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Introduction
December 2024. It
started with a typo. In a note to Dana Linssen, then-editor at Filmkrant – the Dutch tabloid to which Cristina Álvarez López and I
contribute our monthly audiovisual essay series The
Thinking Machine – I mistakenly wrote Filmrant.
She took that error and ran with it, conceiving at the end of 2012 a
collaboration between herself and the graphic artist Typex for the
Rotterdam International Film Festival called Filmrant,
“just
one leaflet a day in a very small circulation, mostly hand designed, drawn
and written and photocopied”. Filmrant thus became part of the (for a time) annual activity at Filmkrant for Rotterdam known as the Slow
Criticism project – an opportunity for film critics, journalists and scholars
to reflect on their practice, or on a theme, or dwell in detail on a
particular film screening in the Rotterdam program. With the caveat
that this philosophically slow criticism – slow like slow food or
slow cinema, in defiance of the usual routines of consumerist
production – usually had to be delivered and packaged very fast, to
be ready by the Rotterdam opening in the last week of January;
nonetheless, a wide range of writers, audiovisualists and related
creators from all around the globe have gave it their best shot until
the project’s finale in 2023 (a very partial archive is here). I
was asked to contribute to Filmrant – “It was your typo, after all”– on the basis of “only a couple
of lines a day ... maybe some sort of serial?” Thus was conceived,
spontaneously, my “Film
Theory of the Asymmetrical Prostate”, to be delivered to its public
in “8 Daily Propositions of 15 Lines Each”, laid out as a
block-paragraph. Filmrant happened only once, but this “DIY no-budget enterprise”, sold
directly by hand to customers, paid for each evening’s round of
beers for the editors and their best friends. You
would be hard pressed to find the eight daily editions of this
publication from 2013 in any library today; it was never put online,
and I’ve never seen a copy myself! Therefore, I here resuscitate my
“Film Theory …” as an assembled series that I can indefinitely
extend – with the original eight installments, plus a ninth (from a
2014 revision) for asymmetry’s sake. But, a little advice: be
careful what you write, because 10 years later I had to have my own
prostate – symmetrical but cancerous – surgically removed.
1.
In
the drawn-out finale of Cosmopolis (2012) by Cronenberg
(Senior), Eric (Robert Pattinson) is told by Sheets/Benno (Paul
Giamatti) that he should have learnt the lesson of his asymmetrical
prostate (which has been discovered in an earlier, memorable, rectal
examination taking place in his vast, customised car). That he could
have dealt with the fluctuating fortunes of the Chinese Yuan by
paying strict attention to this prostate. Because his fault was
always to have aimed for a high logic, order, reason – even when
beyond reason. But it’s all out of whack. It’s not ever going to
be perfect. It’s asymmetrical. Forget your perfect offering. We
face the same problem with film theory, film criticism, and (let’s
not forget it) film itself. Critical minds – including the critical
minds of filmmakers – love to tie everything up. They love form,
symmetry, balance. In minimalist movies on the Festival circuit as
much as in the three-act blockbuster model (which is really four,
symmetrical parts) enforced by Hollywood; in articles with nicely
matched paragraphs as much as on TV reports. Nothing pleases us more
than order. But nothing, ultimately, constrains and depresses us more
than order. Hence this manifesto.
2.
There
are film reviews, articles, entire books, of which I retain only a
single line, phrase or idea. That is enough to make the thing
worthwhile. There was once a piece, on Martin Scorsese in general, on New York, New York in particular, by Alain Masson in Positif magazine. (1) He said something great: that, in the midst of the vast
set, of the precision reverse-shot cutting, of the equilibrium of the
actors (De Niro and Minnelli, Junior), there was one detail,
deliberately (it seemed) stuck in there (or, at least, never
expunged) that threw off the immaculate balance of the whole
show: Bob’s gaudy necktie. This is now the detail of that film I
immediately think of first, last and always: the power of critical
suggestion! This necktie is the emblem of Asymmetric Cinema.
Off-balance cinema, never fully resolved into a form. Hobbling
cinema, off on the wrong foot, and never landing on solid ground. But
it is wrong (post-André Bazin) to see the photographic-reality-index
of film as nothing but neckties, excessive reality everywhere the
camera looks. Because things resolve faster than we can
unsettle them, faster than they can unsettle themselves. And in the
quest for unbalance, we must be ever diligent.
3.
In
the film theory of the 1970s (a lost era, now!), there was a
different pair of terms for symmetry and asymmetry in cinema: homogeneity and heterogeneity. They sound quaint and/or
forbidding today. But there was a point: the difference between
everything that is (on the one hand) blended to a fault, strained to
within an inch of its life, leached of any foreign element, and (on
the other hand) everything that is chaotic, multiple, ruinous, all
over the place. There was a fleeting moment, back then, when both
theory and cinema loved the heterogeneous, with its rally-flag of
difference (not sameness), and its promise of unruly ecstasy: we
glimpsed it in R.W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, the Kuchar brothers,
Kenneth Anger, J-L. Godard – but also Powell & Pressburger,
Scorsese, De Palma, musicals, TV. What is heterogeneous is close to
the unconscious, close to desire itself. But like the magical idea of photogénie for Jean Epstein, it was hard to hold on screen,
and in our minds, for than a minute at a time: too much bliss was
impossible to sustain. We thus convinced ourselves of the false truth
of deviation theory: things have to be (neo)classical in order
for some little, messy deviation to enter and exit. Such a puny,
parcelled-out freedom.
4.
We
delight in the contemporary culture of criticism-in-image-and-sound;
of digital restorations in toto of old, endangered films; of
mash-ups and fan videos. I do, too. But beware: at every point, we
are tending to make the asymmetrical symmetrical, the heterogeneous
homogenous. Putting all these audiovisual tools into our democratic
hands is a good way (as always) to get us all to enforce the
unconsciously absorbed standards of Best Professional Practice, of
convention, of slickness and smoothness. Every time a DVD restorer
(e.g., on Samuel Fuller’s The
Big Red One [1980/2004], or a
Hitchcock movie, or Welles’ Othello [1951]) decides, oh so
rationally, that a particular outtake just “can’t be fit into the
whole”, or that a certain sound effect from 1953 would be better
re-recorded and digitally redone, we are in the Kingdom of the
Smooth. And it is always repressive, always an evacuation of the
media-materiality of the past – which we shouldn’t fetishise, but
which we shouldn’t obliterate, either. The art historian Lawrence
Alloway once wrote that the ends of reels, as they were being
projected – suddenly more scratches, more noise, a mess – became
a beloved part of the emotion of movie-watching. We lose all this in
the clean-up.
5.
The
Big Theorist of Asymmetric Cinema was Jean-François Lyotard. His
1973 text “Acinema” (2) is amazeballs. Cinematography as a medium
is defined as ‘writing with movement’, any kind of movement. But
there are acceptable, accepted movements and unacceptable,
reprehensible ones according to the dominant rules of culture. The
forbidden moves – which cannot be economised, made productive,
tamed by repetition, narrative or Romantic flourish – are, for
Lyotard, “a simple sterile difference in an audio-visual
field […] blissful intensities”. (3) He characterises them as
“what is fortuitous, dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly
framed, overexposed […] aberrant movements, useless expenditures,
differences of pure consumption […] all sorts of gaps, jolts,
postponements, losses and confusions”. (4) Lyotard hesitates –
“We are not demanding a raw cinema […] We are hardly about to
form a club dedicated to the saving of rushes and the rehabilitation
of clipped footage”. Then comes the switch-up: “And yet …”
(5) A new history of cinema is contained in that fondly wished-for and yet. Lyotard never had the time or interest to write a
real sequel to “Acinema” – his subsequent pieces on cinema went
in other directions. That’s our job, now.
6.
I
cherish the bum notes I have heard on the soundtracks of movies. In
the middle of the most beautiful scene of Sergio Leone’s Once
Upon a Time in America (1984), well-dressed old De Niro (again)
in a phone booth outside Fat Moe’s diner, there’s a flat tone
right in the centre of the horn section of Ennio Morricone’s
orchestra. By the time the soundtrack album appeared, there had been
time for a re-take and a fixing of that note (was the muso fired?).
You hear horn fluffs like this, too, in Peter Greenaway movies,
staining their pristine perfection for all time: obviously, Michael
Nyman was working to a tight production deadline on his Henry Purcell
pastiche before the Cannes/Venice/Berlin festival premiere, as many
film composers must. But my all-time favourite made it all the way
through to the soundtrack album: the small dance band ensemble of
Carlos d’Alessio (1935-1992) hits a clarinet honker in the midst of
the jaunty “Rumba des Isles” composed for Marguerite Duras’
sublimely glacial India Song (1975). In fact, the entire musical soundtrack to this film is
fantastically raw: unmixed, hardly even engineered, it sounds like it
was recorded with one lonely mic in one take. Am I celebrating some
sort of vengeful, self-detonating glitch art here? Not
exactly. I recall something the actor Lou Castel explained to me:
that every time he acts before a camera, he feels the welling-up of a
specific gesture – completely disconnected from plot, character, or
immediate situation – that he is absolutely compelled to produce,
that somehow means everything to him in its sheer meaninglessness and
excess; usually the director edits it out (alas!), so he just carries
it over into the next project, the next shoot. (6) Are the bum notes
in soundtrack scores also waiting for their moment, their chance to
exist, ready to possess unsuspecting musicians – despite
everything?
7.
“There
is no need to polish off, but rather a need to combine”. (7) This
is what Bifo (Franco Berardi) says these days when he reflects back
on the period of Free Radio adventures across Europe with which he
was intimately involved. “The blossoming of a multiplicity of
voices and, for the first time, minority and underground cultures
were able to have a voice”. (8) A radical cultural explosion of
mad, uncontrolled, uncontrollable experiments, or resingularising
vectors as Bifo says, in the inspiring language of Félix
Guattari. (9) Anyone ever attached, anywhere on the planet, to
projects of free radio, community television, video collectives or
Super-8 groups, knows this fantastic rush of completely asymmetrical,
political pleasure: it’s all raw edges, individuals or little
groups doing their thing, anarchy of the airwaves. The triumph of amateurism, which is always asymmetrical in its utterances and
assemblages. As Bifo describes such production of cultures and
subjectivities, it’s more like a collage or a montage than a
smoothly formed, seamless egg; a recombinant method, where the
aim is “not so much to correct but rather to integrate”. (10) To
stage encounters of all kinds.
8.
What
Bifo remembers as the best aspects of Free Radio in the 1970s, he
projects forward to the network-culture of the Internet in the 21st century. But he knows, too, the lesson that Wilfred Bion (1897-1979)
drew from the practice of psychoanalysis: every radical explosion of
desire (individual or collective) contains with it the seed of its
own depressive episode (possibly prolonged), because breakthroughs of
the personal or social body are as scary as they are delightful, and
it’s so hard to keep all the channels open and free. We look at the
ghost-town archives of all those media experiments of the past, and
we wonder what went wrong, why the inspiration of creative tension dissipated, sooner or later. The answer is always the same: not
institutionalisation in itself (some institutions are good things for
culture), but the regularising rules that take hold and enter
everyone’s head and body. Suddenly, radio hosts are all speaking
with the same cadence and tone; snatched digital videos resemble TV
documentaries (complete with stupid music and the post-production
effects provided with every computer); amateur films ape Hollywood
gloss on a Z-budget. Break bad!
9.
I
had what is known as a Limit Experience discovering the films
(1968-1973) of Carmelo Bene (1937-2002)
in 2009. They literally changed my life: my sense of what was possible in cinema, art, love, anything. No one took the
principles of excess further than this guy. He worked from
obstruction, difficulty, non-communication: he never wanted to please
anyone, not even himself. When asked in 1988 why he was directing
plays-for-TV in such an odd way, he thundered back: “I also
destroyed cinema; why this wonder for television?” (11) In the
tradition of João César Monteiro (1939-2003), Salò (1975), Werner Schroeter (1945-2010), and not
much else. Beyond mere provocation, in a furious black hole. But what
fury, energy, intensity! And militant asymmetry: maintained from
first frame to last, never a touch-down for a sense of order or
propriety. I like it when people say that, with some film or other,
they had to find a way in – some tear in the fabric, some
protruding detail, some aspect seen from a certain angle or in a
particular light – before being able to scramble inside and poke
around. Bene’s films gave me this messy, corporeal, visceral sense
of being right inside the machine of cinema. “Art makes its
contact point in sense and pleasure”, declares Bifo, evoking an
aesthetics of “juxtaposed entities in epidermal contact, animal and
machinic, mental and electronic”. (12) What a prostate!
(to
be continued …)
NOTES
© Adrian Martin
January 2013 / April 2014 |
New York, New York