Everyday Narratives
Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and
Spectatorial Affect through the Quotidian
Effie Rassos
A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Media, Film and Theatre
University of New South Wales
August 2005
ABSTRACT
This thesis takes as its focus the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday not only as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence but also as distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often approached the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ‘real time,’ I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre’s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday.
Beginning with John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) and an analysis of an affective everyday temporality that film is able to produce as a temporal medium, this thesis goes on to consider the quotidian through photography and stillness in Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), dying and witnessing via Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman,
1993), and finally melodrama and unrequited love in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for
i Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000). In the analysis of these films and videos, this thesis draws on film debates explicitly concerned with time as well as focusing on those places in philosophy and critical theory where a promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. In this investigation, the everyday as both a temporal construction and a spectatorial affective experience is a means to reflect on the cinema as a continually shifting and dynamic affective site.
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Originality Statement
“I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.”
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Copyright Statement
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I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in
Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.”
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Authenticity Statement
“I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.”
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v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To begin, I would like to extend my appreciation and gratitude to my supervisor Dr
Jodi Brooks for her constant encouragement, as well as her sheer determination and stamina during this lengthy project. Jodi has not only invested intensely in this thesis but she has also challenged me and my work in a way that has materially altered the way that I think and write. I thank you for your meticulous readings and unerring generosity.
Dr George Kouvaros, the co-supervisor of this dissertation, whose work has greatly influenced my own thinking and approach to film, has been an invaluable guide and mentor throughout this work. I thank you for your continual support, your detailed readings and reflections, and your counsel in relation to both my thesis and the postgraduate experience.
I would also like to extend my appreciation to the faculty of the School of
Media, Film and Theatre, and especially Kathy Arnold and Jennifer Beale for their administrative support and much needed sense of humour.
I have been very fortunate to meet and engage with a group of extraordinary postgraduates in this School (and the School’s former incarnation, the School of
Theatre, Film and Dance). I thank Erin Brannigan, Daniel Edwards and Teresa
Rizzo in particular for their meticulous proofreading, and Daniel and Teresa especially for their enduring support and friendship.
vi Julie Gray, long time friend and confidant, thank you for proofreading the entirety of this thesis and keeping me emotionally afloat during this process. I am so grateful and fortunate that we were able to complete our dissertations at the same time and provide each other with much needed daily (and often hourly) telephone calls (and counselling) that invariably ended in laughter. I thank you for your sense of humour, friendship and love: you have made this experience not only bearable but also truly memorable.
My gratitude and thanks also goes to Annette Radocaj and the extended
Radocaj/Gray/Wilkes clan for their friendship, support and wisdom during this process.
To my sister and friend Jo Rassos, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continual support, love and confidence in my capabilities, for being at the end of the phone when I needed to talk and finally for much needed retail therapy and laughter over countless cups of tea.
Finally I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to a truly inspiring couple who have taught me the joys of everyday life: my parents, Agapi and Alex
Rassos. Thank you for showing me that the emotional highs and pleasures of life can be found in every moment of our daily lives. I thank you for your constant emotional and financial support during this project, as well as your love, encouragement, and continual belief in my abilities even when the project’s completion felt beyond my reach. I dedicate this thesis to you.
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For my parents
viii CONTENTS
ABSTRACT i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE: Everyday narratives: Narrative, filmic time and spectatorial affect 22
CHAPTER TWO: The cinematic punctum: Filmic temporality, affect and photographic stillness 85
CHAPTER THREE: To be dead, even before the dying begins: Thinking the dying body through video 145
CHAPTER FOUR: Cinematic love and spectatorial intimacy 202
CONCLUSION 266
FILMOGRAPHY 277
REFERENCES 280
BIBLIOGRAPHY 298
ix INTRODUCTION
What is at stake [in modernity] is the representability of time for a subject whose identity is more and more tightly sutured to abstract structures of temporality. The theory of rationalization does not allow for the vicissitudes of the affective, for the subjective play of desire, anxiety, pleasure, trauma, apprehension. Pure rationalization excludes the subject, whose collusion is crucial to the sustenance of a capitalist system. In the face of the abstraction of time, its transformation into the discrete, the measurable, the locus of value, chance and the contingent are assigned an important ideological role—they become the highly cathected sites of both pleasure and anxiety. Contingency appears to offer a vast reservoir of freedom and free play, irreducible to the systematic structuring of “leisure time.”—Mary Ann Doane1
From the cinema’s inception, an idea of cinematic time has been, at various moments, at the forefront of theoretical and critical approaches to the medium. The fascination with cinema’s temporal capabilities has also been, and continues to be, a means of reflecting on the specific kinds of affects and emotions that are generated in the act of viewing. With the recent intensification of work in this area encouraged by the publication of the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image in
1989, earlier considerations of filmic temporality such as those by André Bazin have been resurrected and reassessed not only in terms of post-war modernist cinema but also early cinema and contemporary film and video practice.2
1 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
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One such study is Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, The Archive which thinks through the cinema as a crucial medium for reflecting on the kinds of temporalities that structure modern experience. Doane suggests that the cinema (among other related forms such as photography) is in many ways a privileged medium in modern critical thinking because it plays out capitalist
“modernity’s reconceptualization of time and its representability.”3 Here she proposes that at the heart of a modern conception and experience of time is a contradiction that reveals the potential of the cinema. In the opening quotation, Doane argues that the kind of abstract temporal structures that characterise daily life in a capitalist modernity deny an affective experience of time for the subject. As such, chance and contingency produced in a temporal moment become the ideological means to affectively counter the capitalist constructions of work time and “leisure time.” In a temporal moment that generates the possible and the contingent we find a site “of both pleasure and anxiety.”
For Doane, the kind of freedom and pleasure that chance and contingency create are crucial to thinking about early actualities (and the cinema more broadly). In this book length investigation, she focuses on the way early actualities, through their use of such devices as the long take, are able to create a filmic construction of time that is opened on to a kind of chance and contingency that problematises a capitalist rationality and teleology. As a result, the cinema becomes the means to experience time as affectively charged with an anxiety, pleasure, trauma and desire that is refused by a capitalist temporal ordering.4
In this thesis, as it is for Doane, affect is a very specific term that registers the physiological effects of time on both the spectating and performing body. Anxiety,
3 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 4. 4 Ibid., 11.
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trauma and pleasure tell us of the way the tactile and sensory body reacts to a filmic moment as extended, uncertain and ambiguous. As such, affect, or, more particularly an affective experience of time, allows for an identification of the specificity of bodily responses to a filmic moment (especially as created through the long take).
An idea of affect in this dissertation will often function to recall the very responses that are central to Doane. In fact, the affects that are generated by the films central to this thesis often evoke the kind of anxiety, trauma and desire created by early actualities. However, in this investigation affect also functions on a broader plane to suggest the material, sensory and emotional capacities and capabilities of the body as filtered through time. Crucial to this more general definition is Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s adoption of Baruch Spinoza’s affectus in A Thousand Plateaus (which Deleuze also takes up in Cinema 2) where affect is characterised as “an ability to affect and be affected.” They go on to suggest that this affective responsiveness creates a “passage” that allows the body to move from “one experiential state of the body to another…implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.”5
This conception of affect lays emphasis on the capacity “to affect and be affected,” and the way this can potentially create an excess or deficiency of movement via the body’s transition from one affect to another. What is important here is the way
Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Spinoza allows us to think about the body in the film and, more significantly, watching the film as physically responsive to time (in terms of animated movement, the activation of the senses and the release of emotion) as well as immobilised by time (where the body is stopped in its tracks or weighed down by time’s sheer force).
5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), xvi.
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It is this very relation between filmic temporality and spectatorial affect that this thesis will take as its focus. Here I will analyse the connection between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence and the domestic (and often private and intimate) spaces charged with the smallest of acts. In this thesis, the quotidian is constituted through a narrative concern with the everyday gestures and actions that make up our daily lives such as making coffee, eating dinner and shopping.
However in this dissertation, the everyday is also conceived formally through distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often theorised the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ‘real time,’ I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre’s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday because it is a temporal medium that both plays out and constructs a temporal everyday that is affectively and emotionally charged.
In many ways Doane’s examination of early cinema in a capitalist modernity at the turn of the twentieth century resonates strongly with the analysis and ‘reinvention’ of the quotidian in post-war France by Lefebvre. Beginning with the publication of his first introductory volume on the quotidian in 1947 titled Critique of Everyday Life,
Lefebvre intently examined the climate of post-war reconstruction and its relation to
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the capitalist structures and institutions that ordered daily existence. Much like Doane,
Lefebvre takes issue with the organisation of life through a capitalist logic of production and consumption that sees itself played out in the abstract segmentation of time in to work and leisure hours. For Lefebvre this aspect of life, labelled everydayness, is characterised by a habit and banality that positions the subject as alienated from the world, his/her own body and an “authentic” and affective experience of time.6
Throughout Lefebvre’s work an experience of everydayness also harbours the possibility of its own destruction and transformation. The potential disruption of everydayness and of a capitalist (temporal) order arises from within everydayness itself.
This rupture, which Lefebvre identifies as the everyday, is an experience of time as affective rather than structured or structuring. This affective experience not only runs counter to an experience of order and productivity but it also cannot be qualified or codified by language or discourse. As Maurice Blanchot argues in remarks reminiscent of Lefebvre,
We cannot help but miss it if we seek it through knowledge, for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know, just as it is prior to all relation insofar as it has always already been said, even while remaining unformulated, that is to say, not yet information.7
In this thesis, the everyday is a means to think through the kind of affective and emotional responses that are generated by specific articulations of filmic and viewing time. In the same way that the everyday as a conceptual and material category generates
6 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, Introduction, trans. John Moore (London/New York: Verso, 1991), 71. 7 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 15.
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an affectively charged possibility and contingency, the quotidian in film is a means to meditate on the kinds of affective experiences time creates. More than this, the rupture of everydayness through the everyday also finds its correlate in film. If the everyday disrupts the kind of abstract temporal order central to a capitalist logic, the everyday in and by film likewise disrupts and problematises the kind of (abstract) temporal elision and compression characteristic of classical narrative time.
As a figure that has been largely neglected in film studies, Lefebvre and his conception of the everyday as a rupturing affective experience of time extends those areas in film and critical theory that have been interested in reflecting on the connection between film, affect, time and the everyday. In this thesis, the relation between film and affect is closely situated among those examinations that are concerned with an affective viewing experience in terms of bodily response because the everyday is an affective experience of time that is felt and registered on the body. As Vivian Sobchack notes, the interest in “the meaningful relation between cinema and our sensate bodies” begins with early cinema and Sergei Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions.”8 For Eisenstein the cinema’s potential to be a revolutionary and propagandist tool was not only found in the (socialist) meaning and ideas that the cinema and montage could convey but also in the affective, emotional and sensorial responses these ideas generated in the viewer.9
This kind of affective experience is also the key to Tom Gunning’s conceptualisation of the early cinema. Borrowing the term from Eisenstein, Gunning conceives of this cinema as a “cinema of attractions” whose ‘visual shocks’ (which mirrored those of the
8 Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” Senses of Cinema 5 (April 2000), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/5/fingers.html. 9 See Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions” and “Synchronization of Senses,” in The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).
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sensory overloaded everyday at the turn of the century) were the basis of spectatorial fascination and pleasure.10
For Miriam Hansen, the kind of cinematic “attraction” that is so central to
Gunning’s work is equally indebted to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of experience in “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay as well as his entire oeuvre.11 Benjamin has been a key figure in film and critical theory debates concerned with the cinema and its affective capacities because film is regarded as a cultural form that essentially mimics the shock and distraction that characterises modern everyday life. For Benjamin, what we find in the cinema is a practice that both shocks and distracts (through formal strategies ranging from editing to slow motion) in a way that affectively registers on the body. As such the cinema opens the viewer on to an
“unconscious optics” where the eye becomes a ‘tactile organ’ that implicates the sensual and material viewing body.12
For Benjamin an experience of the cinema involves the body’s affective and sensual capacities in a way that sits closely with Siegfried Kracauer’s phenomenological approach to the medium in the 1940s.13 As Kracauer writes, “[t]he material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.”14 In a move akin to Benjamin,
Kracauer suggests that editing, and more specifically “the discontinuity of individual
10 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989): 33. 11 Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 180-181; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-251. 12 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 237. 13 Miriam Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 459, note 33; Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew,” n.p. 14 Siegfried Kracauer cited in Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’,” 458, original emphasis.
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frames and shots” produces a shock experience that ‘directly attacks the viewer’s senses.’15
The centrality of the tactile and sensual viewing body is also fundamental to the phenomenological consideration of film by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sobchack where an idea of embodiment is vital to thinking through the eye (and vision) as a responsive and tactile site that enables and generates a sensory and corporeal experience of the cinema as a material world. An affective viewing experience here is again premised on a sensual, bodily experience that positions the viewer or spectator as a feeling, lived body that is responsive to the world that constitutes the film. As such, the eye and vision are not disenfranchised from the body but rather a means to experience and perceive film in a holistic way. “The address of the eye,” Sobchack writes, “forces us to consider the embodied nature of vision, the body’s radical contribution to the constitution of the film experience.”16
The analysis of an affective and bodily spectatorship has also been crucial to contemporary examinations of genres such as horror, melodrama and the porn film, and the kind of spectatorial pleasure they create. In Linda Williams’ work, the terror, pathos and sexual excitement that is produced by each respective genre is a means to reflect on these genres as “body genres” that allow us to “explore [the genre’s] system and structure as well as its effects on the bodies of spectators.”17 In “Film Bodies:
15 Ibid., 459. 16 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25, original emphasis. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” chap. 4 in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 17 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 3. See also Williams’ respective examinations of porn and melodrama as affective genres in “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision’,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Williams acknowledges that other film genres such as musicals, slapstick comedies and thrillers, (and here I would also include action films), likewise engage the body in a sensory and affective manner. However, Williams privileges horror, porn and melodrama because they engage with the body of the spectator in very particular ways. Here she argues that the designation of these genres as “low” cultural objects stems from the way “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.”18 Even though this mimicry may not be entirely faithful or exact (especially in the case of the porn film), “the success of these genres seems a self-evident matter of measuring bodily response.”19
What is interesting about Williams’ understanding of the affectivity of certain genres is the way it emphasises the often intimate relation between the body in the film and the body watching and experiencing the film. The kinds of affects and bodily responses that are generated by the narratives and the film bodies are a means to examine the viewing body as one that reacts in a concomitant manner. This mirrored response is, for Williams, also inextricably connected to, among other things, the temporalities that structure the narratives and ‘fantasies’ of each genre. While the porn film functions with a temporality that is “on time” (that sees itself played out in the orgasm), the horror film and its violence and terror are generated by a time that is “too early,” and the melodrama a pathos-driven “too late.”20
The relation between specific articulations of filmic temporality, the film body and the viewing body has also been fundamental to conceptualising and theorising an
18 Williams, “Film Bodies,” 4. For Williams, this idea is also connected to the fact that the displayed body is often a female body. 19 Ibid., 5. 20 Ibid., 9.
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idea of cinematic time in film studies and philosophy. In the work of Bazin and
Deleuze, (and especially in Deleuze’s often Bazinian conception of the time-image), the affective connection between the film and viewer is produced by particular constructions of filmic time that are true to the kind of continuous temporality that we experience in material reality. Through such devices as the long take and shot in depth, time and space reflect a material everyday while also being open to possibility, uncertainty and ambiguity.21 For Bazin and Deleuze, this constitutes a cinematic realism that functions in a way that invariably implicates the viewer and the viewing body.
While for Bazin this conception of filmic time is the very thing that constitutes the basis of his ontological arguments around the cinema, for Deleuze the affective everyday temporality that the cinema is able to produce brings together the body of the performer/character with that of the viewer.22
The challenge that this filmic temporality often poses, however, is associated with the function of narrative. In many ways, an affective viewing experience that is generated out of an engagement with a continuous and distended filmic temporality is frequently the very thing that ruptures a narrative causality and closure supported by temporal elision and compression.23 In film studies, the operation of filmic time has been most thoroughly investigated through structuralism’s concern with the temporal
21 André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 27. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150-155. 23 The everyday in this thesis is one means to think through the rupturing of narrative and narrative time. In Annette Kuhn’s study of cinematic memory and viewing practices in Britain in the 1930s, it is an idea of continuous programming (an exhibition practice where the film was screened continuously throughout the day) that problematises classical narrative time. “Continuous programming promotes a relation to the fiction feature film’s organization of narration and of narrative time which goes against the grain of the linearity that characterizes both clock time and the order of temporality commonly attributed to the classical Hollywood narrative…. With continuous programming, narrative time and narrative closure are modified; and narrative time and viewing time are potentially thrown out of alignment.” Annette Kuhn, “Heterotopia, heterochronia: place and time in cinema memory,” Screen 45, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 110.
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ordering of events. The work of Gérard Genette has been crucial to thinking through order, duration and frequency in film, and his terms have formed the basis of film studies’ consideration and classification of time.24 In the work of Brian Henderson,
Maureen Turim, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, for instance, this terminology functions as a means to come to terms with the temporalities that produce and arrange filmic narrative.25
While these analyses have been crucial in setting up a very specific terminology that allows us to consider the operation of time in narrative film (and often non- narrative film), they have often implied rather than articulated the means by which filmic time can function as an affective and material force for the viewer (as well as the performer/character). This is especially true of the way in which film studies theorises the specificity of time in films that are thematically concerned with the quotidian. Even though there is often an acknowledgement that time functions akin to that of a material everyday, the term that is most often employed, ‘real time,’ invariably collapses the intricate and “multiple temporalities” which structure the cinematic apparatus, narrative, and viewing.26 In the work of Peter Brunette and Ivone Margulies for example, both apply an idea of ‘real time’ in their respective examinations of the French
New Wave and John Cassavetes in order to come to terms with the often distended temporality that characterises their work.27 The issue that this thesis takes with this term
24 Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit: essai de méthode,” in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 65-273. Translated as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 25 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 74- 98; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 59-76; Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette),” Film Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Summer 1983): 4-17; Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), 8-10. 26 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 30. 27 Peter Brunette, “But Nothing Happened: The Everyday in French Postwar Cinema,” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University
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is the way it simplifies and equalises the complex relation between the temporalities
(and affects) which structure narrative, viewing and the apparatus.
In film studies, an idea of ‘real time’ is the predominant means by which the connection between cinematic realism, time and the everyday has been understood. In cultural studies, the everyday as a complex affective temporal site has been at the centre of the discipline for many years. In the work of Benjamin, Kracauer and the Frankfurt
School, the everyday has been a site that, as I argued above, allows for a reflection on the shock and distraction generated by new media such as the cinema. Yet, as Patrice
Petro suggests, it is an idea of boredom that is crucial to thinking about the specificity of the shock and distraction that dominates the work of Kracauer and Benjamin. In remarks evocative of Lefebvre’s quotidian, Petro writes that in everyday life “boredom captures the modern experience of time as both empty and full, concentrated and distracted (the experience of temporal duration as well as temporal disruption in the sense of ‘killing time’).”28 In this idea of boredom, time functions as an excessive experience of time that ruptures the programmed and abstract organisation of time by capitalism. In this “killing time” we find a “relationship between boredom and waiting
[that] becomes especially important, for it is in a waiting without aim or purpose that the possibility of change may be sighted.”29
Benjamin and Kracauer’s concern with boredom in the sphere of the everyday,
Petro argues, finds its way into the conceptualisation of the quotidian in the twentieth century by philosophers and theorists such as Blanchot and Lefebvre. In Petro’s
Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 82-85; Ivone Margulies, “John Cassavetes: Amateur Director,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1998), 282-286. 28 Patrice Petro, “After Shock/Between Boredom and History,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 274. 29 Ibid., 275.
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analysis, this experience of time also allows her to reflect on an avant-garde cinema that is consciously working through a filmic temporality where “nothing happens.” Here she cites the early films of Andy Warhol (such as Eat [1963] and Empire [1964]) and Chantal
Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as films that play out and generate a temporality of boredom through the everyday on a thematic level.30
For Petro, the importance of an idea of boredom as well as the related experience of banality in cultural studies can not be underestimated. The everyday and everyday banality has been an important site for cultural studies generally and for feminist approaches to “the politics of lived experience.”31 In the work of Meaghan
Morris, an idea of banality has been the vehicle to reflect on the very discipline of cultural studies as an often banal exercise that bypasses the transformative potential of banality. Throughout “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Morris takes on the banality that has organised cultural studies as a historically specific and gendered method that essentially circumvents the revolutionary and political qualities of banality.32 In Morris’ feminist analysis of cultural studies and banality we find a means to directly engage with the transformative and political potential of the quotidian. Rather than a site that merely plays out the monotonous grind of daily life, the everyday as debated in cultural studies is, as feminist theory has shown and continues to show us, a means to critically and politically engage with those ideas and institutions that structure material reality and popular cultural forms such as film.
30 Ibid., 276. 31 Bill Schwarz, “Media times/historical times,” Screen 45, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 95. For an overview of the importance of feminist cultural studies analyses of the everyday see Laurie Langbauer, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday,” diacritics 22, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 47-65. 32 Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press/BFI Publishing, 1990), 14-43.
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Cultural studies debates around the everyday continue to be essential to an idea of the everyday in film because they acknowledge and think through the quotidian as a historically shifting and dynamic category. In this thesis, the everyday as theorised by cultural studies and Lefebvre allows for an examination of the everyday on both a thematic and formal level. In films that take the minutia of everyday existence as their narrative concern there is often a concomitant formal interest in the temporalities that characterise and structure the quotidian. As such, Lefebvre opens up a means to explore specific, and differing, conceptions of filmic and viewing time that coincide with the filmic rendering of the everyday at different historical moments.
The analysis of a filmic everyday in this dissertation begins with a close engagement with Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the everyday through an idea of ‘real time.’ In Chapters One and Two, the construction of an everyday temporality in and through film is explored via the long take and the affective possibilities this shot produces and enables. I argue that in the long take, and in filmic temporal constructions concerned with a continuity and integrity of time (and space), we find an alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time which generates an affective experience of time for both the performer/character and the viewer.
In Chapter One, I focus on this conception of the everyday in relation to the cinema of John Cassavetes and Faces (1968) in particular, and the way a filmic everyday often pressures an idea of narrative time. Bringing together Lefebvre with Bazin and
Deleuze’s respective investigations of filmic temporality, I analyse the specificity of the everyday in Faces and suggest that Cassavetes’ film generates a dialectical and affective experience of everyday time. In Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism and Deleuze’s time-image we find a means to think through the often complex relation between time
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and affect. The convergence between Lefebvre, Bazin and Deleuze in this chapter will also demonstrate the way the everyday as a conceptual and material category has found its way in to the examination of the everyday in film and philosophy. As such, Bazin and Deleuze are privileged theorists here because they are consciously concerned with the everyday on a thematic and formal level. Additionally, their respective conceptualisations of filmic temporality (particularly in regard to their concern with the everyday in modernist cinema) facilitate a means to move away from the conception of
‘real time’ that has dominated the analysis of the quotidian in film studies.
This ‘real time’ problematic has also characterised a significant number of the critical and theoretical approaches to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Although Jeanne Dielman is more extreme in its construction of an everyday through the use of extended long takes, in Chapter Two I argue that this film, much like Faces, produces a dialectical experience of the everyday through an alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. In this chapter, my analysis of the affectivity of a filmic everyday temporality in Jeanne Dielman is guided by Ivone Margulies’ seminal book length study on the centrality of the everyday in Akerman’s work.33
Margulies’ reading of the quotidian in Akerman’s work is reoriented in Chapter
Two through an analysis of the photographic-like stillness that is produced through framing, performance, the camera and time itself. In this film, time as a material force
(and weight) for both the performer/character and viewer is played out in the watching and waiting that is created through the banal everyday gestures that make up the film’s thematic concern. Here I propose that the affectivity that this material filmic
33 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996).
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temporality creates is amplified by the stillness within the frame in a way that begins to pressure the divide between film and photography. Rather than suggesting that film becomes photography in these instances, I propose through Roland Barthes and film/photography debates, that the affectivity connected with a specific filmic temporality which often generates a photographic stillness can be conceived through a
‘cinematic punctum’: an affective experience of time that begins to complicate the borders around and between film and photography.
In Chapters One and Two the everyday as conceived through Lefebvre, as well as film, photography and philosophy debates concerned with filmic temporality, allows this thesis to think through a very specific articulation of the quotidian in modernist cinema. In Chapters Three and Four, the emphasis is on the other ways in which an affective experience of the everyday is produced in more recent film and video. In these chapters, the everyday is revealed as a shifting material and filmic category that is rethought and reconfigured through historical, social and cultural events that transform time and its experience. In Chapter Three, I analyse the everyday in the “time of AIDS” through the autobiographical video Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and
Peter Friedman, 1993).34 In this video, which focuses on Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, the everyday no longer holds the kind of possibility and contingency central to
Lefebvre’s quotidian. What we find instead is an everyday that is written through with an inevitability of a certain kind of dying and death even before that dying commences.
In Silverlake Life, everyday time becomes an everyday “AIDS time” where lived experience includes the living out of dying and death.35
34 Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 99. 35 Ibid.
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While Silverlake Life no longer plays out the everyday through an affective possibility, it engages with the revolutionary quality inherent to Lefebvre’s quotidian through its body politics. As an autobiographical and activist video, Silverlake Life rethinks the often personal and intimate video diary form in a way that shows us the broader social, political and cultural need to keep this body alive. In fact, Silverlake Life asks us to grieve, mourn and more importantly bare witness to a body that needs to be remembered (especially at a historical juncture when AIDS has fallen off the media radar). Through Peggy Phelan’s influential essay on the kind of witnessing the video engenders and Alexander García Düttmann’s treatise on the temporal rupture that characterises AIDS, this chapter analyses Silverlake Life as an autobiographical video that works through the connection between the temporality which typifies AIDS and video as a temporal medium that is able to keep dying and death alive.36 Here I argue that the temporality which characterises AIDS itself finds its way into the video’s temporal construction and into the many incarnations of Joslin and Massi’s bodies. The result is a hysterical body that not only plays out the effects of AIDS but one that also shows up the film body (and the viewing body) as temporally complex.
If the everyday becomes reconfigured through AIDS in Silverlake Life, in Wong
Kar-wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua) the quotidian is filtered through memory, nostalgia and a melodramatic engagement with unrequited love. As a film which takes the Hong Kong of the 1960s as its focus, In the Mood for Love creates a vivid sense of the textures of everyday life. Yet once again, the everyday as affective possibility as conceived through Lefebvre becomes reoriented through the loss, longing and melancholy generated by unrequited love and memory. Here the impossibility of
36 Ibid.; Peggy Phelan, “Infected eyes: Dying Man With A Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” in Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 155-156.
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romantic union is played out in a temporality which positions the everyday moment as one which performs a past (as memory) and an unfulfilled future. In Chapter Four, I begin with the temporality which characterises an idea of unrequited love in Wong’s film in order to think through the kind of “intimate” spectatorial experience and connection this film creates.37
In this chapter I propose that the thematic concern with unrequited love in the film generates an intimate and affective spectatorship that brings the film and viewer together in a very particular way. In order to think through this connection between film and viewer, I examine the film’s operation as a melodrama through Williams’ recent work on the “mode” as one that is concerned with the disclosure of “moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.”38 Through Williams, I will discuss the way In the Mood for Love both works within and rethinks pathos and action via its attention to unrequited love from, as Ackbar Abbas terms it, a Hong Kong
“culture of disappearance.”39
As a film which thematically works within the melodramatic mode, In the Mood for Love also functions as a melodrama by encouraging an affective and emotional spectatorial investment in the plot and more importantly in the mise en scène. On the film’s theatrical release in 2000, it was film form and mise en scène which seduced viewers and critics in a way which took us back to the lyrical and romantic engagement with film form in film studies’ infancy. In this chapter, I address this engagement with form as a means to examine In the Mood for Love’s concern with unrequited love in the
37 Marc Siegel, “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 285. 38 Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 42. 39 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7.
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sphere of the everyday as well as the kind of emotional and affective investment such a sphere produces in the act of writing.
The quotidian in this thesis is a means to reflect on the kinds of affective, emotional and sensorial experiences the cinema is able to generate through specific articulations of time. The everyday here likewise allows for a consideration of the affects and emotions that are produced in my own act of viewing. In Cassavetes’ Faces, the possibility and contingency that is so central to the film, as well as Lefebvre’s quotidian, creates an experience that moves me through excitement, anxiety and boredom. Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, which initially instigates both boredom and anxiety in ways distinct from Cassavetes’ film, in the end produces an attention and contemplation that affectively charges the smallest of gestures. In these modernist films, characters watch and wait, and we can only do the same; wait for time to crash over us, jostle us and provoke us in to feeling its proximity.
In Silverlake Life, a sense of watching and waiting is also crucial to the everyday associated with the process of the living out of dying from AIDS. While this video’s temporal strategies differ radically from those associated with Cassavetes and
Akerman’s narrative films, in my watching and waiting I bare witness to Joslin and
Massi’s dying bodies as well as the limits of my own material body. As I watch and witness their dying bodies in what often seems like a protracted present tense, anxiety, grief, mourning and an overwhelming sense of loss become the affective and emotional responses to the most unthinkable of occurrences. Wong’s film too generates a loss, but one that is tied to a longing and melancholy for a romantic union that can never be.
In this film where the union of the two protagonists is thwarted and denied from the very beginning, I also feel a love for the beauty of the film itself, for the colour, the
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lighting, the fabrics of the cheongsam and the swirling cigarette smoke that permeates the image.
Even though these very definite affects, emotions and responses are created for me by these distinct articulations of the everyday, my approach to an affective quotidian is not a prescriptive one. These affective, emotional and sensory experiences are created by my own experiences with the films and function as a means to engage with those areas of film and critical theory, philosophy and cultural studies that acknowledge the act of viewing as complex and dynamic. In this thesis the affective experiences of time that the quotidian enables is only one means to think through this complexity. Here the everyday allows us to trace the specificity of these responses, and the way these responses to time invariably involve the material spectating body.
From Cassavetes’ Faces through to In the Mood for Love, each distinct construction of the everyday registers on and in my body as I watch. My body, a body that carries with it the memory of the indelible affects and sensations produced by each screening of these films, testifies to a body memory that is created through film. The memory of the spectator, an involuntary memory which holds not merely the films but also the way those films have been affectively and emotionally experienced, marks the body in a way that forces these responses to resurface with each subsequent screening.
The power of this memory and the affective and sensational memory of the body stems from the often contradictory quality of the everyday both in these films and in Lefebvre’s conceptualisation. Here the everyday is a recognisable and material site that structures lived experience while also possessing a somewhat elusive quality. In
Faces, Silverlake Life and In the Mood for Love especially, the quotidian seems to slip through the frame in to a time and space somewhere off-screen. This kind of “off-
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screeness” can perhaps be located in the intersection between the everyday in the films and the everyday often creating the films and videos (as is the case in Faces and Silverlake
Life), or in the everyday as filtered through memory and nostalgia (in Wong’s film).40 It is in this very tension between an everyday that is materially grounded and an everyday that is elusive that encourages my fascination with these films. In Faces, Jeanne Dielman,
Silverlake Life and In the Mood for Love I find a way to extend the film frame and the filmic everyday in to my own lived, and yet often off-screen, everyday.
40 Phelan, “Infected eyes,” 172.
CHAPTER ONE
Everyday narratives: Narrative, filmic time and spectatorial affect
I. The presence of time: Faces
In a static frontal long shot, a man and four women stand in and around an entrance to a living room. The man, who is occupying the left-hand side of the frame and with his back to the camera, is placing a record on the record player. As the record crackles, the man turns and looks at the women. At this point, there is a feeling of uncertainty, of anticipation, of possibility, of a need for some kind of release. What I am faced with here is an acute sense of time as well as the effect of time for both the performers and myself. A sultry blues song then bursts out of the stereo releasing the man and the woman on the far right of the frame. They dance toward one another and meet up in the middle of the frame where their bodies come together in an overtly sexual movement. This dancing is quite suddenly interrupted by one of the other women—she turns off the stereo, pulls the couple apart, slaps the man’s face and tells them all to sit down. With this interruption a series of edits appear—the static long shot that has up until now had the characters at a distance becomes a medium shot and then a series of close-ups. Bodies and faces begin to fill the empty spaces of the frame. All five sit down and begin an overly polite conversation covering such social niceties as the weather. But the conversation quickly becomes an uncertain game—the topics become disconcertingly personal, provoking outbursts of laughter as well as long and uneasy pauses. It is this uncertainty, of not only the direction of the scene but also of the man and the four women, that once again makes me overly conscious of time. The duration of this scene is both too much
22 Everyday narratives/23
and too little. I do not know where this scene will take them or me. Time has become a material presence. I feel the time that this scene is taking. Time here is palpable because is it felt by me in time. This time is not only their time but it also seems to be my time.
John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is a meditation on marriage, middle age and class relations in 1960s America. Tracing a day in the life of Richard (John Marley) and
Maria Forst (Lynn Carlin), a Los Angeles middle-class married couple of fourteen years, the film plays out the weariness, fatigue and disillusionment that arises from this societal institution as well as the everyday. The film’s focus, as in Cassavetes’ other work, is characteristically limited or as Diane Jacobs has put it, ‘myopic.’1
Beginning with a scene where we see Richard, a financier, in a screening room being shown a film (that becomes Faces itself when the film cuts to its own rising title),
Faces essentially concentrates on the breakdown of Richard and Maria’s marriage and the sexual liaisons that each experience on the same night as a response to Richard’s announcement that he wants a divorce. As a reaction, Richard finds comfort in
Jeannie Rapp (Gena Rowlands), a prostitute, and Maria solace in Chet (Seymour
Cassel), a young gigolo whom she meets at a nightclub.
For George Kouvaros, Jacobs’ estimation of Cassavetes’ cinema as myopic positions his work away from the broader social and mythical concerns of much
New American cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Rather than an approach that sees the minutia of everyday life as antithetical to more general social, political and cinematic events, Kouvaros suggests that the “facial tics and small betrayals”2 of Cassavetes’ films explore and ultimately open up the larger social picture of the cinema produced
1 Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1977), 39. 2 Ibid., 37.
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by contemporaries such as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.3 As such, Kouvaros proposes that an idea of everyday minutia is especially crucial to a reading of Faces because it allows Cassavetes to “explore those features that threaten the big picture, signaling that ideals are destined to be shattered, allegiances rejected.”4
In Kouvaros’ book length study of the filmmaker, the everyday is also a means to approach minute observations, reactions and emotions on which the film so intently focuses. This is achieved through a particular filmic temporality that, for
Kouvaros, blurs the divide between character and performer, in addition to the everyday within the film and the everyday of the actual production of the film.5 In my analysis however, the everyday is a means to think through another important relation that the film provokes, namely the connection between performer and viewer through the affective presence of everyday time. The everyday here is a means to examine the relation between a specific articulation of filmic time (often associated with cinematic realism) and the kinds of affective experiences this temporality generates in order to reflect on the broader connection between filmic temporality, affect and viewing. It is this very conception of a quotidian temporality that positions the film in close association with the philosophical conceptualisation of the everyday (particularly in France from the 1940s onwards) in a way that begins to question the kind of temporal compression that typifies classical cinema. This
3 George Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 42-43. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Kouvaros suggests the importance of an idea of time in Cassavetes’ work stems from the connection between the time of the actual production of the film and the concept of time that is associated with the moment of filming. As Kouvaros writes, for Cassavetes “film was never a discrete activity, occupying a fixed space and time and separated from day-to-day events.” As such Cassavetes understands film “as an event taking place in the midst of a whole series of other events that it engages with and is affected by.” For Kouvaros, the temporal structure that characterises Faces can be linked with the three year production of the film; an idea of time that begins to disrupt the separation between life and film. Ibid., 15.
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chapter sets out to examine the affective force of the everyday in film by drawing on the quotidian of Henri Lefebvre as an affective and phenomenal experience of time that ruptures the chronological and routine temporality of everydayness. In this chapter, I will examine this conception of time as one that opens up the moment to possibility, chance and contingency in a way that not only problematises the temporal structures of a capitalist everydayness, but also takes on the temporal economy that defines classical narrative cinema. The quotidian here offers a means of reflecting on the kind of temporal distension and fullness that characterises
Cassavetes’ Faces: a distension, which I will argue, is generated from the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. This filmic temporality, I will suggest, is one that animates an affective time of possibility and contingency in a way that is reminiscent of Lefebvre’s conception of the everyday.
This affective presence of everyday time is particularly apparent in a scene from the second half of the film where Maria and three of her friends bring home
Chet, whom they have met at a night club. The four women and the young man flirt, talk, argue and perform for one another. Yet the interaction between the characters in this scene, much like the entire film, is unpredictable and often ambiguous. All the talk, and more importantly, all the time that we are presented with here does not essentially explain these characters nor the way the scene will eventually play out.
Aside from Maria, we do not know who these characters are, why they behave the way that they do or how this interaction will drive the narrative forward. What we encounter here are moments of confusion, unease and uncertainty—moments filled with ‘nothing of consequence.’ Moments of the everyday.
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On the surface, the everyday is commensurate with an experience of boredom and tedium: to speak of the everyday is to speak of ‘nothing out of the ordinary,’ a time and space that we encounter and reencounter on a daily basis. Yet, the everyday here is not simply the ordinary, the routine, or the banal on the level of narrative—the everyday is not merely those aspects of daily life that are unmistakably recognisable. Here the everyday seems to be considerably more complex, uncertain and often ungraspable. In Faces, we are confronted with situations that are, at least on the surface, characteristic of a mundane, familiar and middle-class everyday. However, in this film and indeed the body of Cassavetes’ work, the process of the unfolding of everyday events in time signals a very specific conception and experience of the quotidian that broadens an idea of the everyday beyond the ordinary. In Cassavetes’ work, a sense of unfolding time not only renders the everyday as strange and unfamiliar, but it also suggests the everyday is determined in and by time.
Here the everyday is fundamentally an experience of time. And this time is at once deficient and excessive; deficient because, as Maurice Blanchot writes, “nothing happens,” and excessive because the time that it takes for nothing to happen seems to continue unceasingly.6 And yet it is this experience of time as unceasing that equally opens up the everyday to possibility and transformation, as well as uncertainty and ambiguity. This dual, or rather, dialectical temporality creates a quotidian that is often ungraspable and rationally incomprehensible, as well as phenomenally present and excessive.
6 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 15.
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In Cassavetes’ everyday, time is likewise too much and too little. In Faces, we are presented with a temporality that is engorged and distended. There is too much time and too little information. And while this time generates a temporal conception of the everyday, it likewise forces a reassessment of the operation and inscription of time in the cinema. In Cassavetes’ filmic practice, we are made consciously aware that an experience of viewing film is inextricably connected to an experience of time.
In the scene involving Maria, Chet, Billy Mae (Darlene Conley), Florence (Dorothy
Gulliver) and Louise (Joanne Moore Jordan), time is not elided or compressed; the tension that is created when Billy Mae introduces the women’s husbands into the conversation, is exacerbated by the duration that the scene is given. At this point,
Cassavetes’ camera lingers in a way that not only records the responses of the characters but that likewise provokes a response from the characters. When Billy
Mae is slighted by Chet (when he admits he does not desire the lifestyle or possessions of the older generation of men), and storms off into a corner of the room, there is an uneasiness and unpredictability that arises from the duration that
Cassavetes constructs, as well as his intensely mobile camera (and editing style).7 In this moment, and in the immediate exchanges and events that follow (Florence jumping out of her chair; Chet dancing with Florence; Chet singing to Billy Mae;
Chet coaxing Louise to dance; Chet and Louise arguing), there is the sense that the emotions and affects that are provoked are not only a response to the situation but are likewise a response to time itself. At these points in the film, as Kouvaros goes on to argue,
7 Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 90.
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what we are presented with is an expenditure of energy and film stock that contributes little to our understanding of the characters, their motivations, or their problems. It is at this juncture—when, to borrow a phrase used by Antonioni, “everything seems already to have been said”—that…reveals itself as a deliberate attempt to open the film up to questions and points of view that cannot be answered or contained by the narrative. Cassavetes uses these fragments of “dead time” as a way of exploring the pressures and relations that surround the performance of the drama but are usually excluded from the final print.8
As Kouvaros’ remarks suggest, the performances within Cassavetes’ films are informed by a very particular conception of plot duration that runs counter to a classical temporal economy. These moments of “dead time” in Cassavetes’ work are in fact charged and dynamic, whereby the notion of performance is opened up by time to include both the filmic and the profilmic, both character and actor.9 For
Kouvaros, like Jean-Louis Comolli before him, the temporality that Cassavetes constructs in Faces is one that directly animates the performances within the film.
The characters “define themselves gesture by gesture and word by word as the film proceeds,” Comolli writes.10 Time here is a material presence that generates and provokes the performances within the film—performances that are in part an affective response to the duration of the scene.11 For this reason, Faces problematises
8 Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 98-99. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Two Faces of Faces: Back to back,” trans. Annwyl Williams, in Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 326. 11 An idea of time as a material and affective presence in relation to the everyday almost always implicates an idea of performance—both of time and the performing body within the film. As Kouvaros argues, performance is figured as “a temporal process” that is invested with materiality in terms of both time and the body (as well as the body’s gestural traces of time). George Kouvaros, “Improvisation and the Operatic: Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence,” in Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, eds. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), 51. This idea resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Cassavetes in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, where he suggests the body (in films such as Faces) is marked by everyday gestures that are generated in states of time such as waiting. For Deleuze, the body performs and reveals an excessive and affective temporality that gestures to the everyday. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189-193.
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a classical conception of time, narrative and character. Cassavetes’ concern here is the way time generates and also complicates the interaction between people both in terms of the narrative scenario and the work of performance that is coming together and pulling apart before our eyes.12
Yet the particular concept of time that Cassavetes constructs within the film also generates a distinct viewing experience. In Faces, time takes on a presence that is independent of narrative and character, and begins to assume a kind of materiality and agency that not only renders it an affective force for the characters within the film, but also for the viewer of the film. Plot duration and screen duration are seemingly equivalent. The time that is occupied by the characters is also the time occupied and experienced by the viewer. Their time is also my time: or is it? This apparent equivalence between plot duration and screen duration has often been theorised in film studies under the rubric of ‘real time’: a notion and operation of time that ostensibly clarifies the connection between film, realism and the everyday.13
Even though an idea of ‘real time’ frequently instigates an examination into the connection between specific constructions of time and affect in film, it invariably diminishes the relation between film and viewing because it is premised on an equivalence between screen duration and plot duration. And in much of the
Deleuze’s analysis of Cassavetes will be taken up in relation to the theorisation of time in film studies below. 12 Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 63. 13 An example of this is Peter Brunette’s essay “But Nothing Happened: The Everyday in French Postwar Cinema.” In this essay Brunette argues that the French post-war cinema is concerned with exploring the everyday in ‘real time.’ At no point throughout the essay does Brunette define time in relation to film, nor the way it is differentiated from time in material reality. Peter Brunette, “But Nothing Happened: The Everyday in French Postwar Cinema,” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 82-85.
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scholarship surrounding Cassavetes’ work, this is also the case.14 Cassavetes, Maria
Viera writes,
prefers not to elide time. The situations of his characters tend to work themselves out in real time. Faces is made up of eight long scenes with a story time of two hours, taking place late one night and roughly half an hour the next morning…. This is one of the reasons Cassavetes’ films do not produce pleasure for those whose expectations are that a film shows only those things that are “important,” that move the narrative forward, with all other action eliminated.15
While Viera applies the term ‘real time’ in this instance, her suggestion that a distinct viewing experience is generated by a particular temporality in Cassavetes’ film signals an analysis that moves beyond a ‘real time’ equivalence. As Viera points out, the duration of the scenes in much of Cassavetes’ work rupture a particular viewing position and experience that is associated with classical narrative cinema.
Throughout the extended scenes that make up Faces, there is no sense of establishment or closure. In the last scene of the film where Richard and Maria sit on the staircase smoking, (after Richard has returned home from spending the night with Jeannie only to find Maria recovering from her own liaison with Chet as well as a failed suicide attempt), there is a decided ambiguity and uncertainty regarding their status as a couple. “I hate my life… I just don’t love you,” Maria announces to
Richard.
14 Ivone Margulies also classifies the filmic temporality that characterises Cassavetes’ work as ‘real time’ in her recent essay “John Cassavetes: Amateur Director,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1998), 282-286. 15 Maria Viera, “The Work of John Cassavetes: Script, Performance Style, and Improvisation,” Journal of Film and Video 42 (1990): 37, emphasis added. The term “story time” that Viera employs here suggests an idea of plot duration rather than story time or duration since she is referring to the duration of explicit events in the film.
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Maria’s admission of the lost love between the couple does not, however, provoke a marital separation. In the immediate moments that follow, Richard and
Maria move on to the staircase where they sit apart from one another. While each light up a cigarette and coughs, they shift their positions momentarily mirroring each other by leaning against the wall. The scene carries on in this manner, with both
Richard and Maria momentarily leaving and returning to the staircase. As it continues, there is the sense that this scene could go on without end. But the film finally does end, or rather drains away; Maria eventually walks away into the kitchen and Richard walks into the upstairs section of the house, and with a frontal long shot of the staircase the film stops. Structurally, the film as a whole mirrors the openness of individual scenes. In this film there is no conclusion or resolution, just a break in the drama that lays the scene (and the film) open to more questions.
The temporal distension of scenes in Cassavetes’ films creates an unpredictability and uncertainty that hinders the kind of closure that is connected to classical narrative strategies. Within classical cinematic practice, temporal compression and elision are ways in which the superfluous minutia of the everyday is bypassed for more crucial investigations into causality, motivation and psychology.
As such, a classical temporal economy not only supports and maintains a cause- effect narrative but it also resolves key questions posed by the narrative. Unlike this strategy, Cassavetes’ films open up time and render it a material presence that generates more questions than answers. “Cassavetes jettisons the kind of plotting that provides a straight through-line through most cinematic narratives,” Ray Carney argues.16 Although, this is not to say that the view we encounter is any less limited
16 Ray Carney, “Seven Program Notes from the American Tour of the Complete Films,” Post Script 11, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 40.
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than a classical one: Faces, for instance, elides large segments of time such as the hours between Maria and Chet’s love making and the next morning. (For Carney, this also extends to the camera which often takes the point of view of characters rather than an omniscient one.)17
In Cassavetes’ work, the time that structures individual scenes runs on in a way that opens up time and renders it a material presence. Accordingly, I would like to take this idea a step further in order to suggest that Cassavetes’ films rupture a classical viewing position by generating an excessive experience of time for the viewer: viewing time here becomes exorbitant and in doing so shows up the limitations of a ‘real time’ equivalence. Eric Rohmer says as much when he states,
“[w]e all know that cinematic time is not the same as time in real life. Films that have tried to show in an hour and a half an action supposed to last an hour and a half—
Rope or Cleo from 5 to 7—seem to run much longer.”18
Time is, as Stephen Heath writes, “film’s primary dimension.”19 Yet, film, whether classical or modernist in its aesthetic, is not conditioned by a singular temporality. “The cinema engages multiple temporalities,” Mary Ann Doane argues, on the level of the apparatus, narrative (plot and story), as well as viewing.20 And at this point it might be useful to briefly address the multiple temporal articulations of
17 Ibid., 41. 18 Eric Rohmer, interview by Jean-Louis Comolli, Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, trans. Diana Matias, in Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 252. Brian Henderson echoes this sentiment when he writes, “[d]uration in cinema is a very delicate matter, as anyone knows who has shown [Jean-Marie] Straub or Michael Snow to an unreceptive audience. Even viewers sophisticated in other respects become angry if their sense of proper filmic duration is challenged.” Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette),” Film Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Summer 1983): 8, emphasis added. Here I would substitute “proper” for classical: what seems to be disrupted here is a viewing experience that is produced by a classical compression and elision of time. 19 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1981), 165. 20 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30.
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film in order to suggest a set of terms that will acknowledge and assess the complexity of time in this cinematic practice, as well as the way it diverges from a classical articulation.
In film theory, the analysis of time, especially in connection with narrative, has been influenced by structuralism’s interest in the organisation of literary narrative. A key figure in these debates is Gérard Genette, whose essay “Discours du récit: essai de méthode” has been, and continues to be, a seminal piece.21 In this paper, one of Genette’s concerns is the way narrative and narration are based on the temporal arrangement of events. This arrangement, Genette’s “tense,” involves order, duration and frequency.22 It is these three aspects that have been taken up in film theory debates in order to assess the articulation of time in and by film.23 While all three aspects are important in film studies, it is an idea of duration that is fundamental to our understanding and experience of a filmic everyday.
Duration is essentially the amount of time something lasts. In film studies, duration is connected with plot and story to indicate the temporal length of events in relation to the diegetic world, as well as the actual or literal length of individual scenes and the film itself: plot duration, story duration and screen duration respectively. In this thesis, I will be applying these terms in order to examine the relation between these articulations of time and duration as well as ideas of time in
21 Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit: essai de méthode,” in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 65-273. Translated as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 22 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 29-30. 23 In the work of film theorists such as Brian Henderson, Maureen Turim and David Bordwell, (as well as Bordwell’s collaboration with Kristin Thompson in Film Art), Genette’s terms form the basis of their understanding and classification of time and duration in film. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 74-98; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 59-76; Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film,” 4-17; Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), 8-10.
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film studies. Moreover, I will also be implementing two terms that have been informed by Doane’s analysis of cinematic time and Maureen Turim’s work on the flashback: apparatus time and viewing time.24 For Doane and Turim respectively, apparatus time denotes the linearity and chronology of the cinema per se; a linearity that is associated with both film and the projector. This linearity is more specifically, as Doane argues, a forward movement of the apparatus that generates a “security and certainty of the irreversible flow of time.”25
On the surface, apparatus time as conceived in this way is seemingly comparable with an idea of screen duration, particularly in the work of David
Bordwell who equates screen duration with “projection time.”26 However, the distinction between the two in this thesis is an important one because the linear temporality associated with the filmic apparatus is often problematised by a particular construction of plot duration. Once again it is Doane who recognises this problematic when she goes on to stress that the “irreversible linearity forms the substrate and support for any particular film’s temporal experimentation…. Such a mechanical irreversibility also, however, forms the basis for film’s affiliation with time as chance.” As such the “longer a shot is held…the more likely the intrusion of chance and the unexpected.”27 In this investigation, then, an idea of apparatus time will be informed by Doane and Turim’s definitions while screen duration will refer to the actual length of a scene or the entire film.
24 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 30-31, 140-141; Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 8-10. 25 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 141. 26 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 81. 27 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 113. In the following section, I will be advancing on an idea of the unexpected in relation to the everyday.
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The other term that will be employed here is one that is often alluded to in film studies but very rarely explicitly articulated: viewing time. For Doane, the time associated with viewing is classified as “the temporality of reception”: the temporal component of viewing and reception that is “theoretically distinct” from that of the apparatus, and the plot and story, “but nevertheless a temporality which…classical cinema attempted to fuse as tightly as possible to that of the apparatus, conferring upon it the same linear predictability and irreversibility.”28 In this thesis, I will utilise the term viewing time in order to analyse the way it is not only a temporality that is generated by particular articulations of duration but also the temporal component of spectatorship that is open to affect and sensation. And like Doane, I will consider this temporality of viewing as one that is connected to but nevertheless distinct from the other articulations of time and duration. These terms then not only form the basis of the terminology in this thesis but they also continually speak to and acknowledge the theorisation of time and duration in film theory. Even so, in this analysis there is a concomitant need to look beyond film theory debates concerned with time in order to reconsider the connection between time and affect and suggest an approach to this connection that will broaden our thinking about the aesthetics of film as well as the experience of film.
In this instance, time allows us to take up the questions surrounding the affective exchange between a specific filmic practice and the experience of viewing.
It is precisely these questions that will be explored in this chapter, particularly in relation to the way the cinema and its inscriptions of time and affect have been theorised in film studies. As a result, I will be positioning the focus on Cassavetes in
28 In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, story duration and plot duration are fused together in “the temporality of the diegesis” which is “the way in which time is represented by the image, the varying invocations of present, past, future, historicity.” Ibid., 30.
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these terms in order to move away from a notion of ‘real time’: the site, as I argued above, where the theorisation of filmic time and affect, especially in connection with the everyday, have often been located. While this term often initiates an analysis into the articulations of time and affect in film, it likewise reduces the complex relation between film and viewing because it is based upon an equivalence between screen duration and plot duration. This equivalence is the very thing that overlooks the difference between screen duration and viewing time, ostensibly discounting the affective and sensorial capacity of viewing time. In this examination, the relation between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time is figured as excessive because it generates an affective experience that ruptures an idea of equivalence.
This connection between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time may also be the site that allows us to chart the tension between the affective potential and capabilities of a specific filmic practice and the linearity of apparatus time that seems to ultimately determine film’s temporal flow.
In this chapter, I will be looking at those places in film theory and philosophy where a more promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. Two theorists of particular significance here are André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, whose work is preoccupied with time as a material and affective force. For both Bazin and Deleuze, an idea of filmic temporality is not only founded on a specific filmic articulation of time, one that consciously aligns plot duration and screen duration, but it is also premised upon the affective exchange between film and viewer: an exchange that resonates with an idea of viewing time. It is through this conception of time that I will reflect on the link between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, as well as the
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possibility of their dialectical relation. Beginning with Bazin’s concept of realism as a distinctive construction and engagement with time, I will address the way a specific filmic practice that addresses the relation between plot duration and viewing time continually animates questions regarding indexicality. These ideas will then be taken up in relation to Deleuze’s work on the cinema, focusing on the time-image as a conceptualisation of time and affect that is initiated by a reformulation of a Bazinian idea of filmic temporality.
Deleuze’s time-image animates past, present and future in a temporal becoming and in this respect resonates with the everyday as a dialectical experience of time as conceptualised by Lefebvre. (This is not coincidental as the everyday as both a historical moment and conceptual category shows up in philosophy, photography and film at around the same time.) For Lefebvre, the experience of time in the everyday is on the one hand, an experience of time as structured and structuring—a time that constructs and sustains the incessant routine and habit that characterises the tenets of capitalism, and on the other hand, it is an experience of that structured time as phenomenally present and affective. Much like a Deleuzian time-image the dialectic of the everyday shatters chronology, (and time as structured and structuring), via an overwhelming and affective moment that animates questions regarding the relation between history and the present.29
This conception of the quotidian brings to mind the scenes that characterise
Cassavetes’ films as well as a Deleuzian time-image. Consequently, the filmic everyday that I am concerned with here is not merely one that deals with the daily,
29 The affective experience of time in the moment has been privileged in the theorisation and conceptualisation of the everyday because it is this experience that holds the possibility for its transformation via revolution and socialism. Therefore, an analysis of the everyday can never be isolated from its conceptualisation or its politics. The idea that time can be experienced as something other than structured and structuring is almost always political.
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the ordinary and the routine solely on the level of narrative. Rather what I am interested in here is a kind of film aesthetic that, while clearly engaging with the everyday thematically, is additionally and more importantly concerned with the temporal structures and affective experiences that characterise the dialectic of the everyday.
It is this idea of time as dialectical, along with Bazinian and Deleuzian conceptions of filmic time, that may allow us to reassess and rethink film’s inscription of time and affect as well as film’s connection to an idea of viewing time.
The everyday here may be a way to consider the operation of time in a filmic practice that aligns plot duration with screen duration, not as a singular or equivalent duration but as multiple and dialectical. In this examination of time in film studies and in theories of the everyday, it will become apparent that the everyday is a means of rethinking the affective potential of film.
II. The everyday: An affective experience of time
The everyday is platitude…, but this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived—in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.—Maurice Blanchot.30
The everyday as a conceptual category has a lengthy history in philosophical debates.
As a concept that has arisen out of a socialist critique of the ways in which modernity and capitalism have altered daily existence, it is predominantly concerned
30 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 13.
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with the way this existence is experienced by the everyday subject. The theorisation of the everyday as a conceptual category was taken up by a number of theorists in
France in the 1960s and 70s, namely Roland Barthes, the Situationist International and Blanchot, as well as Michel de Certeau.31 In this chapter and thesis however, it is the work of Lefebvre that offers most to film as it provides a means of exploring the connection between the temporality of the everyday and filmic time, and as such it is his post-war ‘reinvention’ of the everyday that will be the focus here.
In one form or another, Lefebvre has been preoccupied with the way we experience those aspects of the quotidian that structure and influence existence.
While Lefebvre’s theorisation of the everyday has been exhaustive, his reworking of the concept was founded on Marxist ideas of alienation and mystification, and the work of Georg Lukács and Martin Heidegger. As Michel Trebitsch and Rob Shields similarly point out, Lefebvre’s early work, particularly in his collaboration with
Norbert Guterman, was influenced by Lukács and Heidegger’s idea of the everyday.
These philosophers each regarded the everyday as trivial but as something that could nonetheless be punctured by an “authentic” experience of time.32
31 See Roland Barthes’ 1957 monograph Mythologies, ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000); Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Lefebvre also collaborated with the Situationist International, and Guy Debord in particular, from 1957-1962. For further details on this collaboration see Henri Lefebvre, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” interview and trans. by Kristin Ross, October 79 (Winter 1997): 69-83. 32 Michel Trebitsch, Preface to Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, Introduction, by Henri Lefebvre, trans. John Moore (London/New York: Verso, 1991), xvii-xviii; Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial dialectics (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), 67. For an extended analysis of both Lukács and Heidegger’s notion of the everyday in relation to time, see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London/New York: Verso, 1995), 160-196.
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The ‘reinvention’ of the everyday in post-war France is inextricably connected to the altered social, political and economic conditions of the time. In
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Kristin Ross identifies a connection between the preoccupation with the everyday between the late 1940s and 60s and the demise of French colonialism (in South-East Asia, specifically Indo-China, and Algeria), as well as the influx of mass produced modern conveniences from the United States. At this juncture, Ross argues, France becomes inward looking, focusing on domestic issues (in every sense of the word). The consideration of these two simultaneous occurrences, Ross asserts,
means taking seriously the catchphrase popularized by Lefebvre and the Situationists in the early 1960s: “the colonization of everyday life.” In the case of France, in other words, it means considering the various ways in which the practice of colonialism outlived its history. With the waning of its empire, France turned to a form of interior colonialism; rational administrative techniques developed in the colonies were brought home and put to use side by side with new technological innovations such as advertising in reordering metropolitan, domestic society, the “everyday life” of its citizens.33
If, then, these post-war conditions sparked an altered way of living, which due to the emphasis on the consumption of consumer goods and ideas through advertising suggests an idea of middle-class living, they likewise triggered a critique of the way these new conditions were recreating the principles associated with the colonisation of foreign territories. For Lefebvre, everyday life was now the territory of colonial occupation; everyday life was the site that controlled the masses on a daily basis. As he writes in Everyday Life in the Modern World,
33 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 1995), 7.
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Everyday life in France is organized according to a concerted programme…. Daily life is the screen on which our society projects its light and its shadow, its hollows and its planes, its power and its weakness; political and social activities converge to consolidate, structure and functionalize it.34
In Lefebvre’s theorisation, the everyday is figured as a medium, (much like film), that presents all aspects of modern living. It would appear that the everyday is the location of structured and regulated ideas of the social, the political and the cultural, as well as the means by which these ideas are constructed.
Everyday life, for Lefebvre, operates on two discrete levels that are in constant and continual relation to one another: everydayness and the everyday. This is an important distinction because, as John Roberts notes, “Lefebvre is the first writer actually to codify the ‘everyday’ as phenomenologically co-present with, but conceptually distinct from, mere ‘everydayness’.”35 Everydayness is the structuring logic of capitalism and modernity that endeavours to organise existence as well as an experience of that existence. In this logic, which is contingent upon ideas of production and consumption, we find the conscious and subliminal insertion of habit and banality, as well as ideas and culture, into daily life.36 “Everyday life, a compound of insignificances united in this concept, responds and corresponds to
34 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1971), 64-65, original emphasis; hereafter cited in text as “EL.” 35 John Roberts, “Philosophizing the everyday: The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies,” Radical Philosophy 98 (November-December 1999): 23. 36 For Lefebvre, an idea of culture is associated with everydayness and the everyday. Culture is not only the means by which “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” is enunciated. He writes, a “culture is also a praxis or a means of distributing supplies in a society and thus directing the flow of production; it is in the widest sense a means of production, a source of ideologically motivated actions and activities.” (“EL,” 31-32, original emphasis) Even so, culture can likewise be the means by which everydayness is unmasked as both structured and structuring. Henri Lefebvre, “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death,” trans. David Reifman, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 82.
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modernity, a compound of signs by which our society expresses and justifies itself and which forms part of its ideology.” (“EL,” 24) And for Lefebvre, the experience of everydayness by the everyday subject is one that is essentially alienated;37 it is an
experience that positions the everyday subject in an artificial relation to the world
that denies an “authentic” experience of being.38
It is this Marxist conception of alienation that is the foundation for
Lefebvre’s critique of the everyday. Alienation, Lefebvre writes, “may be defined philosophically as [the] single yet dual movement of objectification and externalization—of realization and derealization.”39 Alienation thereby is the way all aspects of lived existence are objectified and reified, particularly consciousness, as well as the way this objectification draws the everyday subject into a closer relation with objects. This process not only disconnects the everyday subject from other subjects, but it likewise disengages the mind from the body. Shields provides an explanation on the repercussions of this disconnection:
Capitalism represents the perfection of a system of alienation that pervades all aspects of life. Alienation is the distancing of subjects from the world, from themselves and from others around them. The distance created between subject (the person) and object (of thought) allows a rational
37 In Lefebvre’s work, an idea of subjectivity is determined by capitalism (and alienation). And for the most part, subjectivity in Lefebvre’s work seems to be a concept that does not implicate an idea of difference—of class, gender or race, even though he argues in Everyday Life in the Modern World that everyday life weighs heaviest on women. (“EL,” 35) For Lefebvre, the true everyday subject (“l’homme quotidian”) would become the “total man” via an “authentic” experience of the everyday; that is, an unalienated experience of the everyday. As Shields writes, “Lefebvre’s ‘total person’ reconciled thought and life, mind and body, by living life as an oeuvre, a work of art that required the full investment and reconciliation of both body and mind.” Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 71. 38 The idea that a relation to the world can be categorised in terms of authenticity or falsity seems to be problematic because it creates a binary opposition between everydayness (as false, artificial) and the everyday (as authentic, natural). Even so, the emphasis here, for Lefebvre, is on the way that an experience of everydayness fundamentally disenfranchises the subject from anything other than a logic of production and consumption. 39 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, Introduction, trans. John Moore (London/New York: Verso, 1991), 71.
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analysis of the social world to proceed along functional lines without being complicated by emotional considerations or a priori moral principles.40
Even so, the experience of alienation is not one that is easily discernible. It is in fact continually disguised and often denied by everydayness and its social institutions
(such as marriage) via a process of mystification, whereby the alienation of the everyday subject is concealed by the myth that he/she is “living ‘the good life’.”41 As a result of this, an experience of alienation is not only ingrained in the way that we live, and in the way that we interact with each other and ourselves, but it is likewise concealed in order to remain unquestioned.
While everydayness and the experience of alienation function in this manner, they only do so through their connection with a particular conception of time.
Everydayness, Lefebvre asserts, “is not only a mode of production but also a modality of administering society. In both instances it refers to the predominance of the repetitive, of repetition in time.”42 The structuring of existence by everydayness is in effect the implementation and application of a repetitious time that organises the day into segments for work and leisure, production and consumption.43 This time is chronological and teleological, and in many ways indicative of “a distinctly modern [and]…bourgeois” everydayness.44 If the temporality of everydayness factors in time for leisure and consumption, then, it is predominantly the middle classes that
40 Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 42. 41 Ibid., 40. 42 Lefebvre, “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics,” 80. 43 Doane puts a similar idea in slightly different terms when she writes, “[a]s time becomes a value it begins to share the logic of the monetary system—a logic of pure differentiation, quantifiability, and articulation into discrete units. The capitalist buys a certain quantity of the laborer’s time in order to produce surplus value. That time must be measurable and therefore divisible.” Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 8. 44 Kristin Ross, “French Quotidian,” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 21, original emphasis.
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are able to spend time and money to uphold and preserve this system. Here time not only arranges daily existence but it also justifies the ordering of that existence for the
‘greater good’ (which is often explicated as progress). Everydayness is therefore the experience of time as both structured and structuring.
In Faces, this idea of everydayness is demonstrated in the film’s opening sequence where we see Richard at work as a financier, as well as his conversation with Maria when he gets home from his initial (and unconsummated) encounter with
Jeannie after work. It is clear from the very beginning that Richard and Maria’s marriage, and the daily life they have created out of their union, is based on a banal routine. This evening, which we can safely say characterises any evening in their household, consists of pre-dinner drinks, dinner, the smoking of cigarettes, incessant joke telling, (a routine of jokes, in every sense of the word, made up of banal riddles and tongue twisters that Maria half-jokingly says ‘will destroy their marriage some day’), and the possibility of sex or a movie.
On this particular evening, Richard and Maria joke with one another, and while Richard eats dinner Maria tells him of the telephone conversation she had that day with Louise. Freddie (Fred Draper), an old friend of Richard’s and Louise’s husband, Maria tells Richard, is having an affair. During the course of the conversation Maria and Richard joke about Freddie’s affair, which amounts to sexual dreams whose details he describes in his sleep. For Maria this not only makes
Freddie a bad husband but also, and more importantly, a bad father. Richard takes exception to this characterisation and it is at this point that the joviality of the conversation slowly becomes cruel and malicious. Here Richard begins to describe
Freddie as a role model father. Yet Maria disagrees and argues that from “a woman’s
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point of view” Freddie comes across quite differently. Richard then begins a diatribe not only on “a woman’s point of view” but also on marriage and the pressures of everydayness from a male perspective:
Oh God… There go the God dam women again… Oh boy!... You know, one of these days, you girls are gonna charge! And you know something funny, we’ll all surrender. And you can have everything. You can have the house, and the cars, and the office, and the bills, and the headaches… And we’ll sit home and nod! That’s what we can do… All we ask for is peace. You give us our daily beating of three square meals a day of bread and water and we’ll just sit staring at the sun going blind, O.K.?
In this monologue, and in this entire scene, there is a strong sense of the fatigue, monotony and resentment that results from a middle-class, upwardly mobile lifestyle. While Richard’s remarks only address an idea of everydayness from a male perspective, it is nonetheless a perspective that demonstrates an alienated experience of everydayness. The pressures it seems not only arise from work, and the bills and possessions that tie people down, but also social and personal expectations of being a good husband, breadwinner and father. As the scene continues, there is also the impression that this everydayness and the institution of marriage (which upholds its tenets) begin to erode the ability to connect with people, and spouses in particular, both emotionally and sexually. Maria’s response to Richard’s scathing monologue gets to the heart of the matter when she says, “Oh, I’m so sorry, do we emasculate you? Poor little boys loosing their virility…”
“Well I don’t have it anymore! What happened to it, huh?” Richard’s response to Maria on his declining virility and sexual prowess is the very thing which seems to strike at the core of the issues with aging also central to the film. Aging and middle-age not only reduce sexual connection—Richard goes on to tell Maria that he
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always wants to have sex with her while she exclaims that she “is not a sex machine!” to be turned on and off—but they also by extension begin to degrade the kind of power these middle-aged and middle-class men possess. Aging changes their positions within the institutions and power structures of everydayness, even though it is an everydayness with which they struggle.45
In many ways, the events of this scene seem to be a daily occurrence. Richard wanting sex and being turned down, and Maria seeking refuge at the movies because she’s “bored” no doubt happens every day. Yet even though this could be approached as a typical argument between the couple, from the very beginning the scene is also unpredictable. Through Cassavetes’ alignment of plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, as well as his mobile camera and editing which follows the characters through the house and, more importantly, shows the reactions of both
Richard and Maria, an idea of everydayness is concurrently opened up on to something else. By the end of the scene when the two have calmed down, Maria goes back down to the bar in the living room and begins placing ice into two glasses.
But Richard now appears in his suit jacket ready to leave. As Maria begins to apologise Richard declares that he wants a divorce. Maria begins to laugh as if it were one of Richard’s jokes. “Did you hear what I said? I want a divorce! That’s the only thing to do, isn’t it?” As he says this the camera slowly moves in to Maria’s face: her laughter has now stopped and as her face fills the frame in close-up it is clear that
45 For many commentators aging (as a passing of time) is a central issue in Cassavetes’ work. See in particular Jodi Brooks, “Performing Aging/Performance Crisis (for Norma Desmond, Baby Jane, Margo Channing, Sister George—and Myrtle),” in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 233-243; Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 128-135. In relation to Faces, Kouvaros argues that it is Florence “who most clearly articulates the film’s concern with mortality and aging. For Florence the dancing with Chet becomes both a physical release and a reminder of her own creeping mortality.” Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 49.
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she is in shock. Richard reacts to her silence: “Well, why don’t you laugh? It’s funny.
Well, what’s your answer? Answer me! ” Maria stands stock still looking at Richard and as he walks away she empties one of the glasses.
The uncertainty and unpredictability of this scene, especially when Richard asks for a divorce, opens the film on to another form of experience and time. It is clear in this instance that the jokes and laughter that diffused the tension and resentment in Richard and Maria’s marriage in the past can no longer do so. At this point Cassavetes’ camera and editing move from close-ups of Richard and Maria looking at one another to linger on their faces in a way that not only tells us this outburst is out of the ordinary, but that it is also a situation that charges the marriage and time itself with an intense unpredictability. As Carney suggests, the characters and unpredictable situations in Faces become “an implicit criticism of the limitations of the normative conventions within which we live most of our lives.”46 In
Lefebvre’s work, this kind of critique of everydayness and its possible rupture is labelled the everyday. For Lefebvre the alienating experience of everydayness (and its specific temporal structure) holds within itself the possibility of its own transformation via the everyday.47 The everyday is “a moment made of moments…, the dialectical interaction that is the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible.” (“EL,” 14) Here, the everyday is a particular experience of everydayness, whereby the consciousness of time by the subject, as both structured and
46 Carney, “Seven Program Notes from the American Tour of the Complete Films,” 37. 47 This idea is also contradicted by Lefebvre at several points across the body of his work. While for the most part he holds on to an idea of time in the everyday as open to transformation and even revolution, Lefebvre has argued that this “change is programmed” and that “the revolution betrayed our hopes and became part of everyday life, an institution, a bureaucracy, an economic control and a rationalization of production in the narrowest sense.” Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 10; (“EL,” 37). Despite this, Lefebvre invariably returns to the everyday as a temporal site of transformation because it is “extraordinary in its very ordinariness.” (“EL,” 37, original emphasis)
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structuring, ruptures the operation and passive consumption of everydayness.48 This consciousness of time paradoxically does not reinforce an idea of everydayness but rather provokes an experience of time as something other than structuring; a time that is excessive. This is the everyday as remainder. As Lefebvre writes, the everyday “is the residuum (of all the possible specific and specialized activities outside social experience).”49 (“EL,” 32, original emphasis) It would seem that this residuum or remainder is that which can not be contained by everydayness. More specifically, the everyday as remainder is suggestive of an experience of chronological and teleological time as exorbitant and uncontainable. What essentially remains here is an experience which can not be qualified by language or the discourse of capitalism.
In this idea of the everyday as remainder we find a concept that takes us back to the “dead time” so central to Kouvaros’ reading of Cassavetes: a filmic temporality which aligns plot duration and screen duration that essentially opens up time and the film’s narrative to questions and resonances that are not explained by causality, psychology or motivation.50 In the same way that the everyday can not be qualified by the discourse of capitalism, the dead time in Faces can not be contained nor explained by classical narrative strategies or readings. If dead time functions as a kind of everyday remainder, what we encounter in scenes that are characterised by its temporality are the affects, responses, reactions and emotions that are left over and
48 While theorists such as Ivone Margulies equate the everyday with Lefebvre’s concept of the Festival (as a pre-modern fusion of work, culture and art), the everyday differs quite significantly because it is a dis-alienation associated with capitalist modernity. (“EL,” 36) See Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996), 25. As Michael E. Gardiner argues, the rupturing of everydayness via the everyday “might be furtively glimpsed in premodern social formations — in the festival, for instance — but can never be fulfilled prior to modernity, due to backward social and technological conditions.” Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 78. 49 Blanchot also echoes this idea when he writes, the everyday is “what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse.” Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 13. 50 Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 98-99.
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often left unexplained. In the scene involving Chet, Maria and her friends, it is the awkward pauses and hesitations which create a sense of an excessive and affective time. Toward the end of the scene, singing an improvised and sexually suggestive song, Chet finally coaxes Louise to dance whose initial protestations eventually give way to a couple of sexually evocative dance moves. At this point, Maria, who for the most part has been observing the flirtatious interaction between Chet and her friends, slowly rises off the sofa and walks out of the room. In response, Chet stops dancing and watches Maria leave. Louise, now somewhat relaxed and carrying on
Chet’s ditty, attempts to keep him dancing. “I think we’re making fools of ourselves,” Chet says to Louise. With this statement comes a pause followed by a change in mood and Louise’s indignant response:
Well, who are you to criticize me?... Well, you don’t have to tell me I’m making a fool of myself. Look I know how to dance my way. I don’t need you to tell me about it. I come from a musical background, I take care of a family of five, I have a college degree. And I don’t need you to tell me I’m making a fool of myself!
What is interesting about this scene is the way that the amount of time these events are taking exacerbates the tension and embarrassment initiated by Chet’s remark. By allowing the camera to roll, and often zooming in to close-ups on character’s faces, Cassavetes creates a temporality that is charged by both the situation as well as time itself. Time here is open to possibility and change, as well as uncertainty and ambiguity. While in some ways Louise’s response is reasonable, it is also a reaction that Chet is unable to placate (in the way he placated Billy Mae earlier). On pursuing Louise, it is unclear if the situation will be resolved by Chet and the party mood reinstated, or if it will give way altogether.
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In Cassavetes’ alignment of plot duration and screen duration we encounter a temporality which generates and provokes affects, responses and emotions that are largely unexplained and unexplainable. In Lefebvre’s conceptualisation this experience of everyday time ruptures a total or absolute alienation and essentially problematises the very idea of organisation: an idea of organisation that we can extend to classical narrative strategies. This experience, Lefebvre proposes, can ultimately transform the way we passively consume the culture of capitalism: a culture that in Faces extends to a middle-class lifestyle.51 Blanchot echoes these sentiments in the quotation that opens this section, where he argues that the regulation of daily life is ruptured in and by a phenomenally present moment. He writes, “in the moment when, lived, [the everyday] escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.”52 For Lefebvre this experience of time (in the moment) essentially facilitates the subject’s access to an authenticity of experience that everydayness endeavours to prevent. And that authenticity of experience is, for me, precisely the affectivity of the everyday.
This proposal of an authentic lived experience is an idea that stems from, according to Shields, Lefebvre’s fascination with the way the Dada and Surrealist movements attempted to dislocate the construction of daily life as trivial through specific aesthetic and art practices.53 This developed into the concept of “moments,” which, as Shields writes, are those points in time “that we would each, according to our own personal criteria, categorise as ‘authentic’ moments that break through the
51 Lefebvre’s notion of the transformative nature of the everyday is utopian (and political). For Roberts, it is this very aspect that separates his work from both Barthes and Blanchot. Roberts, “Philosophizing the everyday,” 24. And as Gardiner argues, this utopian aspect of the everyday may account for the way Lefebvre’s work has been largely disregarded. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, 72. 52 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 13. 53 Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 57.
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dulling monotony of the ‘taken for granted’.”54 Moments are, in effect, a consciousness of not only the way certain experiences cannot be explained by everydayness, but also the way those experiences sit somewhere beyond or outside of everydayness. Yet, moments are an engagement with a particular idea of time that is in effect a rejection of a Bergsonian conception of time. As Shields writes:
For Bergson, time was conceived of as linear duration (durée) or “becoming,” as an arrow of progress, or as a series of separate instances. It took little account of personal insight or feeling. A moment is not an instant, but it is opposed to a stress on simply the passage of time. By “moment,” Lefebvre means that the experience of time passing is variable. One does not feel that time has “stopped” or that one is outside of time. In the moment, one does not feel the passage of time—it is, in a sense “timeless.” Instead of time travelling in an arrow-straight line (conceptual time), we need to think of lived time qualitatively.55
Here moments are an experience of time as changeable and unstable.
Moments are, in Lefebvre’s conceptualisation, not only moments of time but furthermore moments in time, where the subject is submerged in an experience of time that has the potential to generate a host of affects. What is significant here is the way moments not only operate as a specific articulation of time but the way in which they are a concomitant affective experience of that time. These moments (as experiences outside of everydayness) essentially rupture an idea of everydayness.
Even so, for Lefebvre, these moments are in constant relation to everydayness: everydayness is always the point of reference. Yet, rather than concealing the structured and structuring nature of everydayness, moments emphasise it all the
54 Ibid., 58. 55 Ibid., 59, original emphasis.
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more. Consequently, moments are a totality, “the entirety of existence, plus all that can potentially exist in the future as a result.”56
It is this totality that Lefebvre begins to theorise as “presence,” whereby moments become “moments of presence” that are “themselves within everyday life.”57 Here an experience of a phenomenally immediate time that ruptures banality and chronological time inevitably brings the subject back to a consciousness of everydayness, as well as its relation to moments of presence. Yet, moments of presence as totality are also moments of authentic experience. It seems that an idea of authentic experience here likewise arises from an experience of banality.
Therefore, rather than creating a theory of lived experience as one that is divided into experiences that arise from, on the one hand, within everyday life, and on the other, from somewhere outside of everyday life, Lefebvre’s moments of presence emphasise the way these experiences are in constant relation to one another.
This constant relation between moments of presence and everydayness gestures to a conception of the everyday as dialectical. Even though, as I have stated above, moments of presence are in part experiences that are external to everydayness, they in fact suggest a complex relation between affective experiences and the (daily) construction of meaning and order. It would seem that an idea of an affective rupture, that is the everyday, arises from an idea of totality “as the entirety of existence.” If moments of presence are a totality, then, they must be an affective
56 Ibid., 60. While Lefebvre is, according to Shields, consciously setting up the moment against an idea of Bergsonian duration, the moment resonates with Deleuze’s reworking of Bergson in Cinema 2. I will address this issue in the following section. 57 Ibid. In her essay, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday,” Laurie Langbauer argues that in Lefebvre’s later analyses of the everyday, such as Everyday Life in the Modern World, he problematises an idea of totality due to the fact that it can transform the everyday into everydayness. Yet, as Langbauer asserts, on “insisting on a system, Lefebvre still gestures to totality, but his system continually calls its own notion of totality into question.” Laurie Langbauer, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday,” diacritics 22, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 50.
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experience of time for the everyday subject that comes from within everydayness itself. If totality is all that we live and experience then no experience can possibly sit outside of this. Hence, a rupturing affective experience is in effect generated from an encounter with everydayness.
For Lefebvre, everyday life is the dialectical relation between everydayness and the everyday, signifying meaning and affective experience.58 But this is not to say that the everyday and everydayness are two separate concepts, entities, experiences
(or even temporalities). There is a constant and continual movement between the two. That is, the everyday and everydayness are continually reinserting themselves into one another.59 There can be no ‘pure’ moments of the everyday (as ‘pure’ affect) or of everydayness (as the experience of banality and routine as unaffected).
“Lefebvre refuses to make a Cartesian division,” Shields writes,
because this classification would result in two solitudes, where the everyday was condemned to perpetual alienation, with perplexed academics debating the efficacy of strategies for transforming elements of the everyday into elements of an unalienated extraordinary set of “moments.” Instead of two distinct sets—one alienated, bad, everyday; the other special, good, unalienated “moments”—Lefebvre proposes two overlapping sets. Each element of the alienated everyday is also potentially an element of the unalienated extraordinary set. This overlap means that each and every activity must be rethought as a dialectic of presence and “absence.”… Each activity is simultaneously an opportunity for alienation and for dis-alienation.60
58 For Peter Osborne, it is this very dialectical quality of the everyday, as well as its “specifically modern” nature that may possibly connect it to historical experience. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 189, original emphasis. 59As Roberts argues, “the ‘everyday’ is not just a space of critical decoding and redemption, but also a place of active dissent from ‘everydayness’; a place where mass mediated and industrialized everydayness is unable completely to regulate and reify the shared practices, customs, forms of resistance, self-identity, and moments of subversion of a ‘common culture’.” Roberts, “Philosophizing the everyday,” 23. 60 Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 70, emphasis added.
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The consequence of the dialectical relation between the everyday and everydayness then is that both are present and absent within each other at any given point. One cannot be separated from the other. As such, they are both “here and elsewhere” at any particular moment. (“EL,” 4) The importance of this, as Shields argues, is that any and every daily activity, moment, or interaction can either rupture or give in to everydayness and alienation. While this relation is significant, for
Lefebvre it is the possible affective rupture of everydayness in and through time which holds the key to his investigation.
The significance of Lefebvre’s work in this chapter, and for this thesis generally, lies in the way his conception of an authentic and affective experience of the everyday offers a means of conceptualising an idea of a filmic everyday, not as an authentic experience of time but rather as an affective experience of time that provokes a reconsideration of filmic temporality, as well as the relation between that temporality and viewing.61 Throughout Faces, an idea of everydayness (and the kinds of ideas and meanings it manufactures) is continually pressured and ruptured by the temporality that characterises the film. As I argued above, in the alignment between plot duration and screen duration, we find a temporality which generates an idea of the everyday and an affective experience of time for the performers and characters within the film.
61 An idea of a filmic everyday, and the way in which the everyday is both performed and produced by filmic time is distinct from an idea of everyday performance addressed by Pamela Robertson Wojcik. Reading Cassavetes through Erving Goffman, Wojcik argues “what we see most often are moments of failure in which everyday performance breaks down and characters experience…a split between the social front and the personal front.” Wojcik goes on to propose that the performances within Cassavetes’ films exceed an idea of everyday performance due to a collapse of social roles. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “Impromptu Entertainment: Performance Modes in Cassavetes’ Films,” Senses of Cinema 9 (September-October 2000), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/9/cassavetes.html. However, I would argue that the affective and affected performances in his work become everyday in and through time. Rather than exceeding the everyday, Faces continually emphasises the tension between everydayness and the everyday.
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Through the alignment of plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, an affective temporality also becomes materially present for the viewer. In the relation between these temporalities we do not merely find a means of addressing the everyday on a narrative level but also the everyday as a conception of affective viewing time which counters the reductive nature of an idea of ‘real time.’ As I previously argued, Cassavetes’ approach to filmic time has often been classified as
‘real time’: an idea of time that marks the connection between film, realism and the everyday. Yet in Cassavetes’ work and in Faces in particular, this concept of time fails to account for the kind of affectivity that is generated by time for the viewer.
In a scene near the beginning of the film where Richard and Freddie are at
Jeannie’s apartment after drinking at The Loser’s Club, time goes “on and on with
Warholian exhaustiveness” as Andrew Sarris writes.62 Fuelled by alcohol and a sense of time running out of their middle-aged bodies, (as Freddie exclaims they are both
“getting old and grey” and “fat and grey”), Richard and Freddie vie for Jeannie’s affection by singing, telling jokes and performing old college routines.63 In the initial moments of the scene, all three dance, laugh and half-seriously ponder on the importance of Sunday schools, hospitals and friendship. The mood at this point is elevated and their behaviour erratic and uncertain in a jovial way. Yet once Freddie senses a connection between Richard and Jeannie, the mood changes dramatically.
Freddie, now on the periphery, tries to find ways to regain Jeannie’s attention but continually fails. Again the camera keeps rolling, often focusing on Freddie’s
62 Andrew Sarris, Review of Faces, in Film 68/69: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics, eds. Hollis Alpert and Andrew Sarris (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 123. 63 For Sylvie Pierre and Kouvaros respectively, alcohol plays an integral role in Cassavetes’ films as its incendiary and depressive nature is connected to a freeing up of the body and behaviour. See Sylvie Pierre, “Two Faces of Faces: Around the void,” trans. Annwyl Williams, in Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 324-325; Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 158-205.
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disappointed and angry face. Once more the trajectory of the scene and the way the characters will behave and react is unclear: the time that we are given here does not allow us to predict the movement or outcome of the scene, nor the emotions and reactions that will be generated. Finally the mood completely shifts when Freddie asks Jeannie how much she charges. The scene now changes with all three characters angry, defensive and yelling at one another. By the end of the scene Freddie apologises, leaving Richard and Jeannie momentarily alone.
In this scene the time that we encounter (that aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) does not merely present us with the behaviour and emotions of the characters. Rather what we find in this scene and in the entire film is a filmic temporality which provokes and produces them. What we find in
Cassavetes’ work are affects, emotions and behaviours that come in to being in the moment; emotions and affects that are generated and provoked by time itself. For
Kouvaros, the importance of Cassavetes’ cinema lies in “an emphasis on the capacities of expression” and the way those capacities are inextricably tied to “a continuous present tense.”64 Characters in films such as Faces are continually negotiating the erratic and uncertain nature of time, love, emotions and relationships. In many ways, this kind of negotiation also occurs for the viewer of the film who is invariably placed in as an uncertain and ambiguous position as the characters. As Carney writes, Cassavetes “wants to keep us off balance, to induce the same edgy awareness in his audience that he cultivates in his characters.”65
For Carney, the relation between the characters and the viewer is forged by the kind of uncertainty and unpredictability that Cassavetes creates. If, as Carney
64 Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 41, 49. 65 Ray Carney, “Complex Characters,” Film Comment 25, no. 3 (May-June 1989): 31.
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suggests, the viewer needs to be aware, needs to be on the same emotionally ambiguous level as the characters in Faces, then I would argue that in order to do so they need to be on a similar (though not equivalent) temporal level. An idea of the everyday in the work of Lefebvre provides the first step in allowing us to think through the relation between the characters and the viewer, and by extension the film and the viewer. What we find in a filmic practice that consciously aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, is a filmic everyday that is concerned with both film and its reception and experience.
In examinations of cinematic realism and time, the relation between filmic time and viewing is an important line of inquiry in thinking through film’s temporal specificity. In the work of Bazin and Deleuze after him, a film practice that consciously aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time not only opens time up for the performers and characters within the film but it also generates an affective and material experience of time for the viewer: an idea of filmic and spectatorial time that plays out the dialectic of the everyday as well as a circuit of affective exchange between film and viewer.
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III. Philosophical concepts of filmic time: André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze
The cinema does something strangely paradoxical. It makes a molding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object.—André Bazin66
[I]n modern cinema…the time-image is no longer empirical, nor metaphysical; it is “transcendental” in the sense that Kant gives this word: time is out of joint and presents itself in the pure state. The time-image…is no longer time which is subordinate to movement; it is movement which subordinates itself to time.—Gilles Deleuze67
In her in-depth study of Chantal Akerman’s work, Ivone Margulies recognises that in the decades following the post-war period the everyday becomes the site from which to explore changed social conditions. “Between the mid ’40s and the mid
’70s,” Margulies writes, “questions of social reality and the everyday took vivid cinematic forms to represent a new focus of the post-war period—the privileging of materiality, of concrete existence and of social solidarity.” These issues, Margulies points out, were connected “not only to a generic humanist feeling, but to a Marxist sensibility geared toward analyzing material conditions.”68 The analysis of these altered material conditions not only surfaced in the academy in the disciplines of sociology and philosophy but also in film. Through the work of cultural theorists and philosophers such as Lefebvre and Blanchot, as well as film theorists such as
Bazin, Margulies looks into the simultaneous development of the philosophical idea of the everyday and its connection to the quotidian that shows up in an idea of
66 André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema: Part Two,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 96-97. 67 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 271; hereafter cited in text as “C2.” 68 Margulies, Nothing Happens, 24.
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realism in both cinematic practice and criticism. At this historical juncture, she argues, there is a decided interest in film’s ability to substantially represent the reality of daily life through a particular conception of filmic time: a time where “nothing happens.” In the film practices of the Italian Neorealists and the French New Wave, the representation of quotidian reality is undertaken through an exploration of time, and the way time provokes an engagement with the materiality of life and film. As
Margulies writes:
In the films of this period, a number of strategies clearly function to make the everyday and material reality the signifier of the Real: the temporal equality accorded both significant and insignificant events; the programmatic foregrounding of materiality and visual concreteness (Robert Bresson, Straub and Huillet, Akerman); the use of amateur actors (De Sica, Zavattini, Jean Rouch, Rossellini); the reenactment of one’s own experience (Zavattini, Antonioni, Rouch); and the use of real, literal time to depict events (Warhol, Akerman).69
Once again the key issues that surround a cinematic practice concerned with the everyday, a practice that is also reminiscent of Cassavetes’ work in the United
States at the same time, are centred on time. By focusing on the “insignificant,” often banal and routine events of daily life in “real, literal time,” this kind of filmmaking practice begins to question the temporal boundaries between material reality and film. In Margulies’ work, like that of many other commentators, this idea of a “real, literal time” in film is a notion that refers to an equivalence between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time: a filmic duration that takes on an affective materiality for both the performer and the viewer.70 It is this approach to
69 Ibid., emphasis added. 70 In Nothing Happens, Margulies labels the particular concept of filmic time that Chantal Akerman constructs in her films as “real time,” “literal time” and “extended duration.” While an idea of “real
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filmic time and its relation to viewing which has been central to thinking through an idea of cinematic realism and Bazin’s realism in particular.
In his examination and theorisation of film, Bazin’s predominant concern has been with the essence or the ontology of the medium, and its relation to the viewing subject. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “The Evolution of the
Language of Cinema” essays especially, Bazin develops the significance of a post-war cinematic realism that allows us to approach film not merely as the ‘objective’ recording of a pre-existing reality but also as the revelation of a reality in the making.
Like the photograph, the cinema and its ability to be a window on this kind of reality is fused to and arises from a specific relation to its apparatus. Film, he suggests, offers “a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.”71 This “re-presentation” of events in time and space by an automatic and mechanical process, is what essentially differentiates both film and photography from other art practices, and what constitutes for Philip Rosen, Bazin’s “objective” realism.72 Film (and photography) are privileged mediums here because the representation of reality is inextricably connected to the way the apparatus of each medium preserves and presents time.
time” seems to reaffirm the problematic equivalence addressed in the initial stages of this chapter, Margulies’ terms function in very particular ways and offer a means of coming to terms with the specificity of time in Akerman’s cinema. Margulies, Nothing Happens, 45. My analysis of Margulies’ argument will be developed in my proposal of the ‘cinematic punctum’ in Chapter Two. 71 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 13-14, original emphasis; hereafter cited in text as “OP.” 72 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 12.
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This idea of film arises out of Bazin’s engagement with a particular film aesthetic that is concerned with the ontological ambiguity of the Real as it is conveyed through different filmic styles. In the work of Jean Renoir, Robert
Flaherty, and the Italian Neorealists, whose films often take the quotidian as their thematic focus, Bazin concentrates on the use of the long take and shot in depth in particular because they not only produce a material sense of the quotidian through time but they likewise generate a material experience of time itself. On Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North (1947),73 Bazin writes, “[w]hat matters to Flaherty, confronted with Nanook hunting the seal, is the relation between Nanook and the animal; the actual length of the waiting period…. [T]he length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object.”74 Time here, for Bazin, not only explicates the narrative but it also becomes a presence within the narrative. In the hunting scene, there is a decided emphasis on waiting for the right moment to trap the seal. Here Flaherty does not compress the waiting time: there is the sense that, filmically, the hunt is not organised by a predetermined temporality. Like Nanook and the camera, we also wait for the seal to emerge from the water. For Bazin, this conception of time is created through the long take, depth of focus and occasionally montage.75
Filmic practices and techniques such as the long take and shot in depth (or depth of focus) are fundamental to Bazin’s idea of cinematic realism because they are faithful to the kind of continuous time and space that we experience in material reality. Neither of these techniques contort nor usurp the integrity of time or space.
More than this, they construct an often ambiguous and undetermined space, time
73 Nanook of the North’s original release is credited as 1921, while its sound version is 1947. 74 André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 27, emphasis added. 75 Although Bazin is for the most part suspicious of montage, it would seem that montage should invariably be at the service of an unfolding time and space, and therefore reality. Ibid., 34-35.
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and reality. And even though Bazin’s notion of realism is predicated on a pre- existing reality, it does not rule out an idea of a reality that is uncertain and produced in the moment of filming. In the final scene of Roberto Rossellini’s Germana Anno
Zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1947), for instance, Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) wanders through the bombed-out ruins of Berlin after poisoning his father in order to save him from the hardships of post-war everyday life. Yet rather than a sequence that gives us a more detailed insight into Edmund’s motivations and feelings, Rossellini’s camera tracks the boy in a travelling long take while he walks, kicks stones, plays in the rubble and attempts to join a soccer game. The long take in this scene not only gives us a sense of a wandering time but also, via deep focus, the spaces that now characterise Edmund’s neighbourhood, and the sheer hopelessness of both. During this scene, it is the continuity of time and space, as well as the ambiguity and uncertainty that they create, that begin to render time a material presence. Much like other Neorealist films, the concluding scene of Germana Anno Zero can be characterised by Blanchot’s phrase where “nothing happens” because for the most part we see Edmund aimlessly and listlessly wandering: time rolls on in this scene in a way that opens the moment on to uncertainty and possibility. While “nothing happens” at the same time anything can happen. And this is what occurs: in the end the scene takes on a somewhat surprising and dreadful turn when Edmund throws himself out of a bombed-out building in which he was playing. At this point, an idea of cinematic realism is opened up on to the questions, possibilities and ambiguity of the real, no matter how disturbing. “Realism, for Bazin,” as Jon Beasley-Murray
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argues, “is the means by which the cinema becomes more open, if anything more uncertain and challenging.”76
Like the everyday, and the everyday that we encounter in Faces, Bazin’s idea of realism is one that is premised on a particular temporality that opens time on to uncertainty, ambiguity, possibility and chance. I would argue that this temporality within a film, a temporality that is also phenomenally and affectively present for characters or subjects within a film’s diegesis, is often connected to a particular articulation of time that is generated by an alignment between plot duration and screen duration. Taking this idea a step further, I would also suggest that another alignment is crucial to Bazin’s concept of realism: the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. Where the first proposed alignment creates a materiality and affectivity within the film, the second creates it for the viewer experiencing the film. For this reason, both the film and viewer come together in a very specific way.
In Rosen’s analysis, this connection is explained by the fundamental relation between the cinema’s “objective” realism and a “subjective” experience of that realism. As he points out in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Bazin’s
“objective” realism can never be disassociated from the experience of the spectator.
“Bazin believes in the necessary coexistence and interaction of both objective and subjective aspects in the making and receiving/experiencing of films,” Rosen writes.77 For Bazin, a film aesthetic that is concerned with time is one that generates a particular engagement with reality and time for the viewing subject. And as Rosen
76 Jon Beasley-Murray, “Whatever Happened to Neorealism? —Bazin, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky’s Long Take,” iris 23 (Spring 1997): 42, original emphasis. 77 Rosen, Change Mummified, 11.
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goes on to argue, Bazin’s “objective” realism is only available through a “subjective” interaction with the film.78
In this subjective interaction, or Bazin’s “psychology,” we are confronted with a very specific spectatorial engagement with film, realism and time. For Bazin, film and the photograph, by way of their automatic and unmediated processes, essentially create an engagement with the subject’s longing for illusion and immortality. Here, the photograph and film are a defence against the passage of time, and consequently death. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin argues that cinema has a memorial nature, a nature that is connected to the way the photograph preserves time via “the mummy complex.” (“OP,” 9) As Bazin writes,
“photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.” (“OP,” 14) Hence, the photograph is not only the representation of reality via the photographed object and its organisation of time and space, it is likewise the preservation of the time in which the object existed before the camera. Photography then, for Bazin, is indexical, where the referent will always be time. Like the fingerprint and the Holy Shroud of Turin, the photograph is evidence of the existence of a specific moment in time. (“OP,” 14)
And since the cinema for Bazin almost always has a photographic referent, it also shares a similar conception and operation of time as the photograph. In the cinema, Bazin argues, “the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.” (“OP,” 15) It is precisely this idea of cinematic duration that Gilles Deleuze takes up and develops in his idea of the time-image: a
78 Ibid., 12.
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conceptualisation of time that I will return to in this chapter.79 For Bazin, the cinema’s referent is also time but it is an embalmed time in motion: it is the preservation of time as dead. “Photography preserves an instant of time for a subject, and cinema preserves a fragment of time that can be experienced as actual duration,” Rosen points out.80 While the photograph, as Rosen argues, preserves an instant, the cinema has the ability to preserve the movement and continuity of time’s flow. As I have previously argued, it is often the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time that generates a sense of unfolding time for the viewer. As we see in Bazin’s analysis of Nanook of the North, this time is not exclusively at the service of narrative progression. The duration of the hunt is the materiality of the image for Bazin. The waiting time that is often elided in much classical narrative cinema is the “substance” of the image and the very thing that allows us to experience time as dead.
In this conception of cinematic time, there is a sense that an extended amount of time is needed in order for the cinema and the photograph to become traces of time.81 What is significant here is the time that it takes for the cinema to become, and be experienced as, a temporal medium.82 Bazin’s ideas suggest that time here is materially present yet also absent: a seemingly immediate time is experienced as dead. Rosen provides an explanation for this somewhat contradictory experience:
79 Even though Deleuze’s conception of time and post-war cinema is set in motion by a Bazinian idea of temporality, he does not suggest a connection between death and time. 80 Rosen, Change Mummified, 29. 81 The idea that an extended amount of time is needed in order for the photograph to become a trace of time resonates with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” in his analysis of the long exposure photograph. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 17. 82 This idea gestures to a stillness within the cinematic image that allows the image to become a kind of decal (much like the photograph). These issues will be explored in Chapter Two in relation to Roland Barthes’ analysis of the photograph in Camera Lucida.
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Time passing, duration, and change are exactly what Bazin’s ontological subject is driven to disavow, for they raise the problem of death. The lure of automatically produced images is attributable to subjective obsession precisely because time is a threat. It threatens the stable existence of the subject (death, decay) as well as the object (degradation, transformation). Hence, the paradox: On the one hand, automatically produced images fundamentally appeal to a desire that the concrete be preserved, stopped in time as reality. This desire leads to the special attraction and epistemological possibilities of cinema, insofar as it can move the subject toward opening itself to a revelatory experience of reality. But on the other hand, reality itself evolves in time, and is even perceived in the flow of time, which means that reality in some sense goes against that which motivates the desire to engage it.83
For Bazin, then, an idea of time in the cinema is predicated on both the construction of time within the film as well as the experience of that time by the viewer. Thus, what is at stake here is not only the time that it takes for the cinematic image to become a referent of time, but the time that it takes for the viewer to affectively experience film as a referent of time. This seems to suggest a concern with the kinds of affects that are generated in this time/space between film and viewer. The way that time is both changing and in flux, as well as preserved, indicates an experience of time as dialectical.
In the relation between film and the viewer we can locate the essence of the cinema for Bazin. “Always, for Bazin, cinema achieves its specificity through the relations of the subject.”84 For Bazin, a conception of reality in the cinema can never be separated from an experience of that reality. Consequently, in Bazin’s work there is an interdependent union between the time in and of the film and the experience of that time: a union that allows us to consider the affective exchange between film and
83 Rosen, Change Mummified, 28, original emphasis. 84 Ibid., 22.
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viewing as resulting from the dialectical relation between plot duration and screen duration, and plot duration, screen duration and viewing time.
The relation between a Bazinian objective realism and its experience by the viewer is taken up by Deleuze in his exploration of the cinema, particularly Cinema 2:
The Time-Image. In this study, Deleuze’s exploration of a post-war cinema that is
concerned with time and affect is initiated by Bazin’s arguments regarding realism
and time. “For both Deleuze and Bazin,” Beasley-Murray notes, “the specificity of
the cinema remains its unfolding of the image in the real time that becomes the lived
time of thought and the body.”85 Beasley-Murray quite rightly proposes here that the
link between Bazin and Deleuze is an undeniable and important one. And even
though Deleuze’s project has been considered a mere “reformulation” of Bazin’s
work, an examination of his idea of the time-image is vital here for two key reasons:
firstly, Deleuze’s investigation is explicitly concerned with the connection between
time and affect in relation to specific conceptions of filmic time and spectatorship;
and secondly, Deleuze’s work expressly articulates the everyday as a crucial site in
modern cinema for thinking through this connection.86
85 Beasley-Murray, “Whatever Happened to Neorealism?” 39. While Beasley-Murray’s use of the term real time seems to recall the ‘real time’ problematic that was addressed in the initial stages of this chapter, his conception of real time is not one that dissolves the divide between filmic time and the temporality of material reality. Rather it is an idea of time that is concerned with the affective capacities of an unfolding time and consequently is suggestive of the conception of time that I am addressing here. 86 For Dudley Andrew, Deleuze’s project is a “reformulation of Bazin’s prescient view of the utterly new cinema constituted by the appearance of La Règle du jeu, Citizen Kane, and Rossellini.” Dudley Andrew, “André Bazin’s ‘Evolution’,” in Defining Cinema, ed. Peter Lehman (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), 88. Yet I would argue, much like Beasley-Murray, that Deleuze’s conception of time is a continuation of Bazin’s work that is likewise speaking to semiotics and a semiotic immobilisation of the image that he so vehemently objects to. “In stressing continuities I am returning Deleuze’s work to the problematic generated by Bazin, while acknowledging the fact that Deleuze is in no sense ‘returning’ to Bazin. Rather, he uses Bazinian positions and structures as a basis from which to open up a new problematic in the wake of a disillusionment with the semiological project, which he thus side-steps.” Beasley-Murray, “Whatever Happened to Neorealism?” 39. While I will not be pursuing the connection between semiotics and Deleuze, it is necessary to acknowledge the way his work is, in part, responding to the discipline of film theory.
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In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that post-war society and cinema can no longer support a pre-war idea of unification, in regard to social norms, institutions or subjectivity. Beginning with a Bazinian approach to the cinematic realism of the
Italian Neorealists, Deleuze maintains that at the core of the modern cinema is the collapse of the sensory-motor schema; a rupture that effects the connections between situation, action and reaction that characterised “the action-image” of classical narrative cinema.87 As such, cinema can no longer be defined by action and movement but instead is typified by a conscious representation of the uncertainty of a post-war everyday. As Deleuze writes, “the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe.” (“C2,” xi)
For Deleuze, the situations, events and spaces that characterise this period
“could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once.”
(“C2,” xi) In the initial stages of his conceptualisation of the time-image, the everyday is the site that allows Deleuze, much like Bazin, to reflect on a cinematic practice that is no longer defined by predetermined spaces, events and reactions but rather is characterised by the kind of spaces, temporalities and responses that come into being in the moment of filming: a consideration of the everyday that begins to invoke Lefebvre’s quotidian as a rupturing of a programmed and predetermined everydayness. In modern cinema’s concern with the everyday (and the everyday body), Deleuze also finds a disconnection that sees the association between people, spaces and the sensory-motor schema disintegrate. As a result of this, we are
87 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 155.
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confronted with “pure optical and sound situations,” (“opsigns” and “sonsigns” respectively), that cannot extend into movement or response but rather become an investment in the materiality of time and the body. This, Deleuze writes, “is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent.” (“C2,” 2) Here the ability to drive change collapses, and characters often find themselves watching and waiting, in effect becoming spectators in their own films.
According to Deleuze, the breakdown of movement and action essentially arises from an overwhelming and affective presence of time. Cinema can no longer support a movement-image because time “appears for itself.” (“C2,” xi) In other words, time assumes a presence that is disengaged from the idea that it is solely generated by, and consequently subordinate to, movement. For Deleuze, this
‘cinema of time’ marks a radical shift in both film practice and the way that practice reorganises consciousness. Where the movement-image created time through the linkage of ideas and images in the form of montage (“the organic regime of the movement-image”), the cinema of the time-image produces a temporality independent of movement and logical connection. (“C2,” 26) However, the time- image does not represent the impossibility of rational linkages in the sense that perception leads to action, but it becomes the impossibility of those linkages. In this post-war period what we see is an inability to extend perception into affection, and more importantly meaningful action. And because time is no longer the
“measurement of movement,” it begins to destroy the type of consciousness and narrative meaning that is created by the movement-image: a consciousness that equates an image of the world with movement.88 In this cinema, time begins to
88 Ibid.
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assume a presence within the film that is comparable to that of character; it is no longer produced through montage, but rather exists as an independent and often unexplainable force.
This excessive and affective presence of time is the very thing that dissolves the boundaries and relations between past, present and future, and consequently an idea of chronology. It is this idea that gives time the form of the “crystal,” where the fragments of time connect and reconnect in a non-chronological fashion.89 “Once chronology is pulverized, time is fragmented like so many facets of a shattered crystal. The chronological continuum is flayed, shaving past, present, and future into distinct series, discontinuous and incommensurable,” D. N. Rodowick writes.90 As a result, the crystalline conception of time that characterises the time-image essentially ruptures an idea of temporal continuity, chronology and teleology that explains the causal relation between the past, present and future, as well as events, actions and motivations.
For Deleuze, the crystalline conception of time that characterises the time- image is also distinct from the kind of temporality associated with the movement- image through an idea of affect. In the movement-image, affect or more specifically
“the affection-image,” is the intermediary between perception and action where it is an expression of perception and the possibility of action.91 In the affection-image, affect inhabits the subject; affect is internal because it is a possibility of feeling that is generated from perception and has the potential to be realised in action. Conversely, affect in the time-image is inhabited by the subject. The subject inhabits an affect
89 Gilles Deleuze, “On the ‘Crystalline Regime’,” trans. D. N. Rodowick, Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989): 21. 90 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997), 4. 91 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 65.
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that is time, a time that is able to affect and be affected in much the same way it is in
Lefebvre’s everyday. Accordingly, we inhabit a changed and changing state of time.
The subject occupies affect itself as non-chronological time. And here this affective time seems to be both the temporality generated within and by the film (plot duration and screen duration) as well as the temporality associated with the relation between the film and viewing (plot duration, screen duration and viewing time).
Much like Bazin’s conception of time that results from the relation between the cinema and the viewer, the “objective” and the “subjective,” Deleuze’s concept of the time-image addresses time on the level of the filmic image (as well as its operation) and the experience of viewing. As such, time here is not only the affective capacity of the temporality created by film but also the affective potential of viewing that is generated by this image. Thus, the affective temporalities that respectively structure the image and the experience of viewing also become indistinguishable. It would appear that neither time nor affect can be produced or maintained without the other.
In Cinema 2, Deleuze returns to Baruch Spinoza’s conception of affect that was adopted in A Thousand Plateaus:
L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.92
92 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), xvi, original emphasis.
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This idea of affect, like that of the time-image, emphasises the capacity “to affect and be affected,” and the way this equivalence creates either an excess or lack of movement via the body’s transition from one affect to another affect.
The body here is the site of affect. It is affected. But it likewise has the ability to affect, much like time in the time-image. But what is interesting here is the way the body as affected and affective can give out too much or not enough. In
Spinoza’s conception of affect, there is the sense that the motor tendency of the body is disrupted by the exorbitance of affect. Within the time-image, time itself is the body that is concurrently affected and affective. In this cinema of time, like
Lefebvre’s quotidian, time is both excessive and deficient; we are given too much and yet too little. What we are confronted with is the very presence of time and the way that presence questions and unsettles the causal movement of narrative and character. Time here takes on a presence that opens up ideas of character, gesture and performance as sites of temporal response and inscription.
For Deleuze, the cinema of the time-image is one that problematises an idea of temporal chronology and teleology. In Cinema 2, Deleuze proposes that a certain modernist aesthetic produces a temporality that alters the way that we experience film. In Deleuze’s conceptualisation, the specific time-image that ruptures this chronology and creates an affective cinematic time akin to that of the everyday is the third time-image or the “series of time.” And it is in this particular idea of time, which also strongly resonates with the temporality so crucial to Bazin’s realism, that
Deleuze positions the work of Cassavetes.
In the third time-image, an idea of presentness begins to fall away. Here time becomes a “series of time, which brings together the before and the after in a
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becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is to introduce an enduring interval in the moment itself.” (“C2,” 155, original emphasis) In this temporal continuum which ostensibly neutralises the present, we are confronted with the past and the future—the before and the after of time. Here we encounter and reencounter the past and the future, as well as their departure and return, paradoxically through a distended presentness that negates its existence. As
Rodowick argues:
In series, we witness change or metamorphosis across a sequence of images as the transformation of states, qualities, concepts, or identities. This is why Deleuze calls the third direct image of time a “genesign.” Here the distinction between the true and the false is again transformed. The genesign presents a power of the false that questions the notion of the true. But this is not an overcoming of the false as illusion or deception. Rather, it is an affirmation of the force of time as becoming, a force that continually renews the possibilities for change and the appearance of the new.93
In the “series of time,” the overwhelming presentness that is created through the alignment between plot duration and screen duration problematises the distinctions between truth and falsity, which for Deleuze is translated in the blurring between “the cinema of fiction and the cinema of reality.” 94 (“C2,” 155) In Cinema 2,
Deleuze examines this idea of time in relation to both documentary (specifically the
Direct cinema of filmmakers such as Jean Rouch) and narrative film (of filmmakers such as Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke). In his analysis, Deleuze considers the way an
93 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 83. 94 Deleuze’s ideas concerning the blurring between fiction and reality resonates with Jean-Louis Comolli’s 1969 essay “Le détour par le direct.” In this piece, Comolli addresses an idea of direct cinema as one that is continually crossing over between the filmic and the profilmic; a slippage that is predicated on a moment that generates, rather than represents, performance. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le détour par le direct,” trans. Diana Matias, in Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, ed. Christopher Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 225-243.
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‘enduring moment’ opens up an idea of time and performance in each practice to aspects of the profilmic (in narrative cinema) and drama (in documentary film). In
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960), for instance, a documentary that takes as its concern the everyday lives of Parisians at the end of the 1950s, an idea of documentary as an ‘objective’ and ‘unmediated’ record of events is problematised by the sense of “dead time” that is generated by the film’s temporality. Morin and Rouch consciously allow the camera to roll in interviews with participants such as Marilou. In both interviews with Marilou, this temporality opens the interview not on to a singular ‘truth’ (in the strictest documentary sense) but rather onto an idea of performance and drama. On one particular occasion, it is difficult to distinguish whether Marilou is telling us the truth about her emotional and mental breakdown or whether she is playing up to the camera and performing her response.95
In narrative cinema, this idea is reversed whereby time allows a kind of ‘truth’ to be produced, revealed and exposed (rather than reproduced or represented as
Comolli argues) in the moment of filming.96 In Cassavetes’ work, this truth is almost always an emotional and affective one that is provoked by the camera as well as the complex on-screen and off-screen relationships of the characters and actors. This temporal moment, then, as Rodowick argues above, “is an affirmation of the force of time as becoming, a force that continually renews the possibilities for change.”97
95 Bill Nichols argues that in documentaries such as Chronique d’un été, which he classifies as belonging to “the Interactive mode,” the “present-tense quality is strong and [a] sense of contingency vivid.” In a similar vein to Deleuze, Nichols suggests that chance, contingency and possibility are generated by a temporality which allows events to unfold in time. One again, this temporality is for me produced by an alignment between plot duration and screen duration. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 47. 96 Comolli, “Two Faces of Faces,” 326. 97 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 83.
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In the moment there is the possibility of an unknown and unpredictable response to time that disrupts the expectations of both narrative film (as a predetermined representation) and documentary (as a document of unmediated objectivity). It is for this very reason that this particular time-image ruptures the construction of ideas of truth and falsity, as well as the construction of time as one that can ultimately structure and explain events as either true or false.
It is in these terms that Deleuze addresses the work of Cassavetes and begins to invoke the phenomenal affectivity of Lefebvre’s quotidian. For Deleuze, the
“series of time” characterises the operation of filmic time and performance in films such as Shadows (1959) and Faces. In Cassavetes’ film practice there is a production of performance in time, whereby the performances within the films are not only a response to time but they are likewise an interchange between the filmic and profilmic:
[T]ime is necessary here; a certain time is necessary which constitutes an integral part of the film. This is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows and then Faces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in the people more than in the film, in the “human problems” more than in the “problems of mise-en-scène,” so that the people do not pass over to the side of the camera without the camera having passed over to the side of the people. (“C2,” 154)
Deleuze’s approach to Cassavetes, much like those of Comolli and Kouvaros, is through an idea of time that opens the film up to the dynamic and affective exchange between the moment of filming and the time of the actual production of the film. In the cinema of Cassavetes, this temporality opens up the performance space to include those emotions that are generated in the moment as well as a response to the temporal moment itself. As Deleuze’s remarks suggest, this
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particular idea of performance is one that requires time: a temporal moment that also allows performance to include those responses that belong to the actor and the actual production/shooting time of the film. I would argue that Deleuze’s approach to the everyday in Cassavetes’ films in this instance reorients the quotidian in a particularly filmic way. While Lefebvre’s idea of the everyday is productive in thinking through the dialectical relation between the temporalities that characterise both everydayness and the everyday, Deleuze’s approach, much like that of
Kouvaros after him, allows us to reflect on the relation between the everyday within the film and the everyday creating the film. As Kouvaros writes, Cassavetes’ films not only draw on the everyday of the actual production but they also utilise this everyday to examine “the quotidian dramas of family life.”98
For Deleuze, Cassavetes’ cinema is one that is based around people: their emotional, gestural and bodily responses to the process of filming and performance in time. Cassavetes himself expressed this very sentiment in an interview at the time of the release of Faces when he stated, “I am more interested in the people who work with me than I am in the film itself, than I am in filmmaking…. Films are not very important to me. People are more important.”99 In Cinema 2, Deleuze extends his analysis of Cassavetes in relation to the body, primarily in his discussion of the everyday body. Here the everyday body is a vessel of time, a time of the before and after: time as a series. “The body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body…. This is a time-image, the series of time. The daily attitude is what puts the before and after into the body, time into the body.” (“C2,” 189)
98 Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? 16. 99 John Cassavetes, “A Way of Life: An Interview with John Cassavetes,” interview by André S. Labarthe, Evergreen Review 64 (March 1969): 46.
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In Deleuze’s examination of the body as time and human form, the body is a manifestation of the states that arise from both the temporality of everydayness and the everyday. The body is the expression of both temporal repetition and unpredictability. What we see and experience here is tiredness, waiting and fatigue as well as intense, yet ephemeral, states of energy. Here the body is the site of everyday affectivity as both accumulation and potential, (yet a potential that is at once excessive and depressed). These states of the body call to mind the everyday subject as conceived by Lefebvre: a subject and body that arise out of the structures and technologies of capitalism and modernity (repetition), as well as the way the body negotiates an overturning of those structures (affective possibility).
This is the body that we encounter throughout Faces: after spending the night with Jeannie, Richard returns home in the early hours of the morning. In the initial moments of the scene, Richard is revitalized and re-energised: Richard jumps, skips, dances and bounds in a carefree way. Yet once he finds Maria and Chet, his body moves from this active vitality to displaying anger and violence and eventually fatigue and weariness. As Richard and Maria sit slumped on the stairs and perform the routine ritual of smoking, there is the sense that there is nothing left to do but sit and smoke. Heavy with dissipated anger, the routine of their middle-class daily life, and sexual rejection and boredom, their bodies are manifestations of an overwhelming fatigue and tiredness that results from the moment, as well as past moments and situations such as these. Richard and Maria’s middle-aged characters and bodies shows us the before and after of time, bodies that, as Cassavetes puts it,
“change from one minute to the other according to their mood, their state of health, their memories, what happened to them ten years ago, or what will happen to them
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in ten years more, when they’re dying.”100 Through Deleuze, we could also say the same of the actor’s body in this instance: a body that is responding to the long hours of production and the mood of the scene, as well as a body that carries with it the gestures from past performances and the actor’s everyday life.
“The greatness of Cassavetes’s work is to have undone the story, plot, or action, but also space, in order to get to attitudes as to categories which put time into the body,” Deleuze writes. (“C2,” 192) Yet, as Jodi Brooks points out, while
Deleuze’s statement provides a means of looking into the relation between time and the body in Cassavetes’ work, it does not essentially explain the particular conception of time that is in operation here. As Brooks argues, “[i]f time is put into bodies in
Cassavetes’ films, it is a particular form and experience of time. Both explosive and familiar, the temporality that circuits within and between these bodies is abrasive and marked by interruption.”101 For Brooks, the temporality that characterises the capacity of the body as well as its relation to others bodies is one that is fundamentally dialectical and everyday: time here is both unpredictable and familiar, incendiary and depressed. As a result, the body is inscribed with both repetition and possibility.
In Cassavetes’ oeuvre, time is both in the body and a body-like material presence. And this time is an affective and overwhelming force for the performer and the viewer alike. In the ‘enduring moment’ of a Deleuzian “series of time” much like a Bazinian conception of filmic time, there is an unsettling of ‘real time’ since the moment contains more than the present. In this image of time, as Deleuze suggests,
100 Ibid. 101 Jodi Brooks, “Crisis and the Everyday: Some thoughts on gesture and crisis in Cassavetes and Benjamin,” in Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, eds. Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), 76.
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the moment eradicates an idea of presentness because time is experienced as excessive and affective: the moment is one where “nothing happens” but where a nothing happening in time is felt and experienced materially. Here the moment is opened up to both repetition and possibility, to the past and the future, to the filmic and the profilmic. Consequently, Deleuze’s conception of the moment is a departure from the theoretically dominant idea of ‘real time’ and one that allows us to consider the relation between the affective temporality within the film
(and that produces the film) and the affective temporality generated from viewing the film as dialectical rather than “real.” In the connection between plot duration and screen duration, and plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, we find an idea that signals to the dialectic of the everyday as an experience of time as both structured and structuring, and phenomenally present and affective: a dialectic that is experienced as excessive. The temporal dialectic that is animated in the relation between the temporality of the film and the temporality of spectatorship effectively creates a theoretical space from which to reflect on the connection between film and the dialectic of the everyday (as an experience of time that is both lived and historical). Via the conjunction between a Deleuzian “series of time” and the philosophical concept of the everyday, I would propose that the operation of time within the image, as well as viewing time, is essentially dialectical.
The “series of time” as both a specific filmic construction of time and a viewing time is one that allows us to consider the affective and material relation between film and viewing. Cassavetes’ films, Kouvaros writes, “make us look again at how the cinema constructs a sensory world of gestures, affects and meanings.”102
102 George Kouvaros, “Intoxication, The Body, Burlesque: Cassavetes’s Love Streams,” Metro 120 (1999): 46.
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As Kouvaros’ comment suggests, Cassavetes’ cinema not only forces us to examine the production of affect within his own filmic practice, but his films additionally force a reconsideration of film’s affective potential and capacity more generally. I would like to take this idea a step further in order to propose that Cassavetes’ cinema, in connection with Bazinian and Deleuzian concepts of filmic time, allows us to engage with a multiplicity of affective temporalities in a dialectical way. In
Cassavetes’ Faces, the time of production, the temporality of the film and the time of viewing all come together to produce an affective experience comparable to the philosophical concept of the everyday.
IV. The filmic everyday
Cassavetes was infinitely wary of abstract systems of understanding and of the falsifying classifications we impose on experience in an effort to save ourselves from the challenge and danger of uncontrolled encounters. His watchword for both viewers and characters is absolute and unqualified openness—a nearly unattainable ideal.—Ray Carney103
In Cassavetes’ Faces, an idea of the everyday plays itself out in the temporality constructed by the film as well as the way that temporality produces an affective and material sense of time. Throughout this chapter, via Lefebvre, Bazin and Deleuze, I have suggested that the everyday in Cassavetes’ Faces can be approached as a filmic everyday because it produces a dialectical relation between plot duration and screen duration, and plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. Each conception and
103 Carney, “Complex Characters,” 32-33, emphasis added.
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experience of time, I proposed, in particular ways opened the cinema and the viewer on to an idea of everydayness as a structured and structuring time that produces meaning, as well as the everyday as an affective temporality that ruptures everydayness by generating possibility, chance, uncertainty and ambiguity.
In my analysis of Deleuze’s time-image in particular, I argued that his conception of the “series of time,” an affective temporality on the level of the filmic image, performance and production, as well as viewing, was not only a means to offset the problematic of ‘real time’ but also a way to consider the relation between an affective filmic temporality and an affective viewing time as dialectical. Yet, while the dialectical relation between time and affect in Deleuze’s “series of time” addresses the connection between film and viewing, it essentially overlooks an idea of apparatus time. The dialectical relation between film and viewing is, for me, continually pressured by the temporal linearity of the apparatus. If the medium of film is ultimately determined by a linear temporal flow, (film invariably comes to an end), then is a Deleuzian “series of time” possibly unsettled by this idea? Although
Deleuze’s “series of time” is one that opens up the temporal relation between the filmic image and spectatorship, it does not consider the way apparatus time continually imposes a linearity and chronology on the moment. “The camera and projector,” Turim writes,
imply a certain temporality, an unfolding that other representational apparati do not…. [I]n traditional practice, we have a very fixed frame through which we read and watch films. All inversions of temporality that occur within their representations are framed by this assumed clockwork mechanism and measured against it.104
104 Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 14.
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Turim rightly argues here that apparatus time, a linear and repeatable temporality, forces film to temporally unfold in a very specific and determined way.
Unlike other art forms, the cinema and an experience of the cinema are guided by the temporality of the camera and the projector. As such apparatus time not only assigns a temporal boundary to film but also to viewing. Doane also reiterates this idea but suggests that certain filmic constructions of time begin to problematise the linearity and chronology of the apparatus. To quote Doane again, the “irreversible linearity [of the apparatus] forms the substrate and support for any particular film’s temporal experimentation…. Such a mechanical irreversibility also, however, forms the basis for film’s affiliation with time as chance. The longer a shot is held…the more likely the intrusion of chance and the unexpected.”105
Through techniques such as the long take, and filmic constructions of time that are consciously concerned with a temporal continuity and integrity, an idea of apparatus time as linear is problematised and complicated. Yet, rather than suggesting here that apparatus time ultimately renders a Deleuzian “series” as singular, one-dimensional or equivalent, I propose that the relation between apparatus time and a Deleuzian “series of time” is multiple because it animates an additional temporal dialectic. In a filmic everyday, there seems to be a dialectical relation between a specific filmic practice (one that aligns plot duration and screen duration), the temporality of viewing (plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) and the temporality of the medium of film itself.
It is this multi-directional circuit of exchange between the temporality of film, the temporality of viewing and the temporality of the apparatus which resonates with
105 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 113.
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Lefebvre’s quotidian as a dialectic relation between meaning and affect. In
Lefebvre’s work, the quotidian is a favoured site of revolutionary change because it is figured as an affective experience of time that introduces contingency and uncertainty into the banal structures of daily life. This conception of the everyday has been central in thinking through a filmic practice that consciously addresses the temporal and affective capacities of the cinema: capacities that extend beyond the frame to the viewer (and performer) and open up filmic time for both.
For Carney, an idea of openness is also central to Cassavetes in this way. In his analysis of Cassavetes’ oeuvre, Carney suggests that characters (and by extension performers) and viewers need a quality of openness to experience the kinds of affects and emotions that Cassavetes’ films create and traverse.106 Rather than a filmic construction and a viewing experience premised on an intellectual enquiry and engagement, Cassavetes’ films deliberately take as their premise the unknowability and uncertainty of emotion and emotional connection. Yet as Carney writes, “[w]hen all is said and done, it is what makes Cassavetes’ films paradoxically among the most hopeful and idealistic ever created. Even at their most relentless and demanding, they never give up on the possibility of possibility itself.”107
Along the lines of Carney, I too would argue that Cassavetes’ films are firmly entrenched in both possibility and openness because they do not fix or make static emotional and affective connection. Additionally, openness and possibility are ways in which to reflect on the emotional and affective connections within the film as well as those created by filmic and viewing temporalities. In this idea, which takes us back to the kind of openness and possibility that is produced in the temporality of the
106 Carney, “Complex Characters,” 32-33. 107 Ibid., 33.
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everyday, we essentially locate a filmic everyday as a site of affective exchange that forces a rethinking of the more general temporal possibilities and capacities of the cinema in both practice and theory.
CHAPTER TWO
The cinematic punctum: Filmic temporality, affect and photographic stillness
I. “Coffee filter as hourglass”1: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
A woman, in a frontal medium shot, pours boiling water into a coffee filter that sits on a kitchen table. The water drips through the filter. The woman watches the coffee pot and waits. She pours more water into the filter. The water continues to drip through the filter. She barely moves; all movement, apart from the water running through the filter, seems to be on the verge of arrest. She patiently continues to watch and wait. I likewise watch and wait. She and I are watching and waiting together. But unlike this woman, my patience is tested. I fidget and shift in my seat. I cannot help feeling a little anxious. The filtering coffee seems to be taking an eternity. Yet, at some point during this process, I find myself mesmerized by the time that it is taking for the water to transform into coffee. The water eventually finishes running through the filter. As the scene is ending, I get the distinct impression that I have been watching a clock.
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is a film that presents us with the extremes of quotidian domestic routine. Myopically focused on three days from the daily life of housewife/mother and prostitute
1 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996), 79; hereafter cited in text as “NH.”
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Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), the film is on the surface a confrontation with the banality of everydayness conceptualised by Henri Lefebvre. And while making coffee as well as preparing the evening meal, cleaning and shopping signal a routine suggestive of the alienating experience of everydayness, in Akerman’s film they are more importantly everyday tasks that facilitate an encounter with the affective temporality of the everyday.
In Chapter One I argued that the everyday is an affective time and space that punctures and challenges the grinding routine and banality of everydayness. For
Lefebvre, the temporally segmented and scheduled time of everydayness is one that prescribes both work and leisure as activities that uphold a structuring capitalist logic. As such, everydayness organises existence as well as an experience of that existence. For Lefebvre, it is this experience which holds the key to the possibility of undermining everydayness. The alienating experience of everydayness, then, possesses within itself the possibility of its own transformation via the everyday.
Here the everyday is an affective (and phenomenal) experience that is provoked by an encounter with and of time as something other than structuring.
Throughout this previous chapter, I proposed that John Cassavetes’ films, and Faces (1968) in particular, worked within this affective conception of the everyday. In Jeanne Dielman too we find a film practice that is concerned with everydayness and the everyday, yet in a much more literal manner. In some ways the film seems to take Lefebvre’s offhand comments on everyday life ‘weighing most heavily on women’ to task.2 But rather than submitting to a kind of heaviness that
2 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1971), 35. In his work, Lefebvre problematically suggests an “authentic” everyday subject (created through an affective experience of the everyday) that does not account for gender even though he argues that women experience everyday life as a burden.
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sees women trapped by an oppressive routine temporality that hinders an affective experience of time, (an often routine reading of the film itself), Akerman seems intent on creating an affectivity of the everyday through everydayness.3
In a scene from the film’s third day, Jeanne makes a pot of fresh coffee after tasting the not so palatable morning brew from her thermos. After a precise and detailed process of grinding coffee beans, Jeanne sets about making the coffee. In a frontal medium shot which frames the kitchen sink and stove as the scene’s backdrop, we watch Jeanne’s focused and deliberate actions. This scene, which constitutes just over three minutes of screen duration, is one which shows us the task of making coffee in its detailed entirety. Unlike classical narrative cinema which often elides the detail of such mundane everyday moments, Akerman’s film takes quotidian tasks as its focus, and more importantly, the temporality associated with them and their completion. More than this, Jeanne Dielman revels in the time it takes to make coffee (or meatloaf or polish a pair of shoes). Using the coffee making as one instance among many, it is clear that Akerman is approaching time as a kind of material and phenomenal experience which can alter not only the act of making coffee, but also a viewing experience of that act. As such, the act of making coffee is taken to a temporal extreme through the long take where a coffee filter is transformed into a timepiece that measures not only screen duration but also plot duration and viewing time.4 In a similar manner to Faces, the film’s intense
3 A few feminist readings of the film position the everyday (and its routine temporality) as the means by which an oppressive patriarchy subjugates and exploits women. See Jayne Loader’s 1977 essay, “Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 327-340; Carina Yervasi, “Dislocating the Domestic in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,” The Journal of Twentieth Century Contemporary French Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 385-397. 4 An analysis of the distinctions between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time is developed in Chapter One.
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concentration on the everyday is played out in the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time.5 Jeanne Dielman, then, not only challenges a classical viewing experience predicated on temporal compression, but it likewise takes on the kinds of affects that are created via this alignment. “When this movie’s going right,” Patricia Patterson and Manny Farber write, “it makes the spectator aware not only of repetitiousness but of the actual duration of a commonplace act.
What’s wonderful is that we are made to feel the length of time it takes water to filter through in coffee-making, the length of time a sponge bath consumes.”6
Akerman herself has remarked that time is “the most important thing in film, time and energy.”7 In Jeanne Dielman an idea of energy is complex as the film is in various ways an extremely immobile one. In this film, Akerman employs fixed and static camera positions which mirror the kind of fixity and immobility that we often find in Delphine Seyrig’s performance: while making coffee, for instance, Jeanne is often almost photographically still as she watches and waits for the water to run through the filter. Coupled with the use of medium and medium-long shots, the long take that Akerman employs not only allows for a comprehensive acting out of everyday tasks, but it also begins to impose a photographic stillness and immobility on both the performer and the image that suggests a connection between time and a certain kind of energy.
5 Even more strongly than Cassavetes’ films, the filmic temporality of Jeanne Dielman has been approached through a kind of equivalence which a multitude of theorists and critics have labelled ‘real time.’ See Marsha Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman,” Film Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 4; John Pym, Review of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Monthly Film Bulletin 46, no. 543 (April 1979): 72; Laleen Jayamanne, “Modes of Performance in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory 8 (1980): 101. I will be taking up this issue in more detail below in my analysis of Margulies’ approach in Nothing Happens. 6 Patricia Patterson and Manny Farber, “Beyond the New Wave: I: Kitchen without Kitsch,” Film Comment 13, no. 6 (November-December 1977): 49, original emphasis. 7 Chantal Akerman cited in Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman,” 2.
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The interplay between a specific filmic temporality created by the long take and an idea of stillness is also integral to Ivone Margulies’ approach to the film in her important book length study Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday.
Here Margulies looks into the filmmaker’s work in relation to three underlying and recurring concerns: women and the everyday; filmic time and a “corporeal” spectatorship; and Akerman’s notion of type. And while her analysis traces
Akerman’s work from Saute ma ville (Blow up my town, 1968) up until D’Est (From the
East, 1993), it is Jeanne Dielman which provides the foundation for thinking through an idea of duration which structures the everyday and an idea of hyperrealism.
Unlike Margulies, this chapter’s analysis of Jeanne Dielman and an affective everyday temporality are not underpinned by an idea of hyperrealism but rather a photographic stillness that is generated through an extended duration within the cinematic image. Throughout this chapter, I will suggest that this stillness takes the cinema back to its photographic past in a way that opens the cinema, and Jeanne
Dielman, on to the affective temporality that structures the photograph. Yet while the photograph is central to my investigation of the film, an idea of the everyday as
Margulies’ conceives it is also vital in thinking through both filmic duration and a particular viewing practice. As such, a detour through Margulies’ work is crucial here because she explicitly articulates and proposes terms which deal with the specificity of filmic duration in Akerman’s films, as well as the affective and corporeal viewing position that this duration generates.
Beginning with Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot and André Bazin, Margulies tracks the concomitant development of the philosophical resurgence of the everyday in post-war Europe and an idea of realism in both film practice (epitomised by the
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Italian Neorealists) and criticism. For Margulies this quotidian is based on Blanchot’s temporal characterisation of the everyday as “nothing happens.” This characterisation, Margulies writes, “is often appended to films and literature in which the representation’s substratum of content seems at variance with the duration accorded it. Too much celluloid, too many words, too much time, is devoted to
‘nothing of interest’.” (“NH,” 21)
Much like my examination of the everyday in Chapter One, the quotidian as a
‘nothing happening’ in Margulies’ work also hinges on a temporality which exceeds both classical narrative demands and viewing expectations. But more than this, the temporality which characterises the everyday is for Margulies, (as it is for me), also a means of considering the ‘realist impulse’ of a cinema committed to time.8 For
Margulies, much like modernist filmmakers including the Italian Neorealists Vittorio
De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Cesare Zavattini, as well as Robert Bresson,
Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean Rouch, Akerman’s concerns circulate around everyday minutia and their display, as well as the way that display in time challenges classical conceptions of drama and spectatorial affect. Yet Akerman, who was working at a historical juncture that was consciously dismantling the idealistic tenets of realism, takes this idea of display to its extreme, particularly in Jeanne Dielman:
In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman disables romantic connotations by giving to the mundane its proper, and heavy, weight and by channeling the disturbing effect of a minimal-hyperrealist style into a narrative with definite political resonances. Her attention to a subject matter of social interest is literal— fixed frame, extended take—and so stylized as almost to be stilted. In this way, she denotes the idea of display itself; her cinema focuses hyperbolically
8 As Margulies goes on to argue, “[i]n the period between neorealism and Akerman’s films, the intrusion of extraneous elements, or of a different tempo (when the minor event receives an attention involving expanded duration), was shaped as a reality surplus, a reality effect.” (“NH,” 23- 24)
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on what Cesare Zavattini claimed as the main requirement of neorealist cinema—“social attention.” (“NH,” 23)
By giving the everyday its proper, temporal weight (a weight that takes on
Lefebvre’s remarks), Akerman reconfigures the everyday, and especially a woman’s everyday, in Jeanne Dielman via feminist politics. Since the film’s release, it has been viewed as a kind of paradigm for feminist filmmaking as well as a film which has forced a reassessment of the critical (and patriarchal) tools that are mobilised in film theory and criticism.9 This approach is also central to Margulies’ own assessment especially in her examination of Akerman’s idea of type as one situated within an idea of commerce and its connection with woman’s experience of the everyday.
(“NH,” 135-148) The importance of the intersection between a humanist realism and Akerman’s feminist filmmaking strategies and politics, however, is ultimately the extended temporality and fixity of the frame (as well as the camera, the body and movement). While this is the case for Margulies, I will suggest that the fixity and stillness of the frame, as well as the body in performance, is generated through an extended filmic duration which signals an engagement with the photograph and the photographic. In this chapter, the kind of stillness that Jeanne Dielman’s temporality
9 See B. Ruby Rich, “In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erends (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 268-287; Janet Bergstrom, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman,” Camera Obscura 2 (Fall 1977): 114-118; Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “What’s beneath her smile? Subjectivity and desire in Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” in Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Trowbridge, Wilts.: Flicks Books, 1999), 27-33; Loader, “Jeanne Dielman,” 327-340; Yervasi, “Dislocating the Domestic in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,” 385-397.
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enforces harks back to the temporality that structures photography for Roland
Barthes and the long exposure photograph for Walter Benjamin.10
In the process of examining the everyday and cinematic realism, Margulies sets up and develops her own terminology as a means of engaging with the particularities of time and duration in Akerman’s work. Throughout the initial chapters, Margulies employs three terms: “real time,” “extended duration,” and
“literal time,” as well as “temporal distension” and “real-time representation” with less frequency. Here Margulies seems to employ both “real time” and “literal time” interchangeably as a means of dealing with the long take and a filmic construction of a temporality which allows for the completion of daily tasks such as making coffee or preparing schnitzel. As I argued in Chapter One, this conception of filmic duration is achieved through the alignment of plot duration and screen duration, where the time of the plot is aligned with the actual running time of the film. In
Margulies’ analysis, these terms not only gesture to a filmic construction of time but they are also a means of differentiating Akerman’s hyperrealism from the idealist humanist realism of early modernist cinema. Even though the two cinematic practices are connected through a particular kind of filmic temporality and what
Margulies terms “a surplus of reality,” or the impression of a “unique or singular record,” Akerman differs from the Neorealists in an important way. (“NH,” 36-37)
Akerman’s films, Margulies suggests, employ and construct a “literal time” that effects “a surplus of reality,” but one that only stands for one particular “concrete instance.” As such, Margulies rightly suggests that Akerman’s films particularise
10 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993); Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 17.
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narrative situations and protagonists in a manner where they no longer stand for a universal or “symbolic transcendence.” (“NH,” 37)
Even if this is the case, Akerman’s cinema too, like modernist realism, is engaged with the interrogation of classical viewing specifically through the temporal component of spectatorship. This component, which Margulies labels “extended duration,” continually shifts the viewer from narrative readings to sensory ones.
This, for Margulies, creates a “polarity of reception”: a corporeal and material experience of “real time” or “literal time” that emphasises the tension between meaning and affect.11 The movement between meaning and affect, the
“representational and literal registers,” is inextricably connected to the hyperrealism which underscores Akerman’s films. (“NH,” 45) “Hyperrealism,” Margulies states,
“is understood here as a cinematic translation of the effect of distance that results when a picture or sculpture reproduces a subject which is already an image.” (“NH,”
45) Here she goes on to write that,
we are looking at an intermediary, frozen stage of reproduction, which subtly undoes referentiality, presenting it at a second degree of removal. In some hyperrealist art, this distancing effect also results from an exaggerated focus on apparently mundane details of reality, and from a change of scale. The emphasis on surface details intimates an estrangement, an excess—one sees more than one needs to in order to “read” the image. (“NH,” 45-46)
In this instance, the hyperrealist tendency in art and avant-garde film practice in the 1960s (particularly in the US) provides a means to consider an idea of referential illusion, and the kind of ‘excess’ (of time and detail) on a spectatorial level that we experience via the everyday in Akerman’s films. Yet as Margulies argues, the
11 I will be coming back to this tension in my proposal of a ‘cinematic punctum’ below.
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difference between plastic and cinematic representation is essentially an idea of
“extended duration.” Here she emphasises the importance of this duration and the way it not only undermines an idea of referentiality through (temporal) distance but also the way it involves “a corporeal dimension.” (“NH,” 47, original emphasis) Bound equally then to the American experimental cinema of Andy Warhol and Michael
Snow and the European modernist realism of the 1950s and 60s, Akerman’s cinema moves toward the corporeal in a way that magnifies “the referential aspect of representation…constantly [reminding] the viewer of physical, material presences— of cinema, of the actor/performer, of the spectator.”12 (“NH,” 47)
Margulies’ discussion of the corporeal and affective dimension of “extended duration” and its relation to a filmic construction of “real time” or “literal time” is an important contribution to the scholarship surrounding Akerman’s cinema. Clearly,
Margulies is not only concerned with the construction of filmic time and duration
(and its relation to the everyday and hyperrealism), but also with the rupturing of a classical viewing experience via a spectatorship that is open to a phenomenological materiality and corporeality. Yet, the often interchangeable use of these terms begins to collapse the kind of specificity that is central to Margulies’ approach to Akerman’s cinema. While Margulies often assigns certain terms to the temporal and corporeal component of spectatorship, at other times the terms function as interchangeable entities signalling both the filmic construction of time and spectatorship. For example, in the chapter entitled “Toward a Corporeal Cinema,” Margulies writes of
12 Ben Singer echoes this sentiment in an earlier essay when he writes Jeanne Dielman’s “use of very long takes of commonplace activities…aligns itself particularly with the durational experiments of Warhol. It was Warhol who first showed in film that prolonged exposure to long periods of relatively unaltering and thematically vacuous subject matter leads the viewer to experience duration as a ‘concrete’ dimension of film.” Ben Singer, “Jeanne Dielman: Cinematic Interrogation and ‘Amplification’,” Millennium Film Journal 22 (Winter-Spring 1989-90): 58.
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the “corporeal dimension” of spectatorship as characterised by “extended duration,” at the same time arguing “extended duration” as a “principle device for the filmmaker.” (“NH,” 46)
Even though Margulies’ terms often function interchangeably, they ultimately offer a way of beginning to address the intricate temporalities at play in Akerman’s cinema. For me, this forms the significance of Margulies’ study, as well as her approach to the connection between these temporalities and stillness. In her analysis of Jeanne Dielman, Margulies argues that the kind of excess (of time, of detail, of spectatorial affect) generated by the film is due to the film’s construction of and concern with “formal and thematic balance,” as well as “an impetus toward quiescence and inertia in the diegesis.” (“NH,” 65)
For Margulies the balance which characterises the film is produced by
“obsession compulsion” and an “overly ritualized presentation of household routines.” (“NH,” 65) In the film, Akerman employs fixed, static, frontal camera positions that, when coupled with the long take, create “a formal and dramatic equivalence between major and minor events.”13 (“NH,” 66) More than this, the combination of the fixed camera and the long take, Margulies suggests, “represents a frame, the better to see what is shown—Jeanne, but also the table, the sink, the dishes.” (“NH,” 70) This creates a hyperrealist “descriptive thrust that equates objects and human beings.” (“NH,” 70) Thus when Jeanne leaves the frame and the camera lingers on the emptied space, as in the instance of making coffee, objects and space take on a similar physicality and presence to Jeanne herself.
13 Even though this frame allows us to see Jeanne, objects and space, it is nonetheless a restricted vision. The key to the film’s formal and spectatorial strategies, Margulies argues, is the way it denies us an identificatory viewing position. The film foregoes the shot/reverse-shot technique, bypassing Jeanne’s point-of-view. (“NH,” 70) This is also one of the key reasons the film has been, and continues to be, central to feminist film practice and criticism.
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If the kind of immobility that we encounter in Jeanne Dielman then can be traced back to a hyperrealist description, it is also, according to Margulies, created through Jeanne’s obsession compulsion and an animism “staged mostly as a struggle against objects” which is triggered by the rupture of Jeanne’s routine on the third day. (“NH,” 89) I would argue, however, that the kind of immobility and stillness that characterises the film (as well as Jeanne herself, and by extension Seyrig’s performance), is instead generated by an idea of the photographic. At times akin to the long exposure photograph that Benjamin considers in his 1931 essay “A Short
History of Photography,” Jeanne Dielman’s use of the fixed and still camera, as well as the long take, generates an immobility that takes the film back to the photograph.14
Together with an economy of performance that limits conversation, dialogue, and any outward sign of emotion, as well as the absence of nondiegetic music, the immobility of the camera creates a cinematic image that traverses both cinema and photography. In Jeanne Dielman, there seems to be a conscious movement toward immobility and stasis throughout the entire film; while making coffee Jeanne is almost completely still. Once she stops to watch the coffee run through the filter, the only evidence we actually have of the film advancing is the water running through the filter (as well as the sound this makes). At this moment in the film, like others from the third day, Jeanne watches and waits. This watching and waiting, reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s assessment of post-war modernist cinema, mirrors that of the viewer, and only occurs on the third day: the day that Jeanne’s routine is irrevocably ruptured.15 The first two days of the film (each of which take
14 Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” 17. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189-196.
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approximately one hour of screen duration) set up the extremity of the order of
Jeanne’s routine: on day one each task, from waking up her son and polishing his shoes, to preparing dinner and cleaning the kitchen, is performed in full and is also guided by stillness.16 Additionally, Jeanne herself is constructed as not only a creature of habit but a woman whose strict, organised everyday existence is reflected in her appearance and movements: hair and cardigan in place, Jeanne moves through her apartment and routine without superfluous movement.
On the second day, Akerman begins to “subtract” time, as Margulies puts it, from specific instances of the daily routine because our knowledge and experience of that routine have been established. (“NH,” 66) By the end of the second day however, Jeanne’s routine begins to break down: after sleeping with the second day’s client, Jeanne’s hair, for the first time in the film, is tousled and untidy. This moment is the beginning of a rupture in routine that culminates with Jeanne burning the dinner’s potatoes. By the third day, Jeanne’s routine is almost completely shattered and there is a conscious attempt to recapture a reliable temporality that is connected to that routine (as we see in the act of making coffee). On this day however, time itself is now out of joint and Jeanne, out of step with her routine, spends a great deal of time watching and waiting. A little while after the coffee making scene, we see
Jeanne, once again almost photographically immobile, sitting on a chair in the lounge room waiting for her neighbour for a full three minutes.
This idea of watching and waiting on the levels of performance, plot and viewing, I will argue, produces an affective experience of time for both performer
16 The exception to this is the time Jeanne takes with her clients. Here Akerman employs a shot of the hallway that leads to Jeanne’s bedroom as well as the bedroom door itself. Once Jeanne and her client are behind the closed door Akerman elides time via lighting which moves from light to dim.
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and viewer. In a similar manner to my analysis of Cassavetes’ Faces, I will suggest that the connection between a filmic time (that aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) and a temporal conception of the everyday creates specific affects
(such as boredom and anxiety). However, the differentiation here will be premised on the idea that this affectivity is amplified by an immobility of movement (of the camera, of the frame, of the performer): an immobility that gestures to the photograph and begins to obscure the boundaries between film and photography.
This chapter will explore this relation between cinema and photography, as well as time and affect, in order to propose a ‘cinematic punctum.’ Although Roland
Barthes has an apparent and well documented ‘resistance to film,’ his work on the photograph in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography and the way that a “that-has- been” produces an affective encounter of time, reveals a connection between photography and a cinema that consciously addresses the immobilisation of movement.17 A ‘cinematic punctum,’ I will argue, is an affective experience of time that is generated through a cinematic practice that moves cinema toward the photograph and a photographic temporality. The use of Barthes here will enable this analysis of Jeanne Dielman to be positioned within a particular filmic duration and viewing time that is brought about by a photographic stillness rather than a stillness produced from hyperrealist and feminist strategies as it does for Margulies.
The concept of the ‘cinematic punctum’ furthermore enables a rethinking of the relations between film and photography and the ontological arguments about the respective mediums. As such the ‘cinematic punctum’ as proposed here functions as a means to extend the dialogue between photography and film studies, and the way
17 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85.
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each discipline conceives time, duration and affect. While Barthes’ notion of the punctum opens up an analysis of the way the photographic operates in cinema, it cannot solely explain the complexity of time in Jeanne Dielman. Consequently, I will consider the nexus between these interrelated mediums as debated in film studies, proposing a ‘cinematic punctum’ through an attention to specifically filmic elements such as the centrality of the long take and, accompanying this, the long exposure photograph.
By rereading Barthes through film and photography debates, it will become apparent that a ‘cinematic punctum’ is a concept that provokes an examination of the connection between a particular filmic temporality (one that aligns plot and screen durations, and viewing time) and an immobility of movement within the shot.
Cinema here does not become photography, but rather cinema reveals the way the two mediums are “glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse.”18 This connection, I will argue in the final stages of the chapter, also opens
Jeanne Dielman and the medium of cinema on to the long debated and unanswered question that haunts film studies: does the convergence between film and photography in particular cinematic practices create an affective experience that animates an encounter with death?
18 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.
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II. Film, photography and Roland Barthes’ punctum
Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.—Roland Barthes19
[W]hat I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.—Roland Barthes20
Throughout Camera Lucida, it is clear that the photograph can never be separated from the experience of encountering death. In this study, Barthes recognises that the photographic referent, the “that-has-been” as he terms it, facilitates an encounter with death that ultimately complicates the experience of viewing the photograph.
This essentially arises from the co-presence of two opposing forces within the photograph: the studium (the elements in the photograph that are culturally coded and that render meaning transparent) and the punctum (the element that disturbs cultural meaning via an affective experience that exceeds language). Yet, rather than creating a systematic classification of photography, the co-presence of the studium and the punctum, that is, meaning and affect, ultimately complicates Barthes’ experience of viewing because the punctum interrupts the operation of a meaning that is nonetheless constantly attempting to assert its presence.21
19 Ibid., 55, original emphasis. 20 Ibid., 77, original emphasis; hereafter cited in text as “CL.” 21 In many ways, this tension between the studium and the punctum plays out the tension between meaning and affect in the everyday. Throughout Camera Lucida, this everyday is not only demonstrated in the everyday milieu and reflections of certain photographs, but also Barthes’ own grief and mourning.
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From the very outset of Camera Lucida, Barthes argues that the photograph reproduces not only a singular occurrence but the singular event par excellence. The photograph, he writes, “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” (“CL,” 4) Barthes argues that the analogical nature of the photograph signals the reality of the thing that is photographed, “without which there would be no photograph.” Nevertheless, Barthes comes to the conclusion that “the necessarily real thing” will always be ruptured by the punctum. (“CL,” 76, original emphasis)
Initially conceived as the “detail” or “partial object,” the punctum functions as an experience of certain details and objects, or rather the way those details or objects rupture the coded meaning of the photograph.22 (“CL,” 43-45)
Even though the punctum is thought through as the “detail” in the initial stages of the book, Barthes realises that even those details or objects that rupture the literal and obvious meaning of the photograph signal something far greater. “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance,” he writes. (“CL,” 51) It is this inability to name that eventually holds the key to Barthes’ thinking around the photograph and a photographic punctum. On considering a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass,
Barthes realises that he is absorbed by the figures in the photograph without being able to pinpoint the exact reason or detail. “[I]s it the eyes, the skin, the position of the hands, the track shoes?” he wonders. He goes to argue that the “effect is certain but unlocatable”: an effect (and affect) that can no longer come down to the detail or object. (“CL,” 51)
22 For instance, in William Klein’s 1954 photograph “Little Italy, New York” which depicts a group of children, one of which has a gun pointed to his head by an older, taller youth, the thing that Barthes “stubbornly sees” is not the gun but “one child’s bad teeth.” (“CL,” 46)
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It is in the confrontation with the Alexander Gardner portrait of Lewis
Payne, and Payne’s actual relation to death as he sits awaiting execution for his assassination attempt on a government official in 1865, that Barthes formulates the punctum as time (rather than the detail):
The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose…the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. (“CL,” 96, original emphasis)
The very thing that punctures the photograph of Payne is the subject’s actual impending death. The photograph of Payne literally stages this fact for Barthes as
Payne is both awaiting death and already dead (at the time of Barthes’ viewing of the photograph): “this will be and this has been.” Here Barthes not only faces the impending death of Payne but also photography’s own more general relation to death through what has been: a temporality that explicitly engages the viewer with death or the punctum as time.23 (“CL,” 76)
In Barthes’ experience of the Payne portrait we also find a resurrection of the remarks made by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1927 essay “Photography.” Beginning with an old photograph of a grandmother at the age of twenty four being viewed by her grandchildren, Kracauer considers the kind of temporal interruption that occurs
23 Barthes comes to this conclusion in his 1964 analysis of the photograph “Rhetoric of the Image.” He writes, “[t]he type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there.” Even though Barthes is referring to the real object, he is aware that the photographed object prompts an analysis of the temporality in which it concurrently existed and exists. Time will invariably be the photographic referent. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 44, original emphasis.
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when looking at the younger incarnation of a much older subject. Young and lively as a “girl of twenty-four” dressed in the fashions of the late nineteenth century, the photograph initially provokes amusement and interest in outdated fashions, objects and details: the “chignons, cinched waists, crinolines.”24 Yet once this fascination for the outmoded fades, something else overcomes the viewers of this and, as Kracauer goes on to argue, all old photographs. “A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.”25 In other words, “the shudder” or “the horror” that is generated in viewing old photographs does not arise from the loss of the subject that appears in the photograph, but rather a lost time that plays out the loss of temporality that we find in death. For Miriam Hansen it is this very idea which connects Kracauer to Barthes’ conceptualisation in Camera
Lucida. She argues that for Kracauer what is essentially at stake in the photograph,
(and consequently in the viewer’s encounter with the photograph), is the
“momentary encounter with mortality [and] an awareness of a history that does not include us.”26 The photograph, for Kracauer, not only tells of the impending death of the subject of the photograph, but also the death of the subject that is viewing the photograph.27
24 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays by Siegfried Kracauer, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 48. 25 Ibid., 56-57. 26 Miriam Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 456. 27 Along with Kracauer, Barthes’ work echoes both Bazin and Benjamin’s respective examinations of the photograph. In “‘With Skin and Hair’,” Hansen suggests that Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography” gestures towards the complexity of time in the photograph and the way that time facilitates an encounter with death. Ibid., 455. Benjamin writes, “the spectator feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture; to find that imperceptible point at which, in the
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Barthes like Kracauer, then, conceives of photography as a medium that performs death and by extension a kind of history or past that does not include the viewer: an idea that is continually amplified in Barthes’ comments on old, historical photographs and especially the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a small child.28 (“CL,” 96) Even so, the “that-has-been” that is central to Barthes is a complex temporality that cannot be unquestionably assigned to a notion of the past as irretrievable. “The Photograph,” Barthes contends, “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” (“CL,” 85, original emphasis) It would seem that for Barthes, time in the photograph is concurrently past and accessible; it is both present and absent. Time, he argues, “has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.” (“CL,” 77) Therefore, the “that-has- been” is a temporality that is not limited by, nor refers to, a teleological continuity or chronology.
It is for this very reason that Barthes’ conception of time seems to be comparable to Henri Bergson’s notion of duration (and by extension Deleuze’s notion of the “series of time”).29 “In duration,” Stephen Crocker states, “preceding and succeeding states are not separated from one another. Consciousness recalls
immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it.” Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” 7. In Chapter One I examined Bazin’s conception of photographic temporality and its connection with filmic time and duration. Bazin’s conception of time differs from Barthes’ however: for Bazin, the photograph and a cinema based on a photographic referentiality are defences against the passing of time (and therefore death). See also André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9-16. 28 For Barthes, the overabundance of contemporary photographs destroys the effects and affects of the punctum. Like Kracauer’s comments on the “blizzard of photographs” in the popular press and media, Barthes contends that the punctum “is vividly legible in historical photographs [where] there is always a defeat of Time in them.” (“CL,” 96) See also Kracauer, “Photography,” 58. 29 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 155. I will be coming back to Deleuze in my proposal of the ‘cinematic punctum.’
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former states, but it does not extend them in space.”30 For Bergson, time as duration is non-chronological; it destroys the boundaries between past, present and future. In other words, the past, present and future become a temporal continuum in human consciousness that is subsequently not ordered or arranged spatially.31 However, the separation of time from space in relation to Barthes’ conception of photographic temporality is problematic. For Barthes, the photograph is the spatial configuration of time. What essentially constitutes the “that-has-been” of the photograph is the way space, and the objects that occupy that space, represents time. “The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time.” (“CL,” 88-89)
While Barthes’ “that-has-been” continually gestures toward a conception of time that problematises an idea of chronology, it diverges from a strictly Bergsonian duration via its relation to the subject. For Barthes, the “that-has-been” is a temporality that is inhabited through viewing the photograph, rather than being a subjective temporality or a time internal to the subject. Ultimately what is meaningful about this temporality is the way it is a continual encounter with death.32 “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child,” Barthes writes, “I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already
30 Stephen Crocker, “The Oscillating Now: Heidegger on the Failure of Bergsonism,” Philosophy Today 41, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 407-408. 31 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 25. 32 As Barthes states, the photographic referent is “the return of the dead,” whereby the photograph preserves what has been, which returns as dead via the process of viewing (“CL,” 9). This idea resonates with Bazin’s notion of the “mummy complex.” Bazin argues that the photograph is the embalming of time that is dead. Much like Barthes, Bazin recognises that the photograph triggers an ambivalence in the viewer, whereby the encounter with time is both won and lost. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9-16. Hansen likewise addresses this issue in relation to Kracauer when she writes, “[s]eeking to eternalize its objects in all spatial dimensions, however, the photographic present does not banish the thought of death but succumbs to it all the more.” Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’,” 455.
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occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” (“CL,” 96, original emphasis)
What essentially makes Barthes shudder (in a gesture evocative of the grandchildren in Kracauer’s essay) is the concurrent presence and absence of what has been and what will be. Yet, the intimate connection between time and an affective experience of time is what is essentially at stake in Barthes’ analysis. In
Camera Lucida this experience is explicitly examined and articulated at length, and for me is the very thing that provides a point of departure from the way affect is implied in Kracauer, Benjamin and Bazin’s work. Time, for Barthes, cannot be separated from the affective experience that it generates, nor can that affect be separated from time: the two are mutually dependent. As such, the punctum is the affective experience of the “that-has-been.” As Barthes asserts in the first of the two opening quotations, the punctum is an addition to the photograph, “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” (“CL,” 55, original emphasis) Since the punctum is “already there,” it can be said that it is both the presence of the “that- has-been” as well as what is added. In other words, the punctum is the combination of a time “that-has-been” as well as the affective response to the “that-has-been.”
Throughout the study, the affective responses that seem to dominate Barthes’ experience of old photographs are horror and anxiety. Even so, when it comes to the Winter Garden photograph, (the only photograph Barthes does not reproduce in the book), Barthes is adding his mourning, loss and grief.
Even if Barthes is working through and adding his loss and grief, this does not configure the punctum as a subjective affective experience. Rather, it is an affective experience that is activated by the personal. In “The Deaths of Roland
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Barthes,” Jacques Derrida argues that the animation of the punctum in Barthes’ grief does not produce an affective experience that is subjective, but generates a particular experience that is connected to all affective experience. “[T]he poignant singularity,”
Derrida writes, “does not refute the generality, it does not prevent it from having the force of law but only arrows it, marks, and signs it.”33 Therefore, the “singularity” of
Barthes’ personal affective experience represents the way the “that-has-been” of any photograph generates an affective experience of time. Martin Jay reiterates this idea when he writes that, in the Winter Garden photograph, “an image he refused to reproduce for the disinterested ‘studium’ of his readers, Barthes was able to discover what he called ‘the Ariadne thread’ that led him through the labyrinth of all the world’s photographs to find the essence of the Photograph.”34
The punctum, then, is an affective experience of time that is excessive because it is not only singular and universal, but also an element within the photograph as well as an addition to it. And it is this affective experience, Barthes asserts, that is unique to the medium of photography. On the surface, this suggestion arises out of an engagement with the stillness that is inherent to photography. Barthes’ distinction of the photograph’s immobility and his proposal of the punctum seem to originate from his 1970 analysis of the film still in “The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills.”35 In this essay, Barthes argues that the film stills from Sergei
33 Jacques Derrida, “The Death of Roland Barthes,” in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau- Ponty, ed. Hugh Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 272. 34 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 453-454. 35 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 52-68. Even though earlier essays by Barthes analyse the photograph, they do not address an idea of affect. See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 15-31; Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 32-35. Even so, I will examine “Rhetoric of the Image” in relation to time in the closing stages of this section.
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Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part I) [1944], as opposed to its moving counterpart, provoke a “third meaning”—one that is obstinate, obtuse, and affective.36 And
much like the photograph, the immobility of the film still allows Barthes to engage
emotionally and affectively with the text.37
Barthes argues that the “third meaning” is produced on a “vertical” axis only
when the image is freed from the constraint of apparatus time and narrative time.38
For Barthes, the affective experience provoked by the arrested film image emerges
from its disengagement from filmic temporality (which in “The Third Meaning”
seems to be an apparatus time rather than one that is generated within the narrative).
Consequently, the “third meaning” allows Barthes’ affective experience to be “set to
its own temporality” and to move freely in any (emotional or affective) direction.39 It is this idea that seems to connect the “third meaning” with the punctum. According to
Barthes, the “third meaning,” much like the punctum, is generated by the act of viewing in a flexible temporality that is determined by the viewer. This act of viewing
36 Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 53. In this essay, the affective experience is blunt and obtuse, which differs somewhat from the sharpness of the punctum in Camera Lucida. In his analysis, Derek Attridge aligns the concept of ‘obtuse’ meaning with the punctum and argues that “[t]o understand them in their specificity could only be to experience them in the examples Barthes gives, since it is a constitutive feature of both of them that they cannot be conveyed in words.” Derek Attridge, “Roland Barthes’s Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilities of Commentary,” in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 79, original emphasis. In other words, both the ‘obtuse meaning’ and the punctum are affective experiences that are excessive to language and meaning. However, the idea that both the “third meaning” and punctum can only be experienced in the images that Barthes provides is problematic. Attridge argues that the inclusion of the actual film stills in “The Third Meaning” and the photographs (excluding the Winter Garden photograph) in Camera Lucida, transform Barthes’ reflections on the punctum and the ‘obtuse meaning’ into culturally coded meaning or studium. This, Attridge writes, problematises the idea that the punctum is an affective experience that exceeds language. Even so, it can be said that the inclusion of the images that are analysed by Barthes and his response to those images, particularly those in Camera Lucida, become culturally coded via the viewer/reader who consciously endeavours to locate Barthes’ own punctum. At no point does Barthes suggest that his own affective experience of the “that-has-been” is a universal punctum. This seems to be reinforced by the absence of the Winter Garden photograph. 37 Although emotion is distinct from affect, it nonetheless gestures to an alternate (and often bodily) experience of the photograph that is not entirely scopic. 38 Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 67-68. 39 Ibid., 63.
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is particular to both the arrested film image and the photograph because it is not reduced or controlled by a temporal structure that guides the affective experience of the viewer: that is, apparatus time. What is significant about Barthes’ analysis in “The
Third Meaning” is that it establishes a theory of affect that he develops as the punctum in Camera Lucida. Although the arrested film image and the photograph cannot be completely aligned in the same way, both mediums allow for the analysis of an affective experience that is independent of an apparatus time which guides the experience of the viewer. For Barthes, the only medium that does not relinquish its control of affect is film.40
The idea that an affective experience is temporally independent of apparatus time allows Barthes to create a binary opposition between photography and film.
Cinema, Barthes asserts, does not allow the viewer to add to the images on the screen: “[I]n front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes,…I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness.” (“CL,” 55, original emphasis) On the surface, it seems plausible to argue that this “pensiveness” that Barthes asserts is denied by the cinema, arises from the photograph’s immobility. It seems that this somewhat basic opposition between the stillness of the photograph and the movement of the cinema may be an essential element of the punctum.41
The stillness of the photograph allows Barthes to ponder and feel the affects of the “that-has-been.” But more importantly, the photographic image releases a
40 Ibid., 68. 41 Even so, Barthes does (momentarily) contradict this argument in the latter stages of the book when he is explaining the effects of the cinema’s two poses: one arising from “the actor’s ‘this-has- been’” and the other from “the role’s.” “I can never see or see again in a film certain actors whom I know to be dead without a kind of melancholy: the melancholy of Photography itself.” (“CL,” 79)
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Barthesian punctum by virtue of its unchanging nature. It would seem that the stillness of the photograph allows the viewer to reflect on what has been and thus be affected by an encounter with a time that does not include the viewer. And unlike the cinema, the photograph is a solitary image that can produce an affective experience. However, Barthes recognises that this immobility of the photograph is both static and arrested. Although these two terms are seemingly equivalent, I will argue that they differ significantly to one another and that the complexity of their relation can explain the way an affective experience of time in the photograph will invariably be an encounter with death.
The notion of arrest is initially addressed by Barthes when he identifies the foundation of photography as the pose. He writes:
[W]hat founds the nature of Photography is the pose. The physical duration of this pose is of little consequence; even in the interval of a millionth of a second (Edgerton’s drop of milk) there has still been a pose, for the pose is not, here, the attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator, but the term of an “intention” of reading: looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose. (“CL,” 78, original emphasis)
For Barthes the photograph and the act of viewing that photograph, immobilises what has been. The interruption of temporal progression by arrest motions to a non- chronological duration that collapses the boundaries between the past, present and future. As a result of this, the notion of arrest seems to exceed an idea of immobility, particularly in its relation to the pose. For Barthes, arrest is redefined here so that it does not simply imply a stillness or suspension of time, but rather an active immobilisation. “What Marey and Muybridge have done as operators,” Barthes writes,
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“I myself want to do as spectator: I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I retard, in order to have time to know at last.” (“CL,” 99, original emphasis) The pose here is the conscious projection of the stillness of the photograph onto what has been.
Therefore, the pose is not merely the immobilisation of movement but it is the immobilisation of time as present: an immobilisation that not only brings in to play a
“that-has-been” through the capture of the present in which the object/subject exists, but also one that allows Barthes to emotionally and affectively get to “know” his mother through the Winter Garden photograph.
The notion of arrest furthermore gestures to an idea of suspension: for
Barthes it is the suspension of time as well as an affective attraction to that suspension. Like the punctum, the pose is composed of a time “that-has-been” as well as an attraction to that temporality. Consequently, the pose is already there (in the photograph) and something that is added: the pose is the immobility of the photographic moment and Barthes’ projection of that immobile moment onto what has been. By consciously arresting the pose, Barthes’ gaze invokes the gaze of
Medusa: a gaze that incapacitates the viewer with fear, horror and anxiety.42 It is these affects (aside from the kind of loss and grief Barthes explicitly projects onto the Winter Garden photograph) that structure the punctum in Camera Lucida. More importantly however, the arrest of the pose creates a viewing position that has the ability to arrest and fix both movement and time in the photograph. What we are essentially confronted with here is an act of viewing that has the ability to arrest and
42 “The sight of Medusa’s head, “Sigmund Freud writes, “makes the spectator stiff with terror [and] turns him to stone.” For Freud, the gaze of Medusa is inextricably linked with a fear of castration. The stiffness that is experienced by the viewer signifies the erect phallus. Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 18: 273.
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fix both movement and time.43 In other words, it is a viewing position that drains away both movement and time in a way akin to death. Even so, death in the photograph is paradoxically alive; it lives eternally through the “that-has-been” because what has been is also time that will be. As Barthes puts it, “if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing.” (“CL,” 78-79, original emphasis)
And if for Barthes the photograph is ‘the living image of death,’ it is not exclusively the result of an active arrest of the image. Rather, it seems to arise from the relation between stasis and arrest. According to Barthes, stasis is that stillness of the photograph that is at odds with the movement of modern existence. “In the
Photograph,” Barthes writes, “Time’s immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…. That the Photograph is ‘modern,’ mingled with our noisiest everyday life, does not keep it from having an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, the stasis of an arrest.” (“CL,” 91, original emphasis)
What is interesting here is the way Barthes combines stasis with arrest. As I argued previously, arrest seems to gesture toward an idea of suspension, whereby the progress of time is paralysed. Unlike arrest, stasis seems to signal a condition that is inert and devoid of the possibility of any movement or progress. Even so, the relationship between stasis and arrest does not produce an equivalence between the two but rather generates a tension. Here Barthes invests arrest with stasis by
43 For Benjamin too, as Eduardo Cadava writes, the photograph produces the Medusa effect but through its connection to history. Cadava argues that for Benjamin the concept of history is inextricably connected to photography. Like photography, history arrests and isolates events, and creates “the uncanny tomb of our memory.” As such, “there can be no history [and therefore no photography] without the Medusa effect—without the capacity to arrest or immobilize historical movement.” Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11, 59.
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superimposing the inertia of stasis onto the active suspension (arrest) of the image.
Inertia seems to overwhelm the conscious projection of immobility and renders the photograph permanently static, as if it never had the capacity to move.
If we return to the original French text, however, it is apparent that there is a disparity between this original and its English translation. In the original, stasis and arrest are unmistakably equivalent. The phrase “the stasis of an arrest” is “l’essence même d’un arrêt”: literally ‘the same essence of an arrest.’44 For Barthes, stasis and arrest seem to be synonymous. This, I would argue, suggests that stasis is also an active immobilisation or suspension. Therefore, the stasis of time is the transformation of time from a fixed state to a suspended state. The implication here is that in the photograph there can only be suspension: time does not ever truly pass away. And in this idea of suspension, we encounter and re-encounter death—as suspended, as never gone. Of Gardner’s portrait of Payne, Barthes finally surmises,
“[h]e is dead and he is going to die”: “that-has-been” and “this will be.” (“CL,” 95)
Time and death are encountered and re-encountered in the photograph: time as death and death as time. As such, the very thing that Barthes is continually confronted with in the photograph is the presence of absence: the presence of death via a time “that-has-been.”
For Barthes, this renders time as an overwhelming presence that in no way heightens or explains the experience of reality. Rather, this overwhelming presence of a temporal absence essentially produces an affective experience of time: the punctum. For this reason, the experience of time seems to exceed the representation
44 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard/Seuil, 1980), 142.
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from which it emanates because time is present and absent (within the photograph), as well as an addition via an affective experience of the “that-has-been.”
Stasis as arrest therefore produces an affective experience of time. And as I have argued above, this affective experience of time in the photograph as one that is
“set to its own temporality” essentially holds the key to the way Barthes differentiates between the photograph and the cinema. The photograph (and the film still) does not guide the temporality of Barthes’ affective response. The constraints of filmic time, therefore, do not allow the cinematic image to persist in the same way as the photographic image. For Barthes, the photographic image is
“full, crammed: no room, nothing can be added to it.”45 (“CL,” 89) This essentially sets the photograph apart from the cinema, despite the fact that the cinema’s referent is generally photographic. (“CL,” 89) In Camera Lucida, cinema seems to be defined as a medium whose temporal movement (premised on that of the apparatus) invariably produces a chronological time. The forward movement of film, Barthes argues, does not allow the referent to adhere. Consequently, the cinema does not offer the same affective experiences as the photograph:
[I]n the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter. Like the real world, the filmic world is sustained by the presumption that, as Husserl says, “the experience will constantly continue to flow by in the same constitutive style.” (“CL,” 89-90, original emphasis)
For Barthes, the cinema is understood as a medium without a time “that-has- been.” Barthes’ contention that the cinema proceeds in much the same way as life
45 This is a problematic statement in light of the fact that the punctum is an addition to the photograph. I will examine this idea in relation to the ‘cinematic punctum.’
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seems to allude to a specific type of film, perhaps one that relies on continuity editing and classical narrative strategies in order to compress time and elucidate a linear plot. More than this, as Maureen Turim rightly argues, “Barthes’ formulation of the different temporal understanding of photographic and cinematic images coincides with a certain widely held belief that cinema is understood in the present tense.”46 It is this very approach that Barthes takes in “Rhetoric of the Image,” where he asserts that in film “the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of the thing.”47 For Barthes, the “that-has-been” in film is continually erased by a presentness that refuses access to what has been. The cinema’s regulation by a constructed (and constant) filmic temporality denies Barthes the temporal freedom that he finds in the photograph. Hence, for Barthes there can be no cinematic punctum because the cinema constructs a temporality that guides and contains the viewer’s affective experience.
In “Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,” Dana B. Polan argues that
Barthes’ conception of film and the filmic in “The Third Meaning” “prevents [him] from imagining a cinema like the one for which Brecht argued and which Godard tried to put into practice—a cinema which would itself become analytic, fragmenting diegetic flow through a meta-discourse which would qualify immediate realities, to speak ‘as if quoting,’ as Juliette says in Two or Three Things I Know about Her.”48 Polan
46 Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), 15. Mary Ann Doane echoes this sentiment in her analysis of Barthes in relation to early cinema when she writes “there are always at least two temporalities at work in film. Accompanying the spectatorial experience of the present tense of the filmic flow is the recognition that the images were produced at a particular time, that they are inevitably stained with their own historicity. This is what allows film to age—quickly and visibly—in a way similar to that of the photograph.” Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143. 47 Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 45, original emphasis. 48 Dana B. Polan, “Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,” October 18 (Fall 1981): 43.
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recognises that Barthes’ notion of film is limiting particularly in terms of a cinematic practice that consciously analyses the illusionism of classical narration as well as the kind of ‘passive’ spectatorship that it engenders. As is the suggestion here, this would be, or rather is, a cinema that is defined by active analysis—by the film and consequently by the spectator—which interrupts the possibility of a continuous narrative. Furthermore, Polan’s comments imply that Barthes’ conception of film likewise prevents the inclusion of filmic practices that obscure the temporal boundaries around and between film and photography, as well as the way a particular type of cinematic construction can generate affect.
Barthes’ simplified conception of cinema in Camera Lucida however occupies an uneasy position in relation to his previous analyses. This is not to say that
Barthes’ examinations of the cinema ever betrayed any positive sentiments. As
Barthes explicitly states in “The Third Meaning” and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he has a “resistance to film” that is invariably connected to what, for him, are the constraints of the medium: namely, the way film’s constant temporality eliminates the kind of temporal openness that characterises an experience of the film still and the photograph. Polan argues that in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, “Barthes understands the flow of cinema as creating a fullness, a plenitude, that disarms the critic and allows him no more than a ‘resistance to the cinema’.”49 This idea of fullness in relation to the cinema is essentially at odds with Barthes’ understanding of the medium in Camera Lucida and is in fact more closely aligned with his conception of photography (as temporally full and complex).
49 Ibid., 42, emphasis added.
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Yet paradoxically, in “Leaving the Movie Theater” the “inexorable flow of images through the projector creates a force that, for Barthes, is beyond analysis.”50
Although “Leaving the Movie Theater” is a transparent repudiation of the cinema, it does in fact problematise the idea that film does not generate an affective experience. In this essay, film is a “festival of affects” that cannot be contained or explained: an idea that suggests the viewing position created by film may be as complex as the one associated with the photograph.51 Interestingly, “Leaving the
Movie Theater” positions the experience of viewing film away from semiotics. “The conflation of cinema and ideology within the concept of the Imaginary pictures a situation outside codifiability, outside semiosis,” Polan writes. “Ideology is no longer, as it is for Althusser and others, a discursive interpellation, but instead a nondiscursive immersion, a pure bathing in a ‘festival of affects’.”52 According to
Polan, the unification of film and ideology in relation to an ideal representation of the self (and therefore an ideal viewing position) gestures toward the idea that ideology can no longer be understood and classified. For Barthes, ideology itself becomes an experience that the spectator engages with rather than a set of imposed values that are systematically consumed. Film therefore becomes an affective experience of an all-encompassing ideology that cannot be explained or understood.
Interestingly, the conception of the cinema in Camera Lucida bares little relation to the cinema as a “festival of affects” expounded in “Leaving the Movie
Theater” and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.53 It is quite obvious that Barthes’
50 Ibid. 51 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 346. 52 Polan, “Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,” 44. 53 Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” 346; Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, 1989), 54-55.
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restricted view of the cinema does not account for a filmic construction that resists a classical temporal economy by consciously addressing the affective experience of time through the alignment of plot duration, screen duration and viewing time.
Rather, it opposes the idea that cinema can be aligned with the photograph in terms of affect because the photographic “that-has-been” enables an encounter with death that is denied in the cinema. Even so, I would argue that Barthes’ comments in these two earlier analyses open up a (theoretical) space between the photograph and his limited conception of the cinema in Camera Lucida. This space could in fact accommodate a particular type of cinematic practice that offers a photographic punctum. In the work of filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, it becomes increasingly clear that the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time via the long take, in conjunction with a tendency toward immobility (in relation to the narrative, the camera, and performance) brings the cinema closer to an affective experience of time that we find in the photograph. More importantly however, this allusion to the photograph complicates and ruptures an idea of chronological time and filmic ‘presentness.’ What is generated in this cinematic practice is a uniquely cinematic punctum: an affective experience of time that makes the “that-has-been” available to film.
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III. The photographic
[D]oesn’t the held image occasionally remind us that the stillness of photography, its halt and hush, is never entirely shaken loose by sequential movement in and as film but is merely lost to notice?... Is the photographic arrest of film a temporary rejection of cinematic kinesis or the smallest measurable unit of its projection, a fleeting default of the moving image or its vivisection? In other words, film’s absolute contradiction or its basic component?—Garrett Stewart54
In film studies, analyses concerned with the convergence between film and photography are largely premised upon two things: the use of the photograph
(otherwise known as the photogram) and the freeze-frame in the cinema.55 In both
“The Pensive Spectator” and “The Film Stilled,” for instance, Raymond Bellour looks into the way the stilled cinematic image (the photograph in the former, the freeze-frame and the photograph in the latter) opens the cinema on to a Barthesian experience of the photograph.56 On Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman
(1948), Bellour argues that the photographs do not merely serve a narrative purpose but they also, more importantly, “freeze for one instant the time of the film…uprooting us from the film’s unfolding.”57 As such, the photographs in
Ophuls’ film give a history of the unknown and “forgotten” woman (Joan Fontaine) and the son she bore to former lover Stefan (Louis Jourdan), as well as providing a cinematic experience akin to that of the photograph.58
54 Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39. 55 Ibid., 1. 56 Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” trans. Lynne Kirby, Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 6-10; Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” trans. Alison Rowe and Elisabeth Lyon, Camera Obscura 24 (September 1990): 99-123. 57 Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” 6. 58 Ibid.
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The inclusion of photographs in film create a moment that changes filmic time to allow “the precious leisure to ‘add to’ the film” in the same way that Barthes is able to add to the photographs in Camera Lucida.59 For Bellour, the photograph stops time in a way that “subtracts” him from the film and from the film’s diegesis and diegetic time. “Creating a distance, another time,” Bellour writes,
the photograph permits me to reflect on cinema. Permits me, that is, to reflect that I am at the cinema. In short, the presence of the photo permits me to invest more freely in what I am seeing. It helps me to close my eyes, yet keep them wide open.60
The photograph in this instance performs a dual operation: firstly, it creates a temporality within the diegesis, (within the plot duration), that takes Bellour away from the film’s plot and story; and secondly, the photograph and the time in which it exists on the screen (or its screen duration) allows Bellour to “add” and reflect not only on the photograph but also on cinema itself. Here the photograph creates a
‘pensive moment’ that sees Bellour investing in the photograph he is seeing, in addition to the time in which he is seeing it. This viewing experience brings together a photographic temporality and experience that, as Barthes suggests, allows the viewer to “add” to the photograph (away from a predetermined temporality) and a filmic time that is guided nonetheless by apparatus time. As such, Bellour is at once able to ‘close his eyes and keep them wide open.’
It is this convergence between the two mediums, and the way that this also brings together two seemingly different viewing experiences and temporalities,
59 Ibid., 7. 60 Ibid.
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which holds the key to Bellour’s fascination with a cinematic practice concerned with the stilled image. In “The Film Stilled,” Bellour develops these ideas by extending his analysis to the freeze-frame and the conscious concern with time in the cinema of the Italian Neorealists and the French New Wave. In this essay he argues that in films such as François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows,
1959), Rossellini’s La Macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine for Killing Bad People, 1948) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (The Pier, 1964), among others, the concern with filmic temporality is inextricably connected with an arrest of movement in the image, as well as an arrest of the image itself through the freeze-frame and the photograph.
Through Deleuze and Barthes, Bellour maintains that the use of the stilled image not only animates a non-chronological duration that characterises the time- image, (itself often typified by the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time), but it likewise makes “cinema lean in the direction of photography, toward its power to inscribe death.”61 While for Barthes, as I previously argued, the encounter with death that characterises a photographic “that- has-been” is never available to the cinema, for Bellour the kind of pose that is generated in the stilled cinematic image in connection with a Deleuzian time-image returns film to the fixity of the photograph. “For, the overly stilled image,” Bellour argues, “the far too visible suspension of time, leads irremediably to loss and death.”62 The aim of “The Film Stilled” then is to not only consider the kind of experience the photograph and freeze-frame engender, but also the way they make the cinema, more generally, available to death.
61 Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” 108. 62 Ibid., 118.
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Even though Bellour suggests here that the stilled image in film makes the
“that-has-been” available to film via a particular conception of the filmic image, he is in the end unable to reconcile Deleuze with Barthes because “Deleuze is opposed to anything that tends to immobilize the film. He singles out in particular the semiological gaze that, in likening the film image to an utterance, works like a suspension of movement.”63 As such, the implication of Deleuze’s position on the fixed image in the cinema is one that rules out the connection between photographic stillness (and hence affect) and film.
For Bellour, a filmic practice that employs either the photograph or the freeze-frame creates a photographic predisposition in the cinema that becomes photography itself: an idea that according to Bellour can not be easily reconciled with Deleuze. However, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze does indeed pass comment on a tendency toward stillness and immobility within the time-image. “The time-image does not imply the absence of movement (even though it often includes its increased scarcity),” Deleuze writes, “but it implies the reversal of the subordination; it is no longer time which is subordinate to movement; it is movement which subordinates itself to time.”64 The time-image, then, is not consciously concerned with an immobility of movement that results in a stillness of the image as such. Rather, as Deleuze suggests here, it is a conception of filmic time that often induces a stillness within the image. Consequently, Deleuze’s time-image is a conceptualisation of filmic time that can facilitate the analysis of an almost immobile image: an image that tentatively sits between motion and arrest.
63 Ibid., 102. 64 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 271.
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This tendency toward stillness is one that Deleuze recognises in the initial stages of Cinema 2. Here he suggests the sensory-motor schema that constitutes the movement-image and the cinematic cliché, gives way to “pure optical and sound situations.” In the cinema of the time-image, we find a reconfiguration of an idea of the cliché where it becomes a means to completely invest in a temporality that generates ‘pure optical and sound images.’ At this point he writes, however, that it
“is difficult…to know in what respect an optical and sound image is not itself a cliché, at best a photo.”65 Citing the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, Deleuze argues that the cliché in the time-image is a means to go beyond formulaic ideas, narratives, and images. The way this is achieved is through
“obsessive framings, empty or disconnected spaces, even still lifes: in a certain sense they stop movement and rediscover the power of the fixed shot.”66
Interestingly, it is not within this reworking of the cliché as photo that
Deleuze considers Jeanne Dielman, but it is rather within his discussion of the “series of time” and the everyday body. In Chapter One, I addressed Deleuze’s approach to
Cassavetes and the way the “series of time” plays out an idea of the everyday as an affective experience of time. His remarks on Akerman and Jeanne Dielman, on the contrary, are nowhere near as sustained as those directed at Cassavetes’ films. On the importance of Jeanne Dielman, Deleuze writes that Akerman “wants to show ‘gestures in their fullness’”: a “fullness” that implies an excess of gesture, detail and time (to play them out).67
65 Ibid., 21. 66 Ibid., 21-22. 67 Ibid., 196.
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Deleuze’s comments on the stillness often provoked by the time-image in many ways opens up a theoretical space to consider Jeanne Dielman, and especially the film’s construction of an affective everyday temporality, that aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. Even so, his comments imply rather than develop an analysis of the photographic stillness I find central to the film and the film’s construction of time and duration. While Deleuze is an important figure in any consideration of filmic time (especially in modernist cinema), his idea of the time- image is not concerned with the specific relation between photography and film or the cinema’s possible relation to death.68 Analyses explicitly attending to the intersection between photography and film (in combination with an idea of the time- image) encourage a more productive examination of the tension between motion and arrest as well as the way this tension leans cinema in the direction of photography.
Garrett Stewart suggests an approach along this line when he asks a series of questions about the relations between the two mediums in the opening quotation.
While Stewart, like Bellour, considers the use of the photograph and the freeze- frame in the cinema, his line of enquiry is also pertinent to the kind of immobility and stasis that we find in Jeanne Dielman. Here he wonders if the “held image” (a term that seems to perhaps go beyond the actual photograph) takes cinema back to the stasis of photography and to photography per se.69 And if, as Stewart goes on to suggest, the photograph and the freeze-frame (which is essentially the deliberate and literal arrest of the moving cinematic image) can produce the kind of stillness and
68 It is somewhat surprising that Deleuze does not consider the possible relation between cinema and death in light of the fact that Cinema 2 is initiated by Bazin’s realism (which is premised on the temporalities of photography and film). 69 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 39.
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“hush” that we associate with the medium of photography, then I would argue that a filmic practice that consciously enforces a photographic stillness within the moving image can also be reflected on in this manner.70 In Jeanne Dielman, we also find a
“held image” but of a less literal variety: in this film Akerman employs neither the photograph nor freeze-frame but rather imposes a photographic stillness through the camera, performance and even sound. For me, this is not so much a negation of cinematic movement or kinesis as Stewart intimates of the freeze-frame, but a shift back to film’s ‘basic photographic component’ and its historical and technological origins. Along this line, I would suggest that in Jeanne Dielman we find a cinematic conception of the photographic that not only takes us back to the early fixed, frontal actualities of Auguste and Louis Lumière (in particular Repas de bébé [Feeding the Baby,
1895]), or a “cinematic primitivism” as Ben Singer terms it, but also more importantly the long exposure photograph.71
While the early actualities of the Lumière brothers can be seen in the film’s fixed, frontal long takes, the way Jeanne Dielman differs from these actualities is through the extreme duration of those long takes, and more importantly, its sustained and conscious stasis of movement.72 As such, debates around the long exposure photograph and its relation to a specific idea of duration are valuable for
70 Marker’s La Jetée is another film that seems to problematise the divide between film and photography as well as their convergence. As Bellour writes, the film’s “single real movement—the woman half-opening her eyes—breaks the series of photographs.” Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” 100. 71 Singer, “Jeanne Dielman,” 60. Mark Le Fanu argues along the same line when he writes the static long take is based on “the integrity and patient intensity of…[the filmmaker’s] gaze. And of course that goes back once again into the origins of silent cinema.” Mark Le Fanu, “Metaphysics of the ‘Long Take’: Some Post-Bazinian Reflections,” POV 4 (December 1997), http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_04/section_1/artc1A.html. 72 These early actualities are not only approached through their use of the long take and ‘real time’ but also through movement: as many commentators have noted, Repas de bébé, for instance, was considered a marvel at the time of its initial exhibition not so much for the movement of the subjects (which spectators were accustomed to through pre-cinematic visual toys such as the Zoetrope) but the movement of the foliage in the background. On the relation between the long take, ‘real time’ and movement in the Lumière brothers films see Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 136-137.
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thinking about the film’s photographic immobility and use of the long take. For
Benjamin, the long exposure photograph which typifies early photography and photographic technology is the very thing that holds the key to his interest in the medium.73 Due to photographic plates that were considerably less light sensitive, long exposure times in natural, high clarity lighting were necessary. “This in turn made it desirable to place the subject in as secluded a spot as possible where nothing could disturb concentration,” he writes.74 The result of this photographic method,
Benjamin goes on to argue, is a duration that not only teaches the subject “to live inside rather than outside the moment” but also one that compels the subject to
‘grow into the photograph.’75
For the subject to ‘grow into the photograph,’ the subject needs to inhabit the time that it takes for the light sensitive plates to register his/her presence in an immobile and arrested manner. As such, the long exposure photograph is guided equally by the time the subject inhabits, as well as the extended amount of time that is needed in order for the photograph to become a trace of time. It is for this very reason the long exposure photograph differs from the snapshot.76 For Benjamin, as
D. N. Rodowick argues, this has far reaching implications particularly in terms of his conception of the “aura”:
For Benjamin, the longer the interval of exposure, the greater the chance that the aura of an environment—the complex temporal relations woven through its representational figures—would seep into the image, etching itself on the photographic plate…. Benjamin’s commentary on the long-
73 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997), 8. 74 Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” 8. 75 Ibid., 17. 76 As Rodowick writes, “for Benjamin, as…photography became more accurate by decreasing the interval of exposure, the image lost its temporal anchoring in the experience of duration, as well as the fascinating ambiguity of its ‘aura’.” The snapshot, then, alternatively introduces “a new possibility for the image: the representation of movement.” Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 8-9.
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exposure photograph portrays it as…a kind of open window on accumulating duration.77
If the long exposure photograph is ‘a kind of window onto duration’ for Rodowick, it is also a photographic precursor to a Deleuzian time-image, or more specifically “a
‘primitive’ time-image.”78 For Rodowick, the kind of duration that structures the long exposure photograph anticipates the kind of filmic time that is the concern of much modernist cinema.
In Rodowick’s remarks, there is an opening up of the relations between the long exposure photograph and a cinematic time-image that is often premised on the long take. I would argue that the kind of stillness and time that is necessary to long exposure photography (and that Benjamin valued in early photographs) strongly invokes Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. As I argued in the initial stages of this chapter, the film’s use of the long take (that aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) becomes extreme through the camera’s fixity and limited set-ups, as well as the lengthy duration of these takes. Throughout the film, Akerman employs a limited number of camera set-ups, especially on the first two days that establish Jeanne’s routine.79 In the kitchen, for instance, the camera is positioned in one of three ways: firstly, at the entrance in a medium-long shot that shows us a view of the kitchen where the stove is to the left of the frame, the pantry to the right, and the kitchen table (just off-centre) sits near a balcony door and under a window framed by blue and white mesh curtains; secondly, in a medium shot at the kitchen sink where the
77 Ibid., 8-9. 78 Ibid., 9. 79 For Singer, the fixity of the camera and the standardised camera positions reflect Jeanne’s routine existence. Singer, “Jeanne Dielman,” 67.
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sink dominates the frame with a partial view of the stove to the right; and lastly, again in a medium shot, at the kitchen table (which runs the entire length of the frame in the immediate foreground) with partial views of the sink and the stove (to the left and to the right respectively).
This kind of camera positioning is used throughout the film and Jeanne’s apartment. The camera is consistently in a frontal position in order to allow us to see the performance of specific tasks all the more clearly. Consequently, when Jeanne is taking a sponge bath, the camera is set up in a medium shot similar to the one that characterises the one of the kitchen table. The bath dominates the foreground (and the lower part of the frame) and Jeanne’s naked body is only sufficiently seen in order to show us the act of taking a bath, and more importantly, the routine that she also applies to her body in this act: she begins with turning on the water, wetting and soaping up her washcloth, and systematically and thoroughly washing her neck, ears, chest, arms, back and legs (stopping midway to swap the cloth from her left hand to her right).80
In addition to this, the shot-sizes that are employed—medium, medium-long and long shots (for the outdoor sequences where Jeanne goes shopping in town for instance)—in conjunction with the camera’s stasis also amplify the film’s photographic quality. These shot sizes, much like the frontality of the camera, allow us to see the tasks that Jeanne is performing: while making schnitzel, for example, the frontal medium shot of the kitchen table shows Jeanne setting up the plates (for the breadcrumbs and the egg wash), sprinkling flour on the table’s surface and the
80 While this scene shows us the upper part of Jeanne’s naked body it is not a voyeuristic camera set- up. In this scene the camera remains absolutely static and does not focus in on specific (or sexualised) parts of her body.
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movement from one to another in order to create schnitzel. More than this, these shot sizes not only clearly demonstrate Jeanne’s routine (and routine movements) but also the space these movements are guided by. The space of each room of
Jeanne’s apartment, as well as the streets and city square that Jeanne passes through are just as important as Jeanne herself. This becomes apparent when the camera lingers after Jeanne has left the frame: in a scene where Jeanne shops in town, a long shot of the town square shows us Jeanne arriving into the space from the top left hand side of the frame, crossing the square, meeting up with a friend, and the two women departing off-screen in opposite directions. Once they leave the frame, the camera lingers in a way that allows us to take in the details of the space such as the spindly trees and the green park bench, as well as the ochre coloured building and the white, green and blue cars in the background across the street. This suggests that these spaces are just as important as the subjects that pass through them: an idea that
Akerman herself reinforces when she asserts this particular framing was “the only way to shoot…that film…. The framing was meant to respect the space, her, and her gestures within it.”81
For Margulies, as I mentioned in the opening of this chapter, the fixed camera renders objects and space as equivalent material presences to Jeanne herself.
The frame in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies suggests, provides a means for “[o]bjects and spaces [to] gain an effect of presence.” (“NH,” 70) Here she goes on to argue that this framing not only gives a sense of the texture and physicality of objects and spaces but also their detail. (“NH,” 70) Singer echoes this idea when he writes the
“result of fixed framing and distended temporality [is that] we study the smallest
81 Chantal Akerman, “Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman (Excerpts from an interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976),” Camera Obscura 2 (Fall 1977): 119.
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detail of the material mise-en-scene. Our eye caresses the outlines of objects.”82 A case in point is the medium shot of the kitchen sink that demonstrates the way
Jeanne washes the dishes but also her blue checked house coat, the pink flecked white dishes, the bright yellow dish rack and the pale yellow tiled wall where the tea towel, brush and soap holder are hung. What we find here then is a camera framing and temporality that call attention to detail and as such generate the “descriptive thrust” central to Margulies’ reading.83 (“NH,” 70)
As both Singer and Margulies suggest, the way camera framing and shot size encourage a focus on detail can never be disconnected from the duration of the shots and sequences in the film. I have argued all through this chapter that the long take in Jeanne Dielman is extreme. Unlike the conception of the long take that Bazin proposes in response to the films of the Italian Neorealists which is often premised on a tracking long take (or a filmic construction that aligns the aforementioned durations), the long take in Jeanne Dielman actualises film as a medium of time.
Throughout the film, especially on the film’s first day, individual, uninterrupted shots can last anywhere up to three and half minutes, and on the last day at the very end of the film Jeanne sits almost completely still in the dark at the dining room table for seven minutes, (a scene I will discuss below). In this way the film also plays out the ‘accumulation of duration’ that structures the long exposure photograph. In these scenes, there is a strong sense that Jeanne herself is ‘growing into the photographic’ in a similar manner to subjects of long exposure photography: an idea that also involves a viewing experience which I will take up in the following section.
82 Singer, “Jeanne Dielman,” 61. 83 This “descriptive thrust” within the film is also mirrored in the detailed descriptions of my own film analysis, as well as those of Margulies and other commentators.
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It is not surprising then that Margulies states “Jeanne Dielman works like a time bomb.” (“NH,” 5)
In his examination of the long take, Brian Henderson asserts that a great number of analyses concerned with this particular shot and its differing styles often focus on the take itself instead of its relation with the cut. Henderson argues that this oversight tends to neglect “the mode of cutting unique to it.”84 Singer addresses this relation in his study of Jeanne Dielman where he proposes the film’s editing style challenges “the cut as a rudimentary cinematic element.”85 Rather than employing
(and exploiting) self-effacing classical shot transitions and continuity editing, the film makes use of an approach that emphasises the long take as well as the cut. Like
Margulies, Singer recognises that the most noticeable marker of an impending edit comes from within the film’s diegesis: as soon as a task is completed and Jeanne has moved off-screen she turns off the lights (or closes a door). Furthermore, Singer argues, in many shots (such as the end of the coffee making scene) “this process is followed by a post-action lag in which the camera lingers on inanimate objects for about six second [sic] before the cut occurs.”86 For Margulies, this use of lighting brings together Jeanne’s own habitual and frugal nature with the film’s use of ellipses which are “abruptly performed rather than evoked.” (“NH,” 75) Contrary to Singer however, Margulies proposes that once the viewer becomes familiar with this pattern
“the artifice of Akerman’s ellipsis is naturalized—we are already acclimatized to these switches of light. We have come to see them as normal.” (“NH,” 75)
84 Henderson goes on to term this mode “the intra-sequence cut.” Brian Henderson, “The Long Take,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 316. 85 Singer, “Jeanne Dielman,” 58. 86 Ibid., 59.
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My own reading of Akerman’s editing and related lighting strategies lies somewhere between Margulies and Singer’s positions. While I too would argue that the cut provokes an attention to the film (and by extension the constructedness of the medium) in the vein of Singer, Margulies’ estimation of its naturalisation by the film’s narrative also holds true. However, for me there is a tension between the two positions but to a different end. In the darkness that the camera lingers on after
Jeanne turns off lights (especially at night) we find a gap or a fissure that seems to play out the operation of film itself. In these instances, the darkness functions as the spaces that occur between the ‘photographic’ frames on celluloid. Consequently, the film (and the film’s diegesis) is continually taking us back to the photographic frame that constitutes film as well as the photographic.
If this idea of the photographic occurs on the level of the film’s diegesis via lighting, it also occurs through the use of sound and silence. The photographic quality of the film is amplified by the omission of nondiegetic sound and music in addition to limited diegetic sound and dialogue. In most of the film, Jeanne performs her tasks in virtual silence: most of the sounds that are audible originate from the objects and things that she is handling and using. In the act of making meatloaf where we see Jeanne in a medium shot at the kitchen table, for example, the sounds that are dominant are those of the minced meat being hand kneaded and the occasional sound of the plate knocking on the table. The only other sounds in this scene are those of the barely audible outside traffic and hum of the refrigerator. For
Singer, these sounds of the everyday are unnaturally amplified by the film. He argues that Jeanne Dielman’s “soundtrack announces its artificiality not through fragmentation and incongruence, but rather through an unnaturally high and
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uniform level of volume, which causes a subtle perceptual contradiction about the situation of the spectator, and accentuates the microphone as an ineluctable presence.”87
While this kind of sonic strategy on the whole corresponds with Jeanne’s solitude, limited sound and noise are also carried through in Jeanne’s interactions and conversations with her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) and her (off-screen) neighbour for whom she babysits (who is voiced by Akerman). Not only is dialogue “delivered without [emotional] inflection” as Laleen Jayamanne contends but it is often performed in the vein of expressionless monologue.88 When Jeanne greets the neighbour at her door to hand back the neighbours’ baby who she had been sitting, their ‘conversation’ is reduced to the neighbour’s monologue about deciding on the night’s dinner. Here Jeanne stands almost photographically still at the partially open front door barely uttering a word in a medium-long shot that also takes in some of the hallway. Apart from the presence of the neighbour’s voice, the image for the most part resembles a photograph.
This kind of economy on the level of dialogue is also established in other aspects of performance. In her analysis, Jayamanne argues that the film’s performance strategies centre around the tension between action and gesture, the former defined as “a process of doing things, movements, ways of using energy,” while the latter is “the movement of any part of the body to indicate and illustrate
[an] idea or convey feeling.”89 Throughout most of the film, she maintains, Jeanne
(and Seyrig) are defined by action rather than gesture or emotion: Jeanne Dielman’s
87 Singer, “Jeanne Dielman,” 69. Laleen Jayamanne likewise addresses this idea of amplified sound. See Jayamanne, “Modes of Performance in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,” 102. 88 Jayamanne, “Modes of Performance in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman,” 102. 89 Ibid., 98.
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focus on the performance and completion of tasks and acts such as making meatloaf or schnitzel undoubtedly situates performance on the side of an idea of action. “In fact the problem of feeling is irrelevant,” Jayamanne writes, “what is central is the doing of tasks.”90 While Jayamanne rightly suggests that emotion and gesture are not for the most part of real significance, I would argue that an idea of action here is somewhat more complex due to the film’s narrative trajectory and its filmic tendency toward the photograph.
At the end of the film’s second day Jeanne’s routine begins to show cracks that will eventually culminate in the murder of her third client on day three. On the first day and the initial part of the second day, Jeanne’s routine is intact, as is her appearance, and she performs this routine with a meticulous exactness.91 The afternoon of the second day changes this state of things when, for the first time in the film, her hair is tousled and untidy as a result of an off-screen orgasm with client number two.92 Following the ellipsis that signifies the act of prostitution, Jeanne emerges with the second client into the darkened hallway. Unlike the similar instance on day one however, Jeanne does not turn on the hall light until her client has reached the front door and he has his coat and hat on. On his departure, Jeanne goes to the dining room where she leaves the lid off the soup tureen after she places in her earnings (which she systematically closes on the first day each time she retrieves any money).
90 Ibid., 101. Jayamanne does point out here that Jeanne/Seyrig does in fact react gesturally and to some extent emotionally on the second and third days. 91 Lesley Stern on the other hand argues that Jeanne (and Seyrig) “performs her repetitious actions not with habitual ease but with a constrained and constraining precision.” Lesley Stern, “‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things’,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 330. I would suggest on the contrary that there is a kind of effortlessness that comes from Jeanne’s precision that becomes compelling on a spectatorial level: an idea that is reinforced by the duration of the long takes in the film. 92 Chantal Akerman cited in Pym, Review of Jeanne Dielman, 72.
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She then proceeds to the bedroom in order to collect the towel from the bed, where she forgets to switch off the light, and continues into the bathroom to deposit it in to the laundry pamper (where she also neglects to close the door—another routine action).
Combined with Jeanne’s tousled hair, these details are unmistakable and rather shocking signs that her routine has gone array. This escalates when Jeanne makes her way into the kitchen, after cleaning out the bathtub, to check on the evening meal. It is here that the shock of the rupture of her routine is also registered filmically: for the first time, the camera is positioned at the kitchen’s balcony door near the stove. As such, the view we now take in is Jeanne at the kitchen door near the sink and the entrance to the hallway. Once she switches the light on to reveal this new camera position (whose shot size is a medium-long one) she pauses and goes back to the bathroom to switch off another forgotten light. On her arrival back into the kitchen, where the camera is again in its familiar position at the kitchen door facing the stove, kitchen table and window, Jeanne moves to the stove and discovers the burnt potatoes. Once she realises they are burnt and inedible, she picks up the pot from the stove and hesitates for a moment. At this point, pot in hand, she wanders between the sink and the stove not knowing “what to do with (the fact of) the burned potatoes” as Margulies writes, the surprise and shock momentarily registering on her face. (“NH,” 76) Following this, Jeanne walks through the kitchen and out of the frame into the darkened hallway finally proceeding to the bathroom.
In the dark, Jeanne puts down the pot, turns on the bathroom light and picks up the pot and walks into the bathroom: here she pauses and then leaves.
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Once she goes back to the kitchen the camera once again takes its new position at the kitchen balcony door. Jeanne is seen at the sink disposing of the potatoes in order to cook up a new batch. Her actions and movements here are erratic and Jeanne is noticeably flustered. She looks under the kitchen sink, moves off to the bedroom to shut the window in the dark, (an act that barely registers itself on the image), before going back to the kitchen and onto the balcony to retrieve more potatoes. The bag however contains only a single potato and as a result Jeanne proceeds in the dark to the local shop to buy more. This scene and the rupture of the nightly evening meal continue in this fashion. The consequence of the orgasm and the burnt potatoes is far-reaching: from this point on time is out of joint with
Jeanne’s actions and movements expressing this temporal rupture. For example, on this particular night, Jeanne and Sylvain need to wait between courses for their main meal which ordinarily proceed in quick succession.
Once the second day comes to a close, (which is signalled by an inter-title), day three begins with the traces of the temporal rupture from the previous day. Yet while the preceding day had Jeanne trying to catch up to her routine, on this day
Jeanne waits for it to catch up to her. Jeanne’s routine and time function in an unreliable way but now through an idea of waiting or “killing time.” (“NH,” 66) On this morning, Jeanne wakes up before her alarm clock rings, drops the brush while polishing Sylvain’s shoes and fails to button up her dressing gown correctly. As a result, she sends Sylvain off to school too early, she arrives in town before the bank and the shops are opened and when at home she spends time checking the alarm clock (possibly to see if time has caught up with her schedule).93
93 On this day Jeanne also attempts to play with the neighbour’s baby which Margulies argues “hovers between [a] comedy and horror film.” (“NH,” 84)
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It is on the third day that Jeanne often sits in the living room and waits for time to pass. I would suggest that it is also this sense of waiting which moves the image toward the photographic even more strongly. In these instances of watching and waiting, (which is also evident in the coffee making scene from the same day),
Jeanne sits or stands almost completely and photographically still. In the scene where she sits in the living room waiting for her neighbour to bring the baby for
Jeanne’s babysitting duties, the only evidence we have of the film actually running are the faint and intermittent sounds of the traffic and Jeanne’s very occasional and slight movement. While I have argued that this is evident throughout the entire film, even on the film’s first ‘normal’ day, this tendency toward the photographic is amplified on the final day (although it is often punctuated with new movements and actions).
The last day of the film is ultimately about the effects of a time out of joint as well as a recuperation of that time. On this day for instance, Jeanne makes coffee and meatloaf in a way that seems to recapture the reliable temporality of the first day. Even so, Jeanne’s routine and time is actually so out of sync that she once again experiences an orgasm with a client. Yet unlike the implied orgasm of the second day, this experience is explicitly depicted by the film. In this scene, the camera in a medium shot within Jeanne’s bedroom positioned in front of her dressing table mirror shows us Jeanne undressing with the bed reflected in its background. This shot cuts to another medium shot of the bed from a slightly higher angle that depicts
Jeanne and client in a missionary position. After a few moments, Jeanne reaches climax and tries to push the client away in response. Following this, the scene cuts back to the initial medium shot of the mirror where we now see the client sitting up
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on the bed and Jeanne dressing. He eventually lies back down and Jeanne finishes buttoning her shirt, tucking it in and smoothing down her skirt. At this point she picks up a pair of scissors from the dressing table, moves to the bed and stabs the client in the jugular. Jeanne leaves the room, and the frame, and the camera remains on the motionless dead body for a few moments before cutting to a medium shot of
Jeanne sitting at the dining table in the dark.
This murder scene, Margulies rightly argues, is filmed in a way that
“derange[s] a conventional dramatic hierarchy.” (“NH,” 87) Much like the other everyday, routine scenes in the film, this sex and murder scene (both of which are conventional configurations of climax, Margulies writes) is shot and framed in a static medium shot. (“NH,” 87-88) For Margulies, in an approach distinct from that of many other commentators, this scene is not the literal climax of the film (and the film’s drama) but rather “only a privileged disturbance within a film system already saturated with unease.” (“NH,” 88) While the murder is “obscene” due to the way it forces the film to jump from literal to representational registers, the unease and the threat that underlie the film derives from the overall disruption of routine and a spectatorial “complicity with the character’s desire for normality.” (“NH,” 89) For
Margulies this is connected to an idea of animism and Jeanne’s struggle with objects on the second and third days of the film.
Like Margulies, I too would argue the murder scene does not hold a filmically privileged position within Jeanne Dielman, and as such does not function as a conventional climax: unlike the moment Jeanne discovers the burnt potatoes. Killing the client in this instance seems to be a way for Jeanne to also kill and destroy the rupture in her routine and temporality. If the breakdown of time and routine begins
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with an orgasm (brought on by intercourse with the second client), then the rupture needs to come to an end with the client that gives her another orgasm. While this seems to be a straightforward cause-effect reading of the film’s conclusion, I would suggest the murder is the climax of Jeanne’s temporal rupture because she in fact takes time away (through murder and death) in order to reinstate and recuperate a routine everyday time.
IV. The cinematic punctum
What is the debt—or threat—of film to photography, and photography to film?—Charles Wolfe94
Jeanne Dielman concludes with a medium shot of Jeanne in the darkened dining room sitting at the table. Here we are faced with an almost photographically still image where the only movement derives from the flickering neon light reflected on
Jeanne’s face as well as her minute and intermittent facial gestures. This shot, whose duration is seven minutes long, performs the temporality and stillness of the long exposure photograph. For Stewart, the relation between film and photography and a photographic experience of death, is always amplified by death and dying on a narrative level. And although “death within [a] plot often tends to thematize—and so to absorb—the disruptive potential” of the convergence between film and
94 Charles Wolfe, Introduction to “Special Issue: On Film and Photography,” Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 4.
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photography, it does nonetheless bring the cinema closer to the kind of presence and absence that circulates in the photograph.95
In Akerman’s film we confront two kinds of death: the death of the client, and more significantly, the death of routine. Interestingly, it is the death of the latter that brings about the death of the former as a possible means to recapture routine and a routine temporality. For Margulies, in a comment reminiscent of Stewart, “the entire film seems fraught with a deathly texture, a ‘lethal quality,’ the main figuration of…[which] is clearly the murder.” (“NH,” 94) And the “lethal quality of Jeanne
Dielman is perfectly epitomized in this suspended ending—a shot of Jeanne almost motionless.”96 (“NH,” 96) In Margulies’ estimation however, the film’s conclusion
“is not a return of (in the sense of a cathartic return to) the beginning.” (“NH,” 97)
While I argued that the death of the client was a means to recuperate everyday time, following Margulies I would also suggest that the film’s ending does not in fact take us back to the beginning to Jeanne’s routine temporality. For me, the extreme stasis of the final, photographic image shows the rupture of routine everyday time all the more.
To end with a photographically immobile image without a classical idea of
‘closure,’ opens up the film on to an interpretive ambivalence Margulies argues.
(“NH,” 97) I would also suggest that concluding the film in this way opens the film on to a Barthesian conception of photography and photographic affect. The final shot of the almost motionless Jeanne (with again very faint traffic noises as the scene’s sonic background) runs for an entire seven minutes. In this time, the viewer
95 Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 38-39. 96 Margulies also proposes that the film creates “two images of death”: “first, a homeostatic apathy that is a kind of death and, second, the murder.” These images, Margulies writes, resist “any kind of psychological determinism” in terms of explaining Jeanne’s motives. (“NH,” 97)
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is able to begin reflecting and posing questions about Jeanne’s motivations for the murder. But more than this, it is the shot’s seven minute duration that ultimately creates more questions than resolutions, is a temporality that becomes affectively overwhelming. In many ways, this scene is (aside from its connection to the murder) the climax of the film’s temporal and photographic strategies: throughout the film the longest scene we find of routine action or waiting is just over three minutes in duration. Here on the contrary, we find an immobile shot that lasts twice as long in a narrative context that suggests the extreme breakdown of Jeanne’s temporality.
While this is a moment that continues Jeanne’s (and the film’s) temporal rupture, it is also a moment that once again enables us to reflect and “add” to the image: what is Jeanne thinking? Is she shocked or grief stricken? Will she ever be able to go back to making meatloaf or schnitzel, or taking in clients in the afternoon?
Answers to these questions are denied us in the same way they were denied Barthes in Camera Lucida. Like Barthes’ conception of a photographic “that-has-been” whose punctum is invariably premised on an affective experience of time, the temporality that structures the ‘photographic’ Jeanne Dielman refuses any causal resolution. In the end what we are left with is a temporality that, as Patterson and Farber write, makes us “feel.”97
In Jeanne Dielman, we are given ample time to feel, think and add to the image.
For Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film created these effects and more:
I tend to like movies that allow me breathing space in which to think, but this one gives me so much freedom that I don’t know what to do with it— one reason, perhaps, why I take so many notes…. At one point I leave the cinema for a few minutes—partially for a cigarette and partially to see what it feels like not watching the movie—and when I return, I don’t feel as if
97 Patterson and Farber, “Beyond the New Wave,” 49, original emphasis.
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I’ve missed anything important. Yet something keeps me watching, although I’m not sure precisely what.98
When Rosenbaum leaves the theatre and returns to an essentially unchanged scene
(or image—either can be true in this case), he does not believe he has missed anything of narrative significance but he remains compelled. His comments here imply that it is the excessive kind of filmic temporality that not only gives him too much freedom to think (to feel, to add to the film) but also creates an experience reminiscent of the photograph. In his concluding comments on the film, his
“afterthoughts,” Rosenbaum recognises that the film, while fascinating to watch and take in at the moment of the screening, is one that offers up more “recalling it afterwards.” In some way, the film creeps up on him over and again, makes him think through certain details, moments and situations. The key to the film for
Rosenbaum is however not those details but the way it “goes to the roots of experience.”99 Much like Patterson and Farber, Jeanne Dielman is for Rosenbaum a film which makes us ‘feel’ and experience the everyday through a temporality that allows us to recall the film and its details long after we have left the theatre.
In Rosenbaum’s comments we find an experience of Jeanne Dielman that approximates Barthes’ encounter with the photograph. Unconstrained by, for instance an apparatus time, Barthes argues he is able to view and affectively connect at will with the photographic “that-has-been” of any photograph: an experience that he suggests is unavailable to the cinema. (“CL,” 89-90) Like Rosenbaum I too reflect on and add to the film not only as I sit and watch (and re-watch), but also when I
98 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce—1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman),” Sight and Sound 45, no. 1 (Winter 1975-76): 22, original emphasis. 99 Ibid., 23.
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recall it (as image). During the film I wonder about the reason why Sylvain will not eat when Jeanne queries him about his eating habits: what is it that stops a teenage boy from eating? Is he in love? Yet when I am watching the film I also sense the anxiety and boredom rising up in me, as well as a kind of mesmerising contemplation as the film progresses. Away from the film I also add to the film and contemplate my own everyday, and the everyday of my mother (perhaps in a similar way to Akerman herself who has been quoted as saying the film is a love letter of sorts to her mother’s own quotidian existence).100
Adding thoughts, feelings and affects both during and after Jeanne Dielman creates a tension between affect and culturally coded meaning that characterise
Barthes’ studium and punctum. Jeanne Dielman not only creates an affective and material experience of time through the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time, as well as immobility and stasis, but it also produces a space to reflect on everyday temporality as dynamic and affective. This tension between the coded meaning of everydayness and the kind of affective experience everyday temporality generates opens up the cinema onto a ‘cinematic punctum.’ Throughout this chapter, I argued that in a cinematic practice that tends toward the photographic we find both a time and space that takes us back to the long exposure photograph as theorised by Benjamin (in addition to the early actualities concerned with the everyday). In this kind of photography, the stillness needed for the photograph to become ‘an accumulation of duration’ signals photography’s more general relation to stasis and death.101
100 “This is a love film to my mother. It gives recognition to that kind of woman, it gives her ‘a place in the sun’.” Akerman cited in Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman,” 3. 101 Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 8-9.
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As a means of concluding this chapter, I would propose that the ‘cinematic punctum’ as a filmic tendency toward both a photographic stillness and a temporality of the “that-has-been,” owes a debt to photography and poses a possible threat to the way film is conceived as a medium that merely recycles the ‘movement of life.’ In the opening quotation, Charles Wolfe ponders this very thing. In his introduction to a special issue of Wide Angle titled “On Film and Photography,” Wolfe addresses the possible, fruitful exchange between photography and film not only in relation to specific film practices but also in terms of the academy. Here Wolfe argues that the convergence between film and photography in the cinema, as well as the conversation between the two mediums in criticism and theory, empowers “each medium…to disclose a secret of the other.”102 The secret of each medium, for me, ultimately lies in its specific construction of time and the way this time encourages particular affects. But more than this, the convergence between these two mediums in particular film practices also stimulates the question of whether the cinema is ever available to death. While this question remains unanswered, in critical and theoretical examinations of the connection between film and photography we find a means of approaching a film such as Jeanne Dielman: a film which interrogates the boundaries between film and photography, meaning and affective experience, and everyday life and death.
102 Wolfe, Introduction to “On Film and Photography,” 5.
CHAPTER THREE
To be dead, even before the dying begins: Thinking the dying body through video
I. The living out of dying from AIDS: Silverlake Life: The View from Here
The video begins with an end. He is dead even before the dying begins. And his lover, now alone, continues to live out his own dying and grief. But he comes back. Throughout the video he wastes away before my eyes. They both do. Slowly. Painfully. The camera is unflinching. It shows me every detail. Signs of their illness appear with horrific clarity—gaunt bodies, fatigue, KS lesions. Time here does not heal. It only gives in to the progression of their illness. Monstrously it drains away and yet it is devastatingly present, showing me things that I can not bear to face but that I nonetheless can not turn away from. Horribly there is no end. I have watched the film several times over and several times over I have lost them both. But they will live and die time and again, the video will see to that.
“He is dead and he is going to die”1: “This will be and this has been.”2 These statements from Roland Barthes are responses to Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Payne: a man awaiting execution after attempting to assassinate Secretary of State W. H.
Seward in 1865. For Barthes, as I have argued in Chapter Two, the “that-has-been”
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), 95, original emphasis. 2 Ibid., 96, original emphasis.
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is characteristic of a photographic temporality and punctum which signals the inevitable death of the subject (both within the photograph and viewing the photograph). In this instance, the photograph’s more general relation to death becomes amplified by its connection to the actuality of impending death. In Barthes’ commentary on the Gardner portrait of Payne, there is the sense that his reaction is conditioned by the photograph’s context, or more specifically the photograph’s
‘narrative’ context. It is the story behind Payne’s death sentence and the experience of consciously awaiting death that magnifies photography’s connection to death.
This photograph of Payne awaiting death therefore performs the anticipation of death that is characteristic of the photograph more generally.3
Barthes’ response to the Gardner photograph, however, could also be a description of the autobiographical documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here
(Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993). This video focuses on Tom Joslin, a filmmaker and academic, and his lover of twenty-two years, Mark Massi, and their experience of living with and dying from AIDS. In 1989, Joslin began a video diary in order to track the progression of his illness, as well as document his relationship with Massi. Yet as his health began to deteriorate, Massi and other close friends took on the filming duties. Peter Friedman, a former student of Joslin’s, was left to shoot supplementary material and edit the large amount of video footage.4 Initially broadcast in the United States on PBS’ POV program on 15 June, 1993, the video was then transferred to film and released on to the festival circuit. In this video,
3 It is this very thing which ultimately allows Barthes to clarify the punctum as an affective experience of time (rather than the “detail”): an idea that is reflected in the chapter title, “Time as Punctum.” Ibid., 94-96. 4 For an account of Silverlake Life’s production and Peter Friedman’s involvement, see Beverly Seckinger and Janet Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape: Silverlake Life,” in Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, eds. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 145-146.
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Barthes’ concept of photographic temporality is not only played out in the often photographic stillness and framing that the ill and dying body enforces, but a “this has been, this will be” is likewise activated in the documentary’s temporal construction of death and dying. The obvious problem with the use of Barthes’ work here stems from the medium specificity of his arguments around temporality and affect, as well as Silverlake Life’s position as a video (rather than a film based on a photographic referent). Even so, Barthes’ idea of the “that-has-been” opens up a consideration of a photographic stillness, similar to that proposed in Chapter Two, and its connection to actual death.
In my analysis of Chantal Akerman’s formal practice in Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) in Chapter Two, the relation between a photographic “that-has-been” and death were central to my proposal of a ‘cinematic punctum’. In Chapter Two, I argued that a lack of movement arose from an overwhelming presence of time generated by the alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. This alignment, often comparable to that in John
Cassavetes’ Faces (1968), produced an affectivity for both performer and viewer. Yet, in the case of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, the alignment of plot and screen durations also produced a stillness of movement (in terms of bodily gesture and performance, as well as camera movement) that was suggestive of the photograph. It was this very thing, I argued, that made the “that-has-been” available to film more generally.
In this chapter, Barthes’ approach to the photograph as an experience of death differs somewhat from my examination in Chapter Two as it initiates a consideration of Silverlake Life’s literal and actual connection to death and dying. The actuality of the living with and dying from AIDS (as well as the quite literal loss of
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life and being that is symbolised by the corpse) are central to my analysis because they are configured as a temporal process. In this documentary, it is clear that, as Susan
Sontag argues, AIDS is primarily “a disease of time” whose meaning is derived from the lived out succession of symptoms and stages.5 Even so, the documentary is not a straightforward chronological telling of the living out of dying in this sense. Dying as a temporal process is not characterised here by a narrative chronology that begins with diagnosis and ends with death. From the very opening moments of the video, it is clear that a death has already occurred. Over a shot of a monitor (whose image contains a close-up of Joslin surrounded by a graphic love heart and the words
“Mark, I Love You”), Massi’s voice-over says: “The thing I remember most about
Tom is what he feels like… I know what his head feels like… I was so used to just being able to run into the other room to kiss him on the forehead…or bother him, or just get some attention from him. I can’t do that anymore.” The video begins in the present after Joslin’s death with Massi recalling in an interview with Friedman the nature of their relationship and the way actual death is not the way it is in the movies.
The opening sequence sets up and moves through the tenses that characterise the documentary: the present tense after Joslin’s death (that is signalled by
Friedman’s footage and interviews with Massi, as well as images of medications and
Joslin’s ashes) and the past tense of Joslin’s process of dying (represented in shots of monitors containing segments from Joslin’s video diary which constitutes the greater part of the documentary). Additionally, this sequence as well as the video,
5 Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 21.
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incorporates the music track and some time-lapse footage from Joslin’s 1978 coming out documentary Blackstar: An Autobiography of a Close Friend.6
Silverlake Life then takes us from the present day after Joslin’s death, to the late 1970s and the beginning of Joslin and Massi’s relationship (in addition to Joslin’s process of coming out). At the end of the credit sequence we see a monitor and
Friedman’s hand placing a video cassette into a VCR: an action that signals a very conscious shift from Friedman’s introduction (in the present) to the past tense of
Joslin’s video diary. It is within this past tense that the Blackstar footage is used as a kind of “flashback” which gives us a sense of Joslin’s family history in relation to his sexual identity.7 This backward move in time also sets up the anxieties that circulated around Joslin’s act of coming out (as well as the documentation of that act on film) and its relation to his AIDS status and the filming of Silverlake Life. This past within a past brings together the gay identity politics from the 1970s as well as the reconfiguration of that identity politics in terms of the AIDS crisis.8
Much like Barthes’ “that-has-been,” the temporal structure of Silverlake Life complicates and interrogates the seemingly chronological trajectory from dying to death. While for Sontag AIDS is “a disease of time,” as many commentators have noted, it is a disease of a decidedly complex temporality. Living out the succession of symptoms and stages is never straightforward because the process of living out symptoms inevitably becomes the process of dying from those symptoms. In
Silverlake Life, we find that a living with AIDS and a dying from AIDS fuse together
6 Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison, Wis./London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 85. 7 Seckinger and Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape,” 152. 8 Ibid.; Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, 88.
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to become a living out of the dying from AIDS. As Alexander García Düttmann writes in At Odds With AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus:
Time won’t tell: Is not the behavior of an infected person, for whom time seems to have nothing left in store but the outbreak of opportunistic diseases and finally a ‘premature’ death, often marked by wavering, by doubting and questioning, by a split that makes it impossible for him or her to be in one place without at the same time being in another?9
To be in the time of dying, and to live out a “dying before one’s time,” is for
García Düttmann to already be in the time of death. For the person(s) living with
AIDS (PLWA), the temporality of AIDS creates an experience that places them in the present of dying as well as in the future of death. 10 This experience of time, the
“split” that García Düttmann identifies, fractures the unity of time and life, the two very things that make up an idea of a lifetime. This temporal fragmentation of a lifetime by the disease of “our time” generates the “Being-not-one of time” as the
“Being-not-one with AIDS.”11 This “Being-not-one of time as Being-not-one with
AIDS represents the collapse of the subject, through and for which the unity of life exists,” he writes.12 In García Düttmann’s conceptualisation, this fragmentation of subjectivity, “both individual and collective,” impacts on the coherence of both everyday time and historical time.13 Time no longer makes sense of the very things that structure our lives and the place of those lives in a broader historical picture because the time of AIDS, what he terms “AIDS time,” fundamentally characterises
9 Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 2-5. 12 Ibid., 4. Central to an experience of the “dying before one’s time” are affects and emotions such as anxiety and anger which amplify the living out of dying. 13 Michael J. Shapiro, “Globalization and the Politics of Discourse,” Social Text 17, no. 3 (1999): 124.
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the temporality of late modernity. As García Düttmann argues, the AIDS epidemic deconstructs the organisation of society and more importantly its temporal organisation. As such, “[t]ime is always the time of AIDS, AIDS time.”14 What we come across here is a fractured temporality that inscribes the inevitability of a certain kind of dying and death even before that dying commences. If this is the case then, that all time is “AIDS time,” the living out of life ostensibly becomes the living out of dying and death, and it is precisely this that the video explores.
In García Düttmann’s At Odds With AIDS, we come across an approach which endeavours to consider the complex operation of time in late capitalist modernity. In Peggy Phelan’s essay, “Infected eyes: Dying Man With A Movie
Camera, Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” which continues to be an influential critical examination of the documentary, we find an analysis of AIDS and dying through a medium which has been crucial in thinking through modern articulations and experiences of time: namely the cinema.15 Phelan’s approach to the temporality that characterises the video informs my examination of the living with and dying from AIDS as a temporal process as well as the connection between this process and representational mediums such as film and video. In this chapter, Phelan’s essay enables a rethinking of the everyday and the body in “the time of AIDS” as well as the affective experiences this everyday provokes on a spectatorial level. This quotidian differs from the everyday examined in Chapters One and Two because it is based around the actuality of living with and dying from AIDS. Phelan’s work on the affective everyday within Silverlake Life is crucial to this chapter because it allows us
14 García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 99. 15 Peggy Phelan, “Infected eyes: Dying Man With A Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” in Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London/New York: Routledge, 1997); hereafter cited in text as “IE.”
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to consider the particular kinds of affects that are provoked by the act of baring witness to Joslin’s actual process of the living out of dying and death. For Phelan, much like my own approach, the act of witnessing is voiced and articulated in a particular kind of descriptive writing that performs mourning and mourning work.
In the opening of “Infected eyes,” Phelan rightly suggests the documentary is, among other things, “a thanatography, a study in dying.” (“IE,” 154) For Phelan, the issue at stake in Silverlake Life is the time that it takes to die from AIDS and the performative way in which the video constructs that temporality of dying (as a way of working through grief and mourning).16 Prompted by the video’s temporal structure, Phelan proposes that Silverlake Life animates a “time [that] is out of joint”:
“Hysteron proteron.” (“IE,” 166) This time, she argues, places the death, (the
“hysteron” or the end), in the initial moments of the video, whereby the end of
Joslin quite literally becomes the beginning. Beginning with the end (and subsequently I will argue, ending with a beginning) effects an understanding of the temporality associated with dying, as well as the way the healthy and infected bodies of Joslin and Massi function in this temporality. It is for this very reason that an idea of chronology is limiting here since it does not account for the impact of these temporal shifts on an idea of dying as well as the dying body. The movement between the present, the past of Joslin’s video diary as well as the past of Blackstar, connects and blurs the (healthy and infected) bodies of Joslin and Massi.
For Phelan, the end of Joslin’s life as the video’s beginning allows her to address the temporality of dying and the temporality of film; in addition to the way
16 The affective and emotional registers of this video are central not only to its structure but also to an experience of viewing. The video as a mourning work will be addressed in the closing stages of this chapter.
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the two are brought together to preserve Joslin’s living out of dying. While Phelan approaches Silverlake Life as a film,17 in this chapter it is positioned as a video.18 This
is an important distinction because the temporality that characterises video, while
not radically opposed to film, (as Mary Ann Doane argues both mediums have “a
strong investment in the lure of instantaneity”19), differs in that it is predicated on an immediacy that reduces the time and space between production and viewing. While a filmic presentness or instantaneity opens up the moment of filming for the subject and viewer alike, (often through an alignment of plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) it does not allow the immediate viewing of that moment.20 For
Michael Renov, the “material and temporal” divide that separates “shooting from viewing, production from exhibition” is decreased and problematised by video (and by autobiographical video in particular).21
Video, or the “video apparatus,” which consists of the video camera, the playback monitor and frequently closed-circuit video, not only gives the subject and maker (or in Silverlake Life’s case the subject/maker) access to an available medium at
any and every moment, it also provides viewing access to the subject/maker’s own
image (and the image of other subjects) at the very moment of production.22 I will
17 Phelan does in fact acknowledge the documentary’s video origins and the temporal specificity of the medium. For Phelan, the treatment of Silverlake Life as a film is justified by Friedman’s transfer of the video to film. (“IE,” 173, note 3) 18 Many commentators have discussed Silverlake Life as a video. See Seckinger and Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape,” 147-152; Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, 84-91. 19 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 207. 20 As John Belton writes, in “the age of video, cinema has been subtly redefined as a temporally deliberated present…, while video comes to signify immediacy.” John Belton, “Looking Through Video: The Psychology of Video and Film,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 68. See also Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On video culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1991), 146. 21 Michael Renov, “Video Confessions,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 84. I will return to autobiographical video in the third section of this chapter. 22 Ibid., 90.
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take up this distinction between the two mediums (and their relation to death and dying) in more detail in the latter stages of this chapter. While the difference between film and video is integral to my analysis, Phelan’s approach to Silverlake Life as a film is also central to this chapter because it poses a way of looking into the complex relation between the dying body and a medium that preserves that dying.
In her etymological analysis of “hysteron proteron,” (and in a poetic play on words), Phelan suggests a link between temporal reversal, hysteria and history:
To the proteron, the first. Hysteron, hystera. Hysteria. Hystera for the womb, the latter or “upper” part of the reproductive system; hysteria, wandering womb diseases. Wandering wombs breed wandering words. Time’s body will not cohere. The body of the sentence is inverted…. Time’s order is what is reversed, revised, inverted in Silverlake Life. The inversion of action makes visible time’s reversibility—if only in cinema (and certain forms of chemistry and physics). The events that we plot so carefully on a graph of time can be re-ordered. Hystera. Hysteria. History. (“IE,” 166)
In Silverlake Life, time becomes hysterical because it is reversible. Whether Silverlake
Life is approached as either a film or a video the capacity within each medium to reverse time, or more specifically to present us with time as reversed and inverted, remains constant. For Phelan, (as for García Düttmann), this capacity to invert time, to invert the “natural or logical order” of living and dying, dying and death, past and present, calls into question a notion of history that defines the very boundaries around and between these ideas. (“IE,” 166)
This hysterical nature of an inverse time that defines the video’s temporal structure is, for Phelan, amplified by the temporality that is associated with the process of dying in Joslin’s video diary. Where the opening moments of the documentary present us with death as an end, the footage from Joslin’s video diary
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gives us dying as lived out. This living out of the dying from AIDS is created by a protracted sense of time that, for Phelan, allows for a certain kind of “looking”: “a hysterical looking—not a calm, objective, ‘exclusive’ and excluding look.” (“IE,”
167) This hysterical looking, which is afforded by the “intimacy” of the diary format and the accessibility of the video camera, crucially offers us, as Phelan suggests, a view from the inside of Joslin and Massi’s experiences.
In Phelan’s work, this protracted and hysterical temporality is inextricably linked to the everyday. Dying here is a process that is not excluded from or by everyday life. In this documentary, dying and the filming of that dying, not only become part of the fabric of daily life but they accentuate the intensity and affective nature of that life.23 (“IE,” 161) Once again, the everyday that we encounter in
Silverlake Life is temporally affective. In Chapters One and Two, I argued that one of the ways an affective experience of everyday time is created in film is through an alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. In Silverlake Life however, this sense of time, and Phelan’s protracted sense of everyday time, is created through other means. The majority of the video is made up of Joslin’s video diary footage, a highly edited piece that compresses days, and even months, to moments. I would argue that the filming of the very process of dying produces an overwhelming sense of time that is bound up in the affective and emotional registers of the video. The grief, anxiety and trauma that are generated are in direct relation to the time that dying is given in Joslin’s video diary (and in Silverlake Life more generally). What we see, witness and experience in the video diary is the way that the
23 For Seckinger and Jakobsen, the filming of Silverlake Life itself became another everyday task for Joslin and Massi. Seckinger and Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape,” 150.
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process of dying marks and affects the body of Joslin via the increasing number of
Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, his dwindling weight, his reduced physical capacity, and finally the extreme stillness of his body. It is these effects and the way dying is lived out in Joslin and Massi’s everyday lives that make this dying “present” and temporally excessive for Phelan. As she writes, “Joslin wants to suggest that dying, like living, is an ‘is’—its Being fills the present. Dying is not in the future; death is not in the past. Dying is. And this is a film that shows us how long that ‘is’ is.”
(“IE,” 167)
To show and make visible the time it takes to live out one’s dying generates an affectedly charged presentness that situates dying in the here and now for Phelan.
Interestingly, in Phelan’s analysis, this temporal presentness is emphasised by Joslin and Massi’s use of the video camera and closed-circuit video throughout the diary footage. Not only is the use of the video apparatus a highly self-reflexive one that draws attention to the construction of the video footage, but it is also for Phelan a means of responding to the symptoms and progression of their illness. This is made explicit in a scene where Joslin and Massi are lying in bed while watching their live image on a monitor. The couple begins talking about the composition of the shot and the way the video resolution makes Joslin’s hand resemble an amoeba-like creature. During this discussion of the video image, Joslin discovers a new Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on Massi’s eye. Both Massi and Joslin remark that neither had detected the lesion prior to this moment. In this instance, the camera sees what the human eye cannot and Joslin and Massi begin to look at themselves (and their changing bodies) through the video image.
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The video camera (and monitor) can see, show and detect what the human eye can not in a way that for Phelan dissolves the boundaries between the interior and exterior of (particularly) Joslin’s experience of dying. The video camera in
Silverlake Life creates a “dissolution of vision” that both shows up the limits and possibilities of film and video when it comes to confronting and experiencing dying and death. (“IE,” 168) Reflecting on the moment where Massi moves in to an extreme close-up to show us the very painful Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion on Joslin’s right eye, Phelan argues that the kind of vision precipitated by the camera is one that
“points to a way of seeing that we may be able to comprehend, if not perform.”
(“IE,” 168) In this instance, the camera looks into Joslin’s debilitated eye and shows us the way that dying has altered his body as well as his capacity to see. Yet the camera is never able to show or capture what Joslin is seeing through his other good eye even while it shows him looking. While the camera in many ways can show what the human eye can not detect, it can never show or capture the very experience of
Joslin’s dying through his own eyes. “The camera can record him seeing,” Phelan writes, “but not what he sees.” (“IE,” 169)
To look upon the dying body of Joslin is to look upon and experience the presentness of our own mortality for Phelan. Yet while Silverlake Life makes this living out of dying and death visible, it does so in a highly reflexive manner. The capture or the showing of dying and death here should not be mistaken with the kind of ‘unmediated capturing’ that is characteristic of American direct cinema.24
24 “The essential element in cinema verite,” Stephen Mamber writes, “is the act of filming real people in uncontrolled situations. Uncontrolled means that the filmmaker does not function as a ‘director’ nor, for that matter, as a screenwriter. In a cinema-verite film, no one is told what to say or how to act…. The filmmaker acts as an observer, attempting not to alter the situations he witnesses any more than he must simply by being there.” Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 1974), 2, original emphasis. For Mamber,
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This documentary does not merely show and look, it rather consciously constructs the time that it takes to die.25 This conscious construction of time which Phelan approaches through the idea of “hysteron proteron” is always in tension with the kind of looking and presentness that is prompted by Joslin’s process of dying.
Beginning with Joslin’s death before his dying begins alters the way we take in and experience the very process of dying. The tension between the temporality associated with dying and the video’s rupturing of temporal chronology from dying to death also gestures to Barthes’ “that-has-been.”26 While not concerned with death from AIDS, Barthes’ idea is nonetheless fitting here because it is suggestive of the manner in which the video constructs the temporalities of dying and death and the way this provokes us to project death onto the body of Joslin. In the opening sequence there is a literalisation of this: death is projected onto the image of the ‘live’ and living body of Joslin when Massi speaks of him in the past tense. (Alternatively, life is projected on to these images through Massi’s reflection on their relationship).
Even so, in the opening and throughout the entire video this projection of death is not limited to Joslin alone. In a similar way, we likewise begin to project death (or impending death) onto Massi’s own living, yet obviously ailing, body.
This projection of a “that-has-been” and “this will be” of death and dying is carried through most strongly and poignantly within the Blackstar footage (which also seems to function as Silverlake Life’s own past tense). In the last scene of the
this branch of American documentary practice epitomised by the work of Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers is labelled cinéma vérité against the self-reflexive practice of the French direct cinema of Jean Rouch. 25 Seckinger and Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape,” 148-150. For Seckinger and Jakobsen, the consciousness of construction, as opposed to an unmediated capturing, is related to Jean Rouch’s documentary practice and an issue of performance rather than the temporalities associated with death and dying. 26 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
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video, taken from Blackstar, we see the younger and healthier incarnations of Joslin and Massi miming and dancing to Laura Nyro and LaBelle’s rendition of “I Met
Him On A Sunday.” At the end of this scene, Joslin and Massi stand smiling side by side with their arms around each other, and for a few moments they stand almost photographically still. In this scene we see the younger and very much in love couple at the beginning of their relationship. Here we are taken back to a beginning, and to a time and to bodies preceding infection and illness. Yet there is also something else happening here: a playing out of a “this will be.” At this moment, I can not help projecting the events to come onto their young and healthy bodies. I can not help projecting the events and experiences from Silverlake Life that will severely alter those bodies. What comes flooding back (or forward) at this moment is the entirety of
Silverlake Life and the living out of dying (and death) from AIDS.
The temporality of AIDS and the video’s temporal structure (as one that mirrors “AIDS time”) complicates the body in Silverlake Life. In this chapter, I will extend my examination of the body as a kind of vessel of time that is marked by the temporalities that circulate in the video. Following Phelan’s lead, this complex everyday body will be approached as a hysterical body marked by its past, present and future incarnations. This hysterical body is always in tension with a body that bleeds time in its process of dying. The kind of temporal bleed that we encounter is ultimately restored by the temporality of video, or for Phelan by the temporality of film, and allows Joslin and his body to live on and be resurrected with each viewing of Silverlake Life.
While for Phelan it is the temporality of the cinema that restores Joslin and his body, I will argue that it is also an idea of autobiographical video documentary
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which keeps Joslin alive in a highly politicised way. While the two mediums are distinct, film and video are not radically opposed in the way they preserve and resurrect Joslin with each viewing. However, autobiographical documentary, especially in its video manifestation, has been crucial in two ways: an idea of autobiography is central to much of the discourse surrounding AIDS as well as thinking through the philosophical ramifications of the temporality of AIDS; and video has been approached as a fundamentally ‘militant’ activist tool in combating broader social and cultural ideas of AIDS.27 In the practice of autobiographical video documentary then we not only find a practice that engages with AIDS as a social and philosophical issue, but also one whose main impulse is to work through, preserve and mourn a body and a lifetime cut short.
In the final section of this chapter, I will address the way an idea of a lifetime cut short by the living out of dying from AIDS reorients the everyday at a very particular historical juncture. In the “time of AIDS” the everyday is the site that registers and performs a hysterical and fractured temporality that is written through with trauma, anxiety, grief and mourning. While on the surface this seems to position the quotidian away from Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the everyday as a site of possibility and chance, I will suggest that the revolutionary and political potential of Lefebvre’s everyday continues to be played out in Silverlake Life and its collaborative and activist strategies.28 In this video, the everyday not only demonstrates the impact of the living out of dying from AIDS on daily life; it also shows us that loss and mourning can be reconfigured as ‘militant’ affective states
27 Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2002), 39-40. 28 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1971), 37.
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that can generate change in governmental policy and social/cultural attitudes to
AIDS through collective and representational action.
II. The temporal bleed
Silverlake Life asks how the body’s health and death are defined. How are the spatio-temporal marks of location “given” to the body and how do those marks in turn give the body up?—Peggy Phelan29
In Silverlake Life the body that we encounter is a complex one marked by the process of deterioration and dying: a body that becomes the future that awaits Blackstar. Via
Joslin and Massi’s video diary footage we see a body that not only lives out its dying from AIDS, but one that likewise interrogates the limits and boundaries of living and dying. As Phelan suggests in the above quotation, this interrogation also extends to the questions raised by the video in relation to the ways in which we define and approach the seemingly segregated ideas of death and well-being. If Silverlake Life questions and blurs the divide between health and death, and living and dying, it ultimately does so through a body that performs the temporality of AIDS. The body in this instance is a kind of temporal vessel that allows us to reflect on AIDS as a disease of time. And while this is the case here, I do not want to imply the bodies of
29 (“IE,” 167)
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Joslin and Massi quite literally embody an idea of AIDS more broadly.30 Here the
body of the gay, white male does not singularly signify AIDS.31 What we do find in
Silverlake Life is a working through of the experience of the living out of dying from
AIDS and the way this experience forces us to confront and rethink the limits of the
material body in video.
In the diary footage, the body of Joslin, (and to a lesser or less graphic
degree, the body of Massi) is one that is undeniably running out of time. Time’s
relation to the body, and the body’s relation to living, is made explicit by both Joslin
and Massi and the way each day, week, and month that passes becomes a kind of
conquering of time. “As Joslin weakens,” Jim Lane writes, “the passing of time
becomes a moral victory for the couple. As we see Joslin lying in bed, framed by
Mark’s camera, Mark announces that it is the first of June: ‘We made it another
month’.”32 Yet ‘making it another month’ does not essentially buy the time that is
needed to defeat the various illnesses and the stages that arise from AIDS. Making it
another month may conquer time in the sense that Joslin continues to live out his
dying (which creates more time for the video itself) but it likewise materially alters
and marks the body. Consequently the body we encounter in the main part of the
30 “Whatever else it may be,” Paula A. Treichler writes, “AIDS is a story, or multiple stories, and read to a surprising extent from a text that does not exist: the body of the male homosexual. People so want—need—to read this text that they have gone so far as to write it themselves. AIDS is a nexus where multiple meanings, stories, and discourses intersect and overlap, reinforce and subvert each other.” Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1999), 19. 31 In Jonathan Demme’s 1993 film Philadelphia, we find the inverse. The character of Andy (Tom Hanks) is fired from his position as an associate in a law firm when it becomes clear to his law partners that he has AIDS. In this film, Andy’s white, gay, male body becomes aligned with his AIDS status when the symptoms of the disease, symbolised by his KS lesions, come to signify queerness to his law partners. Yet as Robert J. Corber argues, it is only after the symptoms begin to appear and are associated with a queer sexual identity that Andy becomes socially and economically alienated. Robert J. Corber, “Nationalizing the Gay Body: AIDS and Sentimental Pedagogy in Philadelphia,” American Literary History 15, no. 1 (2003): 118. 32 Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, 88.
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video is a body that is not only running out of time but a body that sheds, ‘spends’33 or bleeds time much like a bodily fluid.34
In their analysis of the construction of the epidemic of AIDS in cultural and medical discourse, Didier Gille and Isabelle Stengers argue bodily fluids are “those fluids which…are an intrinsic production of the body and can, in orientation or by accident of design, both leave and enter it.”35 For Gille and Stengers, the importance
of the bodily fluids associated with AIDS, namely blood and semen, are not so
because they allow us to locate the original moment of infection (and by extension,
allocate blame). Of primary significance is the way these fluids move through the
body as well as in and out of the body. This not only implicates the individual body,
but it furthermore suggests the way these fluids can and do connect one body to
33 Catherine Russell, Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 81. An idea of time as “spent” by the body comes from Russell’s analysis of the temporalities that mark the process of dying and performance in Lightning Over Water (Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders, 1980). As a film about the dying and death of director Nicholas Ray, it stands as an interesting parallel to Silverlake Life. For insightful analyses of the film see Ivone Margulies, “Delaying the cut: the space of performance in Lightning Over Water,” Screen 34, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 54-68; Russell, Narrative Mortality, 71-88. 34 This idea is literalised in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1991) where Mr. Orange/Freddy (Tim Roth) lies bleeding to death on a ramp in an empty warehouse in the aftermath of a failed heist. This film, Russell argues, “revives a motif from Double Indemnity in which the time of the film is the time of a man bleeding to death.” Russell, Narrative Mortality, 222. In Reservoir Dogs, we find that not only is the time of dying aligned with the film’s present tense, but there is also an alignment between blood and time (as fluids that drain irretrievably away from the body). After being shot Orange/Freddy does not die instantaneously, rather he bleeds messily, gratuitously, and most importantly, slowly, eventually leaving him swimming in a pool of his own blood. For Mr. White/Larry (Harvey Keitel), Orange’s slow bleed might be seen as his saving grace—it buys him some time. In a conversation with Orange, White tells Orange that “the gut is the most painful area a guy can get shot in… But it takes a long time to die from it. I’m talking days. You’re gonna wish you were dead. But it takes days to die from your wound, time is on your side.” The false hope in White’s words is betrayed by Orange’s ever-present blood stained shirt in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. This bloodied shirt remains in the foreground throughout their conversation. As the conversation develops, so too does the blood stain, and the shirt becomes progressively redder and more bloodied. In this bloodied shirt, and in the flow of blood, it becomes increasingly clear that time is the one thing that is not on Orange’s side. 35 Didier Gille and Isabelle Stengers, “Bodily Fluids,” trans. Paul Foss, Art & Text 26 (September- November 1987): 79.
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another. This, according to Gille and Stengers, brings us into a material and affective relation with the body, and its capacities in both living and dying.36
Thinking about time as a kind of bodily fluid (that is invariably determined by the temporality of AIDS) forces us to confront and rethink the limits of the body,
“what a body is, what it can and cannot tolerate.”37 In Silverlake Life, Joslin’s dying body bares the marks of time draining away and it is horribly clear that this temporal bleeding is a key factor in the creation of the body’s pain. To consider time, then, as a kind of bodily fluid that is bled or drained from the body may be a means of reflecting on the deterioration of the body (as a leaving of time) as well as the way the temporality associated with the medium of video enters (and preserves) the bodies of both Joslin and Massi.
In Silverlake Life, the physical deterioration and temporal bleed that marks the body is made explicit. The most prominent marking of the body and the one that is almost exclusively connected to a positive HIV status, AIDS-related complex and
AIDS, is caused by Kaposi’s sarcoma. The lesions that show up very clearly on the face and body have come to symbolise the physical embodiment of AIDS. For Ross
Chambers and Sander L. Gilman respectively, KS lesions have been configured in the popular press, and consequently in the broader social and cultural imagination as
“stigmata”: a kind of ‘written sign’ that seemingly attests to the connection between
AIDS and homosexuality (and by association, gay sex practices and HIV as a sexually transmitted disease).38 Yet in Chambers’ analysis of Silverlake Life, the KS
36 Ibid., 82. 37 Ibid. 38 Ross Chambers, Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 67-68; Sander L. Gilman, “AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 1988), 99.
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lesions and their visibility are “at the center of the video’s strategy of showing” both queer sexual identity (politics) and the impact of AIDS on that politics.39 Here
Chambers sites the instance where Massi and Joslin are away at a retreat, at the invitation of a friend, and film themselves swimming in the pool.40 When the couple is swimming it is clear that Massi is marked to a greater degree by KS: the lesions appear extensively on his back, torso, arms and face. In this scene, the friend appears to ask Massi to put on a shirt so as not to offend the other guests. At the end of this scene, Massi swims away and turns his back to the camera and “flashes” his KS to
Joslin. This explicit act of showing the KS, and Massi’s own reflection on the way this episode implies a kind of covering up that is reminiscent of the ‘closet,’ extends the queer identity politics of the video.41 What emerges in this instance, and in the entire documentary, is a politics of the body, or more specifically, a politics that is provoked by the body that lives out its dying from AIDS on video. It is this visibility and construction of the deterioration of the body from AIDS that positions the video on a very fine ethical line for some commentators who argue that “such morbid and indiscreet images” of the dying body and the corpse are capable of objectifying and fetishising both Joslin and the process of dying.42
39 Chambers, Facing It, 68. 40 Ibid., 69. 41 In Chambers’ analysis, the act of making the KS visible is also measured against the act of concealing the lesions: an act that “smacks of the closet.” This act of concealment as a kind of regression into the closet, Chambers writes, occurs when Joslin uses a cosmetic concealer when he is flying back with Massi to New Hampshire for a family Christmas. For Chambers, Joslin is forced into this concealment (in contrast to the candidness Joslin and Massi display in California) by the emotional and social anxiety that circulates around the visible ‘signs’ of AIDS in New Hampshire. Ibid., 68. 42 Robert Bourelly, “The Unbearable Lightness of Video: A Study of Silverlake Life: The View from Here, Nick’s Movie and Yearning for Sodom,” DOX (Winter 1993-1994): 36. Bourelly goes on to argue that Silverlake Life makes the process of dying “possible and tolerable” by the loving way it is filmed and constructed. For Bill Nichols this loving approach forms the video’s “extraordinarily humane gaze” which belongs to Massi. I would suggest that this statement applies to all of Massi’s footage in addition to Friedman’s careful construction and editing. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 10.
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Massi’s KS lesions, nonetheless, also function as a sign of his own deterioration and temporal bleed. While for the most part the video is concerned with Joslin’s process of dying (due to the acceleration of his illness), it is also engaged with Massi’s condition. The scene at the swimming pool clearly shows us the progression of Massi’s illness and consequently gestures to his own imminent passing. This becomes more apparent as the video progresses, especially in the scenes at the doctor’s office that appear in the closing stages of the video. Here the
KS is almost completely covering Massi’s back and he is noticeably thinner and weaker. At this point, it is not only Massi’s process of dying that is shown. In the closing stages of the video (after Joslin’s death), it is horribly clear that Massi will live out his dying in a very different way from Joslin: he will grieve his own dying and death while continuing to mourn the loss of Joslin.
While the KS lesions play a vital role in terms of the visibility of the body living out its dying, they are placed in context with the other ways the body is marked by a loss of time. In Silverlake Life, both Joslin and Massi film themselves becoming increasingly gaunt and thin, as well as struggling with the fatigue and tiredness that arises out of their daily routine of shopping, trips to the health food store, and visits to doctors and alternative medicine practitioners. Unlike the everyday and the everyday body that I addressed in relation to filmic representational practices in Chapters One and Two, the everyday in this video documentary is conditioned by the actuality of the living out of dying as well as its autobiographical strategies: an idea that I will be addressing below. In this video documentary the everyday is a site that not only shows us the way the living out of dying from AIDS becomes itself everyday, but it also reveals the affectivity that is created from the
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body’s actual daily struggle with the temporal progression of the disease. The body that we encounter here is not one that is merely gesturally responding to the time that it takes to live out the process of dying but rather an actual body that is literally and materially altered by the temporality that characterises AIDS.
In Silverlake Life and in “the time of AIDS,” the everyday body bleeds rather than stores time. The body slowly becomes immobile and immobilised by the many opportunistic illnesses that characterise AIDS. This is apparent when Joslin needs to rest in the car during a shopping expedition: lying on the front car seat, Joslin tells the camera that he can no longer carry out simple tasks without the need to rest. In this scene, in addition to the one that precedes it where Joslin is in the store struggling to pry apart a stack of plastic planters, there is a strong sense of the overwhelming nature of fatigue and the frustration this causes. Joslin is keenly aware of his physical limitations and the way these limitations not only signal the advance of the disease but also the way they transform his daily routine. Rest breaks from here on become scheduled into and often determine the events of the day.
The need to rest tells us of the advance of the disease and the way Joslin’s body can no longer function in ways it once did. At one point in the video, Joslin records a diary entry about the dread he is feeling about going to an auto show. This outing, he tells the camera, will take days of recovery time. In this instance, much like the previous example, it is clear that Joslin is ill yet still able to handle the filming and short trips or outings (even though they continue to be physically taxing). Yet in the latter stages of the video, Joslin is quite visibly deteriorating and becoming
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immobile. In a scene following the montage of Silverlake,43 the bedridden Joslin
(filmed by Massi) is now noticeably thinner, weaker and in pain.
This scene in the video also represents a turning point of sorts. After this scene, we see Joslin almost exclusively confined to his bed and rapidly deteriorating
(although in one scene we do see Joslin out on the balcony of their home, where as
Massi tells us from behind the camera, he is taking a “European ocean cruise”). This deterioration is compressed by the video and as a result the successive scenes feature
Massi’s voice-off providing temporal markers that allow us to gauge the acceleration of Joslin’s illness and dying. Moreover, the need to locate time is magnified by the limited spatial location of the bed, bedroom and home in these scenes. Phelan says as much when she writes, “[t]hroughout the film, voice-overs announce the date, the location, the hour and space of the images that unfurl across the screen. Without these indexical notes, it would be impossible to know the location—physical, psychical, philosophical, temporal, spatial—of the images embodied in the celluloid.”44 (“IE,” 167)
As Phelan’s comments suggest, Massi’s voice-offs signal a genuine need to establish the amount of time that has passed because of the changing and changed state of Joslin’s body. The first of June is a triumphant moment because the couple
43 In this scene, Joslin films the environs of Silverlake and contemplates his changed relation to the world as a result of dying: “I spend most of my time looking, seeing, just watching this strange thing pass in front of me. I’m not much of a participant in life anymore. I’m a distant viewer, just watching it all pass by.” 44 In Phelan’s analysis she uses the term voice-over rather than voice-off. The voice-over in documentary, according to Mary Ann Doane, is “a disembodied voice” from outside the diegesis which is positioned above the spectator. “As a form of direct address,” Doane writes, “it speaks without mediation to the audience, bypassing the ‘characters’ and establishing a complicity between itself and the spectator—together they understand and thus place the image.” Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 341, original emphasis. For me, the term voice-off is more appropriate here because it (much like the camera in this instance) attests to Massi’s bodily presence and experience.
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has “made it another month” and Joslin, although quite visibly ill, is nevertheless able to carry on a conversation and take on some filming of Massi. But by June 19,
Joslin is visibly more emaciated: lying in bed it is clear that Joslin’s body movement is limited, his speech is slower, his voice softer and weaker, he is forgetful and now needs to be fed by Massi. In the scenes that follow the June 19 diary entry, it is difficult to judge the amount of time that has elapsed because of the changed body that we are faced with: from here on in there is a need for temporal location because
Joslin’s body takes on a corpse-like quality.
This changed body visibly signals Joslin’s closeness to death (as well as an anxiety which forces the viewer into a relation with his or her own death). In the final stages of his illness it is more than apparent that Joslin’s body is one that is traversing both life and death in its living out of dying. In the proceeding scenes this is exceptionally clear, especially when the couple’s friend and photographer Judy visits. In this scene, Judy places the photograph that she had taken of Massi and
Joslin on their anniversary next to the bedridden Joslin. In a medium close-up, we see the now very ill Joslin alongside the healthier version of himself from a year and a half ago. “As a metaphor for the video itself,” Chambers writes, “the photo thus stands for the contrasting images of Tom’s dying that the viewer is faced with. A short, but correspondingly intense, moment of absolutely silent contemplation ensues, the camera on Judy’s eyes as she measures the contrast.”45
The kind of body that we encounter in Silverlake Life in the final days of
Joslin’s life is one that for Vivian Sobchack essentially interrupts a contemporary experience of death and dying. In her 1984 essay “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten
45 Chambers, Facing It, 71.
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Propositions On Death, Representation, and Documentary,” written before the
AIDS epidemic was recognised by the Western community at large, Sobchack argues that our experience of death and dying, which has in large part been shaped by fictional narrative cinema as well as the media, is connected to the violent instant that abruptly arrests the body.46 In reference to narrative cinema, this violent instant conditions death and dying as “representable and often excessively visible.”47
Conversely in documentary film, which is based around the actuality of death and the body, death is “experienced as confounding representation, as exceeding visibility.”48 This is intensified for Sobchack by those rare documentaries that present us with “natural death” or dying as a temporal process.49 It is in these documentaries that we are faced with a body that slowly inches its way toward death:
The slow and primarily imperceptible transformation of the animate into the inanimate, of the lived-body into a corpse, does not signify our more usual contemporary experience of death as a “break,” a “rupture.” Rather, natural death sets up its own expectations and fulfills them over a perceived durée. In regard to its visual representation, it exists in temporal equivalence to the present-tense process of the film medium, marking little or no contrast between movement and stillness, between presence as an embodied being and a merely present body.50
46 Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions On Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 287. In this piece, Sobchack is ultimately concerned with the ethical implications of filming and documenting the process of dying as well as the corpse. I will be returning to her arguments on ethical representation in my discussion of the corpse. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. At this point, Sobchack addresses the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. While this assassination corresponds with Sobchack’s arguments regarding violent death, the evidentiary force of this footage does not essentially gives us access to the actual moment of death. Although the location of the moment of death is almost demanded by the act of violence (especially in film), death invariably exceeds visibility and representation because it can never truly capture the moment of “nonbeing.” 49 Ibid., 289. Here Sobchack cites Michael Roemer’s documentary Dying (1975) which focuses on several cancer patients. 50 Ibid., original emphasis.
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Much like Phelan, Sobchack recognises that the process of dying or “the living of the process of dying” in documentary is inextricably linked to the present tense of filming.51 More than this, dying itself becomes present through a medium that is able to record the process of dying and the way it transforms the states of the body from animate to inanimate.52 And even though Sobchack’s remarks on the temporal process of dying pre-date the recognition of the AIDS crisis, they virtually describe
Joslin’s body in the final stages of his dying. By June 25, there is little distinction between “presence as an embodied being and a merely present body.” On this day, which Massi tells us is very hot, we see an unclothed Joslin lying in bed. Once again,
Joslin’s body tells us that he is close to death through its thinness and immobility.
But this closeness to death is evident more so from the fixity of his facial expression and a gaze that does not seem to register Massi’s presence. There is little indication in this instance of Joslin as a living body that is engaging with his environment.
This idea is likewise played out in the subsequent scene where Massi shows us in extreme close-up the KS lesion in Joslin’s eye: a scene which is for Phelan the video’s “most riveting moment” for several key reasons. (“IE,” 168) In this scene,
Massi opens up the eyelid and he tells us that this lesion causes Joslin a great deal of pain. The other eye, Massi shows and tells us, is fine. For Phelan, this scene may show us Joslin’s eyes but it can never reveal what Joslin sees. It is at this moment, a
“moment of danger,” that a transference occurs between Joslin and the spectator via the eye which, in effect, brings the spectator into an intimate relation with his or her own death.53 (“IE,” 169)
51 Ibid., original emphasis. 52 Ibid., 289-290. 53 I will be returning to the spectatorial experience of death and dying in the closing section of this chapter.
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Yet this scene for Phelan, in addition to the previous one for me, also prepares us for Joslin’s death and his corpse in a very specific way. As I have argued throughout, Joslin’s slowly deteriorating body continually signals the approach of death. Here we also find that the formal construction of these scenes, along with
Massi’s camera and framing, begin to prepare us for “one of [Silverlake Life’s] several ends.” (“IE,” 169)
Joslin’s body and Massi’s framing tell us that the end is near. But even before we see the dead Joslin and his body as a corpse we know that he is already dead. The time that he bleeds and sheds is always already lost not only because the video tells us so from its very beginning but also because the temporality of AIDS makes it so.
If, as García Düttmann writes, “[t]ime is always the time of AIDS, AIDS time,” it is essentially a temporality that inscribes the inevitability of a certain kind of dying and death even before that dying commences.54 In the initial stages of my analysis of the dying body, I suggested that AIDS as a temporally determined disease may open up a way of considering the dying body as one that bleeds time. Yet, even as we watch
Joslin’s dying body before the camera and before our eyes we know that he is already gone. (And his passing, we will come to realise, eventually gives way to the beginning of Massi’s).
To be already dead through every moment of the living out of dying generates a complexity of the body and of time that substantially alters the way we will face and experience that very dying. The immediacy or presentness of dying is continually punctured by a past tense that is written on to the body by death. This pastness which is configured here as a bleeding of spent time once
54 García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 99.
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again gestures to a “that-has been,” “this will be.” Previously I argued this idea is performed in the temporal structure of the video. Comparatively, we find a playing out of this temporality on and in Joslin’s body, especially when it takes on an extreme, often photographic, stillness and fixity in the last weeks before his death. Once again this photographic stillness takes us back to Barthes’ projection of death but this time in an instance that surpasses that of the healthy looking
Payne awaiting execution in the Gardner portrait.55 As Joslin lies on his bed during these final days the divide between the “that-has-been” and “this will be” rapidly diminishes.
In the end, this divide closes and death finally does come, signalled by a close-up of Joslin’s face, eyes staring off as if lost in thought. The framing is familiar.
It looks the same as before, but now it is horribly different. “This is the first of July,”
Massi tells us from behind the camera, “and Tommy’s just died.” The camera registers the shakes, tremors and sobs of Massi’s grief and fear. As he films Joslin,
Massi sings “You Are My Sunshine” as he had done at the very moment of his death. This song, and its re-performance for us, carries on the project’s intent even at this very painful and private moment. At this point, Massi promises to finish the tape and says goodbye.
The body that we see only moments after Joslin’s death is not radically different from the body in the last days of its living (out of dying). The framing of
Joslin’s eye in extreme close-up, the close-up of his face in almost the exact same position on the bed and the approach to filming his prostrate body are revisited and remobilised by Massi now that the end has finally come. It is the same body, it is
55 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
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almost the same framing, but everything has changed. This change, as Phelan argues, is therefore not signalled by the image of the dead Joslin (whose body is ostensibly the same) but rather by Massi’s voice-off. (“IE,” 169) It is Massi’s tremulous voice
(in addition to the tearful groan that we hear as this scene begins) which signals the way we should be reading this moment and the image of Joslin’s body. And while at this moment Massi’s voice-off tells us of the actuality of Joslin’s death, it is unquestionably an impossible and unthinkable moment that shatters the way we have been seemingly ‘prepared’ by the slow deterioration of Joslin’s body because of
Massi’s unseen grief.
The impossibility of Joslin’s death is amplified by Massi’s voice-off. In
Massi’s voice, much like the image, we find the inscription of his loss, grief and fear, as well as the materialisation of these affects and emotions. At this moment, Massi’s experience is not only transferred onto the image and into his voice but it is likewise given over to the viewer. Looking at the dead Joslin through Massi’s shaking camera and through an equally quivering voice, I confront my own affective and bodily experience of death: an experience that is similarly written through with fear, grief and anxiety (not only for Joslin but also those I have lost to AIDS).
For Phelan, the image of the dead Joslin functions as a kind of “after-image” since “what the viewer retains on the retina is the previous image of Tom alive lying in bed in the same position.” (“IE,” 169) In Silverlake Life, we are denied the actual moment of death, or more specifically we are denied the footage that might allow or force an attempt at locating the very moment of death. In Sobchack’s analysis of death and documentary, this moment will always elude location and representation.
As a result, the dead body or the corpse becomes ‘a sign of the dead rather than of
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death.’56 Peter Schwenger reiterates this idea when he writes, “we cannot look upon death, but only upon its effects. It has already taken place, and its place is taken by the corpse. Death is the departed. The corpse remains; and that there are remains is profoundly disturbing.”57
The corpse as remains is acutely disturbing because it is “the body become wholly waste.”58 And this body as waste is the material presence of the ultimate absence. In Silverlake Life, it is not only a sign of the life that was lived but also the dying from AIDS that was lived. In this body we find the absence of being and time
(as well as the presence of that absence in the body that is left behind). It is this very absence which signifies the conversion from subject to object. The corpse, Sobchack maintains, “engages our sympathy as an object which is an index of a subject who was.”59
This relation between the body as the lost subject and as object creates, for
Schwenger, an uneasy divide where the corpse “is neither and both” at the same time.60
The disruption of the subject by the object likewise characterises the abject for Julia Kristeva. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva argues that the essential quality of the abject is that of the object: a quality of “being opposed to
I.”61 Yet in this study, the abject is not merely an object that is positioned counter to the subject but it is the “jettisoned object” which is disordering and debased, and therefore by necessity excluded.62 Here Kristeva situates the corpse as the
56 Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 287. 57 Peter Schwenger, “Corpsing the Image,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 400. 58 Ibid., 399. 59 Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 288, original emphasis. 60 Schwenger, “Corpsing the Image,” 400. 61 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1, original emphasis. 62 Ibid., 2.
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“jettisoned object” par excellence. Without religion or science, as mediating social institutions that define and make meaningful the boundaries of the body, the corpse is the site where life and death merge. As a result, in this body we not only find the subject moving toward the becoming of object, but one which “disturbs identity, system, order.”63
In Silverlake Life, the corpse of Joslin plays out the complexity of the abject.
The body we encounter is one that blurs the boundary between ‘the subject that was and the object that is’ because it is a familiar and known body seen through Massi.
While Joslin’s body, as I previously argued, had slowly crossed over into a corpse- like state in the last days of his living and dying, our encounter with his actual corpse categorically locates his body in the past. No longer an embodied subject, Joslin’s corpse becomes the object in the present that signals his passing and pastness. And though he is dead, his body as corpse continues to be. It is this continuation of the corpse as object that begins to rupture the limits of the body and our understanding of those limits in a way which is symptomatic of abjection.64 In this instance, it becomes difficult to comprehend the passing and pastness of Joslin particularly in light of the body that we encountered as he lived out his dying from AIDS. Much like abjection, this encounter with the corpse, with the body as remains, “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”65 Any attempt at understanding this body and the very thing it signifies, or rather what it no longer signifies, will ultimately fail. The consequence of this break down of meaning and order is an
63 Ibid., 4. Kristeva likewise situates the expulsion of all bodily wastes and fluids of the living body as abject because they rupture the body’s coherence. 64 Ibid., 2. 65 Ibid.
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affective exorbitance which generates fear, anxiety and grief within my own body
(and other viewers’ bodies).
In Joslin’s corpse and in his death we invariably see and encounter our own.
Yet the corpse that we see and face in Silverlake Life is always an image: an image, which Phelan suggests, provides a screen upon which we project our own corpses and deaths (“IE,” 155). Death, Schwenger writes following Maurice Blanchot, not only makes the body an object but it furthermore converts it into an image: an image which bares the ghostly traces of the subject while never wholly becoming object.66
This is more than apparent in Silverlake Life and the image of Joslin’s corpse. It is in the instance of seeing Joslin’s corpse on screen, (be it a theatre screen or a television monitor), that a kind of doubling occurs whereby the corpse as image is given time to exist. In Phelan’s analysis, cinema’s ability to give time to the body, including the dead body, allows for a transference of Joslin’s body onto the screen and into the image (much like the transference that we find between Joslin and the spectator). In this way his body ultimately becomes “a body of film” that lives on as long as the celluloid or videotape lasts. (“IE,” 155) As such, time is given to the body by video
(and film) in a way that is impossible in life (and death). Giving time to an essentially timeless body creates a body that is bound to and secured by the temporalities of these mediums which for Phelan allows Joslin to transgress the limitations of his material body via the body of the film. (“IE,” 155-56)
While the body of film preserves the body of Joslin for Phelan, the preservative function of the cinema (and video) also signals the complexities that surround the image of the corpse and the corpse as an image, particularly in terms of
66 Schwenger, “Corpsing the Image,” 400-401.
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the kinds of ethical dilemmas that arise from this undertaking in documentary. “In the indexical representations of documentary,” Sobchack writes, “the very act of vision which makes the representation of death possible is itself subject to moral scrutiny.”67 This ethical scrutiny is imperative for Sobchack in relation to those documentaries which show dying as a process (and the corpse that results from that process) because it “allows time and space for the ill-mannered ‘stare’ to develop and objectify the dying.”68 For Sobchack, the gaze of the camera and the filmmaker, as human and technological mediators, are not only the means to counter this objectification but also the means by which death and dying are signified in the film itself. This signification of death by the filmmaker is telling in terms of the way in which the experience of death and dying is negotiated ethically. The filmmaker (and the camera), Sobchack argues, “physically mediates his or her own confrontation with death, the ways s/he ethically inhabits a social world, visually behaves in it and charges it with a moral meaning.”69
In Silverlake Life, the filmmakers’ confrontation with this experience is somewhat different from the one Sobchack invokes because the filmmakers in this instance are likewise the subjects. The confrontation with death and the ways in which the social world are ethically and morally reconciled in this documentary continually testify to the blurring between subject and filmmaker. It is this blurring which ostensibly affords us an inside “view” less prone to the objectifying stare often attributed to the filmmaker as outsider.70 In this video, the time that it takes to
67 Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 291. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 292. 70 This kind of looking gestures to one of Sobchack’s categories of looking, the “humane stare,” which is based upon a “complicity between the filmmaker and the dying subject who has ‘invited’ the former to watch and unblinkingly record the subject’s death.” While this is suggestive of the kind of
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die and the body that is left behind are given to us in a highly subjective manner.
The way we are presented with death and dying by Joslin, Massi and to a lesser degree Friedman signals the filmmaker/subjects’ experience of dying as well as the impact of that experience on the video’s construction.
In Joslin and Massi’s diary footage and Friedman’s editing, there is an acute sense of representational ethics because Joslin is never reduced to an object.
Throughout the film and particularly in the scenes that follow his death, the loving treatment of Joslin positions the body not as an object but rather as an additional incarnation of the subject.71 For both Bill Nichols and Robert Bourelly, the very thing which counters the video’s ethical precariousness in terms of an objectification of the body and of death is the loving and “humane gaze” of Massi and his camera.72
In the scene immediately following Massi’s farewell to Joslin, where two funeral directors arrive to take Joslin’s body away, Massi continues to address Joslin and treat his body as if it were alive. At one point during this scene when the funeral directors have uncovered Joslin’s body to assess it, Massi covers Joslin up and says from behind the camera, “I am going to cover you up now, Tom.” This loving treatment continues when Massi follows the body bag containing Joslin to the hearse. And it “is this love,” Bourelly argues, “which renders such morbid and indiscreet images possible and tolerable. But then, one might say, love is blind.”73
looking that is created in Silverlake Life, this “stare” is premised not only upon the filmmaker as outsider but also a “steady camera” that is at a marked physical distance, (and perhaps at an emotionally neutral distance), from the subject. Ibid., 297. 71 This treatment of the body also connects with the project’s essence as the promise not to forget Joslin. 72 Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 10; Bourelly, “The Unbearable Lightness of Video,” 36. 73 Bourelly, “The Unbearable Lightness of Video,” 36.
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Love, in Silverlake Life however, is anything but blind. Love shows us and allows us to experience the most impossible of bodies. As viewers we cannot be blind to the loving way Massi films Joslin’s dying and dead body, nor can we be blind to the way we are ethically implicated in our own act of looking. For Sobchack, filmmaker and viewer are bound together in acts of ethical looking whereby the viewer not only determines the ethical stance of the filmmaker but also confronts
“his or her own ethical response to the visible visual activity represented on the screen.”74 Therefore in Silverlake Life, “the view from here,” (the video’s subtitle), is twofold: while it is Joslin, Massi and Friedman’s view and experience of dying and death, it is also my own. Their view, as Phelan suggests, plays on my own and on the spectator’s “view from here” as we sit and watch. (“IE,” 163) My own act of looking at the body that remains generates a fear, anxiety and grief which force me to confront the very limits of my own body and subjectivity. Looking at Joslin and his corpse through Massi’s eyes only moments after his death, I begin to see beyond
Massi’s overwhelming grief. In this moment and in this body, I find a way to deal with my own grief in order to move to a place which allows me to honour them both in life and death.
Honouring both Joslin and Massi is also an honouring of the body as it deteriorates and finally succumbs to death. In this body, we face certain ethical dilemmas of representation and viewing: dilemmas which act out and invoke the social and cultural taboos that circulate around death and the body that remains. In
Silverlake Life, these ethical considerations are also suggestive of the kinds of politics that are provoked by the vision of the corpse (as well as the dying body that came
74 Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 292, original emphasis.
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before it). No longer invisible or taken away from sight, the corpse here becomes a site which plays out (and plays on) our anxieties around death and the liminal states of the body.
While Silverlake Life is consciously concerned with the politics of queer sexual identity (which in part entails making visible the social and cultural constructions of sex and gender), it is also, just as strongly, occupied with the visibility of the body that lives out its dying from AIDS. And much like the dying body in the video, the corpse’s visibility is connected with a temporality which tracks a process: in Silverlake
Life this process is related to the procedure of bodily disposal and the official proclamation of Joslin’s death by the funeral directors.
Yet, the visibility of the corpse in these scenes and the time Massi takes to film Joslin’s body does not provide us with an understanding of death. In the image of Joslin’s corpse, the body is located as an impossible and unthinkable limit which opens up more questions than it can answer. This body does not become the means by which we come to know death. Rather, this body and its image become the forms which generate and absorb an affective and emotional outpouring. Joslin’s body here is the site that allows for the release of affects and emotions that are not only bound up in the literal and incomprehensible loss of a life but also the loss of the life that
Joslin shared with Massi.
The manner in which the body here is an outlet for an affective and emotional response rather than an understanding of death is magnified by the video’s ‘inside’ view. As I previously argued this inside view, “the view from here,” is one that testifies to the highly subjective and experiential nature of the video. Yet this view from the inside of Joslin and Massi’s experiences and relationship also
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positions the body as one which intersects “the public and private realms.”75 To show the private dead body and private grief in the most public of ways (initially via broadcast television) makes visible the living out of dying from AIDS at a juncture in
U.S. history and politics that for the large part ignored this very body. For me, the visibility of this body in the 1993 broadcast of Silverlake Life is fused to a queer AIDS activism which came about as a direct condemnation of AIDS policy and funding, or the lack thereof, in the Reagan and Bush administrations of the 1980s and early
90s.76 As a result, the corpse, much like the dying body, can be thought of as a political body because it is a private body made visibly public: here the corpse is a body that continues to count and needs to be publicly counted, especially in relation to an AIDS related body count.77 Therefore, while Joslin’s body does not necessarily signify all experiences of AIDS, it has been and will continue to be a body among the many other bodies affected by AIDS.
If Joslin’s body as corpse is one among many in the overall body count related to AIDS, it is also one among the many that circulate in the video. In
Joslin’s corpse we find a body which is never merely an extension of the dying body in the last days of its living. In his dead body we also project and see the somewhat healthier Joslin from the beginning of the video diary footage, as well as the younger, healthy body from Blackstar. Therefore in Joslin’s corpse, we not only see the body that lived out its dying from AIDS but also a younger body
75 Crimp, “AIDS,” 41. 76 Ibid., 38-39. For an extended account of the impact of these administrations see the collection of essays, Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 1988); Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 11-41. 77 For an excellent analysis of the importance of the AIDS related body count, especially in the late 1980s, see Crimp’s examination of ACT UP’s 1987 Broadway window display titled, Let The Record Show. Crimp, “AIDS,” 33-38.
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prior to this dying. As a result, the corpse carries with it the traces of the bodies from the past.
This kind of temporal marking or tracing is not only confined to the corpse. All other bodies that appear in the video also bare the traces of their past and future incarnations. For Massi, who is visibly ill by the end of the video, this ghosting of a past and future body also takes place; although perhaps not to the graphic extent that it does for Joslin. In much the same way as Joslin’s body, the body of Massi carries with it a past from the video diary and Blackstar, as well as a future body which is substituted by Joslin’s corpse.
In Silverlake Life, the body is never merely an extension of the present. All bodies carry with them the traces of the past and the future ultimately as a consequence of the video’s temporal structure. For me, it is this temporal structure and the temporality of AIDS (as a continual projection of future death) which ultimately complicates the division between these bodies. As a result, the body in Silverlake Life is never singular. It is not a body that can be dissociated from the other bodies that circulate within the video, including that of the corpse.
The body here might be, following Phelan’s lead, a historical and hysterical body: a body whose time is as inverted and hysterical as the one which characterises the video. (“IE,” 166) In Phelan’s analysis of the video’s temporal structure as
“hysteron proteron,” she suggests Silverlake Life inverts time in a way which calls into question an idea of history as an ordering force. For Phelan, history becomes hysterical because it can no longer order, because it is reversible. The temporality which determines Silverlake Life’s structure also conditions the temporal complexity of the body. As Phelan suggests, if “[t]ime’s body will not cohere,” the
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body’s time likewise does not do so. (“IE,” 166) The body’s time as constructed through the temporality of the video becomes hysterical because the body is no longer experienced chronologically. Thus, even as Joslin’s body lies dying, death as the future (or a passing which inevitably becomes a pastness) begins to historicise the immediacy of his living out of dying in a way that signals García
Düttmann’s “AIDS time.” His body, especially in the final weeks of his life, crosses over in a way which, as Nichols writes, inscribes “the present with an image from the past.”78
Magnifying an idea of the body as historical is the fact that both Joslin and
Massi function as historical figures now they have both been dead for more than a decade after the video’s initial 1993 broadcast: a period which has seen radical changes in AIDS activism, research and medical treatment, as well as the nature and location of the epidemic on a global level. Yet, as Paula Treichler argues in
1999 in the conclusion of her extensive analysis of the cultural and semantic signification of AIDS, this past decade has not signalled the disappearance of
AIDS nor its impact:
“The end of AIDS” is loudly trumpeted, but statistics at home and abroad tell us otherwise. Every revision of the bibliography of this book, for that matter, has kept death alive for me as authors whose work has deeply affected my own keep dying. An epidemic, like a war, marks us for decades.79
Joslin and Massi, much like the writers that have influenced Treichler’s work, continue to leave their mark and to ‘keep death alive’ through Silverlake Life.
78 Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 11. 79 Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 315.
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Their presence, through the video, continues to live on even while they have been relegated to history. For Phelan, it is the capability of the cinema to preserve which allows Joslin, in particular, to live on. “Transferring his life to film, Joslin renders his body a body of film,” Phelan states. (“IE,” 155) This transference, for
Phelan, not only preserves Joslin’s body but also creates “a cinema for the dead”: a cinema which can continually reanimate and give life to our body’s end. (“IE,”
156)
III. Preserving a body and a lifetime cut short: Autobiographical video
[W]hat conclusion is one supposed to draw from the fact that AIDS provides the occasion for autobiographical reflection, for witnessing, admitting, confessing?—Alexander García Düttmann80
[A] trope that inhabits the entire autobiographical tradition [is one where] representation and death are inextricably combined.—David E. James81
In Phelan’s analysis of Silverlake Life, the cinema’s ability to preserve the dying and dead body of Joslin allows her to reflect on the connection between “the temporality of death and the temporality of cinema” as oddly “comforting bedfellows.” (“IE,”
156) The comfort here lies with cinema’s capacity to continually reanimate and give life to something and someone which has passed. For Phelan, this allows the dying and dead body of Joslin to become “a phantasmal celluloid body” which lives in and
80 García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 11. 81 David E. James, “Lynn Hershman: The Subject of Autobiography,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 131.
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on film. (“IE,” 155) Yet the preservation of the body in this instance is likewise a preservation of the body’s time through filmic temporality. For Phelan, Silverlake Life is a significant film because it gives time back to an essentially timeless body. It is this very thing, Phelan argues, which constitutes the documentary’s primary focus as well as reinforcing its position as a memorial work.
Silverlake Life ultimately becomes “the promise not to forget” (“IE,” 172): a promise to preserve a relationship of twenty-two years as well as the living out of dying from AIDS (which is made explicit by Massi as he films Joslin’s corpse). This promise which extends to an idea of preservation is also, according to Michael
Renov, characteristic of a “preservative” mode of documentary whose emphasis is on “the creation of a second-order reality cut to the measure of our desire—to cheat death, stop time, restore loss.”82 This mode of documentary practice, Renov goes on to argue, correlates with the very memorial nature of the mediums of film and video which seek to preserve life and time.83 In Renov’s proposal, this impulse to preserve is most clearly worked through in the home movie and the filmed diary. Citing the work of autobiographical documentary makers such as Lynn Hershman and Jonas
Mekas, he suggests that while these documentary makers focus on their everyday lives and experiences (as home moves and filmed diaries invariably do), they more
82 Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), 25. 83 The memorial and preservative nature of film is also crucial to Phelan’s approach to Silverlake Life because it allows her to reflect upon the cinema’s more general capacity to preserve the dead. In the early stages of her essay, Phelan contemplates the connection between death and time in theories of photography, namely those of Sontag and Barthes. At this point in her argument, she muses on film theory’s unwillingness to look into this connection: an unwillingness which fundamentally stems from the way death, much like the photograph, “stops the body, arresting its movement through time.” (“IE,” 156) For Phelan, Silverlake Life is a significant film because it gives time back to an essentially timeless body. Yet in her analysis of the photograph and the cinema, Phelan does not give due credit to figures in film theory and criticism such as André Bazin whose work explicitly engages with this very issue.
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importantly use the camera and an idea of documentary in order to seize “the opportunity to rework experience at the level of sound and image.”84
In Silverlake Life, the experience of the living out of dying from AIDS is reworked by examining the ramifications of the disease on the everyday as well as
Joslin and Massi’s relationship. More importantly however, the video reconsiders the experience of living out of dying by thinking through and preserving its consequences on the body. This concern, which meets up with the preservative function of autobiography which structures much of the discourse around AIDS for
García Düttmann, allows Silverlake Life to bring together documentary and autobiography as both a working through and conservation of a lifetime and history cut short.85
The preservation of the body and its time in and by Silverlake Life invokes the desire at the heart of a preservative mode of documentary and AIDS autobiography.86 In At Odds With AIDS, García Düttmann contemplates the connection between AIDS and autobiography, particularly in literature, when he asks in the opening quotation, “what conclusion is one supposed to draw from the fact that AIDS provides the occasion for autobiographical reflection, for witnessing, admitting, confessing?”87 For García Düttmann, at the heart of much AIDS autobiography is an idea of confession and the admission of guilt (and by extension the allocation of blame). Even so, to ‘confess’ one’s HIV and AIDS status is “never of purely informative value” that merely tells us of infection or remorse for the
84 Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” 25, original emphasis. 85 García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 10-11. In his analysis García Düttmann predominantly concentrates on literary examples of AIDS autobiography. 86 For a detailed account of the historical links between autobiography and documentary, see Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, 11-32. 87 García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 11.
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spreading of the virus.88 What is central to AIDS autobiography (and the kind of autobiography that characterises Silverlake Life) is an urgency of testimony and witnessing that makes “it possible to survive oneself in language”: a language that in some sense allows a form of escape from the dying and death “before one’s time,” even though it “does not simply renew the time of life, its meaningfully unified coherence.”89
In García Düttmann’s work, AIDS autobiography is defined by a preservation of an experience and a lifetime that is both created by and cut short by
AIDS. If the urgency of testimony and witnessing arise from the temporal progression of the disease, they also become “a problematic of writing” because dying and death begin to deprive the body of time.90 Considering the work of Hervé
Guibert, García Düttmann argues that the time that allows for the act of writing, for the act of testimony and witnessing, “is being robbed by death, by the fact that the author will die ‘before his time’.” But more than this, the act of writing itself
“devours the time it no longer has, since it is devoured by time and since Being-not- one threatens to cancel the production of coherence and unity.”91 In the act of writing an AIDS autobiography, then, the author and the writing itself are conditioned by a temporal drain (and a body that bleeds times) that defines a dying and death “before one’s time.” As such, the time of writing one’s autobiography as well as the time of the autobiography invariably ceases with death.
Although García Düttmann explores a literary AIDS autobiography his comments are also pertinent to autobiographical documentary making and Silverlake
88 Ibid., 12. 89 Ibid., 13. 90 Ibid., 15. 91 Ibid.
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Life in particular. While Joslin (and Massi) are not utilising language as literary autobiographies do, their use of a self-reflexive documentary vocabulary signals a parallel between Silverlake Life and the impulses behind literary works. Like García
Düttmann, Renov recognises that an idea of confession is not only central to thinking through broader and literary ideas of autobiography but also to an idea of autobiography in film and video. The ‘confessional potential’ of video especially arises from the availability of the camera and the immediacy of the medium.92 On examining confessional video diaries, Renov suggests that this availability and immediacy of the medium, in conjunction with its limited need for other participants and technicians, configures the camera as a confessional instrument in and of itself.
Rather than an address or confession that is directed to an imagined audience, the camera here functions as a provocateur and ‘virtual partner’ which does not bare any judgment.93 The result is often a confessional diary which gives the subject/maker a platform for “unexpurgated self-disclosure as the enunciative act.”94 In this instance then the video camera facilitates and encourages a confessional address that ultimately analyses discourses of subjectivity and the self. As such, video diary work
“tells us more about the specific character and potentiality of video as a medium suited to confession.”95
In Silverlake Life, an idea of confession is situated in closer relation to an investigation of subjectivity rather than the blame and guilt addressed by both Renov and García Düttmann. It is clear that the kind of confessional address we find in the video, characterised by Joslin’s description of his illness and the impact this has on
92 Renov, “Video Confessions,” 81. 93 Ibid., 89. 94 Ibid., 88, original emphasis. 95 Ibid.
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his identity and his relationship to Massi, is connected to a self-examination that is continually pressured by AIDS. It is the way that AIDS changes Joslin’s body and his relation to that body and its capacities that positions the video with other confessional diaries.
While certain aspects of Silverlake Life can be approached as confessional, its address differs from the confessional autobiography that concerns Renov because it does not speak to “an absent, imaginary other.”96 In this video, Massi functions as the addressee that witnesses Joslin’s process of dying as well as the relationship and love they share. As such, ideas of witnessing and testimony are more appropriate and pertinent to Silverlake Life because the video is fundamentally a love letter from Joslin to Massi.
In this love letter, we encounter an urgent testimony and witnessing that goes beyond Joslin and Massi and their processes of dying to all those PLWA living out their own dying and deaths. Silverlake Life appears at a historical juncture that emphasises the need to witness and document the body that lives out its dying from
AIDS. For Joslin, who is conscious of the fact that his time is running out, it is the making of the video which takes precedence over everything including the consumption of his medication: an idea that is demonstrated in the scene where the couple visit their therapist. As Massi complains that Joslin is often forgetful when it comes to his medicine regime, Joslin tells the therapist that it is the video tape which holds more importance and urgency. More than medication that will sustain life, the filming of his video diary and the completion of the original project are the very things that keep Joslin motivated.
96 Ibid.
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Throughout the video however, it is clear that the project of Silverlake Life functions as a means to both document and prolong a life. In literary AIDS autobiographies such as Guibert’s, we find that the act of writing documents the emotional, mental and physical experience of AIDS as well as being a means to
‘escape’ (and ultimately preserve) it. As Guibert writes, his autobiography “which tells the story of my fatigue, makes me forget it.” While “at the same time each phrase torn from my brain, which will be threatened by the intrusion of the virus once the tiny lymphatic belt gives out, [writing] only makes me want more than ever to close my eyes.”97 Even as the need to write and document the experience of the living out of dying from AIDS here is necessitated by the advance of the disease, the act of writing also contributes to the kind of fatigue and degeneration which characterises AIDS. This is also evident in Silverlake Life and in Joslin’s need to rest between everyday tasks which also include the filming of his video diary.
While the autobiographical strategies in Silverlake Life meet up with the literary ones central to García Düttmann, they also differ in substantial ways. Unlike the written word which expresses and denotes the emotional and physical experience of AIDS, video shows us the immediate reactions of Joslin and Massi to the disease and to the time that it takes to die from AIDS. Most importantly, autobiographical video allows us to see the physical changes of the body through time as well as a preservation of that time and body. In the video, we encounter the changing and changed bodies of Joslin and Massi, and the way those changes and a decreased physical capacity impacts on the very act of filming the video diary. This is especially pertinent to Joslin who is eventually unable to independently continue with the video
97 Hervé Guibert cited García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS, 15.
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diary; an occurrence that he is keenly aware of even in the initial planning stages of the project as is demonstrated in the shot of Silverlake Life’s script which notes
Friedman as co-editor and filmmaker “in case of a health disaster.”
Even though Friedman will eventually be responsible for editing the video
(and the final product we know as Silverlake Life), it is Massi who predominantly takes over the filming duties once Joslin’s health begins to deteriorate. Along with a few friends who came to visit and help around the house, Massi carries on filming the daily video diary entries. This collaborative atmosphere is one that ultimately problematises an idea of autobiography in the strictest sense and separates Silverlake
Life from singularly authored literary autobiographies. In Lane’s analysis, this collaboration positions the video as a “shared autobiography” that equally engages with Massi and Friedman, and their own views and experiences with AIDS.98 For
Beverly Seckinger and Janet Jakobsen, the “collaborative authorship” of the video is more importantly characteristic of the collective nature of “gay documentary since the 1970s” as well as the “long-standing approach to activist filmmaking as collective struggle.”99
For many commentators, the collective nature of much gay and queer documentary and autobiographical documentary in particular, intensified with the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. Not only did this crisis materially alter the singularity of autobiographical authorship through illness and death, but it also reoriented autobiography’s central concerns, especially in the gay and lesbian community. While autobiographical documentary continued to address and analyse the relation between the body, sexuality and identity, it now did so in an activist
98 Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, 84. 99 Seckinger and Jakobsen, “Love, Death, and Videotape,” 146.
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climate that required the visibility and preservation of the body infected by HIV and
AIDS. At this historical juncture, as I argued above, activist art practices including autobiographical documentary were a means of making visible the effects of the
AIDS crisis on gay and lesbian communities.
In much of the scholarship around the representation of AIDS and AIDS activism, it is clear that video is the medium which provides the means of directly speaking back to government policy and mainstream media images of PLWA. As a readily available medium with relatively low production costs it is not constrained by the production, distribution and exhibition limitations of film. For Douglas Crimp,
B. Ruby Rich and Bill Horrigan respectively, video rather than film was mobilised by gay and queer documentary makers in order to think through the impact and repercussions of the AIDS crisis.100 As Rich argues, the “potential of video as a medium to carry on and further a mandate once assumed solely by film…has been made clear most explicitly by the response to the AIDS crisis of the late eighties.”101
Video documentary makers could not only manipulate the medium and formal practices to bring light to the issue but also generate a social and cultural dialogue
“on social problems and political organization.”102 Therefore, as Rich goes on to argue, “video has been a player within a social movement and at the same time has taken this movement’s concerns as the material for making art. Elegy, testimony, meditation, investigation and intervention have each defined a number of works.”103
100 B. Ruby Rich, “Don’t Look Back: Film and Video From Then to Now,” in Breakthroughs: Avant- Garde Artists in Europe and America, 1950-1990, ed. John Howell (New York: Wexner Centre for the Arts, The Ohio State University/Rizzoli, 1991), 170; Bill Horrigan, “Notes on AIDS and Its Combatants: An Appreciation,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), 167-168; Crimp, “AIDS,” 39-40. 101 Rich, “Don’t Look Back,” 170. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.
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Silverlake Life is one of those works: a video which bares witness to Joslin and
Massi’s living out of dying while at the same time directly challenging mainstream media images of the gay community’s experience with AIDS. In his 1987 essay
“AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” Crimp argues along Rich’s lines and maintains that the video work of gay and lesbian AIDS activists, and more importantly its television transmission, is central to an enduring social and political intervention:
To date, a majority of cultural producers working in the struggle against AIDS have used the video medium. There are a number of reasons for this. Much of the dominant discourse on AIDS has been conveyed through television, and this discourse has generated a critical counter-practice in the same medium; video can sustain a fairly complex array of information; and cable access and the widespread use of VCRs provide the potential for a large audience for this work.104
Video and television provide two very important things for Crimp: the possibility of a mass audience and therefore the visibility of AIDS, HIV, and AIDS- related issues; and a chance to directly address the homophobic and xenophobic ideas and representations of the gay and lesbian community living with AIDS found on mainstream television. In regard to Silverlake Life, an idea of video is important not only in terms of the location and documentation of symptoms and the physical deterioration of the body, but it is also vital because it generates a “critical counter- practice” that addresses and analyses the effects of the AIDS crisis.
Via its 1993 PBS broadcast in the U.S., Silverlake Life responded to television’s imaging of AIDS while itself becoming an alternate image. As such, the video sits along side the activist video practices that Crimp addresses. Yet in
104 Crimp, “AIDS,” 39.
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Silverlake Life’s conscious (and activist) use of the medium of video in its showing and construction of the living out of dying from AIDS we also find the private transformed into the public. In its public showing of the most private of moments, this autobiographical video also traverses the home movie. In the home movie we find a means of capturing and preserving many aspects of daily life: in the home movie we have a means of creating a personal and private archive of the smallest and the most monumental of events. In Silverlake Life, this is evident not only in its documentation, witnessing and preservation of Joslin’s process of dying but also the everyday life that is built around Joslin and Massi’s relationship. Previously I argued that Silverlake Life works within a preservative mode of autobiographical documentary predicated on the desire to “cheat death, stop time, [and] restore loss.”105 For Renov, this mode of documentary is also aligned with the home movie not only in terms of this restoration of time and loss but also in relation to the way it generates a Barthesian “return of the dead.”106 In Renov’s analysis, the home movie is bound up in a complex dialectic of preservation and loss that is activated (and reactivated) with each viewing, much like Barthes’ experience of the photograph.
For Charles Warren, the kind of loss that Silverlake Life generates as a home movie is inextricably connected to the medium of video. “This work seems all the truer for the look of video, the mode of home movies at present, which perhaps more than film now, reminds us that things are gone,” Warren writes.107 As a result, the medium of video (now embraced and even taken for granted in a domestic setting), gives us daily and unlimited access to moments and loved ones that have
105 Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” 25. 106 Ibid. 107 Charles Warren, Introduction to Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Hanover/London: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1996), 20.
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passed away. Video, now the preferred and most accessible medium in which to document and preserve the everyday, also allows us to work through “[d]omestic space as the locus of emotional intensities” as Nichols asserts.108 In Silverlake Life we not only confront the physical loss that will occur as Joslin and Massi live out their dying from AIDS, but also the complex emotions that are generated by the confrontation with dying and death on a daily basis. Traversing an activist video practice, autobiographical documentary and the home movie, Silverlake Life addresses loss, mourning and remembrance in both the public and private spheres. What we also find in this video is a working out of both private and public grief and mourning through the site of the everyday. In the everyday where Joslin lives out his process of dying from AIDS, grief and mourning serve as potentially revolutionary and political affective states that can generate substantial social, cultural and representational change.
IV. The everyday in the “time of AIDS”
[P]olitics here…[is] more than the idea of basic change, often associated with social intervention and collective action…. Perhaps another way to think about politics is to associate it with conflict—not with settling conflict, which usually means domination anyway, but with sustaining it. Politics can also mean contestation, the fight not to nullify but to assert disagreement, the struggle to be heard rather than silenced, to uncover the vision of unity and harmony as what seeks to silence.—Laurie Langbauer109
108 Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 10. 109 Laurie Langbauer, “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday,” diacritics 22, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 48.
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For Douglas Crimp, the impact of the AIDS epidemic is one that extends to, among other things, the intersection of the public and private spheres. Yet, AIDS does not merely traverse the private and the public. Like other historical events, it also renews an acknowledgement of the way these spheres can not be approached as discrete spatial, temporal or affective entities. Throughout his extensive work on AIDS,
Crimp argues that nowhere is this more apparent than in the act of mourning the thousands that have died from AIDS that constituted both ‘the centre of our worlds as well as its periphery.’110
Much like Crimp, Phelan too mourns for those at the centre and the periphery of the AIDS epidemic through Joslin. For Phelan, the confrontation with
Joslin’s dying and death from AIDS is likewise the confrontation with the death of one’s self. Silverlake Life, Phelan states, “is a prompt that enables us to enter an interior cinema that projects our own living and dying.” (“IE,” 163) If Silverlake Life projects living and dying, it also projects and constructs a very particular process of mourning, which Sigmund Freud writes, “is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”111 The working through of this loss, however, takes time. In the process of mourning, the person who grieves disconnects from the one who has died in stages (that is, over time). In this instance, there is a transference between the dead subject and the one who grieves. In conjunction with this, the libido of the one who grieves slowly withdraws from the
110 Douglas Crimp, “The Spectacle of Mourning,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2002), 196-198. 111 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 14: 243.
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dead subject and “the libidinal investment in the dead is transformed until the dead inhabits a new psychic location.” (“IE,” 170)
In Phelan’s work, Silverlake Life not only becomes a means by which to grieve
Joslin, Massi and all those that have died (and will die after them), but it likewise takes on the temporality that determines that very process. The temporal nature of grief and mourning therefore require a temporal form such as film or video which enables a working through of that process in time. In this way, Silverlake Life both constructs a work of mourning and enacts mourning work.
Silverlake Life constructs and enacts mourning work of both a private and public nature at a particular juncture in history. What we confront in this video is not the private act of mourning become public remembrance but an intersection between the two. In Silverlake Life, the boundaries between the public and private are not so easily defined. To mourn privately in this instance is to mourn publicly: AIDS makes and demands this practice of mourning. And what we find in Silverlake Life is a mourning and remembrance that is in need more so today now that AIDS has become a lukewarm media issue.112 At the turn of a new century, it would be questionable not to mourn and remember those who have lived out their dying from
AIDS.
Central to this act of remembrance and mourning in Silverlake Life is the body that lives out its dying. Throughout this chapter, I have argued that this body is a complex and hysterical one that always bares the traces of its past, present and future
112 In his 1993 essay, Horrigan argues that “the placement of AIDS on the media’s agenda is variable; like child abuse…, AIDS is now a permanently ‘warm’ issue able to be ignited into a ‘hot’ issue with the right turn of events.” Horrigan, “Notes on AIDS and Its Combatants,” 166. This variability, in the twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of this piece, has diminished somewhat whereby the issue of AIDS has fallen off the media radar.
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incarnations resulting from the temporality of AIDS and the video’s temporal structure. In these bodies we not only encounter the body that lives out its dying but also the body prior to infection and after death. The relation between these bodies, I suggested, was continually punctured by the body that bleeds time in its process of dying.
The need to preserve the many forms of Joslin’s body is, for me, paramount in the time of AIDS. In Phelan’s approach, this idea is configured as “the promise not to forget” via a medium which literally allows that promise to stay alive. (“IE,”
172) As I stated previously, Phelan sees in the cinema a unique ability to keep the dead alive, even as (or perhaps especially as) a dying and dead body which allows her to consider this kind of cinematic practice, and cinema in general, as memorial.
(“IE,” 156) Even though with each screening Joslin re-lives his dying and bleeds the spent time which characterises AIDS, each subsequent screening allows the temporality of film to enter his body like a fluid in order to preserve it.113 (“IE,” 155)
While for Phelan the temporality of the cinema restores and resurrects Joslin and his body, in this chapter I have argued that an idea of autobiographical video preserves Joslin in a more politicised manner. I suggested that autobiographical documentary video is fundamental to an analysis of Silverlake Life because it is central to the discourses surrounding AIDS and AIDS representation. These discourses consider the complexity of authorship and the changes that occur to that authorship in the advent of declining health. Additionally, the medium of video has been central as an activist tool in contesting mainstream media representations of AIDS in the
113 I would also include Massi’s body here. For me, the dying body of Massi is for the most part connected to these ideas.
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gay community. Most importantly however, I argued that the mode of autobiographical video worked through the need and desire to preserve a lifetime and history cut short by AIDS.
In Silverlake Life, we encounter an autobiographical video which functions as a means to bring voice to and preserve the kinds of ‘ordinary’ people that have lived out their dying of AIDS on a daily basis. On seeing the Names Project quilt in the
U.S., Crimp, like many others, affectively experienced and re-experienced the death of those close to him as well as the ordinary others whom he had not known. For
Crimp, this kind of project which blurs the divide between private and public mourning should not however be rendered as a spectacle that neutralises mainstream attitudes to queer and gay sexuality, and a queer and gay experience of the living out of dying from AIDS.114 The quilt, like any other mode of representation, as well as the very act of mourning itself, should create social and political action. Mourning,
Crimp argued in 1989, should be a kind of call to arms that generates collective political and representational action against “the violence of silence and omission.”115 Rather than a practice of mourning that positions the gay and queer experience of the living out of dying from AIDS in another closet, a ‘militant’ way of mourning forces change through collective representation and action.
The call against exclusion and silence through a politicised and ‘militant’ mourning from Crimp resonates with the kind of political intervention and contestation that Laurie Langbauer locates as central to the everyday. In the opening quotation she argues for an idea of politics that is premised on a struggle against
114 Crimp, “The Spectacle of Mourning,” 198. 115 Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2002), 137.
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social and cultural institutions, and ways of thinking, that endeavour to cover up, neutralise or ignore the analysis of everyday life. Much like Lefebvre’s quotidian, this kind of intervention has the potential to create material change through an affective engagement with the ideas, spaces and temporalities that structure our everyday lives.
In Silverlake Life, the quotidian that we encounter plays out the revolutionary potential inherent in Lefebvre’s everyday through its documentation and witnessing of the body that lives out its dying at a time when that body was largely ignored. In this video, the body and the everyday are affective sites that not only produce but also reconfigure loss, mourning and grief as ‘militant’ affects and emotions that can materially alter social, cultural and governmental AIDS policy and representation.
More than this, Silverlake Life forces us to rethink the everyday in the “time of
AIDS” and the way that an affective everyday temporality is now written through with a mourning, loss and grief that, like those we have lost, begs not to be forgotten.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cinematic love and spectatorial intimacy
I. Love unrequited: In the Mood for Love
Red screen. Weaving, piercing, melancholic cello and violin. Her cheongsam. His suits. The movement of her body in slow-motion as she climbs the stairs, the way he smokes his (countless) cigarettes. The rain in the lamplight. The sway of the camera. Light, colour, fabric, smoke, rain, music. In these things I can and do invest. The lovers, or the couple that play at lovers, can not be relied upon—I can not invest in the possibility of their union. They do and say the things that lovers do and say, but to no effect. Their union is denied both to themselves and to us. Their union is denied because it is impossible. And it is impossible because it begins with an act. If, then, I cannot invest in their union, I will invest in another. The film and I will come together and form another, more possible, couple.
Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000) begins with a meditation on lost chances and missed opportunities. The inter-title which opens the film, taken from the 1972 novella Intersection by Liu Yichang, reads1:
It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage, she turns and walks away.
1 For a detailed analysis of the impact of Liu Yichang’s writing on Wong’s cinema see Stephen Teo, “Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love: Like a Ritual in Transfigured Time,” Senses of Cinema 13 (April- May 2001), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/mood.html.
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This piece, which functions as something of a prologue, anticipates the sense of loss, longing and regret that will come to permeate the film as well as the film’s central couple. In Liu’s words we encounter a simple scene: a man and a woman, and a moment in time which may bring them together. This moment, while charged with possibility, is nonetheless uneasy. And this moment is uneasy because it can either make or break them as a couple. And it does just that. The woman waits while the man is unable to act (on his feelings). This inability to act, here it would seem from an excess of emotion, stalls their potential union and stalls the moment itself. What we are faced with in this instance is a temporality which draws a potential couple apart and dissolves the possibility of union altogether.
In the cinema of Wong, we find a resolute concern with the relation between love, intimacy and an idea of romantic union. While his work concentrates on the kinds of situations and moments which create feelings of love, desire and intimacy,
Wong’s focus, it is widely acknowledged, centres more deliberately on the way those very moments frustrate an idea of lasting romantic union.2 The opening sequence of
Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zhengzhuan, 1990) plays out this idea with the setting up and breaking down of the relationship between Yuddy (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing), a somewhat disengaged and weary seducer, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), a canteen attendant. In the film’s opening, love and romantic union amount entirely
2 See Larry Gross, “Nonchalant Grace,” Sight and Sound 6, no. 9 (September 1996): 6-10; Jean-Marc Lalanne, “Images from the Inside,” trans. Stephen Wright, in Wong Kar Wai, Jean-Marc Lalanne et al (Paris: Éditions Dis voir, 1997), 9-27; Rey Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together,” Camera Obscura 42 (September 1999): 31-40; Wendy Gan, “Surviving Desire: Rewriting the Romance in the Films of Wong Kar Wai,” SPAN 50-51 (April-October 2000): 83-98. Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin, 1994) may be seen as a possible exception to this idea as it seems to be Wong’s only film which ends with a moment which opens up the possibility of romantic union for Faye (Faye Wong) and Cop #663 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai).
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to beginnings and endings. In these scenes, we do not see a development of the relationship between Yuddy and Li-zhen but rather the moments which make and break their relationship. The first few scenes establish Yuddy’s seduction of Li-zhen: in the second scene Yuddy tells Li-zhen that he wants to be her friend and explicitly marks the beginning of their relationship (as well as his desire for her) by forcing her to look at his watch.3 “One minute before 3pm on April 16th, 1960, you’re with me,” Yuddy says. “Because of you, I’ll remember this one minute. From now on, we’ve been friends for one minute. This is a fact you can’t deny. It’s happened. I’ll be back tomorrow.”4 As he walks away from her, Li-zhen’s voice-over likewise marks her own desire as well as the progress of their relationship: “Afterwards, he came every day. We were friends for one minute, then two minutes. Soon, we met for at least an hour a day.” Yet in the scene immediately following this where we see the two in bed together, the sexual and romantic relationship that has clearly been established quickly breaks down. Here Li-zhen walks away vowing never to return after Yuddy bluntly tells her that he will never be able to commit. As Larry Gross has put it, in these scenes we
have had the narrating of the love story instead of the story itself. We have seen the characters project into the future and reflect on the past as if the present is too fragile to be directly represented. Narration, here as elsewhere, has performed a strange surgical incision into different fragments of time. (“NG,” 9)
3 On this idea Gross writes, the “characters in all the films obsessively mark their positions in time as a way of marking their relation to those they desire. They address things always in self-conscious relation to a past and a future, hoping to gain an authority over things that they never quite achieve.” Gross, “Nonchalant Grace,” 9; hereafter cited in text as “NG.” 4 This transcription, and all that follow, has been taken from the film’s English sub-titles.
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For Gross, whose essay “Nonchalant Grace” continues to be central in any discussion of love in Wong’s cinema, the ‘fragility of the present’ has important repercussions when thinking about love. It is in the use of voice-over narration, as well as editing, Gross argues, that Wong’s films often elide the present tense of romantic relationships. The elision of the very moments, minutes and hours which come to create intimate connections arises out of, among other things, the inability to act and express emotion: an idea which operates equally in connection with the setting up of new relationships and within (seemingly) established relationships.
Rather than a present which shows us the formation of a romantic union, we are offered its past and future. Happy Together (Chunguang Zhaxie, 1997), for instance, begins with Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung
Kwok-wing), a gay couple in Argentina, “starting over again.” Over a grainy black and white image of the couple beginning to make love, Yiu-fai’s voice-over tells us this favourite phrase of Po-wing’s brings them together again each time they part. In this idea of “starting over” there is a strong sense of the ephemeral nature of Yiu-fai and Po-wing’s union. “Like Yuddy with the minute of happiness he offers to
Lizhen,” Philippa Hawker writes, Po-wing’s phrase “simultaneously marks an acknowledgement of the end and beginning of a relationship.”5
This scene from the film and the act of starting over again plays out and draws in the couple’s past break-ups (and the possibility of future break-ups) into the
5 Hawker goes on to observe that the continuation of this kind of temporal marking is not only amplified through character but also via the body of Leslie Cheung (who plays both Yuddy and Po- wing). Philippa Hawker, “Abandon, Abandoned…The Screen Life of Leslie Cheung,” in Leslie Cheung, eds. Clare Stewart and Philippa Hawker (Melbourne: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2003), 18.
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present tense.6 In Gross’ analysis, it is specifically in the use of voice-over that we come to sense the ways in which the characters are trying to negotiate the
“lightness” of the present: while characters such as Yiu-fai may yearn for love and emotional connection, the films give us a present which cannot “be possessed” and one that, in effect, denies “successful emotional expression.” (“NG,” 9) Along this line, I would also argue that the present moment is continually missed (and often by- passed by Wong), because it can never quite deliver the kind of union or oneness that we expect from the coming together of two people over time: an expectation that we have in life and, more importantly, in the cinema. As a result, the present moment either melts away into the past (as memory) or moves into an unfulfilled future.
If the voice-over narration, then, often dissolves into the past and the future, it does so because it is characteristic of the kind of love that ultimately concerns
Wong: unrequited love. For Gross, the function of the voice-over, and the way it moves relationships (as well as the film) into the past and future, is reflective of the temporality which typifies unrequited love. In Wong’s films we encounter
“depictions of worlds where the most important actions have already happened or never will happen,” he writes. (“NG,” 8) Consequently, unrequited love is more than love or affection which is not returned. In Wong’s oeuvre, unrequited love is a
6 The very beginning of Happy Together opens up and questions the presumed stability of an idea of the couple. For Marc Siegel, the film plays out the restrictions of heteronormative union. Taking Gross’ designation of Wong as “the last heterosexual director” as his lead, Siegel argues that Wong’s films “challenge the idea that intimacy can be confined within the form of the couple and within the realm of the private.” Marc Siegel, “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 286. I will be coming back to Siegel’s arguments in order to explore the way Wong’s cinema opens up new forms of intimacy between and beyond the characters in the films.
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particular articulation and experience of time which animates a past and future written through with loss, longing and unfulfilled promise.7
In this temporal conception of love we find a continuation of Wong’s
broader concern with time, and its effects and affects.8 Throughout Gross’ essay, the thinking through of the nature of unrequited love is firmly connected to voice-over narration and temporal elisions into the past and future via editing. In Wong’s cinema however, unrequited love as an articulation of both that which has passed and that which never comes to pass is just as strongly associated with a protracted sense of time in the present. “Wong,” David Bordwell contends, “shifts between a nearly hypnotic stare and a teasing glimpse.”9 In Days of Being Wild, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love, it is this “nearly hypnotic stare” (often via the long take resulting in an alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time) which plays out the longing and waiting that is central to an idea of unrequited love: in this way love “takes time too” as Bordwell goes on to argue.10
Within In the Mood for Love, a film which marks a departure from Wong’s use
of voice-over narration, this protracted present is taken a step further where it begins
7 While loss and longing are central to both mourning and melancholy, in Wong’s cinema they are just as crucial to thinking through the impossibility of romantic union and an idea of unrequited love. For Susan Stewart, longing as a “yearning desire” is also defined through a particular conception and experience of time. The “location of desire, or, more particularly, the direction of force in the desiring narrative, is always a future-past, a deferment of experience in the direction of origin and thus eschaton, the point where narrative begins/ends.” Much like an idea of unrequited love in Wong’s cinema, the temporality of longing also animates a past and future that produces a missed experience which separates one from the object of one’s desire. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), ix-x. 8 See Tony Rayns, “Poet of Time,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 9 (September 1995): 12-14; Chuck Stephens, “Time Pieces: Wong Kar-Wai and the Persistence of Memory,” Film Comment 32, no. 1 (January-February 1996): 12-18; Ackbar Abbas, “Wong Kar-wai: Hong Kong Filmmaker,” chap. 3 in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, “Trapped in the Present: Time in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai,” Film Criticism 25, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 2-20. 9 David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 279. 10 Ibid., 285.
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to perform the effect of voice-over narration and consequently the temporality of unrequited love. Throughout the film, unrequited love is constructed and performed affectively through filmic narration and mise en scène. Rather than a voice-over which elides time and moves the film from the past to the future, here we find a protracted present which performs the effect of voice-over and carries with it traces of the past and future. From its setting in the Hong Kong of the 1960s through to its use of slow motion and a rhythmic and melancholic music score, In the Mood for
Love creates a temporality that short-circuits the possibility of union by invoking a missed past and unfulfilled future defined through loss and longing.11
What we find in many instances throughout this film (and others) is a present where “nothing happens” in the context of relationships and emotional connections.
While characters are given time to come together it becomes increasingly clear that they can not. Characters long for love and connection, as well as a union that joins two people into a classical “oneness.”12 Even so, what we in fact encounter in these films is a profound state of disconnection: characters who are “immobilised by feeling,” as Gross puts it, even, or especially, when connection is most desired.
(“NG,” 10) It is this tension between the need for connection and the inability to connect in the moment which produces, I would argue, an affectivity where time is both too much and too little: too much because it is saturated with feelings of frustration, longing, and waiting, and too little because it does not, and can not bring two people together.
11 In Wong’s most recent film 2046 (2004), the loss and longing associated with unrequited love are taken even further. This new film, which was being shot and produced simultaneously with In the Mood for Love, is in part a science-fiction film that in many ways continues the story between the central characters of In the Mood for Love. See Stephen Teo, “2046: A Matter of Time, A Labour of Love,” Senses of Cinema 35 (April-June 2005), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/2046.html. 12 Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave,” 35.
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This protracted sense of time where “nothing happens” and its concomitant
affectivity once again calls up the quotidian of Henri Lefebvre and Maurice
Blanchot. In Wong’s films, even in his genre pieces, we often find a preoccupation
with the banal and the everyday as well as the time it takes to give a sense of
quotidian occurrences.13 Nowhere is this more apparent than In the Mood for Love
which begins with, what Rey Chow terms, “a series of unremarkable coincidences.”14
It is Hong Kong, 1962. Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), a shipping-office secretary, is inquiring after a room for herself and her husband at Mrs Suen’s
(Rebecca Pan) apartment.15 Just as Li-zhen has rented the room and leaves, Chow
Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a journalist, arrives to rent the very same room for himself and his wife. Mrs Suen recommends her neighbours to Mo-wan. As chance would have it, Li-zhen and Mo-wan move into their respective rooms (in the absence of their spouses) on the very same day in the following scene. The film then proceeds with the intersecting lives of Li-zhen and Mo-wan going about their daily lives consisting of work, trips to the noodle shop, and the occasional game of mah-
13 While Adrian Martin argues that the focus on the “unspectacular and repetitive gestures, spaces and rituals of everyday lives” within this film is “new for Wong,” I would argue that the time given over to creating a sense of the everyday in a variety of Wong’s films allows us to consider this film as a continuation of this concern. Adrian Martin, “Perhaps,” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May 2001), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/wong-perhaps.html. 14 Rey Chow, “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 645. 15 In the film, Maggie Cheung’s character is known as Mrs Chan, yet in the press releases surrounding the film, as well as numerous reviews, her character is referred to by her maiden name, Su Li-zhen: the same character which Cheung plays in Days of Being Wild (set in Hong Kong in 1960). Several commentators have noted the way In the Mood for Love can be seen as a continuation of Days and Cheung’s Li-zhen. See Tony Rayns, “In the mood for Edinburgh,” Sight and Sound 10, no. 8 (August 2000): 14; Olivia Khoo, “Love in Ruins: Spectral Bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love,” in Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures, eds. Larissa Heinrich and Fran Martin (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming 2005), n.p.; Chow, “Sentimental Returns,” 654, note 8.
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jong: their spouses largely absent on business trips are positioned as shadowy, predominantly off-screen figures.16
This sense of intersection is amplified when Li-zhen and Mo-wan realise their respective spouses are having an affair when each recognises gifts bought overseas:
Li-zhen has the same bag as Mo-wan’s wife; Mo-wan has the tie Li-zhen’s husband
“wears every day.”17 As a means of coming to terms with the infidelity, Mo-wan and
Li-zhen begin to act. They act out a conceivable (and yet unthinkable) beginning, along with the dinners, meetings, and small everyday gestures that they assume created the affair: performances which always carry with them the phantoms of their absent spouses. However, as “each one playacts the role of the other’s spouse, in order to understand the affair,” they inevitably begin to “re-create its dynamics.”18
It is in the growing connection between Li-zhen and Mo-wan that the film invests its energy. But while we see the two form another couple, we know from the very opening inter-title, as well as from a familiarity with Wong’s oeuvre, that this couple will not, and can not, be: an idea that seems to run counter to the kind of chance, coincidence and possibility that the opening (and recurring) scenes of the everyday set up. As such, the everyday here does not function as the affective moment of possibility that was central to my reading of John Cassavetes’ Faces
(1968) in Chapter One. In Wong’s films, especially In the Mood for Love, the everyday
16 For Olivia Khoo, an idea of intersection (which is initiated by Wong’s use of Liu Yichang’s novella of the same name) is crucial to thinking about love. On this connection she suggests that although the film begins with and takes up coincidences and intersecting lives, love is a “non-coincidence.” The “contrived ‘coincidences’ and ‘chance’ meetings between Mo-wan and Li-zhen appear as a rehearsal for some belated reunion or meeting that cannot happen now, or indeed within the frames of the film.” Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 17 This is magnified in the film by Li-zhen’s philandering boss, Mr Ho (Lai Chin) and his own gift giving to his mistress. Interestingly, Li-zhen is often the go-between that negotiates meetings with Ho’s wife and mistress as well as being the procurer of gifts. 18 Kent Jones, “Of Love and the City,” Film Comment 37, no. 1 (January-February 2001): 24.
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does not signal an opening up of possibility and contingency as it does in Cassavetes’ cinema, but rather a quotidian laid bare to other influences and temporalities.
In Wong’s film, the everyday is opened up to the temporality of unrequited love in a way which not only enacts the impossible potential of lasting union but, more importantly, plays out and underscores a sense of loss and longing associated with the past (as memory) and an unfulfilled future. Rather than an everyday moment that holds within itself possibility and chance, here we encounter a protracted present which plays out missed moments of the past and future through loss, longing and melancholy. Within the film the everyday no longer holds the same potential because it is an everyday which has passed over into history, memory and nostalgia: an idea amplified by the film’s setting in Hong Kong (and Singapore and
Cambodia) in the years between 1962 and 1966. Unlike Days of Being Wild, which one commentator has noted is a film about the past, In the Mood for Love is “the memory of the past and the rendering of that memory in film.”19 In the Mood for Love, then, intersects the temporality of unrequited love with the everyday in a way which performs a memory and nostalgia charged with loss, longing and melancholy. This nostalgia is based on two things: a nostalgia for, as Wong himself has put it, “the end of a period”20; and a nostalgia for an idea of lasting union that might have been possible in the Hong Kong of the 1960s.21 Chow approaches this in similar terms when she writes that the nostalgia in Wong’s film (which is for her a sentimental one), “is to be identified not merely at the level of the old objects and interiors from
19 Amy Taubin, Review of In the Mood for Love, Sight and Sound 10, no. 11 (November 2000): 55. 20 Wong Kar-wai cited in Rayns, “In the mood for Edinburgh,” 16. 21 In Rey Chow’s analysis of Happy Together, an idea of the couple and lasting union is configured as a nostalgic dream or memory which can never be attained, and as such is “therefore always desired and pursued.” As Chow rightly argues, this nostalgia for the couple is evident in Wong’s entire body of work. Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave,” 36.
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the 1960s but more palpably in the theme of the impermanence of human togetherness to which he repeatedly returns.”22
In Wong’s continual narrative return to the “impermanence of human togetherness” we also find a formal practice which begins to mirror the rhythm, pace and mood of unrequited love. It is In the Mood for Love, more so than any other film, which takes the loss, longing and waiting of unrequited love to a filmic extreme. In this film, there is a giving over of longing and loss onto and into the filmic image whereby the film itself becomes written through with the temporality which defines this kind of love. The languid slow-motion shots of Li-zhen walking down the stairs to the noodle stand, for example, or Mo-wan smoking a cigarette sheltering from the rain distend time in a way which takes us back to Wong’s “hypnotic stare.” These images and instances which recur throughout the film (often accompanied by the melancholy “Yumeji’s theme” by Umebayashi Shigeru or one of Nat King Cole’s
Spanish numbers) are of an oneiric quality which slows down time (and the narrative) in a way that tells us that love is nothing but a nostalgic dream.
And what an exquisite dream it is. Detailed and saturated with colour, these images are, as Olivia Khoo writes, “almost suffocating in their beauty.”23 Yet like a dream these images are also on the edge of fading away. These dream-like images which slow time down and create the pace and rhythm of unrequited love invariably create a time of loss and impermanence: a time that often threatens to erode the image in such a way that it becomes as transient as love itself. “The film looks and feels overripe,” Paul Arthur observes, “on the edge of decay, because no amount of
22 Chow, “Sentimental Returns,” 649. 23 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p.
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repetition, long fades, or slow-motion epiphanies can keep the images—the time, place, characters they inscribe—from wafting into thin air.”24
But is it not this proximity to decay, to an idea of impermanence, which makes the film and the relationship between Li-zhen and Mo-wan affective and beautiful? The film’s use of slow-motion, as well as its melodramatic use of colour, music and lighting allows us to (lovingly) ponder and be drawn into an affective relation with both the couple and the film. For a number of critics including Arthur, this relation between the film and the viewer becomes the mirror image of the film’s romance narrative, where “our romance with the movie image parallels that of Chow and his lost love: impossibly vivid, suffused with desire, yet disturbingly ephemeral.”25 Khoo also suggests a spectatorial experience along these lines and argues this film “like others in Wong’s oeuvre, are rehearsals of and for love.”26
Throughout the film Li-zhen and Mo-wan rehearse or act out the possible scenarios of the affair, as well as confrontations with their spouses. But in a process of performance and rehearsal such as theirs, “feelings can creep up just like that,” as
Mo-wan tells Li-zhen toward the end of the film. For Martin, one of the key levels of the film is the way these rehearsals force an investment in the romance plot.27 The suggestion that In the Mood for Love is a “rehearsal of and for love” implies a dual investment which is central to this chapter. Along the lines of Martin and Khoo’s respective readings, I would argue that a spectatorial investment in the romantic plot of the film is integral to thinking through the connection between Mo-wan and Li- zhen as well as the relationship which develops between the film and the viewer. Yet
24 Paul Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, Cineaste 26, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 41. 25 Ibid. 26 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 27 Martin, “Perhaps,” n.p.
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rather than the film being a kind of rehearsal that allows us to think through an idea of ethnic and Chinese spectatorship as it does for Khoo, I would argue that the film generates an investment that brings the film and viewer together as a couple particularly in the act of writing.28
The filmic rendering of unrequited love within In the Mood for Love produces a certain brand of intimacy between the viewer and the film (in addition to, as one commentator has noted, the very “medium of cinema”).29 The complexity of Wong’s films lies in the way they not only struggle with questions of intimacy and love on a narrative level, but the way they are themselves intimate exchanges with the viewer.
For Marc Siegel, an idea of intimacy is crucial to his approach to Wong’s process of creating “intimate” performances and images. In his essay, Siegel approaches intimacy through the kinds of global spaces Wong’s films traverse. Happy Together in particular opens up ‘accepted’ heteronormative notions of the couple by questioning private space as the exclusive site of intimacy.30 Rather than locating the couple exclusively within the private realm, Siegel argues, Wong’s films blur the public and the private in a way which creates “new kinds of feeling, new kinds of intimacy”:
28 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 29 Nancy Blake echoes Arthur and Khoo’s sentiments regarding the intimate relation between the film and the viewer. Yet Blake goes so far as to argue that Li-zhen and Mo-wan’s “relationship stands as an allegory for the spectator’s relationship to the medium of cinema. At one level then, In the Mood for Love explores what it is like to have a relationship, not with another person but with an image.” Nancy Blake, “‘We Won’t Be Like Them’: Repetition Compulsion in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love,” The Communication Review 6, no. 4 (2003): 347. For me, the relationship between the two can not be so readily discounted and as such I will be arguing for an approach which emphasises a spectatorial investment in both the plot and the mise en scène. 30 As Siegel writes, in “Happy Together intimacy is not achieved within the couple and is not segregated to the private space of the apartment. Instead, the potential for intimacy exists outside in the public sexual world.” Siegel, “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” 285.
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types of feeling and intimacy which not only reconfigure love in relation to the couple but which likewise open up “possibilities for new kinds of looking.”31
In Siegel’s approach, there is an opening up of intimacy on several levels: firstly on a narrative one; secondly in terms of the kinds of spaces globalism creates in Happy Together; and lastly on a production level that considers the intimacy of images and performances (as well as the integral role of long-time collaborators such as Christopher Doyle, William Chang Suk-ping, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung and
Tony Leung). For me, Siegel’s idea of intimacy also alludes to the kind of intimate spectatorial experience that is central to Arthur, Khoo and Nancy Blake in their readings of In the Mood for Love. Yet where Siegel diverges from these other analyses is in his approach to the production of the films themselves. As I previously mentioned, Siegel finds in Wong’s films ‘possibilities for new kinds of feeling, intimacy, and looking’ (and here I would also add hearing). What we find in Siegel’s analysis, therefore, is a means of bringing together a thematic love and intimacy with the ‘intimate’ mobilisation and creation of mise en scène and performance.
In this chapter, these ideas are a way of conceptualising an intimate and affective spectatorship where the film and viewer come together to form a kind of
‘cinematic couple.’32 To begin, I will be going back to an idea of unrequited love in
31 Ibid., 288. The aim of Siegel’s rethinking is, in part, to counter the way many commentators (such as Jean-Marc Lalanne, Chuck Stephens and Ackbar Abbas) approach intimacy as incomplete and deficient in Wong’s films. 32 As Margaret Morse notes, Christian Metz also characterised the relation between “the spectator and the screen as a cinematic couple—an exhibitionist that pretends not to know it is being looked at and a voyeur who sees without being seen.” Margaret Morse, “Body and Screen,” Wide Angle 21, no. 1 (1999): 75, note 4. In Metz’s work and in theories of the apparatus more generally, the apparatus (the camera, lens, projector and screen) is the means by which the spectator co-opts a monocular and omniscient perspective, which not only constructs a spectating subject but also encourages an identification with that perspective. These identificatory processes are also considered through the structuring force of ideology. The idea of the couple in this chapter differs from that theorised by Metz because it is ultimately not concerned with the ideology that structures the affective exchange between the film and the viewer. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington:
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order to look into an important aspect of In the Mood for Love which is often overlooked in critical examinations of the film: namely, the film’s operation as a melodrama. I will be locating In the Mood for Love within this “mode” predominantly through Linda Williams’ recent work in which she conceives of melodrama as the
“dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.”33 Via Williams, Wong’s film will be addressed as one which concurrently works within and rethinks this dialectic primarily through its concern with unrequited love from a Hong Kong-Chinese perspective. Furthermore, this analysis of melodrama will consider the temporality of unrequited love and the way it is often informed by the time that characterises melodrama for Williams and other key theorists.
Melodrama in this chapter likewise advances a consideration of emotion and love in the cinema, as well as the emotional and affective responses of the spectator.
In theoretical analyses, melodrama, and cinematic melodrama more specifically, is conceived as a mode which encourages an affective investment in the plot and a mise en scène which often manifests the unexpressed emotions of characters. As such, I will be looking into Wong’s melodramatic use of mise en scène and the way it opens up the ‘new possibilities of looking and feeling’ that Siegel addresses.
In examinations of Wong’s work, and In the Mood for Love in particular, camera movement, colour, light, sound, and music are often the very things that seduce the critic/viewer. In many analyses of the film, certain objects become
Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 25-37. 33 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42.
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fetishised because they are at once beautiful and ungraspable. In the closing stages of this chapter, I will be exploring this seduction of and by objects and the way this often motivates a kind of intimacy with the film. For me, it is not coincidental that as spectators we are drawn to these things. Here I will propose that Wong’s films, and the characters which populate them, teach us to connect with the one we love through objects.
It is these things and objects which bring us into an affective relation with the film and seduce us into obsessively watching and re-watching. This kind of seduction is unique because it spills over into writing: an idea demonstrated by
Arthur in the opening line of his rapturous review where he wonders, “How do you write a love letter to a movie?”34 While Arthur argues that the film ultimately generates an unrequited love between film and viewer that is “vivid and yet ephemeral,” I would suggest that the act of writing about the film challenges this position. What is interesting about the way we invest ourselves in this film is that it changes the way we write, and the way that change places the viewer/writer in the position of lover. Critical examinations of In the Mood for Love (and many others from
Wong’s oeuvre) are often in a romantic and lyrical tone that takes us back to the
Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the 1950s and early 60s, and their celebration and lauding of mise en scène and the figure of the auteur. We find a comparable response in the criticism surrounding Wong’s cinema: a response that betrays an affective and emotional investment which treats film like a long-lost lover.
34 Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 40.
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II. “How things are and how they should be”35: Cinematic melodrama
If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and action, then the operative mode is melodrama.—Linda Williams36
Considered as an expressive code, melodrama might…be described as a particular form of dramatic mise en scène, characterised by a dynamic use of spatial and musical categories, as opposed to intellectual or literary ones. Dramatic situations are given an orchestration which will allow for complex aesthetic patterns.—Thomas Elsaesser37
In the theorisation of film melodrama, it is widely acknowledged that this genre or mode has been established through “predominantly pejorative terms.”38 For
Christine Gledhill and Williams after her, melodrama’s frequent concern with the personal, the domestic and family spheres, as well as the emotional and affective repercussions of events locates this mode in the ‘traditional’ domain of women. The result of these concerns has been a positioning of melodrama historically as a popular yet ‘low’ and mass cultural form against the critically valued (and masculine) genres of tragedy and realism.39 Both Gledhill and Williams respectively argue that genre criticism in film studies in the 1960s maintained this standpoint due to
35 Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 48. 36 Ibid., 42; hereafter cited in text as “MR.” 37 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 51, original emphasis. 38 Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 5. See also Wimal Dissanayake, Introduction to Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-2. 39 Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” 5.
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melodrama’s generic ambiguity. Aside from the woman’s film and the family melodrama, “melodrama could offer neither the thematic and evolutionary coherence exhibited by, say, the western, nor sufficient cultural prestige to appeal to the cognoscenti—condemned as it was by association with a mass and, above all,
‘female audience’.”40 (“MR,” 43)
The issue with melodrama, then, stems from its concern with emotion and affect (on both a narrative and spectatorial level) and its association with a female audience. For Wendy Gan, writing on romance and love in Wong’s oeuvre, the
“critical reluctance to address Wong’s preoccupation with ‘feminine’ romance” arises from issues not dissimilar to those addressed by Gledhill and Williams.41 Gan argues that the very ‘femininity’ that seems to be inherent to an idea of love and romance often prevents predominantly male critics from venerating Wong as ‘a poet of love.’
What we find instead, Gan asserts, is a critical embarrassment which inevitably develops in one of two ways: critics either focus on the ‘neutral’ (rather than explicitly gendered) aspects of his work, such as time42; or they ‘remove any hint of effeminacy’ via a modernist reading of Wong’s formal and narrative treatment of love.43 Yet while Gan’s project is one which consciously attempts to remedy this prejudice, she too reproduces this bias in her comments about melodrama. If, as
Gan suggests, the critical unease with Wong’s treatment of love can be overcome,
there is still the difficulty of situating him in the romance genre, a category more often associated with women, escapism and melodrama. Wong’s films
40 Yet, as Williams goes on to argue, in the 1970s (and in Elsaesser’s “Tales of Sound and Fury” especially) the matter of ‘emotional excess’ was “redeemed” in the ironic and ideological readings of films by key figures such as Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray. (“MR,” 43-44) 41 Gan, “Surviving Desire,” 84. 42 Ibid., 88. Here Gan cites Rayns who argues that Wong is “a poet of the kinds of love that tear people apart,” in his article titled “Poet of Time.” Rayns, “Poet of Time,” 12. 43 Ibid. This approach informs much of Gross’ analysis in “Nonchalant Grace.”
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are not obviously romances as we know them to be in popular culture. The address is not solely to a female audience, neither is there a single female protagonist for female viewers to identity with, nor are his films melodramas, the “weepies” associated with the woman’s picture.44
For Gan the fundamental issue with attempting to theorise Wong in terms of romance is the way it leads to the problematic of melodrama: a generic classification that effectively ‘reduces’ Wong’s work to the woman’s film and an exclusively female audience. I would argue, however, that the problem with classifying love in Wong’s films does not necessarily lie in its location within an idea of melodrama but in the reduction of melodrama to the woman’s film and to an idea of romance. In Gan’s essay, melodrama is likewise undermined because it seems to run counter to the other genres Wong consciously works within in films such as As Tears Go By
(Wangjiao Kamen, 1988) and Ashes of Time (Dong Xie Xi Du, 1994): the gangster and kung fu film respectively.45
In the process of trying to recoup the analysis of love and romance from a site that is exclusively feminine, Gan once again rethinks melodrama in
“predominantly pejorative terms” and effectively reinforces the essentialist parameters that have dominated its theorisation. It is not surprising then that in much of the criticism surrounding In the Mood for Love an idea of melodrama is often bypassed or considered as the film’s least interesting register.46 If Gan’s approach is anything to go by, film studies continues to regard melodrama as a lesser object even
44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 The exception here is Teo, who argues “Wong’s interest in the genre is not so much narrative as associative” because melodrama is associated with a number of Hong Kong films from the 1960s. Contrary to Teo, I would argue that In the Mood for Love works within melodrama just as strongly in a narrative sense. Teo, “Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love,” n.p. Also see Martin’s analysis in regard to melodrama as the film’s least interesting narrative register. Martin, “Perhaps,” n.p.
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while its endeavour is the recovery of issues that are central to it: the contemporary interest in emotion and affect, particularly on a spectatorial level, is the most obvious case in point. For me, a much more productive way to approach Wong’s concern with love, especially within In the Mood for Love, is to bring together his modernist treatment of love with an idea of melodrama found in the opening quotations by
Williams and Thomas Elsaesser: a concept of melodrama that is defined by specific narrative and formal concerns, in addition to the sounding of emotional, affective and moral registers.
In “Melodrama Revised,” the activation of these registers is crucial to
Williams’ consideration of melodrama as a mode that underlies and characterises the entirety of popular American cinema. Rather than a genre that possesses a recognisable iconography and narrative preoccupation that allows for an approach solely on its own terms, melodrama is a mode that weaves its way through all genres within American filmmaking. The dominance of the mode in early cinema and early cinema classifications, for instance, not only betrays melodrama’s operation “as a basic mode of storytelling” in American film, but also reveals melodrama to be a mode of storytelling that is intrinsic to an idea of American cultural identity. (“MR,”
51) Melodrama then is not relegated to the past, nor is it conceived as an outmoded expression of moral, emotional and affective truths. Rather, Williams suggests that melodrama is a form that has persisted in contemporary American genre films of all kinds because it animates and speaks to the American need for “moral legibility.”
(“MR,” 55) As such melodrama is “a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.” (“MR,” 42) For Williams, this dialectic in part arises from
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melodrama’s relation to realism: a relation that has been considered critically and historically as dissonant, but one that for Williams is not so contradictory because
“realist cinematic effects—whether of setting, action, acting or narrative motivation— most often operate in the service of melodramatic affects.” (“MR,” 42, original emphasis) Consequently, the kind of action and causality that characterises realism invariably “serves the melodramatic passion and action.” (“MR,” 67) What we find in films that are written through with the melodramatic is the movement between action (that often defines realism) and pathos (which is associated with melodrama) in order to work through emotional, affective and moral truths.
Critically and historically, it is this focus on pathos and emotion that has positioned melodrama as a mode of “excess” that runs counter to the tenets of realism. Even in studies that endeavour to recover melodrama from this position,
Williams maintains, inevitably reiterate the binary between realism and melodrama by defining melodrama’s “excess” against realist norms of action and causality.47
While this emotional and affective “excess” allows for a catharsis of innocence and morality in realist films (here she cites moments in Philadelphia [Jonathan Demme,
1993] and Schindler’s List [Steven Spielberg, 1993]), an idea of “excess” per se once again signals “the sense that…emotional displays of virtue necessarily cheapen a more pure and absolute (and also sternly masculine) morality.” (“MR,” 54-55)
47 A case in point here is Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1976). This study, which has been foundational in thinking through an idea of melodrama in film theory for Williams, takes as its focus the mode’s emergence within the novel and the theatre in eighteenth and nineteenth century France and England “not to study melodrama per se but to understand the melodramatic elements informing the fiction of Honoré de Balzac and Henry James.” (“MR,” 51) Williams acknowledges that Brooks has been crucial because he works through melodrama as a site that played out the struggle between a burgeoning bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, as well as a site that likewise entered into a dialogue with moral codes and truths away from the confines of organised religion. Yet the drawback of Brooks’ approach, Williams proposes, is the way he continually reinstates the binary between realism and melodrama, an idea that is reinforced by the subtitle of his book. (“MR,” 53)
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Even though this supposedly ‘feminised excess’ functions as a problematic in both film reception and criticism, for Williams it does not create an antithetical relation between realism and melodrama because even at its most basic level melodrama is concerned with “the conflicts and troubles of everyday, contemporary reality. It seizes upon the social problems of this reality—problems such as illegitimacy, slavery, racism, labor struggles, class division, disease, nuclear annihilation, even the Holocaust.” (“MR,” 53) Historically concerned with the middle classes, melodrama, whether in the novel, the theatre or the cinema, enacts social, cultural and political struggle on the level of the personal and the everyday.
(“MR,” 48) Yet while realism aims to work through the causal relations between motives and actions in the everyday, melodrama and melodramatic pathos think through the contradictions inherent in the social, political and domestic spheres. Via
Gledhill, Williams goes on to argue that melodrama is a category based around a reality of lived experience that is continually shifting in terms of history, politics and culture. (“MR,” 48)
One of the central aims of Williams’ essay is to rethink and reconcile the historically and critically created binary between realism (and action), and melodrama
(as a mode that embodies emotional and affective “excess”), and the respective masculine and feminine viewing positions each supposedly create. Beginning with an analysis of the position of melodrama in film studies, Williams examines the centrality of an idea of pathos and its connection to female spectatorial identification. Here Williams traces the interest in family melodramas of the 1950s
(and their often scathing attacks on the post-war American middle-class family) and goes back to her earlier analyses of melodrama, principally in the debate that arose in
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the mid 1980s with E. Ann Kaplan in relation to the maternal melodrama and King
Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937).48 This debate, Williams argues, was essentially concerned with “women’s attraction-repulsion to the pathos of virtuous suffering.” (“MR,” 45)
While I will not be exploring the finer points of this debate here, the issues at stake circulate around the kind of identification that is generated by a melodramatic pathos.
For Kaplan, Williams writes, at the end of the film when Stella looks through a window at her estranged daughter, female spectators are positioned in the same way as Stella: as ‘powerless witnesses (and victims) of an excluding scene’ that results from a patriarchal gaze. Williams too argues that this scene is crucial because it literally “frames the issue of female spectatorship” via its placement of Stella as a
“movie spectator outside the window.” (“MR,” 46) Yet unlike Kaplan, the importance of the scene for Williams hinges on the way it opens up a “negotiation in a female viewing position that was animated by the contradiction of identifying both as a woman and a mother.” (“MR,” 46) In other words, for Williams the scene opens up an idea of female spectatorship that might function on more than one level, whereby female spectatorship is not solely conceived as the total identification with the male, patriarchal gaze. Consequently, the relation between pathos and spectatorship is more complex than simply sympathising and therefore identifying with the female character in a film.
In her revision, Williams recognises that in her previous conception of spectatorship she restores the patriarchal constructions of woman- and motherhood
48 The film, starring Barbara Stanwyck as Stella, concentrates on the way this once ambitious woman and mother ultimately sacrifices her own aspirations in favour of progressing her daughter’s social mobility.
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and in fact sidesteps the real issue at the heart of the debate, namely the role of
“spectatorial emotion in melodrama” and the temporality which characterises this emotion. (“MR,” 46) This is so much the case that Williams goes as far as declaring that “the entire Stella Dallas debate was over what it meant for a woman viewer to cry at the end of the film.” (“MR,” 47) Williams’ admission here is an important one as the analyses of melodrama by feminist film theorists in the 1980s largely regarded pathos and a pathos driven victimhood as repressive due to its reinforcement of patriarchal power and control. The response was largely the “liberating emotion” of anger rather than pathos. (“MR,” 46) However, for Williams the close analyses that were produced at this time signalled an engagement with melodramatic affect and pathos that ran counter to the kind of anger that undermined a patriarchal positioning of women. “Both drawn to and repelled by the spectacle of virtuous and pathetic suffering,” Williams writes,
feminist critics were torn: we wanted to properly condemn the abjection of suffering womanhood, yet in the almost loving detail of our growing analyses of melodramatic subgenres…it was clear that something more than condemnation was taking place…. [In] the process of distinguishing our “properly” feminist distance from melodrama’s emotions, we failed to confront the importance of pathos itself and the fact that a surprising power lay in identifying with victimhood. (“MR,” 47)
The power that Williams finds in identifying with victimhood lies in its connection with the intricate network of emotions and affects that melodrama generates. Pathos, once degraded by critics, was now central to thinking through the operation of emotion and affect more broadly. A key factor in a spectatorial investment in melodrama, as I argued previously, arises from the pathos associated with victimhood and innocence. For Williams this also hinges on the way
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melodrama is a site that operates on a “‘dual recognition’ of how things are and how they should be.” (“MR,” 48) In other words, melodrama’s pathos is generated by a spectatorial recognition of the ‘true’ and moral way events should transpire for the protagonist, who functions as an innocent victim of circumstance. Yet even while pathos is melodrama’s guiding emotion and central to a spectatorial connection with the protagonist as victim, it is “never a matter of simply mimicking the emotion of the protagonist, but, rather, a complex negotiation between emotions and between emotion and thought.” (“MR,” 49) As such, melodrama constantly traverses a web of emotions as well as the analysis of those very emotions by the viewer. The spectator then, Williams argues, is never at risk of ‘over-identifying’ in a way that would prevent an analysis of the events on screen because pathos “is always in tension with other emotions.” (“MR,” 49)
In “Melodrama Revised,” emotion and affect, and pathos in particular, are the very things which drive and create a spectatorial investment in melodrama for
Williams. But more than this, spectatorial emotion and affect also signal the specific ways in which the viewer/critic engages with cinematic melodrama both in the process of viewing as well as writing. In the “loving detail” found in the critical writing of much feminist criticism on melodrama, there is evidence of an emotional spectatorial engagement that is bound up in the emotional and affective registers of melodramatic narrative and narration.49 For this reason, Williams is crucial to this chapter and my analysis of In the Mood for Love because her arguments not only begin to suggest the ways in which the viewer/film relation is formed through pathos but
49 I will be addressing the role of critical writing in relation to the connection between the viewer/critic and film in more detail in the final section of this chapter.
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they also indicate that this connection is inextricably related to the temporality which fundamentally structures melodrama.
In her analysis of D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) in the final part of the essay, Williams suggests that the pathos that melodrama generates (as well as other emotions such as frustration, sadness and even happiness) is never simply created through a narrative context of the protagonist’s victimhood and the possible recovery of their innocence. Pathos and spectatorial emotion and affect, Williams argues, are likewise produced through the complex temporal relations that structure the mode. Through Gledhill, Williams contends that the temporality of melodrama is one that is fundamentally tied to the past because it is concerned with the “search for something lost, inadmissible, or repressed.” (“MR,” 68) In other words, the need to recover the innocence of the victim and return to a time of innocence continually positions melodrama as a mode that is looking back to the past. This implicates spectatorial emotion and affect because “we cry when something is lost and it cannot be regained. Time is the ultimate object of loss; we cry at the irreversibility of time.” (“MR,” 69) It is for this reason that pathos and crying are crucial to thinking through the temporality of melodrama as spectators essentially long “for a fullness of being of an earlier, still-sacred universe.” (“MR,” 70)
For Williams, this kind of spectatorial response to a time that is lost, missed or past is created through the dialectic between pathos and action which is often configured as “a give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time’.” (“MR,” 69)
This dialectic, which is often played out in romantic relationships in melodrama, moves between the impossibility of the couple coming together and the coming together of the couple “in the nick of time.” In the movement between a time that is
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“too late” and a time that saves or redeems the innocence of the victim or the couple at the last minute, we encounter a temporal rhythm where time is at once “a contradictory hurry-up and slowdown.” (“MR,” 73) In numerous film melodramas this temporal rhythm creates a ‘teasing’ effect that begs the question, “[W]ill we ever get back to the time before it was too late?” (“MR,” 74) In her essay, Williams argues that this teasing temporal rhythm where time is both suspended and accelerated is the key to melodramatic effect and the temporality which characterises spectatorial affect. “At its deepest level melodrama is an expression of feeling toward a time that passes too fast,” Williams writes. “This may be why the spectacular essence of melodrama seems to rest in those moments of temporal prolongation when ‘in the nick of time’ defies ‘too late’.” (“MR,” 74)
In All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) for instance, Ron Kirby (Rock
Hudson) and Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) are positioned as victims due to the social unacceptability of their romantic relationship: Ron is Cary’s younger gardener and a figure whose moral values and truths are situated closer to Henry David Thoreau than Cary’s middle-class social set. The film moves through scenarios and moments that break and restore their relationship, finally ending with their coming together when Ron is injured in an accident and Cary rushes to his side to nurse him back to health. Much like Wong, Douglas Sirk’s interest here seems to lie not only in the things that bring people together but also in the very things that (potentially could) keep them apart. Rainer Werner Fassbinder says as much when he writes, “[h]uman beings can’t be alone, but they can’t be together either.”50 This dialectic between
50 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Imitation of Life: On the Films of Douglas Sirk,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, eds. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 79.
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pathos and action creates a very specific temporal rhythm where the film moves through several climaxes that could potentially function as the film’s conclusion: a case in point is the instance where Cary decides to end her relationship with Ron and her children give her a television as a means of watching life rather than participating in it.
What we find in this idea of time is a movement between a sense of time being lost and a time that recovers the victim’s innocence and their moral codes. The end of All That Heaven Allows ultimately restores the couple with Ron and Cary coming together “in the nick of time.” Yet the moments where time was “too late”
(mostly because of the social norms that Cary falsely upheld) linger and configure time as “the ultimate object of loss.” (“MR,” 69) It is this connection to the past and time as essentially lost or missed which is important, I would argue, in the kinds of romantic or love relationships that melodrama so often is concerned with. In contemporary revisions of melodrama such as Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), which consciously reworks All That Heaven Allows, and Wong’s In the Mood for Love we find that the recovery of time, innocence, and the union of the heterosexual romantic couple is thwarted. Far from Heaven and In the Mood for Love in particular consciously work through time as lost in a way which denies the coming together of the couple and the restoration of romantic union.51
Even though more recent melodramas such as In the Mood for Love think through romantic union via time as “too late,” and as I will propose in the following
51 In Haynes’ film, the couple that is established “in the nick of time” is the gay couple of Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) and his lover, rather than the heterosexual couple of Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), Frank’s estranged wife, and her friend and gardener Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). In this film, Haynes consciously reworks melodrama through an idea of queer cinema in order to resituate the victim as Frank rather than Cathy. See Richard Falcon, “Magnificent Obsession,” Sight and Sound 13, no. 3 (March 2003): 15; Laura Mulvey, Review of Far from Heaven, Sight and Sound 13, no. 3 (March 2003): 40.
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section reconfigure action as inaction, they nevertheless generate the kinds of emotions and affects that are central to the classical melodramas Williams examines.
Much like the melodramas of Sirk, films such as In the Mood for Love also consciously mobilise filmic narration and mise en scène to articulate repressed emotions. As the opening quotation from Elsaesser demonstrates, melodrama is also a formal and aesthetic system that creates the temporality of melodrama as well as the emotions and affects that are crucial to this mode. For Elsaesser, mise en scène furthermore compensates for the characters’ inability to express thoughts and emotions. The result of this is the transfer of repressed emotions onto and into the form where the film becomes formally encoded with pathos. In “Tales of Sound and Fury:
Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Elsaesser argues that this is especially true in the case of the classical Hollywood melodramas of Vincente Minnelli and Sirk from the 1950s.52 Here Elsaesser concentrates on the family or domestic melodrama in order to address the way the use of mise en scène articulates a closed and strictly defined social world where “the characters are acted upon” and suffer as a consequence.53
Melodrama’s etymological roots in the dramatic use of music also extend to other aspects of mise en scène and implicate narrative action and movement. This
“type of cinema,” Elsaesser notes, “depends on the ways ‘melos’ is given to ‘drama’ by means of lighting, montage, visual rhythm, decor, style of acting, music—that is, on the ways the mise en scène translates character into action…and action into gesture and dynamic space.”54 In other words, the kind of formal articulation that we find in
52 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 52. 53 Ibid., 55. 54 Ibid., original emphasis.
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melodrama not only creates and underscores the melodramatic affect associated with victimhood and innocence but it also generates the action, rhythm and milieu that ostensibly create an environment of and for victimhood. For Williams, too, the formal strategies of melodrama are also integral to her conceptualisation, not only in terms of the way repressed emotion finds its way into the form but also, as I have argued above, in the way that filmic narration constructs melodramatic time as past.
(“MR,” 68)
Melodrama’s connection to the inadmissible, the repressed and the past coincides with the kind of pastness and loss that structures an idea of unrequited love within In the Mood for Love. In this conception of love, time is no longer opened up to the possibility of union “in the nick of time.” Unlike the operation of much classical American melodrama, and the melodramatic mode in American cinema, In the Mood for Love does not perform the possibility of time and the possibility of love in a sustained way. While the temporality of unrequited love in this film creates a similar longing for “an earlier, still-sacred universe” that recognises the viability and possibility of romantic union (of a couple that is positioned as innocent victims of circumstance), it does so through the lens of memory and nostalgia: a lens which codes romantic union and togetherness as both a missed encounter and an impossible dream that can never come to fruition through action in the film’s final moments. Prior to taking this up however, this idea of love and melodrama needs to be contextualised in terms of Hong Kong-Chinese culture and cinema. Thus far I have privileged Williams’ conceptualisation because her approach is central to locating melodrama as a mode rather than a genre in American cinema.
While Williams’ analysis is from a resolutely Western perspective, the location of
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melodrama as a mode is also fundamental to thinking through the operation of melodrama in Hong Kong cinema.
III. Hong Kong melodrama as disappearance
It is not the appearance of “Hong Kong themes”…that is significant in the new Hong Kong cinema, but, rather, what I call a problematic of disappearance: that is to say, a sense of the elusiveness, the slipperiness, the ambivalences of Hong Kong’s cultural space that some Hong Kong filmmakers have caught in their use of the film medium, in their explorations of history and memory, in their excavation of the evocative detail—regardless of subject matter.—Ackbar Abbas55
In his introduction to Melodrama and Asian Cinema, Wimal Dissanayake argues that while no Asian language has a synonym for melodrama it is “crucial to bear in mind that melodrama also constitutes an important area of creative expression in many
Asian countries.”56 Yingjin Zhang reiterates this idea in terms of the history of
Chinese and Hong Kong cinema, arguing that even while melodrama is “hardly translatable in Chinese…melodrama is used to refer to a type of Chinese film characterized by moral polarization, prolonged human suffering, excessive emotionalism, exaggerated expression, extravagant representation and extreme suspense.”57 While melodrama does not constitute a separate genre in itself, Zhang contends that the melodramatic shows up across a number of films centred on
55 Abbas, Hong Kong, 24, original emphasis; hereafter cited in text as “HK.” 56 Dissanayake, Introduction to Melodrama and Asian Cinema, 2. 57 Yingjin Zhang, “Melodrama,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 240.
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family, love and marriage, as well as appearing in the epic and political films reflecting on the Cultural Revolution (in mainland China).58
Melodrama in Hong Kong culture, then, functions as a kind of impulse which weaves its way through and across various cultural products and genres that are exploring the kinds of narratives, emotions and affects that are fundamental to a
Western notion of melodrama. For this reason, I would argue that in many Asian cinemas, including that of Hong Kong, melodrama functions more as a mode akin to Williams’ conception rather than a genre. Even so, as Dissanayake goes on to argue, melodrama in the cinema and culture of Hong Kong, “connotes different sets of associations from those obtaining in the West” because on the one hand it is often tied to “myth, ritual, religious practices, and ceremonies,” and on the other, and this is especially true in the case of contemporary Hong Kong melodrama, it works through a localised modernisation.59 As such, Hong Kong melodramas
“represent a confluence of tradition and modernity, Eastern and Western sensibilities, voices of past and present.”60
For Dissanayake then, much like Western theorists, it is crucial to situate melodrama culturally and historically.61 Yet rather than focusing on the melodramatic impulse in the entirety of Hong Kong cinema, I will be approaching
Wong’s film through Ackbar Abbas’ concept of “cultural disappearance”: an idea
58 Ibid., 240-241. 59 Dissanayake, Introduction to Melodrama and Asian Cinema, 4, 3. 60 Ibid., 5. 61 This kind of contextualisation is central to most studies of melodrama. In his study of Sirk, Elsaesser maintains that melodrama needs to be positioned not only historically but also culturally in order to track the way melodrama differs “from country to country” and the way this impacts on its function as either ‘a subversive or escapist form.’ And in “The Melodramatic Field” Gledhill historicises melodrama (predominantly through Brooks) in order to position the mode as a continually shifting form. Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 44; Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field,” 14-28.
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which is initiated by the working through of the tensions between “Eastern and
Western sensibilities” in a Hong Kong identity and cinema in the wake of its handover back to China. (“HK,” 6-7) For Abbas, up until the late 1970s Hong Kong had been positioned, and had likewise positioned itself, as “a cultural desert” where there was no sense of a Hong Kong culture away from China, Britain or an idea of colonisation. The result of this, Abbas contends, was an “import mentality” that regarded an idea of culture as always originating outside of Hong Kong. “Not that there was nothing going on in cinema, architecture, and writing,” Abbas writes, “it was just not recognized to be culture as such.” (“HK,” 6) It was this refusal to see and acknowledge the culture that was generated from a colonial history that traversed the East and the West that created what Abbas terms “reverse hallucination.” If hallucination is predicated on seeing what is not there, “reverse hallucination means not seeing what is there.” (“HK,” 6, original emphasis)
However the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 that would see the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, (when Hong Kong would become one of China’s Special Administrative Regions), created an anxiety regarding the possible disappearance of Hong Kong life.62 This not only lead to an interest in
Hong Kong culture but also an interrogation of what might constitute a uniquely
Hong Kong cultural identity.63 (“HK,” 6-7) It is this very change in the approach to culture that takes Hong Kong “from reverse hallucination, which sees only desert, to a culture of disappearance, whose appearance is posited on the imminence of its
62 Another significant date is 2046: the end of the fifty year period that will bring an end to Hong Kong’s capitalist system. This date is the title of Wong’s 2004 release as well as the number on Mo- wan’s hotel room door in In the Mood for Love. 63 Abbas suggests that the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 was also a factor in triggering a cultural interrogation in Hong Kong. (“HK,” 7)
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disappearance.” (“HK,” 7) This idea of culture is one that not so much suggests a disappearing of culture but rather an approach to an “untheorized” culture. Abbas goes on to explain this idea as not “nonappearance, absence, or lack of presence. It is not even nonrecognition—it is more a question of misrecognition, of recognizing a thing as something else.” (“HK,” 7) In other words, a “culture of disappearance” is founded not on an absence of culture but on the elusiveness of a culture, and more specifically here the possible loss of Hong Kong as a cultural subject. For Abbas, this continues to implicate a culture of “reverse hallucination” because the loss ingrained in an idea of culture is also predicated on the “misrecognition” of “what is not there.” (“HK,” 7)
If, then, the “subject [is] always on the point of disappearing,” one means of resolving or at least thinking through that disappearance is via representation and especially “self-representation.” (“HK,” 26) In his study, Abbas’ analysis of identity through the cinema, “through new kinds of cinematic images or a rewriting of film genres,” as Khoo has put it, allows him to consider the appearance of cultural disappearance.64 In his study, Abbas privileges the Second Wave art filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s such as Wong and Stanley Kwan due to their concern with the often contradictory nexus between the local and the global, Hong Kong cultural identity and Western commodity culture, and history and memory. (“HK,” 23-25)
Abbas’ focus, however, is predominantly situated on Wong’s cinema because it exemplifies an idea of cultural disappearance on and in film. As Abbas writes in the opening quotation, this idea of disappearance in Wong’s cinema is created through a filmic concern with ambivalence and the instability of categories such as
64 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p.
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history and memory. In Wong’s cinematic practice, disappearance formally structures his films regardless of thematic or generic preoccupations. (“HK,” 24) For
Abbas this is achieved through a filmic manipulation of time and space where the image and sound work through the pace and rhythm of Hong Kong’s cultural space: prime examples of this are Wong’s use of “stop-motion” photography and wide angle or fish-eye lenses in Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin, 1994) and Fallen Angels
(Duoluo Tianshi, 1995) to create temporal and spatial disjunctions. Yet while he argues that thematic content is essentially not the key to an approach to this brand of filmmaking, Wong’s work is in fact concerned with the kind of ambivalence at the heart of a Hong Kong cultural identity, particularly in his early work. For Abbas,
Wong’s cinema is privileged because he works through significant aspects of disappearance: namely “using disappearance to deal with disappearance.” (“HK,” 8)
Wong’s cinema works through disappearance by taking the film and the characters to other cultural spaces. This is not however configured as absence but rather a turning away from Hong Kong to other cultural spaces of desire; in this way Hong
Kong’s cultural disappearance appears in and on the landscape of other cultural and geographical spaces. The most literal example of this turning away occurs in Happy
Together where the desire to find one’s self in the context of union is played out in
Argentina.65
Following through with this idea, Abbas proposes that this kind of cinema approaches disappearance in a way that problematises the representation of Hong
Kong cultural identity through the long-standing binary between East and West. We find in the cinema of Wong, for example, a representation of Hong Kong that
65 While Happy Together is the most literal example, in some way all of Wong’s films move from Hong Kong to other cultural spaces.
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embraces ambivalence and elusiveness not by necessarily avoiding this binary all together but instead manipulating the kinds of clichés born out of the opposition.
This creates, Abbas writes, not an impression of déjà vu but rather “the even more uncanny feeling of what we might call the déjà disparu: the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.” (“HK,” 25, original emphasis) For Abbas, a “déjà disparu” as both a spatial and temporal category is a means of keeping up with a cultural subject that is invariably on the point of disappearing: an idea that shows up for Abbas in the changing rhythms, spaces and architecture of Hong Kong.
It is through the concept of a “déjà disparu” that Abbas analyses Wong’s work (specifically Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, and Chungking Express) where he looks into the reconfiguration of history in the technologically advanced Hong Kong of the 1990s, and the kind of affective time and space this in fact creates. (“HK,” 48-
62) For my purposes here, it is Abbas’ analysis of Days of Being Wild that proves the most productive in terms of In the Mood for Love because a “déjà disparu” plays out the kind of time and history with which the film engages. In Days of Being Wild,
Abbas suggests, an idea of disappearance is not only generated by the film’s setting in the 1960s, a time that has literally disappeared, but is likewise created through the use of music. The soundtrack, which is composed of a compilation of Latin
American rumba and cha-cha songs by Xavier Cugat, as well as a recognised Chinese song, “in fact predate the sixties, and even when they were played then, they were already out of date. If the visual details locate a time, the soundtrack dissolves it back into prior moments.” (“HK,” 53, original emphasis)
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Dissolving back into a time and history that has passed for Abbas mimics the experience of disappearance where time “is also there and not there at the same time.” (“HK,” 53) David Martinez, writing on the use of music in Wong’s oeuvre, echoes this sentiment when he argues that the music from the 1940s and 50s
“conjures up an atmosphere with no direct link to the real context.”66 Yet as
Martinez goes on to add, not only does Wong’s use of music create a temporal disjunction it also generates affects and emotions in a way that signals a melodramatic use of music because it aims “to bring out an unstated emotion.”67
The “unstated emotions” that music reveals are for Martinez not exclusively related to the kinds of romantic relationships that populate Wong’s films. What we find instead is a use of music that evokes “a purely referential, even interior world” that owes more to the cinema than real life.68 Nowhere is this more apparent than In the Mood for Love: a film that is continually regarded as a subjective, nostalgic memory piece concerned with an idea of union as well as the passing of a golden period in
Hong Kong’s history.69 For me, the use of music, as well as other aspects of mise en scène, creates a self-conscious interior world in the same way that it does for
Martinez: it is clearly evident that Wong consciously rethinks genre and form in a similar manner to modernist filmmakers in his work.70 Even so, this brand of
66 David Martinez, “Chasing the Metaphysical Express: Music in the Films of Wong Kar-wai,” trans. Andrew Rothwell, in Wong Kar Wai, Jean-Marc Lalanne et al (Paris: Éditions Dis voir, 1997), 30. 67 Ibid. This could also be said of the soundtracks from other Wong films such as Happy Together and Chungking Express. 68 Ibid. 69 As Wong has stated “1966 marks a turning point in Hong Kong’s history. The Cultural Revolution in the mainland had lots of knock-on effects, and forced Hong Kong people to think hard about their future. Many of them had come from China in the late 40s, they’d had nearly 20 years of relative tranquillity, they’d built themselves new lives—and suddenly they began to feel they’d have to move on again. So 1966 is the end of something and the beginning of something else.” Wong cited in Rayns, “In the mood for Edinburgh,” 16. 70 This is also reinforced by Wong’s location within the Hong Kong Second Wave: by the 1970s Hong Kong cinema was being conceived through an idea of the “New Wave” where filmmakers were critically approached as auteurs that rethought the parameters of Hong Kong cinema via
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interiority is also one which is continually filtered through Abbas’ idea of disappearance. While Martinez’s interiority suggests a construction and working through of the individual subject, Abbas’ disappearance allows for an approach that takes into account Wong’s preoccupation with cultural identity more broadly.
In an idea of disappearance we find a concept of time that invokes the temporality of unrequited love central to Wong’s cinema. In Abbas’ conception, disappearance is predicated on the exploration of history and memory, and following this, an idea of “déjà disparu” is centred on a kind of cliché that reconstructs the new as something that has passed or “a cluster of memories of what has never been.” (“HK,” 25) This concept, which calls up the sense of pastness and loss that is central to an unrequited love as Gross conceives it, suggests an experience and construction of time where all that is new and possible fades into a past that has either disappeared or has never existed. (“NG,” 8) Jo Law explains this operation in
Wong’s work in terms of a ‘free-floating’ representational system where time, space and experience become “mis-connected from their original referent so that, for instance, ‘here’ is evoked as ‘elsewhere’ and ‘now’ is evoked as ‘then’.”71 Within In the
Mood for Love this is played out through the film’s melodramatic formal and narrative strategies that situate the temporality of unrequited love in the realm of a lost or missed time. The kind of presentness that the film creates continually slides into a past as nostalgic memory which, on the one hand, thwarts the union of Li-zhen and
Mo-wan, and on the other, reignites a spectatorial desire for their impossible union. concerns with subjects such as the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War and workers’ strikes. Wong, who is situated in the second wave of the 1980s and 90s along side Stanley Kwan and Clara Law, is approached as a self-conscious filmmaker concerned with the intersection between the local and the global, the East and the West, both culturally and filmically. For a detail analysis see Law Kar, “An Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C. M. Yau (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 31-52. 71 Jo Law, “Wong Kar-wai’s Cinema: Analogues of Experience,” Metro 126 (Summer 2001): 96.
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What we find then in Abbas’ concept of disappearance is an echo of the kind of temporality that structures love in Wong’s films. For me, the two ideas do not simply resonate with one another but come together in a manner which seems to suggest a playing out of the temporality of unrequited love on a broader cultural plane: a cultural plane that for me invariably implicates the personal and the everyday. Within In the Mood for Love there is a resolute concern with the everyday of intimate relationships as well as the temporality of unrequited love, memory and cultural history. It appears that Wong is working through a contemporary cultural disappearance through the lens of history and memory: a working through of contemporary life and concerns which likewise takes us back to In the Mood for Love’s engagement with melodrama (from a Hong Kong perspective).
For Tony Rayns, In the Mood for Love defines “an entire world on the brink of extinction.” Beginning in 1962 and ending in 1966, “the year that anti-colonial rioting broke out in Hong Kong,” the film traverses the loss of this world with other more personal losses.72 The film’s thematic concern with questions of “fidelity and sincerity in relationships,” Rayns goes on to argue, finally resolves “itself into a requiem for a lost time and its values.”73 This reading of the film signals the kind of loss and repression at the heart of melodrama in addition to the emotional and moral registers that are fundamental to the mode. In the film, the theme of infidelity positions both Li-zhen and Mo-wan as victims of their spouses’ adultery. Here both characters ostensibly function as sincere innocents quite clearly in love with their respective spouses: early on in the film an excited Li-zhen passes up the large dinner hosted by Mrs Suen to pick up her husband from a business trip; and Mo-wan and
72 Rayns, “In the mood for Edinburgh,” 14. 73 Ibid.
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his wife flirt with one another on the telephone as they discuss their holiday plans. In these early scenes, both couples are represented as affectionate and loving. This obviously changes when Li-zhen and Mo-wan become aware of their spouses’ infidelity: it is also at this point that their spouses are both away on “business.”
Yet as the pair become friends, (and finally unrequited lovers), through their acting out of the affair, it is their friendship that catches the attention of the neighbours and ultimately problematises the strict social mores and expectations that the neighbours (as a small Shanghainese community) embody. The neighbours, who according to Wong function as “spies,” know only a partial truth about the connection between Li-zhen and Mo-wan: publicly the assumption seems to be that they are thrown together as friendly neighbours because of the absence of their spouses.74 Yet the neighbours, who are constantly observing the pair as well as their absences from the neighbourhood community, come to the conclusion that Li-zhen and Mo-wan are in fact the adulterous pair. In a scene toward the end of the film
Mrs Suen speaks to Li-zhen about her social life and about her ‘rights as a young person to enjoy herself.’ But as she tells Li-zhen, her marriage should be her priority and a “couple should spend time together.” The scene ends with Li-zhen walking away from Mrs Suen and down the hallway towards her room. As she reaches the door she stops and looks back to the camera barely containing her distress. While the two are seemingly exposed by Mrs Suen here, this scene reinforces Li-zhen and
Mo-wan’s victimhood and innocence, and this is amplified by the viewer’s
74 Wong Kar-wai, “Wong Kar-Wai,” interview by Scott Tobias, The Onion A. V. Club 37, no. 7 (28 February, 2001), http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3707/avfeature_3707.html.
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knowledge of, and pathos for, the true situation and the moral nature of the unconsummated love between the characters.75
The emotional, affective and moral tones of the film arise then from the infidelity between the spouses as well as the relationship between Li-zhen and Mo- wan. But it is in the growing connection between Li-zhen and Mo-wan and an idea of unrequited love that the film invests its melodramatic energy. In this conception of love (premised on loss, longing and unfulfilled promise) we find an inability to act on emotions that rethinks the dialectic between pathos and action. While this dialectic is fundamental to Williams’ analysis of melodramatic time, I would argue that the movement between “too late” and “in the nick of time” is also integral to thinking through romantic relationships in melodrama. This dialectic, I previously argued, creates a temporality where the possibility of union could be lost or recovered at any possible moment.
While the couple is invariably brought together “in the nick of time” in much
American cinema, Wong rethinks this dialectic through an idea of unrequited love. I would propose that we find in Wong not the dialectic between pathos and action but rather pathos and inaction: an idea that is introduced in the film’s opening inter-title and reinforced by the temporality of unrequited love. This inaction invokes
Elsaesser’s exploration of the family melodrama which is concerned with the recording of “the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could shape the
75 Whether the characters have consummated their relationship is a question which hangs over the film, even though Wong did in fact shoot a love scene between Li-zhen and Mo-wan (which has been included as an extra on the film’s DVD release). In a scene toward the end, Li-zhen and Mo- wan are seen in a taxi holding hands where Li-zhen tells Mo-wan she does not want to go home. The implication is that their relationship becomes sexually intimate, although the film itself neither denies nor confirms this.
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events and influence the emotional environment, let alone change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed, and the characters are acted upon.”76
The world that we find in In the Mood for Love is, in many ways, as closed as the one that Elsaesser describes: here there is a similar sense of emotional and physical inaction created through a fixed and stifling social world (that is also reinforced by the often claustrophobic sense of space the film creates). Even Mr Ho
(Lai Chin), Li-zhen’s philandering boss seems to pass judgement on the calls that she receives from Mo-wan at work: he sits shaking his head in disgust knowing full-well that the man on the telephone is not her husband. Trapped in this social world, which is always keeping track of their movements, Li-zhen and Mo-wan seem to be acted upon in the same way that characters are acted upon in Elsaesser’s conception of family melodrama. Here however, the result is inaction and a stalling that hinders the expression of feelings. It is this very thing which invariably configures their union as impossible: an inaction that in part also stems from not wanting to be like their adulterous partners.77
Yet while they reiterate that they “won’t be like them” in the end they are: toward the end of the film Mo-wan obliquely confesses his feelings to Li-zhen and tells her that he realises that they are exactly like their adulterous partners. The only way to forget her then is to leave, to go to Singapore on the pretence of helping out a friend who is running a newspaper. And to make this transition easier they
76 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 55. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith echoes this when he writes that the protagonist in melodrama is “the passive or impotent hero or heroine.” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 72. 77 The phrase “we won’t be like them” which recurs throughout the film continually reminds them, as well as the viewer that, as Martin has put it, they are different from “‘ordinary’ folk.” This uniqueness, Martin adds, “removes them not only from the sphere of sin and social transgression, but also the possibility of love itself.” Martin, “Perhaps,” n.p.
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rehearse their own break-up. But he eventually asks her along and Li-zhen does in fact follow. Even so, when Li-zhen goes to Singapore it is not in fact to express her own feelings that would result in their being together “in the nick of time.”
What we find in the above moment and throughout In the Mood for Love is pathos driven and reinforced by inaction. In his rethinking of the dialectic between pathos and action Wong also intensifies a “‘dual recognition’ of how things are and how they should be.” (“MR,” 48) In this melodrama, this dual recognition is never resolved: the true and moral way things should transpire for the protagonists/victims is complicated by the relationships within the film as well as the emotional and moral ambiguity that structures those relations. I would argue that it is an idea of unrequited love which short-circuits the possibility of this dual recognition being overcome by action and finally resting within “how things should be.” To a large extent, the film is guided by “how things are” in relation to both their marriages and their relationship: an idea that produces a loss and longing for the way things could have been with one’s love.78
The impossibility of union is additionally underscored by the film’s construction via an idea of memory. For Abbas, the ambivalence of disappearance is premised on a reworking of memory and history whereby memory becomes “what has never been.” (“HK,” 25) Written through with this conception on a more personal plane, In the Mood for Love works through a relationship and an idea of love that symbolises loss and a quite literal disappearance. Therefore the film’s “search for something lost, inadmissible, or repressed ties it to the past.” (“MR,” 68) In this
78 In her analysis of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948), Tania Modleski writes that “one of the basic pleasures of melodrama…is also fundamentally about events that do not happen.” Tania Modleski, “Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 335.
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respect I would suggest that the film seems to mourn the loss of this impossible love through the loss of the Hong Kong of the 1960s. It is well documented that this period of time is significant for Wong because he moved to the city as a young child with his family from Shanghai.79 As such, we find a dream-like memory and nostalgia that subjectively and (lovingly) construct a time and place gone by: as Wong has noted, the film “recreates a time that has vanished from details and remains only in memory.”80 Even so, Wong is “meticulous in his detailed rendering of Hong Kong of the 1960s”: the production and costume design by Chang which uses vintage fabrics for Li-zhen’s cheongsam, for instance, creates a sense of precise recreation.81
Yet as Wong himself suggests, “memory has its own ways of modifying the past…. I did not intend to accurately recreate the 1960s…, I just wanted to realise some of my own memories of this past.”82 These subjective memories of the past create a Hong Kong that is, like love, always on the point of disappearing. In his analysis of the city, Abbas argues that the city of Hong Kong has historically been positioned as a place of “transients”: a temporary space for expatriates and refugees.
As a result, the “city is not so much a place as a space of transit”: a city that traverses different spaces and different temporalities. (“HK,” 4) For Abbas the city also features as the most significant of Wong’s “melancholic objects” because it symbolises a psychic space of desire that is essentially ‘impotent.’83 In other words, the city is a space that works through a desire (for identity, for union, for freedom)
79 See Rayns “In the mood for Edinburgh,” 16; Wong, “Wong Kar-Wai,” n.p.; Jo Law, “Years in Bloom…,” Metro 133 (Winter 2002): 201. 80 Wong Kar-wai cited in Kylie Boltin, “In the Mood for Love: A meeting with Wong Kar-wai at the 54th Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2000,” Metro 129-130 (Spring 2001): 155. 81 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 82 Wong Kar-wai cited in Law, “Years in Bloom…,” 200. 83 Ackbar Abbas, “The Erotics of Disappointment,” in Wong Kar Wai, Jean-Marc Lalanne et al (Paris: Éditions Dis voir, 1997), 48.
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that never comes to fruition. The result of this is a city that is “not only a physical space, but also a psychic one”: a space that is filtered through subjective desires, memories and histories. For this reason, Abbas continues, “the city is never shown whole, but only in fragments, in metonymies and displacements.”84
It is this fragmented Hong Kong that we likewise encounter within In the
Mood for Love: in the film the Hong Kong of the 1960s is constructed through fragments of streets, noodle stands, and stairwells, as well as interiors of apartments and offices. This film, much like Wong’s others, does not give us a sense of the city as a unified whole. Rather the city is an affective space pieced together through fragments of memory that give us a vivid sense of the neighbourhood spaces that are vital to the film as a melodrama.85 Mrs Suen’s apartment, for example, is initially introduced via a panning shot of a hallway that takes in the texture of the wallpaper and the sepia photographs lining the wall. Following this, we see Li-zhen framed in
Mrs Suen’s window in what seems to be the sitting room: this shot continues from outside the window and as such we are only privy to a partial view. These fragments likewise create a sense of the kind of claustrophobic social milieu in which the characters exist: hallways and doorways often frame people and gatherings in a way that creates a mise en abîme that suggests a social confinement reminiscent of Sirk.
This idea is also reinforced by a crowding within the film frame that literally brings the central protagonists in contact with the neighbourhood “spies.”
84 Ibid. 85 Both Li-zhen and Mo-wan are continually moving through hallways or up and down staircases: public spaces of literal transit where they not only run into one another but where they also become acquainted with each other.
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Constructing Hong Kong via this kind of fragmentation produces a city that is ungraspable, and to quote Abbas again, “a space of impotence.”86 The city, even one produced through memory, nullifies the possibility of love and union because the city itself no longer exists.87 Once again, Wong deals with this impossibility and disappearance by taking his characters to other cultural spaces. Within In the Mood for
Love, Mo-wan travels to Singapore and then to Cambodia in 1966 where the film ends: on assignment to cover the visit from Charles de Gaulle, Mo-wan visits the ruins of Angkor Wat. “Ruins are remainders and reminders of things from the past,”
Khoo writes.88 Much like Hong Kong, Angkor Wat is also constructed through filmic fragments that reinforce its status as remains: we are given glimpses of the ruins or long tracking shots that emphasise its fragmented vastness rather than a sense of totality. It is in this kind of fragmented space that Mo-wan also hands over a remainder and reminder: in a hole in a wall amongst the ruins Mo-wan whispers the “secret” of his love for Li-zhen. His only witnesses are a young monk and the camera, and more importantly the ruins themselves: a place that as Wong has stated is a “museum of jealousies, passions, loves.”89 It is therefore the most fitting of places for Mo-wan to entrust his secret and leave behind his unfulfilled love for Li- zhen.
As a repository of memory, Angkor Wat functions as a space that literalises the kind of memory and nostalgia that constructs the film. Reading In the Mood for
Love through Arthur, Khoo suggests that the ruins of Angkor Wat mirror the kind of
86 Ibid. 87 This is even true in a production sense: Wong has noted in a recent documentary that the film’s exteriors (and some interiors such as the newspaper and shipping offices) needed to be shot in Bangkok because Hong Kong no longer “looks like [the] old Hong Kong.” Wong Kar-wai cited in Wong Kar-wai on In the Mood for Love (Hubert Niogret, 2001). 88 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 89 Wong cited in Wong Kar-wai on In the Mood for Love.
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ruin and decay generated from the “overripeness” of the film’s images.90 For Arthur, the “aura of penumbral impermanence [that] hovers over the film as both object and effect of memory” is not only generated by the film’s thematic preoccupations but also, and more importantly, through the film’s often uncanny mobilisation of mise en scène.91 In this film, as I argued previously, the unrequited love between Li-zhen and Mo-wan creates a complex spectatorial experience where their union is desired while also acknowledged as impossible. While for Arthur, the film’s form creates a comparable sense of unrequited love through the impermanence of certain images, in the following section I will propose that the filmic rendering of specific objects, things and aspects of mise en scène materialises and ‘solidifies’ them in a way that allows the film to become a viably material site of affective and emotional connection for the viewer. For me, certain aspects of mise en scène, as well as the way they come together in the image and the film, are the very things in which I begin to invest. With each viewing, I too become a Wong character affectively and lovingly investing in the things that belong to and make up the film that I love.
IV. The things I love
When we speak of things in the cinema, do we mean solid things or something more like the force of things?—Lesley Stern92
90 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 91 Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 41. 92 Lesley Stern, “‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things’,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 321, emphasis added.
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In the previous section, I positioned In the Mood for Love as a melodrama that works through a cultural disappearance on the level of the everyday and the personal.
Central to my analysis was an idea of unrequited love within the confines of a melodramatic mode and the way this idea of love enabled an analysis of the temporality which characterises melodrama. Here I argued that melodrama needs to be approached as a mode which signals emotional, affective and moral codes on both thematic and formal levels. In the following section I will develop melodrama as a formal category in order to explore the affective and emotional relationships within the film as well as those fostered by the film.
In the Mood for Love, I argued above, invests its melodramatic energy in Li- zhen and Mo-wan and the unrequited love that develops between them. In true melodramatic form, the film transfers the repressed emotions that arise from the relationship between the characters onto and into the film. For many commentators writing on melodrama, mise en scène is often the very thing through which socially repressed emotions are expressed in melodrama. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, the use of music, colour and lighting for instance, do not merely “heighten the emotionality of an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for it.”93 In other words, mise en scène in melodrama not only works to underscore the pathos associated with victimhood and other emotions central to the narrative, but it also replaces emotions and affects that would otherwise come from dialogue and from the body in performance.
Within In the Mood for Love, the body and its gestures are understated and economical to the point where the feelings Li-zhen and Mo-wan have for one
93 Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” 73.
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another are quite obviously restrained. In the scene where Mo-wan finally admits his love for Li-zhen, for example, the two stand together leaning against a wall: for the most part their bodies do not touch and neither makes an attempt to physically connect with the other. Even so, it is their facial expressions that often betray their emotional connection. Here they look sad and defeated and even though Mo-wan’s admission would seem the opportune moment to bring them together, neither can transfer their feelings into and onto the body in a way which would result in action.
Once again they deal with this emotional dilemma by performing their own separation: a partial action that essentially short-circuits the development of their union and reinforces the impossibility of love.
It is this emotional control on the level of performance which finds its way into the film via the mise en scène. As Gross has argued, love in Wong’s films is affecting not only due to this kind of performative restraint but also because
“everything in the world of these films—decor, light, the air itself—seems to be an object of displaced erotic feelings.” (“NG,” 10) While Gross here is not situating
Wong in terms of melodrama, his comments resonate with an idea of melodramatic form and the way this form is configured as an object of emotional and erotic investment. Within In the Mood for Love this displacement of feelings, and of love itself, is demonstrated in the saturated colour palate of deep reds, greens and yellows, especially in the cheongsam that make up Li-zhen’s wardrobe. Reminiscent of
Sirk and Haynes’ rethinking of Sirk in Far from Heaven, the intensity of the colour, as production designer Chang has put it, contrasts “with the characters’ restrained emotions.”94 Much like the use of colour in American melodrama, the colour palate
94 William Chang Suk-ping cited in Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 41.
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of the film not only serves as a contrast to the repressed emotions of the characters but also signifies the emotions of the characters. As such, emotions spill over into the film and in a sense create the film’s colour palate: a palate that is as vivid and intense as unrequited love.
While colour plays a central role within the film’s melodramatic mise en scène, the kind of displacement of emotion that Gross addresses is most strongly carried through in the use of slow-motion and music. In the merging of these elements Wong establishes a rhythm that creates a melancholy longing that is both literal and metaphorical. Through Umebayashi Shigeru’s “Yumeji’s theme,” which accompanies the initial slow-motion sequences, and Nat King Cole’s Spanish renditions of “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” “Aquellos Ojos Verdes” and “Te Quiero
Dijiste,” the film sets up a languid pace that the camera speed also takes on. These slow-motion sequences, which are a counterpoint to the bustling scenes of everyday life, distend time and movement in a way that creates a temporality of separation, loss and longing: in other words, the temporality of unrequited love.
In these sequences, which for the most part focus on Cheung’s Li-zhen walking to the noodle stand in her many cheongsam, we find that longing is a way of feeling that becomes materialised in this film. These scenes not only create a loss and longing that mirrors that of unrequited love but they also generate a loss and longing for the image itself. The beautiful and oneiric quality of the languid music and slow- motion seem to suggest a kind of transience of both the image and love. For Arthur, this is most certainly the case: the image for him is always on the verge of disappearing in way that makes us yearn for love and for the image that little bit more. The effect is a romantic eroticism that signals not only a melodramatic formal
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construction but also an emotional and affective investment that melodrama generates for the viewer of the film.
If the film’s use of slow-motion and music mirrors the loss and longing central to unrequited love, the repetition of these elements reinforces the impossibility of the couple’s union. While the melancholy nature of “Yumeji’s theme” and Michael Galasso’s score underscores the repressed emotions of the characters, their repetition, along with the recurrence of slow-motion sequences and freeze-frames, as well as the Nat King Cole songs, often stalls the movement of the film as well as the characters themselves. The result of this is a stalling of action that takes us back to the film’s opening inter-title. Much like the scenario in that passage, the characters and the film itself are often rendered immobile by overwhelming emotion and affect. This is likewise reinforced by the repetition that structures Li- zhen and Mo-wan’s performances of adultery and the confrontations with their spouses. Repeatedly rehearsed and performed, these scenarios literally disable the forward movement of their relationship.
While an idea of repetition literally and metaphorically stalls the possibility of love and union, it also creates, to quote Martin, a kind of “narcotic swooniness.”95
For Martin this effect, which is brought on by the repetition of key musical pieces within In the Mood for Love, harks back to Wong’s general use of music in his body of work and especially in the use of a cover version of “California Dreaming” in
Chungking Express. In Martin’s assessment we likewise find the way in which we, as viewers, are brought into a specific relation with the film: while for Martin the effect in Chungking Express is “being driven batty,” for me the effect and affect is love.96
95 Martin, “Perhaps,” n.p. 96 Ibid.
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With each viewing I fall in love with the film. And while it is a love that takes in the film as a totality, it is also a connection forged by my own, as well as the film’s, isolation and repetition of certain elements of mise en scène. I would suggest that the kind of repetition that is central to the film’s mise en scène, in the context of a thematic preoccupation with unrequited love, creates a relation between the film and viewer where specific formal elements are isolated as things that are admired and loved. In this way certain aspects of mise en scène become the object/s of our desire and love.
For me, this love is created in my investment in the formal elements which I isolated above. It is the sway of the camera, the rhythm of the music, the slow- motion sequences and the rich, saturated, emotion-laden colour that makes me swoon time and again. But more than this, these formal elements are charged with a melodramatic affect in a similar way to objects within the film. In my viewing and re- viewing of In the Mood for Love, I have come to realise that I not only invest in the film’s mise en scène but also in specific things within the film, and more importantly, the way these things are cinematically (and melodramatically) rendered in film.
In the scholarship surrounding film melodrama, the role of objects and things in a film’s décor is just as crucial as a film’s mise en scène. Or to put it another way, the filmic rendering of things and objects in melodrama is often key to understanding the affective and emotional registers circulating in particular films. In
Brooks’ analysis of literary and theatrical melodrama, objects such as floral bouquets function within “the text of muteness” where they are often the means of communicating both moral and emotional states that cannot be verbally expressed.97
97 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 56-60.
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In a similar vein, Elsaesser and Fassbinder respectively argue that décor in Sirk’s
Hollywood melodramas not only embodies a middle-class milieu but it also symbolises social and emotional constriction.98 We find in these melodramas,
Elsaesser writes, “women waiting at home, standing by the window, caught in a world of objects into which they are expected to invest their feelings.”99
Elsaesser goes on to argue that this affective and symbolic emphasis on objects furthermore plays out “another recurrent feature,…that of desire focusing on the unobtainable object.”100 In other words, affectively and emotionally charged objects within a film are often substitutes for love and union and therefore perform the impossibility of union with the object of a character’s affections. Within In the
Mood for Love, objects play a pivotal and often melodramatic role where they are frequently the sole means for physical connection. As Gross writes, “women will make love to the objects of the men they long for, instead of the men themselves.”
(“NG,” 10) In this film, Li-zhen, in the vein of other female characters from Wong’s oeuvre, uses objects to physically and sexually connect with Mo-wan when she visits his hotel room in Singapore and inhabits his space for a day. Here Li-zhen wanders around softly running her hands over the balcony banister and the bedspread as if these objects were Mo-wan. She opens up and smells his cigarette case before lighting one and leaving a trace of herself via her lipstick. Li-zhen also lies on the bed and sits on the chair before finally reclaiming the slippers she had left in Mo-wan’s room back in Hong Kong.101
98 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 61-62; Fassbinder, “Imitation of Life,” 81. 99 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 62. 100 Ibid. 101 Mo-wan, like Li-zhen, also seems to make love via objects; in this case it is through Li-zhen’s slippers which he frantically looks for on realising that she has been to his room.
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While characters in Wong’s films invest in objects and things in a similar manner to those in classical Hollywood melodramas, their relation to objects also differs somewhat. In the closing stages of his analysis of Since You Went Away (John
Cromwell, 1944), Elsaesser suggests that the “banal” yet symbolic objects in this film, when brought together with repressed emotion, invariably signify the way “the characters are enclosed in seemingly ineluctable situations.”102 In In the Mood for Love however, objects are not coded as symbols of inescapability and impossibility to be overcome “in the nick of time.” (“MR,” 69) In Wong’s films, objects enable characters such as Li-zhen to show love in a way that brings them into a kind of physical (and often sexual) proximity with the one they love. Unlike classical melodrama which codes objects as a kind of absence of the loved one, (who will inevitably be united and/or reunited with the central protagonist), Wong’s films and
In the Mood for Love in particular renders the objects of the loved one as the love object. As a result, Wong’s film shows us and teaches us to savour an object that signifies a melodramatic “too late.” (“MR,” 69) I would suggest here that characters such as Li-zhen show us the way to love and be intimate. In this film it is clear that to love is, in part, to make love to the things owned and possessed by the object of one’s affections. If as viewers we are connecting to and with specific things within the film it is because characters are in effect showing us the way to love in a Wong film, and more importantly, the way to love a Wong film.
This is the way that I have come to love Wong’s films and some of the objects and things that populate In the Mood for Love. Like Li-zhen I also want to smell and light up one of Mo-wan’s cigarettes. This is, of course, an impossibility:
102 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 62.
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the next best thing then is Wong’s representation of the swirling cigarette smoke in the film. Often in slow-motion and accompanied by “Yumeji’s theme,” cigarettes and their smoke not only reveal “the way in which individual actors and stars smoke
(how they handle and use cigarettes, how they use cigarettes in orchestrating the nuances of relationships),” but also a fascination with transience.103 Within In the
Mood for Love, cigarettes and smoke are not simply the means by which Li-zhen and
Mo-wan are brought together, (as in the scene in Mo-wan’s Singapore hotel room), nor are they merely an example of a blurring between the gestures of the star and character. In Wong’s work, as Blake has suggested, cigarette smoke, as well as steam, clouds and rain are “images of mutability”: they are images that continually reinforce the kind of mutable and impossible love that is central to Wong’s cinema.104
Yet even while these things and images are of a mutable nature, they possess at the same time a kind of “solidity and tactility of things in the very moment of their passing”: within In the Mood for Love smoke moves and twirls like a body before dispersing into the air or rain.105 For Lesley Stern, cigarettes and the smoke they produce hold a special place in her experience of the cinema. In her essay, “‘Paths
That Wind through the Thicket of Things’,” Stern reflects on the relation between objects, everyday gestures and performative gestures in order to suggest that one of the cinema’s more significant capacities is its ability to ‘materialise’ even the most transient of everyday objects.106 Here Stern is concerned with raindrops and teardrops, kettles and steam, and as mentioned cigarettes and smoke. In this piece, cigarettes are a means to reflect on the performances of particular stars and
103 Stern, “‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things’,” 344. 104 Blake, “‘We Won’t Be Like Them’,” 352. 105 Stern, “‘Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things’,” 354. 106 Ibid., 334.
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characters, and the way that smoking can equally function as a “mode of being” in the films of Humphrey Bogart and as a circuit “of things, words, gestures” in the cinema of Hal Hartley.107 What Stern’s approach to objects and things offers here is a way to think through cinema’s capacity to make those objects into things: the way the cinema confers “a certain quality of thingness” where objects are rendered as material objects that generate sensory and affective connections.108
Although Stern’s approach to objects and things is often premised upon their relation to performance and gesture, her ideas also open up a way to think through the kinds of attachment, fascination and love for certain objects and things within In the Mood for Love that the film itself encourages. Like many other critics and theorists, the many cheongsam worn by Cheung’s Li-zhen are for me the love object and fetish object par excellence. While these dresses are not mutable and transient like cigarettes and smoke, their rendering in and by film confers on them a tactile quality of
“thingness” as well as transience. The seemingly countless cheongsam, which in part suggest the passage of time, become the ultimate object of the kind of ‘displaced eroticism’ which Gross proposes. Arthur suggests a similar operation when he writes the cheongsam are “[v]isually fetishized like nothing else in the film.” He goes on to add that the framing of the cheongsam also calls attention to the movement of
Cheung’s body as well as creating a solidity and tactility reminiscent of Stern’s remarks:
Framed repeatedly in medium-long shot against dark or clashing backgrounds, Cheung’s lithe martial-arts trained body assumes the status of a Platonic form or, less abstractly, a 3-D burst of solidity in a 2-D medium. The shape Cheung projects—along with her posture, movements,
107 Ibid., 350. 108 Ibid., 321.
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accompanying fabric textures, and so on—remains indelible even as words and actions dissolve in the mind.109
In Arthur’s description we find a playing out of the kind of materialisation which Stern proposes in her essay: in Arthur’s review there is the sense that the cheongsam becomes three-dimensional, becomes a thing, through its cinematic rendering. In the movement of the cheongsam (often in slow-motion) we find a filmic rendering that brings to life an object of a two-dimensional nature. And it is this cinematic construction that not only gives us a sense of the texture of the fabric (and by implication the way this fabric would feel to the touch) but it also suggests the way an object’s transformation into a thing in film generates affective, emotional and sensory associations. As Arthur states in this passage, Cheung’s “shape,” and the way that shape is created through the cheongsam, lingers well after dialogue and narrative action: it is the cheongsam, its texture, movement and association with Cheung’s body which “remains indelible.”
Like Arthur, the cheongsam lingers for me long after the film has finished. This garment, and the many floral and striped fabrics which make up its incarnations, becomes a thing which ultimately fleshes out the film’s time and milieu. But more than this, it also sets Li-zhen apart from the other female characters in the film: the cheongsam codes Li-zhen as not only a “liberated Chinese woman” but also positions
Li-zhen as a stand-out of sorts.110 As one character remarks to Mrs Suen, “she dresses up like that to go out for noodles?” For me, this creates a kind of stardom akin to that associated with Cheung. The cheongsam then becomes an embodied thing
109 Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 41. 110 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p.
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through Maggie Cheung and through the movements of her body. Khoo proposes a reading on similar terms when she writes, “the clothes take the place of her body, which becomes merely an outline. Rather than accentuate her bodily movements and performance, they dictate and create them.”111
In Khoo’s approach we find a conception of embodiment which allows for a development of Stern’s argument. In her analysis, Khoo rightly argues that the cheongsam imposes and prescribes a certain kind of bodily movement: a movement which is accentuated and often broken down in the slow-motion shots of Li-zhen walking in the cheongsam. It is in these moments that the cheongsam becomes “a 3-D burst of solidity.” I would suggest that it is in the slowing down of motion and movement, (a filmic protraction which underscores the materiality of the moving body), that places the cheongsam in Stern’s divide between solidity and ephemerality.
It is in this divide between materiality and transience that we find “the force of things” at the heart of Stern’s thesis. The love, attachment and fascination that is felt by the spectator and characters for things in Wong’s film is premised on this very force: an affectivity that is continually emphasised by the force that objects carry within the film. And at the end of the day, it is this very force that brings me closer to the film, (as a thing in itself), and seduces me into obsessively watching and re-watching. In the final section I will consider this emotional and affective connection between film and viewer and the way this connection is worked through in a critical writing that positions the critic as a lover drafting love letters to the cinema.
111 Ibid.
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V. The cinematic couple
When I was young and impressionable, I too wrote briefly under the sway of theory until the day that a wise, kindly friend asked, “Adrian, why don’t you write your articles the way you write your letters?” And that is, in a sense, what I have tried to write ever since: love letters to the cinema, if we remember to include in our working definition of love every kind of passion and need and exasperation and exacting, critical demand…. And cinema responded as passionately as any lover possibly could.—Adrian Martin112
In a special anniversary issue of Film Quarterly, the journal published the correspondence between critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, Nicole
Brenez and Adrian Martin, among others, that addressed in both critical and personal terms the importance of the cinema.113 In these exchanges, each critic openly positions him/her self as a cinephile at a time when cinema was considered
“dead” by theorists such as Susan Sontag.114 These letters, which seemed to have been initiated by Sontag’s estimation of the cinema and are therefore in part a response to her argument, clearly demonstrate a love of the cinema for a multiplicity of reasons. In the dialogue between these theorists and critics, the cinema is not only debated but is likewise positioned as a kind of love object. This idea is nowhere more apparent than in the opening quotation from Martin.
112 Adrian Martin, Letter to Jonathan Rosenbaum and Kent Jones (30 June 1997), Film Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 42, emphasis added. 113 The letters collected in this special issue include the correspondence between the aforementioned critics as well as Alexander Horwath and Raymond Bellour. See Ann Martin, ed., “Special Issue: Movie Mutations,” Film Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 39-53. 114 Susan Sontag, “A Century of Cinema,” Parnassus 22, nos. 1-2 (1997): 23-28. This essay develops Sontag’s original piece and considers “the death of cinema” in relation to cinema’s centenary. See also “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times Magazine (25 February, 1996): 60-61.
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To write love letters to the cinema in the manner of Martin is to both occupy the position of lover as well as treat the cinema as a kind of lover; as both a present and absent lover that critically challenges as well as excites us. For Martin however, love is not an emotion that impedes or prevents a critical and analytical engagement with film. Love is, as Martin argues, a means to both critically and affectively relate to the cinema. In Martin’s words we also find an earlier incarnation of Arthur’s attempt to write about a film that he loves. Arthur begins his review with an important question:
How do you write a love letter to a movie? Not a boffo review brimming with blurbable superlatives or a fine-grained analysis attuned to visual felicities, but something more appropriate—if hopelessly inadequate—to the sensual pleasure, emotional attachment, and fierce admiration (love?) occasioned by a work of stunning achievement.115
In his review, Arthur does indeed manage to write a love letter to In the Mood for Love in a way that begins to mirror the kind of unrequited love the film works with on both thematic and formal levels. What is interesting for me about the opening moments of Arthur’s analysis is the obvious struggle he finds in writing about a film that he so strongly feels for. In Arthur’s review, this uncannily mirrors the kinds of relationships and connections we find in the film, as well as Wong’s body of work. As I argued above, characters always love at a remove through the objects owned by the one that they love. Rather than a physical, sexual and romantic connection premised on actual interaction, characters love one another through things.
115 Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 40.
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It is this kind of love that affectively and emotionally charges things and objects in Wong’s films. This is also the way, I previously suggested, I learn to love
Wong’s films as things. The romantic narratives and themes of the films themselves, and the characters that populate them, teach me how to love as well as teaching me how to love as a cinephile. In the Mood for Love, and Wong himself as a directorial figure, foster a love of cinema, as well as its sensory, emotional and affective capacities. For it is not only that characters love through objects and things but the way they love these things in a cinematic way. It is in the way Wong brings us these things that I begin to experience an affective exchange between myself and the film.
Therefore it is not coincidental that, as Khoo has recognised, the film includes a cinephile in Li-zhen who “escapes to the movie theatres to watch the films she loves” even though “this activity occurs entirely off-screen.”116 For Khoo this mirrors Wong’s own love of the cinema, especially in his short film The Age of Flowers which commemorates the actresses of early Hong Kong films.117
Wong’s own cinephilia is also clearly evident in his numerous references to films and filmmakers in interviews with the press. In an interview promoting In the
Mood for Love, for instance, Wong cites Alfred Hitchcock as a key influence on the film: “I wanted to treat it like a Hitchcock film, where so much happens outside the frame, and the viewer’s imagination creates a kind of suspense. Vertigo, especially, is something I always kept returning to in making the film.”118 Wong’s reference here to Hitchcock’s 1958 film is an interesting one as it too is preoccupied with the visual fetish and more specifically the woman as fetish object. In Vertigo, Detective John
116 Khoo, “Love in Ruins,” n.p. 117 Ibid. Khoo notes that this short appears on the Criterion Collection special edition DVD of In the Mood for Love (2002). 118 Wong, “Wong Kar-Wai,” n.p.
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“Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is obsessed with making over Judy Barton (Kim
Novak) to replicate a former lover, Madeleine Elster (also played by Novak). Scottie insists on changing all aspects of Judy’s appearance and behaviour in a way that it becomes clear that she merely functions as a fetish that reignites the memory of
Madeleine. Much like Hitchcock’s preoccupation with the fetish, Wong’s concern with objects also plays out the idea that love is always at a remove.
In Wong’s cinematic references, knowledge and love we find a connection with the cinema that opens on to a cinephilic engagement with Wong’s own work.
On the release of In the Mood for Love in Australia, for example, the on-line film journal Senses of Cinema dedicated a special section of the journal to Wong which included essays about the film in addition to a compilation of short pieces on the director titled “The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai—A ‘Writing Game’.”119 As a collection of personal reflections on Wong’s oeuvre by numerous writers, this
“writing game” approaches formal preoccupations, key themes and affects as both a critical and emotional exercise. At stake in this “writing game,” much like Martin and
Arthur’s writing, is a working through of a love of Wong as a means to reflect on and become closer to the cinema more generally.
The closeness that is forged between film and viewer in the process of writing is the very thing which creates for me an idea of the ‘cinematic couple.’ Even though for Arthur the film creates a relation between film and viewer that mirrors the ‘vivid and yet ephemeral’ experience of unrequited love, I would argue that
Arthur’s piece and the act of writing problematise this position.120 The act of writing
119 Fiona A. Villella, ed., “The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai—A ‘Writing Game’,” Senses of Cinema 13 (April-May 2001), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/wong-symposium.html. 120 Arthur, Review of In the Mood for Love, 41.
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about the film, an act that has taken on the tone, affects and emotions of a love letter, suggests that the film/viewer relationship is strengthened through close and
‘lovingly detailed’ critical analyses (as it was for Williams). (“MR,” 47) For this reason, I would suggest that this union between film and viewer is played out in a way of writing that finds its origin in the rapturous criticism of the early Cahiers du
Cinéma critics. The result of this kind of cinephilic engagement with Wong’s cinema in writing is not only a reinvigoration of a “dead cinema” but also the resurrection of the kind of mystique that surrounded an idea of mise en scène and the figure of the auteur in the late 1950s and 60s.121 In much of the criticism surrounding the film, as well as Wong more generally, analyses seem to take on or return to this mystique as a way of dealing with an affective and ‘loving’ engagement premised on the kinds of pleasures and affects the cinema produces. Critics that have addressed his work approach Wong’s formal style in a way which revives early mise en scène analysis.
Jean-Marc Lalanne’s comments echo this idea when he writes, Wong’s “complex work in developing narrative is nothing in comparison with his experimentation with images, one forever short-circuiting the other. As complex and convoluted as his narrative devices are, the mise en scène always wins out.”122
It seems that for critics such as Lalanne, the ongoing celebration of Wong as an authorial figure rests predominantly with his formal style: it is the mise en scène which “always wins out” rather than the ways in which mise en scène translates certain thematic concerns. Even though Wong’s cinema is often approached in this way, I would argue that ‘the experimentation with images and mise en scène’ particularly within In the Mood for Love is in direct proportion with the film’s
121 Adrian Martin, “Mise en scene is Dead, or The Expressive, The Excessive, The Technical and The Stylish,” Continuum 5, no. 2 (1992): 111. 122 Lalanne, “Images from the Inside,” 11, original emphasis.
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melodramatic strategies.123 Mise en scène does not win out in exactly the same way as it does for Lalanne but it does reiterate the centrality of a formal practice often at odds with narrative in melodrama. I would propose that it is In the Mood for Love’s location within melodrama which might be a means of working through the kind of mystique that has been generated, but rarely articulated, around the film’s mise en scène. As a formal category, melodrama seems to encourage the mystique around mise en scène because its formal strategies are a means of communicating repressed emotions and affects.
In this chapter, the film’s location within an idea of melodrama as well as the way it reconsiders this mode from a Hong Kong perspective has allowed me to think through the kind of temporality that defines unrequited love. In addition to this, the analysis of melodrama in conjunction with Ackbar Abbas’ idea of disappearance provided a means to reflect on the film’s articulation of this temporality and its connection to Hong Kong cultural identity. More importantly, melodrama forced an examination of not only the film’s thematic and formal strategies but also the way in which those strategies create affective and emotional connections with the viewer.
As I argued in the opening of this section and throughout the chapter, melodramatic themes and mise en scène, carry with them an affective and emotional force that is transferred into an experience of viewing (and by extension into writing) in a distinctive way. Unlike Li-zhen and Mo-wan whose union is thwarted and denied by the film, my union with the film, and the love I feel for it, is continually worked through in both viewing and writing: processes that emotionally and affectively bind me to this film that I love.
123 Wong too acknowledges that for the first time “the look of [In the Mood for Love] is more attached to the content.” Wong cited in Wong Kar-wai on In the Mood for Love.
CONCLUSION
I want this writing to enact the affective force of the performance event again, as it plays itself out in an ongoing temporality made vivid by the psychic process of distortion…. The events I discuss here sound differently in the writing of them than in the “experiencing” of them, and it is the urgent call of that difference that I am hoping to amplify here. Performative writing is solicitous of affect even while it is nervous and tentative about the consequences of that solicitation. Alternately bold and coy, manipulative and unconscious, this writing points both to itself and to the “scenes” that motivate it.—Peggy Phelan1
In her introduction to Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, Peggy Phelan outlines the way certain performances and events generate, and even demand, a different kind of analytical engagement and writing. During her reflection on a lecture given by Jacques Derrida in California in 1993 where he had focused on the poetry of Paul
Celan, Phelan recognises that Derrida’s delivery (and redelivery) of one of Celan’s most notable poems, “Breathturn,” began to move beyond an analysis and an understanding of the poem to an act of baring witness. While reading the poem,
Phelan writes, Derrida’s voice changed in a way that affectively and materially drew on the catastrophe of war and death that circulates through the poem. In the act of reading, Derrida’s voice plunged “into the bloody tongue of his own desire to hear, to respond, to witness Celan’s inert ash.”2
1 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 12. 2 Ibid., 10.
266 Conclusion/267
This act of baring witness is crucial to Phelan’s approach to the performances and events in her study, which include her reading of Silverlake Life: The View from
Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), because it animates a specific kind of performative writing that does not merely attempt to represent but rather “enact” the affective experiences these events create. In the opening quotation, she recognises that while this writing alters the event and experience in some way, it also draws attention to the relation between the affective (and often emotional and sensorial) experience of the event and the affectivity imbedded in the writing itself.
This kind of performative writing, Phelan proposes, continually signals the experience in both the writing and the very objects, events and performances that stimulated experience and reflection alike.
Throughout this thesis, the everyday as a philosophical and filmic category has been a means to examine the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and spectatorial affect, in addition to the different kinds of writing and analysis these affective temporalities encourage and require. In this examination of the everyday, the often personal reflections that open each chapter not only endeavour to come to terms with the distinct temporalities of the everyday and of the everyday created through film, but they likewise attempt to perform the affects, emotions and sensations they produce. Apart from setting the affective tone for each chapter, these reflections also play out the frequently difficult process of harmonising language with affects and emotions that often seem to defy articulation.
Much like Phelan’s approach to performative writing, these reflections and the kind of descriptive writing that is used throughout the chapters signal an affective engagement with the everyday and the shifting conceptions of a filmic
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everyday on the page. When the films are over, and they have been watched and re- watched, I come to the page to perform my particular affective engagement. It is on the page, through the written word, that my compulsion for these films and for their sense of the everyday is played out. But more than this, the act of analysing the films in writing becomes “a type of affective engagement” itself that represents, restores and reconfigures those experiences generated by the films.3
This idea is most explicitly thought through in this thesis in terms of Wong
Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000) and the lyrical and poetic tone that characterises a great deal of the critical work on the film. Since its release, In the
Mood for Love has inspired reviews and essays that not only analyse the love story at the centre of the film, but that also affectively and emotionally engage with the film
(and its mise en scène) in a form of writing that takes its cue from the love letter. In a similar vein to these critical ‘love letters,’ my own affective connection with the film is also played out in a writing that endeavours to unite film and viewer. In the descriptions of the colour, the fabrics of Su Li-zhen’s (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) cheongsam, the lighting and music, I lovingly and affectively engage (and re-engage) with the film. I proposed that this connection could be conceived as a kind of
‘cinematic couple’ that allows an affective, emotional and sensorial exchange between film and viewer (even while such a union is denied within the film itself).
In Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s Silverlake Life, baring witness to the body that lives out its dying from AIDS demanded a form of writing that performed grief, mourning and loss while paying homage to Joslin, Mark Massi and their relationship.
More than this, the intricate and detailed descriptions of the body and the temporal
3 George Kouvaros, “Lessons in Writing: Learning from Barthes,” UTS Review 4, no. 2 (November 1998): 121.
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process of dying, (which took its lead from Phelan), attempted to grasp hold of the body, the life and the time, in essence the lifetime, that was slowly and unavoidably slipping away. In the writing about this autobiographical video, and in the watching and witnessing of Joslin’s body, it is clear that language and analysis are a way to affectively come to terms with both the body that is gone and the body that is left behind in the video.
Throughout this thesis, detailed descriptions of bodies, performances and mise en scène play out the affective experiences generated in the act of viewing as well as the process of analysis. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is also a film which demands detailed description. In this film the smallest of gestures, actions and movements create and alter the temporal balance of the scene and its rhythm. What is found in the very particular accounts of pouring coffee, making meatloaf and polishing shoes is a way to analyse and explain the dual experience of anxiety and pleasure. While watching Jeanne
Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) purposefully and methodically pour the boiling water in to the coffee filter in an attempt to recapture an ordered temporality, the extended long take allows me to contemplate the image, Jeanne’s gestures and the very time this is taking. In my attempts to place this experience on the page, every detail (and the time it takes to describe them), allows me to re-enter the film’s temporality.
John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is structured around a temporality not dissimilar to that of Akerman’s film. While not as extreme and insistent in its use of the long take, the temporality that characterises Faces functions as a presence that materially provokes both viewer and performer/character. Again it is in the accounts of the scenes and the way they seem to go on without end that betray the kind of
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anxiety, tension and excitement that I experience all at once. Open to possibility, chance and contingency, the time of these scenes register on the faces and the bodies that Cassavetes’ so intently focuses on. These faces and bodies however do not explicitly articulate feelings, thoughts or motivations: they are surfaces that respond to time and to one another in very particular and often surprising ways.
Once more the act of description and analysis allows me to draw near to these beings in order to experience the exciting and terrifying possibility of time without truly comprehending it or them.
In each of the films addressed in this thesis, the specific affects and emotions generated in the act of viewing are connected to a shifting and historically contingent idea of the everyday. In Chapter One, I initiated my discussion of the everyday through an examination of Henri Lefebvre’s post-war ‘reinvention’ of the quotidian and Cassavetes’ Faces as a film which works through and performs the temporalities that typify the everyday. As an affective experience of time, the everyday questions and opens up the abstract temporalities that structure capitalism and an idea of everydayness. This opening up of the abstract, chronological and teleological temporalities of everydayness creates a time (and space) that allows the everyday subject to experience time as an affective moment of possibility (rather than as structured and structuring). For Lefebvre, this affective experience of time which reinstates a mind/body connection in the subject holds the potential for a revolutionary action that can overcome the constraints of a capitalist logic of production and consumption.4
4 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1971), 14.
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The kind of affective freedom and possibility inherent to Lefebvre’s quotidian is performed in the temporality which structures Faces. Via the long take and a filmic construction of time that upholds a continuous time (and space),
Cassavetes’ film aligns plot duration, screen duration and viewing time in a way that produces an affective experience of time for the viewer and performer/character.
More than this, the temporal construction that affectively connects both viewer and performer also problematises an idea of narrative and narrative time in a way that animated the dialectic central to Lefebvre’s conception.
In this chapter Lefebvre’s quotidian was considered in relation to the everyday that ghosts the work of two prominent theorists: André Bazin and Gilles
Deleuze. Here Bazin’s concept of cinematic realism and Deleuze’s time-image, and more specifically the “series of time,” were a means to examine the complex relations between filmic temporality and affect in connection with a thematic concern with the everyday.5 In bringing together the analyses of the everyday in film studies, cultural studies and philosophy, I argued that the quotidian in film is an affective and dialectical temporality that problematises the theoretically dominant idea of ‘real time.’
This reconsideration of the everyday through Lefebvre was extended in my examination of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman in Chapter Two. In this chapter, I began with a reflection on the everyday produced through the long take as one that generated a dialectical experience of the everyday and time through an alignment between plot duration, screen duration and viewing time. Through Lefebvre’s work and Ivone Margulies’ important study on the filmmaker and her concern with the
5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 155.
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everyday, I suggested that, in a similar vein to Faces, Jeanne Dielman produced a filmic everyday that worked with the quotidian both thematically and formally.6
In Chapter Two, the everyday was refocused in order to reflect on the photographic-like stillness that is produced through performance, framing, and the camera. Here I argued that the materiality and affectivity of time for both performer/character and viewer was generated out of a watching and waiting that often immobilised the movement of Jeanne/Seyrig, the camera and time itself. As a result, the divide between photography and film became blurred in ways that opened film on to the affective experience central to Roland Barthes’ conception of the photograph: the punctum.7 Rather than film becoming photography, I proposed through Barthes and film/photography debates, that a filmic practice that was guided by a stillness or immobility could be approached through the ‘cinematic punctum’: an affective experience of time that blurs the boundaries between film and photography and forces a reconsideration of film’s photographic origin.
While Chapters One and Two considered the everyday through Lefebvre and modernist cinema, in Chapters Three and Four the everyday was considered in recent film and video as a shifting category often written through with traumatic social and cultural events. In these chapters, I placed an emphasis on the different ways in which an affective experience of time and of the everyday is produced. In
Chapter Three, I examined the autobiographical video Silverlake Life as one that gives us an insight in to a radically different, and socially important, everyday. In this video, the everyday was reoriented as one that no longer produced a possibility but
6 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996). 7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), 55.
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rather one that played out the certainty of a dying and death from AIDS even before that dying commences. Through Phelan and Alexander García Düttmann, I suggested that the everyday and everyday time in this video becomes the everyday
“time of AIDS” where the living out of dying and death are part of the textures of daily life.8 Here the temporality that structures Silverlake Life was considered through the temporality which typifies AIDS and its connection with video as a temporal medium that is able to keep dying and death alive.
Even though the everyday in this video functions in a fundamentally different way than it does in Faces and Jeanne Dielman, the revolutionary quality of Lefebvre’s quotidian is generated through the video’s collaborative and activist strategies. The combination of these strategies and the intimate video diary format positions
Silverlake Life as a video that intersects the public and the private. This intersection between the public and private spheres allows us to encounter a private and social body in its dying and death. In Chapter Three, I argued that this not only allows us to work through grief, mourning and loss but also forces us to reorient those affects and emotions in a ‘militant’ and activist way.9
In Wong’s In the Mood for Love, the everyday was reconsidered in terms of memory, loss and the melodramatic rendering of an idea of unrequited love. In
Chapter Four, I argued that the everyday of 1960s Hong Kong is opened on to the temporality which structures unrequited love (and memory) in a way that positions it as a site that works through loss, longing and nostalgia. In this film, the possibility of
8 Peggy Phelan, “Infected eyes: Dying Man With A Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The View from Here,” in Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), 161; Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds With AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 99. 9 Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, Mass./London: The MIT Press, 2002), 137.
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the everyday and of love is denied from the very beginning of the film (and from a familiarity with Wong’s oeuvre). Here I suggested that the unattainability of romantic union is played out in a temporality which positions the everyday moment as one which is characterised by a past and future that perform impossibility.
Although the film denies us the romantic union of the couple, in this chapter
I proposed that the temporality of unrequited love and the film’s mise en scène creates an intimate connection between the film and the viewer where the two come together as a ‘cinematic couple.’ As a means of examining the intimate, affective and emotional experiences the film creates, I looked into the film’s operation as a melodrama through the work of Linda Williams on the melodramatic mode and the kinds of romantic connections this mode often takes as its focus.10 This analysis of
In the Mood for Love’s melodramatic strategies was contextualised through Ackbar
Abbas’ work on Hong Kong as a “culture of disappearance” in order to examine the way the film both works within and rethinks melodrama.11
Chapter Four concluded with an investigation into the specificity of the affective and emotional engagement melodrama enables and promotes. As a mode that plays on emotion and affect both thematically and formally, melodrama draws in the viewer through its often heartbreakingly beautiful mise en scène. In the Mood for Love has been, and is, for many critics an exemplar of a seductive form and mise en scène that prompts a lyrical analysis and writing not dissimilar to that of the early
Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the 1950s and early 60s. In this chapter, I analysed this engagement with film form as a way of looking into the film’s concern with
10 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42-88. 11 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7.
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unrequited love through the site of the everyday, in addition to the kind of affective and emotional experiences this site produces.
Throughout this thesis, the everyday as an affective experience of time has facilitated the analysis of the connection between specific film practices concerned with the everyday, the spectatorial responses these practices generate and the kind of writing such an engagement requires. In much the same way that the everyday as a philosophical and filmic category responds to time, society, culture and politics, a critical and theoretical approach to the quotidian also demands a form of writing that is affectively, socially and politically responsive. In this dissertation, the different articulations of the everyday initiated a descriptive and reflective writing that both re- enacts and generates an affective engagement with the everyday in film and video on the page.
The affective, emotional and sensory connection between film and viewer as played out in this thesis allows us to think about the broader affective and temporal capacities of the cinema. As temporal mediums, film and video seem to hold a privileged position in analyses concerned with the everyday as an experience of time.
Rather than creating an experience of ‘real time,’ these mediums produce a complex encounter that always implicates the temporalities of their respective apparatuses.
For me, film and video’s ability to create divergent and temporally complex articulations of an always shifting everyday forces an ongoing analysis of the multiplicity of affects, emotions and sensory experiences these mediums are able to create on a spectatorial level. But more than this, the affective everyday created in and through the cinema allows us to reflect on the connection between a filmic and a material everyday: two aspects of the same category that can potentially alter the
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way we live, think, watch and feel. In the intersection of these quotidian spheres,
Lefebvre’s revolutionary and affective everyday is restored in a way that opens up a dialogue between the affective potential of both the cinema and our own material everyday.
FILMOGRAPHY
All That Heaven Allows. Dir. Douglas Sirk. 1955. USA.
Ashes of Time (Dong Xie Xi Du). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1994. Hong Kong/China/Taiwan.
As Tears Go By (Wangjiao Kamen). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1988. Hong Kong.
Blackstar: An Autobiography of a Close Friend. Dir. Tom Joslin. 1977. USA.
Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer). Dir. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. 1960. France.
Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1994. Hong Kong.
Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Wells. 1941. USA.
Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). Dir. Agnès Varda. 1961. France/Italy.
Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zhengzhuan). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1990. Hong Kong.
D’Est (From the East). Dir. Chantal Akerman. 1993. Belgium/France/Portugal.
Deux ou trios choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1967. France.
Dying. Dir. Michael Roemer. 1975. USA.
Eat. Dir. Andy Warhol. 1963. USA.
277 Filmography/278
Empire. Dir. Andy Warhol. 1964. USA.
Faces. Dir. John Cassavetes. 1968. USA.
Fallen Angels (Duoluo Tianshi). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1995. Hong Kong.
Far from Heaven. Dir. Todd Haynes. 2002. USA/France.
Germana Anno Zero (Germany, Year Zero). Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1947. Italy.
Happy Together (Chunguang Zhaxie). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1997. Hong Kong.
In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua). Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 2000. Hong Kong/France/Thailand.
Ivan the Terrible (Part I). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. 1944. USSR.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Dir. Chantal Akerman. 1975. Belgium/France.
La Jetée (The Pier). Dir. Chris Marker. 1964. France.
La Macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine for Killing Bad People). Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1948. Italy.
La Quarte Cent Corps (The 400 Blows). Dir. François Truffaut. 1959. France.
La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game). Dir. Jean Renoir. 1939. France.
Letter from an Unknown Woman. Dir. Max Ophuls. 1948. USA.
Lightning Over Water. Dir. Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders. 1980. Sweden/West Germany.
Filmography/279
Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert Flaherty. 1947. USA.
Philadelphia. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1993. USA.
Repas de bébé (Feeding the Baby). Dir. Louis Lumière. 1895. France.
Reservoir Dogs. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 1991. USA.
Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1948. USA.
Saute ma ville (Blow up my town). Dir. Chantal Akerman. 1968. Belgium.
Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993. USA.
Shadows. Dir. John Cassavetes. 1959. USA.
Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Dir. Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman. 1993. USA.
Stella Dallas. Dir. King Vidor. 1937. USA.
Since You Went Away. Dir. John Cromwell, 1944. USA.
2046. Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 2004. China/France/Germany/Hong Kong.
Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. USA.
Way Down East. Dir. D. W. Griffith. 1920. USA.
Wong Kar-wai on In the Mood for Love. Dir. Hubert Niogret. 2001. France.
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