Institutionalized

Earlier this year at the annual conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), I had the privilege of seeing two eminent scholars of avant-garde film react in antithetical ways to the current state of cinema. On the one hand, Fred Camper responded to a grad student's paper likening meme aesthetics to Structural Film with apoplectic indignation, insisting (somewhat irrelevantly) that pioneering avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage were driven to make films by a profound psychological need rather than any financial or institutional rewards. On the other hand, at multiple panels, Scott MacDonald extolled video essays with an evangelical fervour, calling them "a new avant-garde" and declaring he felt as excited watching video essays on his laptop as he did going to the Anthology Film Archives in the 1970s. In different ways, both Camper and MacDonald were responding to a profound shift in the cultural status of movies: by integrating moving images more and more into the fabric of daily life, social media and streaming services have largely liquidated the autonomy of film as an art, resulting in a waning of the aesthetic function (see Mukařovský 1970).

As an institution, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) acts as a bulwark against the dissolution of movies and life. As Marijke de Valke observes, film festivals are sites of passage —heterotopias— where the pressures of the commercial market are temporarily held in abeyance and movies acquire the status of art (2007: 106; see also Foucault 1986). By the same token, however, the institutionalization of movies as autonomous art—as "films" —renders them politically impotent (Bürger 1984: 50). Even movies with explicitly political subject matter are neutralized by the institution of the film festival, which (like academia) simultaneously provides a public platform for expressions of dissent—both in the films themselves and in post-screening discussions—and quarantines those expressions from the business of daily life. Prior to the second Wavelengths programme of avant-garde shorts, filmmaker Daphne Xu called on TIFF to drop the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) as a sponsor over its complicity in Israeli war crimes. Xu was seconded (somewhat sheepishly) by the other filmmakers on the stage, while programmer Jesse Cummings diplomatically said nothing. And then the audience sat quietly through an ad for RBC.

Likewise, there was often a palpable tension in the films themselves between their makers' artistic aspirations and their politics. At one end of the spectrum, Lawrence Abu Hamdan's forty-five-minute essay film The Diary of a Sky largely subordinates aesthetics to the clear exposition of factual information. The film's image track consists mainly of amateur cell phone footage of Israeli fighter jets flying over Beirut while onscreen titles and voice-over narration provide statistical data about the number of flights per month, the types of aircraft used, and the total number of hours they occupied Lebanese airspace over a two-year period (2020-2021) —information Hamdan obtained from an online archive maintained by the United Nations. The voice-over also describes the effects of noise pollution from fighter jets on the health of populations exposed to it, drawing on the work of a German scholar who was forced to conduct his research in Haifa, Israel after the West German government blocked him from studying the effects of noise pollution from American fighter jets on citizens of the Federal Republic in the 1980s. The film is not without aesthetic interest—the constant roar of fighter jets punctuated by stretches of eerie silence has a visceral impact —but it is worth seeing primarily for the information it imparts (including evidence disproving the conspiracy theory that an Israeli airstrike triggered the explosion at the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020— evidence the Lebanese government evidently wished to suppress) and the cogency of Abu Hamdan's political analysis. In other words, the film does not feel like the work of a cinephile, raising the question of whether the rarefied atmosphere of a film festival is really the best venue for what is primarily a work of journalism and only secondarily a work of art.

At the other end of the spectrum, Malena Szlam's abstract landscape film Archipelago of Earthen Bones—To Bunya resolutely subordinates politics to aesthetics. Consequently, the land acknowledgement that concludes the film has the impact of a sudden twist ending, calling attention to something fundamental that hitherto had been systematically repressed—namely, the presence of human societies on the Australian continent stretching back thousands of years. Layering jittery, pulsating images of rock formations and tropical fauna on top of one another, the film has a musical rhythm that builds and subsides in concert with the soundtrack of ambient noises composed by Lawrence English (who has also worked on films by the late Paul Clipson). In conjunction with the total repression of human presence in the images and soundtrack, the film's non-narrative form creates the impression of a landscape out of time, which is offered to the spectator as an object of disinterested aesthetic contemplation —one entirely separate from the consciousness that perceives it as an object. Rather than communicating any historical or geological information about the Beerwah region of Australia, Szlam's film posits the process of perception as an end unto itself.

Alternatively, Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich's The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire allegorizes its political impotence by self-reflexively foregrounding its inability to represent the life of a woman who chose collectivity and politics over individuality and art. The film opens with a series of expository titles explaining that Césaire (Zita Hanrot) —who was the wife of Aimé Césaire (Motell Gyn Forster)— wrote seven highly poetic essays on subjects related to feminism, Marxism, and Surrealism between 1941 and 1945 and then published nothing for the remaining twenty years of her life. (Later, we learn Mme. Césaire continued to write after the war, but when she was finished working on something, she simply threw it in the trash.) The real subject of the film is not so much Mme. Césaire's life or work as it is her near-total absence from the historical archive. In the absence of any detailed information about Mme. Césaire, Hunt-Ehrlich films her actors (both in historical and contemporary garb—that is, as their characters and as "themselves") reciting passages from her surviving essays and letters and the reminiscences of people who knew her (often with the paraphernalia of filmmaking in plain view) in order to remind the spectator that they cannot have any direct knowledge of Mme. Césaire's life. Accordingly, the sequences depicting episodes from the Césaires' lives do not strive to produce the illusion of "an independently existing... story world framed and recorded from without" (Bordwell 1985: 161). A meeting between M. Césaire and André Bréton (Josué Gutierrez) in a park in prewar Paris is filmed in the same tropical setting that stands in for Martinique (in the post-screening Q&A, Hunt-Ehrlich revealed that the entire film was shot in Florida) and both men speak English with American accents. During this meeting, Bréton remarks that M. Césaire has become "bigger than the page," and the film implies that the same was true of Mme. Césaire, yet the film itself remains stubbornly, impotently a work of art.

Early in The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Hanrot looks directly into the camera and says, "We are making a film about an artist who did not want to be remembered," and as a practicing artist herself, Hunt-Ehrlich can only regard Mme. Césaire's preference for life over self-representation with a certain wistfulness: in becoming bigger than the page, she ceased to be institutionally legible. A similar ambivalence pervades Being John Smith, in which the eponymous filmmaker admits in a printed title to being creeped out by other artists who spend a lot of time assembling their personal archives when the planet will soon be uninhabitable: "Cockroaches don't read." At the same time, Smith's film—a twenty-seven-minute video essay consisting mainly of still images accompanied by a first-person voice-over and sparse sound effects—is itself a sort of personal archive, tracing the filmmaker's life from his childhood in Walthamstow up till the present, and in particular, the various ways in which his desire for an artistic identity has been thwarted by his having the commonest name in the English language. If Mme. Césaire was an artist who did not want to be remembered, Smith has faced an uphill battle in ever being recognized as an artist in the first place. In this regard, Smith's biography mirrors the history of cinema itself: the tireless efforts of institutions such as film festivals to legitimize movies as an art and the (seemingly irrevocable) liquidation of film's hard-won autonomy in the digital era, where moving images no longer have any special status but are, on the contrary, as common as dirt. It is fitting then that Smith's film concludes with an image of anonymous concertgoers joyously singing along to Pulp's "Common People" (1995), shot from above by Smith on his cell phone—an image that perfectly encapsulates both the horror of liquidation and its utopian potential.

Art Films Against Content

With the sole exception of Brady Corbet's The Brutalist—a 215-minute biopic of the architect László Tóth filmed on 70mm (which I did not see)—no movies at this year's festival were projected on film, though a great many were shot on celluloid: not only Archipelago of Earthen Bones and The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, but also Jessica Sarah Rinland's Collective Monologue (Monólogo colectivo), Lawrence Valin's Little Jaffna, Truong Minh Quy's Viet and Nam (Trong lòng dat), and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Harvest, in which the picture is cropped so that the frame edges are visible throughout and the effects of light leaks can occasionally be seen in the images. In conjunction with the film's length (131 minutes) and ponderous pacing, the decision by Tsangari and cinematographer Sean Price Williams to stress the materiality of the medium is a means of preserving cinema's status as an art. And indeed, the film's apocalyptic story, about the closing of the commons and the uprooting of the peasantry in nineteenth-century Scotland—imagine Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) crossed with Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas, Werner Herzog, 1976)—could be interpreted as an allegory for the liquidation of cinema as an autonomous art. When one of the peasants (an unrecognizable Caleb Landry Jones) indirectly rebukes a cartographer (Arinzé Kene) for his complicity in the destruction of the peasants' traditional way of life by criticizing the accuracy of his maps—"You've flattened us"—he sounds like a filmmaker rebuking an employee of a streaming service for their part in reducing the history of cinema to merely so much "content."

In contrast with Tsangari's film, Hong Songsoo's By the Stream (Suyoocheon) looks like it was shot on the cheapest digital camera its maker could get his hands on. And while Harvest is Tsangari's first feature since 2015, Hong has directed an astonishing fifteen features since Right Now, Wrong Then (Ji-geum-eun-mat-go-geu-ddae-neun-teul-li-da, 2015). This is not to say, however, that Hong is necessarily less anxious than Tsangari to assert his status as an artist; on the contrary, he takes the disinterestedness of autonomous art to a rather alarming extreme. Tellingly, in all the years I have been attending TIFF, Hong has never come to Toronto to present one of his films in person, suggesting he is more interested in making films than in exhibiting them to an audience—a quality he shares with the only slightly less prolific Lav Diaz (who has made nine long films since 2015). Also like Diaz, Hong settled long ago into the habit of shooting every scene in one continuous take, which means there is no way for him to alter the pacing of a scene in the editing. As a result, even some of Hong's better films have a tendency to drag. (It probably does not help matters that Hong now cuts his own films, as well as writing, shooting, and scoring them.) By the Stream has a promising comic set-up —a textile artist, Jeonim (Kim Minhee), invites her uncle, Sieon (Kwon Haehyo), to lead an acting workshop at a woman's university in Seoul where Jeonim is an instructor in order to set him up with her boss (Jo Yunhee)— but the film quickly devolves into a series of meandering dialogue scenes that are far longer than they need to be. In particular, Jeonim has a lengthy monologue about a mystical experience in her youth that inspired her to become an artist that serves no dramatic purpose, though it may tell us something about Hong's own conception of artistic production. He appears to regard it as a sort of spiritual calling, unconnected to such worldly concerns as pleasing an audience.

Like Hong, Nicolás Pereda makes movies like he does not know you can do it as a career, forsaking all the hard-sell tactics customarily used to lend films an air of importance: stars, a significant theme, expensive production values, great length. In other words, unlike Tsangari, Pereda is evidently under no obligation to turn out saleable merchandise. Concomitant with this freedom, however, is both a heightened self-consciousness about one's status as an artist and a waning of thematic content, confirming Peter Bürger's hypothesis that the logical endpoint of autonomous art is aestheticism, wherein "art becomes the content of art" (1984: 49). At seventy-five minutes, Pereda's Lázaro at Night (Lázaro de noche) is a good deal tighter and funnier than By the Stream (which drags on for almost two hours), but its narrative is comparably slight, prompting the spectator to redirect their attention from the content of the story to the manner in which it is told.

The first part of the film centres on a love triangle involving three aspiring actors in Mexico City, though the film plays the situation for deadpan comedy rather than melodrama. Indeed, the characters themselves are all pretty chill about it. When Luisa (Luisa Pardo) tells her boyfriend, Lázaro (Lázaro G. Rodriguez), that she is sleeping with their mutual friend Barreiro (Francisco Barreiro), Lázaro immediately forgives her, but Luisa is adamant that she is not asking for forgiveness. The real question is not why Luisa betrays Lázaro but why she ever got together with him in the first place. (In an early scene, Lázaro gets the two of them ejected from a restaurant by annoying the other customers while asking them what they are eating.) In the second part of the film, Lázaro and his mom (Teresita Sánchez) are resurrected, so to speak, as Aladdin and his mother, who learn the hard way that you should not wish for a banquet unless you have a good refrigerator to store the leftovers in. Both of these stories are fairly amusing, but the spectator is never deeply concerned for the characters as nothing important is at stake. The worst thing that can happen in this film is that some food goes to waste.

By embedding a second, largely unrelated story within the film's primary narrative (the tale of Aladdin and his mother is a visualization of a short story Luisa wrote for a class years before) and not returning to the frame story at the end, Pereda self-reflexively foregrounds the film's constructedness. Furthermore, at several points throughout the film, Pereda flaunts his control over his materials by separating sound and image. In an early sequence, we see Lázaro and Luisa attending a recital by a classical trio, while on the soundtrack, we hear a conversation the couple had, or will have, at a restaurant the same evening. Later, when Luisa asks Lázaro to recite one of his poems at his birthday party, we do not hear the poem but rather a message Luisa's mother left on her answering machine, in which she attempts to persuade Luisa to move back to León and get a job in the local casino. And when Lázaro, Luisa, and Barreiro listen to a tape recording of an interview with their former writing teacher, the audio from the interview continues over an enigmatic flashback sequence, in which the three young people repeatedly enter and leave the same apartment and undress on a mattress in an otherwise unfurnished room. By minimizing the film's thematic content and systematically baring the device (see Thompson 1988: 20), Pereda stresses the aesthetic function as an end unto itself rather than subordinating it to some practical goal.

Fin de la fin du cinéma

Writing in the 1990s, Michael Witt observed that Jean-Luc Godard repeatedly identified "his own aging body with the death of cinema," suggesting that "the cinema is likely to die more or less when he does(!)" (1999: 332). As Witt goes on to argue, "the death of cinema" has multiple meanings in Godard's films and videos, though a central one is the deleterious influence of television on the aesthetics and cultural status of film, which Godard likens in Meeting W.A. (1986) to the effects of radiation on the human body (ibid.: 338-339). The irony of this view is that Godard's own work, from the early 1960s-on, "embodies, precisely, the televisual era" (ibid.: 345). In other words, Godard's oeuvre as a whole can be interpreted simultaneously as an elegy for cinema's lost cultural stature and a rearguard attempt to preserve and extend it. Thus, there is a certain appropriateness in Godard dying when he did in September 2022, just as the liquidation of cinema as an autonomous art reached what appears to be its terminal phase following the Covid-19 lockdowns, when theatres were closed (many permanently) and moving images became indispensable to conducting the business of daily life. And in their contrasting approaches, Godard's final two works eloquently bear witness to this historical transformation.

Godard's last achieved film, the eighteen-minute Scénarios is a kind of cinematic epitaph, not only for Godard and the art of film but also "Western" culture as a whole. The film is divided into two sections, "DNA, Fundamental Elements" and "MRI, Odyssey," each beginning with the same series of mostly still images accompanied by the same voice-overs: a photograph of a hand grasping another person's wrist bordered by blotches of multicoloured paint; a man looking up at a masked figure; a production still from Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, 1944/58); an American soldier holding his rifle over his head as he wades through chest-deep water; a man operating a film camera; and a slow motion image of an old man with a cane walking in the desert. The first part centres on an extended clip from Godard's Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991), in which Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), the detective hero of Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), attempts to find his way back to the West à la Ulysses following the reunification of Germany in the company of a Russian sailor. The film's second part climaxes in a montage of violent murders from classic film noirs, as well as the death of Pina (Anna Magnani) in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (Roma, città apperta, 1945), and three of Godard's own films: Le Mépris (1963), Bande à part (1965), and Weekend (1967), the last of which famously ended with the title, "Fin du cinéma." Scénarios concludes with a shockingly candid image of an aged Godard sitting on a bed with his shirt open and struggling to enunciate a characteristically nonsensical text heard earlier in the film as a voice-over. To put it somewhat crudely, Godard's final film is a melancholy reflection on the impossibility of returning to some mythological point of origin, a lost golden age or classical period in which the art of cinema really mattered.

Unlike Scénarios, Exposé du film annonce du film " Scénario" makes no pretence to being an aesthetic work—that is, to being a film—but is instead a straightforward documentation of Godard sitting at a table and explaining his "script" for an unrealized project to an unidentified man sitting opposite him, who is mainly off-screen and out of focus. The entire thirty-six-minute movie consists of a single, unbroken take shot by Godard's regular collaborator, Fabrice Aragno, in which the camera is typically aimed at Godard's hands in close-up as he elucidates a series of stiff white pages on which he has glued various still images and excerpts of texts and written the names of disparate writers (Alain Baidou, Arthur Rimbaud) and films (Ivan the Terrible) in red ink. Had Godard been able to make the film, it would have had a four-part structure, plus an overture scored to music by either Sergei Prokofiev or Igor Stravinsky and an epilogue. The first part is entitled "Fake News," and on the page representing the epilogue, there is a picture of Emmanuel Macron, though despite these topical references, Godard is characteristically cagey about spelling out his intentions. One image, he declares, "means nothing," and when his interlocutor observes that he is less eloquent about the fourth section of the projected film, Godard protests, "I'm not eloquent at all." The movie offers a tantalizing glimpse of a film that will never be, and it is often quite funny to boot (at one point, Godard asks Aragno to photocopy one of the pages so he can cut up an image and then has to be stopped from destroying the original), but it is not a film. Rather, it is a document bearing witness to the impossibility of making a film, and as such, it is a fitting and logical conclusion to Godard's career.

Works Cited

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

De Valke, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinema. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27.

Mukařovsky, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts. Trans. Mark E. Suino. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.

Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Witt, Michael. "The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard." Screen 40, no. 3 (1999): 331-346.

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Festival Reports   avant-garde   experimental cinema   hong songsoo   jean-luc godard   tiff   video essay