Charney on Benjamin's 'Now of Recognizability'

Leo Charney, 'In a moment: film and the philosophy of modernity', in Leo Charney and Vanessa R Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 279-295 , p. 284

Nachträglichkeit

'I submit that we all are within a camera obscura. We all project upon the inner screen (the wake/dream screen) the images. story lines, sound tracks of our own "home movies". These are mingled with the perceptions of our outer world that come through a pin hole (touch, vision, kinesthetic, auditory stimuli, etc.) in the wall of the camera obscura.

In this "in between", this space of intersubjectivity, one can see within the co-mingling how the past lived experience of one's home movies might be restructured, redirected and reinterpreted. One can also see how one's interaction with one's environment can be influenced by one's home movies. Without one's home movies in the camera obscura there could conceivably be an immaculate conception/perception.

Therapeutic action is done by means of recognition scenes. One recognizes one's "me-ness" in the projections of both the external environment and one's home movies. […]

Nachträglichkeit [deferred action] is the theory of transference’

Donald J. Coleman "Nachträglichkeit" and "Mimesis“ (1997)

Film aesthetics, ethics, and politics in Missing (1982)

On Tuesday I gave a talk on my work on contemporary auteurism as part of the Screen Medias and Cultures Research seminars at the University of Cambridge. It was a very enjoyable occasion for me: many thanks to those present and especially to David Trotter, Matilda Mroz, and Piotr Cieplak, the series organisers, and Emma Wilson who chaired the seminar.

There is some very interesting and important Screen Studies research going on in this Cambridge grouping. I was particularly interested to hear of that by the aforementioned Piotr Cieplak who is currently working on 'Image, memory and trauma: photographic and filmic representations of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its aftermath'.

Discussion with Piotr Cieplak about this important topic has prompted me to publish online a related research paper of mine which deals with a cinematic representation of trauma and violence made (like some of the most prominent representations of the events in Rwanda) by those who didn't suffer this violence 'first-hand'; such repesentations prompt particular questions about the ethics of recognition. My paper (available HERE) is entitled ‘Questions of National and Transnational Film Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Costa Gavras’s Missing (1982)’. Here's the abstract:

In the field of Latin American film studies, there has been a great deal of prescriptive criticism about how ‘dominant’ forms of cinema, sometimes even in the name of solidarity and raising political awareness, have crushed, deformed, or simply replaced the attempts of certain, more 'beleaguered', national cinemas to tell ‘their own’ stories about traumatic, political events. Rather than simply joining in with that criticism, it is important to set out to examine, analyse and account for what has actually happened with these ‘internationalised’ film stories during the last thirty years.

Films are never just ‘national’ (and therefore ‘good objects’) or 'international / transnational’ (and therefore ‘bad objects’): they are always made somewhere, by people who always come from somewhere, and although they may or may not be seen in lots of different places, they are obviously always seen in specific places and in specific circumstances. It is important, therefore, to study the unequal exchanges involved in such transactions, rather than simply to make assertions about iniquitousness at the outset.

The material I discuss in this paper draws on research for a project on the international fiction and documentary cinema about South American dictatorships and their aftermath, from September 11, 1973 to the present, and concerns one of the most obvious films to include in such a project: the Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras’s 1982 film Missing for the North American production company Universal (on the recently released DVD of this film, the cover trumpets the movie as ‘The first American film by Costa-Gavras’ [not on the new Criterion Collection DVD version!]). This 'US film' about a hugely significant Latin American 'event', made by a non-US/non-Latin American filmmaker, has been vehemently criticised, over the years, on the political, ethical and aesthetic grounds of cultural and ethnic imperialism, and dominant-cinema ‘manipulation’.

How might a methodological narrative negotiate the minefield posed by these critical discourses? What I hope to show in my illustrated talk about Missing is that any study of cinema in a national (or 'transnational') and historical context can only be well served by paying close attention to the important political and ethical questions raised by how films aesthetically organise their multiple audiences’ access to knowledge and affect.

I have given this research paper as a talk a few times (see the PowerPoint slides which have accompanied it above), most recently on November 17, 2007 at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London as part of a study day on 'The National/Transnational in Hispanic and Latin American Film and the Telenovela' (alongside a great paper by Paul Julian Smith: 'Transnational telenovela: from Mexico to Spain').

It's been really interesting to revisit the paper this week as tomorrow I am acting as a respondent at a 'World Cinemas: in theory/on screen' study day organised by Jacqueline Maingard in the Department of Drama at the University of Bristol which will deal with related issues of cinematic representation, recognition and theory (Friday 5th December, 2-5 pm, Lecture Room, Dept of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, Cantocks Close, Bristol). The titles of the Study Day papers are as follows:

• Jacqueline Maingard (Bristol), 'African Cinema and Bamako: notes for screen theory'
• Augusto de Oliveira (Bristol ), 'Marking time: Afro-Brazilian cinema and the quest for recognition'
• Will Higbee (Exeter), 'Diaspora, intercultural exchange and the myth of return: recent journey film by Maghrebi-French directors'
• Derek Duncan (Bristol), 'Princesa: transgender/transmedial/transnational'

Homecoming and recognition: Volver, Almodóvar, Cruz, Maura, Le Pera, and Gardel

Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar talk about Volver at the 44th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, October 4, 2006 (posted on YouTube by muckster).

I am writing about returning and repeating, and what better film-object to ponder than Pedro Almodóvar’s 16th film, Volver (Return). The storyline of Volver appears as both a novel and movie script in Almodóvar’s earlier film, La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My Secret (1995). But there are many different kinds of 'coming back' and the pleasurable and uncanny recognitions that these entail are laid bare -- and help to structure the spectator's experience -- in this remarkably affecting film.

In an interview for El País, Almodóvar explained that Volver "concludes the films I have made about women’s universe and the type of families that have moved from rural areas to the capital in search of prosperity. Therefore, it ends a cycle" ('Con 'Volver' culmina mi cine sobre el universo femenino: Maribel Marin, Diario El País, Madrid 30/01/2007).

The film memorably includes a sequence in which Cruz, as Almodóvar's protagonist Raimunda, sings Carlos Gardel's tango Volver in a beautiful flamenco-soft version. This moment in the film (see the video embedded below) marks Raimunda's return to singing, following years of silence and oppression in an abusive relationship. It is a poignant musical homecoming, uncannily witnessed by her character's revenant-mother (played by Carmen Maura, herself returning to Almodóvar's film-world after an absence of seventeen years).

The lyrics of Volver (by Alfredo Le Pera) are given in English below (as translated by Walter Kane).

I imagine the flickering of the lights that in the distance will be marking my return.
They're the same that lit, with their pale reflections, deep hours of pain
And even though I didn't want to come back, you always return to your first love
The tranquil street where the echo said yours is her life, yours is her love,
under the mocking gaze of the stars that, with indifference, today see me return.

To return with withered face, the snows of time have whitened my temples.
To feel... that life is a puff of wind, that twenty years is nothing,
that the feverish look, wandering in the shadow, looks for you and names you.
To live... with the soul clutched to a sweet memory that I cry once again

I am afraid of the encounter with the past that returns to confront my life
I am afraid of the nights that, filled with memories, shackle my dreams.
But the traveler that flees sooner or later stops his walking
And although forgetfulness, which destroys all, has killed my old dream,
I keep concealed a humble hope that is my heart's whole fortune.

To live... with the soul clutched to a sweet memory that I cry once again.

Update (28.11.08): Please see the beautiful and illuminating review of this film at Tativille by Michael J. Anderson.

A New Dawning

New recognition. New insight.

'You are who you are seeking to find': Anagnorisis and gradual revelation

Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

So, I saw Oedipus by Sophocles in a new version by Frank McGuinness at the National Theatre last weekend. It is an excellent production (see a couple of positive reviews HERE and HERE, and a much less convinced one HERE). There's a great little video 'trailer' for the production currently accessible through the National Theatre website that concisely conveys the studied starkness of this version. The weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth is performed, mostly, in austere dark suits and white shirts; Frank McGuinness's text is similarly sleek and contemporary.

What struck me about the play (a version of Oedipus the King, rather than of Oedipus at Colonus), which I had never seen performed before, was that the central revelation is gradual for Oedipus. The Wikipedia article on the play successfully conveys the stages of it; here is its summary of the plot:

The play begins years after Oedipus has taken the throne of Thebes. The Theban chorus cries out to him for salvation from the plague sent by the gods in response to Laius's murder. Oedipus searches for the murderer, unaware that he himself is the murderer.

The blind prophet Teiresias is called upon to aid the search, but, after his warning against following through with it, Oedipus oppugns him as the murderer, even though he is blind and aged. In response, an angry Teiresias tells Oedipus that he is looking for himself ['You are who you are seeking to find' in McGuinness's text], causing the king to become enraged in incredulity. He then accuses the prophet of conspiring with Creon, Jocasta's brother, to overthrow him.

Oedipus calls for one of Laius's former servants, the only surviving witness of the murder, who fled the city when Oedipus became king in order to avoid being the one to reveal the truth. Soon a messenger from Corinth arrives to inform the king of the death of Polybus, whom Oedipus still believes to be his real father. At this point, the messenger informs him that he was in fact adopted and that his true parentage is unknown. In the subsequent discussions between Oedipus, Jocasta, the servant and the messenger, the second-mentioned surmises the truth and runs away in shame.

Oedipus remains stubborn and incredulous until a second messenger arrives with the shepherd, who reveals that Oedipus himself was the child abandoned by Laius. He realises what he is [my emphasis], and leaves in a rage. An attendant then breaks the news that Jocasta has hanged herself. On discovering her body, Oedipus gouges out his eyes with the golden brooches on her dress.

The play ends with Oedipus entrusting his children to Creon and declaring his intent to live in exile. Although he initially begs for the company of his children, Creon refuses, and Oedipus is exiled alone. The theme can perhaps be summarized with a line spoken by Tiresias: "Wisdom is a dreadful thing when it bringeth no profit unto its possessor" (Sophocles). In the denouement, the chorus narrates his tragic history.

The final stage of the play's revelation ('He realises what he is') is all the more powerful for the (live) audience precisely, it seems to me, because we do not share this as the moment of our revelation; we can see what Oedipus 'is' long before him. Instead, the power of this terrible anagnorisis lies in the audience's final apprehension of the extent of Oedipus's blindness up until the encounter with the shepherd, a blindness later made literal; and our understanding that the tragedy consists of the impossibility of living with the knowledge he finally allows to sink in. In this play, it isn't the case at all that it is always darkest before the dawning. This is an ending which is possibly all the more tragic for a contemporary audience, standing, as it does, completely in contradiction to one of the self-evident truths of our reality-TV/DNA testing culture: that self-knowledge, self-seeking, is desirable at all costs. At the end of the play as he is driven out of Thebes, Oedipus is not remotely legible as a 'bowed but better' man (less arrogant, less ignorant), but as a human destroyed, a kind of monster. His complex is very devastatingly resolved in an abject non-identity.

McGuinness gave an interview about his work on the play for The Guardian in which he also speaks very movingly about his childhood:

"Of course we know about Freud, we know about the cliché that Oedipus marries his mother and the rest of it. Obviously it is a very primitive taboo that is taken apart in the play. But I find that when you are tackling a great play, something has to come at you, when you think you know the thing backwards but you don't."

"And with this play I feel it is about how you deal with the loss of your father, the threat of your father. I had an astonishing experience when I was working on Oedipus. My father died 11 years ago and my mother about 10 months before. I have spent the past decade dealing with her death; the death I hadn't really dealt with was my father's. And when it came to tackling the scene where Oedipus calls for his children and says goodbye to them, this dreadful shock came over me and I started to see my father with incredible clarity."

"I'm not saying he manifested himself in front of me, but I think I had some tremendous buried grief and sorrow and fear, and it came to the fore. And that's when it struck me how primitive and powerful and basic this play is. You do have to confront the reality of the fact that you have a father, and your father will die. Oedipus killed his father. I'm not saying you'll go out and do it, but the very fact that you survive, the very fact of your existence, is a testament to your father's death."

"Oedipus the King puts us through the death of its principal character's father repeatedly and relentlessly, in different forms: we are told about the death of Laius, the former king; and we are told about the death of Oedipus's adoptive father, Polybus, whom he loved. Then comes the appalling wrench of Oedipus's discovery that he is a parricide, that not only did he kill Laius, but Laius was his father."

Finally, the blinded Oedipus, about to be exiled from Thebes, in one of the most touching scenes in all of theatre, bids his children goodbye: "He has sentenced them to a terrible life," says McGuinness, "and he is killing them in a way, just as he killed his father. It is the stringency of the writing, the plotting, the sheer skill: how much had we forgotten until Shakespeare came along? There's a ruthlessness there in the Greeks - an absolute pitilessness. And sometimes you need to stand before that kind of judgment, where there's no mercy."

The 'revelation' of this interview for me was that McGuinness, brought up in smalltown Northern Ireland in the 50s and 60s, is gay, and that this (along with his educational ambitions) was a hugely difficult matter for him, as it can be for so many of us, in his relationship with his parents ('I couldn't tell [my mother] I was gay for a long time, for instance. Though I knew - when I was very young."). It also helps, perhaps, to explain the particular power of the climax of his version of Oedipus's tragic cycle of revelation and denial of the always already-known and, especially, of the play's truly terrible understanding of human abjection.

Anagnorisis - back to basics

'History of Theater 2 - Development of Greek Tragedy'

Posted on YouTube by beta0net on May 21, 2008 (link HERE)

There are three good reasons why I wanted to post this great little video: one, it's got mighty quiet on this blog (been busy here, there, and elsewhere), but it will get more worthwhile visiting here again, especially as I am currently inspired to write about a couple of films I've been thinking about in the context of 'recognition' and 'insight', namely The Sweet Hereafter and Mulholland Dr. (the latter partly thanks to a comment posted by Nicholas Galvin); two, this blog clearly gets hits from people seeking basic, but good information about 'anagnorisis' and its origins in Greek tragic drama; and three, I'm just about to go and see a new production of Sophocles' Oedipus, in a new version by Frank McGuinness at the National Theatre, London., starring Ralph Fiennes (also see HERE). So, see you soon/Qa ta poume.

[For more discussion of this subject see the class notes on 'Classical Drama and Theatre' by Mark Damen of Utah State University (link HERE).]