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Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith
Special Presentation of the 41st
New York Film Festival
Sponsored by
Grand Marnier
Views from the Avant-Garde premieres experimental films from the frontiers
of cinematic possibility.
( ) (Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003; 21m)
The origin of ( ) was my fascination with inserts. Inserts are
a crucial kind of shot in the syntax of narrative films. Inserts show
newspaper headlines, letters, and similar sorts of significant details
that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling the story.
I have long been struck by a quality of inserts that can be called the
alien, and as well the alienated. Narrative films depend on inserts (it's
a very rare film that has none), but at the same time they are utterly
marginal. Inserts are far from the traffic in faces and bodies that are
the heart of narrative films. Inserts have the power of the indispensable,
but in the register of bathos. Inserts are above all instrumental. They
have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else.
Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually
hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository
information, that the insert conveys. That's the unhappy ideal of the
insert: you see only what it does, and not what it is. This of course
is no more than the ideal of all the instruments of narrative filmmaking
and the rules that govern their use.
So inserts are like all shots in a narrative film in that they are purely
instrumental. But inserts embody this fact to the most extreme degree.
If there is one kind of shot in a movie in which there is the least latitude
for the exercise of expressive intelligence, it is the insert. This is
so because all considerations in composing the shot must bend to the single
imperative to make something clear. If there is a hierarchy in the prestige
and glamour of the different kinds of shots in a narrative film, inserts
are at the bottom. In the old days, the inserts were sometimes directed,
if indeed that is the word, by someone other than the director. That is
how little inserts matter as occasions for expression.
I wanted to make a film out of nothing but inserts, or shots that were
close enough to being inserts, as a way of making them visible, to release
them from their self-effacing performance of drudge-work, to free them
from their servitude to story.
By chance I learned that the root of "parenthesis" is a Greek word that
means the act of inserting. And so I was given the title of the film.
Inserts are the subject that I began with. The question was, how to construct
the film.
I have long been interested in work that is constructed according to rules.
Sol LeWitt is one of my favorite artists. A rule may be arbitrary, but
it has enormous power: it provides a reason for the work to be as it is.
The rule can be stated, and its being stateable locates the origin of
the work outside the artist. The artist didn't make the work, the rule
did. The rule produced the work from which we understand the rule that
produced the work. This reciprocity between rule and result leaves the
artist out. (LeWitt underscores this by hiring art workers to execute
the work.)
Of course ultimately any work made by a rule can only point back to the
artist as its origin because the artist composes the rule. But at least
the rule introduces an intermediate term that does what it can to assign
responsibility for the composing to somewhere else.
I think it's fair to say that rules by their nature are inconsonant with
expressivity, as that notion is conventionally understood. The rule accounts
for everything we see. There are no surprises. A rule, if arbitrary at
the outset, produces the effect of the inevitable.
I've made films according to rules. The films announce the rules more
or less explicitly, so the films are predictable. The viewer can anticipate
what will happen before it occurs on the screen. There will be no surprises.
Further, the films I've made according to rules have the unity of being
shot in continuous time and in the same space. In constructing ( ) I was
dealing with many inserts from many films. How to compose a film that
is not unified by time and place?
Unsere Afrikareise by Peter Kubelka stands as one of the great
examples of a film that embraces cutting as a positive device, an occasion
to make cuts that produce meaning. The meaning of each cut depends specifically
on what is in the shots. I greatly admire Peter, and I greatly admire
his films, but I felt that the editorial principles that his film raises
to such heights were not available to me. I did not want to work within
that history, glorious though it may be; I did not want to make each cut
with a view to producing a specific meaning or enacting a specific trope.
This would have amounted to imposing myself on the material, when my wish
was to set the shots free. But there had to be cuts. Far from wanting
to take the same pains that Peter took in making each cut in his film,
I wanted cuts whose significance was something I did not intend. This
of course is a deliberate refusal of the power of the cut, as that power
has been conventionally understood, but that was what I wanted to do.
So it was a question of finding a rule that would make the cuts for me.
In 1967 a friend of mine named Thom Andersen, with a collaborator named
Malcolm Brodwick, made a film called --- -------. This title is
resistant to language, so those who know the film usually call it the
rock 'n' roll film. It is constructed according to a rule, two rules,
actually, and they are both simple.
The first rule is announced by the film's title, a short line followed
by a longer line. The film is made up of pairs of shots that follow this
relation of relative lengths. The second shot in each pair is longer than
the first. In each succeeding pair, the first shot is longer than the
first shot in the preceding pair but shorter than the second. And the
second shot in each pair is longer than the second shot in the preceding
pair. The relations among the lengths of the shots weave the pairs of
shots together.
The second rule assigns a dominant hue to each shot and arranges the hues
in an order that proceeds crosswise around the color circle. Even if this
second rule is the less evident of the two, in any case we sense the operation
of the first: as the film unfolds the shots get longer. There is a sense
of diffusion, a relaxation of tension. The increase in the length of the
shots is in itself anti-dramatic. In dramatic films the correlative for
the rising action that drama demands is shots that, if anything, get shorter.
I consider Thom and Malcolm's film to be groundbreaking in its brilliant
demonstration of the power of a rule in constructing a film that is made
of shots taken at different times and places. It refuses the power of
montage as that idea has been conventionally understood, only to rediscover
its power in a different form, on a new plane. I have always admired the
film, and I have always been puzzled that it remains largely unknown.
The title of Thom and Malcolm's film declares the more conspicuous of
the two rules that construct it, and we sense it in our experience of
the film. And Thom's notes on the film describe the two rules, if in terms
that are oblique.
But there are works that are composed according to rules, or mechanical
procedures, that are not evident in the work. The great example is the
French writer Raymond Roussel. (And here I must acknowledge, with gratitude,
that it was Thom who introduced me to Roussel.)
Roussel had several methods. They are all simple. In his two novels Impressions
of Africa and Locus Solus he used the same method. His unit
of composition was the scene. He didn't compose a scene so much as he
generated it. His method of generating was arbitrary (or, if you like,
mechanistic). He chose a cluster of words that he found in the world around
him, for example the name and address of his bootmaker, then transformed
it into a homophone, or near-homophone, that served as the seed of a scene.
From this beginning he composed additional material to eke out the scene.
I am tempted to say that Roussel's transmutation of scraps of non-literary
texts into prose is a case of the assisted readymade. Both novels are
an accumulation of scenes that are composed in this way, assembled in
an order that is essentially arbitrary as well: the order in which the
scenes occur does not matter. (I simplify.)
Roussel's method guaranteed in advance that the construction of both novels
is radically anti-dramatic. They are barely stories, and they certainly
don't have plots, in the usual meaning of the word. Roussel composed the
scenes independently of one another and arranged them without design,
so there can be no interweaving of incidents that gather to a climax and
resolution. Instead, the novels are a series of turns, or tableaux, each
scene receiving equal emphasis, assembled one after the other within a
framing device that justifies such a construction. In both novels the
device is the equivalent of a variety show, one unrelated act after another.
To put it another way (and again I simplify), the construction of both
novels follows the principle of a list, a succession of independent elements
in an order that does not matter.
Roussel's arbitrary and mechanical method secured the realization of scenes
utterly beyond the power of imagination to invent. The disturbance that
we experience in Roussel comes in part from our somehow grasping that
the writing does not originate in mere human imagination but comes from
somewhere else.
Roussel's writing teaches a simple lesson. Why confine yourself to something
so limited and already ruled by convention as what your imagination can
dream up, which in any case will almost certainly conform to an already
existing model of construction? Why not let the phonic manipulation of
fragments of language you find already in the world do the work for you?
But when you read Roussel, you lose sight of the origin of his prose in
a method, seemingly anti-literary, that combines the arbitrary and the
mechanical. Instead you respond to what the method produced, some of the
most extraordinary writing in all of literature.
The Surrealists held Roussel in high regard, but among the general public
his work met with utter incomprehension. So in the end Roussel revealed
his methods in a book entitled How I Wrote Certain of My Books ,
as if his revelations would help win over a hostile public.
A rule, or a method, underlies ( ), and I have obeyed it, even
if the rule and my obedience to it are not visible. I needed the rule
to make the film; it is not necessary for you to know what it is. A rule
has the power of prediction, but only if you see it. To the extent that
the rule remains invisible, the unfolding of the film is, for better or
worse, difficult to foresee. The important thing is what the rule does.
No two shots from the same film appear in succession. Every cut is a cut
to another film.
There is interweaving, but it is not the interweaving of dramatic construction,
where intention and counterintention are composed in relation to each
other to produce friction that culminates in a climax. Instead it is an
interweaving according to a rule that assigns the shots as I found them
to their places in an order. In keeping with my wish to locate ( ) as
far as possible from the usual conventions of cutting, whether those of
montage or those of story films, the rule that puts the shots in the order
has nothing to do with what is happening in them.
I wanted to free the inserts from their stories, I wanted them to have
as much autonomy as they could. I thought that discontinuity, cutting
from one film to another, was the best way to do this. It is narrative
that creates the need for an insert, assigns an insert to its place and
keeps it there. The less the sense of narrative, the greater the freedom
each insert would have.
But of course any succession of shots, no matter how disparate, brings
into play the principles of montage. That cannot be helped. Where there
is juxtaposition we assume specific intention and so look for meaning.
Even if there is no specific intention, and here there is none, we still
look for meaning, some way of understanding the juxtapositions.
At each cut I intended only discontinuity, cutting from one film to another,
but beyond that nothing more. Indeed, beyond that simple device I could
not intend any specific meaning, because whatever happens at each cut
is the consequence of whatever two shots the rule put together, and the
rule does not know what is in the shots. So what happens specifically
at each cut is a matter of chance. - Morgan Fisher
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