walking in his writing

In “From the Stacks: ‘The Fire Last Time,'” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes that Baldwin was an intellectual that stood apart from the more prevalent model in the 50s and 60s. Gramsci’s organic intellectual modeled the type of oppositional leadership that the left was privileging at the time. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others exemplify the Gramscian model of socio-political leaders who awaken workers’ class consciousness while mobilizing them to action. Baldwin, on the other hand, invoked the older model of the alienated intellectual who, from the near shores on which alert witnesses stand, tells her or his story. Gates notes how Baldwin was the artist who remained estranged from “the very people he would represent” (The New Republic 1992). There is a quality of estrangement that is generally regarded with great suspicion and even contempt in politics. Think of HRC. or BO. or John Kerry, further back. The opposite, such as Bill Clinton’s type of friendly charm, has been embraced and rewarded electorally.

How is it that people have come to distrust and dislike leaders that remain somewhat distant by not giving themselves entirely in public? The perceived distance is quickly interpreted as the leader’s failure to be likable, relatable, and worst, trustworthy. Obama has been often criticized for seeming aloof, too professorial or simply failing to reach out more earnestly Republicans in Congress, who, regardless of any Democratic concession, were entrenched on performing unprecedented levels of obstructionism. HRC has been touted ceaselessly as unrelatable due to her elitism, or is she elitist due to her dearth level of relatability? The causality, as in most cases that matter or don’t, proves elusive in its ambivalence. The demand for emotive proximity between voters and leaders is not exclusive to Democrats. Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush exemplify in recent history political leaders who fail, in part, due to their immediate untranslatability to the popular imaginary of the so-called common fellow.

Where does this need for palpable identification with someone by definition and circumstances so removed as to set to lead a party representing so many different peoples and interests, lie? What is its provenance? Is the provenance cultural, educational, psychological? The points of departures are probably multiple with many intersecting points. Nonetheless, determining where that urgent need to identify with leaders comes from seems rather unimportant now. At least now, it seems sufficient to point out that such a need continues to prove incredibly dangerous for it unravels consequences that time and again endeavor against the basic and long-term interests of the people who demand it. It is a need that brings utter peril at its coattails. And when that needs asserts itself, the rest of us suffer just as equally, if not more.

Did Baldwin have anything to say regarding this irrepressible need for emotive proximity with political leaders? That he remained a detached artist and intellectual suggests a possible skepticism about proximities of this kind: a connection of intimacy with figures who are by constitution public. As numerous historical cases show, many such experiences of personal or cultural identification fall into deceiving or menacing sentimentalism at the expense of sober clarity. When one stands too close, moved by whatever sets of interests or needs, she or he cannot properly see, let alone examine, its object of desire or aspired proximity.

The expectation from this far apart that remains my space of writing is that leaders who have continued to represent my interests with sobering consistency and moral integrity, however imperfectly, will persist by choosing clear, unmitigated distance from this political and ethical aberration and its party.

Thus, I wonder whether we will finally understand that proper political representation can be achieved when adequate, sobering distance, yet one imbued with moral responsibility, is preserved between leaders and followers. Will we, I ask as my looking back in history quickly deflates my hopes that such an urgent lesson be learned. Faintly I wonder whether in one too many moments the next many years the arguably modest victory of enduring will have to represent our indomitable struggle to prevail.

 

interpretive models

I had seen Sebastián Silva’s La nana (2009) many years ago. Considering to include it in my teaching curriculum next fall, I reviewed it a few weeks ago. Prior to the second encounter with the film, I remembered it as generally enjoyable, with solid, engaging actors, unobtrusive writing, and efficient montage. The film tells a story and communicates it effectively with a realist aesthetic, at times simulating the documentarian form with a hand-held camera. The direction privileges restrained acting, as well as the absence of non-diegetic sounds or melodic soundtrack. Despite its main story –the interaction between a upper-middle class family and the maid that has worked for them for twenty years–, La nana is far from being a melodrama. Some of the formal choices mentioned earlier, help to keep the melo away from the drama.

The second viewing was equally enjoyable, but I was quickly reminded of the problems populating the film. Why is the family portrayed so sympathetically, save some minor plot elements that show that it is not without its problems? Why is the protagonist’s transformation so conservative, as she continues to work for the family when the film concludes? Why not allow a complete break, full liberation for a character who clearly seems a subjugated being? This is where a socio-economic interpretive model of the film finds it to be lacking irreparably. The class divide between la nana and the bourgeoise family seems to be glossed over by general yet inconsequential interpersonal niceness. The beginning of the film shows this rather nicely, when the family is gathered at the table, and having finished the dinner that la nana has prepared and served, is getting ready to perform every year’s known surprise: shower her with presents to celebrate her birthday.

One could say that interpersonally there are no divisions between la nana and the family: la nana tells the kids how to behave, when to eat, what to do; she even prohibits the elder daughter and her friend from snacking late at night because she has already set up the table for the following morning’s breakfast. The girl’s mother, namely the lady of the house and the employer of la nana, quietly leaves the kitchen to avoid, one assumes, any confrontation with the maid. In the next scene the daughter recriminates the mother for her strange behavior to avoid any confrontation with the maid, even at her expense. “Are you out of your mind?” shouts the daughter.

If we continue with the socio-economic and socio-political interpretive model, we can criticize the film for preserving the social status quo pretty much intact, as no consequential change seems to befall either side of the socio-economic divide. Nothing changes dramatically in the residence where la nana works and lives. On the other hand, once could argue that this particular interpretive model allows us to see how the class divide, which may exist in arguably clear binary terms of struggle in the public sphere, becomes confused, obscured and distorted in the domestic space of the home. In the singular space where employer also plays the role of surrogate family, the relations of class and power become not only more layered and complex, but also perverse.

La nana portrays a universe where power struggle configured by class divide remains intact, rather than deactivated, played-out, or resolved, precisely because the divide remains masqueraded by pseudo-familial ties. If the film shows how the relations of power are less than neatly binary in numerous scenes in which la nana seems to exercise control over what transpires in the house, it is also suggested how the domestic space of the bourgeoise home does not so much stand opposite to the public sphere, as engulfs it. The private sphere of domestic relations is not simply the negation or opposition of the public sphere. Rather, it represents the simultaneous consummation of the latter and its repeated  negation.

When I state that the relations of power in the private space of the home are complex, I do not intend to suggest that the figure of la nana holds more control that it would be generally attributed to someone of her social standing. My reading does not afford the character more social or political capacity than what she has, which is rather limited, as eloquently displayed by the uniform she wears. After all, it is clear that the maid’s employer makes every consequential decision for both the house and la nana. By complex I don’t mean that the power relations fail to be clearly demarcated, as, indeed, they are despite domestic interactions that may suggest the opposite or something different. The cinematic representation of such relations, however, becomes layered precisely because the private space and its domestic interactions, rather than public/political relations, stage complexity to obfuscate what is in fact the sustained reality: status quo.

the fragment in The Seventh Continent

In The Seventh Continent (1989) numerous scenes show a breakfast table being set up, or a car being washed, or an entire house being torn apart without capturing in full the individuals who are partaking in these actions. We may see parts of their hands industriously tearing clothes apart, or the unmoving back of their heads as the car goes through the wash, but the individuals are rarely shown. After the film’s beginning sequence we learn who the family’s three members are; what the parents and daughter look like. But the full-body capture of the protagonists does not abound in the film.

The shots are not composed to express emotively or dramatize the narrative: the family’s careful preparation for self-destruction. In The Seventh Continent the camera gaze documents rather than express subjectively, morally or even dialectically. The film does not inspire us to understand, let alone sympathize with, the family. Instead, it captures how incomprehensibly strange yet equally unmoralizable the family’s final days are. 

If any film offers a rigorous study of the image as necessarily a fragment, in addition to an eloquent exposition of how such a type of image can be deployed as the irreducible unit of a film, Haneke’s The Seventh Continent should count as one such a film. The fragmented image, shadowed by an unshown, perhaps also unimagined totality, exposes the arbitrariness of the frame, particularly of the frame that attempts to show it all by hinting to completion and plenitude. No frame is ever complete. Constituted by finitude, no frame is ever final.

Perhaps at this point I should edit the adjective fragmented to fragmentary: Haneke’s frame in The Seventh Continent is fragmentary. It fragments as is also fragmented by the camera’s gaze.    

what literature does

The last text we read in class this semester was Fabian Casas’s Los Lemmings y otros (2005). He is an Argentinian fiction writer, and one could say that his narratives are irrefutably Argentinian. Because we were closing the course with this text, one of the final concerns I wished to address was what could prove as singular about this modality of writing that we rush to recognize as literature. The question is absurdly immense, I admit. But because no definitive answers were sought, I deemed it productive to enter the question’s vast realm through the singular gates of Casas’s fiction.

Some describe Casas’s narratives as examples of a variation of realism that has been emerging in Buenos Aires over the past decade. This recent permutation of realism has extended beyond the literary realm, as filmmaker like Lucrecia Martel and Lisando Alsonso have been regarded as eloquent practitioners of this particular modality of representation. I am avoiding laying out a definition for what is understood as this new form of realism. I would like to arrive at a possible synthesis or conceptual understanding of it gradually rather than positing it as my discussion’s point of departure.

In the absence of a circumscribing definition, the first course of action will be to situate how this discussion understands realism. From the 19th century we inherited a realism that operates as a mimetic form of representation, a master narrative that often times serves as the alter ego of historical discourse. Following Balzac, Vargas Llosa regarded the (realist) novel as the backstage of history. Just as the Latin American boom novels (i.e. those by Cortázar, Vargas Llosa himself, Fuentes, and Márquez, to name a few) in the mid-20th century, the French 19th century novel configured itself as master narratives in which the totality of a universe was contained. And this universe reflected in multifarious ways the reality outside the text, also known as world, history, or even the real. If the 19th century bourgeois novel sought to exhaust the possibility of the novel to cohere a totalized understanding of the world, the boom novel also attempted to recreate a totalized sense of the world by formally exposing the impossibility of such totality.

Many boom authors mobilized the fragment (a structure generally characterized as partial, temporary, limited, finite, incomplete, and precarious) as the organizing unit of their narratives. The once authoritative voice of the narrator gave way to an unreliable, fractured, and self-aware narrating figure. For this and other traits, the boom novel has been regarded as formally experimental, and just as the European modernist novel the boom formalist narrative denied bourgeois realism by deconstructing it. Thus I have denominated the boom novel anti-realist, as it constituted itself upon the dismantling of the bourgeois realist novel.

I propose that, to understand Casas’s realism we need to grapple with the fragment and totality as aesthetic figures rather than ontological entities. As different aesthetic figures, they aspire to different political significance, but such significance does not tell us much about what the fragment is or totality is. And because what they are remains elusive to us to some extent, their relation with realism in whichever permutation, remains undetermined, I argue.

rhythm: from kill bill to reservoir dog

After a minor detour to the u-topos of theory, I return our conversation to the shifty territory of violence and film, and no name indexes the intersection of violence and film more eloquently than Tarantino.

The last post on violence and/in Tarantino offered a detailed reading of two scenes in Kill Bill. I would like to continue some thoughts that began to take form in that post, in addition to extending the discussion to Reservoir Dog, which remains, in my view, pure cinematic genius.

In Kill Bill the rhythmic and speed alteration from sequence to sequence is commonly expressed by the way the camera gaze pans and cuts. The uneven rhythm injects some degree of tension in a long sequence that otherwise remains utterly predictably. No one doubts that Thurman’s character, the master narrator in the movie thus far, will not perish imminently.

Moreover, the way rhythmic speed fluctuates within the same sequence points to the central space that time occupies both formally and thematically in most of Tarantino’s films, especially in Kill Bill. In “Childhood Living: James and Tarantino” Patrick O’Donnell argues that time is Kill Bill’s main theme: “Kill Bill is a film about wasting time, the wasting away of temporality, the time of wasting bodies, landscapes, cinematic repertories” (CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, N. 2, Fall 2009, 2). The excess that has come to characterize Tarantino’s overall style, particularly of his action-driven scenes of violence, goes hand in hand with the structure of waste that pervades his films, thematically and formally.

The stylization of violence, at least as it is executed in Tarantino’s films, not only presents violence within identifiable aesthetic norms (e.g. animation, farce), but also codifies it to circumscribe its possible repercussions to a deliberately limited frame. O’Donnell notes that in the Kill Bill films excess remains a central formal operation, frequently “backtracking and hypercitational excess” (4), through which theme and narrative become inhered in the structure of the films. In Tarantino, both style and script tend to exceed any standard of necessity.

Contrary to the accusation that some critics level against Tarantinesque violence (in that it beautifies, eroticizes, even glorifies it), the careful stylization that configures these scenes does not attempt to amplify the aesthetic and even affective impressions that they may elicit from the spectator, but to impose on them a certain discipline of perception. Tarantino’s choreographed sequences of inordinate violence reminds us of the old truism that represented violence is hardly the same as actual violence. Not only does represented violence differ from actual violence, but the representation of violence required that it be conceived, perceived, and consumed differently. In other words, the stylization attempts to suggest, at once didactically and playfully, how the spectator is invited to view such performance of violence. Perhaps engrossingly self-referential, not only do his films reference the cinematic universe, but they also set the coordinates for their viewing and critique.

The stylization (based on animation or hyperbolic repetition and intensity) recreates a distance that becomes Tarantino’s primary aesthetic and formal tool, which, instead of mythifying violence, presents it within a specific system of signs. In short, these two sequences in Kill Bill I illustrate how the overt violence in Tarantino’s films is generally codified to signal its own falsity. As some have argued, the overt violence in Tarantino can be considered the most tamed, cinematically speaking, of all the violent elements embedded in his film.

If we broaden our understanding of violence to include the experience of not only shock or outrage but also perplexity, confusion, and doubt, Tarantino’s films are indeed teeming with elements that perform an awaking violence on our perceptive capacities, which have turned either dormant or blindly susceptible to inherited aesthetic norms. Few other films disrupt the order of narrative events more adroitly than Tarantino’s, which constantly interrupt the causal lines of transition that conversely govern the structure of classical cinema. Broadly assuming the form of a jigsaw puzzle, none of his 7 films adopt even the semblance of a linear temporal structure.

Reservoir Dogs arguably presents one of the least disrupted temporalities. The film opens with the lengthy diner scene, in which a group of men drink coffee, smoke, and banter, and ends hours later, when not many of the group remain alive. What is surprising about Reservoir Dog’s more or less linear structure is that the central event that drives the narrative from the opening sequence forward is never shown. (I say more or less linear because on numerous occasions the main narrative line cuts to jump to the past to explicate how some of the individuals end up in the diner at the start of the film.)

After the dinner sequence, the film continues with a car sequence in which Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are frantically escaping from something or somewhere and speeding to the next destination. Roth’s character is severely wounded, and though he has not lost consciousness he finds himself in blinding, delirium-thrusting pain. He has been shot in the gut. Behind the steering wheel, Mr. White consoles Mr. Orange while nervously trying to decide what the best course of action is in the circumstances. Wasting irrecoverable blood, Mr. Orange lies in the back seat with his head against the left window. The car’s white-leathered seats accentuate the presence of Mr. Orange’s blood pretty everywhere in the back area of the car.

Because of the camera’s still position, the rhythm of this lengthy sequence is set by how Mr. Orange’s blood gradually stains the back area of the car. Tortured by pain, he recoils in his seat. He wants the pain to stop. He wants out. But the static gaze of the camera intensifies the fact that he is indeed going nowhere, and that the pain is getting only worse. For the duration of the sequence, he is stuck there, churning, turning, bending, folding, moving in damning pain.

Captured by a third-person point-of-view camera, the two men talk briefly about the blinding pain, possible survival, and the imminent help from someone named Joe. Something certainly has gone awry, but it is not entirely clear how, where or why.

The gap lingers as it also advances the plot. In fact, one could argue that the gap lingers to structure the plot, which assumes layered form insofar as the gap is preserved.

sobre la teoría

Rarely do I post in Spanish. Mainly because in the past year or so, rarely do I find myself writing in Spanish. An opportunity to interrupt such a deficient habit offered itself, so I was placed in a situation where thoughts and Spanish had to coexist once again in my life.

A coupe of friends and I are pausing, from time to time, to apply careful and meandering thought to the elusive topic of theory. Who says that method ought to be ordered and neat? Apologies to those for whom the beauty of Spanish remains a foreign thing.

…

Sabemos que etimológicamente el término theoria refiere a la capacidad de ver, a una cierta especie de mirar, que se extiende al acto de llegar a reconocer o saber o ser consciente de algo pero siempre mediante la especulación o la contemplación. No la comprobación.

Creo que la teoría en las ciencias físicas o duras cumple una función diferente. Se presenta como una postura o propuesta que, mediante la experimentación, se va a comprobar como cierta o falsa, como verdad o mentira. Hay avances y retrasos. Vueltas e idas. Lugares sin retornos también. Pero la ciencia física, cuya memoria es tan selectiva como voraz, siempre termina re-escribiendo su narrativa como un fenómeno lineal en el cual el progreso de la verdad falla o se da.

Pero en la humanidades la teoría, cuya infinita historia no pretendo resumir ni mucho menos ensayar aquí, se jacta de una relación más compleja con la verdad y la mentira. La teoría en este caso y a diferencia de la ciencias duras, no es un lugar de partida sino de posible llegada. Siempre posible, nunca certero. Incluso después de la llegada, la idea de certeza nunca llega.

Incluso entonces gobierna la precaria idea de posibilidad. Es tanto el océano y sus vicisitudes como también Ithaca misma.

No nos ofrece un método para llegar a un cierto tipo de verdad que a su vez legitime la validez de la teoría, sino que enmarca la trayectoria mediante la cual un cierto de tipo mirar llega a configurarse y espacializarse. Simultáneamente así adopta un cierto espesor temporal, y se arma con una cierta historia que a su vez cuenta miles de historias. La teoría se ríe del afán binario y se aburre con la linealidad. Ambos llenos de saberes y lugares y ejes comunes.

Es cierto que en la segunda mitad del siglo 20, especialmente en ciertas partes del globo, se puede hablar de una cierta tradición teórica que ha emergido en medio de una íntima relación con los estudios literarios y culturales. En esta tradición, como en toda, se establecen autoridades y marcas de legitimación. Algunos hacen teoría, mientras que muchos otros meramente la adoptan, o mucho peor, la aplican. Ella rechaza su aplicación.

No se puede aplicar simplemente porque la teoría es ello que emerge mediante, y sólo mediante, el proceso de aplicación.

Pero esta tradición reciente no acapara ni refleja la totalidad de la teoría como fenómeno cultural, artístico y epistemológico. Tampoco sintetiza, aunque muchos así lo prefieren, su historia. El new criticism, la escuela de Frankfurt, el postestructuralismo, para mencionar algunos de los isms altamente reconocidos, no son los únicos sistemas de saberes que se estructuran y circulan principalmente con ejes teóricos.

La teoría no debería funcionar para activar un cierto tipo de pensar o saber, o para promover un cierto tipo de lectura. Ni método, estrictamente hablando, ni premisa, la teoría es un algo que resulta como una forma dada de saber o ver, y no tanto que lo preceda. Es expansiva mucho más que unilateral. Estos aspectos temporales y espaciales necesitan tenerse en cuenta en cada etapa del ejercicio teórico.

El acto de ver o mirar siempre configura los espacios y tiempos con una particularidad dada. En términos grandes y abstractos hacer teoría es espacializar y temporalizar. Significa asociar un algo con ciertos parámetros de visibilidad, de hacerlo y hacerse ver. De crear la posibilidad, la capacidad de ver. De esculpir, programar, posibilitar, instituir e incluso a veces institucionalizar, un cierto mirar.

 

violence plus repetition minus realism

Continuing the thread on cinema and violence started last week, next I am focusing on how violence is figured, represented and thought in/by Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Some violent scenes in Kill Bill most evidently express that the hyper-stylization they undertake is precisely to deprive them of any lasting or meaningful capacity to shock. The two most eloquent are the sequence in which O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu)’s parents are savagely murdered while she, still a child, hides underneath the bed in which her mother is stabbed numerous time until the blade finally pierces the bed to land inches beside O-Ren Ishii’s head. As the story suggests, the gruesome experience gives birth to the assassin O-Ren Oshii, who soon enough gets her unequivocal revenge by lashing the blade that tears apart the body of the man who killed her mother and ordered the execution of her father.

These lengthy sequence of almost five minutes is animated, and the presence of blood here is considerably more voluminous and seems to be have adopted the ability to leap unimagined surreal heights. The inclusion of animation interrupts further the flow of the film, whose structure is already fragmented into chapters that carry a descriptive title. Tarantino slashes through linearity in the same way as his characters fictionally slash human bodies and things. It is precisely the animation that encapsulates what otherwise would be extremely unbearable scenes, aesthetically and morally, into the possibility of cinematic consumption. It is not an easy sequence by any means, but the animated action stamps it as fiction in very specific terms by which any possibility for transformative shock also gets irrecoverably diminished.

The animated-action demands that the violence be consumed, perceived, understood even, within the parameters of (melo)dramatic, emotive if not almost sentimental, and consequently tamed or domesticated fiction. As Tarantino’s stylization of violence heightens in such scenes and challenges the formal grounds that his previous films had achieved, any potential for shock, let alone moral outrage or deviance, plummets. In other words, just as his films build upon other cinematic traditions to offer inter-filmic works, his own filmography continues to set the signposts for how later films should or can be viewed, read, and even critiqued.

The other sequence of unbridled violence is when The Bride, played by Uma Thurman, goes to Japan to duel with O-Ren Ishii. To do so, Thurman’s character needs to battle with O-Ren Oshii’s modest battalion of furiously armed guards, who, one by one or in a bunch succumb to The Bride’s prodigious sword. Proven invincible, The Bride reaches the final target, O-Ren Ishii, and kills her in a sequence that dramatically changes pace, rhythm, and overall cinematic tone. Privileging long shots, the camera gaze of the duel sequence grows increasingly more static.

The final encounter between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii looks like a serene succession of beautiful paintings. Not unlike the earlier infinitely more frantic shots, these last ones, bathed predominantly in tones of blue, are also carefully constructed. In the first multiple-fight sequence, the camera hardly stays still. The film cuts sometimes gracefully, sometimes choppily to capture all the rapid movements transpiring in front of it. Shots from multiple angles shift places to capture the full magnitude of the fight.

Our eyes may not be able to account precisely for how the fights unfold, but The Bride’s blade strikes down every contender that meets her march: the ground, staircase, narrow pole, and even while taking a high and long leap on the air. Not one corner of the large hall is left untouched by the victims’ blood or covered by their limbs. It is so much, so increasingly over-the-top, that it is undoubtedly absurd. By the end of the mega fight scene, all of O-Ren Ishii’s mob soldiers have lost at least one extremity. They and their severed parts lie scattered in a thick mass of blood.

The exaggeration, undoubtedly, compounds the parodic, if not altogether farcical, under and overtones of the shots. The sequence, it must be said, asks to be taken at once skeptically and seriously. Serious entertainment; dubious drama. Another element that contributes to the farcical sequence of the sheer violence is editing. The sequence is undoubtedly a few minutes too long. The length is accentuated by the countless number of bodies that fall in dramatic quick succession.

The repetition of these bodies neatly uniformed helps to strip them of any individuading trait. Far from being individuals or even the mere shadow of ones, they are killing and dying automata uniformly dressed in white shirts and black suits. Even though the sequence is not animated as the earlier sequence in the movie depicted above, the governing tone of the sequence is one of pretense in which the meticulous choreography of the fights dominates the spotlight of the scenes.

The repetition predicated on the uncomfortably extended length of the sequence once again compounds the farcical composition of the sequence. If repetition sometimes operates to accentuate the subtle or metaphysical difference between one and another, in this sequence, conversely, repetition works to elongate the oppressive accumulation of the same. The repetition cues the audience to keep up, perception-wise, with the fast, thoroughly rhythmic configuration of the sequence while also accepting that there is no need to deem it too seriously.

Despite the vibrant color of the ubiquitous blood as well as the agility of the martial bodies, the repetition structuring the shots and scenes denies the sequence of gruesome violence, any real urgency. The sequence proves just as realist as the earlier animated part in which O-Ren Ishii becomes an orphan.

figuring (visualizing) violence in cinema

I will return to von Trotta’s film in the future, particularly to consider how Heidegger’s philosophy allows us to think (of) cinema. For now, I would like to write some thoughts about another favorite filmmaker of mine, Tarantino.

The question of violence is the specific angle from which I am to discuss part of his filmography in this post and few others to come. I am unsure about the title of this post. Figuring or visualizing fail to conjure up optimally what I am trying to express.

The criticism leveled at Tarantino’s films seldom strikes a balanced position. There is no possible neutrality when it comes to either the auteur or his works. Being enthralled or repelled pretty mush summarizes the more common responses viewers muster at the end of his films. His surreal violent representations in a movie that otherwise purports to be an example of realism, create a schism in the cinematic experience. Viewers rush to make sense of schism morally and emotionally rather than aesthetically.

Tarantino may be many things, but he is foremost a rigorous (as well as overindulgent) cinematic aestheticist. For that reason, his films demand that spectators respond on that level first. The moral and emotional perspectives ought to and will inevitably follow, but they must surrender first place. His films, as does perhaps any piece of representative work, contain some of the parameters by which their very critique will be rendered. That said, we’d be grossly mistaken to file Tarantino as a filmmaker who privileges form or style over narrative and character development. Undoubtedly there are plenty of the two, but his movies are also propelled by sophisticated character substance and narrative flow.

Following Daneyian wisdom, his characters remain always an enigma, and part of materializing that enigma drives the movie satisfyingly away from its starting sequence–away to places of saturated senses and even meaning. Even though there is plenty that thematize and represent the absurd, Tarantino is no Becket: a great deal does happen in his films. Because of this trifecta (character, narrative, and cinematic style/form), one can be simultaneously marveled, troubled, and fully entertained by any one of his 7 movies.

With his last two movies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino has proven that his style is hardly merely stylistic bravado, self-indulgent bluff, or manipulative affectation. In fact, one could argue that the crimson dyed sequences of violence in which falling bodies multiply exponentially, represent the most accessible form of violence in his films. If films that regard themselves as dignified or sober portrayals of violence always aim for strictly measured realism, Tarantino’s take on the overtly violent shots, conversely, straddles with discipline between realism and myth, and thus situate such violence firmly in the realm of fictional representation. In other words, such scenes make their artificial character disruptively undeniable.

Either by the use of color, formal style, or basic content, the sequences of overt violence remind the audience that they are not what they pretend to be. And by doing so, these predictably and almost parodic scenes of violence lose their ability to shock, perplex, and ultimately fail to alter the way perception, inside and outside cinema, occurs. We may choose to cover our eyes, but that is precisely because such scenes of gruesome violence are meant to disorder the realm of the visible.

This failure to shock, however, remains in itself perplexing because if Tarantino’s entire filmography can assume comfortably any claim is that it shocks, perplexes, and ultimately does alter how perception unfolds and the realm of visibility is organized; that is, how one views the universe inside and outside cinema. As it was suggested already, however, to the extent that his films confront the inner and outer makeup of perception, they do so in ways other than the loud and excessive scenes of violence, in which blood flows, splashes, and squirts upward and downward, defying gravity.

In Film Fables, Rancière analyzes a diverse gamut of films and filmmakers that have left their footprint in the variegated tradition of cinema. Examining Fritz Lang’s transition from his earlier phase led by M to his later years working for large Hollywood production powerhouses, Rancière argues that a shake-up in the realm of visibility can be evinced. Rancière describes that Lang “replays the same story of the chase of a psychopathic killer at two different ages of the visible: the first in M, where maps and magnifying glasses, inventories and drag-nets trap the murderer and prosecute him in a theatrical court; the second in While the City Sleeps, where all these accessories have disappeared and been replaced by a machine of vision, the television that places Mobley ‘face to face’ with the murderer and transforms an imaginary capture into a weapon for a real capture” (18).

Following Rancière’s thoughts on Lang’s two films, I propose that Tarantino’s films allow us to grapple not only with cinema’s capacity to represent violence (to render it visible) but also with cinema as a constitutively violent medium. Future posts will explore how Tarantino’s films may think and figure cinema as a constitutively violent medium.

the cigarette as a cinematic object in hannah arendt

What do I mean by a cinematic object? I hope to muster a tentative answer in this post.

First, I would like to elaborate a few more thoughts about the aesthetic connection that I traced between thinking and dying in the previous post. To begin, it is important to highlight the term dwell, which Heidegger deploys to speak of language as the house of dwelling that relates person to Being. The idea of dwelling suggests a space in which or at which one can reside, spend time, continue to be or being. Could we say that language is where time becomes materialized or spatialized, and thus ceases to be pure negativity? The verb presupposes a spatial configuration that is repository-like, presenting a discernible depth, where the surface-level appearance of things is hardly the most defining aspect. It follows that his magnum opus Being and Time, could also be Being in Time, as Being cannot happen outside the duration or passing of Time. That is, one approaches the truth gradually by journeying through the layered distance of things and in the passing of time.

In both his books and lectures, Graham Harman reminds us that for Heidegger Being represents the start and end of philosophical thought. And “Letter on Humanism” affords us a glimpse into this paradigmatic view, which largely informed Heidegger’s philosophical work. Meaning does not lie on flat surfaces, but rather in that which withdraws from immediate perception. There are levels to things, including, of course, people. Think of his tool analysis, for instance, of which Harman offers an unconventional yet re-energized interpretation. Not all the features of a thing appear or become accessible to the perceiving individual. Harman’s treatment of Heidegger’s tool analysis takes it a step further to claim that the things hide qualities not only to the perceiving individual but also to other things, that is, not only to things (or beings) that bear consciousness. [I will continue to develop this paragraph in future posts.]

I view the cigarette in von Trotta’s film as a cinematic object insofar as the cigarette’s meaning in the many scenes in which it appears cannot be exhausted to operate as a unified, non-contradictory entity of signification. Cinematic objects do not simply amount to narratable signification. It is an object rather than a metaphor or even a figure because the role it is playing in each of the scenes as well as the film as a whole cannot be entirely deciphered or decodified. What the cigarette is in the film becomes decidedly inexhaustible. At the same time, in its varied cinematic articulations, the cigarette assembles aesthetic effects and impressions for the viewer.

Thus I propose that cinema does not express itself only or mainly through metaphors or figures that advance an intelligible narrative–of meaning or even lack thereof. Despite commonly held beliefs by those who produce cinema and those who consume it, films do not exist only to tell stories. Aesthetically speaking, cinema is composed of objects, cinematic objects that assemble a tenuous whole. In other words, I ask us to view cinema’s coming into being not just to represent some other or something other or to tell a story in an inevitably mimetic operation in which the film mimics or prefigures something outside the film.

thinking as dying in hannah arendt

In my last post I offered a quick and concise summary of Heidegger’s idea on thinking from his essay “Letter on Humanism.” I noted primarily his concern that philosophical thinking is defined, thought about in relation to scientific practice, always as a way to prove its legitimacy vis-a-vis the latter. Just as Plato and Aristotle viewed thinking as a techne, an operation that becomes action and deed, consequences of quantifiable, verifiable results. Heidegger, on the other hand, reminds us that thinking falls in between poeisis and praxis.

If von Trotta cinematically represents thinking in any particular way, it is far from rendering it scientific. Yes, there are several moments in the film in which Hannah Arendt and other characters discuss evidence and accuracy. We also see the countless piles of documents from the trial of Eichmann. They besiege her office space. With rigor, Hannah Arendt reviews the statements from the trial, as she begins to focus in the expanding gap between what Eichmann says and who he seems to be, and the colossal atrocities of his deeds. Arendt’s thoughts dwell in the gap, and her thoughts are produced to make some intelligible sense of that gap. Is the banality of evil the result of her dwelling in that seemingly irreconcilable gap? This is matter for another post.

The film also presents other several moments of thinking, of her lying, sitting or standing alone accompanied only by silence and a cigarette. On two occasions we see her lying on a divan in her UPW apartment. On the coffee table near the divan we see an ashtray for the lit cigarette that remains still yet gently burning between her two fingers. She looks calm, asleep if not in a state nearing or resembling death. Without being unnecessarily extended, the duration of the scene does make us wonder, albeit briefly, whether she is indeed asleep. Soon she placidly moves the right hand closer to her mouth to smoke the cigarette. Her eyes still shut, she inhales. She is very much awake. No, she is not asleep, let alone dead. She is thinking. And yet thinking happens almost as if she were performing no deed or action. Thinking happens as if life were inadvertently slipping away from her.

The other scenes in which Hannah Arendt is thinking, reflecting or contemplating show her sitting against the window of the house in upstate NY. Fixing her gaze on the glass, she smokes and thinks. Once again, nothing much seems to be happening, yet we know that Arendt is producing thoughts. These various scenes illustrate Heidegger’s idea on thinking:

“Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man. But all working or effecting lies in Being and is directed toward beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting.” Then, he concludes: “Thinking is engagement by Being for Being” (217-8).

It seems to me that von Trotta’s recreation of Hannah Arendt’s thinking moments dramatize Heidegger’s own ideas on thinking: thinking’s autonomous validity is perched on thinking itself as it connects  person to Being. It seems that for von Trotta thinking also bears the aesthetic of dying or death, a quietude of body and mind that nears the appearance of death itself. In other words, these scenes suggest that there is an actual loss that comes with thinking, a destruction of self. Only under such conditions of destruction, loss and death, can thinking connect person to Being.