Film Theory of the Asymmetrical Prostate

 

 

Adrian Martin

 

 

 

It started with a typo: in a note to Dana Linssen, my editor at Filmkrant—the Dutch tabloid for which I write a monthly column titled ‘World Wide Angle’—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 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 to 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 thought and writing—usually had to be produced and packaged very fast, to be ready by the Rotterdam opening in the last week of January; nonetheless, a wide range of writers from all around the globe have given it their best shot over a period of five years (visit the archive). 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; and it was never put online. Therefore I resuscitate my ‘Film Theory …’ as a series that I can indefinitely extend, with the original eight installments, plus a ninth for asymmetry’s sake. (April 2014)

 

1. In the drawn-out finale of Cosmopolis (2012) by Cronenberg (Senior), Robert Pattinson is told by Paul Giamatti that he should have learnt the lesson of his asymmetrical prostate (which has been discovered in an earlier, memorable, rectal examination that takes place in his 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 constrains and depresses us more than order, either. 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, maybe on Martin Scorsese in general, maybe on New York, New York, by Alain Masson in Positif magazine. 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. In 2014, this is now the sole detail of that film I retain: 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 more 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, or a Hitchcock movie, or Welles’ Othello) decides ‘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’ is amazeballs. Cinematography as a medium is defined as ‘writing with movement’ (169), 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’ (ibid., 172-74). 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’ (ibid., 170). 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’ (ibid.). Then comes the switch-up: ‘And yet …’ (ibid.). A new history of cinema is contained in that fondly wished-for ‘yet’. Lyotard never had the time or interest to write a sequel to ‘Acinema’. 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) is in a phone booth outside Fat Moe’s diner, and 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 (see Castel, ‘State’). 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’ (Berardi, Guattari, 156). 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’ (ibid., 29). A radical cultural explosion of mad, uncontrolled, uncontrollable experiments, or resingularising vectors as Bifo says, in the inspiring language of Félix Guattari (ibid., 31). 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’ (ibid., 156). 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 21^st 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?’ (Bene, ‘Abandonment). 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’ (Guattari, 34-35). What a prostate!

 

(to be continued …)

 

 

References

Bene, Carmelo. ‘Being in Abandonment: Reading as Non-Memory’. Hyperion 8, 1 (Spring 2014).

 

Berardi, Franco (Bifo). Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

 

Castel, Lou. ‘My “State of Things”’. Hyperion 8, 1 (Spring 2014).

 

Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Acinema’ in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989, pp. 169-80. 

 

 

Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy

ISSN 2200-8616

 

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