workless_life

Notes on the making of a film about work and possibly against it.

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Heute würde niemand mehr – wie noch in den 50er Jahren VW oder Siemens – in einem Imagefilm Massen von Arbeitern zeigen, um damit zu illustrieren, wie viele Beschäftigte man hat. 2014 zeigt niemand Arbeiter oder Produktion, wenn dann computergeneriert. Fehlbare Menschen am Fließband gelten nicht als vertrauensfördernd.

Harun Farocki - http://www.taz.de/!143777/

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Documentaries without documentalism

Stories can be true to life without being true of life

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Jean-Pierre Gorin

<<How on earth did this Sorbonne-educated son of Jewish Trotskyites, onetime student of Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault, pre-1968 Marxist firebrand and partner in crime of Jean-Luc Godard wind up in Greater San Diego making these peculiarly all-American movies? Let’s just say that he followed his desire. “Many political people have self-conscious and proclaimed interests that they call revolutionary,” he explained to Danish filmmaker and critic Christian Braad Thomsen in a 1974Jump Cut interview. “But they also have unconscious interests that can be completely reactionary, even if they are linked to the revolutionary interests. There comes the point when I say: ‘Man, blow your mind, try to dig into your own unconscious, try to find where your investment and your interest is.’">>

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Le Diable, Probablement

It’s an existentialist horror movie, complete with zombielike cast and looming apocalypse, and in place of scare tactics, a brutal, breathtaking logic and concision. In an early scene at a church, the congregants discuss the role of reformed Catholicism in modern life in clipped, accusatory tones, while the taunting, dissonant sounds of an organ being cleaned adds to the cacophony. As Serge Daney put it: “There are no sides in the debate; everyone is against everyone else.” More than one philosophical conversation in the film unfolds in this way—in the most famous scene, a spontaneous Brechtian chorus on a city bus, likewise punctuated with a battery of mechanical whirs and clanks, climaxes with the utterance of the film’s title (in response to the question, “Who’s leading us by the nose?”) and the driver crashing into an unseen object. Indeed, the entire movie is built on a system of oppositions, refusals, denials. Bresson ushers Charles through a succession of potential sanctuaries—a political rally, a church, a lecture hall, a psychiatrist’s office, the beds of two devoted lovely young women—and each is found in some way wanting. Like a law of physics, the principle of negation is absolute, extending to Charles’s ultimate fate: a suicide that is also a murder, with the grim anti–punch line of a final epiphany that goes unexpressed—he’s shot in the back of the head, midsentence.

Beneath the desultory despair, it expresses something timeless about the power and the powerlessness of youth, its coiled energy and its raw-nerved capacity for sensation even when shrouded in an apathetic fog. 

From Dennis Lim's review of the Bresson film (1977) in Artforum: http://artforum.com/film/id=30749

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Godard - Masculin/Feminine (1966)

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On the statist/liberal democratic roots of documentalism

excerpts from a review of the book below in http://www.variant.org.uk/43texts/JorgeRibalta43.html

Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. (9780816642885)

The central chapters deal with the 1930s, the key period when documentary discourse was constituted according to technocratic-liberal New Deal policies. In claiming that Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary photography represented the “first and only true art form produced by social democracy” (61), Tagg follows the work of John Grierson, the recognised founder of the reformist documentary film movement in the late 1920s. The second chapter studies FSA and Griersonian discourse as constituting documentary photography as a specific cultural form for social “recruitment and mobilisation” within the specific historical conditions of the 1930s. The ethical contract between the citizen and the paternalistic State as a form of collective participation was based on an ethics of transparency and expressed in documentary tropes such as “truth,” “dignity of fact,” or the “innate decency of the ordinary”

the constitution of the documentary paradigm as an expression of New Deal policies. It is very important (and Tagg does this exceedingly well) to understand how documentary rhetoric has been historically built upon such notions of universalism and transparency, which are inherent not only to New Deal’s social democracy but to liberal representative democracy technologies for public address and communication.

Tagg illuminates the structural link between the documentary approach and the liberal democratic public sphere. But this important and necessary discourse is hardly new. Maren Stange’s, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and John Roberts’s The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) are two good examples of other theoretical photographic studies emerging from the New Art History approach that have traced that lineage before; we might also point to the work of artists like Martha Rosler or Allan Sekula, whose political readings of photographic modernism since the mid-1970s on many levels coincide with and precede those of Tagg.

it would be interesting to see Tagg’s brilliant scholarship applied to the American Photo League as part of the international worker-photography movement of the 1930s, which is the other (and still rather repressed) side of the 1930s documentary and political dilemmas. The Photo League constitutes a possible counter-model to FSA documentary, and it is part of the many successful attempts in the 1930s to constitute a proletarian public sphere.

One wonders to what extent Tagg’s theoretical framework simply does not allow him to study anything but hegemonic practices and discourses, or the ways in which the bourgeois State co-opts, “recruits and mobilises” rather than the deviations, ruptures, and moments of indeterminacy or resistance.

So, what if what is politically needed today is precisely what Tagg seeks to avoid – namely, “the reconstitution of a new archivism or of a new documentalism” (233)? What if, in other words, we need to reinvent some equivalent (but not identical) conditions of universality and transparency associated with the classic forms of New Deal documentary, precisely because the documentary social function continues to exist and operate publicly and hegemonically in spite of declarations from academia that it is obsolete? Documentary is everywhere today, since it is structurally linked to democratic discourse and to the ideological conditions of the liberal public sphere in which we live, as Tagg himself has worked to illuminate. That said, we also need to recognise that documentary practices will continue to exist as long as liberal democracy does. What do we do with that?

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the first and last scene from Daisies (1966)

"...dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle"

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Make Film Politically::Dmitry Vilensky (1964)

my highlights//see more here

01. Old Questions

[...] If we wish to continue the political project today we must first pose the old question: Who is the subject of historical development and knowledge? And we must actualize the simplicity of the old answer: the struggling, oppressed class itself (Benjamin).

Contemporary political art strives to be consonant with the search for this subject, not with the mythic subject of previous social revolutions. As in the mid-19th century, we are once again hard pressed to say what this subject will be like. [...] making film politically means striving towards a historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. The artist/filmmaker should discover himself in the process of becoming-”proletarian.” He should use his work to further the becoming-artist of the “proletariat,” via the participation of the masses in different forms of creativity. [...]

02. The Position of the Speaking Subject

The main difference between the art of cinema/video and progressive journalism is that the artist cannot naively affirm that he is giving someone else a voice. [...] The political film isn’t a film about politics. It is a film that problematizes the privilege of the speaking subject by revealing his social and class ties.

03. The Collective Nature of Filmmaking

Filmmaking is always a collective endeavor. [...]

04. Realism

Cinema and video are manifestations of the realist current in art history. The new technological and media forms of documentalism are the latest avatars of this line. They are heirs to the realistic tradition in art and cannot be understood without analyzing it. [...]

Documentalism helps us rethink the problem of mimesis that has plagued traditional art forms like theater and painting (this rethinking began with the Brecht-Lukács debate) and tackle the problem of authenticity at another level.

As Brecht proved so precisely then, authenticity has nothing to do with the “simple photographic reflection of reality.” Authenticity is based on the work’s construction, for even in the most “faithful” documentary film “there is no material that is free of organization.” [...]

05. In Search of the Typical

Realism becomes such when it depicts not the concrete and particular (which is the case in mainstream contemporary art, where identity politics is hegemonic in representation), but the typical. [...] It rejects the bourgeois fetishism of difference, choosing instead to reflect the similarity in situations of oppression, exclusion, and resistance.

06. The Problem of Form

[...] Paradoxically, we must learn to touch the viewer’s heart without entertaining him.

07. Teaching/Learning

The contemporary political film is a film that teaches. Whom does it teach? Principally open to everyone, it is addressed to those who already have the experience of political development and are looking for ways to grow further.

The task of political films (who said there can be only one film?) is not just documentation and agitation: this task we can leave to progressive journalism. If there is as yet no place for such films in the media, we can clear a path for them into culture. But let’s not confuse the political film with art. The role of these films, rather, is to show the complexity of political subjectivization. “Cultivating the political instinct” means revealing all the difficulties and pitfalls of the becoming-political. It doesn’t mean pretending that everything is simple and you have an answer to every question: we’ll leave this stance to the parties and trade unions. Brecht’s method of “teaching plays” is once again important. This method calls on us to refuse the media’s hierarchical and manipulative strategies. Instead, each time we strive to include collective, participatory practices in the film’s making and thus seek new ways to exit the dead ends of political life.

The political film isn’t simply a teaching film. It shows us the learning process itself.

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Get a Job, 1985

Get a Job by Brad Caslor, National Film Board of Canada

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Travesties (by Tom Stoppard)

"My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist, in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. [...] And besides, I couldn't be an artist anywhere - I can do none of the things by which is meant Art."

"Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does."

"But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art."

"I see I have made myself clear." 

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Tools

Lee Lozano - No Title (1964)

Lee Lozano - No Title (1963)

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From "Socialism & the Sea" (Allan Sekula Obituary)

Walter Benjamin claimed that in film ‘[d]iscontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence’. [...] Sekula once said that Fish Story ‘can be described as a hybrid, “paraliterary” revision of social documentary photography’, which sought to dissolve the relation between essay writing, the ‘poetics’ of sequential photographs and research in cultural, economic and social history. It is a marvellous description that applies to all of his works. For him, the revision of social documentary entailed channelling it through political modernism: Brecht and Benjamin; Vertov and Eisenstein; Godard, Marker, Straub-Huillet. The idea of ‘sequential montage’ is at the centre of his activity – this was his way of responding to Brecht’s suggestion that realism required active construction – while keeping his distance from the vogue for staged images. These pictures are not intended to be viewed as single images, but as carefully edited narrative sequences. His version of political modernism insisted on the cognitive character of the work of art, which had been central to Brecht, Benjamin and the Soviet avant-garde, rather than the idealist conception that dominated second-wave political modernism (where a disturbance in diegesis was thought capable of reconfiguring the Subject). Many of the artist-intellectuals of his generation turned to stylish evocations of desire, but Allan Sekula insists we must attend to capitalism and labour, to unequal power and space; to what a rethought documentary might tell us and show us about the everyday world. A new generation of artists and critics, who came to the fore after 1999, found him already ashore waiting for them.

From: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/socialism-and-the-sea

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From the archives: sanitation & maintenance art

Mierle Lademan Ukeles has been the artist in residence [resistance] at the NY Sanitation Department since the mid-70s. In '69 she wrote a Manifesto for Maintenance Art, cleaned art galleries, and told cleaners to stage their work as if they were artists. A woman on the edge of her time. 

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silly geography makes for silly movies

Thom Anderson's highly-watchable film essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, is at once an anti-dote to snotty platitudes commonly said about LA by the likes of Baudrillard or Woody Allen and a fantastic study on how movies work to foreclose emancipatory politics.

Below the opening lines of the essay:

This is the city: Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city. I know it’s not easy. The city is big. The image is small. Movies are vertical. At least when they’re projected on a screen. The city is horizontal, except for what we call downtown. Maybe that’s why the movies love downtown more than we do. If it isn’t the site of the action, they try to stick its high-rise towers in the back of the shot. But movies have some advantages over us. They can fly through the air. We must travel by land. They exist in space. We live and die in time. So why should I be generous? Of course, I know movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories. If we notice the location, we are not really watching the movie. It’s what’s up front that counts. Movies bury their traces, choosing for us what to watch, then moving on to something else. They do the work of our voluntary attention, and so we must suppress that faculty as we watch. Our involuntary attention must come to the fore. But what if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us? If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations. And what if suspense is just another alienation effect. Isn’t that what Hitchcock taught? For him, suspense was a means of enlivening his touristy travelogues. Then maybe I can find another way to animate this city symphony in reverse. Maybe this effort to see how movies depict Los Angeles may seem more than wrong-headed or mean-spirited.

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on cooperation

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Another way of telling... (by Jean Mohr)

ography

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Workers leaving the factory... and entering the museum

(Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break Installation)

It is quite curious that the first films ever made by Louis Lumière show workers leaving the factory. At the beginning of cinema, workers leave the industrial workplace. The invention of cinema thus symbolically marks the start of the exodus of workers from industrial modes of production. But even if they leave the factory building, it doesn’t mean that they have left labor behind. Rather, they take it along with them and disperse it into every sector of life.

A brilliant installation by Harun Farocki makes clear where the workers leaving the factory are headed. Farocki collected and installed different cinematic versions of Workers Leaving the Factory, from the original silent version(s) by Lumière to contemporary surveillance footage.11 Workers are streaming out of factories on several monitors simultaneously: from different eras and in different cinematic styles. But where are these workers streaming to? Into the art space, where the work is installed.

Not only is Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory, on the level of content, a wonderful archaeology of the (non)representation of labor; on the level of form it points to the spilling over of the factory into the art space. Workers who left the factory have ended up inside another one: the museum.

It might even be the same factory. Because the former Lumière factory, whose gates are portrayed in the original Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory is today just that: a museum of cinema. In 1995, the ruin of the former factory was declared a historical monument and developed into a site of culture. The Lumière factory, which used to produce photographic film, is today a cinema with a reception space to be rented by companies: “a location loaded with history and emotion for your brunches, cocktails and dinners.”14 The workers who left the factory in 1895 have today been recaptured on the screen of the cinema within the same space. They only left the factory to reemerge as a spectacle inside it.

As workers exit the factory, the space they enter is one of cinema and cultural industry, producing emotion and attention. How do its spectators look inside this new factory? 

[...]

It is obvious that the space of the factory is traditionally more or less invisible in public. Its visibility is policed, and surveillance produces a one-way gaze. Paradoxically, a museum is not so different. In a lucid 1972 interview Godard pointed out that, because filming is prohibited in factories, museums, and airports, effectively 80 percent of productive activity in France is rendered invisible: “The exploiter doesn’t show the exploitation to the exploited.” This still applies today, if for different reasons. Museums prohibit filming or charge exor- bitant shooting fees.19 Just as the work performed in the factory cannot be shown outside it, most of the works on display in a museum cannot be shown outside its walls. A paradoxical situation arises: a museum predicated on producing and marketing visibility can itself not be shown—the labor performed there is just as publicly invisible as that of any sausage factory. 

[...]

Without notice, the question of political cinema has been inverted. What began as a discus- sion of political cinema in the museum has turned into a question of cinematic politics in a factory. Traditionally, political cinema was meant to educate—it was an instrumental effort at “representation” in order to achieve its effects in “reality.” It was measured in terms of efficiency, of revolutionary revelation, of gains in consciousness, or as potential triggers of action.

Today, cinematic politics are post-representational. They do not educate the crowd, but produce it. They articulate the crowd in space and in time. They submerge it in partial invisibility and then orchestrate their dispersion, movement, and reconfiguration. They organize the crowd without preaching to it. They replace the gaze of the bourgeois sovereign spectator of the white cube with the incomplete, obscured, fractured, and overwhelmed vision of the spectator-as-laborer. 

[...] 

What else is desperately missing from the museum-as-factory? An exit. If the factory is everywhere, then there is no longer a gate by which to leave it—there is no way to escape relentless productivity. Political cinema could then become the screen through which people could leave the museum-as-social-factory. But on which screen could this exit take place? On the one that is currently missing, of course.

From Hito Steyerl's "Is the Museum a Factory?" The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg press, 2013.

http://indexofpotential.net/uploads/46385/Steyerl,%20Hito%20-%20The%20Wretched%20of%20the%20Screen.pdf