver, Mania Akbari, and her passengers. ‘I did not direct anything, Kiarostami says in an episode of 10 on Ten discussing the role of the director. Due to an apparent lack of storytelling, this approach evoked the criticism that the result is a ‘boring’ film (10 on Ten). ‘When we avoid the literary narration of the story’, Kiarostami therefore asks, ‘the explanation of reality, a familiar theatrical architecture, the art of directing, the sophisticated settings, the special effects and false emotions, what remains?’ In order to answer this question, he invites us to have a look at a sequence of Ten in which Akbari has a conversation with her son as he removes the dialogue. The facial expressions of the boy, his gestures, become much more salient. In Socratic fashion, Kiarostami asks: ‘Do you think that these movements say nothing without the dialogue, that they don’t convey anything to us’ (10 on Ten)? In fact, the facial expressions and gestures of the boy are extremely expressive and point to a visual undercurrent of reality, where meaning seems to be flourishing abundantly, indeed. Kiarostami’s reliance on dialogue did not result in a ‘literary’ cinema, but instead in a thoroughly visual cinema. His sparse aesthetics do not conflict with what he considers to be the essence of cinema, the capacity of the camera to discover reality, but is aimed at setting this capacity free. This is made possible by the disappearance of the director. As this was misunderstood by some critics, Kiarostami felt the urge to make this immanent reflection explicit.

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10 on Ten shows Kiarostami driving on dust roads zigzagging across the hills around Teheran, while addressing the camera positioned at the passenger seat. Towards the end of the film something rather curious happens. Kiarostami pulls his car over and invites the spectator to have a look at the scenery: fields in the distance and a solitary pine tree. Without cutting, he takes the camera saying that he wants to show one last thing, something which reminds him of a haiku. He launches a camera movement towards the entrance of a subterranean ant nest, while reciting the following lines: ‘Light the fire and I show you something, something invisible if you don’t wish to see it, something that cannot be heard if you don’t wish to listen to its breath.’ After having listened to Kiarostami for more than an hour, this scene enacts what his lesson was all about – it enacts the power of simplification underlying Ten, which some critics misunderstood for not being cinema at all. Only a moment before, the spectator was attending a kind of private master class in which Kiarostami encircled this question in an analytical manner, but suddenly – and in one continuous shot – the spectator finds herself in Kiarostami’s cinematic universe. Criticism has become poetry. This shows that it was not Kiarostami’s goal to merely lecture the audience as to how he conceives cinema, but to prepare it to appreciate the simplicity of his imagery and to perceive what cinema actually is about. At the end of 10 on Ten his verbalization in the form of a commentary on Ten shifts back to visualization through which his criticism becomes part of the film itself. The enacting force of the visualization at the end of the film is only as strong as it is because of the ascetic aesthetics of these film lessons modelled after Ten. It manifests the return from criticism to the world and to his film aesthetics, which this detour has made us see under a new light. The final long take of 10 on Ten not only shows us that criticism is a fundamental part of the oeuvre, but also that poetry arises when genuine artists engage in the criticism of an artwork.

Ten and Passion: Towards the essence of cinema Compared with Godard’s work of the 1970s, the political dimension of Passion is rather subtle as only implicit references are made to the Solidarność strikes in Poland at the time. In Ten, on the other hand, Kiarostami takes a turn towards themes of political nature in a much more explicit way than he had ever done before.7 The fact that his reflection on cinema builds upon what is probably his most political film might seem coincidental; yet, at the same time the evasion of censorship that can be achieved more easily is at least one of the advantages of the digital camera without which ‘Ten could not have been made’ (10 on Ten). What ultimately becomes an ontological reflection on cinema is rooted in a specific socio-political background. Furthermore, it is significant that Kiarostami and Godard turn to the new visual media emerging at their respective points in history to interrogate the nature of cinema. In 10 on Ten the use of the digital camera in Ten is presented as a consequence of its being a more adequately ‘transparent’ medium to realize

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the ‘immediacy’ that Kiarostami had been striving for throughout his career. In fact, what Kiarostami seems to be doing in his auto-commentary is situating his previous feature, Ten, within the broader scope of his oeuvre, which he understands as a quest for ‘immediacy’. Correspondingly, Godard understands video in Scénario du Film Passion as an aid to help him ‘see’ the script of passion, a priority of the visual over the verbal he had been aiming at for years.8 Throughout the Scénario, he keeps dwelling on this same word, ‘seeing’ (voir), and aligns it with a presumed betrayal of cinema that, as an art of the visible, surrendered to writing and concurrently forgot to look at the world. That we have forgotten what ‘seeing’ is all about is also a belief espoused by Kiarostami in 10 on Ten. Though having a rather different aesthetic outlook, both films reflect on the oeuvre from the perspective of an ontology of cinema and establish their poetics on a belief of ‘what cinema is’ or, maybe better, what it should be yet was impeded to become by a money-driven film industry. Still, this is no naïve longing for a forlorn past, as technical innovation proves essential to the realization of this presumed essence of cinema.

New media, old ontology From the beginning, Kiarostami wanted to ‘remain faithful to nature, to human nature’ (10 on Ten) and therefore preferred natural settings and working with nonprofessional actors. However, the size of a crew required by shooting on 35mm made his actors anxious and, concurrently, their performances artificial. The smaller digital video camera facilitated recording life in a much more direct and natural way. Kiarostami explains how he discovered this technique on the set of Taste of Cherry while shooting the notorious final sequence of the film (which is concomitantly shown as to illustrate his assertions) in which soldiers are resting on the shoulder of a dust road. Thereafter he used it to make travel notes for A.B.C. Africa (2001), a commissioned film addressing the problem of orphans in Uganda after years of AIDS crisis.9 Back home he realized that he could never make such natural images with a 35mm camera and decided to use the visual ‘notes’ to make a feature-length documentary. While showing us snippets of this film, he states that what for him was the most essential feature of this camera, and most essential to art in general, is that it eliminates artificiality and ‘reports the truth, the absolute truth’ (10 on Ten). Quite the contrary of bringing an end to photographical ‘revelation of the real’ (Bazin), as often has been taken for granted, to Kiarostami, digital cinema made this revelation – the manifestation of the truth of reality – possible for the first time. Ten is the first feature in which he applied this technique deliberately and therefore constitutes an appropriate point of departure for his reflection on cinema. Before moving into digital filmmaking with Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001), Godard had been using video for years, starting with the Sonimage period and his collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville. In Scénario du Film Passion, he plays on the etymology of the word ‘video’ (‘I see’, from the Latin ‘videre’, seeing)

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stating that this medium helped him to visualize what was not visible beforehand (see Sterritt 1998: 136). Although cinema promised to be an art of the visible, this aspect declined, according to Godard, because of the necessity of the script, of something written, as a starting point for a film. He argues that the script is not natural to the cinema but a mere consequence of the praxis of bookkeeping: ‘The accountant wondered where the money went. So he wrote: “Bathing beauty, 100 francs; Cop, 50 francs; Sweetheart, 3 dollars.” Then gradually this became: “A cop falls for a bathing beauty being chased by her sweetheart”’ (Scénario du Film Passion). This explanation surely is exaggerated (though historically not incorrect10); yet, the point Godard makes is not to be misunderstood: the requirement of a fully written script before shooting and capitalist concerns go hand in hand. Filmmakers became writers and forgot about the promise of ‘seeing’, which made cinema unique. In a 1985 interview, Godard commented on the role of video in this process: I am closer to images now. Part of this comes from having worked in video … I use video to help me see and work better, because I can shoot something and see it immediately, all the while imagining a real screen behind. Video lets me look first, and then I can begin to write from what I see. Before – just like most moviemakers and industry executives  – I always wrote first, and then let the image come. (Sterritt 1998: 173–4)

Not unlike Kiarostami’s account of digital film, Godard states that video brought him back to a genuine seeing that got lost because of the requirements of the film industry. Kiarostami furthermore also criticizes the requirement of a script, because it precludes an inherently cinematic ‘discovery’ (10 on Ten). This is essential to both filmmakers. For them cinema is about discovering something that beforehand remained invisible. In Scénario du Film Passion Godard makes this explicit, saying, ‘You don’t want to write, you want to see, you want to re-seeve.’ An erroneous, yet instructive etymology as ‘seeing’ is aligned with ‘receiving’ and thus with a gift on behalf of the world. Godard proves a veritable descendent of the Bazinian tradition in cinema. As already indicated, the new visual media used by Godard and Kiarostami must additionally be understood from the perspective of the liberation they offered from film industrial standards. Digital cinema and video bring cinema closer to the artistic freedom of the other arts. The digital camera, Kiarostami says, is to the filmmaker something like the pen to the writer or the brush to the painter, making solitary work possible and freeing ‘cinema from the clutches of the tools of production, capital and censorship’ (10 on Ten). What was an industrial art gradually conforms to the Romantic ideal of the artist who can work freely on her oeuvre. The praise of cinema’s capacity to passively reveal reality goes hand in hand with a conception of the artist as a creative genius modelled after the poet or painter. Godard uses video editing techniques to cut and paste like an avant-gardist collage artist or a surrealist poet, not unlike Kiarostami, who entirely

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fabricated the last sequence of Five (2003) cutting and pasting several shots together to suggest a single long take of a pond during sunrise.11 The contradiction of the passive and/or active artist, key to early German Romanticism, appears in the way how Godard and Kiarostami approach reality in their commentaries: the latter is out there, in the world, driving his car around the hills, which is rendered with a kind of documentary realism. Godard, on the other hand, sits in his montage booth before a white screen trying to ‘see’, to imagine the film that will become Passion. The contrast couldn’t be bigger; yet, it is Godard who gradually finds reality (and the film will be, as always, part documentary), while Kiarostami, despite the documentary look of his films, eventually stresses the central role of the author’s imagination (10 on Ten). Whereas Godard only gradually reaches the outside world, Kiarostami’s road goes inwards.

The problem of cinema: Reflexivity, the oeuvre, the essence of cinema The use of video to facilitate Godard’s reflexive praxis implies that cinema, even in its essentialist understanding, is not considered self-evident but a problem to be interrogated. After his political radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s that unveiled cinema as a highly ideological apparatus, while consequently subjecting it to a harsh critique, from Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself, 1979) onwards, Godard returns to a questioning of what cinema is or what it still can be in the wake of such a critique. This makes up the reflexive structure of Passion in which Jerzy confronts several of the problems Godard had to cope with at the time. The producers beg him for a story; yet, Jerzy does not seem to be able to offer one. Instead, the only thing we know about and see from the film he is making is gigantic tableaux of famous paintings by, among others, Delacroix, Goya and Ingres that are being staged. These paintings do comment on what happens around the film set – as when Isabelle’s struggle is cross-cut with Goya’s The Third of May 1808 – yet more important is the fact that painting as such serves as an ideal for what cinema should be. Painting, Godard argues, is not so much concerned with narrative but with light and thus primarily with seeing. That Jerzy does not seem able to finish the film is a consequence of working in, what is said to be, the most expensive studio in Europe: the light does not seem to fit the job. (‘The light doesn’t work, Jerzy says repeatedly.) Instead, cinema concerns the pre-linguistic, pre-narrative ‘stories in the light’, Godard claims in Scénario du Film Passion. Since he believes that seeing is the primordial way by which we encounter the world, and that this inherent capacity has now been replaced by a verbal type of cinema, one cannot but conclude that there is an inherent blindness in humankind that only art can undo. Kiarostami, in his turn, also interrogates the unquestioned imperatives of the film industry in 10 on Ten. With regard to acting, the use of music, camera movement and so on, Kiarostami says how he gradually learned that much of these imperatives were not only dispensable, but conflicted with the essence of cinema which to him is, as already mentioned, capturing ‘truth’. Equally essential

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to Kiarostami is the awareness that ‘reality existed and was constantly played out before me’ (10 on Ten) and, accordingly, that cinema should be an aid in learning to see this reality anew. This is the goal of the set-up in Ten with the digital video cameras placed on the dashboard. In a scene that Kiarostami discusses in 10 on Ten Akbari’s sister remains alone in the car. For maybe a minute or longer, we observe her face and gestures, which are highly expressive, not unlike those of her son in the opening sequence. ‘The simplest natural or nervous reactions’, Kiarostami comments, ‘can unveil the insignificant secrets of a life which is apparently ordinary and without mystery’. To relearn to see this invisible interior life, to ‘unveil’ the mystery of subjectivity, one has to cut away all special effects, the redundant use of music, of cutting, and much of the narrative (10 on Ten). The alleged non-cinema of Ten is a consequence of a profound reflection on what cinema should be and on how this can be realized most efficiently. What for Kiarostami is a quest for ‘truth’ is for Godard a quest for ‘seeing’. These are the underlying principles of their oeuvre. These principles are at work in Ten and Passion. However, since cinema is not self-evident and can be seen jeopardized by the constraints of the industry and by audience expectations, Godard and Kiarostami felt the urgency to further reflect on these principles in their auto-commentaries. Ten, which at first glance seems rather distinct from the more classically structured Taste of Cherry, is nothing but the radicalization of what was already at stake in this film: a search for truth, understood as being opposed to the artificiality of most cinema. Passion is the next stage in Godard’s longing for a genuine ‘seeing’, as opposed to the prevalence of writing, of text, of narrative in general, which he will further try to approach in subsequent films. Scénario du Film Passion and 10 on Ten do not merely elucidate the permanently fixed rules of an art in possession of its essence. Instead, their criticism aims at pursuing a reflection already inhabiting Passion and Ten concerning the filmic medium, a reflection at work in their oeuvre that will never be accomplished as the medium itself undergoes a transformation. Therefore, their auto-criticism – as we understand it with the early German Romantics  – should be considered as productive in and of itself and therefore an integral part of their oeuvre.

Chapter 7 A N DY WA R HO L’ S L E G AC Y A N D T H E R E P R E SE N TAT IO N O F T H E B O DY I N C O N T E M P O R A RY C I N E M A Edson Pereira da Costa Júnior

Introduction Andy Warhol’s work is frequently analysed for its importance alongside new North American artistic avant-garde paradigms of the second half of the twentieth century. Although less boasted, the artist’s influence also extends to the domain of cinema. The austere device of his first films, supported by long takes and a fixed camera perspective when dealing with trivial themes  – confronting the viewer with emptiness and the reiteration of sameness – was, for example, a reference for the first structural filmmakers of the 1960s.1 The reach of Warhol’s filmography extends beyond his production period and is seen in works from the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Thus, I present three contemporary filmmakers who, in texts and interviews, affirm the inspiration for their cinema: the American James Benning, the Portuguese Pedro Costa and the Spaniard Albert Serra. As I will discuss in this article, the distinct Warholian legacy in its poetics and aesthetics concerns the way of representing the body. I refer, more specifically, to the acting guidelines and the staging choices that contribute to the constitution of the human figure, its form and its meaning in the film context. The hypothesis I defend is that these filmmakers, in the wake of Warhol’s first 1960s films, intermingle the domains of reality and fiction, questioning, among other aspects, the identity of the subjects in the scene. Within this common axis, I will present how the figuration of the body has been aligned with the pedagogy of duration in Benning, the dialectic of revelation and concealment in Costa and the dramaturgy of presence in Serra. I will also analyse the influence of Warhol’s ideas and early films, starting by looking at the writings and interviews of these three contemporary filmmakers. This material both alludes to the American artist and contains, albeit in a glaring and fragmented way, suggestive evidence of his influence in theoretical thinking on film art and/or in the creative poetics of Benning, Costa and Serra. Mediated by the analysis of verbal production, I will signal sensitive traces of influence in the

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field of film aesthetics. The proposed exercise is to specify confluent movements, even if occasional, and not to defend a direct, integral and ahistorical transmission of a Warholian ‘style’.

Andy Warhol’s beauties or the identities game First, I will briefly go over Warhol’s writings and films to better understand his poetics. Central to this approach is the book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Written with detachment and irony by the artist, the work presents a set of references to two key themes for understanding the figures of the body in his films: photogénie and self-representation. The best-known definition of photogénie is probably that forged by the French avant-garde of the early twentieth century amid their shared enthusiasm for the machine vision. One of the meanings was that of revelation, addition and even clairvoyance triggered by the filmic apparatus, and by the camera’s eye, capable of seeing what was invisible to the naked eye.2 Warhol’s motivations and work could not be further removed from those of the French avant-garde. However, the unique dimension created by the image also fascinated the American artist. The term photogénie is not directly used, but underlies another, more common term in his vocabulary: beauty. Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph. Photographs usually bring in another half-dimension. (Movies bring in another whole dimension. That screen magnetism is something secret—if you could only figure out what it is and how to make it, you’d have a really good product to sell. But you can’t even tell if someone has it until you actually see them up there on the screen. You have to give screen tests to find out.)3

The comment is complemented in another excerpt where Warhol considers that the only unequivocal beauties come from movies, as it would never be possible to recover in real life the mystery of the cinematic appearance. Taking such formulations into view, two irreconcilable manifestations of being are distinguished: that of the person and that of their visual representation/media figure. The first could never deliberately reach the second, which is part of a predicate that only exists in photography, film and television: the photogenic dimension. Warhol was not concerned with accessing the deep or otherwise invisible layers of a being, but, on the contrary, with enthroning the domain of appearance, understood not as opposed to what is real, a disguise, but rather ‘what you really look like’.4 The issue, therefore, is a surficial one. Furthermore, it is not just a distinction of being created from a mere appearance in visual media. Beauty would also be associated with the performative dimension of the subject on camera, with their ability to represent themselves and, more importantly, to play with multiple identities.

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When talking about the actor, there seems to be a difference in Warhol’s book between playing oneself or an appearance of oneself and playing a predetermined role. The first case is often presented from a theme present in silkscreens, Polaroids and in his films: that of the transvestite. As for Women in Revolt (1971, Paul Morrissey), the artist reveals his fascination with ‘boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls’.5 Drag queens would be able ‘to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place’.6 In other words, gender is treated as a matter of performance. While it is possible to unfold the issue from a queer perspective,7 I believe that the transvestite in Warhol is part of a broader reflection on identity. A sign of this is the importance given to makeup, applied by the artist himself to the models he photographed with Polaroids or excessively used on the figures in his silkscreens. One of the effects of such visual intervention is the construction of an ‘epidermal identity’, the personality as a social mask and, in the case of silkscreens, an unreality, given the rarity of a real anatomy due to excessive cosmetics.8 It seems to be in this direction that Warhol9 makes a distinction between temporary beauty issues (concealed by makeup) and permanent ones (refractory to concealment), and the self-image created from how people act or behave and the objective image. When it comes to performing a predetermined role, Warhol’s thought process goes in another direction, signalling a curious disapproval towards any distancing from reality. The artist claims to have a preference for amateur and bad performers over good ones. The latter are compared to absolute recorders, capable of recording experiences, people and situations and invoking them when necessary. Meanwhile, bad actors ‘whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can’t be phoney’.10 To play a role, Warhol’s preference is for the wrong person for the character, after all, ‘no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role [that] is never real, so if you can’t get someone who’s perfectly right, it’s more satisfying to get someone who’s perfectly wrong’.11 Throughout the book, any mentions of the ‘false’ or ‘real’ are extremely rare. As we have seen, this is a category that Warhol does not care about when he ponders the self-image or self-portrait. From this, it may be possible to infer that in the artist’s thinking, the performance of the self and the play of identities are understood as an innate, current, habitual action of each person – given, I presume, the importance of televised mass culture for Warhol’s work. Meanwhile, the actor’s naturalism and the character rigorously prescribed within a role, without a trace of the unexpected, of the ‘wrong’, are considered with suspicion. What could be used from these excerpts to think about how to film the body? A proper response would require a separate text. Considering the space available here, I will limit myself to thinking briefly about the issue based on the well-known Screen Tests, a set of filmed portraits of celebrities, artists, models and other Factory patrons, taken between 1963 and 1968. Approximately three minutes, silent, in 16 mm, the first versions were made for the series The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, inspired by a New York Police Department brochure that contained mug shots of the Thirteen Most Wanted criminals, which would also serve as the foundation for the installation Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964).12

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The first temptation is to associate Screen Tests with the beauty and magnetism that Warhol identified in the images of people in the cinema. Indeed, displaying portraits by Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ann Buchanan and others can awaken a cult value and ‘photogenic’ air for some viewers. However, what interests me here is to recover the effects of exercising discipline and cruelty by imposing Warhol’s demands on those portrayed, such as remaining still and not blinking, which, as is well known, was not followed by everyone. Similar to original mug shots, whose use in the context of criminology was to produce an objective image of offenders based on a set of formal regulations,13 Screen Tests depends on body coercion. If the faces still maintain any expressiveness whatsoever, it should at least be stressed how Warhol limits the tools available to those being portrayed to show something of themselves. It is through the appeal to the surface, the exposure of appearances, that it becomes possible to achieve the elaboration of the self-image, the identity game, rendering the subject’s interiority secondary. What is within the figures is of little interest to the artist’s poetics. The incarnation of a dramatic character and the interpreter’s conscious expressive play are also lessened by the rigid filming scheme, as if the objective was to test the power of looks, microgestures and infinitesimal details of a face in composing the being as they really are, or, following Warhol’s writings, as they really seem to be.

James Benning and the portraits over time James Benning often admits his admiration for Andy Warhol, whom he considers one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.14 A clue for understanding how the poetic and aesthetic correspondences between the two authors are drawn can be found in Life is Finite, a text written by Benning.15 It is a reflection on the acuity of the gaze, namely that which is developed through observation and the many ways of experiencing time. The text discusses three figures: visual artist Bill Traylor, writer Henry David Thoreau and Warhol. About the latter, Benning mentions Screen Tests recalling a childhood episode, when John Drury, a TV news commentator, finished reading the teleprompter, but the camera continued to film him for more than a minute. ‘He just stared into the lens. At first, it seemed like nothing was happening, dead air—but it was far from dead. Slowly Drury lost his professional face. He became himself. He looked real.’16 For the filmmaker, the conditions imposed on the subjects and the duration of a few minutes of the Screen Tests would have a similar effect of interrupting the appearance, triggering a lapse whereby the subject’s mask in front of the camera falls. From then on, a glimpse of the real could be recognized. Benning distances himself from my interpretation of the Warholian poetics of appearance and identifies in Screen Tests a device for suspending performance, capturing an essence that he calls the ethereal beauty of the self. Based on this, and moving towards the conclusion of Life is Finite, the author outlines some axioms: ‘Expectation is a function/seeing is a discipline/most of us don’t use our time wisely/perceived time differs from actual time/to pay attention takes practice/time

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will bring new meaning/understanding takes time/the longer you look the more you see/at some point your mind will wander.’17 Duration is discussed in the passage as a central axis for a scale of actions that includes observation, perception, attention and, finally, understanding. Seeing is suggested as a discipline, a habit to be cultivated with diligence and honed by the keen use of time and meanings that only duration reveals. If the eye cannot immediately understand the object of its gaze, this implies rejecting a cinema with ellipses or pre-established meanings that are delivered directly to the public. Axioms seem to suggest a joint construction between extended temporality and its enjoyment through spectator engagement. As pointed out in the text, Warhol was one of the references for this pedagogy of duration. Screen Tests directly inspired at least three Benning films: North on Evers (1992), After Warhol (2011) and Twenty Cigarettes (2011). The last two help to identify the pronounced aesthetic correspondence with his Sixties model. After Warhol, for example, was done with Benning’s students in his ‘Acting Bad’ class, of which the purpose was to question acting conventions.18 At the time, the filmmaker exhibited Screen Tests and later tried to recreate them with the class. Benning asked the students to act on what seemed to them the central idea of those works, and then he filmed them. The material has explicit interventions in the shots of those portrayed through editing, zoom movements and interference in time.19 Unlike a certain anti-romantic objectivity in Screen Tests, with the reduction of the filmmaker’s domain, Benning’s explicit gestures in After Warhol were a means of introducing students to the gap between the actor’s performance, or the intention with which it was conceived, and the final image on the screen.20 Despite the differences, both Warhol and Benning use portraits not as a device of the personality of the person in front of the camera, but as a means of reflection on the production of a self-image based, above all, on the face. The structure of Twenty Cigarettes conveys the Screen Tests philosophy in another way. This time, the participants are friends of the filmmaker, and appear individually while smoking. The action contributes to the stasis and relaxation of the bodies, while working as a structural marker, as each shot lasts for the duration of a lit cigarette. ‘It seemed like a good way to enable portraits-over-time. I wasn’t so interested in smoking itself. The act of smoking a cigarette is a way of measuring time.’21 Benning also chose the sets, clothes and lighting. And, like Warhol did in the Screen Tests, he would turn on the camera and leave. If the symbolism of cigarettes in films is not part of Benning’s list of concerns, the choice for the artifice certainly creates a circumstance for what the filmmaker identifies in Screen Tests as the transformation before those in front of the camera. As acting studies point out, since at least Pudovkin’s idea of ‘expressive objects’,22 the handling of inanimate materials contributes both to express a state of emotion and to elaborate the character’s mask. In Benning’s film, the directive of the smoking gesture does not engender a narrative role but instead modulates the micro-expressions of looks and physiognomic elements. At the same time, it requires a constant focus of attention, so that the presence of oneself in the herenow of filming is remembered by the gestural imperative. This is said without

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ignoring the fact that sometimes the eyes of those portrayed are directed offscreen and their expression becomes absorbed, suggesting a drift of attention. Among the physiognomic and perceptual variations of each shot, many masks/personas are expressed; it would be foolish to say that any one of them matches the true essence of those portrayed. Just as he identifies a change in the subject of the Screen Tests, and in line with his axioms, perhaps the most important aspect for Benning is the recording of the very transformation of the being in time, of the revelations created in and by the duration of the shot. Perhaps his idea of ‘ethereal beauty’ resides in this passage.

The dialectic of unveiling and concealing in Pedro Costa The possible influence of Warhol in Pedro Costa, as I will defend, is revealed in the creation of stratagems that allow the infiltration of a surplus of reality in the films and, as a corollary, of the saturation of the body in the image. The first step in approaching this process is to understand a common aspect in the creation process of the two filmmakers, regarding the type of involvement with the universes and subjects of their films. Warhol is sometimes described as someone ‘whose personality was that of a workaholic, producing art, setting the direction, and using misfits that found their way to the Factory as sources of inspiration in exchange for being allowed to watch them do what they wanted to do’.23 His films were produced directly in the environment he belonged to and lived most of the time, among his friends and Factory regulars. In the case of Costa, there is also immersive sociability with a particular community  – in this case, Cape Verdean immigrants residing in Portugal. In this sense, his work is built based on daily contact with those who are filmed. Although there is an unavoidable abyss of class and race between the filmmaker and his actors, his films, like those of Warhol, are also modelled on a balance between ethnographic sensitivity and personal life.24 It is possible to infer a second articulation between the authors from an interview in which Costa draws a correspondence between the elusive personality of the residents of the Fontainhas quarter, in Lisbon, and that of Warhol. He [Warhol] hides so well and he shows everything at the same time. The neighbourhood and the people in it [Fontainhas] are exactly the same. They are absolutely isolated, elusive, secretive, and lost and they can disappear from one second to the other, they can die or vanish easily. But at the same time they shout, they show themselves, they like to be seen, and they dance. This feature is one of cinema’s foundations, too. How are we organizing the secrecy and what are we going to show in the film? And for me Warhol is the most consistent in that.25

Continuing the interview, Costa praises Warhol’s ability to suggest a human gravity, a matter of life and death, that hovers over his superstars. In light of

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these statements, I believe that the area of tangency between these two directors’ aesthetics is rooted in a dialectic of unveiling and concealing the filmed subjects. An indication of what I have mentioned is found in Warhol’s 1960s films, in which bodies are filmed in a state of rest, sometimes in poses, as mute presences, devoid of symbolic accent. Sleep (1963), with its six hours of John Giorno sleeping, is the paradigm of this configuration that hyperbolizes the human figure in the image, giving a literality that borders on parody. It is also the work that inaugurates in Warhol a cinematic curiosity for the body and from then installs a contradictory voyeurism in which the subject/camera’s obsession with seeing is never reconciled with the possession or full knowledge of the object of the gaze, as there is nothing (symbolic, at least) to be revealed. These are traits that to some extent remain with another formal treatment in Screen Tests, Chelsea Girls (1966) and Beauty No.2 (1965). I will focus on the latter, which is much admired by Costa. Beauty No. 2 features Edie Sedgwick and Gino Piserchio in a bedroom, on the bed. Chuck Wein is in the space, but not in view, his voice heard questioning the couple and, above all, Sedgwick. The film is situated between the imprecise boundaries of real and staged, because while the situation has an air of improvisation, of mere register, there are a series of artifices created to unfold the scene. ‘It’s his film that touches me the most because that’s In Vanda’s Room without him having thought for a second. It took me three years. I see a filmmaker with a gravity that touches me.’26 There are many points in common between the two films, starting with the porosity towards reality, which comes, among other reasons, from people interpreting their own lives. The separation between what is captured by the camera and what is decided before filming becomes blurred. Warhol often misleads on his films’ scenes, but his scholars point out the direction of the situations filmed.27 Similarly, the authenticity surrounding the presence of bodies in Costa depends on careful staging. For example, the director is categorical when mentioning the methodical rehearsals with the actors.28 Another point of tangency is the economy of means in Beauty No.2 and In Vanda’s Room (2000). Both depend on a modest apparatus composed mainly of the camera’s fixed point of view, long takes and body performance. Thus, Warhol makes the shot a kind of scenic cube in which everything is visually and dramatically aimed at Sedgwick. Dressed in underwear, she is at the centre of the frame, overexposed by the light, responding to Wein’s perverse provocations and Piserchio’s physical advances. The staging exposes her – in the sense of showing her to the gaze (of the spectator and the two actors) as well as subjecting her to risk. The point of view reinforces the violence rising there. Costa does something similar in In Vanda’s Room, also for the still camera. In the opening scene, the severity of the device places the viewer in front of a desolate scenario in which two squalid figures, Vanda and her sister, use drugs in front of the camera in a gloomy room. Image and sound are in no way distorted, engaging the viewer in the face of the excruciating situation taking place. Despite the austerity of the point of view, Costa says that in his film there is a distance between the director and the actors, materialized by the distance

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between the camera and the person being filmed.29 In this sense, the frontality of the device coexists, in tension, with a type of indentation. Marks of this withdrawal also present themselves in other ways, such as in moments of suspension of time, when the actors appear in states of rest, doing something dear to Warhol’s films: ‘nothing’. In such a way, Vanda is filmed sleeping; Zita absently unravelling a skein; Nhurro motionless, thinking; Russo combing his hair flawlessly and obsessively. In these moments, the body is so concentrated on itself and separated from its surroundings that it reaches a retreat from the miserable day to day, a state of introspection to which the viewer has no access, vaguely similar to the blind spot that I describe with regard to Sleep. More importantly, as in Warhol, it is a drama of the surface of the body and not of psychological interiority: I am not the type of filmmaker who wants to know what the actor feels when he’s filming. I am more interested in how the actor will say a certain thing, in what way, how a sentence will sound, how the actor’s rhythm is, his pauses. Or when there is a silence, how is his look, how do I see that look.30

The emphasis on the actors’ exteriority also permeates Costa’s work from the portraits, present since at least the Casa de Lava  – Scrapbook,31 whose pages are full of photographs of the faces of the residents of Ilha do Fogo in Cape Verde. From the film Down to Earth (1994) to Vitalina Varela (2019), the portrait shots are no longer occasional moments to become a structuring axis, giving progressive primacy to the lengthy posing sessions of the filmed subjects, instead of a possible dramatic action.32 To be more precise, the portraits consist of occasions when the camera stops on one or more faces, in silence, static. The flow of narration, dialogues or a logical chain of events is partially suspended in favour of a descriptive look at the physiognomy, retained in its appearance. The interest seems to be more for the social identity evoked from a space or a historical condition of the subjects. Like the presentation of the body in states of rest, alienation and introspection in In Vanda’s Room, the portraits filmed in Costa’s other films refuse to examine interiority, feelings, the psychological element. These are two aesthetic procedures that condense what I have previously announced as a possible legacy of Warhol: the dialectic of unveiling and concealment of bodies or, more precisely, of subjects. In the case of the Portuguese filmmaker, the option is, on the one hand, for frontal exposure of the human figure to present traces of his historical-social experience. On the other hand, films are refractory to an inner probing or even to a nonconscious capture  – realism is the result of acting, of performing oneself, as in Warhol. The resulting opacity seems to function in Costa as a means of dealing with the asymmetry of class and race between the director and the filmed subjects since the filmic device (at least partially) rejects the objectification and framing of the Other within a transparent form, recognizing a distance that it will not be able to effectively cross.

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Albert Serra and the dramaturgy of presence Andy Warhol’s influence on Serra’s work is confirmed in interviews and in Dramaturgy of Presence, a succinctly written reflection on his way of understanding and filming actors in cinema. In the text, the American pop artist and Paul Morrissey are cited alongside critic Manny Farber as names that have identified the actor’s decline in the films of the 1950s. ‘They longed for the cinema of the 1930’s, where the look of the actor was still more important than the hairstyle (a “baluster”), the gesture than its meaning.’33 Throughout the text, Serra flirts with the notion of photogénie or, at least, of a unique nature of the actor that could only be captured by the camera. In this way he approaches Warholian beauty as an exclusive emanation of the technical image. ‘Nothing of what we see should have happened in reality before.’34 There is something secret that is known to exist when seeing the face on the screen. This premise guides the choice for digital cameras, whose agility and technical facilities allow the mobilization of the apparatus to serve the actor: ‘All my method comes down to the principle that the technique should always be prepared to capture the actor’s inspiration, and that this can arise in the most unforeseen moment or circumstance.’35 In his terms, the scene is something latent, and its materialization takes place in the filmed face. The second point of contact between the directors’ poetics is a corollary to the production of such photogenic ‘magic’, and it concerns the conduction of the actors. In addition to the aforementioned coercion of bodies in Screen Tests, Warhol’s scholars and collaborators comment on his choice of insecure or unstable actors in order to confront them during staging, as in the case of Edie Sedgwick’s humiliating and embarrassing situations in Beauty No. 2, and Mario Montez in Screen Test #2 (1965). A screenwriter for some of his films, Donald Tavel says: ‘Another technique was to have people come in with the greatest security about what they were going to do, and then tell them, No. […] And when they’re made to switch, you get a lot of fascinating things going on.’36 At times, actors used alcohol and drugs to stimulate a variation of performance in front of the camera. Recalling Warhol’s manipulation of actors, Serra claims that this is the very theme of films such as Chelsea Girl, which seems to cause a feeling of ‘looking at life in people around, looking at life. The most passive, most quiet, and calm guy is really glowing with life. Life, more life, means more passion, more action’.37 Similarly, Serra’s creative process involves strategies to take advantage of what happens during filming. ‘I have an idea of a​​ concept and when I go to write the script, I go against the ideas I had in mind before. When I shoot, I take all the ideas I thought were good in the script, and shoot against that.’38 The same would apply to editing, in a process of constant opening to chance. To integrate his proposal, the Spaniard prefers non-professional actors. The choice makes the exact moment or form of ‘inspiration’ unpredictable – echoing Warhol’s statements about his preference for bad interpreters.39 The guidelines given to the actors during filming also reinforce an appreciation for the accidental.

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One example is Birdsong’s (2008) eleven-minute take. The only directive given was that the protagonists walk through a wide desert. Each of them had a walkietalkie to listen to any cues from the director while the shot was being recorded. However, on that occasion, Serra used the equipment to share jumbled words, leaving the actors confused.40 The stratagem sought to capture the reaction to false instructions, granting the cast an unexpected freedom and a creative dimension to act  – as long as they continued to obey the imperative of walking, which at that point seemed to be the main indication of a character’s existence. The success of the process also depended on the absence of cuts, necessary for capturing the glaring reactions. Serra and Warhol’s poetic choices create, in their respective films, an indeterminacy between staging and capturing something real from the noises and tensions that surround the filming process. The performance of the body and face, which integrate the mystique attributed by both to cinema, would benefit from this device. This brings me to the title of Serra’s text, Dramaturgy of Presence. The notion advocated an anti-narrative cinema, specifically when it comes to acting. Based on Farber, Serra considers that the actor is unable to keep the character alive and, at the same time, preserve the film style. The answer to this untenable situation would be to present the actor to the lack of need for narrative, action drama or a character with psychological depth. To do so, it is necessary to reduce the filmmaker’s ideas and all machinery in favour of a space created for the actor’s immanence in front of the camera. ‘The great actor does not represent, not even expresses; he only is. […] Only great directors (Bene, Warhol, Straub) have the discipline to repress their own indiscretion, and to accept each actor as a celebration.’41 Thus, the gestures must mean by themselves, by the presence they imprint, without necessarily expressing a direct meaning related to the story. The firm positioning of Dramaturgy of the Presence can lead one to think of Warhol’s first films (Sleep; Eat, 1963; Kiss, 1963; Screen Tests) that have hyperbolized the body in the image, subtracting any trace of a second layer beyond the literal presence and formal austerity as a conceptual programme. In his work, however, Serra seems to have found his own path, less radical than he proposes, since the freedom defended for the actor continues under the guise of literary (Honor of the Knights, 2006), religious (Birdsong) and historical (The Death of Louis XIV, 2016) characters. The Spaniard’s programme seems closer to a desublimation of these figures, an irreverent transposition to the ordinary of life, partially corresponding to the project of the neo-vanguards of the second half of the twentieth century, including Warhol’s own Pop Art, of creating an art that is porous to the dimensions of everyday life. The path taken in this text has aimed to outline some ways that allow discussing the respective poetics and aesthetics of Benning, Costa and Serra based on the influence, alleged by the filmmakers themselves, of Andy Warhol’s films. A closer analysis of each filmmaker could show the true capillarity of such a legacy or, equally, its limits. Even if briefly, I believe to have exposed the heterogeneous influence of Warhol, whose mark I have identified in Benning’s pedagogy of duration, in Costa’s dialectic between revelation and concealment,

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and in Serra’s dramaturgy of presence. A common point of the three proposals is the problematization of the filmed subjects’ performance and the creation of a hyper-referentiality regime, thanks to the long take and the emptying of the body’s metaphysical meaning. These are two characteristic aspects of Warhol’s first films that integrate in the conceptual thinking and practice of contemporary filmmakers as a means of sharpening a mark of reality. In this case, something secret involves the conditions of apprehension and figuration of the body from the articulation between the performance and the physiognomy of the actor, the flow of the image in dilated temporality, and the perceptual engagement of the viewer.

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Chapter 8 M A DA M E C I N É M A : AG N È S VA R DA , O R A P O RT R A I T O F T H E A RT I ST A S A N AG E L E S S WOM A N Fátima Chinita

Agnès ‘La’ Varda Agnès Varda died on 29 March 2019, at the ripe age of ninety, as probably the most famous woman filmmaker ever – or at least as one who managed to gain fitting artistic recognition during her own lifetime. She made all kinds of films, but excelled at a mix of documentary and fiction in which she inserted herself in the folds of the image, in either body/voice (as an explicit or implicit self-presence) and/or an ideological stance on cinema in the world/the world of cinema. The pinnacle of this filmic tendency is Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008), made when she was about to turn eighty. For the first time, critics and scholars alike recognised her cinematic trait and dubbed the film a self-portrait structurally composed as an essay film. Because of her age at the time, it was perceived as a kind of film testament as well, a summary of her life’s work. Since she had already written her own autobiography, entitled Varda par Agnès, published in 1994 by the iconic Cahiers du cinéma, it seemed that, as the film industry puts it, ‘It was a wrap.’1 However, Varda would soon refute this perception and embark on a few crepuscular projects that continued the trend more clearly begun with The Beaches. Because she had started creating installations, very few people took notice of her ongoing film career, preferring to focus on what was perceived as a third stage in her creative life – that of the visual artist – thus praising her versatility. Yet, this approach is a little myopic, because Varda was always versatile, as her own concept of cinécriture (cine-writing) attests to. According to her, cinematic art should be made with all the modalities (image, sound, etc.) and the processes available to it and inexistent in other art forms (including the location scouting, the shooting, the, and so on). Therefore, her cinematic modus operandi had always involved that which the creation and production of art installations also involve, not to mention that the great majority of her installations contain moving images in video format. In this chapter, therefore, I propose to concentrate on Varda’s last film works, made on digital video but not intended for the museum or gallery space. I aim to

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analyse how they continue the practice that she started with The Beaches and how they manage to be just as effective a discourse on herself and her art as that issued by her written autobiography, which she considers to be more about her work than her life. Thus, I will focus on the five-episode TV series produced by ARTE, Agnès De ci de là Varda (Agnès from Here to There, 2011), in which an itinerant Varda encounters artists all over the world, discussing and showing bits and pieces of her artistic output as well; Visages villages (Faces Places, 2017), her first co-directed opus, in partnership with the French artist JR, also an itinerant film of creation and sharing, this time with anonymous French citizens in the French countryside; and finally her closing work, tellingly named, in an intended repetition, Varda par Agnès (Varda by Agnès, 2019), a two-episode TV series produced once more by ARTE, structured in lecture form. All of them, but especially the last, contain her real artistic testament, her discourse on art, and should thus be considered as true ars poetica films, rather than minor works. In them, Varda’s maturity as a filmmaker, but also as an overall auteur, is cristallised. Her ‘cine-maturity’ as she jokingly puts it in one interview (Carcasonne and Fieschi 1981, in Kline 2014: 107) is tightly connected to her main body of work. Therefore, I will address these later works, referring to her entire oeuvre whenever necessary. I will leave her official autobiography aside – as it was written more than two decades ago and is therefore incomplete – exchanging it for its much more updated and eponymous cinematic version (2019), her absolute closing statement.

Varda as Madame Cinéma Agnès Varda has an impressive curriculum: her career spans more than sixty years, during which she never once compromised her artistic vision. Although she is cinematographically self-taught, she became known as the ‘Mother of the [French] New Wave’, proving herself an accomplished director well ahead of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. She was the recipient of an honorary Oscar from the Hollywood Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the first woman to ever win a Palme d’Honneur at the Cannes Film Festival (2015), at which her second feature, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7), had been nominated for a Palme d’Or in 1962. She also received a Berlinale Camera Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019; won the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival for Sans toi ni loi (Vagabond) in 1985, as well as the César for The Beaches (2008), being once more nominated by the Académie des César for Best Documentary in 2018 with Faces Places. All these achievements, and many more, are the result of her singular authorial ‘voice’. That much is reflected in the very beginning of Varda by Agnès. Following the opening credits, the first causerie, as she calls these encounters with the public,2 starts with the shot of an empty director’s chair with Varda’s name on it (more precisely Agnès V., as she referred to herself in the film Jane B. par Agnès V. [Jane B. by Agnès V., 1988]), which marks the beginning of Varda’s more explicit period of cinematic self-inscription. The chair is positioned with its back to us, but facing an equally empty theatrical auditorium, mostly evoking Varda’s importance as a

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cultural item. Then, by means of a hard cut, her body abruptly appears seated in the chair, as the person in charge, the real-life director. This corresponds to the revelation of the apparatus and Varda’s positioning in relation to it, a current trope in her oeuvre in which she is sometimes seen behind the camera (e.g. reflected in a mirror) or in front of it in an impromptu presence. In the opening scene of Varda by Agnès, Varda is, at once, literally in front of the recording camera, inscribing her figure in the film, and metaphorically behind the scenes, as she is perceived from the back, facing what is there to be recorded by her own design. Even in documentary films, Varda advocates a ‘reality with a dispositif’, by which she means that reality is there to be moulded according to a given authorial point of view and then worked over through the mise-en-scène, just like a fictional film is – as she mentions in the first causerie. The reverse is also true. ‘Even in fictional films I like to include documentary elements’, she observes, also in the first causerie, in relation to her film Cléo from 5 to 7.3 In this first scene of Varda by Agnès, the director’s chair, that iconic item of filmmaking and creation – and which is so featured in The Beaches in the exact same position  – indicates that these conversations will mostly be charged with Varda’s directorial philosophy. Indeed, soon after she starts talking, she mentions a triad that has always led her in her artistic practice: inspiration (the context and point of origin, ‘the fortuitous chance that causes a desire to be activated’)/creation (the actual working methods, because ‘creation is a job’)/sharing (‘films are made to be shown’). This, at once, reveals her immense passion for filmmaking but also an anti-egotistical stance wherein her gaze is directed outwards, both during the exhibition stage and in the shooting process. ‘In any case, I always insert myself in my films, not out of narcissism but out of the desire to be honest in my approach’, she claims (Amiel 1975, in Kline 2014: 72). All the meaning in this opening sequence is conveyed through an image and it is in images (as well as sounds, colours, lights, framing, etc.) that everything takes place during this two-part film ‘conversation’, in full obedience to her theory and practice of cine-writing, which privileges the cinematic (i.e. the materials and processes) over the actual writing. In the meantime, the theatre has, in accelerated motion, has filled with people to listen to her. As she says in Varda by Agnès: In literature we referred to style, in cinema I use the word cinécriture. It is the aggregate of choices one makes throughout the production of a film. In the image: soft moving shots or jerky ones, in-focus images, isolated or in a crowded space. Music or no music. It’s in the editing room that the work is defined. […] It’s in the editing and the mixing stages that the cine-writing is completed.

This priority of hers is obvious in the way she refers to the symbolic use of colour in her film Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1965), in which she created scenes entirely dominated by one single colour (blue, yellow or red) and employed coloured fade-outs and fade-ins. In multiple interviews given throughout her life a more detailed definition of cine-writing emerges. Here is a selection: ‘Cinécriture isn’t the scenario, it’s the

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ensemble of exploratory walks, the choices, the inspiration, the words one writes, the shooting, the editing: the film is the product of all these different moments’ (Wera 1985, in Kline 2014: 185). ‘Through a combination of references, memories and free-associations, each film engages me in the exploration of topics which seem to me to be rarely treated in cinema. They always want us to tell stories with events and psychological drama but there are very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory’ (Wera 1985, in Kline 2014: 119). ‘[…] something that comes from emotion, visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling, and finding shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema and nothing else’ (Quart 1986, in Kline 2014: 132). So much so that Varda uses the term ‘word-image’ almost as a synonym of a film shot in its juxtaposition with another, a slippage of emotion between one shot and the next: ‘The word-images are signals or signs to us but not always in the ways we expect’ (Aude and Jeancolas 1982, in Kline 2014: 113). Although many commentators have used Varda’s concept of the cinécriture to trace a direct line from Alexandre Astruc to her, via his notion of the camérastylo (‘camera-pen’), the relationship is not that straightforward. Astruc meant to evince the importance of cinema as a particular ‘means of expression’, but on a par with literature and the novel (Astruc 1948, in 1992: 325) and not above it, as Varda claims. He was trying to promote a less realistic cinema, with probably fewer descriptions and insignificant narratives and with more ideas, abstractions and personal leitmotifs (i.e. ‘obsessions’) exactly as was the case in the late 1940s with ‘the essay and the novel’ (325). He insists that ‘cinema should gradually detach itself from the tyranny of the visual, from the image in and of itself, from the insignificant little events, from the factual, in order to become a means of writing as flexible and subtle as that of the written language’ (325, my translation). It just so happens that Varda appreciates the image and also the factual, little events. When Astruc claims that ‘the mise en scène is no longer a way of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a way of writing it as if with a pen’ (327), he is speaking against film as adaptation of dreary old stories and trying to replace it with creativity. With this Varda concurs. So one could say that there is a coincidence of goals but not of methods between Astruc and Varda; neither has she explicitly mentioned him when she used the concept of cine-writing (which includes much more than Astruc ever conceived of).

The creative dis(order) of the essay film The order of the film clips Varda has selected to show her audience in the first causerie of Varda by Agnès is not dictated by chronology or thematic logic. She starts with Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco, a short film from 1967), which depicts her meeting with a Greek uncle who lived on a pier in San Francisco. This film is the fifteenth work in her filmography and comes after no less than four features. Varda explains it as being about someone in her family, therefore using the film as a calling card. Then follows her second feature, which is the most famous of her films: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), made in the context of the Nouvelle Vague. After that comes Daguérreotypes (1975), a ‘documentary’, in Varda’s own words, shot on

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the Parisian street where she lived most of her life and portraying her conservative shopkeeper neighbours. She contrasts it with another documentary film she made in the United States, about the highly proactive and progressive black minority of the Black Panthers (1968). From racial engagement abroad to the feminist struggle in France: L’Une chante l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, 1977), a feminist musical that uses the songs and their lyrics to abate the radicalism of the theme but convey the message.  Then follows a solitary roaming filled with silent rage: Vagabond (1985); itself followed, contrastingly, by Varda calls a ‘Summer film’, Le Bonheur (1965), shot in a deliberately impressionist-style cinematography in a tribute to the painters of the eponymous period. From painting to (cine)writing by means of Jacquot de Nantes (Jacquot, 1991), her husband Jacques Demy’s handwritten childhood memories first became a screenplay that Varda wrote and then a film she directed on Demy’s behalf. Yet, before that, she says, the couple had been in Hollywood, where she kept to very low-budget films, one of which was Lions Love … and Lies (1969) whose last two words in the title have been withdrawn since. It is based on the contrast between a private, almost alienated love triangle, played by stars of the hippie scene, and the very dramatic contemporary news, persistently seen on an intradiegetic TV set. Then two films of opposing tones, both shot in LA in 1981: Mur murs (Mural Murals), an ‘extroverted’ documentary about LA’s inner-city murals, and the ‘introverted’ work Documenteur, a hybrid about a French mother looking for a place to stay with her young son, played by Mathieu Demy, Varda’s own son, in a mise en abyme of her own personal situation at the time. From an avowed personal episode to another, we arrive at L’OpéraMouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, 1958), shot in her very poor neighbourhood while she was pregnant for the first time a film that blends observation of the dismal reality around her with a poetic sensibility. Only then does Varda speak of her first film, La Pointe-Courte (Pointe Courte, 1955), a feature which mixed a stylised interrelation between an urban bourgeois couple and a local community of real fishermen with their real-life problems portrayed in an Italian neo-realist style then unbeknownst to Varda. Through a wordplay related to two similarly resounding places, Varda jumps to Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988), undertaken under the auspices of (self-)portraiture. Varda depicts the actress Jane Birkin on the brink of turning forty but reverses the typical tribute and makes Birkin play many invented roles in films in which she never acted, together with her own self. In passing, she mentions Kung Fu Master! (1988), a film shot on that year’s Summer holiday, with Mathieu Demy as the love object of an older woman played by Birkin. And then from painting and Jane Birkin’s tableaux vivants to Varda’s last film of the century and also the last she shot on film stock: Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (A Hundred and One Nights, (1995). In truth, the (dis)order of the film alignment in the first causerie of Varda by Agnès could be perceived as part of an informal situation. Furthermore, in the second causerie she constantly consults pages of notes on a table in front of her, a possible hint that her memory was failing. Yet, this filmic design was doubly pre-arranged. First, the film clips shown had to be lined up and inserted at certain specific points in the conversations. Second, the two causeries are presented

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in their final edited version, assembled from several lectures given in different places at different times (several of them in nondescript academic institutions). Considering that Varda takes a long time to edit, pondering all possibilities, as she claims in several interviews, the apparently random order of these clips is to be taken as no less than her ultimate goal. Therefore, with the aforementioned proviso, she does approach Astruc’s idea of a different cinema, one that is essayistic from the very start: ‘[Cinécriture] is when the imagination takes clichés and stereotypes and reinvents them’ (Aude and Jeancolas 1982, in Kline 2014: 110). The (dis)order in the line-up of the first causerie of Varda by Agnès is to be perceived as a free flow of associations and meandering thought, an overall conception that more or less follows the great majority of Varda’s films, in which the story is never the most important element, rather a thin excuse for the depiction of places, people and ideas. Yet, by definition, the essay film contains a ‘message’, not necessarily political but meant to be shared (Rascaroli 2009), although in recent years the essay has become more and more ideologically charged (Rascaroli 2017). Varda conveys the exterior world through her own subjectivity after it has resounded in her, producing thought (Corrigan 2011: 30–2). This is the projected aim of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). Faces Places (2017) perfectly expresses the essayistic dictum that the journey is its own goal. There is ‘a journey whose main merit, in the end, resides in the effort made in the undertaking of the route itself ’ (García Martinez 2006: 95, my translation), and ‘although the focus is kept on the ideas, the genre binds form and content together; reflection is produced imagetically in the images themselves’ (Garcia Martínez 2006: 96, my translation). In Varda’s film with JR  – the young visual artist who pastes large-format portraits of people on all sorts of buildings and sites as a form of popular tribute, much like an ephemeral open-air installation  – Varda travels through the French countryside without destination, led by her curiosity for people, looking out for interesting subjects to work with. This aimless roaming is conducted in pretty much the same way that she did in The Gleaners, looking out for her subjects but never wasting an opportunity when the chance presents her with an unexpected visual and sociological gem. The use of JR’s photographic truck – a real photo booth on wheels – is a means of transportation as much as a catalyst for art and reflection. ‘Ultimately I believe that people have a taste for reflection. […] I want my films to act as revelations. This is what interests me. There are questions that I personally find intensely interesting and which I’d like to find answers to’, says Varda (Arnault 1967, in Kline: 38). This vagrancy of the body, literally on the road, entails a vagary of the spirit, as when the artist duo finds Jeannine, the very last inhabitant in a street of former minors’ houses in the Northern region of Pas-de-Calais, and she tells them how, as a child, she loved to eat her father’s bread leftovers brought from the mine below all black from the charcoal; or when they find a young worker who is pleased to see JR’s monumental photograph of a beautiful horned goat, a rarity in those parts, and suggests the goats should keep their horns and use coloured rubber balls on them to prevent them from fighting. Despite the good humour, behind

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the people depicted there always lurks a serious issue. In the second causerie of Varda by Agnès, Varda speaks of this project as a ‘social and sociological experience’, a way to literally enhance the little people in very large and public reproductions, empowering them. As Rascaroli points out, the essay films ‘reveal the road as a beaten track, as a layered palimpsest of social, political, and cultural histories’ (2017: 95). Although no final definition of essay film exists, structurally, it is always selfreflexive as, on the one hand, the enunciation is made quite obvious (Rascaroli 2009), and on the other its hybridization is nowadays considered its main (un)defining factor. The essay film is about its own nature as a type of film. Because of its intrinsic in-betweenness, Rascaroli has of late claimed that ‘the argument of the essay film is always also an argument on genre’ (2017: 71). José Moure observes that ‘the essay film is both a discourse and a reflection on that discourse, a work and its own poetic art’. Also, ‘the essay film implies the presence of the essayist, an individual who inserts her- or himself in the scene’ (Moure 2004: 37).

Self-creation or the performative self Varda’s essayistic propensity is all the more perceptible in the films where she is heard or seen in the film itself. Indeed, as far as the actual form is concerned, not much seems to distinguish the essay film from the self-portrait. For example, according to Raymond Bellour (1988), a cinematic self-portrait is an intimate and personal form of expression, rather than a narrative vehicle. Like other life-writing genres or subjective cinema, it is characterised by analogies, metaphors and a poetic stance (1988: 34). Among the main aspects of the self-portrait listed by Bellour one finds writing as a form of digression, a kind of solitary drift; writing as an imaginary roaming through the places of one’s personal memory; and writing as a search for oneself and one’s memory (which always entails playing the role of the protagonist). In other words, this practice enables the artist to convey a poetic impression of her-/himself while living, which is why the medium of video is perfect for such practice. Notwithstanding the reality inherent in the conveyance of facts, the selfportrait does not intend to shed light on an entire life. It is built on an enunciation in progress, constructed as the film goes along, rendering it potentially infinite. This is one of the aspects that Varda herself decided to talk about in relation to The Beaches, in the second causerie of Varda by Agnès, dedicated entirely to the filmmaker’s work in the twenty-first century. Varda explains how in Beaches she was interested ‘not just in telling her life and her films, but also in reliving, in the present, moments related to her films, so that she wouldn’t miss certain present moments’ (my emphasis). This connection with temporality highlights the blending of times inherent in cinema, but also Varda’s desire, as she says, to ‘create an emotion in the present’. Rather than nostalgia, in Beaches and Varda by Agnès she focuses on life’s vibrancy. Even the itinerant installation she created with a cart and a film projector showing footage of her long-deceased friend Pierrot, featured in Beaches and shown as a film clip in Varda by Agnès is conceived as a celebration

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of life. Indeed, Pierrot’s two adult sons, who push the cart, knew their father from photographs but had not seen him move, which cinema permits. In Jane B., Varda stages her own film philosophy, remarking to Jane Birkin in one of the film scenes: ‘It’s as if I filmed your self-portrait. You will never be alone in the mirror. There is the camera, which is a bit me, and too bad if I sometimes appear in the mirror or the frame. […] You must look at the camera, right at the lens, or else you won’t look at me.’ This leads Esteve Riambau to claim that ‘the filmmaker suddenly emerges alongside her work’ (2009: 138, my translation). Riambau (2009) mentions that Varda’s cinematic self-portraits are deliberately mediated by the camera, as part of a reflective apparatus that includes her own self and what she portrays. In Beaches Varda admits that she would like to be filmed ‘in old spotty mirrors and behind scarves’, but there is more to this claim. In her filmic self-portraiture Varda reveals another side to her, made of a joyous nature, a propensity for fantasy as well as an increased artificiality. Several commentators write about her self-portraits as being ‘performative’ (Blüher 2013: 59, 67–8 and Rascaroli 2009, for example). Mirrors and the camera are present in Beaches but Varda is partly relegated to the re-enactments – for example, a young Agnès playing on the beach. The adult Varda in the film takes the role of the protagonist, as well as others, some of which are figments of her imagination (as when she appears as a would-be adventurer posing with trapeze artists). With the introduction of the small digital cameras in the twenty-first century, Varda claims that she ‘could do things that were more personal, perhaps intimate’, but also use the camera for ‘stroboscopic effects, narcissistic effects and even unrealistic ones’. Thus, for her, performativity is never very far from reality. Marie-Françoise Grange observes that the self-portrait, as a depiction of the self, entails more than just self-representation (either in voice or body) (2008: 27−30). The only exception is when the body and the voice of the filmmaker are instrumental to her/his own profession (‘métier’), in which case a kind of ‘self-portrait pact could be said to take place’.4 Thus, as Muriel Tinel observes: ‘The real subject of the cinematic self-portrait and what it seems to convey is the very activity of the filmmaker […]’ (2006: no page, my translation). The act of recording oneself in the present, the use of film clips of one’s previous film work as intrafilmic excerpts and the recourse to close-ups of one’s face, for example, are, in Tinel’s opinion, an ‘internal image’ of the artist (hers or beyond his internal thoughts). This corresponds approximately to what Varda presents us with in her two-part project Varda by Agnès. The conversations filmed as lectures seem at first sight to be rather classically conceived. Indeed, Varda remains for the most part seated, a necessity imposed by her advanced age and reduced mobility; the camera, placed a little to her left, frames her in mediumsized shots, contrary to some clips of her, talking about her films on several earlier stages of her life, in which the camera is usually placed a little to her right. Wider shots are used when the filmmaker wants to convey her connection to the audience(s) listening to her. There are no close-ups of her face to really speak of, probably because the wider shots reinforce Varda’s tremendous talent as a communicator. Her gestures  – playing with her glasses, her hair or just

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waving her hands about  – would be totally lost on a closer shot of her face. However, she does not avoid using inserts of her hands in all their texturality. This personal gesture of macro-photography not only enhances private details but also conveys a twofold message, at once social and self-centredly artistic. As Conway puts it: ‘By foregrounding the wrinkled and ageing yet still curious and capable Varda, the film implicitly invites us to look again at what we tend to reject and reconsider its value’ (2015: 79). In Faces Places, Varda’s ageing is the topic of several skits as well as of several conversations between her and JR. For example, in one of them, JR orders some people, spread out on a long staircase holding letter cards such as those of an ophthalmologist’s word-panel, to move them up and down so as to imitate Varda’s flickering vision. So relevant does Varda find this issue that she includes this scene in Varda by Agnès. Brioude thinks that Varda’s portrayal of her own ageing triggered her ‘self-biocinetics’, an agglutination of the ideas of movement, poetry and selfinscription. In Varda’s opinion, cinema as an art form ‘has the ability to sublimate the existential angst and to produce a retrospection more than an introspection, which is the sense of the walking backwards which opens The Beaches of Agnès’ (Brioude 2009: 11, my translation). She admits as much in the second causerie of Agnès by Varda, when she observes that her collaboration with JR enabled them, together, to find ‘a way of sublimating the degradation of her life’.

The forging of a myth, or the ageless woman in the cinematic olympus Varda’s ‘self-cinewriting process’, then, which I posit as a mixture of essay film, selfportraiture, arts poetica and cine-writing is quite conscious on Varda’s part. Such a proliferation of artistic methodologies joined together in one single style may be strange, astonishing even, and yet it happens consistently, and progressively, in Varda’s work from The Gleaners onwards. Thus her essayistic practice is reinforced by her self-portraiture. Although Varda has a demure presence, she is quite aware of her value as a pioneer filmmaker, an artist and a woman, or more to the point a woman artist. ‘As long as I was “little Varda,” “little Agnès,” the exception of the generation called “the New Wave,” I didn’t get in anyone’s way and I was even helped out, supported, and appreciated by my “colleagues” and companions’, she states (Amiel 1975, in Kline 2014: 75). This humble demeanour is how she cine-writes her portrait, degrading herself in a potato costume for the promotion of the installation Patatutopia, a part of the exhibition Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale 2003, or making jokes about her Height. Nevertheless, she speaks about her cinematic stature with hubris: ‘I didn’t see myself as a woman, a courageous woman, I saw myself as a courageous artist, a filmmaker, because nobody was making films at my age at the time – men or women. The young New Wave came later’ (Quart 1986, in Kline 2014:191). In fact, Conway claims that Varda has ‘deliberately cultivated a down-to-earth persona through years of quietly observant self-portraiture and sympathetic identification with marginal figures, while placing herself resolutely in the centre of

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that work with the narcissism of an irrepressible artist who must express herself or die’ (2015: 111). Varda has also built, and maintained, this persona in the paratext surrounding her work and its public reception. In Varda by Agnès she presents herself dressed in her favourite colour, purple, and with the two-toned dyed hair which she began to use as a sort of trademark in her later films. Thus, in Faces Places, while JR uses his trademark sunglasses and brimmed hat, Varda wears mostly purple throughout. They are two artists with strong identities and artistic signatures holding their own side by side. Naturally, this ‘Varda look’ evolved with time and in her later years she became ‘the punk granny of independent film and installation art’ (Conway: 111). Varda was impressed by Picasso’s ability to reinvent himself as an artist through several of his so-called periods (Conway: 138) and decided to do as much. The second causerie of Varda by Agnès opens with the sentence ‘I have been a photographer in my first life’. The aforementioned misperception of her is, thus, very much her own creation. The DVD compilation of her films describes her career as ‘the three lives of Agnès’. However, she was already called the ‘Grandmother of the [French] New Wave’, when she was only about forty (Gow 1970, in Kline 2014: 42). In Varda by Agnès, throughout both causeries, Varda introduces goodhumoured self-deprecating commentaries, which cause the audience to laugh with her and not at her. This behaviour contributes in no small measure to her cinematic reputation and affectionate public image. As a person on film and a voiceover alike, Varda has a calm controlled tone, a seductive one, a voice that diffuses feelings as a strategy of engagement. Early in an interview in 1967 she said: ‘When I talk about feelings it’s because it’s through feelings that we capture the attention of the audience and then engage their minds. You can’t have one without the other. There would be no point in making a thesis-film first and then turn around and make a film about feelings’ (Arnault 1967, in Kline: 38). The plump and short granny, as she refers to herself in Beaches, is an iconic figure of popular culture as well as high art, as attested by the cartoon versions of her on the front covers of the DVDs and posters of The Beaches of Agnès and Agnès Varda from Here to There. Her proactive role in the marketing and promotion of her films as well as engaging in their re-releases in other formats is both a necessity springing from her independence and her shrewd business acumen. Although the TV series Varda from Here to There (2011) is mostly a way to enter into dialogue with some of her fellow creators and discover new artistic potential in exhibitions or performances she attends abroad, it is also a manner of promoting herself and her work as a visual artist. In the second causerie of Agnès by Varda, the line ‘The artists and the filmmakers whose work I love, move my spirit and fill me with pleasure and energy’ (my emphasis) points to the way this artistic rambling is a collage but one charged with an underlying intention, still an essay film, a selfportrait and a self-written arts poetica. This portrayal alongside other creators selected by her, unlike her ‘colleagues’ of the Nouvelle Vague, renders her forever young and therefore immortal. ‘Oh, I’m a perfect cultural gadget, they have me in all libraries and cinemathèques. I’ll be unforgotten’ (Quart 1986, in Kline 2014: 136). Her only regret is that she could not make more films.

Chapter 9 T H E ST RU G G L E S A N D R I SE O F T H E DA L I T P R O TAG O N I ST S : C I N E M AT IC R E P R E SE N TAT IO N S I N T H E TA M I L F I L M S O F T H E D I R E C T O R PA . R A N J I T H Amutha Manavalan

Tamil cinema – politics and caste Over 119 years of its existence, the Tamil cinema has been an influencing force in the culture and politics of Tamil Nadu. The evolution of Tamil cinema has given viewers mythological classics, the anti-Brahmin social awareness during the Dravidian movement and a gradual transition into realistic stories. Cinema played a significant role as a medium for propaganda in the political movements of Tamil Nadu. Filmmakers treated subjects in different situations with their films inevitably touching upon social and political issues. Even as it gave expression to the social comments and opinions of filmmakers, Tamil cinema also reflected the changing social concerns and moods of the period. The role of film in the politics of Tamil Nadu has been significant, and the influence of movie stars on Tamil politics has made political astronomers of those who would seek to understand it. During the course of the 1967 election campaign, the New York Times carried an article describing the film star involvement in the politics of Tamil Nadu as having ‘a touch of California (Robert L Hardgrave 2009)’. Films had become increasingly pervasive in almost all aspects of Tamil society and most prominently in political life.1 Caste has been represented in many ways in Tamil cinema but predominantly the Dalits have always been depicted as a lower, struggling caste controlled by the iron grip of the Hindu caste hierarchy, and their struggle is much less laid bare than their oppressor’s dominance is. A sparse screen description generally leaves the audience with a very superficial understanding and more often than not the cinematic representations leave the audience with a feeling of melancholy and helplessness – the defining factor of the Dalit representation in Tamil cinema. The newness or freshness of this medium gave way to a new trend in Tamil cinema both at the box office and among those who wanted to use Tamil cinema for cinematic expressions. With this essay we aim to understand how each one of these ideologies managed to achieve and prove its point in this industry to the audience

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and the critiques. Expression through cinema was the new identity each of them was seeking for, which could be understood and accepted by cinema viewers of the Tamil society (Manavalan 2020). But off-late Dalit technicians are making a mark in the Tamil film industry, creating a realization both amongst the audience and in the film industry, and this has also been made evident through the changing narratives of films portraying Dalits. Earlier narratives created an image which projected Dalits as powerless and helpless, and in a way, this created a gaze of hatred and a hypocritical sympathy for them. The recent Tamil films appeal to their audiences in a more effective manner by recreating onscreen concerns of the common man’s life in the region. One of the most important features of popular films, and also of some of the Tamil New Wave cinema, has been the Dalit and other suppressed communities in the Tamil cultural context, their culture-mannerisms, vulgar idioms and slangs, humour, local expressions and their culture, which is also the reason that keeps them apart from the higher society. Director Pa. Ranjith uses these as the central characters in his films, bringing out their real stories and struggles while also giving them a place in the mainstream cinematic representation. Ranjith says that ‘the representation of Dalit characters was painful. Either they were written out, or just their inclusion in the story was considered “revolutionary”. The films excluded the discriminatory practices of those dominant communities’ (Singaravel 2020). New Wave cinema redefines cinema as an expressive art form, and as such we can find a high and a low form in it. This kind of art is for both the elite and the masses. Auteurs have tirelessly created films for consumption  – not just to redefine the status quo but also to provide the audience with entertainment that obeys certain standards. ‘Food for thought’ has been another responsibility of the Tamil auteurs, and the Tamil New Wave cinema is the result of the endeavour of these auteurs. (Manavalan 2020).

Who are the Dalits? A Dalit is regarded to be the lowest rank among the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word ‘Dalit’ means ‘oppressed’ and ‘broken’ along with the other meaning: ‘untouchable’. The term Dalit is used in this chapter to portray all characters who are supressed and who are not allowed to openly assert their identity, like the upper castes, or to have a voice in society. The term is not used with a political connotation to reassert identities of the protagonists but instead to represent suppression, humiliation and fragmented identity, even in today’s progressive society, and this is exactly what the characters from the selected films experience.

Director Pa. Ranjith and his work Director Pa. Ranjith is known for his subaltern themes and stories which are usually set around a social, political and cultural issue. Ranjith, a Dalit himself, focuses on these details in his films. Though he is not the first Dalit Tamil film

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director who is successful, he has been assertive about his identity and has a lot of initiatives which converge with the Dalit identity – one such is the Koogai Film Movement, which aims at nurturing a new generation of directors/filmmakers who are conscious of social equality and aesthetics. For instance, the filmmaker himself is particularly concerned about dialogues as an effective tool, which he uses along with the narrative and mise-en-scène. Music in his films is also a strong influencer – Gaana songs, a genre of urban folk songs sung by Dalits, are evident in his films. As a filmmaker, Ranjith often uses the concept of Afro-American music, and agrees that he is greatly influenced by it; he is also the co-founder of The Casteless Collective band.2 In past interviews, Ranjith expressed that music in his films should have a social impact like that of the songs of his favourite artists Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino. Though it seems like a unique feature to experience hip-hop music and lively dance movements in a Tamil film, it remains an important signifier to give an expression to the Dalit voice, which has seen centuries of struggles and suppression. Ranjith finds a lot of similarities between the struggles of Black people and the Dalit strife. The protagonists are inspired by B. R. Ambedkar (Babasaheb) and the common Dalit characters he has encountered, and his own personality is also his inspirations. Another aspect which cannot be avoided is that these voices rise to express the emotions of being casteless and liberated through art. The use of the parai,3 in the film Pariyerum Perumal, is a notable representation of the music of the marginalized Ranjith uses symbolism as tropes to portray his characters in the stories – his signifiers are of a unique nomenclature such as a wall, colours like blue which depicts the Dalit identity, hoardings and banners, which are used to express and signify various emotions like authority, power and mass culture. As an auteur, Ranjith claims that his main aim is to make use of cinema to break the caste barriers in society and to raise awareness about caste resistance. He has also shown the same enthusiasm as a producer for the film Pariyerum Perumal directed by Mari Selvaraj. All the films discussed in this chapter showcase the struggles of suppressed Dalit protagonists and their struggles to rise above the situation and prove that they are equal.

Films and characters Attakathi Dinakaran is portrayed as a character who struggles to be taken seriously in society. There is a transformation of the character from being a lovesick youth to a local student leader whom the younger crowd in his locality and college look up to. He has a teaching career besides taking care of his ageing mother, which is a contrast to the many scenes that portray him as an irresponsible and incapable individual. To rise above the set standards in a competitive elitist environment is a challenge for these youth who end up facing mediocrity, bitterness and delinquency. The film challenges the old stereotype that states that love is pure – it challenges the concept of purity defined by the dominant classes and redefines it within a Dalit perspective. Though the film has humour, it is set differently and with dialogues

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that are uncommon in Tamil cinema such as one between a couple about beef. This was the auteur’s debut film and where he set the stage for future films, which gradually portrays the Dalit protagonist differently and more confidently. Madras Kaali and Anbu are childhood friends who reside in the housing board colony and are happy with their simple lives despite the day-to-day challenges. While Kaali is the educated and white-collar job holder, his friend Anbu is the handyman for the local politicians. The director showcases a contrast that prevails in the societies where the Dalit youth struggle to make a mark for themselves among the elite and upper-caste society. The characters are shown stuck in their struggle for their livelihood and to preserve their identity, and to build a society where their community can live in harmony and keep up with their lives. This film is set up with a semiotic construction – the wall, which stands in the centre of the colony with political graffiti. The semiotic construction is such that it does not allow the audience to be diverted with distractions of any dreamy frames at foreign locations and dance numbers. The film introduces the audience to the signature gaana and hip-hop music along with a dance similar to that of what one can experience at the colonies and settlements at Vyasarpadi and other Dalit areas in the Chennai metropolitan region. Taking control of the wall is the backdrop of the film – the wall is used for propaganda by the local political leaders. After Anbu meets a fateful end at the hands of some goons, Kaali and his family, along with the residents, take control of the wall from the politicians, changing its identity to an egalitarian community symbol. Ranjith says: ‘The wall is just a signifier of the conflict. It doesn’t say that the end of power struggle around the wall signifies the end of the social conflict itself. I have tried to say that oppression exists and people like Kali are beginning to find rational ways to end the oppression’ (Naig 2014). In his interview4 regarding this film, the director said it was made to change the distorted perspective of the Dalits and also to present the vibrant culture of North Madras to the audience, which according to the director has been misrepresented in Tamil cinema: The language people speak; the rise in literacy levels, their interest in sports and the general cultural changes that have taken place over the years have not been reflected in our movies. Even the Gaana songs, which are so popular in Tamil cinema, are being used only as “item songs” in movies. But, people sing Gaana songs for all kinds of occasions. In my first two films, I have tried to use Gaana as a love song.

Ranjith attempts to break the stereotype that urban slums are places filled exclusively with criminal and anti-social elements. Through his characters, the director has tried to redefine it as a place where dreams and ambitions can also be envisioned by the people and youth living in them. Ranjith’s portrayal of the slums in the Vyasarpadi region of Chennai shows football enthusiasts, hip-hop lovers,

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working women and IT professionals. This is very different from the regular portrayal of characters from slums in Tamil cinema. Pariyerum Perumal The film is produced by Pa. Ranjith (Neelam Films) and is directed by Mari Selvaraj. The story is about Pariyan, the protagonist and his struggles with the society as he steps into college to fulfil his dream of becoming a lawyer. The idea that when we study the law of the country one also gets to understand what their lawful right in the country is strikes as a very similar to Ambedkar’s thoughts and dream. The film shows how an innocent young man realizes that the caste system is the grey area of the social fabric in a country such as India. Pariyan is the son of a folk dancer who dons the character of a woman in the folk performances. The protagonist is ashamed just not of his father’s profession but also of his father’s physical appearance (which is very effeminate) and because of this he hides the identity of his parent from his friends and the college administration. This is yet another social issue among the Dalit children who cannot speak openly of their parents’ occupation as most of their jobs are regarded as menial in society. The film also brings out the brutal atrocity that takes place in society in the name of caste system. Tropes and metaphors are used with ease to bring out the emotions in the scenes when Pariyan is not able to understand the lectures in English and the ‘etiquette’ of the city life. His hunting dog, Karuppi, is brutally killed by the upper sub-caste boys from the village, becoming the alter-ego for the protagonist later in the film. The humiliation portrayed in the film is an attempt by the director and the producer (Ranjith) to speak up about the brutalities the Dalits face in society. A change is seen in the character of Pariyan as he goes on to understand the society and its evils in a mature manner and he accepts his identity, facing this truth with self-respect and dignity. The director, who is also Dalit himself, has focused on using cinema to discuss the brutalities faced by Dalits such as honour killings, ill treatment of Dalit students at universities both from the management and fellow students. He stated in an interview that this story was supposedly based on his experiences, but he ended up writing about his friend and the challenges he faced. Both the producer and the director support each other’s views on being different about other regular Dalit films in Tamil cinema along with having assertive Dalit characters. Kaala The main focus of Kaala is spatial representation and the politics behind it. The film starts with an introduction of how land and territoriality are the main reason for human existence as well as its downfall. The concept of an urban slum which is home for the Dalit migrants is an obstacle for the urban development and the planners. In the name of development, these urban slums are constantly vacated and poor reimbursements are given to Dalit migrants, who can be even left homeless. Spatial identity is important for every working class, especially the

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Dalit community who reside in the urban slum areas, close to the cities, which strikes a contrast during the urban development plans. The symbolism depicted in this film reflects the day-to-day struggles of the Dalit community who do the odd and menial jobs in the urban cities. This narrative reflects upon the insensitivity involved while planning and implementing the development programmes of clearing slums from the cities and urban spaces. The protagonist, a Dalit himself, is the son of a slain local leader of a community consisting of migrant workers from Tamil Nadu and other states who arrive at Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. The portrayal of the character Karikaalan, also known as Kaala (meaning black), is symbolic – he is dark skinned, wears black, lives among his people in the slum of Dharavi and is a people’s leader who is feared, loathed by his rival Hari Dada (the antagonist), who killed his father. If Kaala represents the poor, all covered with soot and dirt, and lives among them, Haridada is the opposite – he wears white, lives in a spacious and pristine environment. His coworkers are all dressed in white, the whole ambience around him is immaculate. This contrast is used by the director to express the two opposing ideologies which exist in society – the elite outlook and the underprivileged working class. The protagonist in this film eventually becomes an immortal identity among his Dalit community – he continues to live even after his brutal death, securing and protecting his people and their rights. While talking about it, we gather that ‘space’ is understood as the way it is presented. In both films Madras and Kaala, the concept of space is used more like a symbol where the director uses it to express the emotions of the protagonists – it is supportive in their struggles or even in attaining a superior status. This chapter discusses two relevant factors emphasized in the films selected here – the cultural divide and identity.

Challenging the gaze of hatred and the cultural divide Slums and chock-a-block housing board colonies/localities are typical representations of the Dalit  – working-class residential areas, which are rarely frequented by the elites and upper-caste people of society as these are considered to be taboo areas. These urban slums are often ignored as not many of the lives of the people residing there can be considered as an inspiration for the rest of the society; often these slum clusters have been challenging for the urban development planning. Cinema for the popular culture and its narrative structure creates a psyche among the audience where there is always a divide that is created through the narrative – one such divide is the North-South divide of Chennai’s landscape. The North Chennai region mainly consists of working-class population from the surrounding industrial estates, offices and other commercial establishments. Most of the population is comprised by skilled and semi-skilled labourers (a great number works as housekeepers); hence, this automatically makes South Chennai a more established and sophisticated region with settlements of elite, educated and upper-caste individuals. Tamil cinema has always portrayed this difference

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between the two geographies through language (Tamil spoken in North Chennai has a slang and local flair to it), culture and social etiquette. Considering this factor and how it has contributed to the portrayal and stereotyping of people from these areas through cinematic narratives, Ranjith’s films are constantly challenging this by redefining these stereotypes – ‘You can’t depict the violence done to my community but refuse to register the way they stand up to that violence. It sets up a politics which tells Dalits that you must be a silent victim and only certain others can save you. As a director, I don’t want to graphically show the atrocities that occur’ (Singaravel 2020). Another representation of slums would be the Dharavi slum in the Mumbai region in his film Kaala. Dharavi is regarded as the most densely populated area and one of Asia’s largest slums, though this area has small-scale industrial sectors such as embroidery units, waste management and recycles units. But while it is being a major contributor to the economic growth of Mumbai, this is rarely discussed or portrayed in cinema. Not to avoid the fact that the majority of the people residing in the Dharavi region are involved in unskilled and semi-skilled services, particularly as housekeepers. Dharavi hence is mostly portrayed as a grey region, according to the demographic descriptions, and also shown as a region where anti-social elements are born and raised. This perhaps has been the general perspective of people all over the world about the part of society that comes from the urban slums. Creating a protagonist who challenges the system is a high risk for any filmmaker, especially for commercial consumption. In the four films here discussed, the protagonists have been developed with a lot of confidence and the will to break through the stereotype cast by majority of the regular commercial films. In Ranjith’s films the protagonists hold on to the values set by their leader, B. R. Ambedkar,5 who was a Dalit himself and who believed that the only way to break the caste-based system was to have an egalitarian society bound by a strong constitution in general and a literate and educated Dalit society in particular. The director himself is an Ambedkarite6 and his values reflect most of his activism, which takes on the existing caste system and unrealistic practices in the Hindu society of modern India. As Ranjith realized, stereotypical representations were often clichés and conveyed the wrong idea about Dalits and other oppressed classes. It is a conscious effort by the director to place the background of the central character around slums with a mandate to show the surpassed challenge. He often states in his interviews and talks that there is a need to look at stories and narration, but also music, where the Dalits imprint their identity.

Revisiting the Dalit identity Identity of an individual in India is often associated with social categorization; in short, identity is a social construct. Categorization comes with expected behaviours and certain rules in order to be accepted as members of the society. This understanding of identity and its influence on the individual’s self-respect and

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status in the society is reflected in Ranjith’s films, where the audience get to see how his characters are featured and strengthened as the narrative gradually progresses. In very few frames, we come across a feeling of Dalit powerlessness – throughout the film, the director makes an effort to bring out a new identity of his protagonist. Casting Rajinikanth, regarded as a super star in the Indian film industry, to play a Dalit slumlord and local leader is itself breaking away from the typecasting standards in Tamil cinema. Prominent star performers in Tamil cinema are often portrayed differently than usual in Ranjith’s films. A stereotypical protagonist in Tamil cinema is often identified as someone from an upper caste, talented and unyielding; a submissive behaviour and lack of confidence is a characteristic one does not see in a stereotypical hero  – enter Ranjith’s filmography, the way he highlights fear, lack of confidence, mediocre looks and appearance, someone who carries his not-so-acceptable social and cultural status with a reasonable amount of shame and vulnerability. Here, the characteristics of a stereotypical hero are very subtly replaced by a rustic supressed character who is not a very typical interesting idea of a protagonist. Once the character is established, the audience experience the struggles of the character. The protagonist is not apologetic for his identity, nor does he justify his identity – he just is. This is the most important and highlighting factor where there is a redefining of the character with a total surrender to and acceptance of their surrounding reality, typical of a Ranjith’s protagonist. The characters are created with honesty and confidence: the composition of the frames in films such as Pariyerum Perumal, where Pariyan is unable to cope with the brutal death of his hunting dog Karuppi, there is a funeral for the pet that is similar to a funeral held for a family member. In another scene, he is beaten and humiliated by one of the relatives of his girlfriend, who urinates on Pariyan, reminding him of his caste and status, and threatening to kill him if he does not stay away from her. Just like the pride of a Dalit family falls prey to the atrocity of the upper-caste rivals, so do Karuppi and Pariyan. A similar frame (where the protagonist is ridiculed by the antagonist) can be found in Kaala, where Hari Dada scoffs at Kaala, who wears a black outfit and lives in the chawl (a type of residential building usually rented by workers). To this, the protagonist replies that black stands for hardship, hard work and that it is the colour of the working class. In another scene, Hari Dada sends his goons to kill Kaala (unable to stand the reality that a lower-caste person can compete with him) and both Kaala’s wife and son are killed. Caste pride and ego are reflected in the screen, where the protagonist struggles to redefine his identity amidst the brutal atrocities imposed by social structure. There is a metamorphosis in these characters as they come to accept who they are and no longer run away from the truth – they now face their realities and their own conscience, which has kept them in a submissive state within the caste stratification, understanding that their cultural and social standing is also a contributing factor to the ever evolving socio-cultural system. The whole understanding that the caste system, which often seems like a myth to the upper-caste, privileged, city-bred cosmopolitans, is more often than not the monster in the room that is ignored and brushed off easily. In these films, the protagonists are seen tackling situations as simple as following a lecture in English, having a conversation or even talking about what their parents

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do for a living. Such instances are portrayed in Ranjith’s films not to create a sense of sympathy towards the protagonist but instead to make the audience realize that this still takes place in the Indian society and that we’re not consciously aware of it. The protagonist’s acceptance of these brutal experiences is a step towards redefining his identity, which he has always kept in check and shied away from. He bravely faces the situation and accepts it, taking on the world with a renewed hope. Ranjith has discussed the reason for developing a new identity of an assertive Dalit hero in his interviews, where he reiterates the importance of creating characters who are relatable not only to the general audience, but most importantly, to the Dalit audience. The director strongly believes that a redefinition of identity will provide the much needed confidence and moral support every Dalit individual is seeking in the Indian society today.7 Another defining factor of identity for an individual is spatial imagery. Slums are considered to be a chaotic collection of structures where the lower ranks in caste and societal hierarchy reside. In cinema, spatial representation plays on the minds of the audience to create the effect the auteur wants them to experience. It creates a setting for characters like Dinakaran, Lenin, Selvam, Kaali, Anbu and Kaala. The spatial images are used as a comparative element to bring out the differences between the social and cultural constructs. In the film Kaala, the spatial images are used so effectively that audience can actually feel this difference – the antagonist lives in a palatial setting, pristine and white, a contrast to Kaala’s house, which is congested, small and lacks privacy. Spatial imagery plays on the minds of the individual while defining/conveying the identity of an individual in a societal context. This is clearly portrayed in the film, where the antagonist heads a project to evacuate all slums from the vicinity under the slum clearance project. A dialogue between the antagonist and a party member clearly brings out the sentiment of how slums are considered as a stain next to the high-rise buildings and their aesthetic. Scenes from the film clearly express the struggles that characters like Lenin (the younger son of Kaala), Zareen (Kaala’s ex-wife and now an activist, who is also from these slums, and now fights for a better life for slum dwellers across the globe) and Kaala himself, who strive to retain their identity fighting their way through bureaucracy, a major force in spatial politics. Zareen promises the slum dwellers a better lifestyle, with better amenities like a swimming pool, gym and a golf court; Kaala, on the other hand, questions them as to why the slum residents should give away so much of their land for a golf court and swimming pool, which are not priorities for their community – their real requirement is a systematic planning of civic amenities, sanitation facilities and spacious living space. Throughout this debate, the audience is given two different types of people: Kaala’s older son Selvam, who resembles Kaala in character – a slumlord and hero of the masses – and Lenin, the younger son of Kaala, an activist working along with Zareen, who follows due process, like writing often unattended petitions to the concerned departments. The director brings out a comparison between two types of people within the supressed communities – the educated versus the mass leaders – both call the audience to the thought of rising above one’s situation and retaining one’s identity.

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Conclusion Films based on identity politics and Dalit issues are not new to Tamil cinema, but films of Pa. Ranjith (whether directed or produced by him) are not striving towards the superhero/star status quo, but rather at a narrative built around assertive and bold characters facing the systemic brutalities of caste and religion. Ranjith goes on to say: ‘When I, as a Dalit, watch these films, I have to ask: “Where am I in these? Where is the justice for my community?” If they’re speaking of Tamil culture, why isn’t my culture depicted’ (Singaravel 2020)? Hence, these films have been instrumental in making society realize and practise better sociocultural values; most importantly, it has brought to light many the concealed cruel treatment inherent to the caste system, existing in the society through its stories that otherwise would have perhaps remained concealed forever. Ranjith says that he writes stories and characters that reflect his own struggle, his character and also of people whom he has witnessed as assertive characters even though they were born as Dalits: ‘First, I place myself in these stories and ask, “Where do I stand in society?”’ (Singaravel 2020). Being an Ambedkarite, he says: More than anyone, Babasaheb Ambedkar has been my icon. He opposed Gandhi and the Congress when he thought they did not address the issues of Dalits. While I looked at him as inspiration, I realised how characters that I write already live in every Dalit community. That’s where resistance comes from and so does the idea for characters that I write. I don’t need to dwell only on degradation. Cinema has enough of that. There is a stereotypical victim: barely clothed, unable even to protest against atrocities done to them. A hero has to save them. That image needed shattering because that’s not how I am. I can stand for myself. My courage comes from Ambedkar. To depict such characters in cinema is a type of counter-culture. (Singaravel 2020)

Chapter 10 F R OM P HO T O G R A P H IC SE RV I T U D E T O C I N E M AT IC E M A N C I PAT IO N : T H E P O E T IC S O F M AYA D E R E N Amresh Sinha

Cameras do not make films; film-makers make films.

Maya Deren

In this chapter, I would like to critically examine the writings of Maya Deren, the Ukrainian-born American Avant-Garde, experimental filmmaker and selfproclaimed ‘indigenous’ artist, and the impact they have on her films. My emphasis here would be to explore Deren’s famous article ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’1 in relation to her most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). In this article, Deren espouses the idea of liberating the cinematographic image from its photographic ‘servitude’.2 She lays the groundwork for a creative principle or function of cinema that ‘involves as careful attention to what it is not as to what it is’.3 The creative principle of cinematography is, therefore, a negation of reality. To emphasize art in its negative form, she advances the concept of ‘latent image’ – that which emerges only if nothing else is imposed on it.4 Her assertion that ‘cameras do not make films; film-makers make films’ becomes a motto of her theoretical foundation5 and is directly in conflict with both Kracauer’s theory of the cinema as the redemption of physical reality and Bazin’s theory of photographic realism as the essence of the cinematographic form.6 Taking on the established theoretical framework of cinematic realism, Deren, like her predecessor Rudolf Arnheim, wants to safeguard the artistic function of cinema against the systemic disavowal of the reality principle to which photography was then subjected in the 1950s.7 Like Arnheim, Deren would prefer to see the ‘blossoming of the “abstract” film that would be the beginning of what some day will be the great art of painting in motion’.8 The film Meshes of the Afternoon has been, for decades, misconstrued as an allegorical and surrealist film9 at the expense of being understood as a film that applies every minutiae and credence of Deren’s thinking on the cinema as the unique expression of visual form that is closer to poetry, to ‘verticality’ (as she terms it), than to dramatic exposition, to horizontality or to ‘animated paintings’ – films primarily made by painters and graphic artists like Oskar Fischinger, Hans

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Richter, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, etc. in the 1920s.10 Her article is a manifesto of her art of filmmaking practice aligned with ‘the resistance of small indigenous film-makers’ against the hegemonic cultural-industrial-complex of Hollywood.11 Critics have been misled by its visuals without realizing that the images are simply a translation of her theoretical musings into enigmatic/poetic visual practice. From P. Adam Sitney to Le Corbusier, there has been a tendency to interpret Deren’s films in psychological (surrealist) or mystical (vodoun) terms, while failing to realize that her theoretical writings are amply evident in her films. Recognizing Deren’s original contribution to the cinema of the twentieth century, Annette Michelson writes that the work of Maya Deren ‘provided a model of filmmaking for several generations of the workers in the field’.12 Furthermore, she writes, Deren was ‘[a] theoretician of originality and power, she assumed early on the responsibility of providing informative, critical work on the new cinema’.13 Deren, Michelson claims, ‘spoke for a cinema of poetry and a poetics of cinema, to representing an approach to experience as distinguished from that of “drama”.’14 Deren’s proposition of poetic film is key to her theoretical formulation of her filmmaking ideas.15 The vertical film is an example of poetic film. Deren believes that as far as poetry is concerned it is not so much interested in what is ‘occurring’, which is the domain of dramatic narrative, but ‘what it feels like or what it means’. Furthermore, she says, A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory form for something that is invisible, which is the feeling or the emotion or the metaphysical content of the statement. Now it may also include action, but its attack is what I would call the vertical attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the horizontal attack, to drama which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.16

Cinema  – like poetry, which deals with verbal structure, and painting, which deals with pictorial structure  – deals with the structure of visual images. Both photography and cinematography deal with visual structure, one with the static image and the other with the moving image. Michelson also points out the relation between Deren’s cinematic grammar and Roman Jakobson’s linguistic model.17 She describes Deren’s method of filmmaking in linguistic terms as ‘metonymic and metaphoric’, using the duality proposed by Jakobson.18 Metonymic can be described as syntagmatic (the syntactic) relationship based on the principle of substitution, causality and proprietorship. Metaphoric could be described as a principle of comparison of two or more unrelated substances. Looking at film as a metaphor renders it into the poetic (vertical) form, whereas metonymic association works better in prosaic forms of novel and dramaturgy, the horizontal form. Lyric poetry, opera, songs, etc., are metaphoric because here the combinations of all possibilities are immanent to the form. Michelson contrasts Deren’s critical works from the writings of academic critics, including Bazin, who, according to her, emphasized the metonymic, the ‘syntagmatic chain as the principal axis of the film analysis’, over the metaphoric.19 The linear hegemonic narrative code still remains the

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dominant feature of academic and scholarly production as well as the constitutive force of the industrial and commercial mode of film production. The structural build-up of poetic form is best illustrated in the three sequences in the film of Deren’s entrance in the house and climbing up the staircase. Each sequence performs a basic task of illustrating a combination of images edited in a particular fashion whose meaning is conveyed by the totality of its form. The first movement takes place on the staircase in the following fashion: there are no cuts, but a slow-motion long shot of Deren’s character ascending the stairs from a low angle at the bottom of the stairs. By slowing the movement, Deren creates a Sisyphean effect of endless toil of climbing the stairs by stretching the duration. The second movement is constituted of fourteen cuts from different angles composed in a nonlinear fashion, which propels the character’s advance on the staircase from the bottom to the top. The third movement, which begins at the top of the stairs, applies the apparent reverse motion technique (the actor mimics the motion of moving backwards) to achieve the same result.20 Here she also offers a slow-motion take of the same journey, where the temporality of the sequence is extended in duration without cuts. At the end of the sequence her body is propelled backwards with her arm extended down on the staircase, reminiscent of the shot of the actor Jean Marais descending into hell in Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), a clear intertextual homage. Deren’s presentation of the three alternative sequences of her mounting the staircase is ostensibly an example of her theoretical argument of how in poetic cinema the paradigmatic or vertical ‘attack’ constitutes a significant structuring principle.21 The three different syntagmatic structures of the sequence also represent the paradigmatic quality of her structural principle by suggesting that each option is equally viable. Each part can be substituted for the other without destroying the overall form. These poetic sequences function purely on the level of equivalence in the processes of selection and combination of individual shots. Here the sequence of shots is organized from one axis of selection into another axis of combination. One axis selects and combines static shots. Another, the slowmotion arrangements of various compositions. And a third movement selects shots and combines them in the axis of reverse motion, thus creating both synonymity and antinomity with the previous scene of forward movement in slow motion. Deren’s art of cinematography and its poetic aspirations and lyrical ambitions are projected through combinations and variations of a principle that remains consistent and reciprocal between each singular part as it relates to the other. Thus, the three different interpretations of the same action yield a totality of form (closer to the triadic-line or steppe-line poetry than any other literary form) that is realized in each individual element as an extended and indented part. They form the three staggered lines of the stanzas structured in a trimetric form. There is a direct reference to staircase scenes in the ‘Cinematography’ essay. The kind of manipulation of time and space to which I refer becomes itself part of the organic structure of a film. There is, for example, the extension of space by time and of time by space. The length of a stairway can be

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enormously extended if three different shots of the person ascending it (filmed from different angles so that it is not apparent that the identical area is being covered each time) are so edited together that the action is continuous and results in an image of enduring labor toward some elevated goal.22

Her philosophy of cinematic form is, perhaps, never better illustrated in an apodeictic manner as in the sequence described above. Poetry is often associated with metaphor and prose with metonymy. As a poetic film, Meshes of the Afternoon contains both these elements but at the same time extends the metonymic trope of the film larger than its metaphorical allusions. As a metaphor, we could work on the figurative aspects of the film. What do the flower, the key, the knife, the gramophone, the telephone, the razor, the googles, the black hand, etc., imply? Are they metaphors or symbolic messages? How does metonymy function in the film? Since the flower, the key and the knife are not compared to anything, they stand in for what they appear to be as such. There is a rhythm and equivalence in their appearance that remains constant as in a lyric poetry, where words and phrases are repeated, or as a leitmotif in a musical score. The juxtaposition of the knife and the key has startled and mystified critics. Mostly this juxtaposition (as a game of fort/ da (gone/there))23 is interpreted in terms of a traumatizing experience of a female subjectivity in a domestic environment, with everyday objects acquiring traumatizing or terrifying effects. A telephone in a horror or suspense film can certainly induce trauma or terror to a family besieged by a harasser or a murderer. Numerous films contain scenes of female protagonists terrified by a telephone call. But Meshes of the Afternoon is not a genre film, and those elements of generic structure may not be plausible in a film that is, in principle, geared towards eschewing the model of Hollywood’s traditional visual motifs. To force subjective causation as an explanation for a scene here misses the very core of the film’s philosophy, where the subject and the object do not operate on the same metalinguistic level.24 Their mutual independence guarantees the reciprocal nature of their relationship. Yet, according to Deren, ‘this film [Meshes of the Afternoon] is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience’.25 In a letter to James Card, Deren once again characterizes Meshes as ‘almost an expressionist film’ that ‘externalizes an inner world’ by confounding it ‘with the external word’.26 Thus, the critics who have placed subjectivity, especially female subjectivity, as the central tenet of the film have Deren’s own voice to back them up. I would go as far as ‘lyrical Abstraction’, a category from Deleuze, to describe Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, where the application of the shadow

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has a paramount place, but not that of the ‘Expressionist’ kind.27 This is not a disagreement with Deren’s own characterization of the film above. The shadow of the protagonist in the beginning of the film is not a double or the evil or the dark side of her personality. It simply exists as a shadow without a strife or conflict. It is her virtual side. The idea of virtual personalities is developed far more convincingly later in the film through the split images of the heroine in different forms, placed side by side through Hammid’s ingenious use of double exposure. Deren actually very enthusiastically confirms the role her co-director husband, Hammid, plays in creating this experimental scene. Nowhere does she actually ever say anything mystical about her three different apparitions (shot separately) in either symbolic or metaphorical terms. I call them virtual images because they present a threedimensional side of her actualized presence in three different images. Each one is the same and yet different. Each one comes after the other as a shadow of a shadow as if the three layers of her successive images have been presented in a parallel composition to signify the impossible division of the psyche from the real. Some images are designed to function at the cognitive level because of the codes embedded in them. So, for instance, the scenes of Deren’s repeated futile attempts to follow the mysterious hooded figure, who disappears around the bend of the road, function mostly at the cognitive level, where they can be interpreted, as they have been mostly, as a dream-like state or as a surreal fantasy. The images of Deren’s character closing her eyes in an extreme close-up and the next shot of the tunnel-like view can be easily understood as a point-of-view shot and the following images as borne by the sleeper’s dream. But the denotative aspects still remain intact with these images and cannot be assimilated by the viewer in cognition. There are certain emotive functions in her images that have been stressed by many critics as having a latent feminist discourse embedded in them. The body itself cannot avoid the semiotic coding of a feminine body represented within a scopophilic discourse.28 The scenes of Deren running after the cloaked figure with a mirror-face, signifying a ‘hyalo-sign’, could be recognized in Deleuzian terms as a ‘oneiro-sign’, a dream image. But is it really a dream image? Or, is it just another image that leads us deeper into Deren’s cinematographic pedagogy? The purpose of this particular ‘dream’ seems to articulate a seminal feature of Deren’s philosophy of film that opposes the illusion of realism, the neutrality of objective cine-eye, by deliberately casting a veil of sleep, that is, shutting the eye from an external objective reality to a mental landscape of creative imagination. Here the dream image is selected purely on the basis of replacing the object in front of the camera as real. Deren has said elsewhere that one of the best features of moving pictures lies in its ability to make monsters and trees a reality. Therefore, these multiple repetitions of the dream image throughout the film are not traumatic images that haunt the protagonist. The dream image remains intact and distant from psychological or physical trauma of any kind and simply connects disparate sequences into a tighter whole. This image (of her running after the cloaked figure) hovers somewhere between an imaginary dream, in which the experience of the real dream is actualized, and an implied dream, where the idea of the dream is realized without

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having to do anything whatsoever with a dream, being more like an enchanted idea whose representation requires a metaphysics of technique that Deren could look for and then borrow from the art of cinematography. Yet invested in this image is the residue of deeper philosophical ideas of image and representation, truth and reality, dream and imagination. Even if the dreamer is none other than Deren herself, her dream seems to have the depersonalized characteristics of an artist shedding her personality: ‘Man’s first step, accomplished through reflective recollection, is to depersonalize, to abstract from his personal experience.’29 The periodic recurrence of the hooded figure is a reminder of the poetic nature of the film. Both the figures of shadow (‘shadow substance’) and nun (‘nuns wear’) appear in her poetry written in 1933, ‘Resurrection at Noon’ and ‘Gothic’, respectively, posthumously published in The Legend of Maya Deren.30 Deren had also noted the ‘schism’ between the mirror and the image in one of her tell-tale poems, ‘The Vampire Mirror’. The film image, unlike the different qualities of reality present in either theatre or photography, is not rooted in reality; its existence is a ‘reflection of another world’31 that only exists in the absence of the reality of the performers, objects, etc., in the ‘intangible reality’ (the figure of mirror-faced ghost), in the insubstantial ethereal quality of light and shadow transmitted through airwaves.32 In Deren, the poetics of cinema has reached a level of philosophical introspection without conceding to become a philosophical discourse. In other words, she treats film philosophically without attempting to turn it into a philosophy worthy of its own essence, truth, beauty, etc., the domain of philosophy, so to speak. Raising the stakes to a philosophical exercise also allows her to refrain from doing interpretative criticism, which can fall in both semiotic and aesthetic categories. Her motivations for writing philosophical treatises on filmmaking processes come from an urge to explore and discover a new medium whose potentialities have been subdued or misused, or even usurped, by the regime of signifiers of literature and dramatics. So, one can presume that her interest in liberating the scope of cinematic expression from its subjugation to the existing codes of narrativity (industrialized and commercialized) has more to do with the former’s autonomy and credibility, call it authenticity for sounding more ontological, than anything else. But what elevates film to a philosophical level above other art forms, such as photography, painting, literature, sculpture, dance, etc., lies in its ‘integrative modes of time, space, images, movement’, the basic materials that have formed the bulwark of philosophical speculations since the beginning of the documentation of human thinking.33 Two types of film genre that Deren specifically targets in her article are social documentary of the post-World War II era – the non-interventionist documentary films that started the Cinéma vérité (pioneered by Jean Rouch) or ‘Direct Cinema’ (that took effect in America and Canada) movement  – and Italian Neorealism (1944–51). These genres were quite popular after World War II and heavily dependent on the aesthetics of realism and social and political consciousness of poverty in industrialized nations. Deren’s attack on photography is quite sophisticated and includes aspects that have not normally been discussed in

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relation to it. For her, a photograph not only testifies to the existence of that reality of which it is an image, but, for all practical purposes, becomes its ‘equivalent’.34 In other words, the status of photography is not determined by the standard of manmade images but by the ‘authority of reality itself ’.35 The philosophical difference between a photograph and a ‘man-made’ plastic image is simply this: the artist creates an image in order to communicate its meaning which remains manifest or latent.36 In a photograph the image is not necessarily recorded to communicate the meaning but rather to ‘endure’ the reality either indexically or iconically. In other words, the reality of a photograph becomes meaningful only when the reality of its object is recognized. Abstract photography lacks the manifest quality. The validity of such categorical arguments is debatable and many would not agree with her denigration or lack of appreciation of photography as an artistic medium, but her comments on the cinema have a force of originality that we must recognize and appreciate. Photography, because of ‘controlled action’, strikes a delicate balance between what is spontaneously present and naturally evident.37 Reality is never overstated or recreated but left to enter the realm of cinematography through a ‘controlled action’, which allows the spontaneous reality to enter into the calculation where they become a part of creative reality.38 To continue: In as much as the other art forms are not constituted of reality itself, they create metaphors for reality. But photography, being itself the reality or the equivalent thereof, can use its own reality as a metaphor for ideas and abstractions. In painting, the image is an abstraction of the aspect; in photography, the abstraction of an idea produces the archetypal image.39

In the motion picture, however, the authenticity of the photographic image, its ontological statement on behalf of actuality, is no longer inscribed within the numerous possibilities among which its configurations can form a variety of statements. The photographic image, therefore, becomes only an image in a chain of images whose structural order can be manipulated to provide multiple statements. In other words, as in Eisenstein and the Soviet school, the image itself is a cypher; its meaning depends upon the connection and link with another image. Much like Eisenstein’s vertical montage, but without the soundtrack, Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon moves on a vertical axis eschewing the horizontal sequential model of commercial narrative cinema. The verticality is not only simply grounded in the concept of montage of editing, but as Michelson suggests, it includes the criteria of distribution, reception and exhibition.40 Michelson is referring to the two axes of the Hollywood mode of production, horizontal and vertical integration, in this case of an extreme Avant-Garde and personal cinema that was made on a paltry budget of $276.00. Here we also understand the emphasis Deren puts on le Montagiste and not on the autonomy or the independence of the shot so venerated by Kracauer and Bazin or Deleuze (The Time-Image). For Deren the fact that photography is ontologically related to cinematography serves as an ‘obstacle’ to the creative function that she allocates to the cinema.

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Unlike Kracauer or even Benjamin, for Deren photography is a passive image, merely an imitation of the real, but also a refutation of the real in a negative sense. The photograph of a horse, according to her, is essentially a proof that the object in the photograph is really not a horse. She distinguishes the image in both a negative and a positive sense. Etymology connects image to imitation, a passive trait, and to imagination, which has an active connotation. By linking photography to passivity, a negative quality, she suggests that a photograph can only be ascertained as a negation of what it is not. Barthes, who elevates photography to a realm of moral and transcendental truth, might take serious issues with Deren’s categorical denigration of photography; yet, her assessment to a large extent falls into the then contemporary mainstream ideology of denying photography the status of an art form due to its technical origin. Deren’s conviction that cinema is neither a ‘pictorialized literature’ nor a document of reality, nor it is disposed to theatrical expression, lifts it to another category of aesthetic experience that she acknowledges with the inventions of modernity in transportation and communication, such as trains, airplanes and radio. As a contemporary of these modern transportation and communication industrial products, cinema’s aesthetic form should be understood by its industrial lineage and not with the earlier centuries-old forms of established literary and theatrical practices. Neither can it be reduced to the vagaries of verbal dynamics due to its essential visual dynamics.41 Here she is closer to Benjamin and his articulation of mechanical reproducibility as a form of mass art. P. Adams Sitney’s characterization of Meshes of the Afternoon as a ‘trance film’ of an early American Avant-Garde tradition also puts it in the subjective category with which Deren would, probably, not argue.42 But this subjectivity is not necessarily a psychological conditioning; rather, it is a theoretical endeavour to distinguish the art of cinematography in direct opposition to the photographic servitude of Bazin’s philosophy. For Deren, the photographic medium is, as a matter of fact, so amorphous that it is not merely unobtrusive but virtually transparent, and so becomes, more than any other medium, susceptible of servitude to any and all the others. The enormous value of such servitude suffices to justify the medium and to be generally accepted as its function. This has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine art form – capable of creative action in its own terms – for its own character is as a latent image which can become manifest only if no other image is imposed upon it to obscure it.43

This susceptibility to servitude is illuminated with even more severity in the following statement: ‘Although the photographic process is the basic building block of the motion picture medium, it is a tribute to its self-effacement as a servant that virtually no consideration has been given to its own character and the creative implication thereof.’44 To conclude: Deren’s principal concern is to turn photographic servitude to external reality, the unimaginative reduction of photography to the passivity of

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a purely mechanical devise, whose only function is to capture the world in its appearance, into the creative function of the imagination. Her other contribution, given that she claimed to be a dancer, was to integrate the artistic forms of dance and sculpture into her cinematic vision, to use cinematography as an instrument of discovery. Deren is not alone in her criticism of photography as an unartistic medium. Baudelaire, before Deren, was one of the most vociferous critics of photography. He famously wrote in a review of the Salon of 1859: ‘If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.’45 Like Munch, Van Gogh, and other symbolist and post-Impressionist painters of the earlier generation, including the Tonalist Whistler, who moved away from the ‘perceptual realism’ of photography, Deren, too, was not too enamoured by photography’s hold on visual realism.46 She wanted to create a new art form, a new language and syntax for the motion picture that did not imitate the law of nature but moved to a creative dimension of mental and latent image brought by the historical encounter of the film artist with the new equipment whose potential, she proclaimed, should not be squandered by slavish imitation or duplication of the real world that added nothing to what she called ‘experience’. Yet, almost at the end of the ‘Cinematography’ article, she concedes that the originality and creative action of the moving picture essentially lie in it being a photographic medium. Photography provides cinema with its essential attributes – fidelity, reality, authority: fidelity to the image of the person who transcends time and space; reality, which exists in every photographic image of the things and places that can be recognized as such; and finally, authority, a value that comes from the infinite impartiality of the instrument in recording the world as it exists in front of it, in the objective quality of the image.47 In the concluding paragraph on her essay, she writes, ‘The purpose of cinematic technique is to determine the disciplines inherent in the medium, discover its own structural modes, explore the new realms and dimensions accessible to it and so enrich our culture artistically as science has done in its own province.’48 The status of the photographic image has a limited value, only a fragmentary existence in the totality of the cinematic experience, which is fulfilled by the assembly, by the editing of these fragmented images, that is, the form. ‘The images with which the camera provides him are like fragments of a permanent, incorruptible memory; their individual reality is in no way dependent upon their sequence in actuality, and they can be assembled to compose any of several statements. In film, the image can and should be only the beginning, the basic material of the creative action.’49 There is an echo of the fragmented vessel, the amphora, that Benjamin spoke of in ‘The Task of the Translator’, whose broken pieces are the traces of the ‘pure language’, whose memory, that is, translatability, is recalled in every act of translation.50 The ‘Cinematography’ essay is a filmmaker’s melancholic backward glance to the heap of artworks she has left behind, while a storm of new creativity is blowing her into the future of new engagements, which will soon turn out to be tragic.

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Death forms a long-lasting bond with both photography and cinematography in both a literal and a philosophical sense. We already find in Jean Epstein, from the same point of view, a eulogy of cinema and death: La mort nous fait ses promesses par cinématographe (‘death makes its promises to us by cinematograph’).51 Death’s first promises were offered by one of the earliest photographs, of Hippolyte Bayard fictitiously staging his own suicide, ‘Self-Portrait as Drowned Man’, from 1840. Benjamin stated that nothing is more characteristic of this early period than the way the subjects of David Octavius Hills’s 1843 portraits of peasants in Edinburgh Greyfriars Cemetery ‘were at home there’.52 Benjamin, André Bazin, Roland Barthes and Robert Capa, to name a few of the most illustrious figures, have given a profound account of the relationship between photography and death, not as an analogue of temporality but in terms of its onto-theological relationship with the aura of the photographic image. To be touched by an aura is to be touched by the  presence of a distant past. In a remarkable poetic metaphor, Benjamin presents  the experience of aura in the subject as follows: ‘While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance – that is what it means to breathe in the aura of those mountains, that branch.’53 Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, ends with her in the last shot as dead on a chair (murder or suicide?). In the mythopoeic figuration of her death, echoing prosopopoeia, Deren brings the aura of the sea, like the trace of the distant mountain on the horizon, by entangling her image in the seaweed. Her life would end rather prematurely, in her small apartment on Barrow Street in New York, from poverty, malnutrition and an addiction to amphetamine in 1961. She was forty-four years old.

Chapter 11 E S TA B L I SH I N G R E A L I T Y: M O D E O F P R O D U C T IO N A N D SU R R E A L I SM I N T H E C I N E M A O F N U R I B I L G E   C EY L A N Sezen Gürüf Başekim

Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in January 1959 in Istanbul.1 His father, who was an Agricultural Engineer educated in the United States, instead of working abroad, preferred to return to Yenice, his hometown.2 Being born into a middle-class family, dealing with photography from the age of fifteen, the academic environment of Boğaziçi University – where he graduated as an Electrical Engineer – his travels to the West and the East, and the days spent in London are all defining experiences in Ceylan’s life and influences in his cinema. When it comes to filmmaking, Ceylan invokes Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu, Bresson and Tarkovsky as his main influences. While doing compulsory military service in Ankara, he decided to make films after reading Polanski’s autobiography Roman (1985).3 Before making his first short film Koza,4 Ceylan studied cinema at the university for two years. After a brief incursion into acting,5 Ceylan got a grasp of the technical parts of filmmaking.6 Since then Ceylan has consistently devoted his film practice to questions about what it means to be human in a certain reality. Despite his authorial approach to cinema his films are relatively successful in Turkey.7 For Nuri Bilge Ceylan, cinema, just like philosophy, is a field where we do not have to be clear and where we can show our indecisions as they are.8 Ceylan does not present a specific idea or behaviour as the ultimate truth. He is trying to understand the subjective qualities of every circumstance in his films.9 Questioning, as a process that includes the effort to be free from the effects of conventional knowledge in our thinking, is key for understanding Ceylan’s filmmaking. His film practice favours the scrutiny of reality in a way that inspires dialogue and transformation. Ceylan began his professional art career as a photography artist. Since then, he has cast doubts regarding the potential of photography to reflect reality. This directed him towards filmmaking.10 For Ceylan a good film is one ‘which can combine a certain aesthetic and moral sensitivity with a deep analysis’.11 Ceylan demonstrates a sense of reality that he perceives with his intuitions and invites us to question once again the presuppositions we take for granted.

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In this chapter, first I will focus on the ‘modes of production’ to understand the filmmaker’s realism. In doing so, I will aim to show that certain aspects of his filmmaking enable him to be more like a novel writer. Secondly, I will argue that what makes his realism different from other manifestations of realism is Ceylan’s unique combination of three aspects: ‘redemption of reality’, ‘humour’ and ‘surrealism’. Finally, I will expose elements of his surrealism and bring to the fore a ‘confession’, in order to establish a dialogue between Ceylan’s words and Walter Benjamin’s, with the ultimate purpose of making the case that cinematic practice is a political matter for Ceylan.

‘If there must be limitations, let them be in the mind of the artist’: Mode of production in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema The peculiar point in Ceylan’s filmmaking is the ability to use filmmaking as a means to make philosophical inquiry on reality. Ceylan thinks that his tendency towards questioning certain established meanings – rather than building a clear meaning in his films – may be seen as eclecticism and arbitrariness. The first films had a crew of two, Sadık İncesu and himself. Ceylan restricted his production crew believing that this approach was more suitable for a mode of production that was closer to his tendencies. At that point he was still an insecure filmmaker and wanted to take his shoot without time restraints.12 Ceylan says his scripts are not set in stone. They include ‘gaps in a flexible structure that can be filled with other processes’.13 This increases the importance of the production and editing processes. In this aspect, Ceylan finds his approach close to directors like Wong Kar-Wai and Abbas Kiarostami who ‘leave their script as a sketch and who believe that ideas that are found during shoots and editing would be richer and whose talents have been honed in this direction’.14 Though flexible when it comes to relying on the script, Ceylan works quite diligently during the script creative process. The Turkish director, who finds his own solo-written scripts too didactic, had script support or worked with a cowriter in all of his films – except on The Town15 and Clouds of May.16 After the film Climates,17 he began an enduring cooperation in script writing with his wife Ebru Ceylan. Ceylan prefers the type of cooperation where his ideas can be challenged, due to his view that ‘if an idea stands strong against all refutations, then it is more resistant’.18 For Ceylan scripts should be written in an environment which enables rigorous discussion. Any idea that is thought is tested critically and gets the chance to become deeper.19 ‘We write the same scene separately. Then we bring them together. Everyone writes in their own way, then we collide them.’20 Ceylan does not care much for rehearsal at the preproduction stage. Without breathing in the set atmosphere, it all looks ‘superficial’ to him during the read-through.21 Regarding location, Ceylan says his priority is the story or the issue, and only after that he thinks about the most practically and logistically eligible location that would fit it.22 If a problem occurs regarding the location, he swiftly adapts to

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another place. For instance, when the sun starts to shine on a shoot that requires clouds, instead of waiting for a change in the weather, he adapts his story according to the conditions.23 What is immutable for Ceylan is the ‘essence of the story’. The shooting process is what Ceylan believes to be of utmost importance along with editing. The first reason for this is his care for the acting to establish believability;24 and the second reason is Ceylan’s ability to watch the film during the shoots and then create new ideas accordingly.25 What he writes about a scene in the shooting diary of Three Monkeys is paradigmatic since it reveals the importance of the shooting and editing processes for Ceylan: ‘Sometimes I wish I could pre visualise these scenes so that I could save unnecessary shooting. But it is what it is. I just cannot detect things I see in the editing in a second, through a year of script writing process.’26 Jia Zhangke’s statement on The Town still holds true for Ceylan even if he is not behind the camera as he used to be: he still ‘shoots his films according to the tactile sense. (…) It is important for him to feel the atmosphere’.27 Acting direction is what Ceylan mentions to be the element that he spends most of his energy on. Because it is directly related to something authentic from life linked to something superficial and fake.28 This is how Ceylan describes his acting direction approach: ‘Each actor is a world unto themselves and may require you to employ different methodologies to extract the performance you need from them. A secret struggle ensues between us until the film is complete.’29 That is why he thinks film directors should have an idea on every subject and know how to work with the people in the crew to attain their vision. ‘The Set is a power arena.’ The director ‘has to know’.30 Ceylan states that conflict is normal in technical matters and while the technician pursues standards, the director wants to push the envelope on these standards, and this is the cause of conflict.31 Ceylan mentions that he had to develop alternative approaches after understanding in upsetting experiences that predesigned elements in cinema may not always work out.32 Thus for him ‘less pre-production, scripts with alternatives, shoots with variations and similar options’ began to be more preferable.33 Just like his preferring to eschew pre-production in his filmmaking, Ceylan’s tendency to film the script chronologically is another unconventional production feature that he had discovered through his experience. I stick to the [chronology] as much as I can, because this creates the opportunity to change your mind. When I change something in a scene this can affect the following scenes. Having shot those scenes beforehand can be restrictive. Just as a novelist changes direction during writing, this [chronological shooting] gives you the same chance.34

Editing is, as mentioned by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, in his experience, both an important part of the filmmaking process and the point where the rhythm of the film is designed.35 The following quote shows his attention and care regarding editing: For a director of my style, editing is important. Because I believe that the depth of a script can only go so far. On the design desk the mind can work only to

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a certain extent but when it all comes together, when the actor is on location, every object, every circumstance, every mistake that the actor makes, every change brings forth new ideas. Why shouldn’t I use that to go deeper?36

With the help of the benefits of digitalization, the director of Winter Sleep shoots hundreds of hours of footage for editing. If I have the slightest doubt that something could be done better in a scene, I prefer to shoot that as well. Because I have witnessed miracles happening in editing many times. Editing personally taught this to me. (…) What you shoot is not solely what you shoot. Sometimes, when used elsewhere, it can create an amazing miracle. When two visions collide, an unseen magic may arise. I guess my mind got used to working like this in time.37

In one of his interviews after the film Wild Pear Tree,38 the filmmakers clearly show how the entire process should be considered as interlinked: As dialogues get longer, grander, the effort to rehearse them, make them believable, the effort to make these dialogues sound natural when delivered by the actor also has to be increased inevitably. You have to constantly find a lot of ways, a lot of extra tricks, helping approaches to make these things sound true to life. This search continues even in the editing as well. Cutting where you hadn’t planned to cut before or having to shift to reverse angle for example. Or to try to move a dramatically well acted piece over another frame … During editing there is always a never ending conflict between believability and the style of the film (…) Due to certain obsessions of mine, I gradually moved towards, and made my choices for believability. (…) I guess the psychological consistency and authenticity of the characters are more important for me. Psychological inconsistencies, compared to stylistic ones, sever my viewing experience in a worse way in a film I watch.39

What ties Ceylan’s editing style to his more holistic poetics is mentioned in this quote: As in life, what has been lived gives meaning to what is lived. As in the moment of living, adding an obscurity to watching moment. Needing the next scene for clarity. Perhaps it is another way to interlink each scene with the other more tightly, to make their interrelation a must.40

‘You can’t establish reality with real sounds.’41 This may be Ceylan’s most precise quote on his approach to film sound. How the human hear perceives the sound guides Ceylan’s sound design. ‘The ear is subject to thousands of sounds and hears only what it wants to hear. If this is the case, if consciousness enables this, then I believe I can freely choose sounds to guide the audience using my consciousness.’42

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For Ceylan, sound in films performs its most miraculous effect in creating atmosphere.43 Sound is a practical way to guide the audience without disrupting harmony and even may serve to establish it. ‘Even the disturbing effect of the cutting between the plans may be removed by the softening power of sound.’44 Ceylan considers sound as a stylistic feature of a director and says it is as important as the vision:45 Since I like less dialog and expressionless faces in my films the function of the sound increases a little more. By adding meaning to long parts that have no dialogue, or adding different sounds to a non-revealing, expressionless, pokerfaced character, it is possible to direct that character to different emotions.46

He is cautious in the usage of music in films. That attitude is seen Ceylan’s following quote: I am passionately attached to a sensation that I may call a sense of reality. Nature sounds and other natural sounds sound like music to me. It scares me to harm that or to have a kind of superficiality that comes with music. I get the feeling that, as if we can not extract meaning from a scene cinematically and we can only do it with the help of music support.47

On account of his effort to prevent a precoded external reality to intervene in the relation between the film and the audience, Ceylan does not use music at points where an additional meaning can be imbued. Rather, he uses it in introducing a new character, in theme changes or scene changes.48 Ceylan tries to establish the phenomenon of ‘the field of depth’ which is one of the indicators of realist aesthetics, not through photography but through sound: ‘First of all, I personally know that no mood is comprised of sound only. It is probably not possible to reflect that in cinema in the exact richness and complexity, though we try.’49 In his editing diary he writes: ‘With long shots, a sense of life seems to emerge immediately. While using cuts and short shots seems more like cinema, long shots mean life.’50 Initially Ceylan’s cinematography had most of the stylistic features such as ‘real location, natural light, non-professional actor and objective shoot usage’. The shift to digital and employing a director of photography (Gökhan Tiryaki) in the film Climates; the usage of professional actor as of the film Three Monkeys;51 the emphasis on artificial light in the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia;52 the increased amount of dialogue in the films Winter Sleep53 and Wild Pear Tree; and the inclusion of tracking shots and studio shoots have all been perceived as transformative for Ceylan’s films at the time. Ceylan says the following on his shift to digital filmmaking: ‘Yes, for me the film is dead. It is needlessly cumbersome and less successful in capturing the reality that I want.’54 For Ceylan, since the digital transformation would free realist attitudes

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from being compulsory and make it something that the creator would choose with free will, ‘the realist films would be more valuable’.55 The components that lead the Turkish filmmaker cinematic preferences are ‘freedom’ and ‘believability’. He states that his ‘obsessions’ on natural locations, amateur actors, etc., were partly due to money-freedom matters. Presently, he thinks that in order to reveal the matter, all kind of cinematic methods can be employed and even a world that is not found in this life can be created, if necessary, to reach a specific sense of life or a reality imagined.56 Regarding the use of artificial light in the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan says: ‘There is no such thing as natural light looking natural. (…) It is, therefore, mostly compulsory to use light to reflect what we see in life on the screen.’57 He mentions that in the film Winter Sleep he understood that using a set is quite compatible with his work methods. ‘You get to control the light as you wish and create shadows in any way you like.’58 As for working with professional actors, the film he wants to make determines the approach: I had told the casting director that it could be amateur or professional actors [for the film Three Monkeys]. The only thing that matters for me is that when I look at the test shot, the actor should look like that character.59

However, the film Winter Sleep is the one which had to be filmed with professional actors to establish believability: ‘we wanted actors that could deliver the lines in the script with passion and believability. (…) I knew from the start that for this film I had to work with the best of professionals. (…). If you want what you wrote to be believable without changing too much, then it is only possible with truly good actors.’60 In conclusion, trying to find unchanging principles in Ceylan’s cinematography would not be an appropriate approach to understand his cinema. The director is clear: There are constantly secret tribunals and secret laws being raised over cinema. (…) For me there are no absolute lists of forbidden elements in cinema like the rules of Dogma. Of course there are things I do not like to conduct, though one day someone may come and do these things in a way that I can appreciate. I believe this.61

If Ceylan’s cinema has a specific tendency, perhaps it is its approximation to novel writing. When we analyse his printed scripts from The Town to Wild Pear Tree, we may see that his themes and characters are still similar in terms of spiritual and atmospheric aspects. As in one the scenes of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the two children of The Town, ‘Asiye and Ali, watch in reverence the view of the meadows, whose shadows have lengthened, as if this view has not changed for hundreds of years’.62 Ceylan writes in the script. As we admire the village headman’s girl in the Once Upon a Time in Anatolia we would recognize the character from Distant’s script.

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A sprightly girl of fourteen slides inside the room. The eyes of Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) who is napping in dirt suddenly open unbelievingly. The girl comes with the teapot to serve tea (…) The men feel melancholy when they see the beauty of the girl.63

What may be more important in Ceylan’s effort to bring his filmmaking process closer to a writer’s writing process is that he considers the script as just a sketch, his ongoing contemplation of the story during the shoots, the fact that he follows a chronological order to achieve this effectively and, finally, his personal final touch in the editing room. The use of dubbing allows Ceylan to refine and micromanage to increase believability, just like a writer’s search to find the right words. Digitalization has provided ease and richness in this aspect, the author believes: The artist must be a person that knows what to control. For me the opportunities should be endless. Just like the writer or poet has the freedom to play freely, let it be the same for the filmmaker as well. Let the filmmaker be free from the restrictions of the technical limits. If there must be limits, let them be in the artist’s mind. Let them control it personally. Let them prefer to limit things, instead of restrictions due to lack of opportunities. Perhaps, in this way the term ‘technical impossibilities’ would be used no more then.64

‘What I perceive as real is some unknown general intuition’: The components of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s realism Up until now I have resorted to filmmaking style to characterize Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s attempt to establish a dialogue with reality through his cinema. In this part, three of the themes and approaches that make up his sense of reality will be discussed. These are the ‘redemption of reality’, ‘humour’ and ‘surrealism’. Ties that clearly link to the director’s personal world are consistent phenomena throughout Ceylan’s body of work. We can describe this approach by corresponding it freely with Kracauer’s concept of ‘redemption of reality’.65 Ceylan re-creates deliberately a certain physical reality that, according to Kracauer, the camera itself spontaneously reveals. However the reality that rises as improvisation can also be found in Ceylan’s films. Ceylan ‘redeems’ the reality from death; the reality not only in its physical but also in its spiritual aspect. In this respect, Ceylan’s realism has also features that overlap with Bazin’s realist approach66 which allows cinematic reality to be more fluctuant, more psychologically or metaphysically driven, not only to manifest but also to question the existing reality and memory. The reality that Ceylan redeems is not limited to his own environment. The reality of people whom Ceylan met in provincial areas and who left an impact on him also finds a place in his cinema. Ceylan states that in the provincial areas, all thoughts are connected to practical events and thus everything gets revealed; whereas in the city, due to the disconnect between practice and thought, he cannot get to know people easily.67 He adds that he is in awe of the richness of human nature, during his relationship with the local.68

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A specific example regarding the redemption of physical and spiritual reality through recreation can be given through an anecdote about Mehmet Kaya aka Uncle Flea, in Clouds of May: There was a grandpa called Uncle Flea. We visited him with Ebru. (…) a summer’s day. We went to his village. They said he’s possibly at the field. (…) we passed through some fields, came to a distant one. We called out, but no sight of him. Then we walked at middle of the field, it is a poor one, harvested (…) then I realized that he was sleeping right there in a strange place. A tiny man, just laying as if dried down, just fell asleep. His appearance in harmony with the field. (…) While reaping weeds, he just let himself go to sleep, when he felt tired.69

The reality mentioned (i.e. man falling asleep in the field, an incident that has occurred in real life) can be seen as having been recreated in the film Wild Pear Tree, not only with physical aspects but also in ways that encompasses the soul of the true incident, in the scene where İdris teacher (Murat Cemcir) falls asleep in the field and his son Sinan (Doğu Demirkol) finds him. Another example is Ceylan’s visit to a teacher named ‘Hodja’ during a trip to his hometown. This is how Ceylan talks about his impressions: When this man, who mentions the beauty of lambs, the colour of the meadows, the smell of the earth began to speak, as we were listening attentively, the villagers looked restless, heads down as if ashamed right away. (…) But the Hodja didn’t seem to mind. Without hesitation he kept talking enthusiastically, occasionally laughing at his own words, speaking endlessly about lambs, the colour of grass and the smell of the earth.70

These impressions that form the basis of the film Wild Pear Tree redeem the character of İdris Teacher (Murat Cemcir), his existence and loneliness in the province and the opinions of the provincials on him. Ceylan explains that if an educated person does not behave according to what is expected of them  – including looking down on people, dressing well unnecessarily or using a bicycle instead of driving a car  – provincial people immediately start to ridicule the person.71 Thus, Ceylan ‘redeems’ a kind of provincial reality that we do not see much in other films. Ceylan’s approach to his character makes us feel that the real is multi-faceted and it makes us feel the spiritual connections between the subjects. The emphasis on the phenomenon of ‘loneliness’ is important in the sensing of connections. Loneliness is a condition that the director admits to having felt since his early youth.72 He mentions feeling like a stranger everywhere he goes, and that is something that he inherited from his father.73 Ceylan states that the sense of cosmic loneliness interests him as much as a someone’s social loneliness. He adds that animals and humans have the same fate in terms of cosmic loneliness and he emphasizes this through filmic details.74

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Another aspect that is revealed in Ceylan’s realism is the phenomenon of humour. For Ceylan ‘humour appears spontaneously as one gets closer to the real’.75 For Ceylan who mentions that certain details that do not cause laughter look more humorous when encountered in cinema, extracting these details from life requires the ability to see them from outside without emotional participation.76 This ability for Ceylan was honed through his reading of Chekhov. After I was introduced to Chekhov, it was like as if my observations gained meaning. His power to express small details sharply, his non-cliched approach, his non-preaching agenda and his powerful gift of forgiving and never judging. There are no good and evil people, there is an acceptance of life as fate and a very mischievous outlook. Our lives enrich because he can present a common life that looks unimportant as meaningful. He sharpens our powers of observation and gives us the habit of viewing life with more compassionate eyes.77

Ceylan’s peculiar production mode enables conditions for the appearance of this peculiar sense of humour during filming stage: Things like the second suspect asking for a cola at the dinner in the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia or the ‘Clark Gable joke’ which the audience eventually laughed were ideas that I found during the shoots. (…) As if the scene occurring before you inspires a kind of humour. Or at least this is how it operates for me (…) Most of the humorous elements in the film Winter Sleep are like that. For example that thing where the cold wind blows through the open door in the train station. (…) Perhaps that man’s face give the inspiration for it.78

The final defining trait in Ceylan’s filmic realism that I want to address is his inclusion of surreal elements. The first of the surreal elements in Ceylan’s cinema is the dream sequences that we see in all his films. Ceylan says, both in old and new interviews, that dreams form the important aspect of the sense of reality. ‘We all know how truths appear in dreams. What we try to hide even from ourselves are revealed in dreams.’79 ‘Like Bergman says, dreams may be even more real than real life perhaps.’80 ‘Dreams are a part of life of course. These are things that make the real more real, more authentic.’81 An anecdote that he shares in his editing diary may form a clue about a possible transitivity between reality and dream in Ceylan’s cinema: ‘This morning Ayaz came to my bed and told me about his dream where he and his friends were inside a Trojan Horse.’82 For Ceylan, the surreal is a certain aspect of reality. Ceylan doesn’t aim to establish a code that is open to signification by surrealist elements in his films. His reply to the labelling of certain frames in the film Three Monkeys as ‘surreal collage’ can be considered in this respect: ‘If you can’t internalise a scene, it may look surreal.’83

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On this topic, in another interview the Turkish director invokes the quote by Nietzsche: ‘it is time to let the irrational be left as irrational and be respected in that form’, for Ceylan believes that there is an aspect of life which we cannot subdue. He adds: ‘the details that can be described as metaphysical or spiritual in my films are things that exist in “some unknown general intuition which I perceive as real. These are misty regions which I can only connect through intuitions or my emotions, but nevertheless which I feel that I more or less have a relation with.”’84 The insistent tendency of Ceylan’s surrealism to remain irrational is related to the crisis of the intellectual and the idea of freedom, as Walter Benjamin’s text about surrealism has suggested. Although Ceylan does not offer his approach as a kind of solution like Benjamin, they are quite similar in terms of using confession as a political attitude. For Ceylan ‘(…) the importance of art and cinema is enabling the person to face their weaknesses in order to render them tangible and debatable’.85 Confession is one of the tools that an artist would use in order to communicate about our weaknesses. In an interview on Climates, Ceylan has this to say: It’s hard for me to understand that the effort to be intimate (…) is too much. Of course it needs to be ‘much’. I wish it were even more (…) What good would it serve to just say ‘how evil the people are’ without any responsibility and merely ‘alienate’ İsa as the scapegoat, instead of understanding the male and attributing it to an existential problem?86

Ceylan appears concerned about the fact that social relationships are based on concealing our flaws while exposing the flaws of others. In that kind of social and spiritual climate, confession may lead to a deeper and more real relationship, not only with others but also with oneself.87 Benjamin and Ceylan both propose ‘complete pessimism’. For Benjamin, complete pessimism means being closed to all reconciliations.88 This attitude may be more evident today as the moral ideals of liberalism further integrate themselves with the humanistic concept of freedom. With a similar approach, Ceylan already points out that ‘ideas turned into principles are in fact usually a set of risk-free presuppositions that have been adorned with some virtues and thus made presentable to society’.89 Thus, through his films, Ceylan works in dialectics of ‘metaphor and image’ and tries to expel metaphor from image. According to Benjamin’s suggestion,90 surreal aspects are the tools for that political action. Ceylan is among the filmmakers whose work transcends and transforms the conventional codes, and thus our understanding of realism. His filmmaking style almost enables him to create as if he were a novel writer. Distinguishing facts of his realism include ‘redemption of reality’, ‘humour’ and ‘surrealism’. Those aspects also bring ‘polyphonic’ qualities to his films. Ceylan states that, if making films is really a journey to understand the human soul, we have to be ruthless to ourselves and our character.91 Both his completed films and filmmaking style are tangible examples of this idea.

Part III F ILMS AND F ILMMAKERS’ W RITINGS AS A CTS OF THEORY

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Chapter 12 R E F L E C T I N G O N A P U B L IC D E BAT E A N D I T S A F T E R M AT H : J IA N G HAO, H I S W R I T I N G S I N T H E 1 9 8 0 S A N D H I S F I L M P R AC T IC E S I N T H E 1 9 9 0 S Lingling Yao

Introduction This chapter studies provincial filmmaker Jiang Hao’s evolving views on the right way to make good films in fast-changing, outward-looking contemporary China, as his role has multiplied and complicated in the marketplace with more filmmaking opportunities available than ever. Jiang worked his way from being a writer in the early 1980s to later writing for films in the mid-1980s and then assuming a director’s role in the early 1990s as China’s film industry resumed, expanded and boomed since China’s reform and opening-up. Chinese Film Theory has primarily been confined to film scholars’ interpretations and theorizations of film culture through film text, overlooking the theorizing potentiality of filmmakers’ rich practices, critical reflections and inspiring visions that span beyond the scope of the film text. This chapter is part of this great effort to reimagine how Jiang Hao may contribute to Film Theory, especially to one in which filmmaking can function as a collective enterprise organically and free from cult filmmakers. The truth is, as creators and enablers of films, filmmakers have been pioneers in advancing the definition of cinema, even though their language may be non-theoretical and they may not consciously present their thinking in any theoretical format. Taking as a case study the screenwriter-cum-director Jiang Hao and his collective approach to filmmaking practices, I intend to highlight in Film Theory the importance of this collaborative approach to filmmaking. Needless to say, all national cinemas hold directors dearly and highly, but Chinese cinema has gone to the extreme by structuring itself, past, present and future, in terms of directorship. The overwhelming evidence is that Chinese cinema is imagined as the accumulation of different generations of directors. Since Chinese directors like Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang emerged internationally with award-winning films in the early 1980s, the cult of these then young directors in post-socialist China has started and led to their being named the fifth-generation directors.1 Subsequently, all the previous directors were reimagined in this

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generational framework retroactively as the first to the fourth generations. As of today, this generational narrative encompasses seven generations of directors and has no sign of discontinuing. However, it is worth pointing out that the halo of this directorial cult always surrounds the award-winning fifth-generation directors. It is in this director-worshipping cinematic culture that studies after studies focus on famous directors, especially of the fifth generation, portraying them as the game changers and enablers of progress in filmmaking.2 One might as well say that the celebrated names of the film directors are built upon the namelessness of other filmmakers, an issue persisting in the new Millennial China and thwarting the healthy development of Chinese film culture. Jiang Hao, a screenwriter in the mid-1980s, has long begun to critique this directorial cult in Chinese cinema. He is one of those filmmakers having witnessed and rejected the rise of (the cult of) the fifth-generation directors. He began to reimagine an organic filmmaking culture while fighting against the trend of worshipping directors at the price of erasing other filmmakers or making other filmmakers irrelevant in film history and subsequently irrelevant to Film Theory. This chapter revisits his public dispute with an established female director in 1987 to recreate the film culture he vehemently rejected, even at the price of alienating himself from the film establishment. His radical writings in the 1980s showed his consistent effort to envision an ideal relationship between different professionals for a sustainable future for the Chinese film industry embarking on the world stage. His turn to directorship and subsequent directorial practices in the 1990s anticipated the rapid change in the industry and reflected his evolving take on what means to be an organic filmic enterprise, the knowledge of which, if made available, can still be inspiring to new professionals entering the film industry today.

Challenging the film establishment What this section examines derives partially from the first chapter of my dissertation.3 New ideas have been developed that reflect my current views on this historical event, which moves beyond the issue of gender in filmmaking as focused in my dissertation to the bigger issue of filmmaking disguised partially in gender conflicts as discussed in this chapter. Jiang Hao and Dong Kena crossed their paths for the first time when both joined China Film Delegation to visit Toronto International Film Festival in 1986. Dong, then already a well-known director in Beijing Film Studio, was therefore given the responsibility to head the delegation, while Jiang Hao, an emerging screenwriter from a provincial film studio, came to Beijing to join the Delegation. The subsequent publication of a travel journal about this trip to Canada by Jiang triggered a public dispute that this section is set to examine. As the first public critique of the filmmaking norms, it brought a provincial rising screenwriter into the national spotlight, making him a controversial and unpopular figure among some filmmakers.

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Dong Kena, born in 1930 in Shandong, the home province of Confucius and the Chinese patriarchal stronghold, was raised by her mother in war-torn China and suffered enormously before she met and joined the Communist Party, according to a detailed biography.4 After briefly trying an acting career, Dong subsequently enrolled in 1955 in the two-year Director’s Program at what was then still called Beijing Film School. This Director’s Program was set up for the first time in New China to train film directors in an institutional setting with the help of four film experts from Moscow.5 In this sense, Dong was one of the first institutionally trained film directors in New China. Except for a brief period of two years working in Changchun Film Studio, she was affiliated with Beijing Film Studio from 1960 and retired from there in the early 1990s. Her selection as head of the Film Delegation was proof of her established status in the film community. On the other hand, Jiang Hao differed himself in every possible way from Dong Kena. Born in 1954 in Inner Mongolia, Jiang was an ethnic Mongolian and grew up during the tumultuous Great Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The Mongolian grassland where he toughened himself to survive later became the background of his many writings. During his tenure in the literary journal Khorchin Literature, his novel On the Hunting Ground appealed to the director of Inner Mongolia Film Studio, one of the earliest Chinese stateowned studios to make feature films and dubbed films. Jiang was then invited to join the provincial Film Studio to adapt his novel for the silver screen. Thus, he embarked on a prolific screenwriting career and later took up film directing. The award-winning film On the Hunting Ground/liechang Zhasa (1984), directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang whose directorial reputation was primarily derived from this film, became Jiang’s first screenwork and an instant success internationally upon its release. This film qualified Jiang to represent China at the Toronto International Film Festival. Jiang and Dong’s clash surfaced in great detail in the open dispute and offered a rare window into the ideological and cultural conflicts between Chinese filmmakers that were further complicated by gender, age and professional status. Dong and Jiang might never have had to deal with each other again after they completed their delegation and parted ways. Still, when Jiang published his travelogue ‘Confusions and Anxieties in North America’ in the influential journal Television, Film and Literature,6 their paths crossed once again. For Jiang, the submission of his travel writing was a promise well-kept as usual, but for Dong, it was more like a bomb dropped in her otherwise relatively quiet professional life. It must be noted that in the mid-1980s, China’s reform and opening-up under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership were then well underway. People across all walks of life, feeling less politically charged, were more ready to seek cultural exchange within and with the outside world and more open to voice their opinions. Upon reading Jiang’s article, Dong submitted an open letter to the journal in her own defence. The journal’s deputy managing editor, who solicited Jiang’s publication, felt a moral responsibility to accept Dong’s request to publish her defence letter.

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In the open defence letter, Dong denied all accusations and negative comments in Jiang’s essay regarding her and the delegation. Instead, she insisted on the delegation’s successful participation in the Festival: Frankly speaking, I’m outraged. This is not only because he mentioned me dozens of times in his essay, saying slanderous things about me, but mainly because he denied our achievement as a film delegation to the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada; what’s worse, he untruthfully reported about our delegation’s activities, even to the degree of lying, and attacked me personally. What would be the consequence of publishing such an essay? What was the value of this essay? Of course, every publication has its freedom. But as a delegate and the one mentioned by him in his article dozens of times, I have the right to protest. I hope your journal can publish my open letter to lay out the facts and reverse the negative impact the essay has upon your readers.7

As a well-respected director, Dong’s fierce rebuttal would have a detrimental impact on Jiang’s budding career in the film industry, where seniority and respectability predominated. What does Jiang’s writing do to make Dong go publicly outrageous? Besides leaving the impression that a junior disrespects a senior, how else can his writing be offensive to the film establishment? With those questions in mind, we must read Jiang’s article carefully to locate the many problems that Jiang, as a critical insider, identified, sometimes implicitly, in the Chinese film industry. His article, using critical language in a straightforward and outright way rarely seen among writers and commenters, raises challenging issues and asks legitimate questions that can no longer be swept under the rug. To sum up, Jiang identified three significant issues that exposed the problematic filmmaking practices and simultaneously revealed the limitation of his views on gender. First, Jiang believes that (male) directors are bad-tempered because that’s how they manage a team with members who might attempt to sabotage them for various reasons. Still, Dong, who needs to work with a bad temper like her male counterparts, is unlikable as a woman, according to Jiang. This gender bias explains why Jiang approves of male directors’ bad temper but condemns that of female directors at the same time, as he writes derogatively about Dong, ‘Just by looking at her eyes you can tell she is not an easy-going person, but a woman with a man’s temper.’8 Second, Jiang adamantly believes and condemns that uncritical Party loyalty over independent thinking leads to poor filmmaking. Jiang criticizes Dong as a Party-first person who doesn’t know how to appreciate independent thinking and blindly follows the Party’s regulations while visiting abroad. For instance, Jiang reports that in the meeting with a high-ranking official before departing for Toronto, Dong was eager to demonstrate her loyalty towards the Party before the latter even requested so and told the latter that ‘[iIf the Kuomintang Party flag showed up] our delegation would withdraw immediately’.9 Third, Jiang opposes Dong’s socialist realist approach and prefers a social realistic approach to filmmaking. Dong objected to Chinese films that exposed negative aspects of Chinese society and accused them of tacitly doing so to win international accolades. She was quoted saying, ‘I don’t like [to expose the ugly aspects of life].

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I directed A Girl Called Ming/Ming Guniang to showcase the true, the good, and the beautiful. I made Hotel Run by Women/Xiangsi Nüzi Kedian to show my support for reform. Why should we show foreigners the skeleton in our cupboard?’10 Clearly, Dong’s celebratory filmic style alienated her from a new generation of filmmakers, including Jiang. The latter was then busy experimenting with more realistic and critical filmmaking and attending international film festivals. However, Jiang’s critical observations and analyses of Dong and her filmmaking philosophies were not without issue. Jiang’s attack on Dong, instead of a male director, established or not, easily led to the suspicion of him being part of the deep-rooted misogynist culture which he criticized half-heartedly as below: The Vice Director [of the Public Relations Department]  … emphasized the importance of respecting women. The other male delegate Cao Zheng was waiting for us in Shanghai, so she tossed the question toward me. Foreign countries respect women, so I should let Dong and Yang walk first while in public and open the car door for them. She said China values men more than women, so you can demonstrate male chauvinism here with no consequence, but if you do that overseas, you would be deemed uncivilized. I nodded in agreement, expressing my willingness to help the ladies. In China, due to historical feudal oppression, our appreciation of women remains on the physical level, not the cultural level. We can pretend to respect women once in a while, but to change it would be a long process.11

Jiang identifies the demand for performativity on the side of the Chinese males and keenly insists that Chinese women have remained as a sexual being despite all the hyped progress. Clearly, in his criticism of Dong, there is no trace of male performativity of publicly showing respect to a senior female director. The abandoned male performativity can be interpreted as a sign of the loosening of China’s ideological control that led to the resurfacing of the once suppressed misogynist undercurrent. In addition, Jiang points out a challenge that is seldom discussed in serious cinematic scholarship, that is, the working relationship between a director and the camera crew. From the viewpoint of Jiang, then as a screenwriter, it is perhaps one of the most critical and complex relationships to manage on location: As a director, especially a woman director, if you have no temper, how can you possibly take a varied camera crew under control? The camera crew is often mistaken as a creative art group by those without close contact with it. It is, in actuality, “a labor group,” lacking culture and cultivation but knowing how to intimidate and undermine a director at a critical moment so as to teach the director to recognize its essential existence. Therefore, that Chinese directors become ill-tempered is a predictable development.12

Jiang is right to raise the question about the working mechanism between a female director and her all-male camera crew in the early days of contemporary filmmaking, a topic overlooked in the male-dominated film culture. Jiang, as

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a newcomer to the film scene and a marginal figure himself being a provincial screenwriter, was keen to observe that subtle power relation and brazen enough to speak it out loud, noting the likely dire situation of a female director when being challenged and undermined by her camera crew. It is also worth pointing out that Jiang’s move to tie Dong’s hot temper, a largely subjective judgement of the former, with her task to manage an all-male camera crew remains pure guesswork based on his partial observations of how a male director works with his team. Could a female director have cultivated a healthier work relationship with her crew? With more female professionals and better-trained filmmakers working in today’s filmmaking, have filmmaking challenges changed as well? To answer those questions, more research is needed to historicize and genderize the process of filmmaking. As discussed in this section, the beginning of Jiang’s critical reflections upon Chinese filmmaking already touched upon some sensitive aspects and thus made himself an almost public enemy among those who were less critical of the status quo. No sign of self-assured hubris was more remarkable than a young emerging screenwriter publicly challenging a well-established senior director in an unprecedentedly straightforward manner. It would make many who expected nothing but respect for seniority feel uncomfortable and even threatened. Nevertheless, the following sections will continue to examine Jiang’s career with a proven record of challenging, rejecting and redefining the filmmaking norms in contemporary China.

On screenwriting As mentioned in the above section, Jiang was then a rising screenwriter from the provincial Inner Mongolian Film Studio. He was a writer for many years before embarking on the directing track. Given where he came from, it is no wonder he has volunteered to become a critical voice for screenwriters in China. As an outspoken person rarely seen in his generation, he has aired many grievances against scapegoating screenwriters for being responsible for failed films over the years. Remarks on film, especially on screenwriting, are scattered consistently throughout his extensive writings. The following is an example of his many similar grievances: The film differs greatly from the original [text] … A novelist is self-employed and can make a living according to your own capacity as long as society doesn’t treat you harshly and the good-for-nothing authorities give you a little recognition. But the film is different … Once a screenplay product gets to the hands of a director, all he does is to replace the original wrapping paper with his own and auction it in the market, not caring about what’s wrapped inside. If the film becomes a hit, journalists and film critics will surround the director enthusiastically like they are all passionately in love with him, bragging about him to disgust. If the film flops, those same people will close in on the director

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as if they are all sadists looking for pleasure. In China, no single film critic or journalist read the screenplay before watching the film based on the script. How inconvenient that is! After all, no screenwriter would pay for the film critics or journalists to read the screenplay, nor could reading a screenplay make them famous.13

As elsewhere as in the above-quoted passage, Jiang vehemently contends that screenwriters are either shadowed or scapegoated by film directors or completely ignored by film critics/journalists for neither party has much interest in what the screenplay really is. In his writing on the art-designer-turned filmmaker He Qun, he continues to attack the forces that put down screenwriters in even more contentious terms: ‘In the Chinese film circle there is the golden law of raping screenwriters: when a film succeeds, everyone praises the director; when a film fails, everyone blames the screenwriter.’14 In his view, screenwriters always end up being the victims in the Chinese film culture, whether a film hits or flops. He surely cannot stand this prolonged victimhood and therefore looks for every opportunity to single it out to his colleagues and the general public, perhaps even knowing how little impact his voice would make. If the known working dynamics between directors and cameramen and between directors and screenwriters are not productive, what type of filmmaking should be imagined, desired and practised? From his writings, Jiang expresses clearly that he believes in the collective nature of filmmaking and wishes films to be approached and enjoyed as a joint product. At least, this is the idea he preached when he was primarily a screenwriter and hadn’t taken on the directorship yet. The following extensive quote explains his thoughts on film as a collective creation and why teamwork in filmmaking is crucial to the success of a film: The film is a comprehensive art, which determines its nature of being a collective enterprise. It resembles a relay race. The screenwriter runs the first baton, and the art designer runs the second baton. The cinematographer runs the third baton, and the director runs the last baton. The problem doesn’t lie in the division of labor but in the moment of crossing the finish line. Once it succeeds, flowers and women all rush to the director because he is seen to be the record-breaker. Once it fails, the director turns to complain that the first runner was slow, the second runner didn’t catch up, and the third runner didn’t pick up speed, but he totally forgot he himself is a cripple.15

Jiang draws a vivid analogy between filmmaking and a four-person relay. He sees both the importance of the division of labour in making a film and the unfortunate marginalization of the other work at the price of glorifying directing, often by the director, conveniently if not deliberately. The lack of recognition of talents other than directors leads to unfair distribution of resources for career development. For instance, professionals working behind the set rarely get a chance to attend international film festivals, which are highly regarded as essential platforms for networking and professional advancement. Based on his observation of the

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unfair treatment of those people in the film industry, he has arrived at the painful conclusion that marginalized screenwriters, art designers and cinematographers will look for chances to direct their own films because they have been taught enough lessons to believe that only the directorship can reward them with due respect in the film industry. Jiang has anticipated the arrival of the turn to directorship, himself being one of those talents seeking directorial opportunities. One can tell Jiang’s dilemma in trying to bring justice to the other kinds of labour in the filming industry. On the one hand, he wants to emphasize film as a collective enterprise, ‘a relay’ in his word, so he relentlessly calls for due respect to be paid to the other filmmakers rather than just the directors (and actors). On the other hand, he is practical to admit, whether he likes it or not, that ‘the author of a film is the director’ when he writes about former art designer He, who turned to directing,16 and again when he writes about former cinematographer Hou Yong who turned to directing,17 not to mention himself who turned to directing from screenwriting. Everyone knows the last racer is always the fastest in a serious fourperson relay race, but the medal and flowers go to every racer indiscriminately. If filmmaking resembles a relay race, and even if the director is the most talented, shouldn’t the applauses and flowers for a film go to all talented professionals indiscriminately? The collective turn to directorship from many other film professionals  – screenwriters, art designers, cinematographers and actors  – has alerted Jiang and led to his pessimism on the future of the Chinese film industry, even though he is one of those jumping into directing like his friends He and Hou. On many occasions in his critical writings, he laughs at the many people who claim to be directors with little to no knowledge of directing and eagerly shuns them as if they were infectious diseases. What worries him the most is that the exodus of other film professionals will lead to the lack of adequately trained professionals to fill the positions needed in many filmmaking departments. He wishes publicly that film talents will continue to perfect themselves professionally to help grow an organic Chinese film industry in which they are duly valued and respected. Although he has the Chinese film industry’s best interest at heart, at some point, he chose to ride the directorial tide in hopes of winning respect and, perhaps, making a difference. Heroes without Tears (1991) It is hard to say whether the public contention with Dong had compelled Jiang at that moment to seek the more respectable directorship or not. Not long after that public debate, he indeed rode with the directorial tide he rejected over and again earlier. The first film Jiang directed was Heroes without Tears/Yingxiong Wulei (1991). It is a police story about a young officer who, despite being divorced by his wife and framed by a gang whose criminal activities threatened the safety of the communities, proved his innocence, won another girl’s heart and took his job back. This section will look at how Jiang used the opening and closing credits creatively and functionally to express his thinking about the labour division of filmmaking. Before examining his Heroes without Tears, let’s take a look at Dong

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Kena’s A Girl Called Ming/Ming Guniang (1984) and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s On the Hunting Ground /Liechang Zhasa (1984). Both films were shown at the 1986 Canadian International Film Festival by the Chinese Film Delegation, with Jiang being one of the delegates. In Dong’s film, nearing the end of the title sequence, the opening credits listed the screenwriter as red text superimposed on the last shot, followed by the director and the cinematographer as red text imposed on the static picture of the final title sequence shot, each appearing separately on the screen for about six seconds. Then the other crew appeared in pairs except for the producer, starting with the art designer and the composer, each for about four seconds. A cast of seven actors followed, appearing in groups of two, two and three, each for about four seconds. The differences among the filmmakers were marked by the sequence of being credited and the time duration given on the screen. At least this film visually acknowledged the screenwriter before the director and the crew before the cast. The opening credits in Chinese films prioritized the producers in the 1930s, but by the late 1940s, screenwriters had replaced the producers to be the first among all filmmakers to appear in the opening credits. The history of the opening/closing credits in Chinese films needs more research to answer what has caused the changes. Tian Zhuangzhuang took the opposite approach by having a simple opening and moving the acknowledgements to the closing credits. Four leading actors were first listed as red text superimposed in the final shot, followed by the crew as white text in the order of the screenwriter (Jiang himself in this case), director, the cinematographer, the art designer, the composer, etc., rolling out from the very right of the screen and moving across the screen until finally out of the frame. Tian’s approach to the closing credits had the actual effect of highlighting the collective nature of the contributions of the main cast and the crew, even though the order of the main cast shown and that of the crew still hinted at the differentiated significance of each filmmaker. By contrast, Jiang used both the opening and closing credits more creatively and functionally. Before the title sequence, Jiang’s opening credits listed the screenwriter (himself) as bold red text superimposed on the black screen. Dedicating the entire opening credits to the screenwriter produced the psychological effect of viewing the screenwriter as the creator and the most influential filmmaker of the film, who enabled the story soon to be told on the screen. The closing credits showed that he had both followed and revised the conventional practices. The closing credits started with the two leading performers and stand-ins, followed by the other cast and then the remaining crew in the order of the director (himself as well), the producers, the cinematographer, the art designer, the composer, etc., all as bold red text superimposed on the static picture of the final shot. The superimposed text of everyone from the cast and the crew except the screenwriter rolled up continually from the bottom of the screen to the top until the last name disappeared from the screen. This kind of presentation with the director sandwiched between a long list of the cast and another list of the remaining crew weakened the director’s visibility. Unlike Dong and Tian, who listed their producers near the end of the crew credits, Jiang placed his two producers between the director and the cinematographers.

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The design of the opening and closing credits speaks volumes about Jiang’s theory of labour division in filmmaking. The screenwriter-only opening credits in his film showcase his idea that the screenwriter comes first in film creation, that is, being the first racer in a relay race. By acknowledging that and that alone in the opening credits, he successfully creates the image of the origin of the film being screened. If viewers are receptive enough, they will likely accept the screenwriter as the (first) creator of the film (story). In the closing credits, he starts with the cast, dividing it into the main cast and the remaining cast. Given how often he has consistently complained about the undeserved attention and fame actors receive along with directors in his writings, his choice of prioritizing the cast over the remaining crew and the main cast over the minor cast can be baffling. One speculation is that by the early 1990s when the Chinese film industry entered a free market at full speed, stardom had started to dominate the film industry. The listing of the producers right after the director indicates their increased importance in producing a film in a free market economic era, which, to the dismay of Jiang or not, further relegates cinematographers and art designers back in the order of importance and visibility.

Conclusion Jiang is a radical thinker, a fearless writer and a practical filmmaker. His ideal, as reflected in his envisioning of filmmaking as a collective enterprise and as a relay of different divisions of labour, shows a utopian vision of intellectual teamwork without institutional hierarchy. Meanwhile, his ideal is contradicted and compromised by his insistence on the director being recognized as the author of the film on the one hand and thus assuming the responsibility for the failure of their film on the other.18 In his own directorial practices, he has both challenged and followed some of the conventional practices in the film community. His unrelenting call for reforming the unjust and unproductive filmmaking system might have found few followers and companions. However, he still used his debut film to address some of his long-time concerns and came up with at least one solution that could have changed the game for screenwriters if followed by his directorial counterparts in the 1990s and onwards. The new millennium has witnessed an unprecedented number of films in the making and welcomed more professionals into the film industry. Meanwhile, the unhealthy turn to directorship remains trendy in the new millennial China, and the need to continue to develop Jiang’s imagination of organic filmmaking remains strong and urgent. The unprecedented power of stardom in the millennial entertainment industry, including the film sector, seems to have even marginalized directors. Can the Chinese entertainment industry rely on the authorities to cap the pay of stars and redistribute production resources for its healthy development? Is governmental intervention enough to reshape the industry? If organic filmmaking is desirable, what forces can make it happen? The influences of different film professionals ebb and flow, making these questions ever more intriguing and organic filmmaking ever more preferable.

Chapter 13 A L E X A N D E R K LU G E’ S ‘F I L M I N T H E M I N D O F T H E SP E C TAT O R’ : O R A F T E R- ( D IA L E C T IC A L ) - I M AG E S I N N EW S F R OM I DE OLO G I C A L A N T I QU I T Y: M A R X   – E I S E N ST E I N   – C A PI TA L James Hellings

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. Whence the shadowy light? What company in the dark! To close the eyes and try to imagine that. I love to go to the movies; the only thing that bothers me is the image on the screen. Half the time in a movie theatre is spent in the dark.

Kafka.

Beckett.

Adorno. Kluge.

Introduction In an interview, the author, philosopher and filmmaker, Alexander Kluge responded to a provocation about his friend and teacher1 Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘appreciation, or lack of appreciation, for film’ thus: We actually wanted to write a book about film music together. The films that I’m creating are iconoclastic in a way. Diminishing pictures, never augmenting pictures. Very often I take an image, a scene, and then I say in the commentary the same thing. I repeat it. And I get a relationship between image and text. And if these things are sort of perpendicular to each other, then it’s good.2

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Foregoing, for the time being, the question of Adorno’s appreciation, or lack of appreciation, for film,3 this chapter positions Kluge’s iconoclastic, diminishing and perpendicular films or pictures as after-(dialectical)-images, which is to claim that they are best encountered as poetic/political pictures operating between Adorno’s conceptualization of after-images and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image. To achieve this end, I focus my analysis on just one film by Kluge: News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital/Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike:Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital, 2008.

News from ideological antiquity Kluge’s picture is divided into three parts. Part One, which runs for just over three hours, is subtitled Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House. Part Two, which runs for a mere two hours, is subtitled All Things are Enchanted People. And Part Three, another three hours, is subtitled The Paradoxes of Exchange Society. News from Ideological Antiquity is certainly epic, in both scope and duration. It is constructed in a way familiar to viewers of Kluge’s other productions, i.e. through montage; the juxtaposition of still and moving images; awkward talking head interviews; amateur special effects; improvised, theatrical and farcical performances; exaggerated didactic or pedagogic lessons and exercises; musical interludes; pictorial interludes; and frames and frames of text, (sub-)titles and captions constructed out of a dizzying variety of typographic fonts and devices are all on show. There is far too much news  – visual, textual and aural  – from ideological antiquity to describe in any detail here, so the interviews Kluge conducts focus my analysis. Part One elaborates upon Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized plan  – having just completed October (1927)  – to film Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), loosely using the structure, technique and form of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In a talking head interview, between Kluge and the film historian Oksana Bulgakova, one snippet of noteworthy news (from ideological antiquity) is that Eisenstein went blind editing October. Eisenstein, so the story goes, had been staring into a Moviola for forty-eight hours straight, he was totally exhausted and had even resorted to taking amphetamines to stay awake. Temporary blindness ensued. ‘Everything he cut, he cut with his inner eye.’ With eyes shut, Eisenstein cut October – imagine that. What was true for Kafka’s storytelling, perhaps, held for Eisenstein’s filmmaking: my stories/films are a way of shutting my eyes? In the November of 1929, a month or so after Black Thursday and the Wall Street Crash, Eisenstein visited Joyce in Paris.4 Joyce, himself blind by 1929, ‘tells Eisenstein (…) that he has seen Potemkin’. At their meeting, Joyce played Eisenstein a record of himself reading, and they planned to collaborate. ‘Eisenstein’s idea is to film Capital as Ulysses.’ The film was to be structured as ‘a day in the life of one person’. Where Joyce had penned the stream-of-consciousness of Leopold Bloom, Eisenstein imagined filming ‘an inner monologue of a worker’s wife’, incorporating the whole of human history! Capital as Ulysses was to proceed as

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a chain of associations and stimuli, which the viewer of Eisenstein’s film may (or may not) follow. And, these associations were to be imagined, constructed and cut by Eisenstein who, as Kluge and Bulgakova observe, had recently recovered from blindness brought on by overwork and intoxication. Part Two of News from Ideological Antiquity asks what kind of images, transformations or metamorphoses Eisenstein had in mind when planning his unrealized film Capital. What would these chains of associations and stimuli look like? The wonderful subtitle, All Things Are Enchanted People, comes from the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in another talking head interview with Kluge. ‘Something flows into the product’ according to Sloterdijk’s gloss of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism – much like the nails which were once hammered into wooden figurines, themselves representative of wishes or curses. ‘Subjective intentions (flow) into the product.’ There is a mysterious transferral of energy, an impetus, a flow from the subject into the object, the commodity. Sloterdijk speculates that there is no reality beyond or beneath the fairy-tale enchantment of capitalism, which is why he also recommends reading Marx’s Capital at the same time as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Commodity fetishism further enchants, however falsely, the disenchanted world – but it is, in reality, fairy-tale characters, bewitched people, who hammer fetishes into things, subjective intentions into products. So, if it is the case that all things are enchanted people, it cannot be a question of mere disenchantment at the level of things. We are always already in the fairy-tale (i.e. the phantasmagorical world of capital, with all of its commodities and its fetishes), so all we can do is see the reality of the fairy-tale. For Sloterdijk, ‘the work of demystification consists in going back to the point of production’, which is to say one has to return to the origins of commodity fetishism – the metamorphoses, the nails, the wishes and the curses. In Part Three, following some direct references – both textual and pictorial – to Max Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944–7),5 Kluge is joined by his long-term collaborator, the philosopher Oskar Negt, for yet another interview. There is, for Kluge, a poverty of imagery in Marx’s Capital. To remedy this blindspot, Kluge suggests constructing or developing image sequences: ‘Show an image, then its variant, then a variant of the variant, etc., so we can learn to comment in images and situations. Language couldn’t do that.’ However, Kluge warns, ‘film doesn’t really lend itself to that – it’s too fast’. ‘A new image erases the old one.’ ‘Sometimes you’re lucky enough that the old ones linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory and sort of colorize the new ones, thus creating epiphanies.’ ‘That’s basically what Eisenstein wants’, according to Kluge – a chain of associations or a sequence of images and stimuli that construct epiphanies in the viewer, ‘but it’s a very weak tool. If someone isn’t susceptible to it, it won’t work. And music made only for musical people is wrong’. So, how could Eisenstein colorize Marx’s image-less Capital? What chain of associations or sequences of images and stimuli would be required? Kluge suggests a work of ‘fragments, and hope the viewers fill in the gaps themselves. They have past experience. It’s an incredible resource, the imaginative power of experienced people, viewers’. Such experienced viewers would, perhaps, act as ‘attractors. As if it were a dialogue

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between screen and viewers. That’s not entirely utopian. It is very well possible. It could work in a different kind of cinema. That’s heterotopia!’ In his interview with Negt, Kluge further elaborates upon this, his different kind of cinema, and it is worth quoting him at length. At worst it would arouse such criticism of the medium of film, that the medium itself would change. But maybe the film could also have encouraged people to think. Not like a prosthesis or tool but to consolidate thinking in another way. So that thinking doesn’t just take place in studies, doesn’t just transpire in words, and is not only done by educated people but in all layers of society and to that end I need situations. It’s better to anchor situations with images than with words. There’s not so much along the lines of situations in Capital. They exist. (…) One thing is important: a distant reality like for instance child labour, these little British girls standing on their platforms in a silk factory, working away with their little fingers 10 hours a day, being used up, is not something of our time. But to endure watching something like that, a thing of the past, would change your view of the now. Because you would look for something similar in our time, and you’d find there’s no such thing, not even in Bangladesh. At the same time there are other things. That’s cross-mapping, searching for images based on another image. That’s just it with classical antiquity. From Latin or Greek texts, I can learn a lot about my own time exactly because that time has past. (…) It has to be as far away as the moon then I can colonize it with my imagination.

The final half-hour of Part Three, much to Frederic Jameson’s dismay,6 is a kind of farce of Eisenstein’s unrealized film Capital. Helge Schneider plays a number of characters: (1) an unemployed worker (who attends an evening class on Marx); (2) an actor who has played Hitler and is interested in playing Marx; and (3) a film composer who experiments with setting music to the film. Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity draws to an end with Schneider (as a film composer) saying, ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber has it down pat, he can do that’, i.e. a standardized, Hollywood, happy ending.

The dialectical image According to the art historian Rosalind Krauss, ‘the stereopticon’ itself a precursor to the moving-image camera, served as ‘Benjamin’s model for the dialectical image’.7 A slide projector or magic lantern, the stereopticon combined two images thereby creating a three-dimensional effect and/or a dissolve between them. This archaic, obsolete and somewhat forgotten proto-cinematic technology is not entirely out of keeping with Kluge’s observation that sometimes in film you’re lucky enough that the old [images] linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory and sort of colorize the new ones. With contemporary film technologies, however, it has become increasingly difficult for the viewer to experience epiphanies constructed out of such chains of association and sequences of images or stimuli precisely

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because images move too fast, a new image erases the old. So, a film or picture that operates through fragmentary, slow, discontinuous and diminishing pictures (show an image, then its variant, then a variant of the variant), together with a perpendicular relationship between such images and text, might offer some hope for a different kind of cinema? The cinema imagined by the blind, exhausted and intoxicated Eisenstein? The cinema of the inner-eye? Almost an anti-cinema (iconoclastic), or a cinema of cuts, or a new idea of film noir (shutting my eyes/to close the eyes in the dark and try to imagine that/half the time in a movie theatre is spent in the dark) wherein the imaginative power of experienced people, viewers, may fill in the gaps. This is what Kluge means when he speaks of the possibility of a ‘film in the mind of the spectator’,8 as Miriam Bratu Hansen notes: Kluge himself endorses that position [i.e., Adorno’s fundamental mistrust of the visual immediacy of film] when he stresses the function of the cuts, the “empty spaces between shots”, in counteracting the obtrusive referentiality of the image flow; it is in these ruptures that the spectator’s own imagination can insert itself.9

Pictures like News from Ideological Antiquity are uncompromisingly demanding: the perpendicular relationship between diminishing images and text(s), a radical practice of montage, asks a lot of the spectator. Indeed, Kluge’s ‘concept of montage as an interference of discourses (…) attempts to provoke a more active participation on the part of the spectator’.10 The imaginative power of experienced viewers is, therefore, a presupposition of Kluge’s different kind of cinema. If Benjamin’s dialectical image was indeed modelled on the stereopticon, then this would place proto-cinematic pictures at the heart of his various attempts at conceptualizing the dialectical image wherein a historically specific now constellates or is synchronic with a then.11 As Benjamin phrases it in his Arcades: It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical.12

Is Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity genuinely historical? Does it operate as something of a ‘found ark of lost moments in which’, according to Hal Foster, ‘the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future’?13 Does Kluge’s picture redeem, retrieve or bring into focus the unfulfilled potential of ideological antiquity? What has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. Is this, perhaps, what Kluge is trying to get at when he says, sometimes you’re lucky enough that the old images linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory and sort of colorize the new ones, thus creating epiphanies? And, isn’t this epiphany also the shock of the stereopticon, itself a prototype for Benjamin’s conceptualization of the dialectical image?

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According to Esther Leslie, in his Berlin Chronicle Benjamin likened the protocinematic devices and processes of photography to ‘the irruption of the forgotten past into the present’14 wherein, perhaps, old images linger on unconsciously in a memory beneath the memory. Benjamin remarks, Anyone can observe that the length of time during which we are exposed to impressions has no bearing on their fate in memory. Nothing prevents our keeping rooms in which we have spent twenty-four hours more or less clearly in our memory, and forgetting others in which we passed months. It is not, therefore, due to insufficient exposure time if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases when the half-light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and a snapshot transfixes the room’s image on the plate. It is we ourselves, however, who are always standing at the centre of these rare images. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we separated from ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images.15

Sometimes you’re lucky, and a moment, a situation or an image is ‘seared on to memory’ by ‘something akin to a magnesium flare’.16 The half-light of habit is pierced by a flash of bright-light, which suddenly illuminates our deeper self (the imaginative power of the experienced viewer). ‘The flare of light, intrinsic to flash photography  – in the magnesium explosion or the ready-made flash bulb  – parallels the act of perception, and it constitutes an illumination.’17 Whence the shadowy light? As Leslie observes, it is ‘as if memory’ itself ‘were a photographic plate’. Sometime later that image, ‘from an alien source, as far away as the moon, “flashed again into consciousness” view’.18 What has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. Can this constellation be read? Is it legible, decipherable? Can a spectator fill in the gaps? Perhaps, Kluge’s iconoclastic, diminishing, perpendicular pictures flash  – ‘something momentary and sudden’ – becoming ‘appearances in the pregnant sense of the term – that is, as the appearance of an other – when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality’.19 That’s just it with classical antiquity. From Latin or Greek texts, I can learn a lot about my own time exactly because that time has passed. The accent must fall on the unreality of their own reality (liberation from capital, commodity fetishism, phantasmagoria is blocked), which is a kind of negative capability. This appearance of an other – as far away as the moon – best accounts for Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity. Certainly, it is this process that is required for Kluge’s model of the film in the head of the spectator and his different kind of cinema. Elsewhere, Leslie notes,

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Benjamin insists that the most important images in our lives are those that develop later. The darkroom where this process of development takes place is the darkroom of our subsequent lives, the ‘after-image’ of the moment of the image.20

The moment an image becomes dialectical, when it becomes colorized, threedimensional or made powerful in the imagination of the experienced spectator, it may transform, perhaps, into an after-image. This metamorphosis  – from the dialectical image to an after-image  – occurs, perhaps, when a spectator feels ‘overwhelmed when faced with an important work. (…) Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification’.21

After-images The flash or spark of the dialectical image shocks. On that point, Benjamin and Adorno were in agreement. Benjamin viewed this shock in-itself as a positive, whereas Adorno did not. As is familiar to any reader of Adorno, the negative is privileged and/or made capable. The shocking flash of the dialectical image, in Kluge’s phrase, diminishes the picture  – it is a resolutely negative vision. Given the wretched state of contemporary film as mass media and cinema as the culture industry (augmenting pictures, Hollywood happy endings), this negative vision acts as something of a counterweight, thereby affirming (via determinate negation) the possibility of a different kind of cinema. Diminishing pictures, and a radical practice of montage, ‘negates the affirmative appeal of the image and interrupts the chains of associative automatism’, which for Miriam Bratu Hansen is how ‘film becomes a medium of cognition’.22 Film thinks, through flashes, sparks and shocks, but it does so in the head of the spectator. Something of this diminishing, negative vision is evident in Kafka’s work, according to Adorno: It expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. (…) Each sentence says ‘interpret me’, and none will permit it. Each compels the reaction, ‘that’s the way it is’, and with it the question, ‘where have I seen that before?’ the déjà vu declared permanent. Through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation, he collapses aesthetic distance. (…) Among Kafka’s presuppositions, not the least is that the contemplative relation between text and reader is shaken to its very roots. His texts are designed not to sustain a constant distance between themselves and their victim but rather to agitate his feelings to a point where he fears that the narrative will shoot towards him like a locomotive in a three-dimensional film.23

Adorno likens Kafka’s surrealist, shocking, images to photography and film  – to the early film by the Lumière brothers, The Arrival of a Train (at La Ciotat),

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1895. It is impossible to contemplate such images and pictures, which collapse aesthetic distance. They move too fast, they snap at speed, they overwhelm. But, the diminishing return of such images is negatively capable – It expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. Show an image, then its variant, then a variant of the variant. Very often I take an image, a scene, and then I say in the commentary the same thing. I repeat it. And I get a relationship between image and text (Kluge). The déjà vu declared permanent (Adorno). The perspective is perpendicular, somewhat surreal. The relationship shocks the spectator. The spectator, perhaps, fills in the gaps. Roland Barthes, much like Adorno, also connects Kafka’s work to photography: Ultimately  – or at the limit  – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. “The necessary condition for an image is sight,” Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” (…) The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah (…) to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.24

What else is an after-image if not a detail rising of its own accord into affective consciousness? What else is a film in the head of the spectator? Images of the imagination, then, whose accent falls on the unreality of their own reality are certainly required for a different kind of cinema. If photographic film is too augmenting, too in your face, too immediate, too blah-blah, then spectators would do well to see by shutting their eyes. And filmmakers would do well to edit by opening their inner-eye. Hansen, again, one last time: Kluge has suggested that the fact that we spend about half the time in the movie theatre in the dark means that our eyes, trained to look outward have a chance to look inward during that time.25 Another trace of Adorno’s dialogue with Kluge can be seen in the attempt to base an aesthetics of film on its structural affinity with the stream of associations in the human mind. The raw material of film, as Adorno suggests, should be defined by the movement with which involuntary images succeed each other before the inner eye.26

And, to end (happily) with Adorno, who puts it thus: Irrespective of the technological origins of the cinema, the aesthetics of film will do better to base itself on a subjective mode of experience which film resembles and which constitutes its artistic character. A person who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colourful images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but are rather set off against each other in the course of their appearance, much like the magic lantern slides of our childhood.

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(…) Such movement of interior images may be to film what the visible world is to painting or the acoustic world to music. As the objectifying recreation of this type of experience, film may become art.27 Thus even the cinematographic gaze may appear innate.28

Whence the shadowy light? What company in the dark! To close the eyes and try to imagine that. Have you heard the news from ideological antiquity? Perhaps, Beckett’s prose, much like Baudelaire’s poetry, Kafka’s stories and Kluge’s pictures, ‘is full of those lightning flashes seen by a closed eye that has received a blow’?29 Imagine that.

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Chapter 14 T H E M U LT I - I M AG E : C I N E M AT IC C O L L AG E A S R EV E L AT IO N A N D R EVO LU T IO N Chris Gerrard

There is no image of change, only chains of image. Jean-Luc Godard in To Alter the Image/Changer d’Image – Lettre à la Bien-Aimée

(1982)

Many filmmakers use a collage aesthetic, believing that the combining, colliding or contrasting of disparate images produces a reaction within the viewer’s mind. This chapter explores how this aesthetic can prompt intellectual consideration and convey political messages. Each technique, such as superimposition or split-screen, has been discussed individually before, but I suggest that they are subcategories of a wider aesthetic. The Language of New Media (Manovich 2001) and Beyond Spatial Montage (Betancourt 2016) hint at this broader form by discussing a ‘database aesthetic’, ‘windowing’ or ‘spatial montage’. None has yet attempted to be a completely unifying conception, with Betancourt describing spatial montage (or split-screen), superimposition, kaleidoscopic effects and graphical repetition as separate, rather than part of a single category. In these texts, the phrase ‘multiple images’ recurred, as it is their primary connection. Therefore, I propose the overarching term for all cinematic frames utilizing more than a single image in a frame, aiming to create an aesthetic of multiplicity, should be referred to as the multi-image. The formulation of the multi-image is more than an exercise in accurate categorization. Once an aesthetic has been defined, it can be theorized. Many filmmakers have already developed the multi-image concept, but without the overarching term, these treatises from throughout the world and cinematic history have not been recognized as creating a growing theoretical framework. This chapter focuses on the multi-image as a tool of revelation and revolution, allowing for connections to be drawn from the 1920s to the present, and bringing this concept from film practice to Film Theory. It demonstrates how bringing together multiple images can provide new contrasts and contexts, using the cinema as an enhancement to human perception to allow for new insights into the world at

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large. It begins with Jean Epstein and Dziga Vertov and their respective traditions of ‘photogénie’ and the ‘kino-eye’, each defining the camera and editing process as a mechanical eye that sees more than the human can, literally, philosophically and politically. These parallel threads are drawn together by Jean-Luc Godard in the 1970s, who appropriates them for an analysis of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ and establishes a philosophy of the dialectical ‘Image’. While the concept of the multi-image has not been formulated in this way before, this chapter draws on the comprehensive scholarship that has been produced discussing Epstein, Vertov and Godard. Most important is the translations of their thought and poetics, specifically Keller and Paul’s translations of Epstein and Michelson and O’Brien’s of Vertov. Godard’s reflections are largely expounded within his essay films themselves. The chapter aims to combine various eras and locations of cinematic concepts from film practice to show that they all focus on a specific possibility inherent in the multi-image: that combining images or ideas produces a reaction, a new meaning formed by the viewer themselves. The multi-image allows the audience to become an active intellectual participant in the cinematic process, and through watching, combining and contrasting the image layers, they can see beyond the ordinary limits of perception.

A brief history of the multi-image In order to explain the aesthetic that this chapter focuses on and contextualize the work of the filmmakers discussed, a brief history of the multi-image is required. The use of multiple images in a single artwork has existed since the dawn of art, with early cave paintings, including collages of hands or layered images of animals to imply movement. For the purpose of this chapter, a stricter focus can be drawn from the nineteenth century onwards. The majority of Western art had become representational, meaning that an artificial aesthetic such as collage was rare. An exception can be found in the Magic Lantern, which set the precedent for cinematic aesthetics and was used by several silent film pioneers. The ability to layer multiple slides led to scientific lectures providing numerous pieces of data side-by-side and supernatural tales overlaying spirits or angels. These were not merely visual effects; the supernatural was projected in order to foreground its uncanny nature and the layering effect acted as a portal between our world and the one beyond. In the 1890s, cinema grew from technical experiments to public spectacle and its aesthetics grew from the Lantern’s traditions. Early ‘trick films’ used layering techniques to foreground the power of cinema. Gunning1 describes this as ‘The Cinema of Attraction’, where there was little conception of realism and the ‘attraction’ was the spectacle of cinematic trickery. In the 1910s, the cinema of attraction faded, as visual effects became part of the diegetic world rather than the primary attraction. The foregrounded multiplicity of the multi-image continued in some contexts, with Edwin Porter’s displays of dreams and Lois Weber’s use of split-screen to represent a telephone conversation. The multi-image’s golden age occurred in the 1920s, as cinema was discovered by multiple growing artistic

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traditions: modernism, expressionism and futurism. Each attempted to replace representational art with new forms that revealed insights into the world, whether speed and industry, the inner self, or a cubist view of multiple sides of a single object. This is when filmmakers such as Epstein and Vertov first experimented with combining and contrasting images as tools of revelation. This golden age ended during the 1930s. Whether it was the turn to realism that accompanied the invention of sound film or the growing political efforts to enforce artistic conservatism (e.g. show trials in Stalinist Russia,2 growing standardization of the Hollywood studio system, attempts to recapture ‘classical’ aesthetics in Nazi Germany), the multiimage faded from view, never to return to widespread usage. It did survive in some areas. Experimental video artists continued to use the aesthetic, such as Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton and Peter Tscherkassky. The late 1960s brought a brief resurgence, both in the work of arthouse filmmakers (e.g. the French New Wave) and in studio blockbusters as a novelty to show their superiority to television. A renaissance occurred in music videos and news broadcasts, where multitudes of information is displayed simultaneously. Currently, the use of layered image in the mainstream is rare, but does exist in certain stylized media, e.g. 24 (2001–14) or Sherlock (2010–17). It is more widespread in arthouse cinema, e.g. works by David Lynch, Guy Maddin and Peter Greenaway. This chapter focuses on Epstein and Vertov, two of the aesthetics’ masters at the height of its popularity in the 1920s, before exploring how Godard continued their concepts in a less aesthetically welcoming world. The three filmmakers foregrounded the thematic possibilities of the multi-image as a political tool and drew on this history as signifier of counternarrative and insight into other worlds.

Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov and the inhuman eye Both Epstein and Vertov discuss how cinema can be used as an enhancement to human perception. Epstein’s3 term for this is photogénie, described as, ‘any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction’. This was regarded as superior to ‘objective’ reality and human senses that ‘present us only with symbols of reality: uniform, proportionate, elective metaphors’, rather than truth. The camera surpasses limited subjective perception, allowing humans a broader picture of reality. Epstein4 refers to the camera as the ‘inhuman eye, without memory, without thought’ and an ‘escape [from] the tyrannical egocentrism of our personal vision’. These qualities do not innately appear in any mechanical reproduction of reality. Cinema’s perceptual enhancement is achieved through ‘fragmentation, repetition and multiplied images’.5 This insight is philosophic and moral as well as scientific as the ‘contrastive hybrid nature of the cinema apparatus is more than a mechanical prosthesis, since it reveals perceptual and conceptual domains beyond our psycho-physiological range that may then be annexed to human sensibility and intelligence’.6 The cinema explores the physical and metaphysical world using edited images as enhancements. Discussions of layering, fragmentation and multiplication are seeded throughout Epstein’s

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philosophies. Wall-Romana7 compiled a list of the tenets of Epstein’s oeuvre. With each, the philosophical layering and duplication parallel the multi-image techniques that Epstein uses in his practical work: 1. ‘Cinema is about bodies.’ Epstein’s cinema focuses on the human form, attempting to lay its interiority bare. Internal motivations can be drawn from external representation. The close-up of the human face is not just an external form, but the mind’s ‘area of contact with the world … disclosing the tremulous subconscious of actors’ bodies’.8 The internal and external are represented as one composite entity metaphorically and paralleled by superimpositions of faces onto images that imply the emotions within (e.g. a stormy sea in Cœur Fidèle (The Faithful Heart, 1923)). 2. ‘Cinema is non-human.’ Epstein viewed cinematic processes as non-human; able to reveal the true face of the universe beyond the human, becoming the ideal visual aid. He describes cinema as ‘the machine to think time’9 and the idea of a perfectible ideal of perception represented by the mechanical processes of cinema parallels Vertov’s. 3. ‘Cinema creates physical and affective realities (not just illusion).’ The ‘cinema of attractions’ was the province of fantasy. Editing techniques like the multiimage did not represent reality, but were the antithesis: signifiers of illusion. Epstein’s work reassesses this relationship. Every superimposition is as real as the audience, but in a different world. Cinema is ‘in its very construction, innately and unavoidably representing the universe as a perpetually and everywhere mobile continuum – much more continuous, fluid and agile than the directly perceptible continuum’.10 Epstein notes that water’s lack of hard surfaces and refractive properties causes Euclidian geometry to fail.11 Similarly, the rules of our world fade away in cinema. The cinematic universe is not a direct representation of our world, but exists independently and obeys different physical laws. This connects with Epstein’s facial landscapes, exploring emotion through the visual and thematic joining of subject and location. The imagery turns the screen ‘into relief maps: faces were transformed into kinetic flesh-lands; stark seascapes and barren landmasses became expressive faces’.12 In the human world, seeing both a face and a landscape combined is impossible. In Epstein’s world, this image is free to become an overriding aesthetic reality, allowing interpretation as a single object, as a visual metaphor. The individual elements are still present, but synthesized into a composite entity. It is a real object that is simultaneously one and many – unable to exist in our perceptual world but allowing for revelations about it. 4. ‘Cinema alters knowledge.’ Cinema is not only a fluid world separate from our own; it is a mirror, more expressive and revealing than our own eyes. Epstein used geometry’s dissolution in water as a metaphor to explain cinema’s external world. This dualism reflects back, revealing that fundamental tenets are also fluid in our own world. Due to the lack of the fixed singular in Epstein’s cinema, anything can be layered or faded into something else. These are not illusions in the world of the cinema, but Epstein implies that

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they are not illusions in ours either. Every object is made up of atoms but is simultaneously a whole. As with the multi-image, neither is the ‘correct’ interpretation; both exist concurrently. 5. ‘Cinema responds to a modern ethical and social need.’ This fluidity extends to the social world. Seeing beyond social barriers and conceiving a fluid reality rather than one with unbreakable rules reveals the potential for political critique. Epstein13 calls cinema ‘diabolical’, the Devil’s victory of ‘the side of mutability over fixed forms, of becoming over permanence’. While people have always argued against fixed forms and stifling rules, cinema allows humanity a portal through which to visualize their freedom. The physical world and the societal concepts are mutable. The ‘truths’ passed down by powerful institutions are changeable. Epstein insists photogénie proves nothing is fixed and fuels society’s desire for truth and change. Revelatory vision becomes revolutionary vision, using heightened perception to challenge ‘objective’ knowledge. 6. ‘Cinema is democratic.’ ‘Everything one invents is true.’14 Photogénie is focused on revealing truth. For Epstein, this comes from poetic realism, but the choice is left to the audience. His films are melodramas, but ‘favour “situations”: fragments or moments dislodged from the narrative, meant to be experienced and enjoyed for themselves’.15 A fragmented form of cinema is at the forefront of Epstein’s theory. There are many interpretations of a film and, paralleling the non-hierarchical visuals, none is definitive. 7. ‘Time is multiple.’ Epstein is interested in neither a singular version nor direction of time. Footage can be paused, slowed or reversed. Time becomes one of the dimensions film can traverse and manipulate. This results in the removal of entropy. In our world, things degrade with time, becoming progressively less complex. In the world of the cinema, time can always be reclaimed or reversed. A multi-image may break apart an image to create new meaning, but the fluid nature of time allows the original to reform at any time. Fragmenting an image simply allows observation of its constituent elements and recombination in a new multi-image form. To fragment is no longer to destroy. Instead, it is to reveal. These tenets demonstrate Epstein’s philosophical processes as an attempt to reveal more of reality; to question the fixed nature not only of cinema, but also the physical and social world. The interrogation of social systems is implied, but Epstein does not personally utilize it to any great extent. In his practical work, there is little political critique, being generally focused on the psychological reality. Contemporaneously in Russia, however, similar ideas were being formed into a directly political cinema by Dziga Vertov. Vertov and his filmmaking group, the Kinoks, believed in an equivalent idea the ‘inhuman eye’ of photogénie, referring to it by the parallel term: ‘kino-eye’. This is described as that which the eye doesn’t see, as the microscope and telescope of time as the negative of time as the possibility of seeing without limits and distances [employing] all cinematic means all cinematic inventions all methods that might

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serve to reveal and show the truth … as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood into truth.16

Like Epstein, Vertov’s kino-eye is superior to the human eye, infinitely perfectible and focused on revelation, seeing the world ‘freed from the rule of sixteen-seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space’.17 This revolutionary perception is mediated through the worldview of the filmmaker, with Vertov explicitly admitting he created ‘propaganda’. While he may have transmitted communist messages, he was committed to ‘the manifestation of the actual filmmaking, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the motion picture as reconstructed reality rather than its representational reflection’.18 The camera and eye are superimposed, highlighting the camera as a prosthetic for human perception which allows anyone an insight into the creative process as it is directly comparable to their own natural faculties. Vertov equates the filmmaker to other workers, with his work ‘articulating that unity within which the “natural” inequalities and contradictions formerly generated by a system of division of labour have been suspended’.19 If the filmmaker is one of the masses, they are not a patronizing propagandist, but an equal. Therefore, any of the workers should be able, with practice, to understand their films. If an audience does not understand a difficult work ‘that doesn’t mean that our works are unfit. It means the public is’.20 Machado claims that Vertov deliberately attempted to cultivate this ‘aesthetically naïve audience’.21 Complexity is not to be avoided; it simply requires an audience accustomed to it: ‘Even if one allows that some of our work is difficult to understand, does that mean we should not undertake serious exploratory work at all? If the masses need light propaganda pamphlets, does that mean they don’t need the serious articles of Engels, Lenin?’22 The audience, according to Vertov, should be trained to take a selection of information and build their own conclusions. He attempts to cultivate dialectical thinking, a form of argumentation drawn from Marx that contrasts and synthesizes viewpoints. This is explored further by Godard, but Vertov’s aim was to raise worker consciousness to make all viewers capable of critical thought. This reduces the power differential between the filmmaker and viewer, as Vertov saw them as equal comrades. The kino-eye films were described as a ‘factory of facts’ and Vertov claimed, ‘I am very flattered by such unconditional recognition as the first shoemaker of Russian cinema. That’s better than “artistic film director”.’23 Vertov’s multi-images are tools of understanding and revelation, each instance connecting to a wider agenda. A Sixth Part of the World/Shestaya Chast Mira (1926) is a travelogue throughout the frontiers of the Soviet Union. It contains visually rhyming examples of split-screen. In a city, the streets and aerial view are combined. In a factory, varying facets of industry and workers. On a farm, workers and forms of labour. Each example gives its location a strong identity and shows people, landscapes and machines working together for a common goal. Vertov extends this to connect the entire Soviet people, spanning the titular Sixth Part of the World. Despite living far apart and having different cultural experiences, they

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all become connected as members of the proletariat. Fore notes that capitalism’s atomizing effects create a ‘baleful fragmentation of experience’.24 Sixth Part is a response to this, showing these fragments being drawn back together, split frames becoming an aesthetic whole: a multi-image. The Soviet people are one; they may be different, but they can all be ‘galvanised into a single perceptual collectivity’. The Eleventh Year/Odinnadtsatyy (1928) continues the camera’s transcendence of reality with a different focus. Instead of the kino-eye conquering space, Eleventh Year looks at ‘the conquest of time. The possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order’.25 The first half relates to the construction of the Dnieper hydroelectric dam.26 During the works, an ancient burial ground of the Scythian people was unearthed and Vertov split-screens the modern and ancient. Fore claims that Vertov wished to ‘suggest that historical progress is not always consistently linear and universal … complicating the simple unidirectional scheme of history’.27 The idea that the world is necessarily progressing, advancing through the strata of history, was a tenet of Soviet doctrine, drawn from Marx’s idea that the structure of society must go through phases: ‘In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.’28 Beyond this, the final state is communism. Showing the first and last phases together either proves the victory of history in bettering the world or that all times are one and equal, implying that progressivism is an illusion. While Stalin was revealing his Five-Year Plan to allegedly progress the Soviet Union to new heights, the second point of view was hardly welcome. Vertov writes fervently about Lenin; there is little in his diaries or publications on Stalin. He complains about the bureaucratization of the film industry, a parallel to the Stalinist reorganization of the USSR. There are even veiled criticisms of Stalin’s return to militarism, by showing crowds of soldiers in front of Lenin’s tomb, contrasting with the anti-war views of the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the titular eleven years. While it would have been dangerous for Vertov to publish material explicitly critical of the brutal regime, these visual metaphors hint towards unease with it. With the Kinoks having taught the proletariat ‘the language of the communist decoding of the visible world’ and ‘visual thinking’,29 Vertov can now use the same techniques to hide political dissent in a film for the people. The multi-image’s dialectical processes allow it to be a tool of resistance to power, as the intellectually engaged viewer can take more from the combination of images than is explicitly shown. Vertov’s final silent film, Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s Kino-Apparatom (1929), is an exuberant celebration of Soviet city life and a self-reflexive study of cinematic power. The kino-eye is the star, with the film starting and ending with the literal representation of the idea as a superimposition of eye and camera. While the film glorifies the camera, the same techniques are shown to explore the workings of a factory where a weaver and her machine are superimposed. They become one high-functioning whole, visually equating her skill with the machine and showing the worker’s happiness. The kinoks describe the ‘poetry of machines’ and the ‘delight of mechanical labour’.30 This veneration of the machine also acts as a blueprint for humanity’s future.31 Vertov was attempting to create the ‘electric man’,

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the perfect, machine-inspired, productive and precise human.32 His films show people training and working, with the superimposition of perfectible machine and imperfect human implying possible improvement. The perceptual enhancements of photogénie are here tied to a more materialist view of the world. Vertov’s multiimage creates solidarity and explores political nuance. Both Epstein and Vertov are working in parallel in their attempt to cultivate an intellectually curious audience who will be able to interpret the reaction of images within a frame. It is at this point that sound film appeared and the multi-image ceased to be widely used. Epstein continued filmmaking, but his technical experimentation became secondary to his poetic imagery. Vertov was sidelined by an aesthetically conservative government and spent his later years with little work and in increasingly poor health. Their experimentation was not forgotten, however, and their aim of using multiplicity as a tool of perception and inspiring critical viewership was taken up by Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard, detournement and the ‘image’ After the failed student revolution of 1968, Godard began producing didactic political films. This was partly inspired by being denounced by the Situationist International (1969), a group of revolutionary political thinkers, claiming him as a ‘spectacular manufacturer of a superficial, pseudocritical, co-optive art rummaged out of the trashcans of the past’. Godard began working with a filmmaking collective, the Dziga Vertov Group, and attempted to follow in the footsteps of the group’s namesake by using complex aesthetics to provoke the viewer into intellectual consideration. Godard focused on Vertov due to their shared interest in left-wing politics, but it seems likely he was also influenced by Epstein, having quoted him in his work. Many of his ideas follow the parallel photogénie/kino-eye traditions. Godard took these traditions and fused them with his newfound Situationist values. Their primary text was Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle/La société du spectacle (1967): a series of proclamations against the twentieth-century capitalist world. It asserted that the world is enthralled and directed by a falsehood known as the Spectacle, a manufactured capitalist utopian vision of itself. Attempting to unveil the Spectacle, Godard’s works tried not to obscure the world with unquestioning false reality, leading to his use of non-realist techniques. The multi-image and the Epstein/Vertov conception of it as allowing for conscious viewer interaction meant it could easily be appropriated to be used by the Situationist critique of the Spectacle’s illusion of choice. This claims that the once explicitly downtrodden proletarian ‘suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown [to] him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness’.33 The options are always sanctioned by those in charge, who control people by pretending they have the freedom to choose anything they want.

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Godard became obsessed with intellectually freeing his audience. Godard takes the photogénie/kino-eye aesthetic as a weapon to fight the Spectacle, via ‘détournement’. Détournement (specifically ‘deceptive détournement’) is described as moving an element from one context into another, ‘an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context’.34 Show the audience what they want and invert it; show them something they think they understand and change it; take something familiar and move it to a new place to give new perspectives. This parallels the work of the previous filmmakers. Epstein breaks cinematic geometry to mirror the breaking of societal norms. Vertov combines present and past, and the new context forces the audience to question Stalinism’s accepted narrative. The multi-image portals worlds and breaks down their barriers in order to make the audience think. Beginning with the Dziga Vertov Group, Godard saw these two traditions, political and filmic, and combined them to make himself the heir of both. Godard provokes the viewer to think about the subject, but does not give them the easy set of answers that the Cinema of the Spectacle would provide. This is stated in the essay film, Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972): The film does not answer yet exactly. But the way in which it does not answer yet, is actually an indirect way of asking new questions. Because there is no use in giving old answers to the new questions that are being raised by the development of revolutionary struggles today. One must learn how to ask these new questions.

Rather than abandoning cinema entirely, one must work to change it, to force the ‘spectator to be able to really think’ through ‘questions and answers’. Juxtaposition becomes the key to enquiry. Number Two/Numéro deux (1975) continues to ask questions through aesthetics. The film’s main theme is the one/two divide: are choices truly binary? This is narrated over multiple monitors linking the aesthetic and philosophical points: ‘Why do you always ask either/or? Maybe it’s both at once. Yes, sometimes. What times? We always say, “once upon a time”. Why not “twice upon a time?”’ Godard’s solution is to show two screens and let the combined image speak for itself. It provides an archetypical example of détournement. For instance, footage of news reporters is shown on one screen, while Hollywood films are displayed on the other. By combining their worlds with a split-screen, Godard détours them, bringing new meaning by placing each in the context of the other. Their aesthetic similarities become apparent as a focus on their stars (reporters/ actors), negative content (disaster/violence) and simplicity of narrative (the news reports are as undemanding as the movies). Numéro deux implies that newsreel footage is intended to be as distracting and is as manipulated/ive as manufactured Hollywood products. Godard does not tell the audience this directly; he trusts the multi-image’s ability to inspire such thought. He claims, ‘There is too much DNA and not enough RNA.’ DNA contains information, but RNA catalyses reactions. There is too much didactic ‘telling’ in conventional film and not enough subjective thinking. The viewer must consider all possibilities: allowing ‘both’ to exist at once; or neither; or their own chosen elements of either. As Godard notes in Changer

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d’Image – Lettre à la Bien-Aimée (1982), there can be no single image of change, ‘only chains of images’. The multi-image functions as a chain of image leading from the two visible to the one imagined. Godard thinks of himself as ‘a theoretician, like Einstein, who spots [an area for productive breakthrough in research] and tests it out’.35 He took the work of Epstein and Vertov and pushed it in new directions, but these discoveries are never the end point in themselves. As time progresses, he directly formulates his image as a dialectic. As before, two opposing ideas react and synthesize to birth a third new idea. But now, this new idea is directly referred to by Godard as the ‘Image’. He claims a single picture has no innate ‘Image’ quality and this new contrasting technique forces thought to create one as ‘the image is the relation with me looking at it, dreaming up a relation at someone else. An image is an association’.36 The multi-image has become a dialectic, and Godard’s Image is the invisible, thoughtcreated conclusion. In 1987’s King Lear, Godard appropriates Pierre Reverdy to describe his Image: The Image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of the rapprochement of two more or less separate realities. The more distant and just the relationships between these realities that are brought together, the stronger the image will be. Two realities with no relationship between them cannot be usefully brought together. No image is created. Two contrary realities cannot be brought together. They oppose each other. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant and just.

Through the multi-image, realities/images are brought together and create the Image, the new meaning. This functions as détournement, taking two pictures and re-contextualizing them. Godard is able to situate himself as the next step in multiple traditions of thought. Situationist détournement, Marx’s dialectic, photogénie and the kino-eye represent the same impulse formulated in different ways. They all wish to use collage to reveal the artifice of their worlds and allow for transcendence to a higher, freer level of thought. Mirroring its aesthetic of multiplicity, there are many historical paths that can be traced through the multi-image; this is only one. It is, however, an informative study on how aesthetics can inspire a desired reaction in the audience and make the cinema-going experience more interactive. Epstein and Vertov knew that layering and combination allowed worldviews to be contrasted, fragmented and recombined. Godard took this further, directly theorizing the images as a reaction which the audience must intellectually consider the conclusion of. All three promoted alternate viewpoints on the world than the Western Capitalist standard. This not only connects them historically, but also suggests that the multi-image can be used as a signifier of counter-narrative that can be adopted by political filmmakers to this day. Epstein, Vertov and Godard serve as case studies, examples of this aesthetic tradition that allows current filmmakers or film theorists greater expression in

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their work. As with the fluid multiplicity inherent in the visual manifestation of the multi-image, the concept itself is multi-faceted and changeable, but the unifying theme is that by bringing multiple images together, it is possible to see further through the camera’s eye than with one. Whether that is by contrast or combination, by portraying our psychological inner lives or fragmenting a political world view, the focus is always on radical revelation. We expand our knowledge of the world by seeing more complex images. The scope for further analysis is great, whether exploring how German Expressionism used fractured imagery to portray mental collapse, how Melvin van Peebles used the multi-image to overlay the threat of the police in his radical filmmaking, how Peter Greenaway creates encyclopaedias of information for the viewer to dissect, etc. Many important movements and visually inventive filmmakers marry their form and content through their use of the techniques. For practitioners, if anything, the scope is even greater. If the unifying purpose of the multi-image is to see beyond the ordinary, then it can explore complex psychological issues, historical ambiguity, scientific theory, political radicalism; anywhere that the human eye or mind struggles and the ‘possibility of seeing without limits and distances’ would benefit the artwork and viewer. Therefore, this chapter posits not only a historical link between the three filmmakers studied, but an aesthetic tradition that travels around the world and throughout film history that links many filmmakers who aim to peer beyond the ordinary, to break down the current conceptions of reality – a tradition which can teach us much about the past, but also allow us to radically reveal more about the world we live in.

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Chapter 15 S E E I N G T H R OU G H T H E KA L E I D O S C O P E : W I M   W E N D E R S A N D H I S C O L L A B O R AT O R S I N L I S B ON   ST ORY A N D I N V E N T I N G PE AC E : A DIA LO G U E ON PE R C E P T I ON Olivier Delers

In the first twenty years of his career, Wim Wenders developed a reputation as a director who was deeply concerned with reflecting on the act of filmmaking. He was a frequent contributor to critical discourse on cinema in many interviews in the specialized press and in essays that were later collected in books.1 His selfreflexive films were also sites of experimentation and critique. As one of the leading figures of New German Cinema, he staged characters preoccupied with making meaningful images and with the nature of cinematic creation in postwar Germany. Philip Winter, the photojournalist in Alice in the Cities/Alice in den Städten (1974), comes to mind, as well as his double in Kings of the Road/Im Lauf der Zeit (1975), Bruno Winter, who works as a projection equipment repair mechanic. In The State of Things/Der Stand der Dinge (1982), Wenders reflected on the difficulties of financing auteur films and on his failed experience in Hollywood making Hammett (1982) for Francis Ford Coppola’s production company. TokyoGa (1985) and Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1989), his documentaries on Yasujirō Ozu and Yōji Yamamoto, are also complex film essays about the creative process and about cinema in the digital age. In this chapter, I would like to focus on the last twenty years of Wenders’ career, a period when he was particularly prolific in reflecting on filmmaking and visual culture, even though his films were often reviewed negatively by critics and overlooked by film studies scholars. More specifically, I would like to suggest that Lisbon Story (1994) lays out the foundations for understanding filmmaking as a collaborative and dialogic practice, a vision that is more fully articulated in Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception, a book co-written with the philosopher Mary Zournazi and published in 2013. Wenders’ ‘collaborators’ possess many identities. They can be other film directors who have influenced him or fictional alter-egos who, within a film, present antithetical arguments about the purpose of creating images. Likewise, they can be thought partners like Zournazi or philosophers who echo Wenders’ own thoughts and reveal their larger potential for film theory.

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Part fiction and part film essay, Lisbon Story, blends a transnational tale of friendship, love and personal discovery with a sustained reflection on modes of visual storytelling. Wenders stages two alter egos, Phillip Winter and Friedrich Monroe, who help him express his thoughts on the future of cinema. The two characters use all kinds of filming devices – from a crank camera to a divicam – and compulsively record their environment: one spends hours collecting the ambient sounds of Lisbon while the other experiments with shooting images entirely detached from the gaze of the filmmaker by walking with a camera on his back facing away from him. Lisbon Story includes a cameo appearance by another collaborator of sorts, the legendary Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who, in a short monologue, reflects on the relation between memory, presence and doubt in the act of recording images. The film, as a whole, plays on Wenders’ fascination with the power of cinema and photography, with their ability ‘to rescue the existence of things’ as Béla Balázs famously put it.2 Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception is also informed by film theory but it actually reads as a free-form dialogue between Wenders and a number of collaborators: his co-writer Mary Zournazi, contemporary philosophers like Martin Buber and perhaps most importantly, the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, who greatly influenced Wenders in his understanding and practice of filmmaking. Wenders’ reflections in Inventing Peace help explain the narrative and aesthetic choices that underpin his recent films, especially those shot in 3D like Pina (2011), Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015) and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (2016). They also make a case for the transcendental power of the eyes. Our combined sights, Wenders argues, form a rich kaleidoscope that is akin to an omniscient god’s eye-view of the world. As we will see, this idea parallels some of Michel Serres’ reflections in Eyes, a short philosophical essay published in 2014. The dialogue with Serres encourages us to see Wenders’ arguments in Inventing Peace as a contribution to Film Theory and as an epistemological gesture that seeks to connect all forms of visual expression. Lisbon Story began as a commission from the city of Lisbon to produce a documentary to celebrate Lisbon being named ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 1994. The project quickly morphed into a more hybrid film as Wenders started improvising a script to accompany the footage he was shooting.3 He brought back two characters from earlier films, Philip Winter from his New German Cinema classic, Alice in the Cities, as well as Friedrich Munro, who plays the role of a film director in another film shot mainly in Portugal, The State of Things.4 Federico Fellini had passed away the year before and Lisbon Story also became a way of honouring his legacy and to reflect on the past, present and future of auteur cinema. Film scholars have acknowledged the importance of Lisbon Story as a selfreferential and intertextual film in Wenders’ oeuvre5 but have been critical of the ways in which he chose to depict the city. For instance, Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli6 accuse Wenders of romanticizing Lisbon by portraying it as a peripheral place that is ‘less manufactured and more human’ than other places in the centre of Europe. For them, Wenders fails to show Lisbon as a culturally diverse capital shaped by its colonial past – a valid point that echoes similar criticisms levelled

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at Wenders for his representation of Australian aboriginals in Until the End of the World (1990) or Old Havana in Buena Vista Social Club (1999).7 However, what critics often fail to consider is that documenting Lisbon is only one of many aspects of the film that comes a distant second to what eventually became Wenders’ central project: experimenting with different modes of seeing and creating a dialogue between real and fictional collaborators over the continued relevance of moving images, a century after the first time a film was screened. Lisbon Story is organized around a series of conversations that probe different aspects of Wenders’ inquiry. The first one stages Manoel de Oliveira, first filmed with a crank camera on sepia film, and then recorded by Winter in a sound studio. Oliveira’s life unfolded alongside the history of cinema. Born in 1908, he shot his first film in 1927. He died in 2015 at the age of 106 after making more than thirty full-length features. The vintage look of his cameo appearance in Lisbon Story recalls the early days of cinema. Wenders records de Oliveira channelling his inner Charlie Chaplin as he mimics his signature walk and playfully interacts with the camera. In a mise-en-abyme of filmmaking, de Oliveira holds his two hands together to create a frame – a viewfinder of sorts – and pretends to find the best angle to shoot before turning around and repeating the same gesture while looking directly at the camera. Oliveira’s physical performance as an actor suggests that he plays the part of a visual mediator who is able to quote others through his movements and who is constantly looking for the best way of conveying what he sees. His words, captured by Winter in his role as a sound engineer, and relayed by Wenders in his highly reflexive and dialogic film, add another layer to the question of framing and mediating. ‘The world … is an illusion’, Oliveira tells us, ‘the only real thing is memory’. The paradox of cinema is that ‘the camera can capture a moment but that moment has already passed’. Even though ‘the camera [can] draw a shadow of that moment’, we cannot be sure that ‘the moment ever existed outside the film’, and, therefore, we are forced to accept that ‘we live, after all, in permanent doubt’.8 Filmmakers are in charge of framing images – ideally in dialogue with other images that were previously recorded, but they are also responsible for framing time. They curate what has the potential to become both an epistemological and a metaphysical experience. The storyline of Lisbon Story often echoes and exemplifies what the embedded conversations about the nature of cinema theorize. The film shows how our understanding of the world is shaped by a myriad of visual, linguistic and intertextual clues. In order to solve the mystery of Monroe’s disappearance, Winter first relies on film rushes that his friend left at his apartment. Monroe is ‘the man with a camera’ recording daily life in different neighbourhoods of Lisbon.9 He offers a palimpsestic experience of the city: the aesthetic of images shot with a crank camera and the omnipresence of tramways recall the Lisbon of the past, even though it is in fact the Lisbon of the 1990s that is being preserved and memorialized in his work. Next, Winter becomes the unlikely hero of a film noir of sorts. We find him meeting strange men in back alleys and negotiating in broken Portuguese the price to pay to be led to Monroe. Later on, he follows the enigmatic boy Ricardo in a fast-paced chase that takes him from the historic centre of Lisbon

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to the outskirts of the city. His search ends at a trashcan in a park where a vidicam that was recording him is hidden, in another mise-en-abyme of the film’s own experiment with images and storytelling. Wenders’ film possesses an inherent documentary quality but it often leans towards nostalgia for a picturesque and welcoming place. Likewise, the main character’s journey veers towards parody as it quotes films that explore urban geographies and as Winter comes to question the reality of his own experience. Is he the hero of the story, or are his movements tracked and recorded, unbeknownst to him, in a slapstick comedy filmed at his expense? When Winter and Monroe finally reunite, the two men engage in an extended conversation over the role and power of images. Both characters function as alteregos for Wenders himself, in turn presenting a pessimistic view of the future of cinema and making the case for the continued relevance of shooting moving images. Monroe plays the part of a purist, of a disillusioned filmmaker whose idealized vision of cinema has been polluted by the proliferation of cheap TV and video images and by the aesthetics of violence found in Hollywood films. Winter, on the other hand, positions himself as a pragmatist, as someone who is still able to see and capture beauty and who believes in the potential of music and sound recordings to enhance and give meaning to film footage. As we will see later on, the dialogue in Lisbon Story between a purist and a pragmatic approach to filmmaking prefigures some of the arguments that Wenders and Zournazi develop in Inventing Peace concerning the spiritual power of images. Monroe takes Winter to a dilapidated movie theatre, his ‘film museum’ as he calls it, where he stores videotapes of the unseen images he records with a camera on his back. For Monroe, the death of cinema goes hand in hand with the death of the communal experience of watching movies. ‘The projection room is a thing of the past’, he tells Winter, since it is increasingly being replaced by more individualized modes of consuming images (Lisbon Story repeatedly shows the small control screens of video cameras that allow for instantaneous replay of what has been recorded). Filming Lisbon has proven to be impossible and Monroe has given up on his project of documenting the streets of the city and its inhabitants. In a metatextual statement that can only bring to mind the commission from the city of Lisbon to Wenders, Monroe complains that ‘with every turn of the old crank camera, the city retreated, it faded, more and more’. He laments that pictures ‘are used to sell stories and things’ and that ‘they don’t know how to show things anymore’. For him, ‘pointing a camera is just like pointing a weapon’ and he stopped working on his film because he ‘had the feeling of depriving things of their life’. Monroe’s solution to the problem is radical: he advocates for a new visual culture in which pictures would not be seen by anyone in order to remain ‘true and beautiful’ and in which nobody would be looking through the lens when recording. Monroe’s deeper concern is that the mass production and consumption of images mean that we may start living virtually through images and become unmoored from physical reality. His new technique of filming provides a way to fight against this separation: ‘As long as the picture is not seen, the picture and the object that it represents belong together.’10 Narratively, capturing images without

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looking at the camera frees the filmmaker from the impositions of time. There is no need to follow the rules of storytelling or to come to a climax. There are no choices to be made. And, for Monroe, this is the ultimate definition of freedom. At times, the film depicts Monroe as a mad scientist and Winter seems amused as he listens to his manifesto for a new kind of cinema. He records his reply with a small vidicam and makes a short straightforward argument. ‘Why would you want to produce trash’, he asks his friend, ‘if you can shoot indispensable pictures? With your heart. On celluloid’. Winter’s response indicates a more positive view of the future of images. Monroe has been ‘fooled’ by ‘toy pictures’ and it is time for him to change his outlook: ‘Turn around and trust your eyes again, trust your old camera, it is still able to capture life.’11 Ultimately, the film does not clearly take sides for one of Wenders’ two alter-egos. Nevertheless, it ends on a hopeful note as Monroe, holding his crank camera, and Winter, carrying his boom pole, playfully film on the streets of Lisbon and symbolically take a new departure. Lisbon’s Story, as its title implies, tells a number of different stories at the same time: the love story between Winter and the lead singer of the Fado ensembles Madredeus, the story of Monroe’s sudden disappearance, the story of the city of Lisbon in its transition to modernity, and the story of cinema itself, both as a practice and an art form. But what lies at the centre of the film are the voices from real and fictional filmmakers whose contributions constitute a mise-an-abyme of Wenders’ own project. The film is eminently dialogic. Not only does it pay homage to and draw from the history of cinema, from Chaplin and silent films to the film noir tradition or great masters like Fellini, it also shows the necessity to return to and at the same time challenge older conceptions of filmmaking in a world in which the task of creating images keeps evolving. After Lisbon Story, Wenders made a series of films taking place in Los Angeles that continued to consider the implications of the omnipresence of recording devices and screens in our lives. The End of Violence (1997) depicts a network of surveillance cameras deployed around the sprawling city and monitored from a central point, the Griffith Observatory. In Million Dollar Hotel (2000), several characters record video confessionals that end up being broadcast on the local news and used against them in a murder case. The main protagonist of Land of Plenty (2004) is a paranoid veteran who drives around the city in his van spying on potential terrorist targets and collecting video evidence of possible criminal plots. The film provides a commentary on the forms of psychological and visual violence brought out by the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’. In fact, Wenders begins Inventing Peace by describing his motivations for making Land of Plenty and his desire to think more deeply about the overwhelming presence of violent images in our lives. Written over a period of almost ten years, the book shows the deep continuities between Wenders’ work as a filmmaker and as a visual critic. It collects conversations and email correspondence between Wenders and his cowriter Mary Zournazi, presents short essays by Wenders penned in his signature free-form prose and includes more ‘scholarly’ chapters, for instance on ‘Imagining the Real’ or ‘Which Future of Seeing’. It also highlights the work of a number of film directors (Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, among others)

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from whom Wenders has drawn inspiration since the start of his career and who become collaborators in his attempt to articulate a visual aesthetic of peace. Together, they try to answer the following question: How can we move towards a culture of images that conveys a loving and caring way of looking at the world? Wenders and Zournazi start with a hard truth. There are very few peaceful images in a global culture in which visual representations of war and acts of violence seem omnipresent. In fact, we can often only define peace negatively, as the absence of war, and we have difficulties imagining what peace would actually look like (we tend to visualize peace allegorically, as a beautiful sunset, or serene and untouched nature). To make sense of this paradox, Wenders turns to one of his masters, the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, whose films, shot between 1927 and 1962, stand out for their slow pace and their attention to the details of everyday life. It is not so much what Ozu films that matters but how he films it. One striking characteristic of his style is his choice of lens, a 50mm lens that ‘contracts space a bit’ and that makes ‘things appear just a tiny bit closer’. As a result of that, Wenders explains, ‘You have less distance from things. … The world, in a way, becomes more “present”, you are a bit nearer to everything.’12 Ozu also plays with the position of his camera to create a sense of closeness to the characters and situations he films. In Wenders’ words: All his shots are done from the eye level of somebody sitting on a tatami floor. This is a very defenseless, peaceful position. You always see somebody standing in front of you slightly from below, which increases a feeling of respect and modesty towards ‘the other’. And as this is always the same point of view, Again it eliminates any fear of surprise. You can let your armor down …13

For Wenders, observing and analysing Ozu’s techniques is not simply a thought exercise. He is interested in seeing whether that filmic language is transferable and can be used as inspiration for twenty-first-century films. And indeed, his ‘collaboration’ with Ozu has yielded several films in which Wenders experiments with a visual sense of trust, proximity and openness. Every Thing Will Be Fine, for instance, is a surprisingly peaceful film, in spite of its subject matter – the accidental death of a young child – and of the tortured personality of the hero Tomas. Wenders resists the fast succession of shots that characterizes mainstream commercial cinema and instead slows down the pace of his film, choosing to spend more time with his characters, even when they are not actively doing anything, and with the objects that surround them. Rather than positioning the camera at a certain level or using a particular lens like Ozu, Wenders plays with the new possibilities offered by 3D technology, physically narrowing the distance between the audience and the characters and objects that they see since those are now suspended in the middle of the screening room, as if they were almost within reach. In Pina, the first film he shot in 3D, it is through the dancers’ tributes to

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their late teacher, the choreographer Pina Bausch, that Wenders tries to close the distance between the audience and the screen. Filmed in a close-up, against a dark backdrop, their faces appear as a spectral yet intimate presence that mirrors the intimate memories that they share for the documentary feature. Even in the 2D versions of the films (whether they are experienced in a traditional movie theatre, on a television set or on other types of screens), viewers still see a difference. In the opening scene of Every Thing Will Be Fine, the camera takes stock of the inside of the hero’s ice hut, slowly establishing his identity as a writer on a retreat in search of inspiration. The objects of everyday life (a pencil, a notebook, but also socks drying on a clothesline or a coffee pot) are not just part of the décor. They have a strong presence and function as discrete entities, to the same extent as the character himself. In The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, Wenders’ camera is not static like Ozu’s. It captures the actors’ faces in a consistent medium shot, in a slow circular motion that could be equated to a visual ‘caress’. It is not, however, an intruding or voyeuristic gaze but one that matches the spirit of personal and intellectual communion of the dialogue between the two main protagonists. In a back and forth that recalls the debate between Phillip Winter and Friedrich Monroe in Lisbon Story, Wenders alternates in Inventing Peace between a pragmatic vision for creating loving and peaceful images and a more pessimistic outlook for the future of photography and cinema. With film negatives, ‘the trace of light served as a truthful witness’, but digital technology leaves us with a sense of nostalgia for a material proof. He is concerned that it is no longer possible for the image-maker to capture ‘a single, unique, unrepeatable instant, a truthful glimpse from one person’s existence’.14 This leads Wenders to reflect on a more fundamental and general issue that has to do with the relation between images and peace. Defining peace as ‘a concord, an accord, a mutual agreement, a harmony’, in which we are ‘with the world,/with people, in their presence,/with things, in their presence,/with places, in their presence’, he worries that pictures inevitably separate us from things and people and wonders whether ‘imagery [has] an inbuilt violence’.15 Wenders comes to this radical conclusion: I have a hunch that in order to appreciate PEACE, and to be able to perceive it again, we might have to move away from our culture of images and come back to the things themselves. If ever that return, that homecoming is possible! Sometimes I feel We have left the reality of people, things and places behind for good, have accepted their disappearance and moved on forever into the realm of their surrogates.16

Like his character and alter-ego Monroe, Wenders finds himself in the paradoxical position of a filmmaker who is casting doubt about the transformational power of his art. Yet he leaves the door open for a new visual culture that could bridge the divide between the object and the image and thus create new conditions for peace.

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In his quest to define the nature of peaceful and loving images, Wenders keeps coming back to the question of ‘presence’. He seeks to reclaim what he sees as unique in Ozu’s films, a sense of ‘genuine hospitality’.17 Both narratively and visually, Wenders’ aesthetics is deeply connected with a desire to understand the other, to welcome expressions of difference – literally, to give them a ‘home’. In a hybrid travelogue/essay included in Inventing Peace, he remembers being struck by the realization that ‘the world exists … in the eyes of each person alive’ and that the sum of these perceptions forms a rich kaleidoscope that connects us all and yet preserves our individual perspectives.18 Seeing, as a mode of apprehending reality, breaks down borders and unites us as spiritual beings: If our eyes (and minds) represent a simultaneous ‘awareness’ which constantly makes the world appear (and disappear), then the very sum of all that can only exist – and it must exist as such, I believe – (and feel free, of course, to call that wishful thinking) as part of the all-knowing, ever-presence of God. That would make us God’s instruments, the ‘projectionists’ of his (or her) creation, together shaping an ever-shifting moving image of the world, a ‘feedback’ …19

The task of seeing and representing the world is a shared responsibility. For Wenders, the images that we constantly produce are part and parcel of a transcendental experience since they are both made possible by and given back to God. But, more pragmatically, these images shape our reality. How we see has the power to change the world. Yes, we may literally be feeding images back to God, but our feedback is also a commentary, a way of positioning ourselves with practical political consequences. Wenders’ collaborative inquiries function on different levels. As we saw with Lisbon Story, it is articulated in his films, often through alter-ego visual artists and theorists who themselves record images and sound, tell stories, and reflect on the act of filmmaking. It is also deeply influenced by other filmmakers who, like him, strive to create loving and peaceful images. But the relationship is not simply one of emulation. It drives Wenders to experiment with new techniques and technologies in an effort to elaborate a poetics of visual presence. In the end, he defines seeing as a fundamentally collaborative act: all of us, through our sight, constantly participate in a grand spiritual project that connects us to God and to each other. One last aspect of Wenders’ work with different types of collaborators takes a different form: it is not a conversation with another thought partner but intriguing parallels between two books written and published around the same time, Inventing Peace (2013) and Michel Serres’ Eyes (2014). There is no evidence that the two men met or read each other’s work, even though Mary Zournazi, who co-wrote Inventing Peace with Wenders, interviewed Serres for an earlier book and serves as the co-editor for the Bloomsbury Academic series in which Eyes was published.20

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We have seen that Wenders, even in his more abstract considerations about images and cinema, remains committed to the world of practice and experimentation. The parallels with Serres’ book show that Wenders’ ideas are attuned to their greater philosophical context and reveal that the idea of the kaleidoscope opens the door to a new line of epistemological and political questioning. The similarities between the two books are striking. In Eyes, Serres (2015: 16) uses the image of the kaleidoscope to describe the impression of being ‘seen by countless gazes, by such crazily disparate performances’. This ‘infinite kaleidoscope’ is also connected with the idea of an omniscient Deity: ‘Only an omnipresent God, who sees every point of view, could contemplate this integral.’21 For Serres, just like Wenders, the eye lies at the centre of what connects us and brings us together. Eyes, as a whole, is meant to be a critical intervention into the field of visual aesthetics. Serres suggests that paintings are not simply a representation of what the artist sees but that they have ‘eyes’ that look back at the viewer. Any work of art ‘becomes not just a receptacle for luminosity but it also emits, releases and transforms its own luster’.22 The reverse angle, both a basic and essential technique in filmmaking, and a self-reflexive presence in all photographic images, operates in all modes of visual expression, and, more importantly perhaps, can help us rethink our relationship with objects and with the natural world. Serres wonders if ‘the brightness sweeping through and shaping space shows that the world’s things have their own vision of the world’s things, as does each of us’23 and asks: ‘These things are seen, but do they also see?’ He argues that there is no way ‘to be just and sympathetic in our treatment of animals if we do not try to see the world they discover and which their lives build for them.’24 Serres and Wenders agree that many humans and nonhumans have not been granted visual agency. This was already Friedrich Monroe’s central concern in Lisbon’s Story and the reason why he decided to walk the streets of the city with a camera on his back. Refusing to act like the seeing agent who selects and frames images was, for him, an attempt to bring in the many gazes and perspectives that have been left out of our visual culture. Striving for peace, then, means decentring the dominant logocentric gaze and including visions that seem foreign to us and that have historically been excluded. For Serres, this shift will affect more than the aesthetic realm. It should transform our ways of connecting and interacting with the gazes that surround us. In a context in which we wonder how ‘society will be organized when multiple networks produce a multitude of roads and crossroads, each functioning more or less like an apex’, we should understand that ‘there is an eye in each of these intersections or nodes’: Each network shines with a countless number of different gazes that are more or less awake. All these countless orbits, each of them, permanently look at each other all the time. In other words, the totality looks at the totality; countless numbers permanently watch over countless numbers.25

On one level, Serres describes a rhizomatic world, in which connections are constantly being made and reconfigured and in which there is no dominant perspective. On

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another level, he suggests that we all have something fundamental in common, the eyes with which we take in and reflect the world. We make ourselves present in the world, and, in doing so, we enter into dialogue with a larger transcendental entity that also possesses creative visual powers. Serres26 captures this idea in a beautiful sentence in French: ‘L’Univers s’ensemence de ses propres regards’.27 Democratizing the aesthetic realm does not necessarily mean that the artist no longer plays a central role in shaping our visual culture. Serres, for instance, reminds us that ‘the painter sees what seeing people […] do not know how to see’.28 For Wenders, filmmakers remain mediators who can produce images but also translate for their audience what is at stake in their work. This is true for Manoel de Oliveira when he shares that his attempts to capture truth with his camera have often led him to moments of epistemological doubt. Similarly, Phillip Winter and Friedrich Monroe’s disagreements over the future of moving images lay the ground for Wenders’ inquiry into a visual aesthetics of peace that would entail both seeing people and objects with a loving gaze and closing the distance between what is being represented and its image. Wenders develops his ideas about image making with thought partners who can help him reflect upon and develop his craft but also by staging fictional filmmakers and learning from them. At the same time, collaboration need not be a reciprocal act. It can be posthumous in nature: Wenders never met Ozu, even though he has spent many decades in conversation with him, in Tokyo Ga, in Inventing Peace and in the films in which he seeks to embrace and adapt some of his filmic techniques. In the end, his collaborations form a kaleidoscope composed of a multitude of gazes that come from different time periods and national traditions. It does not necessarily form a cohesive whole but it encourages us to see differently and to create combinations between perspectives that would not normally be in dialogue with each other. It goes without saying that every filmmaker, in one way or another, is constantly in conversation with many different kinds of collaborators. What makes Wenders’ approach unique is that he includes his audience and his readers in his conversations and that he does not claim to have reached a unified aesthetic philosophy. The epistemological value of his work for Film Theory lies in the process by which he reaches conclusions that are temporary by nature and open to being reshaped by new connections. In other words, for Wenders, there is not a singular way of producing images, but a multitude of approaches to try out, assess, adopt and reimagine.

Chapter 16 C HA N TA L A K E R M A N ’ S WO R D S A N D I M AG E S : T H E AVA N T- G A R D E O F T H E O RY A N D F I L M M A K I N G André Rui Graça

Like other filmmakers featured in this book, such as Agnès Varda, Andy Warhol and Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman and her body of film works need little to no introduction. Born in 1950, Akerman is considered by critics and academics alike a pioneer of the moving image. At the time of her passing, in 2015, the Belgian filmmaker had left an oeuvre that was considered, in many ways, canonical. Indeed, the placement of her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the very top of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time, in 2022, is, in some way, a confirmation of this. She was recognized and celebrated during her lifetime not only for her directorial achievements but also as a filmmaker-turned-philosopher. Much has been said and written about Chantal Akerman and the various stages and facets of her work (even by no one less than herself) through a myriad of perspectives related to art history, philosophy, film studies, film analysis and post-Marxist theories, among others. This is only possible because her work lends itself to multiple interpretations and possesses an intertextual richness that cannot be grasped or claimed solely by one area of knowledge. This chapter intends to encapsulate Akerman’s theoretical dimension (even if only in broad strokes) as well as highlight the potential to bring new perspectives to film analysis and the understanding of what it means to be a filmmaker. In order to do so, we will resort to interviews given by Akerman, along with her writings and statements (both actual and metaphorical, i.e. conveyed through film or other elements of her oeuvre). Considered a ‘heavyweight’ filmmaker in the realms of both fiction and documentary, Akerman’s artistic activity spanned almost fifty years. As we will see, the development of Akerman’s career was encompassed by thought and by an ever-more conscious stance concerning the purposefulness of images and sounds. From her beginnings as a nouvelle vague and New York Experimental Film Scene enthusiast to the ground-breaking Jeanne Dielman, all the way to No Home Movie, passing through her documentaries in the 1990s, we will approach major themes and works, as well as statements that will allow us to watch her films (and, indeed, films from other filmmakers) in a contextualized way, i.e. via the Filmmakers on Film approach.

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At first glance, if we are to consider the various interviews given throughout her career, Akerman’s work became more erudite, idiosyncratic and ideological – just like the filmmaker herself. Indeed, in interviews given in the 2000s it seems a given to the interviewers that an interview with Akerman was more than just editorial/journalistic routine; it was a moment to stop and reflect on cinema as an apparatus capable of capturing a certain understanding of the world or making subjective statements. In virtually every interview with Akerman, we feel as if we have learnt more about her own films, but also about cinema and concepts that help us conceptualize and unpack the cinematic praxis. This, perhaps, stems from the fact that Akerman, from early on, has reflected upon her own cinematic thought through philosophical hooks – such as the ones elaborated by Gilles Deleuze1 and Felix Guattari.2 Due to their recurrent themes, modes of production (especially the reiterated use of mostly female crews) and formal approach (such as her signature framings, long shots, the pursuit of atmosphere and nonlinear editing), Akerman’s films and writing have been prone to be seen and analysed through the prism of psychoanalytical and other speculative approaches. Arguably, the use of tropes such as the central place of her mother, the systematic exploitation of trauma (namely, the Holocaust) and displacement, along with the portrayal of women and the manipulation of the image-time contributed to this situation. Indeed, there is no denying that there is a dimension of personal life that is interwoven in the filmmaker’s work. Yet, the Filmmakers on Film approach proposes to revisit Akerman’s films and words and allow them to speak (as it were) by themselves. In the following sections, we will make an overview of Akerman’s films and style and interpret them in the light of the Filmmakers on Film approach and her own words regarding her practice. In the first part we will emphasize the link between the way the Belgian filmmaker worked with time (and its relation with the audience), and consubstantiated her aesthetic options with Deleuzian philosophy, especially in characteristically long – often silent-punctuated – shots. The second part focuses on the exploration of the concept of ‘border dweller’ – an idea that is particularly observable in displaced characters (especially migrants) in Akerman’s documentaries. Finally, we will tackle how Akerman has subjectively and consciously infused her works with her own life history; indeed, how her slices of life could be, at the same time, personal and strikingly universal. This will lead us to conclude that the Filmmakers on Film approach, combined with Akerman’s works and words, can uncover yet another layer of her films.

Film as an act of theory: Akerman and the time-image As is often the case with major filmmakers, Akerman already possesses a rather special place in film literature since the 1990s. Thus, instead of dwelling on extensive film analysis to provide another take on some of her films, the following section has a more specific aim. We will rely on previous premises and intertwine them with some of Akerman’s statements to establish the theoretical potential of Akerman’s films.

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The assertion that there is a correspondence between Akerman’s film practice and film theory and philosophy (namely francophone) is not merely speculation. The filmmaker has remarked more than once that her work is consciously imbued with Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s ideas, namely, the concepts of ‘minor literature’  – after which Akerman developed her ‘minor cinema’  – and ‘image-time’  – which resonates clearly in the slow-paced narratives and in the introspective characters that populate her moving images. Both terms have exerted great influence throughout her work. Indeed, the intricate notion of ‘image-time’ has also been frequently used – at least since Ivone Margulies’ 1996 book Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday3 – to frame discussions around Akerman, as if her works were the substantiation of theory-turned-into-practice. We have to take into account the fact that Akerman’s early films (arguably the ones crucial in her formation as a film director) developed as the ideas of Deleuze and Guatarri were being discussed and gaining momentum in academia and in the cinephile sphere. Therefore, it is no wonder that the Belgian filmmaker advanced the artistic filmmaking trends that made Deleuze come up with the category of ‘image-time’ in the first place. Indeed, Akerman’s films are deeply embedded in the European art film tradition that began with modernist cinema and continued after the Second World War. In Akerman’s works, the movement between documentary and fiction is so constant the frontier line becomes blurred, and the avant-garde features are manifold and span various decades, challenging to some extent the limits of the expression avant-garde itself: it is in the cinematic approach; in the themes; in the relation between storytelling and time; and, finally, in formal elements, such as the viewing apparatus and place of exhibition. All these elements were at some point subjected to experiments by the Belgian filmmaker. Jeanne Dielman, perhaps Akerman’s most celebrated film, as a continuation and amplification of the formal and thematic features explores earlier in Hotel Monterey (1973) and Je tu il elle (1974), not only presents a premise that brought Akerman to the frontline of the feminist movement, but is also a film that addresses time, thought and the details of everyday life in a way that would become known decades later as ‘slow cinema.4 As Irene Corpas put it: ‘With such a descriptive title, so transparent and so typical of conceptualism, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is just that, the life of this woman in that specific house and nothing else.’5 A few years later, in 1977, News from Home, categorized as a documentary, features a peculiar, subjective take on New York City, attained in great part through the montage of image and sound. With influences from Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Yvone Rainer (among others),6 Babette Mangolte provided the cinematography for this film that intertwined personal history, film experience and social critique. D’Est, from 1993, is another key work in Akerman’s history. Initially premiered theatrically, it was the ensuing adaptation to multi-media installation that confirmed Akerman as a museum/gallery artist – in addition to being a filmmaker. Although D’Est is not Akerman’s first work to be shown in a context other than the film theatre (she had by then made a telefilm and some short films had also

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featured in borderline, multidisciplinary spaces), it marked the beginning of her ‘second career’ as a visual artist. Through a scattered course, that arguably renders D’Est as much an architectural work of art as it is visual,7 a myriad of screens show fragments of life in the Eastern bloc, in long shots, leaving the spectators to edit and suture the meaning of those images in their owns heads and thus create unique images and imaginations. In the words of Giuliana Bruno: ‘As Akerman’s video/ installation work extends the potential of her cinema of thresholds, it reinvents it in even more spatial terms.’8 Much like Akerman did in previous works and will continue to do after D’Est, her statement that: I’d like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me. Faces, streets, cars going by and buses, train stations and plains, rivers and oceans, streams and brooks, trees and forests. Fields and factories and yet more faces. Food, interiors, doors, windows, meals being prepared’9 is the essence of her obsession; an ‘atlas of life’, as Bruno has so eloquently put.10

Akerman allegedly wrote that ‘I want to film in order to understand’.11 Such a statement is aligned not only with her film praxis of capturing and contemplating the humanity in (and of) everyday life, but also with the Deleuzian concept of ‘image-time’12 – images in which thought is inherent and presumed. Perhaps the need to stretch beyond the borders of cinema (as a medium) itself was just another way (extra-cinematic, in this case) Akerman found to express certain limitations and try to overcome them. As the filmmaker asserted: ‘My language is very poor; I have a very restricted vocabulary. Deleuze explains this very well when he speaks of Kafka’s language and minor literature. There are no big car accidents, no big effects, everything is very, very, very, very tight.’13 Akerman passed down to us a kind of cinema where waiting, delayed decisions, introspection and transits are central, as they often are central to the understanding of things as well. Moreover, her approach to life is clear: ‘It is through making that I find my way.’14 In her cinema, the point is not usually the arrival, but, rather, the journey. Just like Deleuze was interested in process philosophy, Akerman dwelled on the process of filmmaking. In her own words: ‘We sense time, so we sense ourselves. Face to face with an image, we sense ourselves.’15 That is why her works lend themselves to being acts of theory; they are audiovisual expressions, used idiosyncratically, attempting to reach what may be outside the boundaries of language. That is why Akerman’s films/works may be an extension of her ‘voice’ and consubstantiate so well what we try to convey in the filmmakers on film approach when we state that a film can also create or help unveil theorems.

Film as a statement: The concept of ‘border dweller’ Having established the potential of Akerman’s works as acts of theory, it becomes clear that their discursive element renders them able to make statements or convey messages that the director wants to transmit. For Akerman, making a film is, thus,

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a statement in and of itself. Taking this premise further means that filmmaking is not a symbolic gesture, but also a formal way of presenting content and therefore elaborating on specific subjects. As previously mentioned, Akerman’s practice is difficult to pinpoint and it is widely accepted – even by herself – that the frontiers were addressed and challenged constantly throughout her career, either directly or indirectly: It’s true, I made From the Other Side, which is, of course, a documentary about Mexicans crossing the border. I’ve made plenty of things that had to do with that. And one could say that I’m on the border between so-called experimental film and narrative film and that I travel from one to the other. And I’m here, but I could be elsewhere.16

Miriam Rosen, in 2004, initially proposed the presence of the ‘border dweller’ (frontalier) in Akerman’s cinema. Twenty years on, when looking at Akerman’s cinema in retrospective, that concept seems to become even more relevant, if not key, to identifying a thematic fixation that finds its mirrored image in Akerman’s career, and to the understanding of the worldview contained in those moving images and sounds. Marion Schmid goes as far as stating that Akerman’s films are obsessed with borders and liminal spaces, her cinema is characteristically entre deux (in-between). Her self-portrait Autoportrait en cinéaste (2004), an invaluable source for understanding the ideas and aesthetic principles that have shaped her films, in its meandering style and multilayered narrative, testifies to her resistance to conventional forms of (self-) representation and to her profound distrust of simple binaries and rigid categories.17

In his turn, Jonathan Rosenbaum provides a more poetic, but nonetheless accurate insight: ‘Most of her films, regardless of genre, come across as melancholy, narcissistic meditations charged with feelings of loneliness and anxiety; and nearly all of them have the same hard-edged painterly presence and monumentality, the same precise sense of framing, locations, and empty space.’18 The same author goes on to say: ‘More generally, if I had to try to summarize the cinema of Chantal Akerman, thematically and formally, in a single phrase, “the discomfort of bodies in rooms” would probably be my first choice. And “the discomfort of bodies inside shots” might be the second.’19 A more contemporary commentator, Andre Thoma, says that NOW, from 2015 (one of Akerman’s final works): ‘A close reading of Akerman’s multi-channel installation will consider how a recognition of place (contemporary war zones) is conditioned by nomadic dwelling, where place is experienced “whilst moving” as put forward in Deleuze and Guattari’s Chapter “Treatise on nomadology – the War Machine” (1988).’20 The assertions above lead the reasoning straight to the realm of the concept of frontiers, reminding us that Akerman has, effectively, made a point: regardless of  the categorization of her moving images, her stance as a director and

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metteuse-em-scène in the film and art worlds has shed a unique light on what is borderline and the depth of that situation. In that sense, Akerman’s works find in Marc Augè’s thought about supermodernity21 a space for dialogue. Her films are filled with non-spaces and characters in dubious situations that arguably put them in non-defined circumstances. In a way, Akerman’s film practice is a place where the frontier expands and is put into perspective. Although it is open to debate whether separating lines blur in the specific case of the Belgian director, her films and her ideas were places where boundaries, as structures determined by society and the zeitgeist, became visible. Therefore, they were spaces where the frontier itself could be theorized. Ultimately, it seems reasonable to posit that Akerman’s films are, in many ways, discursive affirmations. She made this possible by turning a fine line into an open field, in which one can contemplate or, perhaps even better, seek understanding about the world and the inner workings of its inhabitants.

Film as expression: Slices of life and personal history The concept of border is closely linked to the ideas of ‘minor’ and ‘deterritorialization’. This invokes, once again, Deleuze and Guattari. Chantal Akerman’s career was always marked by autobiographical substance. Also spread throughout her body of work is her family history, which explains some tropes, namely the focus on migrants, the effects of wars and, more broadly, anything related to deterritorialization. As Schmid remarked: ‘Her marginal status as a Jew in a predominantly Christian society and her belonging to a minority group of immigrants with distinct cultural customs and traditions fostered in her, from an early age, a sense of alterity and non-belonging, which has crystallised as a major theme in her work.’22 With regard to Akerman’s films in the United States (or elsewhere), the same author makes the following point: Developed within the minority culture of American underground art and marked by her own marginal position as an exile earning a living from irregular, low-paid work (among other occupations, she worked as a barmaid and a cashier in a porn cinema), Akerman’s cinema has from the outset settled on minority issues and developed alternative themes and strategies to the dominant form of production, Hollywood.23

There are too many manifestations of deterritorialization to mention in this chapter, but the takeaway is that for Akerman filmmaking and art are prominently subjective, expressive and ways to seek a better understanding of what she already knows, and not the other way around, i.e. discover or deal with subjects that fall beyond the scope of a personal view. Even new situations, people, places or things are means to reflect upon certain conditions. In an interview with Nicole Brenez, Akerman encapsulated this spirit: ‘Yes, certainly. You work with your material. That’s all you have.’24 Indeed, the notion of ‘material’ in this situation does not

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equate to material conditions, but rather, one’s own baggage and experience of the world. As the director explained in another interview given to The Criterion Collection about the personal dimension infused in Jeanne Dielman: ‘The prostitution’s a sort of metaphor. But I knew all the rest firsthand. It was in my blood.’25 In this interview, Akerman talks about Jeanne Dielman through her perspective, relating every major aspect of the film to the history of her family and her observation of her relatives. By the same token, many of Akerman’s works revolve around her relationship with her mother and are deeply rooted in her wish to express and articulate a certain sense of personal belonging (or lack thereof) to social groups that seemed to define her condition as if she could not escape or distance herself from those premises. Je tu il elle is an intimate portrait of a woman trying to come to terms with her female body in the same measure that News From Home is a disembodied confession (the use of the voiceover serves that effect) of the words between a daughter and her mother. The development and exploration of this relationship run so deep in Akerman’s work that it will mark it, in various ways, until her very last film,26 the insightful No Home Movie (2015). If it was not clear by then, Akerman’s necessity to dwell on her ancestry was made explicit in Dis-moi (1980), an intimate documentary about women who survived the Holocaust and had to cope with relocation or the consequences brought about by changes in geopolitics during the twentieth century. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) follows a different path: it deploys an alter-ego character, embodied by an actress (Aurore Clément), to make visible the illusion of clearly defined boundaries between fiction and autobiography. The thoroughly tautological Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1997) shows yet another way in which the Belgian director manifested such a personal approach to filmmaking: the retrospective. The different ways in which this self-expression exists challenge, once more, categorization. In fact, it seems an increasingly difficult task to point out when Akerman is using direct discourse, since, to some extent, there is always an ‘I’ in her films. However, perhaps paradoxically, there is also a ‘you’ and a ‘we’ in the way reality is grasped. In short, it was through subjective takes on life and the roles of image and sound that we were able to come into contact with a perspective that resonates beyond the idiosyncrasy. Few directors were able (or willing) to put so much of them on the record and, in turn, allow their professions to shape their lives and their relationships with others and themselves. Chantal Akerman’s works are, at their core, slices of life, even if they initially appear to us to be covered by thin layers of fiction or imagination. To Akerman, filming was more than an intention to create or capture moving images. It was a means to articulate and elaborate thought, a way to make a statement, and, thus, an act of expression, both personal and discursive. It is now up to us to listen to her images and look at her words as tools to better understand the ethos of an Oeuvre and unpack the multi-layered, complex messages that Akerman bequeathed to us.

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Chapter 17 ‘ S C U L P T I N G EV E RY DAY L I F E’ A N D T H E L A K E A S A M E TA P HO R : T OWA R D S A D O C UM E N TA RY F I L M M A K I N G H I ST O RY Manuela Penafria

This chapter positions itself in the discussion of the evolution of documentary filmmaking. I take as a premise that ‘documentary’ is a noun that refers to a wide variety of films and its designation comes firstly from the filmmakers that place their creative process in a domain in which what the spectator sees and hears takes place or took place outside the film. To address the question of how one may understand the evolution of documentary filmmaking I start by selecting two bibliographic references that have been (at least to me) of major academic importance, and then I turn to filmmakers to discuss that evolution. In the academic references that deal with the evolution of documentary film, its authors consider the films as a result of choices made by the directors. In that way I understand those references as a discussion of a filmmaking practice. So, what is at stake here is the documentary filmmaking history. The first reference is Erik Barnouw’s book entitled Documentary – A History of Non-Fiction Film (1974). This book comes from Barnouw’s consultation of many archives, film screenings and interviews made by himself to documentarists in many different countries like India, Japan, Germany, Denmark, France, Switzerland and Great Britain. So he builds an evolution for the documentary filmmaking by giving documentarist filmmakers a function or ‘role’, throughout documentary history. Barnouw selects major films and documentary filmmakers and sets them as exemplary figures of each of the ‘roles’ filmmakers may assume. The contents of the book are divided into chapters that follow documentary history. I will quote the roles and give examples of filmmakers mentioned in each chapter: in the beginning there is the ‘prophet’ who opened ‘our eyes to worlds available to us, but for one reason or another, not perceived’1 (Lumière Brothers and ‘Lumière operators’); then the ‘explorer’ that permitted the audience to be like the filmmaker, an ‘explorer and a discoverer’2 (Robert Flaherty); the ‘reporter’ with the task of assembling ‘bits of film (…) and sending them forth again, subtitled and in meaningful organization’3 (Dziga Vertov); the ‘painter’ who takes actuality as the basis for abstractions (Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, Walther Ruttman,

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Alberto Cavalcanti, Jean Vigo, Joris Ivens); the ‘advocate’, ‘dramatizing issues and their implications in a meaningful way’4 (John Grierson, Leni Riefenstahl, Pare Lorentz, Akira Iwasaki, Joris Ivens); the ‘bugler’ shooting during war times (Fritz Hippler, Humphrey Jennings, Franz Capra); the ‘prosecutor’ for the documenting of war crimes (Jerzy Bossak, Andrew Thorndike, Akira Iwasaki, Alain Resnais); the ‘poet’ with documentary-like fiction such as Italian neo-realism and nature, wildlife or with ‘individual sensibility’5 films (Arne Sucksdorff, Bert Haanstra); the ‘chronicle’ that tells the past looking at ‘old news footage as comedy material’,6 using reconstruction of events or turning to a more ethnographic look (Nicole Védrès, George Morrison, Vithalbhai K. Jhaveri, Ousmane Sembène, Jorge Preloran, Jean Rouch); the ‘promoter’ with films that received support from industrial sponsors in many countries, including like Portugal (Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton); the ‘observer’, although ambiguous, leaves conclusions to the spectator (Frederick Wiseman, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Leacock, Maysles brothers); the ‘catalyst’ (Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Grigori Chukrai); the ‘guerrilla’ whose critical films ‘have clearly contributed to public enlightenment and social sanity’7 (Jerzy Bossak, Kurt Goldberger, Dušan Makavejev, Želimir Žilnik); and, finally, Barnouw ends with a chapter entitled the ‘discoverer’, to sum up all he wrote and to stress that documentarists discover ‘important new opportunities in the new technologies’.8 He discusses the importance of technology and its increasing new possibilities, facilitating new projects due, for example, to its increasing portability, while also mentioning the use of the computer in filmmaking. Barnouw concludes the following: ‘We have emphasized that the roles were not mutually exclusive. The documentarist has always been more than one of these. Yet different historic moments have brought different functions to the fore, tending to create different sub-genres.’9 And further, in his conclusive remarks, he states: Unlike the fiction artist, he [the documentarist] is dedicated to not inventing. It is in selecting and arranging his finding that he expresses himself; the choices are, in effect, his comments. And whether he adopts the stance of observer, or chronicler, or whatever, he cannot escape his subjectivity. He presents his version of the world.10

Barnouw’s proposal for the documentary film evolution is relevant since it is centred on the filmmaker and how he addresses reality. His book, as mentioned before, comes from a close relationship with filmmakers whom he interviewed. To attribute a role or task to the filmmaker helps understand film and the genre itself and its history in close relation to the social, cultural and political environments. The second bibliographic reference that has been of major importance when considering the evolution of the documentary film is the well-known book Introduction to Documentary (2001) by Bill Nichols. The six modes of documentary representation (poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative) quite clearly explained in this book are not only a way of looking at documentary filmmaking history but an instrument used by many theoretical studies when trying to understand a film or a group of films and are (or,

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at least, mentioned) when documentary cinema is the subject under discussion. Although they are not proposed as an evolution of documentary filmmaking, ‘each mode of documentary representation arises in part through a growing sense of dissatisfaction among filmmakers with a previous mode. In this sense, the modes do convey some sense of a documentary history’.11 Barnouw assumes that the different filmmaker’s role may overlap in each period and Nichols also assumes that the modes may overlap. And both authors propose that documentary has evolved from a primitive and simple form to a more complex one. To add into this discussion the filmmakers’ perspective I begin to take as reference Portuguese cinema history, which includes great documentary films such as Nazaré, Praia de Pescadores (1928) by Leitão de Barros; Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) by Manoel de Oliveira; Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969) and Que Farei Eu com Esta Espada? (1975) by João César Monteiro; A Pousada das Chagas (1972) by Paulo Rocha; Máscaras (1976) by Noémia Delgado; Nós por cá Todos Bem (1978) by Fernando Lopes; Gestos e Fragmentos (1983) by Alberto Seixas Santos; and Trás-os-Montes (1976) by António Reis and Margarida Cardoso. Yet these directors never assumed themselves as documentary filmmakers. The contemporary and well-known Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is also a clear example of Portuguese filmmakers – with major documentaries such as No Quarto da Vanda (2000); followed by films that do not easily fit under any categories, like Horse Money from 2014 and Vitalina Varela from 2021) – that does not assume himself as a documentary filmmaker. This is quite the panorama of Portuguese filmmakers, throughout its history. They do not take the documentary as their main option in their directing work. Before the 1990s, only António Campos (1922–99), the director of iconic documentaries such as A Almadraba Atuneira (1961), Vilarinho das Furnas (1971) and Falamos de Rio de Onor (1974), was, in fact, a director of documentary films. Although he directed many documentaries, in his filmography there are fiction films, in less quantity, but of comparable quality. When asked by José Manuel Costa12 what he wanted to do in cinema, he answered ‘fiction’ [statement in the film Falamos de António Campos (2009) by Catarina Alves Costa]. And this brings us to the main question mentioned before: in Portuguese film history documentary filmmakers do not assume themselves as such. Confirming the peculiar Portuguese cinema history, João Bénard da Costa (director of the Portuguese Cinematheque from 1991 to 2009) states that ‘the dominant genre of Portuguese cinema is Portuguese cinema itself ’.13 So the idea defended by Bénard da Costa is that Portuguese cinema does not have defined genres. And, in fact, concerning the documentary genre, there is no known group of directors who assume documentary as their only filmmaking activity or a documentary movement before the 1990s. This is stated by José Manuel Costa for whom is yet to be studied and discussed in depth our country’s relationship with the [documentary] genre. In very general terms, despite some nuances, I have argued that until now there has not been a true tradition in this area in our country, in the sense that there has not been a movement, even if not very expressive or

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temporary, that has consistently invested in the genre and that dialogued with the strongest stages of the genre. [meaning foreigner movements such as direct cinema or other ‘stages’].14

In the history of Portuguese cinema, Portuguese filmmakers only established a close and committed relationship with documentary film in the 1990s. These young filmmakers were aligned with a renewed interest in the genre, which was taking place in other European countries, such as Spain, France and Latin America. This decade was quite important for documentary filmmaking since it had a renewed interest everywhere in the world and Portugal was no exception. Thus, eventually, only from the 1990s onwards it can be said that there was a Portuguese documentary movement. Another way to look at the documentary within Portuguese cinema history is that it has always been a cinema that does not meet the most common characteristics of the documentary genre (or at least the documentaries made by the most important filmmakers). Some of the greatest Portuguese documentaries mentioned at the beginning of this text are closer to the fiction films of the filmography of their directors than to a specific movement from the documentary ‘official’ history. Considering that, after 2000, Portuguese documentary films assumed a quite hybrid aesthetics, it is possible to see the films from the 1990s as a setback rather than a step forward in the development of Portuguese documentary history. Whatever perspective one may consider, the 1990s are, with no doubt, a significant moment in Portuguese cinema. Tue Steen Müller, who in 1999 was the director of EDN-European Documentary Network, saw what was going on: ‘Portugal has talented documentary directors and producers. Interesting films are being made by young people. The country has a sound structure for financial support through the national film institute, IPACA, supplemented by the TV channels RTP and SIC. Recently [in 1998], Portuguese documentarists formed their own association, AporDOC’ and commenting on a Pitch session he adds that the projects were ‘characterized by fresh ideas and professional commitment’.15 In fact, all these young filmmakers wanted to make films for cinema. Television was considered to give ‘documentary a bad name’, divulging films with many different themes but with no aesthetic variety. In 1999, the Portuguese Cinematheque organized a special screening program with a round table to signal this unique period in Portuguese documentary history. The transcription of that round table is in the catalogue Novo Documentário em Portugal (1999). The filmmakers that participated in the round table were: Luciana Fina, Margarida Leitão, Rosa Coutinho Cabral, Graça Castanheira, Pedro Caldas, Catarina Mourão, Catarina Alves Costa, Olga Ramos, Pedro Sena Nunes, Helena Lopes and Paulo Nuno Lopes. The conversation was moderated by José Manuel Costa, at the time vice president of the Portuguese Cinematheque. Films from these and other directors were also screened. Concerning the films from the 1990s, I have, in a previous work,16 debated their characteristics under the designation of ‘open cinema’. I made a selection of eighteen films that were either exhibited in the Cinematheque programme or

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in the only (at that time) documentary festival in Portugal, Amascultura.17 Plus the selection was also determined by the access to the films. The films considered were: Há Drama na Escola (1993) by Leonor Areal; Senhora Aparecida (1994) by Catarina Alves Costa; Margens (1994) by Pedro Sena Nunes; Surfavela (1996) by Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel; Mulheres do Batuque (1997) by Catarina Rodrigues; Esta Televisão é a Sua (1997) by Mariana Otero; Céu Aberto (1997) by Graça Castanheira; Impressões do 3.º Dia em Glasgow (1997) by Pedro Sena Nunes; Fragments between Time and Angels (1997) by Pedro Sena Nunes; Kilandukilu/ Diversão (1998) by Margarida Leitão; Swagatam (1998) by Catarina Alves Costa; A Dama de Chandor (1998) by Catarina Mourão; A Companha do João da Murtosa (1998) by Paulo Nuno Lopes and Helena Lopes; Outros Bairros (1999) by Kiluanje Liberdade, Inês Gonçalves and Vasco Pimentel; Entraste no Jogo, Tens de Jogar, Assim na Terra como no Céu (1999) by Pedro Sena Nunes; Geração Feliz (1999) by Leonor Areal; Outro País (1999) by Sérgio Tréfaut and Natal 71 (1999) by Margarida Cardoso. In short, the expression ‘open cinema’ sees the 1990s as a period in which films share a common ‘documentary attitude’. In this case, an open relationship is established with the persons and situations to be recorded. The films Impressões do 3.º Dia em Glasgow (1997) and Fragments between Time and Angels (1997) by Pedro Sena Nunes, which are more experimental, with free associations of images and sounds, differ from all the other films but still, there is the same documentary attitude. They are a sensitive and poetic record of impressions originating from the outside world. So the documentary is the result of an encounter with the world. Persons and events are recorded here and now, in an observational style. Events unfolded before the spectator, and the persons we see and hear are allowed to speak with pauses at their own pace and rhythm like Lucas, Gervásio, Helder and Castigo in Céu Aberto; João da Murtosa in A Companha do João da Murtosa; Aida in A Dama de Chandor; or Leonardo and Arnaldo in Surfavela. They speak with great ease to the camera, which denotes that before shooting some kind of familiarity was established between the shooting team and the persons recorded. So, what is happening at the moment of shooting is quite important, but with a focus on lesser-known universes. This is the case with films like Esta Televisão é a Sua, about the backstage of the Portuguese television channel SIC (Sociedade Independente de Comunicação), which was the first private television channel in Portugal, having started broadcasting in 1992. Films featuring what is less known is a task documentary assumes for itself. In Outro País, the filmmaker encounters images that photographers and foreign filmmakers such as Robert Kramer or Thomas Harlan made during Portugals’ Carnation Revolution (25 April 1974). The director’s search for unpublished images that complement the already known is an original approach to the Portuguese revolution. Comparably original in its approach, Natal 71 is a film with the same title as a propaganda music record of the National Feminine Movement offered, on Christmas 1971, to the Portuguese military in Africa. Although there is some archival footage, the film focuses on the testimonies of people involved with this record who remember it well.

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Most of the films are a record of Portuguese cultural manifestations, such as the traditional pilgrimage of S. João D’Arga in Braga, in the film Entraste no Jogo, Tens de Jogar, Assim na Terra Como no Céu; or the last procession in which the persons fulfilling their vows to God are transported in open coffins, in Senhora Aparecida; an isolated life in the village of Chelas, in Trás-os-Montes, despite the construction of a bridge with promises of progress, in Margens, and the traditional Xávega art of fishermen in A Companha do João da Murtosa. Alternatively, the films can also be about foreigner cultural manifestations in Portugal, such as the Hindu community in Lisbon, in Swagatam; the traditional Angolan dance, in Kilandukilu – Diversão; or the Cape Verdean women who created an association to revive the traditional Batuque, in Mulheres do Batuque. Countries that, in the past, belonged to colonial Portugal are also subject to this recording of life. In A Dama de Chandor, a lady is the remaining Portuguese presence in Goa; in Mozambique, the film Céu Aberto seeks the dreams of the children. And the use of archive images is not recurring. The most social committed documentary is Outros Bairros, about the destruction of the Pedreira dos Húngaros quarter, in Lisbon, where many young Cape Verdeans live and struggle with their identity since they were born in Portugal but do not feel like they are Portuguese, they feel like they are Cape Verdeans, although they have never been to Cape Verde. To sum up, these films put aside a more evident social or political commitment, a narrator or voiceover, and archival footage. Even though there are some moments with these elements (and A Companha do João da Murtosa is a film with a narrator), those are not recurrent moments or clear filmmaking options. They are films in which the documentary genre is a discovery of the world, its great cultural wealth and a world worthy of being recorded for future memory. Apart from the films, one may focus on the sayings by this ‘new generation’ of Portuguese documentarists. I quote some of them on why they have documentary as their filmmaking activity and how they select their subjects: Catarina Mourão: ‘The documentary is the space par excellence where your relationship with reality is more visible, that is, where there is a communication that goes not only from you to reality, but from reality to you.’18 Catarina Alves Costa: ‘One thing that interests me a lot when I make a film is arriving at a place, to a situation in which I don’t know what will happen (…) with transparency, with openness, and suddenly starting to learn about what is happening with a camera in hand (…) what is really at stake is this possibility of looking at things and letting ourselves be carried away by things (…) we should film what is happening at the moment.’ 19 Graça Castanheira: ‘For me, making documentaries is trying to understand what is going on around me (…) I’ve always been fascinated by a phrase by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset: “No sabemos lo que pasa y eso es lo que pasa [We don’t know what’s happening and that is what’s happening]”. I make documentaries because all I care about is, precisely, lo que pasa.’ 20 Pedro Sena Nunes: ‘What remains for me is the question of having a person in front of me, sharing a kind of intimacy (…) I can’t film in Lisbon, I have to get out of here, I think it’s a search for the unknown. One of the engines for me is the

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contradictions that things contain, and not so much the surprises. Someone said about MARGENS: poetry and politics, antagonistic things that do not live without each other’21 Kiluanje Liberdade: ‘During the preparation and shooting of the documentary, we are obliged to create a relationship of complicity with the people involved in it. I must say that making a documentary requires being with people daily, thinking like them, and fitting in with them. It’s not the people before the camera that fit me.’22 Paulo Lopes and Helena Lopes: ‘Following people, recreating their worlds, sharing experiences and learning from them, holding on to their contradictions, sorrows and joys, their despair and love of life (…) it is a way of giving meaning to life.’23 Mariana Otero: ‘I discovered the immense pleasure of sculpting everyday life, of revealing the dramatic and extraordinary dimension of what people think is the banality of their lives. since then I continue to film what I know, what has made or is making my daily reality and that of my contemporaries: school, television …’24 The ‘documentary attitude’ expressed orally goes hand in hand with the films since they demonstrate a similar attitude towards the subjects to be recorded. Filmmakers reveal a desire to meet people in the places where they live, and a huge willingness to listen to them. The ‘open cinema’ expression could be substituted by ‘sculpting everyday life’ by Mariana Otero since it is, in many different ways, quite suitable for the Portuguese documentary filmmaking activity of the 1990s. Filmmakers search and are faced with everyday life, and the expression includes the ‘professional commitment’ mentioned by Tue Steen Müller since filmmakers are quite keen on deciding how to shoot and edit, what stays in and what should be taken out from the films (it should be mentioned many of these filmmakers did the directing and/ or the shooting and/or the editing). Filmmakers reveal a desire to meet people in the very places they live and spend time with them so that it is possible to ‘sculpt’ a film, as Mariana Otero suggests. In another way, Otero’s expression is also useful not for a larger context, including documentary cinema all over the world. The filmmaker as a sculptor of everyday life puts aside the heavy weight documentary film carries concerning a truthful representation of reality. Seeing documentaries as a ‘sculpture’ and filmmakers as a ‘sculptor’ is more accurate since there is always something that is left out and the discussion may be concentrated on what is in the film and left out of it rather than as a real representation. If Mariana Otero’s expression ‘sculpting everyday life’ is useful, there is one question remaining: how the sculpting is done? This tends to be answered by the way documentary filmmaking has evolved. Major bibliographic references have answered this question; yet, it is still possible to have an alternative answer from a filmmaker, namely by Brazilian filmmaker and plastic artist Cao Guimarães when he states: I invented a metaphor to talk about my work. It’s the idea of reality as the surface of a lake … The question is how to position yourself, then, in front of this reality: Or do you stand on the ravine contemplating the reality of the lake (which is

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how I see these little contemplative films of mine), either you throw a piece into the lake so that it reverberates and returns to normal differently (which is the idea of more purposeful works like Rua de Mão Dupla [2002], or, finally, you throw yourself into the lake, enter it (which is how I see my most immersive works, the “documentaries” where you enter a universe, go live with a hermit there for a while and set out to investigate that universe).25

This statement stroke me as quite useful to answer to the how the sculpting that Otero mentions is done. Cao Guimarães metaphor is an opportunity to set up a vision for the documentary filmmaking historical evolution. The immediate advantage is that it is a simpler way of looking at documentaries and documentary filmmaking, and as Cao Guimarães himself explains the three documentary attitudes are present in his own filmography. So there is no need to add that they may be present in one given filmography or group of films, they already do in the first place. Contemplating, throwing a stone (interfering) or the filmmakers throwing themselves into the subject (immersion) are three modes of establishing a relation with reality and a filmmaking process that are not mutually exclusive. To clarify one of the possibilities, the interference, Cao Guimarães mentions his film Rua de Mão Dupla, 2002. In this film, people who didn’t know each other switched houses for a period of twenty-four hours. Each person took a portable video camera and had complete freedom to film whatever they wanted in the stranger’s house. Each participant tried to develop a ‘mental image’ of the ‘other’ through living with their personal objects and their homes. At the end of the experience, each one gave a personal statement about how they imagined this ‘Other’. This film is an interference not only with reality but also with documentary filmmaking, throwing a stone at the lake, since documentary as a genre has been considering that people should always talk for themselves, and here the ‘Other’ talks about the ‘me’. As for the Portuguese documentary films, if the Guimarães proposal is to be applied, contemplating and immersion are the main ‘documentary attitude’. The filmmaker’s relationship with subject matters balances between observing, interfering and immersing themselves in the subject matters; or one may take the lead. Instead of roles or modes of representation, the expression a relation with puts aside the idea of representation and truthfulness and stimulates a discourse of ways of establishing a relationship with subjects. Cao Guimarães’ metaphor brings the filmmaker’s documentary attitude to the  fore from which the filmmaker makes the essential work of ‘sculpting everyday life’.

Chapter 18 T O C O N T E ST T H E D E A F N E S S O F T H E G A Z E : T H E M I SE DU C AT IO N O F T H E SE N SE S A N D T H E U N R E L IA B L E R E A L I T Y I N LU C R E C IA M A RT E L’ S F I L M S Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha

To my friends Paula Nogueira Ramos, Regiane Ishii and Yuji Kawasima, for the most erratic and inspiring conversations. Lucrecia Martel is among the most outstanding directors of the so-called New Argentine Cinema of the 1990s1 and one of the most influential contemporary Latin American filmmakers. Over the course of a career spanning more than thirty years, her oeuvre gathered critical acclaim across the globe through features, short films (including one made for a fashion brand), TV programmes, the coordination of the recording of an audio short-story collection and the theatrical direction of a concert tour. She is also well known for her numerous interviews, lectures and workshops,2 having made available a ‘Martelian repertoire’ that provides insightful keys to delving into her work and world. While she is largely opaque and resists discussing the meaning(s) behind her films (contradicting herself on purpose on several occasions and avoiding answering questions the movies carefully leave open to interpretation), she usually speaks very candidly about her creative process, understanding of cinema, the circumstances surrounding the production procedures and autobiographical anecdotes. At one of these talks, which took place in March 2018 at the Centro de Pesquisa e Formação do Serviço Social do Comércio in São Paulo, Martel started her presentation in a rather curious way: as the audience entered the room and settled in, a popular ASMR3 YouTube video was screened. The filmmaker said that she had discovered ASMR through the YouTube rabbit hole, of which she is an outright and obsessed devotee – as she has stated, the platform has restored her faith in humankind4  – and explained what that phenomenon was about: the acronym stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and describes the euphoric tingling sensation people feel in reaction to certain visuals and, especially, sounds. This tingling, feel-good sensation commonly begins in the scalp before slowly spreading through the body, ultimately creating a blissful sense of relaxation. There is not much research behind it so far and not everyone is sensitive to ASMR,

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but since 2010 there has been a boom of YouTube channels (reaching millions of subscribers) specializing in ‘triggering’ it, with videos of people whispering in a melodic voice, making random noises and slowly performing a myriad of activities like hair brushing, finger tapping or towel folding. ASMR videos are frequently characterized as synaesthetic and kind of hypnotic, adjectives that are easily found among the extensive scholarship and criticism on Martel’s cinema. The prominence of sound and the unconcern with scientific or entrenched truths as an alternative to rationalism in order to mobilize other ways of feeling are also attributes that could justify her enthusiasm with this trend. Nevertheless, Martel’s films do not yield a sense of relaxation – quite the contrary – but instead hinge on a radical reorganization of time and space, where there are no establishing shots or transitions that allow the spectators to situate themselves. Montage is truncated, unresolved and anticlimactic, constantly betraying expectations. The dialogues do not help either: they seem to serve no purpose and give out no hints; misunderstanding flourishes and what remains unsaid is more relevant than what is enunciated. Like the characters, the audience is thrust into a state of confusion, placed in an uncomfortable world and forced to embrace uncertainty – not necessarily a bad thing. In this chapter, I will explore the above-mentioned aspects of Martel’s films in relation to some recurrent ideas expressed by the director in assorted remarks, such as the mistrust of the mundane reality and the strategies to unravel its cracks; the use of the horror genre to instil a disquieting atmosphere and its propensity to question our epistemological foundations; the power of sound as a sensorial and narrative tool that opens up new perceptives; and the notions of immersion and time through sound intensity. This compilation of the director’s thoughts regarding some essential components of her filmmaking will hopefully provide new ways of looking at her work.5

Engendering cracks In 2013, Martel wrote a few words in the Argentine magazine Las Naves in response to its request for a short manifesto that should be both a statement and a reflection on her approach to cinema: Sometimes, rarely, in a piece of dialogue, in the coincidence of sounds, in an incomprehensible familiar image, the artifice of reality pokes out. All of our power and the mystery of the end lie in those in cracks. Making movies allows me to look for them and sometimes, rarely, find them. But they do not last long and I forget them.6

The crack (fisura) has been a key concept for Martel in unfolding her search ‘to cast doubt on the assumed nature of things’7 through cinema. The crack would be that moment when one realizes that reality is not the way one thought it was – for instance, someone could have experienced this kind of breach with infidelity,

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when one presumed the days were one thing but they end up being something else, as she suggested during a talk at the 55th New York Film Festival.8 In an interview with Bettendorff & Pérez Rial,9 Martel points out that it is a mistake to believe that reality is something definitive, like a fact, something that exists outside oneself and forced unto them. It is necessary, according to her, to investigate the arbitrariness of reality, what of reality is comprised of social contract. As Gemünden aptly summarized, ‘Filmmaking, she believes, enables us to discover the cracks in the every day, which in turn offer a glimpse into the constructiveness of what we call reality – the fact that reality is made, not given – and how the individual pieces are assembled.’10 As a way to both find and generate cracks, Martel has often employed the metaphor that we should look at what surrounds us with extra-terrestrial eyes, because the extra-terrestrial is not formatted like us to spontaneously accept the unacceptable. As an illustration, if an extra-terrestrial entity visits Earth today and sees some people eating at a restaurant and others eating out of a bin, they would not understand why one is socially unacceptable and the other is not.11 Thus, it is important to make viewers adopt extra-terrestrial eyes, forcing them to question what they see. Sometimes she picks the analogy of putting oneself inside a child’s head, declaring that she likes to set the camera at the height of an eight-year-old who observes the world with a lot of curiosity and no moral judgement.12, 13 For Martel, we are confined to a certain type of perception and cinema permits us to distort it, fighting the commonplace, which she defines as the road most travelled, a road that we do not even see it, and naturalizing things that were chosen, built. This naturalization is the greatest danger not only in the creation of narratives but in our whole way of being.14 Since in cinema everything is invented – pure artifice and trickery  – it grants the possibility of forging other realities, imagining other forms of living, disengaging from our education and mining the established system of beliefs and values to shake up what is naturalized.15 And for this reason I feel that my films have a certain political aspect. They show how a person can transform the world. It is totally possible for someone to transform the world through sheer willpower and through the collective willpower of others. We are the creators of our own reality. Reality is not something that exists but is something that we have constructed, and since we have made it, we can also remake it differently.16

The opportunity to put together a new reality is also present as a theme in the films. In an interview with Enríquez,17 Martel mentioned that La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) and La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) are both connected through a fundamental experience of hers: the discovery that God, the author who stabilizes and protects everything, does not exist. This revelation makes the systematized universe disappear, which ends up exposing itself as a mystery and an unjustified existence, leaving a feeling of helplessness as we are warned that we are indeed alone. Although helplessness may initially insinuate sadness, it is through this feeling that people come to face a fabulous situation in which the

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world seems infinitely more diverse, filled with many possible paths and providing immense freedom. She adds that La ciénaga and La niña santa deal with realms where helplessness is not yet accepted: in the former, something had to be broken to access that revelation, allowing Momi to take charge of her life – the same could be said about Zama (2017)18 – while the latter ends before the break. In La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008), Verónica runs over something with her car and only later tries to find what she did exactly and take responsibility for her actions; however, as evidence does not emerge, she falls into the complacency of those who shield her, electing to stay in her comfort zone and carry a burden for the rest of her life. In the same interview, Martel commented on how diseases are a useful starting point for envisaging other realities, since they work as an inverse process to education by disrupting the routine: When I write, I almost always start with illnesses. For me, far from being such a negative thing, as is often the case because it approaches death, illness has something wonderful about it that is the deactivation of tamed perception. It activates another perception. I am not talking about the blind man who is more tactful. My example is fever, which for me is something of an addiction, especially in childhood. It is like being on drugs. Or hepatitis, with its forty days in bed. You organize another world.19

In a later conversation with Enríquez,20 Martel would include the accident – which sets off the events in La ciénaga and La mujer sin cabeza – next to diseases as a ‘trope’ that can propel us to shatter the domestication of our perception and miseducate our senses. Other strategies that she has been elaborating and deepening throughout the years, continually debating them with audiences, students and journalists, are her attraction to the horror genre and a sound-based understanding of time.

The horror lurks around In the prologue of La ciénaga, middle-aged men and women move their chairs beside a pool. They walk slowly, like zombies, dragging not only the chairs but also their own flaccid and decaying bodies, heavy and sluggish. The chairs produce an annoying sound from their friction on the floor. The fragmented mise-en-scène and the dizzying montage build on that disturbing noise to instil a creepy, outlandish mood. According to Martel, it was crucial to open her first feature-length film in a weird, unreal fashion, as much to mark a blunt denial of costumbrismo (the classic portrayal of mannerisms and customs, so present in the tradition of Argentine cinema) as to signal to the audience that what they are about to watch is a fiction.21 The elements from the horror genre that impregnate the beginning of La ciénaga (and run throughout it) inhabit all of Martel’s films – sometimes as a furtive

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presence, sometimes conspicuously: in addition to the living-dead, their characters subtly recall ghosts and other monsters; they are thematically concerned with the supernatural and the unknown; their soundtracks are peppered by shuddersome barks, shrill birds and telephones, ominous low pitched frequencies and strange acousmatic noises; imperishable menaces lie off-screen; frightening oral legends punctuate daily life; their titles conjure up B-horror movies. Martel’s use of these conventions is a playfully subversive one, and horror is displayed less as a genre and more as a key to unlock new readings of the films. The director argues that what captivates her in the horror genre is the great impudence in using certain things (such as the nonsensical transformations of space) because of its pursuit of effectiveness. Martel has stressed how the genre unsettles our assumptions about what is right or wrong, or even real: ‘I love the dissolution of reality in horror films. The lack of certainty, and the lack of security. What are you seeing? What are you hearing?’22 She emphasizes that horror ‘always takes you to a place where you think you are safe and then you discover you may not be … That is essential for somebody who makes films, to be able to express an idea of instability or disturbance with an image that looks totally quiet or peaceful’.23 As Oubiña analysed, Martel’s films convey the uneasiness that arises when you realize that the ground you are standing on is less stable than it seemed, which he shrewdly labelled as ‘negligent realism’.24 The language of horror on which Martel calls is often intimately linked to her films’ defamiliarising aesthetics, generative of uncanny effects and doubts about reality. Motifs from horror which are commonly used conservatively to demarcate social or sexual otherness are often repeated transgressively in Martel’s work in ways which overturn the genre’s conservative imperatives, from La ciénaga’s queer embracing of the abject of monstrous (adolescent) femininity to La niña santa’s uncanny protagonist Amalia who challenges horror’s disciplining of the female gaze, and La mujer sin cabeza’s use of ghosts to evoke social exclusion and the film’s conversion of the dominant social group into the primary source of fear.25

The filmmaker also discloses that the concept of the monstrous is very fruitful to conceive her characters, thinking of them not as men, women, adults or children (thus escaping age, sexual and social indicators) but as monsters: mysterious beings who cannot be easily categorized or wholly known, and whose actions and reactions are unpredictable  – a dynamics of fickleness and stability like that of the films themselves. According to her, our notion of the monster is linked to the deviant, the marginalized, that which bends the rules or nature’s intent. In the classical tradition, though, instead of being something to eradicate or eliminate, the monster is something that can bring a revelation. From an etymological understanding, the monster shows and warns (from the Latin monere), revealing the uncommon, thus sending out an alert that produces the feeling that something is out of order.26 This method aids Martel in stripping away her prejudices while giving the characters more freedom.

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Additionally, the director has identified among her favourite films Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes without a Face, Georges Franju, 1960), Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) and Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962). Still, Martel has insisted that she is not a cinephile27 and her interest in storytelling does not come from cinema but from horror tales told by her grandmother to kids at siesta time:28 I was raised on stories where fantastical things cohabitated with everyday life. For me this has nothing to do with the ‘magical realism’ often discussed in Latin American literature and culture. I do not agree with this idea that there exists some sort of layer of magic over reality. Because this assumes that there is a concrete reality and every now and then something magical appears. In contrast, our real experience is based in the intermingling of reality and the fantastical.29

Plunging into the pool: A sound approach Martel has underlined how she is influenced by oral traditions, from her grandmother’s horror tales to popular fables and any type of dialogue  – with a special fascination for the drift of her mother’s conversation on the phone. According to the filmmaker, the arrangements we make when speaking are incredibly innovative. There are no defined parameters: space and time move due to verbal tenses; meaning and emotion move; we dissolve, and our age and identity recede; other people become present; there is a permanent metamorphosis of the current reality.30 To Bettendorff & Pérez Rial, Martel details the impact on her of the world of conversations and how it has contributed to frame insight and assemble audiovisual narrative structures.31 Back in Salta, as a keen listener to the exchanges between her mother, grandmother, their neighbours and friends (notably bedridden old ladies like Aunt Lala in La mujer sin cabeza), she was struck by how they could expose bad intentions in such a delicate way. By how they talked about many things that were not true, that were family inventions, using phrases loaded with paradoxes and humour. How they did not necessarily stick to a subject but talked about all kinds of issues, going off on tangents. How, with the typical pretence of northern Argentina, the language is not referential but has plenty of twists, addressing things indirectly. And how chats had no purpose, they were just a way of being together. These are important pillars for the construction of her films. The director pays heed not only to the semantic scope of the conversations but also to the sound quality of the dialogues, which goes beyond the phonetic content of the words and can oscillate as a purely acoustic phenomenon. Sound, in general, takes a leading role in both the design of the films and within the diegesis, as Martel has untiringly demonstrated32 and several studies have scrutinized.33 It is never a redundant accompaniment to what is on screen; it takes over the conduction of the narrative flow almost all the time, which is very operative in keeping the sustained tension that is a distinctive trait of her films. This happens,

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as she explains, because sound is a less referential dimension: it is highly evocative, very wild and less organized compared to the other senses, bringing to our mind a huge amount of information that is not shaped immediately – for instance, a sharp bang can be a slammed door, a bursting bladder, clapping hands, an object that falls … the possibilities are endless, and Martel milks the most out of it (another lesson she retrieves from the horror genre). ‘Guided by the sound, we go slower, think for longer, pay more attention, rather than being so sure we know a territory. It makes us realize other things beyond what is evident.’34 Furthermore, the filmmaker highlights how sound is a vibration that physically touches the audience’s entire body, providing a tactile quality to cinema. Closing their eyes, the audience can escape from the image, but they will never be able to escape the sound, which reaches them through the ears and the skin. Martel imagines the movie theatre as a swimming pool,35 where the spectator would be immersed in a mass of air, a pond of waves spreading in all directions. This is her favourite metaphor for transmitting her concept of time as volume: ‘If we are subjecting ourselves to the idea of time and vision, we are going in one direction, but once we allow ourselves to think of sound, things happen simultaneously that allow us to break through. It is the idea of creating a soundscape, or volume, instead of a plane.’36 While image is sent out in a straight direction, displayed in a rectangle of light, sound propagates three-dimensionally. Sound is a means of thinking about a model of time that avoids the conventional straight arrow version … Time running forward seems to be very much related to the privileging of sight over our other senses. The future is further ahead and that is where we are going. And if we are not going there, it will come to us anyway. We are so afraid of death because we are so centred on the future. The direction of the arrow also marks that: there, not here and now.37

Time in the whirlpool At recent conferences,38 Martel has developed the idea that the timeline forces us into a cost-consequence order, into a teleological course of life required by both the Judeo-Christian doctrine (we need to believe in fate in order to act decently) and the economy that governs us (we need to believe in the future in order to get into debt and consume unnecessary things). This hegemonic model, which floods cinema chains and streaming platforms, endorses a kind of storytelling that assumes that we are always outside the present moment, that we are watching the scenes thinking about what will happen instead of what is happening. She does not want to reproduce it narratively but takes advantage of it to capture and maintain the viewer’s attention: ‘You need classical cinema because this is what creates expectations. And then within this system, we try to disturb that narrative. So that the spectator can withdraw from the constant search for consequence, and the narrator too.’39

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Martel recounts that she has been relying on these principles since La ciénaga – the weight of her mother’s calls, with their troubled chronology, when weaving the plots; the frames composed in layers and their multiple actions; the elliptical editing based on the memory and its gaps – but could rationalize and elaborate this ‘mechanism’ further during her transition from adapting Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s El Eternauta (a project not carried through) to adapting Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama. The former being an iconic Argentine comic (first published from 1957 to 1959) that tells of an outer space invasion and the title character’s voyage through eternity; the latter a story (published in 1956) that takes place in the late eighteenth century about a disgruntled functionary who serves the Spanish crown in the colonies made her think a lot about time. In Zama, the reflection on envisioning a future as well as a past became central. To begin with, there is Don Diego de Zama’s enduring espera – it is vital to clarify that in Spanish ‘to wait’ and ‘to hope’ are expressed by this same word – that results in stagnation, dissipation of energy, a journey not taken, missed opportunities, unproductive pursuits  … postures that rule the lives of many of Martel’s key characters, who for convenience opt to get away from a universe in movement. Alongside it, the filmmaker advocates for us to have the same freedom of imagination that we use to think about the future in thinking about the past, and she describes Zama as a sci-fi adventure. Like every narrative, history is plagued by arbitrariness and biases, having been written by those who won. Hence, adhering to Di Benedetto, she prefers to invent rather than recreate the past, proposing daring hypotheses about it.40 Martel does not ignore or renounce the historical setting, since Zama recovers many elements of the colonial world (such as etiquette, hierarchies, bureaucratic structure, clothing of the time, etc.), but she does so by mixing them up with nonsensical events or distorting them to a point where everything seems ludicrous, like the heavy wigs worn in the hell of the tropics. At the same time, although it is steeped folly and apparently in the remote past, this colonial world has not entirely ceased to exist, and the film reveals patriarchal and racial relations that still organize Latin American societies today – relations that Martel has closely explored in her previous features. Therefore, Zama presents a deliberately anachronistic mise-enscène and bets on a temporal configuration that challenges linear evolutionary time, proposing a circular, repetitive, cyclical time instead. This is how most Native American peoples conceive history, as Rivera Cusicanqui taught us: a history that moves in cycles and spirals that sets a course that will invariably converge on the same place.41 There is no ‘before’ or ‘after’, and both past and future are contained in the present – regression or progression of the past, repeating or overcoming it, is at stake in every situation and depends on our actions.

Un-learnings, or final remarks During a talk in Rotterdam, Martel recollected an episode from her childhood: while playing alone in a room, she noticed an intense sound coming from the wall. While her first reaction was to scream for help, thinking it was the devil, she

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suddenly realized that it could also be … God. This striking experience in infancy turned into existential doubt: What is real? What is beyond what we see? What is good or bad? What can we do with it?42 For the director, making films is the way she found to share all this questioning, which she condensed in the notion of a ‘crack’ – in her words, that instant ‘in which the veil is lifted for a second and you recognize the absurdity of the world … It is a moment of epiphany, one that undermines reality and all the duties it imposes on us’.43 For this gesture to reverberate in the audience, Martel has developed some ‘tools’ – the very particular and refreshing employment of the horror genre, the strong aural and haptic dimension, and an alternative understanding of time that dilutes the focus on the future are a few of them. These are topics (very intertwined together) that this chapter addressed from the perspective of the filmmaker, who has willingly discussed them publicly. Accessing these ideas can enrich the understanding of her films and shine a new light on their idiosyncratic aspects that contribute to the effect of bewilderment that pushes us to be suspicious, look with extra-terrestrial eyes and listen more carefully. Failures can be blessings, monsters can be divinities. As Amalia in La niña santa, we must be attentive to the signs the world sends us – from the frankly bizarre ASMR videos to Di Benedetto’s masterpiece and our mother’s prose on the phone.

This text was developed during my stay at Comenius University in Bratislava within the National Scholarship Programme, funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. I would like to thank Mariana Duccini and Tainah Negreiros for their accurate readings and comments, and to Julia Kratje, with whom it is always a joy to submerge into the mighty Martelian river. Also to Alisa Wilhelm for proofreading the text and for her fundamental support in my adventures in the English language. Julieta Mortati, from Tenemos las Máquinas publishing house, kindly sent me Martel’s contribution to Las Naves; Christoph Hochhäusler and Nicolas Wackerbarth generously shared recordings of Martel’s passage through Berlin in 2018 (her extensive interview with Revolver Live! at the Volksbühne and the masterclass at the Deutsche Filmund Fernsehakademie Berlin – DFFB, whose excerpts were published at Revolver n. 39), and for that I am grateful.

NOTES Introduction 1 Aumont, Les Théories des Cinéastes (Paris: Nathan, 2002). Aumont, ‘Un Film Peut-Il Être un Acte de Théorie?’, in Érudit, vol. 17, no 2–3, Printemps (2007), pp. 193–211. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cine/2007-v17-n23-cine1887/016755ar/ 2 The three volumes may be accessed at: https://labcom.ubi.pt/files/tcineastas/ 3 Oliveira, Daniel, Queers que Criam: Modos de R/Existência no Cinema de Andrew Haigh, Céline Sciamma e Dee Rees (MA Dissertation in Cinema, University of Beira Interior, 2021). https://ubibliorum.ubi.pt/handle/10400.6/11222

Chapter 1 1

Astruc, Alexandre, ‘The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Scott Mackenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2014), p. 606. 2 Dulac, Germaine, ‘At D. W. Griffith’s’, in Prosper Hillairet (ed.), Writings on Cinema (1919–1937) (Paris: Eyewash Books, Paris Expérimental, 2018), location 468. 3 Ibid., location 475. 4 Dulac, Germaine, ‘Germaine Dulac Interview with Paul Desclaux’, in Prosper Hillairet (ed.), Writings On Cinema (1919–1937) (Paris: Eyewash Books, Paris Expérimental, 2018), location 575. 5 Epstein, Jean, ‘Cinema and Modern Literature’, in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 272. 6 Epstein, Jean, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 296. 7 Ibid. 8 Gance, Abel, ‘Le Temps de L’Image est Venu!’, in Germaine Dulac et al. (1927), L’Art Cinematographique II (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 84. In the original: ‘Il y a le cinéma et il y a l’art du cinéma qui n’a pas encore créé son néologisme.’ 9 Klee, Paul (2004), Creative Credo. https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/paul-klee/ creative-credo/ 10 Astruc, Alexandre, ‘The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Scott Mackenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2014), p. 604.

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11 Ibid., p. 606. 12 Truffaut, François, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), French New Wave Articles, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 31, January, 1954. Available online: http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/a-certaintendency-of-french-cinema-truffaut.shtml (accessed 15 April 2020). 13 Truffaut, François, ‘Ali Baba et la “Politique des Auteurs”’, in Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 44 (Paris, February, 1955), p. 47. In the original: ‘Ali Baba eut-il été raté que je l’eusse quand même défendu en vertu de la Politique des Auteurs que mes congénères en critique et moi-même pratiquons. Toute basée sur la belle formule de Giraudoux: “il n’y a pas d’œuvre, il n’y a que des auteurs”.’ 14 Bazin, André, ‘La Politique des Auteurs’, in Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham (eds), French New Wave Articles, Cahiers du Cinéma, nº 70, April, 1957. http://www. newwavefilm.com/about/la-politique-des-auteurs-bazin.shtml 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Sarris, Andrew, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader (Washington, DC: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 132–3. 22 Buscombe, Edward, ‘Ideas of Authorship’, Screen, vol. 14, no 3 (Autumn, 1973), p. 75. 23 Ibid., pp. 78–9. 24 Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996), p. 30. 25 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: BFI/Routledge, 2001), p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 212. 27 Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 124. 28 Ibid., p. 127. 29 Ibid., pp. 130–1. 30 Stam, Robert, Film Theory: An Introduction (Massachusetts, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 87. 31 Sarris, Andrew, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader (Washington, DC: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 132–3. 32 Kael, Pauline, ‘Circles and Squares’, Film Quarterly, vol. 16, no 3 (Spring, 1963), p. 17. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 21. 35 Buscombe 1973: 80. 36 Wollen, Peter, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: BFI, 2013), p. 62. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 145. 39 Ibid. 40 Caughie, John (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: BFI, 1981). 41 Naremore, James, ‘Authorship’, in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 9.

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42 Caughie, John, ‘Authors and Auteurs: The Uses of Theory’, in James Donald and Michael Renov (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage, 2008), p. 408. 43 Cunha, Tito Cardoso e, ‘Teorias dos Cineastas Versus Teoria do Autor’, in Penafria, Manuela, et al. (orgs.), Revisitar a teoria do cinema: Teoria dos Cineastas vol. 3 (Covilhã: UBI, 2017), p. 20. In the original: ‘Em suma, a estratégia crítica para impor o reconhecimento do cinema como arte passa pelo reconhecimento da qualidade de autor aos que a fazem.’ 44 Baggio, Eduardo, Graça, André Rui and Penafria, Manuela, ‘Teoria dos Cineastas: uma abordagem para a teoria do cinema’, Revista Científica da FAP, vol. 12 (January/ July, 2015), p. 25. In the original: ‘pessoas envolvidas na produção de um filme que tenham atividades criativas.’ 45 Naremore, James, ‘Authorship’, in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 16. 46 Deleuze, Gilles, O ato de criação (São Paulo: Folha de São Paulo, 1999), p. 6. 47 Langie, Cíntia, ‘Ter uma Ideia em Cinema: sobre o ato de criação no cinema brasileiro feito por mulheres’, in Paralelo 31, ed. 15 (December, 2020), p. 107. In the original: ‘a ideia de que a criação está num mesclar de coisas e que ela vai além do previsível. Esse mesclar de coisas é anterior à vontade das artistas, supera convenções e fórmulas detectáveis e conecta-se com um certo espírito do tempo. A criação é compartilhada.’ 48 Barthes, Roland, The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). 49 Salles, Cecilia A., Redes da criação: a construção da obra de arte (São Paulo: Horizonte, 2008), p. 22. In the original: ‘Essa visão do processo de criação nos coloca em pleno campo relacional, sem vocação para o isolamento de seus componentes, exigindo, portanto, permanente atenção a contextualizações e, ativação das relações que o mantêm como sistema complexo.’ 50 Salles, Cecilia A., Gesto Inacabado: processo de criação artística (São Paulo: Annablume, 2011), p. 33. In the original: ‘Discutir arte sob o ponto de vista de seu movimento criador é acreditar que a obra consiste em uma cadeia infinita de agregação de ideias, isto é, em uma série infinita de aproximações para atingi-la (Calvino, 1990).’ 51 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: BFI/Routledge, 2001), p. 212. 52 Bazin, André, ‘La Politique des Auteurs’, 1957, p. 2. 53 Naremore, James, ‘Authorship’, in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), A Companion to Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 16. 54 Ibid.

Chapter 2 1 2

This chapter was translated into English by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira. Cunha, Tito Cardoso e, ‘Teorias dos Cineastas Versus Teoria do Autor’, in Manuela Penafria, Eduardo Tulio Baggio, André Rui Graça and Denize Araújo (eds), Teoria dos Cineastas: Revisitar a Teoria do Cinema, vol. 3 (Covilhã: LabCom, 2017), pp. 15–27.

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Ibid., p. 21. The crisis of the author and its consequences in literature (and beyond) has been thematized by Roland Barthes (2015) and Michel Foucault (2001b). The expression, created by critics from the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s (and who later formed the nucleus of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers: François Truffaut, JeanLuc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol), was used to define a practice of cinema criticism whose objective was to identify auteurs (creative artists) among the directors (artisans) of Hollywood cinema. The practice was later extended to other cinemas. For more details, see La cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture (de Baecque 2003). The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘claro que há relações com a minha vida pessoal mesmo, eu, Karim, ali. Saí de casa aos 16 anos, depois volto, saio de novo, entendeu? Isso de não ter casa é uma preocupação da minha vida’. Aïnouz, Karim, ‘Omelete Entrevista: Karim Aïnouz, Diretor de O Céu de Suely’, entrevista realizada por Marcelo Hessel, Revista eletrônica Omelete, 16 de novembro de 2006 (translation mine). https://www.omelete.com.br/filmes/omelete-entrevista-karim-ainouz-diretorde-o-ceu-de-suely-parte-2 The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘Outro dia me falaram: “todos os seus filmes terminam em estradas, com exceção do Madame Satã”. E não é que é verdade? Não foi algo que eu tenha pensado muito’. Aïnouz, Karim, ‘Entrevista: Os Deslocamentos e as Perturbações no Cinema de Karim Aïnouz’, Entrevista realizada por Gabriel Carneiro, Revista de Cinema, 14 de maio de 2014(a) (translation mine). http://revistadecinema. com.br/2014/05/os-deslocamentos-e-as-pertubacoes-no-cinema-de-karim-ainouz/ Deleuze, Gilles, ‘What Is the Creative Act?’, in David Lapoujade (ed.), Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 312–324. ‘I consider that having an idea, in any case, is not on the order of communication. This is the point I was aiming for. Everything we are talking about is irreducible to any communication’ (Deleuze 2006). The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘Talvez o que me caracterize enquanto realizador seja o facto de os filmes que faço falarem de coisas necessárias para mim, mas também para o Mundo. Questões que preciso colocar para o Mundo’. Aïnouz, Karim, ‘Entrevista: Karim Aïnouz, o Realizador que “Queria Falar do Risco”’, Entrevista realizada por Inês Henriques, Fest Magazine, dezembro de 2014(b) (translation mine). http://www.festmag.com/2014/12/entrevista-karim-ainouz-orealizador-que-queria-falar-do-risco/ The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘Esse filme [Praia do Futuro, 2014] foi a necessidade de falar de medo e coragem. Por isso eu acho que os meus filmes estão sempre pautados por questões necessárias, não só importantes, e que eu tenha urgência de falar delas’. Aïnouz, Karim, ‘Entrevista: Karim Aïnouz, o Realizador que “Queria Falar do Risco”’, Entrevista realizada por Inês Henriques, Fest Magazine, dezembro de 2014(b) (translation mine). http://www.festmag.com/2014/12/ entrevista-karim-ainouz-o-realizador-que-queria-falar-do-risco/ I dealt with the indeterminations of the interviews for almost a decade as a professional journalist. The richness of the practice falls precisely in these indeterminations. What follows reflects a little of my experience over these years. Bergson, Henri, Matière et Mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 2012. The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘Acho que o filme renasce a cada momento. Ele [O céu de Suely] renasceu na mixagem – não mexemos na imagem, mas havia vários elementos de som que transformaram o filme’, Aïnouz, Karim, ‘Omelete

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21

22 23 24 25

26

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Notes Entrevista: Karim Aïnouz, Diretor de O Céu de Suely’, entrevista realizada por Marcelo Hessel, in Revista eletrônica Omelete, 16 de novembro de 2006 (translation mine). https://www.omelete.com.br/filmes/omelete-entrevista-karim-ainouz-diretorde-o-ceu-de-suely-parte-2 Burch, Nöel, ‘Fonctions de l’aléa’, in Praxis du Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Twilight of the Idols – or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer (Glasgow: Good Press, 2019). Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 326. Foucault, Michel, ‘La Pensée du Dehors (1966)’, in Dits et Écrits I. 1954–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001a). Aumont, Jacques, ‘Un Film Peut-Il Être un Acte de Théorie?’, Érudit, vol. 17, nos 2–3 (2007), pp. 193–211. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cine/2007-v17-n2-3cine1887/016755ar/ Penafria, Manuela, Vilão, Henrique and Ramiro, Tiago, ‘O ato de criação cinematográfica e a “Teoria dos Cineastas”’, in Manuela Penafria, Eduardo Tulio Baggio, André Rui Graça and Denize Araújo (eds), Teoria dos Cineastas: Propostas para a Teoria do Cinema, vol. 2 (Covilhã: LabCom, 2016), pp. 93–113. The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘os requisitos de “teoria”, é possível teorizar a partir do filme’. Penafria, Manuela, Vilão, Henrique and Ramiro, Tiago, ‘O ato de criação cinematográfica e a “Teoria dos Cineastas”’, in Manuela Penafria, Eduardo Tulio Baggio, André Rui Graça and Denize Araújo (eds), Teoria dos Cineastas: Propostas para a Teoria do Cinema, vol. 2 (Covilhã: LabCom, 2016), p. 108 (translation mine). Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Empirismo eretico (Milano: Editore Garzanti, 2015). Deleuze, Gilles, L’Image-Temps (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985). Deleuze, Gilles, ‘What Is the Creative Act?’, in David Lapoujade (ed.), Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 312–324. The same principle of uncertainty controls the reception. We know that films are not exhausted in their already-enunciated supposed meanings. Films create possible universes, even after they end, which go beyond the significations that ultimately depend also on whoever watches them, on the culture in which their viewers are included, etc. Referring to Deleuze’s lecture on what is having an idea in cinema (2006), Alain Badiou (2015) highlights a certain enigmatic character in what Deleuze calls an ‘idea’ that is tied, among other things, to the problem of transposition: in the end, how does one go from an idea in cinema to concepts about the cinema given by philosophy? The answer for Badiou lies in the role that philosophy would play as a common ground of art, and therefore, as a creator of concepts for the cinema based on cinematic ideas. Keeping in mind Deleuze’s cinema books and the identification in them of filmmakers as thinkers, it seems to me that the films (as the thought of the filmmaker), and not the ideas, would play this role. Gilles Deleuze calls ‘blocks of movement/duration’ (2006) that with which the filmmaker creates in making the film. The idea, which will be developed later in the book What Is Philosophy? (1996) written in partnership with Félix Guattari, echoes the Bergsonian concept (Bergson 2012) of mobile cuts of duration, which is fundamental for the ontological demarcation of cinema proposed by Deleuze in The Movement Image (1983) and The Time Image (1985). Penafria, Manuela, Vilão, Henrique and Ramiro, Tiago, ‘O ato de criação cinematográfica e a “Teoria dos Cineastas”’, in Manuela Penafria, Eduardo Baggio,

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André Rui Graça and Denize Araújo (eds), Teoria dos Cineastas: Propostas para a Teoria do Cinema, vol. 2 (Covilhã: LabCom, 2016), pp. 93–113. 29 According to Penafria et al., if the researcher’s gaze ‘coincides with that of the filmmaker or is not something that should not be largely concerning, since it is from the experience of envisioning that the presented interpretations appear to us’ (Penafria et al. 2016: 111, translation mine). [The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘coincide com o do cineasta ou não é algo que não deve ser grandemente preocupante, uma vez que é da experiência de visionamento que nos surgiram as interpretações apresentadas’.] 30 The palimpsest character of the Filmmakers on Film approach is highlighted in Observações sobre a ‘Teoria dos Cineastas’ – nota dos editores [Observations on the ‘Filmmakers on Film’ – A Note by the Editors], in Revisitar a Teoria do Cinema: Teoria dos cineastas, vol. 3: ‘it concerns, clearly, a writing about another writing (even if “writing” is here understood as a term that includes written, oral and even filmic manifestations)’ (Penafria et al. 2017: 36, translation mine). [The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘trata-se, claramente, de uma escrita sobre uma outra escrita (ainda que “escrita” seja aqui entendido como um termo que inclui manifestações escritas, orais e mesmo fílmicas)’.] 31 The original quote in Portuguese reads: ‘teoria do cinema a partir dos cineastas’. Penafria, Manuela, ‘Fazer a teoria do cinema a partir de cineastas – entrevista com Manuela Penafria’, Entrevista realizada por Leites, Bruno, Baggio, Eduardo and Carvalho, Marcelo, in Revista InTexto, Dossiê Teoria de Cineastas, vol. 48 (2019), p. 17. https://seer.ufrgs.br/intexto/issue/view/3841

Chapter 3 Chinita, Fátima, O Espectador (In)Visível: Reflexividade na Óptica do Espectador em Inland Empire de David Lynch (Covilhã: LabCom, 2013), p. 5. 2 Morin, Edgar, O Cinema ou o Homem Imaginário: Ensaio de Antropologia, trans. António Pedro Vasconcelos (Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1997 [1956]). Schefer, JeanLouis, L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (Sl: Cahiers du cinéma-Gallimard, 1997 [1980]). 3 We would like to clarify that the use of the term institutional, in this text, is not related to the discussion developed in Judith Mayne’s Spectator and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Whereas Mayne frames institutional as one of the three models of spectatorship (the other two being the perceptual and the historical), we use the word institutional to designate lines of thought that originate, stem and continue to be developed in academic, literary and intellectual circles. 4 Our choice for Portuguese directors is due not only to the fact that Portuguese is our mother language but mostly because Portuguese cinema is quite prominent, with international circulation and a cinematography pertaining to the art-film circuit. 5 Marcelino, João, ‘Não olho para o que fiz, olho para o que vou fazer’, 2011. https:// www.dn.pt/artes/nao-olho-para-o-que-fiz-olho-para-o-que-vou-fazer-1764177.html 6 Oliveira, Manoel de, Ditos e Escritos, 2021, p. 68. 7 Ibid., p. 76. 8 Ramos, Jorge, Dicionário do Cinema Português, 1989–2003, 2005, p. 160. 9 Baecque, Antoine and Jacques Parsi, Conversas com Manoel de Oliveira, 1999, p. 48. 10 Araújo, Nelson, A Arquitetura do Plano Oliveiriano, p. 72. 1

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11 Baecque, Antoine and Jacques Parsi, Conversas com Manoel de Oliveira, 1999, p. 48. 12 Guimarães, César, ‘O que é uma comunidade de cinema?’ 2015, p. 49. 13 Câmara, Vasco, ‘Pedro Costa: “Em Portugal estamos a um passo deste abismo: faz-nos falta o cinema …”’, Público (23 September 2009). https://www.publico.pt/2009/09/23/ culturaipsilon/noticia/quotem-portugal-estamos-a-um-passo-deste-abismo-faz-nosfalta-o-cinema-quot-241370 14 Ibid. 15 Alan, René and Hélder Moreira, ‘Precisamos das costas quentes lá fora para enfrentarmos Portugal’, 2013, p. 227. 16 Ibid., p. 225. 17 Ribeiro, Anabela Mota, ‘Teresa Villaverde’, https://anabelamotaribeiro.pt/teresavillaverde-97007 18 Chinita, Fátima, O Espectador (In)Visível: Reflexividade na Óptica do Espectador em Inland Empire de David Lynch, 2013, p. 9. 19 Pereira, Ana Catarina, ‘A voz interior de Cláudia Varejão: Entrevista coletiva’, 2020, p. 124. 20 Ibid., p. 125. 21 Gomes, Hugo, ‘As salas de cinema, mais do que nunca, precisam de nós todos’, 2020. https://c7nema.net/entrevistas/item/53123-claudia-varejao-as-salas-de-cinema-maisdo-que-nunca-precisam-de-nos-todos-sem-excecao.html 22 Ibid. 23 Hart, Stephen, Latin American Cinema, 2015, pp. 48–9. 24 Ibid., p. 50. 25 Ibid., p. 53. 26 Guzmán, Patricio, Filmar o Que Não se Vê: Um Modo de Fazer Documentários, 2017, p. 70. 27 Ibid. 28 Cisneros, James, ‘The Figure of Memory in Chilean Cinema: Patricio Guzmán and Raúl Ruiz’, 2006, p. 60. 29 Ibid., p. 71. 30 Guzmán, Patricio, Filmar o Que Não se Vê: Um Modo de Fazer Documentários, 2017, p. 13. 31 Ibid., p. 21. 32 Ibid., p. 14.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Jáuregui, ‘Carlos, ‘Entrevista con Víctor Gaviria. Violencia, representación y voluntad realista’, in Imagen y subalternidad: el cine de Víctor Gaviria (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2003), p. 92. Cuddon, John Anthony, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 590–3. Duno-Gottberg, ‘Víctor Gaviria y la huella de lo real’, Revista Objeto Visual, vol. 9, nos 1–13 (2003), p. 4. All translations from Spanish are my own. Ibid., p. 5. ‘Tins at the Bottom of the River.’ The translation is mine. ‘Open Letter to Colombian Filmmakers.’ The translation is mine. Juana Suárez tells how, at the ‘Third Film and Video Festival’, in Santa Fe de Antioquia (December 2002), Carlos Mayolo said that Gaviria’s films were a kind of pornomiseria, while Gaviria was present in the room. I agree with Suárez when she points that this judgement is rooted in the preoccupation with giving a good international image of Colombia, in that it provides an image of a non-violent country.

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Looking for Clovers. The translation is mine. Magnifying Glass of the End of the World. The translation is mine. Red Train Car. The translation is mine. Stories from Campo Valdés. The translation is mine. In the City Someone Perplexed Too. The translation is mine. The Boy Who Died Young. The translation is mine. At the End of the Day the Countryside Is Not That Green. The translation is mine. Cinema and Reality. The translation is mine. Víctor Gaviria in Words. The translation is mine. Behind the Cameras. The translation is mine. Gaviria, Víctor, Víctor Gaviria en palabras, ed. Luis Fernando Calderón (Medellin: Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, 2009), p. 11. 19 Gaviria cited in Arenas, ‘Víctor Gaviria en flashback’, Revista Kinetoscopio, vol. 5, no 26 (1994), p. 76. 20 Gaviria, Víctor, Víctor Gaviria en palabras, ed. Luis Fernando Calderón (Medellin: Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, 2009), p. 12. 21 Arenas, Fernando, ‘Víctor Gaviria en flashback’, Revista Kinetoscopio, vol. 5, no 26 (1994), p. 77. 22 My use of the verb ‘to look’ might sound awkward as I am referring to blind children. However, I choose it to express the way in which some of the children face the camera or other objects, a way that is very attentive and that seems to have an intention (as when they look for clovers), even though they are partially or completely blind. 23 Gaviria, Víctor, ‘Del documental y sus habitantes’, Revista Kinetoscopio, vol. 5, no 26 (1994), p. 87. 24 Ibid. 25 Gaviria, Víctor, Víctor Gaviria en palabras, ed. Luis Fernando Calderón (Medellin: Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, 2009), pp. 50–1. 26 Ibid., p. 51. 27 Gaviria, Víctor, ‘La inteligencia del corazón’, in El adiós del tío Miguel (Bogota: Frailejón Editores, 2012), p. 45. 28 Jáuregui, Carlos, ‘Entrevista con Víctor Gaviria. Violencia, representación y voluntad realista’, in Imagen y subalternidad: el cine de Víctor Gaviria (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2003), p. 92. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Gaviria, Víctor, Víctor Gaviria, ed. Luis Fernando Calderón (Medellin: Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, 2009), p. 45. 32 Ibid., p. 47. 33 Jáuregui, Carlos, ‘Entrevista con Víctor Gaviria. Violencia, representación y voluntad realista’, in Imagen y subalternidad: el cine de Víctor Gaviria (Caracas: Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 2003), p. 94. 34 Gaviria, Víctor, Víctor Gaviria, ed. Luis Fernando Calderón (Medellin: Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, 2009), p. 24. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Chapter 5 1

Nascimento, Débora and Luciana Veras, ‘Fiz o contrário do que se esperava’, 2019. https://revistacontinente.com.br/edicoes/225/rfiz-o-contrario-do-que-se-esperavar–2

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Notes Gorbman, Claudia, ‘Auteur Music’, 2007, p. 150. See Truffaut, François, 2000. For more details on authorism, see Bordwell and Thompson (2018) and Cousins (2004). Hubbert, Julie, ‘The Compilation Soundtrack from the 1960s to the Present’, 2014, p. 161. Gorbman, Claudia, ‘Auteur Music’, 2007, p. 150. Bacurau is the third feature film of his career, co-written and co-directed by Juliano Dornelles. Interviewed by Pereira (2019). https://revistacontinente.com.br/secoes/artigo/ocinema-na-musica-de-bacurau Interviewd by Angelo (2013). https://revistamovinup.com/artigosespeciais/ entrevistas/2013/dj-dolores-o-som-do-cinema-pernambucano Hubbert, Julie, ‘The Compilation Soundtrack from the 1960s to the Present’, 2014, p. 302. As described by Pierre Bourdieu (1979). Tropicália was an artistic movement in Brazil in the late 1960s, heavily influenced by pop art and avant-garde, and proposed the fusion of traditional manifestations of the country’s culture with global elements of pop culture and more modern aesthetic innovations. Gorbman, Claudia, ‘Auteur Music’, 2007, p. 151. Cunha, Tito Cardoso e, ‘Teoria dos Cineastas Versus Teoria do Autor’, 2017, p. 23. Interviewed by Pinheiro (2018). https://artebrasileiros.com.br/cultura/sob-o-signode-aquarius/ He also composed original music for Aquarius and signed Bacurau’s original score along with his brother, Tomaz Alves Souza. Interviewed by Contente (2013). https://jc.ne10.uol.com.br/canal/cultura/cinema/ noticia/2013/01/04/som-e-50_porcento-do-meu-filme-diz-kleber-mendoncafilho-68806.php In Portuguese: ‘Charles, anjo 45 / Protetor dos fracos / E dos oprimidos / Robin Hood dos morros.’ In Portuguese: ‘Foi sem querer tirar férias / Numa colônia penal / Então os malandros otários / Deitaram na sopa / E uma tremenda bagunça / O nosso morro virou.’ Kalinak, Kathryn, Film Music: A Very Short Introduction, 2010, p. 87. Interviewed by Pinheiro (2018). https://artebrasileiros.com.br/cultura/sob-o-signode-aquarius/ Just as Sarah Quines (2013) points out. Bartmanski, Dominik and Ian Woodward, Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age, 2015, p. 30. Marks, Laura U., The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 1999, p. 80. Ibid., p. 81. Interviewed by Fonseca (2016). http://revistadecinema.com.br/2016/07/aconsagracao-de-kleber-mendonca/ In Roberto Carlos’ song, the ‘lyrical self ’ dreams of planting a flower in his neighbour’s yard. Interestingly, we note that Clara lives alone in the building Aquarius, as all of her neighbours have sold their apartments. They all wait impatiently for Clara to finally sell her apartment as well. Thus, the song’s lyrics reveal that her relationship with the neighbourhood is the opposite of the persona on the song. Obici, Giuliano (2008: 77) borrows the concept of territory from Deleuze and Guattari (1972), and applies it to the act of hearing familiar music.

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29 Ibid., p. 93. 30 Interviewed by Fonseca (2016). http://revistadecinema.com.br/2016/07/aconsagracao-de-kleber-mendonca/ 31 DeNora, Tia, Music in Everyday Life, 2004, p. 63. 32 In Portuguese: ‘Minha paixão há de brilhar na noite / No céu de uma cidade do interior.’ 33 In Portuguese: ‘Para gravar num disco voador / Eu vou fazer uma canção de amor / Como um objeto não identificado.’ 34 In Portuguese: ‘Se alguém tem que morrer / Que seja para melhorar.’ 35 A drone is a minimalist musical style that consists of sequences of prolonged and or repeated notes to build atmospheres or sound textures. 36 The interview can be seen on YouTube. https://youtu.be/4hQjVGAZ4pQ 37 Bacurau is a small nocturnal bird that inhabits northeastern Brazil’s dry and hot region and feeds on insects. It is also a Brazilian slang that refers to the last bus or train at dawn before the public transport system’s closure for the day. 38 In Portuguese: ‘São muitas horas da noite / São horas do bacurau / (…) Um caçador esquecido / Espreita do alto jirau / (…) Alguém soluça e lamenta / Todo esse mundo tão mau.’

Chapter 6 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

In the same period, Godard made other ‘scenario’-films, Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and Scénario de Je vous salue Marie (1985). Unlike Scénario du Film Passion, however, they were made before the feature after which they are named, thus serving more as preparatory notes than as a retrospective reflection. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise. Godard seems to have derived this quote from Roger Caillois’ preface to a 1946 edition of Lautréamont’s complete works. Caillois emphasizes the romantic legacy in the work of Lautréamont, aligning this legacy with a form of reflexivity inherent to the artwork and an interrogation of the limits of literature (Caillois 1946: v–vi). In this essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities), Walter Benjamin makes a distinction between ‘commentary’ and ‘criticism’ (see Jennings 1987: 181), the former undertaking the preliminary work for the latter’s quest for truth. I will not hold to this distinction in this chapter. My reading is indebted to Benjamin’s Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticim, 1920). Frederic Jameson speaks of the ‘illusion of centrality’ in this film (166), while later explicitly elaborating on its fundamental duality (1992: 173–5). Godard elaborates upon the relationship between the paintings and the story of the film in a research document reprinted under the title ‘Passion. Introduction à un scénario’, in: Godard 1985: 486–97. Already in the first sequence, Akbari mentions the ‘rotten laws of [Iranian] society’, which suppresses women and forced her to falsely accuse her husband to get a divorce. See, for instance, Comment ça va? (1978), a film co-directed with Anne-Marie Miéville. This project is reminiscent of that other filmmaker-theoretician, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Location Hunting in Palestine (1965), a one-hour documentary shot in advance, yet released one year after The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). Pasolini made

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several of these ‘notebook’-films, which might have served as inspiration, not only for Kiarostami but also for Godard, whose Scénario’s to Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979) and Je vous salue, Marie (1985) serve a similar purpose. 10 Producer Thomas Ince introduced the shooting script in 1913 (around the time Sennett was making his first ‘Bathing Beauties’ films). This innovation coincided with what Janet Staiger has termed the ‘central producer’ system, a more centralized mode of production whereby the studio maintained quality and economic control. See Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson 1985, pp. 216–31. 11 See Around Five: Abbas Kiarostami’s Reflections on Film and the Making of Five (2005), included in MK2’s DVD of Five (2003).

Chapter 7 Sitney, Paul Adams, Visionary Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Epstein, Jean, Écrits sur le cinéma 1: 1921–1947 (Paris: Seghers, 1974). Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 63. 4 Ibid., p. 62. 5 Ibid., p. 54. 6 Ibid. 7 Crimp, Douglas, ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012). 8 Fabris, Annateresa, Identidades virtuais: uma leitura do retrato fotográfico (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2004). 9 Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). 10 Ibid., p. 82. 11 Ibid., p. 83. 12 Osterweil, Ara, ‘Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests by Callie Angell’, The Moving Image, vol. 7, no 1 (2007), pp. 100–2. 13 Gunning, Tom, ‘O retrato do corpo humano: a fotografia, os detetives e os primórdios do cinema’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), O cinema e a invenção da vida moderna (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004), pp. 33–65. 14 Benning, James, ‘James Benning Goes Digital: Interview with James Benning’ (By Scott MacDonald), in S. MacDonald (ed.), The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 401–22. 15 Benning, James, ‘Life Is Finite’ (Wexner Center for the Arts (blog), 30 September 2008. https://wexarts.org/blog/more-voices-filmmaker-james-benning 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Benning, James, ‘James Benning Goes Digital: Interview with James Benning’ (By Scott MacDonald), in S. MacDonald (ed.), The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 401–22. 19 Warhol has also manipulated time on Screen Tests. Each film consisted of a shot at 24 frames per second, but projected at a slower speed of 16 frames per second, the rate used in the projection of silent films. 20 Benning, James, ‘The Sight & Sound interview: James Benning’ (By Nick Bradshaw), Sight & Sound, 20 June 2018. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-soundmagazine/interviews/sight-sound-interview-james-benning 1 2 3

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21 Benning, James, ‘James Benning Goes Digital: Interview with James Benning’ (By Scott MacDonald), in S. MacDonald (ed.), The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 411. 22 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Grove Press, 1960). 23 Danto, Arthur, Andy Warhol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 49. 24 Costa, Pedro, ‘Horse Money: Q&A with Pedro Costa’, Institute of Contemporary Art, 14 September 2015, London. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ygSIKWpOUBo&ab_channel=ICA 25 Costa, Pedro, ‘Pedro Costa on the Secrets of Warhol’ (Interview by Eugene Kotlyarenko, Interview Magazine, 26 March 2010. https://www.interviewmagazine. com/film/pedro-costa-criterion-collection 26 Costa, Pedro, ‘Em Portugal estamos a um passo deste abismo: faz-nos falta o cinema’ (Interviewed by Vasco Câmara. Público, 23 September 2009) (translation mine). 27 Murphy, J. J., The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 28 Costa, Pedro, ‘Murmures dans un corridor lointain: Interview with Pedro Costa’ (By Miguel Armas), in Lumière, October 2014. http://elumiere.net/numero9/entrevista_ costa/entrevista_costa_fr.php 29 Costa, Pedro, Interview by Pedro Maciel Guimarães e Daniel Ribeiro, in Catálogo do 11° Forumdoc.br. (Belo Horizonte, 2007). 30 Ibid. (translation mine). 31 Von Kleist, Pierre, Casa de Lava – Scrapbook (Lisbon: Pierre von Kleist Editions, 2013). 32 Costa Júnior, Edson Pereira da, ‘A fotografia e a política das imagens em Pedro Costa’, in Anais do XXIX Encontro Anual da Compós (UFMS/Campo Grande: Compós, 2020). 33 Serra, Albert, ‘Dramaturgy of Presence’, in Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, vol. 2, no 4 (2014), p. 92. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Murphy, J. J., The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 5. 37 Serra, Albert, ‘“Against, against”: Creative Destruction with Albert Serra’ (Interview by Daniel Kasman), Sight & Sound, 15 July 2015. 38 Ibid. 39 Warhol, Andy, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). 40 Serra, Albert, ‘“Against, Against”: Creative Destruction with Albert Serra’ (Interview by Daniel Kasman), Sight & Sound, 15 July 2015. 41 Serra, Albert, ‘Dramaturgy of Presence’, in Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, vol. 2, no 4 (2014), p. 93.

Chapter 8 1

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Early in 2009, Mireille Brioude had the merit of realizing that it was not so: ‘It is important to see that Varda’s path is not necessarily reduced to this last film testament because it is already present as a poetic art throughout her entire oeuvre’ (2009: 11, my translation). In French the word ‘causerie’ means an informal and light conversation.

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Notes All the translations taken from this two-episode series will be mine (from the French edition of the DVD). In line with Phillippe Lejeune’s condition for the autobiography, stipulated in Le Pacte autobiographique, Nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996 [1975]), pp. 13–45. The filmmaker, then, is placed in front of the camera, undertaking at once the role of auteur, narrator and character.

Chapter 9 1

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3 4 5 6 7

A lot of stars from the Tamil film world were involved in protesting against the antiBrahmin ideologies through their films and stage dramas. Many of them were also actively involved in politics – Annadurai, MGR (Marudhur Gopalan Ramachandran), Janaki Ramachandran, M. Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha have held the office of Chief Ministers in the state of Tamil Nadu and all of them came from a Tamil cinema background. Ranjith along with Tenma, a Tamil Indie musician and composer, put together a group of nineteen Dalit musicians and singers to form the band called The Casteless Collective. The band is a Tamil-Indie band, which deals with songs that are political and concern social issues like gender, menstruation, reservations, agriculture and land rights, caste issues, beef consumption and manual scavenging. Parai is a percussion musical instrument made of stretched cow hide. The reference of this instrument dates back to Tholkapiam, the Tamil grammar book, which was written much before the Christian era. The parai is a symbol of Tamil culture. In ‘Conversation with Ranjith, director of Madras’, The Hindu, Chennai, 16 October 2014. https://www.thehindu.com/features/cinema/in-conversation-with-ranjithdirector-of-madras/article6507715.ece Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, popularly known as Babasaheb Ambedkar, he was a Member of Parliament, an economist and a social reformer. He was also the chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution. He was a Dalit. Ambedkarite are followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s views. https://thewire.in/film/pa-ranjith-interview-social-justice-films

Chapter 10 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), pp. 150–67. 2 Ibid., p. 150. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. The latent image is not necessarily a psychological concept, an unconscious Freudian psychoanalytic category. It is actually closer to the methodology of Montage than to some psychoanalytical category. 5 Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. B. R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Dokumentext, 2005), p. 18. 6 Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. H. Grey Berkeley (California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 23–40. 1

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Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 8. Ibid., p. 5. This misconstruction has been made by a score of authors but most notably by P. Adam Sitney, who is mentioned in this chapter. She herself rejected the label of surrealism attached to her films. See Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Surrealist Networks and the Films of Maya Deren’, in Surrealism and Films after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries, ed. Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail Susik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 21–42. 10 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 151. The horizontal axis points to the dramatic axis that virtually proceeds in a sequential or linear fashion towards exposition and storytelling. The vertical axis, on the other hand, refers to the poetic quality of cinematography, whose function is invested in its artistic merits by combining movement and choreography to express a subjective feeling that arises from a latent imagery. 11 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 151. 12 Michelson, Annette, ‘Poetic and Savage Thought: About Anagram (2001)’, in On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), p. xx. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 84. 15 Deren claims that her ‘films stand in relation to most films as poetry does to literature’ (Deren 2005: 211). 16 Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Dokumentext, 2005), p. 211. Emphasis added. 17 Michelson, Annette, ‘Poetic and Savage Thought: About Anagram (2001)’, in On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), p. 80. 18 Ibid., p. 85. 19 Ibid. 20 In the later 1959 version of the film, these clusters of shots are accompanied by Teiji Ito’s music. 21 There is another scene later when she is trying to pursue the phantom figure walking up the stairs and the walls literally start to move in as she crashes against them from side to side. 22 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 160. 23 Fort/da is an allusion to a game played by Freud’s grandson when he was eighteen months old. He would throw a toy attached with string uttering fort (gone) and then retrieve the toy by pulling the string with the expression da (there). Freud mentions the game in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (14–15). 24 This consistent approach to define Deren’s film as a creation as well as an immersion in deep subjective realm has dislocated Deren’s own objection to filmmaking as a subjective experience. See Rhodes, John David, Meshes of the Afternoon, 2011, pp. 93–4. 25 Commentary from Maya Deren on the DVD Maya Deren: Experimental Films 1943–1958 of her films released by Mystic Fire Video, 2007. 26 Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Dokumentext, 2005), p. 194. 27 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 112. 7 8 9

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28 Deren is not only a woman filmmaker, a marginalized and minority figure in the world of Independent Filmmakers, both in America and Europe, and certainly she does not represent herself politically as a feminist filmmaker, but her task was greatly exacerbated in a male-dominant field. Her images, nevertheless, invoke the feminine body in a highly expressive, if not, eroticized fashion. Her concerns are not overtly feminist, but they reveal the experience of a woman’s world and isolation. 29 Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Dokumentext, 2005), p. 45. 30 Clark, Veve A., Millicent Hodson and Caterina Nieman (eds), The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, vol. 1, Part One: Signatures (1917–42) (New York City: Anthology of Film Archive/Film Culture, 1984), p. 362. 31 Ibid., p. 365. 32 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter (1960), p. 156. 33 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, ‘Philosophy of Film: Continental Perspectives’, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): A Peer-Review Academic Resources (n.d.). https:// iep.utm.edu/filmcont/ 34 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89 no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 154. 35 Ibid., p. 155. 36 Deren states that ‘the process by which we understand an abstract, graphic image is almost directly opposite … to a photograph. In the first case, the aspect leads us to meaning; in the second case the understanding which results from recognition is the key to our evaluation of the aspect’. Deren, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 155. 37 ‘By “controlled accident” I mean the maintenance of a delicate balance between what is there spontaneously and naturally as evidence of the independent life of actuality, and the persons and activities which are deliberately introduced into the scene’(ibid., p. 156). 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 40 Michelson, Annette, ‘Poetic and Savage Thought: About Anagram (2001)’, in On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), p. 85. 41 Deren, Maya, Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Dokumentext, 2005), p. 32. 42 Sitney, P. Adams, ‘Ritual and Nature’, in Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–1978, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 31. 43 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus, vol. 89, no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 150. Emphasis added. 44 Ibid., p. 152. Emphasis added. 45 Baudelaire, Charles, The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies, trans. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1995), p. 232. 46 See Herzmann, Aaron, ‘How Photography Became Art’ (2018). https://medium. com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63 47 Deren, Maya, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in Daedalus vol. 89 no 1 (Winter, 1960), p. 166. 48 Ibid., p. 167. 49 Ibid., p. 159. 50 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 80.

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51 Epstein, Jean, Écrits sur le cinema 1921–1957, Tome 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), p. 199. 52 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings (2), Part 2, 1931–1934, R. Livingstone (trans.), Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 512. 53 Ibid., pp. 518–19.

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The translation of this chapter into English was completed by Murat Başekim. Kızıldemir, Güldal, ‘“Seeker of the Meaning from Town’, 2022, p. 19. Erden, Emel, ‘Journey to the Non-Existent City’, 2022, p. 59. Cocoon/Koza. Directed By Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 1995. Amo, Ergo Sum/Seviyorum Ergo Sum. Directed by Mehmet Eryılmaz, 1993. Erden, Emel, ‘Journey to the Non-Existent City’, 2022, p. 60. Box Office Türkiye. (2022.12.21), Top ten domestic films at the box office, appearing in festivals abroad (Date of access, 22.12.2022). 8 Erden, Emel, ‘Journey to the Non-Existent City’, 2022, p. 65. 9 Jafaar, Ali, ‘Melancholia of the Snow’, 2022, p. 128. 10 Köstepen, et al., ‘I’m Trying to Make Cinema Practice Similar to Photography’, 2022, p. 81. 11 Davran, Melda, ‘Distant from the Show’, 2022, p. 108. 12 Ibid., p. 181. 13 Pekçelen, Seda, ‘My Relationship with the Actors Is a Little Unhealthy’, 2022, p. 161. 14 Ibid. 15 The Town. Directed By Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 1997. 16 Clouds of May. Directed By Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 1999. 17 Climates. Directed By Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006. 18 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, p. 184. 19 Çamlıbel, Cansu, ‘Twitter Has Become the Arena of Blaming Others’, 2022, p. 229. 20 Kural, Nil, ‘It is Necessary to Seek the Reality in the Revealed Work’, 2022, p. 241. 21 Kolukısa, Emrah, ‘90 minutes with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 220. 22 Pekçelen, Seda, ‘My Relationship with the Actors Is a Little Unhealthy’, 2022, p. 160. 23 Küçüktepepınar, Esin, ‘The Award Came with the Mount Ida’, 2022, p. 140. 24 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, p. 205. 25 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 271. 26 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge,‘Three Monkeys: Editing Diary’, 2012, p. 422. 27 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Editing Diary’, 2011, p. 17. 28 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, p. 205. 29 Pekçelen, Seda, ‘My Relationship with the Actors Is a Little Unhealthy’, p. 163. 30 Kolukısa, Emrah, ‘90 minutes with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 220. 31 Ibid. 32 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 277. 33 Ibid., p. 277. 34 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, pp. 203–4. Emphasis added. 35 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 277.

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36 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, pp. 186–7. 37 Ibid., pp. 185–7. 38 Wild Pear Tree. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2018. 39 Kural, Nil, ‘I May Return back to Quietness’, 2022, p. 301. Emphasis added. 40 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, p. 193. 41 Jafaar, Ali, ‘Melancholia of the Snow’, 2022, p. 128. 42 Yücel, Fırat, ‘Reality is on the Hidden Side’, 2022, p. 157. Emphasis added. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 This interview took place just after Three Monkeys. 46 Yücel, Fırat, ‘Reality is on the Hidden Side’, 2022, p. 157. 47 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, p. 196. 48 Dinçkök, Ayşegül, ‘We Know Less about the Human Soul than Mars’, 2022, p. 257. 49 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, p. 192. 50 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, ‘Three Monkeys: Editing Diary’, 2012, p. 423. 51 Three Monkeys. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008. 52 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011. 53 Winter Sleep. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014. 54 Dawson, Nick, ‘The Contemplative Story of a Disintegrated Family’, 2022, p. 175. Emphasis added. 55 Ibid., p. 175. 56 Dinçkök, Ayşegül, ‘We Know Less about the Human Soul Than Mars’, 2022, p. 256. Emphasis added. 57 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, pp. 195–6. 58 Dinçkök, Ayşegül, ‘We Know Less about the Human Soul Than Mars’, 2022, p. 256. 59 Küçüktepepınar, Esin, ‘The Award Came with the Mount Ida’, 2022, p. 140. 60 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 262. 61 Yücel, Fırat, ‘Reality is on the hidden side’, 2022, p. 156. 62 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, Script [The Town], (A. Gültekin, 2007), p. 21. 63 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, Script [Distant], (A. Gültekin, 2004), p. 64. 64 Yücel, Fırat, ‘Reality is on the Hidden Side’, 2022, p. 156. 65 Kracauer’s concept of ‘redemption of reality’ also discussed by Diken, Gilloch & Hammond 2018, I.B. Tauris in The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker, in the chapter called ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (pp. 55–71). My focus is different from theirs. 66 I referenced the argument ‘mummy complex’ in the writings of Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (H. Gray, 1970), p. 9. I offer the link because of this words of Ceylan’s: ‘The fact that I tend towards such issues can also be read as protecting my past, my traditions and my loved ones.’ Erdem, The market operates ruthlessly with iron laws! (M. Eryılmaz, 2022), p. 29. 67 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 268. Emphasis added. 68 Ibid., p. 264. 69 Özgüven, Fatih, ‘Personal Journeys with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 91. 70 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, ‘About Wild Pear Tree’, 2022, p. 288. 71 Göktürk, Yücel and Sungu Çapan. ‘When it Comes to Kidney…’, 2022, p. 49. 72 Selçuk, Aslı, ‘Distant is on a World Tour’, 2022, p. 110. 73 Küçüktepepınar, Esin, ‘Our Culture Has Some Fundamental Deficiencies’, 2022, p. 247.

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74 Selçuk, Aslı, ‘Distant Is on a World Tour’, 2022, p. 110. 75 Ciment and Tobin, I’m Almost Ashamed of Excess (M. Eryılmaz, 2022), p. 124. Emphasis added. 76 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, 2022, pp. 189–90. Emphasis added. 77 Özgüven, Fatih, ‘Personal Journeys with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 94. Emphasis added. 78 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 272. 79 Köstepen, et al., ‘I’m Trying to make Cinema Practice similar to Photography’, 2022, p. 81. 80 Ciment, Michel and Yann Tobin, ‘I’m Almost Ashamed of Excess’, 2022, p. 123. 81 Kolukısa, Emrah, ‘It’s Not Important to Feel, It’s Important to Understand’, 2022, p. 294. 82 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Editing Diary’, 2011, p. 31. 83 Alam, Mithat, ‘The Unknown Called Human’, p. 199. 84 Ibid., p. 194. Emphasis added. 85 Küçüktepepınar, Esin, ‘The Award Came with the Mount Ida’, 2022, p. 247. 86 Yücel, Fırat, ‘Reality is on the Hidden Side’, 2022, p. 147. 87 Ibid., p. 200. 88 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, 2018, p. 187. 89 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 269. 90 Benjamin, Walter, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, 2018, p. 187. 91 Aytaç, Senem, Berke Göl and Fırat Yücel, ‘On Winter Sleep with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’, 2022, p. 265.

Chapter 12 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

Guo, Yue, ‘Questioning the Idea of “the Generations” of Chinese Filmmakers’, in Contemporary Cinema, vol. 135, no 6 (2006), pp. 121–3. Clark, Paul, ‘Reinventing China: The Fifth-Generation Filmmakers’, Modern Chinese Literature, vol. 5, no 1 (1989). Available online: htttp://www.jstor.org/stable/41490655. Accessed 5 November 2020), pp. 121–36; Lu (ed.), Identity, Nationality, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); Lan and Zhang, ‘The Fifth-Generation Filmmakers’ Use of Colors’, Film Literature, no 13 (2013), pp. 140–1; An, ‘On the Style and Characteristics of the Mise-en-scène of the Fifth-Generation Films’, in Film Literature, no 10 (1997), pp. 13–14. Yao, Lingling, Visualized Gender and Gendered Visuality: Love, Marriage, and Labor in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Art’ (PhD thesis, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2019), pp. 44–9. Jin, Fenglan, A Woman Director’s Film Career: A Critical Biography (Beijing: Xueyuan Pressing House, 1994), pp. 2–26. Ren, Jie, The History of Beijing Academy, 1950–1995 (Beijing: Beijing Film Academy, 2000), p. 163; Wang (ed.), The Red Film Enterpriser Wang Yang (Beijing: China Film Press, 2016), pp. 146–54. Dong, Kena, ‘A Public Letter to the Editorial Department of Television, Film and Literature Journal’, in Television, Film and Literature Journal, no 4 (1987), pp. 142–76. Ibid., p. 160.

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Jiang, Hao, ‘Confusions and Anxieties in North America’, in Television, Film and Literature Journal, no 2 (1987), p. 142. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 147. 11 Ibid., p. 142. 12 Ibid., p. 158. 13 Jiang, Hao, The Collected Works of Jiang Hao: Documentary Literature, vol. 1 (Beijing: Huayi Publisher, 1995), pp. 597–8. 14 Jiang, Hao, The Collected Works of Jiang Hao: Biographies, vol. 4 (Beijing: Huayi Publisher, 1995a). pp. 29–30. 15 Ibid., p. 29. 16 Ibid., p. 17. 17 Ibid., p. 162. 18 Jiang, Hao, The Collected Works of Jiang Hao: Documentary Literature, vol. 1 (Beijing: Huayi Publisher, 1995), p. 644. 8

Chapter 13 1

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Miriam Bratu Hansen makes the important point that Adorno’s 1966 essay, ‘Transparencies on Film’, is best read as a defence of ‘Young German Cinema, which Adorno refers to as the “Oberhauseners”, and the enemy is clearly the moribund West German film industry. 1966 (…) saw the production of first feature films by independent directors such as Volker Schlöndorff (Der junge Törless), Edgar Reitz (Mahlzeiten), Vlado Kristl (Der Bried) and Alexander Kluge (Abschied von Gestern). (…) [T]he Film Subsidies Bill of 1967 introduced a system which favoured previously successful film-makers and subjected non-commercial projects to a screening process likely to encourage political censorship. (…) Adorno’s publication of this essay in Die Zeit was undoubtedly perceived as an intervention on behalf of the independent film-makers. (…) The person whom Adorno seems to be lending his support for the cause is Alexander Kluge (…). Kluge’s aesthetics and politics of film were themselves significantly formed by his friendship with Adorno.’ Hansen, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’ (1966), New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema, Autumn 1981 – Winter 1982 (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 193–4. Hansen also notes that Adorno introduced Kluge to Fritz Lang. ‘Defending the relative awkwardness and lack of professionalism of the work of Young German filmmakers (Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz, Kluge, et al.), [Adorno] elevates these shortcomings to a trace of “hope that the so-called mass media might eventually become something different.”’ Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 218. ‘[T]he lack of a virtuoso mastery of means and thorough planning is taken to allow independent film to develop “other means of conveying immediacy.” These prominently involve improvisation, or “the planned surrender to unguided chance.”’ (Ibid). Kluge, Alexander, ‘Can We Talk about Angels a Little Bit? A Conversation with Ben Lerner’, in The Snows of Venice (Leipzig: Spector Books, [2016], 2018), p. 74. Appreciation or Lack of Appreciation is a most unsatisfying frame of reference for Adorno’s enduring engagement with film and the cinema. Adorno certainly

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believed in the possibility of an alternative, experimental, critical and subversive film practice – in and against film as mass media and the cinema as a culture industry – all of which I detail in my forthcoming book: Hellings, Adorno and Film: Thinking in Images (London: Bloomsbury, 2024). ‘Adorno and Horkheimer’s emphasis on the illegitimate and anarchic beginnings of the cinema, its affinity with the circus and the roadshow, their preference for marginal genres like the grotesque and the funnies or even some varieties of the musical, their repeated contrasting of the sound film with the less stream-lined products of the silent era – all these swervings from the main thesis [of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”] point to a subversive potential which one day – on a selfconscious level of construction – could provide the negativity essential to a different kind of cinema.’ Hansen, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’ (1966), New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema, Autumn 1981 – Winter 1982 (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 197. See also: Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 208–10. 4 See Werner Werner, Gösta and Erik Gunnermark, ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein’, in James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 27, no 3 (Spring) (Oklahoma: University of Tulsa, 1990). 5 See Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘In The Genesis of Stupidity’, in Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (California, Redwood: Stanford University Press, [1944–7], 2002), pp. 213–14. 6 See: Jameson, Frederic, ‘Marx and Montage’, in New Left Review, no. 58, July–August 2009 (London: NLR). 7 Krauss, Rosalind E., ‘Reinventing the Medium’, in Critical Inquiry, Angelus Novus: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin, vol. 25, no 2 (Winter, 1999), p. 304. 8 Kluge, Alexander, ‘On Film and the Public Sphere’, in Miriam B. Hansen and Thomas Y. Levin (ed. and trans.), New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema, Autumn 1981–Winter 1982 (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 207. 9 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’, in New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, [1966], Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), p. 194. ‘The obvious answer for Kluge – as for Adorno and [Hans] Eisler (…) – is a radical practice of montage. Juxtaposing the heterogeneous elements of the cinematic material, translating their inherently antithetical character into expression “raises them to the level of consciousness,” in Adorno/Eisler’s words, “and takes over the function of theory”’ (ibid). ‘Montage’, Hansen writes elsewhere, ‘seeks not only to fracture the fetishistic illusionism of narrative cinema, along with the fiction of diegetic continuity and closure, but also to shift the production of meaning from the relationship between image and referent to the cut – the space between shots, the space of difference and heterogeneity. Latent in the cut is a third image that is immaterial, which for Kluge marks the entry point for the “film in the viewer’s head”’. Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 225. 10 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’, in New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, [1966], Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), p. 197.

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11 I am well aware that Benjamin did not conceive of the dialectical image as an image, per se. ‘Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image as an image (…) is not a painterly representation, but rather a figure and constellation to be read, as he explains in a letter to Gretel Adorno in 1935: “The dialectical image does not copy the dream in a painterly representation (…). But, it seems to me to contain the instances, the place of the irruption of awakening and to produce out of these places its figure, like a star-constellation by the sparkling dots.” This image, then, although called a Sternbild, is not a picture or a painting, but instead a figure: it belongs to a graphic sphere in contrast to the sphere of painting.’ Nägle, ‘Thinking Images’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 23. ‘In 1935 the dialectical image was conceived as “wish image” and “dream image”, a dynamic figuration of the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old in which the collective “seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production”. (…) In the expose, these dream images attest that ability of the collective to see into a better future. (…) [T]races of utopia [a classless society], engendered in the intersection or collision of the new and the antiquated, can be read off of untold aspects of contemporary society. “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” was written as a kind of road map for such divinatory reading of social phenomenon. (…) [W]ish images that hold within them a potentially revolutionary knowledge.’ Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 491–2. Adorno took exception to Benjamin’s understanding of the dialectical image both as a bourgeois projection (the dream) and as romantic anti-capitalism (the classless society): ‘If you locate the dialectical image in consciousness as “dream”, not only has the concept thereby become disenchanted and commonplace, but it has also forfeited its objective authority, which might legitimate it from a materialist standpoint. The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness but is dialectical in the crucial sense that it produces consciousness.’ Adorno [1935], ‘Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”,’ in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Edmund Jephcott (trans.) Selected Writings: Volume 3: 1935–1938 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 54. 12 Benjamin, Walter [1927–40], The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), [Convolute N3,1], p. 463. 13 Foster, Hal, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, no 110 (Fall 2004), p. 15. 14 Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 130. 15 Benjamin, Walter [1932], ‘Berlin Chronicle’, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds), Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Selected Writings: Volume 2: Part 2: 1931–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 595–638. 16 Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 130. 17 Photography, for Leslie (following Benjamin), produces an illumination ‘more intense than the wan mimicry of art. This process provides the chemical imprint of matter in all its new and revolutionary beauty. Matter has come to voice, and it speaks of itself. The most precise mechanical act produces something quite magical, just as it is material, physical and real, and, furthermore, it is owned by no one. This is not property. It is an art of “luminous values” in “passionate progress” that no modern art, no painting, can halt’. Leslie, ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Birth of

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18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

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Photography’, in Esther Leslie (ed. and trans.), On Photography: Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), p. 16. Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 130. Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: The Athlone Press, [1970], 1997), p. 79. Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 82. Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: The Athlone Press, [1970], 1997), p. 79. ‘Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be effaced, and least of all by the glorification of the artist, artworks nevertheless have a life sui generis’ (4). ‘Through correspondences with the past, what resurfaces becomes something qualitatively other’ (36). ‘Though it will not acknowledge it, for the disenchanted world the fact of art is an outrage, an afterimage of enchantment, which it does not tolerate’ (58). ‘Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage’ (80). Hansen, Miriam Bratu, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’, in New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, [1966], Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), pp. 194–5. Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Notes on Kafka’, in Samuel and Shierry Weber (trans.), Prisms (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, [1967] 1983), p. 246. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, [1980] 1993), pp. 53–5. Hansen, Miriam Bratu, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 237. Hansen, Miriam Bratu, ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”’ (1966), New German Critique, no 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), 195. ‘For Kluge, the structural affinity between film and the stream of associations establishes a utopian tradition of cinema in people’s minds to which technological inventions like camera, projector and screen only responded on an industrial scale; the trope of “the film in the head of the spectator” provides a link between Kluge’s concept of montage and his program of the cinema as an oppositional public sphere’ (ibid). Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Transparencies on Film’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, trans. M. B. Hansen (London: Routledge, [1966], 1991), p. 180. ‘The choice of example’, according to Hansen, ‘is no coincidence. The mode of experience expressed in the movement of images is one of displacement, transience, and loss. The colourful images that appear without being called up are not of a timeless idyllic nature but of a nature segregated as refuge from urban living and labor. Adorno’s example may seem privileged and harmless, but it also calls to mind examples drawn from a worldwide history of rural flight, migration, and exile’. Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 223. Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: The Athlone Press, [1970], 1997), p. 193. Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, [1951] 1978), p. 236.

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Chapter 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Wide Angle, no 8 (1986), pp. 66–7. Williams, Keith, ‘Joyce’s “Chinese alphabet”: Ulysses and the Proletarians’, in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (eds), Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (London: Macmillan. 1991), p. 177. Epstein, Jean, ‘Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna’ (The Cinematograph Seen from Etna), in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, [1926a] 2012), p. 293. Epstein, Jean, ‘L’Objectif Lui-Même’ (The Objective Itself), in Écrits sur le cinéma: Volume 1 (Writings on Cinema) (Paris: Seghers, [1926b] 1974), pp. 128–9. Lundemo, Trond, ‘A Temporal Perspective: Jean Epstein’s Writings on Technology and Subjectivity’, in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 221. Wall-Romana, Christophe, Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 73. Ibid., pp. 165–71. Wall-Romana, Christophe, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 122. Epstein, Jean, ‘L’intelligence d’une machine’ (The Intelligence of the Machine), in Écrits sur le cinéma: Volume 1 (Writings on Cinema) (Paris: Seghers, [1946] 1974), p. 255. Ibid., p. 323. Epstein, Jean, ‘Le Cinéma du diable’ (The Devil’s Cinema), in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press [1947] 2012), p. 323. Apter, Emily, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 24. Epstein, Jean, ‘Le Cinéma du diable’ (The Devil’s Cinema), in Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, [1947] 2012), p. 327. Flaubert quoted in Epstein, ‘L’intelligence d’une machine’ (The Intelligence of the Machine), in Écrits sur le cinéma: Volume 1 (Writings on Cinema) (Paris: Seghers, [1946] 1974), p. 255. Wall-Romana, Christophe, Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 2. Vertov, Dziga, ‘The Birth of Kino-Eye’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press. [1924] 1984), p. 41. Vertov, Dziga, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press. [1922] 1984), p. 17. Vertov, Dziga, ‘The Factory of Facts’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press [1926] 1984), p. 59. Michelson, Annette, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xl. Vertov, Dziga, ‘On the Significance of Newsreel’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1923a] 1984), p. 32. Machado, Robert, ‘Dziga Vertov’s Revolutionary Variety Show’, Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 10, no 3 (2012), p. 248.

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22 Vertov, Dziga, ‘On the Significance of Non-acted Cinema’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1923b] 1984), p. 38. 23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 Fore, Devin, ‘The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s “The Eleventh Year”’ (October, 145, 2013), pp. 3–4. 25 Vertov, Dziga, ‘From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1929] 1984), p. 88. 26 Hicks, Jeremy, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: I.B. Tauris), p. 58. 27 Fore, Devin, ‘The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s “The Eleventh Year”’ (October, 145, 2013), p. 9. 28 Marx, Karl, ‘Preface to A Critique of Political Economy’, in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1859] 2000), p. 426. 29 Vertov, Dziga, ‘On the Eleventh Year’, in Annette Michelson (trans.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1928] 1984), p. 79. 30 Vertov, Dziga, ‘WE: Variant of a Manifesto’, 1919, p. 8. 31 Turvey, Malcolm, The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), p. 135. 32 Vertov, ‘WE: Variant of a Manifesto’, 1919, p. 8. 33 Debord, Guy, La société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle), trans. F. Perlman (Kalamazoo: Black and Red). Available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/debord/society.htm. Accessed 8 July 2021, [1967] 1970), no. 43. 34 Debord, Guy and Gil J. Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (Les Lèvres Nues #8, May. Available online: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm, 1956). 35 Soft and Hard (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, France: Deptford Beach Productions, Channel Four Films, JLG Films, 1985). 36 Godard, Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 190.

Chapter 15 1 2 3 4 5

Wenders, Wim, Emotions Pictures: Reflections on Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); Wenders, The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). Quoted in Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 159. Santos, Marcelino, ‘The Image of the City – Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story’, in Gareth Griffiths and Minna Chudoba (eds), City + Cinema: Essays on the Specificity of Location in Film (Datutop 29, Autumn 2007). Philip Winter, played by Rüdiger Vogler in Alice in the Cities, is now Phillip Winter (with two ls). The spelling of Munro’s name has also changed and he is played by the same actor, Patrick Bauchau. Medeiros Medeiros, Paulo de, ‘Representing Lisbon: Wenders, Memory and Desire’, in Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 1, no 2 (Summer 2001), p. 71.

220

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Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 206–7. 7 Medeiros, Paulo de, ‘Representing Lisbon: Wenders, Memory and Desire’, in Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 1, no 2 (Summer 2001); Hernandez, ‘The Buena Vista Social Club: The Racial Politics of Nostalgia’ (Latino/a Popular Culture, 2002). 8 Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, 1994: 01:11:20-01:14:22. 9 Mazierska, Ewa and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (New York: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 205, note that ‘the film is strongly inspired by silent cinema, especially Soviet formalism’. 10 Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, 1994, 01:27:18-01:33:23. 11 Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, 1994, 01:34:32-01:35:43. 12 Wenders, Wim and Mary Zournazi, Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), p. 95. 13 Ibid., pp. 95–6. 14 Ibid., p. 59. 15 Ibid., p. 67. 16 Ibid., p. 68. 17 Ibid., p. 71. 18 Ibid., p. 52. 19 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 20 Zournazi, Mary, Hope: New Philosophies for Change (New York: Routledge, 2003). Eyes was published in French in 2014 as Yeux (Paris, Editions Le Pommier) and in translation in 2015 (New York, Bloomsbury Academic, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon). 21 Serres, Michel, Eyes (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 48. Later on, Serres (p. 193) comments again on the omniscience and omnipresence of God: ‘Since the omnipresent God occupies each position, his perception of a given object is exactly such an ichnography, the sum or profiles. He is possibly the only One who sees things correctly. Only He knows the global truth. We can only see oblique projections. We are limited to perspectives. And so all the world’s drawings, portraits and paintings just show profiles relative to the position of our view. The artist would have to identify with God to realize an ichnography whose representation would yield the integral knowledge of things, in short their truth. However, the latter remains inaccessible.’ 22 Serres, Michel, Eyes (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 11. 23 Ibid., p. 27. 24 Ibid., p. 111. 25 Ibid., p. 120. 26 Ibid., p. 40. 27 Serres, Michel, Eyes (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 63. The English translation, ‘The Universe is studded with its own gazes’ doesn’t quite capture Serres’ original meaning. 28 Serres, Eyes (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 179. 6

Chapter 16 1 2

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2, l’Image-Temps, 1985. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986.

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Margulies, Yvone, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, 1996. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘Is Ozu Slow?’, in Senses of Cinema, no 4 (2000). www. sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature-articles/ozu-2/ 5 Corpas, Irene, ‘Between Home and Flight: Interior Space, Time and Desire in the Films of Chantal Akerman’, in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 13, no 1 (2022). 6 Schmid, Marion, Chantal Akerman, 2017, pp. 5–6. 7 Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion, 2007. 8 Bruno, Giuliana, ‘Projection: On Chantal Akerman’s Screens, from Cinema to the Art Gallery’, in Senses of Cinema, no 77 (2015). www.sensesofcinema.com/2015/chantalakerman/projection/#fnref-25463-15 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Pocius, Genevieve, Temporality, Spatiality and Looking in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), 2015. 13 Rosen, Miriam, ‘In Her Own Time: An Interview with Chantal Akerman’, in Artforum, 2004. www.artforum.com/print/200404/in-her-own-time-an-interviewwith-chantal-akerman-6572 14 D’Ambrose, Ricky, Interview with Chantal Akerman (MUBI, 2013). mubi.com/ notebook/posts/interview-with-chantal-akerman 15 Rosen, Miriam, ‘In Her Own Time: An Interview with Chantal Akerman’, in Artforum (2004). www.artforum.com/print/200404/in-her-own-time-an-interview-withchantal-akerman-6572 16 Ibid. 17 Schmid, Marion, Chantal Akerman, 2017, p. 2. Indeed, Chantal Akerman’s autobiographical book Autoportrair en Cinéaste is a major source that future, more lengthy studies that take into account the Filmmakers on Film approach can use. It explores in detail and in a rather personal and labyrinthic fashion some key ideas that were eventually channelled more clearly in other interviews or instances. 18 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘Chantal Akerman: The Integrity of the Exile and the Everyday’, in Retrospektive Chantal Akerman (Vienna: Austrian Filmmuseum, 2011). jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/05/chantal-akerman-the-integrity-of-exile-and-theeveryday-tk/ 19 Ibid. 20 Thoma, Andrea, ‘Vertigo of Presence: Chantal Akerman’s NOW, Nomadic Dwelling and the “War Machine” within the Context of Contemporary Moving Image Works’, in Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 19, no 2 (2020). 21 Augè, Marc, Non-Lieux, Introduction à une Anthropologie de lá Surmodernité, 1992. 22 Schmid, Marion, Chantal Akerman, 2017, p. 3. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 24 Brenez, Nicole, Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview in Useful Book #1 (Vienna: Viennale, 2011). www.lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html 25 The Criterion Collection, Chantal Akerman, 1950–2015 (2015). www.criterion.com/ current/posts/3733-chantal-akerman-19502015 26 Araújo, Mateus, ‘Chantal Akerman, between the Mother and the World’, in Film Quarterly, vol. 70, no 1 (2016), p. 32. 3 4

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Chapter 17 Barnouw, Erik, Documentary – A History of Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1974] 1983), p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 40. 3 Ibid., p. 52. 4 Ibid., p. 86. 5 Ibid., p. 191. 6 Ibid., p. 198. 7 Ibid., p. 268. 8 Ibid., p. 297. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 315, emphasis in the original. 11 Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 100. 12 Vice-President of the Portuguese Cinematheque from 1996 to 2013 and its President since 2014. 13 Costa, João Bénard. Um País, Um Género, Portugal no Cinema Português (Lisbon: Cinemateca Portuguesa, 2007). 14 Novo Documentário em Portugal, Catálogo da Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, 1999, unnumbered pages. 15 Müller, Tue Steen, ‘Docs in Portugal – Moving toward a breakthrough’, in DOXDocumentary Film Magazine no 21 (1999), p. 20. 16 Penafria, Manuela, ‘Cinema aberto: os documentários portugueses dos anos 90’, in Maria Marcos Ramos (ed.), El cine como reflejo de la historia, la literatura y el arte en la filmografía hispano-brasileña (Salamanca: Ed. Centro de Estudios Brasileños, 2019), pp. 528–38. 17 Amascultura Documentary Festival, an international festival that took place in Lisbon between 1990 and 2001, precursor to the DocLisboa Festival, which had its first edition in 2002. 18 Novo Documentário em Portugal, Catálogo da Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, 1999, unnumbered pages. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Guimarães, Cao, ‘A superfície de um lago – bate-papo com Cao Guimarães’ (interview by Cezar Migliorin, 2005. http://www.revistacinetica.com.br/entrevistacaoguimaraes.htm 1

Chapter 18 1

The renewal of Argentine cinema that became known, at least by critics, as Nuevo Cine Argentino, emerged in the mid-1990s driven by a series of factors, such as the creation of a law to promote and fund the audiovisual sector, the reactivation of a

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reserved screen quota for Argentine films in cinemas, the appearance and reopening of various film schools, and easier access to equipment due to the exchange rate convertibility between the Argentine peso and the US dollar. These developments conducted a rapid reactivation of the national cinema, with a new generation taking the lead in proposing new modes of production, new aesthetics and new subjects to be approached. See Aguilar, Gonzalo, New Argentine Film. Other Worlds, trans. Sarah Ann Wells (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); Page, Joanna, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Andermann, Jens, New Argentine Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and Verardi, Malena, Nuevo cine argentino (1998–2008): Formas de una época. Procedimientos y representaciones de una estética política (Madrid: Editorial Académica Española, 2011) – all books that also bring sharp analyses of Martel’s oeuvre. 2 The title of this chapter ‘To Contest the Deafness of the Gaze’ is based on one of these interventions, a homonymous event carried out at the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, in New York in 2019. 3 This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoNWLyNbFaY&ab_ channel=GentleWhisperingASMR. The channel Gentle Whispering ASMR, by Maria Viktorovna, is considered among the most famous in the ASMR ‘genre’. Martel also included a brief frame of this video in her short film AI (2019), commissioned by Viennale. 4 Koza, Roger, ‘Una película de 1790 llamada Zama. Un diálogo con Lucrecia Martel’, Con los ojos abiertos, 27 September 2017. 5 I tried to list at least one reference from where Martel imparted each idea that I examine here. It is important to mention, however, that over the years she has said very similar things on a multitude of occasions, most of them easily accessible on the internet. As she has already amusingly affirmed, it is possible to find many spoilers of her ‘theories’ on YouTube (DFFB 2018). 6 Martel, Lucrecia, [no title], Las Naves, no 1 (2013), p. 16. 7 López Medin, Silvina, ‘To Cast Doubt on the Assumed Nature of Things: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel’, post. notes on art in a global context, 11 September 2019. 8 Harvey, Sophia, ‘Finding the “One Miserable Tiny Spark” That Experimental Legend Lucrecia Martel Believes All Creativity Relies On’, No Film School, 10 October 2017. 9 Bettendorff, Paulina and Agustina Pérez Rial, ‘Artilugios de pensamiento. Entrevista con Lucrecia Martel’, in Paulina Bettendorff and Agustina Pérez Rial (eds), Tránsitos de la mirada. Mujeres que hacen cine (Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2014), p. 187. 10 Gemünden, Gerd, Lucrecia Martel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), n.p. [e-book]. 11 Yemayel, Mónica, ‘El ojo extraterrestre’, Gatopardo, 3 June 2018. 12 Oumano, Elena, Cinema Today. A Conversation with Thirty-Nine Filmmakers from around the World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 120. 13 It is possible to detect various points of connection between the extra-terrestrial gaze and the childlike gaze, such as amazement. 14 Casa de América, ‘Phonurgia, la perspectiva sonora del cine y la escritura, con Lucrecia Martel’, YouTube, 17 January 2018. 15 DFFB, Meisterklasse Lucrecia Martel, moderation by S. Chalela Puccini, F. Frisardi, S. Ladwig and F. S. Steinbeck (2018). 16 Guest, Haden, ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’, Bombsite (106), 1 January 2009. 17 Enríquez, Mariana, ‘Ese oscuro objeto del deseo’, Página/12, 2 May 2004.

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18 In a masterclass at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), Martel drew attention to a painting hanging on the wall that appears prominently in the first few minutes of La ciénaga. Showing a snowy landscape, the picture had been painted by her grandmother who, like most people who are part of the Latin American middle/upper class, related snow to Europe and, then, as a chic, better, desired environment. She explained that what this painting means would be fundamental to observe the family that lives in this house and as a background to one of the themes the film proposes: how the middle/upper class in Argentina, a country that claims to be European but is absorbed in the typically Latin American circuit of (economical, political, institutional, etc.) crises, is attached to things it cannot sustain and is unable to assume this inability and surrender to another state – to the life that is within reach. At the end of the eighteenth century, Don Diego de Zama, a criollo (son of Spaniards born in the Americas), suffers from the same pretension (and consequent failure) that afflicts La ciénaga’s characters 200 years later. 19 In the original: ‘Cuando escribo, casi siempre empiezo por las enfermedades. Para mí, lejos de ser una cosa tan negativa, como muchas veces suele suceder porque se aproxima a la muerte, la enfermedad tiene algo maravilloso, que es la desactivación de la percepción domesticada. Activa otra percepción. No hablo del ciego que tiene más tacto. Mi ejemplo es la fiebre, que para mí tiene algo de adicción, especialmente en la infancia. Es como estar drogado. O la hepatitis, con sus cuarenta días de cama. Te organizás otro mundo.’ 20 Enríquez, Mariana, ‘La mala memoria’, Página/12, 17 August 2008. 21 Christofoletti Barrenha, Natalia, A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Resíduos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina (São Paulo: Alameda Casa Editorial, 2014), p. 142. 22 Wisniewski, Chris, ‘When Words Collide: An Interview With Lucrecia Martel, Director of The Headless Woman’, Reverse Shot (25), 17 August 2009. 23 Harvey, Sophia, ‘Finding the “One Miserable Tiny Spark” that Experimental Legend Lucrecia Martel Believes All Creativity Relies On’, No Film School, 10 October 2017. 24 Oubiña, David, ‘Un realismo negligente (El cine de Lucrecia Martel)’, in Paulina Bettendorff and Agustina Pérez Rial (eds), Tránsitos de la mirada. Mujeres que hacen cine (Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2014), p. 72. 25 Martin, Deborah, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 19. 26 Souto, Mariana and Mônica Campo, ‘Muta: Monstrosity and Mutation’, in Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kratje and Paul R. Merchant (eds), ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 65–6. 27 In her hometown of Salta (a province in the northwest of Argentina, on the border with Bolivia), the possibility of cinephilia was null: there were only Westerns – a genre that strongly echoed in her first professional short, Rey Muerto (Dead King, 1995) – and horror films on television, while local theatres alternated between Hollywood and pornographic productions. 28 Portillo, Lourdes, ‘Lucrecia Martel’, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at the Academy, 5 October 2014. 29 Guest, Haden, ‘Lucrecia Martel by Haden Guest’, Bombsite (106), 1 January 2009. 30 Christofoletti Barrenha, Natalia, A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Resíduos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina (São Paulo: Alameda Casa Editorial, 2014), pp. 117–18. 31 Bettendorff, Paulina and Agustina Pérez Rial, ‘Artilugios de pensamiento. Entrevista con Lucrecia Martel’, in Paulina Bettendorff and Agustina Pérez Rial (eds), Tránsitos de la mirada. Mujeres que hacen cine (Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2014), pp. 181–3.

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32 Casa de América, ‘Lucrecia Martel: El sonido en la escritura y la puesta en escena’, YouTube, 26 January 2011. 33 See Russell, Dominique, ‘Lucrecia Martel: A Decidedly Polyphonic Cinema’, Jump Cut (50) 2008; Cunha, Damyler, ‘O som e suas dimensões concretas e subjetivas nos filmes de Lucrecia Martel’, MA diss. (Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2013); Barrenha, Christofoletti, Natalia, A experiência do cinema de Lucrecia Martel: Resíduos do tempo e sons à beira da piscina (São Paulo: Alameda Casa Editorial, 2014); Rapan, Eleonora and Gustavo Costantini, ‘Sonido e inmersión en la trilogía salteña de Lucrecia Martel’, in Imagofagia, vol. 13 (2016). 34 MUBI, ‘Cinema Dialogues | Harvard at the Gulbenkian 4.2’, YouTube, 15 October 2014. 35 The pool, by the way, is a recurrent set in Martel’s work. On the one hand, and despite being terribly disgusted by swimming pools, she finds them intriguing because of how people behave around them: where one is almost naked, there is certain promiscuity, a situation that would be considered odd in any other space in a house. On the other hand, swimming pools are social markers in Argentina (as in Latin America in general), where there is a scarcity of public swimming pools, conforming them into status symbols of the middle and upper classes that are the focus of the filmmaker’s stories. 36 Harvey, Sophia, ‘Finding the “One Miserable Tiny Spark” That Experimental Legend Lucrecia Martel Believes All Creativity Relies On’, No Film School, 10 October 2017. 37 López Medin, Silvina, ‘To Cast Doubt on the Assumed Nature of Things: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel’, post. notes on art in a global context, 11 September 2019. 38 Diseño de Imagen y Sonido, ‘Lucrecia Martel y Alejandro Ros 4a Bienal FADU UBA’, YouTube, 13 May 2021; Televisión Pública, ‘Charla abierta de Lucrecia Martel: Nosotras movemos el mundo’, YouTube, 7 March 2020. 39 Harvey, Sophia, ‘Finding the “One Miserable Tiny Spark” That Experimental Legend Lucrecia Martel Believes All Creativity Relies On’, No Film School, 10 October 2017. 40 Koza, Roger, ‘Una película de 1790 llamada Zama. Un diálogo con Lucrecia Martel’, Con los ojos abiertos, 27 September 2017. 41 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010), pp. 54–5. 42 International Film Festival Rotterdam, ‘Lucrecia Martel (Spanish audio) – Masterclass #1’, YouTube, 22 May 2018. 43 López Medin, Silvina, ‘To Cast Doubt on the Assumed Nature of Things: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel’, post. notes on art in a global context, 11 September 2019.

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FILMOGRAPHY 10 on Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2004). A.B.C. Africa (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2001). Additions and Subtractions / Sumas y Restas (Víctor Gaviria, Colombia, 2004). After Warhol (James Benning, USA, 2011). Agnès from Here to There / Agnès de ci de la Varda (Agnès Varda, France, 2011). AI (Lucrecia Martel, Austria, 2019). Amo, Ergo Sum / Seviyorum Ergo Sum (Mehmet Eryılmaz, Turkey, 1993). https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=YCBXUR8o8S4 Another Country / Outro País (Sérgio Tréfaut, Portugal, 1999). Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2016). Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, Brazil, 2019). The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez / Les Beaux Jours d’Aranjuez (Wim Wenders, Germany, Portugal, France, 2016). Birdsong / El cant dels Ocells (Albert Serra, Spain, 2008). Buscando Tréboles (Víctor Gaviria, Colombia, 1979 and 1980). Caged in / Enjaulado (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 1997). The Cardboard Sword / Atakathi (Pa Ranjith, India, 2012). Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, USA, 1962). Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1942). Céu Aberto (Graça Castanheira, Portugal, 1997). Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (Chantal Akerman, France, 1997). Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, USA, 1966). Clouds of May / Mayıs Sıkıntısı (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 1999). Cocoon / Koza (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 1995). Cold Tropics / Recife Frio (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2009). A Companha do João da Murtosa (Paulo Nuno Lopes and Helena Lopes, Portugal, 1998). Critic / Crítico (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2008). D’Est (Chantal Akerman, Belgium and France, 1993). Dead King / Rey Muerto (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 1995). The Death of Louis XIV / La mort de Louis XIV (Albert Serra, Spain, 2016). Diego Velázquez ou Le Réalisme Sauvage (Karim Aïnouz, France, 2015). Dis-moi (Chantal Akerman, France, 1980). Distant/ Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2002). Down to Earth / Casa de Lava (Pedro Costa, Portugal, France, Germany, 1994). Eat (Andy Warhol, USA, 1963). El Vagón Rojo (Víctor Gaviria, Colombia, 1981). Entraste no Jogo, Tens de Jogar, Assim na Terra como no Céu (Pedro Sena Nunes, Portugal, 1999). Esta Televisão é a Sua (Mariana Otero, Portugal, 1997). Every Man for Himself / Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2001). Everything Will Be Fine (Wenders Wim, Germany, Sweden, 2015).

244

Filmography

Eyes Without a Face / Les yeux sans visage (Georges Franju, France, Italy, 1960). Faces Places / Visages villages (Varda Agnès and JR, Le Pacte, France, 2017). Five (Kiarostami Abbas, Iran: MK2, 2003). Fragments between Time and Angels (Pedro Sena Nunes, Portugal, 1997). Futuro Beach / Praia do Futuro (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2014). Geração Feliz (Leonor Areal, Portugal, 1999). A Girl Called Ming / Ming Guniang (Kena Dong, China, 1984). Há Drama na Escola (Leonor Areal, Portugal, 1993). The Headless Woman / La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, 2008). Heroes Without Tears / Yingxiong Wulei (Jiang, Hao, China, 1991). The Holy Girl / La niña santa (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, Spain, Italy, 2004). Honor of the Knights / Honor de Cavalleria (Albert Serra, ES: Andergraun Films, 2006). Hotel Monterey (Chantal Akerman, USA, 1973). Hotel Run by Women / Xiangsi Nüzi Kedian (Dong, Kena, China, 1985). The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga / A Hora e a Vez de Augusto Matraga / (Roberto Santos, Brazil, 1965). I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You / Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque te Amo (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2010). Impressions of 3rd Day in Glasgow / Impressões do 3.º Dia em Glasgow (Pedro Sena Nunes, Portugal, 1997). In Praise of Love / Éloge de l’amour (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2001). In Vanda’s Room / No Quarto da Vanda (Costa Pedro, Contracosta Produções, Portugal, 2000). Je tu il elle (Chantal Akerman, France and Belgium, 1974). Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975). Kaala (Pa Ranjith, India, 2018). Kilandukilu – Diversión / Kilandukilu – Diversão (Margarida Leitão, Portugal, 1998). King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, USA, 1987). Kiss (Warhol Andy, USA, 1963). La Lupa del Fin del Mundo (Víctor Gaviria, Colombia, 1981). The Lady of Chandor / A Dama de Chandor (Catarina Mourão, Portugal, 1998). Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, France and Federal Republic of Germany, 1978). Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (Dziga Vertov Group, France, 1972). Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, Germany/Portugal,1994). Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés (Víctor Gaviria, Colombia, 1987). Love for Sale / O Céu de Suely (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, Germany, Portugal, France, 2006). Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2002). Madras (Pa Ranjith, India, 2014). Margens (Pedro Sena Nunes, Portugal, 1994). Maya Deren: Experimental Films 1943–1958 (Maya Deren, USA, 2007). Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, USA, 1943). Mulheres do Batuque (Catarina Rodrigues, Portugal, 1997). Natal 71 (Margarida Cardoso, Portugal, 1999). Neighbouring Sounds / O Som ao Redor (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 1997). News from Home (Chantal Akerman, USA, 1977). News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital / Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital (Alexander Kluge, Germany, 2008). Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, USA, 1968).

Filmography

245

No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, France and Belgium, 2015). North on Evers (James Benning, USA, 1992). Number Two / Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, France, 1975). On the Hunting Ground / Liechang Zhasa (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China, 1984). Once Upon a Time in Anatolia/ Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2011). Orderly or Disorderly / Be Tartib Ya Bedun-e Tartib (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1981). Outros Bairros (Kiluanje Liberdade, Inês Gonçalves and Vasco Pimentel, Portugal, 1999). Pariyerum Perumal (Mari Selvaraj, India, 2018). Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, France: Sonimage, 1982). Pina (Wim Wenders, Germany/France, 2011). Saute ma Ville (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1968). Scénario du Film Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1982). Screen Test #2 (Andy Warhol, USA, 1965). Seams (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil / USA, 1993). Senhora Aparecida (Catarina Alves Costa, Portugal, 1994). Sleep (Warhol Andy, USA, 1963). Soft and Hard (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, France, 1985). Surfavela (Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel, Portugal, 1996). Swagatam (Catarina Alves Costa, Portugal, 1998). Taste of Cherry / Tam-e Gilas (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1997). Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002). The Rose Seller / La Vendedora de Rosas (Gaviria Víctor, Colombia, 1998). The Swamp / La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, France, Spain, 2001). The Town / Kasaba (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 1997). Three Monkeys / Üç Maymun (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2008). Through the Olive Trees / Zir-e Derakhtan-e Zeytun I (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1993). Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, 2011). Vampires of Poverty / Agarrando pueblo / (Carlos Mayolo & Luis Ospina, Colombia, 1978). Varda by Agnès / Varda par Agnès (Varda Agnès, France, 2019). Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2019). Wild Pear Tree / Ahlat Ağacı (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2018). Winter Sleep / Kış Uykusu (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2014). Women in Revolt (Paul Morrissey, USA, 1971). Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Netherlands, USA, 2017).

INDEX A.B.C. Africa (Kiarostami, 2001) 71 Acuarimántima magazine 47 Additions and Subtractions/Sumas y Restas (Gaviria, 2004) 45, 50–1 Adorno, Theodor W. 7, 145–6 Aesthetic Theory 217 n.21 appreciation/lack of appreciation 139–40, 214 n.3 Dialectic of Enlightenment 141 “Oberhauseners” 214 n.1 ‘Transparencies on Film’ 214 n.1, 217 n.27 aesthetics 17, 46, 70, 76, 81, 84, 99, 112, 121, 146, 150–1, 156–7, 164, 168, 170, 214 n.1, 223 n.1 clashes of social classes 58 classical 151 of multiplicity 158 revelationist 66 visual 169–70 after-images 7, 140, 145–7, 217 n.21 After Warhol (Benning, 2011) 79 Agnès d’Ici de là Varda/Agnès from Here to There (Varda, 2011) 88, 96 AI (Martel, 2019) 223 n.3 AIM-Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers 4 Aïnouz, Karim 5, 23–9. See also specific Aïnouz’s films Akbari, Mania 69, 74, 205 n.7 Akerman, Chantal 7, 171. See also specific Akerman’s films Autoportrair en Cinéaste 221 n.17 border dweller 172, 174–6 images and sounds 171, 175 life and personal history 176–7 and time-image 172–4 works and words 172, 176–7 Alan, René 38 Aléa, Tomás Gutierrez 34, 39–40 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Becker, 1955) 14

Alice in the Cities/Alice in den Städten (Wenders, 1974) 161–2, 219 n.4 A Almadraba Atuneira (Campos, 1961) 181 Alves, Mateus 57, 59, 64 Amascultura Documentary Festival 183, 222 n.17 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 99, 101, 103, 106, 208 n.5 American Avant-Garde tradition 107, 114 The Animal’s Wife/La Mujer del Animal (Gaviria, 2016) 45 Antonioni, Michelangelo 117 AporDOC 182 Aquarius (Mendonça Filho, 2016) 57–60, 63, 204 n.16, 204 n.27 Clara (fictional character) 58, 60–2, 204 n.27 social classes’ cultural affirmation 58 vinyl records 61 Aragão, Hélder (DJ Dolores) 57, 63 Araújo, Nelson 36 Areal, Leonor 183 Argentine cinema 222–3 n.1 Arnheim, Rudolf 107 The Arrival of a Train (at La Ciotat) (Lumière brothers, 1895) 145–6 ars poetica films 88 ARTE 88 arthouse filmmakers 151 artistic creation 8, 11–12, 14–15, 19, 21, 27–8 artworks 145, 217 n.21 Astruc, Alexandre 13–14, 92 The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo 11–13, 90 Attakathi (Ranjith, 2012) 99–100 Augè, Marc 176 Aumont, Jacques 6 Les Théories des Cinéastes 2 Un Film Peut-Il Être un Acte de Théorie? 2, 29

Index auteur theory 2, 5, 15–19, 24 auteurs 56, 88, 98–9, 162, 199 n.5, 208 n.4 premises 15 residual 21 author/authorship 5, 11–12, 14, 16, 19–20, 24, 73, 136, 138, 189, 209 n.9 auteurism 17–18, 20 author-function 16–18 Author Theory 11 and metteurs en scène 15, 17 before politique des auteurs 11–13 authorism movement 56 auto-criticism 66–8, 74 autonomous entity 33 Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) 187–8 avant-garde 76, 173, 204 n.12 Bacurau (Mendonça Filho & Dornelles, 2019) 57–9, 62–4, 204 n.7, 204 n.16, 205 n.37 Badiou, Alain 200 n.26 Baecque, Antoine de, Conversation avec Manoel de Oliveira/Conversations with Manoel de Oliveira 3 Baggio, Eduardo Tulio 5 Balázs, Béla 162 Barnouw, Erik, Documentary – A History of Non-Fiction Film 179–81 Barthes, Roland 114, 116, 146, 199 n.4 The Death of the Author 16–17, 20 Bartmanski, Dominik 60 Başekim, Sezen Gürüf 6 Baudelaire, Charles 115, 147 Bausch, Pina 167 Bayard, Hippolyte, ‘Self-Portrait as Drowned Man’ 116 Bazin, André 14, 17, 19–20, 108, 113–14, 116, 212 n.66 copy/plagiarism 15 La Politique des auteurs 14 photographic realism 107, 123 The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (Wenders, 2016) 162, 167 Beauty No.2 (Warhol, 1965) 81, 83 Beijing Film School 131 Beijing Film Studio 130 Belgian filmmaker 7, 171–3, 176–7

247

Bellour, Raymond 93 Benjamin, Walter 7, 114–16, 118, 126, 140, 142–3, 145, 205 n.3, 216 n.11. See also dialectical images Arcades 143 Berlin Chronicle 144 ‘The Task of the Translator’ 115 Ben Jor, Jorge 59 Benning, James 6, 75, 84 ethereal beauty 80 Life is Finite 78 and portraits over time 78–80 Bergman, Ingmar 117, 125 Betancourt, Michael, Beyond Spatial Montage 149 Betancur, Javier 48 Bettendorff, Paulina 189, 192 Birdsong (Serra, 2008) 84 Birkin, Jane, tableaux vivants 91 Black Panthers (Varda, 1968) 91 Blanchot, Maurice 29 Bourdieu, Pierre 58 Boyle, Danny 56 Brazilian filmmakers 5, 23, 63, 185 Brecht, Bertolt 34 Bresson, Robert 15, 117 Brioude, Mireille 95, 207 n.1 Bruno, Giuliana 174 Buchanan, Ann 78 Buena Vista Social Club (Wenders, 1999) 163 Bulgakova, Oksana 140 Burch, Noël 28 Buscando Tréboles (Gaviria, 1979 & 1980) 46, 48–51 Buscombe, Edward 15, 17 Caged In (Mendonça Filho, 1997) 55 Cahiers du Cinéma magazine 13–15, 20, 87, 199 n.5 Caillois, Roger 205 n.2 Calvino, Italo 20 Câmara, Vasco 37 Campos, António 181 Canadian International Film Festival 137 Capa, Robert 116 Cape Verdean immigrants 80 capitalism 69, 141, 155

248 Card, James 110 Cardoso, Margarida 181, 183 Carlos, Roberto 204 n.27 Carnival of Souls (Harvey, 1962) 192 Carvalho, Marcelo 5 Castanheira, Graça 183–4 Cat People (Tourneur, 1942) 192 Caughie, John, Theories of Authorship 18 central producer system 206 n.10 Céu Aberto (Castanheira, 1997) 183–4 Ceylan, Ebru 118 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge 117. See also specific Ceylan’s films cinematography 121–2 confession 126 digitalization 120, 123 editing style 120 freedom and believability 122 humour and surrealism 123, 125–6 loneliness 124 mode of production in cinema 118–23 reality/realism 117–18, 123–6 shooting process 119 sound/music 121 Changer d’Image – Lettre à la Bien-Aimée (Godard, 1982) 157–8 Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (Akerman, 1997) 177 Chaplin, Charlie 163, 165 ‘Charles, Anjo 45’/Charles, Angel 45 (Ben Jor) 59 Chelsea Girls (Warhol, 1966) 81, 83 Chen Kaige 129 Childish Gambino 99 China Film Delegation 130, 137 China’s film industry 129 fifth generation directors 129–30 film culture 130, 135 Film Theory 129–30 pessimism 136 Chinita, Fátima 6, 33–4, 38, 41 Christofoletti Barrenha, Natalia 7 cinema 2, 12, 37, 41, 47, 65–7, 71, 108, 129, 151–3, 172, 187, 200 n.26, 215 n.3 artistic legitimation 11, 13 conception and film practice 7 digital 65, 71–2 essence of 70–1, 73–4

Index ideas in 19, 26, 48 means of expression 90, 98, 107, 112 modern literature and 12 and theoretical practice 29 “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” program 20 Cinema Novo (New Cinema) 46 cinema of attractions 152 Cinema Studies 11 cinematography 91, 107–9, 111–16, 121, 173, 201 n.4, 209 n.10 Cinéma vérité (Rouch) 112 cinephilia 7, 224 n.27 ciranda 58 Cisneros, James 40 Clark, Veve A., The Legend of Maya Deren 112 Clement, Rene 15 Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962) 88–90 Climates (Ceylan, 2006) 118, 121, 126 Clouds of May (Ceylan, 1999) 118, 124 Coeur Fidèle/The Faithful Heart (Epstein, 1923) 152 cognitive theory 1, 33, 36 communicative function 26 Comolli, Jean-Louis 20 A Companha do João da Murtosa (Lopes & Lopes, 1998) 183–4 ‘Conversations with Filmmakers Series’ (University Press of Mississippi) 2 Conway, Kelley 95 Coppola, Francis Ford 161 Corpas, Irene 173 Costa, Catarina Alves 183–4 Costa, Gal 62 Costa, João Bénard da 181 Costa, José Manuel 181–2 Costa Júnior, Edson Pereira da 6 Costa, Pedro 6, 34, 37–8, 75, 181 dialectic of unveiling and concealing in 80–2, 84 ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ (British band Queen) 59 creation/creative process 3–4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 19–21, 25, 29, 35–7, 39, 41, 57–9, 62–4, 75, 80, 83, 89, 118, 154, 161, 179, 187, 209 n.24 heterogeneous background of 24–30 ideas 26, 30

Index mélomane directors 56–7 social and political processes 46 spectator 35 un-thinkable 29–30 ‘A Critical Cinema – Interviews with Independent Filmmakers Series’ (University of California Press) 2 critical theory 4 Crowe, Cameron 56 cult filmmakers 129 Cultural Studies 20, 38 Cunha, Tito Cardoso, Teoria dos Cineastas Versus Teoria do Autor/Filmmakers on Film Versus Auteur Theory 18, 24 Curtin, Michael, Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood 2 Daguérreotypes (Varda, 1975) 90–1 Dali, Salvador 108 Dalits 6, 97–8, 103, 106, 208 n.2 Gaana songs 99–100 identity 99, 103–5 parai 99, 208 n. 3 spatial identity 101–2, 105 A Dama de Chandor (Mourão, 1998) 183–4 de Barros, Leitão 181 Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle/La société du spectacle 150, 156 Delers, Olivier 7 Deleuze, Gilles 19, 26, 30, 110, 172–6, 200 nn.26–7, 204 n.28 blocks of movement/duration 200 n.27 The Movement Image 200 n.27 oneiro-sign 111 The Time Image 200 n.27 What Is Philosophy? 200 n.27 Delgado, Noémia 181 Demy, Jacques 91 Demy, Mathieu 91 Deng Xiaoping 131 Deren, Maya 107–8, 151, 171, 209 n.15, 209 n.24, 210 n.29, 210 n.37 alternative sequences (staircase) 109 cinematic grammar 108 ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’ 6, 107, 109–10, 115

249

dream image 111–12 ‘Gothic’ 112 metonymic and metaphoric 108, 110 photography (see photography/ photographic image (Deren)) poetic film 108, 112 ‘Resurrection at Noon’ 112 D’Est (Akerman, 1993) 173–4 deterritorialization 176 dialectical images 7, 140, 142–5, 150, 216 n.11 Diário de Notícias newspaper 35, 38 Di Benedetto, Antonio, Zama 194–5 diegesis 58, 192 Diego Velázquez ou Le Réalisme Sauvage (Aïnouz, 2015) 23, 26 Die Zeit newspaper 214 n.1 digital age 161 ‘Direct Cinema’ movement 112 Dis-moi (Akerman, 1980) 177 DocLisboa Festival 222 n.17 documentary filmmaking 7, 52, 89, 179, 182. See also specific documentaries documentary attitude 183, 185–6 evolution of 179–80, 186 filmmakers 179 Documenteur (Varda, 1981) 91 ‘Dois Navegantes’/Two Sailors (Ave Sangria, 1974) 60 Dong Kena 130–2, 134, 136–7 Director’s Program 131 filmic style 133 socialist realist approach 132 Dornelles, Juliano 57, 59, 62 Double Fantasy (Lennon, 1980) 60 Douro, Faina Fluvial (Oliveira, 1931) 181 Down to Earth (Costa, 1994) 82 Drury, John 78 Duchamp, Marcel 108 Dulac, Germaine 12 Duno-Gottberg, Luis 46 Dwellers of Night/Los Habitantes de la Noche (1983) 53 Dziga Vertov Group 156–7 Early German Romanticism 66–7, 73–4 8½ (Fellini, 1963) 28 Guido Anselmi (fictional character) 28 Eisenstein, Sergei 3, 30, 113, 140–2

250

Index

The Eleventh Year/Odinnadtsatyy (Vertov, 1928) 155 Éloge de l’amour/In Praise of Love (Godard, 2001) 71 El Vagón Rojo (Gaviria, 1981) 46, 52, 54 The End of Violence (Wenders, 1997) 165 Enríquez, Mariana 189–90 Entraste no Jogo, Tens de Jogar, Assim na Terra como no Céu (Nunes, 1999) 183–4 epidermal identity 77 Epstein, Jean 12–13, 30, 116, 150–1, 156, 158 camera as inhuman eye 151–6 tenets of 152–3 Ernst, Max 108 Esta Televisão é a Sua (Otero, 1997) 183 Every Thing Will Be Fine (Wenders, 2015) 162, 166–7 Falamos de António Campos (Costa, 2009) 181 Falamos de Rio de Onor (Campos, 1974) 181 Farber, Manny 83–4 ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ (Queen) 61 Fellini, Federico 28, 162, 165 feminist filmmaker 210 n.29 feminist theory 4 Ferreira, Nelson 58 ‘Entre as Hortências’/Between the Flowers 59 film community 37, 131, 138 filmic elasticity 36 filmmakers 1–2, 5, 7, 18–21, 27, 30, 34, 41, 51, 58, 72, 75, 97, 130, 149, 159, 163, 179–82, 200 n.26. See also specific filmmakers academics and 4, 171 creative processes (see creation/creative process) new generation 99 reciprocity 2 and researcher 5 thoughts and poetics 5, 8, 30, 53 Filmmakers on Film 1–6, 15, 19–20, 23–4, 28, 30–1, 41, 65, 171–2, 174, 201 n.30, 221 n.17

filmmaking 1, 5, 7, 13, 19, 34, 37, 89, 108, 112, 117–19, 123, 126, 130, 134, 161, 165, 174–5, 177, 186, 189 mise-en-abyme of 163 teamwork in 135 theory of labour division 136, 138 film noir 143, 163, 165 film restoration 3 film studies 3, 18, 20, 33 Film Subsidies Bill (1967) 214 n.1 film theory 1–5, 7–8, 30, 33–4, 129–30, 149, 161–2, 170, 173 comprehensive and holistic 5 traditional 38 Fischinger, Oskar 107 Five (Kiarostami, 2003) 73 Fontaínhas community 37 fort/da 110, 209 n.23 Foster, Hal 143 Foucault, Michel 16–18, 28–9, 199 n.4 fragmentation 17, 151, 155, 159 Fragments between Time and Angels (Nunes, 1997) 183 Frampton, Hollis 151 French Society of Philosophy 16 Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 209 n.23 Futuro Beach (Aïnouz, 2014) 25–6 Galindo Orrego, Liliana 6 Gance, Abel 12–13 Gaviria, Víctor 6, 45–9, 54, 202 n.7. See also specific Gaviria’s films Cine y Realidad 47, 50 dead time 48, 51–2 ‘Del documental y sus habitantes’/On Documentary and Its Dwellers 50 Detrás de Cámaras 47 documentary and poetry 51–2 (see also poetics (Gaviria)) El Campo al Fin de Cuentas No Es Tan Verde 47 El Pelaíto que no Duró Nada 47 En la Ciudad Alguien También Perplejo 47 journalism and anthropology 50 series of moving images 49 uncertainty 51, 53 Víctor Gaviria en Palabras 47

Index gaze 78–9, 81, 98, 102–3, 147, 162, 169–70, 191, 201 n.29 Gemünden, Gerd 189 Geração Feliz (Areal, 1999) 183 German Expressionism 159 Gerrard, Chris 7 Gestos e Fragmentos (Santos, 1983) 181 A Girl Called Ming/Ming Guniang (Dong Kena, 1984) 133, 137 Godard, Jean-Luc 6, 30, 65–73, 88, 150, 156, 205 n.6, 205 nn.1–2, 206 n.9 auto-commentaries 65, 67–8, 74 detournement and image 156–9 reflexivity, oeuvre, essence of cinema 73–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Wahlverwandschaften/Elective Affinities 205 n.3 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 67 Gonçalves, Inês 183 Gorbman, Claudia 55–6, 58 The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini, 1964) 205 n.9 Graça, André Rui 5, 7 Grange, Marie-Françoise 94 Great Cultural Revolution 131 Greenaway, Peter 151, 159 Griffith, David W. 12 Guattari, Félix 172–3, 175–6, 204 n.28 What Is Philosophy? 200 n.27 Guimarães, Cao 7, 185–6 Guimarães, César 37 Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction’ 150 Guzmán, Patricio 3, 34, 40–1 Filmar lo que no se Ve: Una Manera de Hacer Documentales, Métodos Artículos, Reseñas 3 Há Drama na Escola (Areal, 1993) 183 Haigh, Andrew 4 Hammett (Wenders, 1982) 161 Hansen, Miriam Bratu 143, 145–6, 214 n.1, 217 n.27 Harlan, Thomas 183 Harris, Andrew 24 Hart, Stephen 39–40 Hellings, James 7

251

Heroes without Tears/Yingxiong Wulei (Jiang, 1991) 136 Herzog 48 heterogeneous background of creation 24–30 Hochhäusler, Christoph 195 Hodson, Millicent, The Legend of Maya Deren 112 Hollywood 108, 176 films 157, 164, 199 n.5 happy ending 142 production 56, 113, 176 traditional visual motifs 110 A Hora e a Vez de Augusto Matraga/The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga (Santos, 1965) 63 Augusto Matraga (fictional character) 63 Joãozinho Bem-Bem (fictional character) 63 Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment 141 Hotel Run by Women/Xiangsi Nüzi Kedian (Dong Kena, 1985) 133 Hubbert, Julie 56, 58 A Hundred and One Nights (Varda, 1995) 91 Huston, John 15 idiosyncrasies 7, 177 image-time 172–4 Impressões do 3.º Dia em Glasgow (Nunes, 1997) 183 İncesu, Sadık 118 Ince, Thomas 206 n.10 infinite kaleidoscope 169 International Film Festival Rotterdam 224 n.18 intertextuality 55, 63–4 In Vanda’s Room (Costa, 2000) 81–2 Ito, Teiji 209 n.20 I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You (Aïnouz & Gomes, 2009) 23 Jacquot de Nantes/Jacquot (Varda, 1991) 91 Jakobson, Roman, linguistic model 108 Jameson, Frederic dismay 142 illusion of centrality 205 n.5

252

Index

Jane B. by Agnès V. (Varda, 1988) 91, 94 Jáuregui, Carlos 52 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975) 171, 173, 177 Je tu il elle (Akerman, 1974) 173, 177 Jiang Hao 7, 129, 134 ‘Confusions and Anxieties in North America’ 131 film establishment 130–4 gender bias 132 male performativity 133 on screenwriting 134–8 Joyce, James 40, 140 Ulysses 140 JR 88, 92, 95–6 Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) 101–2 Dharavi slum 101–3 Haridada (fictional character) 102, 104 Karikaalan (fictional character) 102 Lenin (fictional character) 105 Selvam (fictional character) 105 spatial imagery 105 Zareen (fictional character) 105 Kael, Pauline ‘Circles and Squares’ 17 plurality and flexibility 17 Kafka, Franz 140, 145–7, 174 kaleidoscope 162, 168–70 Kalinak, Kathryn 60 Keller, Sarah 150 Khorchin Literature journal 131 Kiarostami, Abbas 6, 65–71, 74, 118, 206 n.9. See also specific Kiarostami’s films auto-commentaries 65, 67–8, 74 digital cinema 71–2 immediacy 71 new media, old ontology 71–3 truth/reality 73–4 Kilandukilu/Diversão (Leitão, 1998) 183–4 King Lear (Godard, 1987) 158 Kings of the Road/Im Lauf der Zeit (Wenders, 1975) 161 kino-eye 150, 153–8 Kinoks 153, 155 Klee, Paul 13

Kluge, Alexander 7, 139, 142–3, 146–7, 214 n.1, 215 n.9 aesthetics and politics 214 n.1 different kind of cinema 142–6 iconoclastic, diminishing and perpendicular films 140, 144 montage 143, 145, 217 n.26 structural affinity 217 n.26 Koogai Film Movement 99 Koza (Ceylan, 1995) 117 Kracauer, Siegfried 107, 113 redemption of reality 107, 123, 212 n.65 Kramer, Robert 183 Krauss, Rosalind 142 Kristl, Vlado 214 n.1 Kung Fu Master! (Varda, 1988) 91 La ciénaga/The Swamp (Martel, 2001) 189–91, 194, 224 n.18 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 66 La Lupa del Fin del Mundo (Gaviria, 1980) 46, 52, 54 La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange/The Fight of the Angel with Jacob (Delacroix) 69 Lamar, Kendrick 99 La mort nous fait ses promesses par cinématographe 116 La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (Martel, 2008) 190–1 Land of Plenty (Wenders, 2004) 165 Langie, Cíntia 19 La niña santa/The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004) 189–91, 195 La Pointe-Courte/Pointe Courte (Varda, 1955) 91 La Revue du cinéma 15 Las Naves magazine 188, 195 Last Interview Series (Penguin Random House) 2–3 Latin American filmmakers 187 Le Bonheur (Varda, 1965) 89, 91 Le Corbusier 108 Leitão, Margarida 183 Lejeune, Phillippe, Le Pacte autobiographique 208 n.4 Lennon, John 60 Leonel, Nuno 183

Index Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) 92, 95 Leslie, Esther 144, 216 n.17 Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès (Varda, 2008) 87–9, 93–6 Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Akerman, 1978) 177 Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes without a Face (Franju, 1960) 192 Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (Dziga Vertov Group, 1972) 157 Liberdade, Kiluanje 183, 185 Lions Love … and Lies (Varda, 1969) 91 Lisbon Story (Wenders, 1994) 161–5, 167–9 ‘European Capital of Culture’ 162 Friedrich Monroe (fictional character) 162–5, 167, 169–70 Philip Winter (fictional character) 161–5, 167, 170, 219 n.4 literary realism 45–6 Location Hunting in Palestine (Pasolini, 1965) 205 n.9 L’Opéra-Mouffe/Diary of a Pregnant Woman (Varda, 1958) 91 Lopes, Fernando 181 Lopes, Helena 183, 185 Lopes, Paulo Nuno 183, 185 Los Angeles Times newspaper 60 Los Cuentos de Campo Valdés (Gaviria, 1987) 46, 48–52 Love for Sale (Aïnouz, 2006) 24–5, 27–8 Hermila (fictional character) 25 Lumière brothers 145 L’Une chante l’autre pas/One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Varda, 1977) 91 Lynch, David 38, 151 MacDonald, Scott, A Critical Cinema 5 – Interviews with Independent Filmmakers 2 Machado, Robert 154 Madame Satã (Aïnouz, 2002) 25 Maddin, Guy 151 Madras (Ranjith, 2014) 100–1 magical realism 192 Magic Lantern 150 Manavalan, Amutha 6

253

Mangolte, Babette 173 Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media 149 Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s Kino-Apparatom (Vertov, 1929) 155 Marais, Jean 109 Margens (Nunes, 1994) 183–5 Margulies, Ivone, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday 173 Martel, Lucrecia 187, 223 n.5, 225 n.35. See also specific Martel’s films ASMR videos 187–8, 195 engendering cracks 188–90, 195 horror lurks around 190–2 Martelian repertoire 187 sound approach 192–3 time in whirlpool 193–4 un-learnings 194–5 Marx, Karl 154–5, 158 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 140–1 Marxism 4 Máscaras (Delgado, 1976) 181 mass media 145, 214 n.1, 215 n.3 Mayne, Judith, Spectator and Spectatorship 201 n.3 Mayolo, Carlos 46, 202 n.7 Mazierska, Ewa 162 Mekas, Jonas 173 mélomania 55–8, 63–4 Memórias del Subdesarollo/Memories of the Underdevelopment (Aléa, 1968) 39 Sérgio (fictional character) 39–40 Mendonça Filho, Kleber 6, 55–9, 61–4. See also specific Mendonça Filho’s films; music style (Mendonça Filho) Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren, 1943) 6, 107, 110, 113–14, 116 metteurs en scène 15, 17 metteuse-em-scène 176 Michelson, Annette 108, 113, 150 Miéville, Anne-Marie 71 Miller, Toby, A Companion to Film Theory 18 Million Dollar Hotel (Wenders, 2000) 165 mise-en-scène 4, 99, 190, 194 modernity, cinema 12, 28, 165, 173

254 montage 188, 215 n.9, 217 n.26 associative 49 radical practice of 143, 145, 215 n.9 spatial 149 vertical 113 Monteiro, João César 181 Montenegro, Gustavo, Music Licensing activity 56 Montez, Mario 83 Moreira, Helder 38 Morrissey, Paul 83 Mourão, Catarina 183–4 Moure, José 93 Mulheres do Batuque (Rodrigues, 1997) 183–4 Müller, Tue Steen 182, 185 multi-image 7, 149, 153–4 brief history of 150–1 dialectical processes 155 Godard, detournement and 156–9 Munro, Friedrich 162 Mur murs/Mural Murals (Varda, 1981) 91 music 49, 55, 57–63, 74, 99–100 The Musicians/Los Músicos (1985) 53 music style (Mendonça Filho) characteristics of 55 practice in Brazil 56 sound affection and memories 62 Nancy, Jean-Luc 66 ‘Não Identificado’/Not Identified (Veloso) 62 Narboni, Pierre 20 Naremore, James 19–20 Authorship 18 Natal 71 (Cardoso, 1999) 183 National Feminine Movement 183 Nazaré, Praia de Pescadores (de Barros, 1928) 181 negligent realism 191 Negt, Oskar 141–2 Neighbouring Sounds (Mendonça Filho, 2012) 57, 59, 63 Clodoaldo (fictional character) 59–60 Francisco (fictional character) 59–60 neorealism 39, 46, 52, 112 New Argentine Cinema 187 New German Cinema 48, 161–2

Index New Latin American Cinema 39, 46 new millennium 138 News from Home (Akerman, 1977) 173 News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital/Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike:Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital (Kluge, 2008) 7, 140–4 All Things are Enchanted People 140–1 Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House 140 The Paradoxes of Exchange Society 140, 142 New York Film Festival 189 New York Times 97 Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary 180–1 Nico 78 Nieman, Caterina, The Legend of Maya Deren 112 Nietzsche, Friedrich 28, 126 Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) 192 No Home Movie (Akerman, 2015) 171, 177 No Quarto da Vanda (Costa, 2000) 181 North on Evers (Benning, 1992) 79 Nós por cá Todos Bem (Lopes, 1978) 181 Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (Wenders, 1989) 161 Nouvelle Vague filmmakers 96, 199 n.5 Novo Documentário em Portugal (1999) 182 Nuevo Cine Argentino 222 n.1 Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano 39 Number Two/Numéro deux (Godard, 1975) 157 Nunes, Pedro Sena 183–4 Obici, Giuliano 61, 204 n.28 O’Brien, Kevin 150 October (Eisenstein, 1927) 140 Oesterheld, Héctor Germán, El Eternauta 194 Old Guard/La Vieja Guardia (1984) 53 Oliveira, Daniel 4 Oliveira, Manoel de 3, 34–9, 41, 162–3, 170, 181 Omelete website 25

Index Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, 2011) 121–2, 125 Oncle Yanco/Uncle Yanco (Varda, 1967) 90 On the Hunting Ground/liechang Zhasa (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1984) 131, 137 open cinema 182–3, 185 operationalization 4 ‘O Quintal do Vizinho’/The Neighbour’s Backyard (Carlos) 61 Orderly or Disorderly (Kiarostami, 1981) 66 Orpheus (Cocteau, 1950) 109 Ospina, Luis 46 Otero, Mariana 7, 183, 185–6 Oubiña, David 191 Outro País (Tréfaut, 1999) 183 Outros Bairros (Liberdade, Gonçalves & Pimentel, 1999) 183–4 Ovid, Metamorphoses 141 ownership 38 Ozu, Yasujirō 117, 161–2, 166–8, 170 Pariyerum Perumal (Selvaraj, 2018) 99, 101 Karuppi (fictional character) 104 Pariyan (fictional character) 101, 104 Parsi, Jacques, Conversation avec Manoel de Oliveira/Conversations with Manoel de Oliveira 3 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 29–30, 205 n.9 notebook films 206 n.9 Passion (Godard, 1982) 65–8, 70–1, 73–4 Patatutopia (Varda, 2003) 95 Paul, Jason N. 150 Peary, Gerald, Quentin Tarantino Interviews 2 Penafria, Manuela 5, 7, 29, 201 n.29 Pérez Rial, Agustina 189, 192 philosophy 89, 94, 110–12, 117, 150, 172–4, 200 n.26 photogénie 76, 83, 150–1, 153, 157–8 inhuman eye of 153 perceptual enhancements 156 photographic realism, theory of 107 photography/photographic image (Deren) 112–14 attributes 115

255

controlled action 113 and death 116 denigration of 114 perceptual realism 115 servitude 114 Pimentel, Vasco 183 Pina (Wenders, 2011) 162, 166–7 Pinto, Joaquim 183 Pletinck, Karel 6 poetic/political images 7, 156 poetics (Gaviria) 6, 46 of childhood 47–53 dark light of poetry 53 and poetry 45–6, 53–4 Polanski, Roman, Roman 117 politique des auteurs 11, 13–15, 19 author before 11–13 cult of personality 15 pop art 204 n.12 pornomiseria 46, 202 n.7 Porter, Edwin 150 Portugals’ Carnation Revolution 183 Portuguese cinema history 181–2 Portuguese Cinematheque 182 Portuguese filmmakers 3, 34–5, 82, 181–2, 201 n.4 documentary films 182, 186 new generation 184 post-war period modern cinemas 28 violence and poverty 46 A Pousada das Chagas (Rocha, 1972) 181 Propostas para a Teoria do Cinema/ Proposals for Film Theory 3 psychoanalysis 1, 4, 33 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich, expressive objects 79 Que Farei Eu com Esta Espada? (Monteiro, 1975) 181 Rainer, Yvone 173 Rajinikanth 104 Ramos, Jorge Leitão 36 Ranjith, Pa. 6, 98, 103–6, 208 n.2 Ambedkarite 103, 106, 208 n.7 The Casteless Collective band 99, 208 n.2

256

Index

films and characters 99–102, 105 (see also specific Ranjith’s films) and his work 98–9 Rascaroli, Laura 93, 162 Ray, Nicholas 15 realism/realistic intention 45–6, 52, 54, 73, 82, 107, 111–12, 115, 118, 123–6, 150–1 Recife Frio/Cold Tropics (Mendonça Filho, 2009) 58 redemption of reality 118, 123, 126, 212 n.65 Reed, Lou 78 Rees, Dee 4 reflexivity 66–7, 69, 73–4, 205 n.2 Reis, António 181 Reitz, Edgar 214 n.1 repente 58 ‘Réquiem para Matraga’/Requiem for Matraga (Vandré) 62 researcher 2, 4–5, 23, 28–31, 201 n.29 Resnais, Alain 88 Reverdy, Pierre 158 Revisitar a Teoria do Cinema/Revisiting Film Theory 3 Rey Muerto/Dead King (Martel, 1995) 224 n.27 Riambau, Esteve 94 Ricardo, Sérgio, ‘Bichos da Noite’/Animals of the Night 59, 62, 64 Richter, Han 107–8 Rivette, Jacques 15 Rocha, Glauber 30 ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’ 46 Rocha, Paulo 34, 181 Rodrigo D: No Future/Rodrigo D: No Futuro (Gaviria, 1990) 45, 53 Rodrigues, Catarina 183 Romani, Ivo 48 Rosa, João Guimarães 63 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 175 Rosen, Miriam 175 The Rose Seller/La Vendedora de Rosas (Gaviria, 1998) 45, 53–4 Rossellini, Roberto 15 Rua de Mão Dupla (Guimarães, 2002) 186 The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies 18 Salles, Cecilia 20

Sanson, Kevin, Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood 2 Sans toi ni loi/Vagabond (Varda, 1985) 88, 91 Santos, Alberto Seixas 181 Sarris, Andrew 15–17, 19 ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’ 15 Scénario de Je vous salue Marie (Godard, 1985) 205 n.1, 206 n.9 Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard, 1980) 205 n.1, 206 n.9 Scénario du film Passion/Script of the film Passion (Godard, 1982) 6, 65–6, 71–2, 205 n.1 director and his double 67–9 essence of cinema 70–1 immanent and objective criticism 66–7 Isabelle (fictional character) 68–9 Jerzy (fictional character) 66, 68–9, 73 Michel (fictional character) 68–9 Schlegel, Friedrich 67 Schlöndorff, Volker 214 n.1 Schmid, Marion 175–6 Schneider, Helge 142 Sciamma, Céline 4 Screen Test #2 (Warhol, 1965) 83 Screen Tests (Warhol) 77–81, 83, 206 n.19 screen theory 20, 33, 36, 38 sculpting everyday life 7, 185–6 Seams (Aïnouz, 1993) 23 Sedgwick, Edie 78 self-cinewriting process 6, 95 Selvaraj, Mari 99, 101 Senhora Aparecida (Costa, 1994) 183–4 Serra, Albert 6, 75 Dramaturgy of Presence 83–5 Serres, Michel, Eyes 162, 168–70, 220 nn.20–1 Sherlock (2010–17) 151 Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time 171 Sinha, Amresh 6 Sitney, P. Adam 108, 114, 209 n.9 Situationist International 156 A Sixth Part of the World/Shestaya Chast Mira (Vertov, 1926) 154–5 Sleep (Warhol, 1963) 81–2

Index Sloterdijk, Peter 141 slow cinema 173 Snow, Michael 173 society, film in 7, 104 SOCINE (Brazilian Society of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies) 4 Solidarność (Solidarity) 66 Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Monteiro, 1969) 181 sounds and words 29–30 Souza, Tomaz Alves 57, 64, 204 n.16 spatial montage 149 spatial movement 26 spatial wanderings and mental digressions 23 spectator/spectatorship 5–6, 33, 41, 49–51, 65, 143, 146, 157, 183, 193, 201 n.3 as abstract entity 33–4 and audience 36 classical theory of 41 as conceived by filmmakers 35–41 dialogical approach 34 distancing effect 34 institutional notion 34 moviegoer 35 specificity and peculiarity 37 theoretical attitudes 33–4 traditional framework 35 Staiger, Janet 206 n.10 Stalinist Russia 151, 155, 157 Stam, Robert 16 A Companion to Film Theory 18 The State of Things/Der Stand der Dinge (Wenders, 1982) 161–2 Sternbild 216 n.11 Sterritt, David, Jean-Luc Godard Interviews 2 stricto sensu theories 31 Studio System 16 Suárez, Juana 202 n.7 subjectivation 27 superimposition/split-screen 149, 152, 154–6 Surfavela (Pinto & Leonel, 1996) 183 Swagatam (Costa, 1998) 183–4 Tamil cinema 208 n.1. See also Ranjith, Pa. Dalits and Dalit identity 97–9, 103–5 gaze of hatred and cultural divide 102–3

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politics and caste 97–8 Tamil New Wave cinema 98 Tarantino, Quentin 56 Tarkovsky, Andrei 117 Sculpting in Time, The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art 3 Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997) 71, 74 Tavel, Donald 83 Television, Film and Literature journal 131 Ten (Kiarostami, 2002) 65 Tenma 208 n.2 10 on Ten (Kiarostami, 2004) 6, 65–7, 73–4 absence of director 69–70 essence of cinema 70–1 immanent and objective criticism 66–7 Tercer Cine (Third Cinema) 46 thauma 24 Third Film and Video Festival 202 n. 7 The Third of May 1808 (Goya) 73 The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (Warhol, 1965) 77 Thoma, Andre 175 Thoreau, Henry David 78 thought (filmmaker) 11–12, 24, 30–1, 77 outside of 28–9 and poetics 1–2, 5, 8 3D technology 166 Three Monkeys (Ceylan, 2008) 119, 121, 125 Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1993) 66 Tian Zhuangzhuang 129, 131, 137 Tokyo-Ga (Wenders, 1985) 161, 170 Toronto International Film Festival 130–2 The Town (Ceylan, 1997) 118–19, 122 Tradition of Quality and cinema d’auteur 14 Trás-os-Montes (Reis & Cardoso, 1976) 181, 184 Traylor, Bill 78 Tréfaut, Sérgio 183 trick films 150 tropicália 58–9, 204 n.12 Truffaut, François 30, 88 Ali Baba et la Politique des auteurs/Ali Baba and the Politique des auteurs 14 A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema 14

258 truth/reality 4, 27–8, 69, 71, 73–4, 89, 112–13, 151, 159, 189 discovery of 66, 69 photography 107, 113 redemption of 118, 123, 126, 212 n.65 Tscherkassky, Peter 151 24 (2001–14) 151 Twenty Cigarettes (Benning, 2011) 79 uncertainty 29, 51, 200 n.25 unfinished films 2 Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 4 University of Beira Interior (UBI) 4 unthought 28–9 Until the End of the World (Wenders, 1990) 163 Uzak (Ceylan, 2002) 122 Vampires of Poverty/Agarrando pueblo (Mayolo & Ospina, 1978) 46 Vandré, Geraldo 63 van Peebles, Melvin 159 Varda, Agnès 3, 6, 87–8, 171, 207 n.1. See also specific Varda’s films ageless woman in cinematic olympus 95–6 cinécriture (cine-writing) 87, 89–90, 92 creative dis(order) of essay film 90–3 as madame cinéma 88–90 self-cinewriting process 6, 95 self-creation/performative self 93–5 word-image 90 Varda par Agnès/Varda by Agnès (Varda, 2019) 87–91, 94–6 causerie of 88–93, 95–6 Varejão, Claúdia 34, 39 Veloso, Caetano 59, 62 Ver, Ouvir e Ler os Cineastas/Seeing, Listening and Reading the Filmmakers 3 Vertov, Dziga 150–1, 153, 157–8 electric man 155–6 inhuman eye 151–6 kino-eye 153–5 Viktorovna, Maria 223 n.3 Vilarinho das Furnas (Campos, 1971) 181 Villaverde, Teresa 34, 37–9

Index Visages villages/Faces Places (Varda & JR, 2017) 88, 92, 95–6 visual culture 40, 161, 164, 167, 169–70 Visual Poem About Blind Children/Poema Visual Sobre Niños No Videntes 49 Vitalina Varela (Costa, 2019) 82 Vogler, Rüdiger 219 n.4 voluntad realista 6, 45, 53 Von Kleist, Pierre, Casa de Lava – Scrapbook 82 Wackerbarth, Nicolas 195 Wall-Romana, Christophe 152 Warhol, Andy 6, 75–6, 78, 80, 82–3, 85, 171, 206 n.19. See also specific Warhol’s films beauties/identities game 76–8, 83 pedagogy of duration 79 The Philosophy of Andy Warhol 76 photogénie and self-representation 76 Pop Art 84 queer perspective 77 Thirteen Most Wanted Men 77 thought process 77 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 142 Weber, Lois 150 Wenders, Wim 161, 169. See also specific Wenders’s films aesthetics 168 cinema and photography 162, 167 collaboration/collaborators 161, 166, 168, 170 Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception 7, 161–2, 164–8, 170 West German film industry 214 n.1 Wild Pear Tree (Ceylan, 2018) 120–3 İdris Teacher (fictional character) 124 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre/Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) 67 Winter, Bruno 161 Winter Sleep (Ceylan, 2014) 120–2, 125 Wollen, Peter 19 The Auteur Theory 17 Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 18

Index Women in Revolt (Morrissey, 1971) 77 Wong Kar-Wai 118 Woodward, Ian 60 World Wide Web 56 Wright, Edgar 56 Yamamoto, Yōji 161 Yao, Lingling 7

Zama (Martel, 2017) 190 Zavattini, Cesare 52 Zhangke, Jia 119 Zournazi, Mary Hope: New Philosophies for Change 219 n.20 Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception 7, 161–2, 164–8, 170

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