The Skin of the World

The Skin of the World
PROPOSITIONS FOR A CINEMA OF RESONANCE

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2024 (Gent, 27 – 31 March 2024) with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts. Curated by Stoffel Debuysere in the context of the KASK research project Echoes of Dissent.

“The skin of the world… always floating and responding to the thrusting of the world’s breezes, breaths and gusts. In all respects, it is the powerful and fragile resonance of all that arouses a form or tonality of existence.” (Jean-Luc Nancy)

To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again — with the immediate implication of doubling or ghosting, assuming a haunting spectrality. Resound, rebound, refrain, return: sound sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted and refracted by edges and curves. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustic ambience that transforms it. Sound enhanced and prolonged by its passing through a certain field or structure. Sound reaching out into the distance, suspended and straining between arrival and departure. Sound propagating itself, configuring a sense and a presence in the world. But to resonate is also to reverberate and reciprocate, to correspond and respond to something or someone other. Furthermore, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past, to activate its latent potentialities and frequencies. It is also a mode of relation that allows for non-sequential forms of exchange and synergy, accommodating affective affinities and formless formations.

Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, it is actualised and expanded in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. How can we think through the notion of resonance in or as cinema? What would happen when we consider cinema as a territory upon which resonance may unfold?

This programme aims to formulate a set of tentative propositions, or hypotheses, on what a “cinema of resonance” could be — seeking what is grounded in resonance, neither showing nor telling but sounding and resounding. A programme populated by glossic and phonic traces received and amplified across time, conjuring up forgotten histories and haunting memories; chants, murmurs and scansions reverberating through the stillness of desolated spaces and catastrophized places; songs and stories echoing and expanding into symphonic movements and sonic geographies. A programme that tries to consider resonance not only as form or content but also as method, involving a practice of pairing and configuring works that relate in ways that are not necessarily causal, historical or geographical, let alone inevitable, but that nevertheless are there. A programme as an accommodating resonance chamber that allows, but does not compel, a process of mutual oscillation between films that somehow speak to one another. It is up to us to lend them our ears.

Thanks to all the filmmakers and distributors involved, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Erika Balsom
In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent)

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 1
30 MARCH, 2024 – 19:00
SPHINX CINEMA 3

Listening to the Space In My Room
Robert Beavers, US, 2013, 16mm, 19′

“The life of a sound should inhabit the film frame,” Robert Beavers wrote in one of his numerous notebooks. Of all the astonishing films in his singular body of work, Listening to the Space in My Room is perhaps the film that manifests the life of sounds in the most evocative way. Between 2002 and 2012, Beavers lived on the ground floor of an old house in Zumikon, a quiet Zurich municipality, just underneath his landlords, Cécile and Dieter Staehelin, a retired doctor and a cellist, respectively. This film is a lyrical ode to the Staehelins and to life in this long-shared place, as well as an exploration of resonance as an acoustic signature of a space, connecting sound and space through the element of time. Throughout the film, Beavers articulates zones of permeability — between floors, between garden and interior, between subjectivities. Cello tones and birdsong join the crackle of creaking floorboards and the muffled sounds of footsteps and conversation, extending the meditation on the acoustics of shared inhabited space. “At about midpoint in the film we hear the sound of rain first introduced with black leader and then accompanying a pan as the rain falls on the garden and elephant leaves. This rich and complex sound- scape breathes with life and exudes a quality which opens the soundtrack to the outside — to that which is traditionally outside of music (noise) and to the world beyond the visual space of film.” (Luke Fowler)

“Imagine someone boiling down all the impermanent sensations, routines, memories, and emotions that make a home a home into an intensely flavorful reduction, and you begin to understand Beavers’ stunning film. He and his housemates are crystallized at work: the camera sways with the hands of an older man bowing his cello; observes an older woman tending her garden from inside the darkened house; mirrors Beavers himself examining individual frames of film to stage his somatic cuts. The intricately interlaid tracks of sound and image do not abide any standard measure of continuity, and yet there’s something immediately comprehensible in this exquisitely tuned song of the body in space.” (Max Goldberg)

Die Reise nach Lyon (Blind Spot)
Claudia von Alemann, DE, 1981, 16mm to DCP, 112′

2K digital restoration by Deutsche Kinemathek

Elisabeth wanders the sleepy streets of Lyon, following in the footsteps of socialist and feminist writer Flora Tristan. Carrying with her the writer’s diary and a tape recorder, she tries to reconstruct what Tristan might have felt when she walked the same streets, shortly before her death, at 41, in 1844. Filmed before Lyon’s Italianate facelift and its listing as a World Heritage Site, this remarkable exploration of feminist history portrays a working-class city where traces of the past persist, the leprous facades revealing wrinkles that hark back to the Canut revolts of the 19th century and the roundups during the Second World War. But it is not so much the image that marks this film as it is the sound. It is surprisingly present and all the more vivid because it plays on scarcity, somewhat like the image yet in an even more radical way. Everything happens as if the city were an echo chamber, as if each scene were a sounding board for everyday sounds floating between strangeness and familiarity, past and present. The violin, which Elisabeth plays in the final scene as a resolution to her search, makes her grasp the meaning of resonance, which is first of all that of her footsteps in the city. “I could hear the sound of my own footsteps. I moved and my steps echoed through the street. The echo of Flora’s footsteps, a century and a half later: the echo of her passage.” By listening attentively, Elisabeth is able to recognize, in the humblest of sounds, the strongest of resonances: the imprint of the past underneath the ech- oes resounding in the present.

“In Die Reise nach Lyon, a woman historian, fascinated by the diary kept by Flora Tristan during the last few months of her life, refuses the traditional way of ‘looking’ at history and gets caught up in a complex, multi-layered pattern of reverberations. History and ‘her’ story become a network of resonances. One life/ voice imprints in another. The process of social change, instead of being read by academic detectives in stuffffy archives, resound in a space between a sound and its similar echoes. A visually fascinating fifilm which is nevertheless one of the few real sound fifilms ever made.” (Paul Willemen)

Followed by a conversation with Claudia von Alemann
Supported by Goethe-Institut Brüssel

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 2
31 MARCH, 2024 – 14:45
SPHINX CINEMA 3

In der Dämmerstunde – Berlin – de l’aube à la nuit
Annik Leroy, BE, 1981, 16mm to DCP, 67′

Newly digitized version

In some ways reminiscent of Claudia von Alemann’s Die Reise nach Lyon, which came out in the same year, Annik Leroy’s debut film follows the filmmaker as she wanders through the ghostly twilight zones of Berlin in search of a past that no longer exists. Another act of remembering as spatial experience, a journey that traverses space to become, in time, a peregrination. “With this film I try to retrace my journey, my story through the ruins, neighbourhoods, and streets of Berlin. I filmed the dialogue that took place between the city and myself, the wanderings in the old neighbourhoods (Moabit, Kreuzberg, Wedding), places where you can still find most of the traces of the past, or rather what’s left of them.” Shot in a time seemingly far from today’s neoliberal explosion in Berlin, the film depicts the city’s crumbling surfaces and desolated wastelands as the silent witnesses of a tragedy that has left deep wounds. A tragedy that finds resonance in literary and musical fragments borrowed from the work of Gottfried Benn, Else Lasker-Schüler, Witold Gombrowicz, Peter Handke, Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner. From the crunching sounds of Leroy’s footsteps on the snowy shores of the Landwehrkanal, to overheard murmurations of faceless voices on the U-Bahn train and loudspeakers announcing the end of the line, the film renders the city as a vast cavern of sound, impregnated with present absences and absent presences that haunt its phantasmic landscapes.

“We discover the sounds of a claustrophobic city and get lost between loudspeakers announcing dead-end streets. We overhear the constant murmur of foreign languages trying to find a voice in a wasteland of asphalt, street lights and the Berlin Wall, marked by darkness and scars of the past. ‘Just don’t stare at a wall’, declares Gombrowicz, and the film moves on. Leroy searches for traces of World War II as well as for love and humanity. It’s a contradiction, but it contains the darkened German soul: how to make an emphatic image of this place?” (Patrick Holzapfel)

Resonating Surfaces
Manon de Boer, BE, 2005, 16mm to digital, 39′

Newly digitized version with 5.1 audio mix

Cries of death open Resonating Surfaces: the cry of Lulu from Alban Berg’s eponymous opera, and that of Maria, a character in Wozzeck, another opera by the same composer. In the resonance of these vocal timbres, distinct degrees of life-affirmation arise, even and above all in the face of death. Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik wrote: “It is a recognition that, even in the most adverse situations, it is possible to resist the terrorism against life, against its desiring and inventive potency, and to stubbornly go on living. Together, Lulu’s and Maria’s cries convey this lesson and contaminate us.” This sonic experience lies at the heart of Resonating Surfaces; an experience that launched a personal movement of liberating effect, de-anesthetizing the marks of the trauma caused by dictatorship and imprisonment. This experience is conveyed by Rolnik, whose story we hear unfolding throughout the film, as the use of the voice gradually shifts from timbre to language. Made in close collaboration with violinist and composer George van Dam, Resonating Surfaces situates Rolnik in the context of the sounds and sensations of São Paulo, her native city, as well as the intellectual atmosphere of 1970s Paris, the city of her exile. In its open and subtle orchestrations of the spaces between image, sound and voice, the film’s formal inventiveness seems to resonate with Rolnik’s appeal to open our resonant bodies to the forces of the world’s otherness and, above all, to tune our hearing to the affects that each encounter mobilizes.

“One could say that de Boer’s films explore the contradictory relation between perception (based on the recognition of preordered forms) and sensation (meaning the open-ended contact with the flux of physical phenomena) — of the kind that Suely Rolnik also discovers in aesthetic experience… De Boer recently cited Rolnik’s distinction between ‘the sensation of the ‘world-as-force-field’’ and the ‘perception of the ‘world-as- form’’, in order to identify what is at stake in her films. Responding to the kinship between her own artistic sensibility and Rolnik’s philosophical approach, de Boer made Rolnik the subject of Resonating Surfaces, the work that best reveals the political stakes of de Boer’s art.” (TJ Demos)

Followed by a conversation with Annik Leroy and Manon de Boer on sound and resonance in their work

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 3
30 MARCH, 2024 – 16:00
SPHINX CINEMA 3

Signal — Germany on the Air
Ernie Gehr, US, 1982, 16mm, 34′

Ernie Gehr, the son of German Jewish émigrés, might have called Berlin home had fascism not tragically intervened. The film takes its title from the Wehrmacht propaganda magazine of the same name. Its opening shot is backgrounded by a cropped view of the magazine’s cover. The explicitness of this reference comes as somewhat of a feint, as Gehr’s approach to history is otherwise oblique. Signal unfolds in a site of little dramatic consequence: an anonymous intersection, somewhere, we glean from interspersed street signs, on the Rheinstraße. Creamsicle trash cans touting the slogan “Berlin…ICH MACHE MIT” (“Berlin…COUNT ME IN”), locate us in Germany’s capital. Yet Gehr withholds further orientation. The intersection’s nondescriptness repels attempts to impute significance. Gehr couples his crystal-like montage with segments clipped from a cheap German radio and street sounds that never quite align with what we see. Heels clack, buses stall, and conversations transpire over scenes emptied of all but asphalt and low-rises. The faint sound of ghostly and multilingual voices compounds our sense of dislocation. The soundtrack constantly points to an ethereal absence, not only emanating from other parts of the world, but also from Berlin’s continually haunting past. “Gehr films the streets as if they were the scene of a crime,” wrote J. Hoberman in his review of the film. Gehr edited Hoberman’s assessment: “there was,” he said, “no ‘as if’ about it.”

“Signal — Germany on the Air uses empty camera movements, anonymous citizens, and the ubiquitous radio to portray an absent subject, the filmmaker and survivor on a street in Berlin where he no longer lives. An alternative future, another world, opens in the space where I am not, where I might have been. Others are witness to my invisibility, to my absence in advance, and to my return to the place where I am not, or no longer am. The subject is spectral, a trace that marks an absence in advance: An absent, reflected subjectivity, invisible to the film, an autobiograph under erasure.“ (Akira Mizuta Lippit)

still/here
Christopher Harris, US, 2000, 16mm to DCP, 60′

2K digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive

still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. On a basic level, the film constructs a documentary record of the blight and decay of that part of the city. still/here is, for the most part, not an overt assessment of social injustices, but the politics of class and race within American society are integral to the film. In still/here, the ruins are emblematic of an unimaginable absence at the core of much of the African Diaspora’s experience in North America. From the countless Africans lost in the Middle Passage to the lost future generation of unborn descendants of those that perished during the voyage, to the loss of family and loved ones that were sold away during slavery, absence has been and continues to be a fundamental feature of the African-American experience. But how, in an image-based medium such as film, does one represent absence? “With still/here, I attempt to engage this question by developing a vocabulary of absence. To that end, the film acknowledges the limits of representation and proceeds through a series of visual and aural breakdowns, erasures, contradictions and gaps. It does not use the documentary power of film to recuperate a sense of closure but instead dwells within the space of rupture occasioned by the presence of a profound absence.” Fixing our gaze on derelict cinemas, fading billboards and crumbling facades, we are rarely shown a human being — but their presences haunt the dirgelike soundtrack, abound with unanswered phones, eerie footsteps, closing doors, chat show phone-ins and dripping taps.

“still/here’s urban scene is deserted, and it is filled with the aural remnants of the African American community that might have once inhabited the now abandoned houses and made the barren street feel like a neighborhood. still/here is hybrid and contradictory: ethnography without people; a personal essay without a human face; a documentary without neither a setting nor a clear thesis. Harris’s film shows a specific place turned into a nameless, almost borderless space and then monumentalized as a metaphor. Harris’s images invite the audience to reimagine the abandoned lots, absented houses and discarded equipment as not ruined but ruins.” (Terri Francis)

On the Battlefield
Little Egypt Collective, US, 2023, 16mm to DCP, 13′

In the southern Illinois region of Little Egypt, a sound recordist revisits the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts — the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of his hometown, Cairo. His mic gathers sonic ephemera of past, present and future within the grasses, trees and skies. Kids play, birds flock, a grandmother and granddaughter burn sage for protection from evil spirits, and an official who oversaw the projects’ closing reflects on its psychic toll. Throughout, a 1970 private release LP by the United Front of Cairo, a Black power movement led by Rev. Dr. Charles Koen, guides the sound recordist — and us — on a search for connections across struggles for liberation, near and far. On the battlefield, these voices march towards resurgence. As the first Little Egypt Collective release, On the Battlefield is an overture celebrating the joy and power of Cairo, a town famous for confluences and collisions: between the North and South, the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, and Black liberation and white supremacy. The film offers an aperture of encounter, resistance and inspiration, and invites audiences into these muddy histories and potent spaces. (Berlinale)

“Sound is the inspiration for this film. Over the past seven years of our collaborative work in Cairo, we have been focused on sound recording as a means of attending and listening to the stories animating the community and landscape. Thus, we have an incredible library of sounds from the Little Egypt region: environmental sounds of bayous, farmlands, marshlands; industrial sounds of river barges, railroads, the local Bungee’s mill; stories and ambiences from local communities; as well as archival sounds, such as the On the Battlefield LP, which was produced by Cairo’s United Front and serves formally as the structure for this first film… As we all edited together, we understood that On the Battlefield poignantly traverses across past, present, and future, and carries a message that spans to many other landscapes and communities within the US, and beyond.” (Lisa Marie Malloy)

Little Egypt Collective is Theresa Delsoin, Lisa Marie Malloy, J.P. Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker with Rachel Burns, Zah-Karri Levy, Towanda Macon, Kyrie Wright.

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 4
30 MARCH, 2024 – 13:30
SPHINX CINEMA 3

Kere mattu Kere (The Lake and The Lake)
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, IN, 2019, DCP, 38′

Filmmaker and composer Sindhu Thirumalaisamy grew up in Bangalore, India, a city that used to be known for its pleasant climate and green spaces. Today, Bangalore’s wetlands are polluted with sewage and waste to such an extent that they produce spectacular foams — in the artist’s words: “bubbles of wealth surrounded by pools of neglect.” The Lake and The Lake responds to a media-driven crisis around these phenomena by offering a representation of one particular lake, Bellandur, as a toxic commons. The lake is toxic in both senses of the word: poisonous to the living beings that inhabit it and high-risk in economic terms. Nevertheless, it remains a space of commoning for various people whose labour sustains the city’s development. Moving through the peripheries of Bellandur lake alongside fishing communities, waste workers, foragers, security guards, street dogs, and children, the question arises: what constitutes a ‘nature’ worth protecting? On the soundtrack, the landscape is washed over with acoustic and acousmatic voices, devotional music, religious speech, jet engines, rifle shooting sessions, children playing, the rhythms of work, the chatter of hundreds of birds and insects. “Like much of my work with ambient sound, these moments are about presence, about dwelling in common…I treat some sounds as residual echoes, mimicking my experience of the music that echoed over the surface of the lake. When music reached me from across the lake, it would be hollowed out with only a faint traces of its melody. I recreate this effect of the sonic residue in some segments of the film, producing an uncanniness that I associate with the lake.”

“Patient frames lead us along the shores where we can examine a square metre of dirt, a posse of lounging dirt dogs, plants whispering in the breeze. The artist traverses the city’s fringe, the liminal edge, as conversations with friends and strangers, experts and neighbours weigh in, along with a bevy of carefully crafted field recordings… In place of a polemic, a broadsheet, or an overview: there is a search. An attuning. A being with. Little surprise that the artist has a sound practice, not only because her tracks are so rich, but because this is a movie that invites us to listen to her listening. Such a deep and unexpected pleasure. As if there was time for that too.” (Mike Holboom)

Recollection
Kamal Aljafari, PS, 2015, DCP, 70′

For many years, Kamal Aljafari has been collecting Israeli and Hollywood fiction films shot in his hometown Jaffa. These are films in which Palestinians are absent, yet they exist at the edges of the frames, visible only in traces and shadows. Further preserved in this archive is a city; its gradual dismantling over the decades chronicled film by film. From the footage of dozens of films, Aljafari has excavated a whole community and recreated the city from his youth, before its destruction by colonization and prior to the settlement projects. “Though out-of-focus, half-glimpsed, I have recognized childhood friends, old people I used to say good evening to as a boy… My uncle. I erased the actors. I photographed the backgrounds and the edges and made the passers-by the main characters of this film. In my film, I find my way from the sea, like in a dream. I walk everywhere, sometimes hesitant and sometimes lost. I wander through the city; I wander through the memories. I film everything I encounter because I know it no longer exists. I return to a lost time.” The spectral politics of Recollection is accentuated by its soundtrack, recorded in collaboration with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, which brings to life the ghosts lingering beneath the city surfaces. With the help of contact microphones, vibration sensors and hydrophones, they not only captured the hidden sound layers resonating in the walls but also in the ocean, which for Aljafari symbolizes desire. “The Israeli government and the municipality of Tel Aviv destroyed Jaffa. They threw the homes they destroyed into the sea. But every year, in the winter, when the sea rises, it throws part of these homes back onto the shore. The Tel Aviv municipality collects them, throws them back, but the ruins return. Every year the sea brings them back.”

“In Recollection, freedom is experienced in ‘the sound of the ocean… the echo you can hear outside but recorded from inside the wall. Life buried beneath, inside the sea’. As the images move slowly, other times brusquely, from a silhouette to a shadow, a sliver of the port city of Jaffa to another, the sound moves us into the present unearthing a past. We begin to see the ruins as breathing bodies. We see the place Palestinians have lived in and have been exiled from. And gradually we are brought face-to-face with history, with destruction. The phantoms stare at us. The filmmaker ‘frees the image’, an act he calls ‘cinematic justice’.” (Nathalie Handal)

Followed by a conversation with Kamal Aljafari

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 5
29 MARCH, 2024 – 14:30
KASKCINEMA

Get out of the Car
Thom Andersen, US, 2010, 16mm, 34′

Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car is a response to his earlier Los Angeles Plays Itself, considered to be his signature film. He described the latter as a “city symphony in reverse” in that it was composed of fragments from other films which are read against the grain to bring the background into the foreground. Convinced that Los Angeles has not been well served by these films, Get Out of the Car grew out of an obsession with making a proper city symphony film of his hometown. It concentrates on small fragments of the cityscape: billboards, advertising signs, wall paintings, building facades and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks, while the soundtrack brings together an impressionistic survey of popular music made for the most part in Los Angeles from 1941 to 1999, with an emphasis on rhythm’n’blues and jazz from the 1950s and corridos from the 1990s. “Get Out of the Car began as a little study of distressed billboards, which was an intentionally dumb idea. But from there it made sense to go to other kinds of signage, murals, some rundown buildings. Almost all the music in the film is either Latino or Black in origin. The music of Los Tigres del Norte, for example, expresses the feelings of indocumentados. That also says something about the history of Los Angeles and where it is now. It ended up being a movie about immigration as well as Black culture in the city. Most of the things that we filmed in Get Out of the Car are gone now. The murals are pretty much all destroyed. There’s nostalgia there, but it’s not something I’m going to apologize for.”

“Get Out of the Car pays tribute to the unheroic, the overlooked and the disappeared… Andersen asserts that his is a ‘militant nostalgia’, not a passive one. By resurrecting the overlooked, he offffers an alternative story of the city he’s lived in for decades, rife with political as well as aesthetic motive. All the illusion and stagecraft has been stripped away, leaving empty lots and bare scaffolding — a city symphony in a minor key.” (Lyra Kilston)

Xiao Wu (Pickpocket)
Jia Zhangke, CN, 1997, 16mm to digital, 108′

4K digital restoration by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation / World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna

The films of Jia Zhangke depict a China moving from communism to (hyper)capitalism, a rural world slowly entering the urban age, an industrialized cityscape turning to neon bars and Internet cafes, and an ancient, enclosed society looking to join the global market. His heroes and heroines are those left behind in the transition, struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation: disaffected youth, small-time crooks, artists, sex workers. Zhangke’s unsurpassed attentiveness to the texture of quotidian life amid a society in flux is reflected in his remarkable use of sound, which emphasizes texture over clarity, and discordant noise over clean sonance. This taste for the dissonant and gritty, against the grain of today’s cinematic sound design, is nowhere as pronounced as in his debut film, Xiao Wu. It tells the story of pickpocket Xiao Wu, who drifts aimlessly through the streets of the small town of Fenyang. In his aim to capture the sonic environment of his hometown, Zhangke, together with his loyal sound designer Zhang Yang, produced a disorientating acoustic space filled with disjointed layers of street noise and popular tunes emanating from karaoke bars, street tweeters and novelty lighters, merging into a great cacophony of alienation. “Working with sound allows me to reconnect with the empty space of traditional painting, by appealing to the viewer’s imagination. For each of my films, I have therefore taken great care to create this relationship between the figuration of the filming locations and the sound space. In Xiao Wu, I chose to combine the image with the sounds of bicycles coming and going on the road and shop loudspeakers — which at the time were replacing those that used to broadcast political slogans: for me, these sounds document the China of the late 1990s.”

“Noise in Xiao Wu is not a negative presence. It reinforces the thereness of Zhangke’s Fenyang, the inner and outer lives of his characters. Noise is articulate, just as it is in the cacophonous zones of cities around the world. Who knows if it was modernity en masse that constituted the vulgar soundscape for RM Schafer when he was predicting sonic doom in 1977… But if modernity is vulgar, what then is refined? The absence of sound, one might guess: a library, a Buddhist temple, a suburb, death. Aesthetic value judgements and speculations aside silence is, well, silent. Noise on the other hand, is fifilled with information. Noise speaks, and in the Fenyang of Xiao Wu it never shuts up. Well then, let’s listen to what it is saying.” (Morgan Quaintance)

Introduced by Morgan Quaintance

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THE SKIN OF THE WORLD 6
28 MARCH, 2024 – 11:00
SPHINX CINEMA 3

Lost Sound
John Smith & Graeme Miller, UK, 1998, video, 28′

Sharing an interest in synchronicity and chance encounters, film artist John Smith and sound artist Graeme Miller worked together on Lost Sound: a sonic reconstruction of their East London neighbourhood from cassette tapes they found discarded in the street. From sounds found hanging from trees like a mistletoe, from lampposts and awnings like the flotsam of an impossible high tide or blown by a breeze saturated with radio waves and mobile phone signals, Smith and Miller make a modern tangleweed of magnetic tape that sings its discarded memories. Bringing together characteristics of a sociological quest, a light-hearted form of situationism and a simple exercise in the art of the objet trouvé, the work explores the potential of chance. It creates an enthralling audio-visual cartography by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds that are linked by the random discovery of the tape samples. “A lyrical and poignant response to the urban environment, Lost Sound depicts the city as a disparate and fragmented series of personal histories. A sense of migration, loss and displacement seeps through upbeat soundtracks from sunnier climes.” (Helen Legg)

“The resulting video is a pure process piece — whatever music is playing on the soundtrack is that found on the fragment of tape that appears on the screen. The formality of the idea is undercut by the emotive power of the found music (and John stretching his own rules in the editing). John, who had always been suspicious of lush soundtracks, had found an excuse to use passion, albeit in a rigorous way. It was as if any emotion he wanted to feel (but was too embarrassed to deliberately express) could be discovered abandoned out on the street, emotion as a found object.” (Cornelia Parker)

Dogfar nai mae marn (Mysterious Object at Noon)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, TH, 2000, 16mm to DCP, 83′

2K digital restoration by the Austrian Film Museum and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation / World Cinema Project )

Inspired by the surrealist procedure called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), Apichatpong Weerasethakul — who is credited here as a mere “story editor” — and his crew meander from the northern provinces of Thailand to the south and, in a series of chance encounters, ask street vendors, farmers, local theater groups, and children to collectively tell a story. Each storyteller has to continue the tale where it had been left off. With each new encounter, the narrative evolves and changes, absorbing melodramatic and supernatural elements rooted in Thai soap operas and folklore, and extending the telling into the untold. Together, they slowly turn a fairly straightforward exposition into a polyphonic and heteroglossic tale of humans, animals, and aliens. The daisy-chain narrative of interlocking vignettes is shaped through speech or sign language, song and dance or radio broadcast, and grows more outlandish by the mile. Filmed on 16mm over the course of three years during Thailand’s economic crisis of the late 1990s, Mysterious Object at Noon already shows the rigorous attention paid to intricate sound recording and design, as well as uncanny narrative structures, that would characterize the director’s later film and video work, highlighting the full potential of cinema as a resonant form of composition and fabulation. “Less an anomaly than a secret skeleton key to Weerasethakul’s work… Mysterious Object at Noon revels in the myriad ways a story can be transmitted.” (Dennis Lim)

“You’re likely to be utterly enchanted by this unique dish of entertainment that may be the beginning of a new art form: Village Surrealism. Mr. Weerasethakul’s fifilm is like a piece of chamber music slowly, deftly expanding into a full symphonic movement; to watch it is to enter a fugue state that has the music and rhythms of another culture. It’s really a movie that requires listening, reminding us that the medium did become talking pictures at one point.” (Elvis Mitchell)

Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 4) // Politics of the Voice

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2024 (Gent, 27 – 31 March 2024), with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.

The voice emanates from within.

Here are seven artists who are not afraid of the sound of their own voices — whether embodied, sonic, visual, spoken, recited, conversed, unvoiced, silent.

They do not take their agency or freedom to express for granted.
They know these freedoms have been hard won.

This is the Politics of the Voice.

(Elaine Mitchener)

Our voice is what differentiates us from one another and relates us to one another. The voice concerns the throat, saliva, and breath, the chest and lungs, the patina of experienced life, the pleasure of shaping sound waves, the acoustic emission that emits from mouth to ear, as grain, timbre, vibration, rhythm, language. It resonates at the confluence of the individual and the collective, the phonetic and the semantic, interior and exterior, sound and sense. The voice is body and speech, sighs and cries, groans and moans, humming and hawing.

The voice is soul. Voice is noise. It’s what makes us unique as individuals but also powerful as a community. When attending to the question of resistance, of disagreement and redistribution, the emphasis is often on giving voice, speaking up, talking back, on the political act of voicing dissent, articulating demands, vocalizing laments. But what does it exactly mean ‘to voice’? How can we hear and understand the voice as something political?

With these questions in mind, we have invited vocalist, composer, voice and movement artist Elaine Mitchener to compose a programme of performances, conversations and video works that could breathe life into the voice in all its poetic and political force.

Curated by Elaine Mitchener
In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent)

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SESSION 1: THE POLITICS OF VOCAL MUSIC
29 MARCH, 2024 – 19:00
MINARD

LORÉ LIXENBERG / AUDREY CHEN / ESI ESHUN

£pØ@n®diØ$n [LPOANRDIOSN] for Voice and City
Frederic Acquaviva

performance, performed by Loré Lixenberg

“if borders and identity folds imploded, and if for example, the sound body of towns such as Paris or London would be playing together, if those sound biopsies, collected the same day at the same time, would refuse to just be simple ‘field recording’—those sound selfies —, but would reveal to be a music, rid of its victories: composition, de-composition and re-composition of a sonic score illuminated by the voice of the mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg… you would be then listening to the [concerto for town and voice]: £pØ@n®diØ$n by Frédéric Acquaviva.”

I am an animal made of the city. A concrete animal
Loré Lixenberg (mezzo-soprano)

performance

Recordings in the streets of Paris, 2018 by Frédéric Acquaviva.
Recordings in the streets of London, January 19, 2018, by Philip Tagney and Loré Lixenberg.

Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of THE VOICE PARTY
Loré Lixenberg

electro-acoustic presentation

“From the trauma of Brexit, THE VOICE PARTY (a political party & opera action) was born, with the plan to overhaul the structure of society according to the principles of music and sound and takes the forms of structures found in politics as operatic structure. For instance, ‘theVoicePartyOperaBotfarm,’ a kind of Deleuzian ‘Last of England’ for the 21st century, is a radiophonic sonic Twitter troll device musically trolling politicians with a chorus of advice, insults, despair and white-hot rage (Follow the botfarm on @TheVoiceParty1) a voice based cryptocurrency VOXXCOIN and party political broadcasts one of which I present here. PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST ON BEHALF OF THE VOICE PARTY is an acousmatic piece for scored and improvised voice, setting out the aims of THE VOICE PARTY for the UK elections 2024. It is a process piece with no end.”

SOLO
Audrey Chen

performance

Hyper-extensies voor stem en analoge elektronica.

Followed by a conversation with Loré Lixenberg, Audrey Chen, Elaine Mitchener & Esi Eshun

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SESSION 2: THE POLITICS OF VOICE POETRY
29 MARCH, 2024 – 21:00
MINARD

NHÃ THUYÊN / JAY BERNARD / ESI ESHUN

In:action. Speak up.
Nhã Thuyên

poetry reading, English & Vietnamese spoken

Speak up, a finger of mine touches a phrase in a book, a fresh smell. Why, I ask the page, and to whom, about what, in which way? I have no significant stories to tell and I don’t record sufferings. Mom complains about me not knowing what to do with my mouth. No, entering the roof of the mouth, there is a treasure chest. But it was cursed.

A woman figure speaks to the walls of a room or walls on the streets of a city somewhere, exposing her inner world in the form of never-ending sentences.

Reading in and into a place.
Reading in and into a language.
Reading in and into a body.
Poetry itches. Poetry thinks. Poetry acts. Poetry performs.

To overcome this itchy phase of writing. I can’t escape it. It can not escape me. I must let it continue,

new poems
Jay Bernard

poetry reading, English spoken

New poems written in Paris and London that speak to the title of the event Politics of the Voice.

Followed by a conversation with Nhã Thuyên, Jay Bernard, Elaine Mitchener & Esi Eshun

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SESSION 3: THE POLITICS OF SPEAKING OUT
29 MARCH, 2024 – 22:15
MINARD

ELAINE MITCHENER / NEIL CHARLES

SPEAK[ING] OUT
Elaine Mitchener (voice) & Neil Charles (double bass and electronics)

performance

Drawing from texts and poems from SPEAK OUT, the first ever collection of writing from the Brixton Black Women’s Group, one of the first and most important black radical organisations of the 1970s.

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THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA
29 MARCH, 2024 – 16:00
MINARD

EXPO
16:00 – 23:30

Mouth to Mouth
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, US, KR, 1975, video, 8′

English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an ‘O,’ then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act — a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes — so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting.

Vidéoème
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, US, KR, 1976, video, 5′

In this meditation on speech and language, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha juxtaposes English and French words to form new relationships and meanings.

Re Dis Appearing
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, US, KR, 1977, video, 3′

The artist speaks a word, which is quickly echoed in French, so that the words are only barely comprehended. Simple images — a bowl, a photograph of the ocean — appear and disappear.

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(Still from Sam Belinfante, Focus, 2012. 16mm film transferred to HD video, black and white, sound, 13 minutes)

Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 3) // Thinking with Dub Cinema

In the context of Courtisane Festival 2024 (Gent, 27 – 31 March 2024), with the support of KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts.

How to think dub cinema? How to think dub in, or as, or with, cinema? How, and in what ways, to think cinema by way of dub? How, and in which ways, does dub, understood not as a genre but, instead, as a sonic process that undoes the body of song, unmake the temporal structures of film?

In which ways does film invite thought that registers some of the ways in which dub, understood not only as sonic process but as cinesonic process, dramatises the unbelonging of black film to, or for, the institutions of the aesthetic, the ancestral, the archival, the auteurist, the authentic, the avant-garde, the bodily, the communitarian, the formal, the gendered, the generic, the historical, the militant, the narrative, the nation, the oral, the poetic, the political, the popular, the racial, the resistant, the struggle, the sexual or the traditional called upon by thought to organise the coherence of cinema?

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as two days of study, a film programme and a dub session devoted to questioning these questions. An invitation to study that dedicates itself to a practice of listening to cinema enabled by watching Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective, 1986).

Across study sessions led by Kodwo Eshun, Louis Henderson and Lynnée Denise, Thinking with Dub Cinema departs from an invitation to thought that attends to Handsworth Songs. Each session invites attendees to attune practices of watching, reading and listening towards developing a dub methodology for the imagination of auditory blackness, black audition, collective audition and filmic collectivity announced by Handsworth Songs.

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as a convening around an idea of dub cinema proposed, initially, by Greg Tate in 1988 and, subsequently, by Okwui Enwezor in 2007. In ‘Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here Comes Sankofa’ published in The Village Voice on 30th August 1988, Tate wrote that:

“Black Audio Film’s Handsworth Songs is dub cinema — dub, for the uninitiated, being that form of reggae where the lead vocal track is removed, and the foreground space filled with regenerated and decaying sounds bent on invoking a mythic African past and future. Ostensibly a documentary, its free-floating and spectral treatment of historical footage testifies to the mystique of the black British citizen while critiquing the commercialization of the black image. Handsworth Songs is a compressed chorus of black British voices, whose foregrounding puts white media and the police in the position of being Other.”

In ‘Coalition Building: Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational Post-colonialism’ published in The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective edited by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in 2007, Enwezor argued that:

“Though ostensibly addressing the issues of policing, Handsworth Songs reflects more profoundly the agency of the oppressed; it narrates their stories, not purely from the point of view of the event from which it derives its name, but equally through an archaeology of the visual archive of minoritarian dwelling in Britain. As is often the case in Black Audio Film Collective’s work, the ghosts of those stories inform the notion of a historically inflected dub cinema whose spatial, temporal and psychic dynamics relays the scattered trajectories of immigrant communities.”

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as an invitation to hear the ‘free-floating and spectral treatment of historical footage’ proposed by Tate and the ‘notion of a historically inflected dub cinema’ advanced by Enwezor as suggestions or, better still, as suggestures, to use Ian Penman’s term, for imagining a cine-poesis of the echo and a cine-practice of the version.

To hear Handsworth Songs as dub cinema is to elaborate upon the ways in which Handsworth Songs practices its versioning of cinema and its cinema of the version. To hear Handsworth Songs in and as a cine-mix is to attend to the ways in which Handsworth Songs versions film. To hear dub cinema in Handsworth Songs is to listen for the latent dimensions of the retroactive and the proleptic that become available for thought in the sounds and the images deployed by Handsworth Songs.

To hear Handsworth Songs from the place of the queer epistemology of Isaac Julien’s Territories, the television ballad of Philip Donnellan’s The Colony, the negrophobic Pathé newsreel of Our Jamaican Problem and the funerary poetics of Sir Collins & The Versatiles is to orient thought towards the ways in which Handsworth Songs summons archives for the sake and the stake of struggles that threaten the futures of the memories of black lives and deaths.

Think of Thinking with Dub Cinema as an invitation to elucidate the ways in which Handsworth Songs announces a cinema of unbelonging and unsettlement. An invitation to expound, expand and explicate some of the ways in which cinema dramatises its dub acoustemologies, its dub adjacencies, its dub affinities, its dub cosmologies, its dub economies, its dub epistemologies, its dub morphologies, its dub ontologies, its dub poiesis, its dub psyches.

Curated by Kodwo Eshun and Louis Henderson
In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent)
With the support of the Committee for Contemporary Art, KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, Film Department campus Brussels
In collaboration with Auguste Orts and argos

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STUDY DAYS

Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist. In 2002, he co-founded The Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar. They work by looking in the key of listening across media, observing a research-based methodology that studies events, archives, movements, compositions, materials, performance, vocality, and space-time in moving and non-moving image, sound, music and text. He is author of works such as Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (Afterall, 2012) and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet Books, 1998), and co-editor (with Anjalika Sagar) of The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool University Press, 2007). He is a lecturer in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, works as a curator and writes regularly for magazines and journals.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Henderson‘s films and installations are shown regularly in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and are distributed by LUX and Video Data Bank. His writing has been published in both print and online in books and journals. At present, Henderson is a doctoral candidate at the École Nationale Supérieure d‘Arts de Paris-Cergy. His research looks into the riverscapes of the East of England and Guyana through “spiral retellings” of the works of Wilson Harris and Nigel Henderson.

A global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, Lynnée Denise is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Shaped by her parent’s record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. She coined the term DJ Scholarship in 2013, which explores how knowledge is gathered, inter- preted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, Denise’s research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora. She just published her debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (the University of Texas Press), a narrative journey of reclamation that intricately details and humanizes the full life, musical contributions, and cultural impact of Willie Mae Thornton.

SESSION ONE
27 MARCH, 2024 – 10:00
KASKCINEMA

SESSION TWO
27 MARCH, 2024 – 14:00
KASKCINEMA

SESSION THREE
28 MARCH, 2024 – 10:00
KASKCINEMA

SESSION FOUR
28 MARCH, 2024 – 14:00
KASKCINEMA

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SCREENINGS

SCREENING ONE – The Terror and the Time
28 MARCH, 2024 – 22:15
PADDENHOEK

The Terror and the Time
Victor Jara Collective / Rupert Roopnaraine, GY, 1979, 16mm, 70′

The terror is British colonialism in Guyana; the time is 1953, the year of the first elections under a provisional democratic constitution. Stylized scenes photographed throughout Georgetown accompany the poetry of Martin Carter to convey a sense of intense political reform against poverty, repression and silence. The film unfolds against the interna tional backdrop of the 50s: the growth of foreign economic and military interests in the Caribbean basin, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Mau Mau revolts in Kenya, the Cold War, and the U.S.’ covert wars against Cuba, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iran and Nigeria.

In his forward to Poems of Resistance by his comrade and compatriot Martin Carter, the great Guyanese writer Eusi Kwayana, implies that poetry is criticism. This sense of criticism held and released in and before art animates The Terror and the Time. The film offers poetic practice, historical criticism, and critical historiography in a rehearsal of sound, image, ground, and aspiration… Rupert Roopnaraine, a key figure in the Victor Jara Collective, suggested that the product betrays the process so that the film’s unfinishedness is given in accord with anticolonial struggle. As he argues what is important is that the strug gle remains. And what remains is the unstill consistency of the cartman and the dark, glimpsed by and given in criticism, through the absolute dissolution of the poem and the poet, the filmmaker and the film.” (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)

Followed by a conversation with Lewanne Jones, Ray Kril and Susumu Tokunow, members of the Victor Jara Collective

SCREENING TWO – Handsworth Songs / Thames Film
30 MARCH, 2024 – 11:00
PADDENHOEK

Handsworth Songs
Black Audio Film Collective / John Akomfrah, UK, 1986, 16mm to digital, 59′

A cinematic essay on race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain, Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout the film is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. “To make sense of the debris in Handsworth, BAFC had to reconstitute the fragments, and in doing so, words, sound and image came alive in an audio/visual style.”

The feeling of disjuncture is reflected not only in the jump cuts of the film’s narrative discontinuity — moving between archival photographs, newsreel fragments, media reportage, and on-site interviews — it is also deeply anchored by the sombre aural pulse, the disjunctive syncopation of the snare drum beat, the mournful reverb of the dub score that sustains a quiet rage. Though ostensibly addressing the issues of policing, Handsworth Songs reflects more profoundly the agency of the oppressed; it narrates their stories, not purely from the point of view of the event from which it derives its name, but equally through an archaeology of the visual archive of minoritarian dwelling in Britain. As is often the case in BAFC’s work, the ghosts of those stories inform the notion of a historically inflected dub cinema whose spatial, temporal and psychic dynamics relays the scattered trajectories of immigrant communities.” (Okwui Enwezor)

Thames Film
William Raban, UK, 1986, 16mm, 66′

By filming from the low freeboard of a small boat, William Raban attempts to capture the point of view of the river Thames, tracing the 50 mile journey from the heart of London to the open sea. Interspersed with images from Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death and T.S. Eliot reading Four Quartets, this contemporary view is set in an historical context through use of archival footage and the words of the travel writer Thomas Pennant, who followed exactly the same route in 1787.

This is a vision of the dark Thames, of ‘Old Father Thames’ as an awful god of power akin to William Blake’s Nobodaddy; and, in Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, ‘Thames is drunk with blood’. In this film there is something fearful about the river, something monstrous, recalling Conrad’s line in Heart of Darkness that ‘… this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’. Walking along the banks of the Thames, down river, approaching the estuary, it is possible to feel great fear. One of the possible derivations of the word Thames itself is tamasa meaning ‘dark river’; the word is pre-Celtic in origin, so we have the vision of an ancient, almost primeval, time. And yet there is beauty and sublimity in terror. Raban has learned something from the great artists of the river, such as Turner and Whistler, and portrayed the Thames as clothed in wonder.” (Peter Ackroyd)

SCREENING THREE – Territories / Emergence / In the Shadow of the Sun
30 MARCH, 2024 – 22:15
SPHINX CINEMA 3

Territories
Sankofa Film and Video Collective / Isaac Julien, UK, 1984, DCP, 25′

Looking at the history of Carnival in Britain as a subversive phenomenon, Territories views cultures and languages as markers that attempt to define the boundaries of both metaphorical and real territories. The film juxtaposes — and often superimposes — original and archival materials: footage of festive street life and rioting during Carnival, of police surveillance, of white and black British men and women exchanging desiring and alienated glances while vying for control of social space, and of the desolate urban evidence of abandonment and neglect.

In Territories, the growing power of organized sound and music counterpoints the visual montage and is articulated with it aesthetically. Our narrators sit at a Steenbeck editing machine, underscoring their responsibilities as mediators, but the DJs and MCs who make up People’s War are not positioned at that distance. Under the time-stretching impact of what we must call a dub aesthetic — one grasping the shock that only the unintelligible can communicate — the film demands to be encountered as a remix. Its repeated phrases, oscillations, and orchestrations depart from reggae; their relocation to the gray northern metropolis has opened them to the emergent power of hip-hop and what we used to call ‘electro’. … Here is the demotic pulse of a truly populist modernism and we do ‘Feel Like Jumping’. Its dissident spirit is propelled by the energy of ritual repetition, of ceaseless versioning. “ (Paul Gilroy)

Emergence
Pratibha Parmar, UK, 1986, DCP, 18′

Pratibha Parmar made her first video work with the help of Black Audio Film Collective as “a way of saying something about the emergence of Black women and Asian women as cultural artists and cultural activists”. Emergence interweaves the diasporic voices of four women of color: Audre Lorde, Mona Hatoum, Sutapa Biswas, and Meiling Jin. Transporting diasporic identities across a landscape of white noise and silence (soundtrack by Trevor Mathison), alienation, and fragmentation, Emergence moves toward the reintegration of speaking, performing subaltern subjects.

“Emergence is a performative multi-voiced and multi-enacted ritual visual poem that moves women of color, as the voice-over states, ‘from yesterday’s silence to tomorrow’s dreams’. Woman as speaking subject, gazing subject, interrogating corporeal performative subject owns spatiality in an arena that once depended upon her invisibility, her silence, and the suppression of her performing body. Emergence works to recover subjected forms of knowledge. Parmar invokes a performative ethnographic to move across the landscapes of colonial division, in the process underscoring the need for an ‘ethnographic ear’, as defined by Anglo-Asian cultural critic Jenny Sharpe. Sharpe finds that ethnographic listening ‘exists between and not within cultures … beside every native voice is an ethnographic ear’.” (Gwendolyn Audrey Foster)

In the Shadow of the Sun
Derek Jarman, UK, 1981, 16mm to DCP, 54′

In the Shadow of the Sun draws upon Derek Jarman’s interest in alchemical processes as a metaphor for reprocessing Super-8 film. Originally called English Apocalypse, the film’s final title is derived from a 17th Century alchemical text that used the phrase as a synonym for the philosopher’s stone — the highly sought substance that turns base metals into gold and silver. The film, with a score by Throbbing Gristle, was intended as a step toward the idea of an ambient video, that like its musical counterpart, was designed to enhance an environment.

“In the Shadow of the Sun is a fire film, an English Apocalypse… related to John Dee and alchemy where the distinction between words and things is obscured by the identification of symbols with things… The images are fused with scarlets, oranges and pinks. The degradation caused by the refilming of multiple images gives them a shimmering mystery/energy like Monet’s ‘Nympheas’ or haystacks in the sunset. There is no narrative in the film. The first viewers wracked their brains for a meaning instead of relaxing into the ambient tapestry of random images. The language is there and it is conveyed — and you don’t know what you have to say until you’ve said it. You can dream of lands far distant.” (Derek Jarman)

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LATE NIGHT DUB SESSION
29 MARCH, 2024 – 23:00
DE ROES (DONKERSTEEG 4)

A skeletal promise or a spectral insistence
by Louis Henderson

A Late Night Dub Session.
Sound system by Sailah Soundsystem

The Silences of the Voice

By Pascal Bonitzer

An attempt to assemble critical pieces approaching cinema “from the standpoint of sound”. This article was first published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 256, February-March 1975, and with revisions in Pascal Bonitzer, Le Regard et la voix (Paris: Union Général d’Editions, 1976). Translated by Philip Rosen and Marcia Butzel, as published in Narrative, apparatus, ideology : a film theory reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York : Columbia University Press, 1986).

Ah, how repugnant imposing my own thoughts on others is to me!
— Nietzsche

The “Minimum of Commentary”

We know that, politically and ideologically, the issue of the point of view a film reflects is a crucial question, and often becomes the arena of violent controversy. For example, Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle) and The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani) recently gave rise to contradicting interpretations of their ideological content: fascist, progressive, reactionary? Then there was the case of Antonioni’s China: certain “friends of China” analyzed its point of view as progressive and pro-Chinese, while others (not to mention the Chinese themselves) as anti-Chinese and reactionary. This leads us to questions on three points:

(1) A film produces a discourse.
(2) This discourse is, to a greater or lesser extent, implicit, veiled.
(3) And it is the spectators who, “in the last instance” utter (contradictorily) its truth.

Of course, it is true that the fiction film gives rise to diverse interpretations. Is not ambiguity the element in which all fiction is immersed? But a documentary or a montage of documents – on the contrary, isn’t its aim to shed light on the real with which it deals? to disengage from that real a readability and hence a point of view? Insofar as it deals with the real, isn’t documentary a matter of truth? Camera-views, montage: reality is seized and worked through at a certain angle in order to render something on the screen – to the spectators.

It is therefore necessary to envisage the work by which a film organizes its point of view, articulates its discourse. How is it done in the case of a film like Mai 68 (Gudie Lawaetz), which is precisely a film that brings together different points of view from divergent political extremes onto the same object? Does this imply that the film in its entirety produces no point of view? But why does this question have to be asked?

Mai 68 is connected to a type of film and a type of montage with its own traditions and codes, those of the “free confrontation” (produced essentially by television, but which cinema can take up, as is shown, for example, by the success of The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls)). The free confrontation is that of contradictory images and witnesses, a mise-en-scène of the multiple “facets” of an event by means of interviews and archival documentary footage. (The latter’s difference from nature is a sign of the richness of the investigation and of the information and so should be marked: in this case the interviews are shot in color, which has the additional effect of emphasizing the temporal gap 1968-1973, the “receding” of the testimony and of the positions taken.) The lure for the public is that of mastering a dossier – by leafing through it.

A formula credited by Gudie Lawaetz to Sartre rather well summarizes this genre of historical digest, whose success testifies to its seductiveness: “let the event speak.” This is an interesting formula not only because in it can be read the elision of (the author’s) point of view toward the event in question, but also because it displaces this “question of point of view”-which is so important for “politics”-to a problem of speech. It is because it is inscribed there that “it speaks,” that the just vision of an event depends on what the latter says, that the eye is carried by the voice, and under the circumstances, a voice which, if not silent, is at least without subject.

Without subject – this is central to the question. It is true that the event belongs to no one (and this is more true of May 1968 than any other event). Gudie Lawaetz’ film shows this well: if it witnesses something, it is the failure of those who appropriate the movement to themselves (see the points of view the film compares, which are all perplexed or worn down). So, is it “the event itself” which actually speaks in this film? Of course not. What speaks is its descent into the past, into journalistic information and into History in the old sense of the word: linear history, flat chronology, trifles of the recent past and the derision of senescence. Of course all the actors of May have aged. Of course the images of May have aged. But what is this? Is this the meaning-this aging, this slackening? It is like the final scene of Rentrée des usines Wonder, but taken out of its militant context, for which is substituted an “open ending”: Mai 68 repeats the end of May.

This film has the past in its eye. It is indeed a “point of view” which is thus organized, a discourse which is woven in silence. Is it without subject? But this aging, whose image the film offers across its impoverished informative chronology, is indeed that of a subject. Who is this subject? Who if not us, the spectators, in whom “the event speaks” silently. To “let the event speak” is to let it be spoken by the spectators, according to the paths traced in silence by the film and guided by the signposts of montage. It is thus important to analyze the structure, the montage, which conveys the “event” and what historical capacity is distributed to it-here, pretty much that of a Mirror of History. It is important to recognize that what speaks in a film is never the “event” (and what is an event, if not a nodal point of redistributed historical intensities?), but rather the subject who is supposed to know it.

At stake in this type of film is knowledge. What is desired from it is a knowledge of an object (history, May 1968, etc.), a knowledge that is in some way specifically cinematographic, obtained by the eye and the ear, optical and sound recording, the scene which their montage composes.

In this knowledge, it is important to allow the spectator to enjoy — that is, not to take the spectator’s place by uttering it. The principle “let the event speak” also signifies “Let the spectator enjoy (know).” Of course one can protest that this is a false knowledge, an impression of knowledge (in the sense of an “impression of reality”) obtained through the specular lure produced by the cinematographic apparatus [l’appareil]; whereas, in truth, knowledge requires something other than this specular impression, for it only exists as the effect of a labor of inquiry and theoretical elaboration, of placing the object in perspective and investigating its form. Undoubtedly.

But the enjoyment – the jouissance – of the spectator? A difficulty arises here, and one which is nodal for a cinema which, more than any other, utters its knowledge. This is the cinema whose principles are opposed to those practiced by Gudie Lawaetz – namely “militant cinema.” The latter has often been reproached for ignoring jouissance (of the spectators), and to a great extent this reproach is well-grounded. The difficulty thus revolves around a certain number of notions put in play in a specific way by the documentary or the compilation film: discourse, subject, knowledge, jouissance. The place of the spectators in the apparatus [le dispositif] – their role – is there implicated and acted out.

In the Lawaetz system (which is to say, in a classical system), one sees how jouissance under the form (if one likes) of the “impression of knowledge” is put into operation. It is from an absence in the body of the film that it is offered to the spectators. This absence is neither that of a discourse nor that of a subject- both of which, as we have seen, can be implicit and veiled, but never lacking. It is the absence of commentary, which is to say of a voice. More precisely, what is absent is the voice-off, that voice of knowledge par excellence in all films, since it resounds from offscreen, in other words from the field of the Other. In this system the concern is to reduce, insofar as possible, not the informative capacity of commentary but its assertive character and, if one likes, its authoritative character – that arbitration and arbitrariness of the voice-off which, to the extent that it cannot be localized, can be criticized by nothing and no one. This is a system of “no commentary” or “minimum of commentary.” This is, we maintain, a classical system for the documentary, the archival film, and the compi- lation film. In appearance it is a democratic system: it puts restraints on the arbitrariness of the voice-off, of commentary which does violence to the real and to the spectators (by not allowing them to think about the event). What is this system in reality?

The Voice Which Keeps Its Silence

In Mai 68, when Séguy speaks of May, the student movement, and the workers’ movement, his words are inflated by his face and have to be evaluated in connection with that face, with that simultaneously embarrassed and cunning air, those fleeting glances, etc. – that collection of traits which, with a light regional accent, connotes the “personality” of a union leader for cinema and television. For the spectators, having the image of Séguy (or any politician) imparts a relative critical power. Doubtless, this criticism is greatly limited and very equivocal (how could anyone honestly judge a politics by a physical image of those who reflect it? racism is not far away.) But it is still criticism, and spectators never fail to make more or less use of it. If he speaks facing the camera, one can laugh at what he says or insult him (and this happened in movie theaters of the Latin Quarter when Mai 68 was shown). Enclosed in the frame of the (large or small) screen and in some way visibly calling for our complicity, he is, in a certain fashion, delivered to us. Prisoner of a perceptible appearance, doubly mastered by the lens of the camera and the eye of the spectator, the authority of the voice is thus encountered as being submitted to criticism, or at least to a criticism-the most rapid one, that of the look. The image plays the role of fixative for the voice. It restrains the power in it (resonance, amplitude, ambience, its disquieting power.) It is completely otherwise when the voice absents and uproots itself from the image, and returns to haunt it from outside, from space-off, from off screen. It then secures a hold on the image and, through the latter, on the real which it reflects; and this hold can no longer be countered by an easy criticism from the look. So instead of looking, it is necessary to think-but this is precisely the problem: is there time to do so? Was Merleau-Ponty wrong when he wrote “a film is not thought, it is perceived?”

Voice-off. There are at least two types of voice-off, which refer to at least two types of space-off. Take the case of a narrative fiction such as a detective film, when the voice of a character comes from off screen. Even if there is no reverse shot to suture the gap opened by this voice, we know that it comes from a place homogeneous with that of the scenographic lure offered by the filmic image. This is a homogeneity in accord with realist physical space. Such a voice can be disquieting, as, to a greater or lesser extent, voice-off always is; however, it is so only within the dramatic frame of the fiction, which is to say, in a restricted way. Thus, in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich), if the criminal whose identity and terrifying secret is sought by Mike Hammer remains off screen until the last sequences, it is unnecessary from the point of view of the detective enigma; for as he himself says, nothing will be learned from his face by the detective (or the spectators). But keeping it off screen (we only see his lower legs and only know him from his blue suede shoes) gives his sententious voice, inflated by mythological comparisons, a much greater disquieting power, the scope of an oracle- somber prophet of the end of the world. And despite that, this voice is submitted to the destiny of the body: the one institution of the narrative to whose law it is submitted renders it decrepit and mortal. It suffices for the subject of this voice to appear in the image (and thus it suffices that he could appear there) for it to be no longer anything but the voice of a man, in other words, of any imbecile. Proof? A gunshot, he falls—and with him, but in ridicule, his discourse with its prophetic overtones.

The contrary case is when the voice is inscribed in a space which is not in proper interaction (not homogeneous) with that of the image. This voice intro- duces a division of the filmic field that is much more enigmatic. In fiction films this division is rare and produces an effect of strangeness (an example of its utilization for this effect of strangeness is Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives). But as rare as this is in fiction films, it is common and seems natural in documentaries. And to the extent that this is the case, it makes for no problems in them.

In Kashima Paradise ( Bénie Deswarte, Yann Le Masson) the voice-off intervenes with a certain brutality. It forces the image from its discourse of class struggle, and counters naturalness and the perceptibly obvious. But who speaks, and from where and when?

Another practice can be found in China, whose commentary is rarefied and barely assertive. Antonioni does not inform the image with any theory (and especially not with Marxist theory), but rather principally with a circle of information about what is not shown, namely the conditions of the filming, the specifics of what is off screen, etc. For example, he describes, off, not what the filmic image reflects-the Chinese peasants are extremely fidgity, clearly uncomfortable with the camera, almost tormented by it – but, en abime, that which is supposedly seen by these peasants who are being stalked by the apparatus [appareil] (and which is precisely what they avoid looking at): Antonioni himself and his crew, in the disquieting strangeness of their Western disorder (beards, long hair, faded jeans, etc.) But if this permits him, ever so little, to situate himself (unlike the authors of Kashima), from where does he get the right, in their place, to speak the look of these peasants? And what effect is he seeking?

The secret power of commentary and voice-off is that these (and other similar) questions are practically never posed to spectators during the time of projection. The conventional realist homogeneity of narrative space calls up identification by means of the image, and thus all which intervenes from offscreen immediately causes questioning (at least of an anterior identification by means of the play of the shot/reverse shot, reframings, etc.). At the inverse of such narrative space, in the divided, heterogeneous space of documentary, the voice-off forbids questioning about its enunciator, its place, and its time. The commentary, in informing the image, and the image, in allowing itself to be invested by the commentary, censor such questions.

This is not, one surmises, without ideological implications. The first of these is that the voice-off represents a power, namely the power of the disposition of the image and what it reflects from a place which is absolutely other (from that inscribed on the image track)-absolutely other and absolutely undetermined. In this sense it is transcendent; hence, incontestable, uncontested, and supposedly knowledgeable. Insofar as it issues from the field of the Other, the voice-off is presumed to know: this is the essence of its power.
Power indeed.

For if the voice knows, it is inevitably for someone, who will not speak. To say it is for someone is to discuss both its addressee and its place. This someone is undoubtedly the spectator, but not only him. In the sequence from China cited above, Antonioni (the voice) speaks from the place of the Chinese peasants and addresses the Western spectators; and the inverse is also in operation (for in a certain way the film addresses itself to the Chinese as well, to see how the latter have grasped it; and speaks of China from the place of the spectators, to see precisely the position of Antonioni and of the spectator – privileged). The voice speaks from the place of the Other, and this also must be understood in a double sense. It is not charged with manifesting the Other in its radical heterogeneity, but on the contrary with controlling it, with recording it (that is, with suppressing and conserving it), with fixating it by means of knowledge. The power of the voice is a stolen power, stolen from the Other; it is a usurpation. In his article “Who Says What, but Where and When?” (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 250), Serge Daney gives a striking example of the use which Power can make of this appropriated power of the voice-off. It is the daily use which television makes of it:

A short time ago, O.R.T.F presented a short film on prisons. While the camera fluidly slid along the white walls of a model prison, the commentary-off reprised in its way and in its language a certain number of demands and problems posed elsewhere by the prisoners (elsewhere: everywhere, except on television – for example, in the C.A.P.). A “contentist” criticism could satisfy itself with this and see in it, deservedly, the effect – reading through it — of the real struggle of the prisoners, without which television would never have been obliged to make the film. But who does not see a difference in nature between a film like this and Attica?

For Attica speaks with, for, and by means of the voices of the prisoners. It is necessary to note that the film described by Daney is representative of a great deal of news reporting and magazine programs produced by television. Now, what is in operation in that smoothness, that fluidity? First of all the image, that image which shows nothing properly speaking (the blank walls of a model prison), only a metonymy (part for whole) of the carceral world, whose pure, abstract presence is made to shine forth by the small screen. This metonymic usage of the image is very frequent in television news. It fills in the hole of real information, the lack of serious inquiry, and functions as a kind of sign of information (it is necessary to fill up the image box, to show something). But above all, this radical metonymy, this near-emptiness of the image, makes the real shine forth (this paucity of things, these deserted shots, are indications that the camera has touched the real, which can, in turn, touch your eyes); and the commentary-off is then able to seize the real. It is the visual and perceivable support of the commentary – if one likes, its flesh. The action of this kind of film is thus a double reduction, a double mastery of the real, which is to say of that which burns (here, not only carceral space, but the entire social crisis which it reveals): mastery by the image, which manifests the real while denying it, and by the voice, which speaks the real while imposing silence on it.

Indeed, what is this voice which “reprised in its way and in its language”? Whose way and whose language? But these are precisely the questions which are barred, obscured by space-off. What speaks is the anonymity of “public service,” of television, of information in general-and, extending the circle of connotations, perhaps the compassionate and grief-stricken Law, Democracy enunciating its wrongs, Man… A little of all these silently speak in the anonymity of the voice-off, there vaguely tracing the great veiled and abstract subject in whose name it speaks [ça parle]. And this it is the homogeneity of the social order, which in reprising “in its way,” is straining to reabsorb the heterogeneous, burning discourse of the prisoners.

What the anonymous voice-off of “public service” accomplishes is in fact a double suppression of the voice of the prisoners. First, it suppresses their voice by not allowing them to speak, and second by substituting for them. The purpose – television also serves this purpose, and one could demonstrate that a program such as Dossiers de l’Ecran has no other rationale – is that the burning voice of revolt (and through it the burning fact of revolt) give way to the cold voice of order, normality, and power.

In its function as commentary, the voice-off neither is supposed to be nor can be a burning voice – ephemeral, fragile, troubled by revolts when they have for once managed, at great price, to break through the wall of silence. The atony of commentary recloses that wall.

True, it is not always atonic.

Indeed, this is what leads us back to the stake pointed out by the technique of the “minimum of commentary”: the jouissance of the spectator, the right of the latter to knowledge. The submission of the spectator to the master voice indeed has limits. Those limits are encountered when the voice is obviously deceptive – a privilege of the master, but a risky privilege – and when partisan passion is perceived in it. This experience is amusingly illustrated by Chris Marker’s short documentary Letter from Siberia (Chris Marker).

In it the same sequence is seen three times, in continuity, but each time accompanied by different commentaries. The sequence shows workers in an unremarkable Siberian city (Yakutsk) occupied with paving a street; passing through the foreground is an Asiatic whose squinty look crosses the monocular one of the lens. What Chris Marker wishes to demonstrate is that such an image, in itself, is not neutral but is at least ambiguous and is susceptible in its referential function (Siberia, the Soviet Union) to antagonistic, contradictory readings; and that the role of the commentary can be precisely to wrest from the image a strong, univocal meaning (the image opens a field of multiple connotations which the commentary closes in denoting it, in bestowing names on things). Thus, the first commentary for this sequence is a discourse of the sanctimonious Stalinist type: the meaning extorted from the image by this discourse is that of the joyous construction of socialism (“In the joyful spirit of socialist emulation, happy Soviet workers, among them this picturesque denizen of the Arctic reaches, apply themselves to making Yakutsk an even better place to live”). The image track presents the same series of shots and the commentary changes: the voice now extracts from it an eloquent expression of Soviet misery, as would be seen by a professional anticommunist (“Bending to the task like slaves, the miserable Soviet workers, among them this sinister-looking Asiatic, apply themselves to the primitive labor of grading with a drag beam”). For the third and last time, the film returns to the same shots and the end of prosopopoeia: Chris Marker stops parodying the discourse of others – of official joviality or of primitive anti-Sovietism (which, from a certain angle, are the same thing) – and finally enunciates what can be properly said of the material: a commentary which is neither black nor white and which is objective and nuanced (“With courage and tenacity under extremely difficult conditions, Soviet workers, among them this Yakut afflicted with an eye disorder, apply themselves to improving the appearance of their city, which could certainly use it.”)

In reading these (Commentaries by Chris Marker has been published by Editions de Seuil), one cannot avoid a vague sense of deception the third time the sequence is repeated. Is it a matter of nothing being said? Not completely. To begin with, in its entirety the sequence does say something, but in a negative form: it says that commentary should not do violence to the image. To do violence to the image and to impel its referential reality is to extort a surplus meaning from it, to interdict its ambiguity, to congeal it into a type, symbol, metaphor (paving a street = joyful spirit of socialist emulation; an Asian passing = by yellow peril, etc.). This is what makes for propaganda. The ethic here suggested is close to that professed by André Bazin, when he denounced the rape of the image (of its “ontological realism”) by montage, that power of montage to orient the haphazardness of events snared on film toward any meaning (toward a meaning intended a priori). Like Bazin, Marker denounces the reduction of the signifying field opened by the filmic image. He understands it as a terrorist reduction to the benefit of interests exterior to and transcending the cinematographic experience.

In one sense, this is not wrong, but only in one sense. In his brilliant caricature, Marker’s critique runs together without distinction the enunciation and the enunciated, voice and meaning. So one cannot avoid the impression that some- thing (in the functioning of commentary) is escaping notice.

There are two aspects of partisan passion: passion and taking sides. It is wellknown that passion is blind. It enables one to cast doubt on truth and is the very foundation of one’s partiality (retaining the equivocation between partial as meaning in part and partial as meaning biased and unfair). Moreover, it is violent and can settle nothing. (And it is intolerable when it occupies the place of power-“off.”) Marker is against this passion and blindness; he does not judge from a position of involvement. But is it necessary always to prefer detached reason, the “scientific” or ironic gaze? Chris Marker poses the question well (“But objectivity isn’t exact, either. It does not deform the Siberian reality, but stops its movement for the time of a judgment, and thereby deforms it all the same”). But he responds quickly and vaguely: “What counts is the élan and diversity.” Another response, which comes closer to what is in the power of the voice, is sketched out in another short documentary which is much older than Letter from Siberia: Bunuel’s Las Hurdes [Land Without Bread]. We will return to this.

What is certain is that the cold voice is imposed (see above) where the accents of passion give birth to mistrust. Ultimately, is this not what Chris Marker is saying in the sequence of Letter from Siberia? Isn’t he ultimately denouncing not the false character of passionate commentary, but its inoperative character? Here we refind the technique of “minimum of commentary.” What Chris Marker enunciates is the modern knowledge – Western and bourgeois, if one wishes – of what is the reserve of commentary that defines the regime of its mastery, its terrorist opacity. He does not enunciate solely the democratic, liberal ethic of the commentary of political information, but also and perhaps especially, the cynicism of a science, of a mastery of the commentary: it doesn’t say too much, it doesn’t devour the silent, open meaning of the image, it doesn’t counter the “obtuseness,” ambiguity, or power of silent assertion of the image. It is a layer protecting the filmic image, lubricating it and not forcing it.

The countertest of this “science” of the commentary is given to us as much by travelogues as by certain militant films, and also by prewar newsreels of the Pathé-Journal type. These experiment with the descent of the voice into falseness and ridiculousness. One laughs, one cries, one doesn’t believe one’s ears. It is so silly that it is comic, or odious, or both at once. What is evident in this is precisely an accent: the surprising twang, the forced note, the comic rapidity of the voice-off in Pathé newsreels; or the syrupy sentimentality of commentaries in travelogues; or the epic bombast, obligatory class hatred, and insufferable optimism of the commentary in certain militant films. What one hears, then, is something like the body of the voice – and its body is its death to meaning. The voice is no longer drawn for us from the image (presuming that the latter is not itself perceived as grotesque and abusive, which happens but in which case the problem is not posed), nor a fortiori from the real which is mirrored there. It detaches itself and becomes part of an ensemble which does not hold together. This is what permits aesthetes to love film in spite of itself by finding in it the charm of the old, an aspect of kitsch and nostalgia.

The Voices Which Are Heard

The voice ages. Its signifier (that in it which is heard) “labors.” In it is perceived an accent which is not that of a region of geography but rather a region of meaning, the accent of an era, a class, a regime – and this accent neutralizes meaning, defuses the knowledge imposed by that voice. This is why it is necessary for it to speak as little as possible. No commentary is the wisdom or the prudence of the master, of power. The voice expounds. It expounds more than the image, for one can play with the image, but then the ridiculous risked is not that of the ultimate, mortal ridiculous – of meaning.

That which has the “right to speech” (in the sense that it has the power to do so) should use it as little as possible. This is a curious rule. Does it hold for all films in the register of the real, of the document and of the documentary? Is it evaded in the limit case (such as Mai 68) when commentary is abolished and scansions of montage substitute?

To this second question one can respond that the accent – since it is this asperity of the voice which catches critical hearing (as a flood of light can catch the grain of a surface which is the “material” of a painted canvas) – the accent is also perceived, though less directly, beyond the voice in the shocks of montage and the frequency of cuts which are the means by which montage makes discourse. One does not thus escape the hindrances of discourse or truth (even though this is a platitude).

But who is it that is afraid of deception, aging, and dying? Is it everyone? Perhaps everyone, to the extent that, as it is said, he aspires to mastery, he defends his power, his knowledge, his memory. This is to say to the extent that he is one. Voice off: the voice of his master. And there can be only one master. This is why, generally in this system, there is only one commentating voice on the sound track (and most of the time it is a man’s voice). Sometimes, but more rarely, there are two alternating voices (man, woman) so that the superior unity of discourse arises from their discrete conjugal harmony. But if the voice is found to be geared down and with this the unity of the discourse is found to be broken, the system and its effects change. Space-off then stops being the place of the reserve and the interiority of the voice (that place where it “is heard to speak”); it is itself divided, and from this division takes on the dimension of a scene, is dramatized and is peopled. Something happens there, parallel to the image or interlacing with it, but unfixed from it. The voice is no longer simply planted in the image when there are many voices and they struggle with one another (as in Godard, notably during the period of the “Dziga Vertov Group”), or when they desire and love one another (as in Duras). But what is found to be subverted is the very principle of the documentary, its principle of reality (both as unique and as objective).

To encounter the “body” of the voice (what Barthes calls its grain), this refuse from meaning, is to encounter the subject of the voice with its division, the subject fallen to the rank of object and unmasked: thus, in Chris Marker’s exercise “the paranoid anticommunist” and “the jovial Stalinist” were carnival figures. On the one hand meaning is naked, neutralized, laughable (“the emperor has no clothes”); on the other hand, there is its “body,” its cadaver: its noise and cacaphony… Why is it that when it becomes perceivable, this bursting of the unity of commentary and of voice, this scission of sound and meaning, is accompanied by manifestations of revolt, by laughing and crying in the theaters? Against what is a revolt occurring? Against humbuggery. But this humbuggery does not give rise to a special reaction if it does not claim to dominate with its discourse the real that crosses the image. To recognize the humbuggery in the imperturbable voice-off by laughing is to lift the oppression of the commentary. The laugh explodes, its splits open: it breaks through the voice of the commentator.

If the unity of voice and meaning in the commentary-off defines a regime of mastery or of oppression, it is perhaps starting from its scission that one could begin to define another politics (or erotics) of the voice-off. Something of this order was devised by Buñuel in Las Hurdes: the commentary-off is cold, but the image shrieks. Over the image, it cracks, it rots, it cruelly grimaces; and by this, the circumspection, the reserve of the commentary becomes strange, becomes the atony of the disquieting voice, as if the abyss between the silent cry of the image and the discourse of the voice-off were imperceptibly traversed by a silent laugh which belies what this voice says. In the end, this voice is heard. Starting from the moment when it is heard, its discourse – which is never that of mastery – is found to be menaced, the function of the commentary is lacking. and that of documentary is placed on trial. What is devised in Las Hurdes is a radical testing of the mastery based on the commentary, on imperialism, and on colonialism, which are deep-seated in documentary.

All modern cinema since, let us say, Godard on the one hand and Bresson on the other, is instituted by simultaneously placing on trial the filmic image as a full, centered, and deep image, and the utilization of the voice as homogeneous with and in harmony with the image. It has often been said that what cinematographic modernity puts into play – no matter what claims it uses to promote itself – are effects of rupture, disalignings, “noise” in the filmic chain. A tearing in the effect of the real of the image and in the effect of mastery of the voice is brought about. The relation among voice, sound, and silence is transformed and musicalized.

This is what provides the site for limit experiments, such as those in the margin of militant cinema of the “Dziga Vertov Group,” or those of Straub or of Duras. Straub is certainly the filmmaker who has played the most richly, musically, and dramatically with plurality, with the capacity of voices in filmic space; it does not always know a lot, but in the end it will be heard. In Duras (who recently declared that she can no longer synchronize – she said “screw” – voices into mouths) this is, among other things, an experiment with silence and with the subversion of the voice with silence. This is true from Destroy, She Said and Nathalie Granger (Nathalie Granger is inhabited by silence not in order to reinforce, from an effect of reserve, the power of speech which is that of man, but to paralyze and to cast a spell over the latter and to return the voice as lapse, as trouble, as a liberty of the unconscious – to return the voice to women) to Woman of the Ganges and India Song (and perhaps Vera Baxter) where the silence of the image provokes the sonic peopling of space-off. Duras thus introduces the spark of desire and sends the question back to the spectators.

But these are fictions, which is to say works supremely unconcerned with that “reflection of the real” by which the truth of a documentary is measured and which imposes on the voice of the latter that specific discretion which is our problem. It would be necessary to discuss militant cinema, where the voice finds itself invested with a precise function which is, moreover, variable. For example, in Oser lutter (made in Flins in May-June of 1968 by established militants) there is that confused mixture of voices, over black leader, from which emerges in bits and pieces the “truth” of the struggle: “and above all, no negotiations…” To this mixture and burning confusion on the sound track is opposed, as the clarity of revolutionary knowledge, intertitles where that knowledge is all written, white on black. Or in Shanghai au jour le jour, there are two voices-off of women in dialogue, but they do not directly comment on the real which the image reflects (as, for example, does Antonioni, discussed above); but rather they comment on the image track and clearly are speaking in an editing room. Here there is something which blocks the terrorist indetermination of the voice-off-two women who speak to one another, who have a dialogue before the images…

If, in a general way, the problems here evoked are rarely resolved in an interesting fashion (and rarely even envisaged) by militant cinema, it is nevertheless from its place and starting from the problems posed by militant film makers that it is possible to begin to think and to realize a subversion of documentary and of that which secretly operates there: the discourse of power, the discourse-form of power. Indeed, militant cinema cannot be something like classical documentary plus rage and great, fine-sounding words. It has to be something else completely, something which organizes otherwise the relation to the real, the look, and the voice.

Here or there, in varying degrees this is being done, for what is called militant cinema never begins except from where classical documentary ends, in that which the latter smothers and erases: the speaking subject. The stake being risked is that of the subject. This is the reason classical documentary represses that stake, most often in the dogmatism of a voice-off without subject. The greatest difficulty in the order of the document and the real which there makes itself known is indeed that of not effacing the subject, the I and the you. Perhaps this leads toward a new way of approaching the real, a way which is more supple, and also more hazardous, more open to chance. Hazard, discovery – this is the chance of the new.

Hence, militant cinema loves the hazardous…

N.B. 1. It will have been understood that commentary is not point of view. Its problem is precisely how to silence a point of view. Not that the commentary exists before an organized point of view, which could otherwise say everything. But commentary is not for saying all: its role is to legislate on images of the real, to inject knowledge into them.

Rather, the question of point of view has to do with truth. It is about the way in which a subject is implicated in a process and what emerges from it. In discussing commentary, I have thus spoken of the signifier of the voice. I have placed hardly any emphasis on commentary which is written and which in film is called “intertitles.” The procedure of speaking through them has been singu- larly rare, so that today one barely finds it except in the cinema of Godard and, since May 1968, in a somewhat sophisticated sector of militant cinema: le Peuple et ses fusils (distributed commercially), Oser lutter

One immediately sees the difference between spoken commentary-off and commentary through intertitles: beyond the necessarily fragmentary, discontinuous, and compiled character of the discourse of “intertitles,” in them knowledge is designated as such, which is to say as didacticism. To the interiority of the voice-off is opposed the exteriority of the text presented for reading, which solicits the eye and appeals to the “consciousness” (in the political sense of the word) of the spectators. In comparison to voice-off, intertitles involve a kind of effect of distanciation or – as Philippe Ivernel has proposed to translate the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt – of “disalienation.” This is why it is essentially in militant cinema that intertitles are utilized.

It has to be added that they rarely make for pleasure. They will rather provoke irritation, even hatred. The spectators say they are offended that the dotting of the i’s is thus placed between the images for them. They would prefer instead to let the images speak for themselves; and with the images, the real.

With words and intertitles it [ça] is indeed interposed between the spectators and that which filters the real in the image. This is the appearance. The appearance is not disturbing when you are injected unawares from behind, with the voice-off. But in contrast, when on the screen, that appearance frustrates the eye and provokes resentment (or rather, one’s resentment is toward the authors of the film).

N.B. 2. In classical and modern cinema (with the exception of certain under- ground films), but specifically in documentary, filmic space, and even the ensemble of the cinematic apparatus [dispositif], is polarized by two concurrent orderings-the look and the voice. The look and the voice are not equivalent to image and sound. They are the two complementary and concurrent orderings to which the work of the image track and the sound track (shooting, editing, sound mixing, color and tonal grading of the image, etc.) are submitted. This prevalence of the look and the voice is a relation of the subject’s “flickering in eclipses” which regulates the filmic chain (the alternation and disposition of shots: the 30-degree rule, shot/countershot, etc.) and of which the spectator is the support (see Jean-Pierre Oudart, “La Suture” in Cahiers du cinéma nos. 210 and 212). This prevalence points toward that which constitutes the spectator as such: spectator of his or her desires (insofar as desires are constituted by the Other). It thus also involves the division, the identificatory alienation of the spectator, in the filmic chain.

Recently the question has been posed whether this “alienation” is irreducible, or whether it is possible to lift it by some perversion of the apparatus [dispositif]: for example, by inscribing in the film its own means of production; or by making the screen opaque through the multiplication of iconic or sonic traces to the point of nondifferentiation and unreadability, so that the scene of the phantasm becomes blinding and literally puts the spectator back in his or her place. One can have doubts about the interest of such an operation from the viewpoint of systematicity. It certainly mobilizes the look differently, makes it scan the surface which is the wrong side of the décor, and opens it to other adventures. It is not so certain that the latter would fundamentally be something other than tributaries of “representation”; nor, especially, that they would come socially – on the paths crossed by desire and the social – from a fundamental subversion. Beyond the facile conflicts of imaginary depth and real surface subsists the question of the object: what to do – what is to be done – with the look and the voice?

Notes

1. “It speaks” is a translation of “ça parle.” This is a phrase from Lacanian psychoanalytic thought. “Ca” (it) is the French word used to translate the Freudian term es (also literally it), which is rendered in English-language usage by the Latin id. This is, of course, one of three terms in a famous Freudian psychic topology, along with the ego and superego. In Lacan, the phrase “ça parle” emphasizes that speech is not controlled by the coherent subject (1, ego) but something else (it, id) which is potentially disordering and disorderly with respect to that subject; language is not a product of reason, but has its roots in the unconscious, the repressed, what is “other” to consciousness.
In this, its first appearance in the article, Bonitzer puts the phrase “it speaks” in quotation marks, which emphasizes the derivation from Lacan. However, there are other times when Bonitzer engages in the ambivalence enabled by the fact that in French a word which can simply mean it might also denote the id. Sometimes he chooses to associate the antecedent of it with the Freudian id, for example at certain points when the antecedent is the voice-off (speech from elsewhere than the realist space of the image). Since English-language usage maintains the distinction between the two terms, it has not been possible to translate the article’s employment of this ambivalence when it occurs. However, where it is especially important to the sense of a sentence, it is noted.-TRANS]

2. “Jouissance” is a term notoriously difficult to translate. “Enjoyment” does not capture the full range of intensities covered by the French term. “Pleasure” ignores the distinction-some- times exploited by theoreticians such as Roland Barthes-between plaisir and jouissance. There- fore, where it appears in the text, it has been left in French.
What might minimally be said about its significance is first that its meanings can range from enjoying something in the sense of legal possession to pleasure in the sense of sexual climax. In addition, there is a tendency in recent French theoretical formulations to give the term a special, privileged sense. For example, Stephen Heath outlines the distinction in Barthes: “on the one hand a pleasure (plaisir) linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenizing movement of the ego; on the other a radically violent pleasure (jouissance) which shatters-dissipates, loses-that cultural identity, that ego.” Other thinkers, such as Lacan and Kristeva, have their own special uses of the term which are related but not necessarily identical to that of Barthes. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 9; cf. Leon S. Roudiez’s comments on the term in the introduction to Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 15-16.
In Bonitzer’s text, the paragraph before the introduction of the noun jouissance includes two uses of the verb jouit, translated as “enjoy”-TRANS]

3. It has been pointed out to me that “end of prosopopoeia” is not completely exact. The discourse which Chris Marker opposes to two others (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) may not be an outright caricature; however, neither is it entirely that of Marker, whose dialectic is more subtle. It remains no less true that if “objectivity isn’t exact, either” (as all left-intellectuals even sightly tinged by Marxism know), Marker does not say why, or responds to the question obliquely, for want of envisaging wht is arbitrary in discourse-off (he is known, with Rouch, to be one of its most brilliant practitioners). See below.

4. [There is a linguistic play in this paragraph between generalized collective identity and linguistic gender. “Everyone” (tout le monde) is a masculine noun phrase, which is usually pronominalized by the impersonal “one” (on, often translated into English as “we,” but which, interestingly, still takes masculine complements.) In this paragraph it is pronominalized by the masculine il (“he”).
So in the text when the author writes, for example, that “he (il) aspires to mastery” the result is to emphasize, Ina somewhat unusual way. the masculine gender of the antecedent “everyone.” And. when the author writes to the extent dut he is one.” the point is not only the pulling together of “everyone” into “one,” but also an association of this social homogenization with a hierarchy of gender. because the masculine linguistic gender of ‘-everyone” has been so stressed. — TRANS.’

5. (On the peculiar use of “it” here. see note I.—TRANS I

6. Here I think especially of militant cinema and of the Dziga Vertov Group; the earlier films of Godard and Numéro Deux make use of intertitles and letters in ways which are not reduced to didacticism. but cause fantasies of the unconscious, permutations of language, witticisms, etc. to intervene.