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Volume 18, Nu mber 1 doi10.1215/10407391-2006-024
2007 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
elizabeth cowie
Specters of the Real: Documentary Time and Art
At its inception, cinematography, like photography, openedup new opportunities for visual pleasure as both knowledge and spectacle,
for each derives from the achievements of scientists as well as showmen
and entrepreneurs. Subsequently, the recorded visible came to be divided
between the objective and intellectual appraisal of empiricisms gaze anda pleasuring of the eye in a subjective and experiential engagement with
the seen (and, of course, later, the heard). The challenge that emerges in
radical documentary art forms to this opposition between the factual and
the imaginarywith its moral and epistemological assumptionsis the
focus of my discussion here. Also challenged is a view of art as autonomous
from other social practices, in contrast to the approach adopted by art ists
and fi lmmakers for whom the autonomy of art is its social practiceas an
emotional and social encounter with meaning and affect within a con-
tingent worldan approach I will explore here. Central to the aesthetics
of documentary is the temporal disjuncture introduced between the realtime of the event and its presence again in the document. If we answer yes
to Walter Benjamins (albeit rhetorical) question as to whether the very
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88 Specters of the Real
invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art
(Work 227), it is as much because of the specific figuring of time that
the photograph and film present us with as of the mechanical reproduc-
tion of the world it affords, which Benjamin was addressing. The instant
image, snapped by the camera in the touch of a finger, would now suf-
fice to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave aposthumous shock, as it were (On Some Motifs 17475).
The moving image and its accompanying sounds remake our
relation to the time of the represented as one of simultaneity, a present
tense of seeing, but it was not until broadcast television that the real time
of transmission was also the real time of viewing. In television, a medium
of transmission that like the telephone but unlike film is not a record, there
was only the passing and not the pastness of its sounds and images.1In
the digital, the present of events can be both transmitted and recorded.
Experienced in and as the ongoing of digital real time, events are no
longer separated as instants, but as a continuous stream in the doubledworld of an other.2Made available by Webcam or mobile phone, they can
be returned to as remembered.3Real time is the encounter with simul-
taneity in spite of geographical separation. We are present in time but
not in space with those we chat to online or on the phone. Real time is
now time, lived and experienced time, endured rather than calculated,
to draw on Bergsons distinction between measured time and time as
duration. Digital real time and its transmission by the World Wide Web, by
telephone, and by satellite offers not only interaction but also immersion
as we become identified in the unthought of doing and being that is the
ongoing experience of the Other of the Webcam.It is in measured time that causality and narrative come into
play, in a past that foreshadows the present as its future, which we will fully
know only once past, when we determinethat is, speculatively construct
its causes and consequences. Here is historical reality. Everyday reality,
however, just is; it is without history until remembered, recollected.
The new forms that are emerging in the virtual space of the
digital are discursive structures that also instantiate an array of possibili-
ties for engaging with and in the digital. The mobile phone is perhaps the
most important example, for it now gives us at one and the same time both
always available simultaneity any place at all (almost) and memoryin the
images we send and may record. These are images not only of ourselves
but of what we see and are part of, that is, our ongoing reality. We want this
reality to be present to the other, who is our interlocutor, and we want to
make present to ourselves herethe others gaze elsewherethat we imagine
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d i f f e r e n c e s 89
as we listen to her or his reactions to our visible missive. Our here is
both actual, as geographical and spatial, and also virtual, as thoughtin
Charles Sanders Peirces terms,4as the here of me, myself, as desiring
subject. In making simultaneous the actual and the virtual, the digital
engenders not new desires, but a new articulation of our desiring in time.
For Gilles Deleuze, following Peirce, it is only the event that is actual,whereas the remembered and the anticipated, that is, past and future, are
thought, imagined, virtual. The virtual and the actual are not collapsed
together in the digital, however, but remain two aspects and two orders
of being, where being is understood as the organic enduring in time. The
digital image passing between these two orders endures as a separated
part of me but one that I can hold, copy, give (send) as virtual. The voice has
never undergone a similar fetishization. Is the said and heard more on the
side of the actual, more rooted in the contingent and tied to the instance of
utterancea durationas a passing present such that, reheard, it bespeaks
absence as loss, not as made present again? The mobile phoneas voiceand, now, imagenevertheless produces connectivity all over the place
that, recorded, may become by awful chance the documenting of an
event. We need only remember the phone calls by terrified students dur-
ing the Columbine High School massacre to realize again the anguished
separation felt by the hearers, unable to help or protect; or the recorded
messages sent by victims trapped in the New York World Trade Center on
9/11, which movingly speak l ife, addressing futures we now know they are
not part of. More recently, Londons 2005 Tube train bombings became
documented by mobile phones showing agonizing images of passengers
walking in darkness back though the tunnel to the station and medicalcare, while the carnage of the train carriage and its dead are an unseen
horror escaped.
Documentary is the re-presentation of found reality in the
recorded document, its truth apparently guaranteed by mechanical repro-
duction of that reality in what has come to be known as its indexical rela-
tionship to the original. It is closely linked to the development of modernity,
for the documentary asserts itself as the genre of the objective knowabil-
ity of the world. In its desire to show the real, however, the documentary
becomes prey to a loss of the real in its narratives of reality. It is a loss we
cannot mourn, but anxiously return to, that is, a reality imagined before
its fall into mediation, interpretation, narration, presentation. Charles
Baudelaire, in his critique of the nineteenth-century project of realism in
art, identified such an anxiety when he suggested that the realist seems
to say, I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be,
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90 Specters of the Real
supposing that I did not exist, that is, the world before my intervention
(Art162).5Yet, if photography, and later cinematography, realize mechani-
cally this desire, each also and paradoxically f igures the anxiety about the
nature of our apprehension of reality, which is central to realism. They
reintroduce, that is, the problem of truth.
The idea of a truly observational filming has haunted cinemafrom its beginning, for the new visual apparatuses that emerged in the
nineteenth century also gave rise to the idea of, and desire for, an unlim-
ited access to reality in unmediated recordings of actuality, as if through
the camera we could create a record of everything that an al l-seeing God
might have surveyed.6With the development of light-weight 16mm cameras
that could be easily hand held, together with portable sync-sound in the
late 1950s, the documentary filmmaker could at last move freely, following
events and people at will.7The observer-spectator could now see and hear
for her- or himself, as i f she or he were there. But seeing for ourselves in
documentary is ourselves seeing through anothers eye, for we adopt as ourown the look of the camera that has gone before us and that has selected
and organized the space and the seen.8Our access to photographed reality
remains partial insofar as the camera necessarily frames and hence cuts
out from the wider ongoing contingency of the world just this scene, this
event, this action, this person, her speech. Nevertheless, that such scenes,
events, actionscaught by the camera as they happen or discovered as
found realityinclude indiscriminately contingent elements of noise,
activity, and objects confirms them as reproduced through a process in the
making of which as Bazin observed, man plays no part (What1: 12).
The account of photography and cinema as indexical is drawnfrom the work of Peirce who, in his theory of semiotics, proposed a concept
of the sign as tripartite, as icon, index, symbol, whereby each form of sign
is a representation of an object. The icon demonstrates the qual ities of the
object, through an image, a diagram, and so on. An index demonstrates
the influence of its object: the mercury in a thermometer responds to the
warmth or coolness of the atmosphere, organized to rise in a container
in relation to calibrated markings that enable these two qualities to be
measured; nevertheless, we do not seethe heat. The bullet hole indicates
the action of the absentbullet. Similarly, we do not see the time a clock
tells us, we can only read the measurement of time the clocks mechanism
is calibrated to record. But the photograph shows us what it also points
toreality, thus it appears to be both iconic and indexical. Its iconicity
(its status as an iconic sign) rests, however, not in the image of the objects
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d i f f e r e n c e s 91
we see within it, but in the object that the photograph is; the qualit ies
demonstrated are those of the object photographed. Peirce makes clear
that the icon is not simply the object but a rendering of its qualities, for
the representation is clearly differentiated from its object. Photographs,
however, he saw as indexical as a result of their physical connection to
the objects they show, having been produced under such circumstancesthat they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature
(Elements159). This indexicality has seemed to guarantee photography
and cinematographys truth to reality, for indices, Peirce asserts, furnish
positive assurance of the reality and the nearness of their Objects (Sim-
plest414). The cause of this, the dynamical object, is light, and what the
photograph demonstrates is the inf luence of light ref lected from objects
that either produce the changes in the light-sensitive silver salts or trigger
the digitally coded registration of this information. The thermometer does
not indicate the source of the heat or cause of its absence in the indication
of coldness, only its effect; similarly, a photograph shows the effect of lightreflected, namely the images formed by light bouncing off objects, but this
does not guarantee the nearness or reality of the objects imaged, only the
nearness and reality of reflected light.9The indexicality of recorded still
and moving images points to images formed by light, but not their reality
or truthfulness. (Until the advent of magnetic tape, speech and noises as
sound waves were recorded in a mediated form as light images on fi lm.)
Moreover, if what we see is simply reality, then it is not a sign.
While both the icon and the index communicate, only the sym-
bol has what Peirce terms thirdness, the triadic relation he requires for
meaning, namely: an object, referred to by a sign, and an interpretant.10The symbol functions as a sign in being interpreted as a reference to its
object. Although the photograph does not index the reality of our world
of objects, people, and actions, but only of the action of light reflected, it
is nevertheless a sign because contingent and ongoing reality is cut out
and cut off spatially and temporally. The photographs excerpted reality
points both to the reality not excerpted, which we cannot see, and the real-
ity unexcerpted, that is, unfilmed, whole, and complete without loss, but
also unrepresentable.11The photograph indexes time as the instant of the
cameras shutter opening and closing, but it neither measures that time
nor records it. The photograph is the witness to a moment in time but one
that is not itself presentas timein the image. Cinema mimicsthe time
of movement in a mechanical playing of still imagesfilm framesat a
speed that is at least sixteen or more frames per second, at which the eye
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92 Specters of the Real
can no longer distinguish each indiv idual frame (now fixed at twenty-four,
but in projection, the double-shutter means that each frame is seen twice,
thus forty-eight frames per second).
Documentary as evidencewas the concern of the makers of
Spanish Earth(1937) when they showed for the first time in cinema the
brutality and horror of the aerial bombing of Madrid by Francos fascistinsurgents and its devastating effect on ordinary people, the civilians of
the Spanish Republic. Ernest Hemingways voice-over narration discovers
for us in the wrecks of some planes the names of their manufacturers and
the identity papers of their pilots as German and Italian, demonstrating
the involvement of these states in contravention of international law. The
photographs and films recorded by German soldiers during the Second
World War, like those more recently at the military prison of Abu Ghraib
in Iraq, were personal mementoes but, once discovered, could similarly
be mobilized as testimony to crimes in international law, as well as tes-
tifying to the fetishistic desire for precisely such an evidential record bythe photographers.
We have, however, no direct and full access to either contempo-
rary or historical reality, and a process of mediation is necessarily intro-
duced in the temporal transpositions its recording produces. For while the
present time of reality immediately becomes past, as recorded, it becomes
a harbinger of a future in which it wil l be seen again in a reenactment of
past events and actions that appear to occur in a present-time only to fall
back into the past of the recorded reality, as well, now, as the past of our
memories.
Reality in Documentary Art
There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and fa lsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been.T. S. Eliot
The traditional role of art as realism, with its purpose of
enabling us to know and be moved by the world, was challenged by
the scientific and factual possibilities of the new media of photography
and cinematography that mechanically record reality with an automatic
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d i f f e r e n c e s 93
faithfulness that mimics human vision.12At the same time, however, this
realism was dismissed by critics who, drawing on the claims of romanti-
cism, saw it as merely reproduction lacking the interpretation and inter-
vention of the ar tists subjectivity. The process of perceiving the world as
imaged became foregrounded in the visual arts, while the representation
of historical reality as such ceased to be central. To the question Is artuseful? Baudelaire polemically replies, Yes. Why? Because it is art.
Rejecting art as mimesis, he argued for the autonomy of art and saw its role
as imagining anew. It is not the artist alone who produces this imagining,
represented in the art work; rather, a process of encounter and exchange
between the work and viewer arises, through which we come to engage
imaginatively in a way that produces a newness (Lart284).13The politics
of art must be found in this process of engagement.
The recording of reality in the topicals,14 travelogues, and
newsreels that constituted a large part of early cinema (and that remained
widely popular) came to be supplanted af ter 1907, as the dominant com-modity of cinema and the following decade saw the emergence of the
feature fiction film, with its staging of spectacular scenes and historical
enactments as well as its specifically cinematic storytelling through forms
of editing such as cross-cutt ing and the close-up. This was accompanied
by the appearance of theories of film both as a new form of art and as a
popular medium, while artists and filmmakers began exploring its formal
possibilities in the development of avant-garde experimental film prac-
tices. At the same time, a new concern with reality and its representation
emerged in the writing of Formalist theorists debating the nature and
role of the fact film in the work of Soviet filmmakers such as EstherShub and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as in Dziga VertovsMan with a Movie
Camera(1929).15
Drawing on these concerns and his own interest in the social
role of film art, the young Scottish cinephile and social scientist John
Grierson used the term documentary in his review of Robert Flahertys
second film,Moana(1926), to describe its record of the life of a Samoan
community and thereby gave the English-speaking world a new film
genre.16 Grierson went on to promote these new approaches to filming
reality as both a form of art and a means by which the citizen might come
to learn about the world. Documentary was, he declared, not the mere
recording of reality, but the creative treatment of actuality in its use
of the poetics of cinema, namely montage editing, camera framing, and
movement, and also, af ter the introduction of synchronized sound, of voice,
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94 Specters of the Real
music, and noises. Grierson was concerned to distinguish documentary
as an art form and not mere reproduction, drawing on the example of the
Soviet filmmakers, and sought by this phrase to emphasize not a manipu-
lation of reality, but an expressive presentation of recorded reality by the
filmmaker.17
It is the work of Hans Richter, however, that provides a moresalient example of the interrelation of art, reality, and politics. As an
artist, Richter was deeply committed to a modernism that eschewed the
representational and the reproduction of apparently objective reality. In
abstractionism, Richter saw the possibility of a universalism in opposition
to individualism whereby, Timothy O. Benson suggests, The autonomous
elements of art held a power of embodiment capable of transcending the
particular, enabling a universality (30). Through formal invention, the
bourgeois and capitalist conventions of reason and reference in realist
figural art could be subverted. Richter was a central member of the Zur-
ich Dada group and by the 1920s was recognized as a major avant-gardeartist and filmmaker. At the same time, as a political activist in Munich
and Berlin after World War I, he sought to relate his concept of art to his
political commitment. Given the economic and political developments in
the late 1920s, and influenced by the Soviet filmmakers, Richter turned
to figurative representation in a series of documentary essay films18as
the radical form for art necessary at that moment, as other avant-garde
filmmakers, such as Luis Buuel and Germaine Dulac, would later do.
Form intervened in the figurative, however, as demonstrated in his use
of cinematic devices such as slow motion, fast cutting, close-ups, and so
on, which abstracted the recorded reality from its immediate reference,enabling associations not conventionally given by the objects themselves.
Richter did not, like many other Dadaists, embrace surrealism. Never-
theless he says, I did not look at natural objects as literal elements, for
in film, every object tells a story and awakens some emotional or rep-
resentational association, regardless of the context in which it is experi-
enced. Despite the illogical happenings in his films, the f low of images,
he argued, would always make a story for [t]hat is how our mind works.
But he also observed: In addition to the emotional connotation of every
object, I learned that there was an abstract, or purely visual, signi ficance
as well (My Experience 155). For Richter, form was a material element
of art, and a central material of form was time. How, then, did Richter
view the factual? Richter poses an opposition between the beautiful vi l-
lage and the true village, between the scenic view and knowledge of the
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d i f f e r e n c e s 95
social and economic articulation of the community inhabiting the village,
and argues: The task of the documentary film is, on the contrary to make
such a village understandable in its functions, too, i.e., socially, not just
as a beautiful landscape. Only in this way can the true face, an authentic
picture of how men live together, be produced. He goes on to cite Bertolt
Brechts declaration that the situation is becoming so complex that lessthan ever does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about
reality. A photograph of Krupps or the aegyields hardly anything about
those industries. True reality has taken refuge in the functional. Richter
comments, If the forces that determine mens destinies today have become
anonymous, so, too, has their appearance. Hence we are obliged to look
behind the facadeif facts are to be revealed. It is cinema, he argues,
that can reveal the funct ionalmeaning of things and events, for it has
timeat its disposal, it can contract it and thus show the development, the
evolution of things (Struggle47).19
What is rejected here is the mere recording of actuality asspectacle or beauty; instead, the documentary is presented as an episte-
mological discourse that requires that we not only seebut are also brought
to know. The indexical trace of the historical real in the cinematographic
document is put forward for our understanding in relation to the processes
revealed.20At the same time, in the documentarys presentation of reality, it
also produces a statement or discourse by which it constitutes the recorded
reality as knowable. But facts are not given, they must be revealed by a
discourse that thus constructs them as facts. Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, in their critique of Enlightenment rationalism, demand an
interpretive understanding of the presumed givenness of what is presentedas the factual:
What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the
subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the
obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given. What
is abandoned is the whole claim and approach to knowledge:
to comprehend the given as such; not merely to determine the
abstract spatio-temporal relations of the facts which allow them
just to be grasped, but on the contrary to conceive them as the
superficies, as mediated conceptual moments which come tofulfillment only in the development of their social, historical,
and human significance. The task of cognition does not consist
in mere apprehension, classification, and calculation, but in the
determinate negation of each im-mediacy. (2627)
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96 Specters of the Real
Facts are aspects of reality recognized and distinguished through spe-
cific regimes of criteriascientific, legal, historiographical. This injunc-
tion requires that we not accept facts at the face value of a rationality
that presumes a single premise, unmediated, derived from regimes of
categories not themselves examined. Adorno and Horkheimer point to
the multiple in the singularity of facts. The facts of the matter areestablished after the event, which thus brings the event into existence
as the factual, halting the undecidability of the event in its contingency.
An event is an action, something happens, but its nature as happening is
a matter of language in the recognition of something, to be classified as
an event, extracted from the ongoing, contingent reality of a multitude of
actions and happenings. Events entail the temporal as actions that, located
in time and space, become identified as timely, as caused.21In the scien-
tif ic experiment that tests a hypothesis, something happens (even if only
the failure of the experiment), and what happens is articulated as the
factual and a scientific truth by the procedures of the scientific discourse.If it enables new knowledge or changes understanding, it becomes a sci-
entific event. Events are thus known by the facts established about them,
and they are singular and exceptional in being unrepeatable, for while the
experiment can be repeated, the event of the transformation of knowledge
it brought about cannot. The certainty of the event is unknown at the time
of its happening, so that it can be considered, John Rajchman suggests,
following Deleuze, as a moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or prob-
lematization of the very assumptions of the setting in which the drama
may take place, occasioning the chance or possibility of another, differ-
ent setting (viii). It is this undecided in the contingent-to-become-eventthat is important in documentary, which both constitutes and represents
events. For Deleuze, however, it is the chanceness of the event, of its
contingency, that is important. Inversely, Alain Badiou instead emphasizes
the eventness of chance in the break in the ongoing of the contingent that
is the event, inasmuch as it is experienced and discerned as difference but
is also uncertain becauseit is not the same. It is only by chance that the
possibility of discerning differently, and thus the event, arises. Chance,
he says, is, for me, the predicate of the contingency of eachevent (76).22
That an event is distinct from an action is demonstrated by Duchamps
Fountain, a porcelain ur inal laid on its back that he offered for exhibi-
tion in 1917 and that, though rejected, neverthelessin Alfred St ieglitzs
photographbecame the event by which the ready-made was made art.
The event is unrepeatable and, at the time and context of its appearance,
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d i f f e r e n c e s 97
unknown and unknowable as the event we now understand it to be. Not
only the ready-made but also the document might become an event as an
artwork.23What is the role of art and of documents in the emergence of
an event from the facts?
For Georges Bataille, in his contributions to the Surrealist
journal Documents, which he cofounded in 1929, the object was not artbut evidence, not literature but documents. Closely related to the new eth-
nography emerging in France through contributors such as Michel Leiris
and Marcel Griaule,Documentspresented evidence from all aspects of
culture and made connections appear where they were least expected.24
Dominique Lecoq has commented that
Bataille called upon philosophy, ethnology, economics, psycho-
analysis, not to borrow their results but to open up the notions
they defined in new, illegitimate, unacceptable directions: if
logic masks the gaping inadequacies of the logos, Bataille, in
impelling Documents to expose all the contradictions, chose
both to uphold logic and to remove the mask. (125)25
The documentary is here not opposed to art, but itself enables an art of
seeing anew, as evidentiary of the contingent as well as the socially
organized worlds that, juxtaposed, bring about new connections. For
Andr Breton, juxtaposition was a central concept in his 1924 Surrealist
Manifesto, where he had cited Pierre Reverdys declaration that
[t]he image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born
from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more orless distant realities. The more the relationship between the two
juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image
will bethe greater its emotional power and poetic reality.
(qtd. in Breton 20)26
This is not a juxtaposition brought together by the mind as a comparison,
but a juxtaposition that imposes itself on the senses and brings about
an imagining.27The juxtaposed realities must be encountered and not
invented, and the strength of the resulting image is not inherent in the
found realities, but in the subject who apprehends the juxtaposition. The
documents recontextualizationlike the found objectsproduces a ten-
sion, an impropriety or incongruity that disturbs rationality and prompts
associations that may be unconscious as well as conscious. Cinematic edit-
ing, or montage, juxtaposes times and spaces, but it does so to provoke or
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98 Specters of the Real
enable connections and inferences. Buuel, however, inLas Hurdes, his
documentary of the impoverished Hurdes villages in Spain made in 1932,
presents scenes and narrated information that raise more questions than
are answered, that appear inappropriate or digressive, and seem to offer at
face value information about what we see that is shocking (for example, a
child dying of diphtheria), and a narrative that is never resolved. The filmis both documentary and surrealist. The surrealists idea of the unmoti-
vated juxtaposition seems to anticipate the kind of role Deleuze will later
give to his concept of interval in cinema, to which I will return later.
The possibility of seeing anew through an estrangement of
the everyday and the taken for granted reemerged in the work of a number
of engaged artists and filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and
America, which Peter Wollenwho himself made a number of f ilms with
Laura Mulveycharacterized in two key essays as a countercinema and
in terms of two avant-gardes.28An important aspect or central form of
the work of many of these artists was documentary, such as, in Britain,Mary Kellys Post-Partum Document, a serial gallery installation work
on motherhood (19731979); The Nightcleaners(1975, which I wil l discuss
below); John SmithsHackney Marshes;29the work of Steve Dwoskin; and
films such as The Song of the Shirt (1979, Sue Clayton and Christopher
Curling). In the latter, documentary and fictional enactment and reen-
actment of the documentation of nineteenth-century philanthropy is
presented, along with images, photographs, and drawings that open up
a questioning of the given of history and its representation. So That You
Can Live(1981, Channel 4, U.K.), made by Cinema Action, is an essay film
assessing the changes in a mining community, whileHandsworth Songs(1986), by the Black Audio Group, addresses riots in Birmingham and the
history of Britain and black emigration.30The documentary is now, again,
central to contemporary debates on representation in the current return
to issues of historical reality in art, as well as a continuing concern for
earlier artists and fi lmmakers. The debates that concerned Richter in the
1920s are similarly confronted by these artists and filmmakers, for what
is risked is that art drawn upon for political activism is subordinated to a
purpose other than art, reneging on the autonomy of art.31In becoming
form for a content, ar t is reduced to the space and t ime of the represented
political event, to a specificity arising in the conjuncture of the histori-
cal moment and time, which overturns or subordinates the specificity of
the art object and its potential for universalism. Moreover, political art
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d i f f e r e n c e s 99
is bound to an act of communication, to saying this, whereas modernist
art defined itself as engaging in a critique of reason, of the knowable, and
of history as narrative. It is precisely the assumptions embodied in the
characterization of these risks that are challenged in order not just to
represent politics but to engage the viewer in an experience of the politi-
cal, that is, of historical reality and the social as a public sphere that canbe contended, remade, and reimagined. The romantic presumption of the
sovereignty of ar t is critiqued in the focus on the contingent and its speci-
ficity as suchon thismoment and event. The ways in which the referential
is played within the works challenges meaning and meaning systems,
introducing instability and undecidability in the uprush and deferral of
meaning in the moment by moment movement of the film or video work.
The aesthetic effect is not a response or reaction to what we seethe thing
or objectbut to our seeing of the thingness as an experience of the
processof the work.32Evidence and the factual are, then, not only content
but also form in constituting the documentary materiality deployed withinthe work of serial and time-based documentary art. The conceptualism
implicit in Dada (and, in relation to the signifier, in abstractionism) that
was realized in the new approaches by artists in the 1960s and that has
come to be articulated as conceptual art was also important for film
and video documentary art. A key influence for Mary Kelly33 was the
serialism of Hans HaackesReal Estate SystemsShapolsky et al.and the
sequencing of documents, together with text as counterpoint or parallel
discourse, and not only as metadiscourse. Wollen also refers to this work
as important for his approach, with Laura Mulvey, in makingRiddles of
the Sphinx(1976) (Thirteen 25). In the same vein, John Smiths work isboth playful and plays with the relation of word and documentary image
and sounds. The referential is the documentary evidential mobilized in
the work, and, re-presented, it is also displaced from its referential pur-
posefulness, set in play in these works as both a materiality and an idea,
a concept imaged.34
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100 Specters of the Real
The Real of Contingent Reality
No matter how artfu l the photographer,no matter how carefully posed his sub-ject , the beholder feels an irresist ibleurge to search such a picture for the
tiny spark of contingency, of the Hereand the Now, with which reality has, soto speak, seared the subject.Walter Benjamin
The documentary voices reality through organizing its sights
and sounds, but the space and time of contingent reality recorded will
nonetheless exceed the factual it is claimed to represent and, as a result,
may engage us in an imaginative speculation outside the givenness of the
so-called factual and its immediacy, searchingas Benjamin suggests
for evidence of a contingent reality separate from the orchestrated view
of the photographer or documentarist. At the same time, we may becomeaware of what is not represented, that is, not simply what is off frame, out
of sight, but also what is felt to be unexplained and inexplicable in the real-
ity shown, negating its givenness: its radical contingency. This is not only
unrepresented but is, more radical ly, unrepresentable. Here we encounter
the contingent and the uncaused in reality. Mary Ann Doane has pointed
out that [t]he real, for Peirce, is not something sensed or vaguely felt. It
exists as an insistence, a compulsion, an absolute demand (Real 100),
for, Peirce states, [R]eality is insistency. That is what we mean by real-
ity. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the
reality of what we experience, that gives us our conviction of any singular(Scientific 234). Importantly, Doane makes a further connection when
she observes that the place of force here is the same as in his account of
the index (101), which, Peirce says, takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and
forcibly directs them to a particular object (Exact211).
Jacques Lacan has termed this insistence on reality, and its
unrepresentabil ity, the real. Brute reality is contingent and ephemeral, it
just keeps happening, uncaused, and while it may be named fate, it nev-
ertheless remains unapprehendable as signify ingthat is, it is senseless
within our everyday commonsense or rat ionality (53).35The obviousness
of reality and of our look that finds and possesses the world through our
images in a logic of knowledge and understanding are put into question.
We encounter that which undoes reason. Forms of remembering may
recollect cruel fate into an orderliness of remembrance or, instead,
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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 1
in the symptoms of trauma whereby the real, although unrepresent-
able, is nevertheless made palpable by the way in which its absence, its
nonrepresentability, is signi fied.
A certain loss is always entailed in representation. Indeed,
Andr Bazin, the foremost French critic and theorist of film for whom
realism was a key value in cinema as an art, nevertheless observed, Somemeasure of reality must always be sacrificed in the effort of achieving it
(What2: 30), for the more real it appears, the less it signifies the contingent
reality it is the record of. Similarly, Lacan notes that something must be
lostbroken awayin making the hommelette, his pun on omelette and
hommethe little man/childeach made in the breaking of eggs, that is,
for the child, in its separation from the placenta that becomes the first in
the long line of separations involved in the emergence of subjectivity in
the human animal (197).36Such losses are not viewed with equanimity,
however. If the vision machine that is cinema engages our desire for the
really real in the photograph or documentary f ilm, it also thus gives riseto that anxious search for an authenticity Baudelaire spoke of and that
seems assured but yet hasimperceptiblybeen sacrificed. Like other
forms of art, documentary is concerned with the transformation of the
ephemeral and the transitory into the significant through re-presenta-
tion, and it, too, anxiously commemorates as loss what is not preserved,
recorded, remembered. Documentary, as a result, is haunted by the specter
of uncertainty and doubt, both regarding the putative contingent reality
it never quite captures and regarding the sense, the comprehending, of
the (incomplete) reality it presents us with. The documentary evidential
is materially referential, and it exceeds the referential it invokes, as signand as the real. Representation, as Derrida has reminded us, both makes
absent as it makes present, and it makes non-sense as it makes sense, or
meaningdiffering and deferring. Something here is always left out of
account, but this left-out-of-account is itself an effect of representation.
And this is not all. We may desire not only the lost reality but also the los-
ing of reality that documentarys failure attests to. Because it is missing,
we are reassured it was (really) there.37Similarly, in Freuds account of
fetishism, the mother is attributed a missing penis that is then refound in
a (magical) substitute.
Daney identifies a certain disavowal in Bazins realism, for his
cinema of transparency avows a gain in reality while he acknowledges
there is always something necessarily lost between reality and its repre-
sentation, which produces what he calls a t iny difference and which he
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102 Specters of the Real
identifies with the cinema screen that acts as both a window onto reality
and bars us from the reality to which it gives us access (34). Daney relates
this difference of the screen to another difference, of which Bazin writes,
Of course a woman who has been raped is still beautiful but she is no
longer the same woman (qtd. by Daney 35).38Such differences are all the
difference, howevernot only for cinema, or for the woman raped, but alsoand most signif icantly for him or her who apprehends this difference that
is revealed, in Bazins choice of metaphor, to be also an issue of sexuality
and of sexual difference. Uncertainty arises in relation to a difference that
cannot be seen, only thoughtand feared. Daney observes:
The obscenity perpetrated by the rape of reality cannot fail
to send us back to the rape of the woman and the screen, the
hymen. The fundamental ambiguity of the real is the uncer-
tainty regarding virginity: the tiny almost nothing that changes
everything. The attachment to representation, the taste for simu-
lacra, a certain love for the cinema (cinephilia), all derive less
from ontology than from obsessional neurosis. It is in the very
essence of the latter to clothe itself in the former. One is reminded
of Freuds comment that The predilection felt by obsessional
neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn to those
subjects which are uncertain for all mankind and upon which
our knowledge and judgments must necessarily remain open to
doubt. (Daney 35)
If a womans virginity, her sexual probity, is subject to doubt, it is because
her desire, and her being as a subject of desire, are doubtful for the otherof her desire.39What is engaged here is thus always a work of fantasy and
of a fetishism in which answers can be supplied, guaranteed by the pres-
ence, over there (on the woman), of what is absent. But what might be taken
to be absent (in Freuds later account of sexual fetishism, the mothers
penis) was never there, and it is this possibility that is most terrifying.
The apprehension of the undecidable, and the rupture this enacts in rep-
resentations, offers a way through which such obsession and its fetishes
might be addressed textually and, perhaps, psychically.40Chris Markers
Sans soleil(1983) can be read as an essay-fi lm on the cultural fetishes
including ethnographic filmby which we sustain ourselves in the face
of the undecidable, while it also problematizes the easy assumption of
distance from such fetishism that documentary usually affords us.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 3
The Time of Events and Being
The contingency of living becomes an experience in time only
when it is correlated to an idea of a point in time marked by measurement
and by the memory of place, of the material experience of sights, sounds,
smells. We become aware of time through movement marked by change,as dist inct from repetition. Through observing the duration of movement
by objects and people, we understand the time of the event. Time invokes
a before and an after, and with this the possibility of causality. In a process
of afterwardsness, contingent reality in its duration becomes interpreted
as moments of action that bring about change as events.41Doane notes
that for Peirce the ungraspability of the present is a consequence of the
fact that thought (and its necessary embeddedness in signs) takes time
(101). Time is a continuum, but human perception of time sees the pres-
ent as a point of discontinuity in the instance of the moment, and, Doane
argues, The absolute break between past and future is a symptom of ourconsciousness of this discontinuity (99). For Peirce, time is the form
under which logic presents itself to objective intuition; and the signif ica-
tion of the discontinuity at the actual instant is that here new premises,
not logically derived by Firsts [by description], are introduced (Scientific
66). As a result, Doane suggests, The instant is the condition of the pos-
sibility of newness, novelty, modernity (100). It is the contingent, and not
the event, that engages the instant and the possibility of the new.
The image, for Doane, does not speak its own relation to time;
as a result, Film is, therefore, a record of time, but a non-specific, non-
identifiable time, a disembodied, unanchored time (163). Film recordsindexical signs of timeclocks, shadows cast by the sun, styles of cloth-
ing or motorcar, but not time itself. Documentary film, however, indexes
time as past in every sound and image it presents to us; their pastness
is the condition of its very appearance to us as representation and not
transmission, indexed because it is a record and not fiction.
Deleuze draws on Peirces account while developing this in
relation to Bergsons understanding of duration and being, however, it is
Deleuzes notion of the interval (a term he borrows from Vertov) and of the
meanwhile that the interval gives rise to that I want to draw upon in my
discussion here. Deleuze distinguishes a rational interval as one where
the interval div iding two spatial sections serves simultaneously as the end
of the first and the beginning of the second, thereby assuring continuity
in space and succession in time.42It can do so because we infer and make
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104 Specters of the Real
sense of the time or space elided by the edit in terms of rules of continu-
ity so that the movement in the film and the movement forward in screen
time and story time of the f ilm is a moving whole, a duration from which
the image, as an edit, is cut from a mobile section of duration, the rest
of which is elided. This concept of the interval addresses the cut, the edit,
whether in classical continuity editing or Eisensteins montage. Deleuzeopposes this to what he characterizes as the irrational interval that pro-
duces a dissociation rather than an association of images and times that,
D. N. Rodowick suggests,
neither marks the trajectory between an action and a reaction
nor bridges two sets through continuity links. Instead, the inter-
val collapses and so becomes irrational: not a link bridging
images, but an interstice between them, an unbridgeable gap
whose recurrences give movement as displacements in space
marked by false continuity. (143)
It is a juxtaposition that produces association that is not already thought,
that is not organized to prompt a certain order of connection, however
unsuccessfully. Instead, there is thought from the outside (17), a becom-
ing thought that is not internal to the juxtaposition, but a potential, a
virtuality. What is introduced by this outsideness of thinking is a series
of possibilities and thus a series of times in which these virtual possibles
might be actualized, that is, become. The irrational interval produces
an image of becoming rather than being, thus it includes a hesitation, an
uncertainty, and a suspense as to what might be possible that can never
be fully resolved. Deleuze thinks juxtaposition philosophically, wheresurrealist works assert it. He writes: Film ceases to be images in a
chain [. . .] an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of the next,
and whose slave we are (Ici et ailleurs).43Instead, film becomes
the method ofbetween, between two images, which dispels
[conjure] all cinema of the One. It is the method ofand, this and
then that, which dispels all the cinema of Being = is. Between
two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions,
between two visual images, between two acoustic images,
between the acoustic and the visual: make the indiscernible,that is the frontier, visible (Six fois deux). The whole undergoes
a mutation, because it has ceased to be the One-Being, inorder to
become the constitutive and of things, the constitut ive between-
two of images. (Cinema1: 182)
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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 5
The irrational interval no longer divides a before from an af ter, but sus-
pends the spectator in a state of uncertainty where it is impossible to know
or predict in advance which direction change will take. Instead, Rodowick
argues, the chronological time of the movement-image fragments into
an image of uncertain becoming (15). The time-image, in the irrational
interval, is the meanwhile, defined by the Oxford English Dictionaryas during the time intervening. Deleuze and Flix Guattari write: It
is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a
meanwhile: the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it part
of timeit belongs to becoming (What158).
While time always moves on, we remember time in terms of
instants, moments. It is through its interrelationship of stillness and time,
being and becoming, that, I suggest, documentary is constituted as art.
Lessings notion of the pregnant moment, which Brecht adopted for his
theory of radical dramaturgy, articulates an understanding of movement
in stillness that has continued to be profoundly important. The stilledaction of sculpture nevertheless signif ies a future in which the movement
of a gesture begun but held would beor could berealized. The arrested
f low in the image presents a being forever halted before its becoming, yet
that is nevertheless present because it is imaginable in a possible future
time. The moment held is both preserved and lost in time. Inexorable time
can only be stopped through representation in memory, by our imagining
and in our depictions. It is thus by no longer being that life can endure
unchanged. (Representation always therefore involves a certain death and
a certain life, and with this a certain mourning.) 44The visual artist and
writer Yves Lomax, drawing on Deleuze, suggests:
In the empty meanwhile nothing happens or moves in the pres-
ent and this nothing happens in the present could be a way to
(re)think stillness. To think stillness in this way would be, at the
same time, to think the movement, albeit virtual, of becoming.
Indeed, thinking stillness in this way does not bring my think-
ing to a halt; on the contrary, it invites my thinking to go with
becoming in itself, which is nothing but the turning of time where
chance is given a chance, which is what marks times resistance
to banality. (61)
Walter Benjamin points to the importance of stil lness in the movement of
time when he asserts the notion of a present which is not a transition, but
in which time stands sti ll and has come to a stop. Thus, he argues:
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106 Specters of the Real
Materialist historiography [. . .] is based on a constructive prin-
ciple. Thinking involves not only the f low of thoughts, but their
arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration
pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by
which it crystallizes into a monad. (Theses 26263)
For Benjamin this enables what he terms the blasting open of the con-
tinuum of history, that is, of historical time as a movement of cause and
effect. The historical object appears in a new setting, described more
recently by Andrew Benjamin as the explosive now-time, the instantia-
tion of the present by montage; by the movement of montage (a montage
effect whose determinations are yet to be f ixed). It will be a montage that
involves temporality as well as objects and images (235).
It is through cinema that such a now-time came to be con-
ceptualized since, as Hans Richter suggested, it is film that has timeat
its disposal. Most of all, the time to see differently. The documentary
interrelates times, and hence places, showing simultaneous events and
actions. These, being viewed in series, may be understood not only in
terms of an already known and given causality but, in the demand to
think two referentsboth this and thattogether, as bringing the idea
of connection, or its absence, into play in an interval that is never fully
rational. It is not only through editing that film and video produce such
temporal montage. Every mise-en-scne produces a montage within the
frame, remade not only through camera movement that reframes the
scene but also through movement and gesture within the frame. Arising,
here, is a process of becoming that cannot be represented as such, but onlyapprehended through the imaginative work of spectatorship.45Historical
time and the referential are subordinated to the bodily time of viewing,
that is, to an experiential process of memory, cognition, and affect. While
the observational documentary reproduces a lived reality of events and
actions in the real time of their occurrence, the spectator sees this as a
part ofthe world, juxtaposed to other remembered realities. Unplotted,
the meanwhile of contingent reality pervades documentary. It is the aim
of cinema vrit, of direct f ilm, Deleuze declares, not to achieve a real as
it would exist independently of the image, but to achieve a before and after
as they coexist with the image, as they are inseparable from the image(Cinema2: 38). The document, in the time of re-presentation, figures both
historical reality and the real. Documentary art is the engaging of each in
an aesthetic process in time. Such documentary contrasts with that art of
redemption Leo Bersani has r ightly rejected when he argues:
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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 7
A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a
certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently
damaged or valueless experience. Experience may be over-
whelming, practically impossible to absorb, but it is assumed
[. . .] that the work of art has the authority to master the pre-
sumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquelygives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material. (1)46
The Document in Art and the
Political in Representation
What contemporary i mage-practicesare sustaining a resistance to the pres-ent? [. . .] What in our contemporaryimage-practices is resisting the presentin favor of preserving the irreducibilityof that which is not yet and, in doing
so, maintaining a time that remainsuncontrolled?Lomax
The document is a found object, a material trace discovered
or discerned and then constituted as evidence and fact that, as Foucault has
shown, comes into existence and has meaning insofar as it is spoken by a
social discourse such as the scientif ic, or the legal, or the historical. A con-
cern with the documentary and the political in art as well as with the politics
of representation emerged in the 1970s, drawing on abstraction, on struc-
turalism, and on conceptualism in art, while addressing issues of historyand the social through setting in play the contingency, specificity, and mul-
tiplicity of documentary reality. The works I discuss here are each engaged
in this project in which our encounter with the political arises not only in
relation to the represented but also through the juxtapositions produced in
relation to the contingent realities shown and heard. Emerging from the
intervals of image and image, sound and image, sound and sound is a cer-
tain pausing in discontinuity that Deleuzes meanwhileas that which
enables a resistance to the presentgives articulation to. That is, imagining
anew notforus but beforeus that can only become an after in the specta-
tors time. What arises here, therefore, is that documentary ethics describedby Michael Renov, drawing on Emanuel Levinas, of a non-indifference
to the other in an encounter of mutuality and commensurabil ity.
The Nightcleaners Part 1(1975) by the Berwick Street Collec-
tive is a key British film of the 1970s, inf luenced by the work and ideas of
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108 Specters of the Real
The NightcleanersPart 1.
Berwick Street FilmCollective, 1975.
Bertolt Brecht as well as by new accounts of ideology and the subject.47The
collective was a group of artists and fi lmmakers that included Mary Kelly,
whose Post-Partum Document is an important instance of documentary
gallery work, Marc Karlin, James Scott, and Humphrey Trevelyan. From
1970 to 1972, the Collective fi lmed a group of off ice night cleaners, mostly
women, observing their isolating and repetitive routines of work and
recording through interviews their individual stories. Each is involvedin balancing their need to earn for their families and to take care of their
children; night work enables them to do both, but at the cost of their
health. The Nightcleanersbegan as a campaign film for women who were
struggling for better working conditions; for feminists, the nightcleaners
were emblematic of the position of women, confined to low-paid work and
responsible at home for unpaid domestic work and childcare. The inherent
dif ficulties of unionizing isolated groups of office cleaners and the indif-
ference of the male-dominated union meant that these initiatives were
finally unsuccessful despite the extensive financial and moral support of
the London Womens Liberation Movement. During filming the Collective
adopted a documentary style of observational camera and interviews; in
the editing process, following the end of the campaign, a different film
began to be conceived, one that would reflect upon the process of political
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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 9
struggle and consciousness-raising for the workers, feminist activists,
and filmmakers, as well as audiences in a specifically Brechtian project.
From this emerged an aesthetically radical film that remains politically
important.
In The Nightcleaners, we are brought to apprehend, and thereby
understand, the repetition, arduousness, and ritual of the cleaning work.Every night involves the same routine around awkward office spaces,
lif ting heavy vacuum cleaners among filing cabinets and desks that must
be dusted without disturbing the papers left on them. One shot, tightly
framed and in close-up, reveals a cleaner bent over the toilet basin she
is scrubbing. Such scenes are edited with extracts from interviews with
male managers and a company owner, one of whom asserts that all that is
asked of a woman is that she clean here as she does at home. The found
ironies are all too apparent. From the stories of the women, the film opens
out onto the story told by feminism of the contradictions of sexuality, work,
and motherhood experienced by women, presented through voice-over byfeminist activ ists (including Sally Alexander and Sheila Rowbottom, both
now important British social historians). Nevertheless, their discourse
does not fully contain the images. Instead, they reflect upon feminist prac-
tice and the history of womens struggles. We are shown activist meetings,
discussions with union leaders, marches, and, poignantly, a sequence in
which Maythe nightcleaners leaderbegins to realize that the struggle
might not be winnable.
The Nightcleanersshows us visual evidence and personal testi-
mony, but these are wrested from their temporal and spatial continuity. Its
rhetorical use of filmic devices does not, however, impose a hierarchy ofdiscourses with a dominant meaning that is closed and complete. A process
of abstraction is introduced through a series of devices that alternate with
conventional editing, yet, and importantly, the films formalism is never
systematic, nor does it become a separate and distinct system, so that the
formal and referential multivoicing is integral. Sound and image are often
separated, with the image being shown silent or with an unrelated voice:
for example, one of the women cleaners is heard counting across a series
of discontinuous shots until, finally, she concludes with the total of forty-
nine off ices and nine toilets for which they are responsible. Black leader
is interposed between shots, interrupting a gesture or statement. Often
there is no sound; or, as between shots of the cleaners working, a piano
reminiscent of music hall or the music performed with silent moviescan
be heard. Or there is a voice-over, but one that is discontinuous with the
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110 Specters of the Real
images it nestles between. Both sound and image are slowed, which, when
returning to normal speed, surprises, as when, for example, the noise of
the vacuum cleaner suddenly becomes very loud.48
Interviewed, the women appear feisty, aware, and perceptive
and not as victimswhen the film repeatedly returns to shots in which
the camera comes to rest on a womans face. A central visual motif, which
also opens and closes the film, is of the working womans image abstractedthrough refilming in slow motion, zooming in to very big close-ups of
her eyes, nose, or mouth, the image made grainy, often black enframed.
Almost stil led, the womans image appears sculptural, her head tilted; the
materiality of the photographic image and the woman herself are made
palpable, while the pose cinematically held for our contemplation evokes
those in the pictorial tradition of images of the Madonna. Although her
image is extracted from the ongoing moment of recorded reality, this is
present in the sound track, as she explains that she continues to do night
cleaning for the sake of her children despite her doctors warning that it
is destroying her health, saying, I think if Im going to die I might as well
die happy, mightnt I, so Im back. The issues of women, mothering, and
work are neither narratively nor aesthetically resolved in The Nightclean-
ers, but instead leave the spectator with haunting images recalled long
after that become a remembering not only of these particular women at
The NightcleanersPart 1.
Berwick Street FilmCollective, 1975.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 111
Jean Mormontand colleague.The NightcleanersPart 1.
Berwick Street FilmCollective, 1975.
Refilmed close-upof Jean Mormont.The NightcleanersPart 1.
Berwick Street Film
Collective, 1975.
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112 Specters of the Real
this moment in time, during a strike, but also, meanwhile, of any-women-
at-all, any-place-at-all, in the now-time of my viewing that might be a
reseeing of the film or a mental ref lection.
James BenningsEl Valley Centro(2000), on Californias Cen-
tral Valley, 550 miles long and 60 miles wide, together withLos(2001), on
greater Los Angeles, and Sogobi(2002), a study of the Northern Californiawilderness, comprise his California tri logy. Each consists of thirty-five
shots lasting two and a half minutes, and Benning uses the same fixed
position camera set-up for each shot, while all three films conclude with
a final titles sequence, also lasting 150 seconds, identifying for each shot
its subject matter, its owner, and its location. The first shot of El Valley
Centro(which is also the last shot of Sogobi), for instance, is titled spill-
way/Department of Water Resources/Lake Berryessa. For shots five, six,
eighteen, and twenty-seven, the titles read hay raker, Tejon Ranch, Arvin;
freight train, Southern Pacific, Bakersfield; dredge, Delta Dredging Co.,
the Delta; and freighter ship, Naviera de Chile, Stockton Deep WaterChannel. Benning has said that he
wanted to code and then cause a rereading of the whole film by
naming what you see and exposing ownership. Like, you might
not know that this was a cotton picking machine, and almost all
of the land is owned by the large corporations, like railroads, or
oil companies, banks, causing a political reading [. . .]. Not only
do I want to bring out the politics, but I want the viewer to recall
the whole film, to play with memory. (qtd. in Rosenbaum) 49
This information, displaced from intervening as titles betweenthe shots, becomes a deferral that is not missed until we arrive at it at each
films conclusion and that thereby becomes, retrospectively, suspended
information circumscribing the seen and heard in terms of a named subject
represented, a specific location that could be revisited, and an ownership
that introduces relations of the propertied and the propertyless into the
landscape. We must superimpose, in our memory, this language-based
information upon the uncaptioned sounds and images of the thirty-five
shots. The intervals between each shot that were, before, a series only by
virtue of their sequence in the time of our viewing, become afterwards the
interval-with-the-missing-title that we can now insert. Are we successful?
And, what will this process displace and what will it add? Prior to the titles
sequence, we have been viewing a series of landscape portraits whose
closed and formal structure allowed quiet contemplation, enabling us to look
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d i f f e r e n c e s 113
around the scene, knowing the duration, awaiting the changes we expect
within a landscape we are becoming familiar with but that will nevertheless
give rise to the quite unexpected. There is surprise when the freighter ship
enters rear frame and passes horizontally across, followed by a sailboat, each
traveling on the Stockton Deep Water Channel that we can later put a name
to but that we cannot discern within the view Benning has chosen for us.The frame becomes dynamic through such movements across and within
the frame: in one, a hay-raking machine begins as just a small speck in the
distance that, having traveled forward towards us in the frame, abruptly
turns off-screen right but is still present to us in the sounds of its engine
until it reemerges elsewhere in the field (perhaps prompting the memory
of another cornfield, in HitchcocksNorth by Northwest[1959]). The freight
train entering the shot after just a few seconds, again passing horizontally,
fil ls up the image, evacuating the landscape it occupies, creating a rhythm
of movement and vision in the repetition but also differences between
cars, while its enormous length begs the question: will it cross before theend of the shot, or not? Sounds of noise or voices, perhaps unseen, open up
the framed space to the continuousness of a world beyond yet not visually
included. The camera is an observing eye, unacknowledged except, perhaps,
in the apprehensive glances that seem to address us of migrant fruit pickers
working beside an overseer. Our pleasure is in seeing with the camera, in
a seeing again and seeing what Benning could not necessarily know might
happenand what he might only later, reviewing, have seen as we do now.
All this is placed in parenthesis by the final titles that, in naming what we
saw, challenge our own naming, our cognitive perception, in a kind of
sadistic joke that asks: did we get the point? Well, yes and no. What is citedas the content of the shot is partial, a selection and hence an assertion, for
the hay-raking machine exists within a field, a sky, and it has a driver. The
captioning reduces a polysemy we had enjoyed and now remember perhaps
guiltily while suffering our failureindeed the impossibilityto remember
and to remake the film with this new information. The process of mental
review the film demands is also a political act that makes representation,
and our apprehension of the represented, an always incomplete process in
an engagement with the ongoing of the contingent and the time of mental
reflection as a duration that transforms our understanding.
Documentary time and space are central to Portrait of My
Mother(1999), which presents a work of memory and a process of memo-
rial transformation of the space and time of the political of the public and
the private, of the nation and the family, that is also a process of desire.
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Instal led in a gallery are two (or sometimes four) slide projectors showing
images recapturing the past of Tomic, her national history, her mothers
life, and successive intellectual obsessions including, now, her fierce com-
mitment to Serbian Orthodoxy. Between these is a large screen projecting
a video recording that appears initially to be an ordinary documentary, a
journey taken by foot, by car, by tram, and by car and foot again, from her
own apartment to that of her mothers. Made in a single day, it is filmedentirely by hand-held camera. The spectator is thereby restricted to a
single optical point of view, the cameras mechanical eye, with which we
travel across Belgrade and thus adopt as our own. It is a view to which,
however, we may also attribute a subject ivity, namely Tomic herself, and
with which we identify. Yet immediately the sound-track alerts us to a
discrepancy, for the single view and subjectivity of our vision is opposed
and replaced by the multiple voices of several people as we follow the
discussionrecorded at another, later time and placebetween Milica,
her mother, and her mothers oldest woman friend. We may authorize a
new controlling subject ivity, namely, that of Tomic as artist-author of the
work (that she is not the camera-person, too, is only revealed at the end),
but this will never be fully aligned with the daughter who debates stories
of the past with her mother. She says, Between her [mothers] father and
Portrait of MyMother. Installation,1999.
Mi lica Tomic.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 11 5
Her mother says,I was a completelymisplaced child.Tomics father (manin cap) greets afriend.Portrait ofMy Mother, 1999.
Mi lica Tomic.
Tomics fatherboards a bus, whileher mothers voice-over is heard saying:The fact I didntfeel any intimacy.Portrait of MyMother, 1999.
Mi lica Tomic.
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116 Specters of the Real
my father I put a childs voice, so that the words Mama, Papa are heard
intermittently between the recorded conversations and the sounds of the
street, of cars, footsteps, and so on. This voice embodies both the past,
as the child Tomic was, and the future, in which the daughter becomes
mother to her own son. Other nondiegetic sounds are heard over the blackleader that intermittently interrupts the f low of images, first as a kind of
explosion, as Milicas mother tells of the end of her marriage to Milicas
father, and again, shortly after, when strange rhythmic slapping noises
accompany the voice-over describing their breakdown in contact, noises
that here seem to stand in for the missing sexual relation of the parents.
Later, during the taxi journey, after a long discussion of the bombing of
Sarajevo, Kosovo, and now Belgrade, a louder explosion is heard and then
a long sequence of noises we might begin to recognize as stone or con-
crete debris falling down endlessly and to realize the reference as being
to the noises reported by surv ivors of the bombing as they crouched in a
basement while the building above slowly disintegrated. Portrait of My
Mother is a memory work not as a recovery of memory, but as a staging, a
mise-en-scne through which memory as affect is apprehended. Its
A house bombed bynatois seen throughthe car window.Portrait of My Mother,1999.
Mi lica Tomic.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 117
temporal montage is at once personal and public in its interweaving.
The meaning of the past is continually remade by Tomic in the present of
remembering as a work of identity and its politics.
What role might the artwork play in relat ion to the t raumatic
remembered? It is by enabling the apprehension of the real in dreadful
anxiety without losing oneself as a subject, through a form of sublima-tion in which one confrontsbut is not overwhelmed bythe limits of
ones existence.50The anxiety of the artwork as traumatic does not there-
fore involve a remembering of a past trauma as a k ind of recovery of an
experience. It isthe experience, and as such may produce a remember-
ing,Nachtrglichkeit, but one that can become translated, symbolizable,
enabling us to move beyond imaginary captivationyet where this sym-
bolization bears the trace of the real it thereby renders into the reality of
its sounds and images.
Father (2002) by Doron Solomons, while showing television
news footage documenting bomb attacks in Israel, presents this not in acontinuous time, but in a complex montage of sights and sounds that is
both deeply moving and highly challenging: both conceptual and poetic.
It is an interval film, in which time stopsthat is, historical time
and becomes the now-time of juxtaposed images and sounds, of series
and not chronology. Across the film a number of motifs are introduced:
innocence; victims; technology and its promise to protect; violenceboth
human and inhuman; the roboticboth human and inhuman; the magic
of film and imagination; daughters lost/at risk of being lost; terror.
Opening with the carnage of a bomb attack, this is shown out of
focus but with direct sound audible, unti l Solomons is heard in voice-oversaying: You once asked me: Daddy, if I diewill you make magic? and
we then see The Magician/Father, Solomons (53), taking backin a literal
swallowingthe word Death. Then follows the image of his daughter
jumping up and down on a bouncy house, her movement slowed, the
zoom-in losing focus to create a lyrical sense of innocence, physical enjoy-
ment, and a loving gaze, before the film cuts to news footage of a different
aftermath, of an unsuccessful bombing. Here, an extraordinary spectacle
unfolds as we see the wounded would-be suicide attacker approached and
grasped by the mechanical arm of a robot mounted on a tank-like plat-
form that tugs him back, away from the watching crowds gathered behind
security barriers; over this scene is playing the evocative sounds of a Bach
recital. The image becomes the fuzzy lines of an interrupted television
broadcast before it cuts to show the daughter seated, watching something
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118 Specters of the Real
intentlybut surely, we may ask, not the images we have been seeing?
A mental image of risk irrupts, not only of a possible future of the little
girls bodily risk but also the risk of a traumatizing terror in the anxiety
we imagine for her, to which the film answers: In my arms you are safe.
These are the words we hear in the next shot, which shows a promotional
video demonstrating the safety of its car design as robots die testing itsrobustness in controlled crashes. Is this enough, the film seems to ask
when it cuts to another vehicle, a childs toy truck, hurtl ing towards a
wall and, crashing, smashing its driveran egg? Reality and play, the
mechanical and the organic, interchange across the film. In the next shot
we see found footage of a training camp for Palestinian fighters, that is ,
terrorists, which shows two women practicing unarmed combat. The
black and white film is reworked in tones of pink, while wind instruments
play over, as another fathers voice is heard: I always loved to watch you
dance . . . fresh and flexible movements. The film cuts abruptly to an
anguished father and the superimposed image of a baby girl that we mayconnect to the dancing/fighting women and a death that is their future.
The fi lms story l ies in what we make of the father-filmmakers juxtaposi-
tions of realitys mechanics of contingency as he attempts to realize his
role as father-magician. The poignancies of this family make-believe butt
up against the constructed realit ies producing the terror of contested land
and the contesting other. It is not that time stands stil l through the inter-
val of juxtaposition inFather; rather, the relations of causality of past and
present time are questioned, and with it our struggles for time future.
In these films and artworks, the before and after that is
absent but inseparable from the images we see can become thoughtenabling an understanding that is not redemptive but that, rather, brings
us to imagine in these landscapes and places a time of being that is differ-
ent. As a kind of hoping, it is also a human time. This essay has explored
the timeliness of the work of theory and of our return to and renewal of
theoretical approaches and artistic practice. It presents a kind of snap-
shot of the instance of theory and documentary practice concerning time
and contingent reality in our particular historical moment. Such practices
nonetheless constitute a duration and a meanwhile, the events of which,
while remaining virtual, we endure. Ar t practices are another kind of
making history.
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d i f f e r e n c e s 11 9
This essay has been developed from an earlier version, first given as a paper in Vienna in2003 and published in Auf den Spuren des Realen Kunst und Dokumentarismus, ed ited byKaren Gludovatz (Museum Moderner Kunst Stif tung Ludwig Wien, 2005). A second versionwas presented at Film Theory between Indexicality and Virtuality, a seminar organizedby Griselda Pollock, director of the ahrbCentre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History,Leeds, 2005. My di scussion here has greatly benefited from the contr ibut ion and debate bythe participants at each of these events.
elizabeth cowieis Professor of Film Studies at the School of Drama, Film, and Visual Artsat the University of Kent, Canterbury. She published Representing the Woman: Cinema andPsychoanalysis(University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and has recently written on the hor-ror of the horror film; on cinematic dream-work; and on documentary fil m, memory, andtrauma in Alain ResnaissHiroshima mon amour, and on Jean Rouch and surrealism. Heressay in Camera Austria on the work of Milica Tomic, a Yugoslav video art ist committedto working politically in art, focuses on the role of trauma as the unrepresentable figuredin Tomics work. A similar focus ar ises in her commentary accompany ing Juan delGadosvideo work W ho are you entertaining to? inAspect: The Chronic le of New Media Ar t.Sheis currently completing a book on documentary fi lm and video theory and practice.
1 This changed, of course, with the
development of magnetic taperecording in the 1950s.
2 My remarks here draw upon MaryAnn Doanes important insightsin her essay Real Time: Instan-taneity and the PhotographicImaginary.
3 The digital has enabled a newdemocracy of audiovisual pro-duction communicationmobilephones, and mp3 formats, as wellas movies and v ideo artandjust as importantly, new modes of
interaction. The public sphere isextended and changed with thedevelopment of Internet bloggers,MySpace, and YouTube, whilecampaign sites are transform-ing the space of political debateand the structures of knowledgedefinition.
4 Peirce writes that the mind isvi rtual: [N]o present actua lthought (which is a mere feeling)has any meaning, any intellectualvalue; for this l ies not in what is
actually thought, but in what thisthought may be connected within representation by subsequentthoughts; so that the meaning ofa thought is altogether somethingvi rtual (Pragmatism289). At
no instant in my state of mind is
there cognition or representation,but in the relation of my states ofmind at different instants thereis. And, What I say is that themind is vi rtual, not in a series ofmoments, not capable of exist-ing except in a space of timenothing in so far as it is at any onemoment (Letter 248). Deleuze, ofcourse, draws as well on the workof Henri Bergson. See for examplehisBergsonism .
5 Cited by Barasch (367). Baude-
laire therefore also rejectedphotography, as embodying thisdesire for a realism that seeks toportray the world as if w ithoutinterfering with it, that is, anonhuman world.
6 The early panoramic photographsare precursors of Cinerama, andwit h computer-controlled mul-tiple cameras it is perhaps nowpossible to produce a total recordof an event, though it would onlybe perceivable by an indiv idual
person through a process of selec-tion and montage or by serializingthe images in time and hence los-ing the simultaneity of the imagesof the event, limited as we are toeyes fixed in one plane only.
Notes
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120 Specters of the Real
7 It was such an observationalcinema that has been central formany of the filmmakers associ-ated with American directcinema, notably Richard Leacockand D. A. Pennebaker, who wereinvolved with Robert Drew in
makingPrimary(1960), andFrederick Wiseman.
8 Walter Benjamin argued in TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechan-ical Reproduction (1936) that theaudiences identification is reallywit h the camera, whose positionit takes (228). This view has a lsobeen adopted by later theorists,including Laura Mulvey andChristian Metz.
9 Doane argues that indexicalitycan and must be d issociatedfrom its sole connection to theconcept of realism, the reflec-tion of a coherent, familia r, andrecognizable world. Indexicalityis a function that is essentiallywit hout contentin language itis allied with t he pure denotationof this or here it is (25). Mydiscussion here and throughoutthis essay is indebted to her subtleand illumi nating consideration ofPeirce, time, and cinema.
10 The icon has firstness, in rep-
resenting the object in terms ofperception; the index has second-ness, in presenting the object interms of its relations, or causal-ity; the symbol has th irdness (aswell as f irstness and second-ness), in presenting the objectreferentially.
11 Dai Vaughan, in Television Docu-mentary Usage, has called thisthe putative event (41).
12 The creat ion of a perfect illusion
had been seen as an aim of paint-ing, that is, where the spectator isdeceived into taking the image forreality. In the very famous classi-cal tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios,the triumph of Parrhasios lies in
deceiving Zeuxis when he turnsto him and asks to see behind theveil that Par rhasios has pa inted,as if it were real.
13 For Baudelaire, it is the art istsimagination that decomposes allcreation, and with the raw mate-rials accumulated and disposedin accordance with rules whoseorigins one cannot find save inthe furthest depths of the soul,it creates a world, it produces asensation of newness (Art156).As a result, the beauty of art caninvolve what elsewhere in every-day life we might experience asthe ugly. And we are moved not topleasure, but to an engagementwit h the imagi ned new of art.
14 These were filmed events of topi-cal interest, termed actualitsin France.
15 See these discussions in the jour-nalsLefandNovy Lef, in particu-larNovy Lef1112 (1927).
16 Grierson wrote under the pseud-onym The Moviegoer in theNew York Sun8 Feb. 1926.
17 Grierson himself made only one