Dr Carla Thackrah
doctoral research & thesis
music, sound & video portraits
RADIOPHONICS / ACOUSMATIC MUSIC
(Milutis, 1996) Radiophonic Ontologies
An exploration of the body and radio., looking at Beckett radio plays.
The body:
Radiophonoc sound is vibrations not just of the imagination but of real materiality -
"Sound, then, is actually a material for the whole body conducted through nerves and bones by way of a hole in the head. (Whitehead I991:85 quoted in above)
Becketts radio plays are unique oral word plays or speech acts or atomic particles. He says
" The simplest words become bizarre when free of the body, stripped of the illusion of the voice and sense, free to buzz in the radio airwaves with the flies." (p 73)
Becketts plays become schizophrenic voices in the head.
(Fisher, 2012) What is Hautology?
Talks about how 20th century electronic music has failed to develop into the 21st century - it still sounds the same. he sees it as the Postmodern disappearance of the future or the 'end of history as described by Fukuyama characterised by the inability to find new forms because of the cultural logic of late capitalism.
For me, this explains the weird phenomena I've noted, that all electronic sound art sounds the same - like its taking place in a science fiction movie set.
(Basanta, 2015) Extending Musical Form Outwards in Space and Time: Compositional strategies in sound art and audiovisual installations.
An article that analyses the placement of speakers and audience movement as part of the compositional strategy in sound works that are created for gallery installation rather than with a static concert audience. In this article, placement of speakers and the audience movement through them is seen as a significant part of their formal form expressed via time and space (as the audience moves) as opposed to the score which sets out the form in a birds eye view from start to end.
"In an installation the composer can't control the start and end point, the duration of the experience nor the listening viewpoint. we can contemplate form as the particular temporal experience of the first-person subject as they navigate in, through and out of the work’s frame . That is, form as the particular first person narrativisation of experience in a given installation." (p172)
The audience reconfigures the experience of the work through their own movement. Time becomes space.
He goes on to relate various examples of different spatial layouts of speakers for different works.
(Batchelor, 2015) Acousmatic Approaches to the Construction of Image and Space in Sound Art
This article is most interesting for me in its discussion of the difference between sound art and acousmatic music.
Andrew Lewis (2014) usefully identified four defining characteristics of acousmatic music (2014), this means that the music:
1. Does indeed provide ‘ nothing to see – and we know it’ (Lewis 2014).
2. Is produced for fixed medium.
3. Is time-structured – that is, involves a carefully worked order of events predetermined by the composer which result in a musical logic that would be compromised by their rearrangement.
4. Is gesture-based – that is, sounds in acousmatic music, whether recognisable or not, tend to be chosen/manipulated to imply energetic causation and (predominantly human) agency.
(Lewis, A. 2014. ‘LEXICON’ – Behind the Curtain. eContact 15.4. http://cec.sonus.ca/econtact/15_4/lewis_lexicon.html (accessed 14 February 2018).
Fixed medium and time structured are the least compatible with sound art, which is neither fixed medium (the audience moves around) nor time structured (the audience comes and goes at will) Sound art has its roots in the visual arts where the timeline is unspecified and can be experienced over a long or short time. It is presented in gallery settings with a less musically encultured audience.
Acousmatic music has its roots in concert music, presented in concert with seating, using often real-world sounds (sometimes even mimetic) to create loose narratives by the relationships between them.
Time becomes space. (Smalley, D. 2007. Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound 12(1): 35–58.)
(Andean, 2016) Narrative Modes in Acousmatic Music
Outlines the various narrative modes as he has identified them, of acousmatic music.
He says acousmatic music is essentially narrative because of the use of real world sounds (some even mimetic) and the phenomenological emphasis of Schaeffer in the birth of the art form. He defines 'narrative' as a succession of events:
‘the representation of an event or a series of events’ (Abbott 2008); ‘the representation of a temporal development, which consists of a succession of events’ (Meelberg 2006) (quoted p192)
He adjusts the definition to include the experience of the listener and comes up with:
"our experience of an event or a series of events ’; ‘our experience of a temporal development, and of a succession of events " (p192)
He sees the acousmatic work as having many listening positions due to their many parameters, elements, layers working together to construct a narrative through time
"In other words: human experience is fundamentally temporal; because narrative both informs and is informed by human experience, it, too, is fundamentally temporal; and, closing the circle, temporal experience is fundamentally narrative.1 From this, we can further assert that our experience of music will be fundamentally narrative, since music is experienced ‘in time’" (p194)
And don't forget - time is space in acousmatic music
Modes
1. Material Narrative - Use of recorded real-world sounds. eg Jonty Harrison's Undertow and Normandeau's Rumeurs
2. Formal narrative - music requires metaphor to tell story, am can be explicit
3. Structural narrative - strong in music (keys, forms, cadences, phrases) but weal in am
4. Mimetic narrative - use of real world sounds to convey behaviour of objects eg. Wishart's Red Bird. Material and mimetic work together. eg Wishart's Red Bird (1980)
5. Embodied narrative - the embodied experience of the listener when hearing real world sounds
6. Parametric narrative - when a work relies entirely on one aspect of a sound eg. Normandeau's StrinGDberg (2009)
7. Spatial narrative - the work is a series of sound events with space one parameter OR it is a series of spaces in which the sound works to illuminate the space. The space itself can tell a story. eg doors in Rumeurs
8. Studio narrative - where the listener tunes in to the technology behind the work. eg Luc Ferrari's Visages V where we hear the tape deck being handled.
9. Extra-musical narrative - eg titles, programme notes
8. Textual narrative - using the voice and words
(McCombe, 2006) Videomusicvideo: Composing across media
Article that includes my work as one if its examples of composers whose work is challenging the usual demarcation of media categories and work across media beyond the traditional forms. As well, these works have music and visual working together in an equal partnership as opposed to the 'film' and 'score' that is traditional, thereby contributing to the fields of association and emergent meaning.
She says these works
"reflect an ‘intermedia aesthetic’ in which various media and modes of presentation and engagement are utilised by the composer/creator to explore and articulate an expressive intention" (p300)
She analyses the works via Nicholas Cooks ideas of emergent meaning where two fields of embedded meaning in two different media combine to form quite a different meaning - an 'emergent meaning'.
She sees my work as utilising in particular Michel Chion's idea of an 'empathetic' or an 'anempathetic' relationship between music and vision. (Chion 1994, p8) Empathetic the music reflect the mood of the visuals, anempathetic, the music is indifferent to the mood. Chion contends this last relationship intensifies the emotion
"Chion’s point is that ‘this juxtaposition of scene with indifferent music has the effect not of freezing emotion but rather of intensifying it’ (Chion, 1994, p. 8). In Circus Sweet, Thackrah moves between a sense of the empathetic and the anempathetic in the subtly shifting relationship between image and sound." (p305)
She says
"Thackrah’s Circus Sweet creates an intriguing collage of disparate images in which the music and soundscape suggest and evoke many layers of associative and emergent meaning. The music creates a narrative, Thackrah using the visual images to manipulate and enhance the impact of the music, while the sound and music provoke a variety of reactions to the visual material. The nature of the work is such that themes and concepts explored are evoked primarily through the interaction between music and image." (p306)
(Garro, 2012) From Sonic Art to Visual Music: Convergences, Diversions, intersections
The term Visual Music was first used in 1912 to describe Kandinsky's paintings, largely because, as some of the first abstract paintings, their form and content comprising many colours and figures scattered througout the canvas, could be read as a temporal journey, much like absolute abstract music. Certainly Kandinsky saw the parallels and named them often with musical terms - Fugue, Sonata etc.
Hence a definition of Visual Music today could be defined as an ‘experience of pure time, without the burden of a story. Where cinema is audiovisual novel, visual music is audiovisual poetry’ (Piche´ 2003; quoted in Garro p103)
Visual music indicates a form of art in which the combination of moving imagery and sound establishes a temporal architecture in a way similar to absolute music (Evans 2005 Foundations of a visual music) both through the articulation of the visual and the musical and through the interaction and interplay between them. They are typically non narrative and so use a different form of montage to classic cinematography that uses more traditional montage techniques to establish a story, no matter how obscure; shots and cuts done linearly. In visual music, the visual and sound montage and movement happens organically often using similar parameters via computer programming.
"The uneasy relationship between video montage and the electroacoustic idiom is often resolved in
visual music works utilising video morphing in lieu of cuts or transitions (the traditional arsenal of
montage)" ( p109)
According to Garro, "electroacoustic music carries within itself the seed of the journey that took it beyond the acousmatic, mono-mediatic paradigm. Visual music composers have, from their viewpoint, done nothing more than going one small step beyond" (p105) The visual becomes merely another media element not in any way meant to distract from the sound - never allowing it to become merely "pit music" (Chion 1994 p80)
FILM MUSIC
(Tobias, 2003-2004) Cinema, Scored: Toward a Comparative Methodology for Music in Media
An article corroborating the view that music in multimedia has been neglected.
He analyses Run Lola Run.
He says privileging the composer of the film score misses out on many other aspects of music that are at play in the film/music dialogue.
"Privileging the compositional text and the credited composer over what are, in reality, more varied processes, the musicological method of film music study faces serious challenges: there are also intertextual sources for musical motifs to be tracked in terms of varied levels of reference which may not necessarily be articulated in terms of formal musical elements." (p28)
and he says music in film is not pure music but rather 'music in mediation' with culture
"Yet as objects of listening knowledge with a larger re-ception in culture, each melody comprises a response to music in film: film music is, more aptly, music in mediation. Their similarity points to the fact that these responses are determinants in the cultural fabric of which cinema makes use...
Musicality, then, is a function of the production of meaning by synchronizing not sound with image exactly, but rather, medial or narrative form with audience knowledge and practices... Musical meaning since cinema, at least, crosses auditory and visual registers and today extends explicitly to the gesturality of interactive media; and so, it is not surprising that in films such as Run Lola Run musical design turns out to be operative in grounding performative audience gestures toward meaning both in terms of the formal elements of the work but also in terms of the terrain of musical reception.
In this sense, the cinematic image is always an image scored: interpreted in a combination of the performativities of seeing with those of listening, whether programmatic or improvised, the visible is marked by the simultaneous reception of the audible." (p34-35)
THEORISTS
(Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, 1987) A Thousand Plateaus
1. Introduction: Rhizome
Argues the idea that books (and ultimately all human selves) have the quality of rhizomes (tubers) rather than a branching root system that has marked the definitions of Western humanity since the year zero. It's complex...
We have the first type of book - the 'root-book' where the law of the book is the law of reflection -
'the One becomes two' ... Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as "advanced" as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection ... Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and even information science." (p5)
"In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior .... The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place" (signifiance and
subjectification)" (p16)
They propose instead the model of the rhizome - a bulb or tuber - which "is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. "(7)
It's not about adding ever higher dimensions but rather by making multiples, creating assemblages.
"it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudo-multiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions ... " (p8)
Mimicry is a bad concept because it relies on binary logic to describe the object. Rather, a book (or portrait)
"forms a rhizome with the world there is an a-parallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the de-territorialization of the world, but the world effects a re-territorializationof the book, which in turn de-territorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can)" (p11)
"To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much." (p15)
They call for "a-centred systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other, the stems or channels do not pre-exist, and all individuals
are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment-such that the local operations are co-ordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency." (p17)
"Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non sign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that
becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + I). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions
having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n- 1 )." (p21)
and
"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and ... and ... and ... "This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation-all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic ... ). (p25)
7. Year Zero: Faciality
A poetic philosophical journey exploring the relationship between culture, society, power and the depiction and intensity of our focus on the 'face'. Year zero signifies the year of the birth of Christ and the start of Faciality. Prior, the primitive world had a human, embodied view. Now, faces are dehuminised and created automatically and mechanically (by the mechanical action of society I presume) - merely black holes set in white walls - black holes into which our preconceived meanings are embedded; white walls upon which we project our significations, our meanings. Not only faces are the victims of 'faciality' All things can become victim to the automatic dehumanising action of facialisation.
"Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata. Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly
enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The
form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices ("Hey, he seems angry ..."; "He couldn't say it..."; "You see my face when I'm talking to you ..."; "look at me carefully...").
A child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.
Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen.
The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye.
Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that constitutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely begins to appear in the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary, emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it "in pitiless darkness."1 (p167-168)
"The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the absolute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive,
spiritual, human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a nostalgia for a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhumanity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether different
inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads"; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities.
Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have finally become a probe-head... Year zen, year omega, year co... Must we
leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and
probe-heads?" (p190-191)
Laura Marks The Skin of the Film
(Marks, 2000)
Introduction:
Talks of the lack of opportunities for experimental film makers due to lack of public funding for non commercial film making. She is referring largely to multicultural films but what she says equally applies to all experimental films perhaps to a lesser extent.
Chapter 1 The Memory of Images:
Talks at length about Deleuze, Guatarri and Foucault. D & G state that discources are restricting and enabling. For cinema, this means one must work withing the dominant discourse but in such a way as to critically open new lines of discourse to the outside. Is this possible?? She says in Foucault's terms, this means experimental cinema "must work at the edge of the unthought, slowly building a language in which to unthink it" because what can already be thought will stifle any potential new thought. (p29)
She quotes Deleuze at length regarding light and luminosity:
"visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer" (Deleuze 1988 Foucault p52 quoted on p30)
Image and sound
Experimental cinema can express the disjunction between sound/ image and official history /private memory.
"Intercultural cinema reveals new history as it is formed, the new combination of words and things that cannot be read in terms of the existing languages of sound and image but calls for new, as yet unformulated languages. To read/hear the image, then, is to look/listen not for what's there but for the gaps - "mind the gap!'... here the importance of absent images (often video black or black leader). barely legible image, and indistinguishable sound in so many of these works" (p31)
She explains Deleuze defines two different types of films; the movement-image film where there is a direct cause to every action and the subjective-image is seen by someone 'qualified' or someone part of the set (eg. the cowboy shooting the gun sees him fall or the qualified subject understands the close up belongs to the interior monologue) and the viewer shares this subjective-image. In time-image films (contemporary films where the action has no linearity) the eyeball is stranded not understanding why certain images were placed. This forces the viewer to reflect and perceive again to work out which part of the image is relevent. The viewer is confronted by not understanding.
Chapter 3 The memory of Things
Film is like fetish - it carries the trace (index) of another materiality within it. Documentary in particular is fetish because it claims to be indexical top the profilmic event. (Bazin, Barthes) Documentary fixes the fetish object and and intensifies the affect of it. This is like Deleuze's idea of Faciality. The facelike image is "dense with affect that has been deposited in it from elsewhere and that resists analysis" (p94) The facial image returns the look which is a feature of an auric object.
The Foucault Reader (Rabinow, 2010)
Introduction by Rabinow
Summing up of Foucault's central ideas dealt with in the readings chosen by Rabinow.
Opens with the difference between Chomsky's thinking and Foucault's.
For Chomsky there is fixed human nature - a bio-physical structural that enables all humans, despite individual differences, to come to a unified language. Without this central idea, Chomsky feels understanding is impossible.
Foucault avoids the question 'does human nature exist?' and instead asks 'how does the concept of human nature function in society?' He looks at the social functions of the concept of 'human nature' There is no universal fixed understanding of human nature beyond history and society.
The Subjectification
Foucault, throughout his years of study, has attempted to understand the way, in our culture, human beings are made into subjects (are objectified). He sees three ways this is done. (see The Subject and Power in Rabinow & Hubert Beyond Structuralism & heumanetics)
1. Dividing practises - the way society categorise, isolate, manipulate and divide - eg. lepers, poor, insane, homeless, drug addicts etc.
2. Scientific classification - the way we are defined by our classification via discourse - via labour, language, scientific study, historical discourse etc. How we come to understand ourselves through study - scientifically or quasi science.
3. Subjectification - the way we human beings turn ourselves into subjects (or objects); the way we self-form ourselves into meaning-giving selves.
The Author
Foucault believes the reign of the individual intellectual author is over. He believes Sartre was the last incumbent. He is also not convinced by the replacing 'author' with 'writer'.
Historically, the author's legitimacy has changed. Scientific texts in the 17th Century had to have the author's name to be legit. Now the author's name is not important. 'Truth' has become anonymous. Also, fiction was anonymous and today, the author's name is highly important. He also points to a third type of author - the rare social thinkers whom he calls 'founders of discursivity' - Marx, Freud etc.
What is an Author? (M. Foucault, 1984)
How to summarise this?? I'll start at the end...
The author is not a free subject using the grammatical features, formal structures and object of discourse to create meanings - "the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses, in short by which one impedes the free circulation and free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction"(p119) he is not a genius imbued with visionary power in which he deposits meaning in all he writes, so different from other humans. "The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill the work" (p118)
The subject - be it author or other humans - cannot penetrate the sustance of things and give them meaning rather "it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analysing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse" (p118)
He predicts that the future will see the end of the author as the creator of restraint - something else will take over - and discourses will "develop in the anonymity of a murmur" (p119)
We would no longer ask "Who really spoke? What part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead there would be other questions like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?" (p120)
The Body of the Condemned (Michael Foucault, 2010)
He talks of the soul and how the modern soul could be viewed today. Rather than it being a mere outmoded illusion of a past ideology - Renaissance religion - he believes it exists and has a reality. that reality is that our 'soul' is that which society uses to constrain us. It is a function of the power that is exercised on those punished, supervised, educated, divided, defined.
"This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint" (p180)
Modern thinking disregards the soul as illusion and believe a real self has replaced it.
Foucault see this as utterly untrue. Rather the 'free' man is "already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is in effect an instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." (p180)
(Peters, 2001) Picturing the Self: Art of the Body and Camera Portraiture
A review of the Elkin's book Pictures of the Body: Pain & Metamorphoses.
"The corporeality - the seat of emotions, the antithesis of the soul, the opposite of the intellect ... is emblematic of a series of deeply embedded oppositions for the West that stretch back...to the origins of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes and Kant, and, in a discontinuous and broken tradition, all the way back to Plato and beyond" (p103)
Post structural thought has wrestled with this Cartesian idea of portraiture where mimetic image / representations of the body are seen as a means/the eyes to the inner soul/mind only rather than acknowledging the corporeality and importance of the body itself. The body was only important because it expressed something inner. The body as a concept is central to the post structural attack on Cartesian thought and its privileging of the mind. The reversing of the importance of the body and its pleasures and pains, over the mind, has come in post structuralism. The body now defines identity and subjectivity with its accent on performance and self-referentiality in post modern arts practise.
So I will make embodied portraits - sounds emanating from the BODY. Bodily sounds - sounds of life/vitality, pain, pleasure, joy.
"The relative neglect of the body by philosophers has skewed Western tradition toward a Platonism and cognitism that on the whole denies physique and physiology, setting up strange attempts to read or judge 'the real' by looking at appearances." (p104)
He says Elkins says "every picture is a picture of the body" and "every work of visual art is a representation of the body" because "we see bodies even when there are none, and that the creation of form is to some degree also the creation of a body" (p1 Elkins)
AUTOBIOGRAPHY & FILM
(Fanthome, 2006) The Influence and treatment of autobiography in Confessional art: Tracey Emins Top Spot
"Whereas Emin’s installation art offers spectators the freedom to
choose their own perspective and viewing timescale, in Top Spot and her other
videos and films, the camera eye is predetermined prior to the point of consumption,
and viewers are offered one dominant perspective. Moreover, the
use of others to give voice to Emin’s own confessions casts doubt on the ownership
of the confession itself. Although Emin retained a firm authorial hand
throughout the making of Top Spot, her vision was invariably affected by
external influences in the course of filming and editing, not least due to the
numbers of others involved in the cinematic process. In her article on Bergman’s
treatment of autobiographical material, Linda Haverty Rugg grapples
with these issues, and building on the work of Elizabeth Bruss and Susanna
Egan, she suggests that a way forward “might be to imagine a new type of selfhood,
a collaborative subjectivity (intersubjectivity) that would expand the
genre of autobiography to include cinematic self-representation” (75). Rugg
argues that this is an appropriate response, as the intrinsic collaborative character
of film aptly parallels the collaborative character of selfhood." (34)
"Dovey’s (Dovey, Jon. Freakshow: First person media and factual television. London: Pluto, 2001) interpretation of Foucault that “in some sense without confessional discourse there would be
no self” (105). This is compounded by another contributing factor: the
emphasis on what Giddens (Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity, 1991) terms “the project of the self” which has developed
in late modernity as a response to the breakdown of traditional hierarchies,
and now replaces earlier grand narratives as a key focal point for self assessment
and self-identity (198)" (40)
"Postmodern culture has evolved as a result of the breakdown of hierarchies,
which has brought a new emphasis on reflexivity, and has sanctioned greater
freedom in the sense of encouraging individuals to make choices and seek personal
guidelines according to individual taste and opinion, and not predetermined
or established wisdoms. It is perhaps unsurprising that turning to one’s
own personal autobiographical experience, or to that of others, can locate
meaning and provide explanation and validation. Indeed, Giddens notes:
Autobiography—particularly in the broad sense of an interpretative self-history
produced by the individual concerned, whether written down or not—is actually
at the core of self-identity in modern social life. Like any other formalised narrative,
it is something that has to be worked at, and calls for creative input as a matter of
course. (76) (40)"
(Bruss, 1980) Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film
A great essay discussing the differences between written autobiography and film autobiography; and whether it is possible at all to create true ab in the forms that traditional literature have set up. She believes that "all of the extant attempts at autobiographical film seem to run afoul of the same problems and end up becoming indistinguishable from biography, on the one hand, or expressionist cinema, on the other" (297)
She wonders what are the implications for our concept of the self if the autobiographical 'I' cannot survive the move from text to film - there is no 'eye' for 'I'
Descarte was perfect for the text ab - the ab springing forth from the thinking mind - cause and effect.
MY THOUGHT: But what of the PM deconstruction of Cartesian thinking - perhaps film is a better way of addressing this loss of the Cartesian self? In many ways, this, without stating it, is what Bruss is saying. (and also what Renov says in Subject of Documentary)
She defines three parameters that define ab
1. Truth - consistent with evidence
2. Action - a personal performance that exemplifies the character of the subject
3. Identity - roles of author, narrator and protagonist are conjoined with the same individual occupying all roles. "the speaking subject and the subject of the sentence is then, crucial to the autobiographical project..." (301)
She argues that film upsets all 3.
Truth
Film is NOT truthful (see my lit review)
"The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking, in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its be- coming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model." (Bazin, 1958)(8)
We know this to be wrong
Act
Although Bazin stated confidently " For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man" (7)(Bazin, 1958)
But film does NOT happen of its own accord. Many people are involved
"Where the rules of language designate a single source, film has instead a disparate group of distinct roles and separate stages of production.... Authors must exercise their own capacities where auteurs are free to delegate; authors actually possess the abilities that auteurs need only oversee" (304)
Identity
Therefore the role of author, narrator and protagonist are NOT the same individual in film.
"There is no way of marking a personal attachment to one image rather than another, no way of discriminating a shot of the director from the shot of any other, indifferent individual" (305)
Some of the issues Bruss points out to do with the limits of ability of film to create autobiography do NOT apply to my filmic autobiography. That is, that film's representation is one of 'spectatorship' - that is that
"to the extent that the filmmaker accepts the conventions of pictoral realism (and it is these conventions that underlie the truth-value of film) he must avoid ... anything that betrays the work of filming that indicates that it exceeds the mere passive reception of images (or sounds)" (305)
This does not apply to me because the focus in my films is on the sound/words that perform the same function as written ab. The image then is an adjunct and in this context the work as a whole - with image and sound - can be received as the written word is - as
" at once expressive and descriptive; the two are not mutually exclusive in language where truth is acknowledged to be a construction rather than a reflection." (306)
Film however, is seen as too pure for ab where the image is always the other - like frames around a picture, the screen creates an impenetrable objective barrier. In written work we can image the other whereas in film the other is presented to us as external.
Why is film like this? Because of its origins in the natural sciences - pure objective evidence. "Seeing is believing...' (see lit review)
She contends, and I agree, that therefore film can be the site of an extended form of ab because as Benjamin says
"Only the camera can show us the optical unconscious, as it is only through psychoanalysis that we learn of the compulsive unconscious" (Benjamin, 1936)(30)
Film creates a new form of self because the eye and ear of the camera is
"itself a composition made up of separate elements of staging, lighting, recording and editing ... The cinematic subject, then, cannot precede the cinematic apparatus" (319)
"In this respect, film simply shares - or better articulates - the dilemmas of an entire culture now irrevocably committed to complex technologies and intricate social interdependencies" (320)
My comment:
She believes the literary ab will disappear because film is slowly and inexorably taking its place. But, according to her, film cannot replace it because of the reasons above.
"the autobiographical act as we have known it for the past 400 years could indeed become more and more recondite, and eventually extinct" (296-297)
I don't agree with this. The defining character of ab that Bruss states - that the speaking (filming ) subject and the subject of the sentence must be one and the same - can be in films where the person behind the camera is also in front of the camera, and that the narrating voice is also the voice of the subject. The films she quotes are not like this - they are auteur films. However there are films where this occurs - mine included. (See also Renov Subject of Documentary)
(HavertyRugg, 2006) Keaton's Leap: Self projection and autobiography in film
"The process of writing an autobiography calls for a single author who produces a narrative account of his or her own life. As defined by Philippe Lejeune, a "true" autobiography must have an author who bears the same name as the protagonist who is identical with the narrator of the account, which is the history of the author's life.....In her groundbreaking essay, Elizabeth Bruss (Bruss, Elizabeth. "Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film." Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 296-320)
notes that in film, the identity between author (in this case, film director) and autobiographical text (in this case, "authored" film) breaks down inevitably between the persons in front of and behind the camera. While in textual autobiography the pronoun "I" provides the unifying tissue between the narrating and childhood selves, film offers no such anchor. "There is no way," she writes, "of marking a personal attachment to one image rather than another, no way of discriminating a shot of the director from a shot of any other indifferent individual"(305)" (vii)
"In their analyses of film as autobiography described above, Elizabeth Bruss and Philippe Lejeune indicated a central problem: the person behind the camera and the person in front of it cannot be the same person when the subject is childhood or even the recent past. The divided "I," the autobiographer split in two between the director's body and the actor's body, can be seen as an insurmountable difficulty" (xi)
(HavertyRugg, 2001) Carefully I touched the Faces of my Parents: Bergman's Autobiographical Image
"While there has been much criticism of the apparently absolutist nature of Lejeune’s paradigm, his basic contention, that the reader of an autobiography expects to find the type of identification he describes, seems to me pragmatically sound.... The use of the photographic, cinematic medium brings a host of new considerations to bear on life representations. Elizabeth Bruss, in her groundbreaking essay on film as autobiography, dwells on one of them: assuming that we are to identify the person directing the film with the subject
of the autobiography, how can we understand that the person in front of the camera is identical with the person behind it?" (p72)
" the collaborative nature of cinema, with its cast of actors, cameramen,
technicians, set designers, make-up artists, caterers, corporate or
national sponsors, and so on, must inevitably disrupt the concept of the solitary
autobiographer, confronted with the blank page, memories, and a subjective
and singular vision of his or her own life. Not surprisingly, all of these
objections to film as a vehicle for self-representation" (p73)
" we saw the emergence of a cadre of directors—
Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Bergman, for instance—who took their places
as auteurs and proceeded in a number of their films to offer visions of childhood
and adolescence, in some cases clearly marked (albeit through extratextual
indicators) as autobiographical visions.
Autobiographical, perhaps—but can this be autobiography? Opponents
of the auteur concept have regarded its inherent elitism with suspicion.... The primary problem cited by critics of auteurism applies here...
—the appropriation and subjugation of others to a single person’s artistic
vision." (p73 -74)
" Elizabeth Bruss notes that in film, the identity between author (in this case, film director) and autobiographical text (in this case, the “authored” film) breaks down inevitably between the persons in front of and behind the camera. “There is no way,” she writes, “of marking a personal attachment to one image rather than another, no way of discriminating a shot of the director from a shot of any other, indifferent individual” (305).
Here she hinges her argument on the body as a final frontier.(p76)
Haverty Rugg disagrees with this. She feels that a film can be autobiographical because in this contemporary world the collaborative nature of film can correspond with the collaborative nature of selfhood (SEE Susanna Egan encounters in camera)
(Egan, 1994) Encounters in Camera: Autobiography as Interaction
" Eluding singular definition, autobiography slides in and out of various genres with some conviction but has posed particular difficulties in relation to film. Film opens possibilities for grounding a viewer’s experience in a life before and beyond the text (viewers tend to believe in the prior existence of that which is photographed, to resist the possibility of absolute fiction) but it raises questions simultaneously about the subjectivity-in-representation of that life (because that which is manifest is the object of the camera eye and often of a photographer other than the apparently originating subject)." (593)
"To begin with assumptions: autobiography is distinct from biography and history by virtue of its self-referential stance and distinct from all other genres because such self-reference connects its subject-matter distinctively with the world outside the text."(593)
After this definition, she goes on to expand the definition of self into one of 'interaction' and in this way, allows film to be defined as ab even when there is significant collaboration between many people involved in the creating of the ab.
" l would like to define “interaction” within the context of current autobiography theory both to indicate the context of life-experience and to suggest a wider lens with which to read the translation of life into text." (594)
She considers early definitions of ab have been inflexible:
" it has remained too closely bound to the classical nineteenth-century forms of teleological, heroic (white, male, imperialist), singular and linear narrative to admit of variations... " and instead "Contemporary theorists of autobiography are increasingly engaged by diversity, by fragmentary and incomplete narrative that explores possible or tentative meanings as distinct from linear, teleologically oriented narrative that explains" (598)
For me however, this does not excuse ab from what I consider to be the essential feature which is that the consumer of ab expects protagonist, narrator and creator of the work to be the same individual.
Film, in many ways is perfect for ab; the referential power of the camera is unequalled; the 'having been there-ness" of film is undeniable which enables an unparalleled ability to reference the external characteristics of an individual.
She believes if the filmmaker foregrounds herself in the film, film can be seen as ab:
" As soon as the filmmaker foregrounds himself and his activity of filmmaking, the grounds shift for film as autobiography... "
She cites two filmmakers - Jim Lane and Tom Joslin who
"create visual spaces and develop film idiom in ways that enable them to defy the expectations of Bruss or Portugues and offer film as subjective representation."
(Ruby, 1977) The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity in the Documentary Film.
Jay Ruby suggests that personal art films rather than documentary should be the medium for autobiography.
"Until recently the division was relatively clear. If you wanted to make films about people exotic to your own experience you made documentaries, and if you wished to explore yourself, your feelings and the known world around you, you made personal art films" (8)
He believes now, filmmakers make personal films that are documentaries - eg. Jerome Hill's Portrait - they are concerned with self as maker and person and make that quest the focus. Previously film only focused on PRODUCT and both the PRODUCER and PROCESS should have been invisible.
As Ruby pointed out back in 1977:
"Sooner or later the documentarian is going to have to face the possibility of assuming the socially diminished role of interpreter of the world and will no longer be regarded as an objective recorder of reality." (10)
(Gernalzick, 2006) To act or perform: distinguishing filmic autobiography
"Technologically and narratologically, filmic autobiographies as theorized and collected by Sitney and Katz undo Elizabeth W. Bruss's response to auto biographical auteur film, which held that the translation onto film of the classical, structuralist definition of autobiography by Philippe Lejeune - the identity of author, narrator, and protagonist, and involvement of the auto biographical pact-is impossible. As Trinon (8), Renov (6), Egan (96), Lane (28-30, 41), and Lejeune himself have argued, 5 some presuppositions of Bruss's analysis are invalidated by the existence of filmic autobiographies, which are not acted but rather performed by the single-person filmmaker. Bruss's main argument against the translation of autobiography onto film is that "there is no 'eye' for I" (298), that there is never an identity of director, cameraman, narrator, and protagonist. Yet she arrives at this claim because she universalizes the conventional mode of film production by division of labor. As a consequence of not including single-person-produced filmic auto biography and its history and theory in their considerations, scholars, especially literary scholars, continue to deny the possibility of filmic autobiography because a technological division of autobiographical subjectivity in the person before the camera, the cinematographer, the editor, and the narrator is assumed to be irreducible." (3)
(Lejeune, 1989) The Autobiographical Pact
An essay discussing the definition of autobiography?
(p4)
This brings into focus several points
1. it's retrospective narrative
2. the subject is a real individual's life
3. the author and subject are identical
Self portrait is different because it does NOT have a retrospective narrative
Biography or portrait is different because the subject and author are NOT identical
There is NO latitude in the definition regarding the author and subject being the same person
"In order for there to be an autobiography, the author / narrator and the protagonist must be identical." (p5)
"It is a biography, written by the person involved, as a simple biography" (p6)
"Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author, the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about" (p12)
The difference between biography and autobiography is the difference in the relationship of resemblance and identity. (p24)
"We notice already here what is going to fundamentally oppose biography and autobiography; it is the hierarchical organisation of the relationship of resemblance and identity. In biography it is resemblance that must ground identity. In autobiography, it is identity that grounds resemblance. Identity is the real starting point of autobiography; resemblance the impossible horizon of biography. The different function of resemblance in the two systems is thereby explained." (24)
(Renov, 2004) The Subject of Documentary
Renov argues that despite Elizabeth Bruss's pronouncement that the autobiography is dead because of the rise of cinema and her belief that it can't create true ab, he argues that 16mm consumer film, video and the internet provide good platforms for self expression and new audiences.
INTRO:
Is essentially a lit review for ab film documentaries.
The 'subject' has quite a history. It has been attacked or redefined over many centuries. - Descarte saw the self as split between mind and body, Marxists saw it alienated and disassociated, Structuralists saw it merely as a effect of the system; Post Structuralists saw it as decentred, hybridalised and virtualised - and does it matter?
Foucault wrote that in previous eras it was a fight against institutionalisation, state violence and exploitation and now the fight is against subjection, the submission of subjectivity.
He says now that objective truth has been discounted in documentary, there is a place for more subjective non fiction texts.
"Given the waning of objectivity as a compelling social narrative, there appears to be ample grounds for a more sustained examination of the diverse expressions of subjectivity produced in nonfiction texts" (xvii)
The Subject in History: The new ab in film and video
He talks about Barthes par Roland Barthes as being the example of written ab that most epitomises new film ab
"that couples a documentary impulse - an outward gaze upon the world - with an equally forceful reflex of self-interrogation" (p105)
It is a practise of writing at odds with the Cartesian subject/object model of self. Rather it places the self within a matrix of culture and history.
As Barthes says
"When we speak today of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge her simple contradictions, her double postulations etc; it is a diffraction that is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning: I am not contradictory, I am dispersed" (Barthes, 1975)(143)
The style is "disaffiliated with certainty"
It is not enacted by mass consumer artists, but by
"The disenfranchised who work in near isolation, attempting to preserve or refashion our culture, to interpret our lives and emotions for us, to ask questions and suggest answers in terms whose partial opacity is part of the message. This is not 'production for use' the realm of practicality or immediate payoff" (p108)
Doco makers are grappling with the questions of self that the theorists have been posing for years. Now they
"have come to share the revisionist historian's suspicion for top down institutional accounts. Instead a number of contemporary artists seem to have gravitated toward an approach in which a past, frequently public, event id figured through recourse to the subject, the category of the self" (p110)
He talks about video art which has an attachment to the corporeal and performative that is historically distinct from cinema that captures in frozen