#pascalmenoret

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Blogpost #8: Feminist Cinema

The apex of Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966) is probably the scene during which the two Maries devour explicitly phallic croissants and sausages to the soundtrack of Johannes Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem. Meanwhile, one of their lovers is whispering on the phone: “You don’t know what that sleepless night with you means to me... my life is misery without you.” “Another piece of yummy meat,” says Marie number 2 in response to what we understand is a paltry male attempt at emotional blackmail.

The phallus becomes an objet of collage and fragmentation, consumption and destruction — and the laughter induced by the scenes where the two Maries ridicule male suitors, overeat at their expense, and in the end — “What time is your train?” — get rid of them without ceremony is a truly feminist, riotous, irrepressible laughter. As Bliss Cua Lim writes, the two Maries never stop being dolls: they “wear their femininity with all the self-awareness and hyperbole of masquerade” and “move from docility [...] to defiance.” (p. 54)

After one of their bait-and-switch adventures, the two Maries get rid of a tentative lover by bringing him to his train, which they escape through a railway tunnel. They come out with faces covered in soot, in a scene reminiscent of blackface. The doll is an allegory, a system of double entendre that seeks to assuage socialist sensibilities while offering a mordant satire of toxic masculinity. But it is also a character in a carnival. And as often in Europe (including socialist Czechoslovakia), blackface is inherent to masquerades and carnivals. Blackface signals Saint Balthasar, one of the Three Kings, but it is also the sign of a dark-skinned other, vilified and expelled, misrepresented and conquered. It is a racist sign.

“We’ll have to think of a worse life,” exclaims one Marie — is this the life of racialized others? After all, Bohemia, the province where the film unfolds, was an eager province of several German and Austrian polities. And the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the Habsburg Empire, took center stage in the European racialization of Islam, in particular through the equivalence of blackness and infidelity, in the face of the Caliphate of Cordoba and of the Ottoman empire. Is Daisies a typical example of second-wave feminism — rambunctiously ferocious against phallocracy, but also eurocentric and uncritical of European racism? 

Reference:

Bliss Cua Lim, “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory,” Camera Obscura, 47/16-2 (2001) 37-77. 

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Blogpost #1: La Haine

“I saw a cow.

— You saw what?

— A cow! Yesterday during the riot, I ran behind a tower, I turned around the corner and wham! I ran into a cow.

— Stop smoking, it’s hurting you.”

La Haine is structured by two appearing and disappearing objects: a gun, and a cow. The gun creates a unity of action; lost by the police during a riot, picked up by Vinz, it moves the action forward, from the banlieue to Paris and back, from urban revolt to the final gunshot. The cow is more ethereal. Vinz saw it twice, a first time “around the corner” during the riot, and a second time in an opening between buildings. The second scene — the only one during which we, spectators, are made to see the animal — is striking both visually and musically. 

From a window up high, a talented neighbor is mixing NTM’s “Assassins de la police” and Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The camera pans over gateways, openings, thresholds between the housing project’s buildings. The cow emerges in a fracture of the landscape, and Vinz tells Said:

“Check out the cow!

— Fuck off with your cow!

— On my mother’s head, it’s the same… it was right there.

— You are the cow!”

In the following scene, as Vinz cuts Said’s hair, Said asks if he’d really kill a cop (with the gun), to which Vinz responds with another question: “Do you wanna be the next Arab they smoke at the police station?” The implicit comparison is that the projects are a slaughterhouse where police kill Arabs. But “cow” is also slang for cop (“mort aux vaches”, death to cops), and the cow’s appearance to the lyrics of “Assassins of the Police” is an ambiguous image. Who does the cow stand for? Project kids who are subjected to police violence? Or the cops who might be targeted with their own weapons? 

Like Vinz and Said, the cow is suspended in space and time, between the city and the country, between here and there, between the inside and the outside. The cow in the threshold grounds the film in the lost ecology of the suburbs, where projects sprouted among agricultural fields and where a slaughterhouse replaced another. Here is another, more optimistic, hermeneutics of the cow: in Henri Verneuil’s The Cow and I (1959), a French PoW escapes captivity in Germany by walking toward freedom behind a cow. “This story of a cow in the night, just like that, is too weird,” Vinz confesses at some point. By walking away from the cow, he might have hasted his own end. Halfway through the film, the disappearance of the cows foretells the final scene’s bloodbath. Longue vie aux vaches.

References:

Thierry Jousse, “La Haine: Prose Combat,” Les Cahiers du cinéma, 492 (1995) 32-35.

Peter Baxter, “An Iconography of Exclusion: Film in France, 1995,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 21-1 (2012) 122-133.

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Blogpost #9: Battleship Potemkin

Griffith is a bourgeois (and a racist bourgeois at that). He revolutionizes cinema by conceiving montage as a duel between antagonistic forces, man vs. woman, rich vs. poor, good vs. bad, and by creating a rhythmic progression that leads to a conclusion — or not. With us, or against us. In Deleuze’s reading, this way of thinking about montage is bourgeois because it takes the opposite poles as given, as natural, as independent of context, whereas one was not born a man or a woman, rich or poor, but one becomes it. Social qualities are dialectical, not absolute. They depend on power relations and not on birth: being a bourgeois is, by definition, being racist (and vice-versa). Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, did not only please the U.S. (white) middle class; it also led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Eisenstein, while inheriting from Griffith, is also criticizing him: Eisenstein is a cinematographer of context and dialectic, exploitation and revolution (whereas Griffith is a eulogist of eugenics and white supremacy, false consciousness and the manifest destiny). Deleuze sees in Eisenstein’s reliance on the golden ratio a visual and temporal manifestation of his revolutionary cinema. I’ll take one example from Battleship Potemkin to illustrate the dialectical nature of Eisenstein’s visual compositions. 

The first scene of the film shows the deck of the Potemkin. Two sailors are discussing the 1905 revolution and wish their crew would join the workers. They are overshadowed by massive chimneys; the battle that runs through the film is made evident: it is going to be man against machine, freedom against industrial capitalism, life against death. Man occupies the smaller part of the spiral; machine dominates. 

Golden ratio still in the execution scene — but places have moved. Machine is clearly winning; man is losing. It is only through a resurgence of consciousness — visible in the close ups of the aggrieved sailor of the first scene, who gains an understanding of the situation and of the sailors’ own collective strength — that the subjugation of man is overcome, and that the masses gain an upper hand on the world of machines: the sailors take over the battleship.

While the Potemkin sails toward Odessa, the population of the city rises and descends upon the shore. Golden ratio still, but the wheel has turned again; infrastructure, the world of technique, is now a conduct for revolutionary practice. The very machinery of capitalism, by connecting the masses and their grievances, dialectically leads to the demise of capitalism. Rosa Luxembourg, witnessing the 1905 revolution, started believing in the power of infrastructure to unify workers and bring them together as a formidable political force, a force which “flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams.” 

Bridges and stairs, railways and pipelines, piers and steamships bring about the proletarian revolution by funneling the billows and streams of human consciousness. Deleuze writes that “the spiral progresses by growing through oppositions or contradictions”; but what comes out of it is the new power of matter, the ability of steel to decide of human destiny. This epiphany of the Potemkin, which closes the film — golden ratio, again and finally — is left unquestioned by Eisenstein, whose epics of freedom might — perhaps — also be qualified of “bourgeois.”

References:

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986, chapter 3.

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2011, chapter 1.

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Blogpost #6: Vision & Justice

During the 4th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Algiers in 1973, Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, Vietnam’s minister of foreign affairs, routinely had lunch with the cooks. By shunning the company of heads of state, she implicitly pointed to one of the main — if not the main — postcolonial predicaments: the difficulty, for nations who achieved political independence and a measure of economic sovereignty, to stop copying European powers and put an end to class struggles. The NAM tried to break a cycle of reproduction, but it ultimately failed to oppose neocolonialism and settler colonialism. Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat personified this demise when signing the 1979 Camp David agreement with Israel — a settler colonial nation par excellence.

In Two Meetings and a Funeral, the three channel videos visually manifest the split between the NAM’s decolonial impulse and its postcolonial predicaments. As in an international conference, the three channels show the dissociation of image and language; they also echo Madame Bình’s experience of a split social reality, between the kitchens and the main conference hall, between workers and leaders — a split that, according to Indian Marxist historian Vijay Prashad, was the death sentence of the Third World. “Bring many copies of the film,” says Algerian publisher Samia Zennadi at one point, “because the gap is wide.” 

“How were you supposed to maintain something so enormous?” Prashad asked about the Coupole d’Alger, designed in 1975 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to host the Mediterranean Games. The building became immediately shabby; it became a ruin. What goes for modernist architecture also goes for the gigantism of the NAM itself. Like Brazilian modernism, the NAM was too grandiose, and probably too European as well. In his book The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad assigns the “demise of the Third World agenda” to the “growth of forms of cultural nationalism in the darker nations.” To him “fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World project.” (p. xviii)

Source: 

Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007.

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Blogpost #5: Race Representation

Technologies of visibility have a race problem; race itself is a visible construct, or rather, a construct that takes visibility as its medium. This entanglement between race, racism, visibility, and photography — think of the contribution of photography to colonialism and eugenics — calls for a reevaluation of visibility itself, of its techniques and of its meaning. For racism is a distorsion of the visible; it is a twisted phenomenology, a way to look and not see, to stare and not look at. “One was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people,” writes James Baldwin. Baldwin restores the visible to its plenitude, beyond the indigent system of signs that racism is. His stepfather would have loved to take down that picture of Louis Armstrong hanging on the wall; but a female relative forbade him to do so. This was a form of visual education: Baldwin is a close reader of photographs, which allow him to celebrate his stepfather’s “blackness and his beauty” — this stepfather who “knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.” Beauty, beheld in its fullness. Reevaluation of the visible.

But that the visible is so entangled with racism calls for another move: a reevaluation of the other senses as well. What is the point of seeking equal visibility, if visibility is weaponized against us? How might we seek inclusion into mechanisms of surveillance and coercion? into unfair and violent systems? Does it make sense to develop parallel ontologies and ethical modes, whereby touch for instance would become more central to our definition of ourselves, and to our relationship with others? How might we think of a public sphere in which it is no longer the visible that defines us but touch, taken as a polysemic concept, a concept that includes one of the five senses as well as an attention to affect, emotion, and care? “Blackness is also an aesthetic problem,” writes anthropologist Brian Horton. Aesthetic here means not only a theory of beauty but a way of looking, a phenomenological experience that makes beautiful what is desirable and ugly what is undesirable. “Anxieties expressed over individual, communal, and social undoing ... speak in the language of beauty,” also writes Horton. This necessitates another aesthetics altogether, an engagement with the other senses. A counter-aesthetic of touch, taste, sound, and smell. Such is perhaps what Pete Souza’s May 2009 White House photograph is precisely about: showing the limitations of the visible, creating a more tangible connection to power and futurity. Seeing the president, and touching him as well.

References:

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son, New York: The Library of America, 1998, p. 63-84.

Brian Horton, “Future Entanglements: Beauty, Fashion, and (Anti-)Black Aesthetics in India,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 8-1 (2021), p. 146–153.

Sarah Lewis, “The Racial Bias Built into Photography,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019.

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Blogpost #4: Guerilla Cinema

I once read that, in Barbet Schroeder’s film Our Lady of the Assassins, digital filmmaking allowed for the city of Medellín to appear clearly on screen, on a par with the characters, and not as a blurred background, out of focus of an analog camera. (Our Lady of the Assassins, filmed in 2000 with a Sony HDW-700, was one of the first features filmed with a digital HD camera.)

Whoever wrote this clearly does not remember The Battle of Algiers. Algiers is the main character of the film. Its streets, buildings, rooftops are crisp and clear. The city is not a backdrop; it hugs, cuddles, acts, and suffers, too. “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments,” writes Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Algiers is forcibly split between a European and an Arab city, and the French police and army advise Algerians “not to budge” (Fanon again). The indigenous city is “a world without gaps," where the rare openings are created by colonizers bombing houses or creating a no man’s land between the Casbah and the white city.

Fanon writes that, for the colonized, military marches and flags “do not convey the message ‘Don’t dare to budge’ but ‘Be ready to attack’.” The Battle of Algiers painstakingly recreates this readiness, and documents these attacks. It plays on the visibility of the colonized to the colonizer, and of the colonizer to the colonized. Characters spy out, half hidden or in plain sight. They use binoculars and rooftops to dominate the scene or, on the contrary, look out from behind walls and drying laundry. Who is visible to whom is key to an insurrection: the French want to visibly establish dominance; the Algerians want to be visible to one another ("The FLN will avenge you,” Yacef Saâdi tells Casbah residents). They want to be visible to the United Nations. They want to visibly substitute themselves to the colonizer.

Is The Battle of Algiers a case of guerrilla filmmaking? Probably not. In the spirit of Third-Worldism, the film was coproduced by a state-funded company (Casbah Films) on a script inspired by a local FLN leader (Yacef Saâdi, who plays his own role) and its filming in the streets of Algiers was authorized by the Algerian Defense ministry. 

Is the film an act of guerrilla tout court? Maybe. During filming, Defense minister Houari Boumédiène benefited from the confusion of army trucks in the streets when conducting his coup against president Ahmed Ben Bella. The Battle of Algiers, the film that documents the 1957 insurrection and its repression, is a metaphor for another battle of Algiers: Boumédiène’s 1965 bloodless “revolutionary redress.” Documenting colonial domination in the style of Italian neorealism, fiction facilitates the emergence of postcolonial political power, with its violence and ambiguities.

In the end there remains the city of Algiers, and there is much to write about architecture and urbanism in the film. The last scene shows Algerians pouring out of the Climat de France housing estate, built in the 1950s by Fernand Pouillon to rehouse the residents of the Casbah. That this monument of French repression funneled anticolonial protest is a historical reality. Its presence in the film makes The Battle of Algiers “the first banlieue film” and a precursor to La Haine. The housing estate, now renamed “La Colombie” by its residents, also acts as a reminder that the infrastructure of power can always be turned against its creators.

References:

Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspéro, 1961.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin, 2004, 1.3: “Resistance,” p. 63-95.

“Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria, 1973),” in Scott MacKenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014, p 275-284. 

Alan O’Leary, “End of Empire Cinema and the First Banlieue Film,” Film Quarterly, 70-2, 2016.

Elie Tenenbaum, “La bataille d’Alger: Manuel de guérilla ou leçon de cinéma?” Inflexions, 42-3 (2019), p. 159-167.

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Blogpost #3: Prospectus

This semester I have two projects. The first is to finish editing a 20ish minute long documentary film on a man who loses himself and starts believing he is God. The film is tentatively called Mama and here is a poster I fiddled with last year. (The man in the picture is the film’s main protagonist, who was also the narrator of the short film The Stain, Or: How I Betrayed the Russian, which you saw last week.)

Before creating subtitles and sending the film off to the sound editor, I need to make sure the storyline is clear, and that images and dialogues make sense. One caveat: the film is in French, so you’ll have to bear with simultaneous translation until I create subtitles.

My second project is to unearth an archive of film photographs I took in Saudi Arabia in the winter of 2003. I was working on my MA project — an anthropology of a Saudi TV series, Tash Ma Tash — and traveling around Central Arabia with friends. I had just read Raymond Depardon’s Errance and I adopted Depardon’s methods: mostly exterior, black and white, almost always a vertical format, the horizon cutting the frame in two halves of equal surface. As much ground as there would be sky, if these things were quantifiable.

I have 118 film photos and (hopefully) as many negatives. The format of the prints is half-way between a contact sheet and a standard 10 by 15 cm. The contrast is usually very satisfying (I lack the technical vocabulary to describe it, but I find it beautiful). The whole thing is very 1990s, presented in a black “Photo Service” case with a few customer service notes on the flap. What will I do with this archive? This is the question. Reprinting the photos from the negatives? Scanning the whole archive? These could be first steps. The final product could be an exhibit or a book, or simply an online gallery. I start this project with an open mind.

Reference:

Raymon Depardon, Errance, Paris: Seuil, 2003.

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Blogpost #2: Civil Contract

A few days after I took these two shots in Riyadh, I was arrested by the police for taking a photo on an IKEA parking lot. The year was 2018 and I was conducting field research on pick up truck drivers. My interlocutor that day had driven me to the local IKEA store, where he often helped customers bring home their purchases. A group of shayyalin (haulers) was hanging around the store’s exit, waiting for clients. One of them, a ledger book in hand, was organizing the work. We chatted with him; he was friendly and talkative, and after a few moments spent with him I raised my camera and pointed it in his direction. I didn’t have the time to ask his permission to take a photo, for he put his book in front of the lens and ordered me to not photograph him. He then called the police, told them that a suspicious foreigner was taking photos, and we all ended up at the local police station.

The man with a ledger book was not a Saudi citizen, but either a Jordanian or a Palestinian migrant without an ID; this undocumented non-citizen was promptly sent to a jail cell and was released after a couple of hours. I was kept overnight in the officers’ quarters. During my detention I discreetly erased all photos from my camera’s and my phone’s memories; losing hundreds of street photographs of Riyadh seemed preferable to them being called as witnesses during prosecution, and used against me by the police or the judge. In the end the French consul obtained my release and made me promise to not photograph anything anymore. I pitifully nodded before leaving the police’s — and the consul’s — custody.

How do the photographed and the photographer relate to one another when “the potential for turning any concrete encounter into a violent clash” (Azoulay 2012: 82) is no longer a potentiality, but a reality? What happens to the photographic encounter when the state actively uses photographs to surveil, control, indict, prosecute, and jail? The man with a ledger book prevented the photo by calling the cops on the photographer. “A photographed person’s citizen status,” Ariela Azoulay writes, is often “flawed, or even nonexistent (as in the case of refugees, the poor, migrant workers, etc.)” The (non-citizen) man with a ledger decided to not let the (non-citizen) photographer “exploit the photographed individual’s vulnerability” (Azoulay 2012: 111-112) but to put his own vulnerability on the line by calling the cops. He offered himself to potential police abuse to prevent potential photographic exploitation. Maybe he was not that vulnerable; maybe he was a snitch and his being sent to a cell for two hours was a parody intended to protect his reputation. Maybe I was the vulnerable non-citizen in the story, the one whose release demanded the intervention of a state and seventeen hours of waiting. Maybe. Maybe not. 

“Photography,” Azoulay writes, “is the only civic refuge at the disposal of those robbed of citizenship.” (Azoulay 2012: 113) But in this case, photography had clearly put somebody — him, or me — at risk. The man with a ledger chose the power of the state against the civil contract of photography. I chose the power of the state to protect me from the consequences of believing in the civil contract of photography. We both chose sovereignty against the civic refuge of photography. Is the civil contract of photography a theoretical fiction that loses explanatory power when confronted with the fact of state sovereignty? What can photography do against ubiquitous police power?

Reference:

Ariela Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, 2012, chapter 2, p. 81-127.