Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video 9780520953918

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
EXC00. Exergue Ex-Cinema
EXC01. Out of the Blue (Ex Nihilo)
EXC02. Extimacy: Outside Time and Superrealist Cinema
EXC03. Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold’s Memory Apparatus
EXC04. The Rhetoric of Images, of the Unimaginable
EXC05. Derrida, Specters, Self-Reflection
EXC06. (Parenthesis Video Ergo Sum)
EXC07. Digesture: Gestures without Bodies
EXC08. Extract Matthias Müller
EXC09. Revisionary Cinema
EXC10. xxxxMA
Index

Citation preview

Ex-Cinema

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Ex-Cinema From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video

Akira Mizuta Lippit

University of California Press Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Ex-cinema : from a theory of experimental film and video / Akira Mizuta Lippit. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 978-0-520-27412-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-27414-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Experimental films—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.E96L57 2012 791.43'611—dc23 2012010874 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments EXC00 Exergue Ex-Cinema EXC01 Out of the Blue (Ex Nihilo)

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1 15

EXC02 Extimacy Outside Time and Superrealist Cinema

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EXC03 Cinemnesis Martin Arnold’s Memory Apparatus

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EXC04 The Rhetoric of Images, of the Unimaginable

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EXC05 Derrida, Specters, Self-Reflection

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EXC06 (Parenthesis Video Ergo Sum)

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EXC07 Digesture Gestures without Bodies

119

EXC08 Extract Matthias Müller

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EXC09 Revisionary Cinema

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EXC10 xxxxMA

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Index

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Illustrations

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

Phil Solomon, Rehearsals for Retirement / 8 Peter Tscherkassky, Outer Space / 10 Peter Tscherkassky, Coming Attractions / 11 Kenneth Anger, Fireworks / 43 Andy Warhol, Sleep / 46 Hollis Frampton, Nostalgia / 50 Caveh Zahedi, “The World Is a Classroom” / 74 Caveh Zahedi, In the Bathtub of the World / 81 Caveh Zahedi, Plot for a Biennial / 83 Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida #1 / 88 Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida #2 / 97 Su Friedrich, Sink or Swim (typing negative) / 99 Su Friedrich, Sink or Swim (zygote) / 100 Diana Thater, Knots & Surfaces / 111 Diana Thater, Electric Mind / 114 Diana Thater, Shumla / 116 Martin Arnold, Self Control / 120 Matthias Müller, Alpsee / 140 Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Mirror / 144

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List of Illustrations

20. Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Phoenix Tapes, “Necrologue” / 147 21. Naomi Uman, removed / 157 22. Jay Rosenblatt, The Smell of Burning Ants / 161 23. Martin Arnold, Soft Palate / 170 24. Martin Arnold, Postcard from Arnold / 172 25. Martin Arnold, Haunted House / 179

Acknowledgments

Many of the filmmakers and artists discussed in this book have engaged this work, offering insights, responses, and criticisms of my writing at various stages. I am especially grateful to Martin Arnold, Su Friedrich, Matthias Müller, Walid Ra’ad, Jay Rosenblatt, Phil Solomon, Diana Thater, Peter Tscherkassky, Naomi Uman, and Caveh Zahedi, who have served as interlocutors from the book’s conception and throughout its production. The time and energy that each contributed was truly a gift, and their work remains the reason for this book. I wish to thank my colleagues and students at the University of Southern California in the School of Cinematic Arts and the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures, who have provided so much support and inspiration. My sincerest gratitude to Dean Elizabeth M. Daley of the School of Cinematic Arts, who has supported me unequivocally since the time I arrived. The members of the Visual Studies group at USC, especially Richard Meyer and Vanessa Schwartz, have continuously energized and reenergized this project, and Kate Flint, Janet Hoskins, Kara Keeling, Nancy Lutkehaus, and Alexander Marr offered generous responses to an earlier iteration of “Out of the Blue,” as did Jennifer Barker, Alessandra Raengo, and Angelo Restivo at Georgia State University; and members of the Film Studies Program, notably Dudley Andrew and Patrick Reagan, at Yale University. David E. James and Michael Renov forged the way for this book; their mentorship has been crucial in shaping my own attempts to think through the avant-garde. ix

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Jean-Claude Lebensztejn is the origin of more in this book than I acknowledge, and I am grateful for his singular and enduring friendship. I cannot begin to enumerate my debt to Vivian Sobchack, intellectually and professionally, but anyone who knows her will understand this. Three anonymous readers provided vigorous criticism of this manuscript at earlier stages; I hope they will see their efforts reflected in this book. Along the way, I benefited from many responses to different portions of the book. I wish to thank Steve Anker, the late Paul Arthur, James Leo Cahill, Elizabeth Cowie, Safaa Fathy, Roy Grundmann, Peggy Kamuf, Dragan Kujundzic, David Lloyd, Randy Malamud, Laura U. Marks, Sally Ness, Carrie Noland, Scott Nygren, Donald Pease, Bérénice Reynaud, John Carlos Rowe, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Shelley Stamp, Lesley Stern, Maureen Turim, and Genevieve Yue for their contributions. Mary Francis at the University of California Press committed to this project from the start, and I am grateful for her unwavering support, critical insight, and skillful efforts to bring this into existence. UC Press Editorial Coordinator Kim Hogeland has been remarkable at every stage of production, and I had a great experience working with Production Editor Brian Ostrander and the team at Westchester Publishing Services. This book comes from my family: my love and gratitude to Miya, Kohryu, Raizoh, and Rei’un, and a long overdue expression of gratitude to my mother and father. Earlier versions of several chapters appeared in the journals Afterimage and Discourse, and in books published by Columbia University Press, the Dia Foundation, and the University of Minnesota Press. Although those essays have been reworked extensively, I am grateful to these organizations for allowing me to publish the revised versions: “Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold’s Memory Apparatus” is a revised version of “Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold’s Memory Machine,” which appeared in Afterimage 24.6 (May/June 1997): 8–10. “Derrida, Specters, Self-Reflection” is a revised version of “Reflections on Spectral Life,” which appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 30, no. 1–2 (2008). Copyright © 2009 Wayne State University Press. Used with permission by Wayne State University Press. “Parenthesis: Video Ergo Sum” is a revised version of “Video Ergo Sum (The Animal That I See),” in Diana Thater: Knots and Surfaces, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2002).

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“Digesture: Gestures without Bodies” is a revised version of “Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema,” in Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 113–31. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. “Revisionary Cinema” is a revised version of “The Only Other Apparatus of Film (A Few Fantasies about Différance, Démontage, and Revision in Experimental Film and Video),” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Copyright ©2007 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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EXC00

Exergue Ex-Cinema

An exergue, from the Greek ex (outside) and ergon (work), refers to a space outside the work, outside the essential body of the work, and yet part of it, even essentially—a part and apart. An exergue locates an outside space that is included in the work as its outside. What kind of work, and what kind of outside? The Oxford English Dictionary defines the exergue as “a small space usually on the reverse side of a coin or medal, below the principal device, for any minor inscription, the date, engraver’s initials, etc. Also, the inscription there inserted.” A small space for “minor” inscriptions as well as the inscription itself. Inscription and the space of inscription (they appear to bear the same significance in an exergue) located on the body of a work or object (ergon), but on the other side, away. But not far away from the work, neither within nor without it, a minor space of inscription and a minor inscription. In a literary or artistic work, a place that forms an interstice between the frame or framework, parergon, and the proper body of the work, ergon. It belongs neither to the inside nor the outside, is proper to neither, but also exists before and beyond the work, a work that comes apart, exergue. Jacques Derrida locates such an exergue in Friedrich Nietzsche’s quasiautobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888). Suspended between the book’s foreword and its first chapter, “Why I Am So Wise,” the untitled exergue opens onto an anniversary, Nietzsche’s forty-forth birthday from which he looks “behind” and “before”: “How

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should I not be grateful to my whole life?—And so I tell myself my life.” Here, in the suspended midday of his life, exactly halfway between life and death, in a shadowless moment, Nietzsche gives thanks to his life, and gives his life to himself, gives it over, tells and recites it. He mediates his own life, the recitation of his life to come, inscribing himself in the exergue as a medium. Nietzsche’s exergue, this minor inscription and space of inscription resembles a spinning coin, front and reverse, “principal device” and “minor inscription” blending into one, a single work whose inside and out are no longer distinguishable, whose corpus and ex-corpus have become one in a blur. What kind of work is essential and outside, essentially outside while remaining a part of the work? It is a work, or exergue, that takes place outside of the work, alongside and beside it, between the elements that constitute the work. It gives the work its date and its signature (the “engraver’s initials”), inscribing its moment in time and its authorship. In this sense, the exergue initiates the work from outside, an outside or frame that makes possible the work, and remains part of it in the form of a trace or frame. Nietzsche’s exergue is such a dating, written, he claims, on his forty-fourth birthday: “On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen such good things together. Not in vain have I buried my fortyfourth birthday today, I was entitled to bury it—what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal.”1 Nietzsche inscribes his book with an exergue, dates it on his forty-fourth birthday, between the foreword and first chapter. But he also engraves it, buries himself in this exergue on this date, in which “not only the grapes are growing brown.” This anniversary, his birth date is also the date of his death and the beginning of an immortality, an eternal return that returns to Nietzsche, the author, and to the “engraver’s initials.” In the space of the exergue and made possible by the space of the exergue, Nietzsche gives the work to himself, addresses it to himself, to another self that returns to the site of this minor inscription: “How should I not be grateful to my whole life?—And so I tell myself my life.”2 In the exergue, or hors d’oeuvre, in this space of minor inscription, Nietzsche addresses himself, gives himself over to himself. It is, Derrida notes, a unique space of autobiography, of dating, made complicated in this instance by the very concept of return that Nietzsche invokes within this space of the outside, the space outside the work and of the outside work:

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Without fail, the structure of the exergue on the borderline or of the borderline in the exergue will be reprinted wherever the question of life, of “my-life,” arises. Between a title or a preface on the one hand, and the book to come on the other, between the title Ecce Homo and Ecce Homo “itself,” the structure of the exergue situates the place from which life will be recited, that is to say, reaffirmed.3

In Nietzsche’s exergue, says Derrida, life itself is recited and reaffirmed; my life, signed and dated, returns to me in this space suspended within and without the work. On this borderline, the exergue animates this other life (the other’s life, but also my other life) that returns to the proper body on the anniversaries and eternal returns that call it back. But the body that returns and the one I return to are never one and the same. The shadowless moment of the exergue, makes both bodies possible side by side, inside out. This is the spatiotemporal structure of an exergue, but also the force of its vitality: outside life. Borderline life returns on the occasion of its anniversary, on the anniversary of its beginning and its end, in this space essential to the work and yet always at the same time, in the same instant, inessential. For this day, inscribed and remembered is also not a place or time at all. “But this noon of life,” says Derrida, “is not a place and does not take place. For this very reason, it is not a moment but only an instantly vanishing limit.”4 This limit, says Derrida, vanishes and returns every day, each iteration a new recurrence of the same. This vanishing limit of life, of a time that begins in the instant of its end, born at the instant of its death, and signed always by an engraver that addresses itself elsewhere, returning from the outside to itself, operates according to a logic and work of the outside: because the exergue is not only outside the work, a work outside the work, but also a work of the outside. It works the outside as an instantly vanishing limit. The exergue is also a thinking and excavation of the outside. It gives shape to the outside, signs and dates an outside made visible from the work, but which also makes the work visible. This is the necessity of Nietzsche’s exergue that Derrida recognizes: the work of life, of reciting one’s life, of autobiography, is made possible only by traversing the minor inscription and space of inscription, the exergue. Only by crossing and crossing over (and crossing out) these thresholds, by signing and countersigning life (engraving), does life become visible, does life become visible as work. The ergon is made possible by the exergue, framed by it as parergon. Outside the work and the work of the outside, but also a

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work from the work, and a work no longer the (same) work. Exergue, ex-cinema. Could one imagine a cinema that appears as a series of exergues, elements of an essential cinema that take place between works—between, beside, and outside of them—but also as works of the outside, inscriptions of work that illuminate the outside; works that make cinema visible, and thus possible? A cinema elsewhere, to and from cinema, marked by this passage outside, no longer cinema yet not far? Could one call this body of works an ex-cinema? In his essay on the experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” Jonathan Walley, following Hollis Frampton’s coinage, uses the term “paracinema” to describe the phenomenon of cinema outside of cinema. “Paracinema,” he says, “identifies an array of phenomena that are considered ‘cinematic’ but that are not embodied in the materials of film as traditionally defined. That is, the film works I am addressing recognize cinematic properties outside the standard film apparatus, and therefore reject the medium-specific premise of most essentialist theory and practice that the art form of cinema is defined by the specific medium of film.”5 Walley rejects medium specificity in the paracinema but not essentialism as such, only the essentialism of medium specificity. “Paracinema,” he concludes, “is based on a different version of essentialism, which locates cinema’s essence elsewhere.”6 In Walley’s account of paracinema, the essence of cinema does not lie somewhere else, somewhere other than the specificity of the medium, but precisely in the elsewhere. Paracinema is an essence of the elsewhere, a medium displaced from itself, like Nietzsche’s autobiography given to himself from the outside, an exergue and ex-cinema that returns from the outside, from elsewhere, as the essence outside. For Walley, the paracinema is such a return, a “cinema beyond, even before, film.”7 Walley cites Paul Sharits’s early flicker films and Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) as two examples of paracinema, works that begin the process of “dismantling” the basic film apparatus to achieve the idea of cinema.8 Walley traces this impulse to Sergei Eisenstein’s and later André Bazin’s theorization of cinema as a general concept rather than a specific form achieved in the basic apparatus, and the structural-materialist or “expanded” cinemas (Gene Youngblood’s term) of the 1960s and 1970s as the moment of its actualization or attempted actualization. For Walley, cinema is virtual and its actualization in specific forms, iterations, and instances represents only a temporary and

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provisional realization of a cinema that remains ultimately elsewhere, diffuse, a potential rather than an instantiation. Following Bazin, Walley concludes that cinema is “an idea that has temporarily taken the form of certain materials.”9 His argument eventually puts the experimental cinema of this period in dialogue with Conceptual art, which similarly sought to “dematerialize” art, to liberate artworks from specific materials and media. But what if such a paracinema—such an idea of cinema without organs, without bodies, or rather with multiple bodies and parts of bodies—took place within cinema, as cinema, as the specter of an idea of cinema that doesn’t require its dematerialization or dismantling, its displacement into a radical exteriority, but as an exergue within the body of cinema, of film, framed within the frame but always at an irreducible distance? What if the medium was thought here, as the word also suggests, as a passage rather than a fixed body, as a movement rather than a form, as the possibility of contact with another medium? Would it alter the very concept of “medium specificity” if the medium were understood as essentially nonspecific, if its specificity were determined precisely by its opening to another form or thought of the outside—that is, an intermediate (mediating) form rather than a fixed body, a channel of communication rather than an essence unto itself, like a spiritual medium? And what if certain works haunted cinema, returned to cinema, engraving from within the trace of an irreducible exteriority, a second body or secondary revision, like Nietzsche’s exergue, marking a temporal dimension that always comes from cinema (ex-cinema), from a spectral outside (ex-cinema) and becomes cinema, like an autobiography of cinema, inscribing itself within the space of an anniversary exergue? Might one call such a cinema “ex-cinema”—a cinema that opens a space before and beyond, as Walley says, a space beside and outside, but always from within a minor space opened on the other side of cinema? David James locates such parasitic geographies in the minor cinemas of Los Angeles, countercinemas that formed as a resistance to—but also a symptom of—the film industry. “The industry has been a constant presence,” he says, “one that enticed as often as it repelled its would-be other and inspired as often as inhibited it.”10 James calls the constellation of other cinemas that formed around the industry “minor cinemas.” It is an aggregate term for those cinemas outside: To register the collective significance of these multiple traditions of films whose unusual, experimental, and sometimes outrageous qualities set them

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apart from the standardized narrative features made by Hollywood and other industrial centers, they must be brought into some common field of reference with each other. My expanded summary term for these diverse and often mutually incompatible avant-garde traditions is “minor cinemas,” cinemas constructed, in at least some aspects of their motivation, outside the major studios and the dominant film industry.11

James’s collection of minor inscriptions, of “most typical avant-gardes,” defines a cinema borne of ambivalence toward cinema. They are second cinemas, paracinemas, ex-cinemas that exist outside cinema by existing within it. A cinema from cinema, ex-cinema that forms in the space of an exergue, second cinema and medium double, which generates its own grammatology pieced together from the languages of cinema, from its spaces and times and images, often quoting cinema in excerpt and extensive revision, secondary revision. A cinema that describes cinema within the frame of cinema, along its borders as parergon. Would one call this cinema, this ex-cinema, a second medium—another medium specific to its own aspecificity, to medium aspecificity? Or would this ex-cinema supplement cinema, extend its medium specificity outside from cinema, but remain within the parameters of the basic apparatus? The problem of medium specificity that Walley poses with regard to film and the idea of cinema assumes an added degree of complexity in an ex-cinema that never distinguishes itself from cinema and yet never adheres to a cinema proper. All of this made possible by the phantom space and time of an exergue, by the space of work outside and the work of space outside that returns. James’s Los Angeles resembles such an exergue, a city, industry, and concept whose outsides are already inscribed inside, ex-Los Angeles.12 The ex-cinema is never only a thought or conception, an imaginary genre, but a set of manifestations and praxes. Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1964) practices ex-cinema. The pornographic visuality signaled (named and promised) in its title is displaced offscreen, performed where it cannot be seen. If it exists, it takes place outside, folded into the spectacle as an absence. Warhol’s thirty-six-minute close-up of a male face reveals nothing while exposing something, if not everything (else); the sexual activity described in the title never appears in a film that suggests something else, another other film elsewhere. There and not there, visible and invisible, or evasive. Roy Grundmann recognizes the persistent “tension between concreteness and abstraction” that defines Warhol’s sexual vi-

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suality in Blow Job, and which leads outward into a cinema space that forms around the frame. 13 In this film, one sees the space one does not and cannot see, the space of scopophilic desire par excellence. Everything in Blow Job takes place in this exergue, in and beyond the edges of the frame, of a pornographic scene exposed. In Warhol’s ex-cinema, here and elsewhere, the frame is obscene, the mundane spectacle and time of cinema always inscribed on the edges of his cinema. And yet everything takes place in the film: the frenzy outside the frame, its force, exists within Blow Job. The displacement of spectacle in this film and of cinema is its spectacle. The movement between the spaces that constitute cinema—physical, photographic, and cinematographic—forms an exergual momentum in Ito Takashi’s baroque Spacy (1981). Shot inside a gymnasium, the film moves from photographic images of the gymnasium standing (existing) inside the gymnasium; Ito’s camera fuses the photographic and architectural frames until the physical and photographic spaces become indistinguishable. This infinite regress generates a cinema composed of photographed spaces and photographic images of the same photographed spaces: Ito’s ex-cinema emerges in the exergues between those two photographed spaces, in the intervals rendered invisible and indivisible in Spacy. At the end of the film—in the middle and end of a film that has no proper ending—Ito inserts an image of himself, an auto-inscription, like Nietzsche’s autobiographical exergue, a self-reflection of the outside. The last image turns the end of the film into its middle, a center folded into the film’s outside. The interplay of reflection and self-reflection that forms much of excinema’s effect works ecstatically in Sadie Benning’s PixelVision videos, in It Wasn’t Love (1992), for example. Coming out in a series of lowdefinition video works shot on Fischer-Price’s PixelVision (PXL-2000) cameras that produce low-resolution, highly pixelated black-and-white video images, Benning produces a cinema from this apparatus, an excinema—in her case, often an ex-Hollywood cinema that reproduces another cinema, another Hollywood where the industry rarely ventures. Benning’s is an ex-cinema that exists not only below the commercial cinema in its adolescent detritus (the Fischer-Price video cameras were marketed as toys for children) but also under the shadow of the highly avant-garde cinema of her father, James Benning, among others. It Wasn’t Love effects the portrait of a young woman discovering herself in a series of low-resolution images and video scenarios; a pastiche of

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Figure 1. Phil Solomon, Rehearsals for Retirement. Courtesy of Phil Solomon.

diary entries, reenactments, daydreams, and reflections on the world around her. Part television, part cinema, part theater, It Wasn’t Love opens a media space that is outwardly intimate, extimate, an inside broadcast out that transforms the specificity of Benning’s media into her own specificity. That is, the tactile materiality of Benning’s media becomes, as she comes out into it, a paramedia and ex-media. A media outside, of coming out—a medium specific to the outside contours of intimacy. Such intimacies accrue to individual media as they do to individual persons. Phil Solomon’s films generated from the Grand Theft Auto video games using Machinima software platforms are deeply intimate excinemas. His work extends the practice of recycling found footage from Bruce Conner to Craig Baldwin into new territories by establishing a movement between multiple forms of mediated space: game space, film space, and physical space loop through Solomon’s work. From the violent graphical content and agitated rhythms of the controversial games, Solomon generates melancholic landscapes and laconic subjects in his transmedial revisions. In films such as Crossroad (2005) with Mark Lapore—which already opens a referential loop with Conner’s Crossroads (1976)—and then, beginning in 2007, a series of reanimations titled collectively In Memoriam, Mark Lapore and including Rehearsals

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for Retirement (2007); Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007); Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2008–2009); and his installation EMPIRE (2008), which reworks Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) in Grand Theft Auto’s synthetic ex-New York, Solomon generates an alternate cinema in and from the video game’s landscapes and figures, transposing the world from one medium to another, cinema from a place other than its presumed origin, life itself. The place that Solomon discovers in these works is one of irreducible (inconsolable) displacement, an exergue suspended alongside cinema, alongside video, and alongside life (in memoriam), always lonely, always raining. The feedback loop effected by Solomon’s In Memoriam, Mark Lapore reaches its apotheosis in his installation EMPIRE. The referent in this work points at once to an iconic structure and all it invokes, as well as to a film by Warhol and all that he and his film work invoke. The exergue opens between the two, between an object in the world and a film, in the space of film derived from neither. And here, everything stops. Genevieve Yue has described the suspended temporality of EMPIRE, the historical exergue it opens. Of the “indefinite” running time of Solomon’s installation, she says, “EMPIRE thus creates a hermetic, perpetual present that, in merging real time with game-time, edges out the possibility for a past or a future.”14 In his Machinimanic revision of Warhol’s seemingly interminable portrait of the immobile structure, Solomon recasts the original—the film and the building—through the optic of a video game and projects both into a suspended history that never transpires. Without “past or future,” Solomon’s EMPIRE never expires; and held in the exergue of a perpetual present, it mobilizes an extemporality beyond the extreme temporality of Warhol’s original. Another work that exemplifies the ex-cinema is Peter Tscherkassky’s singular Outer Space (1999), an ecstatic ten-minute recycling of Sidney J. Furie’s horror film The Entity (1982), starring Barbara Hershey. Made through a painstaking process of contact printing in which Tscherkassky traced multiple frames from the original film—as many as five, he says— onto a single frame of Outer Space in a darkroom using a laser pointer, his “conceptual starting point was to make a film in which the filmic material would permeate the marginal plot.”15 The result is an engraving, a film that has been overwritten by the material force of film. In spite of the exteriority invoked in its title and the supernatural interiority rendered in the source material, Outer Space delineates neither outer nor inner space, but the space between the two, the imaginary space that opens between a film from a film, ex-film. This is not the space between

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Figure 2. Peter Tscherkassky, Outer Space. Courtesy of Peter Tscherkassky.

frames but that which engulfs the frame, a space at once originary and imaginary. It is the outside or outer space intrinsic to cinema, Tscherkassky’s remarkable discovery. Tom Gunning describes the returns of invisible elements from outer space in Tscherkassky’s ex-cinema: “A concealed area,” he says, “the edge of the film, normally plays a crucial—but unseen—role in the construction and ordering of the film image that underlie the spectacle. Pulling them out of this invisible realm, Tscherkassky invades the space of the image with these elements from cinema’s outer space.”16 A cinema of extraction, “pulling out.” Alexander Horwath recognizes the archeological dimension of Tscherkassky’s work, the way in which the unseen monster in the source material returns in Outer Space as the formless threat of the medium itself. Or rather, in Outer Space, formlessness is defined by the terms of film form, the violence erupting from “the exterior area of the image, ‘negative space.’ ”17 For Horwath, Outer Space recasts the threat from monster to cinema, from invisibility to medium specificity. Of the new threat faced by the female figure in Outer Space, Horwath says: “She is threatened by the soundtrack’s jagged trail of light, by the sprocket holes on the film’s edge, by the sounds of ‘manufacture,’ by the sudden multiplication of her own image, by the perforation of pictorial space, by being stuck in cinema time.”18 What threatens the female figure in Outer Space is no longer diegetic, not even the inscription of nondiegetic force, but cinema itself. Within the frame, the parergon, is the frame itself: sprocket holes and edges of the frame are within the frame, an entity of the mise-en-scène in which the outside is no more external than the inside is internal. The

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Figure 3. Peter Tscherkassky, Coming Attractions.

violence of Outer Space comes from cinema’s energies and what Tscherkassky’s film makes visible is the visibility of cinema itself. Nor is this a matter of genre and convention. “Outer Space is no longer the ‘parallel space’ of the avant-garde,” says Horwath metacritically, “but in fact the ‘world space’ of cinema.”19 In Tscherkassky’s film, outer and inner space, diegetic and nondiegetic figures, form and formlessness, avantgarde and commercial cinemas, and ultimately cinema and noncinema entities are transposed to an ex-cinema, to a world that originates from cinema. From cinema, Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions (2010) returns repeatedly to the beginning of cinema and retraces the history of primitive and avant-garde film, revealing at its center an outside engraved all over its surfaces. Through multiple chapters and a proliferating set of references to primitive cinema, to the historical avant-garde, and to film theory and criticism, Tscherkassky generates a film that pulls itself apart, exploding outward until the film occupies the entirety of cinema, and eventually everything outside until it appears to take place entirely outside. At once an explosion and exegesis of cinema, Coming Attractions is as much about leaving cinema; about a cinema after cinema; from, but no longer cinema—ex-cinema. Recycling commercials and feature films, Tscherkassky etches onto their surfaces a series of citations of, allusions and references to: the Lumières, Brit Acres and R. W. Paul, Georges Méliès, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Dziga Vertov, Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits, and Stan Brakhage, among many others, including himself. (The chapter of Coming Attractions titled “Unseen Energy Swallows Face” refers to Tom Gunning, to primitive cinema, but also to his own Outer Space.) In the end, Coming Attractions signals a cinema yet to come

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after the end of cinema, an outside cinema inscribed and exscribed over the surface of an exergue, coming and going. The films and videos considered herein open such exergues within the media they embody. Mostly contemporary, these works construct an architecture of cinema, of film and video that comes from cinema, that comes back to cinema like a revenant, and in the most spectral sense of the term becomes cinema. Derek Jarman’s figureless blue, Martin Arnold’s secondary revisions and erasures of classic Hollywood films and classic Disney animation, Caveh Zahedi’s interrupted narratives and documents, Su Friedrich’s oblique autobiography in reverse, Diana Thater’s animal reflections and video translations, and Matthias Müller’s excerpts from a phantasmatic whole, to name only a few examples, each present the idea of cinema, of a cinema to and from cinema, that adheres to the corpus of cinema, to its basic apparatus even when it begins to vanish into a space of exile. These “ex-cinemas” return to cinema like an anniversary, like the anniversary that Nietzsche imagines in exergue, without ever making the body whole, without ever restoring the medium to itself. An autobiography of cinema from the outside. The talismanic “ex”—a metonymy of experimental (cinema), a part of its body that comes from experimental cinema—is also a mark of excision, of erasure. It reverberates throughout the works as a phantom signifier—exterior, excorporate, extimate. On the borderlines drawn as minor spaces of inscription, and of minor inscriptions within those spaces, ex-cinemas form an alternate cinema that reaffirms and recites the life of cinema, a life whose bodies are visible even when the forms are diffuse, opaque, dispersed, and extended across a temporality not always recognizable as now.20 Ex-cinema is cinema, the thought and practice of a cinema outside. The works that comprise excinema are essential, essentially outside, without demanding primacy because, as Foucault says, “the outside never yields its essence.”21 The outside remains outside only by refusing the dialectic of interiority, the privilege of intimacy, and the fantasy of belonging to a proper body and history. The ex-cinema—outside, from, and no longer cinema—tells the story of cinema from an outside formed along the frames and borders of another, of another life of cinema no longer here nor there but already within the space of an outside in exergue. Ex-cinema imagines the cinema from elsewhere, a cinema elsewhere that sees itself from the vantage point of the exergue. Neither here nor there, a cinema bound by ex-specificity—outside, from, no longer. Not simply the exposure of cinema, the disclosure of its apparatuses and

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mechanisms, nor the practice of cinema in another medium, but the actualization of cinema outside, of cinema from cinema.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 37, original emphasis. 2. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 37, original emphasis. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies,” in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Avital Ronell (New York: Schocken, 1985), 14, original emphasis. 4. Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 14. 5. Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film,” October 103 (Winter 2003): 18. 6. Walley, “The Material of Film,” 18. 7. Walley, “The Material of Film,” 18. 8. Walley, “The Material of Film,” 20. “McCall’s earlier film, Line Describing a Cone,” says Walley, “had already begun to eliminate certain physical properties of film.” For more on McCall’s oeuvre, see Jonathan Walley’s and Branden Joseph’s contributions to Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works, ed. Christopher Eamon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 9. Walley, “The Material of Film,” 23, emphasis added. 10. David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4. 11. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde, 13, emphasis added. 12. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde, 16. Of space and the avant-garde cinema, James says: “Avant-garde cinemas take place. Existing geographically as well as historically, they emerge from, occupy, and articulate specific spatialities. The role of geography in them is then at least double, involving the representation of spatiality and also the role played by spatiality in their production.” In this sense, spatiality is both the space of inscription and the inscription itself, what James calls the “representation of spatiality.” Los Angeles becomes, in this way, an exergue. 13. Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 3. Grundmann elaborates the extensive outsides that open up around and close in on this film in his book-length study devoted to Blow Job. 14. Genevieve Yue, “At the Edge of Town: The Experimental Machinima of Phil Solomon,” unpublished manuscript, 32. 15. Peter Tscherkassky, “Epilogue, Prologue: Autobiographical Notes along the Lines of a Filmography,” in Peter Tscherkassky, ed. Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein, trans. Alexander Horwath and Barbara Schwartz (Vienna: Synema, 2005), 150. 16. Tom Gunning,“Peter Tscherkassky Manufractures Two Minutes of (Im)Pure Cinema,” in Desde el cuarto oscuro: El cine manufracturado de Peter

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Tscherkassky/From a Dark Room: The Manufractured Cinema of Peter Tscherkassky, eds. Sandra Gomez, Maximiliano Cruz, and Moisés Cosío (Mexico City: Interior 13 Cine, 2012), 136. 17. Alexander Horwath, “Singing in the Rain: Supercinematography in Peter Tscherkassky,” in Peter Tscherkassky, 46. 18. Horwath, “Singing in the Rain,” 46. 19. Horwath, “Singing in the Rain,” 48. 20. Louis-Georges Schwartz pursues a line between cinema and life, thought through biopolitics, history, and philosophy in his “Cinema and the Meaning of ‘Life,’ ” Discourse 28.2 and 28.3 (Spring and Fall, 2006): 7–28. 21. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 28.

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Out of the Blue (Ex Nihilo) In the pandemonium of image I present you with the universal Blue Blue an open door to soul An infinite possibility Becoming tangible —Derek Jarman, Blue (1993)

First is blue, firstness, and then at the end, still blue. At the end, always still the firstness of blue. Derek Jarman’s last film, Blue, begins and ends in blue, running blue from beginning to end. From this blue, out of the blue, ex blue comes a voice: not one, but several voices—those of John Quentin, Nigel Terry, Derek Jarman, and Tilda Swinton. He and she blue, they blue, the film remains blue, the voices blue, everything beginning and ending in blue, in and from Jarman’s blue movie. An entire film rendered in blue, every element turned blue, until nothing remains but a blue image, including its sound. All blues, an image of blue, where everything ends. But can an image be blue? Not the image of blue, the blue of an image, or an image in blue, but a form of being, of being blue. Can an image yield to being blue? Not in the form of a passage—a movement toward a referent rendered blue, in blue—but as an end that arrives at its own limit in blueness. A blue with no beyond but blue. Not a blue picture, but a picture of blue, the blue image that ends in itself, in a blueness without end. And could this blueness constitute an image rather than taking its place? Can it tranquilize the “pandemonium of image”? Is blue an image or the absence of an image, its negation? “Color itself is a degree of darkness,” says Goethe;1 blue emerges from the darkness as a “stimulating negation.”2 Can one imagine a blue without negation, or does blue exist 15

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always in negation—from the negation of an image, as its negative, as the reference to an absence that serves as its referent? Is blue the absence of an image, the image of the absence of an image? Blue of noon; big blue; blue sky; blue moon; “earth is blue” (first Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin and then David Bowie); tekhelet (a blue dye, pronounced t-CHELLet); going blue; code blue; black-and-blue; red, white, and blue; perfect blue; blue elephant (E. E. Cummings); Krishna (Hinduism’s blue god); blue chips; blue ribbon; blue stocking; blue jeans; blue collar; Der Blaue Reiter; blaue Blume (Novalis’s “blue flower”); blue laws; all blues; blue note; blue book; blueprints; Bolak; blue language; blue blood; blue beard; blue balls; blew kisses; blue funk; bluegrass; blue steel; blue cheese; blueberries; blue (now green) screens; Egyptian blue; Blue Angel; Blue Velvet; Blue Hawaii; Blue Valentine; blue film; Blue Meanie: “Are you bluish, you don’t look bluish”?3 Is blue always blue? Is it one, universal blue? Are all other colors blue; are violets blue? “Blue gives other colors their vibration,” says Cézanne.4 Is blue unique among colors? Aren’t all colors unique, each unlike any other, each with its own history of meanings? Is blue a meta-color that makes all other colors possible, as Cézanne suggests, a vibration rather than an image? Or the absence of an image rather than an image, suffused with absence as such, with the specter of a referent no longer there, no longer visible? An image of death, or the image of the death of an image? Like a painting over painting, painted over until nothing is left of its color but color? What takes its place there, in the over-rendered image, in the first instance of an image that no longer leads to the second or thirdness of the image as a sign? Suspended in blue by a “universal blue,” Derek Jarman says, in the “pandemonium of image.” What emerges in this blue expanse that erases the image—this and all images? Color poses a unique problem for the image, for painted images as well as for photographic and digital images. What distinguishes a color from its image: blue from the image of blue? Are they one and the same, as Roland Barthes says of the photograph and its referent, like “laminated objects whose leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape”?5 Are signs and referents distinguishable in a color? Or do colors cling to objects and images, as  André Bazin says of photographic ontologies in which “the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it”?6 Does a color possess any objecthood in and of itself, or is it inseparable from other things? “Color is not an object out there in space waiting to be named,” says Bruce R. Smith, “it is a

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phenomenon, an event that happens between an object and a subject.”7 “Between an object and a subject,” color is the event between the two, the phenomenon of betweenness made visible in color. “With color there is no ‘thing-in-itself,’ ” Smith says. “Color asks to be thought about, not as an object to be observed or as a text to be read, but as a transaction to be experienced.”8 But what happens to the object in this transaction, in the event of color? Are colors in this sense—in the sense that Bazin describes it— ontologically photographic, “objects themselves” determined, as it were, photographically? No longer dissociable from any object, yet never objects themselves except when perceived through the objectif of a camera? Can one photograph a color; take a picture of a color, of color itself? No, according to Josef Albers: “Color photography deviates still more from eye vision than black-and-white photography. Blue and red are overemphasized to such an extent that their brightness is exaggerated.”9 Albers is speaking specifically about the photographic reproduction of painted blue, but his assertion raises intriguing questions about the duplication of color. Is an exaggerated blue any less blue? (Or any more blue?) Is a photographed blue any less authentic in its exaggeration of brightness? Is the photograph of blue an image of blue? Aren’t photographs inseparable from the objects themselves, as Bazin says? Doesn’t photography, following Bazin’s logic of ontological realism, thus render blue an object? Is photographic blue a shade of blue, a bright blue? And are different shades of blue any more or less blue? Azure, cerulean, cobalt, cyan, indigo, Prussian (Berlin, Parisian), sapphire, teal, turquoise, ultramarine—are these shades or variants of blue, different blues, or are they synonyms of a single blue? When is blue no longer blue? Blue may be photographic, but cannot be photographed except in exaggeration. Would the exaggerated brightness of a photographic blue no longer be blue, but a betrayal of blue? Is there a true blue, true to itself, true to the idea and ideal of blue, of blueness? Is there a transcendental blue that signifies but also constitutes blueness? Is there a line or frame that separates colors from images and objects, or are they inseparable one from the other, one already intrinsic to the other? Blue is blue without analogy, already a digital blue, code blue. If color can be an image, then an image of what? And what type of image? Is color abstract, an abstraction of something else (an affect or idea, a semiotic), or is it figurative? Is blue a picture of blue, an index of blue, a blueprint? And what about a blue film? Of Jarman’s film, Vivian Sobchack says, “Blue is not image-less. Rather, it is figure-less.”10 Blue is

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a figureless image of blue. Do figureless images unfold in time; are they filmic or photographic, moving or still? Can time be blue, is there a blue time? Could one imagine a blue temporality, marking and measuring time in blue? In Paul Sharits’s T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G (1969), a film composed in large part of single, monochromatic frames, each frame serves as a cinematographic counter, each color one-twenty-fourth of a second.11 T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G measures time in frames, each differentiated from the other in a flash, often a flash of color.12 Jarman’s Blue runs blue for seventy-six minutes, but is it the same blue that continues from frame to frame or are the 114,000 blue frames different blues, one from the other, each one a distinct blue, a separate instance of blue? If the flicker film defined for the structuralist filmmakers the zero degree of cinema, the reduction of all cinema to its absolute form—the alternation of differentiated frames—then is Jarman’s film, which eliminates the atomic unit of the film from its visual register, still a film? Is Jarman’s Blue cinema at all or rather a series of blues, an assemblage of media TV and radio, since its premiere took place through other media, a simulcast on Channel 4 and BBC Radio 3? As a cinema in pieces, an ex-cinema disaggregated, each element performed separately, a deconstructed blue, is Blue a performance, a live blue and living specter of blue? Only in the end is it a film, once it is no longer live, living. A blue phantom. Is a past blue different from a future blue? What might a history of blue look like? Blue? Michel Pastoureau has written a Eurocentric history of the color, Blue: The History of a Color. It raises a question about the relation between colors and cultures, colors and nations.13 Do colors respect national, even nationalist boundaries? Is Prussian blue still Prussian when it becomes alternately Berlin or Parisian blue? What happens to Prussian blue when it is imported to Japan and used extensively in ukiyo-e—does it become Japanese? Are there national blues? Pastoureau follows the movement of the color from antiquity to the present, from a reviled color of barbarism to the favorite color of more than half the population of Europe and North America today. Among the many changes of blue throughout the history that Pastoureau recounts, one of the more remarkable dimensions of blue is its relatively late entry into history. “Although blue is present in natural elements that go back almost to the earth’s formation,” he says, “it has taken humanity many long years to learn how to reproduce and use it”: Contrary to what one might imagine, the social, artistic, and religious uses of the color blue do not reach back into the mists of time. Blue was not present

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even in the later Paleolithic period, when nomadic tribes with long-established social systems made the first cave paintings. In these images we find reds, blacks, browns, and ochers of all shades, but no blue or green and hardly any white. The situation was almost exactly the same a few millennia later, in the Neolithic period, when human societies had become sedentary and the first dyeing techniques appeared. Dyeing was done in red and yellow long before blue was used.14

In Pastoureau’s history, blue was there from the beginning but late to arrive, prehistoric without being historical, elemental before cultural. It enters history late, even though it was there at the “earth’s formation”—an originary blue, only later reproduced and used. Is the history of blue, of its reproduction and use, an image of blue, of an elemental blue? The slow appearance of blue in the history of colors led many, according to Pastoureau, to question whether ancient peoples were able to see blue at all. “The modest role played by blue in ancient societies,” he says, “and the difficulties many ancient languages have in even naming it caused many nineteenth-century researchers to wonder if the men and women of antiquity could see the color blue, or at least see it as we do today.”15 Nietzsche repeats this belief in Daybreak (1881), attributing color blindness to the ancient Greek propensity for thought. He says, “How different nature must have appeared to the Greeks if, as we have to admit, their eyes were blind to blue and green, and instead of the former saw deep brown, instead of the latter yellow.”16 Nietzsche argues that to the color-blind Greeks, nature must have looked more like mankind, “since in their eyes the coloration of mankind also preponderated in nature and the latter as it were floated in the atmosphere of human coloration!”17 Color blindness, specifically the inability to recognize blue and green (seeing in their places deep brown and yellow, respectively), created an artificial continuity between mankind and nature, according to Nietzsche, which is reflected in Greek thought. To this, Nietzsche adds, parenthetically, “Blue and green dehumanize nature more than anything else does.”18 The evolution of human eyesight and the further differentiation of color that followed—for Nietzsche, the appearance of blue and green—separated mankind from nature, dehumanizing nature by rendering it in colors distinct from those of mankind. Blue and green, the inhuman colors. Nietzsche concludes his account of chromatic evolution with the idea that as the human capacity to perceive the color spectrum expanded with evolution, “mankind learned to take pleasure in the sight of existence: existence, that is to say, was in the first instance presented to them in one

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or two colors, and thus presented harmoniously: mankind then as it were practiced on these few shades before being able to go over to several. And even today many an individual works himself out of a partial colorblindness into a richer seeing and distinguishing: in which process, however, he not only discovers new enjoyments but is also obliged to give up and relinquish some of his earlier ones.”19 Color adds pleasure to the “sight of existence.”More color, in particular blue and green, adds further pleasure by dehumanizing nature, separating it from mankind, and in the process, forcing mankind to experience new pleasures by relinquishing older ones, in particular those afforded by a “partial colorblindness.” The advent of blue (and green) brings new pleasures, making new enjoyments possible, but it also forces one to relinquish some older pleasures in the sight and thought of existence. The relative invisibility of blue in antiquity—in contrast to its high visibility later on—led some to conjecture whether the physiological as well as semiological structures of human beings had evolved from an ocular system that blocks blue and thus prevents it from entering the linguistic and symbolic registers to one that recognizes blue. (At work in Nietzsche’s speculative evolution is the emergence of visual perception in contrast to thought, Greek thought specifically. And, from the enhanced perception, new pleasures.) In the historical ascent of blue emerges a theory of the transformation of human perception, thought, and pleasure, and the newly acquired capacity to recognize what is always there. But in this account, what is the difference between color blindness and blindness: are they one and the same? Goethe identifies a phenomenon he calls “acyanoblepsia,” the inability to see blue. This “morbid impression,” according to Goethe, creates a confusion of colors, in particular blue and red.20 He gives the example of “two individuals not more than twenty years of age, who were thus affected.”21 “Both,” says Goethe, “had bluish-grey eyes,” as if the morbid impressions followed from a physiological disposition, although Goethe classifies acyanoblepsia as a deviation and pathology. These individuals, according to Goethe, regularly confused blue with a rose color, seeing the sky as rose, and calling roses blue. Questioning whether they saw either color or any color at all, Goethe determines that without the ability to see blue, violet and green disappear as well. “Pure red occupies the place of blue and violet,” Goethe says, “and in again mixing with yellow and red produces orange where green should be.”22 The entire pathology originates from the disappearance of blue from the color spectrum.

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Light is rendered visible to human beings in the wavelength range of 400 to 700 nm (nanometers). This range constitutes the visible spectrum for human beings, with violet (400 nm), indigo (445 nm), and blue (475 nm) at the shorter end of the wavelength spectrum, and orange (590 nm) and red (650 nm) at the longest end. Energy with wavelengths too long for human beings to see is considered “redder than red” and called “infrared.” Wavelengths too short for human perception are “bluer than blue,” or “ultraviolet.” Bluer than blue light is invisible. Is blue bluer than blue only when it becomes invisible? When the wavelengths slip below 400 nm, is the invisible ultraviolet radiation still blue, bluer than blue? Can blueness be measured, that is, the quantity of blueness in blue? Perhaps with a “cyanometer,” an instrument invented by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the 1760s to measure “blueness,” specifically the blueness of the sky.23 In his 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky elaborates a semiotics of color that posits two antitheses, yellow and blue, to which he ascribes a metaphysics of warmth and cold, light and dark, respectively. Kandinsky explains his dynamic of yellow and blue forces: Two great divisions of color occur to the mind at the outset: into warm and cold, and into light and dark. To each color there are therefore four shades of appeal—warm and light or warm and dark, or cold and light or cold and dark. Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a color means an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. . . . The movement is a horizontal one, the warm colors approaching the spectator, the cold ones retreating from him.24

In this scheme, blue moves away from the spectator toward dark and cold. Blue defines for Kandinsky a movement of retreat, a movement into itself, a withdrawal. Blue “moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator.”25 While yellow approaches the spectator and “bursts forth aimlessly in every direction,” blue retreats from the spectator into blue until it becomes completely blue.26 (“These statements have no scientific basis,” adds Kandinsky in a footnote, “but are founded purely on spiritual experience.”)27 Before him, Goethe also imagines a “polarity” of color located between the antipodes of plus (yellow) and minus (blue).28 Snail blue, slow blue, blue within blue, blue from the outside in. On February 28, 2011, the New York Times reported a new discovery regarding the biblical blue “tekhelet” in Israel. The article’s author, Dina Kraft, writes: “One of the mysteries that scholars have puzzled

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over for centuries is the exact shade of blue represented by ‘tekhelet,’ which the Bible mentions as the color of ceremonial robes donned by high priests and ritual prayer tassels worn by the common Israelite.”29 “What was known about tekhelet (pronounced t-CHELL-et),” she continues, “was that the Talmud said it was produced from the secretion of the sea snail, which is still found on Israeli beaches.”30 The blue secretions are from the Murex trunculus snail; Kandinsky’s heavenly blue snail, it seems. The exact quality of this blue has remained a mystery, says Kraft, who explains: “Traditional interpretations have characterized tekhelet as a pure blue, symbolic of the heavens so that Jews would remember God.”31 An Israeli scholar, Zvi C. Koren, “a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants,” claims to have discovered the first known physical sample of this metaphysical snail blue. Tekhelet, which means “light blue” in modern Hebrew, is one of the most important colors for religious Jews, but also a color that no living person has in fact seen. Koren claims to be the first. “Tekhelet is the color of the sky,” he says, “It’s not the color of the sky as we know it; it’s the color of the sky at midnight.” . . . It’s when you are all alone at night that you reach out to God, and that is what tekhelet reminds you of.”32 Tekhelet is a sky blue, a retreating twilight sky that compels one, alone, to reach out to God, to reach out from and into the snail’s shell that secretes this secret, sacred blue. Universal blue and blue of the universe. In his own snail blue metaphysics, Kandinsky’s blue mollusk becomes a figure for the spiritual state of withdrawal, for a cold and dark interiority slowly spiraling inward. In the retreat of blue into blue, the unification of a blue exterior and interior, of a blue surface with its blue depth, blue becomes one with itself, to use another spiritual idiom. “The power of profound meaning is found in blue,” says Kandinsky, “and first in its physical movements (1) of retreat from the spectator, (2) of turning in upon its own center. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper.”33 Blue is deep already on its surface. Deep and deeper blue, strongest in its depths. Kandinsky’s recoiling blue snail is also a blue worm, a blue wormhole that reopens outward into the heavens, a cosmos uncoiled in its interior shell. “Blue,” says Kandinsky, “is the typically heavenly color.”34 Krishna is a blue god in Hinduism, whose name means “dark, dark blue.” Isn’t this circularity of blue, a blue god whose name is blue, for example, return blue repeatedly to a state of firstness, a metaphysical firstness, blue without end? Isn’t this Kandinsky’s point about blue, that even when the profundity of blue reaches its limit at the edges of the human, it crosses

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over and continues into the blue beyond? As it winds and unwinds, ascends and descends, Kandinsky’s blue transcends the senses, generating a rich, psychical, spiritual, and affective semiotics at the limits of the human world: “When [blue] sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises toward white, a movement little suited to it, its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant. In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all—an organ.35 If blue is an image, it’s not only visual but sensual and celestial, aural and auratic. Blue orchestras in Kandinsky’s picture play blue music, all blues. Can sound be blue, is there blue music; are the blues blue? Amiri Baraka traces the blue of the blues to blackness, to race, to color, to the color of a people shaded like a god. “Even the Blue,” he says, “the color from our own proto-Krishna faces, so black they blue. Diop says people in Southern India are the blackest people on the planet—like Krishna they blue. But also Equiano tells us that ‘Blue’—that beautiful Guinea Blue—‘was our favorite color.’ ”36 Black and blue, black is blue, blues is blue. Is there blue sound, blue noise? Is the audio of Jarman’s Blue also blue, just as blue, more or less blue than the screen? Jarman suggests an intimate link between the International Klein Blue image and the film’s blue sound, what he calls an “archaeology of sound”: “Blue watched as a word or phrase materialized in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.” In this film, one hears the blue one sees, the blinding blue one doesn’t see, the senses intertwined in blue: a spoken word or phrase materialized, then annihilated in darkness and brightness at once, a paradox of light whose effect is an aural blue, the sound of an image as it disappears. “Color changes,” says Michael Taussig following Josef Albers, “when a changing sound is heard at the same time.”37 Jacques Khalip describes the effect as “a decidedly aural form of spectacle that suppresses the need for optical evidence, and it would be fair to say that, above all else, Blue deterritorializes itself in perpetuum.”38 Blue deterritorializes itself, perpetually rendering blue not blue, rendering the image phonic, drawing from the phonic substance or materiality an inherent blueness. Jarman’s virus is itself blue, suggests Khalip, “an audiovisual thought from outside.”39 Is sound blue, and are the last sounds of the universe, like the colors described by Kandinsky, also always blue? Is the sound of the universe retreating, withdrawing, the last days of the world, heard in blue? “This kind of blindness,” says Fred Moten in another funereal context, “makes music.”40

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Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner also imagines a universe of color expanding from the dialectic of yellow and blue. Like Kandinsky and Goethe before him, “yellow must shine outwards,”41 while “blue shines inwards.”42 From his 1921 lecture “Lustre and Image,” Steiner says: Blue by its inner nature demands the exact opposite of yellow. It must shine in from the circumference. It demands to be at its fullest at the edges and to be at its least intense towards the inside. Blue is in its true element if we make it fuller on the outside and weaker in the middle. This is what makes it different from yellow. Yellow wants to be strongest in the centre, and then to pale off. Blue dams itself up at the edges, flowing together into a wave which dams up around a lighter blue. Then it reveals its essential nature.43

“Blue shines inward.” In contrast to Kandinsky’s cool, luminescent blue that retreats from the spectator, mobilized as it were by universal spiritual forces, Steiner’s blue withdraws into an “inner nature” that “demands,” “wants,” and “reveals its essential nature.” It is a psychic blue, deep like Kandinsky’s, but filled with a vast blue interiority that falls deeper and deeper within itself, a deep blue mise en abyme until it reaches a limit, the limit of humanity. Blue passes through this inner limit to the other side of metaphysics. And like Kandinsky’s blue snail that reopens into the heavens, Steiner’s deep blue can only be flattened onto the surface of an image by divine intervention: Imagine a surface with blue spread evenly over it. This is something which leads us away from the purely human. When Fra Angelico painted his even, blue surfaces he summoned, as it were, something divine into the earthly world. He would never have allowed himself to do this for the purely human situation; for blue, because of its very nature and character, will not readily submit to being a flat, even surface. It needs the divine to intervene for blue to be spread evenly.44

Blue will not submit to flatness, its “very nature and character,” its essential quality, compel it to seek depths, to collapse inward. Only divine intervention, a blue god (Krishna?) can maintain a blue flatness, a blue image, no longer human, no longer earthly. Flat blue is unnatural. The blue earth is round. Blue is the color, says Steiner, without origin in the natural world: “It is impossible to find anything of which we can say blue is characteristic in the way that green is characteristic of the plant. . . . Among animals there is no single colour that is characteristic of their nature as the colour of his complexion is of man, or green is of the plant. With blue we cannot start . . . from natural phenomena.”45 Unnatural blue, the nonhuman image, the machine image. Is this how best to understand

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Jarman’s film? Is the flat blue of Blue the nonhuman figure (figure of the nonhuman) par excellence? Is it maintained only through a blue deus ex machina, cinema? Is Blue the image of the nonhuman being, of a being at the end of humanity, at the end of life, an image of the no longer human? “But what is the image of the living, inwardly?” asks Steiner before concluding, “You must destroy life to have the image.”46 Is Blue such destruction? An image that emerges blue from the destruction of life? Epidemic blue? Janet Hoskins describes “violent death, accident, murder or drowning” among the Eastern Indonesian Kodi, famous for their indigo dyeing, as “blue death (mate moro).”47 For Charles Sanders Peirce, the semiology of color falls into the affective space of feeling he calls “firstness.” Colors, like feelings, are complete in themselves. “First,” he says, “is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else.”48 Colors are a form of firstness, and determine an image of feeling, a feeling image. “A feeling,” says Peirce, “is a state of mind having its own living quality, independent of any other state of mind.”49 This “living quality” of feeling that refers to nothing other than itself defines for Peirce firstness: the primacy of living affect. Firstness “comprises all that is immediately present, he says, “such as pain, blue, cheerfulness.”50 Color and affect, chromaffect. First and foremost here, here and now, completed in itself, blue. Piercing blue. Gilles Deleuze defines firstness in Peirce’s semiotic as “qualities or powers considered for themselves, without reference to anything else, independently of any question of their actualization. It is that which is as it is for itself and in itself.”51 Thus, blue is blue, first and forever blue, without referent. Jarman says this as well, “BLUE IS BLUE.”52 But what does he mean? Or, what does it mean, this sentence, this syntax, this grammar? A solipsism, teleology, palindrome. The vitality of feeling, of firstness, or of both, Peirce unleashes in his semiotic a viral energy that threatens to overwhelm consciousness: “A feeling is an element of consciousness which might conceivably override every other state until it monopolized the mind.”53 Feeling threatens to overtake the mind, every dimension of consciousness, spreading throughout it like a virus. Peirce’s language reflects the viral force of feelings, of firstness. “Feeling tends to spread; connections between feelings awaken feelings; neighboring feelings become assimilated; ideas are apt to reproduce themselves.”54 The feeling activates a nervous system that absorbs neighboring feelings, reproducing and spreading ideas throughout the network. For Peirce, the firstness of feeling opposes true or proper consciousness and poses the risk of usurping “the whole mind.” He says, “It is conceivable, or supposable, that the

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quality of blue should usurp the whole mind, to the exclusion of ideas of shape, extension, contrast, commencement and cessation, and all other ideas, whatsoever.”55 The blue virus, firstness. In Peirce’s evolution of signs, his economy of images, the rapacious drive of feeling, its totalizing force threatens to override or monopolize consciousness, leaving no space or time for anything but firstness. It is a virus, a blue virus. From Jarman’s Blue: “The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest.” Blue is AIDS (AIDS is Blue), the virus that overtakes everyone, in an instant, anywhere and renders all visuality blue. The “blue frost” freezes life and death, the interstice between the two, the transition from one to the other “enshrouded as it were in an instant,” as Bazin says of photography.56 Blue photography. An image that has no referent other than itself, firstness. Blue visuality is visibility and invisibility, a type of avisuality that occupies the visible spectrum from one end to the other. From Jarman’s film: “Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.” Jarman’s blue is the image of darkness (made visible), the image or scene of blindness, blindness seen and obscene. Viral blue, viral visuality, firstness rages fierce. Jarman’s blue death, the blue frost that overtakes everyone and embalms them, like mummies in blue, is also an erotic blue, the blue of eros, a sexual politics that permeates Jarman’s blue screen. It generates if not an image, if not a semiotic, then a language, blue with no referent other than itself. The representation of blue death as blue renders also the death of representation as such. It forms a circular representation, blue signified by blue, around and around. A blue language that remains in a state of suspended firstness, and thus no language at all. Still, a language, a still language, frozen in time, in the time of a blue frost, a universal language. In 1899, Léon Bollack constructed a new language, Bolak, which means—in Bolak—“blue language” and “ingenious creation.” Bolak, which included among its adherents H. G. Wells, followed Esperanto in the attempt to unify and universalize language into one blue language. Wouldn’t a universal language whose name means “blue language” qualify as a language of firstness? For Bollack, the “Blue Language” would be a universal second language, “the ONLY FOREIGN LANGUAGE, and which going with the native language of each one, would become the SECOND LANGUAGE of the civilized world.”57 A universal second language, the sole foreign language that supplements the multiplicity of

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native tongues; a universal language of secondness then, the universal foreign and supplementary blue language. “Forward to the Fraternity, through the international idiom, through the language colour of heavens, through the Blue Language!”58 In his reflection on “blue language,” On Being Blue (1976), William Gass asks whether the erotic nature of “blue” material lies in the form or content of the work: “Blue postures, attitudes, blue thoughts, blue gestures . . . is it the form or content that turns blue when these are?”59 Neither, according to Gass, but somewhere between. Specific words or signifiers do not render a work blue, however explicit; at the same time, the blue of language is intrinsically blue. “If signs are not the same as the things they designate,” he says, “they are at least an essential segment.”60 Blue language can be severed neither from blueness nor from language, according to Gass: “Words are properties of thoughts, and thoughts cannot be thought without them. We are truly in the blue, and if we try to think blue without thinking blue, we are forced into euphemism.”61 Blue is contagious; once it enters language, it contaminates everything, stains everything blue. And not only language but the thought to which it adheres; language and thought dyed blue. The blue of language is truly blue and not a euphemism. Like Jarman’s viral blue, blue language “rages fierce.” The parasitic virility of feeling is tempered in Peirce’s semiotic by the intervention of secondness, or sensation and reaction, “when,” says Peirce, “any feeling gives way to a new feeling.”62 For Peirce, the transition from one feeling to another, the dialectic of feeling, the conflict of one with another breaks the totalizing force of firstness, the totality of a singular feeling: “Suppose I had nothing in my mind but a feeling of blue, which were suddenly to give place to a feeling of red; then, at that instant of transition there would be a shock, a sense of reaction, my blue life being transmuted into red life.” Here, the solipsism of firstness, of a blue quality that sustains itself, encounters an outside object, a thing that it now renders and modifies. Blue is now no longer only blue, but a blue relation. In Peirce’s example, it is life that carries blue, “my blue life.” Blue is not only blue, it is also life. And it is mine. My blue life then gives way to red, to red life. Blue life transmuted through shock to red life. Peirce’s Suprematist figure invokes the dialectical paintings of Kazimir Malevich (black and red squares and circles), but also the structural films of Kubelka, Conrad, and Sharits, and the poststructural recycled cinemas of Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky. Moving from frame to frame, image to image, color to color, each transition produces a

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shock, a new feeling, and the transmutation of one life into another. Peirce’s idiom of life, from the “living quality” of feeling to “my blue life” maintains in his semiotic of the image, the force of vitality that renders blue biographical. Biographical and autobiographical, “my blue life,” “your blue life,” the life I consign in affect to you. “Blue flashes before my eyes,” says Jarman. My blue life flashes before my eyes, one is tempted to add. My blue life gives way to my blue death. Flickering blue. Peirce’s filmlike semiotic of feeling produces not only the totality of blue, the transition of blue life to red, but also an archive of feeling, the memory of affect, of blue and of red, and of the passage between the two. As feelings, as feeling images, blue and red and the clash between the two exist only in the present. “If I were further endowed with a memory,” Peirce continues, “that sense would continue for some time, and there would be a peculiar feeling or sentiment connected with it. This last feeling might endure . . . after the memory of the occurrence and the feelings of blue and red had passed away. But the sensation of reaction cannot exist except in the actual presence of the two feelings blue and red to which it relates.”63 One might remember blue and red after they “had passed away,” but the sensation of reaction only exists in the presence of the two, in the present, in the perpetual present of affect. Following Peirce’s logic, I can remember blue, I can record and preserve it, but blue itself can only exist in the present, now. If the divide between blue and its image seems blurred, then the line that separates blue from a past blue appears more clearly: blue is only ever now, only ever present. But this clarity also brings obscurity: is the painted blue—Yves Klein’s blue, for example—a present blue, here and now, or the memory of a past blue, the record of a blue no longer here, even though I see it here before me? “It is hard,” says Albers, “if not impossible, to remember distinct colors.”64 Does blue always erase the past, erase memory, retrieve and recast it into a perpetual present that renders the past invisible, “if not impossible”? “What if this present,” asks Jarman, “were the world’s last night?”65 Is blue the melancholic image of the past, or rather of forgetting, the image of everything forgotten in the form and uniform of blue? Isn’t this the very logic of cinema? Peirce’s logic of firstness, of feeling, and of color in his eccentric discourse invokes the cinema machine, the chronic present the apparatus projects, and the way in which the present never passes away. Blue erases repetition, representation, rendering the image present, always blue, even when it is an image of absence, an image of death, of the death of the image. Death in blue; consider the last line of Jarman’s film: “I place a

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delphinium, blue, upon your grave.” Which is the noun in this sentence, delphinium or blue, a blue flower or flowery blue “upon your grave”? Does rendering an image, rendering it blue, also involve on some ontological level, on those same ontological levels imagined by Bazin, overrendering the image until it is no longer visible? Surrendering an image, surrendering visuality until this very limit comes to constitute the image, and over-rendering becomes the mode of all rendering or surrendering? The blue photographs that appear in a segment of Walid Ra’ad’s video The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999), “Secrets in the Open Sea,” are erasures, skies and oceans that swallow the image and everything it  contains—politics, history, evidence, life: “Witnesses to a disappearance,” says Laura U. Marks.66 They are surrenders, one might say, images of surrender, over-rendered until nothing appears except the firstness of blue, no history visible in the blue images that hide the dead, in the dead seas of the Mediterranean. (“Blue does not drain the image of detail and detritus,” says Rosalind Gault, “but fills it with the force of that which is invisible yet material.”67) Blue and blown, overblown, overexposed until the referent returns from beyond, returns from outside to an uncanny firstness that remains, like Jarman’s Blue; like Yves Klein’s “Proposition Monochrome: Blue Epoch” (1957); like Picasso’s “Blue Period” (“Periodo Azur,” 1901–1904) and Miles Davis’s Blue Period (1951), Blue Haze (1954), Blue Moods (1955), “All Blues” and “Blue in Green” (Kind of Blue, 1959); or Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971)—endless iterations of blue, audiovisual blue, all different blues, all blue. Images of the drowned and drowned images washed out in a “liquid perception,” as  Deleuze says, “a more than human perception.”68 Taussig considers Colesworthy Grant’s description of indigo emerging in a Bengali vat, a blue that Grant likens to “the intense deep blue of the ocean in stormy weather.”69 For Taussig, Grant’s indigo sea is not merely a figure for blue, a metaphor or simile, but a blue that overtakes the ocean. From the indigo vat emerges an essential blue that exceeds the ocean: “The blueness of the blue hauls in the entire ocean, the color here being bigger than the biggest ocean . . . the signifier (blue) has swallowed up the signified (the ocean).”70 The ocean drowns in blue. Ra’ad’s blue images are images of drowning that swallow everything and leave everything blue, behind, beyond, without boundary, with neither solution nor resolution. As Jarman says, “For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.” An image of everything that leaves nothing. Nothing but blue, everywhere. Wilhelm Reich, who sought among other pursuits to exteriorize sexual energy, libido, as a type of ether or

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“orgone energy,” imagines this quasi-visible energy that fills space as blue. The “Cosmic Primordial Energy, called COSMIC ORGONE ENERGY (COE), was discovered between 1936 and 1939 in Norway” by Wilhelm Reich.71 This “universal life energy” envelopes the earth, says Reich, permeating the sky and the ocean and everything else; and it’s blue: Blue is the specific color of orgone energy within and without the organism. Classical physics tries to explain the blueness of the sky by the scattering of the blue and of the spectral color series in the gaseous atmosphere. However, it is a fact that blue is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric or organismic orgone energy: Protoplasm of any kind, in every cell or bacterium is blue. It is generally mistaken as “refraction” of light which is wrong, since the same cell under the same conditions of light loses its blueness when it dies. Thunder clouds are deeply blue, due to the high orgone charges contained in the suspended masses of water. A completely darkened room, if lined with iron sheet metal (the so-called “Orgone Room”), is not black, i.e., free of any light, but bluish or bluish-gray. Orgone energy luminates spontaneously; it is “luminescent.” Water in deep lakes and in the ocean is blue. The color of luminating, decaying wood is blue; so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmo’s fire, and the aurora borealis. The lumination in evacuated tubes charged with orgone energy is blue.72

In Reich’s alternate, quasi-physics, orgone luminates blue. It colors the blue of the sky and the blue of deep water with a vital erotic charge. “Protoplasm of any kind” is blue, and “loses its blueness when it dies.” Orgone is blue and makes everything else blue, including life itself. Life is blue. Can an image be blue? Can an image be anything but blue; is there any image that isn’t blue? Aren’t all images blue, even when they aren’t? Isn’t the destiny of every image blue, isn’t every image destined for blue, ending in blue, as Jarman’s film suggests, like the default screen of a television monitor when the image fails? Blue at the end of eyesight, at the end of cinema, at the end of life, and at the end of light? The blue image of nothing, an imageless blue? “A color in art is not a color,” says Ad Reinhardt. Blue is, however. “Blue in art is blue,” he continues, as are red and yellow, but “dark gray in art is not dark gray.” Neither is matte black.73 Some colors (in art) are themselves, while others are not, according to Reinhardt. Blue is itself. But what is this self that falls away in blue, into the deep blue, feeling or being blue? What does it take to be blue?

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Jarman’s Blue begins and ends in blue. “O Blue come forth, O Blue arise, O Blue ascend, O Blue come in”; it ends with a blue delphinium, a delphinium Blue placed “upon your grave.” It is blue that greets life, that calls it forth, the first color of the universe. It is also the color that ends life, which fades life and turns everything into twilight, everything into cinema. Blue begins and ends with life, begins and ends with death, pursuing the narrator’s vanishing body and receding eyesight into an acousmatic sea of blue. Into a blue cinema, a blue movie. It renders a certain end to cinema, an end that arrives at the beginning (of cinema) of the void that ends but begins life, a blue that fuses life with image, with an image of life, an imaginary life, the imagined lives of cinema. Blue survives these lives as it does these deaths, these codes blue. It is among many others things blue, many shades of blue, a cinema for the blind or nearly blind, the last light or image before complete darkness. For Jarman, blue is what one sees at the end of eyesight, an image of sightlessness. “Blue is darkness made visible,” he says, or someone that speaks for him, on his behalf, in his place, in the place where he no longer is, from the blue.74 This darkness at the beginning and end, at the moment one opens and closes one’s eyes, the blue of the universe, a “universal blue” funk that permeates the world and the cosmos, the skies and the heavens. “Blue is the typically heavenly color,” says Kandinsky. Is blue also the color of the afterlife? Shades of blue, blue shades, shadows, spectral blue. Looking into the sky, “what do you see out there?” asks Rudolf Steiner. “You see the so-called blue sky. It is not really there, but we see it all the same. Actually it stretches into all infinity, yet it looks as though it curves around the earth like a blue vault. Why is that?”75 You see what is not really there, what is infinite and endless but appears curved “around the earth like a blue vault.” The sky, suggests Steiner, the blue sky, the so-called blue sky, is an optical illusion. The sky itself, the infinite universe is itself dark. Steiner continues, “Now you just have to remember what it is like out there in space; it is dark, of course. Cosmic space is dark. . . . So when you stand there by day you are looking into the dark, and we ought to see dark really. But you see blue instead of black because the atmosphere is illuminated by the sun.76 The sun’s illumination turns black into blue, “darkness made visible,” as Jarman says. “Clearly,” Steiner concludes, “you are seeing darkness through light. You look through light, through illumination into darkness. So we can say, darkness through light is blue.”77 Steiner’s blue sky is darkness illuminated; blue is the image of darkness, the image of darkness carried in

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light. In Steiner’s logic, darkness as such is invisible. Darkness made visible, transformed into light, into the spectrum of visibility is blue. Is blue the last image in the universe, the image of its end at the very end? The blue image of a darkened universe? Is it what replaces the image after its withdrawal, after its surrender, after its disappearance into the blue beyond? Is it the color that remains when all color has retreated; what is left when the other colors have left and nothing else is left? Darkness made visible? An image of imageless surrender, of the surrender of images, an image of emptiness? Isn’t blue always the color of the universe, a deeper shade of sky? The first and last image, the color of everything with or without light. A transcendental blue. And after the bright yellow supernovas have burned all the images, after the blue-black holes have swallowed everything else, only the blue will remain where everything else once was. (“Blue obliterates yellow,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein.)78 A blue melancholy of images, the last image. And like the imageless TV screen that reverts to blue (blue static where it no longer snows), isn’t blue the last color of the universe, the last image at the end of images and of everything else? The image of imagelessness at the end of the universe, universal blue? And when the blue archive is destroyed completely, wouldn’t its remainder, the remainderless remainder still be blue, a still blue, a blue still born after the end? Deep in the blue archive, wouldn’t blue remain the secret name for and memory of images, of the image when there are no more? Aren’t all images blue? Isn’t every image first and last always blue? “So blues is the past,” says Baraka, “the blown all what got blew; the expressive, i.e., the blowing; the loss, the blown, the blowing. The known gone, the unknown coming all the non-time.”79 Blew, blown, blue, out of the blue, ex nihilo, ex-cinema.

Notes 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 17. 2. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 171. “As a hue, it is powerful, but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.” 3. From George Dunning’s animated film featuring the Beatles, Yellow Submarine (1968). The question posed by a Blue Meanie to the Beatles echoes in a Saussurean logic, the color-coded visuality of ethnicity and race: “Are you Jewish? You don’t look Jewish.” The transposition of race into color, the zero degree of racism, returns in the displaced firstness of being blue, or “bluish.” 4. Cited in Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” in Chroma (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 105.

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5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 6. Because the photographic signifier is indistinguishable from its referent, says Barthes, the photograph itself eludes vision: “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” 6. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:14. “No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model” (original emphasis). 7. Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15. 8. Smith, The Key of Green, 16. 9. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 15. 10. Vivian Sobchack, “Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue,” in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, eds. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 197, original emphases. 11. Flicker films in general—from Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) to those made by Sharits and others—measure time in units of frames that burst in rapid succession, marking and inscribing time on the bodies, psyches, and nervous systems of their viewers. 12. In an interview with Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Sharits describes his attempt to create indefinite colors through his flicker cinema: “A pure flat blue is enjoyable, but it has such a definiteness to it that, to me, it is not as sensually involving. One of the reasons that I worked with color flicker was to create colors that were indefinite.” Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Interview with Paul Sharits,” in Paul Sharits, ed. Yann Beauvais (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2008), 91. In a letter to Lebensztejn, Sharits characterizes the flickering colors in his films as “chords”: “Very rapidly altering frames of different colors in a film,” he says, “can produce an apparent infinity of iridescent color ‘chords,’ shimmering time-color fields.” Paul Sharits, “Dear Mr. Lebensztejn,” in Paul Sharits, 115. 13. See in this regard, Michael Taussig’s extensive reflection on color and ethnicity, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Also, anthropologist Janet Hoskins’s remarkable, “Why Do Ladies Sing the Blues? Indigo Dyeing, Cloth Production, and Gender Symbolism in Kodi,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 141–73. Hoskins details the effects of indigo dyeing among the Eastern Indonesian Kodi, in particular the ways in which “blueness” defines gender identities and produces an entire culture of “blue arts.” Among the effects of a sustained interaction with indigo for women is their eventual transformation into witches, signaled by the appearance of blue in and around the body. Hoskins says, “Witchcraft can be detected through bluish marks at the naval, fingertips, or eye sockets, and victims of witch attacks often complain of seeing bluish color moving around them” (149).

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14. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13. 15. Pastoureau, Blue, 14. With regard to the hesitant and imprecise status of blue in the classical and medieval languages, Pastoureau writes: “The silence, hesitation, evolution, and frequency or rarity of words give the historian studying the color blue an extremely important body of evidence. The difficulty that the Greeks had in naming blue recurs in classical Latin (and later in medieval form). There were, of course, numerous terms for blue (caeruleus, caesius, glaucus, cyaneus, lividus, venetus, aerius, ferreus), but they were all polyvalent, chromatically imprecise, and sometimes contradictory. The most common word was caeruleus, whose etymology evokes the color of wax (cera—a color between white, brown, and yellow); it denoted certain shades of green and black before attaching firmly to the blue spectrum. This lack of lexical precision for blue shades reflects how little Roman authors, and the medieval ones who followed them, cared about blue” (26). 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 182. 17. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 182. 18. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 183. Bruce R. Smith cites the same passage from Nietzsche as an epigraph to his brilliant reflection on green, The Key of Green. 19. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 183, original emphases. 20. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 27. 21. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 25. 22. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 27. 23. Götz Hoeppe describes Saussure’s cyanometer: “Literally a ‘measurer of blue,’ the cyanometer was a scale of fifty-two shades of blue ranging from white (‘zero degrees’) to black (‘51 degrees’) via an ultramarine hue (‘Berlin blue’). This simple device had been invented in the 1860s by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Swiss geologist and Alpine explorer. Saussure distributed the scale, drawn with water colors following a well-defined recipe, to friends and fellow naturalists with the aim of compiling a comprehensive record of the sky’s blueness at different locations, elevations, and times.” Götz Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life, trans. John Stewart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 110. 24. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 36. 25. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 37. 26. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 37. 27. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 37. 28. A whole set of metaphysical features accrue to Goethe’s plus and minus colors. To plus/yellow: “Action, light, brightness, force, warmth, proximity, repulsion, and an affinity with acids.” To minus/blue: “Negation, shadow, darkness, weakness, coldness, distance, attraction, and an affinity with alkalis.” Goethe, Theory of Colours, 151. 29. Dina Kraft, “Rediscovered, Ancient Color Is Reclaiming Israeli Interest,” New York Times, February 28, 2011, A7. 30. Kraft, “Rediscovered,” A7.

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31. Kraft, “Rediscovered,” A7. 32. Kraft, “Rediscovered,” A7. 33. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 38. 34. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 38. 35. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 38. 36. Amiri Baraka, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture,” in Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 23. 37. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? 158. 38. Jacques Khalip, “ ‘The Archaeology of Sound’: Derek Jarman’s Blue and Queer Audiovisuality in the Time of AIDS,” Differences 12.2 (Summer 2010): 82. Khalip reads the “sonic materialities” of Blue as a viral assault, not only of the senses but of cinema, linking its force to the destructive force of AIDS: “Jarman’s devastated listening in Blue occurs on the cusp of a newly emergent archaeology of sound whose excavations break down rather than document the aural: a queer archive that persists in its phonic destructivity” (76). The phonic destructivity that Khalip identifies in Blue is itself blue, a queer blue, inseparable from sound or image, inseparable from cinema. The relation between sound and image, between the plenitudes of one or the other, as well as their absences (the bodies that disappear into blue sounds and images, into the “blue frost”), is queer. “By concentrating specifically on the substance of audition in Blue,” he says, “Jarman makes a decisive ethical and aesthetic break in his cinema: he shifts value away from the overdetermined cultural premiums associated with the visual ‘spectacle’ and onto the indeterminate event of aurality that reconceptualizes queer belonging in terms of the erotics of the ear” (76–77). Can blue be queer? Is it ever straight? Is blue always queer, always queering the relation between sight and sound, inside and out, cinema and spectator, color and subject? 39. Khalip, “ ‘The Archaeology of Sound,’ ” 80. 40. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 199. Moten here reflects on the irreducibly sonic quality of the image of Emmett Till, of the phonographic dimensions of the photographs of Till’s murdered body. 41. Rudolf Steiner, “Lustre and Image,” in Colour, trans. John Salter and Pauline Wehrle (East Sussex, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1992), 32. 42. Steiner, “Lustre and Image,” 33. 43. Steiner, “Lustre and Image,” 32–33. 44. Steiner, “Lustre and Image,” 32. 45. Steiner, “Colour Experience—Image Colours,” in Colour, 22. 46. Steiner, “Lustre and Image,” 39. 47. Hoskins, “Why Do Ladies Sing the Blues?” 149–50. 48. Charles S. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” in Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1958), 158. 49. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 150. 50. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 150. 51. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 98.

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52. Jarman, “Into the Blue,” 104. 53. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 150. 54. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 152. 55. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 151. 56. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14. 57. Léon Bollack, “Advertisement,” in Abridged Grammar of the Blue Language, Bolak; National Practical Language; English Version (Paris: Bolak Ditort, 1900), original emphases. 58. Bollack, “Propagation of the Blue Language,” in Abridged Grammar of the Blue Language, original emphases. 59. William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), 8. 60. Gass, On Being Blue, 20. 61. Gass, On Being Blue, 20, original emphases. For Gass, the blue dimension of blue language is language itself, language rendered blue, in blue: “The ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and . . . the true sexuality in literature—sex as a positive aesthetic quality—lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequence on the page of love well made—made to the medium which is the writer’s own, for he—for she—has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation” (43). When language turns blue, it is the language itself that does so. In neither euphemism nor vulgarity, “the thick smear of a blue spot” defines the blue firstness of language. 62. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 151. 63. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 151, original emphasis. 64. Albers, Interaction of Color, 3. 65. Jarman, “Into the Blue,” 108. 66. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 109. 67. Rosalind Gault, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 95. 68. Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, 80. “What the French school found in water,” says Deleuze, “was the promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as condition, as milieu.” 69. Colesworthy Grant, Rural Life in Bengal (Calcutta: Bibhash Gupta, 1984 [1864]), 128; cited in Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? 152. 70. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? 152. 71. Wilhelm Reich, The Orgone Energy Accumulator: Its Scientific and Medical Use (Rangley, ME: Orgone Institute Press, 1951), 9. 72. Reich, The Orgone Energy Accumulator, 15, original emphases. William Gass also cites this passage in On Being Blue, 33–34. 73. Ad Reinhardt, “Art in Art Is Art-as-Art (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part III),” in Lugano Review (1966), reprinted in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 126.

Out of the Blue (Ex Nihilo)

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74. The understanding of blue as darkness made visible is much older than Jarman, or Kandinsky and Steiner before him. In his Theory of Colors, Goethe aligns the antitheses of yellow and blue with light and dark, respectively: “As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it” (170). 75. Rudolf Steiner, “Two Fundamental Laws of Colour Theory,” in Colour, 128. 76. Steiner, “Two Fundamental Laws of Colour Theory,” 128. 77. Steiner, “Two Fundamental Laws of Colour Theory,” 128. 78. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 22e. 79. Baraka, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic,’ ” 25.

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Extimacy Outside Time and Superrealist Cinema

One feature that returns chronically in the various names and modes Jean-Claude Lebensztejn calls “hyperrealism” in painting—photo-, super-, and hyperrealism; sharp-focus and new realism; realist revival and realism now; and post-pop, cool, radical realism, and more—is an intimate proximity to photography. The works collected in his retrospective of hyperrealist painting, Hyperréalismes USA, 1965–1975, held at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) in Strasbourg in 2003, share an origin in photography, in the idea of photography, and in the representation of photographic proximity. A nearness that generates influences and overflows, one to the other, an overflow of images, and the narcissism of minor distances. This relationship is neither contingent nor causal, but semiological. It produces signs of photographs, photographic signs, images of photographs that are not themselves photographs, but photographic. These images are, for Lebensztejn, photographemes. The hyperrealist consumption of photography passes through a constellation of significations that transforms the possibilities of realism and reality as effects of photography. In these works, photography becomes the medium of painting, its medium specificity. In the name or names of an extrarealism, of modified and enhanced realisms, each form of hyperrealism has sought to render something visible but intangible, at once visual and avisual; each engenders a relation to something that is not that thing, but a photograph of it. Photography and the reproduction of photography serve as referents and modes, respec38

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tively, in the paintings Lebensztejn conjures. Not the interpretation of a photograph, says Lebensztejn, but its reproduction. The reproduction of a photograph in the photographic style, where style has come to be an element of form. A form of photographic representation that isn’t itself a photograph, but refers to a particular photograph instead of the objects that photograph depicts. Following Lawrence Alloway, who saw in hyperrealism an affinity with pop art, Lebensztejn remarks: “L’un et l’autre produisent des images d’images, des signes dont les objets sont des signes. À ce titre, l’hyperréalisme est un cas particulier du pop: ses référents iconiques sont des photos [Both produce images of images, signs whose objects are signs. As such, the case of hypperrealism is particular to pop: its iconic referents are photographs].”1 Signs of signs that return through an iconic economy of references to photographs, to this photograph, to an iconic referent that indexes the photographic surface.” The photograph emerges in hyperrealism as an object without objectivity and an objectivity without objecthood, to use Michael Fried’s expression. An object and an idea; an object without value and a value without matter. The contradiction between the two states—absolute objectivity without materiality and absolute objecthood without value—is reconciled in the peculiar economy of hyperrealism, which resembles the principles of noncontradiction that Freud identified in the unconscious. (The absence of negation, this and that at the same time, in the same place.) A thing and its representation, a sign and its referent, a signifier and its signified, are at once fused and erased by the photograph. Synthesized and analyzed, brought together and dispersed. The intersection of a material condition with a conceptual value, the collapse of a sign with its referent makes hyperrealism possible only as an afterthought, an aprèscoup that flashes backward a representational structure no longer possible, only possible as something that has ( just) ended. A contretemps; a semiotics of the moment too late. In this sense, the rigorous hyperrealism that Lebensztejn imagines is possible only at the moment of its disappearance: it is linked inexorably to a duration that passes away—out of sight at the moment it appears. The image and the reality it depicts are fused; their separation (necessary for representation) is undone by hyperrealism, which destroys the possibility of representation in its refusal of the distance that separates things from ideas. Synthesis and analysis at once, and one after the other. Fused, confused, defused; already at work in a semiology of hyperrealism is a complex temporality that disturbs the very possibility of a semiology. The photograph is there and not there, there on the occasion of no longer being there—a fantastic feature of the

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photograph as an image of time. There and not there, almost there, just past, photographic. Hyperrealism designates for Lebensztejn not only a look, a surface that resembles—is at times indistinguishable from—a photograph, that is itself photographic, but a unique semiological structure: the sign refers to a referent, which is itself an index of an object, at least in the fantasy that sustains photography. A phantom or fantastic semiology, which in the final analysis is no semiology but a postponement of signification made visible only on the occasion of its termination: a semiology of the trace, which erases the semiology. Or, the sign generates a signifier that is itself not only another signifier but one that belongs in another semiotic system—a displaced semiology. Hyperrealism initiates an abyss that returns only to the concept of exaggerated reality, a realism in excess of the real, more real than real but ultimately not real, unreal, and (at the same time) superreal. A virtual reality that approximates the real through a gesture, large or small, of deferral. The real that returns as an excess of reality returns from somewhere else. The photograph is the medium (and process) through which the excess is compiled, stored, and discharged. It functions as a porous material, a tissue that separates and connects one layer of reality from another. Atopic and atemporal, a spatiotemporal sieve—hyperrealism reinvests the properties of photography with a chronic disorder, a semiology of time that never adheres to this moment, here and now. The photograph functions in hyperrealism as an anti-sign, an ex-sign (former and no longer sign, sign of an outside, outside semiotic) that makes a semiology possible only after the fact. In the case of cinema, a chronic realism already exists in the properties of the film image. Writing in 1960, Siegfried Kracauer subtitled his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Cinema evolves from photography, Kracauer argues, and like photographs, films “must record and reveal physical reality.”2 Prior to any realist aesthetic, a realist determination is already embedded in the photographic film apparatus as an imperative (a “must”). The photographic image, whether imprinted or scratched on the film stock, produces a photographic referent that is always at work to some extent in any film. (Cinema is always, although not only, bound to the photographic image, even when there is no camera. Stan Brakhage’s “camera-less” 1963 Mothlight can be said to be a film about the photographic images of light, almost nonmetaphorically, about photographic images; images of light.3 A virtual image of photography itself, even as a radical break from photographic cinema.)

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If every film bears some trace of its photographic evolution, a residual relation to photography that lingers always as a referent, then every film can be said to exhibit some features of hyperrealism, although to say so is to eliminate the specificity of hyperrealism, to reduce it to an essence already at work in cinema. Is a hyperrealism of film possible aside from its inherent hyperrealism, and what form would such a hyperrealism assume? (A hyperrealism aside from the hyperrealism already there: an extra-hyperreality, a second degree.) How can a hyperrealist cinema overcome the realism said to reside a priori in the very structure of cinema? And what happens to the photograph in hyperrealist cinema? What is photographic, if not (only) the image, in a hyperrealist cinema? The photographic nature of cinema is best seen in an impurity, a flaw, or a scar: A scratch on the transparent surface of a film enhances the effects of a photographic regime, of a realism rendered photographically. Transparency made visible by the small mark that separates the planes of representation; always on the outside, exposed, exscribed, a sign that sets the world into relief and frames the experience of reality. Carolee Schneemann’s sexually graphic Fuses (1967) became notorious for an excessive realism, but is arguably hyperrealist for the scratched and painted surface of the film that obscures the spectator’s access to the spectacle. What is shown is obscured by the scratch, but also made visible by it. It transforms the act from a spectacle to a sign, a tactile proximity to an optical distance; the entire event is moved to the surface of the film, which becomes itself the referent. (Another vehicle through which excess realism passes is Schneemann’s cat, who serves as an impenetrable point of view and as a distraction from the spectacle. A surrogate realism, apart from the camera, rendered from the vantage point of the nonhuman animal.) The interference on the surface of the image displaces Schneemann and James Tenney from the center and surface of the film’s screen and pushes them away, further and deeper, slightly beneath the surface, into another layer that opens behind it, like Malcolm Morley’s x-ed South Africa, rendering the image a referent and an index, a sign and its (own) trace.4 Hyperrealism is achieved in the scratch, in a dissolution of the photographic surface. “What renders this association possible,” says Lebensztejn of Morley’s x-ed apartheid and image, “is what renders Superrealism itself possible: the double status of the painted image whose object is both reality (this race track, its vast space, its horses, its public) and image (this flat object, the white paper on which the illustration of that reality is inscribed, as well as the words that serve

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to explain it).”5 The second layer forged by the X, the second surface, completely shatters the singularity of its imagined pictorial space. The disruption, for Lebensztejn, propels the simultaneous possibility and termination of hyperrealism: The “X” can cross it all out because it has all become one and the same thing through the crossing-out itself, which links the sign to its referent. In this sense it is true that Race Track put an end to Morley’s Superrealist paintings, because they maintained a dividing line between different levels of representation. . . . [The “X”] renders the painting and the paper visible, the small strokes of the brush and the material support; the image is crossed out three times, by the paint, by the paper and by the “X.”6

The “different levels of representation” made Morley’s hyperrealism possible in the first place; their fusion—in the figure, gesture, and semiographic force of the “X”—closes the hyperreal space by revealing it as an x-space, an x-sign, a figure of representation no longer possible, an outside of representation, indexed by an ex-sign. Another instance of this mode can be seen in the burns at the end of Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), which similarly open a distance between the film and its photographic index, between fantasy (or dream) and reproduction, swelling the space that dictates the film into a vast referential ellipse. The differentiation of the levels of reality and dream, as well as those of representation that erupt in the sparkling scratches that conclude Fireworks make a certain hyperrealism impossible, even as they inscribe the film within a hyperreal temporality. They undo the time of the film at its end, making the film legible and illegible. The painted and scratched surfaces of Schneemann’s Fuses open a series of fissures between the planes of representation—deep and flat space—but also, as Lebensztejn remarks with regard to Morley’s painting, between the “reality” and the “image”; between the depicted activities of Schneemann and Tenney (topical hyperrealism) and the moving photographic image (the intrinsic hyperrealism of film). But even more, Fuses opens a fissure in the temporal realism of this film, and in a way, of film as such. It suggests a realism of time, a chronic realism. A time of exaggerated realism, a realism of exaggerated time, hyperreal time as the collapse of the differences that separate film time from lived time; one time—and maybe even one moment—from another. Schneemann frames her film in terms of the noncoincidence of temporal labor and conceptual duration. “I worked on that film,” she says, “the way I would work on a canvas. It was like an overall immediacy put into a prolonged time

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Figure 4. Kenneth Anger, Fireworks.

duration, a way of working with film as one extended frame in time.”7 The process of making the film, which Schneemann likens to painting, reappears in the film itself: “There is,” in Fuses, “a prolonged time duration. . . . It doesn’t have the titillating quality of dramatic immediacy.”8 The collapse of surface and depth, image and reality, continues into the temporal frame. Immediacy in duration, immediacy as a form of duration, the absence of immediacy in duration; the temporality turns intimacy outward. For Schneemann, the force of Fuses is its photographic relation to time: the residues of the instant, of the immediate, return as a “prolonged duration.” It is a photographic (perhaps a painter’s) notion of film; a conception of time that moves not from instant to instant, producing a drama of multiple instants, but a duration that swallows the titillations of immediacy. A chronic photography that resurfaces in cinema, and as cinema. For Kracauer, two things separate cinematic reality from its photographic predecessor: technique (mise-en-scène, editing, and the basic elements of construction) and time. If, according to the teleology imagined by Kracauer and many others, film is already realist, its photographic origins embedded in its form, then it becomes hyperrealist through a particular construction of time, forged in the experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The function and representation of time in film signals the possibility of overcoming an essential (essentialist) realism in cinema and exposing hyperreality as an effect of photographic time. Chronic: of or relating to time, but also constant, continuous; of or relating to disease, unease, a discomfort, perhaps, intrinsic to the experience of time. A vertigo of time that manifests itself perpetually and as a type of disorder. A recurring, incurable, obsessive relation to time, a temporal disorder, the relation of a time to itself, to another self, a time that

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is never itself, like the hyperreal image and its photograph. The word sustains two meanings (relating to time, relating to illness) that are only possible in an imaginary unification of the two, a homonymic neologism that erases the impurity of the mixture. A temporal fantasy and disorder, the fantasy of a temporal disorder carried in a single sign: chronic, chronographic. In cinema, time is chronic; in other words, it is and is not itself, perpetually—but more so in some instances than others. Chronic time is evident in Michael Snow’s zoom-and-turn films, Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1970–71), among many others. The movements of the camera—forward, back and forth, in Möbius cycles—establish units of time measured by the camera, film time but more precisely camera time.9 The “continuous” forty-five-minute zoom that comprises Wavelength is continuous only as a projection; neither the production nor the temporal duration of the film is continuous. In the projection as a continuous zoom, various systems of time—diurnal time, camera time—are fused into a temporal collage that produces an impression, an experience of single, linear time. Snow describes Wavelength as a “time monument.”10 An object of time and also a memory; the transformation of time into an object or the transformation of objects (the room, chairs, windows, and photograph, but also film stocks, gels, and filters) in and into time; an objection to time, filmed and unfilmed. “Cinema,” says André Bazin in 1945, “is objectivity in time.”11 The many times of Wavelength are refracted in the film’s end, when the film—close to the image of waves on the wall at the end of the room—appears to have a flashback, a slight step back into a previous moment in the film’s forward progression. This brief reversal suggests a memory, a photographic memory even, of the film at its end.12 At the end, the film collides into and merges with a photograph pinned to the wall, which fills the film’s frame, eventually synthesizing the two frames, photograph and film. One disappears into the other, turns into the other, photograph and film fused in a hyperrealism as reversible properties of Wavelength. The photograph seizes the film and imposes a stillness. Chronography plays a key role in Andy Warhol’s screen tests and mouth films, Kiss (1963), Eat (1963), and Blow Job (1964).13 Most of the films consist of 100-foot rolls of film strung together, complete with perforations at the end of each roll. (“I find editing too tiring myself,” says Warhol.14 Chronic fatigue cinema.) Stephen Koch describes Warhol’s early, mostly silent films:

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A motorized Bolex would be set up, loaded with approximately threeminute, one-hundred-foot magazines. Shooting consisted simply in turning on a key lamp, starting the camera, and letting the magazine run out. There was never a camera movement and only a very occasional zoom. . . . Editing consisted of gluing together each 100-foot take on leader, invariably leaving in the weakening and whitening emulsion and the perforated tags at the end of the roll.15

The sense of exaggerated realism comes not so much from the minimal production values but from the asynchrony of filmed and projected time: Warhol’s silent films are shot at 24 fps (frames per second) but meant to be projected at 16 fps, which produces a mild temporal drag, like film moving through ether, a fantastic material there and not there, photographic. Time is divided from itself by 8 fps. Warhol’s six-hour Sleep (1963) exemplifies the chronic realism of temporal photography, consisting of a series of shots of a man sleeping, pieced together from multiple takes. Throughout the film, says Koch, “time remains itself, steadily flowing past at the speed of a clock, in the rhythm of the breath, of the heartbeat.”16 For Koch, the clock and heartbeat are the measurements of real time, mechanical and organic. Time is itself in Warhol’s film; in other words, it isn’t—or rarely is—elsewhere. At the same time, Koch describes Warhol’s Sleep as the “dissociation of time in the name of a hypostatized quietude.”17 Time is itself as a form of dissociation from itself. The rupture of time from itself makes possible a hyperrealism in film: the “slight remove,” to use Francis Bacon’s phrase, of time from itself, its dissociation, makes the representation of extrareal time possible.18 Time beside, in addition to, and outside itself. Photographic time in film produces a reference that is not to time as such, but to the photographic order of time in the instant: a time that is there, or has been there, reproduced. A time that is itself, but never one—dissociated, divided, irreducible to a moment except as a moment of destruction, the moment of the destruction of time as a whole. A time no longer time, ex-time, time crossed out. The dissociation that Koch recognizes in Sleep produces a fissure between the film and its audience: Sleep has its own temporal pace, of course, and a very different one from our own. But we slip in and out of time at will. It is a meditative time, erotic, almost necrophilic, while ours is—well, our time is our own, and perhaps the clock’s. The movement—and it is our own movement—from one temporal realm to the other is among the major sources of interest, and incident, in this

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Figure 5. Andy Warhol, Sleep.

masterpiece of quiescence. It is the meditative pleasures of dissociation that the film proposes to us. Its time and ours are not melded but irresolvably contrasted, and the operation of that contrast from minute to minute gives the film its life.19

Dissociation between the film’s time and “ours”; the unresolved contrasts of time and movement give Sleep its life. Warhol’s Sleep, often thought to serve, along with his Empire (1964), as a parody of film realism, offers the possibility of “real time” in film, time as it is and as such, apart from its condensation into film time. Imagining this possibility in an unrealized idea by Ferdinand Léger, Kracauer recoils from the monstrous and “endless” reality of pure time in film: Such a film would not just portray a sample of everyday life but, in portraying it, dissolve the familiar contours of life and expose what our conventional notions of it conceal from view—its widely ramified roots in crude existence. We might well shrink, panic-stricken, from these alien patterns which would denote our ties with nature and claim recognition as part of the world we live in and are.20

Pure time in cinema would be experienced for Léger and Kracauer as excess and alien, as outside of nature and the “world we live in and are.” It is precisely the experience of reality, experienced as too much reality

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and too much time, that renders the real unreal, alien. In Warhol’s work, the excess of time produces a dissociation that circumvents the panic imagined by Kracauer by indulging the unreality or excess reality of the real. It shatters the singularity, but also the conventions and familiarity of the real, into a multitude of excess realities and times. Schizoid realisms. According to Koch, Warhol’s “real-time” films, Sleep and Empire, are marked by a fissure, a chasm that opens between the film and its viewer within the psyche of its viewer (who slips “in and out of time at will”), from minute to minute and one mode of consciousness to another.21 Each rupture, each sign of distance from to one the other makes the hyperrealism possible. In this cinema, the divide between the sign and its referent, the sign and the photograph of its object, the photograph as its object, is time. Time is the irreducible material that separates film from physical reality. Sleep is a “trenchant redefinition of what filmic time is and can be. For it is exactly in the arena of time—of speed, if you will—that Sleep is so radical. The film entirely modifies the very nature of film viewing.”22 The dissociation of time from life transforms the nature of film and makes possible a hyperrealism apart from that found in all films. The reconvergence of multiple times renders Warhol’s films hyperreal, transient, endlessly ephemeral. A chronic realism determines the structures and editing schemes of Peter Kubelka’s metrical films, Adebar (1957), Schwechater (1958), and Arnulf Rainer (1958–60), and even Unsere Afrikareise (1961–66), where the operation of nonsync sound establishes a realism apart from the ordinary phenomenology of things and their noises. Derived from musical structures, Kubelka imagines a transposition of sound order to the visual realm, which is experienced as neither sound nor sight, but as rhythm. Kubelka’s cinema relies on a reconfiguration of sensed temporality. “Cinema is already rhythmic in its basic appearance,” says Kubelka. “I would introduce measure in time, which had been in music for hundreds of thousands of years: architecture had it for many thousands of years. Equal elements in time. It was such a simple thing, but for me it was a change of the world! It was like being born into a completely new visual world, to see things happen at the same rhythm.”23 The metrical order that Kubelka names in his films determines a sonic chronology, a temporality perceived visually but understood as a form of displaced sound.24 “Cinema is not movement,” says Kubelka. “Cinema is  the quick projection of light impulses. These light impulses can be shaped. . . . You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.”25 The perceptual-conceptual-semiotic circuit in Kubelka’s films moves

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between visuality, musicality, and temporality, although none of those elements is synchronized within its own sign system. Which is to say, visuality is not seen, musicality not heard, and temporality not measured in the conventional registers of chronology.26 Speaking of his second film, Adebar, Kubelka offers this history of its conception: “When you regard the time in which films take place (a normal, storytelling film, good or bad), it is a time which has no form; it’s very very amorphous. So I wished to create a thing which would establish for my eyes a harmonic time as music establishes a harmonic, rhythmic, a measured time for my ears.”27 A semiotics of displaced senses, music experienced as film, perceived as a visual rhythm. A hyperrealist semiotics, pushed to the outside, traveling in and out of the senses, ecstatic. “In all the arts where time is flowing,” Kubelka concludes, “you have a concern with rhythm. What is rhythm? Why is mankind so concerned with rhythm? And why does it give us ecstasy?”28 The ecstasy that Kubelka invokes refers to a form of realism mobilized to overcome realism. Kubelka compares a movement in the world, in reality, with its filmed counterpart: If you film me walking, then project it, you will see me walking up and down here in the same way. Now compare the two things: me walking up and down, and the film image of me walking up and down. There is only a loss with the film. What do you lose? When you see me really walking up and down, you have real colors. You see me plastically. You have the authentic feeling of presence. I mean, it’s real. I’m there. The film walking up and down has false colors, has false proportions because the optics of the camera change things. The gross reproduction only slightly resembles me walking up and down. What have you gained against reality?29

For Kubelka, the race against reality is doomed to fail, since reproduction— especially photographic reproduction—always entails a reduction of the real.30 Reality has to be overcome. “There is an old struggle: medium against reality. The reality is too complex and inarticulate, and it has to be overcome. Our articulatory medium has to overcome reality.”31 To overcome reality, to exceed it, is to disturb its temporal order, the synchronicity of sounds and their objects. For Kubelka, this involves acceleration, separation (of time from its orders), and arrest. The trope of arrested time, of time diverted from its flow, forms in Kubelka’s films and thoughts, an extemporaneity, an outside or ecstasy of time, a stillness at the heart of the rapid successions that characterize his metrical films.

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This is like another world, then. In my films, there are moments when everything stands still. This is a very important thing for me. This is in all of my films. Some films as a whole are like that. These are moments of escape, from the burden of existence, so to say—moments when you are not human, nor something else—not an angel or something like that, but just Out, out of it, and when nothing happens, and nothing leads to this, and this leads to nothing, and there is no tension, and so on.32

Just out. Another world, a simulacrum, elsewhere, outside and still, like a photograph. Static and ecstatic; still and outside. A photographic temporality inscribed in the work as an ecstatic instant, which renders the world extimate. Kubelka’s outside opens onto a world of displaced time: no movement to and from anything, only nothing, no thing as the removal of a moment from the time where it belongs, from its proper time. Sheer extimacy. If, as Michel Chion says, “we are indebted to synchronous sound for having made cinema an art of time,” then, for Kubelka, the task of cinema is to overcome this “art of time,” and make possible ecstatic time; a hyperreal temporality that dismantles synchronicity.33 A moment outside time, but also a time beside itself, asynchronic. The principle of asynchronism, the noncoincidence of time, plays an important role in Kubelka’s films and in his conception of overcoming reality. In Unsere Afrikareise especially, Kubelka insists on the spatial and temporal noncoincidence of objects and their sounds. Consistently, sounds are severed from not only the objects that produced them, but also from the moments of their emission. Other sounds replace the actions—gunshots, cries—expressions that bring with them other times, other moments. A ghostly time, a spectrality of sound and time. Bliss Cua Lim develops the notion of nonsynchronous time and spectrality in film, arguing for the temporal dimension of elision in narratives of haunting. In “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory,” Lim argues for nonsynchronicity as an effect of historical, in this case postcolonial, trauma: “The spectral estranges our predisposed ways of experiencing space, time, and history and hauntingly insinuates that more worlds than one exist in the world we think we know; times other than the present contend with each other in the disputed Now.”34 Spectrality returns, for Lim, as an effect of time; the disturbed visuality of ghosts is perceived as time, as disjointed time, time pulling away from and erupting in the present as another time. The duplicity of time makes possible a semiotics of time, signification in difference: a sign of time that drifts slightly away from this moment, this instant, nonsynchronous and

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futurity, the destruction of the present, the photograph delayed and burned. The slips in time are perpetual in Nostalgia, the inability to secure a stable function of time chronic. The temporality of Nostalgia is  that of a perpetual asynchrony, sustained—like the stillness Kubelka evokes—rather than achieved. Nostalgia is sustained, in other words, it is never completed or achieved. It is elusive, constant, even chronic; perpetual, with no endpoint. “Nostalgia,” says Frampton of the sensation, “is not an emotion that is entertained; it is sustained.”36 Archived, perhaps, as the lapse of one moment to the next, as irreconcilable moments bound together in photographic time. Hyperrealism in film, if there is such a thing, may be a chronic condition. An affliction of cinema and the condition of its possibility. Temporal but also constant, a disorder and contamination of time that separates time from itself, produces memories and futures of the present, a sign of the present moment, an inscription of time, a chronographic extimacy rather than intimacy. Hyperrealism in film allows time to reenter from the outside, from elsewhere, as a trace of time, a time, no longer identical to itself. Time erased and reinscribed, reproduced as something else that only resembles itself. If a certain notion of realism is thought to engender intimacy, the familiarity of the real and the outside, then the hyperrealization that thrusts reality outward and produces an ecstatic and external temporality might be better termed a form of extimacy—an affect of closeness outside and to the outside. And what if there were a photograph of time, an image of time that made its representation possible as a trace, a chronography that realized plastic time? A simulacrum of time, experienced as movement and sound, but distinct from the conventions of time that engender realism. A time outside of time, beyond time, or at least beside it, that nonetheless resembled time, an image or photograph of time. A virtual time, nearly time, always too much or too little (too late), never on time, but always behind it. A time before and after time, avant-garde and après-coup, a premonition and afterthought, time as a distance from time, more real than real, hyperreal. What if the representation of time in cinema was possible only in the form of a hyperreality, time perceived chronographically, at a distance; a time that is not one, no longer, not in its place—outside and ecstatic, unreal and superreal— inscribed in some films as the trace of time: time x-ed, no longer time, ex-time, extimate?

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Notes 1. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Préliminaire,” in Hyperréalismes, USA, 1965– 1975 (Strasbourg: Éditions Hazan, 2003), 28. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 37. 3. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 158. Brakhage’s three-minute film consists of moths’ wings and leaves glued directly to 16 mm filmstrips. Sitney says, “By placing them between two layers of Mylar editing tape, a transparent, thin strip of 16mm celluloid with sprocket holes and glue on one side, he made Mothlight (1963), as ‘a moth might see from birth to death if black were white.’ ” By circumventing the camera, Brakhage breaks from the photographic cinema, but fulfills a certain fantasy of photography, of photogrammatology, by pressing objects in the world directly onto the film. A kind of hyperrealist photography. 4. Malcolm Morley, Race Track (1970), features a photorealist rendering of the Greyville Race Course in Durban, South Africa, with a large red “X” painted over the surface. In his Malcolm Morley: Itineraries, trans. Lucy McNair (London: Reaktion, 2001), 61, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn describes the complex logic this work initiates vis-à-vis hyperrealism: Race Track “simultaneously crosses out an image and the reality it represents: Photo-Realism and the space of Apartheid. As if they were linked, as if the artistic vision of photographic realism and the depoliticized vision of tourism rested on the same middle-class perception of the world.” 5. Lebensztejn, Malcolm Morley, 61. 6. Lebensztejn, Malcolm Morley, 61. 7. Scott MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 137. 8. MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann,” 142. 9. Sitney, Visionary Film, 382. Of Snow’s ↔ (a.k.a. Back and Forth, 1969), in which the camera continuously moves from left to right and right to left, Sitney says, “The incessant panning of the camera creates an apparent time in conflict with the time of any given operation.” 10. Michael Snow, “Two Letters and Notes on Films,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 184. Snow also describes the film as a “definite statement of pure film space and time.” 11. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:14. For Bazin, “photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption” (14). Film “delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy,” and produces an “image of things” as “the image of their duration,” “change mummified as it were” (15). Bazin’s position is echoed by Gilles Deleuze, who offers a similar view of cinema as images of time and duration by following Henri Bergson and C. S. Peirce.

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12. Snow’s use of “a sine wave glissando” on the film’s sound track also acts to measure time aurally. The synced sound of various human events and other noises eventually gives way to a sine wave, which increases in pitch as the film moves toward its end. 13. The relationship of Warhol’s mouths to film time might be significant. Although the mouth is not always central or even apparent in each of the three films, it still operates as a kind of locus, visible or invisible, whose activities—eating, kissing, sucking—regulate the flow of time in and of the films. The mouth might be seen in this context as a metonymy of the film apparatus, a hybrid, biomechanical organ that regulates speed and time in Warhol’s cinema. An oral film crank. 14. Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 58. 15. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1985), 36. 16. Koch, Stargazer, 38. 17. Koch, Stargazer, 38. Koch also says of Sleep, “its time utterly dissociated from that of the audience” (39). 18. David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 30. In response to David Sylvester’s questions—“Can you say why photographs interest you so much?” “Do you know what it is especially that haunts you about them?” “Is it their immediacy?” and so on—posed to Francis Bacon in 1966 and filmed by the BBC, Bacon answers: “I think it’s the slight remove from fact, which returns me onto the fact more violently. Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it.” Bacon’s formulation, “the slight remove from fact,” which reinforces the “brutality” of the fact, describes an economy of photographic signification not unlike Lebensztejn’s hyperrealist semiotic. What is effective in the photographic is the excess reality, which forces the spectator to wander, only to return more violently to the place of the real, to the brutal reality that is at once an effect of and in excess of the reality of the photographic image. In a similar vein, André Bazin says that “photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely an hallucination that is also a fact” (Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 16). A hallucination of reality. 19. Koch, Stargazer, 40. 20. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 64. In a section titled “Endlessness,” Kracauer invokes Léger’s monstrous hyperrealist idea: “Léger dreamed of a monster film which would have to record painstakingly the life of a man and a woman during twenty-four consecutive hours: their work, their silence their intimacy. Nothing should be omitted; nor should they ever be aware of the presence of the camera. ‘I think,’ he observed ‘this would be so terrible a thing that people would run away horrified, calling for help as if caught in a world catastrophe.’ Léger is right” (63–64). 21. Koch, Stargazer, 40. For Koch, even the film’s subject produces a trope of dissociation. “What is sleep, after all, but the metabolic transformation of the

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entire experience of time, our nightly release from the clock’s prison, filled, and flashing with the dreaming motions of the mind and yet an immobility, a quietude in which seconds and hours are confounded.” 22. Koch, Stargazer, 39. Time and speed are variable in cinema in general, and in Warhol’s Sleep in particular. Time is an effect of speed determined by the shooting and projection of the film, neither of which is identical to the time of the sleeper, nor, for that matter, of the audience. 23. Peter Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film, 145. Kubelka describes the basic approach to his metrical films: “In my film every element is the same length, or a double length, or a half a length. The basic length of the elements is 26 frames, and half the length is 13 frames, double 52 frames. The main thing that is achieved is that the visual element is in regular elements.” The regular and regulated visuality of Kubelka’s work, like that of his contemporaries, is not always accessible in projection, since the speed and time of the projection render visual comprehension, or at least awareness, too difficult. Kubelka’s visual harmony is more easily seen when he hangs his films on a wall, as he often does, a practice shared by Paul Sharits and Bruce Conner, among others. Outside of projection, the structure is visible; during projection, the structure is perceived through other senses—as instinct or feel, perhaps. 24. Kubelka’s reflections on and theories of cinema have been rigorously consistent. See, for example, his interview with Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Entretien avec Peter Kubelka,” in Les Cahiers du Mnam 65 (Autumn 1998): 95–112. 25. Jonas Mekas, “Interview with Peter Kubelka,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 291. In cinema, says Kubelka, “you can do something with light . . . in time. It can be conserved, preserved. You can work for years and years and produce—as I do—one minute of a concentrate in time, and ever since mankind existed, you could never do such a thing” (292). Kubelka develops an exacting economy around the English word “serve,” “serving time,” which he supplements with prefixes that “conserve” and “preserve” time. Mekas’s interview with Kubelka was conducted in 1967. 26. Sitney, Visionary Film, 198. Of Kubelka’s last strictly metrical film, Arnulf Rainer, in some ways a culmination of his practice, Sitney writes: “The composition of Arnulf Rainer is so complicated that none of its formal operations can be discovered by watching the film during a normal projection. Instead, one perceives an intricate pattern of synchronous clusters of flashes and explosions of sound mixed with asynchronous patterns which evolve, recall, or anticipate other patterns on one of the two levels of sound and picture. 27. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 144. 28. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 144. Kubelka returns to his use of the term ecstasy, which like everything else, he uses with precision. He links the term to its Greek origins and to the properties of time it invokes: “Now to come to ecstasy, which comes from the Greek, and it means to be situated out of it, and it’s a means to beat the laws of nature, not to be slaves of nature. It means to get out of the prison of nature—in English you have this great expression ‘to serve time’ in prison, and that really is what normal life is—you serve time. . . . I want to cease to be the noble beast obeying the laws of nature. I want out, I want other laws, I want ecstasy” (158). The ecstatic possibility of

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cinema lies, for Kubelka, in its relation to time, in its ability to produce a time outside of time, a time that is more than time, a hyperreality of time that defeats the prison houses of real time. Of Arnulf Rainer, Kubelka says, “With this film I was after the cinematographic ecstasy” (158). 29. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 149, original emphasis. 30. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 144. Kubelka calls the belief that photography captures reality a “philosophical error.” 31. Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 150. 32. Mekas, “Interview with Peter Kubelka,” 295, original emphasis. 33. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16. The advent of synchronized sound cinema, for Chion, stabilized the relation between film and time: “Filmic time was no longer a flexible value, more or less transposable depending on the rhythm of projection. Time henceforth had a fixed value; sound cinema guaranteed that whatever lasted x seconds in the editing would still have the same exact duration in the screening. In the silent cinema a shot had no exact internal duration. . . . So sound temporalized the image: not only by the effect of added value but also quite simply by normalizing and stabilizing film projection speed. . . . The sound cinema can therefore be called ‘chronographic’: written in time as well as movement” (16–17). Kubelka’s cinema can be seen as an assault on every aspect of the stabilizing sound cinema that Chion describes. It begins with the destruction of synchronicity as the fixation of reality and constancy in film. 34. Bliss Cua Lim, “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 294. Lim develops the fantastic relation between time and spectrality in Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 35. Scott MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” in A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 24. 36. MacDonald, “Hollis Frampton,” 60.

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Cinemnesis Martin Arnold’s Memory Apparatus

As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure. —Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality”

The recycled films of contemporary Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold point to the place of a machine, an apparatus for collecting and redistributing memories in particular—a memory machine that preserves interiority outside, ex machina. In fact, the discourses on memory have often imagined such a machine, a perfect memory, a fail-safe mechanism for regulating the vagaries of memory. One might locate the machine’s origin in the Greek figure Mnemon, who was assigned to Achilles as a mnemic prosthesis. Classical historian Robert Graves recounts the narrative: “Thetis had warned Achilles that if he ever killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by Apollo’s hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the sole purpose of reminding him of this.”1 Outside of the subject and auxiliary, Mnemon—like all machines, Achilles, and memory itself—is destined to falter. Mnemon’s inevitable lapse sealed the fate of Achilles, “who put Mnemon to death because he had failed to remind him of Thetis’s words.”2 The wish for memory is that it be machinic: external, vigilant, impeccable. But human memory at least is inextricably cathected by the forces of interiority, desire, and identification to be autonomous. From the beginning, Mnemon was too involved in Achilles’ death drive. The desire for a mechanical memory resurfaced again in the nineteenth century and took shape in the various apparatuses of modernity: 56

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the photograph, psychoanalysis, and cinema, among others. As the desire for the memory machine began to register in the technological archives, it became rapidly clearer that this desire was a drive; that is, its origins lay outside of the subject, removed from its center, excentric. Martin Arnold’s brief cinema of mnemic tremors returns to the site of an abandoned primordial dream, one that Sigmund Freud, for one, left unfulfilled in 1925. Arnold’s cinema attempts to restore the possibility of a memory machine, a technological supplement that finds one of its origins in 1895, the year of multiple and phantastic inceptions.

Anamnesis (1895) In 1895, psychoanalysis and cinema provided two new views of interiority, two new anatomies of the psyche and the world. Against the screens of science and art, the two techniques, two technê, projected another phenomenology of the inside. Both technologies marked their departures from the disciplines that had determined the representations of the mind and the world. Both spectacles were met with considerable resistance from the disciplines of science and art. Despite their differences, the exiled practices were similarly bound by a particular focus on the mechanics, dynamics, and economies of memory. Framing his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in 1895, Freud says, “A psychological theory deserving any attention must furnish an explanation of ‘memory.’ ”3 The search for a representation of memory, what Jacques Derrida calls a “psychographic” system, seems to have initiated the first movements of psychoanalytic thought.4 At the same moment, the cinématographe offered to the public a virtually immediate memory of everyday life. Cinema induced a mechanical nostalgia of the mundane, a mnemic dimension of everyday life—a logical extension of Baudelaire’s call for a modernist art based on the order of memory. Reflecting on the advent of the film medium, Siegfried Kracauer says that the essential function of the film apparatus is to “record and reveal physical reality.”5 For Kracauer, the cinema functions as an ecto-mnemonic device, a displaced and mechanical locus of memory. Its electric vigilance leaves the apparatus perpetually open, sensitive to the incidents that archive and reproduce the “flow of life.” Kracauer’s phrase “denotes a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomenon from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge.”6 The phantasmatic umbilicus gives to film a corpus, a maternal as well as material

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origin. Cinema as Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses and allegorical figure of memory. The practice of collecting and recollecting impressions of everyday life is a common feature of both cinema and psyche, which share a common lineage in the optical phenomenon, “the persistence of vision,” first mentioned by Aristotle in “On Dreams.” Noting that “affection continues in the sensory organs . . . not merely while they are actually engaged in perceiving, but even after they have ceased to do so,” Aristotle observes that “when we shift the scene of our perceptive activity, the previous affection remains.”7 This affection or sensory trace can, according to Aristotle, follow the subject into sleep and resurface in the dream work. For Aristotle, dreams are an elaborate fusion of bodily impressions and psychic image productions. “The dream proper is an image based on the movement of sense impressions, when it occurs during sleep, insofar as it is asleep.”8 The bodily and psychic apparatuses store impressions, memories of stimulations that “are derived from external objects or from causes within the body”; the dream work then replays those traces as images in a type of mnemographic cinema.9 The line between perception and memory in dreams, Aristotle concludes, is never entirely clear. Or rather, in the dream work, their differences are erased; perceptions and memories are of equal value in dreams. Writing in 1960, avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Maya Deren was not the first to note the mnemic undertones of cinema, the uncanny sense of invisible traces or “strips” of memory unfolding alongside and beneath the surfaces of projected films.10 The implicit double exposure to which Deren refers suggests an experience at the limits of perception, suspended between perception and projection, fantasy and phenomenality. These memory phenomena regularly disrupt the economy of sensation, providing stimulation without topography, at once interior and exterior. In this sense, the presence of memory in cinema is only ever implicit, that is, virtual—present without form. It fell to the avant-garde cinema—from Luis Buñuel to Hollis Frampton—to indicate the mnemographic propensity of film, to make apparent this tendency, this necessity; to perform it and make it appear.

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Anti- logos and the Cinema Machine Why a machine? Because the work of art, so understood, is essentially productive—productive of certain truths. No one has insisted more than Proust on the following point: that the truth is produced by orders of machines which function within us, that is extracted from our impressions, hewn out of our life, delivered in a work. —Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs11

Viennese experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold constructs a cinema machine in his found-footage trilogy—the first three films in a remarkable series: pièce touchée (1989), passage à l’acte (1993), and Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)—that is not simply a custom optical printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film.12 Arnold’s cinema functions by incorporating exterior forces, outside energies that press upon the projected images. His machine exports matter, forming an open economy. Scott MacDonald offers the following description of Arnold’s first films: For pièce touchée (15 min.) and passage à l’acte (12 min.), Arnold used a homemade optical printer to analyze the visual motion in an 18-second shot from The Human Jungle (1954, directed by Joseph M. Newman) and the visual and auditory motion in a 33-second passage from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, directed by Robert Mulligan).13

The films effect a hypertension between the impulses of the original material and the rescriptive force of the new edits. On the surface, the exteriority that charges Arnold’s machine can be seen as the history of film, of classical Hollywood cinema, and its systems of representation and systemic repression. Arnold himself is deeply attached, as are many experimental filmmakers, to the classical Hollywood cinema.14 “The cinema of Hollywood,” says Arnold, “is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression.”15 As a result, it carries within it an excluded waste, a refuse of energies that returns in Arnold’s cinema as fuel. On closer observation, the surfaces of history from which Arnold draws have been, to use Freud’s phrase, “worked over”: they have been inscribed already with the marks of an enunciation yet to come, with the traces of a future anterior. The project that emerges from Arnold’s work resides in two traditions of the avant-garde cinema, one national and the other generic. Arnold’s work sustains a lineage of Austrian avant-garde filmmakers that includes Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Valie Export, Mara Mattuschka, and

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Peter Tscherkassky, among others, who built the Austrian cinema as an ex-cinema. It can also be located within a mode of filmmaking referred to as found-footage or recycled cinema. These artists include Bruce Connor, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits, Craig Baldwin, Barbara Hammer, Matthias Müller, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Jay Rosenblatt, and Naomi Uman, to name only a few that have worked and reworked the cinema archives. Arnold’s work circuits through this history of cinema and its secret ego, or alter ego, its ecto-ego psychoanalysis.16 It can be traced to another Viennese exile, Sigmund Freud, who had already begun in 1895 to imagine a memory machine based first on cell tissue and later on technological prostheses or extensions. What is truly remarkable about Arnold’s machine, however, is not the presence of exteriority—the photographic arts are often said to form a kind of tactile connection to the outside world—but rather the location of that exteriority. For, if Arnold’s films seem to take place on the outside, seem ecstatic, or seem to unleash a hypermnemic force that writes as it projects, it is because the outside has come to resemble, in Arnold’s work, a form of radical interiority. In Arnold’s cinema, there lies, “behind the intact world being represented, another not-at-all intact world”—a cinematic substratum or unconscious.17 Thus, with each film, Arnold performs an analysis, a scene or séance, like the writing apparatus of Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” which simultaneously produces an inscription and the site of an inscription, a text and an embodiment. An exergue on the body. And, like Deren’s “strips” of memory that can be seen as both pieces of memory and acts of tearing, Arnold’s cinema reproduces even as it produces. It is not a memory of cinema, but rather a cinema as memory, as memory machine. Arnold’s machine invokes a technological elsewhere, an active cinema unconscious. The contact with another topology, the energetic circuit that flows into and out of Arnold’s cinema, establishes what Deleuze refers to as a machine’s “transversality,” its reversibility; the ability to move forward and backward, into and out of two adjacent bodies. Arnold’s cinema is never a smooth machine. This feature is crucial to its operation: the breakdowns, short circuits, and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. (Neurotics, Freud has suggested, distrust their memories and suffer, in the case of hysterics, “mainly from reminiscences.”)18 Arnold’s machine stutters and twitches from the moment it is turned on. This is due, in part, to the fact that Arnold’s cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes—even as it performs—the

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scene of its own breakdown, obsessively, compulsively. One site of conflict resides in Arnold’s choice of primary tools: “the optical printer,” he insists, “is an apparatus that works against the camera.”19 Another site of neurosis resides in the projector. Arnold explains: In my films the projector is broken (or neurotic) in many ways at the same time. Sometimes it seems to stand still, the next moment it seems to flip the film outside down. With regard to the characters, a similar phenomenon occurs: they clearly project a neurotic impression, although I feel that their form of neurosis would be hard to diagnose because their symptoms are changing from one moment to the next. So they seem to be hysterical, compulsive, and manic, at the same time they are stuttering and having tics, the next moment they fall immobile. So what is their symptom?

Here the projector’s systemic dysfunction affects—or rather infects— the diegetic characters with a kind of rhizomatic virus, transmitted from apparatus to subject. An infection because the prosthetic structure of the memory machine makes the border between the natural and unnatural regions of the body, its internal and external organs, its anatomical and phantom parts, virtually indistinguishable. What is outside is always also inside, while the inside circuits or orbits in the outside. This is the law of technology and that of the unconscious. Arnold’s films produce a constant flow of nervous ruptures, which are the result of a struggle between the host and an invading body. The foreign body or anti-body that contaminates the text can be read as the memory work itself, arriving from elsewhere, from the locus of a remove that is never entirely removed. James Leo Cahill refers to these movements in Arnold’s cinema as seizures, or “cineseizures”: “The multitude of seizures comprising Arnold’s cinema simultaneously enact a grasping, a holding, a fixing and an un-fixing, a break, a (Freudian) slippage. Cineseizure inscribes onto the surface of the screen the apparatus’s co-presence of stasis and motion, mortification and animation, fixity and fluidity, difference and repetition.”20 The combat between bodies and impulses in Arnold’s cineseizures threaten, at every stage, to transform the apparatus from a neurotic to a psychotic machine. (Psychotics, JeanFrançois Lyotard insists, experience the return of the repressed from the outside. Jean-Louis Baudry has, in turn, described the cinema as an artificial psychosis.) The memory that returns from elsewhere, that carries its own discursive matter, serves as a parasitic force that drives and destroys the machine. Says Arnold: “I think that my repetitive transformations affect the basic film text like the AIDS-virus affects the immune system of the body.”

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The convergence of mechanical and parasitic drives in Arnold’s work effects what Derrida terms “the technological condition”: “There is no natural, originary body: technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body. Or at least this foreign or dangerous supplement is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul.’ It is indeed at the heart of the heart.”21 What appears to come from the outside is already at work within: the heterogeneity of the system operates both within and between bodies. This friction, the sheer noise of heterogeneity, produces a parasitic discourse throughout Arnold’s work. Against the fragile surfaces of the original footage, “a message that is in conflict with what is actually being said wants to be expressed.”22 This process follows Freud’s logic of the “screen memory.”

Screen Memories (1899) We shall then form a notion that two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the other—a resistance—tries to prevent any such preference from being shown. —Freud, “Screen Memories”23

If Freud had designated memory as the principal focus of a new psychological theory in 1895, then he had already begun to map the possibilities of its representation in the body. His original emphasis is organic, his goal to map memories in the body’s anatomical structure. Unable to render “an apparatus capable of such complicated functioning,” Freud imagines instead a type of “mnemic cell” that stores stimuli.24 These cells “may, after each excitation, be in a different state from before and thus afford a possibility of representing memory.”25 By 1899, however, Freud had abandoned the self-sustaining biological model, opting instead for an image-based theory of memory. The “screen memory,” a type of memory fragment or freeze-frame that blocks or screens latent material, provides the first iteration of Freud’s nascent apparatus. Noting that memories are usually retained precisely because of their significance to the individual, Freud remarks that in the case of the screen memory, “we are met by a fact that is diametrically opposed to our expectations and cannot fail to astonish us.”26 Screen memories, which most often arise from childhood, are characterized by their banality, by their minor significance in the history of the individual. Against the ba-

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nality of their significance, these memories are sustained by a tremendous affective force, which preserves them: We hear that there are some people whose earliest recollections of childhood are concerned with everyday and indifferent events which could not produce any emotional effect even in children, but which are recollected (too clearly, one is inclined to say) in every detail, while approximately contemporary events, even if, on the evidence of their parents, they moved them intensely at the time, have not been retained in their memory.27

Freud’s description of the screen memory—its capacity to displace, its obsessive attention to detail, and its nervous attachment—conforms uncannily to Arnold’s work. Consider pièce touchée: a fifteen-minute recollection of eighteen seconds; a man who resembles a father (in the obscene domestic spaces Arnold renders, a symbolic patriarch) struggles to pass through a door, enter a living room, and kiss the assumed mother. It is a child’s view, a primal movie scene and an umbilicus to the imaginary. The insignificance of the view is undermined by its fixation. The seemingly innocent act that forms the nucleus of the scene—a kiss—is reworked in the spectator’s imaginary into a series of violent gestures and assaults. Regarding the displacement of the scene from its larger context or flow, Arnold confesses his indulgence in the sampled fragment or excerpt. Passing the original material of The Human Jungle through a computerdriven analytic projector that could both decrease and accelerate the time of projection, Arnold became fixed, he says, on individual moments within the film. “At a projection speed of four frames per second the event was thrilling; every minimal movement was transformed into a small concussion.”28 Those concussions, or traumas, are a feature of Arnold’s own memories of a childhood immersed in Hollywood: “In my childhood,” he says, “Hollywood’s love and crime stories instilled in me great expectations of adulthood. I absolutely wanted to be a part of that exciting world. When I grew up, I was tremendously disappointed.”29 The synthetic ambivalence of love and crime also forms the basis for Freud’s case study of the screen memory, which actually represents a covert autoanalysis. Torn between sexual urges and guilt, Freud’s personal screen memory is routed through a kind of pastoral fragment that submerges the violent impulse beneath a short excerpt: yellow flowers, two boys, one girl, a theft, tears, and black bread. The scene is suffused, in Freud’s later recovery and rewriting of it, with an aggressive, libidinal affect. The screen memory is produced as a compromise between the desire

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to remember and the need to suppress the unabated surge of sexuality. According to Arnold, it follows the logic of tics, twitches, and stutters: Psychoanalysis suggests that in the case of a tic, the movement that is actually acted out is superimposed over an opposite or at least different movement, which had to be repressed as a consequence of censored wishes, ambivalences, and aggressive urges, which in their turn, though stunted to a rudiment, vainly try to overcome the manifest action.30

In Arnold’s cinema, the ticking motion produces a hysterical inscription or scratch upon the screen’s surface. Against the camera’s panoptic fantasy and the film’s total recall, Arnold’s tics shake the apparatus. Arnold’s cinema speaks relentlessly of such elsewheres. Of pièce touchée, Maureen Turim writes: “Its moments of celebratory jouissance are accompanied by overtones of the uncanny, a repressed tension looming somewhere between the frames, a touché coming from some other place.”31 The articulation of an other place, which makes Arnold’s homes unhomely or unheimlich, produces throughout Arnold’s cinema the powerful effects of an irony that divides the subject from itself, allowing another self to rework the self from elsewhere. According to Freud: “In the majority of significant and in other respects unimpeachable childhood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself; he sees the child, however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him.”32 (Jacques Lacan describes such moments as ones in which the subject is no longer the center of a scene, but is rather grafted onto the scene as its outside: “I am photographed,” he says.33) The other place that Turim notes can be seen as the topology of time itself: screen memories are writing tablets on which materials are inscribed retrospectively. They are palimpsests. The screen memory represents a transaction with the future, with a postponed subjectivity. “Whenever in a memory the subject himself appears in this way as an object among other objects this contrast between the acting and recollecting ego may be taken as evidence that the original impression has been worked over.”34 By “working over” impressions, at least two competing sites of enunciation, two struggling loci of subjectivity are introduced in one scene across the divide of time. In a compelling analogy, Arnold compares his work to a friend’s childhood record collection: “Back then she had scratched those passages so severely that now the needle gets stuck, endlessly repeating certain grooves: ‘Dreamlo-lo-lo-lo-ver where are youu-u-u.’ Thus the psyche of a young girl has engraved its desires into the

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record—now a great document situated somewhere between the unconscious of a single person and popular culture.”35 Like a screen memory and the record that has been rerecorded, causing its tracks to be rerouted, Arnold’s work forges a topography somewhere between popular culture and the unconscious, between history and memory, between the ironic subjectivity of time and its counterpoint in madness. “Yes,” Freud says to himself, to his imaginary interlocutor, “You projected two sets of phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them.”36

The “Mystic Writing- Pad” (1925) Everything begins with reproduction. —Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”37

In the end, the screen memory, like many of Freud’s anomalous structures, can be seen as an exemplary rather than exceptional form of remembering. Remembered images and scenes can be rendered as surfaces that hide the work of memory, which continues to occur in the present tense. Memories are machinic. Arnold’s films reveal the presence of a memory machine at work—they index the past without the slightest trace of nostalgia, as if the past had refused to pass. Passage à l’acte, for example, which means the “transition to action,” acting out and an action outside (the action of the outside), describes another domestic tableau, the family meal. Like the mise-en-scène of pièce touchée, the elements of passage are at once emblematic—of the institutions of family, rituals of eating, patriarchal pedagogy, and gender dynamics—and persistently formal. They take place anywhere and nowhere. But the generic material that informs this scene is being worked over even as it jerks into action. The entire film represents a prolonged struggle within the memory apparatus, which appears to be reworking and resisting the eruptions of a crashing repression. The desire, apparent in the form of the original work, To Kill a Mockingbird, is to avoid, according to Arnold, “all irritation of normal human perception.” Accordingly, what has been systematically excised in the castrating edits of the classical Hollywood film returns in passage as a version of the repressed: rapid shot reversals, supersonic vibrations, masturbatory gestures, paralyzed action, aural fragments.38 The irritations are the memories themselves, the disturbances in perception that constitute the basis for postponed remembering. Like the work of memory, the reworking that passage accomplishes uncovers entirely new movements and gestures within the original footage. Says Arnold: “So it seems that there are even more films

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embedded in the original.” The mechanism, however, which channels the passages of perception through the mnemic apparatus, still remains to be described. In 1925, Freud attempted to construct a functioning model of the mnemic apparatus, a last effort to visualize the seemingly graphic properties of memory. The result was a minor study, itself a kind of brief excerpt, on the Wunderblock, or “mystic writing-pad.” Freud’s brief treatise on memory, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’ ” is notable for the reconfiguration of the mnemic metaphor from the biological idiom of the “Project” to that of writing. Thirty years later, Freud conceded the insufficiency of the biological system with regard to memory, situating the function of memory, or rather its representation, partially outside the individual. The revision in Freud’s thinking is significant because it acknowledges that memory does not emerge from and return to the inside alone and that it does not define a closed economy. Both points are crucial to understanding the excentric logic of Arnold’s cinema. In the “Wunderblock,” Freud introduces the practice of writing as an illustration of memory, likening the psychic plane to a writing surface— the surface upon which memories are preserved, “the pocket book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible.”39 To function properly, memories must be supplemented in a form of writing or inscription. This supplementation extends the space of the subject beyond the limits of an organic body, creating a kind of technological surplus. “Metaphor as a rhetorical or didactic device,” explains Derrida, “is possible here only through the solid metaphor, the ‘unnatural,’ historical production of a supplementary machine, added to the psychical organization in order to supplement its finitude.”40 The extension of the subject outside itself breaks the spatiotemporal continuity of the corporeal body and effects a simultaneous dismembering in the act of remembering. Two types of writing are summoned by Freud. The first type or typography is written on “a writing-surface which will preserve intact any note made upon it for an indefinite length of time.”41 A sheet of paper, for example, inscribed with ink would leave such permanent traces. “The disadvantage of this procedure is that the receptive capacity of the writingsurface is soon exhausted.”42 Since human memory possesses a seemingly unlimited capacity for receiving impressions, Freud turns next to a surface that can be erased after each inscription. A slate marked with chalk can be endlessly reused. This system, however, cannot maintain the permanence of its inscriptions. “Thus an unlimited receptive capacity and

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a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive properties in the apparatus which we use as substitutes for our memory: either the receptive surface must be renewed or the note must be destroyed.”43 A writing instrument called the Wunderblock resolves Freud’s dilemma. This apparatus consists of a wax slab or base, which is covered by a translucent sheet of wax, which is in turn protected by a transparent sheet of celluloid. When the transparent plastic is scratched with a stylus, the contact between the three layers effects an impression from the wax base onto the middle sheet. An image is produced. When the contact between the wax base and the translucent sheet is broken, that is, when the page is lifted away from the base, the writing vanishes and the blank surface is restored. The trace, however, remains permanently scratched into the wax. In this manner, the writing space stores permanent traces while offering an infinite capacity for new records. The apparatus, Freud notes, only operates when the three components of the system come into contact: the external stimulus, the protective surface, and the writing pad. It is at this moment that memories are created in writing. The appearance of the image is supported by the possibility of its retrieval in the future. Once the contact is broken, the machine stops and the memory work begins. Freud likens the Wunderblock technology to the system Pcpt.-Cs. (Perception-Consciousness) as it operates in the human psyche. Like the Wunderblock, or vice versa, the human apparatus also involves the tri-level contact between exterior forces, the perceptive filter, and the unconscious. One major difference persists between the analogues. While the Wunderblock stores the traces of its encounters with the outside, it cannot, like the human memory system, retrieve these traces at will. This is due to the fact that the Wunderblock possesses no will, no agency. “It is true,” comments Freud, “that once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot ‘reproduce’ it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that.”44 The inability to reproduce its traces defines the fundamental difference between memory and its metaphors: all of the mnemic models proposed by Freud and others are dependent on the strict delineation between interiority and exteriority and the economic stability of stimulation and perception. Energy, in the form of stimuli, flows into the machine, where it is recorded. Those impressions cannot be reactivated from the inside but are rather dependent on another intervention. Only in the dynamic flow of psychic action does the unconscious counter the influx of external stimuli with its own response, a form of desire. Memories are not

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simply recorded, they are worked over, re-created, constantly reconstructed, and expulsed, sent back into the orbit of the outside. Thus, while the Wunderblock must always remain a lifeless machine whose insides are temporarily occupied, as it were, by external elements, human memory represents a contaminated apparatus that is haunted by the parasitic specters of the unconscious. This is the essential structure of the memory machine: it is a host apparatus that has been invaded by another figure, which is neither inside nor outside the apparatus—a phantastic projection like James Clerk Maxwell’s thermodynamic agent.45

Cinemnesis When you look at a strip of film you will at first see a regular sequence of frames that represent a three-dimensional space. Those are the tracks the camera left behind; the apparatus inscribed itself into the material. If you look more closely “into” the frame, you will see tracks of people and objects which were in front of the camera at the time of the recording. —Martin Arnold46

By 1925, Freud was unable to develop the memory machine further, not because he lacked a supply of analogous instruments, but rather because he could not construct a metaphor for the unconscious, he could not infuse the apparatus with agency, even a phantom agency. It is, in the end, the unconscious that drives the operation of memory, which is itself already a machine, already a metaphor, already facilitated by the supplementation of the outside. Memory is ultimately its own model, at once a subject and its reflection. It is not surprising that throughout his search for the exemplary psychic metaphor—microscope, telescope, photographic camera, writing instrument—Freud never seriously considered film. Given Freud’s often-cited animosity toward film, he undoubtedly saw in the uncanny medium the reflection not of life but of psychoanalysis—the twin sibling of cinema. Freud might have perceived cinema as a doppelganger that projected its unconscious back into the world from which it drew sustenance. Cinema could not be thought of as metaphor, only as simulacrum, and was always unconscious. Theorists from Germaine Dulac to Walter Benjamin have noted the ways in which cinema invokes traces of the unconscious. The presence of the unconscious in film, at work in film, emerges strikingly in Arnold’s cinema: Arnold’s cinema reads. It reads without grammar and thus, in Arnold’s words, gets stuck in the details, obsessively reworking frag-

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ments in an attempt to discover language, to uncover it within the system. Arnold’s cinema closely resembles Freud’s notion of memory because its agency, if there is one, can only exist as a form of outside folded inside, as an outside that takes place inside. Freud’s memory system functions precisely because, even as sensations flow inward, the unconscious seeks to expand outward, to read what is being written. In a moving manifestation of the alien nature of the unconscious, Freud describes its attempt to read the outside. “It is as though,” he says, “the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.”47 Even as the external stimuli write on the psychic plane, the unconscious reads (it is the secret of its technology). It reads. Of the pictographic script (Bilderschrift) that dictates memory for Freud, Derrida writes: “Bilderschrift: not an inscribed image but a figurative script, an image inviting not a simple, conscious, present perception of the thing itself—assuming it exists—but a reading.”48 In a similar fashion, Arnold’s cinema also reads. It reads itself automatically, autobiographically. In the third work of his found-footage trilogy, his 1998 film, Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Arnold uncovers another function of afflicted memory: its capacity for reversal. The inflected passages in Alone— drawn from various moments in Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s Hardy series—travel against the surge of time, creating in the process a sense of deep anachrony. The effects of this reversal suffuse the film with an uncanny sense of sorrow. “If pièce expresses sexuality, and passage aggression,” Arnold remarks, “then perhaps Andy Hardy finds melancholia.” Melancholia understood here as the inability to forget, a chronic remembering and pathological anamnesia. By running the sound track against its harmonic order, moving forward and backward in small units of aural time, Arnold scrambles the grammatical affect of music. The result is a kind of musical anagram that produces and reproduces an impossible grammatology of the unconscious. Adding to his previous work, Arnold provides another component of the viral machine, affect. This film feels against the order of the original feature films. It expresses a feeling that originates elsewhere, at once within and without the reworked passage of film. Arnold’s cinema represents a mnemic technology not only because it writes but also because it reads and feels. It opens a passage toward a thinking of the technical virus, the infected machine that seeks to reach outward and touch the scene of its own writing.

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Notes 1. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (New York: Penguin, 1960), 2:292. 2. Graves, The Greek Myths, 2:292. 3. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) 1:299. All further references to the Standard Edition of Freud’s writings are abbreviated SE. 4. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 220. 5. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press), 37. 6. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 71. 7. Aristotle, “On Dreams,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. J. I. Beare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:731. See, in this connection, Greta Snider’s Flight (1996, Canyon). Constructed entirely of commemorative objects—photographs, letters, pieces of film—that have been pressed onto the surface of the film, Snider’s photogrammatical work of mourning literalizes the forces of impression in the activity of recycling. 8. Aristotle, “On Dreams,” 1:735. 9. Aristotle, “On Dreams,” 1:732–33. 10. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Daedalus 89.1 (Winter 1960): 154–55. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 129. 12. In addition to his found-footage trilogy, Martin Arnold had made five additional works: a commissioned video clip Don’t—The Austrian Film (1996) and four 35 mm advertising spots: Jesus Walking on Screen (1993), Remise (1994), Brain Again (1994), and “Psycho”—The Viennale Spot 97 (1997). Although Arnold shows them only on special occasions—that is, when they are contextualized—these films nonetheless display his ongoing interest in rewriting cinema. 13. Scott MacDonald, “Sp . . . Sp . . . Spaces of Inscription: An Interview with Martin Arnold,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 3. 14. For a thorough analysis of the effects of Los Angeles as a place, projection, and film industry on the avant-garde cinema, see David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of the Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Among the many insights James offers is the realization that the West Coast and Southern California avant-gardes flourished because of the film industry, not in spite of it. 15. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 7. All unreferenced citations of Arnold are from unpublished lectures and personal conversations with the filmmaker. 16. Arnold is a trained psychologist. 17. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 11. 18. Freud and Josef Breuer, “Studies on Hysteria,” SE, 2:7.

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19. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 11. 20. James Leo Cahill, “The Cineseizure,” in Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (Vienna: Index; Paris: Re/Voir, 2006), 8. This essay is distributed with the DVD Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure. 21. Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” trans. Michael Israel, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 244–45. In their penetrations of the “natural” body, Derrida sees drugs as both a form of technology or technique—“a technical supplement”— and a parasite: “Like any good parasite, it is at once inside and outside—the outside feeding on the inside. And with this schema of food we are very close to what, in the usual sense of the word, we call drugs, which are usually ‘consumed.’ ‘Deconstruction’ is always attentive to this indestructible logic of parasitism. As a discourse, deconstruction is always a discourse about the parasite, itself a device parasitic on the subject of the parasite, a discourse ‘on parasite’ and in the logic of the ‘superparasite’ ” (234, original emphasis). In this sense, Arnold’s work can be seen as both parasitic and deconstructive. 22. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 11. 23. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:306–307. 24. Freud, “Project,” SE, 1:299. 25. Freud, “Project,” SE, 1:299, original emphasis. 26. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:305. 27. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:305–306, original emphasis. 28. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 5. 29. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 7. 30. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 11. 31. Maureen Turim, in Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema: 1955–1993, ed. Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky (Vienna: Sixpack Film, 1994), 30. 32. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:321. 33. Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), 106, original emphasis. Lacan says, “What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects” (106). 34. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:321. 35. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 10. 36. Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE, 3:315. 37. Derrida, “Freud,” 211. 38. On the subject of a cinema of exclusions, or “acinema,” Jean-François Lyotard is extremely lucid. See his essay “Acinema,” trans. Paisley N. Livingston, Wide Angle 2, no. 3: 53–59. 39. Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:227. 40. Derrida, “Freud,” 228, original emphases. 41. Freud, “Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:227. 42. Freud, “Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:227. 43. Freud, “Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:227–28.

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44. Freud, “Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:230. 45. In Theory of Heat (London, 1871), Maxwell imagined a fantastic agent that could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics and resist entropy, allowing machines or systems to operate perpetually without an external source of energy. Maxwell’s “demon,” as this agent came to be known, might be seen as a precursory figure of the unconscious. 46. Arnold, in MacDonald, “Spaces of Inscription,” 5. 47. Freud, “Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE, 19:231. 48. Derrida, “Freud,” 218.

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The Rhetoric of Images, of the Unimaginable

Filmmaker and videographer Caveh Zahedi’s body of work shares both a relentless interrogation of reality—relentless to the point of absurdity, or rather to the point of rendering reality absurd—and a similarly relentless interrogation of himself, of his responses to the world he experiences and engages. In a series of feature-length works that often reenact past events and stage present events, Zahedi zealously flings himself into the world and refuses to let it go, mixing and remixing elements of the past and himself until they reflect for him the image he seeks. His feature films, A Little Stiff (1991), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Am a Sex Addict (2005), and Plot for a Biennial (2011–12), turn the camera outward and inward at once, effecting the portrait of an individual in the world and the world within a person until the lines between the two, the borders between one and the other, begin to blur. The savage and excessive honesty that characterizes Zahedi’s work turns into an uncomfortable form of extrospection at once narcissistic and excentric. Between the feature-length documentaries, docudramas, and pseudodocumentaries, all forms of paradocumentary or ex-documentary, are also a series of shorter works that similarly reflect, but at times deflect, Zahedi’s obsessive themes of self and self-reflection, affect, desire and sexuality, psychic and emotional reality, and the politics of filmmaking. One such short produces a vast exergue in Zahedi’s oeuvre, his 2002 video “The World Is a Classroom,” which chronicles a film course he 73

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Figure 6. Hollis Frampton, Nostalgia.

ecstatic. Chronographic because time is no longer one but divided, contaminated, outside. The aggressive continuity of time in film (Warhol, Snow) and the violent realignment of film time in single-frame units, Stan Brakhage’s painted films, Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970), Paul Sharits’s Ray  Gun Virus (1966) or T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969), Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965), among many others, render time—from opposite directions—photographic. That is, time displaced from itself, time returned from the outside, at a slight semiotic remove. This reproduction of time returns as an exaggeration, a hyper- or photo-realism of time that is never equivalent to time as such, but a sign of time that is not, in itself, a plastic sign. This time remains haunted and in a sense invisible, crossed out to make it function. Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971) thematizes the relationship between photography and film, photography and time, film and time, and the destruction of each of those relations. It brings together (and destroys) the elements of nonsynchronicity, photography, and the spectrality (nostalgia) of film time, burned as it were in the ashes of the photograph. Scott MacDonald describes the film: In nostalgia, we see close-ups of a series of photographs (mostly his own) as they are burned, one by one, on a hot plate. As we look at each image burning, we listen to Michael Snow read a discussion of the image we will see next. The grid structure so common to Frampton’s early films remains evident here: each section is one roll of 16mm film long (approximately two minutes, fifty seconds).35

Each narration anticipates the next image, a type of nostalgia in advance, the memory of that which is yet to come. And in each present instant of

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Figure 7. Caveh Zahedi, “The World Is a Classroom.” Courtesy of Caveh Zahedi.

taught at the San Francisco Art Institute during the fall of 2001. The ten-minute work is included in an anthology compiled by Zahedi and Jay Rosenblatt, two filmmakers then based in San Francisco, who issued a call in the moments after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to one hundred independent and alternative filmmakers for short works that responded to those events and their aftereffects. “The World Is a Classroom” is one of eleven works featured in Underground Zero (2002).1 The video begins on September 4. Zahedi’s video opens on a black screen, followed by a voice: “(Um) I’m Caveh, I’m the teacher.” The title then appears on the black screen, “The World Is a Classroom.” Still without an image, Zahedi continues: “How should we start? . . . The people who hired me actually know almost nothing about me. So it’s a fluke that I’m here in a way.” Zahedi’s face appears in close-up, the first image of the work. “I actually don’t like teaching very much.” Zahedi, known in his work for the persistent, even obsessive interrogation of himself and his life, opens this video with a series of disavowals: unknown to his employers and thus a largely accidental presence in the classroom, Zahedi doesn’t even like to teach “very much.”2 In the first meeting of his class, Zahedi establishes a small dilemma regarding the economy of pedagogical power: “I don’t like this sort of hierarchical thing where I teach you. I don’t like democracy either, cause that’s tricky too. But I would like some kind of dialectic between those two extremes.” Still in close-up, Zahedi proposes to the class a pedagogical experiment: Each student will make “a personal, poetic documentary” about the class—a personal and poetic representation of a collective experience. “You are going to have to be honest,” Zahedi warns. The subject of the work is restricted to the class; the genre documentary, its mode personal

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and poetic. Every member of the class including Zahedi will shoot video and everyone will be available to appear in the individual works that emerge from the class. Everyone a producer, everyone a subject. The video resumes on September 6; students discuss their general ideas regarding the assigned project. The third installment falls on September 11. Nothing happens. Or rather, no record of the day is presented. The events of the day—in the classroom and in the world—never appear in the work; 9/11 is marked only by a title that holds its place in the chronology of the video. The narrative resumes on September 13, and captures the students’ reactions to the events of 9/11. Zahedi’s students, still in shock, seek to articulate their thoughts and feelings in the wake of 9/11. Zahedi himself confesses his past desire to commit terrorist acts against the state, including a once-articulated plan to car bomb the Pentagon, and offers the maudlin although apparently sincere claim: “What saved me from that path was art.” The events known collectively by the abbreviation “9/11” intervene in Zahedi’s classroom. They collapse the discrete spaces established by  Zahedi, in particular the distinction between the classroom and the world, and the personal and collective experiences of history. The trajectories of the “personal and poetic” have intersected with those of history, opening an impossible space of representation. The events that constitute 9/11 consist of more than the airplane bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; they include the forces of the spectacle, in particular the media spectacle, and the psychic mobilization of the world into a state of extensive identification with the victims, named collectively and metonymically as “American.” Everyone became a victim, everyone an American. To bear witness to the attacks was to be rendered by the spectacle both a victim and an American. As the French newspaper Le Monde (the world) declared the next day: “We are all Americans (Nous sommes tous Américains).” Are we? Are you? (Can one be American in French?) How does one respond to a declaration of universal nationalism from the other? Zahedi and his class, along with the rest of world, have been rendered American, a term that suggests in this syntax a universal condition: American and victim, one and the same, everyone. What intervenes in Zahedi’s classroom, into the spaces of the “personal and poetic,” is the force of an outside; a collective and mobilizing experience that renders the personal universal and the universal personal: youniversal.3 The violent intrusion of the world, le monde, which turns everyone, perhaps only for an instant, into Americans, destroys in that instant the

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possibility of one rhetorical trope in particular, allegory. One story that tells another; the two stories kept apart by an irreducible and essential distance. Allegory is the distance maintained between two stories.4 It is, for Angus Fletcher, a duplicitous distance. “In the simplest terms,” he says, “allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ ”5 Duplicitous and destructive, allegory severs the relation between words and their meanings, allowing a speaker to say one thing and mean another, or to speak otherwise. A certain spatiotemporal structure of allegory was rendered impossible on 9/11. All references pointed to the catastrophe, and one could not speak otherwise. The catastrophic collapse of 9/11 merged the world and its narratives into one. In this state of radical defiguration, the distances that separate one narrative from another—one person, one identity, one place, nation, state, or state of mind from another—have vanished, rendering everything and everyone American. How can one allegorize this disaster if its effect is to turn everything into the same thing? The question of allegory in this instance, and perhaps more generally in film and video, is bound to the rhetoric of images, of the televisual image, which John Rowe qualifies as “the combination of graphic, aural, oral, performative, and visual elements that is operative especially in television and film.”6 The “media image,” as Rowe calls it, already establishes a transverse relation between sensory data; any rhetoric of images involves the allegorization of visuality. A rhetoric of images always opens onto another rhetoric, not always visible—onto another destination of the image. Zahedi’s class and video resume in the wake of 9/11. On September 18, a pedagogical crisis erupts beneath the shadow of events that hangs over Zahedi’s classroom—a crisis within a crisis; a political and personal emergency that emerges, and merges one into the other. During an exercise in which students are instructed by Zahedi to walk around the classroom and in relation to one another—“Just try to be you; just walk through space being you”—one students rebels. The student, Daniel, refuses to participate, calling the exercise “silly.” Zahedi confronts the student, who refuses to back down from his challenge. When the student accuses Zahedi of exerting his power over the class, Zahedi responds: “This isn’t a power thing. And if you see it as a power thing, and that I’m trying to impose something on you, then you shouldn’t be here, because that’s not how I’m seeing it. And I find that offensive.” And the confrontation escalates.

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On September 19, Zahedi, now at home, addresses the camera, and reveals that he has received a call from the dean of the Art Institute regarding Daniel. Daniel has accused Zahedi of coercion. “He seems insane to me,” says Zahedi. Donald Pease suggests that the point of rupture between Daniel and Zahedi may be unconscious but is neither pathological nor illegible. He argues that Zahedi’s exercise, which seeks to establish or reestablish community and continuity within the classroom, is not possible there or elsewhere, and that Daniel’s resistance to the exercise can be understood as a protest against Zahedi’s effort to reestablish the continuity of space and life where none is possible.7 In this light, Daniel’s protest can been seen allegorically as an attempt to maintain the spatiotemporal disturbance of the world within the classroom against Zahedi’s imposition of an artificial flow. It can be seen as the attempt to reestablish the possibility of allegory as such. Daniel reenacts in perpetuity the ruptured space of 9/11, and its disruptive force. The confrontation escalates again on September 20, when Zahedi announces to the class that the dean has reassured him that he has the right to expel Daniel from the class. The balance between “hierarchy and democracy” appears to have shifted toward hierarchy, the imagined dialectic subsumed by authority. For Fletcher, allegory emerges from and establishes a “conflict of authorities.” “At the heart of any allegory,” he says, “will be found this conflict of authorities.”8 Fletcher continues by asserting that as a rhetorical mode, allegory is “hierarchical in essence”: One ideal will be pitted against another, its opposite: thus the familiar propagandistic function of the mode, thus the conservative satirical, thus the didactic function. The mode is hierarchical in essence, owing not only to its use of traditional imageries which are arranged in systems of “correspondences,” but furthermore because all hierarchies imply a chain of command.9

What began as the impossibility of allegory in the wake of 9/11 appears to be a form of allegorical overdetermination: the conflict of authorities, “one ideal pitted against another, its opposite,” appears in this light as a symptom of allegory. Paradoxically, the impossible allegory leaves only one possibility—allegory. An allegory, perhaps, of the total destruction of allegory. Daniel resumes his challenge of Zahedi’s authority: “You cannot force anyone into a contract through coercive measures. It’s illegal.” Daniel’s offscreen voice is augmented by subtitles, rendering the lines phonic and graphic, the juridical tone reinforced by the two modes of inscription. Zahedi responds to Daniel by reiterating that he can still expel him from

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class because Daniel has become disruptive. The following exchange is subtitled. Zahedi: “Daniel, you’re being disruptive, so I’m throwing you out of the class. And I can do that.” Daniel: “You don’t have the authority.” Zahedi: “Daniel, I’m the teacher.” Daniel: “It doesn’t matter. You’re causing trouble. You’re going against your authority.” Daniel’s rhetoric here has shifted. The conflict is no longer between the individual authority of the teacher and the democratic voice of the student, but now rests on the accusation of an abuse of authority that invalidates Zahedi’s authority. “Allegories,” says Fletcher, “are far less often the dull systems that they are reputed to be than they are symbolic power struggles.”10 An uncanny mise en abyme has opened inside the hole torn open by 9/11; a rehearsal or allegory of political events on the outside is being acted out in the “personal and poetic” spaces of the classroom. The classroom has started to resemble the world. Echoing the idiom of the moment, Zahedi announces to the class: “You know, I really believe in peace and healing. And I really would like to heal this. But I am not willing to have a class in which there is like opposition and antagonism in the room.” Zahedi’s logic—the expressed desire for “peace and healing” coupled with his refusal to succumb to “opposition and antagonism”— mimics perfectly the national political rhetoric of the time, undermining what appears to be Zahedi’s genuine interest in resolution. Peace and healing through the destruction of opposition. Either Zahedi has deliberately calibrated his language to that of the deceptive national registers, or he has been inadvertently penetrated by the national, nationalist discourse: a language that renders everyone American. “Either you are with us,” said President George W. Bush on the same day, September 20, “or you are with the terrorists.”11 The synchronicity of Zahedi’s and Bush’s declarations introduces a temporality of coincidence, the coincidental temporality, perhaps, of allegory. Pressing his students to sign a release form that would allow him to use the video footage for an eventual work, Zahedi faces another obstacle with Daniel, who refuses to sign the release and to leave the room until after a meeting he has arranged with the dean. “You don’t have the authority,” Daniel says to Zahedi. At this point, Zahedi solicits the opinion of the class. One woman expresses frustration at the situation, and says of the conflict: “It’s now suddenly the focus of our attention, which seems very far away from what the class was supposed to be about.” The conflict between Zahedi and Daniel has taken over, thrusting aside the intended focus of the class.

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When one student calls the situation a “power struggle,” Zahedi agrees: “It is a power struggle, and to me it’s like totally the same power struggle that’s going on in the world.” The reference to the world and its events has become explicit: the rhetoric symbolic, synecdochical, and quasi-allegorical. The allegory collapses at the moment one narrative names the other; the two narratives have become explicitly intertwined. Zahedi argues against the suggestion that the conflict between Daniel and himself is a distraction from the true purpose of the class: I don’t think it’s irrelevant to the class, what’s happening. Because for me the class is about documentary, documentary is about reality, and this is reality. So to me, this is very important, what’s happening, and how we deal with this is very important. And if we could find a peaceful, collective solution to this, that would be fantastic. But I don’t know how to do that . . . I don’t know how to create peace in a violent world.

From peace in the classroom to peace in the world. There is something disturbing about Zahedi’s glib movement from the classroom to the world, about the ease with which he establishes a fluid relation between one conflict and another. Disturbing and obscene, since it personalizes the collective in ways that appeared taboo in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The classroom confrontation continues. Seemingly exasperated, Zahedi says to Daniel, who is offscreen: “If I turn the camera off, will you address this? Is it all about the camera? You can nod or shake your head.” Zahedi invokes the role of the camera, of the audiovisual image, and its role in the mediation of conflict. During this time, and presumably because Daniel is protesting the class and has not signed a release form, he is rendered offscreen, outside of the frame, reduced to or perhaps amplified as only a voice. Another student presses for a resolution: “That’s why we have to resolve this. It’s like, do we want to live with terrorism our whole life? It’s the same conflict.” And the scene ends. A disruptive student now becomes a figure for the terrorist, a referent already named and renounced by Zahedi. The rhetorical figures are receding: one conflict is the same as another, perhaps any other. Disruptive students are like terrorists, they are terrorists in the absence of a trope.12 What happens to allegory or any other rhetorical gesture when it names its referent, when it reveals the meanings that lie at the end of the trope; when it concedes the action of the trope to a stated equivalence that dispenses with the work of the figure entirely? What emerges at that

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moment is a rhetorical economy peculiar to the image, to images, in which the meaning of a sign is given by the sign. What is lost in the withdrawal of the trope and its figures is the very materiality of the sign. John Rowe describes the media image as a dialectic between material and immaterial dimensions of the media sign, and the mechanisms that produce it: The media image depends upon and emphasizes its immateriality and the manner that such immateriality governs the material mechanisms and technologies employed to present it. Although material elements are part of the production of the image, the immateriality of the image governs and determines the sorts of material mechanisms required. Thus the subsumption of the use value by exchange value is not a covert furtive process constantly in danger of demystification. Whereas the rhetorical logic of industrial capitalism requires material exploitation to disguise itself by way of “immaterial” mystifications (the “illusions” of ideology), the immateriality of the media image is openly acknowledged and even celebrated as the essence of postmodern social reality.13

Rowe has shifted the rhetorical dilemma from the sign to the image, from the dialectic of tropes to a material dialectic, to the very dialectic of materiality understood as the basis of the media sign. What is postmodern about social reality in the era of what Rowe calls “metavideo” is not the play of meaning between signs or the movement of meaning from signifier to signified, but the celebration of the immateriality of the media image: the emergence of an immateriality that dispenses with the figure (with disguise) and allows the material conditions of production, but also of life and meaning, to take place within an immateriality that moves freely from sign to referent, from narrative to narrative, and from world to world. The very condition of the rhetoric of images is the simultaneous acceleration and elimination of the rhetoric of allegory. We are all Americans: immaterial, interchangeable (media) ghosts. We all become ex-Americans. At the limit of the rhetoric of images is the image of catastrophe, an image of the unrepresentable that engenders a rhetoric of the unimaginable. Is an image of the unimaginable possible? What would such an image look like? How can one imagine the unimaginable? Zahedi’s work, here and elsewhere, consists of elaborate stagings and restagings of actual events, those that have occurred and—in the future anterior of Zahedi’s idiom—are yet to occur. In his first feature film A Little Stiff (1991), Zahedi retells the story of an unrequited love affair he had—or failed to have—with an art student while in film school. The film is shot shortly after the episode and while Zahedi was still in school; it features the actual people involved, including Zahedi as himself, the woman of his

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Figure 8. Caveh Zahedi, In the Bathtub of the World. Courtesy of Caveh Zahedi.

affections as herself, and her actual boyfriend. During the time between his idea to make a film and the beginning of production, Zahedi fell out of love and in order to compensate for his lost affection, Zahedi had to reenact not only his past but also his past affect. He had to re-create his own love that was no longer there. The restaging of A Little Stiff produces an image of two disasters—the original, unrequited love, and the sudden and absolute loss of love on the occasion of its representation. Both instances generate an unimaginable image of love, two different forms of failed love. In another feature-length reenactment of past family excursions to Las Vegas and of a script that was never produced, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), Zahedi stages in anticipation a reconciliation of his fractured family—his father, half-brother, and himself—by returning to the site of his childhood anguish, Las Vegas, where his family gathered every year to celebrate the Christmas holiday. Traveling with a camera crew to document his return to Vegas and his attempt to reconcile with his family, Zahedi struggles between passivity—what he calls the will of God—and directorial control, the desire to make a film from the experience. In the end, Zahedi offers the “love drug” ecstasy to his father and brother in an attempt to ensure the experience of family love.14 This effort to manufacture an experience similarly fails, adding

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instead another imaginary scenario in Zahedi’s archive of unimaginable scenes. In each instance, his personal and interpersonal failures produce a successful film. Zahedi’s impulse to at once penetrate and deflect reality, to overdetermine his failures until they turn into successes, resumes in his featurelength video diary, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), a project undertaken while waiting to begin a new film. Frustrated that his film projects were not moving forward and that his funding prospects were dim, Zahedi moved to San Francisco, purchased a consumer video camera, and decided to shoot ten minutes of video each day for an entire year in 1999. The result is a candid but highly engineered glimpse into Zahedi’s life during the course of one year, filled with the ordinary drama and boredom one might expect of anyone’s life during any given year. Zahedi argues with his girlfriend, plans new projects, teaches classes, visits his family, reflects on himself, and argues more with his girlfriend. Intermittently throughout the year, Zahedi is overcome by the anxiety that he is running out of ideas, and begins to dread the daily taping. At work throughout Bathtub is the sense that Zahedi is passing time, that the work and everything reflected in it—his life—is on hold while other film projects are in development. A film in lieu of a film, or rather a video in lieu of a film. In this, like all of Zahedi’s work, one feels the force of a cryptic allegory at work: something else always there, alongside what one sees. The trace of another work, another figure inscribed like a ghost in the work itself. A doubling effect, a doppelgänger that Zahedi himself embodies and which renders the work one sees on some irreducible level unimaginable. In his long-postponed I Am a Sex Addict (2005), Zahedi reflects on his own sexual life, in particular his self-described sex addiction— disclosing, exposing, and reenacting past behaviors and relationships. Mitigated by humor, the deceptive comedy chronicles a tragic series of relationships marred by Zahedi’s inability to control his sexual drives, but even more than the urges themselves, his inability to suppress the desire to disclose those impulses to his partners. In each of the relationships he chronicles, the failure comes from his compulsive need to expose himself to another—his inability, as it were, to keep secret his interiority. What appears in Sex Addict is less the pathology of sex addiction, although it is also there, than the compulsion to destroy secrets and to maintain a form of hypervisibility or exposure. The film itself, while deploying the false rhetoric of a cure, perpetuates Zahedi’s exhibitionism. In Plot for a Biennial (2011–12), which chronicles Zahedi’s attempts to make a commissioned narrative while battling the benefactors that

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Figure 9. Caveh Zahedi, Plot for a Biennial.

funded the film, Zahedi blends narrative and documentary, staging a confrontation not only with authority—the authorities that are his sponsors—but between two distinct modes of authorship. Produced in multiple iterations, Plot for a Biennial consists of at least two films folded into one: a narrative film that’s never realized but witnessed in flashes throughout Plot for a Biennial, and the making of the film that’s never made. The documentary, one might say, of a film that’s never actualized. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, Zahedi was offered a budget of $15,000 to produce a film no longer than twenty minutes. According to Randy Kennedy, Zahedi was prohibited from showing “frontal nudity and making fun of the prophet Muhammad or Sheik Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah.”15 Zahedi abides by the first two restrictions, but not the third, involving Sheik Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi, who became the principal subject of his film. Facing obstacles at every turn, Zahedi was not only unable to complete the film he envisioned (a plot involving the establishment of civil rights for South Asian guest workers in Sharjah, among other aspects, including a kidnapping and acts of terror), but the film he did complete was dropped from the Sharjah Biennial and the Sharjah Art Foundation subsequently demanded the film destroyed. As a result, no film exists, only the record of its production. Or rather, one film exists in place of another, an allegory of a film that doesn’t exist. Even in subsequent versions of the film (Zahedi never relented), the imagined film

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exists only as excerpts in a record of its making. Plot for a Biennial, in its multiple iterations, remains the record of an imaginary film and at the same time something else. It produces a politics and rhetoric of images. Zahedi’s engagement with political subjects has always been at work in his films, although not always explicitly. His work is in fact unimaginable without this political force. “The World Is a Classroom” reenacts an unimaginable, exterior reality and introduces a rhetoric of reenactment that is neither figurative nor concrete, but somewhere between the two. As an oeuvre, Zahedi’s films and videos frequently offer images of the unimaginable, imaginary stagings and restagings of precisely those things—love, desire, interiority, God, and catastrophe, for example—that resist representation. The acts and events that constitute Zahedi’s work are in a fundamental way, unimaginable. They take place at the limits and ends of rhetoric, in the interstice between the image and the unimaginable, the material and immaterial dimensions of the image. Zahedi’s video, “The World Is a Classroom,” ends on September 24 and 25. On September 24, Zahedi tapes himself outside of the classroom. Speaking to the camera—a mode of address that breaks from the sphere of the classroom—Zahedi describes the resolution of his conflict with Daniel. “So I just talked to Daniel for an hour. And I said, ‘Please Daniel, will you please agree to be in my movie?’ . . . And that was the magic word, ‘please.’ And he said ‘OK.’ ” On September 25, the final episode of the work, Zahedi announces the resolution to the class and offers a public apology to Daniel. About the sudden resolution of their differences, Zahedi says: “I’d like to talk about that more, but I don’t want to get too sidetracked around this, although I also think this is part of what I think documentary is actually about. It’s about what actually is, not what you think should be. So, who has work to show today?” The image of Zahedi’s face in close-up freezes, and the video ends. According to Zahedi, the class detour through an interpersonal conflict arrives at an appropriate destination. Reality, or actuality, is the proper site of documentary, the place where it belongs, and the eruption of the real on 9/11 followed by its aftershock in the classroom serve to forge a passage between the micro- and macrocosmic versions of the world. We are all, after all, Americans and “The World Is a Classroom”; learning takes place in the world, and the same world unfolds in the classroom. A transversal allegory: One into the other, the material into the immaterial, and vice versa, with no rhetorical device to mediate between them. In the case of unimaginable disaster, the rhetoric of images—an unimaginable rhetoric at the end of rhetoric—collapses the distinctions

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between places and persons, rendering signs and their signifieds one and the same, in this case, American. Zahedi’s video posits a parallel between the classroom conflict and catastrophe, between the ordinary and extraordinary, between local and global crisis. Between you and the world. What is unimaginable there is rendered here in your experience. You are able to figure 9/11 through this fable. The inappropriate nature of its rhetoric is the audacity of its claim: your crisis, here, is like that horrible event, there. Zahedi actualizes in a profane way the desire throughout much of the world to feel connected to 9/11, to be a part of the horrific events that constitute it. This is the rhetoric of “We are all Americans,” an expression of solidarity and perverse identification. Zahedi actualizes what remains unspoken, unspeakable, and unimaginable after 9/11, which is the allegorization of 9/11 elsewhere, in this instance, in a classroom in San Francisco. It is in the end, perhaps, in the sudden and magical resolution of the conflict (“please”) that “The World Is a Classroom” veers away from allegory, from “reality,” and enters into fantasy. The exaggerated comparison between classroom and global conflict is resolved through an equally theatrical device—the magic word. Two former adversaries, both figured at different points in the work as “terrorists,” have now become, in Zahedi’s words, “friends.” World peace is achieved metonymically. But in a rhetorical economy without tropes and figures, a metonymic world peace is no more persuasive than the allegory of global conflict. What seems obscene about Zahedi’s work, and what appears to be a source of the considerable resistance it generates, is its liquid rhetorical economy—a rhetoric without rhetoric. This is that, without figures. The collapse is reflected in the work’s title: “The World Is a Classroom.” The rhetorical device that likens the world to a classroom, the classroom to a world, has been replaced with the verb “is,” the simile now a simulacrum. The difference between the spaces has vanished, and one is now an extension of the other. Zahedi’s video performs this collapse without restraint. But perhaps this is the rhetoric instituted in the wake of 9/11: An obscene allegory that no longer distances itself from its referent. In the collapse of the sign and referent—the photographic collapse, as Roland Barthes might call it—the rhetoric of the image collapses, and with it the forms of social and personal identity it produces in the mass media. The disfiguration of the image, of its rhetorical force, disrupts its ability to generate identity: no one is any longer American; no one can any longer be American. No longer universal Americans, you and I, we become ghostly ex-Americans.

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Notes 1. Zahedi and Rosenblatt curated two film programs, Underground Zero and Underground Zero II, both of which screened at various venues in 2002. The DVD release featured work from both programs. 2. Caveh Zahedi’s filmography includes feature films, A Little Stiff (1991), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), In the Bathtub of the World (2002), and I Am a Sex Addict (2004). His short works include I Was Possessed by God (2000), Worm (2001), and “The World Is a Classroom” (2002). Zahedi has also acted in a number of films besides his own, most notably in Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth (1996) and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001). 3. The personalization of mass media from traditional forms to newer social media has generated these pronouns: YouTube, iPhone, MySpace, Wii, to name a few examples. Anne Friedberg first pointed this out. 4. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207. According to de Man: “Allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal distance.” 5. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2. 6. John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 156. 7. Donald Peases’s extensive and spontaneous analysis of the scene of rupture came in the form of a response to the screening of Zahedi’s film at the University of California, Irvine, in May 2004. 8. Fletcher, Allegory, 22. 9. Fletcher, Allegory, 22–23. 10. Fletcher, Allegory, 23. 11. On September, 20, 2001, George W. Bush said in his address to the joint session of the United States Congress: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” 12. The rhetorical gesture that integrates education with terrorism is not entirely new. George W. Bush’s education secretary Rod Paige called the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, “a terrorist organization” during a private meeting with Republican governors in February 2004. 13. Rowe, New American Studies, 156. 14. Ultimately, only Zahedi consumes the ecstasy. After lengthy negotiations, Zahedi’s father and brother pretend to take the drug in an attempt to appease him. 15. Randy Kennedy, “A Film Angers an Emirate Festival,” New York Times, April 14, 2011, C1.

EXC05

Derrida, Specters, Self-Reflection

Who or what is a specter? When and where does it appear? Jacques Derrida offers some thoughts on spectrality and the timely dimension of ghosts. Against the assumption that ghosts always return only later, and are an effect or aftereffect of the past, Derrida suggests that specters are always there in the living, and haunt the present in advance. They are, Derrida insists, the condition of possibility of all work: A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. Like the work of mourning, in a sense, which produces spectrality, and like all work produces spectrality.1

Visibility is at work in spectrality, even when invisible. As is life: “At the heart of the living present,” says Derrida, specters make possible “all work.”2 They are always there, in advance of all the work to come. They are there, the specters, already, “at the heart of the living present.” “Visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal,” the specter signals a temporality of absence in advance. It haunts the present in advance, it haunts me in advance, which is to say that I always come before it, before the specter and the law of spectrality, which watches me. I am always in the scene of spectrality. “The specter,” says Jacques Derrida, “is not simply this visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without 87

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Figure 10. Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida #1.

any possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation.”3 Before the spectral gaze I am blind, blinded by the very law of blindness, of spectral visuality. It is a blind law, if not justice, of spectrality.4 It watches me, the specter, without any possible reciprocity; someone watches me, without the possibility of reciprocity: Although I can see the specter, I do not see it as it sees me. It—the specter and the law of spectrality—is also someone, at once a “who” and a “what.” A figure, being, subject, or trace of a subject, and a law that reveals itself to me in the form of a blind visibility, a visible invisible that I can see, and that blinds me in this act of seeing. I see the visible invisibility of the specter, which sees me without reciprocity, rendering me blind before it, before myself, before the law of spectrality. Without reciprocity, the specter opens a field of visuality with no reflection. Among the many legacies of Jacques Derrida, the many lines of thought that remain to be thought and rethought, thought through, and extended in thought, are the reflections that Derrida left on the subject of life, spectrality, and autobiography. They are always there, in advance, throughout his work, ex-Derrida. Separately and together, the points of life, spectrality, and autobiography form a constellation of points, a virtual universe that opens in and across his oeuvre. In this universe, each point forms a portal through which, but also in which, a world of thought opens up—a world of thought, but also a thought of the world. “What I call the gaze here, the gaze of the other, is not simply another machine for the perception of images,” Derrida says. “It is another world, another source of phenomenality, another zero degree of appearing.”5 The other, the look of the other that appears before me, a zero degree of appearance, forms another world, arrives from another world of phenomenality. The look of the other is world-forming; it sig-

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nals the appearance of the other, the world of the other, the subject of another world. It brings to life a specter of life “at the heart of the living present.”6 The subject of life names not only a topic, a topos and site of vitality, but also signals the arrival of the one who bears life, the one for whom life animates the possibility of being. In its numerous forms and iterations, the subject of life in Derrida’s thought trembles on the line between life and death, being and otherness, the singularity of this being and the singularities of others, but also along the thresholds of “who” and “what.” Whose life and what life? The space that opens between these two subjects of life shimmers in Derrida’s universe, a pulse of light that travels through it like a lifeline. An exergue par excellence. The forces of spectral visuality that drive much of Derrida’s thought— the vital economies of visuality and visibility, avisuality and invisibility, and specularity and spectrality—are marked not as opposing dimensions of vision, as the conflict of visuality with its negations, obfuscations, and interferences, but rather as variations on the aporetic possibility of seeing formed around a subject of visuality not always visible. (“An aporia,” Derrida says, “is not simply a momentary paralysis in the face of the impasse. It is a testing out of the undecidable.”)7 Never a dialectic, the visuality that informs Derrida’s thought is always and from the beginning spectral: “Visibility,” he says “is not visible.”8 The condition of the visible, of visibility, is not itself visible. Invisibility is folded into the condition of visibility from the beginning. There is no visibility that is not also invisible, no visibility that is not in some way always spectral. The trope that determines Derrida’s reflections on visibility in so many instances is blindness. Blindness, in Derrida’s idiom, emerges less as the absence of vision, and more as the inability to see someone or something—who or what, ultimately myself—at a critical moment. It is a blindness that reflects me. Neither a failure nor a flaw, the blindness that Derrida elaborates serves as a form of visuality that leads most often to the very subject of visibility as such: a subject whose subjectivity is invisible, whose subjectivity is constituted by the invisibility at the heart of visibility and which renders it always at this moment, blind. Vitality and spectral visuality, life and blindness, converge in Derrida’s thought upon a subject always haunted by life and the specter, yielding always a spectral form of autobiography, a secret autobiography of the other. Secret and other because, the biograph, and especially the autobiograph, always comes to me from elsewhere, from the outside, from

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another, and remains in the end secret to me. I am the secret end, the secret subject of autobiography. Derrida says: “The secret isn’t just some thing, a content that would have to be hidden or kept within oneself. Others are secret because they are other. I am secret, I am in secret, like any other.”9 The secret is not only a content, a what, but an other, a who, ultimately myself as other, my other self. I am revealed in the secret; I exist in secret, like any other, forged in the secrecy of others. In my autobiography, I am named, like the secret names of psychoanalysis, by an other.10 Autobiography, blindness, and the secret name or subject of life open a vast horizon in Derrida’s thought. The constellation that orbits Derrida’s thought, his world—vitality, spectrality, and autobiography—appears in the form of a reflection. A series of reflections, to be exact. Reflection, both as a mode of thought and as an image, a representation. An image of thought, an image of thinking back, in this case, on oneself. Revenant, a ghost of thought. Reflections are thoughts that return, like ghosts; they are images of thought. These topoi appear in reflection because each point of the spectrum forms a surface, a screen that remains impenetrable. Life, spectrality, and autobiography are, in Derrida’s treatment of them, surfaces that refuse the penetrations of thought; they divide and disperse each line of thought. They turn back thought, turning thoughts into reflections, crystallizations of thought as images, but also thoughts that have been turned back, rendered spectral. Photographs are such reflections. Of the photographic image described by Roland Barthes and its punctum, the point of singularity, a prick or wound that comes (back) to me from the image, Derrida says, “On its minute surface, the same point divides itself: this double punctuation disorganizes right from the start both the unary and the desire that is ordered in it.”11 (“A point of singularity,” he says, “that punctures the surface of the reproduction—and even production—of analogies, likenesses, and codes.”)12 Points of contact splinter against the surfaces of life, spectrality, and autobiography; sending streams of reflections back to the subject of each. Everything arrives in reflection, from an other to me. I am this subject, reflected; the subject of life, spectrality, and autobiography. Reflection serves not only as the mode of Derrida’s thought, sustained, as Jean-Claude Lebensztejn once said, by an “extravagant patience,” but also as the mode in which vitality, spectrality, and autobiography appear as images. Images formed in each instance by an irreducible invisibility: the specularity of this universe, alive and haunted and self-reflexive (reflected back as the ghost of oneself) is formed in reflection, but also in re-

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fraction and diffraction. A profound invisibility develops on the surface, effecting in the subjects of life, spectrality, and autobiography an instantaneous (temporary, extemporary, momentary) blindness. The invisibility of one’s life to oneself—an invisibility made visible to oneself on the occasion of its presentation visually to others—initiates this economy. I see my own invisibility when others see me, in the eyes of others, reflected in others.13 My invisibility is projected and reflected not as the absence of myself or of visibility as such, but as the scene of my invisibility to myself. It determines an autoinvisibility, an image of my own invisibility. Derrida spoke of this invisibility, the autoinvisibility of the other, in relation to love and cinema. Responding to a presentation by Kyung Hyun Kim during a 2002 symposium held in Irvine, California, Derrida spoke of love and cinema, and the temporalities that bind each. Kim had commented on the economy of speech acts in cinema, in particular the dense phrase, “I love you.”14 Working through a scene from Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996), Kim focused on a brief exchange between two minor characters: “I am trying to love you.” “Me too.” Addressing the expression of love as a unique speech act, and marking the distance that separates written word from visual text, Derrida asked Kim what he thought a film could accomplish that a novel could not. During the course of their discussion, Derrida suggested that in a film, two people can say to each other, “I love you,” simultaneously. A temporality and economy of love specific to cinema. The impossible reciprocity of love, a spectral love or trace of love that makes simultaneity possible in film, reveals, in Derrida’s thought, a sharp focus on the logic of the present, a presence opened in cinema, that can be marked in advance only by absence. Two expressions of love compressed into the same moment, a reciprocity in the present. At once: live, alive, love. The simultaneity of love in cinema that Derrida imagines, haunts the present, blinds me to it, to myself and an other. Love becomes at this moment, the moment in which it is superimposed onto the other’s love, no longer my own, estranged from me, but returning to me, reflected in and on me, as a secret love, exposed and invisible. What happens when the sequences of love, of alternating declarations, are compressed into a single, overlapping utterance? Is love made more meaningful or reinforced by the simultaneity of a synchronized expression? Or is love negated, muted, reduced to silence by a deafening sonic confusion? Is this a mode of love specific to cinema? Derrida’s brief intervention into cinema reminds one of his many reflections, dispersed throughout his oeuvre, on the visual arts and the

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subject of visuality as such. His contributions to literature and philosophy are well known, as are his interventions in, critiques of, and theses on animality, art, and architecture; politics, sexuality, and technology; and many more fields, nonfields, subjects, and not yet (or no longer) subjects. Derrida has spoken at length of architects and buildings, designs and drawings, individual paintings and painting as such, photography, landscape, video, and specific technologies of representation. What about cinema? The Derrida oeuvre constitutes a virtual archive on the subjects of visibility and invisibility, but also on the possibility or impossibility of visuality as such. He speaks of the specter and spectrality, of the visible invisible and absolute invisibility, or the “radiant invisibility of the look,” and of the image, the photograph, and cinema, among many traces of the invisible.15 The trope of blindness—abundant in Derrida’s work to the point of a theme—and the figure of the blind emerge most often for Derrida in the form of a paradox: blindness is the mechanism or condition through which one sees oneself. I am blind to myself, but this blindness is revelatory: it reveals me to myself, and it reveals my blindness as a condition and precondition of seeing myself. “The blindness that opens the eye,” Derrida says, “is not one that darkens vision.”16 In Memoirs of the Blind, a sustained reflection and speculation on the subject of blindness and self-portraiture written on the occasion of an exhibit he curated at the Louvre in 1990, Derrida develops a crucial thesis on a form of visuality that inhabits the visible and renders it invisible. Derrida’s thesis charts an economy of visuality unique to painting that generates as its subject “the singular body of the visible itself,” the blind: In order to be absolutely foreign to the visible and even to the potentially visible, to the possibility of the visible, this invisibility would still inhabit the visible, or rather, it would come to haunt it to the point of being confused with it, in order to assure, from the specter of this very impossibility, its most proper resource. The visible as such would be invisible, not as visibility, the phenomenality or essence of the visible, but as the singular body of the visible itself, right on the visible—so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness.17

The visibility that Derrida imagines secretes its own medium, its own form, and engenders a mode of spectatorship, blindness, intrinsic to it. Blindness, says Derrida, is an effect of the invisibility of the visible as such. Absolute invisibility inhabits the visible, living in and living on or after the visible as blindness. Visibility secretes invisibility, “as if it were secreting its own medium,” producing blindness. The subject of Derrida’s

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secret and secreted medium is blind. The invisibility that Derrida sees is not an aspect of visibility, neither a phenomenon nor an essence of the visible: it is an image that inhabits or haunts the visible right on the visible. Visible and invisible are not antitheses of visuality as such, inversions of an economy. They are positive forms of the image—visible and invisible images—superimposed over one another and generating a secret medium and unique blindness. A seeing blindness. The phenomenon of blindness remains bound to the subject of autobiography in much of Derrida’s thought. Blindness appears for Derrida not as the absence of sight but as a particular relationship to oneself, to the image of oneself; it is an autobiographical condition, a configuration of the regard and a mode of self-regarding: that is, blindness is conditional. It generates a specific mode of insight. For Derrida, blindness is also bound, as is autobiography, to death. Of his collaboration with Gary Hill and his exposure to video, Derrida says: “Seeing myself passing by reading in front of a camera against an absolutely white background that made me think, I don’t know why of the cemetery in Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives, I was all the more gravely passive in that I did not know what Gary Hill would do with what I saw myself doing without seeing myself.”18 Derrida connects this moment of autobiographical blindness to “the cemetery in Jerusalem,” which he projects against the white screen. But also to passion and love: passion, he says, “in the sense that right away I loved it, that is to say, as always when one loves, I right away wondered why I loved that, what or whom I loved exactly.”19 Passion is forged for Derrida by an experience of love, but also of passing, passing away, the loss of oneself in the other, acutely in the death of another, but also in the passive scenes of autobiography and blindness provoked in the passing of another. Speaking on the death of Louis Marin, Derrida describes residual images, those images that remain as traces of the other “in us”: What is only in us seems to be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scenes that are no longer anything but images, since the other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or  passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves “in us” only images.20

The other leaves in me only images. In leaving, the other becomes an image left in me. I am left with, but also replaced by, images. When I look inside, I see images of the other in me. On the deaths of Roland Barthes,

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the singular multiplicities of Barthes’s lives and deaths, Derrida says: “The absolute singularity of the other addresses itself to me, the Referent that, in its very image, I can no longer suspend, even though its ‘presence’ forever escapes me, having already receded into the past.”21 The absolute singularity of the other remains in me as an image, a photograph, even as everything else recedes. And I have become its referent, the referent of the other, whose image I carry in me. What I see in me are the images of another, other images. This is the blindness that I bring to introspection, the blindness that I see. Derrida recounts a deferred experience of “liveness” during his conversation with Bernard Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” collected in Echographies of Television. “Liveness,” a term that Derrida uses in English with regard to an effect of television, is infused with repetition from the start, with the specters of technology and the image of another who sees me live from elsewhere from another time. “When we watch television,” he says, “we have the impression that something is happening only once: this is not going to happen again, we think, it is ‘living,’ live, real time, whereas we also know, on the other hand, it is being produced by the strongest, the most sophisticated repetition machines.”22 Televisual liveness is associated in Derrida’s thought with the “living,” which is, in turn, already also an effect of the “repetition machine,” of the specters that inhabit the living and liveness. It is an effect not only of television but also through a separate economy of time, of cinema. Derrida recalls such a moment of deferred spectral liveness in a film that he appeared in, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983). In one scene, Pascale Ogier, who appears with Derrida, asks him: “I would like to ask you something. Do you believe in ghosts?” Derrida responds: “Firstly, you are asking a ghost whether he believes in ghosts. Here, the ghost is me.” “Cinema is an art of ghosts,” he continues, “a battle of phantoms. . . . It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” (“Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts.”) Modern technologies of the image bring back ghosts: “I believe that ghosts are part of the future.” As the largely improvised scene concludes, in response to Derrida’s question, “And you, do you believe in ghosts?” Ogier says, in a series of repetitions drawn from multiple takes: “Yes certainly”; “Yes absolutely”; “Now I do, absolutely.” For Derrida, this exchange is marked by a nonreciprocity, or rather a reciprocity that takes place later, at another time, out of time, elsewhere. In a time out of joint, it signals a spectral extemporaneity. He describes the process of rehearsing this exchange over and over, producing already,

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according to Derrida, an estranged liveness. During this time, Derrida notes, Ogier taught him about the “eye-line,” “that is to say, the fact of looking eye to eye.”23 “And so, already during shooting, she repeated this sentence [‘Yes, now I do, yes’] at least thirty times. Already this was a little strange, a little spectral, out of sync, outside itself; this was happening several times in one.”24 But the moment of spectral liveness arrives years later, in another place and time, after, in the interval, Ogier has passed away. Derrida recounts this return of Ogier’s liveness elsewhere: But imagine the experience I had when, two years or three years later, after Pascale Ogier had died, I watched the film again in the United States, at the request of students who wanted to discuss it with me. Suddenly, I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead woman’s face, come onto the screen. She answered my question: “Do you believe in ghosts?” Practically looking me in the eye, she said to me again, on the big screen: “Yes, now I do, yes.” Which now? Years later in Texas. I had the unnerving sense of the return of her specter, the specter of her specter coming back to say to me—to me here, now: “Now . . . now . . . now, that is to say, in this dark room on another continent, in another world, here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts.”25

In a dark room, “the specter of her specter” returns from another world, from that other world, to answer a question, to respond here and now, to respond to the here and now in a moment of haunted liveness. Derrida’s management of time, something unique to his methods, sensibilities, pedagogies, and performances, places him always in another time, another rhythm and pace; in a spectral temporality entirely his own, but one that at the same time excludes him from time. It marks a mourning postponed, or rather captured in a melancholic liveness, suspended in a cinema without end. The forces of death and mourning generate, in Derrida’s thought, a form of specularity that renders the seer seen, transforming the spectator into an image. He says: “The force of the image has to do less with the fact that one sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it. The image sees more than it is seen. The image looks at us.”26 I have become an interior image within the subject of the image, which is endowed in Derrida’s speculation with a perceptibility. “The image looks at us.” I have become myself one of those images “in us,” left behind by the other who has disappeared. (An image looked at by an image.) I now inhabit the interiority of the image. I am an image within an image that looks into itself and sees me. I am a trace, the phantom residue of another that has disappeared, leaving only images within an image. This is the site of my blindness and of my death.

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Derrida’s scene of images within images, one on top of and inside another, forms a mnemic montage (the figure that Freud invokes for the unconscious) not unlike the simultaneity of “I love you” made possible in cinema. Can one imagine, following Derrida, a sonic blindness? A convergence of sound and nonsound images that initiates (or secretes) a secret phonography? A form of filmic audiovisuality like the simultaneous expression of love that generates a noisy superlove that both enhances it and renders it inaudible? And do I see myself reflected in this density; do I see in it and hear in it my own blindness? Am I rendered blind or blinded by the secret medium of audiovisuality that Derrida imagines? Wouldn’t this be a theory of cinema based on the montage of visible and invisible images, audible and inaudible sounds? A secret cinema, a medium secreted autobiographically that posits as its only possible spectator someone blind. A blindness that lives in and lives after cinema, that inhabits and haunts it. A spectator blinded on the occasion of this cinema, which looks at him or her, which looks at me only.27 I am seen there in it, but cannot see it. I am secreted by it. Peggy Kamuf describes a version of this cinema in Derrida’s gaze. Speaking of his immense generosity, one that exceeds the very terms of generosity, she says: “To look him in the eyes was to see someone seeing you see. . . . This quality of the gaze was neither transfixing nor piercing, but once again expansive and moving. It moved one into the open space where one’s own look does not return to itself and can never see itself.”28 My cinema, like Kafka’s law: for me only, but also closed to me. A cinema secret to me. On the subject of cinema—of a particular film, one of two that bear his name—Derrida describes the following exchange with filmmaker and poet, Safaa Fathy. It concerns the subjects of autobiography, cinema, and blindness: Safaa Fathy said to me, one fine day, that I was blind. That was her word. She treated me as a blind person, she repeated that I could not see the film, and that all of my incomprehensions, my impatience, my fits of anger, my crises of nerves followed from the fact that I could not see anything, from the other side, from her point of view, the truth of the film she was preparing. She was right, I say to myself now, I saw nothing, I could not see what was waiting for me on the other side of the camera and of the edit. Still today, this truth remains, but as I am reconciled to it (to her), it is of another fashion that I can never see it, this film.29

Not any film, but this film. This film that bears his name “elsewhere”: D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999). A film that only Derrida cannot see: his

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Figure 11. Safaa Fathy, D’ailleurs, Derrida #2.

blindness here is conditional and autobiographical. A spectral cinema that reflects only him. (Throughout the film, Derrida looks into the camera—a self-conscious breach of cinema’s laws, its fictions, its laws of fiction—which underscores the seemingly absolute blindness that Derrida thematizes elsewhere, everywhere.) Derrida says: “Spectrality is at work everywhere, and more than ever, in an original way, in the reproducible virtuality of photography or cinema.”30 A virtual specter, cinema: a spectral specter, doubled, reproduced, superimposed, one specter over another. One place where such spectrality is particularly apparent is in the experimental cinema, especially a body of work that explores the spectral autobiography, oneself written by the other, oneself that arrives in the form of a secret. Autobiography marked by an essential blindness. Numerous examples of spectral and blind autobiographies, thanatographies, reflections on life, death, and spectrality fill the archives of experimental film and video. Among them are some that never name the subject of the autobiography or feature the disappearance of the subject; the subject is here in the place of his or her autobiography, but displaced, elsewhere, returning in the form of a reflection. I do not see the place where I am.

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On blindness, dying, and autobiography, two films about AIDS, both estranged autobiographies, follow the contours of Derrida’s constellation: vitality, spectrality, autobiography rendered blind. Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) and Marlon Riggs’s Black Is . . . Black Ain’t (1994) name two colors of blindness, one referring to the visuality of affect, the other to the visuality of race and racism. Each dramatizes—one as fiction, the other as documentary—the disappearance of the subject into the surfaces of blindness. Each reflects the death of its subject as a form of spectral visuality. But many more films and videos explore the spectrality of autobiography, the disappearance of the subject at the moment of his or her articulation. Ernie Gehr’s Signal—Germany on the Air (1982– 85) uses empty camera movements, anonymous citizens, and the ubiquitous radio to portray an absent subject, the filmmaker and survivor on a street in Berlin where he no longer lives. An alternative future, another world, opens in the space where I am not, where I might have been. Others are witness to my invisibility, to my absence in advance, and to my return to the place where I am not, or no longer am. The subject is spectral, a trace that marks an absence in advance: An absent, reflected subjectivity, invisible to the film, an autobiograph under erasure.31 Or, Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), filmed in a Pittsburgh morgue; the passivity of the filmmaker, the vigilance with which he watches and observes the lifeless yet phenomenal bodies, flesh and blood, reflects his absence in the image: an autothanatography in reverse. I am there, in reflection. Aside from many more examples of films and videos that disturb the surfaces of life, autobiography, and the spectral images they produce stands Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990), an autobiography that hides behind a series of screens: narrated in third person by a young girl, ordered by an alphabetical set of titles that unfolds in reverse, and a narrative about a girl slowly losing her father over the course of her childhood, the film features the absence of the subject on-screen. She is there (in several scenes, in fact), but obscure, invisible, spectral, the subject of a text that maintains her secrecy. Of the general economy of displacement at work throughout Sink or Swim, P. Adams Sitney refers to the title of a specific chapter, “Ghosts,” to note that in Friedrich’s film, “ghosts may be taken as a term for the rhetoric of displacement itself.”32 Sink or Swim tells the story of a girl’s relationship with her father, the increasing estrangement she experiences, and her eventual disillusionment with the idea of her father, who becomes increasingly ghostly.

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Figure 12. Su Friedrich, Sink or Swim (typing negative). Courtesy of Su Friedrich.

Friedrich tells this story in reverse, each chapter introduced by a single word, the first letter of each word from the alphabet in reverse, from z to a. Friedrich develops the scene of writing as a primary trope in the story of a conflict between daughter and father. The film follows a series of autobiographical displacements that renders the subject, the ostensibly autobiographical subject, distant and opaque. Conveyed in third person, the narrative adopts the voice of a novel; it speaks about me. (Around me, of me, and to me.) I am there in this film as a reflection. The choice of a young girl as narrator induces the temporality of trauma that at once inscribes and describes the subject. The scenes of writing that suffuse the film establish throughout it a contested authorship. The father’s scholarship and poetry about a lost sister projected over a failed trip with his estranged daughter compete with the daughter’s auteurship, scenes of production, an unsent letter to her father, and the image of a script, which coincides with the text of the film. But the conflict also involves the question of authority: who has the right to speak? Who or what speaks of me, for me? (In this sense, the trajectories are reciprocal: she speaks of him.) The father is an

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Figure 13. Su Friedrich, Sink or Swim (zygote).

anthropologist and linguist, a master of culture and language, of the culture of language. He imposes authority, sometimes severe and cruel, even as she takes it from him. Whose authority? What authority? Friedrich’s decision to use the voice of a young girl as her narrator inscribes a particular moment as the temporality of the film—the moment at which everything changes for the young protagonist, the moment at which everything falls apart. The voice of the young girl serves as a monument, an anniversary, one could say, suspended and reflecting the invisible author elsewhere: a photographic phonography. The complex economy of love and forgiveness, reflected against the surfaces of life, spectrality, and autobiography produce, in Sink or Swim, a form of autobiography that remains undisclosed, unexposed, secret, and irreducibly other, spoken always in the voice of another. Sitney picks up on the spectral autogeneses (like Athena’s) at work in Friedrich’s cinema here and elsewhere, drawing from a line in Friedrich’s Gently Down the Stream (1981), “giving birth to myself.”33 A secret and spectral autobiography that returns to me, that reflects me and blinds me, but also comes from me, ex-ego. But another figure intervenes in Friedrich’s scenes of writing: an athletic figure, a body in motion, living and desperate, and also a specter. It is the figure of the swimmer, of swimming, which serves as a metaphor for writing—for a constant motion of the body that is threatened by drowning (Friedrich’s narrator recounts a scene of mock drowning, a type of theatrical torture performed by the father on his two daughters in a bathtub in front of their horrified mother)—and as a theme, a trope, and a crypt. Friedrich’s narrator recalls a death scene in which the father’s sister, while still a young girl, dies of a heart attack in a cold lake; a death from which the father never recovers and in which the daughter is submerged. The daughter drowns in the figure of a drowned girl. This spec-

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ter is always there, already there, inscribed visibly and invisibly in Friedrich’s film. This motif of swimming and drowning, of sinking or swimming is embodied by the father, his dead sister, and the protagonist. They share the swimmer’s body and author it. The daughter is drowning in the specter of a drowned sister and in her father’s melancholia; she is slipping into the body of her father’s sibling, and her attempts to flee this aquatic specter pull her deeper into the maelstrom of writing. She resists the temptation to drown in her own tears (a figure of blindness); tears that threaten to consume her into an aquatic scene of life: her mother’s tears, her father’s, her own, an oceanic world of tears. Tears exteriorized until they fill the world and she is forced to swim in them, like Alice in her own tears. She writes to flee and to survive: for the same reasons she swims. It is a reenactment of the moment of death, overturned, forestalled, refused, and rewritten. Writing is conceived of as athletic, as much about breathing and surviving as communicating or creating. The young girl breaks the surface of the water, which is also a writing surface for the body, for her body. She marks the surface with inscriptions that disappear immediately. These temporary marks compete with those of her father, whose own body is marked by water and death, by scenes of swimming, drowning, and writing. Beneath the liquid surface lies the past, immemorial, haunted, encrypted: a surface reflecting the subject that swims and the subject that succumbs. A biographical and thanatographical surface—of writing and death, of the dream of writing. The dream of writing is spectral; it is a medium and nocturnal. Cinema, televisual and media arts, are nocturnal, says Derrida. They reveal a night visuality, a night view and view of the night: And what happens with spectrality, with phantomality—and not necessarily with coming-back [revenance]—is that something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates a night light. At this moment, in this room, night is falling over us. Even if it weren’t falling, we are already in night, as soon as we are captured by optical instruments which don’t even need the light of day. We are already specters of a “televised.” In the nocturnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are in the process of having “taken,” is described, it is already night. Furthermore, because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here.34

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I am disappearing. Here, always disappearing. I am becoming the subject of your autobiography. In Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick’s Derrida (2002), an eponymous film about him, a biography or quasi-biography that he also writes, Derrida speaks of the eyes as the one constant organ of the human body. The look of the eye, he says, is perhaps one aspect of the human body that does not change over time, over the course of one’s life. What is this look that Derrida refers to? It is the point in the body but also the image that survives both the body and the image: a punctum, inside and outside of me, the inside out of the subject. Only the eye remains, and I am reflected in it—a trace, a specter, a reflection in my own eye. “The specter,” says Derrida, “is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood. It resists the intuition to which it presents itself, it is not tangible.”35 Something visible, the visibility of the specter is an invisible visibility, a form of visibility that remains invisible, without diminishing the force of visibility itself. It suggests a tangibility where there is none, the idea or trace of tangibility, a tangibility that Derrida locates in the image. The intuition to which the specter presents itself, an intuition brought to life in the image, is the life of the specter, the specter of life, the essential spectrality of life itself. Derrida is, today and tomorrow, such a specter. No longer tangible, “present in flesh and blood,” Derrida is nonetheless here in the impossible temporalities of presence he always affirmed. He lives in the spectral autobiography of the other he authors; a form of self-inscription that takes place always in another, in you. It is an imaginary writing: text and image, flesh and specter, trace of flesh and spectral body; Derrida and his reflections, metonymies, images; his lives and deaths, appearances and disappearances. In the end, an end that does not end in the end, the points on this constellation will have been superimpositions, repetitions, specters: Life is always spectral, my life is always spectral, and in the trace is always life. Life, spectrality, and autobiography—these are the elements of a secret cinema, and of Jacques Derrida, from him.

Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, “Spectrographies,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 117.

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2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). “All work produces spectrality,” says Derrida (117, original emphasis). He makes a similar claim about the work of mourning: “I have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production—in what links it to trauma, to mourning, to the idealizing iterability of expropriation, thus to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhne” (121). Spectrality, mourning, and trauma are bound to work, to the very work of work, to productivity in general, and as such, by what Derrida calls elsewhere a “hauntology” (10). 3. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 121. 4. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida links justice to a point beyond “the living present in general,” to a “spectral moment” (xix). He says: “To whom, finally, would an obligation of justice ever entail a commitment, one will say, and even be it beyond law and beyond the norm, to whom and to what if not to the life of a living being? Is there ever justice, commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to answer for itself (for the living self) before anything other, in the last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by that natural life or the life of the spirit?” (xx). The living being is posited here, according to the law of spectrality, at a moment beyond the present: Justice, for Derrida, is destined to the living being that lies beyond the law, whose very being beyond the present determines this law. It is the nature of justice to survive life, to live beyond, and to posit life beyond the present. Derrida continues: “This justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on, namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present” (xx, original emphasis). Justice carries life beyond life, into the spectral; justice is spectral, the act of taking life beyond life, or surviving life. 5. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 123. 6. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 117. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Others Are Secret because They Are Other,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 154. 8. Derrida, “Others Are Secret,” 157, original emphasis. 9. Derrida, “Others Are Secret,” 162, original emphasis. 10. In Jacques Derrida, “Roundtable on Translation,” in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), a book about, among other things, autobiography, Derrida speaks on the possible end of psychoanalysis: “The ideal pole or conclusion of analysis would be the possibility of addressing the patient using his or her most proper name, possibly the most secret. It is the moment, then, when the analyst would say to the patient ‘you’ in such a way that there would be no possible misunderstanding on the subject of this ‘you’ ” (107). The other names me, but also exposes me, revealing my secret name; at the end of analysis, my autobiography comes from the other.

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11. Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 39. 12. Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 39. 13. As David Wills pointed out in response at “ ‘Who?’ or ‘What?’—Jacques Derrida,” organized by Dragan Kujundzic and held at the University of Florida on October 9–11, 2006, the look that comes from an other, the other’s look in which I see myself, extends, in Derrida’s thought, to animals. Derrida begins “The Animal That There I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, in Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002) with the scene of such a look. He says: “I often ask myself, just to see, who I am—and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment” (372, original emphases). The look of the other, in this case an exemplarily other animal, Derrida’s cat, whom Derrida also describes as “a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person” (372), initiates a self-reflexive moment of embarrassment. Derrida sees himself seeing himself in the other’s look; he sees himself reflected in it. The specific visuality that opens in the look of animals leads, for Derrida, to a profoundly critical, historical, autobiographical reflection: “As for history, historicity, even historicality, those motifs belong precisely—as we shall see in detail—to this auto-definition, this auto-apprehension, this auto-situation of man of the human Dasein with respect to what is living and with respect to animal life; they belong to this autobiography of man that I wish to call into question today” (393, original emphases). This autobiography of man appears reflected in the look of animals. 14. Kyung Hyun Kim, “Too Early/Too Late: Temporality and Repetition on Hong Sang-su’s Films,” presented at “Derrida/Deleuze: Psychoanalysis, Territoriality, Politics,” University of California, Irvine, April 2002. 15. Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 36. 16. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126–27. Derrida calls this a “revelatory or apocalyptic blindness” (127). 17. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 51–52, original emphases. 18. Jacques Derrida, “Videor,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderberg, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 75, emphasis added. 19. Derrida, “Videor,” 76, original emphases. 20. Jacques Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 159, original emphases. 21. Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 39. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Truth, Testimony, Evidence,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 89, original emphasis. 23. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 119, original emphasis. Derrida adds, parenthetically: “We spent long minutes, if not hours, at the request of the filmmaker,

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looking into one another’s eyes, which is an experience of strange and unreal intensity: you can imagine what this experience of the eye-line can be when it is prolonged and passionately repeated between two actors, even if it is only fictional and ‘professional.’ ” 24. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 120. 25. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 120. And what of Derrida now, of his “nows” that arrive here and now, from another world, extending the lines of liveness further? 26. Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” 160, emphasis added. 27. Paul Bartel’s short The Secret Cinema (1968) develops this idea of cinema in a paranoid narrative trajectory. Jane’s life is filmed and screened secretly in episodic installments. 28. Peggy Kamuf, “Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 480. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Lettres sur un aveugle,” in Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 86, my translation, original emphasis. Derrida appears in Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999). 30. Derrida, “Others Are Secret,” 158. 31. For a sustained reading of Gehr’s film, see Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 111–19. Of the visible invisibility of the subject in Signal, Skoller says: “This is a rigorous process that strips away any extraneous elements. It produces a form of attention that heightens our awareness of what we are seeing and hearing, bringing us to the point of sensing what is not being seen as much as what is” (112, original emphases). What is not being seen in this film is the ethical subject, erased in the banality of the postwar German landscape. 32. P. Adams Sitney, “Su Friedrich: ‘Giving Birth to Myself,’ ” in Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 314. 33. Sitney, “Su Friedrich,” 318. Sitney describes Friedrich’s mode as “confessional irony,” a way of exposing herself indirectly, in absentia. In Rules of the Road (1993), about the relationship between the filmmaker and her girlfriend and their shared automobile, neither human being appears in the film. The film consists of images of cars like the one the two women shared. Other cars. Even the car in this oblique autobiography is played by other cars that resemble the actual car, by figures of cars or automotive actors. Of Friedrich’s own narration in Rules of the Road, her voice, and the incessantly moving images of other cars that stand in contrast to the missing images of the principal characters, Sitney says: “The restless images provide an ironic commentary on the autobiographical monologue, as if they had to stand in for the unfilmed record of the lost relationship” (320). 34. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 117, original emphasis. 35. Derrida, “Spectrographies,” 115, original emphasis.

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On the many screens and surfaces that constitute video artist Diana Thater’s work, one face looks back repeatedly—the animal’s. One face but many, many animal faces played back in her medium of choice, video. And more than one video; many looks, surfaces, media, and videos. In her numerous installations, frequently consisting of multiple and dispersed screens spread across large spaces, as much architectural and sculptural as visual, animals and video come together. Both of them subjects, both of them media. Of one, Thater says, “Video is a medium whose flexibility has obscured both its history and language.”1 Video’s flexibility, its adaptability and mutability perhaps, has obscured certain essential properties, a history and language proper to video, leaving it with a flexible (and obscure) specificity. In her many uses of the medium as witness, reflection, object, architecture, installation, cinema, and animal, Thater draws from this flexibility, using it and even the obscurity it confers on the “history and language” of the medium. Thater’s videos large and small, which include small videos in large spaces and large videos in small spaces, deploy the medium’s flexibility to make video itself visible. Can one see video (itself, as such)? What does one see, when one sees video? Can video itself be a thing to be seen? Thater suggests an ontology, “a history and langauge,” even if that essence has been obscured. Or is obscurity the essence of video history and language, the essence of video? Perhaps obscurity is what one sees, there.

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For Thater, the origin of video obscurity lies in the medium’s flexibility, presumably, its plastic ability to appear as other media, to reflect and also transmit other media through its screens, to give itself over to other media. In two senses video can be said to function as a medium: as a form or practice, like painting or film; and as a channel that can, following Thater, obscure its own features by allowing other media to traverse it. A medium in the spiritualist sense, a parenthetical body in and through which other media are expressed. Video intervenes; it mediates between technologies and media, and in the process obscures its own history and language. For Thater, the ability of video to assume the properties of other media, to adapt to the demands of another language and practice (to another’s history), comes at the expense of a history and language proper to video. Video serves several media, and that kind of flexibility effects a medium that is never one, oneself. Video makes possible new forms of film, television, sculpture, and even painting, without breaking or losing its own figures or language, however obscure. Somewhere in this protean flexibility of video, Thater summons a material video that speaks of and in the voices of “a signal, tape, camcorders, monitors and projectors.”2 These are its bodies, its orifices and organs, the material elements of its language. But how does one recognize an obscure language? How does one know it is there? Is it heard as a type of voice, in the audio of the industrial noises that envelop Thater’s work? Signaled in the graphical text that frequently traverses her installations, like subtitles for an inaudible language? Or, as the Latin video (“I see”) suggests, is the language of video seen—perceived in the phonic registers of visuality? A visuality that sends signals and signs from the depths of an ocularcentric order—a sonic visuality? Ex-audio, a sound of the outside that arrives in the form of an obscured vision? Is this obscured or obscure language to which Thater refers a single one? Maybe there are several languages at work in video, separate languages of “a signal, tape, camcorders, monitors, and projectors,” as well as other secret multilingualisms. Tracing the logic of Thater’s claims about the medium she follows, video is haunted by heterogeneity; it is even fundamentally constituted as a multiplicity. Video possesses an identity (a history and language), but habitually adopts a flexibility that allows it to assume the features of other media. Video is a medium that is not one, always itself and other, perhaps only ever itself when it also appears other, as other, an animal.

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Neither video nor animal are one. In Thater’s work, video assumes the flexibility of an animal. “What animal?” asks Derrida, “The other.”3 That the animal is considered other, in all of the meanings that have accrued to that term, is well known; considering alterity as animal is perhaps a more disorienting formulation. Every animal may be other, but is every other animal? To become animal may be to become other, but is becoming other always a form of becoming animal? The questions raised by formulas of equivalence are particularly revealing when the animal is inscribed as a figure, metaphor, or other rhetorical trope for those obscure bodies that otherwise appear unnameable. Is there, for example, a likeness of animality? Can one be like a chimpanzee, like a wolf, like a dolphin, without on some basic level becoming the animal itself? (Of the “tame” or “professional” wolves she chose to work with for her video installation China, Thater says: “Their theatrical lives are spent impersonating wolves, thus making likenesses that are readable to us, regardless of what might actually be ‘natural’ to them.”4 Can some animals be like other animals?) Are there rhetorical spaces between humanity and animality that allow for temporary passages between those two modes of existence? What laws of mediation intervene with regard to animality and the otherness that is said to characterize it? Perhaps such likenesses between heterogeneous beings are possible in the space of parentheses, in the suspension of systems they allow, their flexible syntaxes into which I see this likeness. The animals that look back from Thater’s work, from the screen she places before her spectators, before herself, also serve as mirrors, as reflections that cause one to become animal before them. Hasn’t the flexibility of animals also obscured their singular histories and languages? In response to a question frequently posed to her, Thater responds: “Yes, I’m the ‘animal artist’ or some such thing.”5 (Does she mean an artist who is herself animal, an animal that makes art, or an artist who works with animals? As or with animal? And what possibilities are left in the balance of “some such thing”?) In thinking about, representing, and interacting with animals (wolves, chimpanzees, zebras, horses, dolphins, and other animals of the “caucus race”), Thater has come to be identified with her subject, has become the subject of her subject, as if she were a flexible medium capable of becoming the animals that inhabit her video work. She becomes, in some eyes, the animal she sees, herself another’s medium. Yes, I am the animal artist. One is tempted to fold Thater’s sentiments together, to allow her dual media—video and animality—to mix, form packs, and roam. “The animal is a medium whose flexibility has obscured both its history and lan-

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guage.” “Video is an animal whose . . .” “I’m the ‘animal video’ or some such thing,” the animal I see. In the human realm of thought, history, and even of ethics, hasn’t the animal’s flexibility cost it a “history and language”? For a long time, animals have served as the locus for a human projection that has resulted in fantastic animal morphologies. Animal and video, zoon and technê; hybrid, flexible media channeled through each other, traversing each other, and leaving imprints on one another’s landscapes. Other to each other, but not as antitheses, animal and video can be thought of as a speculative, even specular topography, an imaginary Umwelt (environment). In the economy of such speculative, spectral topographies, are animals like videos, videos like animals? Can one extend this likeness across not only species but also modes of being and media? Does Thater suggest and elicit this simile in her flexible work as (the very) evidence of its flexibility? (The waters in which dolphins swim are like the neutral blue of video, notes Thater. Video seas. Her analogy operates not according to a comparison of colors, but rather according to a medial logic: water and video are absorptive media, opening space and volume.) According to one trajectory of thought, nature and technology are consigned to the distant ends of a spectrum that divides the world. Physis and technê (nature and technology), or the arts, in the classical ontologies, operate at two ends of a teleology that anticipates humanity. Yet, in at least one philosopher’s attempt to think about the zero degree of being human— the essential form of humanity or consciousness—animals are aligned with machines, automata (clocks, for example). Regarding the manifestation of intelligence—language and its articulation as speech—Descartes insists that one “must not confuse speech with the natural movements which express passions and which can be imitated by machines as well as by animals.”6 Descartes’ collapse of animals and machines against the frontiers of language forms the basis of the possibility of the cogitatum, “cogito ergo sum,” “je pense donc que suis,” “I am thinking therefore I am.” It also disturbs the segregation of a world carefully divided between the poles of animality and technology. The capacity to be human follows from a causal conjunction— “therefore”—after which animals and machines are excluded. Humanity follows—and follows from the ahumanity of animals and machines, which establish the limits of humanity. Outside of humanity, animals and machines form an environment, a space, a topography that positions humanity in its interior, in parentheses. Before the animal and machine, the animal-machine I see (therefore) I am. Derrida puts it this way: “The

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animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me—I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me.”7 Derrida describes a human being surrounded by animals—in front of, beside, and behind—an animal world that precedes, envelops, and leads him toward a threshold of animality, which, therefore, she follows. The animal world appears, one might say, in the space opened by this “therefore,” “therefore,” “there-before,” that which appears there, before, and in front of (but also within) me. I see, therefore I am; the animal that I see, therefore I am. To be there, before, is to be beside inside, from the Greek, putting in beside. To put in parenthesis is to put aside, inside. To make an aside, to be beside (oneself), elsewhere, and inside. A type of exergue, the parenthesis locates spatially and graphically an outside folded inside. Not entirely visible, but not invisible either. Another thought, an extension of thought, an afterthought, set aside inside. A parasite. The encounter with animals begins, says Derrida, with a look that moves both ways, from human being to animal and animal to human being. It initiates the trajectory of thought itself: “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins here.”8 In this encounter between human being and animal, in the recognition of an animal that looks at us, in feeling naked by being seen, thinking begins. The origin of thought. Here, before, and therefore the animal. “Naked,” according to Derrida, because he sees the animal looking, sees himself looking at the animal looking, and sees himself in the look of the animal, naked. (“Now she is naked,” writes Thater, about the dreaming animalgirl Rachel in her screenplay Electric Mind [1996].9 Rachel is a chimpanzee with the implanted psyche of a young girl.) Between human and animal looking, Derrida locates a powerful, vigilant look, which forms an environment within which the human being is stripped (clothing, says Derrida, is the quintessentially human technê, the one that more than others distinguishes human beings from most other animals). Diana Thater’s video installation provides an exemplary site for viewing the confluence of animality and technology, the flexibility and obscurity of video reflecting and reflected in each. Everything becomes visible without exposure, parenthetically. “I’m always thinking about making time and space visible.”10 Thater’s zoo video installations—China (1995), Electric Mind (1996), The Caucus Race (1998), The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals—The Best Space Is the Deep Space (1998), Delphine (2000), and Knots & Surfaces (2001), among others—build, through an always complex layering of video mon-

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Figure 14. Diana Thater, Knots & Surfaces. Courtesy of Diana Thater.

itors and projections, environments that engulf their viewers. The animals are not simply around one—all over—but, across Thater’s landscapes, animals move beneath the surfaces and outside of the video frames that project them. The dolphin in The Caucus Race leaps vertically, yet arrives horizontally; dolphins swim beneath the floors. In Knots & Surfaces, hexagons frame but fail to contain the swarms of bees. Throughout, one senses an excess of animals—animal ecstasy. Inside, before, above, or below (one cannot always decide which), but always in some way within Thater’s work—one feels the abyss, a singular effect of the intersection of the two media, animality and video. Why an abyss? The adjectival forms of the word hardly describe the effect of Thater’s work, which is just the contrary—ecstatic, explosive, lively. Her sites are marked by a flexible jouissance that traverses the frames and fails to restrain her animals. One experiences before her work, the sense of being inside it: a parenthesis, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, a spectator becoming a spectacle, an element of it. Says Thater, “the best outside is the inside.” The abyss that surrounds Thater’s spaces and opens up within them is the experience of space and depth, of time and space made visible. It

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is the same abyss that separates human beings from animals, humanity from animality, you from me. It is the source of difference and multiplicity: For Derrida, the abyss is also a limit, which is made up of a series of lines that cannot be reduced to a single divide. Thus, from the chasm erupts a form of multiplicity that threatens the oneness that constitutes the human observer, the unity of the cogito. A vast parenthesis. Derrida seeks to follow the limits of humanity and animality, “to think what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line, but more than one internally divided line; once, as a result, it can no longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and indivisible.”11 Thater’s works are filled with such lines, planes, and plateaus, which multiply and expand, pulling the spectator closer toward the parenthetical encounter with animal, other. (It is experienced as a pause, a rupture, an interruption folded from the outside in, the best outside.) Like the flexible space of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland (one of Thater’s frequent reference points), Thater’s spaces flex, compelling her spectators to adjust in size, to follow the impossible trajectory of circular, folded, fluid lines. “In order to transform a viewer who probably brings to the work a singular point of view,” Thater says, “I present her with disconcerting space, one with images imbedded in it that make it move, that change it. And these images undermine the singularity of time, space, and being.”12 Images imbedded parenthetically within disconcerting space. The ocean, sometimes mythologized as an all-consuming abyss, figures as more a trope than a topos in Thater’s work, most notably in Delphine. More generally, her spaces draw her viewers deeper into the abyss, toward an experience of animality, blurring the lines that separate human beings from animals. (An animal’s “experience of time and space never seems to me to be singular.”)13 Inside the Museum of Natural History in London, Thater projects images of primates across the walls and ceilings in gorillagorillagorilla (2009), living images projected across the spaces of natural history, a palimpsest of animals and videos, one laid over the other. Thater’s installations frequently alert one to the irreducibility of the abyss—her wolves, dolphins, and bees, for example, erase the singularity of any lines that separate human beings from animals. They are always all around, in all directions and dimensions, outside. In China, monitors surround the spectator with a circle of wolves. Six cameras propagate two wolves into a pack of many. At work is a series of exchanges. The wolves multiply and move across a landscape engendered by Thater. Cameras surround the wolves; monitors surround the spectator. Camera

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to wolf to viewer, who sees from the vantage points of video and wolf, alternately, simultaneously, in a rapid succession of flashes. One is there, in the circle of wolves parenthetically, put in beside. “Thus, we move, record, project, and see, changing the nature and configuration of what we see through our movement and our being and ultimately find ourselves not looking at the work of art but with it.”14 Thater describes an artwork that looks, whose look overtakes that of the viewer who finds herself looking with rather than looking at—looked at by the artwork that looks and sees. Inscribed within a parenthesis, an environment that comprises and confuses the looks of animal and video, the spectator enters the oceanic expanse that encourages transference, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. There before, one sees and sees as “manwolf (dog) and wolfman (werewolf),” two points of view that become three, then four, therefore never one.15 China encourages several passages of becoming: lycanthropy in one direction; caninity (canis-anthropy) in another; wildlife and domestication; nature (wolves) and technology (trained wolves that impersonate wolves); animal and video. Thater says (as did several psychoanalysts before her): “Who are these wolves, out of what part of myself did they come, and when I engage their image, what do I become?”16 Before and within Thater’s spaces, due to a disorientation that occurs as an effect of the abyss, one finds oneself also before language. Prior to, without, and also in front of language, the law of language. Thater sometimes works with the graphic materiality of text, evoking words and letters that move across monitors, into and out of projections, always at the edges of her work and thought, as supplements. (At one time, Thater worked as an indexer, constructing indexes for art historical books.) A passage from Carroll’s “A Caucus Race and a Long Tale” appears as frontal text on monitors (suggesting plastic refrigerator magnets), graphic titles on monitors in The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals series, and in Electric Mind (the installation), “A mouse is a cat is a chimp is a girl.” (Thater also published a screenplay, Electric Mind, in book form.) In Thater’s work, one always feels the proximity of language, of languages. But those uses of words do not constitute the language that permeates her work. Hers is an other language, an obscure language of an other— animal, video—a language forged in the moment of the encounter with her work. She explains: “In forcing the focus to be on the here and now for a viewer when he or she is in the work—the only sound is the sound of the machines making the exhibition (DVD players, and projectors, and so forth) and of people walking and talking in the exhibition.”17 An obscured language, a language before language, within language (within

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Figure 15. Diana Thater, Electric Mind. Courtesy of Diana Thater.

parentheses, a parenthetical language), the material language of “a signal, tape, camcorders, monitors and projectors.” Thater imagines specular languages in Electric Mind, her screenplay that adapts Pat Murphy’s short story “Rachel in Love” (1987).18 The narrative concerns a chimpanzee named Rachel, whose mind has been fused with that of a young girl, Rachel, whose body died in a car accident. One mind grafted onto another, two minds beside and inside one another. The “electric mind” comes from the imposition of the patterns from one mind onto another. This imprint effects a consciousness that is not one, that can never be reduced to Descartes’ rigid consciousness, but rather is haunted by one other set of experiences and memories, one other language. This new flexible mind, consisting of two living minds side by side and put beside inside, obscures any single history and language: there are always two languages, two histories inside Rachel. The girl Rachel continues to grow and develop inside her host body; she exists within the hybrid and electromnemic structure that constitutes the chimpanzee Rachel. Rachel is and is not Rachel, always more than and less than Rachel, ex-Rachel, animal and human, living and dead, living dead. Rachel is often before Rachel and also follows Rachel. The two Rachels, chimpanzee and girl, encounter one another in the specular space of dreams, frequently in reflection, always parenthetically.

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And because the chimpanzee Rachel cannot produce human sounds with her vocal apparatus, she communicates with her hands, in sign language. Her language is visual, performed, and follows from the movements of her body—language folded directly onto the body, but never fully contained by it. Words become signs, which are then restored, as it were, to gestures, to hands and indices that leave the body, severed from it on the occasion of expression. Hers is an outside language. It is a human language that Rachel speaks, but one that is spoken with a chimpanzee’s hands, the other hand. (There are no animal noises or sounds in any of Thater’s zoo videography.) Apart from the thematic aspect of a visual language that Rachel signs, another spectral language envelops Thater’s screenplay—the language of a cinema yet to materialize. Thater’s adaptation invokes an imaginary, virtually impossible cinema, a film that has yet to be made, an ex-cinema in parentheses. Inside and outside cinema, and arrested in the polymorphic dynamism of becoming other, Electric Mind signals an apparatus of language destined to remain imaginary, embedded in a text that summons a film without ever becoming one—framed, like both Rachels, in a state of becoming, learning to become as a mode of being. Becoming film, Electric Mind is no longer a story and not yet a visual artifact. Somewhere in between, in flux, flexible, it remains a form of specular, spectral, and speculative language whose modes of expression are avisual and parenthetical. (“I’d rather be a dolphin than a man.”)19 Following the zoosexual politics that drive Murphy’s and Thater’s narratives, Rachel enters Rachel without the violence of a penetration. An adolescent girl’s electric mind is woven into the body and mind of a female chimpanzee: The new heterogeneous Rachel is girl and primate, former girl and former primate, fused into a mode of animality that is neither nonhuman nor properly human, but feminine, according to the process of transpeciation. The girl Rachel’s mind and sexuality are folded onto another Rachel; this fold moves one part of the body onto another, preserving the alterity of those parts while bringing them into contact. No inside or outside, but only the radical forms of those topographies at once, together. “For me,” says Thater, “the feminine sensibility, which anyone of any gender can sport, is one that is not singular.”20 “One that is not singular,” a form of radical togetherness that does not adhere one to the other. Rachel faces her selves, standing in an abyss before and after her selves. To stand before Thater’s work, to stand before the animals that move within and without the work, is to stand within a space that opens

Figure 16. Diana Thater, Shumla. Courtesy of Diana Thater. “This falcon is really amazing—she is blind. Weird. I mean what’s the point of THAT, right? Their eyesight is the most amazing construction in the world–in order to focus on prey while flying in excess of 100 mph (fastest animals EVER!–up to 220 mph in a dive) they have two focal points in their eyes—one for distance and one for close-up. Anyway she was going to be euthanized and of course a 13-year-old girl who is a falconer rescued her. She lives in her bedroom. I didn’t know she was blind and I asked the girl to put her on the tripod instead of her perch. So there you go. Blind bird on a tripod. How poetic can you get–without knowing it?” (From Diana Thater, email, February 21, 2012.)

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suddenly in many directions and dimensions; a space within and without space, ecstatic, parenthetical. Rhinoceroses, elephants, and giraffes move across a wall of fragmented flat-screen monitors in Thater’s 2008 Rare; the animals look, as do the screens. In Knots & Surfaces, Thater follows mathematician Barbara Shipman into the six-dimensional space of bees. Shipman speculates that bees communicate (dance) according to the dynamic of a so-called “flag manifold,” a space charted by bees in six dimensions. For Thater, these dimensions, which defy conventions of representation, present another challenge to make “time and space visible.” They are also, outside of the visible spectrum. Thater projects images of bees that appear to be placed within hexagonal frames. But the bees transgress the frames and move across the floors and walls, columns and ceilings, on which they are projected. The effect is a shifting set of relations between video light, bees, frames, and architecture. Anteriority is lost in the ecstatic and flexible—elastic—space that Thater creates. Like the dimensions she imagines, Thater allows the surfaces to pass through one another, folding and knotting space within space, leading to a six-dimensional abyss. The bees in this work are all over, exceeding the frames and screens that are meant to contain them. Through the medium of video, Thater allows these bees to be, to be bees again. This is part of the parenthetical flexibility that video facilitates. And if the bees disclose in this work their obscure history and language, it is that history and language of bees, a form of being specific to bees, beeing. The animals (and insects) that inhabit Thater’s work move before, behind, below, above, and ultimately within a spectator, who therefore doesn’t remain one. Facing a world at the intersection of animality and technology, animals and video, a language that elides the subject, Thater’s spectator becomes other. “How do I construct myself,” Thater asks, “in the face of the natural world that I continually create?”21 Before the multiplicity of animals and flexible video surfaces, the spectator enters a parenthesis: A place before the subject, inside it from without, an exergue. There, in that parenthetical aside, inside, the spectator sees the animal before it. No metaphor, figure, trope: the animal that I see, that therefore I am seeing, that I become, there. (Therefore, parenthetical.)

Notes 1. Diana Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” in Diana Thater: China (Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1996), 11. Thater also shoots film, which she transfers and incorporates into her video installations.

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2. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 12. 3. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louse Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3. Derrida says, “Since time, therefore. Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us? What animal? The other.” 4. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 15, emphasis added. 5. Diana Thater, “A Conversation between Carol Reese and Diana Thater on the Occasion of the Opening of Delphine at the Secession, Vienna, 2000,” Secession (2000), 23. Thater’s response is to this question by Carol Reese: “I’ve heard a shorthand description of you as ‘the artist who works with animals, whose subject is animals.’ ” 6. René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 45. 7. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 11, emphasis added. Derrida is using both meanings embedded in the first-person conjugations of the verbs être (to be) and suivre (to follow), “je suis,” with clear reference to Descartes. Being and following brought together for Derrida before and alongside animals. 8. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 29. 9. Diana Thater, Electric Mind (Gent, Belgium: Imschoot, uitgevers, 1996), 89. In addition to her installation Electric Mind (1996), Thater published a screenplay with the same title, in which she describes the character Rachel dreaming: “Rachel turns and looks at their reflection in the television set. Now she is naked. She is pale and thin. She watches as Jake presses his open hand in between her shoulder blades. She closes her eyes.” Dream, television, trauma, and the convergences of girl and chimpanzee form the space of Rachel’s nakedness. 10. Thater, “A Conversation,” 23. 11. Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” 30–31. 12. Thater, “A Conversation,” 23. 13. Thater, “A Conversation,” 23. 14. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 15, original emphases. 15. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 14. According to Thater, the long-ago domestication of wolves, “the most terrifying animal in the forest,” created two new creatures, one domestic, “the manwolf (dog),” the other supernatural, “the wolfman (werewolf).” In place of one animal, two chimera. 16. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 16. 17. From a personal conversation with the artist, March 2001. 18. Pat Murphy, “Rachel in Love,” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 11.4 (April 1987): 70–95. 19. Thater, “A Conversation,” 23. 20. Thater, “A Conversation,” 27. 21. Thater, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” 15, emphasis added.

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Digesture Gestures without Bodies

The very term cinema, from kinematics or “pure motion,” alludes to a foundation in movement and gesture; its vernacular name makes the relation explicit, “movies”—images that move, that produce and reproduce movement from life itself, animation.1 The illusion of authentic movement in cinema depends on the verisimilitude of the image, on the reproduction of the bodies in motion.2 The photographic images that form the basis of live-action films refer to a body in space, a body from which the images are drawn indexically, if not umbilically. Noting the lengthy exposures required in early photography, Walter Benjamin speaks of the photographed subject as one who “as it were grew into the picture,” as if the movement from the world to the photograph entailed an evolution of the body, its extension from one world to another.3 Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, among others, imagine the relationship between physical bodies and the photographs they produce as an umbilicus that connects the photographic image to its source, one body passing to another through the photographic medium. Alluding to Sontag, Barthes says: “A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”4 The idiom of corporeality reappears in the discourses on cinema, where André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer make similar claims regarding the contact or touch— punctum, says Barthes—that connects bodies and photographs in the realm of cinema.5 The phantasm of photography, haunted by the specter 119

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Figure 17. Martin Arnold, Self Control. Courtesy of Martin Arnold.

of an irreducibly maternal indexicality, enters with cinema into the secondary fantasy of animation—to make move and make live, to make alive. The body, captured in the photographic crypt (Bazin speaks of photography as embalming) returns to life in cinema; it resumes life, on the occasion of a cinematography. The photographic relation between bodies in the world and bodies in film is extended by some film theorists into the registers of movement. Bazin, for example, says of cinema: “Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.”6 The movements of bodies in the world dictate, through the medium of photographic reproduction, the movement of bodies in cinema.

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Movement is measured in time and captured in cinema; a feature unavailable in still photography. Unlike photography, which preserves only the body as such, cinema preserves an image of the body in motion—for Gilles Deleuze, the image of movement, or the movement-image. The two instances of movement, physical and filmic, are bound by a photographic logic that transposes the body from reality to cinema. Time animates the photographic body in cinema, which in turn, says Mary Ann Doane, provides a “pure record of time,” a record of the body’s movement in time.7 For Kracauer, the dimensions of time (duration) and movement in cinema perfect the representation of reality begun in photography. “Films tend to capture physical existence in its endlessness,” he says. “Accordingly, one may also say that they have an affinity, evidently denied to photography, for the continuum of life or the ‘flow of life,’ which of course is identical with open-ended life.”8 Life returns to the cinema image, like Nietzsche’s anniversaries, inscribing in each film an autobiography of cinema. Between physical and filmic reality, life itself establishes an endless continuum that sutures the two registers of movement. But if physical reality, as Kracauer calls it, and photography or cinematography are bound by an umbilical line that maintains a “continuum of life” between life and cinema, a unique paradox haunts the articulation of bodies in cinema. Despite the simultaneous presence of two bodies in cinema—one in the physical world, the other on film— the body in film is also a lost body, in some fundamental way there only as a trace, as the remnant of a body no longer there, its revenant. The powerful force of photographic impression is countered in cinema by an irrecoverable sense of loss. Kaja Silverman describes a tendency in the history of film theory to posit a lack that is symbolic but also essential to the phenomenon of cinema. What is missing in cinema, says Silverman, prior to subjectivity, is the body itself. It is at the heart of filmic representation: cinema is an apparatus that doesn’t lose bodies as much as it generates lost bodies. Silverman encapsulates Bazin’s paradoxical logic of photographic indexicality on the one hand, and the disappearance of real objects, which “is somehow intrinsic to the cinematic operation,” on the other:9 Despite Bazin’s assertion that the photographic image “is the object itself,” and his conviction that the continuum of the image and object is interrupted only by syntax and metaphor, he occasionally concedes that lack is somehow intrinsic to the cinematic operation. In “An Aesthetic of Reality,” he speaks of the “loss of the real” which is “implicit in any realist choice,” and which “frequently allows the artist, by the use of any aesthetic convention

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he may introduce into the area thus left vacant, to increase the effectiveness of his chosen form of reality.” Elsewhere Bazin suggests that one of the sacrifices cinema thus necessitates is the physical presence of the actor—and, by extension, that of any other profilmic event.10

In Bazin’s thought, realism is ultimately an antidotal idiom designed to address a symptom of cinema, which is the inevitable loss of bodies and things in their depiction. Although, perhaps more than any other medium, cinema generates the effect of verisimilitude bordering on hallucination, the reanimation of these bodies is balanced by the fundamental disappearance of the body as such in cinema. In other words, the body is both virtually present and absent in filmic representation. A shift to psychoanalytic registers produces the same paradox: the powerful forces of primary and secondary identification in cinema do not suture, and are in fact dependent on, the phenomenon of lost bodies. Comparing the reality that is “given” in theater, the presence of bodies “in the same space as the spectator,” with the slight remove from reality that determines the effect of reality in cinema, Christian Metz says: “The cinema only gives it [reality] in effigy, inaccessible from the outset, in a primordial elsewhere, infinitely desirable ( = never possessible), on another scene which is that of absence and which nonetheless represents the absent in detail, thus making it present, but by a different itinerary.”11 Metz calls the “primordial elsewhere” that renders the absent and the absence of the absent distinctly present (“but by a different itinerary”) an “imaginary signifier.” No signifier is more imaginary in cinema, more primordially elsewhere, perhaps, than that of the moving body. The moving, gesturing body in cinema signals its presence in the world—a presence transposed in the umbilical, photographic continuum that binds cinema to physical reality—but also its withdrawal, its status as an imaginary signifier that becomes a figure for absence; a figure of the absent figure. At work in the peculiar phenomenology that renders bodies present and absent at once is a doubling of bodies in cinema, which allows for the paradox to remain intact: The body is there as an animated photograph, carrying with it all of the phantasms of photographic reality, but the body, that same body doubled, is profoundly and irreducibly absent. The body is at once moved into the frame of cinema, and removed from it; moved and removed. Mixed together are the various systems (machinic, perceptual, phenomenal, psychological, photographic) that create movement in cinema, as well as the various levels of signification (indexi-

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cal, symbolic, imaginary) that register the movement. But the duality that haunts the movement of bodies in cinema is not restricted to the body in the world and its transposition to film. Movement in cinema also signals the presence of two types of bodies: those profilmic bodies of actors and even objects, which can also be made to move; and the body of the apparatus, which introduces another form of movement into the spaces of the cinema. The apparatus inscribes onto each film a regime of movements that originates in another body. The camera introduces pans, tilts, tracks, cranes, and other types of movement that refer to the body of the camera, even when it serves as an agent for a character in the film (the point-of-view or subjective shot, for example). Editing also introduces movement by forging temporal and spatial flows, usually with the objective of seamlessness and transparency, but not always. The jump cut, for example, and any breach of the 180-degree line of axis will introduce jarring movements that do not originate in the body of an actor or thing, nor in the camera, but so do ordinary edits that generate shifts in time and space that tear the film’s tissues. Taken together, the camera and the apparatus of film (even the projection can introduce movement, in some instances) can be seen as a separate body distinct from profilmic bodies, and capable of gesturing in another register. In every film, two bodies produce gestures and movements and serve as two separate modes of inscription. To understand movement in cinema, and gesture in particular, one must recognize the activity of two bodies or sources of movement in cinema: the represented movement of profilmic bodies, which are complicated extensions and erasures of bodies in the world; and the movements that are produced as an effect of the apparatus—synthetic movements, or those movements that do not return to any body in the film. The latter form of movement suggests the possibility of gestures without a body, or of a body defined prosthetically as the cinema apparatus itself. Can gestures take place without a body? Or rather, is it possible to conceive of gestures that are inscribed on a film body from without rather than produced from within a body? The doubling of bodies that defines movement in cinema follows two economies. The first involves the photographic duplication of bodies in the world, which produces at once an extension of the body indexically from world to cinema, and which also generates an absent body, a phantom body that appears in the film under erasure. Following a tradition of firsts and seconds (Peirce, Freud, and others), one might refer to the gestures of profilmic bodies as primary gestures and those produced by the

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apparatus as secondary gestures. Secondary gestures, one should note, always include primary gestures: they incorporate and even consume the profilmic body and its gestures. The two systems work together and at once in cinema, effecting a simultaneous proliferation and disappearance of bodies across the threshold of movement that defines, in its essence, the operation of cinema. If two bodies inhabit cinema, one transposed from the world, the other formed in and from the apparatus, then it would follow that movement is similarly doubled, as are gestures in cinema. What term can best accommodate the dual, doubled, but paradoxical and contradictory forces of movement and gesture in cinema? What expression might best account for the doubled and absent bodies that generate movement in cinema? The prefix “di-” can mean “two” and, as an abbreviation of “dis-,” an antithesis: Two gestures or nongesture—disgesture, digesture. Digestures are doubled gestures that indicate the presence of two bodies or two bodily systems and, at the same time, the radical negation of the body—its complete erasure—which forges gestures without bodies: digesture. It also signals a system and an apparatus that consumes bodies, that swallows them. Although the machinery that produces movement in cinema is visible in many instances, one genre in particular, one practice more than others, illuminates the complex mechanisms of movement and gesture in cinema: experimental film. Of the various moments and modes that define the history of avant-garde and experimental cinema, the structuralist films of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s best illuminate the emphasis on film movement. Michael Snow’s films, including Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), La Région centrale (1971), and Breakfast (1976), among others, emphasize the movement of the camera through space. Zooms, pans, tracking, and other motorized camera movements generate a repertoire of camera gestures in Snow’s films that return forcefully to the camera, to the site of the camera, as the origin of movement. The camera assumes in Snow’s work the dimensions of a mechanical body, a source of the gestures that fill the nonhuman spaces of his films. Breakfast in particular produces a voracious apparatus that consumes the food it gestures through. By contrast, Tony Conrad, Peter Kubelka, and Paul Sharits, among others, use single-frame editing or “flickers” to generate movement in the dense transitions between frames. Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) introduce movements of light on the screen, small explosions of light by alternating rapidly between dark and light frames of film.12 In T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

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(1969), Sharits uses human figures and objects as single-frame still images, which he mixes with colored frames. These abstract and concrete frames spark bursts of movement between colors and images and engender movement where none is discernible.13 Stan Brakhage, whose later works often consisted of painted or carved films made without cameras, also emphasizes the movement between frames—gestures performed by the apparatus in the exergues that open between film frames. By painting or scratching the surface of the film, Brakhage extends lines across the limits of the frame, engendering a movement not bound by the alternation of frames and the breaks between them when projected. Ernie Gehr uses the “energies of the projector” in Reverberation (1969) to interject random and irregular movement between frames.14 The energy of the projector and its erratic drives produce movements in Reverberation that supersede those of the camera. Andy Warhol also uses the vagaries of film projection to institute random movement in his split-screen projection of The Chelsea Girls (1966), which generates mobile configurations of the screens, as the twelve reels of identical length that constitute the film can be projected in any order. Stephen Koch describes the apparatus: The film is projected two reels at a time, in a phased relationship that separates the beginning of each by about five minutes. Tradition, rather than Warhol himself, has established the standard sequence of the reels. . . . Theoretically, any arrangement is possible—and since every reel has a soundtrack, that arrangement would permute with any interplay between sound and silence theoretically conceivable. The sequence of the film freely offers itself to tradition or randomness or taste or invention; playing with it, the projectionist at last has his day as chef d’orchestre.15

In The Chelsea Girls, Warhol has established an economy of movement that shifts between the profilmic bodies of the actors, the gestures of the camera, and the actions of the projectionist, whose own body comes to determine the choreography of movements in the projected film. The crucial movement of the film is performed in its projection, the gestures spread across three bodies. In the contemporary avant-garde, experimental filmmakers and video artists such as Matthias Müller, Douglas Gordon, and especially Martin Arnold have emphasized movement and gesture in a series of works that put into relief the multiple structures and systems of the body in cinema. Matthias Müller’s compilation film Home Stories (1990) consists of shots of famous women actors, taken from famous Hollywood films, repeating similar gestures in clusters of rapid sequence. Ingrid Bergman, Tippi

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Hedren, Kim Novak, and Lana Turner, among many others, appear to repeat virtually identical gestures in a compulsive and mechanical manner: falling onto a bed, shutting a door, listening at a shut door, turning on and off lights, peering out of windows, frightened by noises, running to and from rooms in a house. Müller takes the primary gestures inscribed on the original works he cites and adds through an exscription, secondary gestures that come from his secondary revisions of these women’s movements. The bodies that Müller animates in Home Stories—all women in domestic settings—appear less photographic than automatic.16 Müller refers to their movements as “large, expansive gestures.”17 The women become, according to the apparent politics of the film, like automata, no longer in control of their own bodies, moved by other forces through the threatening domestic spaces. At work in Müller’s film is a tension between the movements of the photographed bodies, the movements that they bring to cinema from the physical world, and the movements that have been imposed on them by the montage, by the generative forces of the apparatus. They have become photographic marionettes, hybrid bodies that oscillate between the physical and cinema worlds. In his video installations 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Five Year Drive-By (2001), among others, Douglas Gordon moves in the opposite direction of Müller, reducing film movements to near imperceptibility by slowing them to a virtual standstill. In 24 Hour Psycho, Gordon projects Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in its entirety, but stretched to a twenty-four-hour running time. (Hitchcock’s original runs approximately 109 minutes, so Gordon has stretched the duration by more 1,300 minutes, or by more than thirteen times its original length.) Gordon’s version of Psycho appears to be immobile, frozen in particular frames; its movement is perceptible only over extended stretches of time. In Five Year Drive-By, Gordon goes further. Using John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Gordon stretches the film across several months to approximate in real time the five-year narrative of the original. Ford’s film runs approximately 119 minutes, while Gordon’s installation would last just under seven weeks, meaning that each second of film in the original takes approximately six hours to project in the installation. (Five Year Drive-By has never been performed, leaving it a virtual projection in time.) In these works, Gordon destroys nearly all of the movements in the original films. Camera movements and the movements of people are reduced to freeze-frames and tableaus, imposing an overwhelming catalepsy onto the bodies that roam the original, highly agitated works.

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Gordon all but annihilates movement, leaving just enough to maintain an umbilical line to the original films and to the worlds they are in turn bound by. He replaces them with the nearly imperceptible secondary gestures he introduces through a secondary revision of the original. In three found-footage films, pièce touchée (1989), passage à l’acte (1993), and Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), and in a digital film installation, Deanimated (2002), Martin Arnold creates an entire circuit of bodily inscriptions and gestures that begins with violent animations and concludes with the attempted erasure of not only gestures and bodies but of cinema as such. Arnold’s first three films can be seen as a trilogy, since each work explores in progression the relationship between the movements of bodies and film frames in contiguous shots, entire scenes, and ultimately across multiple films. Pièce touchée reworks one shot from Joseph M. Newman’s The Human Jungle (1954), moving forward and backward in small units of space. The result is the expansion of eighteen seconds of original footage into sixteen minutes of reconstituted movement. The original gestures and movements of the depicted characters, a man and a woman, have been torn from their original worlds and relocated into the synthetic spaces of Arnold’s cinema. Their bodies are no longer theirs, as the original film is no longer itself; even the mise-en-scène has been inverted and flipped in Arnold’s reconfiguration. (At moments in the film, Arnold reverses the frame, reversing left and right, and at others he turns the frame upside down.) The relations between movements and gestures have also been reconstituted in pièce touchée: Arnold’s version links, for example, the movements of a man entering a room with a seated woman turning her head. The causal relation of the two movements is amplified, and the synchronicity of the gestures is transformed into an aggressive economy of force. In Arnold’s mix, the man opening the door appears to be jerking the head of the seated woman. The other films from Arnold’s found-footage trilogy sustain the impression that movements in the original works have been dismantled and that new gestures not located in the original bodies have been inscribed over the original cinematography. Passage à l’acte reworks a scene from Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), stretching the horizon of gestures from contiguous frames to a larger scene with edits and a sustained shot reverse-shot sequence. The breakfast table scene features a stern Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), who admonishes his two children to get along. The minor disturbance and scolding is enhanced in Arnold’s remix into a cacophony of noise and mechanical

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gestures that transforms the sensible original into a violent domestic explosion. The family appears to be gripped by a paroxysm of uncontrollable violence, every gesture exaggerated into a raging force. Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy is drawn primarily from the “Andy Hardy” films, which feature Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The prepubescent romantic and sexual awakenings that tend to drive those films and others that star Rooney and Garland are transformed in Arnold’s remake into libidinal eruptions and a constant flow of aggressive sexual gestures. Brief touches between a mother and son are turned into displays of erotic affection; a father’s slap is repeated until it turns from a spontaneous scolding into a sustained beating; a mother’s sigh becomes an expression of sexual excitement; and an awkward kiss between two teenagers becomes a frenzy of hisses. Throughout the trilogy, Arnold generates in his recycled bodies a repertoire of new gestures: nervous ticks, extensive stutters, apparent seizures, involuntary jerks and spasms, exaggerated signals, overexposed affect, and minute movements like the quivering of fingers between two frames. In each instance, Arnold puts into relief the two systems of movement and the two forms of incorporation at work in cinema. Two bodies clash in Arnold’s cinema: the body in the world, and by extension the photographed body; and the body of the apparatus, which appears in conflict with the photographed body. The tension between the bodies produces a series of digestures that operate like the nervous movements Arnold inscribes: bodies start, stop, and falter, unable to advance smoothly because of a resistance inscribed in each movement as a countermovement. Every movement is slowed and resisted by countermovements, counterforces, and counterbodies. The apparatus possesses the body, takes it over, and erases the organic body and its gestures, inscribing onto the images of bodies a series of secondary gestures. The bodies that inhabit Arnold’s work are lost bodies; he has evacuated them of all personhood and inscribed them into an emptied-out cinema space. Arnold reanimates these bodies, establishing a form of movement, but more precisely of gesture, that does not flow from a body in the world but from another body—an inert, static body that only resembles a photographic imprint or index. One gesture inscribed over another, one gesture absorbed by another, digested. Bodies absorbed by the cinema, digested, regestured, and reinscribed over other bodies and gestures. The structural problem of doubled bodies and missing bodies reaches another plateau in Arnold’s work, which emphasizes through exaggera-

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tion the paradox of bodies and their movements in cinema. The problem concerns the vicissitudes of identification in cinema generally and in Arnold’s work specifically. Among the spectral crises that film representation provokes is the indexical presence of the photographed body, which effects an inverse sense of deep absence. The fact that the body is there, that it appears to be there, photographically transposed and cinematographically animated, intensifies the realization of its absence. Further complicating this metaphysics of the body is the vector of identification, which invites an affective and psychological investment in the dialectic of presence and absence. Arnold’s bodies are devoid of psychology, even when the bodies and their identities are recognizable—Gregory Peck, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Bela Lugosi. Arnold’s figures are inaccessible, making identification nearly impossible. That is, they are not open in the way that even phantoms are. His bodies and their secondary gestures are sealed, materially and psychologically impenetrable. These bodies have been excorporated: they are recognizable as photographic traces, as intact figures, but they have been severed from the “flow of life” and swallowed in the secondary gestures of his ex-cinema. They are there and not there; their movements synthetic assemblages of organic and machinic movement. In each work, Arnold illuminates the heterogeneity of movement in cinema, the superimposition of two bodies and two systems of movement that cannot be resolved into a singular form and energy. Another visual artist who has engaged similar crises of movement and the figure in the register of painting is Francis Bacon. Gilles Deleuze characterizes Bacon as the artist who explored the force of movement on immobile bodies. “What fascinates Bacon,” says Deleuze, “is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by wind, deformed by an aspiration—but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make spasm visible.”18 In the static frame of painting, Bacon’s figures struggle to release “interior forces,” to expose the spasm that explodes onto the surface of the painting, not as the liberation of an organic movement but as the expression of a visual force that is taken out on the figure. Why compare a painter and filmmaker across the vast divide that separates the arts, that separates their arts especially? One entry is through the relationship that both establish between figure and movement, between bodies and immobilities, and the effect that this convergence produces on the medium of each artist. The figure in Bacon’s work is “too present,” says Deleuze; it conveys an “excessive presence.”19 Like the photograph, which plays an

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important role in Bacon’s work, the excessive presence of the figure marks its fragility and its proximity to absence.20 According to Deleuze, Bacon’s figures do not represent attempts to reinscribe the body into the painting, to counteract the forces of abstraction, but are the means— the media—by which invisible forces become visible. The figure is there, as in Arnold’s films, to receive the blow of a force, which makes visible the force of movement. The body serves to register the force; movements and spasms are effects of force and not their origins. Deleuze says: “What interests Bacon is not exactly movement, although his painting makes movement very intense and violent. But in the end, it is a movement ‘inplace,’ a spasm, which reveals a completely different problem characteristic of Bacon: the action of invisible forces on the body (hence the bodily deformations, which are due to this more profound cause).”21 The body does not generate movement in Bacon’s work; it absorbs and registers those movements imposed on it by force. The body makes movement visible, but does not initiate it. Movement deforms the body and renders force visible in the figure. Although the differences are great between Bacon and Arnold specifically, and the distances between painting and cinema more generally, couldn’t one make a similar claim regarding the artificial movements of Bacon’s and Arnold’s figures? Arnold’s figures are, like Bacon’s, deformed: the secondary movements ascribed to them are not organic, not derived from the flows of life that are thought to animate cinema.22 Rather, Arnold’s figures convey the gestures of a figure, a former or ex-figure devoid of subjectivity and identification. “It is not I who attempts to escape from my body,” says Deleuze, “it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of . . . in short, a spasm.”23 The spasms that characterize Arnold’s cinema, the seemingly perpetual states of seizure, reveal an inorganic body or other body, doubled and erased, which seeks to escape movement, escape itself, and erupt into the field of a more general force. James Leo Cahill calls this operation in Arnold “cineseizure”: “Arnold’s films—characterized by a semiotic economy of parapraxes (symptomatic slips, twitches, spasms, stutters, lapses, automatism)—constitute a cinema by seizure . . . a cinema of seizure . . . cinema as seizure . . . a cinema seizure . . . a cineseizure that situates his work at the semantic edges of the conventional languages of cinema.”24 In Bacon’s painting, Deleuze identifies the mechanism of escape: an opening in the figure through which force escapes and becomes visible. Bacon’s figure, says Deleuze, “presses outward, trying to pass and dissolve through the Fields. Already we have here the role of the spasm or

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of the scream: the entire body trying to escape, to flow out of itself.”25 It is as if the movements of the body enter and exit through a portion of the figure, an intensified locus of the figure that comes at, but also leads to, the end of figuration. A figure of and at the end of figuration; this is Bacon’s strategy for visualizing force, for releasing the body from itself. “Never (except perhaps in the case of Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the Figure to such prominence.”26 Bacon’s figures are situated, for Deleuze, at the limits of figure and field, representation and abstraction, materiality and dissipation, body and energy, and ultimately body and figure.27 “Painting,” says Deleuze generally, “directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation.”28 The release of force takes place in Bacon through an opening in the figure, a crack or tear, like the mouth. These cracks become the orifices through which secondary gestures escape. The eruption and visualization of force is hysterical, says Deleuze: The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomiting and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to rejoin the field or material structure. Bacon has often said that, in the domain of Figures, the shadow has as much presence as the body; but the shadow acquires this presence only because it escapes from the body that has escaped from itself through some localized point in the contour. And the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth. All the pressures of the body.29

All the pressures of the body are released through some localized contour, and even shadows become expressions of this release. In Deleuze’s account of Bacon, gesture and digesture lead to excretion. In Arnold’s cinema, localized points on the body serve as similar mechanisms of excretion: a twitching finger in pièce touchée; the tip of Gregory Peck’s finger or the vibrating hand of the boy in passage à l’acte; the mother’s heaving respiration and Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s hissing kisses in Alone, for example. In each instance, one senses the force of another body that seeks to escape the photographed body—not an original or organic body, but a force that refuses to remain within the cinematographic figure. It is a force that ultimately destroys the figure and the film, both excreted by secondary gestures that come to figure figureless forces of energy. And like the elevation of the figure as a means to break with the figure, which Deleuze describes in Bacon’s work, Arnold’s work refigures a trajectory of largely abstract, formal, and nonfigurative work that

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includes Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka among many others, who tore the figure from the screen and replaced the movement of bodies with an entirely other body of movement. In contrast to this lineage of experimental filmmakers who introduced a rupture into the illusion of cinematographic movement, Arnold reintroduces the figure not as a means of reinscribing the body, but as a way to exhaust it. The photographic body returns in Arnold’s work as a figure of exhaustion, drained out and emptied, bodies consumed by their gestures until they have been completely exhausted. Giorgio Agamben notes the inevitable destination of Deleuze’s theory of cinema as gesture and not image: “The element of cinema is gesture and not image . . . properly speaking, there are no images but only gestures.”30 In Deleuze’s account of cinema, says Agamben: “Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reification and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or as symbol); on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any sports photograph).”31 Arnold’s figures, like the figures that Deleuze describes in Bacon, like the figures that become gestures in Deleuze’s cinema, come at the extreme end of figuration. It is thus logical that the figure starts to disappear in Arnold’s first work after his foundfootage trilogy, Deanimated. Arnold’s digital found-footage installation reworks an entire film, Joseph H. Lewis’s The Invisible Ghost (1941), starring Bela Lugosi. Arnold transposes nearly the entire film (with the exception of one scene), but erases various figures from the mise-en-scène. Here and there, Arnold digitally removes characters from the film, filling in the evacuated spaces with a digital mat that conceals the absence, at least graphically. Neither systematic nor consistent, Arnold’s digital erasure leaves large holes in the recycled work through which the forces of narrative cohesion, spatial balance and orientation, camera logic, and the economy of bodily movement and gesture escape. Characters are not where they should be, looks remain unreturned, the camera moves through space for no apparent reason and stares at empty furniture, and conversations remain one-sided when queries and attempts at dialogue are left open by unresponsive and empty silences. In order to avoid the “invisible man effect,” as Arnold calls it, he introduces another form of erasure into Deanimated, the removal of voices from the sound track.32 In the middle of conversations, Arnold excises the voices from one or more characters. As a result, characters engaged in dialogue remain in view, but their vocal participation in the scene has

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been suspended, leaving awkward and unmotivated gaps, pauses, and absences in the economy of a conversation. In order to fill the void left by the erased dialogue, Arnold digitally seals the mouths of the silenced characters, producing an uncanny suture of the orifice where sound was formally located. It is this act of inscription that produces the most disturbing gestures of Deanimated: The normal movements of a body in speech remain, while its focal point, the mouth, has been paralyzed. The mouths in Deanimated become “phantom limbs”; or rather, in Arnold’s immobilization of the mouth, its deanimation, the entire body becomes a phantom limb. The gestures in this are virtual, phantom gestures no longer linked to the speaking body—to any body for that matter. Acousmêtres in reverse. Like the focal organs and orifices that Deleuze identifies in Bacon’s painting, in Arnold’s cinema, this inverted orifice— the sealed mouth—serves as a release of force, but through an economy of digestion. The words are literally swallowed by the bodies that produced them, forced back into the figures. The attempts to digest these words are registered by the secondary gestures of the bodies struggling to reabsorb the attempts at expression, in the twitching motions that remain as traces of the original gestures. Arnold reinscribes the original gestures back onto the photographed bodies, effecting secondary gestures without bodies. Arnold’s deanimated mouths become sites of release for his figures: they absorb the forces that deform the figure. In this sense, Arnold’s erasures excrete a new system of gestures, digested gestures, digestures. Deanimated gestures produce gestures in reverse. In Arnold’s work, the two bodies of photography (one in the world, the other in the photographic impression) and the two bodies of cinema (one cinematographic, the other apparatic) are compressed into the missing body of photography and film, generating a synthetic figure of doubled and absent bodies. This fantastic economy of gesture produces a figure of erasure, a gesture of disappearing gestures that absorbs and digests all figures, including the scene of representation, the spectacle, and even the spectator. As Deleuze says of Bacon’s work, “One discovers in Bacon’s paintings an attempt to eliminate every spectator, and consequently every spectacle.”33 The force of digesture that Arnold unleashes through the figure and into the plane of representation consumes everything—every system of the body, every form of movement and gesture, and ultimately the spectacle and spectator. Nothing remains but the gesture of deanimation, the  movement of the end of movement. Nothing is left in Arnold’s cinema except empty gestures without bodies. These are neither the

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cinematographic movements of bodies nor the movements of the apparatus; they are the gestures at the end of cinema, gestures that come at the end of cinema and that end cinema. They are gestures that come from no body, that have been divested of bodies, that have incorporated the bodies until only the bodiless gestures are left: secondary gestures, digestures, with no body to return to, an ex-cinema.

Notes 1. The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, called their 1895 invention “the Cinématographe.” 2. In contrast to other movement machines such as the Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope, or Praxinoscope, which brought together pictorial representation and movement, the particular nature of the cinema effect depended on the convergence of pictorial realism—however imaginary—and movement. 3. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 245. 4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81. “The photograph,” Barthes says, “is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” (80–81). 5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26–27. Certain photographs are capable of wounding their viewers. “A Latin word exists to designate this wound,” says Barthes, “this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it refers to the notion of punctuation . . . punctum.” In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press), 1960, Siegfried Kracauer says: “Due to the continuous influx of the psychophysical correspondences thus aroused [between cinema and the physical world], they suggest a reality which may fittingly be called ‘life.’ This term as used here denotes a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomena from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge” (71, emphasis added). Similar motifs appear throughout André Bazin’s writing. See, for example, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1:9–16. “The photograph as such,” says Bazin, “and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint” (15). 6. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15. See, in this connection, Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), which builds upon Bazin’s expression. 7. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 22. Do-

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ane says: “The indexicality of the cinematic sign appears as the guarantee of its status as a record of a temporality outside itself—a pure time or duration which would not be that of its own functioning” (23). 8. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 71. 9. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 3. 10. Silverman, Acoustic Mirror, 3. See also André Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:59. Contrasting the uses of reality in cinema and theater, Bazin says: “Not that we are against filmed theater, but if the screen can in some conditions develop and give a new dimension to the theater, it is of necessity at the expense of certain scenic values—the first of which is the physical presence of the actor” (emphasis added). Bazin concludes by declaring Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) one of the first examples of “pure cinema,” achieved in the total disappearance of aesthetic form: “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema” (60). 11. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 61, original emphasis. Speaking of the imaginary recess of the image, the illusion of fullness engendered by all forms of looking, Metz notes the specific quality of the imaginary signifier, which installs a figure of absence: “It is this last recess that is attacked by the cinema signifier, it is in its precise emplacement (in its place, in both senses of the word) that it installs a new figure of lack, the physical absence of the object seen” (63, original emphasis). 12. For a sustained and searching analysis of Conrad’s films and artworks in the larger context of the visual arts, see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2008). 13. Jonas Mekas, “Interview with Peter Kubelka,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 291. “Cinema is not movement,” says Peter Kubelka. “It can give the illusion of movement. Cinema is the quick projection of light impulses.” For Kubelka, cinema takes place in the movement between frames, in the concentrated time and space of the interval between frames: “Where is, then, the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said it’s the collision of two shots. But it’s very strange that nobody ever said that it’s not between shots but between frames. It’s between frames where cinema speaks” (292, original emphasis). 14. Ernie Gehr used the expression the “energies of the projector” to describe his screening of Reverberation at the LA Film Forum in Los Angeles, March 2005. 15. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), 87. Movement in The Chelsea Girls is generated further by the interaction between the actors’ gestures and those of the camera: “The camera is invariably on a fixed tripod; its entire movement consists of zooms and swiveling on its stand. Each performer is set in front of the camera

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and told to stay there playing until the reel runs out. And so they do, pinned by the camera against a wall of time.” 16. Müller continues his obsession with found gestures in his homage to Hitchcock, Phoenix Tapes (1999), which he directed with Christoph Girardet. The project consists of six videotapes, which are compilations of scenes from forty Hitchcock films. Each tape emphasizes an aspect of Hitchcock’s cinema, including mothers, landscapes, and close-ups. One tape is devoted to the movements of hands in Hitchcock’s work. The continuous sequence of hands has the effect of foregrounding, but also isolating and abstracting the economy of gestures in Hitchcock’s cinema. 17. Matthias Müller, “Matthias Müller,” in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 292. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxix. 19. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 44, original emphasis. 20. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 74. Bacon has spoken at length about his attachment to photography, and he frequently used photographs as sources for his paintings. Of Bacon’s fascination with photography, which is tempered by an aesthetic restraint, Deleuze says: “What we see, what we perceive, are photographs. The most significant thing about the photograph is that it forces upon us the ‘truth’ of implausible and doctored images. Bacon has no intention of reacting against this movement; on the contrary, he abandons himself to it, and not without delight.” 21. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 36, original emphasis. 22. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 50. “Bacon’s faces,” Deleuze says, “are indeed those of deformation and not transformation.” He explains the distinction: “These are two very different categories. The transformation of form can be abstract or dynamic. But deformation is always bodily, and it is static, it happens at one place; it subordinates movement to force, but it also subordinates the abstract to the Figure.” 23. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 15. 24. James Leo Cahill, “Martin Arnold: From Cineseizure to Silenced Cinema,” Cinematexas 10 (2005): 64, original ellipses. In an expanded version of this essay—James Leo Cahill, “The Cineseizure,” in Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (Vienna: Index; Paris: Re/Voir, 2006), 10—Cahill adds: “Cineseizure operates at the fissure between the intact world and its not-at-all intact other, the interval where politics and art converge, working through the compulsion to repeat to realize the conscious expression of desire.” For Cahill, Arnold’s cineseizure opens the space for the realms of politics and art to converge, and to compulse in repetition. 25. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xxx. 26. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xxxii. 27. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 129. Deleuze concludes his study of Bacon by positing the presence of a “body beneath the organism.” This other body is neither originary nor primary, but a body of force. Deleuze says: “We witness the revelation of the body beneath the organism, which makes organisms and their

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elements crack or swell, imposes a spasm on them, and puts them into relation with forces—sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time, sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time.” The “body beneath the organism” may be an analogue of—or figure for—the other body of cinema. 28. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 45. 29. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 16, original emphasis. 30. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 55. 31. Agamben, Means without End, 55. 32. From a conversation with the author, 2002. 33. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 13.

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Extract Matthias Müller

Among the many faces of German experimental filmmaker Matthias Müller—many faces, but also hands, limbs, prosthetic accessories, and other body parts, as well as surfaces, including global landscapes both barren and lush—are also many phases: poet, video artist, landscape artist, melancholic, and comic. These faces form an autobiography dispersed throughout his work, a series of faces or surfaces that Robin Curtis, following Paul de Man, calls prosopopeia, “a figure by which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting, or in which something inanimate or abstract is personified.”1 Müller’s autobiographies do not lead to Müller himself, but to a proliferation of absent Müllers that never form a whole, that never return to a fixed anniversary. Instead, they create and re-create numerous other Müllers, bits and pieces of Müller in other figures, Müller excerpted everywhere else than in himself. Extracts and ex-Müllers spread across his cinema. His is a cinema or ex-cinema forged in a prosopopeia that produces Müller outside in other figures and selves. These extraordinary Müllers resurface in the ordinary fragments, gestures, shots, and scenes that constitute his cinema of excerpts. Müller describes his prosopopeia in reverse, his ability to lose and then find himself in strange images, images made strange, in the estrangement of the self reflected in found images. Of Aus der Ferna—The Memo Book (1989), Müller explains:

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In The Memo Book, the found footage integrates my introspection into a collective world of images. Creating a hybrid form allows you to recognize yourself in the stranger—and the stranger is what is supposedly yourself as well. The appropriated material forces my own images to show what lies latent in them: drama, hysteria, pathos, sentiment. . . . And the long period of time it took to produce Aus der Ferne, which included a process of distancing myself from the material, made it possible to see my own creations as if they were found footage.2

In the strange images, Müller discovers himself in precisely this strangeness and in the process loses himself, loses his own images that return to him as found images, lost and found images that return to him from an other. Müller’s system of prosopopeial disavowal and recovery operates through his cinema, his ex-cinema, as a mode of autobiography, always of an other and another autobiography that returns like a revenant. The categorical or generic gestures of famous actresses in Home Stories (1990) and Kristall (2006), the sad oscillation between a young boy’s face and his largely faceless mother’s body in Alpsee (1995), and the small slices of Hitchcock that constitute Phoenix Tapes (1999, coproduced with Christoph Girardet), among many other examples, reveal a world of partial bodies, human and film, projected onto the face of Müller’s cinema. These many faces and facets of Müller’s work form a whole, a composite or portrait, but one marked by an irreducible heterogeneity that renders the work an assemblage of excerpts. Excerpts that have been plucked out (ex- + carpere), like eyes, from another body, another’s body, a locus elsewhere, and reorganized into new and incomplete bodies laid out over an extraordinary surface. These excerpts never restore a body or form a new one; the assemblage of pieces leaves the body, in some fundamental way, formless. An aggregate of holes in place of a whole. Plucked from the outside, Müller’s cinema of excerpts reforms on the surface, turning what was once complete elsewhere into an organless body on the screen. An organless body of cinema, composed from an abundance of organs. The logic of Müller’s work cannot be reduced to a mere frenzy of citationality or excision, nor can it be rendered simply as a drive toward (obsessive) categorization, although the compulsive categorization of figures throughout Müller’s work suggests an irrepressible urge to organize. (His is a unique form of montage that also dismantles as it assembles, at once a montage and démontage.) Rather, the assemblage of faces and surfaces, corporeal and ex-corporeal forms, objects, and spaces

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Figure 18. Matthias Müller, Alpsee. Courtesy of Matthias Müller.

generates an economy of physical and metaphysical matter that transforms in the process the ordinary debris of the world into an extraordinary body that remains wholly intact in pieces. Recycled materials in Müller’s films and videos are transformed and estranged; estrangement a motif that frequently recurs in his work and even overwhelms it at times. Excerpted from one body and transposed onto another, the pieces that constitute Müller’s films and videos open a vast distance, an affective distance that separates one body from one body to the other, the original from the revision, ordinary affect from its remarkable expression. Müller’s work does not consist only of found images and sounds, he also shoots and reshoots his own footage, frequently manipulating the images and sounds until their origins are lost in the texture of his work. But even more significant than their sources, Müller’s images and sounds, found and made, lose the borders that separate them until they become indistinguishable. Of this process in Sleepy Haven (1993), Müller says: “I wanted to take my own material and the found footage and associate them as closely as possible, in order to blur the distinction between them.”3 Unlike other filmmakers and artists who work both with and without found materials, Müller seems to work in the same

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manner regardless of the source. His logic remains consistent in either mode, treating found materials and original footage as artifacts extracted from a vast elsewhere. Travelogue images that form a large dimension of Müller’s work function as found images, estranged from their source as well as their producer, discovered in and removed from a place that is always in Müller’s cinema, elsewhere. Müller’s sound designer and collaborator Dirk Schaeffer calls this a “distant proximity” in Müller’s cinema.4 From Album (2004), “I fall asleep in Lisbon and wake up in a Japanese film.” Life and cinema, the images of life, dreams, and films blend in a serene uneasiness, images moving from one space to another between the curtains that connect as much as they close those spaces everywhere in his work. But what is the nature of this economy, of the extraction that infuses the fragment with overpowering affect? How do these pieces, parts, and excerpts acquire such affective force, as if the ordinary faces, bodies, body parts, gestures, objects, and spaces of the world had been infused with a quantum of affect far in excess of their capacity to sustain it? (One can think of the lonely objects that inhabit Alpsee: the dresses, trees, watches, pitchers of milk, and household appliances.) Somewhere, an atopos (nowhere) perhaps, a powerful economy drives Müller’s work. An engine, one could say, that brings the fragments together, never seamlessly, but always with an enhanced, even exaggerated degree of affect, always in excess of the specific artifact. A surplus economy, superfluous and superficial, a phantom economy that renders the screen spectral. Home Stories sustains such an economy: A six-minute assemblage or ensemble of famous screen women drawn from famous films (all of them classical American), drawn together by their inability to escape the basic architecture of the house. Bound by the house, the corridors, rooms, and passages that constitute it, the women’s turns, retreats, bursts of energy, and collapses that drive the film expose an economy of the household and its particular hold on the sexual and emotional dynamic of its women. Economy, from the Greek oikonomía (household management, oîko(s) house + -nomia), is made literal in Home Stories, a hysterical history of the American cinema, no longer at home in its home.5 An oikomania. A haunted house filled with the phantoms of anxiety, nervousness, expectation, and longing. What Müller recognizes and portrays in this work of extracts is the transformation—already at work in the originals, perhaps, but regulated by a narrative economy— of the home into a house; the movement of a concept into a thing, a warm metaphysics into a brutal physics.

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Here becomes there; I am no longer here, where I am, but there, where I am not. Or, I am there when I am here and feel myself anywhere only at a distance. At home, I am estranged, homeless, homeless at home. The transformation of the ordinary scenes and gestures of the original to an extraordinary alienation involves a unique treatment of space in Müller’s work. (In the case of Hitchcock, a major source for Müller, the original material already courses through the extremities. But one of Hitchcock’s extraordinary talents was his ability to normalize the obscene. Among the great projects of Hitchcock’s cinema—from The Lodger (1927) to Strangers on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and Family Plot (1976), as well as virtually everything in between—is a perverse domestication, the unheimlich in reverse, the double-negation of familiarity, anunheimlich.) But this is not the ordinary (ordinarius, regular, ordering, regulating) economy of the uncanny described by Freud, in which the familiar become unfamiliar; it is extraordinary because it neither preserves order nor erupts in disorder. Rather, it generates a second order, a second space, unbound by the dialectics of home and house, an outside order, an extraorder, extraordinary and outside. Another world folded from the outside into the interior spaces of the home and cinema. A secondary cinema outside, ex-cinema opened by the excerpt. The excerpt, plucked out of one body and inserted into another—a citation (in both the literary and legal senses) or quotation (from quotare, to divide into verses, to transpose the speech or text of another)— provides a tissue between two bodies: the former body from which it was removed and its new host. Not only images, but also letters, diaries, novels, poems, sounds, and voices are excerpted throughout Müller’s corpus. In this sense, the material excerpted functions like an organ, a donation or transplant that serves two bodies. The logic of recycled cinema often operates on the play between origin and revision, the friction between an older context and newer framework. To recycle is to produce a surgical gesture that exposes two bodies and their various parts. But what happens when the excerpt itself becomes estranged from both? When the excerpt, the transplanted organ, refuses to be reorganized; when it refuses to serve two bodies, or either body? In Home Stories, the women and their movements establish an intricate choreography, an ensemble of gestures that undoubtedly form a new work, a ballet méchanique from the synchronized and automatic movements Müller collects. But the force of the work depends on the unassimilability of those individual gestures. Together, in the same house, perhaps, each woman is alone, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.

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Without the narrative to recollect their gestures, and without the comfort of a new home in which to rest their bodies, each woman becomes a violently animated excerpt; each body suspended without a world. Homeless and worldless, restless. The second order, here and there, is extraordinary. Each body, but even more minutely, each gesture of each body, as well as each face and body part, is rendered whole, an indivisible unit, a body without origin or organs. (The body without organs, say Deleuze and Guattari, following Antonin Artaud, another multimedia poet who dreamed of this dense solitude, “is the body without an image.”)6 One can think of the atomized faces that Hide (2006) comprises: fashion images and ads slowly destroyed by the collapse of the images under the weight of decay. A Wildean aging of the image, which renders the women faceless, effaced, an abyss that opens onto the face. The liminal spaces of Home Stories render all of the bodies discrete, even when together. A singular multiplicity, a collective singularity, no body is any body: each body is secluded, estranged, and alone along with all of the other bodies. The economy that transforms these excerpts into solitary and completed units, atoms or monads, forms the basis of a cinema that is extraterritorial. Christa Blümlinger calls Müller’s films, videos, and installations “ruins due to their fragmentary and discontinuous montage.”7 Dislocated from the spaces that harbor but also govern the bodies Müller snatches, these figures become irreducible spaces onto themselves. Each woman a distinct space, each movement, turn, gesture another opening— neither to the world nor cinema that engendered it—but to itself. This is achieved not only because the relationship that once bound live bodies to the world (Kracauer’s dream of an umbilical cinema) has been severed, but because the secret umbilici that connect bodies to themselves— the pieces, parts, affects, and organs that form an ordinary body and allow it to exist in a relationship to space—have been melded into a single, irreducible unit. The body becomes its own space, folded into itself and distinct from the spaces of world and cinema. The estrangement of this body follows not only from the disappearance of its world, but also from the nonopening of a new world in the film or video to receive it. That is, the transposition of the body from world to cinema in Müller’s work does not lead to the establishment of a new space as such. For this to happen, the body would need to be reorganized here and reabsorbed into a new world forged in film space. But that film space never appears in Müller’s cinema. The estrangement he depicts—figures immersed in a deep and absolute solitude—extends

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Figure 19. Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Mirror. Courtesy of Matthias Müller.

to the spectator vis-à-vis the extraterritoriality of Müller’s work. It forms within the work and without it, a total estrangement. The space of the figure never resurfaces, remaining, as it were, outside and atopic. No new worlds form in Müller’s cinema, only extensions of discrete units of self-contained space; a proliferation of faces, bodies, movements, and spaces that congeals on an extraterritorial surface. An explosion, like the vibrating and exploding roses of Promises (2003). If, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, the body without organs is “imageless,” then Müller’s cinema without organs can be seen as a pure surface: a faceless, imageless cinema of excerpts, estranged not only from the world that produced it (“the body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced,” they say)8 but also from the viewer that seeks to consume it. It is, to borrow another expression from Deleuze and Guattari, “unconsumable.”9 A cinema of (excerpted) images that remains imageless. Extraterritorial and extraordinary, outside of space and order, Müller’s cinema forges an aesthetic of the outside, one that organizes the excerpts elsewhere and forms a démontage. Not merely a disassembling, Müller’s démontages form a surface of multiple singularities; solitary excerpts that form a porous cinema, one not only of wholes, but of holes. Each body, each movement forms a discrete unit in Müller’s work, but it also produces a tear in the cinema and a passage to the outside. Because the excerpts are never integrated or sutured into a new whole, they remain holes in the surface, openings to an elsewhere in Müller’s cinema that leaves each work exposed. This exposure and the outside to which each work is exposed, is never entirely outside in Müller’s work, but always along the edges of the outside, along its parergon, the space outside the work, its frame, but also the work that imagines the outside.

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The alienation and estrangement of the women is enhanced by the recognizability and even familiarity that each star engenders. The excess affect carried by each figure and expressed in her movements is never dispersed throughout the film, never absorbed by it. Rather, it forms an intensity, overflowing onto the film until it tears a hole in it. In Home Stories, these holes are the only means of escape: the women themselves, trapped inside houses that are no longer homes, but also within a set of ideologies—patriarchy, misogyny, gender roles, and representational conventions—become passages out of the house and out of the film. They disappear, says Elisabeth Bronfen, “not into a void, but into the darkness,” the true outside of cinema.10 Inside, they are already out; they become figures of this radical exteriority: in contrast to the original economies in which they are located, in Müller’s version, they are already agents of dislocation, already—even before the final shot—escapees. Extraterritorial, beyond jurisdiction, ungovernable. The final shot only depicts the escape that Müller has already facilitated: a figuration of the extraordinary line of escape at work in Home Stories, a means to exit cinema. Müller’s hybrid work Alpsee, a fifteen-minute assemblage of episodes, clips, and fragments, but also a mise-en-scène of excerpts, expands this extraordinary economy of space. Using both filmed material and found footage, Alpsee follows the timeless childhood of a young boy as he waits for his mother to stop her ordinary mechanical activities (household chores) and notice him. The boy spectator watches the body parts of his spectral mother, reduced like the women of Home Stories to fabrics and gestures, her body frequently cropped like the magazine images she resembles, confined to her home and child and the absence of an adult male figure. Here, the proximity of objects is countered by the emotional distances that sustain the film, inducing Schaeffer’s “distant proximity.” The tactile 16 mm footage, intensified by a richly textured sound design, envelopes the boy and his spectators, generating a chiasmatic contrast to the found footage, especially that from TV, which recedes into his loneliness. In Alpsee, film and video, shot and found footage produce an extraordinary spatiality that is at once close and far, too close and too far. The vertiginous spatiality of Alpsee—an emotional effect not unlike the dolly zoom in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—is enhanced by the peculiar movement of time, which never moves fast enough, but also seems always fleeting. In Album, Müller says: “While he is moving forwards geographically, inside he is moving backwards.” A boy is born, a marriage

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falls apart, and a childhood drags by in waiting. Müller calibrates time in a series of excerpts: A repetition of ticking watches, a montage of boys hugging their mothers from other films, a pitcher of milk smashed in one frame and then in another, a seedling grown into a tree and then discovered on another planet, and a boy who continues to wait and watch. Time is at once too slow and too fast, but also discrete: each moment contiguous to no other, every moment repeatable. Time is excerpted, extemporaneous, each moment a hole into which the boy peers. The spatial and temporal order of Alpsee, an immiscible mixture of proximity and distance, momentary and timeless solitude, produces another dimension of Müller’s extraordinary cinema. Neither here nor there, this person nor that, the texture of the film generates a series of episodes—all of them ordinary—that together form not as much the portrait of a childhood as the portrait of a profound absence at the surface of this film. The plenitude of images and sounds, as with Home Stories, produces the opposite effect: the assemblage of tactile and distant bodies and objects, sounds, and affects renders an image of absence, the absence of an image, an image of the hole through which the spectator falls into a vast solitude. In Alpsee, faces, bodies, parts of bodies, objects, images, tasks, and gestures do not form a whole, a coherent portrait of one life (or two), but instead a hole, a passage into which life lived and postponed vanishes. A material representation of absence, but not an absence as such. An imageless absence generated by the proliferation of images. More ordinary moments and images permeate Phoenix Tapes, a sixscreen installation originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, on the centenary of Hitchcock’s birth. Ordinary moments from Hitchcock’s films are excerpted, taken outside, and reassembled as a series of rapid exteriorities: landscapes and space in “Rutland”; the activities of hands in “Burden of Proof”; dreams of trains and trains of dreams in “Derailed”; mothers there and not there in “Why Don’t You Love Me?”; more home stories in “Bedroom”; a single shot of Ingrid Bergman between this world and that other one in “Necrologue.” Each installment excerpts Hitchcock, plucks out segments of the corpus and puts it on display. Hitchcock’s work is itself a complex source, since so much of it is bound by a tight economy of sexual pleasure and violence, quotable in many regards, but not always easy to extricate from the specific momentum of the work in which it circulates. Taken outside of their original structures and economies (homes), these parts produce a vast and inverse archive of Hitchcock, an extraordinary Hitchcock out-

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Figure 20. Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Phoenix Tapes, “Necrologue.” Courtesy of Matthias Müller.

side. In the outside, exterior, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, exordinary. In Phoenix Tapes, ordinary moments in Hitchcock are no longer ordinary, but outside it, transformed in their excision from ordinary to extraordinary. Hitchcock’s many bodies that form the unique body of his cinema are here transformed into a series of discrete bodies, each one whole, even when chopped into pieces. But Müller and Girardet’s bodies are not exactly dismembered; each piece becomes a whole in itself, but also a hole in the installation, which keeps each installment separate and contained, but also porous. Bodies pass through bodies, into and out of them like a sieve, forming an archive of remembered bodies that are never truly remembered. But not only bodies. The extraordinary economy here extends the body into the spaces that surround it. “Rutland” consists of mostly empty landscapes, landmarks, corridors, alleys, rooms, signs, and windows; periodically, figures are visible in tracking shots and from high angles, but always dwarfed by the spaces that engulf and swallow them. In most cases, each image is marked by the absence of a human figure. Here, in

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these excerpts from Hitchcock’s cinema, the human beings appear to have been excerpted, erased, like in the depopulated works of Martin Arnold. Müller and Girardet’s landscapes are evacuated of bodies and their parts; the fragments of vacant space become displaced body parts, they are like bodies turned inside out: antibodies, antidotes for disappearing bodies. (One thinks of the empty spaces and absent bodies of Brasilia that Müller portrays in Vacancy from 1998, also in Album.) The extraterritoriality of “Rutland” follows from the elaboration of a negative space from which bodies have been diminished or removed. An effect of this removal is not the negation of bodies as such, but rather the representation of negativity itself: the empty landscapes and spaces come to serve as signs for an inconsolable emptiness, loneliness, and distance. An image of absence, an imageless absence. The last installment of Phoenix Tapes, “Necrologue,” consists of a slowed and reversed single shot of Ingrid Bergman (Under Capricorn, 1949) waking from sleep. Her eyes open slowly, close, reopen and reclose, recalling the brief flights of movement in another homage to Hitchcock, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963). Everything passes through this eye (one more visible than the other), carried by the tear that slowly moves down, then up, Bergman’s face. The tear seeps from Bergman’s face, her eye a whole not to the other side, not to life, or even her inside, but to the extraordinary interiority of the image, from the inside of the surface. It exposes the inside of Bergman’s face, a faceless face, which has no other side. Her affect is carried by the seepage, this tear that is also a tear on the surface; her affect overflows with this tear, a materialization of sadness. Sadness excreted, an image of profound sadness without depth. Hypnos and Thanatos, sleep and death, but also life and death, life and film tremble on this threshold, a face that has become a pure surface, establishing an extraordinary space in this solitary excerpt. An excerpt that forms a whole, no longer bound to its original, nor transplanted into another body. Müller’s excerpt, this face, is a prosopopeia and an end, the face of another, his face, and the end of cinema in that other face. A “necrologue” that serves as epilogue and exergue—a dead end without end. “The frozen moment of Necrologue,” says Müller, “shows that there is no salvation: the images of death continue on into eternity.”11 No longer an inside experienced as from without, but an outside imagined as inside, from inside, an ex-interiority. This dream a nightmare viewed from the outside. The dreams, longings and wishes, and nightmares that appear everywhere in Müller’s work crystallize here as a dream without images, an imageless dream without inside or outside, a

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dream that falls into and through itself to no other side. In the end, at the end, an absolute and unending end that reverses itself, the excerpt becomes whole and exposes a hole in Matthias Müller’s extraordinary necrology.

Notes 1. Robin Curtis, “Life in the Present Tense: Matthias Müller and the Peripheries of the Autobiographical Aesthetic,” in The Memo Book: Films, Video and Installations by Matthias Müller, ed. Stephanie Schulte Strathaus (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005), 205. 2. Matthias Müller, “Matthias Müller,” in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 287. 3. Müller, “Matthias Müller,” 289. 4. Dirk Schaeffer, “Distant Proximity: Tracking the Sounds of Matthias Müller’s Films,” in The Memo Book, 137. With regard to cinema images that cross the visual threshold and appear to touch one, images that come “too close,” Schaeffer says: “In the concert of the senses, it is traditionally the ear that mediates between near and far.” This faraway nearness mediated by the ear defines for Schaeffer much of Müller’s sensibility, not only toward sound but also toward every other sensual dimension of his work. 5. See Elisabeth Bronfen, “I Am Haunted, but I Can’t See by What: Matthias Müller’s Uncanny Hollywood,” in Matthias Müller Album: Film, Video Photography, ed. Kathrin Becker (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004), 69–93. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 8. 7. Christa Blümlinger, “On Matthias Müller’s Logic of Appropriation,” in The Memo Book, 69. 8. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8. 9. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8. 10. Bronfen, “I Am Haunted,” 81. 11. Müller, “Matthias Müller,” 300.

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Revisionary Cinema

“This is only a dream.” An unknown voice interrupts the dream, not entirely from within its diegesis, but somewhere there on its surface, like a voice-over. It resonates across the mise-en-scène from someplace both within and without the dream, an ambiguity infused into the dreamworld. From where? “Das ist ja nur ein Traum.” For Sigmund Freud, the nondiegetic utterance suggests evidence of a secondary revision, habitual, he argues, in all dreams. Another apparatus has interrupted the flow of the dream, leaving a trace of its intervention in the form of a différance: another subject (of enunciation) from another temporal order has entered the dream work, like Chris Marker’s time traveler.1 At the moment, the dream’s agency is at stake, its authority as dream as well as the dream’s authorship. Who says this and to whom? Is there more than one dreamer at this moment? This voice, this expression is self-reflexive: it refers to the dream, draws the dreamer’s attention to it, and makes visible the dream work, deconstructing it. Somebody dismantles the dream machine from within the dream. An acousmêtre, myself, acephalic, as Lacan says. The acousmatic voice divides the subject, multiplies and displaces it from the dream, adding a second voice, which now also speaks in the dream: “This is only a dream.” Freud’s emblematic phrase disrupts the illusion of temporal coherence and exposes the presence of another subject and temporality already at work within the dream. “We must be several in order to write,” says Jacques Derrida, “and even to ‘perceive.’ ”2 150

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Freud devotes the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to the dream work, identifying four factors that contribute to the construction of dreams. The “displacement of psychical intensities,” “considerations of representability” (as visual and acoustic memory traces), “condensation,” and “secondary revision” serve as mechanisms by which dream thoughts evade censorship (always at work to protect the dreamer from unconscious forces) and congeal as dream texts. Each factor is designed, according to Freud, to relieve the pressures of the unconscious without damaging the psychic economy of the subject. The fourth element of Freud’s scheme, secondary revision, contributes less to the content of the dream than to its agency. Only in instances of extreme affect, when the continuation of the dream is threatened, does the second agent appear, make itself seen or heard, and attempt to reassure the dreamer. “I am here, but not entirely present; you are not where you think you are, so you can return there, where you were, safely.” Secondary revision works to rearrange the eruption of affect and the chaos it threatens into a coherent dream economy. At work in secondary revision is a mocking, “contemptuous” tone, Freud says: “In my view the contemptuous critical judgment, ‘it’s only a dream,’ appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety of the distressing feeling aroused by it.”3 Something has evaded the censor; an idea, suffused with affect, has entered into thought and threatens the dreamer with a high degree of displeasure: the contemptuous utterance, “it is only a dream,” seeks to control the damage of a thought unleashed from the unconscious by dismissing it, and the entire work into which it has entered. This is nothing more than a dream. The phrase serves as the index of a lapse, a failure of the censorship to prevent the entry of surplus affect—usually, but not always, associated with anxiety or displeasure—into the sleeping subject. It also exposes, on the occasion of the utterance, the presence of a censoring agent, a second apparatus at work in the construction of dreams. (“The apparent exteriority of political censorship,” says Derrida of Freud’s dream work, “refers to an essential censorship which binds the writer to his own writing.”)4 Two machines construct the dream; or, the dream emerges from a divided machine disguised as one. Dream and dream machine consist in Freud’s thought as assemblages of parts, authors, and agencies that are designed to appear organic. As with most Freudian structures, the exception or anomaly provides the rule, in this case, a law

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of the dream work. All dreams, Freud insists, are reworked in the first instance, have already been revised at the moment of their appearance as dreams. Those dreams that appear the most coherent have been the most revised during sleep. “Dreams occur,” says Freud, “which at a superficial view, may seem faultlessly logical and reasonable; . . . they appear to have a meaning, but that meaning is as far removed as possible from their true significance. . . . It is in these dreams that the secondary revision has played around with the materials most freely . . . They are dreams which might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation.”5 Secondary revision usually erases its own traces, leaving no residual presence in the dream work. Insisting on the habitual nature of secondary revision, Freud sees the working over of dreams as a necessary process by which unadulterated dream thoughts are reassembled and realized as dreams. Secondary revision “fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches.”6 It imposes an order where there is none, the impression of narrative structure and unity against the chaotic force of the unconscious. At stake in Freud’s claim is a defense against the void that threatens to open within each psyche; the unrepresentable form of the unconscious, which relies on the activity of imagination—the production of visual and acoustical images—to disguise the presence, always, of nothing. Of only nothing. In this sense, secondary revision functions as a form of editing, as a practice of arranging dream materials into semblances of order and causality. Rarely, says Freud, does secondary revision “create new contributions to dreams. . . . It exerts its influence principally by its preferences and selections from psychical material in the dream-thoughts that has already been formed.”7 Psychical materials already there are revised and rearranged, producing new sequences, narratives, and effects. Constructed like Vertov’s cinema, dreams are assemblages forged in a psychic “factory of facts.”8 In Freud’s view of the dream work, one finds a theory of writing: editing as authorship, revision as inscription. An other as author, another who writes with me, beneath and alongside me, in my place. Although they (dream agents) seek to disguise the fact, dreams are essentially heterogeneous, authored by multiple subjects at different stages in the dream cycle and after. In this sense, the “only” of Freud’s phrase can also be understood to insist on the singularity of the dream, “this is the only dream,” “only this dream is the dream.” Only one; one dream only. Besides the practical necessity of dismissing the dream as “only a

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dream” (in order to reassure the dreamer), another purpose of the statement may be to maintain, paradoxically, the singularity of the dream, its unity. “This is only one dream.” An untenable unity for Freud, given his view of dreams as originary translations. Dreams are, already in the fi rst instance, translations drawn from a vast semiotics, conscious and unconscious. The dream emerges always from an irreducibly other site, an other world— the unconscious—which the dream work seeks to naturalize and integrate into consciousness. Only on the occasion of a failed dream, in which the surveillance has broken down, does the structure and radically foreign nature of the dream thought— the ideas and affects that constitute it—become apparent. “This is only a dream,” signals a disturbance in the dramatic and temporal order of the dream; it functions like a stutter, a tear in the matrix of the dream that exposes its internal modes of production. That is, secondary revision generates the semblance of meaning and coherence in dreams, largely in order to continue the dream, but also to mask the absence of meaning as such in the unconscious. “This is only a dream” produces a rupture, a small hole through which the profound absence that sustains each psychic subject is made visible. According to Slavoj Žizek, the fundamental question of psychoanalysis asks, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”9 The intervention of the second voice—“This is only a dream”— exposes the industrial structure of the dream, and implements a mode of reparative reflexivity: “This here, where you believe yourself to be, is only a dream. In reality, you are elsewhere, safe, so return to the dream where in truth you are not.” The displacement introduced by the reflexive différance of the statement, renders the dream closer to a phantasy, which Freud likens to a dream, and calls a daydream (Tagtraum): Closer investigation of the characteristics of these daytime phantasies shows us how right it is that these formations should bear the same name as we give to the products of our thought during the night—the name that is of “dreams.” They share a large number of their properties with night-dreams, and their investigation might, in fact, have served as the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night-dreams.10

In contrast to the intensity of dreams, phantasies are marked by a degree of reflexivity, by the ironic distance between the subject and its work. “(I know) this is only a dream.” At the moment when the censoring mechanism at work in all dreams fails and the schizoid apparatus is revealed, the dream becomes a phantasy. Like dreams, phantasies are traversed by

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secondary revisions that inscribe a series of agents or moments of agency on a single scenario. Unlike dreams, the secondary revisions are part of the manifest structure of phantasies. Phantasies are dreams in which the process of secondary revision, rewriting, has been made transparent. “This is only a phantasy,” no longer signals the termination of a reverie, but rather its beginning. It doesn’t end the state but prolongs it, acting as its opening. A phantasy is like and unlike a dream; it begins where the dream ends, but also acts, like dreams, as a revision of the world. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis define a phantasy as an “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive [perceptual] processes.”11 Although the mechanisms are more conscious than in dreams, the wishes remain unconscious ones. In phantasies, the subject inscribes itself always as protagonist, often against the evidence of the senses. (The author is bound neither by perceptions nor physical laws. I can be you, only you, or you and me at one time.) Like dreams, phantasies serve as opportunities to fulfill wishes, to revise one’s experience of the empirical world. They are productions, and Laplanche and Pontalis infuse their descriptions of phantasy with the idiom of theater and film: “What Freud means in the first place by ‘Phantasien’ are day-dreams, scenes, episodes, romances or fictions which the subject creates and recounts to himself in the waking state,” for example.12 Phantasies, say Laplanche and Pontalis, are episodic, characterized by movement and narrative identification. “Even where they can be summed up in a single sentence,” write the authors, “phantasies are still scripts (scénarios) of organised scenes which are capable of dramatization—usually in a visual form.”13 The subject of a phantasy is inscribed as protagonist in a sequence “in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible.”14 Staged and performed, phantasies can be seen as psychic film projections, animated and dynamic, susceptible to habitual revision, and they always return to me, to a fictive and fantastical me generated in the phantasy itself. Apart from their classification in psychology, phantasies also carry the popular connotation of an activity outside the boundaries of reality; they suggest the work of imagination and fiction. In English, the distinction between psychoanalytic and popular uses of the word is marked by a homophonic shift in spelling from “f” to “ph,” the same secret sound at work in film. A différance: the “graphic difference itself vanishes,” says Derrida, “into the night, can never be sensed as a full term, but rather

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extends an invisible relationship, the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles.”15 Between two spectacles, night falls; the darkness emerges from the inapparency that binds the two. At work in a thinking of ph/fantasy is a dialectic between the structure of the dream, Freud’s figure for and point of entry into the psychical apparatus and the unconscious, and a mode of rumination, “daydreaming,” which leads to nothing, is itself of no consequence, and represents the antithesis of action and meaningful thought. A thinking of two spectacles, two forms of spectacular thinking (or wishing, or representing) that “eludes both vision and hearing.”16 In psychoanalysis, everything is at stake; in the popular idiom, nothing. In psychoanalysis, phantasy represents the very possibility of a politics of the unconscious. Outside of psychoanalysis, there is no politics proper to fantasy. To fantasize, even if it signals a more dangerous line of thought and action yet to come, does not in itself constitute a political act. In the end, “it is only a phantasy.” A popular view of cinema regards dramatic narratives as fantasies, forms of escape. Christian Metz likens the fiction film to a daydream or phantasy and notes the periodic convergence of film and phantasy in a spectator. This “little miracle,” he says, temporarily suspends the dialectic between perception (of external images) and imagination (internal reverie) by bringing together the disparate experiences of exteriority and interiority. Of this effect peculiar to film, Metz says: This is the specific joy of receiving from the external world images that are usually internal, images that are familiar or not very far from familiar, of seeing them inscribed in a physical location (the screen), of discovering in this way something almost realisable in them, which was not expected, of feeling for a moment that they are not inseparable from the tonality which most often attends them, from that common and accepted yet slightly despairing impression of the impossible.17

An impression of the impossible opens onto but also follows from a world that is at once inside and out; a world in which the distinction between interiority and exteriority has been momentarily halted and replaced with the impossible and miraculous impression of synchronicity. Inside and outside converge; psyche and world collapse. An “artificial psychosis,” says Jean-Louis Baudry.18 Another dialectic of phantasy opens between two minor genres of film—experimental film and documentary. Minor because they exist at the limits of the cultural, political, industrial, financial, and aesthetic film economy, along with Third, minoritarian, and other forms of alternative

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global media. Collectively, one can refer to this world as a “minor cinema,” in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka’s oeuvre: Languages are deterritorialized, the individual is connected to a political immediacy, and each enunciation is always part of a collective assemblage.19 David James also uses the phrase to describe similar relations of space and production. He says, “minor cinemas depend on and depict the spatiality in which they are produced.”20 The minor cinema can be seen as an inversion, even a perversion of the feature-length fiction film. Both interior and exterior worlds are made unfamiliar, distant, irreducibly foreign. Before this media, I no longer recognize the world around me, nor, for that matter, myself. I am only a spectator, but never the only one. Experimental film and video, which frequently foreground the enunciation of an individual or subject, complicate the machinery of phantasy and expand it. By contrast, the documentary, a term coined by John Grierson and that follows the earlier designation “actualities,” emphasizes objectivity, history, and ultimately, an indexical relation to reality as such.21 (This is only a provisional distinction, already unpleasant and in need of revision.) Phantasies, or historical revisions, are superfluous in documentaries—their presence is understood to detract from the success of a work. One could posit a dialectic between documentary film or video, which is generally understood to adhere to conventions of truth, and experimental cinemas, which are permitted, even expected, to develop a discernible subjectivity that actively interferes with objectivity. Fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, objective representation and subjective interpretation, history and memory, documentary and experimental media operate according to contradictory imperatives and could be seen in cinema as antinomies. To the list of oppositions, one might add another ultimately fantastic opposition—politics and psychoanalysis. Laplanche and Pontalis, who have produced a map of psychoanalysis, a chart of its world, inscribe the operations of phantasy at the intersection of “imagination and reality.” They write: “The use of the term ‘phantasy’ cannot fail to evoke a distinction between imagination and reality (perception). If this distinction is made into a major psychoanalytic axis of reference, we are brought to define phantasy as a purely illusory production which cannot be sustained when it is confronted with a correct apprehension of reality.”22 The contradiction (between imagination and reality) embodied by a phantasy is transformed into an antinomy in its encounter with “a correct apprehension of reality.” The uneasy frame that surrounds documentary and experimental media—two modes that frequently share political sympathies but dis-

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Figure 21. Naomi Uman, removed.

play deep ideological, aesthetic, and practical divides—can be seen as a symptom of contradiction, appearing as an antinomy. Even when they actively subvert the terms, documentaries return inevitably to the registers of truth and the protocols of reality, even realism, which are embedded in the discursive foundations of the genre. Experimental films and videos, by contrast, are grounded in the forces of the subject and the vicissitudes of subjectivity. History and enunciation, and the adherence to facts and their revision, seem to establish an irreducible distance between documentary and experimental work. The provisional opposition between documentary and experimental form is called into question by a minor genre, form, style, or practice known as “found-footage” or “recycled” cinema. Working with film and video documents that have already been established in one context, found-footage works rewrite and reconfigure the material to produce a revised text that retains the material traces of the original beneath its revision. They are assemblages and collages of other work that document in each iteration an earlier work.23 They can be understood as revised documentaries, even when the original material was not a documentary. That is, the documentary is created in the revision, an effect of the revision. Bruce Conner’s reworking of atomic test footage in Crossroads (1976), Harun Farocki’s dissection of state media representations

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of the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s political regime in Romania in Videograms of a Revolution (1992), Peter Forgács’s reinscription of archival home movies of Dutch Jews condemned to death in The Maelstrom (1997), Naomi Uman’s erasure of women from pornographic films in removed (1999), and many other recycled cinemas produced across the world map a politics of revision, a form of secondary resistance to the orders inscribed on commercial and national media. Found-footage works defuse the conflict between fact and figure, archive and invention, by inscribing an aesthetics and politics of revision. They undermine the originality of the original, as well as its immutability, drawing into question the singularity of any text. According to Paul Arthur, found-footage films disrupt the flow of subjectivity assumed to be at work in cinema, pushing the subject farther away from the point of contact with a reality. In found-footage films, Arthur says, “subjectivity is pushed back at least one degree from direct camera confrontation with a profilmic reality.”24 The displacement of an intact subjectivity follows from the split or dual structure of time at work in most found-footage films. Like the temporal logic of the unconscious, past and present appear simultaneously in found-footage films. Arthur describes this phenomenon: “Since in most cases the temporality of the film fragment is split between a present context and the shadow of prior production circumstances, the historical provenance of recycled images is never totally cancelled. Rather, found footage re-presentations work precisely because as viewers we grasp an ironic, impossible collision between successive phases of production and reception.”25 The two or more times of recycled cinemas produce an irreducible irony, a subject never present to itself, an ex-subject always under revision. It is a dream machine. Revised and recycled, found-footage films engender a différance between the original and its revision, the past and the present, and the imaginary (fantastic) divide that separates documentaries from experimental films and videos. Derrida describes the chrono-geographic economies of différance: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past of a future as a modified present.26

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The present is possible only as a relation to something other than itself, to something prior and outside; it is possible only if it carries a trace of the past (and future): the mark of what it is not. Only this if it is also (only) that. A distance between elements and times, from one to the other, but also a distance within the work, like a dream that divides it from within. “An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself,” continues Derrida, “but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present.”27 The architectures of différance, dream, and recycled cinema require an internal division, spatial and temporal, which carries the trace of another, a spectral mark of the past and the outside, in its material organization. Phantasy is the inscription— either conscious or unconscious—of this distance. As revisions, foundfootage works resemble dreams; the dimension of reflexivity brings them closer to phantasies. Jay Rosenblatt’s found-footage film Human Remains (1998) exemplifies the stakes of phantastic revision. Superimposed over archival footage of a number of infamous twentieth-century figures, Rosenblatt appends what appear to be their voices, always in two languages, one native, the other English. The acoustical form, borrowed from the conventions of TV documentaries, renders the translation as a form of revision, a second voice in the film. The first-person narrations consist of anecdotal, personal, and otherwise intimate details, most often regarding the individual’s dietary habits, hygiene, preferences in women, and emotional vulnerabilities. The effect is a synchronicity between image and sound, the illusion of a unified subject sutured together from archival imagery and acousmatic voices. In Human Remains, one hears Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Mao speak from beyond the grave. Or rather, one hears acoustic representations of their thought. The disembodied voice-over suggests the convergence of the image with a profound interiority. A voice speaks over the image. This illusion of unity is assailed by the sheer intimacy of detail and the synthetic quality of the simulated voices. Rosenblatt scrambles the synchronicity with the use of selective single-track audio: some gestures produce sounds, most others silence. A pen scratching on paper, footsteps, and a kiss, among other actions pierce the silence of the world (of the dead) from which these figures return. In Rosenblatt’s pantheon of historical villains, these figures form an ex-cinema formed around ex-human beings.

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The monstrosity of Rosenblatt’s historical figures has been revised by the indices of corporeality reinscribed on their remains, on their film shadows. Another voice speaks, a human voice, always two; defensive, anxious, and depressed. On the defensive tone of phantasies, Laplanche and Pontalis write: “Such defences are themselves inseparably bound up with the primary function of phantasy, namely, the mise-en-scène of desire—a mise-en-scène in which what is prohibited (l’interdit) is always present in the actual formation of the wish.”28 To be perceived, in this case, as human. Rosenblatt’s revision introduces the structure of phantasy into historical objects, a desire inherent in the “impossible impression,” to return to Metz’s term, of history. In addition to the polyphony that Human Remains evokes, the questionable veracity of some material—Hitler’s digestive apparatus, Mao’s personal hygiene, for example—creates a rupture between the apparently reliable historical footage and the ambiguous text, indicating the marks of a revision. Rosenblatt, a former psychotherapist, produces an impure documentary—part fact, part speculation—which reveals a series of agencies inscribed on the surfaces of a finite history. A paradoxical document, outside the conventional space of documentary practice and doxa, a type of paradocumentary, a paradoc. The acts of revision that emerge from the surplus intimacy of Rosenblatt’s text expose the archive as dynamic, accessible, and vulnerable. By evoking the specters of doubt, Rosenblatt transforms the nightmare of history into a violent daydream, a waking nightmare. Freud identifies daydreams as “immediate fore-runners of hysterical symptoms,” which “are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of memories.”29 Human Remains hystericizes the interred bodies of history, forcing them to return like repressed thoughts and effect new symptoms. At the intersection of history and expression, figure and voice, Human Remains exposes the vulnerability of historical representation to phantastic revision. Neither history nor memory, it problematizes the notion of the “only” of “only a film.” “It is only a film”; history is only a film; only film can speak (in) the voice of history. Rosenblatt’s sabotage of the documentary “I,” the formal device that promises the authenticity of history, opens the field of history as such to the vicissitudes of revision. If, as Laplanche and Pontalis claim, phantasies are acts of imagination that posit the subject always as protagonist, then Human Remains has rewritten the historical screenplays and exposed them to a habitual and indefinite rewriting. Rosenblatt turns history into a vast repository of phantasies, where the singularity of the

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Figure 22. Jay Rosenblatt, The Smell of Burning Ants. Courtesy of Jay Rosenblatt.

subject no longer remains singular, only. I am no longer only me. The first persons that appear to speak in Human Remains are no longer embodied; they represent the forces of an indeterminate and hysterical subjectivity at work in the representation and apparatus of history.30 Another historical phantasy explores the limits of thinking and writing history. In The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999), videographer Walid Ra’ad searches for distinct moments of subjectivity, for the possibility of a single instant of total subjectivity that would render the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1991) intact. While not a found-footage work in the strictest sense, Ra’ad’s video appropriates the logic of recycled cinema by simulating the discovery of and reworking of documents, artifacts, and traces from a history yet to be constituted.31 Traversing the media of photography, film, and video, the brief arrests that constitute Dead Weight—photo finishes, anniversaries, the ends of war, cryptic blue photographs, sunsets—seek to capture moments of finitude, departure, and disappearance. A phantasy that sustains Ra’ad’s work concerns the desire to pause the flow of a symptomatic history, an event (or series of events) that has ceased to be legible. Ra’ad questions the very capacity to experience even a single moment of a hysteric history. The only moment of a history made meaningful as finite. Again, for Laplanche

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and Pontalis, phantasies are never constituted by single moments, but rather by movements: “It is not an object that the subject imagines and aims at, so to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible.”32 Like Rosenblatt’s strategy in Human Remains, Ra’ad introduces a set of historical figures that appear, in the end, permeable. They hover like phantoms between fact and fiction, displaced and hybrid, unable to stop in one place. Laura U. Marks describes the effects of Ra’ad’s work to excavate the missing Lebanese wars, and its symptomatic “fossilization” of fact and fantasy into a single irretrievable depth: “Ra’ad’s oblique, seemingly dispassionate, and overtly fictionalized approach hints that to try to recover the memories these fossils contain would be too painful. Instead, he moves cautiously over their surface, examining the geological forces that produced them.”33 One of Ra’ad’s key sources of information is Zainab Fakhouri, the wife of Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon.” The presence of both Fakhouris, always as traces, remains a crucial feature of Ra’ad’s work, but like the episodes that constitute Dead Weight, the question of authenticity—and also authority and authorship—is ultimately exceeded and put in the service of a larger framework—the phantasies that accrue to a historical trauma. Facts assume significance once they have been revised in the economy of phantasy. Dr. Fakhouri first appears in Ra’ad’s tape as a chronicler of Lebanon’s leading historians, who, Ra’ad asserts, were avid gamblers and bet regularly at the races, not on the actual outcomes, but on the images of winning horses that were published in the next day’s newspapers. Regarding Dr. Fakhouri’s racehorse photos and annotated notebooks, Ziad Abdallah and Farah Awada suggest they be approached as “ ‘hysterical symptoms’ based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.”34 At work in Ra’ad’s history is a Borgesean revision, and a paraphrase and citation of Freud’s thesis on phantasy. In an echo of Human Remains, Dr. Fakhouri’s notebook describes the day’s winning historian: “He undeniably drank to excess, and as far as women goes, he is essentially very shy. One feels that he is sexually terribly inhibited. He is obsessively clean and tidy.”35 At stake is not the accuracy of the detail, but its supplementary quality, its irreducible exteriority appended to the body of an image. It is in the supplementarity of revisions and phantasies that the other subject appears. Always beside the point, Fakhouri’s secondary revisions push the practice of history into the space of a daydream.

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The desire that propels Ra’ad’s video—that of a unified subject of the Lebanese Civil War, secure in a distinct moment of time—gives way to the phantasies that determine any historiography. To write history is to daydream, to allow for the fluidity of its subjects and to relinquish the possibility of its finitude. The secondary revision of a history is what makes that history possible in the first instance, always too late. From history to memory, Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) provides another version of phantastic revision. Cutting scenes from the film work of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Arnold’s found-footage work rewrites the compulsively repetitive narratives that constitute Rooney and Garland’s Andy Hardy and other films. In Alone, Hollywood films assume the status of historical documents. Arnold’s rewriting of the Hollywood artifacts comes to expose the phantasies that inform the desires repressed in the original films. Or rather, the revisions ascribe symptoms to the original as if they had been repressed.36 Arnold superimposes Freud’s primal phantasy of the Oedipal crisis over Hollywood narratives of romance, allowing the two layers of myth to generate a new set of hysterical symptoms. Oedipus and its exaggeration. Arnold’s revisions of the Oedipal scene—the erotic caresses between mother and son, the father’s violent eruptions and assault of the son, the mother’s despair at the arrival of a new erotic object—are all exaggerated by the stutters and repetitions that Arnold introduces into scenes that might have already sustained an Oedipal form. This is a strategy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a line of escape from the grand narrative of the psychosexual subjectivity after psychoanalysis. From their analysis of Oedipal structures in Kafka: “To expand and augment Oedipus by adding to it and making a paranoid and perverse use of it is already to escape from submission . . . Opening the impasse, unblocking it. Deterritorializing Oedipus into the world instead of reterritorializing everything in Oedipus and the family.”37 An exaggerated Oedipus releases the subject from the grip of its tyranny and back into the world, deterritorialized. Exaggeration represents a way out. “But to do this, Oedipus had to be enlarged to the point of absurdity, comedy.”38 The absurd enlargements in Alone take the form of repetition. Rather than adding to the text, Arnold repeats pieces of it, enlarging and expanding the family structure to the point of absurdity. Arnold dismantles Hollywood cinema, in a manner similar to the dismantlings that Deleuze and Guattari discover in Kafka. In the French original “démontage,” anti-Oedipus, anticinema. Of Kafka, they write: “The dismantling of the assemblages makes the social representation

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take flight in a much more effective way than a critique would have done and brings about a deterritorialization of the world that is itself political and has nothing to do with an activity of intimacy.”39 Arnold’s démontage thrusts Andy Hardy’s desires outward, outside of familial territories and into the world as a comic phantasy.40 Each inscription, each act of démontage scratches the surface of a desire, its mise-en-scène, and accumulating, in the process, a set of marks along its ˇ exterior. This construction of exteriority determines, according to Zizek, the place where all phantasies are destined—the outside. “The Unˇ conscious is outside,” Zizek writes, “not hidden in any unfathomable 41 depths.” The unconscious is in this sense an ex-conscious, located elsewhere, outside, where desire accrues. On the outside, Alone generates a series of symptoms that implicate the viewer in a transgression of the law that determines the original myths. The revisions and perversions of ˇ order, of the law, implement the very conditions of desire. Zizek says, a “fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way,” rather, it “constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire.’ ”42 ˇ Phantasies are, in Zizek’s reading, pedagogical and, one might add, as he does elsewhere, fundamentally political in nature. As supplements to established orders—myth, narrative, truth, law—they subvert a politics of the unique subject, or single author. They disorder the world, and in the case of found-footage cinema, they dismantle even the revision. The secondary revisions that constitute found-footage cinema revise and devise, assemble and dissemble the originary documents, materials, and forms, as well as their orders. “To create is to understand,” says Trinh T. Minh-ha, “and to understand is to re-create.”43 For Trinh, the fluid lines of inscription between author and viewer provide an exemplary relation between media producer and consumer. Operating according to a practice of interminable revision, she offers this scenario, which can be read as a manifesto of media reinscription: The maker constantly reads and re-reads, and is the first as well as the nth . . . viewer of her own text, while the viewer is co- and re-creator of the media text in the diverse readings it is able to engender. Thus, the media text which challenges its commodity status by letting itself be experienced only in an activity of production . . . radically acknowledges the plural texture of life—of intervals among words, images, sound, silence. It invites the perceiver/reader to follow what the creative gesture has traced, therefore rendering visible how it can be unmade, restored to the void, and creatively re-made. It reflects on itself

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as social/textual activity by apprehending the same language with a foreigner’s sight; hearing, looking, and listening with intensity in unexpected places; making mistakes repeatedly where it is not supposed to; displacing thereby the stability of correct syntaxes and fixed nominations.44

Like the intervals and gaps that determine Freud’s dream work, Trinh’s media text resembles a dream that has been exposed by the productive logic and politics of revision. It resembles, reassembles, a phantasy that has punctured the continuity of a work and destabilized its “correct syntaxes.” Like phantasies, Trinh’s media renders visible how every idea, every object, and every instance of the real “can be unmade, restored to the void, and creatively re-made.” It teaches one to perceive reality with a “foreigner’s sight,” to discover at the center of one’s thought and experience of the world, the irreducible distance of another world. Foundfootage films and videos, which are also by definition heterogeneous, inscribe those traces of revision and offer the possibility of a practice based on the operations of phantasy, différance, démontage, and deterritorialization. The convergence of fact and figure, the document and its revision in found-footage work illuminates the possibility of conceiving a documentary aesthetics of the phantastic. Jay Rosenblatt’s Human Remains, Walid Ra’ad’s The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, among many other works, provide an opportunity to begin to think about the rhetoric of phantasy in the realm of the documentary—a category that has perhaps already been conceived phantasmatically. To recycle, revise, and reinscribe media opens lines of escape to other topographies of representation. In the deterritorialization of commercial media, another world of cinema becomes possible outside, only.

Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5. Différance, Jacques Derrida says of his neologism, refers “to an order which no longer belongs to sensibility.” “But neither can it belong,” he continues, “to intelligibility.” Neither sensible nor intelligible, différance “belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense,” but to “the strange space . . . between speech and writing” (original emphasis). A “strange space” shared also by the dream. 2. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 226. 3. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James

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Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 5:489. 4. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 226. 5. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 5:490. 6. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 5:490. 7. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 5:491. 8. Dziga Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 50. Sections of Vertov’s numerous Kino-Eye manifestos bear a resemblance to Freud’s dream work, especially to secondary revision and the censoring agency. “Instead of surrogates for life (theatrical performance, film-drama, etc.),” wrote Vertov in 1925, “we bring to the workers’ consciousness facts (large and small), carefully selected, recorded, and organized from both the life of the workers themselves and from that of their class enemies.” ˇ 9. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 48. 10. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 5:492. 11. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 314. 12. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 316. 13. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 318. 14. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 318. 15. Derrida, “Différance,” 5. 16. Derrida, “Différance,” 5. 17. Christian Metz, “Film and Phantasy,” in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 136. 18. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 315. “Cinema offers,” says Jean-Louis Baudry, “an artificial psychosis.” For Baudry, the comparison of cinema to the unconscious, especially the dream, is premised on the ability of both to simulate reality, to generate the experience of a “real perceived from the outside” (310). The result is a “fusion,” he says, “of the interior with the exterior,” which effects a simulation and representation of the subject to itself (311). In dreams and films, Baudry concludes, “the subject is induced to produce machines which would not only complement or supplement the workings of the secondary process but which could represent his own overall functioning to him: he is led to produce mechanisms mimicking, simulating the apparatus which is none other than himself” (317). 19. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–18. 20. David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 16.

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21. See, in this connection, Philip Rosen, “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 58–89. Rosen writes of Grierson’s “phraseology”: “An arena of meaning centering on the authority of the real founded in the indexical trace, various forms of which were rapidly disseminated at all levels of industrial and now postindustrial culture” (66). 22. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 314–15. 23. For a historical overview of the compilation film that leads to foundfootage cinema, see Patrik Sjöberg, The World in Pieces: A Study of Compilation Film (Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2001). 24. Paul Arthur, “Bodies, Language, and the Impeachment of Vision: The Avant-Garde at Fifty,” in A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 140. 25. Arthur, “Bodies, Language, and the Impeachment of Vision,” 140. 26. Derrida, “Différance,” 13. 27. Derrida, “Différance,” 13. 28. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 318. 29. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams 5: 529–30. 30. Many of Rosenblatt’s found-footage works forge relations between the individual and the historical, the singular and the universal, the personal and the mythical, and the particular and the general. In addition to Human Remains, Rosenblatt’s The Smell of Burning Ants (1994), about a boy’s relation to his own violence and masculinity, and King of the Jews (2000), about a boy’s relation to Jesus Christ’s Judaic heritage and the representation of Christ and Judaism, and Phantom Limb (2005), about Rosenblatt’s own work of mourning for a brother lost in childhood, among other films and videos, search for the point of contact between singular voices and the archive, small tensions in the historical spaces and times of the filmed image. 31. In a subsequent work, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2000), Ra’ad invents the author and autobiography of Lebanese hostage Souheil Bachar, who was kidnapped in Beirut in 1983 and held in solitary confinement for ten years, except for twenty-seven weeks in 1985, when he was held with famous American hostages Terry Anderson and others. Of the fifty-three tapes that Bachar made, only numbers 17 and 31, says Ra’ad, are available in North America and Western Europe. The tape opens onto a white screen. In a voice-over narration, Souheil Bachar introduces himself, then gives instructions for voice-over and subtitle translations: His narration is to be translated into the “official” language of the country where it is shown (i.e., “English in the U.S. and U.K.”); the voice-over should be that of “a neutral-toned female”; and subtitles should be set against a gray or blue background. The background turns blue (“like the Mediterranean”), a small magnetic storm, and then Bachar appears. 32. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Phantasy (or Fantasy),” 318, original emphases. 33. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and The Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 109. 34. Ziad Abdallah and Farah Awada, Foreword, “The Plates,” Public Culture 11, no. 2 (1999): ii. 35. Abdallah and Awada, Foreword, “The Plates,” v.

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36. Elizabeth Cowie suggested this structure of retroactively applied symptoms. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 10. 38. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 10. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 47. 40. In his digital video installation Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002), Martin Arnold continues the démontage of his previous found-footage films in another direction. He erases characters from a minor horror film—The Invisible Ghost (1941), directed by Joseph H. Lewis and starring Bela Lugosi— removing them entirely in some instances from the film. Arnold digitizes the film image, then removes just the human figures, replacing the background to create a seamless erasure. At other times, he removes only the spoken dialogue from the film’s sound track, then, using a morphing technique, seals the characters’ mouths shut. Arnold induces a kind of Oedipal différance, in which characters have been displaced from themselves in space and time and from the meaningful relations that would define them. The results are comical and in places dreamlike, but only as an effect of the horror from which they originate. ˇ 41. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 3. ˇ 42. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 7. 43. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The World as Foreign Land,” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 194. 44. Trinh, “The World as Foreign Land,” 194–95, emphasis added.

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Cinematography. In a brief essay from 1973, “L’Acinéma,” Jean-François Lyotard speculates on the relation between cinema and negation, filmmaking as the labor of negating movement.1 The title of the essay almost forms a pun, forms an almost or aborted pun, a silent negation of the negation, a denegation of “la cinéma” as “l’acinéma.” The pun collapses because the French word “cinéma” carries a masculine article, “le cinéma.” Lyotard’s negation of cinema as acinema produces a mild sonic play, almost inaudible, through the already somewhat faint acoustics of gendered nouns. “La cinéma,” “l’acinéma” represents a transgendered cinema (the negation of cinema as feminization); Lyotard’s “a,” which forms the basis of the negation, transposes one cinema into the body of another, virtual cinema, acinema of eliminations. One cinema among many possible cinemas, a cinema, but also the antithesis of cinema, anticinema, acinema. The other or noncinema in a woman’s body, as a woman’s body, a kind of drag cinema. A mother cinema. In “L’Acinéma,” Lyotard insists that although “cinematography is the inscription of movement,” individual films are created by eliminating the superfluous movements of “actors and other moving objects,” but also “of lights, colors, frame, and lens.”2 “It seems,” he says, “that image, sequence, and film must be constituted at the price of these exclusions.”3 Each film is formed by retaining some movements while eliminating others: “Which movements and moving bodies [mobiles] are these? Why is it necessary to select, sort out, and exclude them?”4 169

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Figure 23. Martin Arnold, Soft Palate. Courtesy of Martin Arnold.

Lyotard’s description implies a balance between the inscription of movement and its elimination, between writing and erasing, inscription and exscription. But even more than antithetical gestures or impulses, Lyotard’s acinema implies a form of writing under erasure, a writing generated by erasure, deinscription or exscription as a mode of writing. The erasure of movement is also an order of movement. And from these erasures, specific films are born, cinema is born; each film a synthetic body of movements designed to appear organic. A film corpus. Each movement represents a specific force, what Lyotard calls an “intensity,” which either

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contributes to the order of the whole or threatens to pull the film apart, to disorganize its narrative or trajectory. Mistaken (superfluous, unnecessary, excessive) movements are eliminated, along with their intensities, until the film comes to resemble an order, an organic corpus. We observe that if the mistake [le décrochage] is eliminated it is because of its incongruity, and to protect the order of the whole (shot and/or sequence and/or film) while banning the intensity it carries. And the order of the whole has its sole object in the functioning of the cinema: that there be order in the movements, that movements be made in order, that they make order. Writing with movements—cinematography—is thus conceived and practiced as an incessant organizing of movements following the rules of representation for spatial localization, those of narration for the instantiation of language, and those of the form “film music” for the sound track. The so-called impression of reality is a real oppression of orders.5

The organization of movements involves the elimination of stray intensities, “the subordination of all partial drives, all sterile and divergent movements,” until an order becomes visible, even sensible.6 Lost are the extensities that threaten to take an orderly film outside of itself. This corpus of movements, of cinematographics, determines the law of each individual film, ordered and organic, born, says Lyotard, from a “nihilism of movements.”7 “The film,” he insists, “is the organic body of cinematographic movements.”8 The visibly organic body of a film is engendered by the erasure of movements that threaten to disorganize the film, to pull it apart into parts and pieces. This is the repression (of erasure) that allows films to appear organic. But what of the stray intensities? What happens when the right movements and their intensities are accidentally eliminated, and the wrong ones are left to surge through a film? What if too many movements are eliminated, leaving the film lethargic and tired, immobile and empty? Chaos or catalepsy? According to Lyotard’s schema, surplus and deficit intensity, the two poles of “immobility and excess movement,” serve as the very basis for the possibility of pleasure.9 For the possibility of an expenditure without return. In practice, immobility and excess movement are features of, Lyotard notes, the “experimental and underground” cinemas. One filmmaker in particular has based an entire cinema on surplus and deficit movement, small degrees of excess and absence that generate throughout his corpus a series of tremors and nervous disorders. In his found-footage trilogy, pièce touchée (1989), passage à l’acte (1993), and Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), Martin Arnold manipulates

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Figure 24. Martin Arnold, Postcard from Arnold. Courtesy of Martin Arnold.

individual film frames from various black-and-white Hollywood films, breaking down shots, sequences, and entire scenes in the vibration of small excesses and absences. Arnold’s Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002)—based on Joseph H. Lewis’s The Invisible Ghost (1941)—is a feature-length digital reworking of the original that develops an architecture of cinema unimagined by Lyotard. Unimagined and unimaginable in the terms that bind Lyotard’s economy, but also an unimaginable cinema as such. A cinema of the unimagined and unimaginable, Arnold’s work consists of a series of unimages, animages. The animagination of cinema in Deanimated is not simply a matter of economy, of avoiding returns, but rather of diminishing movement and representation, a materiality of the empty. After Deanimated, Arnold has returned to animation, to the postapocalytic icons Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and Tom and Jerry to reanimate the animal bodies that populate the end of cinema, the end of history. In Deanimated, Arnold has digitally erased most of the characters from the film at various points in a quasi-random sequence, leaving behind stretches of vacant space and interaction. He has also removed or altered portions of the dialogue and closed the mouths of several speaking actors. Left behind are largely useless and awkward bodies, the nervous residues of disappearance. The bodies have become bundles of uncoordinated movements; disorganized, they remain in the film uncomfortably, especially in those scenes in which Arnold has morphed the mouths of characters shut.10 During scenes that originally contained dialogue, Arnold has, in places, removed the voices and digitally sutured the actors’ mouths shut, erasing not only the sounds of voices but also

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the oral gestures that produce them. The result is a deformed set of bodily gestures that seem like impulsive twitches and attempted restraint. Absent the dialogue, the bodies seem to wait out the duration of the conversation, leaving scenes of twitching individual figures anxiously gazing at others for any sign of relief. Early in the film, Kessler (Bela Lugosi) dines with his wife, who is invisible to the other characters and to the audience. (Mrs. Kessler is presumed dead and the widower suffers each year from a melancholic delusion. She is in fact alive and mad, and manipulates her husband hypnotelepathically to commit murder.) Only Kessler sees his imaginary wife. Evans, the butler, and Virginia, his daughter, play along with the charade. When Virginia’s boyfriend Ralph stumbles on the scene, Virginia pulls him aside to explain the situation. At this point, Arnold introduces a series of vocal lapses and digital morphs into their conversation. “I don’t understand” . . . “Well it happened several years ago” . . . “Father worshipped me” (“worshipped her,” in the original) . . . “It almost broke my father’s heart.” Throughout the scene, inappropriate gestures, unmotivated looks, and aggressive silences or nonresponses generate a mildly hysterical breakdown between the two. (By changing, in Virginia’s explanation, the object of Kessler’s affection from “her” (his wife) to “me” (Virginia), Arnold has initiated the theme of incest, which remains as a subtext throughout Deanimated.) Suddenly, Ralph lunges toward Virginia and begins to kiss her passionately. Nothing has been explained, nothing has provoked the embrace, which appears driven by an inexplicable libidinal surge. (One objective of the commercial cinema, says Lyotard, is to purge “all impulsional movement” [tout mouvement impulsionnel].)11 The scene ends when the camera cuts to a close-up of Ralph, who looks startled, as if discovered in the act of committing a crime. He looks toward the foyer and sees Cecile, the maid. His apparent fear, banal and overwrought in the original, is left unexplained in Deanimated. Another feature of Deanimated is the insertion of alien technologies into the space of the cinema technic. Once considered the exemplary technology, cinema, in Arnold’s revision, looks distantly photographic, faded, pretechnological; the visible horizon constricted and stifling. Arnold has infected the liminal space with a set of barely perceptible technological functions and effects that make Kessler’s home, where the film is set, uncanny. Erasures and morphs, which constitute Arnold’s principal interventions, tear small movements into and away from the original,

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recalibrating it as a set of partial intensities. The digital compositing generates visible and invisible meshes in which images are added and blocked by others. The returns of each movement, what Lyotard calls “value,” have been stripped from the film. The economy of Arnold’s cinema generates invaluable, valueless movement. Camera movements with no apparent destination or purpose; zooms and pans to and from nothing. From time to time, one is surprised to find a face or a figure at the other end of a camera movement, as if the presence of a face or the origin of a look is gratuitous, ridiculous, or repulsive. What is this person doing there, in the house? The body is itself an excess movement in the deanimated economy of Arnold’s work, the actors “crippled,” says Arnold. Lacking key elements of their bodies—organs and voices—they are a useless assemblage of organs without bodies. “They should seem to be objects as well,” says Arnold, “like the objects in the empty interiors.”12 Inscription. Inscribed in Deanimated is a form of phantom writing, a ghost script, a writing that removes the sign and leaves only traces. Description, one could say, unscribing, exscribing, writing out of view, a writing that leaves behind a graphic emptiness. Acinematography, writing as removal, removing, removement. Invisibility. The invisibility that permeates Deanimated is marked by a disorder: many characters seem to see what has been erased. Not a genuine invisibility, but a visibility marked by the absence of bodies. The house acts as the center of the film, the human characters afterthoughts, accidents, useless movements that periodically traverse the profilmic space. Deanimated circumvents the body, circumscribes and circumcises it: Here, as in Arnold’s earlier works, the body is itself an excess—unsightly, excremental. In Deanimated, visuality does not originate in, nor does it return to the body. Human bodies are slight interferences in the trajectory of an empty visuality, an inhuman visuality of the camera. Another form of invisibility plays throughout Deanimated in the figure of the black butler, Evans. (See Evans, below.) Interval. Arnold’s work has inserted intervals throughout the film that reroute the logical flow of the original. Those intervals are often sites of massive immobility, points of unbearable frustration at the inaction of the body. Arnold’s bodies are always under only a partial erasure: something is left. A mild convulsion, irrepressible twitches, looks into and from nowhere, sometimes an effect that lingers in the place of an erasure. A trace of the erasure as an ex-sign, an intensity. (The fantasy of a sign of intensity, a graphics of the unimagi-

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nable.) Incest. The triangle of father, absent mother, daughter is enhanced in Arnold’s revision of the original. Like the exaggerations that charge the obscene familial gestures of Alone—Andy Hardy rubbing his mother’s shoulders and thrusting his body into her from behind while she licks her lips and flutters her eyes—the imposed restraint between father and daughter, the slight brushes between them, and a few lapses and changed lines in Deanimated produce an electric, Electral, anti-Oedipus. Oedipus, who had his feet pierced at infancy, and whose name bears the sign of his crippling—“swollen feet”—is, like Kessler, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, a master criminal-victim. (Like Oedipus, Kessler fails to realize he is the perpetrator of the crimes that disturb him so much.) Arnold describes one of his approaches to the symptomatic acting he has engendered in Deanimated: One is the “hanging around” approach, they look as if they are relaxing, dreaming, waiting for the part they can act out, but they’re either too early or too late. I think that’s interesting, because it contradicts the usual expectations: actors are usually acting in feature films, they usually have something to do or to say, they don’t hang around—hanging around in front of the camera is a Warhol-like approach that didn’t exist in the 40s. Back then (times were better) actors were still actors and they had to act. That’s what they were paid for. In Deanimated we’re looking at actors in their spare time, Warholian actors that were born too early.13

Adirecting, “la mise hors scène,” says Lyotard.14 A cast of Oedipuses limping behind the crime and its investigation, always arriving too late, only to discover they have already been there. Investigation. The Invisible Ghost and Deanimated operate according to the narrative structure of detection and investigation, the resolution of a string of murders. While The Invisible Ghost moves, however lamely, toward closure, Deanimated reveals less and less, until blackness overtakes the final minutes of Arnold’s revision. An inverted Oedipal structure in the form of an absent mother, a father and daughter left together, and an epidemic of blindness or invisibility that overtakes the house and ultimately the work. The film has been blinded, has succumbed to the Oedipalizing force of erasure, every spectator blinded and silenced, like Oedipus in the end. When the Inspector, whose task consists of vigilance, investigation (inspection), and interrogation, succumbs to the mute and inarticulate order of Arnold’s house, the edifice of audiovisuality itself seems to have collapsed. Arnold’s Deanimated is accompanied by two companion works: shorter, erased loops from All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952). The three erasures and morphs,

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which form a triptych, are in fact installations. By moving the screening space from a theater (where Arnold’s earlier works were projected) to a specific installation site, consisting of three works projected across five screens, Arnold has marked the break from cinema to ambient space, televisuality, digital video. The break is not primarily technological in nature, but spreads across the temperature of visual media—the cool spaces that Arnold occupies allow one to sense the deanimation of film, the cooling of cinema into the folds of other media. The emphasis is never technological in Arnold’s media—although the techniques are dazzling— but rather symptomatic. Technological functions illuminate the excesses and deficits of the image. A superficial interiority opens within each work (an exergue), but also as a set of installations; the line that separates life from animation, image from experience, and excess from deficit no longer falls on the screen, but seeps into the architecture. They become exstallations. Nihilism. The nihilism that Lyotard rejects is different from the asystemic eliminations of Arnold’s work. The nothings that linger in Deanimated form a material presence, a form of haunting. The very term elimination is a solecism since only the figures are eliminated from the surface of the narrative: what is not seen is the substitution of a trace, the material inscription of something else that replaces the missing figure in the form of nothing. There, invisible, but perceptible. Looking at nothing, watching someone looking at nothing, following empty points of view is not a nihilism as such. Deanimated enacts an extensive annihilation, the destruction of “the unity of an organic body.” This is not a nihilism (a politics of total destruction), but a reversal of the nihilistic tendency of the commercial cinema, a rejection of the despair that envelopes the very desire for order. Following the spirit of Lyotard’s language, one could say, an anihilism. Erasure. For Lyotard, the economy of cinema operates on the principles of “exclusions and effacements.”15 In his schema, exclusions are largely unconscious, effacements are part of the active work of eliminating useless movements. But Arnold’s gestures are neither, since they are both conscious and unconscious erasures, and circulate within an entirely distinct film economy from that articulated by Lyotard. The exclusions that spread throughout Deanimated are material forms of emptiness, excretions on the surface of the film, stains rather than negations. Effacement is an even more complex issue in Arnold’s work, because the rearranged faces of Deanimated are not effacements in the ordinary

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sense of the term. The morphographic closures, especially of mouths, can be considered the exact contrary of effacement, materially and conceptually. Surfacing or resurfacing rather than effacing. The butler Evans, for example, represents a key resurface in Arnold’s recycled work. In the reworked version, he is, Arnold notes, “the only character regularly referred to by name,” and serves as a key conduit between the various rooms and moments of the narrative. From a ubiquitous and invisible device in the original, Arnold has turned Evans into a central figure of the perverted narrative. Already only extra, Evans’s visibility has been enhanced in Deanimated, perhaps the only character to increase in this register. By disfiguring the actors, Arnold has reconfigured Evans, moving him from an already-effaced extra to a central figure in the new economy of paralyzed life. He has been eraced from the film, which is to say, his race has become visible. In one scene, Evans rushes into Kessler’s room early in the morning after discovering the murdered body of the maid (which Arnold has erased). Leaning onto the sleeping Kessler’s bed, Evans whispers, “Mr. Kessler?” “Yes?” “Something terrible has happened.” What follows are series of exchanges, silent intensities, where Arnold has suppressed the ensuing dialogue and sealed their mouths. The encounter concludes when Kessler says, “Call the police, I’ll see what I can do.” The exchange between Kessler and Evans, overdetermined by the aesthetic, political, social, racial, and gendered functions of the human figure in 1941, has been expropriated, emptied, and reduced to a comical and touching series of inarticulate exchanges between an interracial couple in and over a bed. Evans has assumed the figure of a nervous intruder, a tentative predator (a stereotype buried in the figure of the black domestic). What has happened in the span of the morph—a partial seduction? An expressive communication of desire? What has been eliminated is the infrastructure that determines and overdetermines the encounter, leaving behind only the erotic vacuum of pure, disfigured intensities. Regarding such erotic vacuums, Naomi Uman follows another path toward erasure in removed (1999). After staining recycled scenes from pornographic films in pink nail polish, she carefully removes, frame by frame, the women from their scenes of exploitation, leaving behind white shadows where their bodies once were. The film is emptied of its women. Martin Arnold. The Japanese concept ma (䭧), space, refers to the interstices that constitute aesthetic space and experience, perhaps what Vertov meant by “interval.” It appears in Lyotard’s notion of the renunciation of

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bodily totality in art and theater when he invokes the “almost imperceptible movements of the Nô theater.”16 If the Noh theater is the reduction of the theatrical body to a near immobility, then Arnold’s Deanimated crosses the threshold from theater to cinema by orchestrating the transformation of the body to empty movements. The romantic materiality of Lyotard’s acinema has been transfigured—muted, mutated, mutilated—in Deanimated into pre-vocal murmurs and mutterings. (Mutter, mother.) Maternity, a feminized cinema—“la cinema,” “ma cinema”—erupts in Deanimated in the figure of a negated and absent mother. (Murderer.) The missing mother, the phantom mother who haunts and destroys the house and its occupants, produces all around her a “madhouse architecture,” according to Arnold, in which the human figures seem intellectually and emotionally crippled, drugged, or hypnotized. Malcontent, malfunctioning. Like the homicidal mother already inside Kessler (a male mother, MALE, and prototype Norman Bates), Deanimated renders maternity within masculinity, a parasite maternity, “ma” and “pa” cinema—a polymorphology of cinema, gender, and the sexes. One effect of Lyotard’s neologism is that it establishes a kind of cyclical word, a faux palindrome that invokes Duchamp’s anagram, “anemic.” Words that fold into and disappear into other words. Arnold’s revision infects the inhabitants of Kessler’s house with a form of anemia, the gradual loss of red blood cells, oxygen, and energy in a decreasing, inverse animation, deanimation. Movement and paralysis, vitality and exhaustion, image and erasure, cinema and anemia set the limits of Deanimated. Movement, repetition, repeal, removal. “The acinema,” says Lyotard, “would be situated at the two poles of . . . extreme immobilization and extreme mobilization.” It is only in thought that these two modes are incompatible. In a libidinal economy they are, on the contrary, necessarily associated; stupefaction, terror, anger, hate, pleasure—all the intensities—are always displacements in place. We should read the term emotion as a motion moving toward its own exhaustion, an immobilizing motion, an immobilized mobilization.17

Acinema. A word that begins and ends in “a” and suggesting reversibility, like Arnold’s earlier film, Alone; a word loop, like so many of Arnold’s films. At the end of cinema, in the mark of its negation, is its beginning in the circular “a” that cycles and recycles cinema, acinema. Of the premature blackout that consumes the final minutes of Deanimated, Arnold says, “no light, no cinema, not even an acinema.”18 Nothing is left, cinema ex nihilo. The dark screen signals the end of cinema, this and every

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Figure 25. Martin Arnold, Haunted House. Courtesy of Martin Arnold.

cinema, but also a point of departure for the cinema that comes after cinema, after this and every cinema, from this and every cinema, ex-cinema. No longer cinema. Afterlife, ex-cinema. From this end, cinema starts over in Arnold’s work after Deanimated; it comes from a series of recycled animations he calls “cartoon works.” Arnold’s dialectic of animation and erasure moves from live to drawn bodies, fulfilling a mode of corporeality always at work in his cinema: the collapsing distinction between organic and mechanical bodies, living beings and shadow puppets. Arnold brings the display of animation after animation, after total deanimation into full view in his series drawn from iconic animal cartoons: Shadow Cuts (2010), Soft Palate (2010), Self Control (2011), and Haunted House (2011). In these films, the remove from photography, the exergual space he opens between original and copy is mediated by another hybrid figure, the animated animal, a being neither natural nor supernatural, but suspended between the two. Even these animals, monsters in their original incarnation, are subjected to the exacerbations of movement frequent in Arnold’s work, as well as to the excisions of movement Lyotard describes in “Acinema.” Drawing from cartoon animals, drawing and undrawing these iconic figures, drawing and quartering these monstrous figures, Arnold creates a new breed of animation, an animation that no longer tracks the movement from still to moving image, but rather one that creates

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movement upon movement in a void, a movement that no longer exudes vitality but instead a deep stillness. It is the ultimate paradox that emerges in the wake of cinema, of Arnold’s and all other cinemas, a morbid animation that frames the end of cinema with its beginnings, and opens onto a perpetual afterlife one might call ex-cinema. From and no longer cinema, everything moves outside. And at the end of cinema, the outside begins.

Notes 1. Jean-François Lyotard, “L’Acinéma,” in Cinéma: Théorie, lectures (Paris: Ed. Klincksieck, 1973). English translation, Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, trans. Paisley N. Livingston (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 349–59. 2. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 349. 3. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 349. 4. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 349. 5. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 350. 6. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 355. 7. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 350. 8. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 355. “Le film est le corps organique des mouvements cinématographiques.” 9. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 351. 10. Arnold describes morphing, a form of digital compositing, as “a combination of the techniques of warping and dissolving between two images over a specific period of time. Dissolving is known from classical cinema. Warping is a method of distorting an image. Conceptually, it is easiest to think of warping as if your image were printed on a thin sheet of flexible rubber. This rubber sheet can be pushed and pulled by various amounts in various areas until the desired result is obtained.” Author’s conversation with Martin Arnold, August 12, 2002. 11. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 355 (original emphases). 12. Author’s conversation with Martin Arnold, July 16, 2002. 13. Author’s conversation with Martin Arnold, August 3, 2002. The second approach is the “confused intellectually/emotionally crippled” approach, which creates a sense of irreducible disorientation throughout Deanimated. The third approach, which Arnold has strived to minimize, is what he calls “the Invisible Man” approach, a kind of 1950s special effects look. 14. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 354. 15. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 353. 16. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 358. 17. Lyotard, “Acinema,” 356, original emphasis. 18. Author’s conversation with Martin Arnold, August 8, 2002.

Index

Abdallah, Ziad, 162 Achilles (Greek figure), 56 acinema, 169, 170, 178–79 acinematography, 174 The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971, Brakhage), 98 actualities, 156 acyanoblepsia, 20 Adebar (1957, Kubelka), 47, 48 Agamben, Giorgio, 132 AIDS, 26, 35n38, 61, 98 Albers, Josef, 17, 28 Album (2004, Müller), 141, 145–46, 148 Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (Carroll), 112 All About Eve (1950, Mankiewicz), 175 allegory, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86n4 Alloway, Lawrence, 39 Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, Arnold), 59, 69, 127, 128, 163–64, 171, 178 Alpsee (1995, Müller), 139, 140fig., 141, 145, 146 Anger, Kenneth, Fireworks (1947), 42, 43fig. anihilism, 176 animagination, 172 animality, likeness of, 108 animals: Derrida on, 108, 109–10, 118n3, 118n7; in Thater videos, 106–17 animation, and cartoon works of Arnold, 179–80

archaeology of sound, 23, 35n38 Aristotle, 58 Arnold, Martin, 12, 27, 127–29, 132–33, 148, 171–80; Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), 59, 69, 127, 128, 163–64, 171, 178; Brain Again (1994), 70n12; cartoon works of, 172, 179–80; Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002), 127, 132–33, 168n40, 172–79; Don’t—The Austrian Film (1996), 70n12; Haunted House (2011), 179, 179fig.; installations of, 176; Jesus Walking on Screen (1993), 70n12; and memory apparatus, 56–69; passage à l’acte (1993), 59, 65, 127–28, 131, 171; pièce touchée (1989), 59, 63, 64, 65, 127, 131, 171; Postcard from Arnold, 172fig.; “Psycho”—The Viennale Spot 97 (1997), 70n12; Remise (1994), 70n12; Self Control (2011), 120fig., 179; Shadow Cuts (2010), 179; Soft Palate (2010), 170fig., 179 Arnulf Rainer (1958–60, Kubelka), 33n11, 47, 54n26, 124 Artaud, Antonin, 143 Arthur, Paul, 158 asynchronism, 49 autobiography, 121; and blindness, 93, 96–98; of Müller, 138, 139; of Nietzsche on forty-forth birthday, 1–3; reflection in, 104n13; secret, 89–90; in Sink or

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autobiography (continued) Swim (1990, Friedrich), 98–101; and spectrality, 88, 89–90, 97, 98 autoinvisibility, 91 avant-garde cinema, 6, 13n12, 59 Awada, Farah, 162 Bachar, Souheil, 167n31 Back and Forth (1969, Snow), 124 Bacon, Francis, 45, 53n18, 129–32, 133, 136–37n27, 136n20, 136n22 Baldwin, Craig, 8 Baraka, Amiri, 23, 32 Bartel, Paul, The Secret Cinema (1968), 105n27 Barthes, Roland, 16, 33n5, 85, 90, 111; deaths of, 93–94; on photographs, 119, 134nn4–5 Baudelaire, Charles, 57 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 61, 155, 166n18 Bazin, André: on cinema, 4, 5, 44, 52n11, 119, 122, 135n10; on photography, 16, 17, 26, 29, 33n6, 52n11, 53n18, 119, 120, 121–22, 134n5 “Bedroom” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146 Benjamin, Walter, 68, 119 Benning, James, 7 Benning, Sadie, It Wasn’t Love (1992), 7–8 Bergman, Ingrid, 146, 148 The Best Animals are the Flat Animals—The Best Space is the Deep Space (1998, Thater), 110, 113 Bicycle Thief (1948, De Sica), 135n10 Black Is . . . Black Ain’t (1994, Riggs), 98 blindness: autobiographical, 93, 96–98; color, 19, 20; Derrida on, 89, 90, 92–93, 94 Blow Job (1964, Warhol), 6–7, 44 Blue (1993, Jarman), 15, 17, 18, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 31, 35n38, 98 Blue: The History of a Color (Pastoureau), 18–19 blue death, 25, 26 blue language, 26–27, 36n61 blue life, 27, 28 Blümlinger, Christa, 143 Bollack, Léon, 26 Bowie, David, 16 Brain Again (1994, Arnold), 70n12 Brakhage, Stan, 50, 125; The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), 98; Mothlight (1963), 40, 52n3 Breakfast (1976, Snow), 124 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 145

Buñuel, Luis, 58 “Burden of Proof” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146 Bush, George W., 78, 86n11, 86n12 Cahill, James Leo, 61, 130, 136n24 Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, 112; “A Caucus Race and a Long Tale,” 113 cartoon works of Arnold, 172, 179–80 The Caucus Race (1998, Thater), 110, 111 “A Caucus Race and a Long Tale” (Carroll), 113 Cézanne, Paul, 16 The Chelsea Girls (1966, Warhol), 125, 135–36n15 China (1995, Thater), 108, 110, 112–13 Chion, Michel, 49, 55n33 chromaffect, 25 chronography, 44, 50, 51, 55n33 cinemnesis, 68–69 “cineseizures” (Cahill), 61, 130, 136n24 Citizen Ruth (1996, Payne), 86n2 color blindness, 19, 20 Coming Attractions (2010, Tscherkassky), 11–12 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 21 Conner, Bruce, Crossroads (1976), 8, 157 Conrad, Tony, 124, 135n12; The Flicker (1965), 33n11, 50, 124 Crossroad (2005, Solomon and Lapore), 8 Crossroads (1976, Conner), 8, 157 Cummings, E. E., 16 Curtis, Robin, 138 cyanometer instrument, 21, 34n23 D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999, Fathy), 96–97 darkness made visible, blue as, 31–32, 37n74 Davis, Miles, 29 The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996, Hong), 91 Daybreak (1881, Nietzsche), 19 daydreams, 153, 154, 155, 160 The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999, Ra’ad), 29, 161–63 Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002, Arnold), 127, 132–33, 168n40, 172–79 Deleuze, Gilles, 25, 29, 60, 156; on body without organs, 143, 144; on image of movement, 121; Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 163; on painting of Bacon, 129–32, 133, 136–37n27, 136n20, 136n22; Proust and Signs, 59

Index | 183 Delphine (2000, Thater), 110, 112 de Man, Paul, 138 dematerialization, 5 démontage, 139, 144, 163, 164, 165, 168n40 “Derailed” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146 Deren, Maya, 56, 58, 60 Derrida (2002, Kofman and Dick), 102 Derrida, Jacques, 57, 62, 65, 66, 69, 71n21, 87–102; on animals, 108, 109–10, 118n3, 118n7; on différance, 154–55, 158–59; on dream work of Freud, 150, 151; Echographies of Television (Derrida and Stiegler), 94; on exergue of Nietzsche, 1, 2–3; Memoirs of the Blind, 92; on vanishing limit of life, 3 Descartes, René, 109, 114 De Sica, Vittorio, Bicycle Thief (1948), 135n10 Dick, Kirby, 102 différance, 150, 153, 165; Derrida on, 154–55, 158–59 digestures, 124 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 23 “distant proximity” in Müller films, 141, 145, 149n4 Doane, Mary Ann, 121 Don’t—The Austrian Film (1996, Arnold), 70n12 dreams, 58, 150–53; and daydreams, 153, 154, 155, 160; and found-footage films, 159; Freud on, 150, 151–52, 153, 160; and phantasies, 153–55, 156; of writing, 101 Dulac, Germaine, 68 Dunning, George, Yellow Submarine (1968), 32n3 Eat (1963, Warhol), 44 Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888, Nietzsche), 1–3 Echographies of Television (Derrida and Stiegler), 94 ecstasy, Kubelka on, 48, 54–55n28 Eisenstein, Sergei, 4 Electric Mind (1996, Thater), 110, 113, 114fig., 114–15, 118n9 Empire (1964, Warhol), 9, 46, 47 EMPIRE (2008, Solomon), 9 energies of the projector, Gehr on, 125, 135n14 The Entity (1982, Furie), 9 Equiano, Olaudah, 23

erasure, 98, 123, 124; in Deanimated (Arnold), 127, 132–33, 172–73, 176–77; in removed (Uman), 158, 177; and writing in acinema, 170 erotic nature of blue, 27, 36n61 Esperanto, 26 estrangement in Müller films, 138, 140, 143–44, 145 evolution, color vision in, 19–20 excerpts in Müller films, 139, 142, 146, 148 exclusions and effacements, 176–77 exergue, 1–14, 73, 89, 110, 117, 125, 148, 176 Export, Valie, 59 exscription, 126, 170 extimacy, 38–55 extra-hyperreality, 41 extrarealism, 38 eye-line, 95, 104–5n23 Fakhouri, Fadl, 162 Fakhouri, Zainab, 162 Family Plot (1976, Hitchcock), 142 fantasies, and phantasies, 153–55, 156 Farocki, Harun, Videograms of a Revolution (1992), 157–58 Fathy, Safaa, 96, 97fig.; D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999), 96–97 feelings: and color, 25, 27, 28; and expression of love, 91, 96; firstness of, 25; living quality of, 25, 28 Fireworks (1947, Anger), 42, 43fig. firstness, 25–26, 27, 28 Five Year Drive-By (2001, Gordon), 126 Fletcher, Angus, 76, 77, 78 The Flicker (1965, Conrad), 33n11, 50, 124 flicker films, 18, 33n11, 124 Flight (1996, Snider), 70n7 Ford, John, The Searchers (1956), 126 Forgács, Peter, The Maelstrom (1997), 158 Foucault, Michel, 12 found-footage films, 60, 157–65; of Arnold, 127–28, 132, 163–64, 171–80; of Müller, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146; of Rosenblatt, 159–61 Frampton, Hollis, 4, 58; Nostalgia (1971), 50fig., 50–51 Freud, Sigmund, 39, 57, 59, 60, 96, 142; on dreams, 150, 151–52, 153, 160; on film, 68; The Interpretation of Dreams, 151; on memory, 62–63, 64, 65, 69; “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad,” 66; “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, 57 Fried, Michael, 39

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Friedrich, Su, 12; Gently Down the Stream (1981), 100; Rules of the Road (1993), 105n33; Sink or Swim (1990), 98–101, 99fig., 100fig. Furie, Sidney J., The Entity (1982), 9 Fuses (1967, Schneemann), 41, 42–43 Gagarin, Yuri Alekseyevich, 16 Garland, Judy, 69, 128, 129, 131, 163 Gass, William, On Being Blue (1976), 27, 36n61 Gault, Rosalind, 29 Gehr, Ernie: on energies of the projector, 125, 135n14; Reverberation (1969), 125; Serene Velocity (1970), 50; Signal—Germany on the Air (1982–85), 98, 105n31 Gently Down the Stream (1981, Friedrich), 100 gestures and movement, 119–34. See also movement and gestures Ghost Dance (1983, McMullen), 94–95 ghosts, 94–95 Girardet, Christoph, 136n16, 139; Hide (2006, Müller and Girardet), 143; Kristall (2006, Müller and Girardet), 139; Mirror (Müller and Girardet), 144fig.; Phoenix Tapes (1999, Müller and Girardet), 136n16, 139, 146–49, 147fig. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15, 20, 21, 32n2, 34n28, 37n74 Gordon, Douglas, 126–27; Five Year Drive-By (2001), 126; 24 Hour Psycho (1993), 126 gorillagorillagorilla (2009, Thater), 112 Grand Theft Auto video games, 8, 9 Grant, Colesworthy, 29 Graves, Robert, 56 green: in color blindness, 19–20; of plants, 24 Grierson, John, 156 Grundmann, Roy, 6–7, 13n13 Guattari, Félix, 143, 144, 156; Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 163 Gunning, Tom, 10, 11 Haunted House (2011, Arnold), 179, 179fig. Hershey, Barbara, 9 Hide (2006, Müller and Girardet), 143 High Noon (1952, Zinneman), 175 Hill, Gary, 93

Hitchcock, Alfred, 136n16, 139, 142, 146; Family Plot (1976), 142; The Lodger (1927), 142; Phoenix Tapes based on films of, 146–49; Psycho (1960), 126, 142; Strangers on a Train (1951), 142; Under Capricorn (1949), 148; Vertigo, 145 Home Stories (1990, Müller), 125–26, 139, 141, 142–43, 145, 146 Hong Sang-soo, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996), 91 Horwath, Alexander, 10–11 Hoskins, Janet, 25, 33n13 Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2000, Ra’ad), 167n31 The Human Jungle (1954, Newman), 59, 63, 127 Human Remains (1998, Rosenblatt), 159–61, 162, 167n30 hyperrealism, 38–45, 47, 51 I Am a Sex Addict (2005, Zahedi), 73, 82, 86n2 I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994, Zahedi), 73, 81, 86n2 I Was Possessed by God (2000, Zahedi), 86n2 images: blue, 15–32; within images, 95–96; of movement, 121; remaining as traces of the other in us, 93; rhetoric of, 73–86; warping of, 180n10 imagination and phantasy, 156 immateriality of media image, 80 In Memoriam, Mark Lapore (Solomon), 8, 9 inscription in Deanimated (Arnold), 174 intensity, Lyotard on, 170–71 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 151 intervals in Deanimated (Arnold), 174 In the Bathtub of the World (2001, Zahedi), 73, 81fig., 82, 86n2 invisibility: and autoinvisibility, 91; of blue, 20, 21; in Deanimated (Arnold), 174; Derrida on, 89, 91, 92–93, 102; in Outer Space (Tscherkassky), 10; and visibility, 89, 92–93, 96, 102 The Invisible Ghost (1941, Lewis), 132, 168n40, 172, 175; Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost (2002, Arnold) based on, 127, 132–33, 168n40, 172–79 invisible man effect, Arnold on, 132, 180n13 It Wasn’t Love (1992, Benning), 7–8

Index | 185 James, David, 5–6, 13n12, 70n14, 156 Jarman, Derek, 12, 16, 28–29; Blue (1993), 15, 17, 18, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 31, 35n38, 98 Jesus Walking on Screen (1993, Arnold), 70n12 justice and spectrality, 88, 103n4 Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 163 Kafka, Franz, 156, 163 Kamuf, Peggy, 96 Kandinsky, Wassily, 21, 22–23, 24, 31; Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 21 Kennedy, Randy, 83 Khalip, Jacques, 23, 35n38 Kim, Kyung Hyun, 91 King of the Jews (2000, Rosenblatt), 167n30 Kiss (1963, Warhol), 44 Klein, Yves, 28; “Proposition Monochrome: Blue Epoch” (1957), 29 Knots & Surfaces (2001, Thater), 110, 111, 111fig., 117 Koch, Stephen, 44–45, 47, 53–54nn21–22, 125, 135–36n15 Kofman, Amy Ziering, 102 Koren, Zvi C., 22 Kracauer, Siegfried, 40, 43, 46, 47, 53n20, 57, 119, 121, 143 Kraft, Dina, 21–22 Kren, Kurt, 59 Krishna, 16, 22, 23, 24 Kristall (2006, Müller and Girardet), 139 Kubelka, Peter, 47–49, 54n23, 59, 124, 135n13; Adebar (1957), 47, 48; Arnulf Rainer (1958–60), 33n11, 47, 54n26, 124; on ecstasy, 48, 54–55n28; metrical films of, 47–49; on reality in photography, 48, 55n30; Schwechater (1958), 47; on “serving time,” 54n25; Unsere Afrikareise (1961–66), 47, 49 Lacan, Jacques, 64, 71n33, 150 “L’Acinéma” essay (1973, Lyotard), 169 La Jetée (1963, Marker), 148 language: blue, 26–27, 36n61; and Thater videos, 113–14, 115; of video, 107 Laplanche, Jean, on phantasies, 154, 156, 160, 161–62 Lapore, Mark, Crossroad (2005) (Solomon and Lapore), 8 La Région Centrale (1970–71, Snow), 44, 124

Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007, Solomon), 9 Lebanese Civil War, Ra’ad video on, 161–63 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 33n11, 38–40, 41–42, 52n4, 90 Léger, Ferdinand, 46, 53n20 Lewis, Joseph H., The Invisible Ghost (1941), 132, 168n40, 172, 175 Lim, Bliss Cua, 49, 55n34 Linklater, Richard, Waking Life (2001), 86n2 A Little Stiff (1991, Zahedi), 73, 80–81, 86n2 liveness, Derrida on experience of, 94, 95 living quality of feeling, 28 The Lodger (1927, Hitchcock), 142 Long Film for Ambient Light (1975, McCall), 4 Lugosi, Bela, 129, 132, 168n40, 173 Lumière, Auguste, 134n1 Lumière, Louis, 134n1 Lyotard, Jean-François, 61, 71n38, 169–71, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179 MacDonald, Scott, 50, 59 Machinima software, 8, 9 The Maelstrom (1997, Forgács), 158 Malevich, Kazimir, 27 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., All About Eve (1950), 175 Marin, Louis, 93 Marker, Chris, 150; La Jetée (1963), 148 Marks, Laura U., 29, 162 “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant- Garde Film” (Walley), 4 Mattuschka, Mara, 59 Maxwell, James Clerk, 68, 72n45 McCall, Anthony, 4, 13n8; Long Film for Ambient Light (1975), 4 McMullen, Ken, Ghost Dance (1983), 94–95 medium: aspecificity of, 6; specificity of, 4, 5, 6; spiritual, 5, 107; video as, 106, 107 melancholia, 69 The Memo Book (1989, Müller), 138–39 Memoirs of the Blind (Derrida), 92 memory, 56–72; of color, 28; Freud on, 62–63, 64, 65, 69; screen memories, 62–65; and writing, 66, 67 metavideo, 80 metrical films of Kubelka, 47–49 Metz, Christian, 122, 135n11, 155, 160

186

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Index

Michelangelo, 131 minor cinemas, 5–6, 155–56 Mirror (Müller and Girardet), 144fig. Mitchell, Joni, 29 mnemographic propensity of film, 58 Mnemon (Greek figure), 56 Morley, Malcolm, 41; Race Track (1970), 41–42, 52n4 Moten, Fred, 23, 35n40 Mothlight (1963, Brakhage), 40, 52n3 mourning, 95, 103n2 mouth films of Warhol, 44, 53n13 mouth immobilized in Deanimated, 133, 172–73 movement and gestures, 119–34; in Arnold films, 127–29, 132–33, 171–74; in Bacon paintings, 129–32; from camera or apparatus, 123, 174; and digestures, 124; doubling of bodies in, 122, 123, 124, 129; impulsional, 173; Lyotard on, 169–71, 173, 174, 179; primary gestures, 123–24; of profilmic bodies, 123, 124; secondary gestures, 124 Müller, Matthias, 12, 125–26, 138–49; Album (2004), 141, 145–46, 148; Alpsee (1995), 139, 140fig., 141, 145, 146; Hide (2006, Müller and Girardet), 143; Home Stories (1990), 125–26, 139, 141, 142–43, 145, 146; Kristall (2006, Müller and Girardet), 139; The Memo Book (1989), 138–39; Mirror (Müller and Girardet), 144fig.; Phoenix Tapes (1999, Müller and Girardet), 136n16, 139, 146–49, 147fig.; Promises (2003), 144; Sleepy Haven (1993), 140; Vacancy (1998), 148 Mulligan, Robert, 59; To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), 59, 65, 127 Murphy, Pat, “Rachel in Love” (1987), 114, 115 “mystic writing-pad” (Wunderblock), 65–68 nature, blue and green colors dehumanizing, 19, 20 “Necrologue” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146, 147fig., 148–49 Newman, Joseph M., 59; The Human Jungle (1954), 59, 63, 127 New York Times, 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 121; Daybreak (1881), 19; Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), 1–3; on evolution of color vision, 19–20

nihilism, 176 nonsynchronicity, 49, 50 Nostalgia (1971, Frampton), 50fig., 50–51 “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” (Freud), 66 Oedipus, 163, 175 Ogier, Pascale, 94–95 On Being Blue (1976, Gass), 27, 36n61 “On Dreams” (Aristotle), 58 orgone energy, 30 Outer Space (1999, Tscherkassky), 9–11, 10fig. Paige, Rod, 86n12 paracinema, 4, 5 paradocumentary, 160 parenthesis: as type of exergue, 110; and videos of Thater, 112, 113, 114, 117 parergon, 1, 3, 6, 10, 144 passage à l’acte (1993, Arnold), 59, 65, 127–28, 131, 171 Pastoureau, Michel, 18–19, 34n15 Payne, Alexander, Citizen Ruth (1996), 86n2 Pease, Donald, 77, 86n7 Peck, Gregory, 127, 129, 131 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 25–26, 27–28 phantasies, 153–55, 156, 159, 160, 161–62, 164, 165 Phantom Limb (2005, Rosenblatt), 167n30 Phoenix Tapes (1999, Müller and Girardet), 136n16, 139, 146–49, 147fig. photographemes, 38 photographs: Barthes on, 119, 134nn4–5; Bazin on, 16, 17, 26, 29, 33n6, 52n11, 53n18, 119, 120, 121–22, 134n5; color, 16–17, 26, 29; as embalming, 120; evolution of cinema from, 40–41; and hyperrealism, 38–41, 52n3; in Nostalgia (1971, Frampton), 50–51; reality in, 48, 55n30; referent in, 16, 33n5; as reflections, 90; relationship with physical bodies, 119–20, 129, 134n4; as sources for paintings of Bacon, 136n20; in Spacy (1981, Takashi), 7; and time, 43 Picasso, Pablo, blue period of, 29 pièce touchée (1989, Arnold), 59, 63, 64, 65, 127, 131, 171 PixelVision videos of Benning, 7–8 Plot for a Biennial (2011–12, Zahedi), 73, 82–84, 83fig. Pontalis, J.-B., on phantasies, 154, 156, 160, 162

Index | 187 Postcard from Arnold (Arnold), 172fig. postmodernism, 80 primordial elsewhere, Metz on, 122 profilmic bodies, 123, 124 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud), 57 Promises (2003, Müller), 144 “Proposition Monochrome: Blue Epoch” (1957, Klein), 29 prosopopeia, 138, 139, 148 protoplasm, blue, 30 Proust and Signs (Deleuze), 59 Psycho (1960, Hitchcock), 126, 142 “Psycho”—The Viennale Spot 97 (1997, Arnold), 70n12 psychoanalysis, 57; Derrida on, 90, 103n10; phantasy in, 155 psychographic system of memory, 57 psychosis, artificial, Baudry on, 155, 166n18 Ra’ad, Walid, 29; The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (1999), 29, 161–63; Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2000), 167n31 Race Track (1970, Morley), 41–42, 52n4 “Rachel in Love” (1987, Murphy), 114, 115 Rare (2008, Thater), 117 Ray Gun Virus (1966, Sharits), 50 realism, 38–51; Bazin on, 122; chronic, 40, 42, 45, 47; and hyperrealism, 38–45, 47, 51; and time, 42–51 reality: and essential function of film, 57; and phantasy, 156 recycled cinema, 60, 157–65. See also found-footage films red: in acynoblepsia, 20; wavelength of, 21 red life, 27, 28 Reese, Carol, 118n5 reflection: Derrida on, 90, 104n13; and self-reflection, 7 Rehearsals for Retirement (2007, Solomon), 8fig., 8–9 Reich, Wilhelm, 29–30 Reinhardt, Ad, 30 Remise (1994, Arnold), 70n12 removed (1999, Uman), 157fig., 158, 177 revenant, 12, 90, 101, 121, 139 Reverberation (1969, Gehr), 125 revisionary cinema, 150–65; and dreams, 150–53; and found-footage films, 157–65; and phantasies, 153–55, 156 Riggs, Marlon, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t (1994), 98 Rooney, Mickey, 69, 128, 129, 131, 163

Rosenblatt, Jay, 74; Human Remains (1998), 159–61, 162, 167n30; King of the Jews (2000), 167n30; Phantom Limb (2005), 167n30; The Smell of Burning Ants (1994), 161fig., 167n30 Rowe, John, 76, 80 Rules of the Road (1993, Friedrich), 105n33 “Rutland” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146, 147–48 San Francisco Art Institute, 74; Zahedi class at, 73–85 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de, 21, 34n23 Schaeffer, Dick, 141, 145, 149n4 Schneemann, Carolee, Fuses (1967), 41, 42–43 Schwartz, Louis-Georges, 14n20 Schwechater (1958, Kubelka), 47 screen memories, 62–65 The Searchers (1956, Ford), 126 secret cinema, 96, 102 The Secret Cinema (1968, Bartel), 105n27 Self Control (2011, Arnold), 120fig., 179 self-reflection, 7 semiotics: of color, 21, 25, 27; of hyperrealism, 39, 40; of time, 49 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and “The World is A Classroom” video, 73–79, 84–85 Serene Velocity (1970, Gehr), 50 sexuality of blue, 27, 36n61 Shadow Cuts (2010, Arnold), 179 Sharits, Paul, 4, 33n11, 124; Ray Gun Virus (1966), 50; T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969), 18, 50, 124–25 Sharjah Art Foundation, 83 Shipman, Barbara, 117 Shumla (Thater), 116fig. Signal—Germany on the Air (1982–85, Gehr), 98, 105n31 Silverman, Kaja, 121 Sink or Swim (1990, Friedrich), 98–101, 99fig., 100fig. Sitney, P. Adams, 52n3, 52n9, 98, 100, 105n33 sleep: dreams in, 58; Warhol film of, 45–46, 46fig., 47 Sleep (1963, Warhol), 45–46, 46fig., 47 Sleepy Haven (1993, Müller), 140 The Smell of Burning Ants (1994, Rosenblatt), 161fig., 167n30 Smith, Bruce R., 16–17 snail blue, 21, 22, 24 Snider, Greta, Flight (1996), 70n7

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Index

Snow, Michael, 50, 53n12, 124; Back and Forth (1969), 124; Breakfast (1976), 124; La Région Centrale (1970–71), 44, 124; Wavelength (1967), 44, 124 Sobchack, Vivian, 17 Soft Palate (2010, Arnold), 170fig., 179 Solomon, Phil, 8–9; Crossroad (2005) (Solomon and Lapore), 8; EMPIRE (2008), 9; Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007), 9; In Memoriam, Mark Lapore, 8, 9; Rehearsals for Retirement (2007), 8fig., 8–9; Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2008–2009), 9 Sontag, Susan, 119, 134n4 sound: archaeology of, 23, 35n38; audible and inaudible, 96; of blue, 23, 35n38; and chronographic cinema, 55n33; and erased dialogue in Deanimated, 132–33; and time in films of Kubelka, 47, 49 Spacy (1981, Takashi), 7 specters and spectrality, 87–102; and justice, 88, 103n4; and mourning, 103n2; and nonsynchronous time, 49, 55n34; visibility in, 87 “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory” (Lim), 49, 55n34 split-screen projection, 125 Steiner, Rudolf, 24–25, 31–32 Stiegler, Bernard, 94; Echographies of Television (Derrida and Stiegler), 94 Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2008–2009, Solomon), 9 Strangers on a Train (1951, Hitchcock), 142 structuralist films, 124 superrealism, 41, 42 Sylvester, David, 53n18 synchronicity, 49, 55n33; and asynchronism, 49; and nonsynchronicity, 49, 50 Takashi, Ito, Spacy (1981), 7 Taussig, Michael, 29, 33n13 tekhelet, blue represented by, 16, 21–22 Tenney, James, 41, 42 terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and “The World is A Classroom” video, 73–79, 84–85 Thater, Diana, 12, 106–17; as animal artist, 108, 118n5; The Best Animals are the Flat Animals—The Best Space is the Deep Space (1998), 110, 113; The Caucus Race (1998), 110, 111; China (1995), 108, 110, 112–13; Delphine (2000), 110, 112; Electric Mind (1996), 110, 113, 114fig., 114–15, 118n9;

gorillagorillagorilla (2009), 112; Knots & Surfaces (2001), 110, 111, 111fig., 117; Rare (2008), 117; Shumla, 116fig. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Kracauer), 40 time, 42–51; and intervals in Deanimated (Arnold), 174; and movement in cinema, 121; in Müller films, 146; and spectrality, 49, 55n34 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Mulligan), 59, 65, 127 topoi, 90 T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969, Sharits), 18, 50, 124–25 transversality, 60 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 164–65 Tscherkassky, Peter, 9–12, 27, 60; Coming Attractions (2010), 11–12; Outer Space (1999), 9–11, 10fig. Turim, Maureen, 64 24 Hour Psycho (1993, Gordon), 126 Uman, Naomi, removed (1999), 157fig., 158, 177 Under Capricorn (1949, Hitchcock), 148 Unsere Afrikareise (1961–66, Kubelka), 47, 49 Vacancy (1998, Müller), 148 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 145 Vertov, Dziga, 152, 166n8 Videograms of a Revolution (1992, Farocki), 157–58 videos: flexibility and obscurity of, 106–7; language of, 107; of Thater, 106–17; of Zahedi, 73–79, 74fig., 84–85, 86n2 visibility: and blindness, 89, 92–93; and invisibility, 89, 92–93, 96, 102; and spectrality, 87, 89 visuality in Blow Job (Warhol), 6–7 Waking Life (2001, Linklater), 86n2 Walley, Jonathan, 4–5, 6, 13n8 Warhol, Andy, 44–47, 50; Blow Job (1964), 6–7, 44; The Chelsea Girls (1966), 125, 135–36n15; Eat (1963), 44; Empire (1964), 9, 46, 47; Kiss (1963), 44; mouth films of, 44, 53n13; Sleep (1963), 45–46, 46fig., 47 warping of images, 180n10 Wavelength (1967, Snow), 44, 124 Wells, H. G., 26 “Why Don’t You Love Me?” section of Phoenix Tapes, 146

Index | 189 Wills, David, 104n13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 32 “The World Is a Classroom” (2002, Zahedi), 73–79, 74fig., 84–85, 86n2 Worm (2001, Zahedi), 86n2 writing: dream of, 101; and erasure in acinema, 170; and exscription, 170; and inscription in Deanimated (Arnold), 174; and memory, 66, 67; and “mystic writing-pad,” 65–68; and swimming and drowning, 100, 101 Wunderblock (mystic writing-pad), 65–68 yellow: in acynoblepsia, 20; and blue in semiotics of color, Kandinsky on, 21; and polarity of color, Goethe on, 21, 34n28, 37n74; shining outwards, Steiner on, 24

Yellow Submarine (1968, Dunning), 32n3 Youngblood, Gene, 4 Yue, Genevieve, 9 Zahedi, Caveh, 12, 73–85; I Am a Sex Addict (2005), 73, 82, 86n2; I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), 73, 81, 86n2; I Was Possessed by God (2000), 86n2; In the Bathtub of the World (2001), 73, 81fig., 82, 86n2; A Little Stiff (1991), 73, 80–81, 86n2; Plot for a Biennial (2011–12), 73, 82–84, 83fig.; “The World Is a Classroom” (2002), 73–79, 74fig., 84–85, 86n2; Worm (2001), 86n2 Zinneman, Fred, High Noon (1952), 175 Žižek, Slavoj, 153, 164