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An enticement to knowledge: Documentary spectatorship and a theory of performatives

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An enticement to knowledge: Documentary spectatorship and a theory of performatives

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Content AN ENTICEMENT TO KNOWLEDGE:
DOCUMENTARY SPECTATORSHIP AND A THEORY OF PERFORMATIVES
by
Susan F. Scheibler
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Cinema/Television)
August 1994
Copyright 1994 Susan F. Scheibler
UMI Number: DP22282
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, w ritten by
......Susan_ Fae S cheibler.................
under the direction of h? T. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C TO R OF PH ILOSOPH Y
Dean o f G raduate Studies
Date ..Jwe.23,..19?4.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
. £ t
Chairperson
i
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Performing the Promise ..................... 1
Chapter 2 Constantly Performing the Documentary: The
Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water 22
Chapter 3 The Other: A Translation Performed .... 54
Chapter 4 A Performance of Memory......................81
Chapter 5 Marlene and Madonna: Truth or Dare:
Performative and Performance ............. 108
Chapter 6 Death and Desire: AIDS and Representation 142
Chapter 7 A Performance of History................... 173
Works Cited........................................ 198
1
Chapter 1
Performing the Promise
Knowledge is an invention behind which lies
something completely different from itself;
the play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear,
and the will to appropriate. Knowledge is pro
duced on the stage where these elements struggle
against each other.
--Friederich Nietsche
Only death and desire have the force that
oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only
the extremism of desire and of death enables one
to attain the truth.
— Georges Bataille
Death, desire and truth. Bataille traces out the
triple trajectory that one could argue underlies our
impulse towards documentary films, especially when it
masquerades itself as knowledge, an invention which,
according to Nietsche, hides the play of instincts,
desires and fear. In terms of documentary films, these
instincts, desires and fears play around the
epistemological and ontological.
In documentary texts, we find a merging of our basic
ontological desires which posit a world which can be known
and a subject who can know it and our epistemological
desires which rest on the assumptions of the possibility
of knowledge and the pleasures knowledge brings. Our
basic will to power, expressed as a will to appropriate,
finds its expression in our will to know. This will to
know, in turn, finds its expression in the ontological
promises of a documentary text for it is by knowing and
2
naming that we order our world and carefully find a safe
place for whatever threatens us within that ordered world.
Laying claim to its status as document, a text
arouses our assumptions that what we see when we watch it
is verifiable in terms of the real world; that it is
offering some aspect of the world to us, something which
can be named and contained, appropriated and therefore
owned by the spectating subject. We assume a relationship
with the obeserved that promises verification of its
assumptions, presentation and/or argument and read this
relationship from our own understanding of the codes and
conventions we associate with the terms "documentary" or
"nonfiction" film.
As an institutional practice, documentary engages an
inherited tradition of textual codes and spectatorial
expectations. In his book Representing Reality. Bill
Nichols offers a definition of documentary in terms of
these practices, as well as a corpus of texts which engage
these elements, tracing out some of these assumptions as
centered around an informing logic which requires either a
representation of, or an argument about, the historical
world. In his discussion of documentary's relation to its
spectators, he points out that most basic to the
assumptions and expectations that characterize the viewing
of a documentary are the skills of comprehension and
interpretation. This epistemological ability, which
3
allows for an active process of inference based on prior
knowledge as well as assumptions drawn from the text
itself, enables the spectator to make sense of a document
and, by extension, the world itself. As he puts it, the
"most fundamental difference between expectations prompted
by narrative fiction and by documentary lies in the system
of the text in relation to the historical world" (25).
These expectations allow us to set up a pattern of
inferences by which to make sense of the argument
presented by the text because of our expectations that the
documentary does indeed bear an indexical relation to the
world. And yet, it is not only that we expect a certain
ontological relationship between sign and referent but we
go so far as to erase the space between the two, choosing
to believe that, in some sense, the sign is the referent.
As Nichols puts it,
As viewers we expect that what occurred in front
of the camera has undergone little or no
modification in order to be recorded on film and
magnetic tape. We are wont to assume that what
we see would have occurred in essentially the
same manner if the camera and tape recorder had
not been there. (27)
This state of disavowal is enhanced by our knowledge
of the conventions of documentary film, conventions we
assume or choose to believe mark our representation as a
presentation of a world that can be known and mastered.
Concentrating on a discussion of objectivity in
nonfiction film, Noel Carroll traces these codes and their
4
spectatorial assumptions back to the influence of direct
cinema or cinema verite, arguing that this is the most
important influence on conceptualizations about nonfiction
film. The style introduced by Robert Drew, the Maysles
Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Frederick
Wiseman and others employed lightweight camera and sound
equipment to produce what Carroll calls an epistemological
breakthrough. The promise of documentary is then the
promise to fulfill our epistemological desires. These
desires motivate us to approach a text which, in its turn,
addresses our desires in a way that will further our
desire for it. Documentary texts depend on our desire to
know or name the unkown or unnamed, to offer the
transcendental freedom of the documentary eye as it floats
freely over the world, seeing and therefore knowing all.
They also depend on our Cartesian assumptions that
knowledge is possible and presentable.
According to Carroll, the practioners of direct
cinema offered a new technique that guaranteed the filmic
representation of reality. This very guarantee was then
turned back on itself as a dialectice which arose around
questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Regardless of
where various filmmakers and theorists/critics stood on
the question of personal vision, subjectivity,
interpretation and mediation, the epistemological
assumptions were the same: that there was a world
5
standing outside the text and that the text, in some way,
records this world and the filmmaker's relationship to it.
Involving an attitude towards the filmmaker as observer,
this approach to filmmaking presents the material of
reality in such a way that the spectator is free to make
connections and associations rather than have them imposed
on him or her by a voice of God narrator and/or other
authorial interventions. At the same time, the spectator
endows the images with authenticity and viability, erasing
the boundaries between presentation and representation by
virtue of assumptions about the veracity of handheld
cameras, grainy footage, and a use of black and white
film.
These codes, in turn, have become conventionalized so
that their presence in a text conveys an epistemological
attitude about the knowability of the world. Easily
recognizable, they are considered able to offer a truth or
a reality that other images don't. Used in fictional
texts or even in various forms of music videos and
advertising, these codes denote authenticity and truth,
offering their epistemological assumptions as support for
an inventiveness that covers over the impulses and drives
that lie beneath them. And in the process our fear of a
world beyond our control and mastery is contained.
If epistemological and ontological assumptions govern
the way in which documentary films are received and read
6
by spectators, then it would seem that documentary
pleasures will involve those pleasures associated with our
epistemological drives for mastery, control, power, know
ledge, naming, containing, categorizing, spectacularizing,
eroticizing and exoticizing as well as our ontological
ones associated with the presence of a subject who can
know and a world which can be known. These pleasures, in
turn, raise the question of what promises are offered by
the documentary form. What audience expectations are
aroused, engaged, activated, manipulated; what conventions
are imposed from outside, from our spectatorial
expectations?
Bill Nichols traces these impulses and drives back to
Plato and his call for the acquisition of knowledge rather
than opinions. While Nichols concedes that Plato would be
uncomfortable with documentary as a form of knowledge, we
descendents of Plato find ourselves confronting a bond
between image and reality that does seem to offer
knowledge on some level, if not of the forms at least of
the particulars of the material world. As subjects who
assume that our access to historical reality can only be
made through representation, we are often willing to
accept these representations as reality in one way or
another.
For both Nichols and Carroll, the world offers an
index of meaning. As observers in the world, we match our
7
cinematic observations with those we make of objects in
the world around us. Nichols argues that documentary
texts offer a metonymic representation based on our
assumptions that the sounds and images "partake of the
same order of reality as that to which they refer,"
offering tangible evidence from the historical world in
support of an argument (28). Such an understanding of
documentary rests on assumptions of a subjectivity marked
by a drive toward truth and authenticity. These drives,
in turn, become the operative terms when we think of
documentary practice and spectator expectations.
Ontologically, we assume a documentary to be a transparent
rendering of events and/or individuals as captured by the
recording eye of the cinematic document which becomes a
tool making observation possible, and with it knowledge
and control. Capitalizing on the relationship between
observation and knowledge, documentary pleasure can be
characterized as epistemological and ontological.1
As Annette Kuhn states in her article "The Camera I,"
To judge from most existing accounts of
documentary, the defining characteristics of
that body of films (or rather, given the terms
of the discussion, of that filmmaking practice)
do pivot on the question of the rendering
visible of, the representation of, the already
observable: that is, the ways in which a non-
fictional world ('reality') is conveyed
filmically .... (73)
As she points out, the truth or authenticity of a
representation
8
turns precisely on an exclusion from that
representation--or denial within it— of the
means of its own material and semiotic
production, which means that truth or
authenticity has to be taken at face value—
ideology contemplating itself— without recourse
to textual marks of authenticity. (76)
While this has been true of a spectatorship situated
within a space marked by the acceptance of what could be
termed a Platonic or even Cartesian assumption of the
possibilties of referentiality, what can be said about the
assumptions of a spectatorship marked by a space defined
by the poststructuralist suspicion of referentiality and
its possibilities? Have we moved into the realm of yet
another epistemological break, this time in terms of our
attitudes towards the relationship between the signified
and signifer, world and referent? Do the codes associated
with authenticity call up an authentic world or an
awareness of what these codes represent, a self-
referentiality that plays itself out only in the arena of
its own performance rather than in the arena of a world
that lies outside the subject and text, captured and
presented by the film?
Given the parameters of contemporary documentary
practice, it would seem appropriate to discuss them within
the concerns of poststructuralism. These concerns seem
highly relevant to the study of documentary practice,
premised as it is on assumptions of truth and
9
authenticity. As Avery Gordon writes in his essay "A
Ghost Story,"
the present historical landscape of what might
be named postmodern America . . . challenge the
traditional distinctions between fact and
fiction, between truthfulness and lying, between
reality and fantasy . . . If increasingly the
images of reality were becoming more real than
the real itself then the methods and the desires
to capture that reality and describe it
truthfully might need to be made problematic.
(29)
Or, as Nichols puts it, our "access to historical reality
may only be by means of representations, and these
representations may sometimes seem to be more eager to
chase their own tails than able to guarantee the
authenticity of what they refer to" (7). In these terms,
then, a fictional, narrative text like Schindler's List
which depends on a spectator who understands what the
various documentary codes signify may be chasing its own
tail. Its avid desire to use the representational codes
of documentary as a guarantee of authenticity leaves it
open to a confusion of its desire to teach and inform with
the narrative desires that it shares with many classical
Hollywood narrative films and with Spielberg's own desires
to situate himself firmly within the patriarchy of
Hollywood auteurs.
Poststructuralism in all of its manifestations has
raised a certain skepticism about the status of the
referent and the possibility of knowledge. Increasingly
10
unsure of the accessibility of the referent, we have
turned to the status of its representation as our
material. Having lost faith in the knowabiltiy of the
real, we have begun to foreground our exploration of the
techniques of representation, examining the random play of
signifiers at our disposal rather than an unattainable and
possibly nonexistent signified. While this state of
things has a political efficacy in the sense that it
reminds us that ideology is composed of imaginary
relations which serve the dominant order, there is a
danger in overturning the hierarchy, in privileging the
signifier over the signified, celebrating the endless play
of signifiers and losing history in the process. If this
is the case, then this epistemological break is marked by
a new space of mourning.
Unlike the classically centered spectator who mourns
the unattainability of the referent while holding firmly
to a belief that, unattainable as it is, there is a
referent hiding somewhere behind the signifiers so that a
figure can stand in and represent the missing real, the
postmodern or poststructuralist spectator has, in some
way, moved beyond the place where referentiality is even
an issue. Caught up in the hyperreality which is the play
of signifiers, he or she mourns the loss of history as a
possibility, recognizing that, if all things are
constructs created out of signifiers, then Liam Neeson
11
playing Spielberg's Schindler is as real as some shadowy
figure named Oskar Schindler who we can never reproduce or
even know. Our only access to him is through the
mediations of the memories of Schindler's Jews as told to
the novelist who in turn has fictionalized them. This
fictional Schindler has, in turn, been mediated once again
through his filmic construction as filtered through
Spielberg's narrative skills and Neeson1s performative
abilities. And yet, the codes brought into play by the
film text ask us to disengage ourselves from any knowledge
we might have of all of these mediations and to accept the
black and white images as a document of the man Schindler
and his struggle to save the lives of these Holocaust
victims.
The danger of such spectatorial assumptions,
especially for a text like Schindler's List which has as
its agenda the desire to inform and teach the public about
the horrors of the Holocaust is that, to some extent,
history is emptied out of its meaning and efficacy. This
may explain why some screenings of the film have been met
with such a level of disbelief that spectators have
responded with inattention or even laughter. It may be
that these spectators are not unmoved by the historical
fact of the Holocaust but by this particular
representation of its horrors, recognizing the claims of
the underlying classical narrative style and refusing to
12
accept or acknowledge its documentary impulse. It is not
so much that the boundaries of fact and fiction are
blurred but that the opposition between the terms is
turned inside out through the appropriation of the
signifiers.
This appropriation of the signifers of documentary
practice raises questions about our epistemological and
ontological desires. It may be possible that we are in
the space of another epistemological break, one which
overturns the hierarchies of true and false, fiction and
nonfiction, subject and object, while putting questions of
history, representation and performance into play. There
are documentary practices which reveal this crisis or
advance (depending on our perspective), which raise the
question of whether or not we are at the limits of
documentary practice as it has been historically
understood. The relationship between performative and
constative as posited by J. L. Austin and examined by
Derrida is one way to discuss the crisis of legitimation
that confronts knowledge and, by virtue of its
relationship to epistemological desire, documentary.
Since documentary assumes relations to authenticity, an
examination of a performative level within specific texts
may open up the play which serves to undercut both
authentic intent and a hegemony of factiticy.
13
J. L. Austin defines and discusses the idea of the
performative in his book How To Do Things With Words. In
this text, he questions the philosophical assumption that
statements are used only to describe a state of affairs or
a fact that must be either true or false. Austin's work
must be placed within the parameters of ordinary language
philosophy; that is, a philosophical discourse concerned
with the forms and concepts of ordinary language (as
opposed to philosophical language). Believing that the
clarification of ordinary language was the beginning point
of any philosophical endeavor, Austin devoted his
attention to a study of the institution of language,
emphasizing the examination of the ways in which subtle
distinctions have survived the struggle for existence with
competing distinctions.
Austin's work was carried out with the fervent hope
that a new science might emerge, one which would
incorporate linguistic and philosophical concerns. This
science would involve the careful selection of an area of
discourse whose vocabulary would then be collected. As
part of the process of collecting the vocabulary, the
philospher notes any and all instances of what are
considered appropriate and inappropriate uses of a term or
phrase. After collecting and examining all the possible
terms, stories are made up using the so-called legitimate
words and phrases. From these stories, an attempt is made
14
to give an account of the meaning of their terms and their
various relationships as legitimated through ordinary
discourse. The primary concern of this science of
ordinary language is to determine what can and cannot be
said within any given discursive context.
Having observed that, within certain contexts, some
utterances could not be characterized as true or false,
Austin proposes the idea that these utterances seem to
perform rather than report an act. Calling these
utterances "performatives," he applied the term
"constative" to those utterances which can be called true
or false. On further examination of various
performatives, Austin reached the conclusion that this
distinction was not enough to account for the various
criteria which would distinguish a performative from other
utterances. Since the constative often seemed to him to
collapse into the performative, in his later work Austin
introduced the notion of illocutionary forces as a means
of distinguishing between the various forms of statements.
According to his account, the locutionary act occurs
whenever an utterance is used with a more or less definite
sense and reference. An example of this would be the
sentence "The door is open." The illocutionary act is
that which is performed in performing the locutionary act
and the perlocutionary act is that which is successfully
performed by the illocutionary act. Thus, by saying that
15
the door is open, the speaker may be performing the
illocutionary act of exclaiming, stating, hinting, etc.
and by performing this act succeed in the perlocutionary
act of getting a listener to shut the door.
In examining these illocutionary acts, Austin
isolates various classes of performatives. These include
verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and
expositives. The verdictives are typified as those
utterances which give a verdict or a finding about
something. The exercitives are the exercising of powers,
rights or influences and can be found in statements of
appointing, voting, ordering, urging, advising, warning,
etc. Commissives are utterances of promising. These
statements commit the speaker to doing something. The
fourth category, behabitives, have to do with attitude and
social behaviour such as apologizing, congratulating,
commending, condoling, cursing and challenging. Finally
we have the expositives which clarify and explain. Or, in
Austin's terms
To sum up, we may say that the verdictive is an
exercise of judgment, the exercitive is an
assertion of influence or exercising of power,
the commissive is an assuming of an obligation
or declaring of an intention, the behabitive is
the adopting of an attitude, and the expositive
is the clarifying of reasons, arguments, and
communications. (163)
In a sense, expositives form the basic element of a
documentary's performative power as it is in the
16
exposition or the clarification of arguments or claims
that the documentary gains its force. One could argue
that all documentary images are expositive since they
attempt, in one way or another, to clarify reasons and/ or
arguments and to communicate the documentation of an
argument, world or attitude towards a world as presented.
The other categories are applicable in various ways and to
varying degrees to images within specific documentary
texts as wells as to fiction texts.2
In terms of a film like Schindler's List, the
locutionary aspects could be characterized by the
constative statement: there was a man named Schindler who
saved a thousand Jews from death in the concentration
camps. This locutionary force is articulated through the
use of documentary conventions. The illocutionary force,
spoken through the fictional elements, offers a variety of
performatives from giving a verdict to promising the truth
to offering a commendation to articulating an argument
about the atrocities of the Holocaust. The perlocutionary
act then would differ depending on which of the
illocutionary aspects are foregrounded. If the spectator
leaves the film with a commitment to taking steps to
ensure that another Holocaust will never happen, then the
text has performed as a commissive. If the spectator
leaves the theater awed by Spielberg's authorial prowess,
then the exercitive has been performed, and so on.
17
According to Shoshana Felman, Austin's strength lies
in the fact that he has introduced the dimension of
pleasure into language. In so doing, she argues, he
introduces the potential for scandal, especially in terms
of what he himself did with what he was saying. Her point
is well taken, especially in terms of Austin’s style for
it is one of playfulness, irony, performing within and
against his own constatively constructed arguments.
Drawing on stories and fictions, he punctures his own
pretenses, mischievously undermining any assumptions
towards authority and authenticity. His work blurs the
bounds between performative and constative, playing in the
intervals and spaces along the margins, offering a
counterpoint to itself and within itself.
Felman argues that part of Austin's strength lies in
the fact that he has reintroduced the problem of the
referent into linguistics. She points out that it "is not
so much the reintroduction of the referent in the
performative, but rather the change of status of the
referent as such" (75). In a carefully articulated
discussion, she isolates three common features that define
the conceptual transformation of the status of the
referent: the fact that the referent can only be
approached through the intermediary of language, that the
referential aspect arises in a dialogic situation, and
18
that referentiality can be reached and defined only on the
basis of the act of failing (76ff).
These features seem appropriate to a discussion of
the characteristics of poststructuralism. Having lost the
referent, how do we negotiate the demands of documentary
which seem premised on the promise of a referent? Using
Austin, we can begin to reconceive the performative
aspects of the referential as it is mediated through the
dialogic and discursive, punctured and ruptured by the
exposure and performance of its failed promise to deliver
the world up to our knowledge and control. As Felman
says, if
the capacity for misfire is an inherent capacity
of the performative, it is because the act as
such is defined, for Austin, as the capacity to
miss its goal and to fail to be achieved, to
remain unconsummated. to fall short of its own
accomplishment. (82)
It is this capacity for misfire that I would argue
the performative shares with the documentary project.
Having promised access to the referent in some way, the
documentary cannot but fail to produce it, to fulfill its
promise. It is in the act of lacking or missing that the
performative presents itself as a challenge to the
constative dimensions of the documentary text. Or, as
Felman points out, the
act of failing thus opens up the space of
referentiality— or of impossible reality— not
because something is missing, but because
something else is done, or because something
19
else is said: the term "misfire" does not refer
to an absence, but to the enactment of a
difference. (84)
An examination of performative moments is then an
examination of missed encounters or a performance of
missed encounters between referent and text, subject and
object, fact and fiction. These missed encounters can be
applied to an examination of the epistemological and
ontological promises that underlie the spectatorial
expectations of the documentary form, especially in terms
of a poststructuralist practice and spectatorship which
assumes the referent to be suspect from the beginning.
The tensions between constative and performative
element effaces the boundary between fact and fiction,
calling into question the privileged relationship to the
real that supports documentary assumptions and
presumptions. In some way, then, the performative turns
on the moment when a film text enunciates its own
discourse, exclaiming and proclaiming its own utterances
even as it exceeds its own promises. The performative
passes judgment on the constative dimensions of a text.
But it's not the performative in and of itself that is of
concern. While one could argue (as Austin tried to do)
that the performative relies on the constative for its
existence, I would argue that it is not so much the fact
that each constative is at heart a performative but that
each utterance has elements of both. These two aspects of
20
language are in constant struggle for supremacy and it is
at the point where they meet that the divisions between
oppositions are made manifest and begin to waver.
Thus, we do not propose an overturning of
hierarchies, as Austin seemed to suggest. The texts we'll
be examining are those which place their borders under
erasure by blending performative and constative. These
texts open up a space in which something else is done with
the forms and promises of the document. And this
something else raises the elements named by Bataille:
death, desire and truth. The performance of the
constative opens up the area of truth while the moments
when the constative punctures the performative circulate
around images of death. And all of these elements are
united in the endless play of desire. For as Felman
states, the
utterance of knowledge, no longer constative but
performative, is no longer so much the object of
contemplation, but of enjoyment. Knowledge, in
other words, is no longer what is to be seen in
a representation. a spectacle: it is what is to
be tasted in a feast of language. (102)
It is in the problematics of satisfaction that we are
able to address questions surrounding our understanding of
the various epistemological and ontological desires that
fuel our documentary activities. The undecidability that
lies at the heart of the utterance, the undecidability
marked by the convergence of constative and performative,
21
allows us to discuss and interrogate the undecidability
that lies between things and events, subject and object,
fact and fiction. The texts examined here offer up the
play of the performative and constative in various guises.
In some of the texts, we are presented with moments in
which the two pass into each other, rupturing what appears
to be a straightforward offering of the constative
dimension commonly associated with documentary films.
Other texts, such as those of Bill Viola and Trinh T.
Minh-ha, articulate the blending and blurring of the
boundaries between these two aspects of language on almost
every level. In conclusion, we will look at a narrative
film, Schindler's List, that also calls into question any
attempt to separate the constative from the performative,
playing the two off of each other in a film that
effectively blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction,
narrative film and document.
1. While there are two desires at work, epistemological
and ontological, it is difficult to separate the two as
the ontological desire for a world that can be known rests
in some sense on the epistemological desire to know. The
entertwining of these desires reveals the basic
subjectivity of our perceptions and knowledge of the
world. Ontology must be filtered through epistemology for
us to be able to talk about it in any way. As Gregory
Bateson puts it in Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology
of the Sacred, "... because what is is identical for all
human purposes with what can be known, there can be no
clear line between epistemology and ontology" (19).
2. For a discussion of the application of Austin's views
to fiction film, see Daniel Dayans Western Graffiti.
22
Chapter 2
Constantly Performing the Documentary:
The Seductive Promise of Lightning Over Water
In 1979 while at work on the film Hammett, Wim
Wenders took time off to visit his friend and mentor
Nicholas Ray in New York. Wenders’s work on Hammett was
proceeding with difficulty. His visit to Ray, captured in
the film Lightning Over Water, seems to be as much about
his need to overcome a creative block as it is the need to
visit a dying friend and father figure. The film,
ostensibly a documentary about the life and work of
Nicholas Ray, also documents Ray's death even as it
performs as documentation of Wenders's own journey into a
cinematic relationship.
The multilayered film is punctuated with shots of the
editing apparatus. These shots, filmed both in Ray's home
and on the Chinese junk carrying Nick's ashes and
Wenders's crew, serve to call attention to the apparatus
even as they inform, reveal, and puncture the
epistemological and ontological promises that underlie the
spectatorial expectations Of the documentary form.l
The signifying system of this particular film slides
in and out of the outer filmic frame of Wenders's study of
Ray, documenting itself by means of an inner text captured
on video. The outer text also slides" in and out of its
filmic references, shifting between scenes of Wenders's
23
visit to the dying Ray, clips from the body of Ray's own
cinematic work, and sequences shot aboard the Chinese
junk, filmed after Ray's death and including conversations
among the film crew as to the difficulty of finishing a
✓
project once the subject is ho longer present.
The text of Lightning Over Water provides us with an
exemplification of the Derridean notion that "every text
is a double text" offering an interweaving, a play which
includes the work of meaning or the meaning of
work, and includes them not in terms of
knowledge but in terms of inscription: meaning
is a function of play, is inscribed in a certain
place in the configuration of a meaningless
text. (Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of
Writing" 260).
The video sequences begin to enact the technology of
the documentary form itself, offering a look which seems
to align itself with the conventions and codes most often
associated with the self-verification of the verite style.
These referential conventions promise an authenticity and
authorization of their shots and frames as "here it is"
real-life footage. The video segements, complete with
out-of-focus shots and handheld camera movements, provide
the deictic moment associated with what Roland Barthes
calls the referential plenitude of photography, the
"voila" that Bill Nichols mentions in Ideology of the
Image as the magic of the documentary form (240).
Yet, while it would seem that the video text is
functioning as a documentary of the documentary, a
24
documentation of the film Wenders is shooting of the film
we are watching, these segments also perform the
documentary, exposing its absent referent and turning its
reflexivity back upon a self other than itself, a turning
back upon its subject/object and upon its spectator.
The question of performance, captured by the video
camera, involves an element of self-reflexivity, but a
reflexivity that lies beyond a disclosure of its own
mechanisms. It reflects the gap that emerges between
signifier and signified, revealing the abyss that lies at
the heart of the cinematic endeavor. The performative
element begins to efface the boundaries between what would
appear to be the nonfiction document of the life and work
of Nicholas Ray and the rehearsal that would seem to
define it as a fiction or at least a fictive account of
this life and work. The interweaving of discourses
introduces issues clustered around the question of what it
means to deconstruct both a document and the discourse
surrounding that document.
Both the documentary form and the discourse
surrounding it appear to be driven by what Henry Staten
refers to as "the desire to have the good thing and to
have it always, beyond the boundaries of mortality" (152).
The desire to represent the unnameable, to name the other,
to organize the past and memory into a discourse and to
furnish that discourse with referentiality, often seeks to
25
find an articulation through the documentary image. This
notion of documentary attempts to legitimize its discourse
by means of a claim to a privileged relationship to the
real. It imitates historiographical discourse as that
which is supposed to have knowledge and allows its desire
to be propped on certain epistemological and ontological
yearnings. These yearnings, in turn, serve to position
the spectator as an omnipotent and omniscient observer,
able to traverse the gap between signifier and signified
by means of various codes of authenticity and veracity.
These codes, in turn, act to guarantee a position of unity
and mastery, a suturing over of a lost plenitude and
coherence.
For Nicholas Ray, the film Lightning Over Water
offers an opportunity to seek mastery over death through
the performance of subject as filmmaker and of object as
the one being filmed. As he works on his film We Can’t
Go Home Again, he attempts to perform a closure for his
own life and work. By performing his own life and death
in Wenders's film, Ray is trying to see himself whole
again, to recapture his own lost imaginary. In turn, by
writing and imagining the other film that he will call
Lightning Over Water (the title bequeathed to Wenders),
Ray seeks the cure for death in the cinematic apparatus
itself, in the narrative of an originary search marked by
a desire to find the perfect ending.
26
Nick Ray's tragedy is that, as he himself states in
his address at Vassar, the tiloser one comes to an ending,
the closer one moves to a rewriting that is a beginning.
In this way, he expresses not only the metaphysical desire
for enclosure, for a stable dimension of existence in
which the definition can coincide with the defined, in
which there is referentiality and a constancy of identity
and knowledge, but also the grief that follows upon the
recognition of the impossiblity of this desire, a desire
as futile as that envisioned in Ray’s narrative of the
searchers aboard the junk, pursuing a solution to death
and mortality.
Ray's tragic desire becomes our own as the film we
are watching, coded as a documentary, elicits our own
expectations of the nonfiction form. Not only are our
expectations aroused but so are those of Wenders himself
as he lays claim to the title Lightning Over Water, the
title Ray had hoped to use for his story of the artist
aboard the Chinese junk, traveling toward the drug that
would ensure life. By assuming the title, Wenders assumes
the search, translating the terms so that it is the
apparatus that serves as the much desired cure for cancer,
the object of Ray's narrative. Like Ray, Wenders places
his cure aboard the Chinese junk, not in the form of a
heavenly narcotic but as the cinematic apparatus signified
by the editing equipment on the bow of the boat. Wenders
27
goes a step further by shifting the terms from those of
the fiction film to those of the nonfiction, the
documentary. By combining the forms and collapsing the
narratives, Wenders's film inscribes itself within both
the epistemological and ontological desires that prop up
the drive to documentary.
The term documentary itself reveals an inherent
epistemological desire. Its Latin root, docere, indicates
an ability to teach, to provide mementos of knowledge able
to provoke a desire for a place marked by cognition and
its relationship to issues of desire and pleasure.
Premised as it is on basic expository proposals, the
documentary form creates an expectation in a spectator
trained to read codes associated with authenticity.
Firmly situated within a space of cognitive desire, the
spectator "expects to be fulfilled in terms of the real
conditions of existence, the pro-filmic event or 'real
work' apart from the mediation of the system of textual
codes" (Nichols, Ideology and the Image 206).
Appropriating its photographic genealogy, the
documentary form is able to offer itself as a metaphysical
guarantee, offering presence and coherence through the
possibility of knowledge. This cognitive possibility also
allows the documentary form to lay claim to the
satisfaction of an ontological desire. The document
promises that the limitless text of existence will take on
28
a manageable form and substance, providing the spectator
with a position of mastery over a potentially threatening
world. Being becomes being, observed and thus observable,
named and, thus, nameable by means of the indexical nature
of the photographic image which provides the onotological
means for the cogito (the knowing subject) to create and
establish categories by which the world can be known and
controlled.
Even as it promises mastery through knowledge, a
documentary such as Lightning Over Water confronts itself
with what it cannot encompass. Interweaving document and
performance, fiction and nonfiction, it confronts its own
forgetfulness, its place on the edge of the center. As a
film generically posed in the style associated with that
of a documentary, Lightning would appear to promise
verification of its status as true or false. Its own
position within the spectatorial expectations associated
with nonfiction representation encloses it within the
never-ending circle of what may be termed a mirror theory
of knowledge and truth.
Frederic Jameson refers to this state as a
so-called crisis of representation, in which an
essentially realistic epistemology... conceives
of representation as the reproduction, for
subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies
outside it. (viii)
He goes on to state that this crisis of representation
projects a mirror theory of knowledge "whose fundamental
29
evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and
truth itself."
In a way, the conventions associated with the
documentary form resemble the mirror theory of knowledge
for they also seem to invoke a transcendental standpoint
outside of a set of representations from which the
relation between representations and objects can be
inspected. The documentary form often involves a
supposition that there are essences which can be
accurately represented to a subject in whose mind the
object can be reflected. Knowledge becomes the promise of
a representation of a transcendental signified to a
transcendental subject. The crisis to which Jameson
refers is the problem of legitimation precipitated by the
interrogation of the status of the object as well as of
any possibility of knowing it. It is also the crisis of
the documentary or nonfiction film as it must negotiate
its spectatorial expectations in the face of its own
ontological and epistemological limits. Lightning Over
Water, enclosed within this desiring system, seeks to find
a way out of the bind of documentary's cognitive
suppositions, setting itself up as object as surely as it
does the work of Nicholas Ray.
In a documentary, the interrogation of the object
often takes a form which expresses itself in cognitive
terms as a constative event. As mentioned in chapter one,
30
J. L. Austin discusses two aspects of language, referring
to one as the constative and to the other as the
performative. He defines these in terms of their
approaches to the issue of facticity or referentiality;
that is, in terms of their relationship or nonrelationship
to a claim to authenticity and authority.
The constative can be defined by its dependence on a
belief in the possibility of a knowledge that is able to
guarantee the actuality and presence, the facticity, of
its observations and remarks. The performative, on the
other hand, is unconcerned with its relation to facticity,
to truth or falsity, performing its enunciative function
apart from and outside of issues of verifiability and
authenticity.2
The constative rests on a promise of consistency and
of the resemblence of sign to referent. Calling on the
mirror theory of knowledge, it depends on the principle of
equivalence which promises that an image equals a
representation of its referent, seducing its subject with
the promise of the possibility of the referent as a
nameable and, thus, knowable and mastered actuality. What
is at stake for the constative is the correspondence
between the utterance and its promise of a real referent.
The assumption supporting the possibility of the
constative is that language is able to transmit truth,
that it can and does provide a means for knowing and
31
mastering reality. The constative stands as a promise
that meaning not only will last, but, by so promising, it
offers the lure that there is a possibility of a stable
and coherent meaning and a stable and coherent subject
able to possess that meaning. As Shoshana Felman states
in her work on Don Juan, the constative presents a
promise of constancy, a promise that meaning
will last, a promise underwritten . . . by the
constancy of God himself, by the voice of
heaven— a promise that is in the last analysis
only the promise of language to refer, to make
sense, to ensure a meaning that will be
lasting, constant, constative. (35)
An examination of the performative aspect, on the
other hand, is an examination of the breaks and ruptures
in the constative as well as in the discursive apparatus
itself. Performing the constative as excess, the
performative reveals the desire for referentiality which
adheres to and underlies our concepts of language and
culture. The meaning of the constative statement can be
seen to slide into and around its own performance,
eclipsing its concern with and promise of truth and
constancy.
In his essay "Performative Utterances," J. L. Austin
defines the notion of performatives as
perfectly straightforward utterances with
ordinary verbs in the first person singular
present indicative active...if a person makes
an utterance of this sort we should say that he
is doing something rather than merely saying
something. (233).
32
Thus, the performative functions "not to inform or to
describe but to carry out a performance, to accomplish an
act through the very process of its enunciation" (233).
The performative takes on meaning only when it is
performed. It involves a level of pretense, a masquerade,
that demystifies the illusion that the thing at stake is
truth or falsity.
It is not enough, however, to pose these two aspects
of language. By introducing these terms, one is in danger
of presenting a new opposition, a new hierarchy in which
the performative displaces the constative and assumes the
power of the higher position. In examining a documentary
such as Lightning, we are confronted with a text that
struggles against oppositions and boundaries. This
struggle plays itself out in the discursive arena by
performatively confronting the constative with its own
assumptions of authority, authenticity, veracity,
verifiability. The performative, in turn, is displaced by
its own constative performance within and around the video
segments, a performance which turns on and turns into the
conventions which mark it as a documentary.
In her article "The Camera I: Observations on
Documentary," Annette Kuhn discusses the codes used by
documentary images to offer themselves as truth. These
codes serve to connote authenticity, an autheniticy I
would claim rests on the spectatorial desire for the
33
constative dimension of the text, a resolution of
contradiction "between an assertion of truth and a lack of
evidence supporting that assertion of truth by a
displacement which constitutes a representation as a set
of codes which in themselves signal self-evident truth"
(76).
These codes of authenticity allow the transparent
style found in many documentary films to lay claim to a
certain reality effect. The utilization of cinema-verite
codes promises a sense of directness and immediacy, of
events captured as they unfold naturally and in an
untampered fashion before the camera. These codes signal
a seeming erasure of space between referent and
representation, promising an aura of credibility on which
the constative moment of the documentary is premised.
As Nichols writes in his essay "The Voice of
Documentary," documentary "displays a tension arising from
the attempt to make statements about life which are quite
general, while necessarily using sounds and images that
bear the inescapable trace of their particular historical
origins" (262). He goes on to point out that whereas we
understand that these sounds and images function as signs
and are not history speaking directly to us, there still
occurs a disavowal of the constructed meaning, of the
textual voice that is addressing us. Documentary as
expository cinema makes a proposal to its spectator in
34
which it promises to "invoke and gratify a desire to
know." Expository films make propositions, constative
statements, which position the spectator in a relationship
of expectancy.
The documentary as constative stands on an
expectation of cinematic language as that which is capable
of fulfilling its most arrogant promise of representation:
the promise to renew the imaginary state of full presence
and coherency. In this constative state, the document
proposes historical and/or objective fact as its domain.
It offers its epistemological and ontological credibility
by laying claim to its relationship to photography, a
relationship often capitalized on through the use of
newsreels, found footage, and photographic stills.
In Camera Lucida. his collection of essays on the
nature of photography, Roland Barthes describes the
photograph as that which "always carries its referent with
itself." He states that a "specific photograph, in
effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from
what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or
generally distinguished from its referent" (5).
The referent is held to adhere to the photograph,
authenticating itself and the image in the process. This
"analogical perfection" or "plenitude," to use Barthes’s
terms, establishes a fullness of relation between
appearance and reality, representation and object. The
35
object as photographed and the photograph as object carry
within themselves a referentiality that posits a specific
onotological relationship premised on the impression that
the signifier is able to represent the real in an
unmediated fashion, the photograph as constative.
the Photograph is indifferent to all
intermediaries: it does not invent; it is
authentication itself; the (rare) artifices it
permits are not prohibitive; they are, on the
contrary, trick pictures: the photograph is
laborious only when it fakes. (87)
The authenticity of the photographic image lends to
it an ontological authority. The documentary image as
constative, by laying claim to its relationship to
photography, is able to capitalize on this genealogy as a
means of support for an impression of itself as a faithful
representation of the real. The documentary's power of
authentication seemingly enables it to actualize the real.
For Barthes, "photography's referent is not the same
as the referent of other systems of representation" (76).
The referents of other representational systems are
contingently real. Their referential status is contingent
on a relationship to a discursive status created by means
of a combination of signs. The photographic referent, on
the other hand, is necessarily real. At some time an
object was placed before the lens, it has been there.
This having-been-there endows the photograph with its
inherent referentiality. "What I intentionalize in a
36
photograph is neither Art nor Communication, it is
Reference which is the founding order of Photography"
(77). Truth and reality appear to meet in the photograph,
driven by a compelling belief that the referent which, as
Barthes points out, "someone has seen...in flesh and
blood, or again in person" does adhere to the photograph
(79). This same belief adheres to the documentary image.
As Annette Kuhn points out, the "importance of on-the-spot
observation and the centrality of the film crew or . . .
the camera operator" serves as ". . . the defining
characteristics of that body of films (documentary) (or
rather, given the terms of the discussion of that
filmmaking practice)" which "pivot on the question of the
rendering visible . . . the already observable" (73). The
having-been-there of the image provides the ground work
for the belief that what is seen is what would have been
there had not the photographer/camera crew been present.
The tautology of the deictic moment ratifies what it
represents as having-been-there, as being exactly what it
is.
The sense of immediacy, in turn, guarantees that the
referent which adheres to the image is able to certify the
existence of what it represents. By pointing out and
pointing to the object, observation and description emerge
as legitimate enterprises entailed by the photographic
image which documents the existence of the real even as it
37
certifies its own authenticity by virtue of its implied
"this is it."
Whereas the seeming transparent rendering of
phenomenal events creates an aura of authenticity, the
revelation of the camera or person behind it quite often
serves to reinforce the having-been-there sense of the
deictic moment. As Nichols points out in "The Voice of
Documentary,"
those rare moments in which the camera or
person behind it is acknowledged certify more
forcefully that other moments of pure
observation capture the social presentation of
self we too would have witnessed had we
actually been here to see for ourselves. (262)
The recognition of the filmmaker/camera/spectator as
observer may also contribute to the overall suturing
effect of the documentary film. The foregrounding of the
apparatus, itself a seemingly performative move in its
self-reflexive attitude, may only serve to reinforce the
constative aspects of the documentary image. The double
move of the codes struggling to efface or deny their own
workings as a mode of mediated representation even as they
foreground their work to reinforce the deictic moment
supplies the documentary with its suturing dimension.
Within cinematic discourse, discussions of suture
generally pivot around questions concerning its function
within narrative cinema. Central to the concept as
applied to narrative or fictional discourse is the
38
presence of a character on whom the spectator1s
identification and pleasure turns. Kaja Silverman's
summary of suture in The Acoustic Mirror is that of a
cinematic activity which reflects this apparent
theoretical consensus:
The viewer's exclusion from the site of
cinematic production is covered over by the
inscription into the diegesis of a character
from whom the film's sound and images seem to
flow, a character equipped with authoritative
vision, hearing, and speech. Insofar as the
spectator identifies with this most fantasmatic
of representation, he or she enjoys an
unquestioned wholeness and assurance. (13)
This model of suture relies heavily on that proposed by
Jean-Pierre Oudart and Daniel Dayan, a scenario that turns
primarily on the shot/reverse-shot sequence as the means
of suturing over the uncomfortable absence confronting the
spectator. Premised on a Lacanian understanding of the
subject as caught up in the play of signification, it
designates suture as a logic of the signifier, raising the
issue of the spectator as subject to assault by the
cinematic apparatus. This state of seige defines the
tragic nature of cinematic language as that which plays on
the perpetual absence and loss confronting the spectator.
In the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, suture
names the relation of the subject to the chain
of its discourse . . . it figures there as an
element which is lacking, in the form of a
stand-in. For, while there lacking, it is not
purely and simply absent. Suture, by
extension, (becomes) the general relation of
39
lack to the structure of which it is an
element, inasmuch as it implies the taking-the-
place-of. (25)
Suture, then, functions to cover over the absence
that lies at the heart of the cinematic experience by
enclosing the spectator within the apparatic imaginary.
The discursive elements of cinema allow it to recuperate
the loss of the totality of the image, to replenish a
sense of pleasurable wholeness for the subject. In the
documentary form, this sense of loss arises when the
awareness of the absent referent makes itself known. The
ensuing epistemological and ontological distress threatens
the spectator's claim to a transcendental status of
mastery over a chaotic and disordered universe.
The "I" that must know desires to suture itself into
an enunciatory position. Knowledge involves the necessity
of leaping the abyss of the subject/object oppositon that
lies at the heart of one's own subjectivity. This sutured
position provides the knowing "I" with a coherent
representation from which it may engage in the production
of meaning. In the documentary form, this coherency
establishes itself within the conventions associated with
the constative dimension of verifiability and facticity.
In narrative cinema, the crisis of identification can
be covered up through the play of identificatory
structures stretched out over the diegesis as a movement
between primay and secondary identifications. This dual
40
movement allows the subject to be transported into the
realm of the fiction as either a recognizable subject of
address or as the omnipotent transcendental subject, able
to conquer time and space in the movement of the camera I.
The spectator shifts positions between the I/eye of the
camera and the I/eye of the character, creating his/her
own identity of the enunciated/enunciating I— the "it's
me" of the desiring subject.
The movement of the suturing moment which functions
in the play of lack and absence constructs its own
imagined wholeness which it then passes along to the
spectator, offering the cinematic fort/da as a function of
its own representation. This play of presence and
absence, loss and recovery, passes along the junction of
the symbolic and the imaginary, offering a pleasure that
is itself both epistemological and ontological.
If the suturing moment functions on the join between
the symbolic and the imaginary, caught up in the
spectacular moment, then the nonfiction film also offers
suture along that join. The imaginary of the documentary,
the imagined real, joins with the documentary's symbolic
in its concern with language, culture, history and the
other to produce a subject within the promise of the
constative. If the fiction film encourages the viewer to
establish a relationship with his or her fictional
representation, then the nonfiction film encourages the
41
spectator to take up a position of privilege in a
relationship of what has been termed the constative
dimension. The spectator is invited into this space of
authenticity through the ontological and epistemological
promise of a constative that relies on its spectacular
effects to suture the subject into a presumed imaginary
relationship to his or her own relation to the symbolic
order, to culture and language.
If, as Michael Renov states, the "purview of non
fiction is the representation and interrogation of the
phenomenal world, itself a limitless text" (10), then the
promise of an authentic representation and interrogation
becomes as problematic as the text is limitless. The
image, read as a transparent rendering of reality, creates
for its spectator the imagined condition of both an
epistemological and ontological plenitude. The desiring
subject is promised a profilmic event delivered
authentically and fully, a promise which offers to be
fulfilled by the constative. The existential bond between
sign and referent would seem to allow the limitless text
of the phenomenal world to be captured by the cinematic
image.
And yet, the task is impossible and the promise is an
empty one. Whereas some documentary films may continue to
masquerade themselves under the cloak of the full
constative, films such as Lightning allow the other
42
element of discourse, the performative dimension, to
disrupt the apparent mastery of the documentary form as
sense-making apparatus. In these films, the performative
turns on the moment when the film enunciates its own
discourse, exclaims its own utterance even as it exceeds
it. The performative text passes judgment on its
constative self, demarcating the point at which the
divisions between fiction and nonfiction, subject and
object, begin to waver.
In the performative the referential aspect is not
viewed as an entity to be captured but as a discourse
which expresses its referential knowledge as an act within
and through language. As Derrida points out in his
article "Signature, Event, Context," the performative
differs from the constative in its proposed relation to
the referent:
Differing from the classical assertion, from
the constative utterance, the performative's
referent... is not outside it or in any case
preceding it or before it. It does not
describe something which exists outside and
before language. It produces or transforms
a situation, it operates; and if it can be said
that a constative utterance also effectuates
something and always transforms a situation, it
cannot be said that this constitutes its
internal structure, its manifest function or
destination, as in the case of the
performative. (321)
The performative aspect turns the referent inside
out, enabling the constative to move away from its center
toward the edge, the marginal. This break, this slide in
43
meaning, performs the missing of the real which marks the
empty promise of the constative. The desire to anchor the
signifier on a transcendental signified is exposed as
impossible, revealing the absence of both a
transcendental subject and a transcendental object, the
mythic elements of both epistemological and ontological
desire. An attachment to the authenticity of the
constative exposes the futility of the attempt to cover
over the void which lies at the heart of representation.
In a nonfiction film such as Lightning, the
constative characteristics of the documentary form are
eventually put into conflict by the demands of the
performative that lie within and around each constative.
At this limit point, the form explodes as the documentary
performs the emptiness of its epistemological and
ontological claims, not so much because the constative is
by virtue of its definition in jeopardy, but because, at
the performative moment, the film demonstrates itself as a
text which exposes the limits of the cinema in general.
These performative moments which deconstruct
documentary erupt when the fictional aspects and the
nonfictional collide. At those points, the structure of
the document slips between and around the carefully
demarcated categories of constative and performative,
enabling the text to call attention to its own generic
limits. Enunciating marginaltiy, these films are able to
44
call attention to the limits of the documentary form as
one promising a privileged relationship to the real and/or
the authentic. A film such as Lightning Over Water
performs its own status on the edges of the cinematic
institution, placing itself and its own borders under
erasure. While documenting the death of Nicholas Ray, it
also documents its own death, its own inability to remain
a pure constative, lost in the performance which marks its
eclipse.
In any discussion of the performative, language
becomes a central concern. The performative, in its
demystification of the illusion that the thing at stake is
truth or falsity, allows language to become a field of
enjoyment, of play and desire. Instead of the
constative's striving after a promised constancy, the
performative plays with language, unsettling and
destabilizing it. While the constative props itself on
the promise of and desire for a referent, for a centered
presence that is knowable and thus attainable and
mastered, the performative ruptures this notion, finding a
break, a rift in its movement away from the center toward
that which is marked as marginal, inauthentic, the
neglected second term of the opposition. Taken together,
the constative which performs reveals the emptiness of its
promise as constative even as the performative which
declares itself reveals the instability of its spectacular
45
status.
To speak of a cinematic moment as performative is to
turn a way of speaking into a way of seeing. Performative
as performance turns on the spectator, circling around and
constituting the subject in a relation to the performance
which is documentary. It also turns on the spectator in
an act of aggression, rupturing the constative moment,
displacing the mastery of knowledge sought in the
imperative of the documentary image. The performative
exposes the desire for the imagined epistemological and
ontological plenitude as what it is— an absent other, an
impossible dream, an impossible form. As Gayatri Spivak
writes in her introduction to Of Grammatology, all texts
"carry within themselves the seeds of their own
destruction" (liii). In Lightning Over Water the seeds of
destruction are carrried within the tensions between the
desire on the part of both Wenders and Ray to make the
ends coincide with the means, to offer the promise of the
documentary even as they perform their own attempts to
master death and cinema.
In the story Ray creates and names Lightning Over
Water a painter and his Chinese friend set off in search
of a cure for cancer. By casting himself as an artist
rather than a filmmaker, Ray, disguised by another name,
seeks to name death even as he overcomes it by asserting
his own directorial and artistic wholeness. Cinema is
46
used as a means to avoid the closure that is death. Yet
the inevitablity of death brings with it an awareness of
closure, an awareness marked by fear both of the
possiblity of closure as well as of the fear of its
absence.
The role of this story within the film Wenders is
shooting, also called Lightning Over Water is to function
performatively in the repeated shots of the Chinese junk
circling the harbor, carrying aboard it not the two
travelers seeking the medicinal cure but Wenders's own
film crew seeking another type of cure, a cure for the
absent cinematic object. They sit aboard the junk
discussing Ray's death and its effect on the unfinished
film.
The reference is doubled by the performative shot of
the editing equipment on the bow of the junk, film blowing
in the wind, wrapping itself around the ginger jar which
presumably contains Nick Ray's ashes. And so death
becomes the last directorial assertion for both Ray and
Wenders. As Derrida states in his essay "From Restricted
to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve,"
To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life,
to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the
stakes, to have respect for death at the very
moment when one looks directly at it--such is
the servile condition of mastery and of the
entire history it makes possible. (255)
47
Ray seeks mastery through performance, not only as
director/artist, but also through his performance in both
the Wenders film and in the clips from the unfinished film
We Can't Go Home Again. He expresses his concern about
the performance even as he delights in it. Ray's
performance at Vassar is topped by his final performance
in the hospital room, a performance in which he offers
himself as sign, as representation, becoming the mingling
of representation that, as Derrida states in his article
"Linguistics and Grammatology,"
mingles with what it represents to the point
whereone speaks as one writes, one thinks as if
the represented were nothing more than the
shadow or reflection of the representor. A
dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious
complicity between the reflection and the
reflected which lets itself be seduced
narcissistically. In this play of
representation, the point of origin becomes
ungraspable. (36)
Even as he constitutes himself as sign, Ray seeks an
emancipation through death, a relationship with death that
will, ultimately, constitute his subjectivity. His death
guarantees the making of the film, guarantees the
satisfaction of a textual closure that will promise the
fullness of his life.
For Wenders, the film offers mastery of the death of
the other who is the father. He fears and yet is
attracted to Ray's death and fears his own seduction by
this death. As he describes it, he is afraid of betraying
48
Ray's death and suffering. He promises that, should he
find himself in this position, he will need to leave, for
he will be mastered by the very thing he is hoping to
master yet unable to master it cinematically.
Nicholas Ray figures as father for Wenders, a father
already constituted in absence, inscribed in cinematic
history as well as in representation through the video and
filmic text that Wenders is shooting/performing. Ray's
wife Susan confronts Wenders with this paternal legacy
when she is asked why Ray has called him to New York.
Susan explains that Nick is gathering his family around
him, a filial position Wenders denies and rejects in his
constative declaration even as he figures Nick Ray as
father/cinema/self/other in a performative gesture. As
spectator, Wenders watches the performance of the other
and of the other's death, seeing Ray's performance of
himself as other to himself, an other already constituted
in absence, a presence placed and effaced in and by
representation, a representation performed and constituted
by the cinematic apparatus.
Throughout the film, Wenders refuses to name both
Death and the Father. His denial of the father is, in
turn, denied as he adopts his paternity within the visual
performative of the film itself. The repeated shot of the
editing equipment on board the Chinese junk, film blowing
in the wind, functions as the performative that comments
49
on, judges, expounds on the meaning of a presence that
requires representation. It is cinema concretized in the
figure of Ray that Wenders wishes to name as Father, as
the other of his own desire and as the structure of death
and absence.
As quoted by Derrida in "From a Restricted to A
General Economy," Hegel states that
In question is the death of the other but in
such cases the death of the other is always the
image of one's own death. No one could enjoy
himself thus, if he did not accept one
condition: the dead man, who is an other, is
assumed to be in agreement. (258)
The film offers Wenders a chance to seek mastery over
death by offering mastery over his own subject position as
spectator. He looks at himself in Nick, "the reflection,
the image, the double which splits what it doubles." The
split which becomes a doubling effaces the distinction
between subject and object, between Nick Ray and Wim
Wenders. As the representation mingles with what it
represents, "the description of the object is as
contaminated by the patterns of the subject's desire as is
the subject constituted by that never-fulfilled desire"
(Spivak lix). As Wenders tells Nick, "My action is
defined by yours, by your facing death." This gesture of
doubling is itself a performance/performative enunciated
in the film by a discussion as to whom the film is really
about--Ray or Wenders. At this moment, the film performs
50
its own desire for the center as constituted in the figure
of the father, a desire that turns back on itself as it is
performed, raising the question of whose desire, whose
performance.
As Wenders returns to Nick's apartment to be
confronted by Nick's absence, the performative and
constative are interwoven in a rupturing move that allows
this most moving and seemingly referential moment to play
as if rehearsed. Meaning is lost to discourse as the
performative wounds the constative, puncturing it and
opening it up to expose the emptiness of the
epistemological and ontological desire supporting the
craving for a documentary and documented image. Knowledge
and presence are displaced by the performative. The
constative declares its referent to be abandoned by a
document that begins to perform in the spaces between
signifier and signified. And yet the fact that the
sequence occurs on video, a form associated throughout the
text with what might be termed the constative dimension,
allows it to offer the constative as well as the
performative. The sliding between performative and
constative, fiction and nonfiction, subject and object,
functions as the interval, the space and gap in meaning.
The hierarchy is turned inside out and upside down.
Even as the scene of the Chinese junk circling the
harbor echoes the scene of the editing equipment in Ray's
51
apartment, so too does the performative echo the
constative at the moment of death. The equipment, film,
and ginger jar aboard the junk function as an interval
performed. The collapse of the performance and document
reveal the space at the heart of representation. The
title of the film itself doubles, splits, performs in the
intervals as a two-edged sign of the status of the text
which is a document by Wenders/Ray; subject/object
effaced, erased, leaving behind a trace of the
epistemological and ontological status of a document once
promised yet now exposed in its own seduction.
The slippage enters at the spectacular point of the
performance as the film comes into us, the spectators.
The visual dimension distances us, moves us to the edge of
the center as we realize that the film is performing the
referent, re-presenting it, not displaying it or
presenting it. The performative moment exposes the space
between sign and referent. Play inserted into the
structure undermines its mastery. The spectator,
confronted by the interval, recognizes the performance
which is the sliding of signifier to signifier, the
impossible task of expressing the limitless text of
existence. As constative, it declares its status as
performance, as an empty promise of a verifiable and
authentic referent.
The documentary form seduces us with the promise of
52
the constative, the promise of a plenitude of meaning
embodied in a referent. But meaning is an impossible
dream. It cannot be produced within the static closure of
binary oppositions. Signification is produced through the
open-ended play between the presence of one signifier and
the absence of others.
Meaning is never truly present, only performed
through a potentially endless process of reference to a
chain of absent signifiers. The endless performance of
the constative seduces and disrupts its own promise to
provide a referentiality that guarantees both
epistemological and ontological stability and comfort.
In Lightning Over Water we have the subject
"constituting itself in displacement and condensation, in
the play that forever distances the other, the object of
its desire, from itself" (Jacques Lacan, Ecrits 672).
Nick Ray and Wim Wenders stave off death through the film
even as they embrace death through film. The paradox of
their position becomes a performative that ruptures the
film's own structure as document, that serves as its own
event. Presence is fragmented into discourse, then
further fragmented into both a constative that performs
and a performative that declares itself to be a document
about death and mastery. Lacking a signature, the
cinematic event is determined by the trace of an absent
other, performed in a headlong rush into the death of a
53
meaning traversed by the truth of the master and of self-
consciousness .
1. It is not my intention to collapse the epistemological
and ontological concerns into one or to reduce either one
to the other. Each term deserves its full and complete
treatment; however, that project does not lie within the
scope of this paper. Since I am discussing the
documentary promise in terms of both, I generally refer to
them as an equation of sorts.
2. Whereas Austin did set forth the terms performative
and constative in his early theory, he abandoned these
categories in favor of an examination of the force of the
utterance. In his later work, he recast his interest in
the opposition between the performative element and that
of the constative in terms of the illocutionary force or
meaning of a statement. I am using his terms performative
and constative as a means of discussing what I consider
the epistemological and ontological thrust of discourse
and as a means of explicating other levels of reflexivity
in a documentary text.
54
Chapter 3
The Other: A Translation Performed.
A man attending a slide show on Africa turns to
his wife and says with guilt in his voice: "I
have seen some pornography tonight . . .
Documentary because reality is organized into an
explanation of itself/ Every single detail is to
be recorded . . . The man on the screen smiles
at us while the necklace he wears, the design of
the cloth he puts on, the stool he sits on are
objectively commented upon . . . It was when I
started making films myself that I really came
to realize how obscene the question of power and
production of meaning is in filmic
representation.
— Trinh T. Minh-ha
In his essay "Pornography, Ethnography, And The
Discourses of Power," Bill Nichols writes that
documentary trades heavily on its own
evidentiary status, representative abilities,and
argumentative strategies. If truth stands as a
cultural ideal or myth within a larger
ideological system that attaches it to matters
of power and control, it also stands in close
proximity to documentary. (201)
This assumed relation to truth, what Trinh refers to as
the organization of reality into an explanation, can be
considered a marked convention of ethnographic film, a
mode of representation that appears to be most dependent
on the constative for its epistemological authority and
power. This epistemological authority and power then
aligns itself culturally with the authority and power
associated with Western patriarchy and its values.
As Trinh states it in her essay "Film as Translation"
I think that whether you look at a film, attend
a slide show, listen to a lecture, witness the
55
fieldwork by either an expert anthropologist or
by any person subjected to the authority of
anthropological discourse, the problem of
subject and of power relationship are all there.
They saturate the entire field of
anthropological activity. (112)
It would appear that the epistemological desires of
documentary film are propped on promises of power and its
concomitant pleasures. As Nichols points out when he
writes about the relationship between pornography and
ethnography, pleasure
and power entwine themselves around fulfillment
and knowledge. Technologies of knowledge set to
work, producing carnal knowledge on the one
hand, cultural knowledge on the other. These
technologies--discourses, disciplines,
institutions, social practices— define,
regulate, and distribute bodies of knowledge;
they are the material base where epistemology
and ideology meet. (203)
This relationship can be seen in ethnographic films where
epistemology can be understood as yet another means
towards mastery and control, generally of whatever is
posed as other and therefore a perceived threat to the
subject. In these terms, ethnographic knowledge is
associated with a curiosity which is perpetuated in the
continual discovery and appropriation of difference. "The
fascination with the Other is stressed; it avails itself
for knowledge. It is a world in which We know Them, a
world of wisdom triumphant" (Nichols 218).
Trinh Minh-Ha's work confronts the problem of the
inescapability of the other, an other already inscribed in
56
language and in our cultural dealings. In her discussion
of anthropological discourse, she confronts the guilt we
must experience whenever we attempt to represent this
other. Her theoretical discourses both written and
cinematic can be read as an answer to the empty
epistemological promise of ethnographic film. As Nichols
writes, ethnography promises something it cannot deliver:
"the ultimate pleasure of knowing the Other." While
ethnography may depend on the promise of cultural
knowledge, it is condemned "to do nothing more than make
it available for representation" (225).
In her book Woman, Native. Other Trinh observes that
the representational methods of many ethnographic films
are shaped by a positivist dream of a neutralized
language, a desire to mean. These films attempt to strip
off the singularity of their cinematic language as well as
that of their objects in the mistaken attempt to pose as
nature's (and culture's) unmisted reflection. This
unmisted reflection aligns itself with the constative
dimension of language, seeking truth and information which
will validate a stable and coherent subject able to
process this information. In this endeavor we find the
"positivist yearning for transparency with respect to
reality" always lurking "below the surface. The world of
concepts separates itself from the world of signs, as if
57
thinker could be conceived apart from thought and beyond
it" (53, 64).
Her own work stands in opposition to the kind of
omniscience which characterizes the positivist dream, an
omniscience that pervades the narration, structure,
editing, and cinematography of most ethnographic texts.
Unlike these films, Trinh's texts do not attempt to efface
the filmmaker or to promote what she calls "the
invisibility of the politics of non-location." Unlike
those films which efface their status as sign, her texts
draw attention to the function of the sign as marker of
the thinker (filmmaker) in a move that re-positions
subjectivity within the realm of the objectivity promised
by the observational form. Like Lightning Over Water, her
films perform the constative. However, where Wenders's
film performs his obsession with and desire for cinema as
paternal signifier, her films perform the constative in a
way that allows the other to speak in her own difference.
Her works are posed against those that hide their
performance beneath the transparency of the constative.
This sense of transparency is generally accomplished
by the conventions of observational film, a mode of
representation characterized by Nichols as that which
privileges the non-intervention of the filmmaker. It
hinges on the ability of the filmmaker to be unobtrusive
and is marked by what she terms "the exhaustive depiction
58
of everyday life" (39). Observational film conveys a
sense of unfettered access to the world, positioning the
spectator as ideal observer, moving transcendentally among
the people and events which seem to unfold themselves in
front of the camera. According to Trinh, it
affords the viewer an opportunity to look in on
and overhear something of the lived experience
of others, to gain some sense of the distinct
rhythms of everyday life, to see the colors,
shapes and spatial relationships among people
and their possessions, to hear the intonation,
inflection, and accents that give a spoken
language its 'grain' and that distinguish one
native speaker from another. ("Film as
Translation" 127-128)
Yet, as Trinh points out, few ethnographic films actually
allow the native speakers to preserve and articulate the
grain of their own voices. For one thing, their speech is
generally translated, an act which can never be neutral or
objective. Translation should be understood as a
politics of constructing meaning. Whether you
translate one language into another language,
whether you narrate in your own words what you
have understood from the other person, or
whether you use this person directly on screen
as a piece of 'oral testimony' to serve the
direction of your film, you are dealing with
cultural translation. (133)
Such an act of translation works to rationalize the other
in terms of one's own experience and implies questions of
language, power and meaning.
In the politics of constructing identity and
meaning . . . film as translation is necessarily
a process whereby the self loses its fixed
boundaries--a disturbing yet potentially
empowering practice of difference. (133)
59
Trinh Minh-ha's work can be read as an attempt to
accomplish this difficult translatory task by allowing the
other to perform her own name rather than being named. In
this way the other poses her own plea for recognition, her
desire to be called by her own secret name, the name that
lies underneath and around the borders of the name or
names given her by the surrounding discourse. She is able
to escape the inoculating and incorporating moves made by
the epistemologically driven ethnographer. Trinh's work
in general poses the question of the constative dimension
of cross-cultural representation by playing in the in-
between spaces, exposing the oppositional thinking of
representational vs. non-representational thinking
premised on the opposition of subject and object as well
as on the status of the constative vs. that of the
performative. Her texts draw attention to the paranoid
structures of conventional ethnographic filmmaking and
offer a possible way out of the abyss offered by such
binarist thinking.
In Discerning the Subject Paul Smith characterizes
anthropological work as a disciplinary field "beset by
questions of epistemology and interpretation and by
concomitant philosophical questions about the relations
between observer and observed." He goes on to
characterize anthropological epistemologies as a search
for a "conceivable whole", a totality by which to make
60
sense of the world and one's place in it. Smith
classifies this endeavor as "... the paranoia of a
humanism that works to maintain its rights on a reality
which it will yet not recognize as its own offspring or
construction" (83, 87).
Smith characterizes this paranoia as a 'metaparanoia'
and comments that this metaparanoia tends to mark most
humanist practices since the " 'subject' in these
practices, as in paranoia, is an interpreter, unable
and/or unwilling to recognize the condition of its own
interpretations as constructs, fictions, imaginary
narratives" (97). The paranoic perceives the world in
terms of his or her own internal economy, imagined or
otherwise. Since this internal economy is predicated on a
basic narcissism, it constitutes the Lacanian Imaginary or
that set of images, figures, and identifications by which
the 'subject' seeks a guarantee of its unity and
plenitude. According to this model, the subject mistakes
the imaginary for the real, projecting its own worst
tendencies and qualities onto the external world. In this
way, the paranoic is able to maintain the fiction of
wholeness and unity as a subject and a wholesomeness in
the his or her own internal economy. In other words, the
fictional delusion of goodness and plenitude "demands the
expulsion, the destruction even, of the 'subject's' own
impropriety and division" (96).
The paranoic's projection creates a comforting and
wholesome internal image, its external fictional universe
is threatening to its creator. Since he or she has
expelled all of the bad things from within outward into
the external world, it appears filled with everything
against which he or she must clearly defend. In order to
maintain the fiction, the world must be seen as fixed and
obstinate. According to Smith, this defense involves the
paranoic in a double movement which sees the external
world as malignant and catastrophic while vindicating his
or her own internal world. As he points out, this
projective mechanism both defends and alienates the ego.
Projection defends the ego insofar as it
demarcates it, gives it an impregnable border
with a vigilant border patrol; it also alienates
it insofar as it cuts it off from its own
production (that is, its fictional world), so
that the ego can refuse to acknowledge the
fictitious nature of the world it has created.
(96)
It would seem that the documentary project, marked by
its yearning towards epistemological and ontological
plenitude, can also be characterized by these paranoid
structures. As Smith says,
paranoia is a kind of archetypical objectifying
device, an arrangement by which the 'subject'
produces and interprets its world and then
reconciles its own putative and defensive
coherence with what is established a priori to
be an objective formation. (97)
It is this objectifying move that characterizes the voice
of documentary, especially in its form as an ethnography
62
which attempts to close off the categories of self and
other. As Smith points out, the
discomfiture of a Clifford Geertz, for example,
with having to think through the dialetics of
the otherness of the other, as it were, is
actually a symptom of the fundamental
instability of the hermeneutic closures upon
which humanism depends and which it demands.
(97)
He goes on to characterize that discomfiture as a threat
to the self or the subject. Much like the defense
mechanisms of the paranoic, the humanist discourse of
anthropology and, by extension, ethnographic filmmaking,
hides the division of the subject and the threat of
otherness from itself in order to maintain a position of
mastery.
Bill Nichols comments on ethnography's epistemo
logical desires as an encounter with the paradoxical
structure of knowledge. "We want to know and yet not know
completely. We seek to make the strange known, or, more
precisely, to know strangeness . . . We are caught within
oscillations of the familiar and the strange" (225). This
oscillation can be compared to the position of Smith's
paranoid humanist, caught up in the fascination with the
other but terrified by the lack of mastery and control
that acknowledgment of the other represents. The
constructs of ethnographic documentaries bring the
spectator/ subject face to face with his or her own
fascination with the other. This fascination poses at
63
the same time an awareness of the other which terrifies
the subject.
The empty promise of cultural knowledge reveals the
subject's desire both to know and not know the other.
Confronted with the inescapability of the other, we begin
to oscillate between these two positions until our desire
to know strangeness gives way to a fascination with the
oscillation in and of itself. As Nichols points out, we
"acquire a fascination with this oscillation per se, which
leads to a deferment of the completion of knowledge in
favor of the perpetuation of the precondition for this
fascination" (225). Afraid to know the other in his or
her own difference, unwilling to accept the other as a
double, we displace our fascination/fear onto the
apparatus itself. Fascination with the mechanisms of
observation becomes a form of translation, a capturing of
the other in a cross-cultural game of fort/da which
expresses a desire to know, organize and name the other.
In this way our epistemological desires begin to merge
with our ontological ones; that is, our desire to know is
displaced onto our desire to be the eye which knows, the
transcendental subject able to capture and categorize the
other.
Hal Foster quotes Roland Barthes as pointing out that
the other is a scandal, a threat which defines the "limits
of the bourgeois social text--what is (a)social,
64
(ab)normal, (sub) cultural" (166). Threatened by the
other, the subject attempts to contain the threat by
various forms of recuperation which, according to Hal
Foster, Barthes characterizes as either inoculation or
incorporation. Applying Barthes's terms
epistemologically, one can see that inoculating oneself
against the other is a protective move which renders the
other harmless through an application of constative
categories such as the observational mechanisms of
ethnographic films. Like Smith's paranoid humanist, the
inoculator protects his or her position by projecting the
scandal of otherness onto the other and then naming this
position in a move that would seem to promise a
recuperation of mastery and control. Refusing to allow
the other to be both same and different in a non-
oppositional move, the threatened subject effaces any
marks of similarity while articulating the other's
difference as a safe and containable threat. This threat
is rendered innocuous by a process of labeling it as
primitive or exotic, terms which enable epistemological
categories to function protectively. As Nichols comments,
"ethnography is an essential tool for the anthropologist
who hopes to tell us something about ourselves by telling
us about a more sauvage version of ourselves" (218).
Trinh Minh-ha's films, on the other hand, work to
65
deconstruct this fetishistic approach to culture. As she
says in "Film as Translation," what you see are
peoples' daily activities, nothing out of the
ordinary; nothing 'exotic1; and nothing that
constitutes the usual focal points of
observation . . . such as the so-called objects
of rites, figures of worship and artifacts . . .
(116)
According to Foster's reading of Barthes, the other
can also be rendered harmless by a process of what Barthes
terms "incorporation, whereby the other is rendered
incorporeal by means of its representation (here
representation acts as a substitute for active presence,
naming is disavowing)" (166). For Barthes, this form of
recuperation recognizes the difference of the other in a
move that can take the form of appropriation or
commodification.
In effect, the media transforms the specific
signs of contradictory social discourse into one
normal, neutral narrative which speaks us . . .
In this way social groups are silenced; worse,
they are transformed into serial consumers of
simulacra of their own expressions. (168)
This strategy often takes the form of either collapsing
the many into the one or of making the other the same so
that it becomes a safe double for the spectating subject.
Those elements that can not be made into safe doubles of
the spectator are rendered to the world of the
superstitious, exotic, primitive.
Trinh Minh-ha's work speaks to and of this safe
doubling of the other into a reflection of the same.
66
This is the way the West carries the burden of
the Other . . . The threatening Otherness must,
therefore, be transformed into figures that
belong to a definite image-repetoire. (Woman.
Native, Other 54)
This image-repetoire, which often involves inventing needs
for the other and then helping the needy by rescuing the
others from their situation in a way that translates the
other into a form of the same, invokes expository
conventions of documentary. According to Bill Nichols,
these conventions are designed to "address the viewer
directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument
about the historical world" (34).
In the expository mode, the authoring presence of the
filmmaker is represented by a voice of authority, often
that of the filmmaker him or herself. This authorial
voice in turn is understood by the spectator to represent
the logos, the voice of paternal authority. According to
Nichols, ethnography occupies the ideological place of a
male dominated discourse. It addresses the domain of
knowledge in a "symbolic representation of power and
authority" which centers on the male.
Ethnography represents a masculinist order—
symbolic of male structures of experience and
knowledge subsequently naturalized as universal.
Men (ethnographers and informants) know; they
guard the domain of reason, logic,
conceptualization. The male stands in for
culture and power. (Nichols "Pornography,
Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power" 217-
218)
67
The phallic orientation of documentary film is best
understood in its prevalent use of the disembodied
voiceover, a voice which speaks authoritatively from the
position of the Father. Kaja Silverman writes in
"Disembodying the Female Voice" that the voice-over
can be seen as 'exemplary' for male
subjectivity, attesting to an achieved
invisibility, omniscience and discursive power
. . . (a) capacity of the male subject to be
cinematically represented in this disembodied
form aligns him with transcendence,
authoritative knowledge, potency and the law— in
short, with the symbolic father. (134)
Even if the text is constructed and spoken by the female
voice, the discourse remains patriarchally centered if it
is embedded in the discourse of patriarchal knowledge
represented by the disembodied voice of authority.
This authoritative voice enunciates itself by
effacing subjectivity. While it promises an authorial,
authoritative voice, the camera makes every effort to
present the filmic material in such a way that the
discourse appears authorless. The author remains absent
in terms both of physical presence on screen and as master
of the camera gaze. The apparatus seeks to erase itself,
presenting the filmed subject as captured and recorded
"objectively." Space and time are constructed within a
stable and secure relationship to camera and spectator.
As Annette Kuhn remarks, it is this
which constitutes the definition of
observational film as a type of documentary, the
68
space of such a film practice is marked out by a
particular form of spectator-text relationship
which holds the spectator in the same position
of observer as the camera operator and the
camera. (79)
Camera movement is thus kept to a minimum and the
spectator is positioned as the privileged camera eye. The
gaze remains central; the narcissistic pleasures adhere
solely to the primary pleasures enhanced by identification
with the authorial address, describing, appropriating and
mastering. Seeing, aligned with the master’s voice,
becomes the road to truth, unmediated visually yet made
accessible aurally by the all-knowing father. The subject
is firmly located within the symbolic structures, made
secure by the constative promised by the disembodied
voice.
Trinh Minh-ha’s work, on the other hand, unsettles
the authority of the father’s voice even as it
deconstructs the stability of the viewing subject. Unity
is continually disrupted, shifted, the subject put on
trial even as it is acknowledged in its own otherness to
itself. The textual strategies of jump cuts, jerky or
unfinished panshots, split images, discordant rhythms of
both image and sound, irregular colors that seem either
too bright or strangely vibrant, a hesitation of framing,
a reluctance to offer a frame, to establish a border
around the other, an other who gazes back, who speaks the
silent music in the midst of repetitions, exchanging a
69
look for a look, a question for a question, a text for a
text, unsettling the constative even as it performs the
other, disrupting the promise of stability, unity.
Visually, her work illustrates the theoretical stance
of the impossiblity of ever really confronting the other
or objects in any sort of constative, analytic experience.
In her terms, the only possiblity is that of a self
reflexive and self-critical relationship to the object
filmed/ written as well as to the subject filming/writing.
Because any act of examination or study involves a
performance of the one examining and/or studying as well
as of the object under scrutiny, her camera in
Reassemblage and Naked Spaces: Living is Round is rarely
still. Constantly on the move in both films, the camera
frames and reframes the spaces within which it moves,
drawing attention to the construction of its images as
well as to the presence of the filmmaker who stands as
other to the culture filmed. By using a plurality of
shots of the same subject, generally from slightly
different distances or angles, she doesn't choose a single
view of the subject but explores various ways of looking
at it and at the process of representation itself. Her
camera movements often appear exploratory rather than
definitive. Hestitating, re-framing, erratically shifting
attention, they refuse the desire to capture the other on
film.
70
The unsettling of any constative stance is doubled by
the unsettling of the singular authorial voice usually
marked by the disembodied voice-over. Trinh's films
deconstruct the male-centered discourse of ethnographic
film. They present a challenge to the authorial discourse
which presents itself as factual, as that which seeks and
claims knowledge. In Woman, Native, Other Trinh Minh-Ha
writes that the
other is never to be known unless one arrives at
a suspension of language where the reign of
codes yields to a state of constant non
knowledge . . . unless one understands the
necessity of a practice of language which
remains, through its signifying operations, a
process constantly unsettling the identity of
meaning and speaking/ writing subject, a process
never allowing I to fare without non-I. (76)
In her films she unsettles the identity of meaning by
suspending the language of film, especially of
ethnographic film. The guarantee of authenticity is
disrupted as language gives way to silence and/or music,
as visuals give way to sound and sound to images. The
objective documentarist conventionally associated with the
disembodied voiceover is replaced with the fragmentary,
suggestive, hesitant and repetitious voice in
Reassemblage. by a multiplicity of voices in Naked Spaces:
Living is Round, and by an interrogation of the
ethnographic interview in Surname Viet, Given Name Nam.
Naked Spaces: Living is Round unsettles the
spectator by multiplying the voices on the soundtrack,
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providing three discursive modes in the process rather
than a single authoritative voice. An explanatory logic
which marks the space of Western humanist sciences is
offered in voice-over by an English speaker. This voice
of Western logic quotes a number of Western writers,
including Cixous, Heidegger, Bachelard and Eluard. The
voice of authority is offered as a mediated voice of the
people, a low voice which quotes the villagers' saying and
other statements by African voice. The filmmaker herself
provides the highest-pitched voice which speaks of
anecdotes and personal feelings, offering the subjectivity
of the filmmaker and acknowledging her own position as
other to these various cultures represented.
In Surname Viet. Given Name Nam Trinh further
unsettles the patriarchal discourse by displacing the
authority generally attached to the interview style, a
style she refers to as an antiquated device in which truth
is "selected, renewed, displaced." The voice-over of the
film draws attention to the problematics posed by the
interview style as it discusses the control assumed by the
tactics of setting up and re-presenting the interview.
These problematics are posed in terms of the opposition
between inwardness and surface, self and other, listening
and recording, speaking and writing, originality and
familiarity--oppositions examined by all of Trinh1s work.
Surname Viet. Given Name Nam interrogates these
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oppositions by performing numerous interviews, re-creating
and re-presenting the interviews with Vietnamese women
presently living in the United States who, in turn,
perform the interviews of other Vietnamese women living in
Vietnam. This doubling and even tripling of the
interviews functions to disrupt and blur the boundaries
between the various oppositional elements.
She also allows the filmed subject as other to speak
her own language--the untranslatable utterence of the
other that proclaims difference while posing the question
as one of identity, representation and authenticity. As
the filmmaker differs from the filmed subjects, her text
defers to them in their otherness, posing itself alongside
her own position as other to them, unsettling the border
between subject and object, I and thou, self and other.
Trinh's film Reassemblage, a documentary about the
women of Senegal, is as much about the process of making
anthropological films as it is about the women filmed. It
examines the relationship of the self to a culture of
otherness even as it interrogates the classical structure
of ethnographic films which attempt to speak for the
other. By posing herself as other, the filmmaker
interrogates the issue of subjectivity, foregrounding her
own otherness by means of her meditations and mediations
as filmmmaker. This film is as much about the act of
looking as it is about the women who are its object of
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study. By structuring itself around the self-conscious
look, it offers a critique of the objectivity on which the
ethnographic film is generally premised. By utilizing the
very limits of the cinematic apparatus, Trinh Minh-ha is
able to unsettle the spectator's usual habit of seeing.
In some sense the film documents the ability of film
to capture and represent a referent which is nothing other
than the film itself. If, as Shoshana Felman states,
the trap of seduction thus consists in
producing a referential illusion through an
utterance that is by its very nature self-
referential , the illusion of a real or
extralinguistic act of commitment created by an
utterance that refers only to itself, (31)
then the seduction of Reassemblage is its promise as
documentary to provide the constative even as it performs
itself in some self-referential way, exploding the
constative as it turns epistemological desire back on the
spectator, exposing us and our relationship to difference
and identity. As the film puts it, "the omnipresent
eye... I look at her becoming me becoming mine/ Entering
into the only reality of signs where I myself am a sign".
The film draws attention to the constative dimension
implicit in the observational form, even as it performs
the subjectivity also present in the observational form.
"What I see is life looking at me/ I am looking through a
circle in a circle of looks."
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By situating the other's discourse within the
problematics of translation, by performing this trans-
latory discourse, one is able to pursue the tensions
arising from the fact that any analysis of the other will
always involve an intervention through the analyzing
subject- Aware of this, Trinh's films acknowledge the
fact that the other can never be delivered to the
spectator in any form of presence, but will always be a
reproduction of its reality bounded by its otherness.
Acknowledging the irreducibility of the other involves
acknowledging the presence and subjectivity of the
filmmaker- This performance of subjectivity is
threatening to the spectating subject, desiring the unity
that comes from being centered and transcendent. Trinh
Minh-ha's work unsettles the imagined plenitude of the
viewing subject as it performs the empty space of the
subject. Speaking of Reassemblaqe in "Film as
Translation" she says,
There is no single center in the film--whether
it is an event, a representative individual or
number of individuals in a community, or a
unifying theme and area of interest. And there
is no single process of centering either. (116)
The refusal to center and be centered allows for a
questioning of the opposition of both subject and object.
It does not pose an alternative hierachy of subject over
object, a subjective form of documentary that sets up the
filmmaker as yet another voice of authority and
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experience. Trinh’s work seeks to play in the spaces, in
the intervals, in the gaps between constative or objective
and performative or pure subjectivity. Her films refuse
to be categorized as personal films. She is not
interested in making films to express herself but to
"expose the social self (and selves) which necessarily
mediates the making as well as the viewing of the film"
(119). This space between subject and object,
performative and constative lies in the space between what
is translatable and what is not.
Reassemblage provides an example of the in-between
ground of both the translatable and the untranslatable.
It performs the difficulties documentaties as cross-
cultural representations face in their yearnings to
fulfill our epistemelogical and ontological desires. The
film demonstrates the emptiness of what might be termed
the documentary promise and the underlying plea spoken in
and through the other. The promise becomes a breach in
the memory of desire, an act of forgetting death, even as
it expresses the desire to have the promised good thing--
the referent and a referential world--and to have it
always. An examination of the promises of the documentary
form as well as of the discourses surrounding these films
should reveal the constatives which express the desire,
epistemological and ontological, of the films and
discourses alike.
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The plea for a constative becomes the speech of the
film's own Other. Within the intervals of the signifying
chain, the subject takes up the desire of this Other.
This desire is also a return to its own starting point, a
place where the filmmaker as subject attempts to move
into a discourse with the cultural other. This movement
becomes a discursive passage marked by the ceaselessly
displaced conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, a
journey into and through the metonymy of desire set up by
the experience of its lack-in-being. According to this
Lacanian model, desiring the gaze and address of the
other, the subject hallucinates a position from which
he/she is recognized and addressed. Since desire remains
above all the desire to be desired, to be recognized, to
be called by one's secret name, the subject makes every
effort to attach itself to the Other and to the Other's
desire.
In documentary films this desire often circulates
beneath the constative dimensions of the film texts,
motivating the search for a discursive Other which is
displaced onto the other as object of the film. This
seems especially true of ethnographic film and the
promises it makes to the spectator, promises to deliver
the other in form which can be known and therefore
possessed, satisfying the impossible desire to know and
possess the Other, that empty place of power and mastery.
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Our epistemological desires, therefore, function in this
Lacanian model as yet another form of trying to take up
the position of the Other, a position we yearn for as the
satisfaction of our desires. In our attempt to take up
the position of the Other, we use the documentary form as
a means of translating the other into terms of possession.
Cross cultural representation as an act of trans
lation shows the impossiblity/possibility of translating
the other into our own terms. As a means of unsettling
the guilt of the documentary promise, Trinh's films allow
the other to perform herself. A multiplicity of voices,
repeated in the multiplicity of gazes, allows for a
plurality of subject positions. In the process, each also
becomes object to the other subjects, subjected to as much
as subjecting, all in the attempt, as the filmmaker states
in Woman. Native. Other
to inscribe difference without bursting into a
series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of
yourself and your own kind. Without indulging
in a marketable romanticism or in a naive
whining about your annihilating. (28)
Reassemblage. Naked Spaces: Living is Round. Surname
Viet. Given Name Nam pose the problem of how one
represents the other in a way that recognizes difference,
that does not translate the other into a version of the
self, that seeks to escape the ontological trap embedded
in the epistemological desires of the ethonographic film.
78
The conflict of the promise is performed in a film
such as Reassemblaqe as a conflict between the
cognitive/constative dimensions of the documentary film
and the performative dimensions. Even as the act of
promising produces an expectation of meaning, so too does
it involve the possibility of failure. The possibility of
missing, of breaking the promise, marks Reassemblaqe with
certain performative aspects. These performative moments
play themselves out as referential excess, as moments in
which the utterance exceeds the statement. By utilizing
textual strategies that unsettle fixity, that seek to
establish a plural, sliding relationship between subject
and object, self and other, self and self, other and
other, the films serve as a critique of what might be
termed classical ethnographic discourse, that is, a set of
discursive practices that seek to translate the other
within a paradigm of established subject positions such as
the I of the camera/spectator, the you of the other, the
objectified I of the anthropologist. By breaking down
conventional forms and reified positions, the film
disrupts the break between the I and the non-I, serving to
illustrate Trinh's theoretical stance.
Naked Spaces: Living is Round and Surname Viet Given
Name Nam both function to allow the filmmaker to work
against forms of domination and exploitation which attempt
to name and contain the other. By refusing to locate
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herself within a binarist subjectivity, Trinh Minh-ha's
films fight by working on the borderlines of shifting
categories, seeking out the limits of things and of
representation, speaking, as she calls it, from a hybrid
place. These two films illustrate the weaving of fiction
into non-fiction, the collapse of boundaries and the
performance of hetereogeneity. Documentary becomes an
examination of the question of degrees of fictiousness in
so-called authentic documents. As she says in "A Hybrid
Place," the "more one tries to clarify the line dividing
the two, the deeper one gets entangled in the artifice of
boundaries" (145).
It is this attitude towards boundaries that provides
us with a space from which to question the relationship of
knowledge to power as well as the oppositional thinking
that supplies the space between constative and
performative. The hybrid space of her work as well as the
celebration of fragmentation and difference marks her
films and written texts as offering possibilities other
than those of fragmentation and alienation. The danger of
choosing fragmentation and alienation lies in the thinking
that supports these terms for alienation implies an other
to be alienated from and fragmentation implies the
possiblity of wholeness. Trinh’s work seems to offer a
possible third term, one in which the dream of plenitude
80
and unity no longer apply but rather an acceptance of
multiplicity and difference.
If one sees a fragment as being the opposite of
a whole, then I have no affinities with the term
since it carries with it the compartmentalized
worldview I questioned earlier. But if the
fragment stands on its own and cannot be
recuperated by the notion of totalizing whole,
then fragmentation is a way of living with
differences without turning them into opposites,
nor trying to assimilate them out of insecurity.
Fragmentation . . . always points to one's
limits. Since the self, like the work you
produce, is not so much a core as a process, one
finds oneself, in the context of cultural
hybridity, always pushing one's questioning of
oneself to the limit of what one is and what one
is not . . . Fragmentation is therefore a way of
living at the borders. ("Theory and Poetry"
157)
Living and working at the borders enables us to produce a
different way of looking at difference, a different way of
talking about difference and, above all, a different way
of producing texts about difference. These texts not only
explore the conjunction of constative and performative but
they produce a space from which both elements can function
rather than a space from which one must choose one over
the other.
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Chapter 4
A Performance of Memory
As we have seen, Trinh Minh-ha's work expresses a
desire for a poetic language by which to engage
anthropological issues, a language which does not seek to
master or control but which allows the in-between to speak
itself. Or, in the terms of this project, a language
which punctuates and punctures both its constative and
performative aspects, drawing both into a deconstructive
turn that leave traces of their own deferral. This poetic
language can be likened to what Rosalind Krauss, in a
discussion of Francois Lyotard's work, calls
the issues of rhythm, or beat, or pulse— a kind
of throb on/off on/off on/off--which, in
itself,acts against the stability of visual
space in a way that is destructive and
devolutionary . . . this beat has the power to
decompose and dissolve the very coherence of
form which visuality may be thought to depend.
(51)
In the same way, the pulsing rhythms of Bill Viola's video
corporealize the visual by mapping the temporal onto the
spatial, capturing the shifting undecidability of
Lyotard's matrix which lies below the seen order of the
image, presenting what, in Krauss's terms,
we could call the formal conditions of
possiblity of visualizing the object...Belonging
to the unconscious, the matrix is the form of
the primary process as it operates invisibly,
behind the constraints of repression, such that
only its fantasmatic products ever surface into
the field of the visible. (64)
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In an interview with Bill Viola, Raymond Bellour
points out that what is really striking about Viola's
video texts is that the reality unfolding in the tapes
offers a constant flow of mental images. As he says,
we’re "always brought back to the inside and the outside
of the representation." Viola replies:
Certain experiences keep reappearing as images;
those images, for me, are crucial, the basis of
all my work. In a way my work is very literal,
but it has more to do with the after-experience
than the actual experience in itself. As if
memory were a sort of filter, another editing
process. In fact the editing is going on all
the time. Images are always being created and
transformed. (103)
His video work involves texts which foreground the issues
of the relationships between representation, the material
of reality and our perception of it; spectator and text;
subject and object; subjectivity and objectivity; observer
and observed as well as the role of memory and other
forces which come into play in our perceptual processes,
all experienced by the viewer as the constant flow of
images. The title piece of his video compilation The
Reflecting Pool and a second text I Do Not Know What It Is
I Am Like examine these issues and offer a space from
which to begin to construct a possible metalanguage for a
discussion of non-expository forms of documentary or non
fiction films. Both texts question the truth content (or
constative dimension) of visual representation by
exploring various regimes of meaning and order. As they
83
deconstruct the medium itself as well as any assumed
referential or ontological values attached to it, they
render meaning ambiguous and indeterminate, mixing the
constative with the performative in a throbbing movement
that punctures both.
Viola's The Reflecting Pool can be read as an essay
on the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity
as it explores the barriers and boundaries we erect
between subject and object. By spatializing time and
temporalizing space, it opens up a space in discourse as
well as in representation, drawing attention to our
understanding of "reality" as well as to the objective
moments/ elements/ story that fuel our epistemological
concerns. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like is an essay
on the possibilities of representation itself. The text
foregrounds its own status as constructed document in a
way that draws attention to the status of both perceiver
and perceived, using duration to force a shift in
perception. This shift, in turn, offers an
epistemological break as the spectator discovers a
different relationship with the thing seen which entails
adopting another form of categorizing and defining
objects. By holding an image past the threshold of
boredom, the text functions like Lyotard's matrix,
offering a space between inner and outer, subject and
object, performative and constative, in such a way that
84
vision itself is understood in terms of how the self
negotiates an epistemological and ontological place in the
world.
These texts construct a sliding subject position, a
metonymic relationship with both image and sound which
performatively confronts the subject with the conditions
of his or her own interpretations as constructs, fictions,
imaginary narratives. They bring the spectator face to
face with the fascination with the other that drives
documentary spectatorship, a fascination which often rests
on terror and awe for its voyeuristic pleasures.
Viola's Reflecting Pool operates as a sort of matrix,
offering the same formal conditions for visualizing
objects and subjects that lie beneath the surface while
exploring the conditions and the subjectivities that give
rise to them. The pool, like the matrix, does not
maintain oppositions within a rule-governed system;
"rather, it courts the transformation of everything into
its opposite, thereby undermining the productive work of
structure" (Krauss 64). It does this spatially, offering
the space of the unconscious without intervals, a seamless
and simultaneous offering of presence and absence by means
of freeze frames, superimposition and a play of sound and
image that maintains the pulsing beat of the matrix.
For Lyotard, the matrix marks the form in which
desire remains caught by a transgression which is a
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transgression of form. The formless form of the matrix
offers the alternating charge and discharge of pleasure,
the presence and absence of contact which marks the un
conscious of desire. In the same way, Viola's pool offers
the spectator a glimpse of its own game of fort/da, miming
the structures of the unconscious, playing its own desires
out upon the surface of its form, a subjectivity in search
of a discursive end.
I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like also functions in
a manner similar to that of Lyotard's matrix. Unlike the
pool, which provides the surface for the superimposition
and simultaneous presence of the objects and filmmaker,
the surfaces in this text are more often than not the eyes
which reflect the filmmaker even as they return his/ our
gaze. The poetic language of the matrix is made visible
through the pulsing images. This is especially true in a
sequence about three quarters through the text. In this
sequence, our eyes are caught by the on and off throbbing
of images, many of them glimpsed momentarily, as our ears
register the beat of the sound track, its metronome
quality matching the metonymic course of the images.
The sequence begins with a dog attacking the video
maker. The attack is shot frame by frame as the dog
approaches, teeth bared and threatening. As soon as the
dog lunges, the sequence shifts into the throbbing on and
off of black leader and quick images, some of them
86
definable, some not: images of bared teeth, two dogs lit
by spotlights, blurred ground, blurred movement.
The sequence continues with its on and off throbbing
of images and black leader, interspersed with colors
caught from images shot in such extreme closeup that only
the color is defined. Included in this sequence are shots
of a zebra being photographed, a lightning storm, trees
shot at night, birds, streets with traffic, rooms in a
house, a roast, a car crash, a fire burning in a yard, and
a traditional fire ritual. As the images shift and move,
all to the pulse of the metronomic beat, we begin to
narrativize a forest fire. We see the fire and a mountain
field, fire and animals, fire and bones, fire and prairie,
fire and buffalo, fire and skull. We shift from forest to
town and see the fire in the yard. The images flash so
quickly that we begin to see the fire as continuous,
burning over every shot.
Is this an example of persistence of vision? In some
sense, the pulsing rhythm reminds us of the basic
apparatus of projector and film. And yet, this is video
we're watching. It is not projected. And the sequence
continues with its shots of the mountain covered with
smoke. Or maybe clouds. But our spectatorial training
leads us to connect the images and so we see it as smoke
from the fires we've been watching until the sequence ends
with images of a flight of white birds. The flapping
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wings soon dissolve into a white light, visually mirroring
the rhythmic beat of the sound track until we are left
with the black/white, on/off rhythm of sound and image.
For Viola, the image exists within the spectator:
I got a sense which grew stronger through all my
later works, of an unseen presence or missing
element 'out there1 all the time, which it was
necessary to contact in order for the work to
live. It was something not yet manifest, and
so it made the immediate work— the recording
incomplete in a sense. This missing element
was, of course, the viewer or the viewing
experience— the other half of the system.
It's the dynamic interaction between these two
systems, not just the technology and language
of video alone, that is the fundamental nature
of the medium. (Bellour 94)
This statement regarding the dynamic interaction between
two systems positions his work within the realm of
discourse, concerned with the dialogic moment which occurs
as spectator and text engage each other. In these video
texts, the verbal characteristics of discourse are often
displaced, replaced by the images at work through the use
of space. Viola's video texts offer an example of the use
of visual statements which perform as interventions by the
text. Enhanced by a play of sound and image, the
performative aspects are played out spatially. In this
sense, discourse is spatialized and the exposition is
performed. In much the same way as the phrase "I do"
constitutes a verbal performative, performing the act of
marriage even as it constructs a discursive moment, so too
88
do these video texts perform their discursive moments
visually.
The question of the discursive status of non-verbal
modes of address entails an examination of the position of
the spectator on one hand, and, on the other hand, the
relationship between the image and the reality it
represents that is, the triple relationship of spectator/
pro-filmic material/ filmed representation. The movement
among these three terms calls up the opposition between
subjectivity and objectivity as a foregrounded issue in
the search for a documentary metalanguage and as terms
especially relevant to a discussion of Viola's video work.
If we position subjectivity as being within language
and locate the development of the subject as a linguistic
moment then it follows that subjectivity is constituted in
a dialogic movement, as a verbally discursive act. In
terms of cinematic discourse, the camera is quite often
considered to be the "I"--the apparatus as enunciating
subject--while the spectator is positioned as the "you" of
the discursive moment, addressed and placed by the camera
and text. If the spectator is allowed to assume the
position of an "I", it is through the suturing moment
constituted by means of such codes as various point of
view structures which activate the play of secondary
processes. Even as subject, the spectator is subjected to
the position offered him/her by the apparatus, addressed
89
even as he/she is lured into thinking that he/she occupies
the privileged place of mastering authority and control.
In The Reflecting Pool, the pool becomes the
subject, in some sense enunciating to the spectator bits
and pieces of its story/ history/ future. As the surface
of the pool shifts and changes, it reveals to the
spectator various images which constitute it as a subject.
As the piece begins, we see a pond or pool in the
foreground, situated within a forest. A man, Viola
himself, emerges from the forest and walks up to the edge
of the pool. We see his reflection in the water as he
stands there. Suddenly, he jumps and his body is frozen
in midair over the pool. His frozen image slowly
disappears while the remainder of the visual scene remains
intact.
The light in the pool changes and the water begins to
reflect various movements and shadows. The reflection of
the videomaker appears and disappears. By anthro
pomorphizing the pool, the discursive elements can be made
clear. The pool at times becomes the "I" of discourse,
revealing/ narrating its story to the spectator, the "you"
of the discursive moment. Viola posits consciousness, a
pool which appears to cover its own memory at times. At
other times, it reveals its memory, tracing the traces of
its past and future lives. As the piece continues, the
water turns black, reflecting nothing, then changes back
90
to its original color. Suddenly the videomaker emerges
from the water, naked with his back to us. He climbs out
of the pool and disappears in small, fragmented movements,
into the forest.
The pool performs as object before the spectatorial
gaze, constituted as spectacle, projecting its history
upon its surface for the spectating subject to examine and
take delight in. In this sense, the pool functions as
both subject and object, as narrator and actor, as
enunciator and enunciated, as "I" and "it" (or even
perhaps as "he" since the reflection is that of the artist
himself as object as well as enunicating subject, or as
'they' since both a 'he' and a 'she1 are seen). While the
pool plays the role of object, the spectator becomes the
subject, the one who organizes and interprets, who bestows
meaning on things. The spectator becomes both an "I" and a
"you", involved by means of the act of interpretation in a
dialogue with him/herself. The text, premised as a play
of the subjective and objective, begins to open up
theoretical discourse, providing a means of enunciating
the relationship between the image and its reality. These
two terms play themselves out in an epistemology in which
differences defer to one another and oppositions
eventually collapse, questioning the very notions of
"subjectivity" and "objectivity" in the process. If the
psychic unity embraces the totality of actual experience,
91
then it must embrace its own status as both subject and
object, and it is possible that it does so through other
than linguistic means.
Paul Ricoeur's approach to philosophical discourse
may be useful in examining the discursive aspects of a
text, especially in terms of the the boundaries between
subject and object. Using Wittgenstein's writings,
Ricoeur stresses the element of event or activity in the
discursive situation, commenting on the series of choices
and actions necessary for the production of meaning and
textuality. Language "seeks to die as an object,"
becoming instead a mediation between subject and object
(Ricoeur 113). This mediation works itself out in the
form of metaphor, the basic element which underlies and
supports our epistemological statements and beliefs.
Discourse, in turn, becomes the common ground between
text and metaphor, involving both levels as metaphor opens
up the arena of sense and explanation and text offers up
the space of reference to a world and a self. Thus we
have in discourse the dual play of epistemology and
ontology, involving the subject in a play between a
constantly sliding I and thou. This play, which performs
itself on the perceptual screen of the viewer, is
elucidated by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
As Wittgenstein points out, there are two uses of the
word "see." One offers a description of the thing seen;
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the other foregrounds the fact that seeing is a matter of
seeing as, seeing a likeness between two objects, drawing
comparisons and parallels which are dependent on the
perceptual memory of the viewer. Using the famous example
of the rabbit-duck, Wittgenstein argues that each time an
object is seen, it is seen as a different thing. While
the physical object, a picture of a rabbit-duck, remains
the same, the perception changes. The viewer sees the
picture as a rabbit or as a duck because the act of seeing
is filtered through a perceptual screen (193).
The subject's act of seeing introduces a new
metaphor--that of the language game, a term Wittgenstein
uses to "bring into prominence the fact that the speaking
of language is part of an activity or form of life" (22).
Meaning comes from within the language game, through the
use to which the language is put, derived from the entire
surroundings in which the language is spoken or written.
Merely pointing out an object and saying a word has no
meaning unless one is able to contextualize the word
within the rules of the language game at hand. In this
sense, seeing as becomes an interpretive or performative
act as the object seen is filtered through the perceptual
screen defined in part by the language game employed by
the perceiver.
Like the throbbing of Lyotard's matrix, meaning in
the language game is constantly shifting as the text
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supplies the interpretive limits of the illusion, playing
with the polysemy of language and perception as well as
the dispersal of the subject over a variety of boundaries
and borders.
The same play of borders between subjective and
objective can be seen in I Do Not Know What It Is I Am
Like. In this text, the subject is made multiple: at
first glance, the subject is the glance of the spectator,
observing a reality rendered unreal yet also more than
real by the extreme closeups which deny any sort of
establishing shot. As the piece begins, the spectator is
caught unawares, trying to make sense of the images,
finding a place in which to locate the seeing/knowing eye
which will make sense of the visuals, re-presenting the
presentation in terms of the constatives which will allow
mastery and control of the text. As the text unfolds, the
subject is revealed as filmmaker, at work on the video
text we are seeing. With a sigh of relief, the
spectator's constative glance is allowed to rest in a
familiar place, watching the documentation of the document
now unfolding.
And then, the familiar constative comfort is
disrupted by the play of the image which shifts the
categories of subject and object so that what was once the
object now appears to subject the spectator to its gaze.
The various eyes look on us, size us up, judge and
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categorize us; in other words, act as performatives,
puncturing the constative dimension of the documentary in
an interplay of subject and object.
The beginning of the video establishes its concern
with the possibilities of perception, drawing attention to
the constructions that underlie our way of looking at
things. Using duration, Viola forces us to see things
differently. The first shot is upside down and too close
for a spectatorial eye to establish categories by which to
understand and locate the image. The music on the sound
track does not provide any clues but rather serves to
exoticize the image with its native drum beats mingling
with the sound of rushing water. As spectators trained to
read such music as the "normal" accompaniment of a
documentary exploring various cultural practices, we are
confused by the performance of the image which punctures
our assumptions of the constative dimension usually
associated with similar soundtracks.
The text continues to dislodge and displace our
spectatorial assumptions as it progresses from an
underwater, upside down shot of a cavern to extremely
phallic shots of portions of the cavern. These phallic
objects are replaced by vaginal ones as the stalegmites
give way to the cave's openings. A quick shift and the
spectator is brought face to face with a swarm of flies.
Shot after shot of flies reveal the hairy surface on which
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they move. This surface, in turn, reveals itself as a
buffalo carcass, lying in a large field. As soon as the
spectatorial gaze rests confidently in its understanding
of a dead, fly-covered buffalo in a field, its constative
satisfaction is disrupted by what appears to be a shot of
sand dunes. Sand dunes in the field? Or have we shifted
location? No, the images say. This is not sand, but a
grass covered prairie and soon we are brought into the
midst of a buffalo herd and our assumptions about the
carcass are verified.
These first 30 or 40 shots of the video text
establish its presumptions and arguments about vision and
the viewing subject. They seem to function in Trinh Minh-
ha's hybrid space, a space of play between and in the
intervals of visual discourse, spatializing the
oppositions between pairs and multiplying the
possibilities that lie within and around both constative
and performative. In this play around the constative,
boundaries between subject and object are dislodged,
deferred into a relay between a subjectivity that absorbs
the object and an objectivity that threatens the subject.
The text frequently plays with the assumptions of
observational cinema, carefully offering moments of pure
observation: a candle flickering offers an examination of
its flame, a snail crawls out of a golden boat, an egg
hatches.
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This interplay of subjective and objective elements
at work within the epistemological structures call up the
context of Zen philosophy whereby the goal becomes the
understanding of the inter-relationships between things, a
context commented on by Viola:
There is the emergence of the solitary figure--
the process of differentiation or individuation
— out of an undifferentiated natural ground,
here is also the suggestion of the events of
this world's being illusory or transient, since
they are only visible as reflections on the
surface of the water. (97)
In Zen, the illusion of separation of subject and
object is overcome through emptiness or sunvata, a concept
difficult to grasp by minds embedded in the oppositonal
structures of Western thought which construct elements in
terms of subject or object and split experience into being
and non-being. Sunvata is variously translated as
'emptiness,1 'blankness,' or 'nihility.' It marks a space
of "radical impermanence" where the subject comes apart.
Moved into the field of sunvata. the subject "cannot be
said to occupy a single location, since its locus is
always the universal field of transformations: it cannot
achieve separation from that field or acquire any kind of
bounded culture" (Bryson 97).
In Zen philosophy, these oppositions disappear, not
in an imaginary unity of wholeness or experience, but
rather in an understanding of and in an absorption of the
categories of subject and object, of difference and
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sameness, of being and non-being. "If we actually or
subjectively realize that we are living and dying at every
moment, we will attain the paradoxical oneness of living
and dying which is true of all our life" (Abe 9). Thus,
subjectivity becomes not a Lacanian search for an imagined
unity based upon a misrecognition of one's subjectivity.
Rather, it is a subjectivity that embraces contradiction
and paradox, a subjectivity that absorbs objectivity, one
that allows the process of differentiation to emerge from
and into undifferentiation. It is a binarism without
hierarchy, a system of oppositions without privilege.
As Norman Bryson explains it, the concept of sunvata
concerns the question of where the subject resides by
introducing the notion of blankness into the realm of the
gaze (88). In this emptiness, the gaze is never allowed
to come to rest and so meaning never arrives. The move of
Zen is to dissolve the frame which produces an object for
a subject and a subject for an object. "the viewer is
pulled away from the aperture of the viewfinder or lens
and redefined as radically dis-framed" (100). Both of the
video texts in question seem to illustrate and explore
this notion of a radically dis-framed object viewed and a
radically de-centered viewing subject.
Viola's work shares this Zen-like quality with the
work of Trinh T. Minh-Ha who, in an interview with Judith
Mayne, is asked about the Zen elements of her work,
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especially in their connections to the feminist work of
Helene Cixous. She responds with a comment about the
reluctance of theorists to engage Zen concepts, reading as
they do any such references through its mystification by
men such as John Cage, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsburg.
She argues that this mystification of Zen has led to its
recuperation into what she terms "a dualistic and
compartmentalized worldview. Speaking again of
classifications and borders, you are here either
"holistic" or "analytical," but you can't possibly be both
because the two are made into absolute antithetical
stances" ("A Hybrid Place" 141).
Trinh Minh-ha's desire to work in the spaces in
between, in the hybrid place that disrupts borders and
boundaries, relies upon Zen's "gift to frustrate and
infuriate the rational mind," a gift she compares to
Derrida's theories which she sees as not being new but
rather as using ideas that active in Zen and other forms
of Buddhism for centuries. She points out that it is the
way he puts them into discourse, the links he makes, which
are new. In this way, drawing on the influence of Zen on
Derrida and others, she is able to claim that using Zen in
her own work is not a return to her roots but "a grafting
of several cultures onto a single body--an acknowledgement
of the heterogeneity of my own cultural background" (141).
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Her interest in Zen motivates her to work with the notion
of negative space,
the space that makes both composition and
framing possible, that characterizes the way an
image breathes. To see negative space as
intensely as the figure and the field, instead
of subjecting it to the latter in
cinematography, mise-en-scene, and narrativity,
implies a whole different way of looking at and
of relating to things. This is not far from the
notion of the Void in Asian philosophies. (141)
It is also not far from the use of negative space in
Viola's work, especially I Do Not Know What It Is I Am
Like in its documentation of a different way of looking at
and of relating to things, with shots joined by black
leader and the confusion of the gaze by distorted framings
and camera distance.
The subjectivity that absorbs objectivity is one
defined spatially in both of Viola’s video texts. Space
is used to remember/ project subjectivity before the
spectator. In The Reflecting Pool space constitutes the
subjectivity of the pool, providing the surface on which
it constitutes itself as object. As sole object in the
frame, it is also the very object of the spectator's gaze,
offering a space in which the boundaries of subject and
object collapse, disappear and through which the pool
begins to illustrate how the processes of non-verbal
imagistic discourse can be said to function. As we watch
the surface of the pool shift and change, reflecting first
the world around it and then the world within it, the "I"
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of the pool becomes the "it" of the pool through the play
of reflections upon its surface, through a discourse which
is spatialized. The verbal characteristics of discourse
are displaced, replaced by the images at work through the
use of space as the pool itself speaks to us, showing us
its history, imagined and symbolic. The space at play
within the video text is that of a subject constructed as
memory. The subjectivity at work on the part of the pool
as enunciator is that of memory; in a way, this play of
memory is reminiscient of the Derridean notion of traces.
The being at work upon the surface of the pool is one
which deconstructs the notion of a constitutive or
essential present tense state of being. The return of
memory's imprint is a deferred action, providing a
paradigm of cognitive activity. The present of the pool
is actually a play/ replay of memory, or at least the
traces of memory left either upon the surface of the pool
or allowed to float to the surface by the pool itself.
In the play of memory there is also a sense of
prophecy as the pool functions as both mirror and oracle.
It allows for the play of presence and absence on its
surface, a play of tenses. As subject and object lose
their differentiation within the subjectivity/enunciation
of the pool's surface, so too does the opposition of
presence and absence, past and present dissolve and float
away, lost in the traces of the pool's surface. There is
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a literal sense of the Heraclitan idea of panta ra, of
everything flowing, of the impossibility of stepping in
the same river twice.1 The flowing spaces of the pool
become a fort/da game of memory revealed by the traces
left upon the surface.
Once again we find ourselves in the realm of sunyata
where neither being or memory arrive. As Nishitani says
the form of the seed is already turning into the
form of the flower, and the flower is already
becoming dust. The present state of the object
appearing as the flower is inhabited by its past
as seed and its future as dust, in a continuous
motion of postponement..." (quoted in Bryson
97 ) .
The past tense becomes an issue as what may have
occurred is written upon the surface of the pool. There
is a play of time and history, allowing history to become
lost in recall/memory/story. The confusion of boundaries
between past, present and future foregrounds the issue of
history as memory, as a rewriting embedded in a person's
subjectivity. The shifting images of the pool function as
the same continuous motion of postponement, of historical
flow, through a spatialization of time.
Time becomes a frozen action played out against the
present tenseness of the sound track which forms a
continuum within which the images play and change in the
unconscious mechanisms of the reflecting pool. The play
of time is enunciated through the sound track as well as
within the single, continuous fused space of pool, trees
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and figure. The interplay of the subjective and objective
elements at work within the epistemological structures
constructs cognition within the categories of space and
time or within the categories of a time which is space and
a space which is time.
In both texts, there is a play of three levels of
time: the continuous time which involves the filmmaker
and his perception of reality as it appears on his
monitor; the recording time which makes a selection form
this continuum; and the time of the finished, edited piece
which creates "the illusion that the second time possesses
the continuity of the first" (Bellour 101). In other
words, by means of the play of time within a seemingly
coherent space, "reality unfolds in a constant flow of
mental images. We're always brought back into the inside
and outside of representation" (Bellour 103). That is,
the play of space and time provides the focal point for
the involvement with issues of representation and the pro-
filmic material.
I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like engages these
issues even more directly, referencing them within the
work itself. From the opening shot, spatial references
are constantly manipulated and distorted. As the
spectatorial eye is dislodged and dislocated from its
sense of reality, it is sent floating and reeling through
the world of representation. But even as it is sent
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hurtling through the dizzying images, it is brought face
to face with its own presence in the form of countless
shots of eyes. These eyes often seem to engage the
spectator even as they reflect the videomaker. For
example, in one sequence we see a medium shot of an owl.
We cut in to a closeup on the face and eyes. The owl
stares back at us, unblinkingly engaging us, staring us
down in a game of who will blink first. The image slowly
zooms in to an extreme closeup of the owl's eye and we
see, reflected in the pupil, the camera and videomaker.
As we watch, the owl watches us, his eye blinking in a way
that recalls the shutter action of a camera. In this way,
the text performs and narrativizes its concerns for us,
spatializing the voyeuristic enterprise within its
specific frame of reference, the unblinking eye followed
by the black space of leader.
In The Reflecting Pool, there is an act of
narrativizing through the play of shadow and time. Em
bedded within the play of time as mobility and immobility
is a movement that both incorporates and defeats the
narrative moment. On one hand, the introduction of the
character allows for the beginning of the story; yet the
discursive (performative) action by which the figure is
frozen in action (the classical narrative modus operandi)
serves to undercut the narrative moment in order to allow
the play of memory traces, calling into the foreground the
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relationship/ tension between story/ discourse/ history;
that is, the frozen moment of narrative foregrounds the
issue of interplay within the filmic text of the moments
in which history is incorporated into the fiction, or vice
versa. Visual utterances comment on the sliding position
of the spectator as well as on the shifting boundary at
play between spectator and text, between subject and
obj ect.
As the spectator moves/ is moved within the play of
signifiers from discursive position to discursive
position, incorporating at some point both "I" and "you"
within him/ herself, so too does the text move between
signifiers, constituting itself not only as "I" and "you"
at play singly and together, but also as "he/ she/ it/
they"--serving as mirror to itself as well as to the
spectator; a mirror, however, not constituted by the
misrecognition of the unified subject, but of an image
that reflects the status of both subject and object. The
mirror of the pool posits a consciousness which
differentiates subjectivity and objectivity and which
absorbs both poles in an undifferentiated manner,
embracing contradiction and paradox, absorbing memory and
history (if there is indeed a difference), enunciating and
being enunciated.
The mirror of the eye in I Do Not Know also posits a
consciousness which absorbs both poles, embracing
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contradiction and paradox even as it absorbs spectator and
filmmaker, object seen and subject seeing. Shots of eyes
occur frequently throughout the text, drawing attention to
the gap that lies between the act of seeing and that of
articulating what one sees. In a similar fashion, the
text also offers repeated reflections of the video maker.
We see him at work but we also see him in the owl's eye,
in the surface of the water faucet, in the water drops, in
the fishbowl and on the surface of the plate as he eats
the fish.
These texts offer a model by which questions of the
discursive nature of non-fiction film, the role and
construction of subjectivity within these texts, the
blurring boundaries between subject and object caught
within these self-reflective moments and the circularity
of translation and its loss can be examined in a way that
can unpack the notion of a metalanguage, freeing it from
the constraints of a binarism that duplicates what it
criticizes. If a metalanguage is to be constructed for
documentary/non-fiction film, it must be able to take into
account those texts which rely primarily on visual
utterances as well as texts which defy classification,
texts which perform rather than state their observations.
As Viola's work shows, visual utterances are able to
comment on the sliding position of the spectator as well
as on the shifting boundary at play between spectator and
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text, subject and object. As the spectator moves/ is
moved within the play of signifiers from discursive
position to discursive position, incorporating at some
point both "I" and "you" within him/ herself, so too does
the text move between signifiers, constituting itself not
only as "I" and "you" at play singly and together, but
also as "he/ she/ it/ they", serving as mirror to itself
as well as to the spectator. It is a mirror, however, not
constituted by the misrecognition of a unified subject but
of an image that reflects both the status of subject and
object. The mirror of the pool and the mirror of the eyes
posit a consciousness which differentiates subjectivity
and objectivity, absorbing both poles in a manner which
embraces contradiction and paradox. As Trinh Minh-Ha
states:
Too often a binary opposition between
subjectivity and objectivity is perpetrated in
the claim that one makes subjective documentary-
as if anyone can produce such a thing as
objective documentary. It is as if the
acknowledgement of the politics of the
documentation and the documenting subject
disturbs because the interests at stake are too
high for the guardians of norms. ("A Hybrid
Place" 119)
She advocates an exploration of new subjectivities and
offers the possibility that these new complex
subjectivities can best be carried out through poetical
language.
In poetical language, there is no "I" that just
stands for myself. The "I" is there; it has to
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be there, but it is there as the site where all
other "11s" can enter and cut across one
another. This is an example of poetical
language and of how it can radically contribute
to the questioning of the relationship of
subjects to power, language and meaning in
theory. (122)
1. Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic philospher
who argued that opposition is the guiding rule of
experience and that opposites are always engaged in
perpetual strife. While we may adopt various ways of
relating opposites (eg they are logically
indistinguishable or work in succession), the fact remains
that opposition remains and that it is impossible to
experience one without the hunger. Change, or flux, is
seen as a balance of opposites; the ebb and flow of
constant balanced change which offers a unity of
continuity, not identity. His theory of flux allows for a
space of difference without hierarchy. For an
articulation of his argument see Plato's Cratylus■
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Chapter 5
Marlene and Madonna: Truth or Dare
Performative and Performance
By having the staged and the real together,
what is brought out is the element of
fiction in representation— the fiction
of film caught in the fictions of life.
Of course, the point here is not to blur
the line between fiction and fact so as
to render invisible the artifice of
re-enactments .... fiction operates right in
the heart of documentation. The truest
representation of oneself always involves
elements of fiction and of imagination,
otherwise there is no representation or else
only a dead, hence false representation.
--Trinh T. Minh-ha
In her article "Trespassing through Shadows:
History, Mourning, and Photography in Representations of
Holocaust Memory," Andrea Liss comments that the "dis-ease
with documentary's presumptions" rests upon a concern that
the "viewer is brought into the scene, as it were, under
false pretenses." She raises the question of the "lurking
invitations to enthrallment, if not pleasure, opened up
when re-creations of lived experience strive for emphatic
response" (31). These invitations to enthrallment often
function in the divide between fact and fiction in
documentary films, especially those films that offer a
portrait of a star or performer. When one's life has been
a performance, it is perhaps easier to say, with Trinh
Minh-ha, that the truest representation of oneself
involves elements of fiction and of imagination.
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Two recent documentaries pose these questions of
enthrallment and seduction, the staged and the real,
fiction and the fictions of life. Madonna: Truth or Dare
offers these questions in the form of a game: truth or
dare. The spectator is brought into the scene under the
rubric of this ludic challenge, tempted to accept
Madonna's dare and to try to unearth the truth that lies
within and under her performance. The film raises
questions regarding the relationship between performance
and performative. As an observational documentary, it
plays along the edge of observation and peformance,
blurring the boundaries between the two.
In the same way Marlene, directed by Maxmilian
Schell, also raises the question of the line between
performance and non-performance as well as that of the
fiction of representation. It, too, places the real and
the staged together in such a fashion that the staging of
the staged is the real, or so it appears. Both films call
attention to the manipulations that tend to be taken for
granted in documentary practice and in documentary
spectatorship, politics which rest on certain assumptions
regarding the conventions of documentary practice as well
as their relationship to the real world and its truths.
These films offer a space from which to examine the play
of performative and constative as they circulate around
issues of mastery and control. In both films, the
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performative performs the puncturing moment, allowing a
sometimes brief overturning of the power structures,
reversing hierarchies of control and, to an extent,
rendering them meaningless.
These films illustrate Trinh Minh-ha's assertion
about the practice of interviews as a documentary
convention. As she points out, interviews play a dominant
role in documentary practices. As spectators, we expect
interviews and look to them as a means of authenticating
the information we are absorbing. They validate the
voices within the film as well as the voice of the film
itself, legitimizing the argument advanced by the film
while offering proof that the people are being allowed to
speak for themselves. As she points out, interviews can
be used to legitimize a system of representation which
furthers the aims of a dominant ideology of presence and
authenticity. Yet, interviews are really only
sophisticated devices of fiction ("Who is Speaking" 193).
Marlene uses the interview style as a power play between
the filmmaker, Maxmilian Schell, and his subject, Marlene
Dietrich. Since she will not allow herself to be seen,
the film is structured around her voice even as our gaze
is solicited by images captured from other sources. The
images comment on Marlene as constructed by the voice-over
interviews, overturning the authenticating information
Ill
provided by Marlene in favor of the critique offered by
the director's voice in the form of the various images.
Truth or Dare also offers a power play in this film
between filmmaker and filmed subject but this time it is
played out in the tension between interview and
observation. The struggle for control is filmed and
observed with Madonna apparently the winner. And yet
there are those moments in which the director's voice
leaves its stamp on the film, revealing his interests and
concerns as they deviate from those of his star. These
are the moments I have termed "performative" as they serve
to puncture the constative or fact related voice of the
documentary with a movement that is reflexive and which
reveals the gap between fact and fiction while reveling in
the pure performance of cinematic pleasure.
Both films are composed of multiple sliding
discursive systems. In Marlene we have shots of the
apparatus itself as it performs for us mingling with film
clips from Marlene's work as well as sequences from other
filmed interviews with her. These various images work with
and against the voice over as well as with the sequences
which reveal the making of the documentary including shots
of the painstaking reconstruction of Marlene's Paris
apartment as well as images of Schell's own obsession with
cinema. Constructed as such, it becomes a film about the
gap between signifier and signified, a film that accepts
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signification as being about an unreachable, unknowable,
unattainable signifed; thus it is able to shift from the
unattainable signified to the apparatus of signification
itself. We have signifiers of Marlene, but these are left
behind in the celebration of the apparatus itself.
Marlene is a document about cinematic pleasure in
general and Schell's cinematic pleasure in particular.
His pleasure becomes ours, captured and celebrated by the
numerous film clips. Marlene herself appears, or is
heard, as the ideal spectator who doesn't want to watch
her old films yet demands that the videos be turned up in
order to achieve the proper sound and feel. As she
watches the videos, she provides a running commentary
about the film, her career and, more important to the
documentary itself, cinema as object of desire. As we
watch with her, we too are caught up in our desire for the
various signifiers and for the institution that makes
these signifiers possible.
Madonna: Truth or Dare combines black and white
"behind the scenes" footage of Madonna's Blonde Ambition
Tour with dazzling color sequences of the production
numbers from the various concert appearances themselves.
In a way similar to the play of voice and image in
Marlene, the concert appearances comment on and pose a
context for the information offered by the black and white
observational moments. As we watch the spectacular
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production numbers, we are caught up again in our desires,
this time for the world of music video and concert
appearances. The energy of the film is generated by these
performative moments, performances which satisfy our
desire for the various signifiers which add up to Madonna.
In her book The Acoustic Mirror, Kaja Silverman
traces out the work of theorists such as Hugo Munsterberg,
Andre Bazin and Christian Metz, showing their emphasis on
the idea of the role of absence in cinema and its
consequent substitution of absence for presence.
According to her reading of these theorists, loss is
posited as a lack which is so central to the cinematic
operation that, in Silverman's terms, theory becomes a
story of missed encounters. As she summarizes the various
theories about loss, she argues that "film theory's
preoccupation with lack is really a preoccupation with
male subjectivity, and with that in cinema which threatens
constantly to undermine its stability." She goes on to
speak of the "obsession with the coherence of the male
subject" which informs debates on realism, suture, sexual
difference, representation, disavowal and fetishism and
argues that all of these are marshaled to protect the
coherence of the male subject (2).
Maxmilian Schell's documentary Marlene represents
this loss literally. The absence at the center of this
film is a doubled absence. As is true of cinema in
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general, there is the absence of the signified; the real
is foreclosed, re-presented rather than presented. But in
Marlene the body as signifier of the foreclosed real is
also absent. As a film about Marlene Dietrich, it offers
a glaring absence— the physical presence of Marlene
Dietrich. As specified in her contract with the film
maker, Marlene is never filmed, only heard in interview.
Her absence is covered over by other signifiers: previous
television, newsreel and concert appearances and sequences
from her many movies. Instead of Marlene's body as
presence, we are given images of the production of the
film we are now watching. These sequences include the
painstaking reproduction of Marlene's Paris apartment,
revealing the attempt at authentication that underlies so
much of documentary practice. We are also given images of
the production process itself: sound and editing equip
ment fill the gap left by Marlene's absence. Cinema
appears to be the foreclosed real of concern to the
filmmaker.
Not only is the real Marlene Dietrich as subject
absent, but her absence is marshaled around the sub
jectivity of the film's male director, Maxmilian Schell.
In many ways, the film is as much about him and his
obsession with cinema as it is about Dietrich, her life
and her work. As Silverman points out, the "object thus
acquires from the very beginning the value of that without
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which the subject can never be whole or complete, and for
which it consequently yearns" (7). Schell's film voices
its yearning for Marlene as well as for cinema in general,
personified not only by the work of great directors such
as Welles and von Sternberg but also by the apparatus
itself.
Part of cinema's thrill has to do with the
vicariousness of possession. The object is always and
only a phantom, absent even as it appears to be present.
As soon as the viewer reaches out to the object, it fades
away, lost in the final credits and a black screen. For
theorists of suture, the viewer's pleasure is constantly
disrupted by both an awareness of the absence of the
object as well as by the awareness of the frame. As the
spectator realizes the loss of the cinematic object, he or
she discovers a field which lies beyond and behind his or
her gaze. Dispossessed of the object, the spectator is
rewarded by a new possession--the transcendental eye of
the apparatus. Secured within the locus of an
authoritative vision, the viewer feels in possession once
again of power and mastery over the image.
Of course, according to this reading of spectatorial
pleasure, the spectator is unable to enjoy this pleasure
in its pure cinematic form since this form brings with it
an awareness of an enunciator who is other than the
spectator. Such an awareness disrupts the spectator's
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sense of control and mastery as it reminds him or her that
this control is indeed imaginary, that there is an
enunciator standing outside the frame, controlling the
spectator's sense of control. It is this disquieting state
that requires the reassurance of a character whose
presence offers an eye to which the enunciating presence
can be sutured. If a character stands in for the
enunciator and the spectator is fully aligned with the
character's gaze, then the character is able to cover over
the field of the controlling other, standing in for both
spectator and enunciator and erasing the gap between the
two.
There is a sense in which Marlene seems to offer a
counterexample to those theorists who, as examined by
Silverman, articulate the trauma caused by the awareness
of the workings of the apparatus and the renewed sense of
coherence when these workings are covered over, sutured
onto a character within the film. While cinema may replay
the drama of loss and recovery, a film such as Marlene
replays this drama on one level while it also illustrates
theories about this drama on another level. In its
performance of its own loss, it documents the attempt on
the part of the filmmaker to cover over his own losses.
While it may be true that cinema "challenges the imaginary
plenitude of the viewing subject whenever it reveals the
fantasmatic basis of its object— whenever it re-enacts the
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foreclosure of the real from representation" (27), it may
also be true that there are other ways to meet this
challenge than by the activity of suture. It just may be
that the revelation of the fantasmatic basis of cinema is
able to set into play a new mechanism of imaginary
identification, one in which the filmmaker revels in the
apparatus rather than its effects, identifying with the
enunciator to such an extent that secondary
identifications are dismissed in favor of the more
pleasurable primary identifications.
Documentary film seems ideally situated as a point
from which such an imaginary can be constructed. In its
terms as a document, it is left with the responsibility of
puncturing our assumed spectatorial pleasures with
didactic images and persuasive or instructional voice
overs. In some way, our expectations as spectators
generally fall along an oppositional line of fiction as
equal to the pleasures of the imaginary and non-fiction as
equal to the less than pleasurable but certainly edifying
experience of the symbolic.
When we settle down to watch a documentary, we are
already in a position of resigned acceptance of an
alignment with the symbolic rather than the pleasurable
experience of the imaginary. Marlene blurs the boundaries
between these two poles not so much by its mixture of
fiction and non-fiction but by its mixture of constative
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and performative which offers a highly charged celebration
of the cinematic apparatus as suture. With its
asssumptions about the impossibility of signification, it
is already situated within a peformative space that no
longer demands a pure constative but rather is content to
revel in the unbridled performance of constative
assumptions and pretensions.
From its opening shots, Marlene establishes its
concerns with the apparatus and its assumptions about the
limitations of signification. The film opens with titles
shot on black, simple and stark, without sound. The film
fades to black and Marlene's voice is heard, stating her
preference of books over film. Her stated disdain for
cinema leads to her next comment: a disavowal of
loneliness. From the beginning we are bereft of her image
yet filled with the grain of her voice. But her voice
argues against our own pleasures; not only are we denied
an image but our desired object clearly states her disdain
for cinema.
As her voice is heard, we are offered an extreme
closeup of the keys of a tape recorder. The camera pulls
back to reveal the tape recorder which we assume is
playing back Marlene's voice, a voice that continues to
proclaim that its owner who prefers books to films is also
never lonely and doesn't give a damn about herself. The
film will make every effort over the next ninety minutes
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to reveal the contradictory nature and possible falsehoods
of Marlene's claims. We will be given images of Marlene
that will show us her loneliness and an obsession with her
own images— filmed, photographed and written.
The visuals shift first to black and white footage of
Marlene's farewell concert in Paris and then to newsreel
footage of her arrival somewhere by plane. As she plays
with the camera, hiding behind a pillar, the voice over
discusses her refusal to be shot, her reluctance to be
seen. These sequences set up two sets of oppositions:
that of image and voice and that of filmmaker and filmed
object. Both of these oppositions will continue
throughout the film in a play for mastery. As the image
constantively punctures the assertions of the voice, so
too will Schell performatively assert his directorial
control over Marlene, relegating her to the role of object
and eventually dismissing her in his celebration of cinema
as cinema.
Marlene is named by the text, even as she struggles
against the name given to her. Yet the name she produces
was given to her by von Sternberg. She appears as a woman
who has always been named by men, created and packaged
according to the contours of male desire. Her recorded
comments about the various films make their point about
the role von Sternberg played in her life. In addition,
the documentary itself deflects any attempts by Marlene to
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name herself. As she comments on her inability to fight
and her ability to get along with everyone, we see shots
from the bar scene in Destrv Rides Again. These images
show us a rough and ready Marlene, able to hold her own,
an untamed wild woman eventually subdued by Jimmy Stewart.
In the sliding categories of performance and constative,
fiction and non-fiction, the spectator begins to read the
narrative images as a form of documentary comment on
Marlene's character, taking the fictional images as the
documents and dismissing the spoken commentary as less
than a truthful representation of Marlene's character.
This discrepancy between the image of self and the
Marlene as constructed by the film is articulated by her
concern with kitsch. Throughout the film, Marlene speaks
of her contempt of kitsch and her refusal to be or have
her work be considered kitschy. Her refusal of kitsch
runs as a thematic thread throughout the film even as the
film documents the very elements she disavowals. The
various concert performances especially come across as
pure kitsch. Her refusal to acknowledge the performative
level of her career and her obsessive desire to be taken
seriously, as serious art, creates a painful spectatorial
position. Our voyeuristic pleasures are suspended, lost
for a moment as we become aware that we are watching the
death of an image as well as a career. The performative
level distresses us even as the constative level
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entertains our epistemological desires. We may know more
about Marlene but we also know more than we desire since
we do not desire to confront death in any of its
manifestations. The end of the film reminds us this death
as we watch scenes from Marlene's last film, Just a
Gigolo. We see her face, veiled and obscured, and hear
her voice, unmistakably Dietrich's, grainy and husky,
seductive in every aspect. Yet, we are aware of death's
imprint even as the sequence fades and we hear the
filmmaker question her on the song her mother used to
sing. He presses her to remember the words, forces her to
confront her own fears of death and dying. The film ends
with the sounds of her weeping as she sings about a lover
kneeling at a graveside, seeking forgiveness too late. As
Iain Chambers writes in Border Dialogues, "(f)orms of
remembering may even be more violent than semblances of
forgetting the past" (32). Schell performs a violence on
Marlene, asserting his directorial authority. As he does
so, he violates the bond between object and viewing
subject and creates discomfort by introducing death and
dying.
And so we have a documentary that is about death and
dying, expressed with both nostalgia and contempt through
the interview style. Bill Nichols discusses the
relationship between control, power, and knowledge that
seems to fuel the interview as a documentary stylistic, a
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stylistic he refers to as an interactive mode. In his
definition of this mode, Nichols asks what happens when
the filmmaker intervenes and interacts in an encounter
with the object. No longer a recording eye, the filmmaker
functions as a "human sensorium: looking, listening, and
speaking as it perceives events and allows for response"
(Nichols, Representing Reality 44). With this mode, the
encounter between filmmaker and other is as much the focus
of the film as the information delivered about the other.
As Nichols points out, issues
of comprehension and interpretation as a
function of physical encounter arise; do they
react to overtones or implications in each
other's speech; do they see power and desire
flow between them? (44)
With Marlene the answer to the above is yes. Both Marlene
and Schell react to the overtones and implications in each
other's speech and they seem very aware of the power and
desire that flow between them. Schell as filmmaker
appears to be most threatened by the latter and so he
constructs his film in such a way that Marlene is rendered
powerless with her desires and her fear of kitsch revealed
as pathetic illusions. When we read the film as a
document about the interaction between these two, we see
the preoccupation with male subjectivity that Silverman
points out in her discussion of cinema and its theorists.
If, as she says, film theory's preoccupation with lack is
a preoccupation with male subjectivity and with what
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threatens that subjectivity, then we can read Marlene as
an example of this preoccupation and fear.
In her book Technologies of Gender, Teresa de
Lauretis speaks of the construction of gender as both a
product and a process of representation and self
representation. The end of Schell’s film shows us Marlene
in the position termed by de Lauretis as a "tension and
constant slippage betwen woman as representation, as the
object and the very condition of representation, and ...
women as historical beings, subjects of 'real relations'"
(10). This tension or slippage becomes a focus of
violence, expressed rhetorically, in this case
cinematically, through the containment of Marlene. The
film replays the narrative trajectory outlined by de
Lauretis, one in which
the hero must be male regardless of the gender
of the character, because the obstacle, whatever
its personification (sphinx or dragon, sorceress
or villain), is morphologically female--and
indeed, simply, the womb, the earth, the space
of his movement. As he crosses the boundary and
"penetrates" the other space, the mythical
subject is constructed as human being and as
male; he is the active principle of culture, the
establisher of distinction, the creator of
differences. Female is what is not suspectible
to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is
an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance,
matrix and matter. (43-44)
Nichols, in reference to de Lauretis's work, speaks
of the activities that work to "implant a gendered, social
subjectivity that never disrupts the linkage of knowledge
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(any more than sexuality) from power" and situates the
interview "in its various guises" in a central position
within these "technologies of knowledge" (38-39).
According to his argument, the interview style is well
suited to these technologies, especially in films like
Marlene in which the filmmaker retains mastery, working
from the higher plane in the hierarchy of power and
control. Schell asserts this mastery as he uses the
various film clips and shots of the apparatus to comment
on and contain Marlene's own comments about her life and
work. And yet, as he does so, he produces a film that
illustrates the problematics of the interview style.
Read as a film that explores the practice of the
interview, Marlene reveals the play of true and false,
real and staged that underlies such practices. A film
that seeks an answer to the question of how to tell a
story, Marlene's story, it begins to answer another
question which is how to tell Schell's story of trying to
tell Marlene's story. In this sense, it is a film about
trying to (re) appropriate an inappropriated body. It is
a struggle over the body, played out within the confines
of the interview as a game of naming and re-naming a
person, or rather, two persons since both Marlene and
Schell are struggling to name and be named. But while
Marlene remains named by another, Schell seeks to name
himself by the patrinomy of Welles. His desire is made
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clear as his film about Marlene disintegrates in a
dazzling display of cinematic excess worthy of both Welles
and von Sternberg as Schell struggles through a hallway
filled with dangling strips of film which entangle him,
ensnaring him in his own cinematic passion. Once again,
the documentary begins to perform as this sequence aligns
itself visually with the cinematic excesses of Welles and
von Sternberg. Schell's struggle erupts in a blinding
flash of light as he is consumed by the apparatus itself.
In the same way that Lightning Over Water can be read
as an Oedipal search for Wenders's cinematic father, so
too can Marlene be read as Schell's search for his. While
Wenders's was Nicholas Ray, Schell's is Orson Welles and,
to a lesser extent, von Sternberg. The ultimate father
for both directors is cinema itself, represented and
performed in both films by the apparatus in all of its
manifestations. Within this performance, the editing
process and as well as the use and function of sound are
privileged. The beginning sequences set up the film's
concerns for these structuring elements as we first see
the tape recorder and, later, the editing equipment as the
film editors work on Marlene. Once again we are reminded
of Lightning Over Water and Wenders's obsession with the
apparatus, revealed in his shots of editing equipment and
strips of film blowing in the wind--patriarchal desires
made manifest in the cinematic signifiers, visual
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signifiers designed to control the tactical power of
speech.
Both Marlene and Truth or Dare illustrate Trinh Minh-
ha’s comment about the artifice of boundaries.
We tend to forget how tactical speech always is.
no matter how naturally it seems to come out.
To assume that testimonies filmed on the site
are de jure more truthful than those
reconstructed off the site is to forget how
films are made. Every representation of truth
involves elements of fiction, and the difference
between so-called documentary and fiction in
their depictions of reality is a question of
degrees of fictiousness. The more one tries to
clarify the line dividing the two, the deeper
one gets entangled in the artifice of
boundaries. ("A Hybrid Place" 145)
In Marlene we have the careful reconstruction of
Marlene's Paris apartment. The spectator is given images
of the attempt at authenticity, an attempt commented on by
the elderly lady/spectator within the film who asks why so
much effort is being made to reproduce the apartment. As
we watch this scene, we too wonder about the work
involved. Is this a scene being constructed for the film
we are watching or are we watching a documentary about the
making of another documentary? If the latter is true,
then where is that film--the one with the dancing Marlenes
and the reconstructed apartment? We become entangled
within the artifice of boundaries, lost in the dazzling
display of cinematic signifiers which remind us how films
are made.
127
Truth or Dare also plays with the artifice of
boundaries. In fact, one could argue that Madonna's work
in general is all about the artifice of boundaries. Her
performance is built around the attack on the various
boundaries constructed by a social order, especially those
boundaries governing issues of gender and power. Truth or
Dare offers a glimpse behind the scenes, showing us the
work involved in constructing an image that continually
deconstructs then reconstructs itself. With this film, we
move into the realm of Nichols's observational film.
Nichols defines the observational mode as that which
stresses the non-intervention of the filmmaker. According
to his model, these films appear to cede "control" over
the events, allow the spontaneity of the event to control
the construction of the film. They also rely on editing
and tend to eschew voice-over, music external to the
observed scene, intertitle, re-enactments. This mode
hinges on the ability of the filmmaker to be unobtrusive
and are characterized by indirect address, speech
overheard rather than heard since the social actors engage
with one another rather than speak to the camera.
Synchronous sound and relatively long takes are common.
According to Nichols, these techniques anchor speech to
images of observation that locate dialogue and sound in a
specific moment and historical place (Representing Reality
38-39).
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Truth or Dare would seem to offer a perfect
illustration of Nichols's observational cinema. In this
film we have the presence of the camera on the scene,
acknowledged by Madonna and crew and therefore
acknowledged by us, the spectators, as an actant within
the historical world captured for us on screen. We
believe what we see because we see the camera, in one form
or another, and we see when it is refused entry into a
space. Our desires for the constative are satisfied by
the markers and signifiers of observational cinema. We
can sit back, comfortable in our position as observers of
Madonna’s world and the sets of relationships that
comprise this world. And yet there is a sense in which
the film sets up a spectatorial position that doubts the
truth of our observations. In part this position is
offered us by the play of interview and voice over with
the image sequences. This play allows the director to
emerge from his subjected position of servant for the eye
and voice of Madonna. As in Marlene, the editing process
is seen as the final position of power and authority.
Unlike Marlene. however, editing in Truth or Dare offers a
chance for the hierarchy of power to be overturned. And
as it is overturned, the politics of power are revealed
and held up for question.
As Nichols states, observational films set up a frame
of reference "closely akin to that of fiction film"--
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social actors who seem to perform, use codes of actions
and enigmas we recognize as semic or behaviorally
descriptive moments. As trained spectators, we pay
attention to the referential codes.
We may note the play of a symbolic code that
governs the economy of the text in metaphysical
or psychoanlytic terms (such as the desire for
the fullness of knowledge and the transcendental
authority of the observing gaze or the desire
for unity between observer and observed, viewer
and text, without reminders of lack, deficiency
or fissure between the text and the real,
representation and referent). (42)
Truth or Dare plays with these codes. We become
acquainted with the various performers within the text:
Madonna, Oliver, Sandra Bernhard, Madonna's brother Chris,
the dancers and crew. The film especially concentrates on
two performers: Madonna and Oliver, setting them up in
some sort of parallel narrative, two blondes dealing with
their fathers, their sexual desires and anxieties, their
ambitions and fears. In the same way that the film uses
the color music sequences to comment on the observational
moments, so too does it use the sequences with Oliver to
comment on the position Madonna has taken with and over
her crew and companions.
In observational cinema, we expect to take up the
position of an ideal observer, moving among people and
situations, learning the truth by watching and hearing, by
our seeming unmediated access to the world which satisfies
our demand for the constative, for categories. On one
130
hand, Truth or Dare offers us these pleasures but, on the
other, it takes them away from us by blurring the
boundaries between the constative realm of pure
observation and the performative realm of the staged.
Even as it provides us a position from which to observe
the world of the "Blonde Ambition Tour", it takes this
position away from us, threatens our stability by
presenting sequences that appear staged and constructed
for us. In Marlene we had the images of the reconstructed
apartment, a stage set for the spectator. In Truth or
Dare we have a more subtle intervention and its very
subtlty causes us to question the boundaries of fact and
fiction. Are we watching a spontaneous game of truth and
dare, or has this been staged for our benefit? Are we
watching the spontaneous play of Madonna and dancers or
has this been staged, rehearsed, as each one comes into
her bed?
Warren Beatty points out in a crucial scene in the
film that "she doesn't want to live off camera, much less
talk. There's nothing to say off camera. Why would you
say something if it's off camera? What point is there to
existing?" The omnipresent camera marks Madonna's self-
consciousness about her life as performance. Her
exhibitionism puts our status as voyeurs in jeopardy even
as the performance of the document calls its status as
observational flim into question.
131
Warren Beatty: This is crazy. Nobody talks
about this on film?
Madonna: Talks about what?
Beatty: The insanity of doing this all on a
documentary?
Madonna: Why should I stop here?
Part of the allure of Madonna: Truth or Dare is her
refusal to "stop here". The spectator is seduced by her
promise that she will dare not to stop, will eschew the
truth in order to pose provocatively. It is not the truth
we seek but the promise of a performance, of an exhibition
that will titillate our desire. This documentary survives
because it withholds the constative in favor of the
performative and performs it as the ambition of a woman
coded as blonde, scandalizing us with her vocal display of
desire and ambition.
"Gentlemen prefer blondes, but only if their roots
don't show. I am determined to make mine visible." These
words of Teresa Podlesney seem applicable to Madonna, whom
she calls "the blondest blonde ever," placing her within
"forty years of the blonde phenomenon" and claiming that
this phenomenon informs her every move (70). The blonde
phenomenon is defined as an emblem of 501s America:
Any woman who has chosen to bleach her hair
blonde at any time, in any place, since then has
willfully/willingly written herself into the
image matrix created with and inscribed upon the
memory of those blondes in their pre - corpse
state (death comes so horribly, tragically, to
the blonde, yet fulfills and continues the
process of her signification), augmenting, with
her look, an accretion of meaning that of
necessity reflects/refers to the perfect
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post-WW II product, that ultimate sign of US
global primacy, the bottle-blonde Hyperwoman.
(71-72)
Podlesney's article describes the symptoms which the
blonde phenomenon makes manifest, quoting Katz' Film
Encyclopedia in which descriptions of 501s blonde stars
such as Kim Novak, Dorothy Malone and Marilyn Monroe are
posed in terms such as "an erotic blend of strength and
vulnerability . . . breathless sensuality that was at once
erotic and wholesome, invitingly real and appealingly
funny . . . standoffish coolness and earthy sensuality"
(73). The blonde negotiates the seeming threat of female
sexuality by posing it as both sensual and vulnerable,
innocent and wholesome even as it exudes sensuality.
In the same way, Madonna plays with the conventions
of the 50's blonde, playing off the tension between
strength and vulnerability, sensuality and innocence with
a self-conscious awareness of the constructed nature of
both. In Truth or Dare we see the innocence of the child
perverted by the presentation of a precocious, post-
Oedipally knowledgeable child playing the charged game of
the title. The presentation of strength is figured
through the threatening rather than nurturing maternal,
Madonna as phallic mother in total control of the lives of
her children, the dancers around her. And throughout the
film there is no question of Madonna's eroticism as she
133
exhibits her sexuality, tempting censorship in Italy and
Toronto for her provocative staging of her sexual desires.
As such, Madonna presents herself not just as sex
object but as offering a subject position available to and
desired by her female fans. In her analysis of the 50's
blonde phenomenon, Podlesney speaks of the'"somewhat
overwhelming and vaguely frightening aspect of these
excessively womanly women" who figure in some way as "an
object of desire for women". She comments that this
desire works through an identification with excess
specifically with what I construe as the Other:
the Perfect Woman, the Hyper Woman. Hating my
body, hating my self, I see Dorothy Malone and I
realize (she is realized by me) everything I am
not. My desire to darken and negate my own
"femininity" sees its negative double in the
blindlingly white excess of womanly markers that
' constitute the screen image of Dorothy Malone.
(75).
Podlesney associates the problem of the blonde with the
problem of excess, with uncontainability. She speaks of
the promises that can not be restricted by the film frame,
of the unrepresentability of women's desire within the
patriarchal structures of representation (75). Even so
Madonna dares the patriarchy to silence her, to contain
her. And she dares the documentary form to capture her,
to turn her performance of herself into a constative.
Podlesney's comments seem appropriate to a discussion
of Marlene as well as Madonna, both of whom exhibit their
excess with a dare and a taunt.
134
The blonde's status as an obvious image
construct is now rendered transparent, and the
search begins for the "real" woman behind the
mask. In a very complex process of assigning
identity, the blonde is constructed so that she
may be de(con)structed, all in the name of
entertainment and spectacle. (76)
Marlene's image is deconstructed by Schell. In the power
play that underlines the film, the director asserts his
control over his subject, rendering her helpless and
vulnerable, exposing her to death and contempt. Madonna,
on the other hand, is in full control of her image. Her
power is real, her sense of mastery and control evident
throughout her career and the film we are watching. We
see this control as she refuses entry to the camera.
Unlike Schell, Keshishian is not able to circumvent
Madonna's dictum. Or if he is, he must find another way
to assert his directorial control. While Marlene is
constructed by the film text, Madonna takes hold of the
construction not by turning the voyeuristic gaze upon
itself but by defusing it through the performance of her
own position of mastery and control. And by choosing for
her vehicle the documentary form, Madonna calls into
question its epistemological voyeurism, its drive to
contain the other, denying the constative its truth
dimension.
One way in which the differences between Madonna and
Marlene may be read is in terms of Madonna's use of camp
as opposed to Marlene's fear of becoming kitsch. Schell
135
plays on Marlene's fear, revealing her as a kitsch object,
holding her up to our contempt not only because she is
kitsch but because she seems unable to acknowledge her own
status. Madonna, on the other hand, displays a self-
conscious adoption of the elements of camp, not only in
the moments when she camps it up with her dancers, but in
the camp elements of the concert appearances themselves.
In her seminal article "Notes on Camp", Susan Sontag
defines camp as a sensibility whose essence
is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and
exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric--something
of a private code, a badge of identity even,
among small urban cliques . . . a deep sympathy
modified by revulsion. (105)
Madonna's work circles around this sensibility or
aesthetic, which is not unusual considering the influence
of gay culture found in her various levels of performance,
from her concert appearances to her book Sex. It is by
exploiting the camp aesthetic that Madonna is able to
politicize her work in terms of overturning gender
relations and stereotypes. As Sontag defines camp, it
involves the following elements: a way of seeing the
world as an aesthetic phenomenon, in terms of artifice,
stylization, and a sensibility which Sontag considers to
be predominately disengaged and depoliticized, or at least
apolitical. Camp offers a vision of the world in terms of
style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off", of
things-being-what-they-are-not, a response to the markedly
136
attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. It draws on a
mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined
form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined
form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the
grain of one's own sex. "What is most beautiful in virile
men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in
feminine women is something masculine" (108). Camp
relishes the exaggerated sexual characteristics and
personality mannerisms of icons such as Bette Davis and
Joan Crawford, but it also relishes the tragic sexuality
of figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
According to Sontag, camp sees everything in
quotation marks--Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the
farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of
life as theater. In its theatricality, man and woman,
person and thing become convertible. As these categories
become performances, the categories themselves diasappear
as does a desire for hierarchy implicit in such binarisms.
Camp overturns these oppositions by celebrating the very
artifice on which they are constructed. Tracing its roots
back to the mannerist perios, Sontag comments on the late
17th and 18th century, a period marked by an extraordinary
feeling for artifice and surface,
a taste for the picturesque and the thrilling,
elegant conventions for representing instant
feeling and the total presence of character
. . . the Camp sensibility is one that is alive
to a double sense in which some things can be
137
taken . . . It is the difference, rather,
between the thing as meaning something,
anything, and the thing as pure artifice.
(110)
We get this double sense in Madonna's film as well as in
her concert and film performances. She is aware of the
pure artificiality of things and plays this up, exploits
it, in a performance of seduction which illustrates
Sontag1s comments that camping
is a mode of seduction— one which employs
flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double
interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with
a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another,
more impersonal, for outsiders... a duplicity is
involved. Behind the "straight" public sense in
which something can be taken, one has found a
private zany experience of the thing. (110)
Madonna also exemplifies the element of parody which
helps define camp. Her performance blurs the line between
a presentation of self and a presentation of a parody of
self, exaggerated and self-conscious, raising the question
once again of truth or dare, performance or reality,
fiction or document. The structure of the film itself
comments on this thematic as it mixes observational,
behind the scenes footage of Madonna's Blonde Ambition
Tour with interviews and elaborate music video type
sequences from the concerts themselves. The shift between
performance and observation is intensified in an
exploitation of the conventions of documentary: rough
black and white footage captures the real life feel of the
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tour while the concert appearances are marked by slick
color sequences.
Her performances offer the "proper mixture of the
exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive"
(112) that Sontag associates with camp, even as they
glorify the force of her character. The stress placed on
Madonna as character, performer, person illustrate
Sontag's argument that the theatricalization of experience
found in camp is a reaction to the understanding of human
nature as a simple or continual thing. Camp's interest in
performance is an interest in the complexities of human
nature, the fluidity of boundaries, expressed in a
reversal of hierarchies such as good and bad, high and
low. Yet, as Sontag points out, camp does not just
reverse these concepts, Rather, it turns its back on
them, offering a supplementary set of standards (114).
Madonna's camp aesthetic turns its back on various
aesthetic and cultural standards in a playful,
performative fashion. She dethrones the serious even as
she presents a new relation to the serious in a playful
objectification of her own body. By consciously turning
herself into spectacle, she takes the role of object and
subjects it to her own desires. Her performances
illustrate Mary Russo's argument that, by making a
spectacle of oneself, a woman is able to affirm her
position and power. As she says the
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masks and voices of carnival resist, exaggerate
and destabilize the distinctions and boundaries
that mark and maintain high culture and
organized society . . . carnival and the
carnivalesque suggest a redeployment or
counterproduction of culture, knowledge, and
pleasure. (218)
Where Marlene fails, Madonna apparently succeeds,
asserting her own power and authority over the desires of
the male director. And yet, like Schell, Keshishian also
asserts his directorial control by juxtaposing image and
voice, sequence with sequence. As he does, we are faced
with the question of power and knowledge once again and
the difficulty of oppositional thinking. While we are
uncomfortable with the power exerted over Marlene, power
which renders her speechless, robs her of subjectivity, we
are also uncomfortable with Madonna's power. While we may
acknowledge the role gender plays in each of these films
and associate Schell's struggle for mastery as an attempt
to recuperate a threatened male subjectivity, we must also
examine Madonna's struggle for control.
We see Keshishian as author in the sequence in which
Madonna visits her mother's grave. Throughout the film,
Madonna comments on the affect her mother's death had on
her. Losing her mother, for whom she was named, when she
was six years old, had an impact on Madonna's life and
art. This impact is worked out through the trajectory of
her concert, a drama of journey and change, of coming into
self. At one point in the tour, Madonna returns to her
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home town in Michigan. Here she meets her father and
older brother as well as childhood friend. She also
visits her mother's grave. The sequence is filmed in a
very "Marilynesque" moment (as many sequences in the film
are), using the similarities between Marilyn and Madonna
to set up Madonna's vulnerability and fragility. Within
this sequence we have Madonna lying on her mother's grave
as the very poignant song "Promise to Try" plays on the
soundtrack. But we also have shots of Madonna's brother
Chris, standing alone, leaning against a tree, watching
her. As the camera continues to return to her, we become
aware of his sorrow, his pain, his isolation. Throughout
the film, we are given glimpses of his role in Madonna's
life. He is her artistic director and best friend,
supporting her when she must confront various family
members as well as the authorities. And yet the film
rests its eye lovingly upon him, puncturing its constative
promise to provide information and insight into Madonna's
world of truth and dare. The object of our gaze is seen
as another subject with a story to tell and one whose
story may be more interesting than Madonna's. In this
way, the straying camera eye performs the author's desire,
puncturing the constative moment which documents Madonna's
grieving act in favor of a performance of another desire,
one for Chris's story and one which seeks to explore his
grief.
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Moments such as these offer us a glimpse of our dis
ease with documentary's presumptions. As the film
performs its desires for us, we become aware of the
pretenses that have brought us into its world, the
invitations and promises offered us by its re-creations
and re-presentations of lived experience. These two films
offer us the stage and the real, performing their fact as
much as their fictions and, as they do so, blurring the
boundaries between constative and performative, fact and
fiction, object and subject, presentation and
representation.
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Chapter 6
Death and Desire: AIDS and representation
I shall die soon, I know
This thing is in my blood.
It will not let me go.
It saps my cells for food.
It soaks my nights in sweat.
And breaks my days in pain.
No hand or drug can treat
These limbs for love or gain.
How am I to go on
How will I bear this taste
My throat cased in white spawn
These hands that shake and waste?
Stay by my steel ward bed
And hold me where I lie
Love me when I am dead
And do not let me die.
--Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth's poem attempts to capture the pain and
fear of living with and dying from AIDS. The trajectory
of the illness and its inevitable end is represented with
a sparseness that is unremitting in its articulation,
offering a visual depth to the language that we find
inescapable.
Silverlake Life: The View From Here and The
Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter are two video texts which
document the frustration and agony of living with AIDS as
well as the marginalization experienced by gays. Both
texts explore these interwoven experiences, daring to
interrogate the representation of the body and, more
specifically, the body in death. The texts also comment
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on the attitudes towards AIDS and the role representation
is able to take in this crisis as it presents the possible
attitudes towards the virus: Mark's "I'll fight and
survive" and Tom's "I'm dying so I'll make a video of it
in Silverlake Life and Dr. Peter's "I'm going to beat this
thing" articulated in his broadcast tapes. These
attitudes, performed within the video texts, also function
constatively as statements marking out two approaches to
representations of the AIDS crisis: those that present
its sufferers as victims, colonialized by the disease, and
those that allow for an attitude of survival.
In her article on images of the Holocaust, Andrea
Liss comments on what she calls the fragile yet stubborn
borders which divide notions of objectivity and
subjectivity. She cites these overlapping margins as
sites where the assumptions governing conventional
documentary practice are located. According to her
argument, these assumptions, which involve the "self-
knowingly skeptical claims to fully apprehend its subject
both raise and erase the possibility of empathy for the
object of its representation" need to be reframed so that
the positions circulating between the photographer, the
person/site/event photographed and the viewer can be
reformulated. Her strategy is to reframe these
relationships so that the subject can be represented
'without projecting images of victimhood (31). Liss's
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primary concern is with photographic representations of
Holocaust memory, yet her arguments can be attached to
images of what has been termed another Holocaust— those of
the AIDS crisis.
As she points out, questions of "mimesis, strategies
of empathy, the fiction in truth, the truth in fiction,
and the tension between literalness and metaphor through
narrative ways of telling are always at work in any
attempt at documentary represention." She argues that
these questions raise serious problems when one is dealing
with images of the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust.
Citing Adorno1s warning that writing poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric, she comments on the dubious eye we
cast on representation in general when the subject of
representation is that which seems, by its very nature,
unrepresentable. As she says,
Adorno's reservations about Holocaust
representations and contemporary analyses about
documentary practice question the lurking
invitations to enthrallment, if not pleasure,
opened up when re-creations of lived experience
strive for empathetic responses. (31)
Liss ably argues against accepting Adorno's dictum,
pointing out that silence, the fitting memorial allowed in
Adorno's schema, is not the absence of representation.
She comments that "it is precisely through mediated images
that their histories reverberate," while raising the issue
of just how much reality can be shown before the desired
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bond between viewer and viewed becomes codified in terms
of the positions of privileged and pathetic. She quotes
extensively from an interview she conducted with Martin
Smith, director of the Holocaust Museum's permanent
exhibition.
In this interview, Smith comments on the relationship
between the arts and images of social distress, raising
the question of how much one should push against the
barriers of respectability and acceptability (36). Since
the Holocaust Museum is organized around an agenda of
information as a means of education which will in turn
develop tolerance, documentary in its many manifestations
takes a central place as an effective means of presenting
the spectator with images which will inform and teach,
tracing documentary back to its roots: docere, to teach.
The need to educate which circulates around images
and documentaries about the Holocaust (as well as fiction
films such as Schindler's List) must also, by their very
nature, encounter and deconstruct the various faces of
anti-Semitism for it is not possible to discuss the
Holocaust without engaging Hitler's Jewish question.
While it is true that not every one murdered by the SS
were Jewish, it is also true that the overriding issue to
Hitler and his followers was the problem of racial purity
personified by the Jewish race.
Documentaries about AIDS confront this same
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problematic as it is not possible to examine the various
faces of AIDS without engaging the homosexual question.
Simon Watney points out in his article "Photography and
AIDS" that there is an unconscious agenda which identifies
the absolute difference of death with the effects of HIV
infection as well as the social groups in which it has
emerged. Commenting that
AIDS has been widely interpreted as if it were
an intrinsic property of these groups, which are
seen as actively threatening rather than
vulnerable, with the outward and visible signs
of infection taken as evidence of their supposed
inner and secret depravity. (173),
he argues against the fetishistic and obsessive
concentration on death present in most portrayals of AIDS,
pointing out that such approaches serve to further
colonize people with AIDS. As he says, "there is no way
in which a person with AIDS can hope to enter the public
space of photographic representation save as a sign of
mortality, regardless of their own responses to AIDS"
(182). Pointing out that, while there are thousands of
people living healthy lives even as they are either HIV
positive or defined as people living with AIDS, images of
these people do not satisfy the public agenda which
prefers images of victims, he argues that the majority of
AIDS representations relegate it to the level of
stereotype. As such, we are rarely allowed glimpses of
the scale and complexity of the epidemic. To provide such
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glimpses would be to acknowledge diversity, something that
is "threatening to many institutions, especially those
that have a major investment in policing and defining our
perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in" (190).
He calls for a representational practice that will not
marginalize people living with AIDS, that will allow other
representations than those of the face of death, those of
the AIDS victim.
In a sense Silverlake Life falls into the category of
texts that are concerned with the face of death. It
educates through fascination and horror, reminding us of
the terrible cost of AIDS and its ultimate death sentence.
Yet it represents the life and vitality of these men and
the marginalization they have experienced first as gay men
and then as people with AIDS. Keeping this relationship
in mind, the text makes a clear argument for a
reconsideration of both margins, negotiating its own
textual practices in a performance in which both men waver
in their positions as victim and survivor.
It is the story of a relationship, a final document
about desire, which is finally and irrevocably about
death, begun by Tom Joslin, a film teacher and maker, and
finished by Peter Friedman, one of Tom's former students.
From the beginning it foregrounds its concerns: the
problematic of the body as we see Mark's form lying there,
asleep or dead we cannot tell, and later the shadow of
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Tom’s head moving behind the title sequence as well as
Mark's comments that what he misses most about Tom is
feeling him, knowing his body so well and not being able
to feel its form beneath his arm; the use of the video
diary as our gaze shifts from Mark's still form to a video
screen and the words "Mark I love you" around Tom's image;
the difficulty of facing death and offering its
representations as we look at Tom's ashes and hear Mark
describe how difficult it was to look at Tom's body right
after he died, how he had to close Tom's eyes and the
struggle that involved; the fact of AIDS as we see the
medicine bottles lined up; the relationship of
stigmatization on the basis of sexual orientation and on
the basis of health issues; and the mediation by Peter
Friedman as he enters a garage where the numerous video
tapes are stored, his voice over telling us that Tom had
decided to shoot a video diary when he and Mark were
diagnosed with AIDS, asking Peter to finish it if he
couldn't. Later in the film, at Tom's memorial service,
Tom's brother will comment on the necessity of death for
the completion of the film. AIDS must run its course in
Tom's life in order for the document about it to be made
and circulated as a means of increasing awareness of the
toll AIDS has brought to the world. In much the same way,
death is necessary for the acceptance of Tom and Mark's
relationship as Mark points out after Tom's death: Tom
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had to die before Tom's mom could see how much Mark loved
him and it takes Tom's death to motivate Mark's father to
send him a "surreal letter" recognizing that Tom and Mark
were a family.
In its desire to inform and teach, Silverlake Life:
The View From Here grapples with these questions of how
close should the viewer be brought into the world of these
men who are struggling with AIDS? Can the story really be
told to those who have not experienced it and if so, how
can this be accomplished? The video text stands as an
affirmative answer to the question of whether or not the
story can be told, and yet leaves gaps in its telling. At
one point Tom, bedridden, admits to the camera that he has
just gone through two weeks of very serious illness.
Since he was extremely depressed and hopeless, he had
decided not to tape during this period, waiting to return
to his video diary when he found himself more optimistic
about his struggle and its possibilities. Even in its
announcement of Peter's mediation, the text admits its
gaps and absences, one of which is Mark's death; the other
that of Tom's editorial voice as it is Peter who must
finish the project.
In this film the judgment uttered is the action
performed. If the polaroid held in Mark's hand works as a
fetish object, helping him in the work of mourning, then
the end of the film functions in the same way for us since
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it does not end with Tom's death but with Mark's
struggling with the grief process. We share in this
process as we participate in the memorial service, hear
the legacy of AIDS deaths, position Tom's death in its
teleological role as necessary for the completion of the
film. We hear Peter's voiceover as he returns to complete
the project, interviewing Mark five months later as his
own condition has worsened, dealing with the death of the
other which is literally his own death.
The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter is a documentary
made for HBO from a series of video diaries shown on
Canadian television. In the beginning we are informed
that in 1986 Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, a Canadian physician,
was diagnosed with AIDS. Unable to practice medicine
because of the effects of the disease, he began a weekly
segment of video diaries on a television broadcast in
order to combat prejudice about AIDS and homosexuality.
The text situates our response to the tapes we are about
to see by informing us that over the years, the Canadian
viewers grew close to Dr. Peter, accepting him into their
lives and affectionately calling him Dr. Peter.
While the opening sequence situates the video texts
within the realm of broadcast tv and the abovementioned
titles praise the role of television in creating a
familiarity and intimacy with the figures shown, it also
positions the text within the educational drives of
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documentary. As we see the title "HBO presents" we hear a
voice-over asking "how's my head position?" We then hear
the "3-2-1-take one" and we cut to a shot of a bank of
video monitors in a television studio. A face appears on
all of the monitors and we slowly zoom in on the largest
monitor as we hear the man shown tell us about his initial
diagnosis with AIDS. Given a life expectancy of 9 - 14
months, he decides this will not be him and vows to beat
this thing.
He continues "four years later I'm even more
determined than ever ..." and his voice fades away for a
moment until he says, with a laugh, "after four years I
don't have anything to say." We cut to the title, then a
voice-over "roll the tape" and we are again in the studio,
this time with the temporal marker on the bottom of the
screen informing us that it is two years later. The face
on the monitor is familiar yet different. He tells us
that he actually had no shortage of things to say.
v *
Commenting on how privileged he feels to be practicing
medicine in an unconventional way, he has found these
diaries fun, rewarding, and a means to educate and help
people through television. And so we have the merging of
broadcast tv, video diary, documentary and the discourse
of medicine, all circulating around the project of
educating and helping by making the unfamiliary familiar,
putting a face on both AIDS and homosexuality.
152
By virtue of their status as video diary, Silverlake
Life and Dr. Peter extend the notion of documentary.
Where Dr. Peter draws on the conventions of broadcast tv,
Silverlake Life remains within the conventional
expectations of a documentary film, released theatrically
before being shown on public television. Both move beyond
the conventional uses of archival photography and various
interview techniques to confront the reality of AIDS and
of death in a way that foregrounds the issue of
representation and the representable even as they provide
a space for contemplation and analysis. The use of video
with its sense of presentness and liveness intensifies our
confrontation with the various representations of death
and dying. It brings the lives of these men into focus in
much the same way that television offers us performers and
celebrities right in our own home, a relationship between
spectator and text.
The familiarity and intimacy of the video image is
intensified by the use of the diary form, a highly
personal and private genre. In an article on the diary
film of Jonas Mekas, David James contextualizes the role
of the diary in American culture, noting that women's
diary writing in the seventies opened up a space for
"individual participation in a collective historical
recovery" (150). As he states, the politics of the diary
as invested by women eventually led its status as
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feminist, privileging the open-ended, nonhierarchical, and
impermanent in opposition to the teleolgically ordered
masculine autobiography proper. These same
characteristics seem quite applicable to the texts at
hand. While not feminist works, they share with such
projects the desire for participation in a collective
historical recovery and are also aware of the political
efficacy of questioning the marginalization of the private
sphere. By bringing the spectator into the private sphere
of suffering and survival, the text is able to confront
the public with the horrific dimensions of the AIDS
crisis.
James argues, however, that the film diary in its
present tense, author centered discourse, is not
completely adequate as a social discourse. It must be
transformed into the diary film, an edited revision that
allows for a greater discursivity, an extension socially
as well as temporarily (161). This discursivity comes
into being through loss. It is the attitude towards loss
that marks the difference between the film diary and the
diary film.
Reflecting the epistemological limits of
photography, the former could register only what
was present, while the contemplation of the
fragments of what has become the past confronts
the loss that is congealed in them. (168)
Both texts are defined by the loss they try to
recuperate; Silverlake Life by means of Peter's mediation
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after Tom's death and Dr. Peter by his death which defines
the edited version as shown on HBO. Announcing themselves
as video diaries, they negotiate the fine line between
what to disclose and what to keep hidden, between their
concern with the creative present which would mark it as
diary video and the irrecuperable loss of the posthumous
which mark them as diary video.
Both texts open up the world of AIDS to us,
unrelentedly recording the daily frustrations and agonies
of life with AIDS. In Silverlake Life, we have images
which catch us up in the daily battle that defines living
with this disease. From the trip to Thrifty in the
beginning of the film to Tom's last month of battling the
disease when he speaks of losing the steam of life and
wonders if his life has value we are brought into the
lives of Tom and Mark as they struggle to survive. We see
and hear Tom's anger as he lies exhausted in the car,
waiting for Mark to do some shopping; we recognize his
frustration as he is unable to complete the simplest of
tasks without collapsing in exhaustion and weakness. In a
heartbreaking sequence filmed in the middle of the night,
Tom worries about not being able to go to the Auto Show as
he is too weak, does not want to be confined in a
wheelchair and is afraid that it may be raining, always a
health threat to individuals with no immune systems. We
watch as a trip to New Hampshire to visit his family ends
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with a New Year's Eve visit to the hospital and the worry
that what one is found doing the first of the year will
characterize the entire year.
Dr. Peter mixes his comments on the fears and
frustrations of the disease with glimpses into his
survival tactics and celebration of life. In tape #2 he
describes the loss of his vision, carefully explaining how
viral retinitus works, finishing with an almost off-handed
comment that he must now accept the eventuality of going
blind; an eventuality that becomes a reality by tape #6 in
which he describes his blindness as living in a grey fog
and tells us that he must now call up a friend to know
what the weather outside is like. In tape #53 he talks
about the many friends with HIV or AIDS, confessing the
difficulty he encounters in dealing with these friends as
he doesn't know how to help them. Feeling that all he has
to offer are platitudes, he admits that, with so many
doing poorly all of a sudden, it's difficult not to be
pessimistic sometimes.
Both texts allow us a glimpse into the endlessness of
drugs, hospital stays and medical tests as well as the
uncertainties and warnings about various side effects and
toxicities that may prove more deadly than the virus
itself. Dr. Peter takes us into his hospital room twice
and comments on other visits. Since his concern is to
practice medicine in a new way, his tapes.are often
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concerned with the various infections he encounters and he
offers fairly detailed explanations of viral retinitis,
the bouts with pneumonia and the treatment for his Kaposi
Sarcoma.
Silverlake Life also presents a sequence in which
Tom discusses the beginning of his disease as well as
hospital and doctor visits. But its power lies in its
final assault on us with the unimaginable as it offers us
images of the seemingly unendurable duration which marks
the slow process of dying. We see Tom's frame as it
becomes increasingly skeletal, as he becomes bedridden,
wrapped in a diaper, too weak to eat and even to speak.
A picture of AIDS emerges which demonstrates the
debilitating aspects of the illness as it ages young men
seemingly overnight, robbing them of youthful exuberance
and energy, laying a death sentence on them that robs them
not only of life but also companionship as friends and
family grapple with what it means to live with AIDS.
But in the midst of this, we are also given glimpses
of life: Mark dancing to music, celebrating his life and
his struggle; Mark and Tom on an outing to the Huntington
gardens, celebrating the fact that they are able to walk
on past a bench without needing to sit and rest; enjoying
the LA Marathon; Dr. Peter snow skiing, learning to play
the piano, discussing his venture with water skiing.
Small victories, yet victories all the same, victories
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that remind us that is not about dying from AIDS but about
living with AIDS.
In Silverlake Life the more painful moments seem to
be softened by the love story that forms the focus of the
text. When we are caught up in the horrors of the AIDS
crisis, we are momentarily let off the hook with visual
reminders that what we are watching is a love poem to
Mark. It is not so much a record of one's dying as a
reminder of one's life and love, of the relationship that
has sustained the struggle and provides the impetus to
continue living even within the confines of physical
weakness and pain. Yet these moments only allow a
spectator who is comfortable with the nature of the
relationship to find a space of respite from the
unrelenting images of death and dying. In this regard,
they can be read constatively; that is, as visual
statements reinforcing and mirroring an acceptable
relationship. To the spectator uncomfortable with the
nature of the relationship, these images can be read
performatively, as visual statements which perform their
status as acts which challenge the dominant order.
Dr. Peter also speaks of his relationship, telling
his viewers that he met his partner and lover after going
blind. In this way, he finds, blindness is eye-opening as
he fell in love with the man and not the appearance. As
documents about AIDS and about gay relationships, neither
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text can escape their political position. Tom's diary may
attempt to avoid the political, concentrating as it does
on its status as love letter to Mark, yet, by virtue of
the fact that it is about AIDS and a homosexual
relationship, it is already positioned within a political
discourse that raises questions not only about death and
representation but about the public and the private and
those who have been marginalized by the dominant social
order.
Dr. Peter also downplays the political agenda, yet
his diaries are also concerned with homophobia as well as
a fear of AIDS and people with the disease. In several
tapes he discusses what it meant to grow up gay,
commenting on the loneliness of the marginalized. In one
particularly vulnerable moment, near the end of the
broadcasts, he tells us how difficult it was to know he
was gay from a very young age. Unable to discuss his
feelings with either peers or family members, he hid it
for a while, then, hoping to convert himself to
heterosexuality, he began to read his father's Playboy
magazines. With his usual humor, he admits that when he
found that he was spending more time looking at the fully
dressed Marlboro Man rather than the centerfolds, he
accepted his sexual orientation.
In the same tape he remembers a book on teen-age sex
by Ann Landers given him by his mother. Reading the one
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chapter on homosexuality, he was gripped by the last
sentence in which the author writes "well, just thank God
that you're normal." Remembering this, he asks "how many
other children of the 50's read that and were completely
crushed as I was."
Silverlake Life foregrounds this political sub
jectivity by means of the text within the text. As Tom
and Mark travel to Tom's hometown for what will be their
last Christmas together, Tom comments on how worried his
family is about this visit— not so much because of Tom's
health but because of the film he is making. It reminds
them of a film he had made a decade earlier. Shown on
PBS, the earlier film entitled Autobiography of a Close
Friend had functioned as Tom's coming out and coming to
terms with the fact of being gay. In it we see Tom asking
his family about their responses to his coming out. The
answers are varied, ranging from the cautious acceptance
by his mother to his father's vehement refusal to
acknowledge Tom's sexual orientation or to accept Mark as
a viable love object. The film is further politicized by
a sequence in which Mark, sitting on the roof of the barn,
reads aloud portions of Out of the Closet: Voices of Gav
Literature, a text which enunciates the efficacy of
adopting "gay" as an identificatory term. The book argues
that, since words and labels tell a story, freedom lies in
adopting the term "gay" rather than "homosexual" as gay
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poses a challenge to the system in its blatant
performance. Mark ends his reading with the statement
that the personal is the political, the economic, and the
cultural. In keeping with this dictate, Tom's film
situates the confrontational aspects of coming out within
his very loving and very secure relationship with Mark.
As Mark finishes reading, Tom asks "Do you love me?" and
is answered affirmatively.
The text within the text functions as an essay on the
relationship between struggling with one's identity as a
gay man and struggling with one's identity as a person
with AIDS. As we see the very young Tom discuss his
coming out with his parents, as we hear Mark read about
the issues of a gay identity, we draw the parallels
between the two visits and between the marginalization of
the gay experience and the marginalization of those
suffering with AIDS. This marginalization is commented on
throughout the text in part by its emphasis on the body.
The body is central to both texts: the body alive in
dance and sports, the body in love, the body marked by the
ravages of the disease and its various infections, the
body dying and the body in death. We see this vividly
portrayed in Silverlake Life as Tom and Mark spend a few
days relaxing poolside at a desert resort. As they swim,
Mark is asked by the owner to put on a shirt as his
numerous KS spots are disturbing to the other guests. We
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see him taking cover in another part of the pool, an area
from which he emerges to make his political statement: he
shows off his back with its telltales spots. Later,
covered by a t-shirt, he sits by the pool and discusses
the dilemma such a request poses for him, admitting that
it forces him to confront his own feelings of ugliness and
inadequacy to such a point that he wants to shout out that
it doesn't matter, that this is who he is. He wants to be
a reminder to the viewers that he is alive. In the same
breath, he reminds us as viewers that he is alive yet
marked by death and we cannot turn our heads. He
expresses his frustration at having to deny the very thing
of which he is most proud: his body as proof of his
survival.
Not only is disease written on the body, but it is
the body in death that puts the possibility of
representation to the test. As the film unfolds, we are
caught up in Tom's dying process. He tells us that he is
no longer an active participant in life. Calling himeself
a distant viewer, he remarks that his time is now spent
looking, watching and seeing from the vantage point of the
walking dead, that is a person with AIDS. We see the
friends and family gather for the final visits and observe
Tom's gradual dying as he begins to lose his memory, his
ability to function, and fades from life. The slow
process unfolds from mid June until July 1 when, in spite
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of our expectations, we are suddenly confronted with the
fact and image of Tom's death: the lifeless corpse and
Mark's heartbreaking sobs. Seeking to avert our eyes, we
f ind we cannot.
In her article on death, representation and
documentary, Vivian Sobchack discusses the cinematic
medium's "tendency to avert its eyes before the sight of
actual death," a tendency she attributes to the fact that
"semiotically speaking, we can say that death presents a
special problem in representation" (283). Noting that
"the event of death seems particularly privileged in its
threat to representation," she comments that it is such a
challenge to our notion of representation that "it seems
unrepresentable . . . a sign that ends all signs . . . the
last, the ultimate act of semiosis" (286). In an attempt
to interrogate this ultimate act of semiosis, she poses
ten propositions that attempt to describe the problematic
relations that exist between death and its representation
in cinema. These propositions include comments about
death's semiotic status as a confounder of codes as well
as those about the ontological threat death poses. By
presenting the corpse, death provides us with "an object
for scrutiny, a way of releasing and fulfilling our
natural curiosity about a taboo cultural object. We are
fascinated and fearful ..." (288).
We see this in Silverlake Life as we see Tom's
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lifeless body and hear Mark's heartrending and
heartbreaking commentary: Tom has died, has completed his
last performative gesture. We gaze at him in death,
fascinated yet horrified, wanting perhaps to turn away yet
unable to as the camera focuses our attention on the body.
We are confronted by Bataille's trilogy: death, desire
and truth, locked within our spectatorial gaze as we stand
captured and captivated by the full force of the tragedy
to which we bear witness. Unable to turn away, we watch
as the body is stripped and bagged, noticing then how much
like a skeleton Tom has become, wasted by the ravages of
the disease. The film does not let us off the hook as we
watch them wheel out the body and place it in the back of
the station wagon. Our gaze is captivated by the double
sight of Tom's body in its sealed bag, lying in the back
of the car and the image of Mark with the video camera,
reflected in the back window as he records Tom's final
image.
Sobchack states that, before
the event of an unsimulated death, the viewer's
very act of looking is ethically charged and is,
itself, the object of ethical judgment when it
is viewed: The viewer is held ethically
responsible for his or her visible visual
response. (292)
It is in the act of viewing that the spectator is able to
judge his or her ethical response to the representations
of death. As the spectator confronts, is confronted by,
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the visual taboo of death, he or she moves into an ethical
space— "that is, the visible representation or sign of the
viewer's subjective, lived, and moral relationship with
the viewed" (292). Discussing the difference between
documentary and narrative representations of death,
Sobchack points out that death is fairly commonplace in
our narrative films. Yet, the emotions we feel, the
values we risk in looking, differ from the way we respond
to death in documentary.
Using Rules of the Game as an example, she discusses
the role that contextualization plays in our understanding
of a textual representation of death. In the Renoir text,
we are confronted with the death of a rabbit and of a
human. The rabbit dies in the service of the narrative;
the human dies only in the fiction. She points out that
the kmowledge that informs our distinction between the
rabbit's death and that of the actor is extra-cinematic
and intertextual. The "textual moment of the rabbit's
death gains its particular force from a cultural knowledge
which contextualizes and exceeds the representation's
sign-function as narrative" (293).
In this way, a death that exceeds the narrative code
succeeds in rupturing and interrogating the boundaries of
narrative representation. However, the world of the
documentary is indexically constituted as a conjunction of
the spectator's world and the world as represented by the
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text- The spectator's gaze is informed by his or her
knowledge of this world, a knowledge that moves the
spectator into an ethical space of "responsiveness and
responsibility toward a world shared with other human
subjects" (294). This is especially vivid in the scene in
which Mark receives Tom's ashes. We watch as he carefully
prepares the urn which he has chosen. As he struggles to
unwrap and open the container, he cuts his thumb and
begins to bleed. He continues to struggle with the
wrappings until the wound requires attention. We are
drawn into the scene by the view of blood and ashes
intermingling. Aware that AIDS has made his blood unsafe,
we find ourselves alarmed by the sight of Mark's blood,
carrier of the disease, especially as he sucks his thumb
in an attempt to stop the bleeding. As he returns to his
work, thumb safely cleansed and bandaged, he spills some
of the ashes in the attempt to relocate them in the urn.
Again we watch, fascinated yet possibly a bit horrified as
he sweeps up Tom's remains, carefully collecting the ashes
and placing them in the urn. Judgment and performative
mix and mingle, ethical propositions with performatives,
self-expression with epistemological renderings as we are
brought face to face with our own revulsions, prejudices,
and judgmental attitudes.
Silverlake Life: The View From Here and The
Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter attempt to walk the fine line
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between representations of the cost and toll of AIDS,
representations that must by their very nature show us the
face of death, and representations of the struggle to live
courageously. The two become inseparable in the
performance of the texts themselves as they raise the
question: if we are not confronted with death, how will
we ever struggle to bring an end to the crisis? Yet, they
also focus on the struggle to live, capturing the humor
and liveliness, the love and vitality these three men
share with countless other people living with AIDS.
Silverlake Life ends on the images, drawn from Tom's first
film, of a very young and vital Tom and Mark dancing and
doing VaudeviIlian routines, setting a celebratory mood as
they quote Gertrude Stein's last words and seal the film
with a kiss. The love that cannot speak its name is
spoken. The personal is political. As such, it is
possible to argue that these texts offer an intervention
as they produce subjects who address us and confront us
with their courage and their love, blatantly performing
their gayness. This confrontation works along the divide
between the constative demands of the documentary form and
the performative aspects of the video diary. As diary,
they unite these two supposedly disparate elements,
constatively performing its promises and claims, opening a
space from which to theorize the possibilities of
representation and representational strategies.
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Bill Horrigan writes
where are we now? Here we are in the midst of
the AIDS crisis, trying as before, trying still
to understand the terms of its representations,
to advance counter or additive representations,
to efface those representations favored by the
media but disserving the interests of those
whose lives the epidemic has diminished. (166)
His answer to where are we now is that the attempt to talk
about AIDS puts us in a colonized space. He quotes Stuart
Hall who discusses the problem of representations in the
face of the impossibility of a response to the dying who
ask if they should take a drug that will prolong their
death from within a few days to a few months. In the face
of the AIDS crisis, cultural studies and theoretical
discourse seems futile and inconsequential. And yet, as
Horrigan quotes Stuart Hall as asking, how
could we say that the question of AIDS is not
also a question of who gets represented and who
does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance
of sexual politics is being rolled back. It's a
site at which not only will people die, but
desire and pleasure will also die if certain
metaphors do not survive, or survive in the
wrong way. (quoted in Horrigan 167)
As he points out, we must understand that in the face of
this crisis cultural studies must analyze the nature of
representation, especiallly as it is the site of life and
death.
In this way, Horrigan argues, the AIDS crisis seems
to offer a challenge to documentary practice. As he puts
it, it "exposes some unspoken assumptions regulating the
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relationship between who is viewer and who is viewed
(171). One way in which Silverlake Life does this is by
presenting death as the ultimate performative. Tom
performs the phrase "I am dying" before the video eye and
as he does he creates a text that challenges our
assumptions about the use of the document as a way to
stave off the idea of death.
In Sobchack's words
The possibility of planned exploitation of
human beings, of ghoulishness, of a cold
voyeurism, is belied by the dying subject's
openness to the probity of the gaze, by a
collaboration with its interest .... In a
regression from the social conditions of
death in the 20th century...the bedchamber
again becomes a space for public ceremony, a
space organized, in part, by the dying subject.
(297)
In his article "The Cinematic Photograph and the
Possibility of Mourning," Corey Creekmur discusses the
function of the photograph in the work of mourning. Using
Freud's essay on mourning and melancholia, Creekmur traces
out the work of mourning, isolating its symptoms and
aligning them with the symptoms of melancholia. We have a
similar discussion in Silverlake Life as Mark reads from a
book sent to him by his support buddy at AIDS Project Los
Angeles after Tom's death. The book sets forth the
various stages of grief and provides helpful comments on
how best to negotiate these stages. We hear Mark's
commentary as he finds himself working through his grief
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and loss. As he does so, he holds a polaroid photograph
in his hand. While we are never allowed a look at the
photo, we have been told by Peter's voiceover that when he
arrived at the house six months after Tom's death, Mark
met him at the door with a polaroid photo of Tom, taken
right after the moment of death. Peter states that Mark
shoved the photo at him, asking him if he wanted to see
Tom dead. Throughout the interviews that take place after
Tom's death, we see Mark holding tightly to this
photograph.
In On Photography Susan Sontag declares that all
"photographs are memento mori." Later in the text she
makes the comment that photographs "state the innocence,
the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own
destruction, and this link between photography and death
haunts all photographs of people" (15, 70). The polaroid
in Mark's hands functions as a memento mori of Tom but
also of Mark himself. For the aspect of Tom's death that
is most terrifying for Mark is the fact that he sees his
own death quite literally in that of Tom's. If it is true
that what we fear in the death of the other is not so much
the other's death as that of ourselves, then this fact is
performed quite powerfully by the film at hand as our
knowledge that Mark will die very shortly invests our
understanding of his response to Tom's death.
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As Creekmur points out
it becomes unnecessary to prolong the existence
of the lost loved object psychically, or through
fantasy, when the object has been preserved
photographically; nostalgia is sustained in the
way that photographs of the dead are kept on the
mantlepiece or dresser. (45)
The photograph works as a fetish, aiding in the work of
mourning but also endangering this work by prolonging it
nostalgically. The fetish steps in, replacing the lost
object and delaying the acceptance of loss. And yet, we
know, as does Mark himself, that his loss is real and is
twofold for he, too, has AIDS. If death confronts us with
the death of the other, it frightens us because it
confronts us with the possibility of our own deaths. In
Mark's case, this possibility is extremely real.
In his article, Creekmur argues against Metz's idea
that films, as temporal experiences, cannot encourage the
prolonged contemplation provided by a photograph and
necessary to its work as a fetish. Creekmur points out
that films, like photographs, preserve. They may not
freeze motion and time, but they do record and contain it.
In this way, film texts may also function as fetishes in
the work of mourning. The relationship between film and
photography is not to be taken lightly, especially when
one is confronted with a documentary image for it is in
the nature of documentary to function like a photograph:
to record and preserve, to provide an image for
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contemplation and analysis. It is in the contemplation of
the photograph that the border between objectivity and
subjectivity blurs and it is this blurring of borders that
provides a text like Silverlake Life with its performative
power.
With these video diaries we have an illustration of
Barthes's puncturn and studium, terms which seem to
resonate with our argument about the constative and
performative dimensions of a text. For Barthes, the
studium is that field of information surrounding a
photograph. The studium marks the space in which the
sovereign consciousness examines and makes sense of the
photograph, of the photographer's intentions, an encounter
with the field of knowledge. As he writes in Camera
Lucida, the functions of the studium are
to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause
to signify, to provoke desire. And I, the
Spectator, I recognize them with more or less
pleasure: I invest them with my studium (which
is never my delight or my pain). (28)
The punctum, on the other hand, punctures the
studium. It is the element which rises from the scene and
pierces the spectator.
A Latin word exists to designate this wound,
this prick, this mark made by a pointed
instrument: the word suits me all the better in
that it also refers to the notion of punctuation
(26)
Often the punctum is a detail which can be expanded
through the power of metonymy. In the AIDS texts, the
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power of the puncturing moment is intensified by the level
of expansion so that we become aware that what we are
watching are not isolated incidents, individual stories of
courage, but representations of an enormous plague that
has political and social ramifications.
As Barthes states, it is not possible to construct
rules by which to govern the connection between these two
elements. "It is a matter of a co-presence, that is all
one can say" (42). In similar manner, it is in the co
presence of performative and constative moments in a film
or video text that its promises and possibilities are
revealed, punctured and overturned. Our epistemological
and ontological demands are revealed, emptied out,
reconstituted along lines which blend and merge the two.
It is also in the co-presence of the two that we are
able to present the unrepresentable in ways which allow
the document to fulfill its desire to teach and inform
while not modifying its demands or mollifying its
spectator. It is this political power that allows
Silverlake Life and The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter to
offer themselves up to our scrutiny, puncturing our
demands while performing their own.
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Chapter 7
A Performance of History
In the historical discourse of our
civilization, the process of signification
always aims at "filling" the meaning of
History: the historian is the one who collects
not so much facts as signifiers and relates
them, i.e. organizes them in order to establish
a positive meaning and to fill the void of pure
series.
--Roland Barthes
Death as the end of a personal history has been a
thematic running through many of the texts we’ve examined:
the deaths of Nicholas Ray, Tom Joslin and Mark, Dr.
Peter; Madonna's discussion of her mother's death;
Marlene's confrontation with her own death. The works of
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Bill Viola also have to do with death
on some level as they interrogate the fragility of
mortality as well as the fragility of the spectating eye,
capturing these in a play of presence and absence which
marks the space of death and leaves a space for mourning.
In this sense, death can also be seen in the
performative aspect of the documentary for death is the
ultimate performative, transgressing the limits of our
experience and breaking promises, revealing the emptiness
of our desire for the sense of immortality we obtain
through epistemological and ontological fulfillment
expected by the documentary form. Death is the space in
which ontology and epistemology meet and are overwhelmed.
As the state of being is transformed, the processes of
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knowledge are confounded and silenced, at a loss for
categories by which to make sense of the finality of
death. We see this merging in Lightning Over Water.
Silverlake Life and The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, not
only in our own spectatorial concerns with the images of
death and loss but also in the subjectivities of the
filmmakers Wenders and Friedman as they must continue a
project without a subject, seeking in these cinematic
performances some sense of mastery over their own grief
and loss as well as the reminder of their own mortality.
Death is also the weapon that Schell holds over Mar
lene, opposing her opposition to his directorial control
with constant reminders of her own impending death as well
as the death of her mother and of her career. In the
process, Schell, like Wenders, appears overcome by the
pressures of death's presence and retreats into the
comforts of cinema. Wenders's strips of celluloid
drifting off the bow of the junk become Schell's images of
the editing apparatus and process as well as the surreal
sequence in which he fights his way through the dangling
film strips, surrounded by the images of his desire.
The texts we have examined offer articulations of a
relationship between performative and constative. Rather
than privileging one over the other, the texts intertwine
the two, exposing the limits of each as well as the limits
of representation by joining them in the presentation of
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death, desire and truth. It is precisely in the
performative play of the constative that claims to truth
and authority are overturned, turned inside out and
revealed to be empty promises.
A deconstructive turn must reverse and displace the
oppositional terms which are generally situated in a
hierarchical structure. Once the hierarchy is reversed,
it must be displaced so that opposition is no longer
possible. The texts we have examined so far offer moments
in which the usual hierarchy of constative over
performative, characteristic of the documentary form, has
been overturned, revealing the performative aspects. This
reversal has been displaced in those moments when the
constative and the performative pass each other and pass
into each other.
Through an Austinian play of negative and positive,
the texts of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Bill Viola illustrate
the deconstructive play of the performative and the
constative. Radical negativity is not simply "negative"
but also very affirmative. While the other texts we've
looked at offer deconstructive moments almost in spite of
themselves, Trinh's and Viola's work self-consciously play
within the spaces and intervals, celebrating negativity by
performing both the negative and the positive.
Performative and constative meet, blend, merge and emerge
in a transgressive explosion of limits and boundaries.
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Having looked at texts which, by their nature as
documentaries, are defined primarily in constative terms,
privileging the non-fiction over the fiction, what happens
if we turn our eye to those films which privilege the
performative over the constative, privileging the fiction
over the non-fiction? A film like Schindler's List, for
example, offers another test case by which to examine the
deconstructive possibilities of Austinian performatives.
What history cannot assimilate is thus the
implicitly analytical dimension of all
radical or fecund thoughts, of all new
theories: the "force" of their
"performance" (always somewhere subversive)
and their "residual smile" (always somewhere
self-subversive). (Felman 143)
Felman argues that Austin's theory provides a way of
talking about the nonlinear and discontinuous manner in
which history is done. Concerned with the history of
ideas and the historical doing of history, she offers
Austin as a model by which to examine the constative
misfirings of historical self-referentiality. As she puts
what history cannot assimilate--what is
indigestible in the language feast (Austinian,
Lacanian, Freudian, Nietzschean language)--is
also, at the same time, the very stone that
makes— or builds— history, the stone that,
although unassimilate, is nevertheless the
cornerstone of History. (145)
She comments that Austin, like Lacan, Freud, Nietsche and
Marx, makes history by offering a conception of the act
and the referent which displaces historical knowledge and
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in so doing, modifies the conception of history through
the understanding that truth is only an act.
Nowhere is this masquerade of historical knowledge
more prevalent than in a film like Schindler's List,
Steven Spielberg's long awaited treatment of the
Holocaust. Constructed by means of a self-conscious
appropriation of documentary conventions, the film creates
a fiction which masquerades as a document, an attempt to
offer a record that records not the historical unfolding
of events but a story about those events by means of
performance and representation. In this film, the codes
of reality collide with the codes of fiction, creating an
ambivalence which allows the spectator a space from which
to read either one or both, to negotiate a position in
which history is either saved of savaged.
Schindler's List overturns the hierarchy of
performative and constative, privileging the supposed
constative elements in its claim to offer a record of the
Holocaust. This plea to the constative can be seen in the
discourses surrounding the film, propping an understanding
of the constative on popular assumptions that mark the
reception of a film as a document rather than a fiction,
acknowledging that spectators will read black and white
images and hand held footage as denoting an element of
authenticity, of the "real" world or at least the "real"
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story, as a document or report rather than a fictional
construction which reworks events.
In his review of the film, Richard Schickel writes
that Spielberg told his cast "we're not making a film,
we're making a document." He goes on to point out that
documents "of course are printed in black and white, and
so is Schindler's List. To Spielberg, these are the
colors of reality" (75). David Ansen, writing for
Newsweek, comments that the film has a "newsreel like
urgency," and offers a "harrowing authenticity." Quoting
Spielberg who stated that his goal was to bear witness, to
reduce the artifice, Ansen characterizes him as "an
unblinking reporter" (114). The constative demands
articulated discursively seem to overwhelm the
performative elements which define the text as a narrative
fiction. For after all, the film is a triply mediated
version of the Holocaust experience: Schindler's story,
told to the novelist Thomas Keneally by several of
Schindler's Jews, turned into a screenplay and filmed by
Steven Spielberg, performed by Liam Neeson, surrounded by
all the visual and aural riches of classical Hollywood
narrative.
The film refuses to be propped on archival footage,
preferring to rely on a utilization of documentary codes
to create and authorize an impression of the real.l
Ontologically it presents a careful reconstruction of a
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world and a time with which we are familiar because of our
exposure to other texts. These references, generally from
documentary films, have taught us to position any images
that call them to mind within the historical context of
World War II, the Nazis and the crimes of the Holocaust.
Fueling our ontological assumptions, these other texts
enable us to read the world and the people presented as
denoting an authenticity of representation. This sense of
ontological authority is intensified by our knowledge that
it was filmed in Poland, on location, using Schindler's
factory as well as other "real" spaces and little known
Polish and Israeli actors.
Epistemologically the film confuses us by blurring
the boundaries between what we know to be true or real
events and what we know is the performance of a fictional
text unfolding before us. To some extent, Schindler1s
List relies on the discourses surrounding it to provide
the spectator with the knowledge necessary to read it not
as a fiction but as a document. We know the history that
lies behind the story and our spectatorial mastery relies
on this knowledge. But, the ontological markings confuse
us, seducing us into a state in which we accept the entire
film as fact or history, forgetting that this is a
reconstruction of a man, not the man himself. Our
concepts and categories are thrown into disarray as we
seek a term with which to classify the film: fiction or
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non-fiction, historical document or historical re
construction, based on real events or recording real
events.
While Schindler's List is not a recording of what had
occurred had not the camera been there, we read it as
such. It draws its power from the space of our disavowal.
While we know this is a fiction film, utilizing actors, a
carefully constructed script adapted from a novel (and
marketed as such), and a deft amount of staging, we also
know that it partakes of the real and the true in some
way, that we are watching a true story unfolding before
us. We know that there was a Schindler, that he had a
list and that those people saved by him have had a hand in
shaping the film. Our disavowal is intensified by the
film's stylistics and we find ourselves sutured into the
text by our belief in the authenticity of the codes of
documentary film.
Any efficacy that the film might have depends on our
awareness of the history that lies behind it and our
willingness to read the images as documentary rather than
fiction. I would argue that there is nothing in the film
itself that would convince the unconvinced that this is
what the Holocaust was like. In this sense, the film does
not offer a constative but only pure performance. It does
not put its borders under erasure but rather celebrates
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the ability of classical narrative cinema to do
documentary better than any documentary.
In one sense, the retreat into the performative may
be inescapable in any film dealing with such a horrific
subject. It raises the same questions we confronted in an
examination of Silverlake Life and The Broadcast Tapes of
Dr. Peter: how to represent the unrepresentable. In those
texts it was the issue of the body in death as well as a
desire that cannot speak its name, that has been
marginalized and castigated, aligned with a deadly
disease. Like these texts, Schindler's List must negotiate
the question of how much one should and can push against
the barriers of respectability and acceptability.
As we have noted earlier, Andrea Liss has discussed
the difficulties of representing the unrepresentable. In
her article on images of the Holocaust she remarks on the
"lurking invitation to enthrallment and pleasure which are
opened up whenever re-creations of lived experience strive
for empathetic responses" (31). This concern is
intensified in a fiction film like Schindler, especially
one situated so firmly within the institutional practices
of classical Hollywood narrative. The dangers of
enthrallment and pleasure are intensified by the suturing
elements of performance as well as by the marks of the
auteur, inescapable even in a film that claims to have
left its signatory aspects in favor of pure recording.
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Liss quotes Adorno's dictum that "an unimaginable
fact still seems as if it had some meaning; it becomes
transfigured, with something of the horror removed"
whenever the aesthetic principle of stylization is applied
(31). Spielberg's film attempts to avoid this
aestheticizing pitfall, relying on documentary codes
rather than the fictional codes with which Spielberg is
familiar. But in this move he is in danger of what Liss
calls a dis-ease with any attempt to represent the
unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.
Is the dis-ease due to the self-assumed bedrock
assumption that through bearing witness,
through an unqualified embracing of
documentation, the glowing doors of universal
understanding will be thrown open once and for
all? (33)
It is this desire for universal understanding which
was expressed by Spielberg and others at the Academy
Awards. But, by virtue of the self-congratulatory
celebration of American cinema, the desire for universal
understanding of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust is
mixed with the desire for universal acceptance of
Hollywood films. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment,
no one seemed to notice how odd it was to award the film
for its set design and makeup or how dangerous it could be
to juxtapose images of women being fitted with wigs that
would make them look like concentration camp inmates with
images of Robin Williams outfitted in the drag garb of
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Mrs. Doubtfire. Like Schell and Wenders, Spielberg is
caught up in his oedipal desires to take his place in the
patriarchy of Hollywood narrative cinema.
By blending constative moments with performative
ones, the film does offer a masterful attempt to negotiate
the daunting and delicate demands of Holocaust
representation. The horrifying images of the destruction
of the ghetto, the representation of the gas chambers in
Auschwitz, as well as the interminable selections all
graphically evoke the terrifying nightmare endured by
these victims of Hitler's regime. Yet these constative
moments are offered to us through the performance of
memory. As Liss points out "Adorno's dictum is also lined
with psychoanalysis's crucial signal that forms of
remembering may even be more violent that semblances of
forgetting the past" (32). Histories reverberate through
mediated images and stories, each of which must engage the
question of how much can be conveyed as well as how memory
functions in the telling and retelling of the story. And
the subject of the Holocaust is extreme, urgent, complex,
vivid yet obscure. As Martin Smith, the director of the
Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibition says
That any individual who wasn't a part of the
event can comprehend the event seems to me
beyond the realm of reason. Even the survivors
themselves cannot comprehend the event. They
can perhaps occasionally comprehend the part
and parcel of it. (Liss 34)
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The success of the film may be precisely in its attempt to
bring us to the gate of Auschwitz without bringing us too
far inside. As Elie Wiesel often comments, anything that
attempts to bring us inside is doomed to fail for we who
have not really experienced it cannot ever go inside.
There is a double trajectory at work in this film:
the images of the unimaginable horrors of the Nazi
atrocities and the story of Schindler, heroic figure and
protagonist, fictionalized and performed. It is here
where the task of bearing witness is turned inside out and
strained at the seams. Since the images are only as good
as the eyes, motives and capabilities of those empowered
to look at them, the storytelling elements may in fact
work against the film, draining the evidentiary aspects of
their power. As Liss asks "Does not the exhilirated
desire for facts and data also perform its own kind of
privacy invasion, its own sort of violence? (36).
It is in the inevitable problem of otherness, with
the victims constructed as "them" and the privileged
viewer as "us" that we find another element of the danger
of enthrallment. Once again Schindler's List shares the
concerns of Silverlake Life and Dr. Peter: how to portray
the people involved without setting up the opposition of
victim and viewer, how to negotiate the tension between
victim and survivor without lessening the impact of the
185
horror or the condemnation of political forces that have
allowed these events to take place.
Spielberg's film offers an ambiguous and ambivalent
stance towards the question of otherness. On one hand, by
presenting a morally complicated protagonist, the
spectator is left in the odd position of where to place
his or her secondary identifications. With whom do we
identify? From the beginning we see Schindler as an
opportunist, a womanizer, a manipulator. Yet, I would
argue, it is precisely in these qualities that a spectator
can find a point for identification; at least a spectator
priviliged by Hollywood cinema for what is Schindler if
not a great capitalist? And when he begins to fail in his
capitalistic endeavors, he is saved in our eyes by virtue
of his moral conversion, offering us a larger than life
ego ideal with whom we can identify, thinking ourselves
into the place of savior.
We are not allowed many moments in which to identify
with the victims. While we are offered glimpses into
their lives and terrors, we are kept at a distance,
identifying only with their names and a sense of the
nightmare they endured captured in isolated moments: the
shooting of the one-armed man, the indescriminate shooting
within the confines of the camp, the desperation of the
children hiding in the latrines, the equally desperate
attempt to look healthy in the face of another fatal
186
selection. And yet, we are confronted with these people
as names, listed, called, enunciated. With the exception
of Ben Kingsley's character and Amon Goeth's maid, we are
never allowed to live the experiences of these people,
perhaps because it is impossible.
If too much "reality" is shown, the desired
bond between viewer and pictured easily turns
into codified positions of the pathetic and the
privileged...Often, the horror of the scene
blinds the viewer entirely or turns him or her
against the pictured. (32)
In a sense, then, the performative elements function
to alleviate the problem of too much reality, offering a
safe space for the viewer to occupy. Schindler's story as
capitalist overtakes the documentation of Holocaust
horrors, suturing the spectator into a comfortable zone
that not only avoids the reminder of the frame but also of
the erruption of the real or history which threatens all
forms of stability. Cinema functions once again as the
form which enables us to manage the trauma of history,
reasufring us through our identifications with the
narrative codes of classical film. We are comfortable
with Schindler and can enjoy his maneuverings and
posterings. We can even understand Amon Goeth for we have
seen this type of antagonist before, especially in any
renditions of Shakespeare's work. We can recognize the
dimensions of the tragic despot. This identification and
187
empathatic response is intensified by the superb
performances offered by Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes.
The tension between performative and constative
articulated by this fim is perhaps most notable in the
sequence in which the ghetto is destroyed and the Jews
marched off to Goeth's camp. Surreal images of the the
actions of the Nazi troops and the complete dislocation of
the Jews are blended with isolated scenes capturing those
few people with whom we have become acquainted. Filtered
in part through the point of view shots of Oskar situated
high above the action, doubly positioned as authority by
his presence on horseback, we watch in growing horror and
recognition of the extent of the Nazi objective. This
horror and recognition is intensified for us by the
omniscient narrator's eye which brings us into the rooms
and spaces of these people. We watch as they eat their
jewels, seek hiding places, attempt to locate escape
routes, and make efforts to mollify their Nazi captors.
But it is in the red coated little girl that the
performative and constative meet, blend, and pass each
other. As we and Oskar watch, the sequence takes on the
most documentary feel of any episode in the film. Eerily
moving, its black and white images take on a sepia tone
and its narrative dimensions recede into what appear to be
pure constatives: statements that reveal and record the
events, allow them to unfold before our eyes. This looks
188
and feels like documentary to us, until we see the tinted
coat of the little girl.
Spielberg's authorial intervention punctures the
constative moment even as it performs Oskar's awakening
moral imperative. Captured by the sight of this child, he
begins to comprehend the enormity of the event. Our
identification with him is intensified as we leave his
perceptual point of view to follow the child's aimless
wandering. Desperately seeking shelter, she also seems
somewhat wraithlike, unattached to the events, moving
spiritlike through the confusion until she finds a place
under a bed. There is an odd sense of unreality about
her, enhanced not only by her red coat, the first and only
use of color in the black and white film, but also by her
isolation from family and friends. It is this sense of
unreality that marks her as representation of Schindler's
awareness for, while isolated and alone, she does not seem
alarmed by this state of things. Rather than being
contextualized as a lost and terrified child, she almost
calmly takes her place under the bed, looking out in what
is almost a direct address to us and presumably Schindler.
Later in the film Schindler visits Amon Goeth who is
involved in the task of burning all of the corpses.
Holding a handkerchief to his nose, he complains to
Schindler about these new directives. Schindler's, and
our, gaze moves across the immense pile of human bodies.
189
Again we are caught up in the tension between performative
and constative, between the epistemological demands of the
text which ask us to confront the reality of these events
and the narrative dimensions of the story which fling us
back into the world of fiction. As we attempt to
negotiate these two positions, we see the red coat lying
atop a wheelbarrow full of corpses and are punctured by
the image.
A final example of the blending of performative and
constative occurs at the end of the film. Before the
credits roll, we are offered a color sequence in which
some of Schindler's Jews shuffle past his grave in Israel,
accompanied by the actors who portrayed them in the film, j
i
As each places a rock on the grave, he or she is named by I
the text. The sequence ends with an image of the film-
i
maker standing alone in the graveyard. This final sequence :
articulates the problematics of the film as a whole: the |
| question of the other as victim, the issue of empathy and j
i
j identification, the difficulty of representation, the
i
I
elusive quality of memory and narrative and the function j
i
of mourning. !
Constructions and elucidations of the
Holocaust, in their myriad manifestations, are
often hauntingly divided between functioning as
history lessons and as sites for mourning.
(Liss 32)
This divide is also a divide between performative and
i
J constative. While the film overturns the hierarchy,
190
privileging the constative elements, the opposition still
remains, although rendered unstable it may be. In order
to maintain balance, a master narrative is brought into
play, represented by the mark of the auteur. Beyond the
authorial interventions which occur throughout the text,
this last image of grieving filmmaker helps contain the
play of binaries. The relationships of exchange which
have been deferred throughout the text are stabilized in
this moment.
They are also stabilized in the work of mourning. As
was mentioned earlier, images of the Holocaust involve the
two-fold project of remembering and mourning. In a sense,
remembering and mourning are two sides of the same thing
as mourning circulates around and through the act of
remembering. But there is also a political sense to the
act of remembering. We must remember so that it will not
happen again. We must remember the past in order not to
repeat it.
The political efficacy of remembering cannot occur
unless the act of mourning is fulfilled for without a
completion of mourning, the subject is crippled and unable
to perform. As Kathleen Woodward points out in her
discussion of Freud and Barthes, we read our lives "as
having been shaped by a rhythm of attachments to and
separations from people we have loved" (93). This reading
of our lives takes the form of a narrative in which we
191
assert a relation which allows us to speak about our pain
and grief.
Discussing Freud's treatment of mourning. Woodward
observes that he defines mourning as normal, a psychic
work which must be accomplished in order to free the
subject from the emotional bonds and allow him or her to
invest the energy elsewhere. Freud privileges the role of
memory in this process, portraying it as "a passionate or
hyper-remembering of all the memories bound up with the
person we have lost. Mourning is represented as a
dizzying phantasmagoria of memory" (95). These memories
must be tested against present experience until the
reality of the loss is recognized and accepted.
Freud opposes the normal state of mourning with the
pathological one of melancholia. In his terms,
melancholia is the denial of the reality of loss. As a
disorder or disease, melancholia is failed or unsuccessful
mourning. Woodward's argument is that Freud leaves no
place in between the two places but rather presents that
attitude that mourning should be accomplished, brought to
an end. There is "an almost ethical injunction to kill
the dead and to adjust ourselves to reality" (95).
Contrary to this binary, she proposes that there is
something in between mourning and melancholia, that there
may be a grief that is interminable but not melancholic,
"a grief that is lived in such a way that one is still in
192
mourning but no longer exclusively devoted to mourning"
(96) .
This space seems appropriate when we're dealing with
events such as the Holocaust or the AIDS crisis. These
events compound our losses with the sheer numbers of
deaths as well as the events which allowed them to tran
spire. In the face of silence and political inaction,
Hitler was allowed to carry out his tragic plan. In much
the same way, in the face of silence and political in
action, AIDS was allowed to run rampant, wreaking
devastation and grief in its wake. In the face of such
utter devastation and waste, how can grief be obsorbed in
a single act of mourning then left behind in an act of
exhausted resignation. These events present us with the
facticity of pain.
Unlike Freud, who Woodward finds too clinical in his
discussion of mourning, Barthes offers a "figure and
performance of interminable grief" (97). Camera Lucida
offers another response to loss. "The book itself emobies
a resistance to mourning, a resistance which entails a
kind of willed refusal to relinquish pain" (97).
According to Woodward, Barthes makes a subtle distinction
between pain and emotion, allowing for the play of time in
which the wild flourishes of grief subside.
One reason Barthes is able to maintain the inter
minable state of grief is because he insists on the
193
particularity of his loss. He historicizes it, refusing
to assimilate it to an abstraction, generality or family
structures. He hasn't lost a Figure but a being. He
externalizes this being, his mother, through a photograph.
As he does so, he refuses to transform his grief,
preferring to retain his psychic pain. Resting before a
photograph of his mother taken before he was born, he
represents an impossible mourning, an interminable grief,
intensified by the fact that the photograph does not call
up a memory but the essence of memory. "It is rooted not
in the actual but in the imaginary. This particular
photograph of his mother is a kind of imaginary afterimage
which takes on value in its materialization after death"
(100).
Turning to a scene from a novel by Jose Revueltas
entitled Human Mourning. Woodward discusses its
establishment of the parameters of grief within the
perimeters of state terror. She points out that the novel
suggests that the end of mourning will be impossible
because grief and terror are intimately related to each
other. "But if grief is in part produces by the apparatus
of the state, it can also be a sustaining force against
its terror" (105). There is a way in which terror and
grief can be mobilized in order to subvert power through
disorderliness. As she concludes, "grief— or perhaps
better, psychic pain--can also give us strength, and there
194
are times when we do not wish to, and should not,
willingly yield it up" (105-106).
Schindler's List as well as Silverlake Life and The
Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter articulate this position of
grief and mourning, in part through their play with the
constative. But all of these texts leave a space for
mourning to be fulfilled, offering an escape from the
psychic pain which leads to the subversion of power. By
reversing the hierachy of constative and performative,
they all call attention to the loss which lies at their
centers. The performative elements allow for the release
of affect, displacing the political edge of mourning into
the personal and private space where it tends to remain.
Of all of these texts, perhaps Silverlake Life leaves the
space most open, allowing for an interminable grief. Yet,
since it does not contextualize its loss but leaves it
particularized and, in a sense, de-historicized, the
political efficacy of grief is alleviated or at least
modified.
The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter also brings about an
end to mourning through its closure. Without reference to
the larger world of loss through AIDS, it ends with a
sense of the personal loss of a figure who has become a
friend. While it does offer a context at times through
its various segments, its resolution with its praise of
195
the universal human spirit and courage also modifies its
political efficacy.
And finally we have Schindler's List, a text which
positions us in that stage of mourning articulated by
Woodward. On the narrative level, Schindler's story, we
have the display of his grief as he exclaims that he did
not do enough. Caught up in his perceived failure, he
mourns his inability to save more Jews. Reassured by the
ones he did save, his mourning appears completed and he
drives off. Having been sutured into the diegetic world
of story, our mourning is also accomplished. But on the
extra-narrative level, what we have termed the constative
level, while we see the completion of mourning through the
ritual at Schindler's grave, we are also reminded of the
heavy loss exacted by Hitler on the Jewish community.
<
j Once again we find ourselves in a space which must be j
I i
' negotiated: narrative closure or an open-ended text which 1
1 i
i
allows the rupture of the real to offset our pleasures,
which does not allow us to complete our task of mourning
but forces us into the realm of active remembering.
Indeed, there is nothing of significance that
can fill that hole in the real, except the |
totality of the signifier. The work of
mourning is accomplished at the level of the
logos: I say logos rather than group or
community, although group or community, being
j organized culturally are its mainstays. The
I work of mourning is first of all performed to
I satisfy the disorder that is produced by the
inadequacy of signifying elements to cope with
the hole that has been created in existence,
196
for it is the system of signifiers in their
totality which is impeached by the least
instance of mourning. (Lacan 38).
Interweaving constative and performative, Spielberg
seeks to cope with the hole created in history by the
events of the Holocaust. The performative level, the more
fully fictionalized story of Schindler and Amon Goeth,
attempts to satisfy the disorder, attempting to impose a
meaning and morality on the events portrayed. The events,
however, escape this imposition of order. Defying both
our epistemological and ontological demands, the Holocaust
remains outside the realm of a hole which can be filled in
with signifiers. Try as we might, the unimaginable horror
intervenes and we are left with only an articulation of
the senselessness of the moment. This senselessness is
captured in the constative play of images. Not really
documents, they defy easy categorization as they re-create
the horrors so accurately and affectively our grief finds
no surcease and the hole is left open.
While I would argue that the narrative level works
against the political power of the film, erasing its
efficacy in its plea to the conventions of classical
Hollywood film and all that model represents, it seems
that those other moments which blend constative and
performative in the play of something which is not fiction
or non-fiction illustrate the argument offered throughout
this project: that the play of performative and
197
constative open up a space in which to examine the desires
that fuel our spectatorship, revealing the empty promise
of epistemological and ontological satisfaction.
Privileging our desire for order and fullness, the text
offers up those moments of rupture and reversibility, the
traces and deferrals of the play between performative and
constative.
1. This refusal to use archival footage creates a space
in which to raise questions about fiction's capability in
dealing with the Holocaust. While Night and Fog. which
the film quotes at times, and Shoah use documentary images
to evoke the horrors, Schindler's List reproduces the
horror, aestheticizing it in the process. As Richard
Alieva points out in his review of the film for
"Commonweal," when we watch Schindler's List "we are
always silently murmuring our astonishment at the filmic
skill deployed on the recreation of horrors. But, in
Shoah, skill disappears and we seem to be in the very
presence of enormity (18).
198
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Asset Metadata

Creator Scheibler, Susan F (author)

Core Title An enticement to knowledge: Documentary spectatorship and a theory of performatives

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television Critical Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Kinder, Marsha (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-683565

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Legacy Identifier DP22282.pdf

Dmrecord 683565

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Scheibler, Susan F.

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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