Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
Return to Contents»
Absence and Sociality in Live Film Narration: Poets of the Unreeled in Miami / Alan Clinton
“Every medium, in its presence, presents its own absence.” This was the mantra running through my head as I lay flat on my back, eyes closed, on the concrete floor of a dark, empty room in the Dorsch Gallery in Miami, an extra dose of Klonopin running through my blood to calm my nerves before the show. It was the explanation of why I would soon be entering the Gallery’s yard to participate with Walter K. Lew and several University of Miami poets in the strange phenomenon Lew has dubbed “movie telling,” or live film narration. It was, on some level, what drove the many guests to sit outside to witness something most of them were unfamiliar with as an art form, the sense that, in the face of absence, we want new socialities, between people, between media, new connections that are not wholenesses but supplements to the absence presented by communication in the age of total media.1 Poetry needs cinema, cinema needs poetry, and we need each other, even if none of these brief meetings leads to completion. Poets of the unreeled are also poets of the (un)real, come apart like the disorganized, prematurely born body imagined by Jacques Lacan, negotiating spaces and apparitions of consciousness that are always too real and not real enough.
It’s always a ramshackle (un)gathering, no matter how carefully planned, which is why Lew was prescient in holding the show outdoors, ready to project films from his “batmobile,” a projector stand perched astride the front and back seats of his black, vintage Infiniti M30 convertible. Indeed, watching the set-up of this equipment inevitably became part of the show itself---balancing the legs properly, attempting to anchor the “family-movie” sized screens so that they wouldn’t blow over in the gentle April wind. We were gathered to do something that has, in one shape or another, been done many times, but never exactly like this, and so the two screens, blank as of yet, alluded to the absence that had been running through my mind, an absence that can only be addressed through mutual voyage, a voyeur-voyant-voyage effect enhanced by the swaying screens, graced with shadows of palm trees, evoking the sails of an old wooden ship.
Live narration of cinema has been around as long as cinema itself, often to bridge the perceived gap between traditional theater and film, often as a form of explication of silent or foreign, unsubtitled films. It seemed to suggest itself as a necessary “supplement” to a cinema which had not yet codified its narrative strategies, and appeared in one form or another all over the world. Yet, its richest traditions are undoubtedly those developed in Japan and Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. The traditions here are rich for various reasons, and although they largely died out soon after the advent of sound film, it is hard to say that this is because cinema had attained the “total realism” Bazin promised us as cinema’s telos. Every medium, in its presence, presents its own absence, which is why we were here tonight, in the early 21st century.
Lew began the evening by showing excerpts from The Water Magician (1933), a silent film narrated by a contemporary movie teller, and a scene from The General’s Son (1990), which depicts the way a movie teller’s performance might appear at the height of the art form. These films cued the audience, however partially, to movie telling’s history and potentialities. In Japan and Korea, audiences would often attend films based upon the particular benshi/kabutsen (Japan) or pyonsa (Korea) performing that evening. They were as much a part of the experience as “the film” itself, not merely explicating but dramatizing, interpreting, performing the films, bringing whatever they had to the absence presented by film as a medium and, in the case of Korea (which in colonial times showed mostly films from Japan), the absence of the Korean experience of occupation and Korean attitudes towards its Japanese occupiers.
........................................................
Next came a brief recorded piece originally performed by Marlon Unas Esguerra, which retold Richard Quine’s 1960 feature film The World of Suzie Wong, only Esguerra narrated a version so sped up that every scene passed before our eyes in only four minutes. Whether or not the original source of the film is known, which like all romances worth their name is haunted by loss (of innocence, of a child), what we experience in Esguerra’s piece is the barren nature of (cinematic) narrative itself. Esguerra’s beginning line, “Having no name, it. . .” begs the question of why, and to what effect, we tell ourselves stories at all. Maintaining the anonymity of the the characters and whatever other subtexts may be resonant in the movie teller himself, referring to them only by letters, Esguerra reminded us that, perhaps, the most a work of art can hope for is to point to an absence, to break our hearts, not restore them to a wholeness that never existed in the first place.
The rest of the performances, all with live narrators2 (with one exception) including Lew and myself, combined this sense of the phenomenological absences associated with cinema (and poetry) as media as well as the sociopolitical absences presented in contemporary film and video. Indeed, even the most hilarious performances of the evening (and they were truly hilarious), those of Jen Nellis and Matt Gajewski, nevertheless presented a certain melancholy related to the barrenness of media and genre introduced by Esguerra.
Nellis’s version of Poison from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series presented us with the characters and plot repurposed as Tristan Tzara (giving birth to a new avant-garde “movement”), Hans Arp as the “midwife” making jokes about Tzara’s feminine nails, and Salvador Dali as the doctor himself. Nellis’s “lip-synching matches” to the original story are perfect and belly laugh worthy even as her piece dramatizes the silliness and pathos of an historical avant-garde which has taken itself so seriously so many times---most often to little lasting effect. Of course, we could say the same of the Paris Commune of 1871, which is why what Nellis presents to discerning viewers is not mere cynicism, but something perhaps more troubling.
Notably absent (though mentioned) is Andre Breton who, an easy target for the cynical, at least stuck to his guns when it came to the revolutionary possibilities of Surrealism, unlike Dali who became famous and rich by turning Surrealism into yet another commodity, for which he earned Breton’s anagrammatic nickname “Avida Dollars.” Indeed, the painful expression on “Tzara’s” face as he believes he is giving birth is the real story here, given Dada’s resistance to commodification (and its revolutionary counterpart, an engaged populace). Tzara’s line from his 1918 Dada manifesto is the story of that which can’t be introjected into the popular imagination: “Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison.” Nellis revises the line to suggest another question, for her “pavilions of intense joy, empty of sadness, empty of poison” presents us with the dilemma of not only the avant-garde, but with all political movements---how to move from the expression of political desire to its enactment.
Gajewski’s three pieces, narrated to the music videos California Gurls, Hello, and All is Full of Love and spaced throughout the evening, form a sort of mechanical triptych that lacerates us with each convulsion of our heaving diaphragms. What they narrate are the mechanics of love and our inability to depict it to others, no matter what the medium. Despite the lyrical content of Katy Perry’s ode to West Coast promiscuity, the video’s setting in Candyland begs for Gajewski’s rendering of a subtext associated with the emptiness of traditional marital bliss and family values. Even if such a dream (inevitably one based in the ownership of the props we associate with marriage) were possible to attain for the average Pyramus and Thisbe in today’s economy, and Snoop Dogg’s cameo at the end as the “high roller” suggests that it definitely is not, would this be something that we would even want? Not true romantics, who are left with the perversions and imperfections of Gajewski’s final two pieces. We write our love poems but are trapped in cliche’s such as Lionel Richie’s literalization of the “love is blind” metaphor in Hello. Gajewski speaks of his “real love” for the “blind girl” in the video as opposed to the “fake love” of R‘n B hits from the 1980s, but his persona gives away the secret. The true romantics are lost in a wilderness of stock phrases and gestures as grotesque as the oversized sculpture of Richie produced by the unnamed (even by Gajewski) “blind girl” at the end of the video. In the society of the spectacle, Gajewski suggests in his necessarily sinister form of humor, there is no outside of video. We are all lost making our robotic promises---this is what Gajewski’s All is Full of Love performs.
Every medium, in its presence, presents its own absence.
Like a repressed (anti)memory.
Leah Silvieus wrote an underwater letter whose ink will dissolve, is dissolving, so that I can only make out certain phrases of “CEPHALO[pod/sema]PHORE”: “Everything leaks out. . . the ink spilled out. . . they acquiesce to disappearance without protest. . . retraced pathways and schema. . .”
Racial schema (Christine Williamson). . .
Political schema (Chris Joyner). . .
Techno-schema (everyone). . .
Sometimes in a blade runner’s paradise there are moments of conjunction almost magical even when melancholy, as when a plane, the first one of the night that Easter Sunday, flew over us, from or to us? No relation to us. Just across us at the very moment Walter K. Lew read these lines:
All day I sulked
like a fat trout circling
slowly above LaGuardia.
Even though most of the time, as we know more eerily in Lew and Klahr’s “Treadwinds,” it’s more of a discontinuous drift through spaces that “receive us without us.”
Still some of us, all of us?
We note those moments of conjunction, still believe that in this world of mechanistic gesture that catapults of real love might be constructed, as Clinton/Keaton)
believes to the extent of trying to build a working love catapult in “The Autobiography of Buster Keaton,” a machine that lets us fall without destination, still building and betting on love amongst the falling hammers, crumbling walls, urinating elephants, and shattering mermaid tanks, building and betting on a love we declare to exist, somewhere, despite everything. And yes, you build the catapult so that you are thrown and fall hard---there is no other way, not with the first lovers, not in the “Modern Age of Speed and Greed,” to quote Keaton, and definitely not now in a “virtual” world that, to paraphrase Guillermo Gomez Pena, “is all too real, ese.”
This is a choice of a choice then, not of an outcome. It is either “Your Arising Tide” and yours only, as in Vincent Caruso’s exorcism of the loneliness---exorcised from cinema right back into us as we, almost but not quite, race to drown ourselves in the nearest body of water---loneliness that is, to our surprise, actually programmed into the very structures of lovers’ bedrooms, domestic spaces, and community ritual; it is either that or something else, a ramshackle (un)gathering, media coming together like mediums, the darkening night (or living room, or theater) making us all somnambulists, bumping into each other perhaps, feeling much needed skin, analogue skin. Movie telling, once a popular art form, now a hybrid of narrative, lyricism, and critique (as movie telling always has been), suggests yet another route for the avant-garde in a digital age we will not completely cede to the digital.
Will you, despite everything, accept an invitation to the voyage one more time, trust those swaying, shadowed screens, hoping there are shadows being cast from both sides? Would this essay have been better if it had ended more cynically?
Endnotes
1. During our recent conversations, Lew has made the interesting contention that there has always been cinema, to which I would add we have always had media that is both total and partial. Lew has wanted to designate these things through the letter K, which has many resonances not the least of which is that this designation would be an admission that variously named and as yet still inchoate K-effects, K-strands, and K-processes have always been central to a kinetic, kinematic dynamic in human (though not exclusively human) cognition and culture, an admission that has particularly split Walter “K.” Lew at the very core of his artistic vision. K is also a nice letter to designate the nondialectical splits and convergences that exist at the heart of media, of which Lew and I have come up with a few examples to be expanded upon later: 1) the “still” vs the moving image, deconstructed by the likes of Edweard Muybridge and Chris Marker in L’Agate 2) digital vs analogue production and perception; 3) blur vs hypostasis, [both a “still frame” (as if cut out of the flow of perception) and “still framed as always” within the predisposing schema of the intending cognition---Lew]; 4) direct vs peripheral cinematic perception; 5) the frontal (visual, abstracted) and the dorsal (embodied, felt); 6) live performance vs mechanical reproduction.
2. In the conclusion, which has already occurred---another ramshackle (un)gathering---I plan to make the very unfashionable argument that live performance which, at its most realized, would not be a performance at all but a creative “event” that is truly social, is the closest we can come to attaining the community we never had, to staving off the existential isolation not created by, but definitely replicated in, the artist/spectator binary.
Performers, Filmography, and Production Credits
Return to Top»