kino-fait: in search of an emancipated cinematic pedagogy through a de-centered montage Pedro juan vidal thesis master of arts in media studies the new school 2011 primary thesis advisor: Ethan spigland second reviewer: sam ishii-gonzales Thesis coordinator: dawnja burris
kino-fait (cine-made)
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What is an emancipated spectator? Is there something in the construction of a
work of art that allows for an emancipated spectator? Is it possible for the object of a spectatorʼs gaze to facilitate an egalitarian discourse between the construction of the object, the artist, and the spectator? !
Kino-Fait postulates a theoretical relationship and realization between the ideas
of Jacques Ranciereʼs Emancipated Spectator, Brian Hendersonʼs Non-Bourgeois Camera Style and Serge Denayʼs Godardian Pedagogy. This essay is going to investigate Jacques Ranciereʼs notion of the ʻemancipated spectatorʼ and the cinematic object realized by the spectator. In the case of this essay, the cinematic object will be signified as Kino-Made, the juxtaposition and synthesis of the theories and practices of
Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertovʼs ʻKino-Eyeʼ and French artist Marcel Duchampʼs ʻReadymadesʼ (tout-fait). !
Thus, Kino-Made is a cinematic object constructed from the already-processed
sounds, images and texts from everyday life and situations. This cinematic object is a de-centered object held together by the relations between its assembled elements. It proposes an emancipated pedagogical relationship between artist and spectator through the work of art, an art object that allows for observation and analysis of its intervals, elements, appearance, and construction in a heterogeneous manner. !
The emancipated spectator, the readymade, and kino-eye are related because
they deal with a certain construction of the work of art that opens the relationship between artist, work of art, and spectator of art. Viewing is perceived as an active gesture. !
Discourse is revealed in Cinema through montage. Montage, therefore, is
cinematic discourse, a certain language per-se. In this sense, the spectator is an active producer able to conceive of new situations and discourses from the materials, elements, and assemblages that exist before them as ready-mades, as spectators before an image and the fact that the image exists as a discourse to be rendered before the spectator. !
Kino-fait is a type of cinema, an attempt at cinema, of the emancipated spectator.
It is a cinema of what Iʼd like to call the ʻeveryday readymade.ʼ A cinema of a so-called emancipated spectator firstly questions emancipation and the role of a spectator.! In the case of cinematic emancipation we must consider the spectator an an active mediator,
one who is active in the production of the process of communication of sounds and images.
the object of the emancipated spectator’s gaze !
In his essay “The Emancipated Spectator,” Jacques Ranciere explores the
“relationship between the theory of intellectual emancipation and the question of the spectator” (Ranciere 1). He says that there is a “paradox of the spectator” in critical theory which is “easily formulated: there is no theatre without a spectator” (2). For cinemaʼs sake we can say that there is also no cinema without a spectator. This paradox problematizes and separates cinema as the work of art and the spectator into different positions and roles. !
Being a spectator becomes problematic in this paradox because “viewing is the
opposite of knowing” and “the opposite of acting” (ibid.,). This idea dates back to Platoʼs critique against the appearance of a false reality versus the true reality that lies behind it. In Platoʼs critique, the images that we see are merely false constructions that hide truths about power relations in society and ideological structures. This therefore says that to be a spectator is to lack the knowledge that allows one to read and comprehend constructed images, as well as being in compliance and passivity to their appearance. “To be a spectator,” Ranciere critiques Plato, “is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (ibid.,). To be a spectator is thus considered a bad thing. !
The ignorant spectator is separated from knowledge and action. In this
separation, knowledge is mediated through an object; in this case the film-object, or
cinema. Ranciere continues his critique of the ʻparadox of the spectatorʼ using the works of French “anti-” philosopher, theorist, and artist Guy Debord and German playwright Bertolt Brecht as examples. For Guy Debord, the cinema, like all commercial massmedia, was part of the reign of the spectacle that dominated everyday life under capitalism while theatre for German playwright Bertolt Brecht could be transformed into a critical medium to inspire political action. Cinema and theatre both then fall under the reign of the spectacle. Spectacle is synonymous with ideology, representative of the dominant forms and ideas that structure a certain society politically and culturally.
brecht & debord !
Brecht & Debord were both critical of ideology and the predetermined notions
about the world it created. “Brecht argues that the bourgeois theatre is based on an ʻillusionismʼ that takes for granted the assumption that the dramatic performance should directly reproduce the world” (Eagleton 64). The “bourgeois” theatre is one that the spectator takes as a given, a “finished, unchangeable art-object offered to them as ʻreal” (ibid.,). Brecht thought of traditional, bourgeois theatre as a dramatic illusion that creates an aesthetic of a seamless whole reflecting the ideological belief of the world as fixed, given, and unchangeable. For Debord, the ʻseamless wholeʼ represents the spectacle “in which everyday experience is cut off from decision making” (Debord 87). It is when theatre, or the spectacle as a whole, presents these seemingly natural images as givens, whether presented in cinema or theatre, that the production, presentation, and consumption of them “is an absolutely bad thing” and “whoever says ʻtheatreʼ says ʻspectatorʼ - and therein lies the evil” (Ranciere 3). The identity of spectator that sits before the spectacle of theatre or cinema is thus constructed to be passively consuming
an illusion, an experience ʻcut off from decision makingʼ, and in there lies to evil of the spectacle. it presents “a scene of illusion and passivity that must be abolished in favour of what it prohibits - knowledge and action; the action of knowing and action guided by knowledge” (2-3). !
However similar their intentions, Brecht and Debordʼs solutions for the passivity
of the spectator from the domination of the spectacle differ. Brechtʼs epic theater declares “the spectator must be roused from the stupefaction of spectators enthralled by appearances and won over by the empathy that makes them identify with the characters on stage” (Ranciere 4). Debordʼs critique of the spectator of the spectacle, Ranciere states, “...can be summed up in a brief formula: ʻthe more he contemplates, the less he lives” (6). !
Brecht proclaims the abolition of a traditional theatre in favor of an active
spectator with a “refined gaze” that allows them to realize the construction of the theatrical production, its ʻseparation of elementsʼ. Just as the theatre is truly an assemblage of all the parts of a theatrical production, the spectator is supposed to also acknowledge their own elements which construct their own situation in the world. Brecht thought of his epic theatre as ʻthe modern theatreʼ. In his writings he notes his description of the epic theatre: ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
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...narrative over plot, turns the spectator into an observer, but arouses his capacity for action, forces him to take decisions rather than providing with sensations, he is made to face something rather than involved, argument over suggestion, spectator stands outside and studies, the human being is the object of inquiry (alterable and able to alter), each scene for itself, montage, man as a process, social being determines thought, and reason over feeling... (Brecht on Theatre 37).
These notes are more like methods of critical analysis than of theatrical production because thatʼs exactly what Brecht intended his mode of theatrical production to be. The epic theatre was to be a way to distance the spectator from the emotions of plot engagement and allow the spectator to stand back from the situation and view the narrative objectively as an assemblage of relationships. Similar to Dziga Vertovʼs use of kino-eye, the use of the cinematographic camera, Brechtʼs epic theater was supposed to be a way to allow the spectator to observe, objectively, the assemblage of different elements and their relationships to one another. This assemblage of elements also reflectʼs Vertovʼs own montage theory, in which what he calls the ʻfilm-objectʼ is constructed upon intervals, or movements and transitions between one shot to another. For Brecht the elements of epic theatre call upon montage theory in its separation of elements to observe the construction and build upon those relations. !
Brecht calls the result of his epic theatre a radical ʻseparation of elementsʼ, “the
great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production” (ibid.,). He believes that the bourgeois theatre is one of a homogeneous, muddled aesthetic in which the arts are ʻfusedʼ together, “the process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive part of the total work of art... Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another” (38). Brecht is calling for words, music, and setting to work in montage, in relation, to one another while maintaining their own power and affect in objective engagement with the spectator; creating an active spectator. !
Debord proclaims the abolition of the spectator and spectacle all together in
order for passive spectators to become actors of the world. His films, manifestos, and
publications question and challenge a society which has become identified with massproduction and consumption of constructed illusions in everyday life. !
Debordʼs now famous book Society of the Spectacle critiques the society of
consumption he saw develop post-World War II. In his book Debord critiques a society that is centered in spectacle, that is, the spectacle manifested in any sort of massproduced medium of communication. The performative arts such as theatre, cinema and later television were largely products and producers of ʻthe spectacleʼ as a result of the profitable investments in mass-media entertainment. !
The few films he produced from the 1950ʼs to the 1970ʼs present the spectacle
as a mash-up montage, or collage, of images from older newspaper, magazine, and television ads and clips from old movies; but also as documentation of Franceʼs and the modern worldʼs transformation into a fully capitalist system. His first film, Howls for Sade (1952) features no images, just the juxtaposition of white and black screen while five different voices exchange seemingly irrelevant statements. He negates the traditional conventions of cinematic language to distance the spectator and view the filmic construction as an objective work to realize the same construction of the spectacle, similar to Brechtʼs ʻseparation of elementsʻ in theatre. On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), his next film, has three different voices comprise the sound track while documentary clips of the streets and plazas of Paris, photographs of Debord and his band of Situationist International renegades, newsreel footage, and book covers make up the image track. A third element, sub-titles & intertitles, further distances the spectator by acknowledging the spectator and the fact that they are watching a documentary/film. In 1973, Debord released the film adaptation of
The Society of the Spectacle. In the film, Debordʼs voice-over is monotone and authoritative as he reads excerpts from the book. Images from from the mass-media are presented as found-footage that are critiqued and commented on by Debord. !
Throughout his films, Debord keeps his voice constantly heard over the image as
if someone were looking down above us at the images we are watching. He holds the audience in the cinema, responsible not for watching the images then at that moment, but for having watched those images, because they come and go and their arrangement is not taken seriously but innocent. Debord has the audience return to these images with his own discourse, more so a monologue, to teach them a lesson. !
However critical they both are about the impact and effect of seamless,
homogeneous aesthetic, Ranciere argues that Brecht and Debordʼs theories become just at stuck in the paradox of the relationship between spectator and spectacle, for they both believe that the spectator must be emancipated from their passivity and lack of knowledge through alternative spectacles, different discourses. In this paradox, the works of of art produced by Brecht and Debord hold the knowledge that the spectator lacks. They produce their works to teach a lesson, and in there lies the paradox, the relationship of inequality that exists between the artist and spectator which continues to hold the spectator. !
Ranciere believes that the predetermined notions established as givens between
spectacle and spectator that Brecht and Debord aim to critique should be critiqued themselves. It is the “network of presuppositions... equivalences between theatrical audience and community, gaze and passivity, exteriority and separation, mediation and simulacrum; oppositions between the collective and the individual, the image and living
reality, activity and passivity, self-ownership and alienation,” as Ranciere puts it, that “should be re-examined today” (7). These sets of pre-determined equivalences and oppositions in effect restrict the possibility of any reform, defining roles and meanings as ʻeither / orʼ instead of ʻandʼ; dismissing the possibility of any radical juxtaposition, arrangement or collaboration. The network of presuppositions must be re-examined as representative of the “very logic of the pedagogical relationship: the role assigned to the schoolmaster... to abolish the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus” (8). !
Just as the network of presuppositions must be re-examined, the logic of the
pedagogical relationship must be re-examined as well. Assigning the schoolmaster as the beholder of knowledge and the pupil as ignoramus separated from that knowledge automatically establishes and “constantly confirms its own presupposition: the inequality of intelligence.” This presupposition of inequality is where the theory of Joseph Jacotot comes into play, who claimed in the early nineteenth century “that one ignoramus could teach another what he himself did not know, asserting the equality of intelligence and opposing intellectual emancipation to popular instruction” (1). The inequality of intelligence, on the other hand, is an “endless confirmation” of the logic of in a pedagogical relationship, “what Jacotot calls stultification” (9). !
Jacques Ranciere begins here in his critique of this problematic paradox. “In
truth,” he says, “there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors.” (8-9) This is the difference between Ranciereʼs spectator from Brecht and Debordʼs, Ranciere presupposes a
spectator that is already active and has the capacity to read, learn, and understand the elements laid out before them while Brecht and Debordʼs must first realize an inability they lack, a separation between the knowledge the schoolmaster and the ignorance of the student. That separation problematizes a real equality of intelligences. !
Presupposing that a spectator is already intellectually emancipated rather than
held impassive until emancipated by an alternate spectacle challenges the already established oppositions; these ʻembodied allegories of inequalityʼ. Ranciere makes it clear that the importance of an equality of intelligences is to realize that it “does not signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence, but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations” (10). The paradox of stultification persists in the relationship between schoolmaster and student because the structure remains as one who possesses a capacity and one who does not, and the structure remains even if the student has become the schoolmaster. In the “logic of the stultifying pedagogue, the logic of straight, uniform transmission” structures knowledge as “a capacity, an energy in a body or a mind - on one side, and it must pass to the other side” (13-14). Ranciere compares the logic of the stultifying pedagogue to an identity of cause and effect which he claims is based upon an inegalitarian principle “based on the privilege that the schoolmaster grants himself - knowledge of the ʻrightʼ distance and ways to abolish it” (ibid.,). This is where Brecht and Debordʼs own stultifying pedagogue lies. ! ! ! ! ! ! !
As Ranciere states ! ! ! ! “Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition ! ! between viewing and acting; when we understand that the ! ! self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying and ! ! seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination ! ! and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also
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an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar� (13).
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Dziga Vertov was already questioning this stultifying pedagogy through his kino-
eye, the mechanical camera eye. The spectator, like the film-maker, pupil, or scholar, is viewing, thinking, and deciding and in doing so constructing an object that has used and re-produced those elements and intervals before them, producing a new object and interpretation. For Vertov, production is subject to selecting, observing, and organizing collected footage. Film production, or montage, is just as Ranciere describes the active, emancipated spectator: ! ! ! ! ! !
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She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her... They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them� (ibid.,).
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To begin to discuss the emancipation of the spectator is to abolish the idea that
their is a separation between an emancipated and ignorant spectator. It begins, as Ranciere says, when we challenge the separation between viewing and acting and understand that they can be one in the same. The idea of an emancipated spectator blurs the roles between activity and passivity, production and consumption. Thus, the work of art or art object that separates the artist/schoolmaster and spectator/student is produced by the artist for the spectator and in this interaction the spectator/student reproduces the work of art/art object for themselves. ! ! ! ! ! !
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“In the logic of emancipation, between the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated novice there is always a third thing - a book or some other piece of writing [or cinema] - alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which
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subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect” (15).
The object exists as the third thing owned by no one and emancipated from any cause or effect. It exists as an assemblage of elements which is available to the spectator to view, observe, and visually explore for a given duration. The object exists indifferently to the spectator whereas the spectator inscribes the object from the signs and symbols they have seen and experienced elsewhere. The object thus offers a common ground, per-se, a distribution or assemblage of elements that can be shared and experienced by a variety of spectators in everyday life. “In a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them” (16). Thus everyday objects are assembled from sonic and optical situations as sounds and music, texts and images, all elements and intervals of everyday life as an object. “The collective power shared by spectators,” Ranciere states, “is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in their own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other” (16-17). It is this collective power of the spectator that reads and translate those assembled objects that questions and challenges the previous notions of the spectator:
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“This shared power of the equality of intelligence links individuals, makes them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone has to plot her own path (ibid.,).”
To challenge the traditional critical notions of the role(s) of the spectator is to realize that a spectator is “not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our
normal situation” (17). To be a spectator is to be free to attend, inhabit, and experience acts and signs from everyday life. !
Ranciere argues that the previous forms of critical discourse hardly differ in their
consequences of stultification in which the blurring of boundaries and the confusion of roles are used “to enhance the effect of the performance without questioning its principles” (ibid.,). He believes that to create a work of art open to the spectator is to “problematize the cause-effect relationship itself and the set of presuppositions that sustain the logic of stultification... so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image” (22). In this proposal, the emancipated spectator is not just one who holds the capacity of knowledge but also holds the capacity of production. Therefore, the spectator is not just a passive consumer of information but just as well an active producer.
kino-eye: A refined gaze THE SCHOOL OF KINO-EYE CALLS FOR CONSTRUCTION OF THE FILM-OBJECT UPON “INTERVALS,” THAT IS, UPON THE MOVEMENT BETWEEN SHOTS, UPON THE VISUAL CORRELATION OF SHOTS WITH ONE ANOTHER, UPON TRANSITIONS FROM ONE VISUAL STIMULUS TO ANOTHER (90) !
Kino-eye was conceived by Russian documentarian filmmaker Dziga Vertovʼs
with “a belief in social transformation as the means for producing a transformation of consciousness and a certainty of accession to a ʻworld of naked truth,ʼ paradoxically grounding his creed in the acceptance and affirmation of the radically synthetic film technique of montage” (intro xxv). Film production was thought to be “a directing force in the revolutionary process,” in which montage was directly part of dialectical thinking.
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The cinematic camera was Vertovʼs way to approach the sounds, images, and
texts of the world. By viewing the world through the camera, viewing truly becomes an active act, an act of production, and so is Vertovʼs ʻKino-Eyeʼ. In their manifesto “Kinoks: A Revolution,” published in June 1923, Dziga Vertov and the Council of Three state, “We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space” (DV 14-15). It is through the kino-eye that Vertov proposed to prepare “a system of seeming irregularities to investigate and organize phenomena.” Kino-eye, or the cinematic camera, was used by Vertov as a tool of exploration, analysis, and presentation of the known world. In his writings he states that “the movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena... But,” he declares, “the camera experienced a misfortune. It was invented at a time when there was no single country in which capital was not in power. The bourgeoisieʼs hellish idea consisted of using the new toy to entertain the masses, or rather to divert the workersʼ attention from their basic aim: the struggle against their masters” (67). His films produced under the kino-eye doctrine attacked the conventions of cinematic relations and production, making the assemblage of the film-object one in which the audience was just as much involved, beyond traditional character and narrative identification. In the Kinoks manifesto, Vertov addresses the readers directly as if an attempt to raise them to social activism and engagement: “You - filmmakers, you directors and artists with nothing to do . . . You - theater audiences, patient as mules beneath the burden of the emotional experiences offered you . . . You - impatient proprietors of theaters not yet bankrupt . . . Youʼre waiting for something that will not
come; the wait is pointless” (11). The movie camera was a tool for Vertov that allowed him to view the world, to capture the world, and to inscribe the world cinematically. !
Having come from newsreel production, Vertovʼs films retained some episodic
structures similar to newsreels themselves. His films, though, played with what was possible in recording, playing back, fast-forwarding, and reversing motion in the shots. From the film Kino-eye (1924) to Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertovʼs films expressed through montage, cutting, and editing what was not possible by capturing the everyday life of the Soviet Union transforming into a modern nation.
The kino-eye method is the scientifically experimental method of exploring the visible world - based on the systematic recording on film of facts from life; based on the systematic organization of the documentary material recorded oN film. !
Vertov was interested in what he called ʻintervalsʼ: “the transitions from one
movement to another.” In his writings he recognized these intervals as the material and elements of the cinematic object. The world for Vertov was an archive of movements of all kinds and the organization of intervals linked these movements. The intervals “are the material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves” (DV 8). Vertov compared the organization of his elements to cinematic phrases and the organization of the phrases as compositions. “Itʼs entirely a question of the particular juxtaposition of visual details, of intervals” (DV 21). Vertovʼs question politicizes the very act of looking at the world through a camera and the very nature of gazing. Vertov is first and foremost a spectator and the cinematic camera is his spectatorial tool. The ʻparticular juxtapositionʼ of intervals is the production of montage.
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“Montage means organizing film fragments (shots) into a film-object” (DV 88).
Vertov made it clear the importance of montage in the production of the cinematic object. It is through montage that images, sounds, and texts can be linked, related to one another. It is through montage that these elements can be organized, assembled, and composed into a cinematic object so that the viewer may be able to see with their own eyes, observe, study, and think about the images, sounds, and texts presented to them, just as the filmmaker takes inventory of these materials and elements and organizes them into “an orderly montage study” (16).
Montage means organizing film fragments (shots) into a film object. It means ‘writing’ something cinematic with the recorded shots. The orderly montage study of the kino-eye is “the documentary cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye” (87). Montage makes visible the links and relations that may remain silent or obscured without having to define its subject matter by one way or another. Montage links, montage juxtaposes like an addition. Similar to Serge Eisensteinʼs theory of intellectual montage, it juxtaposes alternate or opposing ideas, whether they be a sound and an image, a sound and a text, an image and a text, or all three together, to create a new idea or meaning. Kino-eye, however, realizes montage not just as a form for the cinematic object, but also as a constantly open thought process that may begin even before any cinematic intervals are recorded or written. “Every Kino-Eye production is subject to montage... during the entire process of film production” (89). Kino-eye is montage, as Dziga Vertov states, and montage is “when I select a theme... when I make observations for a theme... when I establish the viewing over of the footage on the
theme” (90). Kino-eye is montage in process as montage is the realization of the process of thought.
Kino-Eye =
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Kino-Seeing (I see through the camera) +Kino-Writing (I write on film with the camera) +Kino-Organization (I edit)
Dziga Vertovʼs “process of intellection generating a critique of cinematic
representation is united with cinematic production within the construction of a socialist economy” through The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Through montage, the filmtext/object transforms the raw materials, the accumulation of labor and tools of production. The film is “in form and structure, the synthetic articulation of the Marxist project, concretized in every detail of an unprecedented complexity of cinematic design. [It] joins the human life cycle with the cycles of work and leisure of a city from dawn to dusk within the spectrum of industrial production” (xxxvii). It captures “...the activities of labor, of coming and going, of eating, drinking and clothing oneʼs self,ʼ of play,” presenting these actions as the “material production of ʻlife itself.” !
As manifested in The Man with a Movie Camera and articulated in his many
journal entires, Vertovʼs work features “a rationalized production organized in direct and explicit service of the construction of socialism; the necessary elaboration of a new ʻvocabularyʼ; the development and use of standardized equipment; the resolutely contemporary nature of production conditions and techniques; the redefinition of the production process, the implacable and public explication of its nature; and the radical revision of aesthetic canons and priorities” (xxviii). Kino-eye is Dziga Vertovʼs attempt at an emancipatory socialist cinema of reparation.
THE READYMADE: The Emancipatory “Third Thing” It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them !
Marcel Duchampʼs “Ready-mades” are unique, particular objects of
contemplation. As stated by Hector Obalk in his essay The Unfindable Readymade, “the only definition of "readymade" published under the name of Marcel Duchamp ("MD" to be precise) is found in Andre Breton and Paul Eluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme: "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist." It has never been made clear whether Duchamp ever defined his ready-mades as such, however, in the publication Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud notes “it is the viewers who make the paintings,ʼ Duchamp once said ... in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work” (20). Perhaps, then, the ready-made is an object in negotiation between the artist and the spectator, that “emancipatory third thing” that Ranciere refers to in The Emancipated Spectator, “a book or some other piece of writing [or cinema] alien to both and which they can refer to verify in common” what others have seen, talked about, and thought about. “It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect,” which sets a kind of equality between artist and spectator. This is what Duchamp refers to when he speaks of the collaboration and negotiation between the artist and ʻthe one who comes to view the workʼ.
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The ready-mades were assembled from ordinary, everyday mass-produced
objects: stools, bicycle wheels, bottle racks, snow shovels, brass plates, balls of twine coat racks, hat racks, and urinals. That was what Duchamp used between 1913 and 1917 between New York City and Paris, what was available to him in markets and stores at that time. Today, it could be any product from a taxicab to an elevator or subway car. Whatʼs interesting about Duchampʼs ready-mades is that they problematize “the status of the transformation of an ordinary object into an objet-dʼart, that is to say, the split that we experience as spectators in a museum, before the elevation of an ordinary object through the artistʼs nomination into something different - an art object,” as stated by Dalia Judovitz in her essay Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp. !
The ready-made, besides produced through the act of nomination, is an object
assembled or constructed from something which has already been produced. It dissociates the “visible character of the object” from its “proper character,” defined as a sort of expropriation by Judovitz. The everyday, ordinary object is stripped bare of what defines it as the mass-produced object is what intended for, whether it may be a bicycle wheel turned upside down and attached to a stool to be spun in one spot, a bottle rack with no bottles, a suspended snow shovel, or a urinal turned 90 degrees on its side. The expropriation takes its intended use and turns it on its head so that it becomes a useless product. In the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx “argues that ʻtools of productionʼ created by civilization are ʻproducts of laborʼ, “that is, capital, a mixture of accumulated labor and tools of production” ( Bourriaud 23). From this statement we can compare Duchampʼs ready-mades to Marxʼs theory of capital. Capital, like the readymades, is built upon an accumulation of products and their production. Duchamp did
exactly that in the production of his ready-mades, accumulating, assembling, and juxtaposing one object with another, producing through expropriating, or using, consuming. “Duchamp started from the principle that consumption was also a mode of production, as did Marx, who writes in the introduction to the Critique that “consumption is simultaneously also production... A product only becomes a real product in consumption... a dress becomes really a dress only by being worn, a house which is uninhabited is indeed not really a house.” (Ibid.,) By using every-day, seemingly ordinary, mass-produced objects, Duchamp re-inhabits the products and commodities alienated from the consumer. The ready-made is an object transformed into a sign, its own representation, while still keeping its material objectivity.
materialist intervention !
When Duchamp used mass-produced objects as raw material for art production,
he was using Marxʼs theory of capital and a mixture of labor and products into the practice of the readymade. By using mass-produced, everyday objects, he was taking that which was already produced and through choosing those particular products and objects he transformed them into something other. That which was already-made became the possibility of transformation into anything and nothing. The dissociation between the visible and proper character is a gap “representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize.” This, Duchamp writes in The Creative Act, “is the personal ʻart coefficientʼ contained in the work ... like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” The ready-made is that emancipatory third thing excluding any uniform transition and any identity of cause and effect, creating an
indifference between the intention of the artist and the interpretation of the spectator. That indifference “...à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict.” Duchampʼs intention of the ready-mades becomes a “materialist intervention,” the expropriation of the object as experienced by the spectator. The materialist intervention, through expropriation, de-centers the object from any role or definition, opening it to the spectator. By presenting the object as a raw assemblage of materials, the spectator takes part in its production, that is, choosing to view the object before them as a work of art and interpreting it in relation to other objects, images, and sings the spectator has seen and experienced before hand. As Duchamp wrote, “...the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” !
The ready-made presents an object in constant collaboration between the artist
and spectator. This collaboration is reflective in the construction of the ready-made, whether by the literal juxtaposition of one object with another, such as the bicycle wheel (1913) or trap (1917), or dislocating the object from its natural being, such as in advance of the broken arm (1915), hat rack (1917), or fountain (1917). The production and creation of a ready-made is in the choosing of the materials and elements as fragments, itʼs dislocation and transformation from an ordinary and familiar massproduced object of everyday experience to an uncanny and strange object that questions and problematizes the purpose and identity of its objective nature. Observing and experiencing a ready-made is in effect producing the ready-made. “Because
consumption creates the need for new production, consumption is both its motor and motive,” writes Bourriaud. “That is the primary virtue of the readymade: establishing an equivalence between choosing and fabricating, consuming and producing...” (23). In viewing the object, the spectator is confronted with an object with no absolute signification. The ready-made exists in a certain art/non-art limbo. The Bicycle Wheel presents a stool that cannot be used because a bicycle wheel is attached on top of it, able to be spun round and round but never able to get anywhere. Trap disables a coat rack as it is nailed to the floor, also becoming an obstruction. In Advance of the Broken Arm does not advance any broken arm as long as it is suspended in a gallery.
indifference & the infrathin !
The juxtaposition of elements and realities gives the ready-mades a collage-like
characteristic, where materials and elements are built and played upon, collected and presented indifferently as collected fragments. Here we return to the dissociation between the visible and proper character of the ready-made and the gap between the intention and realization of the object. In the production of a ready-made, the separation between artist and spectator is merely a decision, an intervention which sets the readymade into an interplay between visible appearance and discursive nature. The object of the ready-made “thus emerges as a hinge - the doorway between the visible and the discursive,” writes Judovitz. The ready-made truly emerges as a pun within a “delay effect.” The delay effect is a result of the ordinary, everyday objectʼs dislocation and dissociation as well as the difference or separation between intention and realization.
For me there is something else in addition to yes, no and indifferent, that is, for instance, the absence of investigation of that type (M.Duchamp)
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Judovitz points out that “Indifference thus comes to mean an activity and an
operation upon objects and contexts marked by oppositional difference of vision and discourse.” Duchampʼs interest in the absence of defined, oppositional types of investigations “rejects the difference made by vision” to a specific discourse, meaning, or interpretation governed by a homogeneous ideological pedagogy, similar to Ranciereʼs critique of a stultifying pedagogy that creates a separation between schoolmaster and student, or in this case, artist and spectator. The separation and difference creates a uniform transmission and direct cause and effect. The schoolmaster is the cause, the one who holds the knowledge to be passed over to the student, the effect. For Duchamp to reject these types of investigations is to reject “the difference made by vision, insofar as vision is equated metaphysically with knowledge, sexuality, and power.” The ready-made is owned by no one. Its meaning is owned by no one, thus, any uniform transmission or any identity of cause and effect is of no importance when it comes to the object or its subject. !
The ready-madeʼs construction presents indifference through its juxtapositions
and separations, a constant back and forth between one intention and the other, between one element and the other, between yes and no. This type of construction creates a clash of heterogeneous elements, a struggle between elements exploring “visual and verbal multi-dimensionality” (Judovitz). This clash of elements is one where the elements are juxtaposed with indifference to each other, indifference to the difference and separation between the elements. Since the object of the ready-made is not defined by its visual characteristics the visual experience of a readymade is one of indifference and anesthesia, since the object has been selected on purpose because of
its lack of ʻesthetic emotionʼ, as a defense against the ʻlookʼ. The object of the readymade is not defined by its visual characteristics as an aesthetic object, the object dematerializes. !
In his essay The Undefinable Readymade, Hector Obalk states that Duchampʼs
notes “donʼt name any object but describe the way these objects could be grasped and/ or presented.” Rather, Duchampʼs notes present a readymade as something that could be bought like a pair of ice-tongs, found like the inscription for the Woolworth building, made as something unrecognizable by its sound, and planned or inscribed to be later looked for; like a ʻrendezvousʼ. !
Besides his notes on the ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp also presents a very
unique and specific attribute to its character, the ʻinfrathinʼ. Duchamp has four clues in his notes describing the infrathin. In the first he writes “sameness / similarity / the same (mass prod.) practical approximation of similarity... In time the same object is not the same after a 1 second interval - what relations with the identity principle?” Then he defines it as a “separation between the detonation noise of a gun (very close) and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target.” Next he states it is “the difference (dimensional) between 2 mass produced objects [from the same mold] is an infrathin where the maximum (?) precision is obtained.” Lastly, under ʻInfrathin Separationʼ, “2 forms cast in the same mold(?) differ from each other by an infrathin separative amount. All ʻidenticalsʼ as identical as they may be, (and the more identical they are) more toward this infra thin separative difference.” These notes really do not reveal any more about the ready-made other than making it more of an elusive object/subject. Any sort of definition or identification of the object only further expropriates it, further asserting the
fact that the ready-made is in constant transition, destabilizing its objective character. Beyond any linguistic signification, the ready-made exists a self-referential discourse among itself proposing an infrathin difference not only between what may constitute a ready-made but also an infrathin difference between artist and spectator.
sound & image à l'état brut It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt. !
In “Sixteen working statements: Notes from a work on a film in progress,”
Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall present a thesis on Sound and Image. In it, they discuss a possible transformation of passive spectator to active mediators. They argue that cinematic language is not autonomous from the constraints and limitations of verbal language but is in fact formed and biased because of it. It is because of a certain ideological manipulation of sound and image which creates what they call an “unproblematic ʻseamless” filmic construction. This unproblematic and seamless construction hides “power relationships and assumptions about society” through a “conventional film language” that is “seamlessʼ and appears ʻnatural.” This seamless, unproblematic, and apparently natural manipulation of cinematic production does not allow for the spectator to be an active and engaged participant. It sets a determined meaning and essence in a cinema with no room for open interpretation, merely produced to be consumed by a passive spectator. !
They propose sound and image “rendered in a problematic manner” so that the
spectator can be liberated and involved in the production and understanding of meaning
in film. As liberated spectators they are active mediators in the cinematic production of meanings and ideas. !
Cinematic production is based on three essential modes according to them: ʻthe
photographic image, written text on the screen, and words on the sound-trackʼ. They add that “in conventional cinema, verbal language (both as text and as sound) takes on an explicatory function which gives directional meaning to the primary and pre-existing element which is the photographic image (for instance, voice-over or subtitles).” Thus, image, text, and sound are cinematic elements whose power relations must be investigated to challenge the seemingly natural and unproblematic construction of a homogeneous and closed cinematic object and discourse. “This investigation would take place by attempting to create a tension through heterogeneous use of filmic language, by which no one mode would be ancillary to another.” (McCall & Tyndall, 32) !
McCall and Tyndall propose what seems to be a collage-assemblage of
cinematic elements. Here, the organization of cinematic elements is equated with the construction and form of a language. As McCall and Tyndall state, it is a certain ideological manipulation that creates an un-questionable, homogeneous cinematic language, one tied to ideology as much as any other piece of literature. Terry Eagleton reminds us about philosopher Louis Althusserʼs argument that “art cannot be reduced to ideology: it has, rather, a particular relationship to it. Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world... the kind of experience literature gives us too...” (18). Eagleton also presents literary critic Pierre Macherey and his theory of literary production. Macherey defines ideology as ʻillusionʼ, manʼs ordinary experience, as “the material on which the writer [and artist in this case] goes to work...” (19). But in
this work, ideology is given a “determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits... thus revealing to us the limits of that ideology” (ibid.,). Cinema, in turn, is a sort of illusion, presenting a recorded reality as a given, un-alterable reality. A reality represented cinematically comes from a pre-existent reality, one that has already been worked upon but that can still be captured and altered. Through the movie camera, the raw material of reality is transformed into an image of reality that we can observe in its construction. More than just “an amorphous body of free-floating images and ideas... it has a certain structural coherence ... and since literary texts ʻbelongʼ to ideology, they too can be the object of such scientific analysis” (ibid.,). !
“A work is tied to ideology not so much by what is says as by what it does not
say,” states Pierre Macherey. Just as McCall and Tyndall relate the ideological manipulation of sound and image as a certain limitation in the cinematic text, Macherey would argue that the ideological presence is most felt in the limitations and constraints as silences, gaps, and absences. The construction of a work of art “contains these gaps and silences, it is always incomplete.” A cinematic object, incomplete because of its gaps and silences, is always ʻde-centeredʼ, there is no central essence to it, just a continuous conflict and disparity of meanings ... it is in the nature of the work to be incomplete, tied as it is to an ideology which silences it at certain points” (34-35). The ideological manipulation of sound, image, and text becomes the basis of cinemaʼs raw material in context with Machereyʼs theory. The term ʻraw materialʼ stems from what Louis Althusser calls practice, “any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ʻproductionʼ) ...
The artist uses certain means of production... to transform the materials of language and experience into a determinate product” (69). !
“The author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values,
myths, symbols, ideologies come to him already worked upon, as the worker in a carassembly plant fashions his product from already processed materials” (ibid.,). Cinematic language is constructed from its own specific raw materials already worked upon. However, just as McCall and Tyndall state, what needs to be investigated is a heterogeneous construction or assemblage, a cinema that is not defined by a single discourse but open to all forms of discourse. Sound, image, and text are the material and elements already-worked upon, the already-said-by-others, therefore become objects themselves. The language of an alternative cinema as a heterogenous assemblage that allows for spectators as active mediators is thus produced from readymade sonic and visual elements that are cinematically realized from everyday life.
Collage as de-centered montage Montage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns. Collage does not do this; it collects or sticks its fragments together in a way that does not entirely overcome their fragmentation. !
In the essay Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style, Brian Henderson analyzes
Jean Luc Godardʼs use of the tracking shot in his film Weekend as a revolutionary aesthetic statement while also acknowledging a different formalistic structure in films like Une Femme Mariee, La Chinoise, & Le Gai Savoir; that of collage. Rather than
reflecting cinematic duration as a continuing, linear strip, collage structures the cinematic object as an open, de-centered assemblage. Montage “imposes a set of relations of its pieces to fill out a pre-existent plan,” Henderson states. !
The idea of a collage-montage is interesting because it collects fragments “in a
way” that does not overcome their fragmentation. “It seeks to recover its fragments as fragments” restoring them into a new life by seeking “to bring out the internal relations of its pieces” (Henderson). Vertovʼs Kino-Eye sought to accomplish that same incentive, “itʼs entirely a question of the particular juxtaposition of visual details, of intervals,” organizing the fragments into an object. Vertovʼs film-object is produced from “writing something cinematic with the recorded shots” This cinematic object exists as a collection and inventory of fragmentations, sonic and optical elements that are organized as cinematic phrases and compositions. Therefore, it lends itself to the formation of a certain grammar, recalling Tyndall and McCallʼs proposal of a heterogeneous investigation of the filmic language instead of a seamless and unproblematic construction. !
In Godardʼs films, collage is used throughout in one way or another, whether it be
through the use of sound and the conflicts between louder sounds over quieter ones, cutting seconds out of long takes, juxtaposing images from different media, etc... But the idea of collage is not just in the objective construction of the cinematic object, but also in the collaboration and investigation of the object coming into meaning. Just as Duchamp inscribed everyday objects as something other than their production value or purpose as commodity, Godard inscribes situations with complex connections and relations to be questioned rather than answered.
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In Une Femme Mariee (A Married Woman), Godard fragments a certain situation,
that of a married woman whose involved in an affair with another man. Using still framed close-ups and long takes of Charlotte and her lover in bed and Charlotte and her husband in competition with another, the film is structured into chapters, vignettes, and tableaux. Subtitled as ʻa film shot in 1964 in black and whiteʼ, Une Femme Mariee, is a movie in which the story of a marriage ending and its relationship with established cultural roles are looked at from a distance. Its structured segments allow the spectator to an inventory of fragments, a collection of images connected through intervals. La Chinoise (the Chinese Woman) and Le Gai Savoir (the Joy of Learning) are also structure this way except they were shot in color. La Chinoise (1967) and Le Gai Savoir (1969), both shot only a little after Une Femme Mariee, both share the collage-type of structure in montage. All of these films use not only the recorded scenes of the actors but also newspaper clippings, magazine pictures, photographs, television and radio broadcasts. !
La Chinoise presents the white, middle-class ʻbourgeoisʼ teenage youth in Paris
studying the politics of Maoist China while Le Gai Savoir shows two friends and possible lovers inhabiting a dark television studio exploring and searching for pure sounds and images. La Chinoise incorporates many ʻready-madeʼ images and objects, especially the signs of Maoist Marxism: Maoʼs face, Maoʼs little red book, plenty of red (as well as blue, yellow, and white; primary colors used in search of basic fundamentals and principles), there is even a pop-song, Mao!Mao!, fully realizing all of Maoism into a commodified fanaticism.
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Le Gai Savoir was originally meant to be broadcast on French public television
over a course of nights, entering the homes of France and proposing a discourse of televisual production and cultural criticism. In the film, Jean Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto (both having acted in ʻLe Gai Savoirʼ) are two colleagues in the observation, analysis, and deconstruction of cinematic and televisual language all together in search of a truth in sounds and images. Le Gai Savoir may be one of Godardʼs most honest works in attempt of discussing the full potential and possibilities of the assemblage of sounds and images. The filmʼs structure rests on the different nights that Leaud and Berto come together to study the sounds and images of the political climate in France surrounding May 1968 and revolutions around the world. As they sit together in a dark studio, some magazine and newspaper clippings seem to appear as assembled highlights along with the recordings and broadcasts of demonstrations, cutting in and out like sonic fragments, while bits of the Cuban revolutionary anthem are dispersed throughout the whole of the film. !
This idea of collage reflects Dziga Vertovʼs methods of montage production in
which editing takes place throughout the entire film production process, from thought to image, from recording and capturing footage to viewing it in completed form. Vertov himself wrote that “editing is the inventory of all documentary data directly or indirectly related to the assigned theme (in the form of manuscripts, object, film clippings, photographs, newspaper clippings, books, etc.) ... the human eyeʼs summing up of observations on the assigned theme (the montage of your own observations)” ... and “the summary of observations recorded on film by Kino-Eye” (89 - 90).
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This fragmented approach to montage uses filmic structure not to point to one
meaning or interpretation, but to allow the spectator to be creatively and productively engaged. It is using the filmic object as a tool of analysis of any given situation, as a tool that can be shared and produced in collaboration between the filmmaker and spectator. Montage becomes more and more used as an object of discourse, the ʻart coefficientʼ contained in the work, as Duchamp said, between the intention and the realization. This inexpressible measurement, the intervals of montage, is what connects those observations through the camera and what forms the gaps and silences between the elements.
godardian pedagogy / discourse as montage . . . the scenographic cube [transformed] into a classroom, the dialogue of the film into a recitation, the voiceover into a required course, the shooting of the film into a tutorial, the subject of the film into course headings. . . and the filmmaker into a schoolmaster . . . Just as Dziga Vertovʼs method of cinema proposes a ʻschool of thoughtʼ, Godardʼs cinema does so as well. Cinema becomes a sort of school where the filmmaker is the schoolmaster and the and spectators are students. Jacques Ranciere might argue that this relationship between filmmaker and student could stultify any actual development or alternate distribution of roles in the process. However, Godard, like Vertov, takes the spectator not as a passive consumer of images but as active interpreters and producers of meaning, ideas, thought; alternately redefining and reproducing the images themselves. The organization of images, the viewing,
observation, and analysis of images reconstructs images from their initial construction and presentation. Vertov and Godardʼs school of thought views the use of montage as a way to disrupt the seemingly normal and conventional discourse of cinema, as a way to disrupt the distribution of the senses. ! ! ! !
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“School thus becomes the good place which removes us from cinema and reconciles us with “reality” (a reality to be transformed, naturally) ...the family apartment has replaced the movie theater (and television has taken the place of cinema), but the essentials remain: people learning a lesson.” (Daney)
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Vertov and Godard searching for a cinematic truth through their films transforms
the cinema into a place like school, a place where, like Ranciere says, “the spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets ... She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her... They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them” (Ranciere 13). School is the place where the spectating pupil and scholar can both sit down and observes the elements and materials brought before them and that has come before them. They deal with elements and materials that have been processed and worked-upon before hand through ideological, political, social, and economic systems. Therefore, statements, texts, and quotes become what Daney calls the ʻalready-said-by-othersʼ, “with what has been already-said-already established in statements ...statement-objects, like monuments, words treated as things: take them or leave them.” !
Godardʼs collage-like films begin to question to politicization of cinematic
aesthetics. His approach “consists of taking note of what is said (to which one can add nothing) and then looking immediately for the other statement, the other image which
would counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image.” Again, here, we can see the importance of the collaboration and negotiation of the object, the filmic-object specifically, where the sounds and images of discourse can be juxtaposed against each other in an aesthetic struggle. Serge Daney suggests Godardʼs interest is “more than ʻwho is right? who is wrong?,” the real question is “what can we oppose to this?” Similar to Duchampʼs attitude of neither yes nor no, nor indifference, but the absence of investigations of that kind, Godard wants the spectator to engage with the relations between sounds and images, how, where and when they were produced and from what. “To what the other says (asserts, proclaims, extols) he always responds with what another says (asserts, proclaims, extols). There is always a great unknown in [Godardʼs] pedagogy, and that is the fact that the nature of the relationship he maintains with his “good” discourses (those he defends) is undecidable.” !
Like Duchampʼs ready-mades, constantly in transition and going back and forth
between meaning and interpretation, Godardʼs films put certain ideological discourses and critiques into play. In La Chinoise, there is a constant struggle between those Marxist-Leninists who propose violent demonstrations and acts in support of the Maoist Cultural Revolution and those oppose the acts of terror. The students in the film hold lectures and seminars in oneʼs parentsʼ apartment while the parents are away on summer vacation. Throughout the film, quotes are recited from Maoʼs little red book, whether it be directly from one of the lectures or as background sound while other characters discuss other things. Just like the characters in Le Gai Savoir, emancipated spectators in their own right, the students are attempting to rationalize the connection between theory and practice, analysis and action.
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As spectators in our own right, we sit before the film observing, analyzing, and
speculating the ideas, messages, and meanings that exist within the film, its elements, and intervals. The student-spectator is held onto by the films “...in order to delay the moment when they would risk passing too quickly from one image to another, from one sound to another, seeing too quickly, declaring themselves prematurely, thinking that they are done with images and sounds when they donʼt suspect to what extent the arrangement of these images and sounds is something very complex and serious, and not at all innocent.” The images and sounds found and presented come already worked upon, ideologically and symbolically inscribed. Through the ʻdelay effectʼ constructed in his filmic objects, “...Godardian pedagogy consists of unceasingly returning to images and sounds, designating them, repeating them, commenting on them, reflecting them, criticizing them like so many unfathomable enigmas: not losing sight of them, holding onto them with oneʼs eyes, keeping them.” Duchampʼs ready-mades oppose a specific discourse. With its meaning owned by no one it opposes any uniform transmission and any identity of cause and effect. Daney notes that Godardʼs cinema stems “from his total contempt for any discourse of the ʻspecificityʼ of cinema.” A discourse on the specificity of cinema would close any subjective inscription of the cinematic object, becoming a cinema of uniform transmission, of a seemingly natural and seamless construction. !
Daney categorizes Godardʼs contempt for a specificity of cinema that includes
“the spontaneous discourse of the spectator (this is what cinema is for me), the selfinterested discourse of people in the business (you have to make films like this) or that of the enlightened university critic (this is how cinema functions).” Godardʼs cinematic
itinerary is directed towards the question of the “filmic contract,” the relationship between the filmer and that which is filmed, “a question which concerns the very act of filming.” This contract can be explicitly seen in Godardʼs films where scenes become interviews or interrogations of the characters, actors, subjects. Whether it be on student questioning another in La Chinoise where just or right ideas come from or Jean Pierre Leaud and Juliet Bertoʼs characters playing word association games with two young boys and an old man from the French country side, Godard is interested in the idea of reparation. Reparation would mean returning images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. This also commits them to produce their own images and sounds.”