"There are no genres in cinema, only multiple polarities (fiction, documentary, diary, experimental, essay) between which every film finds its own balance and invents its own machine."
Retrospective & Lecture Notes from Vienna 2007
Curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin
A cooperation with the Austrian Filmmuseum, from October 1 to 31.
The film essay as a thought
The film essay is a strange beast. To simply define it as this form that foregrounds a voice and sketches a persona falls short. The essay is rumination in Nietzsche's sense of the word, the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or has been elected by). It is surplus, drifts, ruptures, ellipses, and double-backs. It is, in a word, thought, but because it is film it is thought that turns to emotion and back to thought. The strange thing is that as such it flirts with genres (documentary; pamphlet; fiction; diary…you name them) but never attaches itself to one. It flirts with a range of aesthetics but attaches itself to none.
"Termite Art" /vs/ "White Elephant Art"
It is both in form and content, unruliness itself, "termite art" and not "white Elephant art". I am, of course, borrowing from Manny Farber, and borrowing wholesale. Listen to Farber, and forget he might just be speaking about Laurel and Hardy, the words stick even tighter to the film essayists: "They seem to have no ambitions toward gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything...The most inclusive description of [their] art is that, termite-like it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement."
The origins of cinema
The film essay might well be cinema's last irreducible. You find it, arguably, at the origins of cinema with A Corner in Wheat (1909), but a few years later Griffith laments the fact that cinema has turned away from filming "the rustle of the wind in the branches of the trees". Twenty years and ten days that shook the world pass, and you see it triumphant in Vertov's Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929) but a few trials later you feel the Stalinist boot heavier by the day on its neck in Entuziazm - Simfoniya Donbassa 1931) and Tri pesni o Lenine (1934). You think it is done and over with when the oppressiveness of commercial cinema rules, but it reappears under the guise of Straub, Huillet's Trop tôt, trop tard (1981), Marker's Sans soleil (1983) or Godard's Puissance de la parole (1988). As soon as you wonder if it is after all just an ubër western mode, it becomes Asian with Oshima's Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (1970), Tahimik's Mababangong bangungot (1977) or Weerasethakul's Dogfar nai mae marn (2000). And when you want to keep it there it bounces back to the Middle East or South America…
The film essay might well be cinema's last irreducible. You find it, arguably, at the origins of cinema with A Corner in Wheat (1909), but a few years later Griffith laments the fact that cinema has turned away from filming "the rustle of the wind in the branches of the trees". Twenty years and ten days that shook the world pass, and you see it triumphant in Vertov's Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929) but a few trials later you feel the Stalinist boot heavier by the day on its neck in Entuziazm - Simfoniya Donbassa 1931) and Tri pesni o Lenine (1934). You think it is done and over with when the oppressiveness of commercial cinema rules, but it reappears under the guise of Straub, Huillet's Trop tôt, trop tard (1981), Marker's Sans soleil (1983) or Godard's Puissance de la parole (1988). As soon as you wonder if it is after all just an ubër western mode, it becomes Asian with Oshima's Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (1970), Tahimik's Mababangong bangungot (1977) or Weerasethakul's Dogfar nai mae marn (2000). And when you want to keep it there it bounces back to the Middle East or South America…
The essay is haunting cinema
This is, of course, a fairy tale hurriedly told to infuriate academics and critics alike, and they'll accuse me, once again, of confusing everything. One fact remains though: however dire the circumstance, the essay remains alive in the margins, an Id that haunts cinema. It is never more alive than when the times are more repressive and the dominant aesthetics occupy more squarely the middle of the road. In short, it might just be a perfect time to think about it.
(Jean-Pierre Gorin)
Here are some notes on a lecture he gave:
1. There are no genres in cinema, only multiple polarities (fiction, documentary, diary, experimental, essay) between which every film finds its own balance and invents its own machine.
2. Any film worthy of the name is a machine, with its functions, its dysfunctions, its own operations. The interest of a film does not lie in its message or in its story in the literary sense, but in the operations it executes, in the articulations it keeps making and unmaking between form and meaning.
3. What sets the essay apart is its ability to unveil its own operation and articulations, more so than its subject or contents. Thus way, the image attains a special status in the essay: "it doesn't pass but it revisits itself, resisting its own temporal nature, its own passing," as Gorin writes in the catalogue that accompanies the retrospective. He also states that the essay is a form of energy, the energy of the termite, of an insect always busy digging and breaking through barriers, "an energy that constantly redefines the practice of framing, editing, mixing, freeing these from their habitual allegiance to genres."
4. Based on the kinds of operations they execute, films can be divided into two broad categories: those that tend toward unity (of message, of form) and those that try to divide, to propagate division and a dialectic - of the image, of ideas, procedures, and operations.
1. There are no genres in cinema, only multiple polarities (fiction, documentary, diary, experimental, essay) between which every film finds its own balance and invents its own machine.
2. Any film worthy of the name is a machine, with its functions, its dysfunctions, its own operations. The interest of a film does not lie in its message or in its story in the literary sense, but in the operations it executes, in the articulations it keeps making and unmaking between form and meaning.
3. What sets the essay apart is its ability to unveil its own operation and articulations, more so than its subject or contents. Thus way, the image attains a special status in the essay: "it doesn't pass but it revisits itself, resisting its own temporal nature, its own passing," as Gorin writes in the catalogue that accompanies the retrospective. He also states that the essay is a form of energy, the energy of the termite, of an insect always busy digging and breaking through barriers, "an energy that constantly redefines the practice of framing, editing, mixing, freeing these from their habitual allegiance to genres."
4. Based on the kinds of operations they execute, films can be divided into two broad categories: those that tend toward unity (of message, of form) and those that try to divide, to propagate division and a dialectic - of the image, of ideas, procedures, and operations.
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