Issue 6: Winter 2010
Exploring 'Different Directions'
Ari Neary
It was extremely timely programming on behalf of the Different Directions team, to stage a festival dedicated to women filmmakers. With women directors and video artists at the forefront of creativity on a worldwide scale- even in the USA, where Kelly Reichardt, Erin Dignam, Debra Granik, Nicole Holofcener et al. are among the most exciting figures of the little that remains of creative filmmaking there- it could hardly be a better time to take stock of the incredible contribution made by women to the inexhaustible richness of experimental film history.
Having been glued to my seat in the atmospheric venue of Nuns Island for the best part of three days, what impressed me most in the films selected was the sense in which an artist doesn't have to abnegate challenges of aesthetic form for the purposes of political content. The sheer variety and complexity of artistic strategizing on view facilitated intensely political investigations, in particular regarding perceptual issues relating to women's place in the world. The old Godardian trope is still as relevant as ever: if you make a political film you must make it politically.
The Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964)
The lesson of these films was that visual and perceptual standardization is the political problem of our age, and any challenge or resistance to contemporary power must first and foremost take place on this battleground, amidst the clichés that are promoted by the dominant culture.
Experimental film can involve experimentation with any or every element of the filmmaking process. For those who associate women filmmakers with chick-flicks and indulgent displays of emotion, Different Directions provided an incredible variety of practices and approaches to re-inventing the medium; for example, on the level of narrative form (Duras, Akerman), colour (Antonioni), text and image confrontation (Gisele and Luc Meichler) ritualized repetition (Carasco), even mise-en-scene (Carole Roussopoulos's S.C.U.M. Manifesto's masterly demonstration of what can be done with just a book, a typewriter and a TV), but there were also so many interconnections, resonances, internal arguments between the films. It's a commonplace but an accurate one in this context: the more films you attended, the more you got out of the festival. That the proliferation of images in every facet of life has profound effects on both women and men was, perhaps, emblematized in the image of a man who can't sustain the camera's gaze and cries at the end of Jackie Raynal's Deux Fois (1968). Even the words spoken by the disembodied female voice in India Song (1975) "I love you so much I can't see anymore, can't hear, can't live" took on a whole new meaning in the context of the other films screened.
The impression I had, confirmed by others I spoke to in the very convivial waiting area outside the screening room of Nuns Island, was of the uniqueness in this age of the 16mm experience and the way in which experimental films in particular tend to accentuate its singularity, heightening awareness of its imminent loss in the face of global digitization. I was struck several times over the weekend by the feeling that preserving this unique experience was a vital part of a more general drive in favor of difference against the ambient forces of cultural uniformity. As Daniel Fitzpatrick pointed out in his introduction to Presentation Sisters (2005), Tacita Dean's thematization of disappearance (of the way of life of nuns in a Cork convent) also refers to a concern for the disappearance of 16mm and the singular potentialities of the medium. The hope is that in these recessionary times when questioning the greed and hysteria produced by Techno-Capitalism is becoming an everyday occurrence, resisting Digital will come more and more into the reckoning as cultural activity becomes a means of, in Guy Debord's words, "the experimental construction of everyday life."
The curators took the decision to intersperse the programme with some studies by men of problems faced by women in society. The choice of Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) was inspired. The Italian's famous declaration 'we are sick with Eros', meaning we are caught up in destructive power-relations between the sexes, had, as Garin Dowd made explicit in his introduction, by the time of The Red Desert, become tied to the question of perception, in particular the perception of colour. It is the instability of colour which seems to move in time that causes psychological problems for Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti. As Deleuze said "Eros is sick..because caught in the pure and empty form of time." This makes sense of what Antonioni said to Rothko, whose work had influenced the colour scheme of the film: "Your paintings, like my films, are about nothing...with precision." Their focus isn't on narrative or theme, they are symptomatologies! Deleuze recommends that we look for symptoms in the Antonionian image, we should "treat variations of colour as symptoms". Deleuze borrowed the term chronochromie (the colour of time) from Olivier Messiaen to describe this temporal experience of colour.
Antonioni is often accused of opportunism whereas in fact he was always trying to capture the new experiences brought about by changing times and asking: What are we now at this moment in history? What's happening to us? When Giuliana in The Red Desert asks "what should I look at?" she reflects the problematising of perception as a (particular) problem for women which dominated the films at Different Directions, many of which served to diagnose what we are becoming here and now.
India Song (Duras, 1975)
The importance of seeking alternatives to linear narration and realistic representation was evident in the breaking down of figuration through stillness and tableaux vivants in Duras' India Song, the repetition of lateral movements through Parisian streets and gardens in her Les Mains Negatives (1978) and Césarée (1978), the birds-eye perspective of Gisèle and Luc Meichler's magnificent film about architecture and schizophrenia Allée des Signes (1976) and in Chantal Akerman's fluid moving-car shots through the New York streets in News from Home (1978). The Negative Hands on the cave-walls South of the Atlantic (discussed by Brigitte Le Juez in her introduction to the films of Duras and Varda) and the colour-stained walls of Pompeii and the land of the Tarahumaras in the work of Raymonde Carasco displayed an interest in the potential for beauty in transitory images of decaying matter on ancient rocks and walls. Again the influence of Rothko and other painters wasn't too far away.
Several of the newer filmmakers explore further Duras and Antonioni's interest in images that exist in-between movement and stasis, cinema and painting. Even the veteran Agnes Varda finds a supplementary dimension in an old photograph that no investigation of the circumstances in which it was made can account for.
Gradiva (Carasco, 1976)
Some viewers saw Straub/Huillet's film Too Early, Too Late (1982) as a simple documentary, lacking the artistic contribution made by the poetic and musical models that structure their other films (including The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach [1968] and A Trip to the Louvre [1990], also screened over the weekend). In response we might cite Nicole Brenez' beautiful, searing attack on this taken-for-grantedness of cinema's descriptive capacities: "what is the world worth if simply filming it is enough to denounce it?"
Johanna Vaude (in Samurai [2001] and Our Icarus [2002]) and Marylène Negro (in X+ [2010]) use found material in an effort to grasp the expression of thought through movement, constantly adjusting and alternating speeds and slownesses and adding multiple layers to critique the limited parameters of 'normal' perception. In her interview with Nicole Brenez (translated on the Different Directions website) Negro gives this mistrust of the contemporary perceptive regime an autobiographical spin: "I don't film what I see but what I've lived. Whenever I catch one of my films I don't see it as made up of images but of fragments from my life." Going beyond the representational function of images might be a pre-requisite to any serious combatting of the current regime of image-clichés and the impoverished idea of living and perceiving it offers - this was one of the many lessons of the wonderful films on offer at this year's Different Directions Experimental Film Festival.
Ari is a freelance writer living between Galway, Tokyo and Berlin.