Cowie - Specters of the Real. Documentary Time and Art

8/13/2019 Cowie - Specters of the Real. Documentary Time and Art

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Volume 18, Nu mber 1 doi10.1215/10407391-2006-024

2007 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

elizabeth cowie

Specters of the Real: Documentary Time and Art

At its inception, cinematography, like photography, openedup new opportunities for visual pleasure as both knowledge and spectacle,

for each derives from the achievements of scientists as well as showmen

and entrepreneurs. Subsequently, the recorded visible came to be divided

between the objective and intellectual appraisal of empiricisms gaze anda pleasuring of the eye in a subjective and experiential engagement with

the seen (and, of course, later, the heard). The challenge that emerges in

radical documentary art forms to this opposition between the factual and

the imaginarywith its moral and epistemological assumptionsis the

focus of my discussion here. Also challenged is a view of art as autonomous

from other social practices, in contrast to the approach adopted by art ists

and fi lmmakers for whom the autonomy of art is its social practiceas an

emotional and social encounter with meaning and affect within a con-

tingent worldan approach I will explore here. Central to the aesthetics

of documentary is the temporal disjuncture introduced between the realtime of the event and its presence again in the document. If we answer yes

to Walter Benjamins (albeit rhetorical) question as to whether the very


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88 Specters of the Real

invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art

(Work 227), it is as much because of the specific figuring of time that

the photograph and film present us with as of the mechanical reproduc-

tion of the world it affords, which Benjamin was addressing. The instant

image, snapped by the camera in the touch of a finger, would now suf-

fice to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave aposthumous shock, as it were (On Some Motifs 17475).

The moving image and its accompanying sounds remake our

relation to the time of the represented as one of simultaneity, a present

tense of seeing, but it was not until broadcast television that the real time

of transmission was also the real time of viewing. In television, a medium

of transmission that like the telephone but unlike film is not a record, there

was only the passing and not the pastness of its sounds and images.1In

the digital, the present of events can be both transmitted and recorded.

Experienced in and as the ongoing of digital real time, events are no

longer separated as instants, but as a continuous stream in the doubledworld of an other.2Made available by Webcam or mobile phone, they can

be returned to as remembered.3Real time is the encounter with simul-

taneity in spite of geographical separation. We are present in time but

not in space with those we chat to online or on the phone. Real time is

now time, lived and experienced time, endured rather than calculated,

to draw on Bergsons distinction between measured time and time as

duration. Digital real time and its transmission by the World Wide Web, by

telephone, and by satellite offers not only interaction but also immersion

as we become identified in the unthought of doing and being that is the

ongoing experience of the Other of the Webcam.It is in measured time that causality and narrative come into

play, in a past that foreshadows the present as its future, which we will fully

know only once past, when we determinethat is, speculatively construct

its causes and consequences. Here is historical reality. Everyday reality,

however, just is; it is without history until remembered, recollected.

The new forms that are emerging in the virtual space of the

digital are discursive structures that also instantiate an array of possibili-

ties for engaging with and in the digital. The mobile phone is perhaps the

most important example, for it now gives us at one and the same time both

always available simultaneity any place at all (almost) and memoryin the

images we send and may record. These are images not only of ourselves

but of what we see and are part of, that is, our ongoing reality. We want this

reality to be present to the other, who is our interlocutor, and we want to

make present to ourselves herethe others gaze elsewherethat we imagine


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d i f f e r e n c e s 89

as we listen to her or his reactions to our visible missive. Our here is

both actual, as geographical and spatial, and also virtual, as thoughtin

Charles Sanders Peirces terms,4as the here of me, myself, as desiring

subject. In making simultaneous the actual and the virtual, the digital

engenders not new desires, but a new articulation of our desiring in time.

For Gilles Deleuze, following Peirce, it is only the event that is actual,whereas the remembered and the anticipated, that is, past and future, are

thought, imagined, virtual. The virtual and the actual are not collapsed

together in the digital, however, but remain two aspects and two orders

of being, where being is understood as the organic enduring in time. The

digital image passing between these two orders endures as a separated

part of me but one that I can hold, copy, give (send) as virtual. The voice has

never undergone a similar fetishization. Is the said and heard more on the

side of the actual, more rooted in the contingent and tied to the instance of

utterancea durationas a passing present such that, reheard, it bespeaks

absence as loss, not as made present again? The mobile phoneas voiceand, now, imagenevertheless produces connectivity all over the place

that, recorded, may become by awful chance the documenting of an

event. We need only remember the phone calls by terrified students dur-

ing the Columbine High School massacre to realize again the anguished

separation felt by the hearers, unable to help or protect; or the recorded

messages sent by victims trapped in the New York World Trade Center on

9/11, which movingly speak l ife, addressing futures we now know they are

not part of. More recently, Londons 2005 Tube train bombings became

documented by mobile phones showing agonizing images of passengers

walking in darkness back though the tunnel to the station and medicalcare, while the carnage of the train carriage and its dead are an unseen

horror escaped.

Documentary is the re-presentation of found reality in the

recorded document, its truth apparently guaranteed by mechanical repro-

duction of that reality in what has come to be known as its indexical rela-

tionship to the original. It is closely linked to the development of modernity,

for the documentary asserts itself as the genre of the objective knowabil-

ity of the world. In its desire to show the real, however, the documentary

becomes prey to a loss of the real in its narratives of reality. It is a loss we

cannot mourn, but anxiously return to, that is, a reality imagined before

its fall into mediation, interpretation, narration, presentation. Charles

Baudelaire, in his critique of the nineteenth-century project of realism in

art, identified such an anxiety when he suggested that the realist seems

to say, I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be,


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supposing that I did not exist, that is, the world before my intervention

(Art162).5Yet, if photography, and later cinematography, realize mechani-

cally this desire, each also and paradoxically f igures the anxiety about the

nature of our apprehension of reality, which is central to realism. They

reintroduce, that is, the problem of truth.

The idea of a truly observational filming has haunted cinemafrom its beginning, for the new visual apparatuses that emerged in the

nineteenth century also gave rise to the idea of, and desire for, an unlim-

ited access to reality in unmediated recordings of actuality, as if through

the camera we could create a record of everything that an al l-seeing God

might have surveyed.6With the development of light-weight 16mm cameras

that could be easily hand held, together with portable sync-sound in the

late 1950s, the documentary filmmaker could at last move freely, following

events and people at will.7The observer-spectator could now see and hear

for her- or himself, as i f she or he were there. But seeing for ourselves in

documentary is ourselves seeing through anothers eye, for we adopt as ourown the look of the camera that has gone before us and that has selected

and organized the space and the seen.8Our access to photographed reality

remains partial insofar as the camera necessarily frames and hence cuts

out from the wider ongoing contingency of the world just this scene, this

event, this action, this person, her speech. Nevertheless, that such scenes,

events, actionscaught by the camera as they happen or discovered as

found realityinclude indiscriminately contingent elements of noise,

activity, and objects confirms them as reproduced through a process in the

making of which as Bazin observed, man plays no part (What1: 12).

The account of photography and cinema as indexical is drawnfrom the work of Peirce who, in his theory of semiotics, proposed a concept

of the sign as tripartite, as icon, index, symbol, whereby each form of sign

is a representation of an object. The icon demonstrates the qual ities of the

object, through an image, a diagram, and so on. An index demonstrates

the influence of its object: the mercury in a thermometer responds to the

warmth or coolness of the atmosphere, organized to rise in a container

in relation to calibrated markings that enable these two qualities to be

measured; nevertheless, we do not seethe heat. The bullet hole indicates

the action of the absentbullet. Similarly, we do not see the time a clock

tells us, we can only read the measurement of time the clocks mechanism

is calibrated to record. But the photograph shows us what it also points

toreality, thus it appears to be both iconic and indexical. Its iconicity

(its status as an iconic sign) rests, however, not in the image of the objects


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we see within it, but in the object that the photograph is; the qualit ies

demonstrated are those of the object photographed. Peirce makes clear

that the icon is not simply the object but a rendering of its qualities, for

the representation is clearly differentiated from its object. Photographs,

however, he saw as indexical as a result of their physical connection to

the objects they show, having been produced under such circumstancesthat they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature

(Elements159). This indexicality has seemed to guarantee photography

and cinematographys truth to reality, for indices, Peirce asserts, furnish

positive assurance of the reality and the nearness of their Objects (Sim-

plest414). The cause of this, the dynamical object, is light, and what the

photograph demonstrates is the inf luence of light ref lected from objects

that either produce the changes in the light-sensitive silver salts or trigger

the digitally coded registration of this information. The thermometer does

not indicate the source of the heat or cause of its absence in the indication

of coldness, only its effect; similarly, a photograph shows the effect of lightreflected, namely the images formed by light bouncing off objects, but this

does not guarantee the nearness or reality of the objects imaged, only the

nearness and reality of reflected light.9The indexicality of recorded still

and moving images points to images formed by light, but not their reality

or truthfulness. (Until the advent of magnetic tape, speech and noises as

sound waves were recorded in a mediated form as light images on fi lm.)

Moreover, if what we see is simply reality, then it is not a sign.

While both the icon and the index communicate, only the sym-

bol has what Peirce terms thirdness, the triadic relation he requires for

meaning, namely: an object, referred to by a sign, and an interpretant.10The symbol functions as a sign in being interpreted as a reference to its

object. Although the photograph does not index the reality of our world

of objects, people, and actions, but only of the action of light reflected, it

is nevertheless a sign because contingent and ongoing reality is cut out

and cut off spatially and temporally. The photographs excerpted reality

points both to the reality not excerpted, which we cannot see, and the real-

ity unexcerpted, that is, unfilmed, whole, and complete without loss, but

also unrepresentable.11The photograph indexes time as the instant of the

cameras shutter opening and closing, but it neither measures that time

nor records it. The photograph is the witness to a moment in time but one

that is not itself presentas timein the image. Cinema mimicsthe time

of movement in a mechanical playing of still imagesfilm framesat a

speed that is at least sixteen or more frames per second, at which the eye


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can no longer distinguish each indiv idual frame (now fixed at twenty-four,

but in projection, the double-shutter means that each frame is seen twice,

thus forty-eight frames per second).

Documentary as evidencewas the concern of the makers of

Spanish Earth(1937) when they showed for the first time in cinema the

brutality and horror of the aerial bombing of Madrid by Francos fascistinsurgents and its devastating effect on ordinary people, the civilians of

the Spanish Republic. Ernest Hemingways voice-over narration discovers

for us in the wrecks of some planes the names of their manufacturers and

the identity papers of their pilots as German and Italian, demonstrating

the involvement of these states in contravention of international law. The

photographs and films recorded by German soldiers during the Second

World War, like those more recently at the military prison of Abu Ghraib

in Iraq, were personal mementoes but, once discovered, could similarly

be mobilized as testimony to crimes in international law, as well as tes-

tifying to the fetishistic desire for precisely such an evidential record bythe photographers.

We have, however, no direct and full access to either contempo-

rary or historical reality, and a process of mediation is necessarily intro-

duced in the temporal transpositions its recording produces. For while the

present time of reality immediately becomes past, as recorded, it becomes

a harbinger of a future in which it wil l be seen again in a reenactment of

past events and actions that appear to occur in a present-time only to fall

back into the past of the recorded reality, as well, now, as the past of our

memories.

Reality in Documentary Art

There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and fa lsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been.T. S. Eliot

The traditional role of art as realism, with its purpose of

enabling us to know and be moved by the world, was challenged by

the scientific and factual possibilities of the new media of photography

and cinematography that mechanically record reality with an automatic


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faithfulness that mimics human vision.12At the same time, however, this

realism was dismissed by critics who, drawing on the claims of romanti-

cism, saw it as merely reproduction lacking the interpretation and inter-

vention of the ar tists subjectivity. The process of perceiving the world as

imaged became foregrounded in the visual arts, while the representation

of historical reality as such ceased to be central. To the question Is artuseful? Baudelaire polemically replies, Yes. Why? Because it is art.

Rejecting art as mimesis, he argued for the autonomy of art and saw its role

as imagining anew. It is not the artist alone who produces this imagining,

represented in the art work; rather, a process of encounter and exchange

between the work and viewer arises, through which we come to engage

imaginatively in a way that produces a newness (Lart284).13The politics

of art must be found in this process of engagement.

The recording of reality in the topicals,14 travelogues, and

newsreels that constituted a large part of early cinema (and that remained

widely popular) came to be supplanted af ter 1907, as the dominant com-modity of cinema and the following decade saw the emergence of the

feature fiction film, with its staging of spectacular scenes and historical

enactments as well as its specifically cinematic storytelling through forms

of editing such as cross-cutt ing and the close-up. This was accompanied

by the appearance of theories of film both as a new form of art and as a

popular medium, while artists and filmmakers began exploring its formal

possibilities in the development of avant-garde experimental film prac-

tices. At the same time, a new concern with reality and its representation

emerged in the writing of Formalist theorists debating the nature and

role of the fact film in the work of Soviet filmmakers such as EstherShub and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as in Dziga VertovsMan with a Movie

Camera(1929).15

Drawing on these concerns and his own interest in the social

role of film art, the young Scottish cinephile and social scientist John

Grierson used the term documentary in his review of Robert Flahertys

second film,Moana(1926), to describe its record of the life of a Samoan

community and thereby gave the English-speaking world a new film

genre.16 Grierson went on to promote these new approaches to filming

reality as both a form of art and a means by which the citizen might come

to learn about the world. Documentary was, he declared, not the mere

recording of reality, but the creative treatment of actuality in its use

of the poetics of cinema, namely montage editing, camera framing, and

movement, and also, af ter the introduction of synchronized sound, of voice,


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music, and noises. Grierson was concerned to distinguish documentary

as an art form and not mere reproduction, drawing on the example of the

Soviet filmmakers, and sought by this phrase to emphasize not a manipu-

lation of reality, but an expressive presentation of recorded reality by the

filmmaker.17

It is the work of Hans Richter, however, that provides a moresalient example of the interrelation of art, reality, and politics. As an

artist, Richter was deeply committed to a modernism that eschewed the

representational and the reproduction of apparently objective reality. In

abstractionism, Richter saw the possibility of a universalism in opposition

to individualism whereby, Timothy O. Benson suggests, The autonomous

elements of art held a power of embodiment capable of transcending the

particular, enabling a universality (30). Through formal invention, the

bourgeois and capitalist conventions of reason and reference in realist

figural art could be subverted. Richter was a central member of the Zur-

ich Dada group and by the 1920s was recognized as a major avant-gardeartist and filmmaker. At the same time, as a political activist in Munich

and Berlin after World War I, he sought to relate his concept of art to his

political commitment. Given the economic and political developments in

the late 1920s, and influenced by the Soviet filmmakers, Richter turned

to figurative representation in a series of documentary essay films18as

the radical form for art necessary at that moment, as other avant-garde

filmmakers, such as Luis Buuel and Germaine Dulac, would later do.

Form intervened in the figurative, however, as demonstrated in his use

of cinematic devices such as slow motion, fast cutting, close-ups, and so

on, which abstracted the recorded reality from its immediate reference,enabling associations not conventionally given by the objects themselves.

Richter did not, like many other Dadaists, embrace surrealism. Never-

theless he says, I did not look at natural objects as literal elements, for

in film, every object tells a story and awakens some emotional or rep-

resentational association, regardless of the context in which it is experi-

enced. Despite the illogical happenings in his films, the f low of images,

he argued, would always make a story for [t]hat is how our mind works.

But he also observed: In addition to the emotional connotation of every

object, I learned that there was an abstract, or purely visual, signi ficance

as well (My Experience 155). For Richter, form was a material element

of art, and a central material of form was time. How, then, did Richter

view the factual? Richter poses an opposition between the beautiful vi l-

lage and the true village, between the scenic view and knowledge of the


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social and economic articulation of the community inhabiting the village,

and argues: The task of the documentary film is, on the contrary to make

such a village understandable in its functions, too, i.e., socially, not just

as a beautiful landscape. Only in this way can the true face, an authentic

picture of how men live together, be produced. He goes on to cite Bertolt

Brechts declaration that the situation is becoming so complex that lessthan ever does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about

reality. A photograph of Krupps or the aegyields hardly anything about

those industries. True reality has taken refuge in the functional. Richter

comments, If the forces that determine mens destinies today have become

anonymous, so, too, has their appearance. Hence we are obliged to look

behind the facadeif facts are to be revealed. It is cinema, he argues,

that can reveal the funct ionalmeaning of things and events, for it has

timeat its disposal, it can contract it and thus show the development, the

evolution of things (Struggle47).19

What is rejected here is the mere recording of actuality asspectacle or beauty; instead, the documentary is presented as an episte-

mological discourse that requires that we not only seebut are also brought

to know. The indexical trace of the historical real in the cinematographic

document is put forward for our understanding in relation to the processes

revealed.20At the same time, in the documentarys presentation of reality, it

also produces a statement or discourse by which it constitutes the recorded

reality as knowable. But facts are not given, they must be revealed by a

discourse that thus constructs them as facts. Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer, in their critique of Enlightenment rationalism, demand an

interpretive understanding of the presumed givenness of what is presentedas the factual:

What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the

subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the

obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given. What

is abandoned is the whole claim and approach to knowledge:

to comprehend the given as such; not merely to determine the

abstract spatio-temporal relations of the facts which allow them

just to be grasped, but on the contrary to conceive them as the

superficies, as mediated conceptual moments which come tofulfillment only in the development of their social, historical,

and human significance. The task of cognition does not consist

in mere apprehension, classification, and calculation, but in the

determinate negation of each im-mediacy. (2627)


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Facts are aspects of reality recognized and distinguished through spe-

cific regimes of criteriascientific, legal, historiographical. This injunc-

tion requires that we not accept facts at the face value of a rationality

that presumes a single premise, unmediated, derived from regimes of

categories not themselves examined. Adorno and Horkheimer point to

the multiple in the singularity of facts. The facts of the matter areestablished after the event, which thus brings the event into existence

as the factual, halting the undecidability of the event in its contingency.

An event is an action, something happens, but its nature as happening is

a matter of language in the recognition of something, to be classified as

an event, extracted from the ongoing, contingent reality of a multitude of

actions and happenings. Events entail the temporal as actions that, located

in time and space, become identified as timely, as caused.21In the scien-

tif ic experiment that tests a hypothesis, something happens (even if only

the failure of the experiment), and what happens is articulated as the

factual and a scientific truth by the procedures of the scientific discourse.If it enables new knowledge or changes understanding, it becomes a sci-

entific event. Events are thus known by the facts established about them,

and they are singular and exceptional in being unrepeatable, for while the

experiment can be repeated, the event of the transformation of knowledge

it brought about cannot. The certainty of the event is unknown at the time

of its happening, so that it can be considered, John Rajchman suggests,

following Deleuze, as a moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or prob-

lematization of the very assumptions of the setting in which the drama

may take place, occasioning the chance or possibility of another, differ-

ent setting (viii). It is this undecided in the contingent-to-become-eventthat is important in documentary, which both constitutes and represents

events. For Deleuze, however, it is the chanceness of the event, of its

contingency, that is important. Inversely, Alain Badiou instead emphasizes

the eventness of chance in the break in the ongoing of the contingent that

is the event, inasmuch as it is experienced and discerned as difference but

is also uncertain becauseit is not the same. It is only by chance that the

possibility of discerning differently, and thus the event, arises. Chance,

he says, is, for me, the predicate of the contingency of eachevent (76).22

That an event is distinct from an action is demonstrated by Duchamps

Fountain, a porcelain ur inal laid on its back that he offered for exhibi-

tion in 1917 and that, though rejected, neverthelessin Alfred St ieglitzs

photographbecame the event by which the ready-made was made art.

The event is unrepeatable and, at the time and context of its appearance,


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unknown and unknowable as the event we now understand it to be. Not

only the ready-made but also the document might become an event as an

artwork.23What is the role of art and of documents in the emergence of

an event from the facts?

For Georges Bataille, in his contributions to the Surrealist

journal Documents, which he cofounded in 1929, the object was not artbut evidence, not literature but documents. Closely related to the new eth-

nography emerging in France through contributors such as Michel Leiris

and Marcel Griaule,Documentspresented evidence from all aspects of

culture and made connections appear where they were least expected.24

Dominique Lecoq has commented that

Bataille called upon philosophy, ethnology, economics, psycho-

analysis, not to borrow their results but to open up the notions

they defined in new, illegitimate, unacceptable directions: if

logic masks the gaping inadequacies of the logos, Bataille, in

impelling Documents to expose all the contradictions, chose

both to uphold logic and to remove the mask. (125)25

The documentary is here not opposed to art, but itself enables an art of

seeing anew, as evidentiary of the contingent as well as the socially

organized worlds that, juxtaposed, bring about new connections. For

Andr Breton, juxtaposition was a central concept in his 1924 Surrealist

Manifesto, where he had cited Pierre Reverdys declaration that

[t]he image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born

from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more orless distant realities. The more the relationship between the two

juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image

will bethe greater its emotional power and poetic reality.

(qtd. in Breton 20)26

This is not a juxtaposition brought together by the mind as a comparison,

but a juxtaposition that imposes itself on the senses and brings about

an imagining.27The juxtaposed realities must be encountered and not

invented, and the strength of the resulting image is not inherent in the

found realities, but in the subject who apprehends the juxtaposition. The

documents recontextualizationlike the found objectsproduces a ten-

sion, an impropriety or incongruity that disturbs rationality and prompts

associations that may be unconscious as well as conscious. Cinematic edit-

ing, or montage, juxtaposes times and spaces, but it does so to provoke or


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enable connections and inferences. Buuel, however, inLas Hurdes, his

documentary of the impoverished Hurdes villages in Spain made in 1932,

presents scenes and narrated information that raise more questions than

are answered, that appear inappropriate or digressive, and seem to offer at

face value information about what we see that is shocking (for example, a

child dying of diphtheria), and a narrative that is never resolved. The filmis both documentary and surrealist. The surrealists idea of the unmoti-

vated juxtaposition seems to anticipate the kind of role Deleuze will later

give to his concept of interval in cinema, to which I will return later.

The possibility of seeing anew through an estrangement of

the everyday and the taken for granted reemerged in the work of a number

of engaged artists and filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and

America, which Peter Wollenwho himself made a number of f ilms with

Laura Mulveycharacterized in two key essays as a countercinema and

in terms of two avant-gardes.28An important aspect or central form of

the work of many of these artists was documentary, such as, in Britain,Mary Kellys Post-Partum Document, a serial gallery installation work

on motherhood (19731979); The Nightcleaners(1975, which I wil l discuss

below); John SmithsHackney Marshes;29the work of Steve Dwoskin; and

films such as The Song of the Shirt (1979, Sue Clayton and Christopher

Curling). In the latter, documentary and fictional enactment and reen-

actment of the documentation of nineteenth-century philanthropy is

presented, along with images, photographs, and drawings that open up

a questioning of the given of history and its representation. So That You

Can Live(1981, Channel 4, U.K.), made by Cinema Action, is an essay film

assessing the changes in a mining community, whileHandsworth Songs(1986), by the Black Audio Group, addresses riots in Birmingham and the

history of Britain and black emigration.30The documentary is now, again,

central to contemporary debates on representation in the current return

to issues of historical reality in art, as well as a continuing concern for

earlier artists and fi lmmakers. The debates that concerned Richter in the

1920s are similarly confronted by these artists and filmmakers, for what

is risked is that art drawn upon for political activism is subordinated to a

purpose other than art, reneging on the autonomy of art.31In becoming

form for a content, ar t is reduced to the space and t ime of the represented

political event, to a specificity arising in the conjuncture of the histori-

cal moment and time, which overturns or subordinates the specificity of

the art object and its potential for universalism. Moreover, political art


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is bound to an act of communication, to saying this, whereas modernist

art defined itself as engaging in a critique of reason, of the knowable, and

of history as narrative. It is precisely the assumptions embodied in the

characterization of these risks that are challenged in order not just to

represent politics but to engage the viewer in an experience of the politi-

cal, that is, of historical reality and the social as a public sphere that canbe contended, remade, and reimagined. The romantic presumption of the

sovereignty of ar t is critiqued in the focus on the contingent and its speci-

ficity as suchon thismoment and event. The ways in which the referential

is played within the works challenges meaning and meaning systems,

introducing instability and undecidability in the uprush and deferral of

meaning in the moment by moment movement of the film or video work.

The aesthetic effect is not a response or reaction to what we seethe thing

or objectbut to our seeing of the thingness as an experience of the

processof the work.32Evidence and the factual are, then, not only content

but also form in constituting the documentary materiality deployed withinthe work of serial and time-based documentary art. The conceptualism

implicit in Dada (and, in relation to the signifier, in abstractionism) that

was realized in the new approaches by artists in the 1960s and that has

come to be articulated as conceptual art was also important for film

and video documentary art. A key influence for Mary Kelly33 was the

serialism of Hans HaackesReal Estate SystemsShapolsky et al.and the

sequencing of documents, together with text as counterpoint or parallel

discourse, and not only as metadiscourse. Wollen also refers to this work

as important for his approach, with Laura Mulvey, in makingRiddles of

the Sphinx(1976) (Thirteen 25). In the same vein, John Smiths work isboth playful and plays with the relation of word and documentary image

and sounds. The referential is the documentary evidential mobilized in

the work, and, re-presented, it is also displaced from its referential pur-

posefulness, set in play in these works as both a materiality and an idea,

a concept imaged.34


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The Real of Contingent Reality

No matter how artfu l the photographer,no matter how carefully posed his sub-ject , the beholder feels an irresist ibleurge to search such a picture for the

tiny spark of contingency, of the Hereand the Now, with which reality has, soto speak, seared the subject.Walter Benjamin

The documentary voices reality through organizing its sights

and sounds, but the space and time of contingent reality recorded will

nonetheless exceed the factual it is claimed to represent and, as a result,

may engage us in an imaginative speculation outside the givenness of the

so-called factual and its immediacy, searchingas Benjamin suggests

for evidence of a contingent reality separate from the orchestrated view

of the photographer or documentarist. At the same time, we may becomeaware of what is not represented, that is, not simply what is off frame, out

of sight, but also what is felt to be unexplained and inexplicable in the real-

ity shown, negating its givenness: its radical contingency. This is not only

unrepresented but is, more radical ly, unrepresentable. Here we encounter

the contingent and the uncaused in reality. Mary Ann Doane has pointed

out that [t]he real, for Peirce, is not something sensed or vaguely felt. It

exists as an insistence, a compulsion, an absolute demand (Real 100),

for, Peirce states, [R]eality is insistency. That is what we mean by real-

ity. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the

reality of what we experience, that gives us our conviction of any singular(Scientific 234). Importantly, Doane makes a further connection when

she observes that the place of force here is the same as in his account of

the index (101), which, Peirce says, takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and

forcibly directs them to a particular object (Exact211).

Jacques Lacan has termed this insistence on reality, and its

unrepresentabil ity, the real. Brute reality is contingent and ephemeral, it

just keeps happening, uncaused, and while it may be named fate, it nev-

ertheless remains unapprehendable as signify ingthat is, it is senseless

within our everyday commonsense or rat ionality (53).35The obviousness

of reality and of our look that finds and possesses the world through our

images in a logic of knowledge and understanding are put into question.

We encounter that which undoes reason. Forms of remembering may

recollect cruel fate into an orderliness of remembrance or, instead,


15/42

d i f f e r e n c e s 10 1

in the symptoms of trauma whereby the real, although unrepresent-

able, is nevertheless made palpable by the way in which its absence, its

nonrepresentability, is signi fied.

A certain loss is always entailed in representation. Indeed,

Andr Bazin, the foremost French critic and theorist of film for whom

realism was a key value in cinema as an art, nevertheless observed, Somemeasure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it

(What2: 30), for the more real it appears, the less it signifies the contingent

reality it is the record of. Similarly, Lacan notes that something must be

lostbroken awayin making the hommelette, his pun on omelette and

hommethe little man/childeach made in the breaking of eggs, that is,

for the child, in its separation from the placenta that becomes the first in

the long line of separations involved in the emergence of subjectivity in

the human animal (197).36Such losses are not viewed with equanimity,

however. If the vision machine that is cinema engages our desire for the

really real in the photograph or documentary f ilm, it also thus gives riseto that anxious search for an authenticity Baudelaire spoke of and that

seems assured but yet hasimperceptiblybeen sacrificed. Like other

forms of art, documentary is concerned with the transformation of the

ephemeral and the transitory into the significant through re-presenta-

tion, and it, too, anxiously commemorates as loss what is not preserved,

recorded, remembered. Documentary, as a result, is haunted by the specter

of uncertainty and doubt, both regarding the putative contingent reality

it never quite captures and regarding the sense, the comprehending, of

the (incomplete) reality it presents us with. The documentary evidential

is materially referential, and it exceeds the referential it invokes, as signand as the real. Representation, as Derrida has reminded us, both makes

absent as it makes present, and it makes non-sense as it makes sense, or

meaningdiffering and deferring. Something here is always left out of

account, but this left-out-of-account is itself an effect of representation.

And this is not all. We may desire not only the lost reality but also the los-

ing of reality that documentarys failure attests to. Because it is missing,

we are reassured it was (really) there.37Similarly, in Freuds account of

fetishism, the mother is attributed a missing penis that is then refound in

a (magical) substitute.

Daney identifies a certain disavowal in Bazins realism, for his

cinema of transparency avows a gain in reality while he acknowledges

there is always something necessarily lost between reality and its repre-

sentation, which produces what he calls a t iny difference and which he


16/42


identifies with the cinema screen that acts as both a window onto reality

and bars us from the reality to which it gives us access (34). Daney relates

this difference of the screen to another difference, of which Bazin writes,

Of course a woman who has been raped is still beautiful but she is no

longer the same woman (qtd. by Daney 35).38Such differences are all the

difference, howevernot only for cinema, or for the woman raped, but alsoand most signif icantly for him or her who apprehends this difference that

is revealed, in Bazins choice of metaphor, to be also an issue of sexuality

and of sexual difference. Uncertainty arises in relation to a difference that

cannot be seen, only thoughtand feared. Daney observes:

The obscenity perpetrated by the rape of reality cannot fail

to send us back to the rape of the woman and the screen, the

hymen. The fundamental ambiguity of the real is the uncer-

tainty regarding virginity: the tiny almost nothing that changes

everything. The attachment to representation, the taste for simu-

lacra, a certain love for the cinema (cinephilia), all derive less

from ontology than from obsessional neurosis. It is in the very

essence of the latter to clothe itself in the former. One is reminded

of Freuds comment that The predilection felt by obsessional

neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn to those

subjects which are uncertain for all mankind and upon which

our knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain open to

doubt. (Daney 35)

If a womans virginity, her sexual probity, is subject to doubt, it is because

her desire, and her being as a subject of desire, are doubtful for the otherof her desire.39What is engaged here is thus always a work of fantasy and

of a fetishism in which answers can be supplied, guaranteed by the pres-

ence, over there (on the woman), of what is absent. But what might be taken

to be absent (in Freuds later account of sexual fetishism, the mothers

penis) was never there, and it is this possibility that is most terrifying.

The apprehension of the undecidable, and the rupture this enacts in rep-

resentations, offers a way through which such obsession and its fetishes

might be addressed textually and, perhaps, psychically.40Chris Markers

Sans soleil(1983) can be read as an essay-fi lm on the cultural fetishes

including ethnographic filmby which we sustain ourselves in the face

of the undecidable, while it also problematizes the easy assumption of

distance from such fetishism that documentary usually affords us.


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The Time of Events and Being

The contingency of living becomes an experience in time only

when it is correlated to an idea of a point in time marked by measurement

and by the memory of place, of the material experience of sights, sounds,

smells. We become aware of time through movement marked by change,as dist inct from repetition. Through observing the duration of movement

by objects and people, we understand the time of the event. Time invokes

a before and an after, and with this the possibility of causality. In a process

of afterwardsness, contingent reality in its duration becomes interpreted

as moments of action that bring about change as events.41Doane notes

that for Peirce the ungraspability of the present is a consequence of the

fact that thought (and its necessary embeddedness in signs) takes time

(101). Time is a continuum, but human perception of time sees the pres-

ent as a point of discontinuity in the instance of the moment, and, Doane

argues, The absolute break between past and future is a symptom of ourconsciousness of this discontinuity (99). For Peirce, time is the form

under which logic presents itself to objective intuition; and the signif ica-

tion of the discontinuity at the actual instant is that here new premises,

not logically derived by Firsts [by description], are introduced (Scientific

66). As a result, Doane suggests, The instant is the condition of the pos-

sibility of newness, novelty, modernity (100). It is the contingent, and not

the event, that engages the instant and the possibility of the new.

The image, for Doane, does not speak its own relation to time;

as a result, Film is, therefore, a record of time, but a non-specific, non-

identifiable time, a disembodied, unanchored time (163). Film recordsindexical signs of timeclocks, shadows cast by the sun, styles of cloth-

ing or motorcar, but not time itself. Documentary film, however, indexes

time as past in every sound and image it presents to us; their pastness

is the condition of its very appearance to us as representation and not

transmission, indexed because it is a record and not fiction.

Deleuze draws on Peirces account while developing this in

relation to Bergsons understanding of duration and being, however, it is

Deleuzes notion of the interval (a term he borrows from Vertov) and of the

meanwhile that the interval gives rise to that I want to draw upon in my

discussion here. Deleuze distinguishes a rational interval as one where

the interval div iding two spatial sections serves simultaneously as the end

of the first and the beginning of the second, thereby assuring continuity

in space and succession in time.42It can do so because we infer and make


18/42


sense of the time or space elided by the edit in terms of rules of continu-

ity so that the movement in the film and the movement forward in screen

time and story time of the f ilm is a moving whole, a duration from which

the image, as an edit, is cut from a mobile section of duration, the rest

of which is elided. This concept of the interval addresses the cut, the edit,

whether in classical continuity editing or Eisensteins montage. Deleuzeopposes this to what he characterizes as the irrational interval that pro-

duces a dissociation rather than an association of images and times that,

D. N. Rodowick suggests,

neither marks the trajectory between an action and a reaction

nor bridges two sets through continuity links. Instead, the inter-

val collapses and so becomes irrational: not a link bridging

images, but an interstice between them, an unbridgeable gap

whose recurrences give movement as displacements in space

marked by false continuity. (143)

It is a juxtaposition that produces association that is not already thought,

that is not organized to prompt a certain order of connection, however

unsuccessfully. Instead, there is thought from the outside (17), a becom-

ing thought that is not internal to the juxtaposition, but a potential, a

virtuality. What is introduced by this outsideness of thinking is a series

of possibilities and thus a series of times in which these virtual possibles

might be actualized, that is, become. The irrational interval produces

an image of becoming rather than being, thus it includes a hesitation, an

uncertainty, and a suspense as to what might be possible that can never

be fully resolved. Deleuze thinks juxtaposition philosophically, wheresurrealist works assert it. He writes: Film ceases to be images in a

chain [. . .] an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of the next,

and whose slave we are (Ici et ailleurs).43Instead, film becomes

the method ofbetween, between two images, which dispels

[conjure] all cinema of the One. It is the method ofand, this and

then that, which dispels all the cinema of Being = is. Between

two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions,

between two visual images, between two acoustic images,

between the acoustic and the visual: make the indiscernible,that is the frontier, visible (Six fois deux). The whole undergoes

a mutation, because it has ceased to be the One-Being, inorder to

become the constitutive and of things, the constitut ive between-

two of images. (Cinema1: 182)


19/42


The irrational interval no longer divides a before from an af ter, but sus-

pends the spectator in a state of uncertainty where it is impossible to know

or predict in advance which direction change will take. Instead, Rodowick

argues, the chronological time of the movement-image fragments into

an image of uncertain becoming (15). The time-image, in the irrational

interval, is the meanwhile, defined by the Oxford English Dictionaryas during the time intervening. Deleuze and Flix Guattari write: It

is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a

meanwhile: the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it part

of timeit belongs to becoming (What158).

While time always moves on, we remember time in terms of

instants, moments. It is through its interrelationship of stillness and time,

being and becoming, that, I suggest, documentary is constituted as art.

Lessings notion of the pregnant moment, which Brecht adopted for his

theory of radical dramaturgy, articulates an understanding of movement

in stillness that has continued to be profoundly important. The stilledaction of sculpture nevertheless signif ies a future in which the movement

of a gesture begun but held would beor could berealized. The arrested

f low in the image presents a being forever halted before its becoming, yet

that is nevertheless present because it is imaginable in a possible future

time. The moment held is both preserved and lost in time. Inexorable time

can only be stopped through representation in memory, by our imagining

and in our depictions. It is thus by no longer being that life can endure

unchanged. (Representation always therefore involves a certain death and

a certain life, and with this a certain mourning.) 44The visual artist and

writer Yves Lomax, drawing on Deleuze, suggests:

In the empty meanwhile nothing happens or moves in the pres-

ent and this nothing happens in the present could be a way to

(re)think stillness. To think stillness in this way would be, at the

same time, to think the movement, albeit virtual, of becoming.

Indeed, thinking stillness in this way does not bring my think-

ing to a halt; on the contrary, it invites my thinking to go with

becoming in itself, which is nothing but the turning of time where

chance is given a chance, which is what marks times resistance

to banality. (61)

Walter Benjamin points to the importance of stil lness in the movement of

time when he asserts the notion of a present which is not a transition, but

in which time stands sti ll and has come to a stop. Thus, he argues:


20/42


Materialist historiography [. . .] is based on a constructive prin-

ciple. Thinking involves not only the f low of thoughts, but their

arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration

pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by

which it crystallizes into a monad. (Theses 26263)

For Benjamin this enables what he terms the blasting open of the con-

tinuum of history, that is, of historical time as a movement of cause and

effect. The historical object appears in a new setting, described more

recently by Andrew Benjamin as the explosive now-time, the instantia-

tion of the present by montage; by the movement of montage (a montage

effect whose determinations are yet to be f ixed). It will be a montage that

involves temporality as well as objects and images (235).

It is through cinema that such a now-time came to be con-

ceptualized since, as Hans Richter suggested, it is film that has timeat

its disposal. Most of all, the time to see differently. The documentary

interrelates times, and hence places, showing simultaneous events and

actions. These, being viewed in series, may be understood not only in

terms of an already known and given causality but, in the demand to

think two referentsboth this and thattogether, as bringing the idea

of connection, or its absence, into play in an interval that is never fully

rational. It is not only through editing that film and video produce such

temporal montage. Every mise-en-scne produces a montage within the

frame, remade not only through camera movement that reframes the

scene but also through movement and gesture within the frame. Arising,

here, is a process of becoming that cannot be represented as such, but onlyapprehended through the imaginative work of spectatorship.45Historical

time and the referential are subordinated to the bodily time of viewing,

that is, to an experiential process of memory, cognition, and affect. While

the observational documentary reproduces a lived reality of events and

actions in the real time of their occurrence, the spectator sees this as a

part ofthe world, juxtaposed to other remembered realities. Unplotted,

the meanwhile of contingent reality pervades documentary. It is the aim

of cinema vrit, of direct f ilm, Deleuze declares, not to achieve a real as

it would exist independently of the image, but to achieve a before and after

as they coexist with the image, as they are inseparable from the image(Cinema2: 38). The document, in the time of re-presentation, figures both

historical reality and the real. Documentary art is the engaging of each in

an aesthetic process in time. Such documentary contrasts with that art of

redemption Leo Bersani has r ightly rejected when he argues:


21/42


A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a

certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently

damaged or valueless experience. Experience may be over-

whelming, practically impossible to absorb, but it is assumed

[. . .] that the work of art has the authority to master the pre-

sumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquelygives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material. (1)46

The Document in Art and the

Political in Representation

What contemporary i mage-practicesare sustaining a resistance to the pres-ent? [. . .] What in our contemporaryimage-practices is resisting the presentin favor of preserving the irreducibilityof that which is not yet and, in doing

so, maintaining a time that remainsuncontrolled?Lomax

The document is a found object, a material trace discovered

or discerned and then constituted as evidence and fact that, as Foucault has

shown, comes into existence and has meaning insofar as it is spoken by a

social discourse such as the scientif ic, or the legal, or the historical. A con-

cern with the documentary and the political in art as well as with the politics

of representation emerged in the 1970s, drawing on abstraction, on struc-

turalism, and on conceptualism in art, while addressing issues of historyand the social through setting in play the contingency, specificity, and mul-

tiplicity of documentary reality. The works I discuss here are each engaged

in this project in which our encounter with the political arises not only in

relation to the represented but also through the juxtapositions produced in

relation to the contingent realities shown and heard. Emerging from the

intervals of image and image, sound and image, sound and sound is a cer-

tain pausing in discontinuity that Deleuzes meanwhileas that which

enables a resistance to the presentgives articulation to. That is, imagining

anew notforus but beforeus that can only become an after in the specta-

tors time. What arises here, therefore, is that documentary ethics describedby Michael Renov, drawing on Emanuel Levinas, of a non-indifference

to the other in an encounter of mutuality and commensurabil ity.

The Nightcleaners Part 1(1975) by the Berwick Street Collec-

tive is a key British film of the 1970s, inf luenced by the work and ideas of


22/42


The NightcleanersPart 1.

Berwick Street FilmCollective, 1975.

Bertolt Brecht as well as by new accounts of ideology and the subject.47The

collective was a group of artists and fi lmmakers that included Mary Kelly,

whose Post-Partum Document is an important instance of documentary

gallery work, Marc Karlin, James Scott, and Humphrey Trevelyan. From

1970 to 1972, the Collective fi lmed a group of off ice night cleaners, mostly

women, observing their isolating and repetitive routines of work and

recording through interviews their individual stories. Each is involvedin balancing their need to earn for their families and to take care of their

children; night work enables them to do both, but at the cost of their

health. The Nightcleanersbegan as a campaign film for women who were

struggling for better working conditions; for feminists, the nightcleaners

were emblematic of the position of women, confined to low-paid work and

responsible at home for unpaid domestic work and childcare. The inherent

dif ficulties of unionizing isolated groups of office cleaners and the indif-

ference of the male-dominated union meant that these initiatives were

finally unsuccessful despite the extensive financial and moral support of

the London Womens Liberation Movement. During filming the Collective

adopted a documentary style of observational camera and interviews; in

the editing process, following the end of the campaign, a different film

began to be conceived, one that would reflect upon the process of political


23/42


struggle and consciousness-raising for the workers, feminist activists,

and filmmakers, as well as audiences in a specifically Brechtian project.

From this emerged an aesthetically radical film that remains politically

important.

In The Nightcleaners, we are brought to apprehend, and thereby

understand, the repetition, arduousness, and ritual of the cleaning work.Every night involves the same routine around awkward office spaces,

lif ting heavy vacuum cleaners among filing cabinets and desks that must

be dusted without disturbing the papers left on them. One shot, tightly

framed and in close-up, reveals a cleaner bent over the toilet basin she

is scrubbing. Such scenes are edited with extracts from interviews with

male managers and a company owner, one of whom asserts that all that is

asked of a woman is that she clean here as she does at home. The found

ironies are all too apparent. From the stories of the women, the film opens

out onto the story told by feminism of the contradictions of sexuality, work,

and motherhood experienced by women, presented through voice-over byfeminist activ ists (including Sally Alexander and Sheila Rowbottom, both

now important British social historians). Nevertheless, their discourse

does not fully contain the images. Instead, they reflect upon feminist prac-

tice and the history of womens struggles. We are shown activist meetings,

discussions with union leaders, marches, and, poignantly, a sequence in

which Maythe nightcleaners leaderbegins to realize that the struggle

might not be winnable.

The Nightcleanersshows us visual evidence and personal testi-

mony, but these are wrested from their temporal and spatial continuity. Its

rhetorical use of filmic devices does not, however, impose a hierarchy ofdiscourses with a dominant meaning that is closed and complete. A process

of abstraction is introduced through a series of devices that alternate with

conventional editing, yet, and importantly, the films formalism is never

systematic, nor does it become a separate and distinct system, so that the

formal and referential multivoicing is integral. Sound and image are often

separated, with the image being shown silent or with an unrelated voice:

for example, one of the women cleaners is heard counting across a series

of discontinuous shots until, finally, she concludes with the total of forty-

nine off ices and nine toilets for which they are responsible. Black leader

is interposed between shots, interrupting a gesture or statement. Often

there is no sound; or, as between shots of the cleaners working, a piano

reminiscent of music hall or the music performed with silent moviescan

be heard. Or there is a voice-over, but one that is discontinuous with the


24/42


images it nestles between. Both sound and image are slowed, which, when

returning to normal speed, surprises, as when, for example, the noise of

the vacuum cleaner suddenly becomes very loud.48

Interviewed, the women appear feisty, aware, and perceptive

and not as victimswhen the film repeatedly returns to shots in which

the camera comes to rest on a womans face. A central visual motif, which

also opens and closes the film, is of the working womans image abstractedthrough refilming in slow motion, zooming in to very big close-ups of

her eyes, nose, or mouth, the image made grainy, often black enframed.

Almost stil led, the womans image appears sculptural, her head tilted; the

materiality of the photographic image and the woman herself are made

palpable, while the pose cinematically held for our contemplation evokes

those in the pictorial tradition of images of the Madonna. Although her

image is extracted from the ongoing moment of recorded reality, this is

present in the sound track, as she explains that she continues to do night

cleaning for the sake of her children despite her doctors warning that it

is destroying her health, saying, I think if Im going to die I might as well

die happy, mightnt I, so Im back. The issues of women, mothering, and

work are neither narratively nor aesthetically resolved in The Nightclean-

ers, but instead leave the spectator with haunting images recalled long

after that become a remembering not only of these particular women at

The NightcleanersPart 1.



25/42


Jean Mormontand colleague.The NightcleanersPart 1.


Refilmed close-upof Jean Mormont.The NightcleanersPart 1.

Berwick Street Film

Collective, 1975.


26/42


this moment in time, during a strike, but also, meanwhile, of any-women-

at-all, any-place-at-all, in the now-time of my viewing that might be a

reseeing of the film or a mental ref lection.

James BenningsEl Valley Centro(2000), on Californias Cen-

tral Valley, 550 miles long and 60 miles wide, together withLos(2001), on

greater Los Angeles, and Sogobi(2002), a study of the Northern Californiawilderness, comprise his California tri logy. Each consists of thirty-five

shots lasting two and a half minutes, and Benning uses the same fixed

position camera set-up for each shot, while all three films conclude with

a final titles sequence, also lasting 150 seconds, identifying for each shot

its subject matter, its owner, and its location. The first shot of El Valley

Centro(which is also the last shot of Sogobi), for instance, is titled spill-

way/Department of Water Resources/Lake Berryessa. For shots five, six,

eighteen, and twenty-seven, the titles read hay raker, Tejon Ranch, Arvin;

freight train, Southern Pacific, Bakersfield; dredge, Delta Dredging Co.,

the Delta; and freighter ship, Naviera de Chile, Stockton Deep WaterChannel. Benning has said that he

wanted to code and then cause a rereading of the whole film by

naming what you see and exposing ownership. Like, you might

not know that this was a cotton picking machine, and almost all

of the land is owned by the large corporations, like railroads, or

oil companies, banks, causing a political reading [. . .]. Not only

do I want to bring out the politics, but I want the viewer to recall

the whole film, to play with memory. (qtd. in Rosenbaum) 49

This information, displaced from intervening as titles betweenthe shots, becomes a deferral that is not missed until we arrive at it at each

films conclusion and that thereby becomes, retrospectively, suspended

information circumscribing the seen and heard in terms of a named subject

represented, a specific location that could be revisited, and an ownership

that introduces relations of the propertied and the propertyless into the

landscape. We must superimpose, in our memory, this language-based

information upon the uncaptioned sounds and images of the thirty-five

shots. The intervals between each shot that were, before, a series only by

virtue of their sequence in the time of our viewing, become afterwards the

interval-with-the-missing-title that we can now insert. Are we successful?

And, what will this process displace and what will it add? Prior to the titles

sequence, we have been viewing a series of landscape portraits whose

closed and formal structure allowed quiet contemplation, enabling us to look


27/42


around the scene, knowing the duration, awaiting the changes we expect

within a landscape we are becoming familiar with but that will nevertheless

give rise to the quite unexpected. There is surprise when the freighter ship

enters rear frame and passes horizontally across, followed by a sailboat, each

traveling on the Stockton Deep Water Channel that we can later put a name

to but that we cannot discern within the view Benning has chosen for us.The frame becomes dynamic through such movements across and within

the frame: in one, a hay-raking machine begins as just a small speck in the

distance that, having traveled forward towards us in the frame, abruptly

turns off-screen right but is still present to us in the sounds of its engine

until it reemerges elsewhere in the field (perhaps prompting the memory

of another cornfield, in HitchcocksNorth by Northwest[1959]). The freight

train entering the shot after just a few seconds, again passing horizontally,

fil ls up the image, evacuating the landscape it occupies, creating a rhythm

of movement and vision in the repetition but also differences between

cars, while its enormous length begs the question: will it cross before theend of the shot, or not? Sounds of noise or voices, perhaps unseen, open up

the framed space to the continuousness of a world beyond yet not visually

included. The camera is an observing eye, unacknowledged except, perhaps,

in the apprehensive glances that seem to address us of migrant fruit pickers

working beside an overseer. Our pleasure is in seeing with the camera, in

a seeing again and seeing what Benning could not necessarily know might

happenand what he might only later, reviewing, have seen as we do now.

All this is placed in parenthesis by the final titles that, in naming what we

saw, challenge our own naming, our cognitive perception, in a kind of

sadistic joke that asks: did we get the point? Well, yes and no. What is citedas the content of the shot is partial, a selection and hence an assertion, for

the hay-raking machine exists within a field, a sky, and it has a driver. The

captioning reduces a polysemy we had enjoyed and now remember perhaps

guiltily while suffering our failureindeed the impossibilityto remember

and to remake the film with this new information. The process of mental

review the film demands is also a political act that makes representation,

and our apprehension of the represented, an always incomplete process in

an engagement with the ongoing of the contingent and the time of mental

reflection as a duration that transforms our understanding.

Documentary time and space are central to Portrait of My

Mother(1999), which presents a work of memory and a process of memo-

rial transformation of the space and time of the political of the public and

the private, of the nation and the family, that is also a process of desire.


28/42


Instal led in a gallery are two (or sometimes four) slide projectors showing

images recapturing the past of Tomic, her national history, her mothers

life, and successive intellectual obsessions including, now, her fierce com-

mitment to Serbian Orthodoxy. Between these is a large screen projecting

a video recording that appears initially to be an ordinary documentary, a

journey taken by foot, by car, by tram, and by car and foot again, from her

own apartment to that of her mothers. Made in a single day, it is filmedentirely by hand-held camera. The spectator is thereby restricted to a

single optical point of view, the cameras mechanical eye, with which we

travel across Belgrade and thus adopt as our own. It is a view to which,

however, we may also attribute a subject ivity, namely Tomic herself, and

with which we identify. Yet immediately the sound-track alerts us to a

discrepancy, for the single view and subjectivity of our vision is opposed

and replaced by the multiple voices of several people as we follow the

discussionrecorded at another, later time and placebetween Milica,

her mother, and her mothers oldest woman friend. We may authorize a

new controlling subject ivity, namely, that of Tomic as artist-author of the

work (that she is not the camera-person, too, is only revealed at the end),

but this will never be fully aligned with the daughter who debates stories

of the past with her mother. She says, Between her [mothers] father and

Portrait of MyMother. Installation,1999.

Mi lica Tomic.


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Her mother says,I was a completelymisplaced child.Tomics father (manin cap) greets afriend.Portrait ofMy Mother, 1999.

Mi lica Tomic.

Tomics fatherboards a bus, whileher mothers voice-over is heard saying:The fact I didntfeel any intimacy.Portrait of MyMother, 1999.

Mi lica Tomic.


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my father I put a childs voice, so that the words Mama, Papa are heard

intermittently between the recorded conversations and the sounds of the

street, of cars, footsteps, and so on. This voice embodies both the past,

as the child Tomic was, and the future, in which the daughter becomes

mother to her own son. Other nondiegetic sounds are heard over the blackleader that intermittently interrupts the f low of images, first as a kind of

explosion, as Milicas mother tells of the end of her marriage to Milicas

father, and again, shortly after, when strange rhythmic slapping noises

accompany the voice-over describing their breakdown in contact, noises

that here seem to stand in for the missing sexual relation of the parents.

Later, during the taxi journey, after a long discussion of the bombing of

Sarajevo, Kosovo, and now Belgrade, a louder explosion is heard and then

a long sequence of noises we might begin to recognize as stone or con-

crete debris falling down endlessly and to realize the reference as being

to the noises reported by surv ivors of the bombing as they crouched in a

basement while the building above slowly disintegrated. Portrait of My

Mother is a memory work not as a recovery of memory, but as a staging, a

mise-en-scne through which memory as affect is apprehended. Its

A house bombed bynatois seen throughthe car window.Portrait of My Mother,1999.

Mi lica Tomic.


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temporal montage is at once personal and public in its interweaving.

The meaning of the past is continually remade by Tomic in the present of

remembering as a work of identity and its politics.

What role might the artwork play in relat ion to the t raumatic

remembered? It is by enabling the apprehension of the real in dreadful

anxiety without losing oneself as a subject, through a form of sublima-tion in which one confrontsbut is not overwhelmed bythe limits of

ones existence.50The anxiety of the artwork as traumatic does not there-

fore involve a remembering of a past trauma as a k ind of recovery of an

experience. It isthe experience, and as such may produce a remember-

ing,Nachtrglichkeit, but one that can become translated, symbolizable,

enabling us to move beyond imaginary captivationyet where this sym-

bolization bears the trace of the real it thereby renders into the reality of

its sounds and images.

Father (2002) by Doron Solomons, while showing television

news footage documenting bomb attacks in Israel, presents this not in acontinuous time, but in a complex montage of sights and sounds that is

both deeply moving and highly challenging: both conceptual and poetic.

It is an interval film, in which time stopsthat is, historical time

and becomes the now-time of juxtaposed images and sounds, of series

and not chronology. Across the film a number of motifs are introduced:

innocence; victims; technology and its promise to protect; violenceboth

human and inhuman; the roboticboth human and inhuman; the magic

of film and imagination; daughters lost/at risk of being lost; terror.

Opening with the carnage of a bomb attack, this is shown out of

focus but with direct sound audible, unti l Solomons is heard in voice-oversaying: You once asked me: Daddy, if I diewill you make magic? and

we then see The Magician/Father, Solomons (53), taking backin a literal

swallowingthe word Death. Then follows the image of his daughter

jumping up and down on a bouncy house, her movement slowed, the

zoom-in losing focus to create a lyrical sense of innocence, physical enjoy-

ment, and a loving gaze, before the film cuts to news footage of a different

aftermath, of an unsuccessful bombing. Here, an extraordinary spectacle

unfolds as we see the wounded would-be suicide attacker approached and

grasped by the mechanical arm of a robot mounted on a tank-like plat-

form that tugs him back, away from the watching crowds gathered behind

security barriers; over this scene is playing the evocative sounds of a Bach

recital. The image becomes the fuzzy lines of an interrupted television

broadcast before it cuts to show the daughter seated, watching something


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intentlybut surely, we may ask, not the images we have been seeing?

A mental image of risk irrupts, not only of a possible future of the little

girls bodily risk but also the risk of a traumatizing terror in the anxiety

we imagine for her, to which the film answers: In my arms you are safe.

These are the words we hear in the next shot, which shows a promotional

video demonstrating the safety of its car design as robots die testing itsrobustness in controlled crashes. Is this enough, the film seems to ask

when it cuts to another vehicle, a childs toy truck, hurtl ing towards a

wall and, crashing, smashing its driveran egg? Reality and play, the

mechanical and the organic, interchange across the film. In the next shot

we see found footage of a training camp for Palestinian fighters, that is ,

terrorists, which shows two women practicing unarmed combat. The

black and white film is reworked in tones of pink, while wind instruments

play over, as another fathers voice is heard: I always loved to watch you

dance . . . fresh and flexible movements. The film cuts abruptly to an

anguished father and the superimposed image of a baby girl that we mayconnect to the dancing/fighting women and a death that is their future.

The fi lms story l ies in what we make of the father-filmmakers juxtaposi-

tions of realitys mechanics of contingency as he attempts to realize his

role as father-magician. The poignancies of this family make-believe butt

up against the constructed realit ies producing the terror of contested land

and the contesting other. It is not that time stands stil l through the inter-

val of juxtaposition inFather; rather, the relations of causality of past and

present time are questioned, and with it our struggles for time future.

In these films and artworks, the before and after that is

absent but inseparable from the images we see can become thoughtenabling an understanding that is not redemptive but that, rather, brings

us to imagine in these landscapes and places a time of being that is differ-

ent. As a kind of hoping, it is also a human time. This essay has explored

the timeliness of the work of theory and of our return to and renewal of

theoretical approaches and artistic practice. It presents a kind of snap-

shot of the instance of theory and documentary practice concerning time

and contingent reality in our particular historical moment. Such practices

nonetheless constitute a duration and a meanwhile, the events of which,

while remaining virtual, we endure. Ar t practices are another kind of

making history.


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This essay has been developed from an earlier version, first given as a paper in Vienna in2003 and published in Auf den Spuren des Realen Kunst und Dokumentarismus, ed ited byKaren Gludovatz (Museum Moderner Kunst Stif tung Ludwig Wien, 2005). A second versionwas presented at Film Theory between Indexicality and Virtuality, a seminar organizedby Griselda Pollock, director of the ahrbCentre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History,Leeds, 2005. My di scussion here has greatly benefited from the contr ibut ion and debate bythe participants at each of these events.

elizabeth cowieis Professor of Film Studies at the School of Drama, Film, and Visual Artsat the University of Kent, Canterbury. She published Representing the Woman: Cinema andPsychoanalysis(University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and has recently written on the hor-ror of the horror film; on cinematic dream-work; and on documentary fil m, memory, andtrauma in Alain ResnaissHiroshima mon amour, and on Jean Rouch and surrealism. Heressay in Camera Austria on the work of Milica Tomic, a Yugoslav video art ist committedto working politically in art, focuses on the role of trauma as the unrepresentable figuredin Tomics work. A similar focus ar ises in her commentary accompany ing Juan delGadosvideo work W ho are you entertaining to? inAspect: The Chronic le of New Media Ar t.Sheis currently completing a book on documentary fi lm and video theory and practice.

1 This changed, of course, with the

development of magnetic taperecording in the 1950s.

2 My remarks here draw upon MaryAnn Doanes important insightsin her essay Real Time: Instan-taneity and the PhotographicImaginary.

3 The digital has enabled a newdemocracy of audiovisual pro-duction communicationmobilephones, and mp3 formats, as wellas movies and v ideo artandjust as importantly, new modes of

interaction. The public sphere isextended and changed with thedevelopment of Internet bloggers,MySpace, and YouTube, whilecampaign sites are transform-ing the space of political debateand the structures of knowledgedefinition.

4 Peirce writes that the mind isvi rtual: [N]o present actua lthought (which is a mere feeling)has any meaning, any intellectualvalue; for this l ies not in what is

actually thought, but in what thisthought may be connected within representation by subsequentthoughts; so that the meaning ofa thought is altogether somethingvi rtual (Pragmatism289). At

no instant in my state of mind is

there cognition or representation,but in the relation of my states ofmind at different instants thereis. And, What I say is that themind is vi rtual, not in a series ofmoments, not capable of exist-ing except in a space of timenothing in so far as it is at any onemoment (Letter 248). Deleuze, ofcourse, draws as well on the workof Henri Bergson. See for examplehisBergsonism .

5 Cited by Barasch (367). Baude-

laire therefore also rejectedphotography, as embodying thisdesire for a realism that seeks toportray the world as if w ithoutinterfering with it, that is, anonhuman world.

6 The early panoramic photographsare precursors of Cinerama, andwit h computer-controlled mul-tiple cameras it is perhaps nowpossible to produce a total recordof an event, though it would onlybe perceivable by an indiv idual

person through a process of selec-tion and montage or by serializingthe images in time and hence los-ing the simultaneity of the imagesof the event, limited as we are toeyes fixed in one plane only.

Notes


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7 It was such an observationalcinema that has been central formany of the filmmakers associ-ated with American directcinema, notably Richard Leacockand D. A. Pennebaker, who wereinvolved with Robert Drew in

makingPrimary(1960), andFrederick Wiseman.

8 Walter Benjamin argued in TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechan-ical Reproduction (1936) that theaudiences identification is reallywit h the camera, whose positionit takes (228). This view has a lsobeen adopted by later theorists,including Laura Mulvey andChristian Metz.

9 Doane argues that indexicalitycan and must be d issociatedfrom its sole connection to theconcept of realism, the reflec-tion of a coherent, familia r, andrecognizable world. Indexicalityis a function that is essentiallywit hout contentin language itis allied with t he pure denotationof this or here it is (25). Mydiscussion here and throughoutthis essay is indebted to her subtleand illumi nating consideration ofPeirce, time, and cinema.

10 The icon has firstness, in rep-

resenting the object in terms ofperception; the index has second-ness, in presenting the object interms of its relations, or causal-ity; the symbol has th irdness (aswell as f irstness and second-ness), in presenting the objectreferentially.

11 Dai Vaughan, in Television Docu-mentary Usage, has called thisthe putative event (41).

12 The creat ion of a perfect illusion

had been seen as an aim of paint-ing, that is, where the spectator isdeceived into taking the image forreality. In the very famous classi-cal tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios,the triumph of Parrhasios lies in

deceiving Zeuxis when he turnsto him and asks to see behind theveil that Par rhasios has pa inted,as if it were real.

13 For Baudelaire, it is the art istsimagination that decomposes allcreation, and with the raw mate-rials accumulated and disposedin accordance with rules whoseorigins one cannot find save inthe furthest depths of the soul,it creates a world, it produces asensation of newness (Art156).As a result, the beauty of art caninvolve what elsewhere in every-day life we might experience asthe ugly. And we are moved not topleasure, but to an engagementwit h the imagi ned new of art.

14 These were filmed events of topi-cal interest, termed actualitsin France.

15 See these discussions in the jour-nalsLefandNovy Lef, in particu-larNovy Lef1112 (1927).

16 Grierson wrote under the pseud-onym The Moviegoer in theNew York Sun8 Feb. 1926.

17 Grierson himself made only one