Zidane's conducts of time

Screened at the Ritzy in Brixton around December 06 or January 07

First there is a vague halo of green, then as the camera retreats from the screen it begins by touching, or as if touching, two green squares rounded off by light which diffuses their boundaries, then, more, their geometrical arrangement becoming more evident and the contours which demarcate them becoming more defined. The camera continues its retreat until it is revealed that the object of its scrutiny which it has begun at its limit of being, at the very threshold beyond which it would not longer exist, is in fact a projection screen displaying a projected digital televisual image.

What the camera has touched here is the absence of image, at the same time as it has touched a vestige, a remain, it has touched the pixel itself, the constituent and support of the image. It has shown that at its core there is only this smudged square lost in light, fixed in its place, immovable, static, dead. Nowhere else has the uncanniness of the digital image been rendered in cinema so chillingly as in the opening sequence of the film Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait.

The footage for the film was captured by means of multiple cameras. Some mobile, some fixed, one famously borrowed from NASA, others parasitically drawn on in order to capture events missed by the dedicated cameras.

They may be dedicated but they are not dedicated to the recording of the spectacle of the sport of football as defined by its grid, boundaries and goalposts. The film is concerned with the vectorial (MacKenzie Wark has presented a typology of the vector in Virilio’s thought).

What is especially interesting in the particular conjunction created by Gordon and Parreno is the bringing into cinematic presence (at least for a while before going to DVD) of the two faces identified by Brian Massumi of the regularatory and the regulatory. It is the television itself, he argues, in an analysis of sport – football specifically – in its conjunction with televised sport which serves to emphasise this distinction. A distinction which serves less to indicate and hold either side to its position, than to emphasise the transitivity of our epoch (he hesitates to call it postmodern). The homes in which televisions screen football matches are themselves passable membranes, leaky facades, monads connected at a low level of communication, transmitting at low resolution we might say (see Virilio), often in the dark. There may be no home in the film, but this may be the point; there is only the network, only the televisual (see Derrida’s terminology).

Of course one of the defining characteristics of modern football is the intensification of the circulation of capital...another conduct of time which is analysed by Eric Alliez in his study Tales for the Conquest of Time...I will have to leave that excursion for another occasion.

The clichés of Dumont's Twentynine Palms

Bruno Dumont’s excursion from the Nord Pas de Calais to Twentynine Palms in the Californian desert can be read as proof that molecularity isn’t enough to save us from bad films, or instances of what Deleuze calls “organised ineptitude” (367). If localised violence and sexuality “in what is represented” characterise bad cinema, he writes in Cinema 2, “[R]eal cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localised” (367).

A man and a woman are on a scouting trip for locations to be captured in photographs for an unspecified project. They fail to locate anything which will suffice but their quest had, at any rate, receded very rapidly as they became subject to the forces of the desert. In particular the forces to which the characters succumb reflect the altered density of the contemporary world, even its deserts, in the face of the colonisation of the wilderness by the possibilities of modern transport, settlement, infrastructure and communications. It is indicative that the camera which might have been used to scout for locations and to capture them fro future reference remains invisible throughout the film as if to underline the alienation from their environment (and hence from their object) experienced by these subjects, who are defined nonetheless by these lost relations.

The most significant precursor for Twentynine Palms in terms of its geographical setting and place in the filmmaker’s emerging oeuvre is – as many have pointed out - Zabriskie Point. In Zabriskie Point Antonioni is drawn to the desert as a space in which character dissolves. For Pascal Bonitzer his cinema is in pursuit of the non-figurative, which one might describe in Lyotard’s terms as the figural (a concept revisited by Brenez too). Deleuze cites Bonitzer’s account (Deleuze 1986: 119) before going on to forge the link so central to the cinema books: in such a recourse, Antonioni, with his spaces and people adrift in ‘deconnected’ spaces, is registering a crisis in the action image. The rambling, strolling characters are not found in motivated sensory motor situations but rather in pure optical and sound situations (120).

To a degree this remains true of Twentynine Palms. However the utopian dimensions of Zabriskie Point as registered in the cataclysmic finale are atrophied in Twentynine Palms: its version of the cataclysm is rendered in the denouement which sees violence erupt in the liminal space of the motel (a ‘non-place’ in Marc Augé’s formulation). Both films share a tendency to deconnected spaces, characters sheared off from the socius and to pure optical and sound situations divorced from the sensory motor schema.

In some senses what has changed between Antonioni’s film of 1969 and Dumont’s of 2003 is the restriction of the space for action in the sociopolitical domain. While the central couple remains in the earlier film the space for a performative intervention, in Twentynine Palms there is less space in which such occupation might occur. The desert too is striated and blocked, whereas in Zabriskie Point barren spaces are invoked as smooth spaces of ‘flight’ or of potential – if impossible – ‘burrowing’ (see Orr 1993: 150).

Preparatory to the first of two shocking turns of event, David banishes Katia from the motel room leaving her prey to possible abduction on the highway. Seeking her out he confronts her and as she lies on the highway strikes her several times about the head.



Then follows David’s subjection to a rape which Katia is forced to watch. Finally the scene which delivers the film’s brutal ending. Unfortunately we are firmly in the domain of cliché here. The sensory motor schema may be subject to rupture in the emptied, oneiric open spaces through which and in which the characters are filmed traversing and pausing, but via clichéd psychosocial types Dumont bridges these divides. If, for Deleuze, ‘cliché is the sensory-motor image of the thing’ (Deleuze 1986: 20), despite its daring, Twentynine Palms remains content with such clichés. Death is an a priori form which Dumont’s film stamps upon ‘a life’. In short it operates as a form of reactive judgement rather than an affirmative and evaluative point of view. Dumont’s decision to embed the irrational violence of its final sequences in the non-place of the motel is, curiously, of a piece with the reinscription of it (the motel) as displaced domestic sphere (one is perhaps reminded of Irigaray’s description of the home – or, here its replacement - as place of ‘murderous control’). Correlatively, in the desert encounter brought about by the ‘trajective-domestic’ capsule of the 4x4 driven by the couple, a ‘psychopathic’ homosexuality (a cliché Dumont’s film shares with Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) is figured as that which precipitates the disfigurement of the norms which are (barely, and until a certain point) holding out in the motel. Dumont is not interested in Godard, and it shows.

[An aside: there is a short distance between provocation of the sort Noé inscribes in his countdown to enable the audience to leave the auditorium and the self-congratulation that greets a job excessively done].

There is a monstrosity specific to each film, but whereas in Zabriskie Point the explosion remains aberrant and in some sense nonsensical - but, importantly, outside judgement - in Twentynine Palms the abject capitulation is to normative [albeit ‘monstrous’] heterosexuality, an acquiescence accompanied within the film by a form of judgement. It is a film drained of vitality presided over by organs and seized up subjects in subject-object relations whereas to some degree Zabriskie Point veers towards dis-organised bodies in a domain bereft of the loci that would facilitate subject-object relations.

Twentynine palms may be read as exploring the encounter between a type of vitality and a mode of atrophy, or between force and form. The force is sexual desire denuded of social mores. The imperatives of form trace themselves over the forces. In the Nietzschean idiom developed by Deleuze what arises here is a reactive formation, which as Brian Massumi reformulates it, is a mode of ‘back formation’ (Massumi 2002). Twentynine Palms continues Dumont’s reflection on the human being’s capacity for violence. It is also in the words of the director his attempt to deliver his ‘truth’ in a ‘form’ derived from Hollywood. This film, by one of recent French cinema’s least cinephilic directors (Frodon 2003: 20), is presided over by a ‘logique hétérosexuelle’ which, despite the film’s moves in the direction of an abstraction not necessarily at odds with what has here been identified as an aesthetics of force, retains the gridding implied by this logic. For Deleuze

Il y a une grande différence entre les virtuels qui définissent l’immanence du champ transcendental, et les formes possibles qui les actualisent et qui le transforment en quelque chose de transcendant (Deleuze 1995a: 7).

Dumont’s contribution to what I propose might be called a ‘cinethology’ examines the body as a mobile zone consisting of ‘poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients’. The body in each case is ‘traversed by a powerful non-organic vitality’ (Deleuze). If Dumont’s film comes close to an abstraction of the sort that might disclose something of that vitality, it is nonetheless in the detail that it implodes.

Overlope: a collaborative fiction (fragment)

Written in January 2001

CHAPTER 2

AFAR A POOL AFAR A MALL

Lacking coordinates ordinate yourself in the sand ceaseless shifting inscrutable there is a way out there is not a way out there is another place there is not another place where you are where you will be where you might have been where you were you are where you were where you always were in the sand in the sand not the sand of the coast not the sand where you trod arm in arm intermittent shingle the odd stone innumerable shells ah shells that is what is lacking here shells even one would do and pools are wanting too there is much here that is wanting that’s soon said but it remains undeniable to the extent that it is almost axiomatic vis-à-vis the place we are in if it is a place that is that there are no pools or rather that there are few of them although perhaps as many as you would expect in such a zone desert they call it but it’s just sand whatever fancy name you want to give it sand which shifts or doesn’t or which shifts so imperceptibly that it may as well not have moved as far as you are concerned

afar a pool afar a mall it is becoming crowded in this desert such facilities! and amenities! you are being spoilt for choice well it happens I’ve heard it said that in the desert you fall prey to illusions so it must be a case in point but the drought the drought it would get to you you would need a slaking to slake the infinitive by way of a first person modulation of the verb in question and its embodiment in a kind of vital charade to satisfy both protagonist for there we have you you squirming prototype and the audience come now you will do me the honour of attending to this little spectacle will you not? in short you are in need of a drink hence the mall hence the pool both afar both opposed both ablur

Sub-Lyotard (Economie libidinale)

Notes to an Archivist (June 2000)

You were there, out there, beyond the inflected space, variably twisting, folding in your curvature. Like a noise which beckons, like a smell which repels. Like a Being which waits. A metaphyics in abeyance. You were there, in your space which is not one, luminous, incendiary, abstract. I tried to speak to you, there, lodged in the circuitry like a loose log tossed on the foreshore, to leave something to you. But you are there circulating like a rumour spoken by yourself, and cannot hear me, cannot register this breath which is also an exhaltation. My breaths leave me, caressing the glottis; they lap along the tongue's shores. They are moistened, replete, overburdened. They leave. I articulate. I speak to you, there in your archive. But my utterance dissipates in the air which seems to separate us. The output of lungs collapses into air. I cannot reach you. Or, alternatively, a wind picks up, accumulates desert sand and sweeps across an ocean it defies. Parched it shifts across the maritime domain. It settles on you but in doing so loses any coherence it possessed when it swept in a continuum to you. The dust disperses. It may inhabit you, like a virus programmed for the millenium, but it has communicated nothing to you.
That is why I have chosen to call you sirocco. You possess the profound melancholy of circuitry, the oceanic swirl of maritime space and the porous facade of pixel. I am destined to send these words out to you, to leave this waste on the band you set aside for the communications of others.
You are divided, you are half shadow, half toxin. You murmur, you oscillate, you are vague like last year's news. You are nothing to me. And yet I must overcome you, even as you kill me, throttling me with circuitry and hardware.
You plunge into me. You say I have a corpse of velvet. You say I am a tract of slime, immeasureable stretching into the gulf we call a horizon but which you label, having been there, death.
What is this vestige of harmonics that I seem to ascribe us, knowing that your manner of inflecting space with an accent of tungsten is a stark disavowal of my guttural whine?

Empathicalism, Gitanes, Jazz

I was an Empathicalist (1998)

Ever since my late teens I have held in high esteem an institution which then to me was substantially distant. In those days the very words ‘jazz club’ conjured in my nascent bebop sensibility a paradisiacal mélange of yes, goatee beards, strong liquor, black turtle necks, debonair double-bass players, Gitanes and Parisian rain. I may, at that time, never have heard any jazz apart from the pale imitations offered by the British crossover combo Working Week, but that factor did not prevent me from thinking that Miles Davis, Chet Baker et al were the epitome of cool.

Coupled with my francophile tendencies, which once more were a fantasy projected outward on the basis of a few encounters with nouvelle vague and an undergraduate reading of Sartre’s Nausea, the completed picture would have me relocated to the famous Tabou club or the Hot Club de Paris, where the legendary Boris Vian would introduce Miles on stage, while at the bar the legendary Juliette Greco would exchange repartee and cigarette smoke with the legendary Jeanne Moreau.
The lure of this image has over the years been compounded by my actually getting to hear, see and visit some of the sounds, images and places which constituted the raw material of my imagined spatio-temporal haven. I came to possess a CD (purloined!) which includes previously unreleased recordings of Vian himself playing at the Tabou; I can listen to Davis’ soundtrack for Louis Malle’s film L’ascenseur pour l’echaffaud, originally produced by Vian; I can combine a recording of Martial Solal’s breathtaking soundtrack for Godard’s A bout be souffle with the (very important detail: non-subtitled) video recording I also possess. But this is as close to a jazz club as I believe I shall ever come. A jazz club which takes place entirely within my head, a Tabou of the imaginary, a Hot Club of the simulacrum. The jazz club does not exist.
In a sedate northeastern city of France I once attended its 'Blue Note' jazz club. Four or five couples canoodled on the ample sofas while my brother and I bravely essayed our pina coladas and, between sets, endured - I’m not making this up - The Eagles. The Eagles are what one might call anathema to jazz, as are canoodling couples. The Eagles and canoodling couples deserve one another. But the jazz club belongs to soloists both onstage and off. That is why the choice of the jazz club as meeting place for witches in the film Bell, Book and Candle is so apt. To be a witch one must keep one’s distance from the human, even whilst living amongst them as a nomad or a feline.
The theme of otherness associated with the jazz club is made even more emphatic in the film Funny Face where, in an amusing pastiche both of existentialism and the St-Germain-des-Pres, Audrey Hepburn is seduced by the ‘empathicalist’ philosopher at the club, where adherents swap bon mots and body fluids with equal empathicalist abandon. Both films feature the jazz club as potentially demonic, dangerous and otherworldly.
The jazz club is outside time. It goes on all night. The St Germain des Pres is timeless. It’s a Dexter Gordon solo, an Art Blakey drumroll. That is why Tavernier’s film Round Midnight is so effective. It is aware that jazz is more than just a sound, but that it is also a time, many times, and a place, many places.
Blue Note records knew this too when, putting on record the inimitable voice of Pee-Wee Marquette, introducing Art Blakey at the Birdland in New York, saying “When you listen to the record . . . you can say that’s my hands there on that record, that I dug down at Birdland”.
The Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, in a remarkable little book, The Poetics of Cinema, mentions the Portuguese word saudade, which means “a nostalgia for what might have occured”. For me the word aptly describes my engagement with the myth of the jazz club. The jazz club is an iconic space-time where one must don a mask (goatee, turtle-neck, Audrey Hepburn poise, Juliette Greco coiffure, Belmondo Gitane), take a performance enhancing pharmaceutical supplement, and try to avoid canoodling with anyone human.
The jazz club does not exist.

A poem concerning space!

Buzz

(February 1998)

with this rose I name you
I adorn this dusted sphere
Delicacy, abandon
One step, two

this tango will endure
it takes light years

telepresence
telly presents
camera obscura

camera lucida
camarera mia

Buzz exits into a void

he is reborn as a terrible beauty

Consider Yeats in Celtic Twilight:
a ruddy moon illumines
as much as it occludes
Buzzantium, I am going to Buzzantium

I was a Cahiers du cinema addict

I was over-enamoured of Cahiers, trusting too much to my limited French, though I was right about Daney. (from 96 0r 97)

I was a Cahiers du Cinéma addict

“Monsieur, vous n’avez rien contre la jeunesse?”, a street vendor of Cahiers du cinéma asks Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard’s legendary film A bout de souffle: “moi, je prefere les vieux,” responds Poiccard, eliciting a disgusted response from the vendor. Cahiers du cinéma, which along with its French rival Positif, has maintained throughout its turbulent career a defiantly intellectual approach to cinema, may be 47 years old, its jeunesse long gone along with the jaunesse of its famous early yellow cover page, but people in Britain, like Poicard in the film, no longer wish to know about it, if its erstwhile distributors are right. Early in 1996 they decided to relinquish their British distribution of Cahiers, which now no longer can be purchased by francophone cinephiles from the European Bookshop in Soho, the French Bookshop in South Kensington and the sundry street vendors which once stocked it in London. The only recourse now is to take up a yearly subscription.
If it is true that sales of the magazine in Britain had dwindled to such a low point that it became a loss-making title, what are we to glean from that decline? Either that there has been a diminution in the market for the intellectual consideration of the medium of cinema or that many of its British readers have suddenly taken up yearly subscriptions. Of these two speculations, however, it is I fear the former which seems more likely. One recent ominous indication of this decline is the impending closure of what is perhaps London’s finest ‘art house’ (a term I reluctantly use) cinema, the Lumiere on Saint Martin’s Lane.
What we are currently bearing witness to is what the French urbanist Paul Virilio refers to as the “industrialistaion of perception”.
The recent disappearance from the shelves of Cahiers du cinéma is, in fact, symptomatic of a sea-change in the British cinema-goer’s relationship with French film in particular. Instead of awaiting the new Godard (none of whose films have been distributed here since 1990), we await the new Emmanuelle Béart; instead of the new Garrel (never screened in Britain, yet arguably the foremost contributor to French cinema in the generation after Godard) we anticipate the more acceptable faces of charlatans such as Patrice Lecomte. Like Michel Poiccard we prefer les vieux: the europudding costume drama, the traditional love story featuring the perennially pouting Béart or the ditzy Binoche (the recent film by Belgian director Chantal Akerman featuring the talented Binoche may break this trend) or the work of prolific crowd-pleasers and nouvelle vague grand-daddies Chabrol and Rohmer. We spurn the work of those who continue to forge new possibilities for cinematic expression, by simply acting as if it was not there. It would appear that Cahiers du cinéma and Jean-Luc Godard are superfluous to the requirements of the year in Provence generation.
This fact is most tangibly revealed in the critical acclaim and almost universal appeal amongst the “chattering classes” of Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy. Kieslowski is a great colourist, a weaver of complicated but ultimately simple tales of coincidence and parallelism. His work offers pleasing diversions but cannot compare with the altogether more rigorous work of Godard in the same period (the recent screening within the BBC2 series TX of Godard’s JLG/JLG was a rare emergence from the shadows).
Cahiers du cinéma itself has not been immune to sea-changes. Having been founded by Bazin in 1950, it became the radical voice of the French nouvelle vague, helping filmmakers such as Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer himself to prominence, its criticism becoming increasingly sophisticated in the 1960’s as it absorbed some of the intellectual ferment of structuralism and post-structuralism. Paralleling Godard’s own trajectory in the early 1970’s, it first embraced and then promptly rejected Maoism. It re-emerged under the helmsmanship of the late lamented Serge Daney (perhaps the greatest cinema critic) and has held its own ever since, with regular contributions from old hands such as Serge Toubiana (the current editor) and a continually excellent base of younger aspirants to Cahiers stardom (although a recent letter published in Cahiers berated its editor for the lack of contributions by anyone under thirty-something). Quintessentially French, Cahiers du cinéma belongs to a world where the government still funds an indigenous industry which could not otherwise financially survive. It is a world where younger filmmakers such as Carax, Dubroux, Assayas and Desplechin all write and critique before they make films; a world where it would be unthinkable to embark on a film career without a thorough grounding in cinema history. Cahiers du cinéma is part of a broad intellectual spectrum, and, in its day has been capable of forging strong interdisciplinary links with such intellectual luminaries as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio. In short it is unique.
I have taken out a subscription to Cahiers, but it is not quite the same as rushing to the European bookshop to grab a copy of the latest issue, retiring to the French House for a demis, reading the most recent interview with Godard on the way home, for half an hour transforming the tube into le metro and East Putney into Saint Germain des Pres. Moi je prefere les jaunes, les Cahiers jaunes!