The crevice and the stitch
2009; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8705.2009.01873.x
ISSN1467-8705
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoThere would never have been an ‘art’ of cinema had there not been many different hypotheses about montage, many different ways of forbidding oneself to pass from A to B, without some underlying theory of editing that ‘insured’ the transition. There is something inherently equivocal about the cinematic cut. It brings two shots together, while setting them apart. It plays an important role in the constitution of the film's meaning, but can also function as its limit – as a trace of the failure of discursive and perceptual totalisation. The cut simultaneously conceals and asserts the space, the crevice, that figures between images. The crevice is the necessary, if also the commonly disavowed, foundation of every cinematic series. It is the point of departure for the operation of suture: the zero (0) that ensures continuous textual signification by maintaining spectatorial engagement with the flow of images. The notion of suture reached the peak of its theoretical popularity in the 1970s film theory. It originated in Jacques Lacan's teaching, but it was Jacques-Alain Miller who, in 1966, elevated suture to the status of a theoretical concept in its own right. Emphasising its general character, Miller defined suture in terms of formal logic, as that operation which joins the subject to the signifying chain and as the ‘relation in general of the lack to the structure of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies position of a taking-the-place-of’.2 2 Miller, Jacques-Alain, ‘ Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’, Screen, 18: 4 (Winter 19778), 26, 32. For the scholars of cinema who follow Miller's original account, suture is the operation that ties the subject to the film discourse –not (as has sometimes been wrongly assumed) by simulating closure, but rather by effecting the impression that there is always more than meets the eye, that there is an excess beyond the frame of the image: an impression that closure is never total.3 3 See the dossier on suture in Screen, 18:4 (Winter 1977–8), as well as Joan Copjec's thorough revision of the concept in ‘Apparatus and Umbra: A Feminist Critique of Film Theory’ (PhD diss., New York University, 1986). It is, then, through inscription of lack in the audio-visual field, rather than its concealment, that the subject is ‘stitched’ into the discourse. Anticipation of the absent audio-visual content – the ‘more’ to be seen and heard – is encoded into the cinematic chain, and this anticipation operates as an exciter of the spectator's desire. In a sense, suture may be said to bespeak the subject's endless affirmation, through the signifying chain, of his/her desire to desire (to use that famous phrase). The spectator desires the totality of the image, of the visible and its meaning. Although, according to psycho-semiotics, suture pertains to the human subject's general acquisition of meaning, the institution of cinema – because of the specific manner in which it relates time to the image; because of the way it, by definition, passes time through a series of signifiers – provides a particularly valuable point of reference where understanding the dynamic of this acquisition is concerned. In the cinema, the spectator's desire ‘to see more’ is structurally upheld, normativised as a desire for an ongoing flow of images – a desire for a film to ‘take place’. Mechanisms of this cinematic desiring are, on the other hand, most directly explicated – and, potentially, most radically upset – in films built on the principles of fragmentation, elliptical structuring, and disjunctive montage; films that foreground the existence of crevices, holes, and precipices in the fabric of their images. As we shall see, the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard is here a case in point. In extremis, cinematic desire, desire of the cinema, can be reproduced even under the conditions other than those of watching an actual film. From László Moholy-Nagy's ‘typophotos’ (Dynamics of the Metropolis, 1924–5) and El Lissitzky's ‘bioscopic’ Suprematist tales (About Two Squares, 1922), to Karel Teige's and Raoul Hausmann's photomontages (the former's ‘static films’, and the latter's Synthetic Cinema of Painting, 1918), and Max Ernst's collage books (Une semaine de bonté, 1934); from Letterist ‘metagraphic’ superimpositions of image and text (Jean Isidore Isou's Amos (1952), for instance), to Michael Snow's slide projections (Sink, 1969), and the more recent uses of this format by Kendell Geers (Shooting Gallery, 2000) and Aki Onda (Cinemage, 2005) – artists have repeatedly demonstrated that a static, originally non-cinematographic medium can be successfully engaged to generate the effects of filmic seriality and movement.4 4 Ernst's Une semaine de bonté quite literally gave rise to cinematic desire: it inspired a short film called Desire, co-authored by Ernst and Hans Richter (and included in Richter's 1947 multi-part feature Dreams that Money Can Buy). When properly stimulated, the mind will itself perform an ersatz cinematographic synthesis, stitching together and animating disparate imagistic fragments it encounters. The decisive role montage plays in this process has been extensively analysed by the Soviet filmmakers and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Using the example of Leonardo Da Vinci's detailed written notes for a projected painting of Deluge (‘a certain remarkable “shooting-script”’), Eisenstein points out that the distribution of details in a picture on a single plain also presumes movement – a compositionally directed movement of the eyes from one phenomenon to another. Here, of course, movement is expressed less directly than in the film, where the eye cannot discern the succession of the sequence of details in any other order than that established by him who determines the order of the montage. Unquestionably though, Leonardo's exceedingly sequential description fulfills the task not of merely listing the details, but of outlining the trajectory of the future movement of the attention over the surface of the canvas. Here we see a brilliant example of how, in the apparently static simultaneous ‘co-existence’ of details in an immobile picture, there has yet been applied exactly the same montage selection, there is exactly the same ordered succession in the juxtaposition of details, as in those arts that include the time factor.5 5 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Word and Image’, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947), 30. Next, Eisenstein turns to elaborating the spectator's own vital contribution to the production of meaning in a montage-based work: ‘The strength of montage resides in this, that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator. The spectator is compelled to proceed along that selfsame creative road that the author traveled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author.’6 6 Ibid., 32. One of the conclusions Eisenstein ultimately draws from this is ‘that the montage principle in films is only a sectional application of the montage principle in general, a principle which, if fully understood, passes far beyond the limits of splicing bits of film together’.7 7 Ibid., 35–6. For a detailed explication of the epistemological functions of Eisenstein's disjunctive montage, see Michelson, Annette, ‘ Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura’, Artforum, 11: 5 (January 1973), 30– 37. Dziga Vertov, similarly, posits montage as no less than ‘the organization of the visible world’, and distinguishes among a variety of editing techniques.8 8 Dziga Vertov, ‘From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye’, in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 72–3. Some of these techniques are clearly specific to the medium of cinema (such as ‘editing during filming’ and ‘editing after filming’), but others are essentially modalities of the human subject's natural perceptual and cognitive activity: ‘editing during observation– orienting the unaided eye at any place, any time’; ‘editing after observation– mentally organizing what has been seen, according to characteristic features’; and ‘gauging by sight (hunting for montage fragments)– instantaneous orienting in any visual environment so as to capture the essential link shots. Exceptional attentiveness …’9 9 Ibid. See also Annette Michelson, ‘Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval’, in Montage and Modern Life: 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 71–2. Consider, in light of these generalisations of the montage principle – which, nonetheless, retain film as their central point of reference – the medium of comics. The space between consecutive frames – known as the ‘gutter’– is here, by definition, structurally repeated across a chain of images. As such it stimulates both the actual movement of the reader's eye along this chain, and an imaginary effect of movement within the space of the image(s). It was precisely this preponderance of activity triggered by the naturalised textual fissures that once prompted Godard, himself an advocate of an inclusive understanding of montage, to claim that ‘the découpage of comic strips is aesthetically years ahead of film découpage’.10 10 Quoted in Richard Roud, Jean-Luc Godard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 67. An illuminating example of the convergence between the comic-strip and the filmstrip is found in the eight-frame-long cartoon bearing the title ‘A French Nurse's Dream’ (fig. 1). Sigmund Freud originally used this cartoon (discovered by Sándor Ferenczi in a Hungarian newspaper) to describe a fundamental mechanism of dreaming: the dreamer's wish to continue dreaming. He wrote: ‘A French Nurse's Dream’. The drawings bear the title ‘A French Nurse's Dream’; but it is only the last picture, showing the nurse being woken up by the child's screams, that tells us that the seven previous pictures represent the phases of a dream. The first picture depicts the stimulus which should have caused the sleeper to wake: the little boy has become aware of a need and is asking for help in dealing with it. But in the dream the dreamer, instead of being in the bedroom, is taking the child for a walk. In the second picture she has already led him to a street corner where he is micturating – and she can go on sleeping. But the arousal stimulus continues; indeed, it increases. The little boy, finding that he is not being attended to, screams louder and louder. The more imperiously he insists upon his nurse waking up and helping him, the more insistent becomes the dream's assurance that everything is all right and that there is no need for her to wake up. At the same time, the dream translates the increasing stimulus into the increasing dimensions of its symbols. The stream of water produced by the micturating boy becomes mightier and mightier. In the fourth picture it is already large enough to float a rowing boat; but there follows a gondola, a sailing ship and finally a liner. The ingenious artist has in this way cleverly depicted the struggle between an obstinate craving for sleep and an inexhaustible stimulus towards waking.11 11 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 402–3. Structurally, the wish to continue dreaming is analogous to the desire to be, to remain, sutured into a signifying network. In the cartoon, diegetic elimination of the persisting threat of the dream's cessation has its formal expression and support in the artist's act of making visible, from one frame/drawing to the next, ever more off-screen space. But what especially interests us here is the fact that, although presented in a series of distinct static images, the struggle at the core of the dream narrative generates a cumulative (proto-)cinematic effect of enduring movement (within as well as between images). The tension between the wish to continue dreaming and a disruption in the form of an external stimulus – this tension motivates not only the content and the mise-en-scène of the comic strip (the nurse taking the boy to the street corner, where he can micturate), but also the framing of the event which brings together the actual fragmented (montage-based) layout of the cartoon, and the reader's/spectator's impression of an ongoing, uninterrupted tracking shot. The more intense the external disruption (the boy who awoke is crying), the further the ‘imaginary camera’– which provides the reader's point of view on the entire incident – seems to dolly out. As it ‘moves’, without any change of angle, from the original full shot (the first drawing) to an extreme long shot encompassing not only the boardwalk but also the surrounding water and the huge ship passing nearby (the seventh drawing), it effectively bridges (diegetically conceals, one could say) the textual breaks – the ‘gutter’– evident in the cartoon's paper layout. And this, precisely, is what the logic of suture entails: maintaining spectatorial desire (like some sort of incessant, discretely sensed tracking shot) through perpetual negotiations between the on- and the off-screen space, between images and the innumerable crevices, ruptures, and voids that traverse them. Significantly, the impression of the ‘camera's’ movement in the French nurse's ‘dream’ would seem to rest on a paradox. The camera reveals the space around the nurse and the boy – the water and all the vessels in it: a canoe, a gondola, a sailboat, a liner –only insofar as this initially off-screen space is constituted by the micturating boy himself. It is as if his action within the frame actually makes possible an extension of the diegetic reality beyond the frame. Only after it has been properly summoned into existence by the on-screen events, can this reality be incorporated inside the frame. Here we encounter a version of what Lacan, in his ‘return to Freud’, designated the ‘effect of retroversion’: the cause functioning as the consequence of its own effects.12 12 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 306. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),102–5. The camera dollies out to reveal more space, but this space is, to begin with, generated by the camera's movement. Do the passing vessels increase in size because of the boy's incessant micturation, which enlarges the surface of the water? Or, is his persistent micturation (‘the dream's assurance’, in Freud's words, ‘that everything is all right’) actually stimulated by the ever larger vessels passing him by (symbols of the growing external pressure to stop dreaming)? In a sense, the answer is … both. The dreamer's/spectator's desire for an uninterrupted drift along the chain of images (the wish to continue dreaming, to continue watching the film) directly stimulates an ongoing production of the signifying chain. In the words of Serge Daney: ‘The brain functions as a second projector allowing the image to continue flowing, letting the film and the world continue without it.’13 13 Serge Daney, ‘The Tracking Shot in Kapo’, Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 21. Understood in this light, filmmaking is not unlike the process of mutual adjustment between a dream, or a hallucination, and the format of the comic strip. … we have not yet learned to watch and listen to a film. And therein lies our most important task today. For example, those who are politically aware are rarely cinematographically aware as well, and vice versa. Generally it's one or the other. As for myself, I owe my political formation to the cinema, and I think this is comparatively rare at present. When the cinematic cut foregrounds its crevicular properties it begins to function, in Gilles Deleuze's words, as a montage interstice. The French philosopher identifies the interstice thus: the question is no longer that of the association or attraction of images. What counts is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images … Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new … It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or the association … It is the method of between, ‘between two images’… It is the method of and, ‘this and then that,’ which does away with all the cinema of Being=is.15 15 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 179–80. In the interstice – the filmic relative of the comic strip's ‘gutter’– the distance between two images is forever preserved. Although it cannot entirely terminate the operation of suture, this separation/differentiation among images does have the power to temporarily suspend it – at the price, however, of simultaneously intensifying the desire for its restitution. The interstice represents a liminal cinematic structure, open and indeterminate. It is a paroxysmal manifestation of the cut's ability to make two shots both attract and repel each other. For this reason, the interstice can also function as a powerful instrument of political filmmaking. Instances of interstitial use of montage can be found scattered throughout the history of cinema. Its origins are probably to be located in the age of Dada, in works such as Man Ray's Le Retour à la raison (1923) – a remarkable short film (one of the first ‘anti-films’) organised according to the principle of chance encounter between its debased images. Deleuze, however, notes that the interstice becomes particularly prominent in the cinema after the Second World War, and that this tendency reaches its peak during the highly politicised late 1960s and early 1970s. Deleuze is thinking first and foremost of Jean-Luc Godard, especially his Ici et ailleurs (‘Here and Elsewhere’), a project begun in 1970 with Jean-Pierre Gorin under the aegis of the Dziga Vertov Group (and originally titled Jusqu'à la victoire), and finished in 1975 with Anne-Marie Miéville. In this piece of radical film praxis (commissioned by Al Fatah), the possibility of developing a revolutionary propaedeutic is critically examined in the context of the 1970–71 Palestinian revolution, through a superimposition of, on the one hand, dialectical materialism, and, on the other hand, semiotic analysis of the cinema. The filmmakers explicitly posit the cut as an index of auditory and visual separation, as a marker of spatial and temporal, as well as political, differences between Western Europe (the passivity of ‘here’) and the Middle East (the struggle waged ‘elsewhere’), between ‘Arab Revolution and French Revolution’, ‘Foreign and National’, ‘Victory and Defeat’, ‘Dream and Reality’… At the same time, the authors also acknowledge that the cut, this elementary feature of film language, is typically concealed by the naturalised movement of images. Godard's voice-over declares early on: ‘Death is represented in this film by a flow of images … A flow of images and sounds that hide silence … A silence that becomes deadly because it is prevented from coming out alive.’ The possibility of eroding the classically constructed film text – of replacing a stable and nonporous ‘big picture’ with a variety of uprooted, free-floating image-bits, and thereby foreclosing (if only temporarily) the subject's effortless insertion into the signifying chain – has permeated Godard's cinema since its inception. Already in his first films Godard sought to problematise, by way of the spatio-temporal caesurae created through jump-cuts (À bout de souffle, 1960) and narrative chapters (Vivre sa vie, 1962), the normative, seemingly ‘self-evident’ mechanisms of textual causation used to transform lively multiplicities of images into homogeneous units of meaning. By the mid 1960s, his analysis of different modes of spectatorial engagement by the variously fragmented cinematic structures had clearly become intertwined with, on the one hand, linguistic and semiotic concerns and, on the other hand, Marxist critique of ideology. Endless reflexive layering of sounds over images, images over images, and sounds over sounds in the 1966 work Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (including the director's own whispering voice, questioning the validity of the film's diegesis), and the commanding, even suffocating presence of citations in Week-end of 1967 (Buñuel, Dumas, Saint-Juste, Brontë, Engels, Carroll, Mozart, the International, and much more), corresponded with the contemporary structural-Marxist (Althusserian) accounts of the all-pervasive character of ideology and the dynamics of ‘interpellation’.16 16 The psychoanalytic session in the beginning of Week-end explicitly introduces the impossibility of separating reality from fantasy – another notable parallel with Althusser's (Lacan-influenced) critique of ideology. On the other hand, in La Chinoise (also made in 1967, before Week-end), Godard explicitly took his exploration of the cinematic sign along the path of Maoism. Famous for its ‘anticipation’ of the 1968 student rebellion, the film advanced a sustained critique of representational realism (by drastically reducing the depth of compositional space and saturating images with written text, thus complicating the indexicality of the profilmic event with the symbolic valence of the political slogan), but it also concluded with an equivocal stance toward the necessity of revolutionary violence (a stance also assumed in Week-end). Week-end proclaimed ‘Fin de cinema’– a claim that may be understood as both a call to bring about the end of the mainstream commercial cinema, and a diagnosis of the future of the medium as such, if it were to remain rooted in capitalist modes of production and bourgeois ideological values. In the spirit of this proclamation, in 1968 Le Gai Savoir staged a Godardian experiment in total suspension of suture, diegetically motivated by ‘Patricia Lumumba’ and ‘Émile Rousseau's’ youthful revolutionary desire to impose the tabula rasa, to strategically undo the meaning of all images and sounds before reconstituting them on entirely new ideological grounds.17 17 Drawing on the ideas of Roland Barthes, James Monaco describes Le Gai Savoir as ‘Godard's ultimate effort at “semioclasm”’. See Monaco, The New Wave (New York: Sag Harbor, 2004), 209. Le Gai Savoir was to clear the way for the future of radical filmmaking – the shaping of which would begin with the activities of the Dziga Vertov Group (British Sounds (1969), Pravda (1969), Vent d'est (1970), Lotte in Italia (1970), Jusqu'à la victoire (1970), Vladimir et Rosa (1971), Tout va bien (1972), Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still (1972)).18 18 During the ‘Dziga-Vertov’ period, Godard dismissed most of his earlier films – including the overtly political La Chinoise– as ‘Hollywood films because I was a bourgeois artist. They are my dead corpses.’ He was, however, still willing to attribute some ‘positive merit’ to Week-end, Pierrot le fou, and ‘some things in Two or Three Things’. See Kent E. Carroll, ‘Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga-Vertov Group’, in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S. Brown (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972), 61–2. Creating cinematic fissures was defined as an elementary objective of the Dziga Vertov Group. The interstice – commonly evoked through the use of the black screen – became an expression of the Group's desire to enact a political demystification of the cut. The theoretical rationale behind this strategy was given one of its clearest expressions in Vladimir et Rosa: What's this black section mean? … We've been toting those black frames around for ever so long, since May, 1968, to hide a bladeless knife without a handle. At first, these black frames were shots we couldn't shoot, we'd say they belonged to CBS, and we couldn't afford them, so … we'd put black leader instead. Then we realized those black frames were shots we didn't know how to shoot: shots of bourgeois ideology and imperialism and they weren't even black, they were colored, like in any James Bond movie. So we started looking for black images, production relationships, images defining relationships. Our problem is to show colours different from those in bourgeois and imperialist films. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Miéville, ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (1975). Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Mieville, ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (1975). The apparatus the filmmakers created for this paratactic sequence was inspired by the amateur cinematic practice of a Jordanian doctor. Gorin explained: ‘In Palestine, during the shooting of the film … we discovered a doctor in the south of Jordan who was making films with stills. Each week he received some stills from Amman, from El Fatah, edited them, put black spaces into them, made his own commentary in front of the people. He was a real film-maker.’20 20 Jean-Pierre Gorin, interview by Robert Phillip Kolker, ‘Angle and Reality: Godard and Gorin in America’, Jean-Luc Godard Interviews, ed. David Sterritt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 64. A real anti-illusionist filmmaker is, more specifically, what Gorin seems to have meant. For, by including a replica of the doctor's home cinematograph into their own film, the Dziga Vertov Group effectively overlap the space and the function of the interstice with the dynamic of intermittent movement. By filming in a single shot, in an uninterrupted stretch of cinematic duration, a tripartite sequence of motionless but changing slides, the authors ‘give us’, as Rosalind Krauss would have it, ‘the moment of [analytic) reflection without destroying its object; … at one and the same time the abstract components of film and the reality of its experience’.21 21 I borrow Krauss's formulation from her analysis of the work of Paul Sharits, another seminal (though very different from Godard) anti-illusionist filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s. See Krauss, Rosalind, ‘ Paul Sharits’, Film Culture, 65–6 (1978), 94. Godard and Gorin invite a structural analogy between the process of filmic signification – specifically, production of meaning through montage: interaction of the psycho-semiotic sewing machine that is the human subject (filmmaker, spectator) with the dispersed ‘patches’ of visual text (shots) – and the manner in which the cinematographic technology transforms the discontinuous passage of serial photograms (the filmstrip) through the projector gate, into an impression of continuous on-screen movement.22 22 Here it is useful to evoke Blake Stimson's recent differentiation between the photographic essay and film: ‘The photographic essay was born of the promise of another kind of truth from that given by the individual photograph or image on its own, a truth available only in the interstices between pictures, in the movement from one picture to the next. At the moment when photography became film, however, a new question opened up that threatened to undermine its promise before it had even really emerged: How best to realize that movement? How best to develop the truth content of the exposition itself? Would it be with the spatialized time of the photographic series or with the retemporalized space of film as a form?’ (Stimson, ‘The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation’, in The Cinematic, ed. David Company (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), 96). However, the effect achieved in the slide sequence in Ici et ailleurs– as well as in a number of other works such as Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), Michael Snow's One Second in Montreal (1969), and Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) (1971) – is that of blurring the distinction between serial still images and motion pictures through concurrent‘spatialisation of time’ and ‘temporalisation of space’. Referring to Dziga Vertov's own exploration of the relationship between kinesis and stasis in the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Laura Mulvey describes this effect as ‘delayed cinema’ and ‘cinema's variable temporality becoming visible’. See Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 182. What is more, the multiple ruptures inherent in the structure of the film are here not only made visible – they are explicitly identified as essential sites of cinematic labour. In Godard and Gorin's ‘self-conscious’ para-cinematographic apparatus, the darkness and the emptiness of the space separating the three slide-viewers coincide with the ‘emptiness’ (direct experience) of the time required to accomplish the transition from one image to the next, the time required to perform the interstice. As a barely visible hand maintains the visual flow by changing slides, the linking of images is prevented from
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