Essays on the Essay Film
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ESSAYS ON THE ESSAY FILM EDITED BY NORA M. ALTER AND TIMOTHY CORRIGAN Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alter, Nora M., 1962– editor. | Corrigan, Timothy editor. Title: Essays on the essay flm / edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017 | Series: Film and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2016040210 (print) | LCCN 2016056155 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231172660 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231172677 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231543996 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental flms—History and criticism. | Documentary flms—History and criticism. Classifcation: LCC PN1995.9.E96 E88 2017 (print) | LLC PN1995.9.E96 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/611—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040210 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America cover design: Lisa Hamm CONTENTS INTRODUCTION NORA M. ALTER AND TIMOTHY CORRIGAN!1 PART I. FOUNDATIONS 1. “ON THE NATURE AND FORM OF THE ESSAY” GEORG LUKÁCS!21 2. THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ROBERT MUSIL!41 3. “ON THE ESSAY AND ITS PROSE” MAX BENSE!49 4. “THE ESSAY AS FORM” THEODOR W. ADORNO!60 VI!CONTENTS 5. “PREFACE TO THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY” ALDOUS HUXLEY!83 PART II. THE ESSAY FILM THROUGH HISTORY 6. “THE FILM ESSAY: A NEW TYPE OF DOCUMENTARY FILM” HANS RICHTER!89 7. “THE FUTURE OF CINEMA” ALEXANDRE ASTRUC!93 8. “BAZIN ON MARKER” ANDRÉ BAZIN!102 PART III. CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS 9. “IN SEARCH OF THE CENTAUR: THE ESSAY-FILM” PHILLIP LOPATE!109 10. “THE POLITICAL IM/PERCEPTIBLE IN THE ESSAY FILM: FAROCKI’S IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR” NORA M. ALTER!134 CONTENTS!VII 11. “ESSAY QUESTIONS” PAUL ARTHUR!161 12. “THE ELECTRONIC ESSAY” MICHAEL RENOV!172 13. “THE ESSAY FILM: PROBLEMS, DEFINITIONS, TEXTUAL COMMITMENTS” LAURA RASCAROLI!183 14. “OF THE HISTORY OF THE ESSAY FILM: VERTOV TO VARDA” TIMOTHY CORRIGAN!197 15. “THE CINEMA AND THE ESSAY AS A WAY OF THINKING” RAYMOND BELLOUR!227 16. “THE ESSAY FILM: FROM FILM FESTIVAL FAVORITE TO FLEXIBLE COMMODITY FORM?” THOMAS ELSAESSER!240 PART IV. FILMMAKERS ON THE ESSAYISTIC 17. “PERFORMING BORDERS: TRANSNATIONAL VIDEO” URSULA BIEMANN!261 VIII!CONTENTS 18. “PROPOSAL FOR A TUSSLE” JEAN-PIERRE GORIN!269 19. “THE ESSAY AS CONFORMISM? SOME NOTES ON GLOBAL IMAGE ECONOMIES” HITO STEYERL!276 20. “ON WRITING THE FILM ESSAY” LYNNE SACHS!2 87 21. “TRAMP STEAMER” ROSS MC ELWEE!292 22. “THE ABCs OF THE FILM ESSAY” HARUN FAROCKI AND CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER!297 23. “RIDDLES AS ESSAY FILM” LAURA MULVEY!314 24. “CERTAIN OBLIQUENESSES” RENÉE GREEN!323 25. “ESSAY DOCUMENTARY: THE DISEMBODIED NARRATOR AND AN UNCLAIMED IMAGE THAT FLOATS THROUGH SPACE AND TIME” REA TAJIRI!333 CONTENTS!IX 26. “FROM TEN THOUSAND WAVES TO LINA BO BARDI, VIA KAPITAL” ISAAC JULIEN!335 Bibliography 345 Contributors 351 Permissions 361 Index 363 16 THE ESSAY FILM From Film Festival Favorite to Flexible Commodity Form? (2015) THOMAS ELSAESSER Afer more than a decade of increasing academic attention, a consensus is beginning to emerge that seems to confrm that essay flms “are flms which refect their own representational mode, are more likely to develop an idea than narrate a story, and at times produce intellectual and philo- sophical works that are a form of thought or at the very least, they stimulate thinking. Categories that need to become the focus of discussion in the essay flm are association, analogy, fragment, constellation, proportion, topology, hybridity and deconstruction.”1 Tis quotation, which comes from the introduction to a collection of essays on the essay flm, tries to be inclusive and broad, but rather than follow its lead and explore the suggested categories, I begin with a brief summary of what conventionally constitute the features that distinguish the essay flm from the documen- tary, the fction flm, the found-footage flm, and the compilation flm, even as essay flms tend to overlaps and intersects with all of them. Te essay flm is considered to be more “subjective” than the docu- mentary, because its relation to the evidentiary ground of documentary is looser, more speculative, and more suggestive. As a consequence, its rela- tion to veracity and verifcation (i.e., truth-seeking) is more ambiguous, and its declarative tone more ironic, self-deprecating, or even deliberately deceptive. Tese aspects are part of what we term the essay flm’s subjec- tivity, and “subjectivity” is part of its appeal, its special status as a flm practice, short of being a genre in its own right. THE ESSAY FILM!241 Te essay flm difers from the feature flm—even the auteur flm, also ofen praised for its subjective point of view—by being less beholden to, or dependent on, “narrative.” Hence the ofen stated maxim that in the essay flm “theme substitutes for plot,” and that argument and associa- tion prevail over anticipation and narrative momentum. Hence also the connection of the essay flm with idea of “meditation” and “introspec- tion,” and the inevitable reference to Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, and Francis Bacon as the literary fathers of the essay flm. But as Christy Wampole, a literary scholar, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece from May 2013, entitled “Te Essayifcation of Everything”: “Te essayist sam- ples more than a D.J.: a loop of the epic here, a little lyric replay there, a polyvocal break and citations from greatnesses past, all with a signature scratch on top. But this is the force of the essay: it impels you to face the undecidable. It asks you to get comfortable with ambivalence.”2 Tis, with equal plausibility, could be—and has been—said of the essay flm as well. Indeed, what we have been witnessing in the past decade or so is the “essayifcation of the documentary.” Te essay flm can be like a found-footage flm in that it accommodates and even welcomes a certain heterogeneity of materials and moods, of topics and temporalities, of locations and levels of reference. Yet it distin- guishes itself from found-footage and compilation flm by having a stron- ger singular voice: it can be assertive and personal, even autobiographical, but it is also not afraid to question its own status or challenge its own authority. As the initial quotation confrms, essay flms are driven by a structure of thought, however apparently hidden or at frst glance imperceptible this thought-process may be. To that extent, even the disparity of sources and the assemblage of heterogeneous elements generally results in an order or a sequential logic that is less a matter of compilation and more the result of composition. Two sets of metaphorical descriptions prevail: one taken from fabric and texture, the other from music and melody. Tat is, the essay flm can assume montage-form, with modular units, a patch- work of separate motifs quilted together by way of contrast or even clash. Or the essay flm deploys a themes-and-variation approach, where voices and motifs weave in and out, stay in the background, or are allowed to come to the fore. For instance, both Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (ofen claimed as an early essay flm) and Harun Farocki’s 242!CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS Wie Man Sieht (As You See, 1986) compare flmmaking to weaving: one by emphasizing the stitching together of flm strips to form patterns and make connections, while Farocki aligns the mechanization of the Jac- quard weaving loom with the turn to automation in general, and—via the IBM punch cards and player-piano sound performance—links “the regularity of the weave” with the substitution of the hand by the eye, thus suggesting that the eye becomes a tactile organ, but also that images and sounds come under operational regimes that link the automatism of the photograph with calculating machines and computational programming. More specifcally, the tactile-textural qualities of the essay flm have also been explored by writers like Laura Marks and Antonia Lant. As to the musical analogy, one can think of Handsworth Songs (1986), made by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective, and one of Britain’s outstanding contributions to the essay flm. To the three characteristics—subjectivity, associative logic, hetero- geneity—we can thus add a fourth: refexivity, a feature also frequently attributed to the essay flm. Its specifc type of refexivity can be identifed with cinematic modernism, albeit in a slightly diferent confguration, as a type of recursiveness, where images are able to comment on themselves, or where voice and image are in a dialogue with each other, in mutual interaction or fruitful tension. Such recursive dialogism emphasizes the ways the essay flm can enact strategies of displacement, irony, plurivo- cality that the more conventional documentary might avoid, in order not to blunt a political message, weaken an activist agenda, or jeopardize an air of impartial neutrality. A classic of the political documentary, for instance, such as Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), might there- fore, retroactively, be a candidate for the essay flm, because of its sardonic irony, its sound and image counterpoints, thus resolving a long-standing debate over the generic identity of Land Without Bread as a documentary, a parody of a documentary, or an essay in surrealist anthropology.3 Now that the essay flm is gaining ground also outside Europe, in Latin America and Africa, where traditionally documentaries were expected to be hard-hitting instruments of political advocacy, supporting spe- cifc causes, exposing social evils, or act as militant weapons in political struggles—think Argentinean “Tird Cinema” or Brazil’s “Cinema Novo”— the adoption of the looser and more refexive form of the essay flm may be an indication, not necessarily that these struggles have been won, THE ESSAY FILM!243 but that a more pensive tone or melancholy mood now refects the state of politics and personal engagement also in the countries of the Southern Hemisphere.