In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film Author(s): Phillip Lopate Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 48 (Winter, 1992), pp. 19-22 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384052 Accessed: 17-03-2015 17:20 UTC

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This content downloaded from 193.61.13.36 on Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:20:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FILM build into an innate image," I don't of this patient searching for historical even have to see it to know that it's not meaning, in sites now emptied of their my idea of an essay-film. infamous activity. 3) The text must represent the It may sound grotesque to say this, but In Searchof the Centaur:The Essay-Film speaker's attempt to work out some rea- I was more delighted with Cayrol'sheady soned line of discourse on a problem. I use of language than I was depressed by am a little shaky about how to test this the subject matter-which, in any case, Phillip Lopate criterion; but I know when it's not I knew all too well, having grown up in there. For instance, Jonas Mekas' haunt- Jewish Brooklyn.What stuck in my mind ing text in Lost Lost Lost functions like for years was that voiceover phrase: Y INTENTION HERE is to essay is a search to find out what one an incantatory poem, not an essay. "The only sign-but you have to know define, describe, survey and cele- thinks about something. By now it should be clear that I am -is the ceiling scored by fingernails." brate a cinematic genre that barely Whatevertwists and turns occur along using the word "essay-film" as a des- That "but you have to know" (mais il exists. As a cinephile and personal its path, and however deep or moral its cription, not an honorific; there are faut savoir), inserted so cannily in mid- essayist, I have an itch to see these two conclusions are, an essay will have little great cinematic works that do not qual- sentence, thrilled me like an unexpected, interestswed, via essays on celluloid. But, enduring interest unless it also exhibits ify as essay-films, and highly flawed aggressive pinch: its direct address while there are cinematic equivalents a certain sparkle or stylistic flourish. It ones that do. broke the neutral contract of spectator- and to practically every literary genre, is not enough for the essayist to slay the 4) The text must impart more than ship forced me to acknowledge a filmmakers tend to shy away from this bull; it must be done with more finesse information; it must have a strong, per- conversation, with its responsibilities. form, and that in itself is intriguing. than butchery. Freshness, honesty, self- sonal point of view. The standard docu- A similar frisson occurred when, I an What it signals to me is that, in spite of exposure, authority must all be asserted mentary voiceover which tells us, say, some years later, was watching Alexandre Astruc's tempting utopian in turn. An essayist who produces magis- about the annual herring yield is funda- otherwise conventional documentary, term "camera-stylo," the camera is not terial and smoothly ordered arguments mentally journalistic, not essayistic. Nemec's Prague Oratorio, about the a pencil, and it is rather difficult to think but is unable to surprise himself in the Nor is Luis Bufnuel'smischievous Land events of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As the with it in the way an essayist might. process of writing will end up boring Without Bread-which parodies the visuals displayed Russian tanks advanc- Ever since I began looking for models us. An essayist who is vulnerable and faceless, objective documentary per- ing on the crowd, the narrator said of essay-films, the cinema mavens I con- sincere but unable to project any author- spective while refraining from giving us something like (I am paraphrasing from sulted were quick to suggest candidates ity will seem, alas, merely pathetic and Bunuel's own private thoughts about memory): "Usually we do not know that seemed pretty far-fetched. I was fail to keep our attention. So it is a dif- Las Huertes-an essay-film. (For the where to pin the blame for massacres, told, for instance, that Brakhage's ab- ficult game to pull off. Readers must difference, see Bunuel's lovely, literate we invoke large historical forces and so stract film-poems, Jansco's masterly feel included in a true conversation, autobiography, My Last Sigh.) on. This time we do know who gave the :-:- :- tracking shots, Tarkovsky's transcen- allowed to follow the rough mental Finally, 5) the text's language should order to fire. It was Captain dental dramas, even the supposedly processes of contradiction and digres- be as eloquent, well-written and inter- and the camera zoomed in optically on a Soviet man's head. I felt a genre-subversive remake of Little Shop sion, and yet aware of a formal shapeli- esting as possible. This may seem less a army Again of of Horrors, were all "essays" of one ness developing underneath. category than an aesthetic judgment. sort impudent tweak, "Stay awakel" Not that I had idea who this Rus- sort or another. These examples sug- An essay is a continual asking of ques- Still, I include it because you would not any sian officer but I loved the sudden gested a confusion between a reflective, tions-not necessarily finding "solu- expect to find, in a collection of the was, the civilized for self-conscious style and an essayistic tions," but enacting the struggle for year's best essays, a piece written in a way elegy Prague was and we were cata- one. While an essay must reflect or med- truth in full view. Lukacs, in his meaty condescendingly simple, primer dic- Spring ruptured, itate, not all meditative sensibilities are essay "On the Nature and Form of the tion; therefore you should not expect to pulted into that more basic Eastern of tribal scores to essayistic. Take Brakhage: for all the Essay,"wrote: "The essay is a judgment, hear such watered-down language in an European mentality memories and bitter humor. mythic sweat of his writings, or the lyri- but the essential, the value-determining essay-film. That such wonderful writers settle, long human cal satisfaction of his visuals, I'm thing about it is not the verdict (as is the of the Thirties as Hemingway and Dud- That atypically malicious voice on I later as unable to follow a coherent argument case with the system) but the process of ley Nichols should have, in attempting the commentary, identified or know what he actually thinks about, judging." to reach the masses, used so cramped an intrusion of the essayistic. say, the play of light on an ashtray for and patronizing a discourse in their There are essayistic elements or color- forty minutes. So let me propose that, narratives for Joris Ivens' The Spanish ations in certain films by Chris Marker, rather than rushing in anxiously to fill WILL NOW try to define the qualities Earth and The 400 Million, when they Alexander Kluge,Jon Jost, Ralph Arlyck, the void, it might be an important start- that to my mind make an essay-film. could have written genuine essays, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, ing-point to face squarely the scarcity Bear in mind that I'm no film theorist. seems a sadly missed opportunity. Joris Ivens, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dusan of essay-films. Starting with my most questionable Those who regard the cinema pri- Makavejev,Jean-Marie Straub, Yvonne What exactly do I mean by an essay- proposition first: 1) an essay-film must marily as a visual medium may object Rainer, Woody Allen, Wim Wenders, film? To answer that, I have to step back have words, in the form of a text either that my five criteria say nothing about Hartmut Bitomsky, , Ross first and convey my sense of the literary spoken, subtitled or intertitled. Say all the treatment of images. This is not McElwee, Robb Moss; in Alain Resnais's essay. To me, the essay is as much a tra- you like about visualization being at the because I mean to depreciate the visual shorts, Fellini's Roma, Michael dition as a form. A fairly discrete tradi- core of thinking, I cannot accept an component of movies, which is what Moore's Roger and Me, Isaac Julian's tion: prefigured by Cicero, Plutarch and utterly pure, silent flow of images as drew me to the medium in the first place, Looking for Langston, Tony Buba's Seneca, it crystallized with Montaigne constituting essayistic discourse. To be but only because I am unconvinced that Lightning Over Braddock, Morgan and Bacon, thrived with the English honest, I've never seen a silent-era the handling of the visuals per se dic- Fisher's Academy Leader, Cocteau's familiar essay of Dr. Johnson, Addison movie that I could consider an essay- tates whether some particular work is Testament of Orpheus, My Dinner and Steele, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, film. Something like Dziga Vertov's or is not an essay-film. I will say more With Andre, Swimming to Cambodia, Orwell, Virginia Woolf, propagated an Three Songs of Lenin delivers a clear about the relationship between sound and I'm sure many others that I've for- American branch in Emerson, Thoreau, ideological point (as does, say, Franju's and image in this genre later. For now, gotten or overlooked. By no means will Mencken, E.B. White, down to our con- Blood of the Beasts), but conveying a permit me to look at a few examples. I be able to discuss all these in the temporaries like Didion, Hoagland, message or politics through one's images limited space allotted; but my hope is Gass, and Hardwick. There is also a does not alone make an essay-or else we I REMEMBER my first glimpse of the that, by zeroing in on a handful, I can European strand of philosophical essay- would have to speak of political posters centaur-the essay-film-in college: it convey a sense of the potentials and pit- writing that extends from Nietzsche to or Madison Avenue ads as essays. was Alain Resnais's Night and Fog. falls of the form, as well as begin to Simone Weil, Benjamin, Barthes, Sartre, 2) The text must represent a single While watching it I became aware of weed out the true essay-films from Cioran, etc. voice. It may be either that of the direc- an elegance in the screenwriter Jean those that have merely a tincture of It is easier to list the essay's prac- tor or screenwriter, or, if collaborative, Cayrol's language that was intriguingly essayism. titioners than to fix a definition of this then stitched together in such a way as at odds with the usual sledgehammer The one great essayist in the film protean form. My American Heritage to sound like a single perspective.A mere treatment of the Holocaust. "Sometimes medium is Chris Marker. Letter From Dictionary, maybe not the most presti- collage of quoted texts is not an essay. I a message flutters down, is picked up. Siberia, The Koumiko Mystery and gious but it can be held in the hand and know that Walter Benjamin used to fan- Death makes his first pick, chooses again Sans Soleil are his most pure essay- was given me by an ex-girlfriend, says: tasize writing an essay composed wholly in the night and fog. Today,on the same films, though it seems to me that Marker "A short literary composition on a of quotes, but he never got around to track, the sun shines. Go slowly along has an inveterate essayistic tendency single subject, usually presenting the doing it; and even if he had, it would it... looking for what? Traces of the that peeps out even in his more interview- personal views of the author." While I not be what draws us to Benjamin- bodies that fell to the ground?"The voice oriented documentaries,like Le Joli Mai, defy anyone to boil down Montaigne's what draws us is his compelling, tender on the soundtrack was worldly, tired, or his compilation films, like Grin With- omnivorous late essays to a single sub- voice and thinking process. When I read weighted down with the need to make out the Cat. In Marker there is a tension ject, I do agree that the essay offers per- in an Anthology Film Archive calendar fresh those horrors that had so quickly between the politically committed, self- sonal views. That's not to say it's of an "essay-like" Japanese Super-8 in turned stale. It was a self-interrogatory effacing, leftwing documentarist of the always first-person or autobiographi- which "Some words are taken from voice, dubious, ironical, probing, like a Thirties/Ivens tendency,and an irrepress- cal, but it tracks a person's thoughts as Dostoevsky, others from Susan Sontag, true essayist's, for the heart of its sub- ibly Montaignesque personal tone. He he or she tries to work out some mental Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, creating a string ject matter.Meanwhile Resnais's refined has a reputation for being elusive and knot, however various its strands. An of overlapping images that ultimately tracking shots formed a visual analogue shy-not the best qualities, on the face

WINTER 199219

This content downloaded from 193.61.13.36 on Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:20:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of it, for a personal essayist-and yet, ing and celebrating,with mordant relish, of films that incorporated essayistic Privilege unfolds like a single multi- perhapsbecause he has evolved so diverse his own death, projecting a more mythi- throat-clearing as but one of many faceted argument, uniformly illumi- and complicated a self (ex-Resistance cal figure of himself in the process. noises in an echo chamber of aesthetic nated by white-hot rage and wit-a fighter,novelist, poet, filmmaker),he can "He wrote: 'I've been around the cross-references that ultimately "sub- cacophony of voices and discourses to emit enough particles of this self to con- world several times, and now only banal- verted," to use current jargon, the very be sure, but a purposeful and meaning- vey a strong sense of individuality and ity interests me. On this trip I've tracked notion of a single personal voice. ful cacophony in which all the voices still keep his secrets. He also has the it like a bounty hunter."' Place and It was the bad luck of the essay-film are speaking to us as well as to one essayist's aphoristic gift, which enables homesickness are natural subjects for that, just as its technical moment arrived, another...." Much as I sympathize him to assert a collective historical per- the essay-film: Sans Soleil is a medita- the intellectual trends of the hour- with Rosenbaum's position, it almost sona, a first-personplural, even when the tion on place in a jet age, where spatial deconstructionism, post-modernism, sounds as though he is saying that all first-person single is held in abeyance. availability confuses one's sense of time appropriation art, the new forms of you have to do is recategorize some Finally, he has the essayist's impulse to and memory. Unlike Wim Wenders, feminism and Marxism retrofitted with plotless stew as an "essay" and every- tell the truth: not always a comfortable who keeps whining (Tokyo Ga, etc.) semiotic media criticism-questioned thing immediately belongs. Even essays attribute for an engage artist. that every place is getting to look like the validity of the single authorial have plots! Now it so happens that I In a characteristically witty passage every other place-an airport-Marker voice, preferring instead to demonstrate admire and like Rainer's film; but I still in Letter From Siberia (1958), Marker has an appetite for geography and local over and over how much we are all con- cannot bring myself to accept a "cacoph- interprets the same footage three differ- difference;his lament is that, if anything, ditioned and brainwashed by the images ony of voices and discourses" as an ent ways, based on three separate ideo- he feels at home in too many places. around us. Not that these points aren't essay. I also have to admit that when I logical positions, demystifying with a Particularly drawn to Japan, he visits valid, but they happen to mute the essay- left the theater I was still unsure what light touch the spurious objectivity of his favorite Tokyo haunts, and the nar- istic voice: for, if the self is nothing but exactly Rainer's argument about meno- documentaries.The sequence also points rator reflects: "These simple joys he had a social construct, and individuality a pause, and its relation to racism, was, to one of Marker's key approaches as a never felt on returning to a house, a bourgeois illusion intended to maintain other than that both involved being film-essayist, which is to meditate aloud home, but twelve million anonymous the status quo, then the hip, "transgres- made to feel an outsider.She would prob- on the footage he has shot. In Marker inhabitants could supply him with sive" thing to do is satiric quotation, ably say, "I'm not trying to tell you any- there is often a pronounced time-lag them." Marker/Krasna is a man of the appropriation, collage. thing, I'm trying to get you to think." between the quick eye and the slow, crowd, who revels in anonymity; a Some of the bright, experimental Fine; so does an essay; but an essay also digesting mind, which tracks months or romantic who in San Francisco visits all young filmmakers, like Abigail Child, tells us what its author thinks. even years later the meaning of what it the locations Hitchcock used in Vertigo: Laurie Dunphy, and Anita Thacher, Jon Jost is another independent film- has seen; and this delay accounts for a a collector of memories ("I have spent produced "found footage" films, which makerwho has experimentedwith essay- certain Markerian nostalgia for the istic elements. His Speaking Directly: escaping present, and a melancholy Some American Notes (1972-74), which < "I le over the inherently receding reality of the filmmaker refers to as an "essay- photographed images. It is like that film," I found insufferably irritating. In famous passage from Tristes Tropiques, part my reaction was to Jost's solemn, in which Levi-Strauss laments that the humorless, self-hating, tediously lectur- traveler/anthropologist always arrives k~~~~? ing persona. Granted, all essayists have "too early or too late." In Marker'scase, the option to bring out the obnoxious his camera arrives on time to record aspects of their personality, but they events, but his mind and heart take too k usually balance it with something long to catch up and appreciate it I charming; in Jost's case I wanted to sufficiently at the moment. A qA hide under the seat every time he came This time-delay also allows Marker to onscreen. Still, if only he had made a project an historical understandingonto true essay-film I could have applauded. otherwise bland or neutral footage. The But instead he created one more hybrid most dramatic instance of this occurs in collage, with Vietnam atrocity stories Sans Soleil: the medal-bestowing cere- and nightly news broadcasts quoted mony in Cape Verde, Africa. "A year " I -~~~~s~~~~i~ simultaneously for ironic effect; with definitions some- later," Marker tells us on the sound- 4 dictionary suggesting track, "the President would be deposed thing or other about linguistics; with fulminations cin- by the man he is pinning a medal on." sla0yp I against imperialism; As he explains that the army officer ema verite interviews of his friends and thought he deserved a larger reward lover; and large smugly self-reflexive than this particular medal, we have the dollops informing us that this was a chilling sense that we are watching a movie, as if we didn't know. Jost's bloody tragedy like Macbeth unfold at autobiographical passages, when he the moment the idea first crossed the addresses the camera, suggest the most upstart's brow. potential for an essay-film; but he makes such state- Sans Soleil is Marker's masterpiece, my life trying to understand the func- mocked the patriarchy by deconstruc- vague, unprobing ments about his life or and perhaps the one masterpiece of the tion of remembering") who explicitly tionist editing; others,like TrinT. Min-ha, relationships- his in one sentence essay-film genre. How ironic, then, that associates recollecting with rewriting. made "text films" (Reassemblage, Sur- dismissing parents Marker chooses the fictive strategy of a Sans Soleil touches upon time, empti- name Viet Given Name Nam), which as a war criminal and a cipher-that the woman's voice (Alexandra Stewart's) ness, Japan, Africa, video games, comic surrounded a subject like colonialism self-analysis comes off as evasive and reading passages from the letters of a strips, Sei Shonagon's lists, dog burials, or oppression of women through a re- shallow. Perhaps all this is intentional: friend, Sandor Krasna. This Krasna fel- relics, political demonstrations, suicide, shuffling of voices and doctored footage; a self-portrait of an unlikable fellow. low is obviously a lightly fictionalized the future,Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, and the Steve Fagin's videos on Lou Andreas It finally seems to me, though, that Jost stand-in for the author, like Lamb's Absolute. What unites it is the melan- Salome and Flaubert's Bouvard and hasn't really attempted to understand Elia. The film was assembled mostly choly-whimsical, bacheloric sensibility Pecuchet used Syberberg-like puppet himself, but just subsumed his self- during the Seventies, a period when of Marker looking at the fragments of stagings, with results that were intrigu- portrait in larger and more forgiving Marker was part of a political commune the modern world moment by moment ing, campy and elusive. These films are socio-historical categories. and preferredto downplay his authorial and trying to make at least poetic sense frightfully intellectual; and they're Clearly, the chief influence on early signature (the title "Conception and of them. "Poetry is born of insecurity," effective, up to a point, in circling their Jost, and indeed on most independent editing: Chris Marker," buried in a he says, "and the impermanence of chosen themes; and yet the last thing filmmakers who have selectively used long list of credits, is the only indication things," at which point we see a samurai any of their creators would do is tell us essayistic maneuvers only to abandon it's his film), which may partly explain swordfight on television. directly, consistently what they actually or undercut them, is Jean-Luc Godard. the diffident whimsy of hiding behind think about their chosen subject. Now, Godard may be the greatest film Sandor Krasna. On the other hand, the IVEN Marker's sterling example, A recent "collage film" by Yvonne artist of our era, but strictly considering distancing device of putting his com- and the video access "revolution," Rainer, Privilege, is a case in point: it the developments of the essay-film, his ments in the third person, or first person and with more and more conceptual mixes dramatic scenes, found footage, influence has been a mixed blessing. once removed, has the effect of giving a artists and defrocked academics taking faked interviews, written texts, docu- Godard is the master of hide and seek, respect and weight to them they might to portapaks and cheap movie rigs, I mentary sequences, etc. in a stimulat- the ultimate tease. Just when you think not have commanded otherwise. As half-expected to see a whole school of ing, braided exploration of menopause you've got him, he wriggles away. How Alexandra Stewart reads passages from essay-films develop. Not only did the and racism. Critic Jonathan Rosen- can we be sure those soundtrack whis- Krasna's/ Marker's letters, prefacing technical potential exist, but a distribu- baum, defending this film in the Chicago perings in Two or Three Things... are them with "he once wrote to me" or tion circuit of underground venues, col- Reader,wrote: "Approachedas a narra- really his opinions? He is too much the "he said," the effect is almost like a ver- leges and museums was in place. But the tive, Yvonne Rainer's sixth feature takes modernist, fracturing, dissociating, col- bal funeral portrait. One cannot escape essay-film never really arrived. What forever to get started and an eternity to laging, to be caught dead straightfor- the impression that Marker is anticipat- took its place, instead, was an explosion end... Yet approached as an essay, wardly expressing his views. (This raises

20 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

This content downloaded from 193.61.13.36 on Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:20:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions an interesting side-issue: to what degree of film he is trying to make. While it's order to have, as he puts it, a "conversa- of the world, the potential for essayistic is the modernist aesthetic itself inimical become a cliche of the New Documen- tion" about the making of Othello. discourse comes into play. First-person to the essay? Certainly the essay form tary to present the difficulty of getting Conversation is of course the heart of narration in film is complicated by the allows for fragmentation and disjunc- the necessary footage as the gist of the the personal essay tradition. disjunction between the subjective voice tion; and yet it keeps weaving itself finished film, Gorin brings to this device A famous raconteur and compulsively on the soundtrack and the third-person, whole again, resisting alienation, if only a flexible, self-mocking voice (the ex- watchable actor, even when bad, Welles material objectivity which the camera through the power of a synthesizing, patriate filmmaker with the French solves through his own charisma the tends to bestow on whatever is photo- personal voice with its old-fashioned accent, too smart and lazy for his own sticky problem of what to do about vis- graphed, like it or not. This tension has humanist assumptions.) good) that is very engaging. In Routine uals in an essay-film-simply by filling been cunningly exploited by the film- To get back to Jean-Luc. Godard has Pleasures, he dispenses entirely with the screen with himself talking. Sud- makers who are drawn to first-person, often used the word "researches" in a news "hook," cheekily alternating denly we are face to face with our essay- like Robert Bresson, Joseph Man- describing his filmic approach, particu- between two things he happened to ist, rather than hearing a disembodied kiewicz, Woody Allen. First-person nar- larly after 1968. "Researches" implies a take footage of, toy train hobbyists and voice. Cutaways to sequences of Othello ration in movies often brings with it a scientific attitude, enabling Godard to painter-film critic Manny Farber, and (re-edited), a relaxed luncheon discus- bookish quality, partly because it has so present, say, deadpan ten-minute shots trying to weave a connection between sion of the play between Welles and two often been used in movies adapted from of an assembly line, ostensibly invoking, these non-related subjects (something actor-friends, and footage of Welles novels, but also because it superimposes through "realtime," the tedium that will about recreating the world ideally?)-if addressing a Boston audience, provide a thoughtful perspective, looking back- encourage us to empathize with the fac- only to justify his having spent the Euro- sufficient visual variety to his talking wards on the supposed "now" of the tory worker. The two times he approxi- pean TV production money. The result torso. film-time. Even an I Walked With a mated an essay-film, not a "research," is a perversely willed, unpredictable What is so refreshing about his talk is Zombie begins to seem studied and were Ici et Ailleurs and Letter to Jane. piece about the thin line between art that he is speaking in an honest, maxi- literary the moment we hear Frances Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) is and hobbyism (the film itself seems a mally intelligent way about things he Dee's narrative voice orienting us to both Godard's (surprisingly) sincere demonstration of this), in which we loves, Shakespeareand filmmaking.This events that began in the past. effort to reflect on the frustration of learn still more about the inertial per- Welles bears little resemblance to the Michael Moore's Roger and Me prom- making a movie about the Palestinian sonality of Mr. Gorin. By drawing arch poseur of late-night talk shows. ises at first to be a model essay-film.The struggle, and a typically modernist at- closer to himself as subject, however, he We are privileged to eavesdrop on a filmmaker sets up, in the first twenty tempt "to weave a text and to tear it to raises the ante of our expectations: for theatrical genius as he shares his minutes, a very strong, beguiling auto- pieces, to build a fiction and to ruin its instance, having acknowledged Manny thoughts and doubts about one of his biographical narrator: we see his par- pretensions" (Andre Bleikasten). Two Farber as his mentor, Gorin's discreet most important productions. On the ents, the town where he grew up, his voices, a "He" and a "She," chase each refusal to be more candid about Farber's one hand, he is musing to himself, misadventures in San Francisco cappuc- other on the soundtrack, saying things personality and the dynamics of men- seeming to dictate an essay aloud. On cino bars. Then, disappointingly,Moore like: "Too simple and too easy to simply torship leaves one disappointed. In both the other hand-as how could Welles phases out the personal side of his nar- divide the world in two. Too easy or too features, Gorin seems hot on the trail of not?-he is also giving a performance, rator, making way for a cast of "color- simple to say simply that the wealthy are the essay-film, but is still too coy about and we can't help judging him simul- ful" interviewees: the rabbit lady, the wrong and the poor are right.Too simple sharing the fullness of his thoughts. taneously as an actor, the way he whips evicting sheriff, the mystic ex-feminist, and too easy to simply say that the poor his head from side to side or raises his the apologist for GM. True, he inserts a are right and the wealthy are wrong. eyebrows. Our awareness of the contriv- recurringmotif of himself trying to con- Too easy. Too easy and too simple." O NE OF THE natural subjects for per- ance behind this seemingly artless con- front Roger Smith, but this faux-naif Godard's Gertrude Stein linguistic cub- sonal essay-films is moviemaking versation has been enhanced by Jon- suspense structurebecomes too mechan- ist approach may be effective in making itself, since it is often what the athan Rosenbaum's research on the ically farcical, and in any case none of us contemplate whether a truth is no filmmaker knows most. There is already making of : apparently these subsequent appearances deepen less valid for being simple; but I would a whole sub-genre of essay-films about it was shot over a number of years, with our sense of Moore's character or mind. hardly call the text, with its blurted slo- the Movie That Might Have Been, Or changing TV crews operating under It's as though the filmmaker hooked gans undercut by verbal arabesques, an Was, Or Could Still Be. Pasolini's Notes Welles's tight direction. us by offering himself as bait, only to attempt at reasoned essayistic discourse. Toward an African Orestes is a sort of Welles's other so-called essay-film, F draw us into this anti-corporate capital- Letter to Jane, on the other hand, is a celluloid notebook into which the film- For Fake, is much less successful as ist sermon. The factual distortions of closely-reasoned if nasty provocation by maker put his preliminary ideas about such, largely because Welles seems Roger and Me, its cavalier manipula- two male-bonded ingrates, Godard and casting, music or global politics for a more intent on mystifying and showing tions of documentary verisimilitude, Gorin, against the female movie star project that never came to pass. Maybe off his magician-Prospero persona than have been analyzed at great length; I still who so generously collaborated with by shooting these "notes," he used up in opening his mind to us. I am never find the film winning, up to a point, and them on their otherwise unbudgetable the enthusiasm that might have gone convinced that Welles is working hard do not so much mind its "unfairness" feature, Tout Va Bien. There is some- into filming the classic itself. Given the to say all he can on the subject of coun- to the truth (especially as the national thing so preposterously unfair about the murkiness of his Medea, I would just as terfeit art; he is so taken up with a glib news media regularly distort in the impersonal didactic language with which soon watch an essay-film of Pasolini defense of artifice that he forgets to other direction), as I do its abandon- Godard-Gorin, like thought-police in- thinking about how he would do an convey his own sincerity, something an ment of what had seemed a very prom- terrogators, critique the supposedly Orestes in Africa as actually view the essayist must do. He would rather have ising essay-film. Perhaps the two are "neo-colonialist" angle of Jane Fonda's finished product. The opening sequences our tepid agreement that everyone's a related: Moore's decision to fade out head as she appears to listen sympathet- are promising: he "casts" by shooting charlatan or all art a kind of lie, than his subjectivepersona, "Michael," seems ically to a Vietnamese peasant. Letter to passersby in the street, telling us, "This move us. Academic film critics, who to coincide with his desire to have his Jane does open up new possibilities for young man could be Orestes." He de- overrate cinematic self-reflexivity and version of the Flint, Michigan story be essay-films, though, by so audaciously livers ambiguous touristic impressions, attention to the narrative "frame," accepted by us as objective truth. resisting any pressure to dazzle the eye such as "The terrible aspect of Africa is adore the cheap joke he pulls on us, Unlike a true personal essayist, Moore (the visuals consist mostly of the Fonda its solitude, the monstrous form that when he promises that everything in the resists the burden of self-understanding, newspaper photo, with a few other stills Nature can assume." But then the film next hour will be true, then makes up electing to ridicule the inanities of the thrown in), and allowing the voiceover abandons these reflections for ten min- some cock-and-bull story towards the rich while not being hard enough on commentary to dominate, for once, un- utes of Gato Barbieri noodling around end, without having told us the sixty himself. Don't get me wrong: the issue apologetically. Also, Letter to Jane in rehearsal,and an awkward,staged dis- minutes were up. Still, I'm grateful for F is not whether Roger and Me betrays solves one of the key problems of essay- cussion in which Pasolini asks a group of For Fake, because its florid windbag the essay-film, a form that barely exists films, what to do for visuals, by making puzzled African male exchange students Welles makes me appreciate the more and that Michael Moore may have no semiotic image-analysis its very subject. how they feel about the Oresteia. the wonderfully civilized, humane Orson conception of. The real question is, why The result is, like it or not, an essay- What makes Notes Towardan African of FilmingOthello. do filmmakers find it so difficult to fol- film. And, for all its Robespierreancold- Orestes so tantalizing and frustrating is Before he died, Welles was planning low a train of thought, using their own ness, I mostly like it, if only because of to have a narrator of the intellectual to make yet another cinematic self- personal voice and experience to guide its unshakeable confidence in the power stature of Pasolini, who nevertheless lets analysis, Filming 'The Trial'. The direc- them? In Moore's case, he seems to have of expository prose. only slivers of his mind show through. tor, who claimed that he read Mon- had a more pressing political agenda. Godard's ex-partner, Jean-Pierre Were he to have written an essay on the taigne every day, had clearly become But there may also be a huge difference Gorin, went on to develop a much more same subject,he would surelyhave strug- seriously devoted to the essay-film. As between writing about oneself and truly personal-essay film style in his own gled harder to pull his thoughts into Welles said himself in a 1982 interview: filming oneself. Filmmakers usually features,Koto and Cabengoand Rou- focus. (Pasolini could be a very compel- "The essay does not date, because it choose that career expecting that they tine Pleasures.In Koto and Cabengo, ling and persuasive essayist.) represents the author's contribution, can stay behind the camera. I suspect Gorin takes as his departure-point a A much more satisfying essay-film however modest, to the moment at that an immense reticence or bashful- seemingly sensationalistic true story about the process of moviemaking and which it was made." ness may set in, once a filmmaker who about two sisters who invent their own what might have been is Orson Welles's has taken center screen as the governing way of speaking, and turns it into a Filming Othello. This brilliant, if rarely- IT COULD be said that all first-person consciousness and main performerof an meditation on language acquisition. seen, self-exegesis consists, for the most narration tends toward the essay, in autobiographical film realizes how ex- Gorin's narration interrogates his own part, of Welles seated with his back to a the sense that, as soon as an "I" begins posed he/she is-an exposure, perhaps, doubts and confusions about what sort TV monitor, talking to the camera in to define his/her position in and view far exceeding what a literary essayist

WINTER1992

This content downloaded from 193.61.13.36 on Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:20:48 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions feels. Hence the dance of coyness and filmmaker-to the great chagrin of his I don't know whether to blame these retreat, mentioned earlier in regard to bankbook. Perhaps his most original processes, chance or the immaturity of Gorin. trick has been to smuggle contraband the genre, but so far, almost none of the Roger and Me also raises the ques- essayism into the fiction film.) examples I would consider essay-films tion: to what extent can an essay-film have boasted superlativevisuals. Service- welcome and ingest interviews while I BEGAN by pointing to the rarity of able, yes, but nothing to compare with still being true to its essayistic nature? essay-films, without explaining why the shimmering visual nobility of a dra- At what point will the multiplicity of this was. Let me try to do that now. matic film by Mizoguchi or Antonioni or voices threaten a unified presentation of First, there is the somewhat intracta- Max Ophuls. The one exception I know "the personal views of the author?" Of ble nature of the camera as a device for of is Night and Fog, a case in which course a film can be composed entirely recording thoughts: its tendency to pro- the separation between visual stylist of interviews and still exhibit a personal vide its own thoughts, in the form of (Resnais) and screenwriter (Cayrol) vision-see Errol Morris' or Marcel extraneous filmed background infor- may have helped both images and text Ophuls' documentaries-but a personal mation, etc. rather than always clearly to reach the same level of artistic ripe- vision is not necessarily a personal essay. expressing what is passing through the ness. Even when a great cinematic stylist Both Morris and Ophuls employ a filmmaker's mind. like Orson Welles tries his hand at an degree of interview material that would Second, there may be, as Stanley essay-film, the visuals are nowhere near BLACK seem, at least in my mind, to tip the Cavell has suggested, a sort of resis- as interesting as those in his narrative scales away from the essay-film toward tance on the part of motion pictures to features. suffers from too A K t Greattalks and readings, the documentary. verbal much Francois Reichenbach, who shot A alwaysfree largesse. Screenplays today The relationship between documen- employ skeletal dialogue, following the most of its documentary material, and tary and essay-filmis uneasy at best. They received wisdom that the screen cannot Filming Othello is a conventional-look- are often mistaken for each other; fre- "sop up" much language. Whether this ing, talking-heads production made for BOOKS quently,a work starts off as an essay-film is because of an inherent property in the German television. Chris Marker em- EXCELLENTNEW, 1491Shattuck Avenue and then runs for cover to the protec- medium, or because its limits have ploys a visual style which is notationally USED,AND Berkeley,CA94709 tive of the never been tested of and decentered (and occa- OUTOF PRINT BOOKS 415 486-0698 camouflage documentary. sufficiently (think engaging Roughly speaking, the essay-film is a the novelty of Rohmer's My Night at sionally even mournfully beautiful, as sub-genre of the documentary (it must Maud's when it first appeared-a real in Le Joli Mai, when he had the budget be, since it is shelved that way in video "talkie"!), the amount of rich, ample for better cameramen); but for the most rental stores). At times, however, they language a film can support remains a part, his visuals lack the syntactical rigor behave like two different beasts. question mark. and elegance of his language. Ralph When Michael Moore made a splash Then there are commercial consider- Arlyck's texts have considerable com- with Roger and Me, he was at pains to ations: just as essay collections rarely plexity and charm, but his visuals remain tell reporters, somewhat churlishly, that sell in bookstores, so essay-films are only one cut above the usual neutral doc- he hated most documentaries and did expected to have little popularity; and umentary or hand-held cinema verite. It not consider his to be one. In so doing films, after all, require a larger initial is almost as though, when the part of he was distancing himself both from the investment than books. Still, this uncom- the brain that commands a sophisti- "box office poison" of documentaries mercial aspect hasn't exactly stopped cated rational discourse springs into and the standards of ethical documen- the legion of experimental filmmakers, action, the visual imagination becomes tary procedure. He also left the impres- whose work often takes a more esoteric, sluggish, passive, less demanding. sion that he had invented a whole new impenetrable form than would an intel- Here it might be argued by some that type of movie, instead of acknowledging ligently communicative essay-film. the power of cinematic images springs that there were other autobiographical Finally, I suspect there is a self-selec- from the unconscious mind, not from filmmakers like Ross McElwee, Tony tion process attracting certain types of rational thought processes-that you Buba, and Ralph Arlyck who had got- people into filmmaking as an art form: need access to the irrational, the ten there first. they revere images, want to make magic, dreamscape to make visually resonant To my knowledge Ralph Arlyck is, and are uncomfortable with the pinning films. I wonder. So much of film theory besides Chris Marker, the one consis- down of one's thoughts that an essay is prejudiced in favor of the oneiric. Yet tent essay-filmmaker.Arlyck, whose last demands. You would probably stand a many of the film images that move me a two movies, An Acquired Taste and better chance of getting a crop of good most reflect detachment, serenity or Current Events, both showed at the essay-films if you gave out cameras and philosophical resignation toward the I I . New York Film Festival, reported he budgets to literary essayists, and told wakened world that can only think of I want was once on a panel discussion and them to write their next essay for the as-rational. don't to sound too described himself as a maker of essay- screen, than if you rounded up the usual dualistic about this by implying that films, at which point some industry pro- independent filmmakers and requested essays are only written with the rational ducer said with an incredulous sneer: them to make essay-films. (I realize this mind; certainly an essayist taps into "You mean like-Thoreau?" After that, will sound like a very self-serving sug- unconscious currents for imagery or even Arlyck has been leery of using the gestion on my part!) passion. But I still say that the essay is a term essay-film, which may be more I also can anticipate a howl of pro- form par excellence for the display of box-office poison than "documentary." test: If what you are after is a polished rational thinking processes. So too An Acquired Taste (1981) is, in fact, literary text, why not simply write an should be the essay-film. an hilarious half-hour personal essay essay? Why make a film at all? Don't I think it's not suprising, this sudden about the filmmaker's lack of commer- you understand that the film medium frequency with which the term "essay- cial success, his jealousy and career has certain properties of its own, etc. film" is being optimistically and loosely envy, as seen against the American etc.? Yes I do understand. But I continue invoked in cinematic circles. Right now, dream of rising to the top. Arlyck pokes to believe that it is worth exploring this there is a hunger in film aesthetics and fun at his pathetic go-getter attempts: under-used form, which may give us experimental film practice for the med- ighest there is one excruciating scene in which something that neither literary essays ium to jump free of its genre corral, and we watch the filmmaker typing out a nor other types of films can. to reflect on the world in a more intel- grant application. "Increasingly I feel It seems to me that three working pro- lectually stimulating and responsible like the Ferdinand the Bull of filmmak- cedures suggest themselves for the mak- way. When a good film with non-fiction ing," he concludes. He prefers to stay ing of essay-films: 1) to write or borrow elements comes along that provokes home, play with the kids and make mild a text and go out and find images for it. thought, like Yvonne Rainer's Privilege, little films, while his wife flies off to I don't necessarily mean "illustra- it is understandably hailed as an essay- France to defend her doctoral thesis. tions," which casts the visual compo- film. And it may turn out in the end that The Arlyck character comes across as a nent in a subordinate position. The there is no other way to do an essay on likable schlemiel, cousin to Woody images and spoken text can have a con- film, that the type of essay-film I have Alien-not necessarily because he is trapuntal or even contradictory rela- been calling for is largely impractical, ANN FLANAGAN influenced by Alien but because both tion to each other. 2) The filmmaker can or overly restrictive, or at odds with the TYPO GRAPHY are drawing from the same well of shoot or compile previously shot footage inherent nature of the medium. But I 2512 Ninth Street, Suite 5 urban Jewish self-deprecating humor. and then write a text which is a medita- will go on patiently stoking the embers Berkeley, CA 94710 (Indeed, listening to Woody Alien's tion on the assembled images. This is of the form as I envision it, convinced Tel 415.549.1128 digressive, epigrammatic narrators in often Chris Marker's approach. 3) The that the truly great essay-films have yet FAX 415.549.2759 films like Annie Hall, Hannah and Her filmmaker can write a little, shoot a to be made, and that this succulent Sisters or New York Stories, I've often little, write a bit more, and so on-the opportunity awaits the daring cine- SINCE 1975 thought that with a little push Woody one process interacting with the other essayists of the future. O could have ended up a natural essay- throughout.

22 THETHREEPENNY REVIEW

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