3. The Everyday
Practical exercises
Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take your time.
[…]
Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?
Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.
You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.
The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street.
[…]
People in a hurry. People going slowly. Parcels. Prudent people who’ve taken their macs. Dogs: they’re the only animals to be seen. You can’t see any birds — yet you know there are birds — and can’t hear them either. You might see a cat slip underneath a car, but it doesn’t happen.
Nothing is happening, in fact.
A Short History of the Everyday
Slow cinema’s structuring principle is time, but there is a further qualification to be made: the time of Slow cinema is the time of the everyday. The vexing temporal liminality of Slow films is compounded by the inherent indeterminacy of the quotidian. Physical and material, sublime and cosmic, the locus of repetition and change, the time of everydayness carries with it the frustrations and possibilities that lurk in the indeterminate. According to theorists of the everyday, the resistance to systematization in the uneventful creates an effect that cannot be folded neatly into either the distancing devices of modernism, or realist ‘fly-on-the-wall’ approaches. After a brief overview of the history of the everyday in theory and the arts, we will see how it makes an appearance in contemporary Slow films.
In 1947, Henri Lefebvre published the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life. Written just after the war, Critique was a call for regrouping: the rebuilding of a new life had to start at the basis, at the level of the everyday. When Lefebvre’s second Critique was published in 1961, the everyday as a field of interest had begun to gain momentum in the French intellectual and artistic world. Thinkers and artists alike, including Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Michel de Certeau, and Guy Debord, were being drawn to the everyday in the respective fields of structuralism, literature, history, anthropology, and art. This momentum was spurred by the socio-political character of the post-war development of capitalism. In the sixties, as a consequence of rapid modernization, the colonialist activity of France, now threatened by decolonization movements, had gradually turned inward to what Marxist intellectuals such as Lefebvre and Debord called the ‘colonisation of everyday Beginning of page[p. 163] life’.1 According to such analyses, the fragmentation and control of labour-time enacted by Fordism and Taylorism had become increasingly all-encompassing with the steady expansion of capitalism. The scrutiny and control of everyday life took the forms of bureaucracy, functionalism, and a burgeoning consumer society, effecting a ‘de-realization’, an abstraction of the everyday, which had become rationalized, measured in official documents and consumer products.2 Following Marx, Lefebvre saw the everyday as the locus of the alienation brought about by capitalism, ‘the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected’.3 At the same time, however, he pointed to its revolutionary potential: it is only through the everyday that the everyday can reclaim itself.4
Maurice Blanchot picks up on this ambiguity in The Infinite Conversation (1969). As opposed to Lefebvre, however, who identifies the everyday’s true potential in the resolution of its inherent ambiguities,5 Blanchot indicates that it is precisely the everyday’s radical indeterminacy which forms the locus of its revolutionary character. The everyday is the ordinary, the uneventful; it is insignificant, and consequently overlooked. In other words, the everyday eludes.6 It eludes also because it is without subject: it Beginning of page[p. 164] is the il y a, the ‘there is’, subjectless.7 Finally, it escapes because it is impossible to locate it without transforming it; ‘we cannot help but miss it if we seek it through knowledge.’8 In other words, the everyday contains an anarchic quality that has the destructive potential to undermine authority.
In the aftermath of this concerted reflection on everyday life, the preoccupation with the object of the everyday did not wane. On the contrary, as Stephen Johnstone noted around the time that Slow cinema emerged as a distinct tendency, contemporary art became saturated with references to everyday life so that it attained ‘the status of a global art-world touchstone’.9 From Annette Messager’s feminist investigations of the everyday object, Sophie Calle’s photographic project of problematizing the private/public function of everyday spaces, Gabriel Orozco’s reappropriations and transformations of the banal object, or Christoph Büchel’s subversive twists on everyday social space (Simply Botiful, 2006), to the particular strand of durational cinema examined in this book, the common underlying thread is that of a radical engagement with the quotidian.
Even so, this current in the arts has its own predecessors. Viewers had been asked to interrogate the nature of the quotidian long before Navin Rawanchaikul started putting his works in taxis (Navin Gallery Bangkok, 1995–98), and even long before Allen Ruppersberg asked us to ‘collect, accumulate, gather, preserve, examine, catalogue, Beginning of page[p. 165][…] and conserve the ephemeral’.10 Around the same time that Yoko Ono urged us to ‘step in all the puddles in the city’ (Grapefruit, 1964) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles published the Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969),11 the Oulipo literary group, and Georges Perec in particular, were forcing upon us the question, as Paul Virilio puts it, ‘What happens when nothing happens?’12 Even earlier, the Lettrists, later the Situationists, had shifted the emphasis of art from the museum object to the provisory nature of lived experience. They were preceded, in turn, by the Surrealist focus on experience and everyday objects, and the 1930s British Mass Observation movement. This inverse genealogy points to the breadth and depth of the preoccupation with everyday life in the twentieth century. Why this continuing engagement with ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual’?13 Equally importantly, how does one go about engaging with such elusive subject matter? In Perec’s words, ‘how are we to speak of these common things, […] how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, of what we are’?14Beginning of page[p. 166]
One possible answer, which has taken myriad forms over the centuries, lies in the struggle of the arts to faithfully represent reality. ‘If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology’, as Bazin famously said, ‘then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, realism.’15 This is the familiar journey from Bazin’s Egyptian terracotta statuettes,16 to the invention of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy, and on to the Impressionists and the experiments of twentieth-century art. The turn to the everyday might be seen to have a similar agenda at its heart: the aspiration to record reality at its most basic. As we have seen, some have interpreted Slow cinema’s focus on the everyday humdrum through this lens.17
Another point of entry to the preoccupation with everyday life in the arts can be found in the reaction to the idea of the spectacular. Rather than foregrounding the dramatic, or, inversely, spectacularizing the ordinary — ‘offering up to it its own spectacle’, as Lefebvre puts it, as in soap operas and psychological dramas — the turn to the everyday can be seen as an impulse to showcase a level of experience that falls beyond rigid formulation, that eludes categorization and subverts the hierarchies of Beginning of page[p. 167] individuality and progress. There is, contemporary artists appear to say, a transformative energy in the ordinariness of the mundane. The ethico-political resonance at stake in this claim is unmistakable. The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco describes the ‘practice of transforming the objects and situations in which we live everyday [as] a way of transforming the passage of time and the way we assimilate the economics and politics of the instruments of living’. Orozco underlines that this practice has become ‘a recurrent tool for many contemporary artists all over the world’, a proliferation that proves its political power: individuals can reclaim their own everyday reality and, ‘with simple means, make these altered objects the materials and tools of our revolutionary mornings’.18
This turn of the arts towards practice was accompanied by what Alain Badiou calls the ‘philosophical moment’ of post-war French thought, which took philosophy out of the academy and into circulation in daily life. This moment did much to ‘abandon the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and to demonstrate that knowledge itself, even scientific knowledge, is actually a practice’.19 As we have seen, the vitalist project of Bergson survived through Deleuze, whose philosophy works to undo the hegemony of the well-defined subject and to champion becoming and difference. Blanchot, prefiguring Deleuze, similarly spoke of the everyday as a process of perpetual becoming, and of repetition as endless Beginning of page[p. 168] difference.20 In the twenty-first century, the Deleuzian impulse survives in Jacques Rancière’s ‘dissensus’, which similarly foregrounds the political importance of practices that elude the official. Rancière sees Béla Tarr’s distended, flat temporalities and his focus on mundane, repetitive activities as effecting a politically loaded undermining of the logic of cause–effect and teleology in cinema. The elusiveness that accompanies the everyday is, in fact, its most significant and fascinating attribute. Even within a capitalist appropriation of the quotidian, as Lefebvre points out, where ‘exceptional activities’ — the political superstructures — create or impose ‘feelings, ideas, lifestyles and pleasures’ on the everyday, it is nonetheless within the everyday itself that they have to be confirmed, where the changes that take place ‘“somewhere else”, in the “higher realms”’, have to be measured and embodied.21 As we will see, it is the uncategorizable residue of the realm of the ordinary, a nature that escapes the totalities of history and culture, which, for many, makes it the locus of political change.
The Elusive Nature of the Everyday
The various and, at times, contradictory attempts to engage with the ordinary showcase the difficulty in capturing a realm that is often approached as inherently elusive. The indeterminacy of the field is one of the main issues that Lefebvre attempts to tackle in his Critique of Everyday Life: ‘There are as many everyday lives as there are places, people and ways of life. […] In fact, what do the words mean?’22 In Beginning of page[p. 169] the second volume of his Critique, he proposes something of a definition:
Let us use our thought and imagination to exclude specialized activities from praxis. If this abstraction is successful, it will rid practical experience of discreet occupations like the use of such and such a technique or implement (but not, of course, in physical terms of effort, time consumed, rhythm or absence of rhythm). What are we left with?
Nothing (or virtually nothing), say the positivists, scientists, technologues and technocrats, structuralists, culturalists, etc.
Everything, say the metaphysicians, who would consider that this abstraction or analytic operation scarcely attains the ‘ontic’ and is still far removed from the ‘ontological’, i.e., it fails to grasp the foundation, being (or nothingness).
Something, we will say, which is not easy to define, precisely since this ‘something’ is not a thing, nor a precise activity with determined outlines. So what is it? A mixture of nature and culture, the historical and the lived, the individual and the social, the real and the unreal, a place of transitions, of meetings, interactions and conflicts, in short a level of reality.23
The definition seems to capture some fundamental quality of a concept that by nature escapes us. In fact, the everyday is not a plane in which concrete dialectical movements can be observed — ‘need and desire, pleasure and absence of pleasure […] work and non-work’24 — but is rather, following Blanchot, a region where determinations such as true and false, yes and no, do not apply, ‘it being always Beginning of page[p. 170] before what affirms it and yet incessantly reconstituting itself beyond all that negates it’.25 Despite this resistance to dualism, Blanchot manages to verbalize a succinct definition of the everyday without betraying the indeterminacy of his subject: ‘the everyday is without event’;26 or even, ‘Nothing happens; this is the everyday.’27
In order to elaborate his definition of the eventlessness of the everyday, Blanchot compares it to the dramatization effected in the news item: ‘in the everyday, everything is everyday; in the newspaper everything is strange, sublime, abominable. […] In the newspaper everything is announced.’28 How does this transposition onto a medium enable the modification of the everyday? ‘Newspapers, incapable of seizing the insignificance of the everyday, are able to render its value apprehensible only by declaring it sensational’, says Blanchot.29 The translation that occurs, according to Blanchot, modifies everything. This has consequences for the possibilities of treating the everyday directly in any way — artistic, philosophical, sociological — because the everyday is lived, yes, but how is it accessed? To attempt to define the everyday is to alter it. What is required, Lefebvre therefore posits, is ‘an interdisciplinary openness, a willingness to blur creatively the traditional research methods and protocols of disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology’.30
The representation of the everyday thus might always entail a paradox, but perhaps that paradox can be generative Beginning of page[p. 171] of a transformative power. There are utopian political overtones implicit in this aspiration to engage fully with such an open-ended, inexhaustible realm: ‘Is not the everyday, then, a utopia,’ says Blanchot, ‘the myth of an existence bereft of myth?’31 The project of fully attending to everyday life in contemporary art might be an impossible aspiration. Yet by showcasing what is the elusive but common ground of human experience, one is faced with the alienation of everyday life while, at the same time, one becomes privy to the crevices through which the everyday may incite its own transformation, just as, for Deleuze, the face can be both the locus of alienation and the seed of its own liberation from individuation.
The everyday inhabits ambiguity and indeterminacy; it is visible in practices, but impossible to intellectualize; it is repetitive, but not same; for these reasons, which we will now look at one by one in relation to durational cinema, a focus on the everyday can throw into crisis some of the founding ideas of modernity and capitalism.
The Everyday and Contemporary Cinema
How does this long tradition of attempting to engage with everyday life survive into twenty-first century cinema? Ben Highmore suggests, echoing Lefebvre, that any discourse seems inadequate for the representation of the everyday. At the same time, there are forms of representation that are ‘more adequate’ than others.32 But an ‘appropriate’ form of representation, if it existed, would make the everyday visible in such a way as to rationalize it. As Highmore puts Beginning of page[p. 172] it, in fact, ‘the everyday may profit from the attention of purposefully inappropriate forms of representation. Or rather, the everyday might be more productively glimpsed if the propriety of discourses is refused’ altogether.33 Slow cinema makes no investigative or archival claim to the representation of the everyday. It operates on the basis of three principles that allow a durational representation of quotidian activities to come close to it without betraying it: uneventfulness, repetition, and indeterminacy.
Georg Lukács famously qualified everyday life as a ‘chiaroscuro’, an undulation between utter boredom and momentary epiphany. Lefebvre and, after him, Blanchot criticize Lukács for failing to see that the everyday takes place in ordinariness, and not in the rhythmic oscillation between the mundane and the dramatic. ‘The ordinariness of each day is not in contrast to something extraordinary’, Lefebvre points out; ‘it is not an “empty time” that awaits the “extraordinary moment”.’34 Deleuze will echo Lefebvre in his discussion of Ozu’s simple stories of Japanese family life, where, he proclaims, ‘everything is ordinary and regular, everything is everyday!’.35 In cinema, Deleuze says, ‘daily life allows only weak sensory-motor connections to survive, and replaces the action-image by pure optical and sound images.’36 These ‘opsigns’ and ‘sonsigns’ are often allowed to emerge in everyday banality, according to Deleuze, dissolving the sensory-motor links of the action-image and the movement-image, and revealing, instead, direct images of time.37 Ozu’s films treat subjects that Beginning of page[p. 173] are ordinary: a father and daughter (Late Spring, 1949), a mother and daughter (Late Autumn, 1960), an elderly couple and their grown children (Tokyo Story, 1953). In the particular strand of Slow cinema under discussion here, stories are similarly simple: the everyday life of Vanda and her family in No quarto da Vanda; the daily routines of an Italian goatherd in Le quattro volte; the work and leisure time of an Argentinian lumberjack in La libertad; a journey in Honor de cavalleria and El cant dels ocells; neighbourhood life in Mafrouza. The dramatic event is weakened or eliminated, and replaced by an all-encompassing everyday.38 The uneventful everyday resides in an informal space that is different to the space of the event, and thus comes into tension with certain understandings of history and formal elucidation. Instead, its historicity is, as Sheringham puts it, ‘embodied, shared, and ever-changing’.39 Slow cinema’s resistance to teleological narrative, which is replaced not so much with non-linearity as with un-linearity, an indifference to linearity, also puts it in tension with the programme of time-as-progress.
The uneventfulness of daily routine can be seen as stale, crushing repetition. In Tarr and Hranitzky’s A torinói ló, we see a father and daughter perform, day after day, the most basic gestures of subsistence. They get dressed, they eat, they get undressed, they sleep, until life seems like it might be no longer possible. For the spectator, the weight of their everydayness feels punishing, whether it leads to frustration or to boredom. Even so, as Alice Kaplan Beginning of page[p. 174] and Kristin Ross have suggested, it is ‘in the most banal and repetitive gestures of everyday life […], in the space where the dominant relations of production are tirelessly and relentlessly reproduced, that we must look for utopian and political aspirations to crystallize’.40 Feminist theorists’ engagements with the everyday — Dorothy Smith’s sociology of power relations in the mundane, the Wages for Housework manifesto on social reproduction as indispensable for capital accumulation, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, which sees the social construction of gender as based on the sedimentation of learned habit41 — have been crucial in demonstrating that everyday life is both ‘the most authentic and the most inauthentic’ level of reality,42 the space of ‘what we are, first of all, and most often’, as Blanchot puts it, but also where patriarchal norms are created and maintained.43
At once the locus of alienation and the locus of change, the everyday is repetitious but it is not static. Lefebvre asserts that ‘the days follow one after another and resemble one another, and yet — here lies the contradiction at Beginning of page[p. 175] the heart of everydayness — everything changes’.44 In this sense, Slow cinema brings the spectator face to face with the most universal and yet most personal type of experience, offering up the un-spectacle of everyday life. In Tarr and Hranitzky, it confronts one with the stagnating temporality and repetition of everydayness; in Costa, as we will see shortly, it points to the crevices that allow for political thought and action in the daily experiences of the Portuguese subproletariat; in Serra, it subverts the magnificence of great narratives by re-embedding them in the distended temporality of everyday uneventfulness; in Frammartino, it expands the terms of the everyday to include all elements of organic and inorganic life; in Demoris, it becomes an instrument of deferral against epistemological violence. In this view, Slow cinema becomes a platform for rethinking the possibilities of the most shared of human experiences.
The contradiction inherent in the double nature of repetition-as-change points to the third and most central of the characteristics of the everyday. For Blanchot, the repetitious and mundane everyday is still also the perpetual present moment, ‘alive with the force of lived but uncategorizable experience’, as Sheringham puts it.45 Nowhere is its elusiveness more apparent than in the impossibility of intellectualizing it, as we saw earlier. The everyday dissolves under systematic theoretical scrutiny. Practice, on the other hand, can tap into the everyday more successfully, because the everyday is practice. In Slow cinema, the long duration of unedited sequence shots, making ‘dead time’ into all the time there is, flags up the indeterminacy of the everyday scenes we are watching. What are we meant to look at? Often there is no dialogue to provide semantic Beginning of page[p. 176] anchoring. In Serra and Frammartino, speech becomes part of the buzz of existence. The unspecific chatter of dailyness, ‘the soft buzz of daily speech flowing in and around us, requiring no conscious effort at formulation’, Sheringham says, ‘epitomizes the ontology of the everyday’.46 Undefined and undefinable, indeterminate and overlooked, the everyday becomes a field of radical possibility and difference. How can we trace all of this in a film like Serra’s El cant dels ocells?
Albert Serra’s El cant dels ocells
Serra’s El cant dels ocells (Birdsong) (2008), shot on HD video, portrays the story of the Magi’s pilgrimage to the city of Bethlehem. This is the moment of the birth of Christianity. Before the legitimization of the Messiah implicit in the act of the adoration, by which the journey acquires significance post factum, there is not much more to this story other than the long hike of three old men trudging through the desert. The film takes place in this narrative vacuum before the event that will transform it into ‘the greatest story ever told’. In Serra’s own words:
We are talking about three men. Christianity has not been born yet. All of the ideology, what Jesus means, we added later. We’re talking about the pioneers. Just three men who probably feel stupid, you know? They don’t know why they are going to see this child, or where they’re going, or how long it will take. They’re following a star to find a small child in order to adore him. There is something absurd here, something profane, because Christianity doesn’t yet exist.47Beginning of page[p. 177]
Like Serra’s previous feature, Honor de cavalleria, El cant takes as its starting point a seminal narrative only to subsequently strip it of its dramatic content, turning it instead into an account of physical endurance and mundanity. We see the men plodding along an infinite expanse of land for an hour and a half, awkwardly striving to handle the heat and wind in their evidently uncomfortable robes. El cant is asking what happens to ‘the greatest story ever told’ if you take away the story.
This de-dramatization is effected through a number of stylistic choices. The use of non-professional actors — Banyoles locals — echoes Neorealist aesthetics and Bressonian methods, discussed in the previous chapter. But contrary to both, Serra does not give his actors any sort of script, thus distancing himself from Neorealism, nor does he prepare them in any way, contrary to Bresson’s exhausting ‘model’ technique.48 Rather, there is a desire to observe the three men as they do the most unspectacular things, like bicker about how uncomfortable they are whilst sitting in the shade of a bush. For a while they lie silent as the camera, framing them from a high angle that foreshortens their bodies, registers the play of sunlight on their white robes. They look cramped, the spindly older Lluís (Lluís Carbó) squeezed between the thicket and the two bigger men. Exasperated, he eventually turns to the young Lluís Serrat. ‘Could you please lean a bit more on your father’s side? You’re always on top of me.’ ‘You’re on top of me!’ Lluís Serrat replies. ‘It’s comfortable for you.’ ‘Yes, very,’ he replies Beginning of page[p. 178] sarcastically, ‘with my head like this!’ The third Lluís (Lluís Serrat Batlle), sprawled out next to them, slowly turns his head around: ‘Are you not comfortable?’ (Fig. 3.1).
The linguistic exchange does nothing to forward the narrative. The dialogue thus becomes another thing that is, rather than something that signifies. As Serra himself says,
the dialogue is there, but because it doesn’t contain any dramatic information related to the film’s subject, it is there just as the landscape and the actors are there, simply because they are and not to advance the film or develop its subject.49Beginning of page[p. 179]
Like the ‘soft human murmur’ that constitutes idle chatter for Blanchot and Lefebvre, the interactions of the Three Wise Men fall in and out of our consciousness, sometimes audible, sometimes indistinguishable. This semantic indeterminacy brings us closer to a direct contact with the everyday, which, as Sheringham remarks, is a level of experience we can encounter ‘at the fringes of consciousness’.50
Importantly, another level of indeterminacy makes itself available here. When the old Lluís asks the younger one to roll over to his father’s side, this pro-filmic slippage — unlike the characters, the actors are, in fact, father and son — underlines the indifferent oscillation between reality and fiction, an irreverence that constitutes the heart of the film. This is not held up as an anti-illusionist banner, as in Godard’s protagonists addressing the camera, or the camera addressing us (Le Mépris (Contempt), 1963; 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), 1967), nor is it the premise of an investigation, as in Jean Rouch (Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 1961). In other words, the slippage to the real acts as a guarantee that the character is neither real nor fictional.
One may object that the strong narrative backbone of the story of the Three Wise Men offends the resistance to narrativity that Serra and others promulgate. Serra does not only pick stories to tell cinematically, but selects some of the most celebrated and deeply embedded narratives in Western Christianity. Yet it is precisely the operation of choosing a narrative starting point that strongly resonates with the experiences of many audiences that makes the displacement onto the quotidian compelling. To how many has it ever occurred that the Magi must have suffered the Beginning of page[p. 180] heat, that they might have had mindless chats under the shade of a sagebrush, or been endlessly bored on their long journey in search of the Messiah? Serra states he wished to consider what that journey must have been like ‘as it was happening’, rather than as a narratively necessary but uninteresting prerequisite for the legitimization of Jesus as the Son of God, through the symbolic offering of gifts. The film disables the narrative significance of the pilgrimage, displacing its destination as the focus of narrative attention and reinstating physicality in the story of the Magi. The encounter between a seminal religious tale and its unspectacular, de-dramatized account recalls Blanchot’s paradoxical proclamation: the utopian aspiration to an existence without myth.
As the film is situated chronologically in the final moments of the pre-Christian world, it adopts an appropriately pre-Christian, immanent sense of spirituality, one in which the weight of human existence is still palpable, as the promise of salvation and a spiritual afterlife has yet to be made. A whitewashed, extreme long shot of the Magi in a sublime landscape, an infinite expanse of white that seems neither earth nor sky, is majestic, metaphysical. But the direct sound, registering the humming of idle chit-chat, and the awkward, directionless masses of the three men, stumbling and stooping, snatches that transcendence and plants it back into the everyday (Fig. 3.2).
Fortifying this sense of de-dramatization, whilst still allowing the duality of materiality and spiritualism to emerge, is the conscious abandonment of perspective, in terms both spatial and psychological. Serra’s frontal compositions, combined with images steeped in the sunlight that bounces off the sandy expanse, and the idiosyncrasies of the desert landscape, almost obliterate any depth of field, lending the film a flatness akin to that of medieval religious Beginning of page[p. 181] icons. To quote Serra: ‘There’s no perspective on any dramatic or visual level. There is no spatial or psychological volume. Like a medieval reredos.’51 A sense of obscurity and semantic ambiguity is thus foregrounded in the film. Lacking conventional action and psychological depth, it rather engages itself with the details of the everyday in their full duration. Never is this more poignant than in the almost nine-minute-long fixed-camera sequence shot on the sand-hills. For nearly five minutes, we watch the three men simply walk into the distance. Their walk is equal parts assertiveness and disorientation, but we grasp the general direction of their path. Once the three tiny dots Beginning of page[p. 182] have disappeared behind the sand-hill, we retrospectively systematize the shot (‘this is a shot about walking from A to B’). But the cut does not come, and seconds later we see the little dots reappear on the horizon. Now their motions have become simply haphazard. They walk in different directions, stop, reappraise, walk the other way. The cut comes unsolicited, in the middle of this pointless exercise.
Here, the lessons from cinematic modernism are evident, in the suspicious attitude toward classical narrative, the favouring of ambiguity, and the roaming attitude, all bringing with them echoes of Antonioni’s drifting characters. At the same time, the film’s departure from that legacy is clear. Serra’s camera roams just like the characters it observes, without making claims to meaning or the search for meaning, be it connotative, symbolic, allegoric, or didactic. It rather lets us look at the image unrestrained by any obligation to interpret it, either as a rationally structured network of narrative signification, or as a conceptual experiment. It is ambiguous, but it does not ask us to conceptualize this ambiguity. Unlike the ‘walking’ tradition of modernist films such as Theo Angelopoulos’s To vlemma tou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze) (1995), for instance, it is not steeped in references and reflexivity. In Angelopoulos’s film, the two men walking down an empty street in Belgrade in many ways prefigure the meandering walks of the men in El cant or Honor. The long take in To vlemma similarly features an elegantly slow back tracking shot which observes the men unflinchingly for a long time. But the theatrical acting, poetic speech, and overstated allusions to a wide range of political, social, cultural, and specifically cinematic figures distance it definitively from its Slow progeny: ‘Let’s drink to the sea, to the inexhaustible sea, the beginning and the end’, says A, the Greek-American film director on a quest to find the first Beginning of page[p. 183] film made in Greece. ‘To Charlie Mingus, to Tsitsanis, to Kavafis, to Che Guevara, to May of ’68, to Santorini’, the friend, a war journalist, continues. A picks up again: ‘To Murnau, to Dreyer, to Welles.’ ‘To the three reels you are looking for, to Eisenstein — did we love that guy?’ ‘We loved him, but he didn’t love us!’
Angelopoulos’s unique work on the intersections of cinema and history aside, Serra’s cinema also stands at a distance from that of other obvious relatives, such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. In films based on works by eminent Italian literary figures, such as Cesare Pavese (Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Clouds to the Resistance), 1979) and Elio Vittorini (Sicilia! (Sicily!), 1998), the text remains central, delivered in long dialogue or monologue scenes in the ‘non-psychological’ acting style that is a signature of Straub and Huillet’s work. Contrastingly, Serra’s film empties out the original texts and is organized, instead, around the principle of the ordinary, that which ‘becomes remaindered after rationalist thought has tried to exhaust the world of meaning’, as Highmore describes.52 What holds the film together is perhaps most succinctly put by one of the Magi near the beginning of the film: ‘Sometimes we are awestruck by the beauty of things’, and, if I may complement this remark with another by Paul Virilio, ‘things that are hidden not in the obscure, but in the obvious’.53 If the everyday is without event, Serra successfully displaces what for many is the most significant event of all time and upholds that which is hidden because it is obvious — the everyday which exists below the threshold of the noticed.Beginning of page[p. 184]
The King introduces an interesting juxtaposition in his remark: mundane, material objects on the one hand, and the expression of awe, or sublimity, on the other. Perhaps, for Serra at least, the project of bringing the everyday to the screen goes beyond the political and into the affective — can the quotidian, ‘sometimes’, be sublime? Is this a contradiction in terms? And if such a relationship can be established, does it undermine the politics of representation of everydayness in art cinema?
Cinema of the Everyday — Sublime of the Now
There are two ways of thinking about the sublime in Albert Serra’s El cant. The first is in the promise of infinity and grandeur of the Spanish and Icelandic landscapes where the film was shot, both when dominating the screen as well as when they are seen in juxtaposition with the minuscule figures of the Kings inefficiently confronting the overpowering forces of nature. The wind, forcefully present on the soundtrack, and implied in the rapid movement of the clouds that constantly rearrange the distribution of light on the swooping sand-hills, does what it will with the three men’s robes, which flutter in all directions. This is Kant’s sublime, found in the natural world in things that are without end, like mountains or the sea, expressed as the imagination’s failure to conceive of such things, due to their large scale (Fig. 3.3).54
According to Kant, the inability of the imagination — the human tool for sensory apprehension — to conceive of Beginning of page[p. 185] materially present entities awakens ‘the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us’.55 The sublime feeling thus stems from the satisfaction in the acknowledgement by reason of the inadequacy of the imagination. In El cant, a static shot shows a raging sea, its dark waves bursting screen left, whilst, in the top half of the arrangement, the white clouds rush to the right. A large backlit rock sits unimpressed in the centre of the composition. The next few shots venture inside the waters. The soundtrack suddenly drops out as we switch elements. Now we follow the three men’s bodies as they clumsily swim around. The camera looks up at them from an unflattering angle, and the water distorts their Beginning of page[p. 186] bodies further. The juxtaposition between the majestically steady rock in the earlier fixed shot and the three bodies flailing about haphazardly invokes a feeling of inadequacy of the human when confronted with nature. It points to a revisiting of the sublimity of the previous scene with the added acknowledgement of the incapacity of the human to envisage the magnitude of the sea and the strength of the rock (Fig. 3.4).
There is, however, another way in which Serra’s film relates to the sublime, not in its Kantian sense, but through the idea of indeterminacy that stems from the dilution of narrative time and focus on the quotidian. To account for this, we must appeal to a model of the sublime that is formulated in temporal terms, embedded in the here and Beginning of page[p. 187] now of the everyday, thus departing from the distantiating other of the Kantian sublime.
In ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Jean-François Lyotard identifies the sublime as the mode that takes us from classicism to romanticism or modernity, from poetics or rhetoric to aesthetics, from a didactic approach to art criticism to a descriptive one. The sublime, for Lyotard, thus displaces the fundamental questions we ask about art. The question is no longer ‘How does one make a work of art?’ but ‘What is it to experience an affect proper to art?’.56 One of the main attributes of the sublime, according to Lyotard, is that of indeterminacy. ‘With the advent of the aesthetics of the sublime,’ he says, ‘the stake of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be the witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy.’57 Following Edmund Burke, Lyotard posits that this indeterminacy is rooted in a fear of pain stemming from anxiety at the prospect of nothing happening. The pleasure of the sublime moment comes from the removal of that fear through the opening of a possibility of something taking place. Silence and stillness, for example, are terrifying because they promise the end of language or life. The promise, on the other hand, that something might still happen undoes the terror of the end, thus generating the sublime feeling. In Lyotard’s own words:
Delight, or the negative pleasure which in contradictory, almost neurotic fashion, characterizes the feeling of the sublime, arises from the removal of the threat of pain. Certain ‘objects’ and certain ‘sensations’ are pregnant with a threat to our self-preservation,Beginning of page[p. 188] and Burke refers to that threat as terror: shadows, solitude, silence and the approach of death may be ‘terrible’ in that they announce that the gaze, the other, language or life will soon be extinguished. One feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place. What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take ‘place’ and will announce that everything is not over. That place is mere ‘here’, the most minimal occurrence.58
It becomes obvious that Lyotard’s sublime differs from Kant’s in its temporality. Lyotard argues for a sublime of the present, of the ‘here and now’.59 The idea is appealing. Traditionally, the concept of the sublime is understood as something that is elsewhere, but Lyotard’s sublime tricks consciousness in a different manner to Kant’s. He uses the artist Barnett Newman’s work to qualify this difference. In his paintings, Newman is not concerned with a ‘manipulation of space nor with the image, but with a sensation of time’. Newman ‘did not mean time laden with feelings of nostalgia, or drama, or references and history’,60 but with the now. How does one define ‘now’, then?
According to Lyotard, now is not the present instance, which has constituted ‘one of the temporal “ecstasies” that has been analyzed since Augustine’s day and particularly since Edmund Husserl, according to a line of thought that has attempted to constitute time on the basis of consciousness’. Instead, Newman’s now is ‘a stranger to consciousness’; it is ‘what dismantles consciousness’.61 This now is a pre-perceptual one which lodges itself before the moment Beginning of page[p. 189] of apprehension, outwitting consciousness.62 This is because, according to Lyotard, the occurrence precedes the elaboration on the meaning of the occurrence: ‘it happens’ precedes ‘the question pertaining to what happens’, and both are preceded by the ‘is it happening […] ?’63 Newman’s art revels in this indeterminacy, this question that is really just a question mark: ‘the possibility of nothing happening’.64 In doing so, his art takes the place of the event that holds this possibility in suspense. ‘Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing,’ Lyotard says, ‘and that’s what is sublime.’65 Through this indeterminacy, avant-garde art acquires, for Lyotard, a political dimension. In hypercapitalism, he contends, ‘the distribution of information is becoming the only criterion of social importance’.66 Yet, information ceases to be such as soon as it is transmitted, ‘as soon as it […] has been fed into the memory machine’.67 Thus ‘the duration of time it occupies is, so to speak, instantaneous’, so that ‘between two informations, by definition, nothing happens’.68 In cinema, the cut appears as the ‘nothing happens’ between clusters of information, an interval of vacuity organizing moments of semantic plenitude into commensurable relations (Deleuze’s movement-image, or what Tarr has called ‘information–cut, information–cut’).69 On the other hand,Beginning of page[p. 190] the cut can also be ‘irrational’, refusing to arrange relations logically. In the time-image, the cut can create incommensurable relations between shots, and expand, even, to the point of overwhelming all other images: the black screen or white screen can become a variation of the irrational cut, thus acting as an interval in which time asserts its autonomy.70 The replacement of the seriality of information with the reign of the interval, the ‘nothing happens’, becomes a politically marked gesture.
This political nuance becomes clear in the distinction Lyotard makes between artistic innovation and the avant-garde. Innovation, in the context of capitalism, ‘means to behave as though any number of things could happen, and it means taking action to make them happen’.71 This will is a forward-moving one which, in affirming itself, ‘affirms its hegemony over time’, thus also conforming to the metaphysics of capital. In other words, the logic of innovation is incompatible with Lyotard’s sublime. Its now clashes with the teleological temporality of capitalism, geared towards the future and the new: whilst ‘innovation “advances”’, the indeterminacy of the ‘is it happening? arrests’.72 We should not confuse the lack of forward movement, however, with a complacent stasis. Just as with the everyday, whose indeterminate nature, ‘its dangerous fluidity and non-alignment, make it a reservoir of dissident political energy’,73 the ambiguous tension of the sublime of the now in avant-garde art represents a ‘stationary movement’ between the nothing happens and the something is always happening that flaunts the affirmative narrative of capitalism.Beginning of page[p. 191]
Can we use this reasoning to approach a film like Serra’s El cant, or Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad (Freedom)? The Mexican director’s day-in-the-life feature about a lumberjack, for example, has all the ingredients of film: image, sound, story, dialogue, camera movement, montage, occasionally even continuity editing techniques. What it lacks is the cinematic equivalent of capitalism’s forward-moving referent. The film frustrates spectators, who again and again pose to themselves the question ‘what happens next?’, until the question becomes ‘what happens?’, and then, happily, ‘is it happening?’. The first question is that of the spectator trained in conventional narrative continuity, but also of the human in fear of the ‘nothing happens’, that prerequisite Lyotard poses for the delight of the sublime of the now. Between these two functions, that of the traditionally trained spectator and the death-fearing mortal, is the hope that something will take place, here and now, to appease the stillness of the ‘nothing happens’. It is not difficult to see Blanchot’s affirmation that ‘something essential might be allowed to happen’ in Lyotard’s sublime moment,74 ‘the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take “place”’.75 In Blanchot’s inability to accommodate the ‘nothing happens’ and the ‘something is necessarily always happening’ that cohabit the everyday,76 we can detect the Lyotardian sublime of the now. If the everyday is the now, inevitably, the moment of living whose signification eludes us, then in durational films such as La libertad the sublimity is born out of the indeterminate relationship between those two positions: the ‘nothing happens’ and the Beginning of page[p. 192]‘is it happening?’. This can be as subtle as the sky lighting up behind the lumberjack in La libertad as he eats his dinner in real time during a thunderstorm (Fig. 3.5).
In Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte, the threat of death and the promise of something happening cohabit the animistic spirit of the film. The long takes figuring the end of a life — in turn, that of the goatherd, the kid, the tree — uphold the anxiety of stillness, of an impasse. But the transfiguration of life comes to undermine that threat, until the next death, or the next painfully long take. This is often accomplished in the film through an operation that can best be described as the gag deprived of its pacing, showcasing the ‘occurrence’ as opposed to an event of a forced cause–effect logic, traditionally effectuated by montage. We can detect this operation by revisiting that bucket Beginning of page[p. 193] of snails alluded to in the first chapter: one day, having gathered a bucketful, the elderly goatherd returns to his house and places the snails in a big pot on the kitchen table, adding a rock over the lid. With an unchanging slow pace, the film continues to follow the man over the ensuing night and day, as he takes his goats out in the fields with the help of his lively sheepdog, comes back to the village, distributes the milk to the villagers, and finally, as we have by now learned to expect, pays a visit to the church to collect his divine medicine, the holy soot he consumes daily to treat his cough.
The next shot is absolute darkness. There is an indistinguishable, unidentifiable sound in the background, and then the approaching intermittent sound of a goat bell. Joined by the sound of someone tiredly climbing up the stairs, the aural cues signal to us that we are probably inside the old man’s house. The turning of the key confirms our suspicion. The thin line of light coming through the opening door slowly expands. The camera, we discover, is sitting in the goatherd’s kitchen, near to that pot full of snails. The latter have broken out of their jail and have slowly but steadily taken over the entire room — we now pair up the subtle sounds of the lethargically rioting snails with the image. The effect is not so much comic as it is delightful. This is not a gag, because that form of pacing is completely absent. We had forgotten about those snails. For what seems like an infinity, we were left alone in the absence of sound, image, motion. All those terrifying sensations that Burke identifies — solitude, silence, the approach of death — are encroaching upon our sense of ‘self-preservation’. The only promise that something will happen, ‘despite everything’, is in that hardly audible, indeterminate sound. That hope slowly solidifies in the sound of the steps insinuating a human presence. But the reward is not simply the removal Beginning of page[p. 194] of that threat of pain; it is absolute delight. And it all happens in one fixed long take (Fig. 3.6).
The Drab and the Cosmic
And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness where constancy, quietude, and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here we only experience general motion, and at first we don’t notice the events we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the Sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand there in its brilliance. This is the Moon. The Moon revolves around the Earth.Beginning of page[p. 195] What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the Moon, the disc of the Moon on the Sun’s flaming sphere makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger… and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly, only a narrow crescent of the Sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment… the next moment, say that it’s around one in the afternoon, a most dramatic turn of events occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens and then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds, the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then… complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will Heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us. But, but no need to fear, it’s not over. For across the Sun’s glowing sphere, slowly the Moon swims away. And the Sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes light again, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.’
‘That’s enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!’
‘But, Mr Hagelmayer, it’s not over yet.’77
Indeterminacy is a fundamental characteristic of the everyday, as theorized in Lefebvre and Blanchot. So far, indeterminacy has been identified in the stylistic decisions and subject matter of contemporary art cinema (for convenience’s sake, and at the risk of oversimplifying, let us say these are largely represented by the long take and the everyday, respectively). Another line of enquiry is rooted in the Beginning of page[p. 196] construction of indeterminacy as a political gesture. For this, I turn again to Rancière’s dissensus. For Rancière, as we have seen, artistic practice in the aesthetic regime entails a paradox: it is both autonomous and heterogeneous, because it encompasses both the singularity of the aesthetic, as well as an equality of representation which includes the ordinary, and thus that which falls outside of it. The politics within aesthetics stems not directly from its political content, but from the way art participates in the ‘distribution of the sensible’, that is, the way in which society decides what is visible and what is not. Dissensus is enabled when artistic practice enacts a redistribution of the sensible, an upsetting or mismatch between what is considered representable and what is not. I understand indeterminacy as occupying a large part of this process, as that space of play which allows for the blurring of boundaries between reality and representation, art and life, materiality and spirituality, documentary and fiction, aestheticism and authenticity. The endpoint of this obfuscation, ultimately, is not to redraw the categories, but to disrupt them in their function as the basis for the formulation of normative judgement.
The emphasis is now on time, ‘le temps d’après’, indicating that the politics of aesthetics has less to do with the thematic representation of problematic social realities as with the space that time opens up, a space of indeterminacy that resists consensual systematization.
True events for [Tarr] are not the ones that spell out actions, obstacles, success, or defeat. The events that make up a film are those moments of the sensible, those stretches of duration: moments of solitude where the fog from outside slowly penetrates the bodies on the other side of the window. […] Béla Tarr’s art is one that Beginning of page[p. 197] constructs global affects, where all these forms of dissemination are condensed. This global affect does not translate into emotions felt by the characters. It is a matter of circulation between points of partial condensation. And time is the stuff of which this circulation is made.78
The focus is displaced from ‘entreprises’ to the interstices. By durationally exiling the drama and thus dismantling it, Tarr carves out a space for the endless waits, the lulls, the suspensions. This resistance to narrative systematization and the distended time of everydayness that replaces it become politically activated by presenting moments and configurations of the sensible, in Rancière’s terms, that do not spontaneously ‘count’ as interesting, or productive of sense, and in a form that equally refuses to systematize them.
I would like to put these observations to the test through a reading of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (Satanic). In the films Tarr and Hranitzky made with author and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, the premise is often the same: in a decrepit Hungarian town, where people live small, stagnant, repetitious lives, something is about to happen. A mysterious force is about to erupt; everyone is in a state of immobile unrest — a phlegmatic, indifferent kind of concern. The small towns in Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) and Sátántangó, and the farmhouse in A torinói ló, are held up in the wait for this promised doom. In Werckmeister, it comes in the guise of the Prince, the little man in possession of a dead whale. In A torinói ló, the disaster is unseen. Like the harsh wind, invisible but for its draining effect on living things, disaster bespeaks itself in the form of a steady disappearance — of the will to Beginning of page[p. 198] work, of water, of light. In Sátántangó, on the other hand, the figure of disaster is embodied by Irimias, and his companion Petrina, two outlaws believed by the townspeople to have been dead. As is often the case in these films, the ominous arrival circulates as rumour long before they turn up in town. ‘Irimias the wizard,’ Futaki says upon hearing the news, ‘he could build a castle out of cow shit, if he wanted to.’ It is interesting to note that ‘the irresponsibility of rumour’ is another fundamental characteristic of the everyday, according to Blanchot, ‘where everything is said, everything is heard, incessantly and interminably, without anything being affirmed, without there being a response to anything’.79 A transformation takes place, however, in the passage ‘from street to newspaper, from the everyday in perpetual becoming to the everyday transcribed […], it becomes informed, stabilized, put forth to advantage’.80 Tarr stages this difference in Werckmeister when János the paperboy goes to pick up the daily from the press: the ominous rumours of the circus’s arrival and the loud sound of the printing press cohabit the scene.
Irimias and Petrina make their first appearance in one of those endless walking tracking shots that have become Tarr’s signature. The two are walking swiftly down an empty town street, with a savage wind propelling them forwards along with flying debris. The camera follows them at a distance, framing them from a slightly low angle, as if from the point of view of a child. It slowly catches up with them and then withdraws again, eventually stopping in the middle of the street as they walk into the distance. The walking shots in Tarr are usually self-contained blocks of time. An everyday activity associated with purpose, agency,Beginning of page[p. 199] and finality becomes an objectless motion. The cut comes before a destination is ever reached. The infinite duration of the walk suddenly stops short of its linearity, its forward-moving approach toward a telos, and becomes a distension. In the next shot, Irimias and Petrina are waiting outside an office in a police station. The camera retains its fixed low angle, framing them in a profile medium shot. The long corridor shows a clock on the wall in the distance, as we hear the low buzz one associates with public services. They wait. Someone leaves an office down the corridor, a phone rings in the background, Irimias shifts slightly in his seat. After two minutes, the film cuts to a fixed frontal medium shot of the two men, as they continue to look distractedly into space. Petrina shuffles in his seat. They wait. Irimias says, ‘The two clocks show different times. Both wrong, of course.’ He nods to the front: ‘This one here is too slow. The other’, he motions to the end of the corridor, ‘as if it showed the perpetuity of defenselessness. We relate to it as twigs in the rain: we cannot defend ourselves.’ Petrina, impressed, responds, ‘Twigs and rain…? You’re a great poet, I tell you.’ They remain silent. ‘Think there’s a snack bar here?’ Petrina says finally. ‘Don’t think so’, Irimias replies. They continue waiting. The dreary wait at a public service has a definite, and yet characterless, vacuous quality. The non-space of the corridor is matched by the indeterminacy of time, a non-time. One clock is too slow, the other — can we assume it has stopped? Time has stopped and so it has become infinite, distending and fixing everything in space.
Later, when the men are finally taken to the police captain, he will ask them why they have not looked for a job since they were released from prison. ‘Me, I’m not in love with what I do either but… Do you fancy being out of work all your life?’ he asks. Petrina nods. ‘Yes’, he says. Their anarchic energy becomes increasingly apparent after Beginning of page[p. 200] they leave the police station. Away from the official space of order and authority, they walk into a local bar. Over a shot of liquor, Irimias becomes alerted to something: ‘What is it? Do you hear it? Quiet!’ he shouts, and everything and everyone rests still and silent. The camera frames the inside of the bar from its far end. It is a mise-en-scéne of ordinariness, a cheerless local bar, customers in their winter coats, the checked floor smudged with mud from people’s boots. The camera tracks up at a lethargic pace. The scene is unnervingly fixed, like a photograph: ‘We’ll blow everything up’, says Irimias finally. ‘We’ll have to stop this somehow, what do you say?’ As the two men walk out (‘We’ll do them all in!’), the camera stays behind, panning at a deliberate pace to a close-up of a bearded customer by the window. With a drink in his hand, his hat and coat on, the camera scrutinizes him at length as he stares blankly ahead. Why does the camera not follow the ‘action’? The time of narrative becomes disjointed before it has time to announce itself, as in the opening scene of Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player) (1960), where, as Deleuze says, the chase sequence is interrupted by a chance conversation that takes centre stage. This peculiar breed of the irrational cut undercuts the ‘motor pursuit’ promised us.81 In Sátántangó, the distracted camera unhooks us from that inkling of narrative and places us back in daily time.
Another walking sequence shot follows. This time the couple have to face the relentless rain. The camera precedes them, as they walk down a country road to the next town. Irimias says:
They were servants and that they will be all their lives. They sit in the kitchen, shit in the corner, and look out the window now and then. I know Beginning of page[p. 201] them inside out… They just sit on the same dirty stools. Stuff themselves with potatoes and don’t know what’s happened.82
Irimias echoes Karrer’s monologue from Kárhozat, discussed in the second chapter, and a cohort of Tarr characters whose lives are defined by these basic, repetitive activities. Karrer, János, and Olsdorfer and his daughter indeed spend their time looking out of the window and eating potatoes. Along with them, so do we. In this mundane space, drab and real, weighted down by the time of existence, and yet suspended in the infinity of the long take, we start to think about our own existence.
What this example shows is that Tarr’s cinema retains a fascination with the real in its obsession with the observation of humanity and the cosmos. It does this with an eye for chaos, ‘un caos di possibilità’, to remember Pasolini. But at the same time, it does not let us forget that on the flipside of the engagement with the pace and things of everyday life, there is a range of stylistic choices and themes that point towards an uneasiness with the realist tradition: as much as Tarr chooses to film on celluloid, for example, he also chooses black-and-white photography, a post-production soundtrack, a minutely orchestrated use of the camera, and extradiegetic music. Additionally, the intertwining of the drab and the cosmic is ubiquitous in Tarr. It is made obvious in the overt references to planetary arrangements and the mysteriousness of a suspended threat, but can also be invoked in the most everyday object, such as a set of dull stone steps, drenched in rain and lit by a single lamp in the total darkness.
The aesthetics of the everyday and focus on time in Slow cinema opens up an undecided, indeterminate space Beginning of page[p. 202] that refuses to operate within a systematized structure. This politics based on ordinary time-space, or the time-space of the ordinary, is also operative in the example I will turn to next, Pedro Costa’s No quarto da Vanda.
Pedro Costa and the Everyday
No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) takes place in suburban Fontainhas, a self-built Lisbon neighbourhood in the process of being demolished. Its inhabitants, mostly Portuguese subproletarians and Cape Verdean immigrants, are seen dividing their time between long conversations, drug consumption, and a little business as they prepare to be relocated to modern, but isolated, social housing on the peripheries of Lisbon. Part of the Dedicated National Rehousing Plan (Programa Especial de Realojamento) which began in the mid-1990s, the demolition of bairros de lata like Fontainhas was touted as a success in official channels, but for the inhabitants it meant losing the homes they had built as a community, and with which they shared an ‘umbilical’ relationship.83 With Vanda, Pedro Costa sheds most of the conventional filmmaking apparatus and shoots entirely with the help of a single DV camera and a sound engineer. Every day for over a year, as he likes to emphasize, he would take the number 58 bus from central Lisbon to Fontainhas, or otherwise sleep over at Vanda’s. He would film her and her family as they went about their daily business, or they would stage scenes together and then perform them.Beginning of page[p. 203]
The film addresses institutional violence, gentrification, social inequality, colonialism, and drug use. Does this suffice, then, to make a film political? Not according to Jacques Rancière: ‘a social situation is not enough to make art political. Nor is the visible display of sympathy for the exploited and neglected.’84 Is it the manner of representation, then, the form that content takes, that moulds a film into political shape? Endless debates in film theory have taught us that cinematic form as a political tool is crucial, not least because political struggles are struggles over the way we want society to be organized, the forms we want it to take;85 and yet, as hard as one might look, there can be no direct road that takes us from any particular configuration of bodies on screen, or any particular way of splicing two shots together, to a political message.86
Rancière will say that Vanda’s politics resides elsewhere — that, escaping the dangerous twin endgames of aestheticism and populism, a radical message is to be found in the shareable qualities of its cinematic forms and the human lives it observes, that turn away from representations of some ‘misery of the world’ and towards a communal wealth that ‘anyone can become a master of’, without reifying or victimizing. Aesthetic but not aestheticized, he seems to suggest, Costa’s work proposes a continuity, a shareable experience between the inhabitant of the shantytown who insists on cleaning his friend’s table whilst the Caterpillars are eating their way to his house, and the director Beginning of page[p. 204] who films impeccably lit still lives of plastic bottles on the same table, or the play of light on the clouds of dust from the demolition.
For Rancière, therefore, Costa performs that fundamental function of a contemporary politics of aesthetics that consists in a rupture with dominant strategies of representation, a redistribution of the sensible. He describes Costa’s style as enabled through attention and patience, binding together the everyday moments of everyday people. To bring to the surface the lived experience of those historically invisibilized by focusing on what is traditionally considered narratively unphotogenic, is politically important. It champions the equality of the ordinary; it challenges policed forms of representation and our habits of viewing. In what follows, I look closely at Vanda and the spatial strategies Costa uses, as well as at the film’s context of production and circulation. Somewhere in there, I contend, Costa’s project of resistance hangs in the balance (Fig. 3.7).
Much of what is peculiar about Vanda has to do with space. Fontainhas is in many ways a hybrid space, where public and private, personal and political are mixed and inseparable. Costa has said that in the Lisbon suburb ‘there was no inside and outside, every street was a hallway, every house was a street, every bedroom was a public square’.87 Very early in the film we are introduced to the holey space of Fontainhas. Nhurro is washing himself with the help of a hot water bucket in a dark empty room. The door is wide open, or perhaps there is no door. Is this his house? Is it the other man’s, the one standing by the window preparing to Beginning of page[p. 205] shoot up? Are they squatting an abandoned house, or using it temporarily? Nhurro recruits the help of a man from the street who washes his back and goes back to his business. The conventional privacy of the act of washing oneself becomes negotiable in the face of the lack of a bathroom, running water, and electricity — a lack which, along with other deprivations, demands the shaping of close social relationships in Fontainhas. These bonds, linking the inhabitants to each other ‘as neighbours and exiles’, produce Beginning of page[p. 206] the physical space of Fontainhas, with its narrow meandering streets, improvised houses in close proximity, and open doors, as much as they are reinforced by it.88
Vanda’s room, similarly, is a private dwelling place, a space she almost never seems to leave except to do her daily rounds, in which she sleeps, does drugs, and freely indulges her perpetual cough. But it is also and crucially a space of exchange, of conversation on matters that vary from the everyday to the political and the metaphysical: house chores, a friend who did jail time for stealing Knorr cubes, the junkie lifestyle as a matter of choice or determinism. This public dimension makes of Vanda’s room a hybrid space — a quality Costa is evidently interested in. As the title suggests, Fontainhas is a room, a close-knit community in which we dwell for the duration of the film, all three hours of it; and it is also a space of free comings and goings, a city square, an Athenean agora. Neither a miserable space nor a romanticized one, Vanda’s room serves, as Costa has said, as ‘a space (lieu) for discussion, for the discussion of the problems of this area. And in the film there is hopefully the feeling that people always find a way to do politics, to do philosophy, to think and talk’ (Fig. 3.8).89 The ambition of Costa’s project is for Vanda to become an expression of resistance and community without resorting to abstraction or to miserablism — as João Bénard da Costa says about Costa’s previous Fontainhas film, Ossos, of 1997.90
If there is a central conflict in Vanda, it revolves around the production of space. As opposed to the regularity of Beginning of page[p. 207] urban planning, the shantytown inhabitants propose the entanglement of self-produced liminal space, the ‘sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant’.91 One way of understanding the physical space Beginning of page[p. 208] of Fontainhas and the filmic space of No quarto da Vanda is through the twin concepts of the smooth and the striated as laid out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Smooth space is amorphous and nonformal, as opposed to striated space, which is delineated, rationalized, partitioned. One typical example of smooth space is the desert, although the thinkers rush to emphasize that smooth ‘does not mean homogeneous’.92 As an example, to the legible space of fabric, they oppose the anti-systemic felt. To the rational order of embroidery, they juxtapose the acentred patchwork. Deleuze and Guattari make sure to point out that the two types of spaces ‘in fact exist only in mixture’. Whether or not their reassurance suffices to undo the otherwise rather strict dichotomy they set up between smooth and striated space, it does make it easier to picture the invisible conflict of Fontainhas: the latter does not come into existence despite the former. Rather, as Amita Baviskar points out, state-controlled urban environment functions as the condition of possibility for liminal slum space. She says, regarding the slums around New Delhi, that the city’s Master Plan
envisaged a model city, prosperous, hygienic, and orderly, but failed to recognise that this construction could only be realised by the labours of large numbers of the working poor, for whom no provision had been made in the plans. Thus the building of planned Delhi was mirrored in the simultaneous mushrooming of unplanned Delhi. In the interstices of the Master Plan’s zones, the liminal spaces along railway tracks and barren land acquired by the DDA [Delhi Development Authority] grew the shanty towns built by construction workers, petty vendors, and artisans, and a whole Beginning of page[p. 209] host of workers whose ugly existence had been ignored in the plans. The development of slums was, then, not a violation of the Plan; it was an essential accompaniment to it, its Siamese twin.93
Ventura, a Fontainhas local from Cape Verde, and protagonist of Costa’s Colossal Youth, encapsulates this double relationship of inclusion and expulsion: just as he built the walls and doors of the Gulbenkian museum that he is now not welcome to traverse, it will be poor workers, former inhabitants of the shantytown like him, through whom the demolition, reappropriation, and ‘rationalization’ of Fontainhas will be performed physically.94
Baviskar calls the double relationship between the slum and the planned city one of Siamese twins, but the metaphor, I believe, does not render the peculiarity of the rapport. For the bourgeois inhabitants and city officials of the Portuguese capital, Fontainhas is not so much an embarrassing, disfigured space as much as it is simply ignored.95 The decision to demolish the area does not contradict this. It shows the urgency to make that space disappear, to smoothen that rough edge, instead of putting unnecessary effort into denying its existence.
The makeshift space of the Lisbon slum translates into a different experience of time as well, time that is not reduced to forward movement, but which inhabits space and distends in it, like the activities of those who populate it.Beginning of page[p. 210] That is why Costa’s camera, after the more mobile Ossos, opts for complete stillness, and insists on the long take. Vanda says: ‘You used to ask us to be quiet; now we’re going to talk, you’re going to listen. That’s all we do, talk and take drugs.’ Unfailingly fixed, Costa’s camera allows the distension of time to take on its full importance, resisting the urge to turn time into the unit of measurement for narrative meaning. As we watch Vanda look through the pages of a phone book for traces of crack, or her mother watch soap operas on the television, we become forcefully aware of the passage of time, and we might drift in and out, become bored, or question our voyeurism. Instead of forward-moving temporal vectors, Costa’s long takes and fixed gaze collaborate with the hybrid space-time of Fontainhas at this crisis moment of its gradual demolition.
Vanda’s insistence on going about her everyday chores as if nothing has changed is presented neither as a vocal statement of resistance nor as dire necessity in the face of a lack of alternatives. Perhaps it is both: the film’s obstinate focus on Vanda’s routine activities appeals to the form of the sit-in, one amongst many weapons of the powerless, alongside forms of class struggle like ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’ that James C. Scott describes in relation to everyday peasant resistance.96 Resistance through refusal is important because it activates political intent in what is traditionally seen as the passivity of the refusing body. The mobilization of immobility as a political tool becomes a way of expanding bracketed notions of productivity and meaningful action. Not doing, or doing less, or doing purposelessly, can open up possibilities Beginning of page[p. 211] for resistance for those who do not have the capacity for mobility, or those who are trying to escape policed, dictated, or excessive mobility. In No quarto da Vanda, this relationship is forcefully enacted between the ceaseless mobility of the Caterpillar tearing down the self-built homes and the obstinate immobility of Costa’s camera and Vanda and Zita’s bodies, slouched stubbornly on beds and sofas, as the overactivity of the demolition clamours on the soundtrack.
Vanda’s family resist by inhabiting their house and going about their daily business despite the forces of ‘progress’ gnawing at their existence. In the film, the people and their space occupy the image, wholly and relentlessly, with the help of the director’s insistent camera. This is a process that Rancière might call ‘resolving a political problem aesthetically’, in perfect contraposition to the equivalent project of the police (both actual and in the sense Rancière intends it), that ‘aesthetic’ task of cleaning the streets of the unwelcome denizens of Fontainhas.97
The fixity of Costa’s Panasonic DV camera is meant as a political gesture in yet another way. He says in a workshop:
I have the impression that these little cameras come with a label that states the price, that says ‘3CCD’ and ‘Optical Zoom’ and there’s also an invisible label — though very visible for me — that says: ‘Move me, move, you can do everything with me.’ That’s not true. Don’t do that with your camera or sound recorder, what the people who make them want. I bought this Panasonic camera but I’m not going to do what Panasonic wants. […] That’s resistance.98Beginning of page[p. 212]
This is not stubbornness, in Costa’s mind, but a true political programme that I see encapsulated in his idea of ‘writing a love letter in a bank’.99 This way of negotiating his relationship to capitalism, carving out a time-space that is incongruous with it but also already within it, is, in my view, a good way of thinking about the politics of his films, steeped in contradictions and ambiguities but not for that reason emptied of political weight. The gaze of his fixed camera is ambiguously ‘at once completely passive and committed’, as Malin Wahlberg says, invoking yet again the image of a sit-in or a silent protest, resistance through passivity and immobility.100
There is a constant reminder of a different kind of spatial ambiguity on the soundtrack of No quarto da Vanda. It is the unrelenting sound of a digger biting Fontainhas off one bit at a time. Every now and then we are shown this violent invasion that eats into the entrails of houses, exposing them to the outside. An image of a house with its façade torn off encapsulates this perverse relation between interior and exterior. Ambiguity of space is thus not just the positive ambiguity of community and resistance, but is also that of invasion and constitutional violence. Neither Costa’s camera nor the inhabitants of Fontainhas ever Beginning of page[p. 213] directly blame anyone for this state of things. The camera shows us the gradual reappropriation of space, that starts out as a yellow ‘X’ on a wall and ends in a pile of rubble, reminding us that urban planning is about the production of space through the exercise of power, a truth further complicated by the fact that at least some of the demolition work is being done by workers who are themselves inhabitants of Fontainhas.101
The intrusion of Caterpillars and the state control that puts them in motion are violently changing the relationship between a space and its population. But what is the difference between their function and that of Costa’s camera? As minimalist and discreet as it may be, Costa’s cinema can be said to invade the private space of the Fontainhas community, the same way the Caterpillar exposes the inside of a house by doing what it was made to do. Just as the demolition will pave the way for the reordering and ‘rationalization’ of slum space into urban propriety, so will Costa’s testimony run the risk of being interpreted as a ‘rationalization’ of a certain kind of existence. What guarantees that its invasion, as opposed to that of the demolition equipment, enables a positive ambiguity between private and public space? What makes it more like the idiosyncratic architecture of Fontainhas, with its room-squares and its corridor-streets, and less like the exposed entrails of the house whose façade has just been eaten up by a digger?
I believe that this is an anxiety Costa himself feels. After all, he knows very well that he had to go all the way to Cape Verde to be led to Fontainhas, that neighbourhood in his own city he had never visited. In 1994, Costa travelled Beginning of page[p. 214] to Portugal’s former colony to film his second feature, Casa de Lava. The people he shot the film with all turned out to have relatives who had made their way to the European country in the hope of a better life. Many of them lived in Fontainhas, and Costa was asked to deliver letters upon letters to them on his return. It was the first time Costa had ever heard of the suburb. Well aware of the paradoxes that his presence in Fontainhas gave rise to, Costa searched for a type of cinema that would be produced by the space it inhabited, that would collaborate with it. To resist the process of rationalization and ordering, Costa practically did away with narrative and script, as well as embellishing equipment, apart from a few makeshift light reflectors made with found mirrors or tin foil, and operated through an unflinching point of view shot in long takes, staged in collaboration with his protagonists.
Unfortunately, and perhaps the director would agree, even if the film itself attempts to negotiate the inequality of the relation between a camera and its subject, this inequality inevitably comes back on the table as soon as issues of distribution and dissemination are introduced. The world in which Costa’s films circulate, that ‘detestable’ world that ‘completely changes a film’, as he himself says, is that of the high-end film festival.102 It is the same lament that Rancière expresses:
Costa’s films […] are immediately labeled as film-festival material, something reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of a film-buff elite and tendentiously pushed to the province of museums and art lovers. For that, of course, Pedro Costa blames the state of the world, meaning the naked domination of the power of money, which classes as Beginning of page[p. 215]‘films for film-buffs’ the work of directors who try to bring to everyone the wealth of sensorial experience found in the humblest of lives. The system makes a sad monk of the director who wants to make his cinema shareable [partageable].103
The final shot of Vanda shows the pitiful remnant of a house wall, the trace of a space that has been transformed. The black screen that follows it is accompanied by the sound of breathing, a promise that life will continue to happen elsewhere. The lone remnant and the disembodied breath announce themselves as two traces of resistance. It is in that web of relations between the two, a collective of people and a space that is continuously produced and transformed by them and despite them, that Costa’s film takes place.
Before closing this chapter, I will visit one last set of films that equally addresses the anxiety of rationalizing its object through the use of extended duration and a focus on the mundane: Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza cycle.
When in Doubt, Hesitate104
In Demoris’s Mafrouza, a five-part film about a poor neighbourhood in Alexandria, Egypt, the anxiety about the film’s relationship to visual justice is performed through duration. This worry is enacted temporally, through what poor Beginning of page[p. 216] theory might name a ‘working around’ intransigent problems, a tinkering with one’s subject. Tinkering, such a modest word, evokes a sustained activity of dubious productivity: to tinker means ‘to work at something […] clumsily or imperfectly […], to occupy oneself about something in a trifling or aimless way’.105 Poor theory is self-effacing and anti-heroic: it pays attention to ‘the murky, unsystematic practices and discourses of everyday life’, and chooses description over interpretation, in particular ‘descriptions […] that do not leave what is described unchanged’.106 In Mafrouza, the question of the French filmmaker’s presence in the shantytown is often evoked, with varying degrees of entertained curiosity and aggressive mistrust. ‘The foreigner will make a mockery of us abroad’ is a recurring accusation that repeatedly snaps us out of our immersion. Technical errors have a similar effect of distancing and reminding the audience of the presence of the woman behind the camera: we see her fingers slipping over the edge of the lens as she’s correcting the light or protecting the camera from the rain; we catch glimpses of the boom, or her silhouette on the wall.
More importantly, perhaps, Demoris’s limited Arabic means that much of the time she does not know what people are talking about. After spending some time in Mafrouza on her own, she recruited a translator, Rania Berro, who became the routine interlocutor in the film, although she is never shown. Every now and then, Berro explains to Demoris what is being discussed, but often the camera, though regularly addressed or interpellated, is not fully Beginning of page[p. 217] abreast of what is happening. This fundamental failure is perhaps the most potent performance of the limits of legibility, enacted for instance when Demoris’s camera is slow to follow a developing mise-en-scéne as a result of the director missing out on conversational cues.
Tinkering, this prolonged and constantly imperfect approach that seems to have no end: Demoris had originally thought of calling the film Lessa shwaia — ‘not yet’ — a ritournelle that people would often use in the neighbourhood. This ‘endless process of ending’, to quote Roland Barthes, can produce what he describes as the ‘paradoxical infinity of weariness’, just as it can the pleasure of continuing to tinker pointlessly (Fig. 3.9).107 But more than anything, I suggest, Mafrouza’s endless ending is ‘a way of proceeding’, a strategy of deferral when solutions are not discernible.108 The film hesitates — not yet, not yet — as if weary of the fact that an ending brings pronouncement: by deferring termination, the film continuously postpones the moment when it will become possible to say ‘this film is about…’.
The parallel I am drawing here, between end/death and rationalization/pronouncement, also crops up in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ruminations on the long take. He draws an analogy between montage and death, in which the life of a man remains suspended in ambiguity — the attribute closest to reality, according to him — until the final ‘cut’ of death. Just as, after their existence has ended, it is possible to be conclusive about a person’s life, editing in film Beginning of page[p. 218] explains, rationalizes, and undercuts the ambiguity of the uninterrupted long take.109 The difference of course is that for Pasolini the long duration of the uninterrupted take is (closest to) reality, whereas my assertion is that the extended temporalities of Mafrouza — manifesting as total film duration, use of the long take, and a focus on the empty time of the quotidian — showcase not authenticity but reluctance.Beginning of page[p. 219] Joseph Vogl celebrates hesitation as going against a long Western tradition of imperative decision-making that sees it as ‘a capricious act that frustrates work’.110 Vogl hails the ‘heroes of reluctance’ for standing up for the unproductive and distracted, but I feel that this operation of heroization undermines the premises of the argument: I believe the reluctant and hesitant would find themselves more at home with the likes of the good soldier Švejk and other such petty actors of resistance.111 The film resists the impossible task it has set for itself — how to ‘do justice’, what else to do if ‘doing justice’ does not seem an adequate objective in the first place — by ‘using the lag’. Ackbar Abbas suggests this as a strategy for when something threatens to ‘outpace our understanding’.112 But can one also use that lag to suspend understanding?
I think there is something to be said here about this form of durational opacity (opacity created through the accumulation of dead time), which is somehow similar to that accumulation of petty acts that we have been discussing as ‘resisting weakly’.
Mafrouza begins with a neighbourhood, a situated locale in Alexandria, Egypt. Yet instead of recounting a community, it gravitates towards a small number of people.Beginning of page[p. 220] Demoris describes the necessity she felt to avoid situating the spectator visually and spatially from the very start. In fact, the first panorama shots of Mafrouza only occur after the first hour. Instead, the film begins by slowly introducing us to some of the people who will reappear throughout the twelve hours. This choice was part of an effort to avoid the pronouncement that she felt would proceed from opening with establishing shots of the neighbourhood, which would situate the spectator, unambiguously, in a bidonville.
By contrast, the film begins with a misunderstanding. The opening shot finds us walking through a narrow corridor of the neighbourhood. No people are visible yet, but indiscernible voices are heard in both Arabic and French. The first trace of a figure is that of the filmmaker herself. Her voice, unmistakably hers because it is heard from behind the camera, and the unsteady pace of the hand-held camera are followed by a shot in which the shadow from the boom can be discerned against a sun-lit wall. The rest of the first scene takes place at Ghada and Adel’s house. Here, a perplexed Adel is trying to help a French archaeologist figure out the layout of the tomb to which the house is attached. The scene contains a series of entertaining miscommunications. Adel doesn’t understand what the archaeologist is doing: ‘What is he measuring? There’s nothing there. He’s a professor. What can I say?’ The French group don’t understand what Adel is saying. Adel asks in Arabic, ‘Is this cemetery important?’ The French debate the meaning of this obscure word. After a while, Adel decides to take matters into his own hands; he walks up to the camera, grabs the lens, and points it to the area of interest: ‘Important, or no interest?’ The archaeologist replies in his clumsy Arabic: ‘I don’t understand “important”’, to the amusement of Adel…Beginning of page[p. 221]
Demoris’s use of what we might call dis-establishing shots forces us to confront the ethics of ‘making visible’. Making the invisible visible is often cited as one of the underlying objectives of documentary filmmaking that deals with issues, people, or places that are usually disregarded. Decades of debates on documentary representation have made clear that this task is not inherently informed by some principle of equality. Who ‘makes’ visible, for instance? The documentarist, as Trinh T. Minh-ha knows from her own practice, ‘in “giving a voice”, might forget that she thereby becomes the “giver”’.113 That is one risk. Another risk is that one might take for granted a clear dichotomy between visibility and invisibility. To whom does one make visible? How is invisibility constituted? What about visible invisibilities? A recent example of this might be the Lebanese documentary film Makhdoumin (A Maid for Each) (2016),114 where the violently obvious screen absence of the domestic workers at the centre of the documentary makes a point about their position in Lebanese middle-class society. Or what about invisible visibilities, akin to a Gramscian notion of hegemony as naturalized ideology? Perhaps the challenge might be to break with an easy division between visibility/invisibility, or, as Trinh suggests,
not to fall prey to the dominant process of totalization: rather than working at bringing, through gradual acquisition, what has been kept invisible into visibility, one would have to break with such a system of dualities and show, for example, what Beginning of page[p. 222] constitutes invisibility itself as well as what exceeds mere visibility.115
As an example, in the first Mafrouza sequence of Om Bassiouni, the woman who bakes bread in a makeshift outdoor oven, the camera introduces us very slowly, over the course of around half an hour, first to the woman and her daughter, to their struggles with the handmade oven and the persistent rain. Only much later does the scene switch to wider shots of the locale where all this takes place. Since this site is the Mafrouza garbage dump, the film wants us to invest time in Om Bassiouni and her bread-baking before seeing the difficult images of the dumping ground. Demoris insists that if she showed an establishing shot first, we would then only be able to see the garbage dump and nothing else.
And yet, nothing much seems to have changed. At the end of the day, deferring and accumulating is the emphatic perpetuation of a lack and the persistence of a hoarding — too little, too much; diluted, dilated, yet again. But this might just be the point. The durational opacity that results from the accumulation of time and everydayness, twice redundant, places us at the centre of the most fundamental queries regarding cinematic representation. What I appreciate about Mafrouza are its impossibilities — in one sense, a film by a Frenchwoman in the bidonville of a country that has been an economic colony of France can never be anything but a failure. In another sense, however, the film acts as a springboard for a set of important questions. The decision not to begin with an establishing shot of the garbage-filled yard in which Om Bassiouni bakes betrays Beginning of page[p. 223] an assumption that that particular form of visibility would trigger an immediate jump to abstraction: everything else would be blinded by it and subsumed into it. In that sense, abstraction is a form of transparency. Talking about long duration as a strategy of decolonization in the work of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, William Brown notes: ‘Applied to films, the process of abstraction can be understood the moment a viewer experiences unhappiness about the length of a film “because they got the film already”.’116 Nevertheless, to claim that there’s anything intrinsically ethical about long duration would be naive, to say the least — the long debates in documentary ethics have done their part in establishing the disingenuousness of conflating uninterrupted spatio-temporality with any form of adequate ethical representation. It is my contention that the careful montage work that takes us at a snail’s pace from Om Bassiouni to her surroundings has very little to do with preserving any kind of spatio-temporal integrity and is equally irrelevant to any kind of realist impulse that would guarantee access, presence, empathy, or authenticity. Instead, I think its strategy comes closer to an anxious and self-conscious response to the complex issue of the ethics and politics of visibility — and here, as in Costa, the use of long duration and the undramatic temporalities of everyday life become crucial, both as a tool (something with which to) and as a medium (something within which).117 In other words, accumulation in Mafrouza does not operate as the steady acquisition of visibilities — a quasi-Marxian accumulation of understanding as property. Instead, the Beginning of page[p. 224] accumulation of everydayness and dead time pushes the event further and further back as it swells.
I have tried to show that the film attempts to sabotage the landmines it sets for itself at every turn. By using this form of durational opacity, it creates a hesitation that accumulates in order to defer. It doesn’t really matter if it fails.
The everyday’s fundamental elusiveness and marginality, central concerns in Slow cinema, pair up with a mode of presentation that frames it compulsively and at the same time preserves its slipperiness. The focus on the everyday in Slow cinema, as we have seen, does not lay claim to a privileged relation to the real. Instead, it reaches out both to the definitively material as well as to the sublime and the cosmic. Ultimately, its centrality as a field of interest in contemporary cinema lies in the possibilities it opens up as malleable subject matter and mode of representation — as a politics of the ordinary.
Rancière’s remark regarding the modes of production, distribution, and exhibition of Costa’s films (and Slow films in general), however, opens a new, larger set of questions. Whatever the aesthetic and political potential of the image, the structures that support and distribute this image come with their own range of political implications.
Notes
- Guy Debord, ‘Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), pp. 90–99 (p. 93). ↵
- Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 10 <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199273959.001.0001>. ↵
- Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, trans. by Christine Levich with the editors, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), pp. 7–11 (p. 9) <https://doi.org/10.2307/2930193>. ↵
- Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 3 vols (London: Verso, 1992–2005), ii: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. by John Moore (2002), p. 44. ↵
- Ibid., p. 226. ↵
- Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 18. ↵
- Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 245. ↵
- Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. by Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), pp. 12–20 (p. 15) <https://doi.org/10.2307/2930194>. ↵
- Stephen Johnstone, ‘Introduction: Recent Art and the Everyday’, in The Everyday, ed. by Stephen Johnstone (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 12–23 (p. 12). ↵
- Allen Ruppersberg, ‘Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday’, in The Everyday, ed. by Johnstone, pp. 54–56 (p. 56). ↵
- ‘I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.’ See Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969; proposal for the exhibition ‘Care’, originally published in Jack Burnham, ‘Problems of Criticism’, Artforum, 9.5 (January 1971), p. 41. ↵
- Paul Virilio, ‘On Georges Perec’, in The Everyday, ed. by Johnstone, pp. 108–09 (p. 109). ↵
- Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), p. 210. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. by Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), p. 5. ↵
- The terracotta statuettes act as ‘substitute mummies which might replace the bodies [of the mummies] if these were destroyed. It is this religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of the statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life’. See Bazin, What Is Cinema? (2009), p. 5. ↵
- Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2011); Tiago De Luca, ‘Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema’, in Theorizing World Cinema, ed. by Lúcia Nagib, Christopher Perriam, and Rajinder Kumar Dudrah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 183–205. ↵
- From a text Orozco presented as curator of the exhibition ‘The Everyday Altered’ at the 50th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2003. ↵
- Alain Badiou, ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, New Left Review, 35 (2005), pp. 67–77 (p. 76). ↵
- In Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 22. ↵
- Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, p. 45. ↵
- Ibid., p. 18. ↵
- Ibid., pp. 46–47, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Henri Lefebvre, ‘Clearing the Ground’, in The Everyday, ed. by Johnstone, pp. 26–34 (p. 32). ↵
- Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 242. ↵
- Ibid., p. 243. ↵
- In John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2006), p. 76. ↵
- Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 243. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Johnstone, ‘Introduction’, in The Everyday, ed. by Johnstone, p. 15. ↵
- Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 245, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 5 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203464229>. ↵
- Ibid., p. 6. ↵
- Sheringham, Everyday Life, pp. 19–20. ↵
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 15. ↵
- Ibid., p. 15. ↵
- Ibid., p. 6. ↵
- This is another principle of selection which has kept out of my discussion directors such as Bruno Dumont and (outside the European context) Tsai Ming-liang, who work with radical undulations of time and dramaticity (Dumont’s moments of shock following stretches of ‘dead time’; Tsai’s peppering of his earlier films with extravagantly staged musical comedy). ↵
- Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 360. ↵
- Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, ‘Introduction to Everyday Life: Yale French Studies (1987)’, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. by Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 76–100 (p. 78). ↵
- Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012); Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin, The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory and Documents (New York: Autonomedia, 2018); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2011) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979>. ↵
- Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2000), p. 94. ↵
- Maurice Blanchot, in ibid., p. 93. See also Rosa Barotsi, Saima Akhtar, and Clio Nicastro, ‘Who Sustains the Flourishing of the World? Film, Women’s Work and Labour Organising’, in minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise, ed. by Zairong Xiang (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020), pp. 113–27. ↵
- Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, p. 9. ↵
- Ibid., p. 17. ↵
- Ibid., p. 20. ↵
- Darren Hughes, ‘Albert Serra Interviewed on El cant dels ocells (Birdsong)’, Senses of Cinema, 50 (2009) <http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/50/albert-serra-interview/> [accessed 25 July 2024]. ↵
- Serra says that, with his actors, it makes little sense to record more than one take. See Mark Peranson, 'The Beauty of Horror and the Horror of Beauty: An Encounter with Albert Serra’, Cinema Scope <https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/tiff-2013-cinema-scope-56-preview-albert-serra-on-story-of-my-death-albert-serra-spainfrance/> [accessed 23 January 2025]. ↵
- Vitor Pinto, ‘Three Lost Kings in Serra’s Radical Landscapes’, Cineuropa, 20 May 2008 <https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/84306/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 20. ↵
- Cyril Neyrat, ‘Entretien avec Albert Serra’, Revue Vertigo, 30 (2007), pp. 39–43 (p. 40), my translation. ↵
- Ben Highmore, ‘Everyday Life and Cultural Theory’, in The Everyday, ed. by Johnstone, pp. 79–87 (p. 80). ↵
- Virilio, ‘On Georges Perec’, p. 110. ↵
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 256, §26 <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511804656>. ↵
- Ibid., p. 250, §25. ↵
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 97. ↵
- Ibid., p. 92. ↵
- Ibid., p. 84, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Ibid., p. 89. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid., p. 90. ↵
- Ibid., p. 79. Lyotard’s sublime of the present can thus be seen as an alluring alternative to phenomenology in thinking about the affective experience of art. ↵
- Ibid., p. 90, emphasis in the original. ↵
- Ibid., p. 92. ↵
- Ibid., p. 93. ↵
- Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avantgarde’, trans. by Lisa Liebmann, Artforum, 22.8 (1984), pp. 36–43 (p. 43). ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Phil Ballard, ‘In Search of Truth: Béla Tar Interviewed’, Kinoeye, 4.2 (2004) <http://www.kinoeye.org/04/02/ballard02.php> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 179 <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396871>. ↵
- Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avantgarde’, p. 43. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 19. ↵
- Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, p. 15. ↵
- Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 84. ↵
- Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, p. 15. ↵
- Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies), dir. by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky (2000). ↵
- Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, le temps d’après (Paris: Capricci, 2011), p. 40. All translations from this book are my own. ↵
- Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, p. 17. ↵
- Ibid., p. 18. ↵
- Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 239. ↵
- Sátántangó, dir. by Béla Tarr (1994). ↵
- Ana Naomi de Sousa and António Brito Guterres, ‘Pushed to the Periphery: Lisbon’s Rehousing Policies Lose the Life of the Neighbourhoods They Demolish’, The Architectural Review, 6 January 2021 <https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/city-portraits/pushed-to-the-periphery-lisbons-policies-of-demolition-and-rehousing> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Jacques Rancière, ‘Politique de Pedro Costa’, in Rancière, Les Écarts du cinéma (Paris: La Fabrique Éditions, 2011), p. 137, my translation. ↵
- Michael Ryan, ‘The Politics of Film’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 486. ↵
- Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, trans. by John Howe (London: Verso, 2019), p. 5. ↵
- Will Noah, ‘Pedro Costa, Filming the Saga of Lisbon’s Cabo Verdeans’, The New York Review, 3 March 2020 <https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/03/03/pedro-costa-filming-the-saga-of-lisbons-cabo-verdeans/> [accessed on 28 July 2024]. ↵
- ‘Casal da Boba’, Manifesta <http://www.manifesta.org.uk/our-work/belonging/the-workshops/the-contexts/casal-da-boba.html> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- In Tout refleurit: Pedro Costa, cinéaste (All Blossoms Again), dir. by Aurélien Gerbault (2006). ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 481. ↵
- Ibid., p. 477. ↵
- Amita Baviskar, ‘Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi’, International Social Science Journal, 55.175 (March 2003), pp. 89–98 (p. 91) <https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2451.5501019_8>. ↵
- Rosa Barotsi, ‘A Pile of Bricks? Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006), Labour, and the Space of the Museum’, in Proceedings of the 34th CIHA World Congress of Art History, ed. by Shao Dazhen, Fan Di’an, and LaoZhu, 2 vols (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2020), i, pp. 167–72. ↵
- As Pedro Costa says, for instance, in the documentary Tout refleurit: Pedro Costa, cinéaste. ↵
- James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xvi. ↵
- Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 151. ↵
- Pedro Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, Rouge, 10 (2007) <http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html> [accessed 25 July 2024]. ↵
- ‘I thought of an old film by Lubitsch called Trouble in Paradise (1932). There’s a moment in this film when a character goes to a bank, and he’s so worried, so unsettled, that instead of writing out a cheque, as he should, instead he writes a love letter. It’s a very beautiful scene, because you see the contradiction, writing a love letter in a bank! […] Very few people are going to see this love letter in the bank, and still fewer are going to write a love letter in a bank. So, to finish with the metaphor, I would say that my work as a director, your work as students, future directors — it’s in this bank, here. Your work is to continue trying to write love letters, and not cheques. Sometimes people don’t notice your work, of course. Well, we resist and we keep going to the bank to write love letters’ (Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’). ↵
- Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 92. ↵
- Pedro Costa, from the Q&A following a screening of No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) at the Filming Transnational Interiors conference, University of Cambridge, September 2012. ↵
- Ibid. ↵
- Rancière, ‘The Politics of Pedro Costa’, trans. by Emiliano Battista, in Pedro Costa, booklet accompanying film retrospective at Tate Modern (London: Tate, 2009), n.p. ↵
- A version of this section appeared in my book chapter ‘Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle’, in Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 75–92 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24_3>.↵
- ‘Tinker’, in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 20 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) vi, p. 1701. ↵
- Ackbar Abbas, ‘Poor Theory: An Open Source Manifesto’, University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), December 2019 <https://uchri.org/foundry/poor-theory/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977–1978), trans. by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 16. See also Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies’, Discourse, 34.2–3 (Spring–Fall 2012), pp. 311–47 (p. 315). ↵
- Abbas, ‘Poor Theory’. ↵
- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, ed. by Guido Fink (Milan: Garzanti, 2000), p. 241. ↵
- Maaike Lauwaert, ‘Helden van de tegenzin’, Tubelight, 66 (January 2010) <https://www.tubelight.nl/helden-van-de-tegenzin/> [accessed 28 July 2024]; in English as ‘Heroes of Reluctance: On Hesitation as an Active Act’, Maaike Lauwaert <https://web.archive.org/web/20120225112854/http://maaikelauwaert.com/articles/joseph-vogl/> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- See the discussion of Švejk in Preciosa de Joya, ‘The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance: In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth)’, in Errans, ed. by Holzhey and Wedemeyer, pp. 19–47 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24_1>. ↵
- Ackbar Abbas, ‘Poor Theory and New Chinese Cinema: Jia Zhangke’s “Still Life”’, public lecture, Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine, 3 December 2008 <http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/pdf/AbbasPoorTheoryStillLife.pdf> [accessed 28 July 2024]. ↵
- Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 67 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700624>. ↵
- Makhdoumin (A Maid for Each), dir. by Maher Abi Samra (Icarus Films, 2016). ↵
- Marina Gržinić, ‘Shifting the Borders of the Other: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha’, Telepolis, 12 August 1998 <https://web.archive.org/web/20221205202004/http://www.heise.de/tp/features/Shifting-The-Borders-of-The-Other-3441351.html> [accessed 23 January 2025]. ↵
- William Brown, ‘Melancholia: The Long, Slow Cinema of Lav Diaz’, in Slow Cinema, ed. by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 112–22 (p. 119). ↵
- Thank you to Claire Nioche for this insight. ↵
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Primary Filmography
- , dir., Casa de Lava (Down to Earth) (1994)
- Costa, Pedrodir., No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) (2000)
- , dir., Mafrouza — 3. Que faire? (Mafrouza — 3. What is to Be Done?) (2010)
- , dir., Le quattro volte (The Four Times) (2010)
- , dir., El cant dels ocells (Birdsong) (2008)
- , dir., Sátántangó (Satanic) (1994)
- , , dirs, Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) (2000)
Other films, video art, and installations
- , dir., Makhdoumin (A Maid for Each) (2016)
- , dir., La libertad (Freedom) (2001)
- , dir., To vlemma tou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze) (1995)
- , dir., Tout refleurit: Pedro Costa, cinéaste (All Blossoms Again) (2006)
- , dir., 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) (1967)
- Godard, Jean-Lucdir., Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)
- , dir., Trouble in Paradise (1932)
- , dir., Late Autumn (1960)
- Ozu, Yasujirōdir., Late Spring (1949)
- Ozu, Yasujirōdir., Tokyo Story (1953)
- , dir., Waiting for Sancho (2008)
- , dir., Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) (1961)
- , , dirs, Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Clouds to the Resistance) (1979)
- Straub, Jean-Marieand Danièlle Huilletdirs, Sicilia! (Sicily!) (1998)
- , dir., Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) (1960)
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