Sabine Nessel, Winfried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert (eds),
Wort und Fleisch: Kino zwischen Text und Körper/
Word and Flesh: Cinema between Text and the Body,
German edition. CD with English version and clips.
Berlin: Bertz and Fischer
ISBN: 978-3-86505-182-0
€19,90
158pp
(Review copy supplied by Bertz+Fischer
http://www.bertz-fischer.de/wortundfleisch.html)
This collection of essays on film and media studies is published by the editors Sabine Nessel and Winfried Pauleit in collaboration with Nordmedia Stiftung, Universität Bremen and Bertz + Fischer. Published in two languages: as a book in German, and an e-book in English and Spanish (one essay), it includes film passages which are provided as empirical material.
In a paradigmatic shift away from a disembodied approach to film theory, this collection contributes to a somatised analytic film framework. Beginning from Tom Gunning’s notion of a cinema of attractions, which emphasises a direct experiential approach, the editors have collected a persuasive set of arguments to foreground fairground spectacle over the disembodied narrative as a premise for understanding cinema.
Despite Nietzsche’s project to replace the centrality of the fetishised subject with the body, the suspicion for the proximity of the body to abjection (decay and death) has meant that (at least Western) film has been circumscribed for its ability to approximate the flesh. Due to its ‘loyalty’ to nature, matter and animal, bodies in film are often associated with unreliable irrationality. While early silent film has reflected moral dangers in relation to the body, the sensual turn in 1960s cinema and the cultural turn in the 1990s have both attempted to counteract a tendency to stifle and ignore the body. Attempting to go beyond familiar discourses of race, class, gender, and cultural difference in film and media studies, these essays propose a variety of ways to think text and body in film together – narrative, abstraction, energies – and between interpretation and affixation, word and flesh. They recognise the subversive potential of a bodily ambivalence towards the constructed subject. While ‘pre-verbal’ nature is feared for its powerlessness, these essays recognise the potential in the body for cognition and remembrance.
As part of these ‘new body discourses’, the first essay by Thomas Morsch criticises the Freudian equation of vulgar excess, found in ‘B-grade’ horror, porn and melodrama, with loss of autonomy, control and sovereignty. He prefers a Deleuzean escape from intellectual voyeurism in cinema by understanding an experiential plurality of forces and intensities. Situated within a recent batch of radically carnal films, Morsch discusses the aesthetics of shock in Audition (Takashi Miike 1999). When an abject male, mute and mutilated, is let out of a sack, we experience a short-cut to the emetic. This ‘register’ of disgust, Morsch observes, is perfected in a meticulously indifferent rendition of violence in the final scene. A labyrinthine surreal ‘ride’ leads to a ‘secret torture chamber’ where the camera can do nothing but gaze. Rather than conclude that the film is ‘pitilessly’ nihilistic, Morsch regards the refusal to explicate the event as the only way to speak of this Carthaginian ‘field of ruins’.
Sabine Nessel uses the cinema theories of Christian Metz and Rick Altman to explore text and body in her discussion of the French auteur film La Maman et la Putain (Jean Eustache 1972/73). Eustache replaced or simplified every dramatic action with verbal description, creating a presence through a void. Rather than despairing of our physical limitations, Nessel regards the non-represented event as precisely that which generates imaginative material. However, to Nessel this imagination can only come through work. Citing the notion of film as a total complex distillation by Gilbert Cohen-Séat, in an address to the critic she sets the impossible task of integrating sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history in order to arrive at a ‘comprehensive anthropological awareness’.
Writing in Spanish, Domènec Font spots the disappearing body as it appears throughout modern cinema history: Tourneur, Bergman, Godard, Fassbinder, Lynch, Cronenberg. The spectral nature of cinema, he contends, is conducive to bodies which disappear and return again, the main representative of which is the vampire (revenant). As occupants of the impossible space between life and death, Font sees them as the very material quality of film itself. Like an embalmer (as in Antoine de Baecque’s Le corps exposé), film preserves corpses which are about to disappear. Vampires ‘cross the bridge’ with an obsessive hunger to live again, and in so doing return the past to the present. In feeding on life, they self-duplicate, much like the way the figures in film occupy the bodies of the audience. The obscenity of the revenant, Font contends, is that they are ‘empty’ of any memory of their past. This ‘rebellious amnesic vagabond’ lacks everything but an insatiable hunger for more.
In the darkness of the cinema lies the potential for play along the limits of life and death. Font notes the trend in recent post-humanist aesthetics; Orlan’s modifications, Derrida’s ‘ghostly forms’ (Dreyer’s Ordet), Nancy’s revivified body fragments, Cronenberg’s hybridized incarnations. He traces this back to a collection of inhumanities in film since the 1930s. In the ‘unfinished’ bodies in Tod Browning’s Freaks (USA 1933), the animalistic feminine body in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (USA 1942) and the inhuman body in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956), Font regards the changing social anxieties through body representations. For the eroticised ritualistic performances in Bergman’s Persona (Sweden 1966) and Fassbinder’s Die Bitternan Traen Der Petra Von Kant (West Germany 1972), Font classifies the filmmakers themselves as ‘vampires’. He notes the continuation of the ‘mutation’ theme in Blade Runner (USA 1982), Dogville (Denmark 2003), The Truman Show (USA 1998), Twin Peaks (USA 1990) and The Village (USA 2004). Given the correlation between a fear of invasion and a fear of destabilised subjectivity, the inclusion of non-Anglo-European films would build further on Font’s discussion of postmodern hybridity.
Selecting Bronenosec Potjomkin (Battleship Potemkin; 1925; Sergej Eisenstein), Cirk (Circus; 1936; Grigorij Alexandrov) and Kljatva (The Pledge, 1946; Michail Ciaureli), Wolfgang Beilenhoff analyses the ways in which the State organologically linked the ‘head’ and ‘body’. The unified collective body marching together is the imagined Soviet body par excellence. Organic or machinic, hierarchical or ethnic, the technological design of this image was used ‘performatively’ upon its audience. In the mid-1920s, the body heirarchies of head and rear, fatherhood and filial relation were used to instruct an illiterate majority in ‘somatic management’. In the early 1930s, still imagery of the hand in the gesture of a fist configured the individual as a prosthetic of the collective ‘proletarian’ body.[1] Film then ‘moved’ this body by associating its organised behaviour with the flow of the Volga. Such embodied metaphors, Beilenhoff notes, were used for their capacity to permeate differential complexities with a view to an international synthesis.
In Grigorij Alexandrov’s Cirk for example, an American trapeze artist escapes discrimination due to her black baby to Moscow. Literally embraced by a marching avant-garde body dressed in white, she finds herself enmeshed within a vertical hierarchy of bodies proffered to the gaze of a leader on a tribune. Here Bleilenhoff describes how the mass creates an image of the mass (profilmic, ritualised) for the production of a desired collective body, which is re-projected onto the mass as organological myth: the ruler as the head of the social family to whom all are attendant.
Bleilenhoff then describes how the rituals of this family are the focus in Kljatva, in which the panoramic ‘head’ controls the ‘ethnic’ limbs via the mediators of text, painting and film.[2] Wherein Stalin receives a letter addressed to Lenin while standing in front of Lenin’s portrait, he embodies an ancestral lineage, thereby ‘crowning’ the mobilized marching body. In doing so, a unified State discourse becomes familial and health-related.
From the making of a fist, to a crowd that has swollen to a river, to an organic marching body, to a triumphant monarch, Bleilenhoff shows how film rehearses the masses for total mobilization. Bleilenhoff contends that this opened the way for a consumeristic ‘society of the spectacle’ to take shape.
Winfried Pauleit bases her cinema semiology on bodies. Referring to Roland Barthes’ theory of cinematographic writing she discusses how he adopts the roles of viewer, surgeon and detective in selecting and examining stills from Fellini or Eisenstein films. In barring the (thèse barrée) signifiers (of the cinema), and emphasizing the (bodily) traces he arrives at a ‘third meaning’. In so doing, Pauleit argues, Barthes creates a new methodology of ‘politique des spectateurs’ in 1950s auteur cinema. For example Pauleit observes how Fellini’s dolls are transitional objects, which like films, offer a process of ephemeral transference. Yet, the ‘photographic ecstasy’ Barthes found trapped in the still, Deleuze regarded as inseparable from movement. Pauleit sees the audience body as the point of synthesis between the two, which she argues, becomes the film itself.
Referring to Dana Polan’s proposition that films perform, Robin Curtis traces the ‘performative turn’ from text to event in the 1980s. Instead of a cognitivist privileging of the ‘embodied mind’ in film analysis, Curtis argues that useful film theory deconstructs fixed filmic representations in order to appreciate how films are ‘events’ at the site of the specific body. Lakoff and Johnson regard ‘film experience’ as mirroring our ‘shared bodily experiences’, created, for Sobchak, via an illusory sense of ‘being there’. Casetti’s typology of camera shots shows how the camera optically orients (deixis) the viewer’s tactile body image, while Sean Cubitt discusses how sound vibration blurs the distinction between inner and outer.
Georges Méliès, the inventor of transformative film effects used his inventions to address the unconscious of the audience. A contemporary of Freud’s with whom he shared the contextual fragmenting conditions of warfare and domination, Melies made film poems to explore the unconscious. For Klaus Theweleit, Melies’ disrupted dreams reassembled in his collages is the visuality of the unconscious (ie libido). These were verite, Theweleit argues, not in the sense of Dziga Vertov’s streets, factories, trains, ships, and bodies, but the ‘imago’ of human psyche.
‘Camera thought’ contends Theweleit, has the potential to heal our schizophrenic culture. In the way that music resonates with our earliest memories in the mother’s womb, Theweleit regards the body as being ‘played’ by and resonant with waves (light or sound). The material quality of both waves and bodies necessitates an interdependence and mutual affect.
Rather than the skin being a perceived ‘wall’ between subject and object, realizing the skin as a fluid part of the world and body, often is described as an ‘oceanic’ sensation. Theweleit approaches it at the cellular level, describing these experiences as being when synapses in the subcortex are bioelectrically activated (at 40 Hz) to forge microcellular clusters, or nerve structures which are then stored. Unhappy with the term body memories’, and influenced by Massumi’s ‘synaesthetic autonomy of affect’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s polyphonous ‘assemblages’, Theweleit describes these as a ‘Third Body’.
Avoiding the semantics (surface/meaning) of the cinematic image, he wants to consider this ‘third image’ created from an amalgam of ‘digested’ cinematic imagery and the unconscious. Theweleit sees an opportunity to measure the intensities (emotional uproar) produced by film and music, which he regards as mirroring parts of the architecture of the traumatic structure. Like a surrogate object, if the analysand can ‘grow against’ the compulsive emotional reaction, they might be able to break the pattern of the trauma (voidness) and form alternative neuronal formations (the unconscious), in the form of the third body.
The theorist and the analyst, Theweleit urges, must develop an acuity in reading emissions from the amygdala (movement, expression, smell). Beyond word and flesh he proposes this as a literacy in energies. Like sniffer-dogs trained for early cancer detection, Theweleit sees a sensitivity to wave concentrations as enabling the analyst to transform cellular structures of rage ‘about to explode’.
Considering the political aspects of the speaking and singing bodies in 1940s African-American Hollywood musicals, Richard Dyer focuses on the singer Lena Horne. Premised on the practice of image construction for the purposes of popularity, stars, like politicians, Dyer argues, use techniques such as dubbing and affecting music (as opposed to the veracity of the star’s personal voice) to manipulate their reception. The fight for the position to speak for us all, to voice our collective feelings in their singular voice, Dyer regards as a fight for power.
In this setting, the voice of Horne subversively claimed space and attention. In the cinema close-ups of a big black female mouth filling the screen, Horne possessed significant potential to elevate the social role of African-American women. However, negotiating black femininity in the 1940s meant that while resolutely identifying as an African-American woman while refusing the primitive stereotype, Horne adapted her voice to white genteel norms, strictly keeping her capacity to sing low and move her hips for when she sang the blues. For her modulations she was rewarded with ‘mulatto’ roles. The editing of her films however reflected the unsubtle situation: Horne singing to white impresarios on the balcony and all-black audiences downstairs. Perhaps it was not accidental that blackness was a rare stroke on an otherwise white modern canvas.
Christa Blumlinger points out how film controls time, but also offers the potential to open layers. For Blumlinger, Fassbinder’s use of cinematic technology either reflects traumatic repetition, or exposes the virtuality of the narrative. Interruptions remind the viewer that an apparatus can reiterate the ‘live’ words endlessly, reflexively disrupting their immersive experience. Fassbinder’s standstill moments in the credits of Die Ehe der Maria Braun (West Germany 1979) and Mutter Kuster (West Germany 1975) intertwine correspondence from the maker and the narrative logic, the structure itself doubling the narrative caesurae between life and death. The freeze-cut is conducive to the narrative of a traumatized Peter in Ich Will Doch Nur, Dass Ihr Mich Liebt (West Germany 1976), whose memories of prison obsessively return in flashbacks. Blumlinger identifies Fassbinder’s repeated reference to ‘music systems’ – the removal of a stuck record needle in In Einem Jahr Mit Dreizehn Monden (West Germany 1978) or to reveal the mendacity of images in Die Dritte Generation (West Germany 1979) – as directorial intervention in ‘the (time and motion) universe’.
She also observes the frequency of sadistic scenes in several Fassbinder films, which explore violence and pathos in an examination of power. Considering Thierry Kuntzel’s notion of the filmic as lying between movement and the freeze, Blumlinger identifies the utopian in Fassbinder as existing in the non-measurable time or space between moments, interim places where time opens within which to become imaginative.
For Gabriele Jutz, Cinéma Brut is the loci for synthesising “material is” (textuality) and “material means” (physicality). Jutz describes how Cinéma Brut emerged out of the avant-garde film of the 1920s (after 1945 in the US) which had sought an independent identity through stressing its formal purity. Reducing the cinematic codes to their material basis, dictated the approach the artist took. Found footage, collage, ready-mades, even the negation of the film apparatus itself, were approaches used to liberate film art from its reliance on language. Both the body of the artist and the material film body, or ‘film flesh’ were then conjoined by Christian Metz through his proposition that the film’s specific substance determines the nature of the film.
Jutz locates cinema within the theory of informe found in George Bataille’s surrealist dictionary Documents(1929) which he used to sabotage highly valued cultural terms. ‘Base material’ or phénomènes bruts provided resistance to uprightness and distance of a vision-led humanity. ‘Lowering’ to the corporeal senses meant appreciating touch, the material ground, and enter the realms of the primitive, the animal, the instinctual, the rejected and the scatological. For Bataille, the informe was symbolized by spiders and sputum, worms and corpses. They are nonverifiable and non-hierarchized, and they reverse the production of significance. But rather than a specific thing, Jutz regards the informe as an operation, which deconstructs purism through a dynamic of decay. A material process beneath everything, the informe necessitates a direct approach, without divisive ideology.
When the word materialism is used, it is time to designate the direct interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw phenomena, and not a system founded on the fragmentary elements of an ideological analysis, elaborated under the sign of religious relations.[3]
Although Jutz argues that the body’s carnality chaotically deconstructs modernism, she cites Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss who order informe into 4 categories: horizontality, ocularcentrism, pulsation and degradation. Horizontality attacks the ‘human’ tendency to envisage itself as being superior to material, and supports the devolutionary ‘equality of the corpse.’ Entropy, a term in thermodynamics, is an inexorable movement in a closed system towards metabolic dedifferentiation, and is signified by accumulation, be it dust or the trash of affluence. Cinema Brut shared with surrealism an aesthetics of degradation.
As a note to editors and directors the final essay in this collection is by film director Michael Klier who observes how the elemental art of cutting has morphed alongside the new formations of digital technology. It is well known that the rights to the final cut as the key to the control over the film demonstrates the importance of editing. Since the 1920s and 1930s, editing in Germany has been dominated by women, and at the center of which is the ‘Berlin School’ editor Bettina Böhler.
In our epileptic age of fast cuts, Klier compares Böhler’s role to that of a surgeon. Her independence overlooks vanity and creates tension, incisively shaping the material to find the breath between the images. Film directors, Klier maintains, withstand the avalanche of everyday television with an aesthetic morality. Audiences can be blinded by a series of images, their rapid montages being designed to match the pace of urban youth. Slow contemplation nevertheless makes things coherent. Like the closing of an eyelid, an edit signifies as shift in thought. Klier argues that Böhler’s radical prescriptions are crucial in pairing back elegiac material, which reveal their logic in the last images. Along with Böhler, Klier argues for the protection of a diversity of niches in order to mirror our society, the maintenance of which will be determined by funding policies.
Adam Broinowski,
Melbourne University, Australia.
Endnotes
[1] Gustav Klutsis’ poster Let Us Fulfill the Plan of the Great Works, 1931.
[2] For example as described by the proletarian poet Vladimir Papernyj’s Kollektiv’noe–Individual’noe: ‘In agreement with its egalitarian-entropic aspirations, culture ONE does not divide the individuals from the mass. Culture ONE does not see the individual at all. The subject of culture ONE is solely the collective.’ Wort und Flesch, p. 143.
[3] Bataille, G., (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, p. 16.
Created on: Tuesday, 1 December 2009