What is radical cinema today?
Knut Åsdam, Abyss, (film, 43 min), 2010.
‘Darkness brings out the best in people. Everybody looks good in darkness, while the light brings out all the failings of people in their skin or in their postures. In darkness, fantasy and imagination merge with the real and material. Even sound is better in the dark.’[i]
What is radical cinema today? Is it possible to answer such a question, and what is the status, or even the necessity, of such a question? Cinema as we know it through its big industrial productions, e.g. Hollywood, is not the dominant entertainment industry any more; that peak is occupied by computer gaming. However, culturally speaking, cinema, as it finds new spaces to occupy on television, online and in museums and galleries, maintains a significant presence within the popular imaginary, and remains a medium that can host relatively accessible social discussions. So clearly cinema — the narrative moving image — still matters as a medium. But it is possible to say anything cohesive about which strategies work best? Or is it even meaningful to do so?
It is not really meaningful, of course, since to talk about film is to discuss an area with a diversity only comparable with literature, in its span from the popular to the esoteric. But why does it matter anyhow? I think that question can be answered in two ways. One is that the sites of cinema, the spaces in which we experience it, the spaces which allow it to have a place, and the spaces it creates, are all significant. The other answer relates to the films themselves: the moving image as the image of our time. The moving image, in its shapeshifting form, is a medium in which different worlds and discussions can coexist, and where different timescales and subjectivities can be placed next to each other. It is the ultimate collage — moving through time, but always suggesting something outside its frame — and one that relates to the composite character of our lives.
But where is critical or radical cinema to be found today? Is it within art house cinemas, museums, TV, or in multiplex theatres? In mainstream narrative film or art school video? The answer here, too, is obvious: radical cinema is in all these places, yet still it is marginalised. If you were to list the most interesting, groundbreaking films you have seen, it would probably include examples of all these spaces of distribution: blockbusters, TV series, made-for-TV movies, art house films, and films made within an art context.
I have previously written[ii] that the movement which pushed much radical cinema into the art space in the last fifteen years marked a shift in the claims of mainstream culture and the claims upon the conventions of film making. As the film industry grew and then started to recede, there was a continued economic pressure on what could be shown. But we also experienced the expansion of populist culture, in response to a perceived demand for it. Aided by the news industry’s need to sell and to dissipate information, and the understanding of populist rhetoric, cinema increasingly became a space claimed by the middle ground. With the claim of the centre and the middle-ground identity — of what is a ‘citizen’: who is this person, and what content should this person see or experience — the fight for the centre increased, but also marginalised film that offered any critique of conventions.
As Dan Graham and Michel Foucault have separately observed, the space of cinema is a site for the organization of the power of the look, and this relates the space of cinema to architecture. However, there is a deeper relation to ideas of what Jacques Lacan called ‘the Gaze’,[iii] as well as that of the parallax: the filmic place is an intersection of representations of surface, performative processes and narrative. However, it is also the space of movement, and the unsettling function of that movement towards the uncontrollability of the next frame. The subject viewing a film — or rather, experiencing the film, in the sense that viewing and listening, mixed with other intersecting or disturbing elements, makes up a composite experience while watching — is not able to control the sequencing, or the next frame coming. This amounts to what I’d like to call cinema’s ‘parallax moment’. When one relates to something spatial through movement, a building for example, there is a shift that is not merely an alteration of speed or the scopic view; rather it’s an ontological shift that occurs in both the subject and object. Neither the subject nor the object is the same in this relation as they were earlier, and cannot be defined in the same way in relation to each other; nor are they controllable by the subject. This lack of control opens up a Lacanian ‘gaze’, a kind of zero point in language, a hole in the scopic field. The scopic field is the visual field of understanding for the subject and thereby constituting the subject. This temporary hole, before language fills it in, is therefore traumatic for subjectivity since it does not have control, and because it undermines its very stability as a subject. It is no longer the origin of the spatial coordinates[iv]. In this sense, one site of politics in cinema lies in the relationship between the subject matter and the gaze: what matters here is the potential in the meeting between the subject matter and the viewer’s own sense of instability and impermanence brought on by the destabilising shifts that occur while the film is running. This is what makes the space that cinema opens up to a viewer so particular and useful.
What I have been describing here is an effectual space, a physical-psychological bridge constructed from within the image-stream of cinema. This is what particularised the space of cinema together with the different contexts and environments of reception we have today. If you are watching TV, a DVD or an internet stream in a domestic environment, there is likely to be a process of voluntary or involuntary disruption: you go to the kitchen, somebody calls, you call back, you read something or start talking to someone else, and so on. This resembles the way we take part in conversations in other areas of our lives. What is put into context, or what is processed in relation to this, of course, is the actual film you are watching, and the subject matter of that film.
The key formal elements here are speed, temporality and the surface of representation. The cinematic place in particular, then (rather than the space of cinema), is a site of movements, accidental and constructed meetings, and differential energies, and — film being primarily a photographic medium — the filmic place is a space of the surface. It is simultaneously the site of surface and the space of an image in transition.
But so far we have only talked generally about the function of cinema, not about a specifically radical cinema. However, a radical cinema of today is conscious of the machinery and function of the cinematic relationship, and why this is different from, for instance, reading a book. Another factor is that we cannot separate one thing from another. I still believe Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote to be true, “The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically”[v], to be true. This is because the political is embedded in the deeper structural layers of modes of production; it is not about merely ‘illustrating an opinion’. It’s the difference between rhetoric and function: it doesn’t matter if a smiling, friendly politician warmly tells you that s/he is not racist, and that they condemn racist acts, if the same person is instigating policies that unfairly limit and obstruct people on the basis of ethnicity. The political is not about nice people being nice or bad people being bad,[vi] instead it’s largely a question of effectual structures. This is why even formal conventions are important. In my opinion, the relation to conventions is the key relation of art, and of critical and political cinema. This is a strategy that involves the entire span from TV series to art house cinema. It is about being conscious of the politics of the language you are using, and its inherent conventions.
The assumed transparencies of photography, acting, pacing and different modes of speech adhered to in much film work today, in both mainstream and artists’ film, only serves to perpetuate the representative power of a hopelessly restrictive representation of identities and social and private signifiers. Filmmaking must make visible the agencies of the surfaces, the languages and the movements of the contemporary society surrounding it, without attempting to neutralise it. A conscious and critical relation to the conventions at play is about bearing witness to the present-day image-overload, but it is also about claiming a space for the imaginary — the meaning and horizon of possibility within this mass of images — for image-compositions that give different meaning and movements of information.
If relating to conventions is also about the struggle of the imaginary — that which can be imagined, announced or suppressed within different public spheres — where can one discover ‘different imaginaries’ within the general overload of images and information?
Perhaps, with Deleuze and Guattari, we should talk about ‘major’ and ‘minor language’. Major language is that of state power, control and assimilation, the privileging of an ‘official’ language; minor language grows out of that same language, but is local and parasitic, creatively consuming pieces of the official language. Minor language works through a minimum of deviation that produces transformative effects, such as within racial and sexual identities, where derogatory terms get converted into affirmative ones (but only for the communities themselves); or where broken English enables a narrative and affirmation of identity that is not possible within the official language.
Now, what does this minor language speak of? Of course, it speaks of processes of change — local, personal, physical changes and changes of identity. Changes caused partly by the movements of the major body — the cementing, controlling force or claim of the neutral and universal — and partly driven by the possibility for people to find difference within language for themselves.
This is a space of deviation: often only a slight, minimal deviation. Since this space of deviation is clearly the space of the imaginary, this is also the space of literature, and by extension the space of cinema.
And who speaks this minor language? Well, minor language is spoken everywhere. It is spoken by individuals and groups who either cannot master the full breadth of the major language, or who speak it against itself, i.e. where English is broken and spoken ‘incorrectly’ as a testimony to the changing nature of the everyday around us, an everyday marked by the continued migration of people, images and desires. Where everyday tasks are handled in ways that are recombinant and different.
Minor language is recombinant because it takes material that is already there and puts it together in a slightly different way, altering the meaning in the process. The recombinant and broken qualities supply precision in an everyday mediascape that’s overflowing with images and verbal information. This precision is cultural, social, historical and economic, since it grows out of a creative process relating to the dominant language of its time and place. A recombinant strategy is one that dares to speak, but knows the singular image’s incapability of speaking truth — but nevertheless still mentions it, and yet another, as two words and two possibilities coexisting and contextualising each other into a statement.
In this, the world, with its ‘interpretation hunger’ for ideas, is afforded a perspective through a narrative interpretation of reality akin to literature, that is cinema. This is a bent, oblique look at the ‘real world’; a reading through a bent or queered history of seamless interpretation of representation onto a social and political everyday. In return, the gaze opens up a hole in this very same scopic field, threatening and changing the borders between the subject and object, and opening up, temporarily, for the ‘real’ that is never consumed by language, but which implies one’s instability and involvement in a larger context.
If we conflate the imaginaries of Deleuze and Guattari with that of Walter Benjamin, so as to bring the ideas of the local and acute from the minor language together with the material study of details in everyday life and language, we can produce a difference of representation. This is a form of cinema that picks up the nitty-gritty of everyday life; that witnesses the real material spaces of our time; and studies the details and effects of economic and social change through language, in its desire to speak as cinema, or film itself.
This is a cinema where ‘neutral casting’[vii] — in which, for example, all characters in a Western film are white — has no meaning or purpose. This is where photography, characters, casting and speech must deviate from current cinema and TV norms, and where different, wrongly-spoken languages of the different struggles of acting or narration must necessarily coexist within the space of cinema as much as within the spaces of the everyday. That is what radical cinema is, still.
Notes
[i] The character ‘A’ in the Knut Åsdam film Pretext for Murmansk (2012)
[ii] Åsdam, Knut. “Oblique Language. The Bent Gaze” in Seminarene på Fotogalleriet 2005-08. pp115-121. Some of these paragraphs have been lifted from this earlier text.
[iii] See, for instance, Lacan, Jacques. Seminar Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991)
[iv] This sounds intentionally like a quote from Caillois. There is an interesting relationship here between Lacan and Caillois. We know that Lacan developed some of his ideas around the psychological relationship between personality and place through the earlier writing of Caillois. See especially Caillois’ writing on psychasthenia, a disruption in the relationship between personality and place: Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”. October, (31) Winter 1984, pp17-32 (First published in Minotaure in 1935 in a short version, and then in the extended version in Le mythe et l’homme, Paris, Gallimard in 1938)
[v] Godard, Jean-Luc. In Hoberman, 2005, criterion.com’
[vi] As Dont Rhine of the Ultra-red collective has repeatedly pointed out.
[vii] This relates to the double standards of the TV and film industry and its production of ‘realistic’ film. In which, on one hand, white actors are used as to avoid speaking about particular identities playing characters that have very little social characterization. Then on the other hand, any actor of a non-white ethnicity is only given roles to represent an ethnic character. It traps both the actors and the film industry in a deadlock and pertains only a racist and wholly constructed idea of the ‘realistic’.
Printed in Wuxia 1, 2012