WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/westminsterresearch Reclaiming the image Béla Tarr's world of 'inhuman' becoming: an artistic and philosophical inquiry Elzbieta Buslowska School of Media, Arts and Design This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2012. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] RECLAIMING THE IMAGE. Béla Tarr's World of 'Inhuman' Becoming: An Artistic and Philosophical Inquiry ELZBIETA BUSLOWSKA Béla Tarr, Sátántangó (1994), 419min A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 abstract: The thesis entitled 'Reclaiming the Image' is an artistic and philosophical enquiry. It aims at a radical re-thinking of the concept of the image outside the accepted notions of realism and representation by opening up the photographic real in the process of bringing together photography and cinema, stillness and movement, life and art, aesthetics and politics. It involves a thinking and writing with Béla Tarr's cinematic imagery through Gilles Deleuze's philosophical concepts. Its objective is not to illustrate Deleuze's ideas with Tarr's images, nor to read Tarr's cinema through Deleuze as such, but to think with images philosophically, in the hope of opening up the area of theory to the creative 'powers of the false'. I wish it to be seen as an aesthetico-ethical experiment which, rather than developing an overarching theoretical argument, constructs a critical and creative assemblage of different ideas and voices. On the one hand, the project seeks to creatively re-think Deleuzian concepts while thinking 'about' still and moving images, in relation to the real as affect and thought. On the other, to 'continue' films' images by opening their thinking further. The project of reclaiming the image as re-thinking in non-representational terms of immanent becoming will engage the Deleuzian- Bergsonian- Nietzschean concepts of time, life and aesthetics, and Tarr's intensely felt image-world in the series of encounters – affect-thoughts – that will undermine the normative notion of reality. The two modes – critical and creative – are not constructed separately but weaved together throughout what is 'enacted' as filmosophical "free indirect discourse" – a poetic coming together of film, philosophy and writing (as art). It is hoped that this will enable the potential for opening new areas of thinking and writing about/ with film/ photographic imagery outside the main discourses concerning theory and practice, the critical and the creative. 2 contents: acknowledgements 4 author's declaration 5 prologue 7 exposure 1: (Re)creating the Real. By way of introduction 15 exposure 2: The Moving Image: Tarr's Cinema and Deleuze's Time-Image 51 The Quest(ion) of W(a)onderous Narrative. exposure 3: Rendering Real. Still(ed) Image and The Outside. Space 103 exposure 4: Textured Soundscapes. Poet(h)ics of the Image-Sound 169 exposure 5: Fleeing Poetics or Ontology of Becoming: an Aesthetico-Ethical 217 Experiment in Thought. Becoming Artist-Child of Philosophy epilogue: Without Conclusion; As Such 274 bibliography 288 filmography 299 appendix 300 illustrations 314 3 acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Dr Margherita Sprio for her continual support and encouragement, Dr Shohini Chaudhuri for the insightful commentary, the University of Essex and the University of Westminster for the financial assistance, my partner William for his kindness, understanding and unending patience, and all those whose generosity and support have made this PhD dissertation possible. 4 author’s declaration: I Elzbieta Buslowska, hereby state that the material contained within this thesis is all my own work. 5 …films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films – strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time. I really don’t know why I make films. Béla Tarr He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human The virtual structure of art and concepts bares only the potential to make us come in contact with the virtual forces of the world, which then makes us, or make us want to, become in some sense. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? 6 prologue: Throw away lights and definitions And say of what you see in the dark … Wallace Stevens1 It was some time ago during one of my undergraduate tutorials, that the encounter with the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr (1955-) began; virtually then, and through my own photographic practice. It was an invitation to see his films that started a journey leading eventually to this doctoral thesis. What stayed with me, and 'forced' me to go back to Tarr's films again and again, was the 'photographic' or 'photo-cinematic'. An image-sensation that is real in a very particular way – linked to the world but neither of the world as a copy, nor about the world as representation. Somewhere between reality and fiction, the real seemed to be created outside of recognition and referentiality or, better still, rendered 'visible'.2 It resonated intensely with my own photographic work, along with some black and white films I saw as a child, to which I could not put a name, and whose titles (and most of the stories they contained, but not the 'image', or rather, the sense of it) now escapes me. It was the overwhelming sensation of the visual, a strangely felt aesthetic in a sense, and the 'real' that I have already started pursuing in my own photographic practice – the real that existed somehow through or alongside the image, rather than in it. It was the desire to 'speak' about this intensity in the intuitive mode, and the necessity to find a new language to invoke what I now can refer to, with Deleuze, as the 'time-image'. I felt that in order to search for this nagging real, it was necessary to abandon all the 'realities' that the Western philosophical tradition offers as "image of thought": phenomenological, realistic, and idealistic.3 Amongst so many images that seem to 1 Wallace Stevens, 'The Man With the Blue Guitar', in The Palm At the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and Plays (Vintage Books, New York, 1990), p. 149. 2 Rendering visible invisible forces is the Deleuzian motif adopted from Paul Klee, describing the nature of art. As Deleuze asserts, after Klee, the object of painting (art) is "not to render the visible but to render visible." Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (Continuum, London and New York 2002), p. 39. 3 ‘Image of thought’ is an expression developed by Deleuze which refers to the tradition of Western philosophy, in which philosophy or thinking has been regarded as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason or universals: “An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively 7 adhere to the dialectic imperatives of what is accepted as real, positioned against virtual or fictional, Tarr's cinema appeared so refreshingly and challengingly new – a real 'food for thought'. He seemed to 'liberate' the photographic of cinema from representation, realism and its affinity to storytelling; creating an image 'in itself' – a pure cinema or non-cinema, depending on the discourse at hand.4 Difficult and demanding, Tarr's work sits uncomfortably between categories and styles, fleeing from positioning and naming, powerfully and uncompromisingly resisting conventions of mainstream cinema and yet neither 'avant-garde' nor popular, an art outside the opposition of high and low. Black-and-white, all shot on 35mm celluloid film, with no actors or ready scripts, with very long takes edited mostly 'within shots'5, the very long films he creates are neither realistic/ naturalistic nor formalistic; in a sense neither documentary nor fiction; a strikingly distinctive creation. A "heroic violation" of conventional cinema, Susan Sontag wrote after seeing Sátántangó (1994); "first exposure to his work punctures all conventional expectations of cinematic time and space", notes Fionn Meade.6 A particular sense of the real is evoked within each immaculately constructed shot, and runs throughout Tarr's work, which he sees as a single project. It is "getting close to life", and "a vision." What is happening during each filming could only be described as creating with life, or alongside it; as a somewhat almost impossible combination of the director's 'vision' and what Tarr describes as "living in the situation."7 The kind of stops people from thinking” asserts Deleuze in the conversation with Claire Parnett.