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Common Interests, Competing Subjectivities: Us and Latin COMMON INTERESTS, COMPETING SUBJECTIVITIES: U.S. AND LATIN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE FILM THEORY AND PRACTICE By Sarah Louise Childress Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2009 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Date: Dana D. Nelson 6-15-09 Paul Young 6-15-09 D.N. Rodowick 6-15-09 Gregg Horowitz 6-15-09 For my Dad, who knew I’d make it ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Center for the Americas and the Center for Ethics, both at Vanderbilt University. My profound gratitude to Paul Young who started me on this wild and wonderful adventure in film studies five years ago. He has been a constant supporter of my work and my teaching and I can only hope to repay him by becoming a generous mentor and supportive colleague in my own turn. This dissertation would not have happened without Dana Nelson. She has always believed in me and her steady hand has helped me to believe in myself. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Gregg Horowitz, who has been my North Star. He has always helped me find my way, even when I seemed most lost. I can only begin to express my thanks to David Rodowick for his cheerful encouragement, constant care, generous guidance, and for championing my cause. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION.................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iii Chapter INTRODUCTION: THE SUBJECT OF NEW AMERICAN CINEMA ............................1 I. INSTITUTING THE SUBJECT IN NEW AMERICAN CINEMA..............................34 II. SEEING I’S: THE SUBJECT AS WINDOW ON THE WORLD IN DOG STAR MAN, MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESAROLLO AND TERRA EM TRANSE ...127 III. EMPOWERING OTHERS: THE ALTERNATIVE CINEMAS OF THE CHELSEA GIRLS, TIRE DIÉ, AND LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS .......................207 CONCLUSION: THE COMMON INTERESTS AND COMPETING SUBJECTIVITIES OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA...........................................279 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................293 iv INTRODUCTION The Subject of new American cinema This study focuses on seven canonical filmmakers of the 1960s: Fernando Birri (Argentina), Stan Brakhage (United States), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba), Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Argentina), and Andy Warhol (United States). By reading their film manifestos and interviews in conversation with their films, we can see how these public statements about their filmmaking serve as a place of epistemological reflection. The filmmakers ponder what we know, how we know it, the implications of this knowledge, how new forms of knowledge can be created, and what role film plays in the process of knowledge formation. Their films enact these questions while also portraying alternative forms of knowledge and presenting perspectives that challenge established ideas. Central to these epistemological investigations is a focus on subjectivity. The filmmakers’ concepts of subjectivity influence their film practice. In contrast to political modernism, which emphasizes how films determine subjectivity by reproducing a critical consciousness in spectators via self- reflexive theoretical practices that expose the ideologies inherent in dominant cultural forms,1 I examine how filmmaker concepts of subjectivity shape their formal experiments. 1 According to D.N. Rodowick in The Crisis of Political Modernism, the discourse of political modernism, how those involved in political modernist theory and practice describe their projects, tends to consist of three basic principles: the development of an avant-garde representational strategy that emphasizes the materiality of the film in order to combat the illusionism of dominant ideological forms that repress their communication of conventions, norms and values; the attempt to produce a critical subjectivity capable of breaking an identification with dominant ideology by redefining the relations between spectator and the cinema; and emphasis on an epistemological break, a sort of before-consciousness and after-consciousness, which results in the organization of concepts and rhetoric grounded in sets of binary oppositions. The formal relations within the political modernist text are seen to reproduce these dualisms. Thus, they are 5 I also read the manifestos, interviews, and films of these seven filmmakers in conversation with one another. By doing so, I have discovered a variety of common interests and shared influences that connect them. Subjectivity is certainly one of those concerns, since these filmmakers frame their inquiries and envision their formal experiments by thinking through how systemic pressures shape subjectivity, and Hollywood and its filmmaking model serve as the primary ideological instrument that detrimentally shapes subjectivity. It is also the economic and aesthetic monolith that these filmmakers think themselves through and against, and they take pains to place their own filmmaking in contrast to it. Such common concerns and shared influences unite them, as does the flow of their discourse about film and filmmaking. Through the discourse of these filmmakers, we can trace out the existence of a discourse network that connects these filmmakers to one another and that produces a North-South flow of information, ideas, and practice, which begins in Hollywood, spreads out to Europe, then to the independent filmmakers in the U.S. and Latin America, and finally back to Europe and Hollywood when filmmakers there begin turning to Latin America and the U.S. for inspiration. The formal experiments of the Western hemisphere filmmakers begin with their common interest in how various systemic influences detrimentally shape subjectivity. U.S. filmmakers concern themselves with the loss of individuality in contemporary society, a loss precipitated by consumer culture and the culture industry. Warhol talks about the erasure of particularity and the repetitive nature of thought and action: everybody looks alike and acts alike, doing the same thing day after day. Brakhage generally conceived of as dialectical, both in terms of performing a negative-dialectical function of critique and in the ways that they link subjectivity to film form, since the dialectical function of the text is what generates a critical consciousness in the film spectator. 6 expresses his concern with a society “bent on destroying that which is alive within it, its individuals” so it can “run on and on like the machine it is.” The Latin American filmmakers focus their attention on neocolonialism and what Solanas and Getino call the “conceptual dependency” it generates. Solanas and Getino describe bourgeois art forms and concepts as ideological instruments that mediate the Argentine people’s ability to express their own thoughts, experiences, and creativity, thereby disrupting their ability to portray their unique experiences and conditioning them to inaction through the acceptance of imposed beliefs. Likewise, Birri sees neocolonialism blinding individuals to its workings through cultural products, like film, which present a false appearance of reality; this false reality prevents the Argentine people from realizing they share a common experience and forecloses the potential for an Argentine nation. Gutiérrez Alea and Rocha similarly highlight the connection between appearance, belief, and action. Gutiérrez Alea describes the Cuban people as appearing to support the revolution, yet in their everyday lives, they succumb to counter-revolutionary attitudes and actions – the memories of underdevelopment. Because the people cling to these memories, they have not yet caught up to the radical political change that surrounds them and the Cuban nation remains an ideal rather than a reality. Rocha characterizes the Brazilian people as also deriving their identities from colonial power relations. They do not break free from the conceptual and material systems that subordinate them because of the limits put in place by neocolonial structures but also because they believe they are powerless.2 2 These descriptions occur in: Andy Warhol’s interview with G.R. Swenson. “What is Pop Art?” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. Ed. Kenneth Goldsmith. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004; Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, New York: Film Culture, 1963; Fernando Birri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” New Latin American Cinema: Volume One: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, Ed. Michael T. Martin, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997; Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the 7 Each filmmaker foregrounds the relationship between system and subjectivity but also proposes a way that film can create an autonomous subjectivity, one free from systemic mediation. In their descriptions, the cinematic experience serves as a location where difference thrives and where challenge and change can occur, and thus serves as a free space where autonomy becomes possible. In political theory, “free spaces” are locations where people draw on existing traditions to generate unconventional values, beliefs, behaviors, histories or versions of community. These revised worldviews
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