kino-made:i n s e a r c h o f a n emancipated cinematic pedagogy through a De-centered montage

Pedro juan vidal

thesismaster of arts in media studies

the new school2011

primary thesis advisor: Ethan spigland

second reviewer: sam ishii-gonzales

Thesis coordinator: dawnja burris

table of contents

3abstract

4introduction & intention: A readymade cinema

6the object of the emancipated spectator’s gaze

16kino-eye: A refined gaze

21THE READYMADE: The Emancipatory “Third Thing”

28De-centered montage as collage: sound & image à l'état brut

33godardian pedagogy: cinema made with marxism

43conclusion & realization: Kino-made

45works cited

2

Abstract

“In the logic of emancipation, between the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated novice there is always a third thing - a book or some other piece of writing - alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says

about it and what she thinks of it. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform

transmission, any identity of cause and effect” - Jacques Ranciere

! What is an emancipated spectator? Is there something in the construction of a work of art that allows for an emancipated spectator? Is it possible for the object of a spectatorʼs gaze to facilitate an egalitarian discourse between the construction of the object, the artist, and the spectator?!! This paper is going to investigate Jacques Ranciereʼs notion of the ʻemancipated spectatorʼ and the cinematic object realized by the spectator, as realized in certain films by Jean Luc Godard. In the case of this essay, the cinematic object will be signified as Kino-Made, the juxtaposition and synthesis of the theories and practices of Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertovʼs ʻKino-Eyeʼ and French artist Marcel Duchampʼs ʻReadymadesʼ.

3

introduction / intention

A Readymade cinema! In his essay The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Ranciere proposes an

egalitarian relationship between the artist and spectator and between the spectator and

work of art. This essay, Kino-Made, suggests a cinematic relationship between certain

artists whose works of art are exemplary of this emancipatory relationship.

! What is an emancipated spectator? Is there something in the construction of a

work of art that allows for an emancipated spectator? Is it possible for the object of a

spectatorʼs gaze to facilitate an egalitarian discourse between the construction of the

object, the artist, and the spectator? In this essay I will investigate Jacques Ranciereʼs

notion of the ʻemancipated spectatorʼ and the cinematic object realized by the spectator.

The cinematic object will be signified as Kino-Made, the juxtaposition and synthesis of

the theories and practices of Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertovʼs ʻKino-Eyeʼ

and French artist Marcel Duchampʼs ʻReadymadesʼ. Examples of ʻKino-Madeʼ, ready-

made cinema, will be used in conjunction with this essay.

! Thus, Kino-Made is a cinematic object constructed from the already-processed

sounds, images and texts from everyday life and situations. This cinematic object is a

de-centered object held together by the relations between its assembled elements. It

proposes an emancipated pedagogical relationship between artist and spectator

through the work of art, an art object that allows for observation and analysis of its

intervals, elements, appearance, and construction in a heterogeneous manner. The

emancipated spectator, the readymade, and kino-eye are related because they deal

4

with a certain construction of the work of art that opens the the intervals between the

elements, showing its construction in all of its rawness. It attempts to create an

egalitarian relationship between artist, work of art, and spectator of art. Viewing is

perceived as an active gesture.

! Discourse is revealed in cinema through montage. Montage, therefore, is

cinematic discourse, a certain language per-se. In this sense, the spectator is an active

producer able to conceive of new situations and discourses from the materials,

elements, and assemblages that exist before them as readymades, as spectators

before an image and the fact that the image exists as a discourse to be rendered before

the spectator.

! Kino-made is a type of cinema, an attempt at cinema, of the emancipated

spectator. It is a cinema of what Iʼd like to call the ʻeveryday readymade.ʼ A cinema of a

so-called emancipated spectator firstly questions emancipation and the role of a

spectator. In the case of cinematic emancipation we must consider the spectator as an

active mediator, one who is active in the production process of communication of

sounds and images.

5

the object of the emancipated spectator’s gaze

! In his essay “The Emancipated Spectator,” Jacques Ranciere explores the

“relationship between the theory of intellectual emancipation and the question of the

spectator” (Ranciere 1). He says that there is a “paradox of the spectator” in critical

theory which is “easily formulated: there is no theatre without a spectator” (2). For

cinemaʼs sake we can say that there is also no cinema without a spectator. This

paradox problematizes and separates the cinema as an actively produced object of art

from the passively gazing spectator.

! Being a spectator is problematic in this paradox because “viewing is the opposite

of knowing” and “the opposite of acting” (ibid.,). This idea dates back to Platoʼs critique

against the appearance of a false reality versus the true reality that lies behind it. In

Platoʼs critique, the images that we see are merely false constructions that hide truths

about power relations in society and ideological structures. This says that to be a

spectator is to lack the knowledge that allows one to read and comprehend constructed

images, as well as being in compliance and passivity to their appearance. “To be a

spectator,” Ranciere critiques Plato, “is to be separated from both the capacity to know

and the power to act” (ibid.,). Platoʼs spectator is thus considered to be a bad thing, put

into a role of ignorance.

! The ignorant spectator is separated from knowledge and action. In this

separation, knowledge is mediated through an object such as the cinematic film-object.

Ranciere continues his critique of the ʻparadox of the spectatorʼ using the works of

French “anti-” philosopher, theorist, and artist Guy Debord and German playwright

6

Bertolt Brecht as examples. For Guy Debord, the cinema, like all commercial mass-

media, was part of the reign of the spectacle that dominated everyday life under

capitalism, while theatre for German playwright Bertolt Brecht could be transformed into

a critical medium to inspire political action. Cinema and theatre both fall under the reign

of the spectacle. Spectacle is synonymous with ideology, representative of the dominant

forms and ideas that structure a certain society politically and culturally.

brecht & debord

! Brecht & Debord were both critical of bourgeois ideology and the predetermined

notions about the world it created. “Brecht argues that the bourgeois theatre is based on

an ʻillusionismʼ that takes for granted the assumption that the dramatic performance

should directly reproduce the world” (Eagleton 64). The “bourgeois” theatre is one that

the spectator takes as a given, a “finished, unchangeable art-object offered to them as

ʻreal” (ibid.,). Brecht thought of traditional, bourgeois theatre as a dramatic illusion that

creates an aesthetic of a seamless whole reflecting the ideological belief of the world as

fixed, given, and unchangeable. For Debord, the ʻseamless wholeʼ represents the

spectacle “in which everyday experience is cut off from decision making” (Debord 87). It

is when the spectacle presents these seemingly natural images as givens, whether in

cinema or theatre, that the production, presentation, and consumption of them “is an

absolutely bad thing” and “whoever says ʻtheatreʼ says ʻspectatorʼ - and therein lies the

evil” (Ranciere 3). The identity of the spectator who sits before the spectacle of theatre

or cinema is thus constructed to be passively consuming an illusion, an experience ʻcut

off from decision makingʼ, and in there lies to evil of the spectacle. It presents “a scene

7

of illusion and passivity that must be abolished in favour of what it prohibits - knowledge

and action; the action of knowing and action guided by knowledge” (2-3).

! However similar their intentions, Brecht and Debordʼs solutions for the passivity

of the spectator from the domination of the spectacle differ. Brechtʼs epic theater

declares “the spectator must be roused from the stupefaction of spectators enthralled by

appearances and won over by the empathy that makes them identify with the characters

on stage” (4). Debordʼs critique of the spectator, Ranciere states, “...can be summed up

in a brief formula: ʻthe more he contemplates, the less he lives” (6).

! Brecht proclaimed the abolition of traditional theatre in favor of an active

spectator with a “refined gaze” that allows them to perceive the construction of the

theatrical production, its ʻseparation of elementsʼ. Just as theatre is an assemblage of all

the parts of its production, the spectator is supposed to also acknowledge their own

elements which construct their own situation in the world. Brecht thought of his epic

theatre as ʻthe modern theatreʼ. In his writings he notes his description of the epic

theatre:

! ! Narrative over plot, turns the spectator into an observer, but arouses his ! ! capacity for action, forces him to take decisions rather than providing with ! ! sensations, he is made to face something rather than involved, argument ! ! over suggestion, spectator stands outside and studies, the human being is ! ! the object of inquiry (alterable and able to alter), each scene for itself, ! ! montage, man as a process, social being determines thought, and reason ! ! over feeling... (Brecht 37)

These notes seem more like methods of critical analysis than of theatrical production

because thatʼs exactly what Brecht intended his mode of theatrical production to be.

The epic theatre was to be a way to distance the spectator from the emotions of plot

engagement and allow the spectator to stand back and view the situation as an

8

assemblage of elements and their relationships. The epic theater was supposed to be a

way to allow the spectator to observe, objectively, the assemblage of different elements

and their relationships to one another.

! Brecht called the result of his epic theatre a radical ʻseparation of elementsʼ, “the

great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production” (ibid.,). He

believed that the bourgeois theatre is one of a homogeneous, muddled aesthetic in

which the arts are ʻfusedʼ together, “the process of fusion extends to the spectator, who

gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive part of the total work of

art... Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another” (38).

Brecht is calling for words, music, and setting to work in montage, in relation, to one

another while maintaining their own power and affect in engagement with the spectator;

creating an active spectator.

! Debord proclaimed the abolition of the spectator and spectacle all together in

order for passive spectators to become actors of the world. His films, manifestos, and

publications question and challenge a society that became identified with mass-

production and consumption of constructed illusions.

! Debordʼs now famous book Society of the Spectacle critiques the society of

consumption he saw develop post-World War II. In his book, Debord critiques a society

that is centered on spectacle, that is, the spectacle manifested as an entire economic

system mediated through images. The performative arts such as theatre, cinema and

later television were largely products and producers of ʻthe spectacleʼ as a result of the

profitable investments in mass-media entertainment.

9

! The few films he produced from the 1950ʼs to the 1970ʼs present the spectacle

as a mash-up montage, or collage, of images from old newspaper, magazine, and

television ads and clips from old movies; but also as documentation of France and the

modern worldʼs transformation into a fully capitalist system. His first film, Howls for Sade

(1952) features no images, just the juxtaposition of white and black screen while five

different voices exchange seemingly irrelevant statements. He negates the traditional

conventions of cinematic language to distance the spectator, to view the filmic

construction as an objective work produced under certain restrictions and limitations. On

the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), his next

film, has three different voices comprise the sound track while documentary clips of the

streets and plazas of Paris, photographs of Debord and his band of Situationist

International renegades, newsreel footage, and book covers make up the image track.

A third element, sub-titles & inter-titles, further distances the spectator by

acknowledging the spectator and the fact that they are watching a documentary/film. In

1973, Debord released the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle. In the film,

Debordʼs voice-over is monotone and authoritative as he reads excerpts from the book.

Mass-media clips and images are presented as found-footage that are critiqued and

commented on by Debord.

! Throughout his films, Debord keeps his voice constantly heard over the image as

if someone were looking down above us at the images we are watching. He holds the

audience in the cinema for not having been responsible previously for watching the

images before them. Debord has the audience return to these images with his own

discourse, more so a monologue, to teach them a lesson.

10

! However critical they both are about the impact and effect of a seamless,

homogeneous aesthetic, Ranciere argues that Brecht and Debordʼs theories become

stuck in the paradox of the relationship between spectator and spectacle, for they both

believe that the spectator must be emancipated from their passivity and lack of

knowledge through alternative spectacles, different discourses. In this paradox, the

works of of art produced by Brecht and Debord hold the knowledge that the spectator

lacks. They produce their works to teach a lesson, and there lies the paradox, the

relationship of inequality that exists between the artist and spectator which continues to

hold the spectator in a sort of passive compliance.

the emancipated spectator

! Ranciere believes that the predetermined notions established as givens between

spectacle and spectator that Brecht and Debord aim to critique should be critiqued

themselves.

! ! The network of presuppositions... equivalences between theatrical ! ! audience and community, gaze and passivity, exteriority and separation, ! ! mediation and simulacrum; oppositions between the collective and the ! ! individual, the image and living reality, activity and passivity, ! ! self-ownership and alienation,” as Ranciere puts it, that “should be ! ! re-examined today. (7) These sets of pre-determined equivalences and oppositions in effect restrict the

possibility of any reform, defining roles and meanings as ʻeither / orʼ instead of ʻandʼ;

dismissing the possibility of any radical juxtaposition, arrangement or collaboration. The

network of presuppositions must be re-examined as representative of the “very logic of

the pedagogical relationship: the role assigned to the schoolmaster... to abolish the

distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignoramus” (8).

11

! Along with the network of presuppositions, the logic of the pedagogical

relationship between artist and spectator must be re-examined as well. Assigning the

schoolmaster as the holder of knowledge and the pupil as ignoramus separated from

that knowledge automatically establishes and “constantly confirms its own

presupposition: the inequality of intelligence.” This presupposition of inequality is where

the theory of Joseph Jacotot comes into play, who claimed in the early nineteenth

century “that one ignoramus could teach another what he himself did not know,

asserting the equality of intelligence and opposing intellectual emancipation to popular

instruction” (1). The inequality of intelligence, on the other hand, is an “endless

confirmation” of the logic of in a pedagogical relationship, “what Jacotot calls

stultification” (9).

! Jacques Ranciere begins here in his critique of this problematic paradox. “In

truth,” he says, “there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things,

who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation

and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors.” (8-9) This is the difference

between Ranciereʼs spectator from Brecht and Debordʼs, Ranciere presupposes a

spectator that is already active and has the capacity to read, learn, and understand the

elements laid out before them while Brecht and Debordʼs must first realize an inability

they lack, a separation between the knowledge the schoolmaster and the ignorance of

the student. That separation problematizes a real equality of intelligences.

Presupposing that a spectator is already intellectually emancipated rather than held

impassive until emancipated by an alternate spectacle challenges the already

established oppositions; these ʻembodied allegories of inequalityʼ. Ranciere makes it

12

clear that the importance of an equality of intelligences is to realize that it “does not

signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence, but the self-equality of

intelligence in all its manifestations” (10). The paradox of stultification persists in the

relationship between schoolmaster and student because the structure remains as one

who possesses a capacity and one who does not, and the structure remains even if the

student has become the schoolmaster. In the “logic of the stultifying pedagogue, the

logic of straight, uniform transmission” structures knowledge as “a capacity, an energy

in a body or a mind - on one side, and it must pass to the other side” (13-14). Ranciere

compares the logic of the stultifying pedagogue to an identity of cause and effect which

he claims is based upon an inegalitarian principle “based on the privilege that the

schoolmaster grants himself - knowledge of the ʻrightʼ distance and ways to abolish

it” (ibid.,). This is where Brecht and Debordʼs own stultifying pedagogue lies.

! As Ranciere states ! ! !! ! Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing ! ! and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that ! ! structure the relations between saying and seeing and doing themselves ! ! belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we ! ! understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this ! ! distribution of positions. The spectator also acts, like the pupil or ! ! scholar. (13)

! The spectator, like the film-maker, pupil, or scholar, is viewing, thinking, and

deciding and in doing so constructing an object that has used and re-produced those

elements and intervals before them, producing a new object and interpretation.

Ranciere describes this already active spectator as if they are an editor of a film or the

writer of a poem:

! ! She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a ! ! host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of

13

! ! place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before ! ! her... They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the ! ! spectacle offered to them. (ibid.,)

! To begin to discuss the emancipation of the spectator is to abolish the idea that

their is a separation between an ignorant and emancipated spectator. It begins, as

Ranciere says, when we challenge the separation between viewing and acting and

understand that they can be one in the same. The idea of an emancipated spectator

blurs the roles between activity and passivity, production and consumption. Thus, the

work of art or art object that separates the artist/schoolmaster and spectator/student is

produced by the artist for the spectator and in this interaction the spectator/student re-

produces the work of art/art object for themselves.

! ! In the logic of emancipation, between the ignorant schoolmaster and the ! ! emancipated novice there is always a third thing - a book or some other ! ! piece of writing [or cinema] - alien to both and to which they can refer to ! ! verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and ! ! what she thinks of it. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose ! ! meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding ! ! any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect. (15)

The object exists as the third thing owned by no one and emancipated from any

cause or effect. It exists as an assemblage of elements which is available to the

spectator to view, observe, and visually explore for a given duration. The object exists

indifferently to the spectator whereas the spectator inscribes the object from the signs

and symbols they have seen and experienced elsewhere. The object thus offers a

common ground, a distribution or assemblage of elements that can be shared and

experienced by a variety of spectators in everyday life. “In a theatre, in front of a

performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals

plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround

14

them” (16). Thus everyday objects are assembled from sonic and optical situations as

sounds and music, texts and images, all elements and intervals of everyday life as an

object. “The collective power shared by spectators,” Ranciere states, “is the power each

of them has to translate what she perceives in their own way, to link it to the unique

intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure

is not like any other” (16-17). It is this collective power of the spectator that reads and

translates those assembled objects that questions and challenges the previous notions

of the spectator:

This shared power of the equality of intelligence links individuals, makes ! ! them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them ! ! separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone ! ! has to plot her own path. (ibid.,)

To challenge the traditional critical notions of the role(s) of the spectator is to realize that

a spectator is “not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our

normal situation” (17). To be a spectator is to be free to attend, inhabit, and experience

acts and signs from everyday life. To create a work of art open to the spectator is to

“problematize the cause-effect relationship itself and the set of presuppositions that

sustain the logic of stultification... so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling of

a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image” (22). In this proposal,

the emancipated spectator is not just one who holds the capacity of knowledge but also

holds the capacity of production. Therefore, the spectator is not just a passive consumer

of information but just as well an active producer.

15

kino-eye: A refined gaze

THE SCHOOL OF KINO-EYE CALLS FOR CONSTRUCTION OF THE FILM-OBJECT UPON “INTERVALS,” THAT IS,

UPON THE MOVEMENT BETWEEN SHOTS, UPON THE VISUAL CORRELATION OF SHOTS WITH ONE ANOTHER, UPON TRANSITIONS FROM ONE VISUAL STIMULUS TO ANOTHER

(D. Vertov) ! Russian documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov conceived Kino-Eye with “a belief

in social transformation as the means for producing a transformation of consciousness

and a certainty of accession to a ʻworld of naked truth,ʼ paradoxically grounding his

creed in the acceptance and affirmation of the radically synthetic film technique of

montage” (Michelson xxv). For Vertov, film production was thought to be “a directing

force in the revolutionary process,” in which montage was directly part of dialectical

thinking. !

! The cinematographic camera was Vertovʼs way to approach the images and texts

of the world. Through the camera, viewing truly is an active act, an act of production,

and so is Vertovʼs ʻKino-Eyeʼ. In the manifesto “Kinoks: A Revolution,” published in June

1923, Dziga Vertov states, “We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the

camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the

chaos of visual phenomena that fills space” (Vertov 14-15). It is through the kino-eye

that Vertov proposed to prepare “a system of seeming irregularities to investigate and

organize phenomena.” It was used by Vertov as a tool of exploration, analysis, and

presentation of the known world. In his writings he states that “the movie camera was

16

invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual

phenomena... But,” he declares,

! ! The camera experienced a misfortune. It was invented at a time when ! ! there was no single country in which capital was not in power. The ! ! bourgeoisieʼs hellish idea consisted of using the new toy to entertain the ! ! masses, or rather to divert the workersʼ ! attention from their basic aim: the ! ! struggle against their masters. (67)

! His films produced under the kino-eye doctrine attacked the conventions of

cinematic relations and production, making the assemblage of the film-object one in

which the audience was just as much involved, beyond traditional character and

narrative identification. In the Kinoks manifesto, Vertov addresses the readers directly

as if an attempt to raise them to social activism and engagement:

! ! You - filmmakers, you directors and artists with nothing to do . . . You - ! ! theater audiences, patient as mules beneath the burden of the emotional ! ! experiences offered you . . . You - impatient proprietors of theaters not yet ! ! bankrupt . . . Youʼre waiting for something that will not come; the wait is ! ! pointless. (11)

! The movie camera allowed Vertov to view the world, to capture the world, and to

inscribe the world cinematically. Having come from newsreel production, his films

retained some episodic structures similar to the newsreels themselves. The kino-eye

films, however, played with what was possible in recording, playing back, fast-

forwarding, and reversing motion in the shots. From the film Kino-eye (1924) to Man

with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertovʼs film captured the everyday life of the Soviet Union

in its transformation into a modern nation. This transformation was expressed through

Vertovʼs use of montage, directly relating different camera and editing techniques to

industrial production, distribution, and consumption.

The kino-eye method is the scientifically experimental method of exploring the visible world - based on the systematic recording

17

on film of facts from life; based on the systematic organization of the documentary material recorded oN film.

(D. vertov)

! Vertov was interested in what he called ʻintervalsʼ: “the transitions from one

movement to another.” In his writings he recognized these intervals as the raw material

of the cinematic object. The world for Vertov was an archive of movements of all kinds

and the organization of intervals linked these movements. The intervals “are the

material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements

themselves” (8). Vertov compared the organization of his elements to cinematic phrases

and the organization of the phrases as compositions. “Itʼs entirely a question of the

particular juxtaposition of visual details, of intervals” (21). This question politicizes the

very act of looking at the world through a camera and the very nature of gazing. Vertov

is first and foremost a spectator and the cinematic camera is his spectatorial tool. The

ʻparticular juxtapositionʼ of intervals is the production of montage. By assuming the role

of spectator viewing the cinematic object, Vertov assumes the equivalences of the

audience as spectators like him.

! “Montage means organizing film fragments (shots) into a film-object” (88). Vertov

stresses the importance of montage in the production of the cinematic object. It is

through montage that images, sounds, and texts can be linked, related to one another. It

is through montage that these elements can be organized, assembled, and composed

into a cinematic object so that the viewer may be able to see with their own eyes,

observe, study, and think about the images, sounds, and texts presented to them, just

as the filmmaker takes inventory of these materials and elements and organizes them

into “an orderly montage study” (16).

18

Montage means organizing film fragments (shots) into a film object. It means ‘writing’ something cinematic with the recorded shots.

(D. vertov)

The orderly montage study of the kino-eye is “the documentary cinematic

decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye” (87).

Montage makes visible the links and relations that may remain silent or obscured

without having to define its subject matter by one way or another. Similar to Sergie

Eisensteinʼs theory of intellectual montage, it juxtaposes alternate or opposing ideas,

whether they be a sound and an image, a sound and a text, an image and a text, or all

three together, to create a new idea or meaning. Kino-eye, however, realizes montage

not just as a form for the cinematic object, but also as a constantly open thought

process that begins even before any cinematic intervals are recorded or written. “Every

Kino-Eye production is subject to montage... during the entire process of film

production” (89). Kino-eye is montage, as Dziga Vertov states, and montage is “when I

select a theme... when I make observations for a theme... when I establish the viewing

over of the footage on the theme” (90). Kino-eye is the cinematic realization of the

process of thought.

Kino-Eye = Kino-Seeing (I see through the camera) +Kino-Writing (I write on film with the camera)

+Kino-Organization (I edit)(d. vertov)

! The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) unites a critique of cinematic

representation “with cinematic production within the construction of a socialist

economy” (Michelson xxxvii) .Through montage, the ʻfilm-text/objectʼ transforms raw

materials, the accumulation of labor and tools of production. The film is “in form and

19

structure, the synthetic articulation of the Marxist project, concretized in every detail of

an unprecedented complexity of cinematic design,” utilizing the industrial production

cycles of work and leisure (ibid.,). It captures the human life of the city in its actions of

labor, transportation, eating and drinking, and playing, “the material production of life

itself” (ibid.,).

! As manifested through his writings on Kino-eye and in his film The Man with a

Movie Camera, Vertovʼs work presents an attempt to produce a cinematographic work

“in direct and explicit service of the construction of socialism.” This involves the

investigation of a certain language or vocabulary, the necessary development of its tools

of production, and the redefinition and redistribution of the cinematic production process

and “aesthetic canons and priorities” (Michelson xxviii). Kino-eye is Dziga Vertovʼs

attempt at an emancipatory socialist cinema of reparation.

20

THE READYMADE: The Emancipatory “Third Thing”

It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them

(J. ranciere)

! Marcel Duchampʼs “Readymades” are unique, particular objects of

contemplation. As stated by Hector Obalk in his essay The Unfindable Readymade, “the

only definition of "readymade" published under the name of Marcel Duchamp ("MD" to

be precise) is found in Andre Breton and Paul Eluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du

Surréalisme: "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere

choice of an artist." It has never been made clear whether Duchamp ever defined his

readymades as such, however, in the publication Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud

notes “it is the viewers who make the paintings,ʼ Duchamp once said ... in which

meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who

comes to view the work” (20). Perhaps, then, the readymade is an object in negotiation

between the artist and the spectator, that “emancipatory third thing” that Ranciere refers

to in The Emancipated Spectator, “a book or some other piece of writing [or cinema] -

alien to both and which they can refer to verify in common” what others have seen,

talked about, and thought about. This third thing ʻowned by no oneʼ sets an equality

between artist and spectator, “meaning is owned by no one... excluding any uniform

transmission, any identity of cause and effect.” Marcel Duchampʼs readymades are

these third things in collaboration and negotiation between the artist and ʻthe one who

comes to view the workʼ.

21

! The readymades were assembled from ordinary, everyday mass-produced

objects: stools, bicycle wheels, bottle racks, snow shovels, brass plates, balls of twine

coat racks, hat racks, and urinals. That was what Duchamp used between 1913 and

1917 between New York City and Paris, what was available to him in markets and

stores at that time. Today, it could be any product from a taxicab to an elevator or

subway car. As stated by Dalia Judovitz in her essay Rendezvous with Marcel

Duchamp, Duchampʼs readymades present:

! ! The status of the transformation of an ordinary object into an objet-dʼart... ! ! the split that we experience as spectators in a museum, before the ! ! elevation of an ordinary object through the artistʼs nomination into ! ! something different - an art object. (186)

! In addition to its production through nomination, the readymade is an object

assembled or constructed from something which has already been produced. It

dissociates the “visible character of the object” from its “proper character,” defined as a

sort of expropriation by Judovitz. The everyday, ordinary object is stripped bare of what

defines it as the mass-produced object it was intended for, whether it may be a bicycle

wheel turned upside down and attached to a stool to be spun in one spot, a bottle rack

with no bottles, a suspended snow shovel, or a urinal turned 90 degrees on its side. The

expropriation takes its intended use and turns it on its head so that it becomes a

useless product, an anti-product. In the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx “argues

that ʻtools of productionʼ created by civilization are ʻproducts of laborʼ, “that is, capital, a

mixture of accumulated labor and tools of production” ( Bourriaud 23). From this

statement we can compare Duchampʼs readymades to Marxʼs theory of capital. Capital,

like the readymades, is built upon an accumulation of products and their production.

Duchamp did exactly that in the production of his readymades, accumulating,

22

assembling, and juxtaposing one object with another, producing through expropriating,

or using, consuming. “Duchamp started from the principle that consumption was also a

mode of production, as did Marx, who writes in the introduction to the Critique that

“consumption is simultaneously also production... A product only becomes a real

product in consumption... a dress becomes really a dress only by being worn, a house

which is uninhabited is indeed not really a house.” (Ibid.,) By using every-day, seemingly

ordinary, mass-produced objects, Duchamp transforms the use & exchange value of the

products and commodities he selects allowing consumers to see, observe, and analyze

the object as a construction; an assemblage of juxtaposed intervals. The readymade is

an object transformed into a sign, its own representation, while still keeping its material

objectivity.

materialist intervention

! When Duchamp used mass-produced objects as raw material for art production,

he was using Marxʼs theory of capital and a mixture of labor and products into the

practice of the readymade. By using mass-produced, everyday objects, he was taking

that which was already produced and through choosing those particular products and

objects he transformed them into something other. That which was already-made

became the possibility of transformation into anything and nothing. The readymadeʼs

expropriation, the dissociation between the visible and proper character is a gap

“representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference

between what he intended to realize and did realize.” This, Duchamp writes in The

Creative Act, “is the personal ʻart coefficientʼ contained in the work ... like an arithmetical

relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.” The

23

readymade is that emancipatory third thing excluding any uniform transition and any

identity of cause and effect, creating an indifference between the intention of the artist

and the interpretation of the spectator. That indifference “...à l'état brut, that is, still in a

raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the

spectator...” (Duchamp). Duchampʼs intention of the readymades becomes a “materialist

intervention,” the expropriation of the object as experienced by the spectator. The

materialist intervention de-centers the object from any role or definition, opening it to the

spectator. By presenting the object as a raw assemblage of materials, the spectator

takes part in its production, that is, choosing to view the object before them as a work of

art and interpreting it in relation to other objects, images, and signs the spectator has

seen and experienced before hand. As Duchamp wrote, “...the creative act is not

performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external

world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his

contribution to the creative act,” open to be reinterpreted by future spectators.

! The readymade presents an object in constant collaboration between the artist

and spectator. This collaboration is reflective in the construction of the readymade,

whether by the literal juxtaposition of one object with another, such as the bicycle wheel

(1913) or trap (1917), or dislocating the object from its natural being, such as in

advance of the broken arm (1915), hat rack (1917), or fountain (1917). The production

and creation of a readymade is in the choosing of the materials and elements as

fragments, itʼs dislocation and transformation from an ordinary and familiar mass-

produced object of everyday experience to an uncanny object that questions and

problematizes the purpose and identity of its objective nature. Observing and

24

experiencing a readymade is in effect producing the readymade. “Because consumption

creates the need for new production, consumption is both its motor and motive,” writes

Bourriaud. “That is the primary virtue of the readymade: establishing an equivalence

between choosing and fabricating, consuming and producing...” (23). In viewing the

object, the spectator is confronted with an object with no absolute signification. The

readymade exists as if in an art/non-art limbo. The Bicycle Wheel presents a stool that

cannot be used because a bicycle wheel is attached on top of it, able to be spun round

and round but never able to get anywhere. Trap disables a coat rack as it is nailed to

the floor, also becoming an obstruction. In Advance of the Broken Arm, a snow shovel,

does not advance any broken arm as long as it is suspended in a gallery. The

readymade, therefore, undermines the objectʼs original use-value.

indifference & the infrathin

! The juxtaposition of elements and realities gives the readymades a collage-like

characteristic, where materials and elements are built and played upon, collected and

presented indifferently as collected fragments. Here we return to the dissociation

between the visible and proper character of the readymade and the gap between the

intention and realization of the object. In the production of a readymade, the separation

between artist and spectator is merely a decision, an intervention which sets the

readymade into an interplay between visible appearance and discursive nature. The

object of the readymade “thus emerges as a hinge - the doorway between the visible

and the discursive,” writes Judovitz (187). The readymade truly emerges as a pun within

a “delay effect.” The delay effect is a result of the ordinary, everyday objectʼs dislocation

and dissociation as well as the difference or separation between intention and

25

realization. Here, this difference returns us to Duchampʼs “personal ʻart coefficient”, that

indiscernible difference and separation between intention and realization of the art-

object.

For me there is something else in addition to yes, no and indifferent, that is, for instance, the absence of investigation of that type.

(M.Duchamp)

! Judovitz points out that “indifference thus comes to mean an activity and an

operation upon objects and contexts marked by oppositional difference of vision and

discourse.” (Judovitz 48). Duchampʼs interest in the absence of defined, oppositional

types of investigations “rejects the difference made by vision” to a specific discourse,

meaning, or interpretation governed by a homogeneous ideological pedagogy (ibid.,). A

specific discourse would establish a cause and effect and a knowledge owned by a

schoolmaster that must pass to the student lacking the knowledge, creating a uniform

transmission of knowledge and establishing power relations. Duchamp rejects “the

difference made by vision, insofar as vision is equated metaphysically with knowledge,

sexuality, and power,” which is why the readymade is owned by no one (ibid.,). Its

meaning is owned by no one, thus, any uniform transmission or any identity of cause

and effect is of no importance when it comes to the object or its subject. Hector Obalk

states that Duchampʼs notes “donʼt name any object but describe the way these objects

could be grasped and/or presented.” Therefore, Duchampʼs notes present a readymade

as something that it is open to a variety of discourses and exchanges: bought like a pair

of ice-tongs, found like the inscription for the Woolworth building, made as something

unrecognizable by its sound, and planned or inscribed to be later looked for; like a

ʻrendezvousʼ.

26

! Duchampʼs indifference of difference leads us to the personal ʻart coefficientʼ, an

immeasurable unit only to be characterized as infrathin. Duchamp has four clues in his

notes ( describing unique and specific attributes of the infrathin. In the first he writes

“sameness / similarity / the same (mass prod.) practical approximation of similarity... In

time the same object is not the same after a 1 second interval - what relations with the

identity principle?” Then he defines it as a “separation between the detonation noise of

a gun (very close) and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target.” Next he states it is

“the difference (dimensional) between 2 mass produced objects [from the same mold] is

an infrathin where the maximum (?) precision is obtained.” Lastly, under ʻInfrathin

Separationʼ, “2 forms cast in the same mold(?) differ from each other by an infrathin

separative amount. All ʻidenticalsʼ as identical as they may be, (and the more identical

they are) more toward this infra thin separative difference.” These notes really do not

reveal any more about the readymade other than making it more of an elusive object/

subject. Any sort of definition or identification of the object only further expropriates it,

further asserting the fact that the readymade is in constant transition, destabilizing its

objective character. Beyond any linguistic signification, the readymade exists as a self-

referential discourse among itself proposing an infrathin difference not only between

what may constitute a readymade but also an infrathin difference between artist and

spectator. The readymadeʼs construction presents its infrathin quality through its

juxtapositions and separations, a constant back and forth between one intention and

the other, between one element and the other, between the artistʼs unexpressed

intention and the unintentionally expressed realization experienced by the spectator.

27

De-centered montage as collage:sound & image à l'état brut

althusser & macherey

! In his book Marxism & Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton refers to Louis

Althusserʼs idea of practice:

! ! Any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a ! ! determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ʻproductionʼ),” ! ! just as “the artist uses certain means of production –– the specialized ! ! techniques of his art –– to transform the materials of language and ! ! experience into a determinate product. (69)

Not far at all from Karl Marxʼs definition of capital, Althusserʼs ʻpracticeʼ of the artist is

reflected in Duchampʼs readymade objects and Vertovʼs kino-eye cinema. For Duchamp

and Vertov, their works of art seemed to acknowledge the value of their accumulated

and assembled existences.

! Eagleton recalls Althusserʼs argument that “art cannot be reduced to ideology...

Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world... the kind

of experience literature gives us too –– what it feels like to live in particular

conditions” (18). Eagleton also presents literary critic Pierre Macherey and his theory of

literary production. Macherey, having studied under Althusser, defines ideology as

ʻillusionʼ, manʼs ordinary experience, as “the material on which the writer goes to work;

but in working on it he transforms it into something different, lends it a shape and

structure” (19). Cinematic production captures the reality before it, “the exploration of

the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space” as Dziga Vertov wrote. Cinema gives a

certain shape and structure to the the material of reality, transforming it through “a

system of seeming irregularities to investigate and organize phenomena.”

28

Ideology is given a “determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits... thus

revealing to us the limits of that ideology” (Eagleton 19). Cinema, in turn, is a sort of

illusion, presenting a recorded reality as a constructed, re-produced image of reality. A

reality represented cinematically comes from a pre-existent reality, one that has already

been worked upon but that can still be captured and altered. Through the movie

camera, the raw material of reality is transformed into an image of reality that we can

observe in its entire construction. More than just “an amorphous body of free-floating

images and ideas... it has a certain structural coherence ... and since literary texts

ʻbelongʼ to ideology, they too can be the object of such scientific analysis” (ibid.,).

It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt.

! “A work is tied to ideology not so much by what is says as by what it does not

say,” states Pierre Macherey (34). Macherey would argue that the ideological presence

is most felt in the limitations and constraints as silences, gaps, and absences. The

construction of a work of art “contains these gaps and silences, it is always

incomplete” (35). A cinematic object, incomplete because of its gaps and silences, is

always ʻde-centeredʼ, “there is no central essence to it, just a continuous conflict and

disparity of meanings ... it is in the nature of the work to be incomplete, tied as it is to an

ideology which silences it at certain points” (ibid.,). The manipulation of sound, image,

and text becomes the basis of cinemaʼs raw material in context with Machereyʼs theory.

The term ʻraw materialʼ stems from Louis Althusserʼs idea of ʻpracticeʼ, the

transformation of the raw material of language and experience into a determinate

product.

29

! “The author does not make the materials with which he works: forms, values,

myths, symbols, ideologies come to him already worked upon, as the worker in a car-

assembly plant fashions his product from already processed materials” (69). Cinematic

language is constructed from its own specific raw materials already worked upon. What

needs to be investigated is a cinema that is not defined by the discourse of certain

materials but open to all forms of discourses and materials. Sound, image, and text are

the material elements already-worked upon and therefore become objects themselves.

Montage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns.

Collage does not do this;it collects or sticks its fragments together in a way

that does not entirely overcome their fragmentation.b.. henderson

! In the essay Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style, Brian Henderson analyzes

Jean Luc Godardʼs use of the tracking shot in his film Weekend (1967) as a

revolutionary aesthetic statement while also acknowledging a different formalistic

structure in films like La Chinoise; that of collage. Rather than reflecting cinematic

duration as a continuing, linear strip, collage structures the cinematic object as an open,

de-centered assemblage. Montage “imposes a set of relations of its pieces to fill out a

pre-existent plan,” Henderson states (61).

! The idea of a collage-montage is interesting because it collects fragments in a

way that does not overcome their fragmentation. “It seeks to recover its fragments as

fragments” restoring them into a new life by seeking “to bring out the internal relations of

its pieces” (ibid.,). Vertovʼs Kino-Eye and Duchampʼs readymades sought to accomplish

that same incentive, “itʼs entirely a question of the particular juxtaposition of visual

30

details, of intervals,” organizing the fragments into an object. The cinematic object exists

as a collection and inventory of fragmentations, sonic and optical elements that are

organized as cinematic phrases and compositions.

! In Godardʼs films, collage is used throughout in one way or another, whether it be

through the use of sound and the conflicts between louder sounds over quieter ones,

cutting long takes into clips, juxtaposing images from different media, etc... But the idea

of collage is not just in the objective construction of the cinematic object, but also in the

collaboration and investigation of the object coming into meaning. Just as Duchamp

inscribed everyday objects as something other than their production value or purpose

as commodity, Godard inscribes situations with complex connections and relations to be

questioned rather than answered.

! La Chinoise (the Chinese Woman - 1967) is structured as segments that allow

the spectator to take inventory of the fragments and collection of images. The film

carries a collage-type of structure throughout its montage. It not only uses recorded

scenes of the actors but also newspaper clippings, magazine pictures, photographs,

and radio broadcasts. The film presents the white, middle-class ʻbourgeoisʼ teenage

youth in Paris studying the politics of Maoist China. It incorporates many ʻreadymadeʼ

images and objects, especially the signs of Maoist Marxism: Maoʼs face, Maoʼs little red

book, plenty of red (as well as blue, yellow, and white; primary colors used in search of

basic fundamentals and principles), there is even a pop-song, Mao!Mao!, fully

transforming Maoism into a fetishized commodity.

! This idea of collage reflects Dziga Vertovʼs methods of montage production in

which editing takes place throughout the entire film production process, from thought to

31

image, from recording and capturing footage to viewing it in completed form. Vertov

himself wrote:

! ! editing is the inventory of all documentary data directly or indirectly related ! ! to the assigned theme (in the form of manuscripts, object, film clippings, ! ! photographs, newspaper clippings, books, etc.) ... the human eyeʼs ! ! summing up of observations on the assigned theme (the montage of your ! ! own observations) ... and the summary of observations recorded on film ! ! by Kino-Eye. (Vertov 89 - 90)

the effect of [cinema] is essentially to deform rather than to imitate.if the image corresponds wholly to the reality (as in a mirror),

it becomes identical to it and ceases to be an image at all.(P. Macherey)

A fragmented approach to montage uses filmic structure not to point to one meaning or

interpretation, but to open the work to the spectator as an object in collaboration

between the filmmaker and the spectator. Like a fragmented montage, Macherey would

argue that a work of art is a mirror “placed at an angle to reality, a broken mirror which

presents its images in fragmented form, and is as expressive in what it does not reflect

as in what it does” (Eagleton 49). It is a filmic practice in contrast to Sergie Eisensteinʼs

montage seeking to create a single and specific concrete meaning. The filmic object is

used as a tool of analysis of any given situation, shared and produced in collaboration

between the filmmaker and spectator. Montage becomes more and more used as an

object of discourse, the ʻart coefficientʼ contained in the work, as Duchamp said,

between the intention and the realization. This inexpressible measurement, the intervals

of montage, is what connects those observations through the camera and what forms

the gaps and silences between the elements.

32

godardian pedagogy:cinema made with marxism

. . . the scenographic cube [transformed] into a classroom, the dialogue of the film into a recitation,

the voiceover into a required course, the shooting of the film into a tutorial,

the subject of the film into course headings. . . and the filmmaker into a schoolmaster . . .

Just as Dziga Vertovʼs method of cinema proposes a ʻschool of thoughtʼ,

Godardʼs cinema does so as well. Cinema becomes a sort of school where the

filmmaker is the schoolmaster and the and spectators are students. Jacques Ranciere

might argue that this relationship between filmmaker and student could stultify any

actual development or alternate distribution of roles in the process. However, Godard,

like Vertov, takes the spectator not as a passive consumer of images but as active

interpreters and producers of meaning, ideas, and thought; alternately redefining and

reproducing the images themselves. The organization, viewing, observation, and

analysis of images reconstructs images from their initial construction and presentation.

Vertov and Godardʼs school of thought views the use of montage as a way to disrupt the

seemingly normal and conventional discourse of cinema, as a way to disrupt the already

established distribution of images and words.

! ! School thus becomes the good place which removes us from cinema and ! ! reconciles us with “reality” (a reality to be transformed, naturally) ...the ! ! family apartment has replaced the movie theater (and television has taken ! ! the place of cinema), but the essentials remain: people learning a lesson. ! ! (Daney)

33

! By searching for a cinematic truth or value, Godardʼs films transforms the cinema

into a place like school, a place where, like Ranciere says, “the spectator also acts, like

the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets ... She composes her

own poem with the elements of the poem before her... They are thus both distant

spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them” (Ranciere 13).

School is the place where the observant pupil and scholar can both sit down and

observes the elements and materials brought before them and that has come before

them. They deal with elements and materials that have been processed and worked-

upon before hand through ideological, political, social, and economic systems.

Therefore, statements, texts, and quotes become what Daney calls the ʻalready-said-by-

othersʼ, “with what has been already-said-already established in statements

...statement-objects, like monuments, words treated as things: take them or leave

them.” Therefore, these ʻalready-said-by-othersʼ and ʻstatement-objectsʼ become the

collection of fragmented texts and objects from everyday, domestic living juxtaposed

with any alternative, radical opposition to it.

! Godardʼs collage-like techniques begin to question the politicization of cinematic

aesthetics and aesthetics themselves. His approach “consists of taking note of what is

said (to which one can add nothing) and then looking immediately for the other

statement, the other image which would counterbalance this statement, this sound, this

image” (Daney). Again, here, we can see the importance of the collaboration and

negotiation of the object, the filmic-object specifically, where the sounds and images of

discourse can be juxtaposed against each other in an aesthetic struggle. Serge Daney

suggests Godardʼs interest is “more than ʻwho is right? who is wrong?,” but rather “what

34

can we oppose to this?” Similar to Duchampʼs attitude of negating investigations of right

and wrong, yes or no, Godard wants the spectator to engage with the relations between

sounds and images; how, where and when they were produced and from what.

! ! To what the other says (asserts, proclaims, extols) he always responds ! ! with what another says (asserts, proclaims, extols). There is always a ! ! great unknown in [Godardʼs] pedagogy, and that is the fact that the nature ! ! of the relationship he maintains with his “good” discourses (those he ! ! defends) is undecidable. (Daney)

object lesson & classroom exercise : Althusserian practice!! In his essay on Godardʼs politics, The Red of La Chinoise, Jacques Ranciere

suggests that “Godard doesnʼt film ʻMarxistsʼ or things whose meaning would be

Marxism. He makes cinema with Marxism” (143). Like Duchampʼs readymades,

constantly in transition between meaning and interpretation, Godardʼs films juxtapose

ideological discourses and critiques against each other like structural objects. As stated

in the title of his essay, Ranciere is referring specifically to Godardʼs film La Chinoise.

He suggests that we “start with the following formulation: Godard puts ʻcinemaʼ between

two Marxisms –– Marxism as the matter of representation, and Marxism as the principle

of representation” (ibid). La Chinoise ʻrepresentsʼ a certain Marxism as the subject of

the film and as the principle of its construction. In the film itself there is a constant

struggle between those young, bourgeois French Marxist-Leninist students who

propose violent demonstrations and acts in support of the Maoist Cultural Revolution

and those who oppose the acts of terror. The students in the film hold lectures and

seminars in oneʼs parentsʼ apartment while they are away on summer vacation. The

film, as cinematic object and commodity, represents Chinese Maoism as it was “figured

in the Western imaginary at the time” (ibid.,), commodified itself.

35

! Already-said-by-others and statement-objects are composed throughout La

Chinoise, whether it be in quotes recited from Maoʼs Little Red Book, radio broadcasts

from Radio Pekin in the background, or used in conversation. The students immerse

themselves in the texts, images, and sounds of Maoism. Emancipated spectators in

their own right, the students attempt to rationalize the connection between theory and

practice, analysis and action. “Instead of the Romanticism of Poe, Dostoyevsky or

Garcia Lorca, it was the voice of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought that now

overloaded the soundtrack of his films with quotations, providing an interminable and

pitiless metalanguage, attacking the spectator with a series of inquisitorial

monologues... to provoke the audience” (Wollen 78). The characters in the film not only

speak to themselves, but also to the camera; sometimes even acknowledging their role

as an actor in the film. By reciting these texts and monologues, the actors and

characters of the film gives object to the words of the subjects they speak, materializing

varied discourses. Peter Wollen recalls Serge Daneyʼs late 1970ʼs essay on Godardʼs

“drill-master style of pedagogy, for setting citation against citation while avoiding

responsibility for either, for his decontextualization of sources and his terroristic use of

theory (91).

one must learn how to leave the movie theater (to leave behind cinephilia and obscurantism)

or at least to attach it to something else. And to learn, you have to go to school.

(S. Daney)

! Rather than a bootcamp, experiencing the film becomes a classroom exercise

through the dialogue as a recitation, the voiceover as a course, and the shooting as a

tutorial. La Chinoise is ʻa film in the making,ʼ inviting “us onto the set, it makes us feel

36

like weʼre watching the shooting of the film. And it also makes us feel like weʼre

watching Marxism, a certain Marxism anyway, in the process of making itself into

cinema, of play-acting” (Ranciere 143).

! Godardʼs transformation of cinematic experience into object lessons and

classroom exercises uses stereotypical rhetoric and gestures of Chinese Maoism,

represented as a “catalogue of images, a panoply of objects, a repertoire of phrases, a

program of action: courses, recitals, slogans, gym exercises” (143). This catalogue of

text and images become central to the exercise portion of the scenographic classroom.

They are the already-said-by-others and the statement-objects that become the raw

material collected to be juxtaposed to each other. The Little Red Book and the Cahiers

Marxistes-Leninistes, two red objects that are central to the filmsʼ raw material, “stand in

a relationship of solidarity and contradiction” (144) as a result of their shared color. They

are used as the ʻalready-said-by-othersʼ and ʻstatement-objectsʼ of the film.

! Using these literary works as raw materials establishes them as fragments in the

object of the film. Their use serve as the “method of the ʻobject lessonʼ, aligning

“perfectly with the specific Marxism that serves as the principle of representation,

namely Althusserian Marxism” (ibid.,). Ranciere suggests that one could “sum up”

Godardʼs “whole method as a filmmaker” by reading this sentence from the preface of

Althusserʼs Reading Capital:

! ! I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the ! ! history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial ! ! of all, the discovery and training in the meaning of the ʻsimplestʼ acts of ! ! existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading––the acts which relate men ! ! to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, the ʻabsences of ! ! workʼ. (ibid.,)

37

! Godard picks prefaces and conclusions from Althusser, later composing the

pieces into the “speech of the militant Omar and the peroration of the actor

Guillaume.” (ibid.,) In this sense Godard assumes the role of the student studying and

forming his own Cahiers marxistes-leninistes, “the sophisticated militant journal that

lends to the chosen bits and pieces learned by the Red Guard,” a sort of Little Red Book

for the the students of the Ecole Normale Superieure.

! ! This journal transforms the Althusserian project of relearning to see, ! ! speak, and read into Maoist rhetoric and gestures. Godardʼs method is to ! ! split up the terms of this operation, to break up the evidence, by making ! ! Althusserian pedagogy the principle for the mise-en-scene of Maoist ! ! rhetoric and gestures. (ibid.,)

Watching La Chinoise becomes “about learning to see, hear, speak, or read these

phrases from the Little Red Book or from the Pekin Information ...learning to read with

them,” (144) the film itself an ʻobject lessonʼ and the experience and duration a

ʻclassroom exerciseʼ, no different from the stories and examples that illustrate the

workbooks pupils use when learning to read and write in elementary school. The film

opens itself as both a space and an object to be read and transformed. Like a science

experiment or lab exercise, “La Chinoise is an exercise on Marxism with Marxism as

much as it is an exercise on film with film” (ibid.,).

! Daney notes that Godardʼs cinema stems “from his total contempt for any

discourse of the ʻspecificityʼ of cinema.” A discourse on the specificity of cinema would

close any subjective inscription of the cinematic object, becoming a cinema of uniform

transmission, of a seemingly natural and seamless construction. Daney categorizes

Godardʼs contempt for a specificity of cinema that includes “the spontaneous discourse

of the spectator (this is what cinema is for me), the self-interested discourse of people in

38

the business (you have to make films like this) or that of the enlightened university critic

(this is how cinema functions).” Godardʼs cinematic itinerary is directed towards the

question of the “filmic contract,” the relationship between the filmer and that which is

filmed, “a question which concerns the very act of filming” (Daney). This contract can be

explicitly seen in Godardʼs films where scenes become interviews or interrogations of

the characters, actors, and subjects. If it is a student questioning another in La Chinoise

where just or right ideas come from, Godard is interested in the idea of reparation.

Reparation would mean returning images and sounds to those whom they were taken

or stolen from. This also commits them to produce their own images and sounds.

already-said-by-others and the statement-objectsor

Quasi-words & Quasi-images

! ʻTo give vague ideas a clear imageʼ is painted on the back wall of a living room in

La Chinoise. It is in the same room in a different scene where Jean-Pierre Leaudʼs

character Gauillaume shares his desire with Anne Wiazemskyʼs character Veronique to

be blind to speak to each other better and listen carefully to each other, “weʼd talk

seriously to each other, which means finally meanings would change words... talk as if

words were sounds and matter.” This is not the first time Godard plays with the dialectic

between language and material. Godardʼs ʻMarxist filmsʼ “remain tied to the everyday

functioning of communication... in the image of the everyday chasse croise of words

and images” (Ranciere 145). Here Ranciere is referring to words and images

intertwining, as if stitched or sewn together seamlessly like a canvas or sheet, or just as

likely, the cinematic screen. The sounds, images, and texts of everyday subjects and

objects are then taken as ʻalready-said-by-othersʼ and ʻstatement-objectsʼ. Both subject

39

and object, word and image, take part in a “quasi-language not subject to the rules of

speech” (ibid.,). They are taken as things that can be kept or discarded. “Words make

images. They make us see. A sentence gives a quasi-visible that never attains the

clarity of the image. Images, in their turn, constitute a discourse” (ibid.,).

! Ranciereʼs chasse croise hides words by making them “visible and of images

made invisible by becoming audible. One quasi entails the other. One refers to the

other, lasts only as long as is needed to do the otherʼs work and to link its powers of

disappearance to that of the other” (ibid.,). In this case, the metaphor created from

these quasi-words and images become subjected to an “apparent naturalness” that

“seems to bind a signifier to a signified, a sound to an image, in order to provide a

convincing representation of the world” (Wollen, The Two Avant-Gardes). Godardʼs

critique of bourgeois communication is “one of a discourse gaining its power” from the

apparent naturalness of the metaphor. Therefore, as Wollen concludes, “...the effect is

to break up the homogeneity of the work, to open up spaces between different texts and

types of discourses” (ibid.,). An example from La Chinoise is what Ranciere calls the

ʻbowl-and-toast principleʼ:

! ! “Look at Henri drink his cafe au lait and butter his toast in front of his water

heater as he itemizes all of his reasons for going back to the Communist Party. The

realistic weight of his words is entirely dependent upon these accessories” (Ranciere

145). As Henri drinks his coffee and eats his toast, Godard allows for the actor/student

to speak about being kicked out of the filmʼs group, in turn giving him his own freedom

to return to the reality outside of the apartment and his own choices. This is also a break

from the interior of the apartment cell, no longer structured by the primary colors and

40

authoritative lectures. “The point is to split in two the One of representative magma: to

separate words and images, to get words to be heard in their strangeness and images

to be seen in their silliness” (146). We see Henri drinking his coffee and eating his toast,

but what we think of is not that silly, authentic image of coffee and toast. I think of the

words as Godard asks him from off camera “You left?” -”Yes, Well, they excluded me.

Itʼs all the same” he responds. I think of the apathy in his statement, however the weight

of authenticity in his coffee and toast in his hand give material value to those words.

“Terrorism leads to nothing today” he says as he light a cigarette. Again, this matter of

fact, everyday object give weight to the realism of the words.

! If Godard really wants us to hear the words––and Marxism, like any theory, is first ! and foremost an assemblage of words––and see the reality they describe and ! project––and reality is, first and foremost, an assemblage of images––he cannot ! treat them separately. (146)

Godard treats reality as an assemblage of words and images both visually and

sonically, therefore his cinema becomes a collage of reality, transforming it rather than

imitating it. If cinema were to imitate reality, it would cease to be an image at all. He

makes us see the images by replacing “their obscure image-making with a brute image

of what they say” (146).

the interview as authentic image

! La Chinoise is structured not only by the interior image of the “white walls of the

apartment, but also the relationship between inside and outside. The outside is the real,

the referent of the discourse” (148). Godard structures La Chinoise around the three

primary colors of the apartment and the varied discourse of Moaist text. The interview,

the lecture, and the theater are the three modes used to portray different situations of

authority, therefore, different levels of freedom:

41

! ! The lecture is thought to portray the situation of authority commanded by ! ! big words divorced from reality. The apparatus of the lecture––table, ! ! blackboard, and lecture standing in front of an audience seated on the ! ! floor and answering their questions––seems to accentuate the image of ! ! the authority wielded by big words. The interview, on the other hand, is ! ! generally thought to sound the voice of the real with the small and slightly ! ! awkward words that anyone at all––preferably a woman––uses to ! ! describe the personal experiences that have led her to entrust her life to ! ! these big words. (149-150)

The lecture becomes the most authoritative situation with one person standing before

the students on the floor, dictating with “big words” to objectively answer their questions.

The interview instead presents a more vulnerable and subjective situation where “small

and slightly awkward words” of personal experience lends itself to a “voice of the real”.

These ʻsmall and slightly awkward wordsʼ increase authenticity in the real when their

voice “is muted or annulled in order to transform the solicited response into a gush of

spontaneity” (150).

! It is in these moments of ʻthe realʼ, “the insertion of a stupid shot, the voice of the

interviewer that we hear without being able to make out the words, the performances of

the naive and canny” that the images invite us to see and hear “the regime of ʻauthenticʼ

speech.” Ranciere refers specifically to the "vacant suburban lots and the university of

Nanterre barely visible beyond them that Godard uses, once he has them rendered

equivalent with a panoramic shot, to illustrate Veroniqueʼs speech” (148). As the camera

pans from old sheds in an industrial, agricultural compound to a desolate street and lot

with the universityʼs high rises in the background, Wiazemsky speaks about

understanding the ʻthree basic inequalities of Capitalism:” First, the difference between

intellectual and manual work. Secondly, between town and country... Third, between

farming and industry. Like Ranciereʼs ʻbowl-and-toast principleʼ of Henriʼs dialogue, the

42

pan of the outskirts of Veroniqueʼs university gives weight to her words, or also her

words give a certain weight to the silly image or stupid shot, producing an authentic

image of sight and sound.

! Ranciere says that this regime of ʻauthenticʼ speech is “like the lecture, the

regime of an already-said, of a recited text” (150). Because this regime is constructed

by quasi-images and quasi-words, the authentic speech invites us to see and hear

objects that may be visible or hidden as words or images themselves. Quasi-images,

stupid-shots, silly images, quasi-words, inaudible voices, and strange words are the raw

material of this sort of authentic image. Here we return to “a question which concerns

the very act of filming,” that of the ʻfilmic contractʼ, the relationship between the filmer

and and that which is filmed, especially in the interviews and interrogations characters

and actors.

! ! The actor becomes, in the same gesture, the elementary school teacher ! ! who returns the speeches and gestures of the naive interviewee and of ! ! the learned professor to their first elements. The actor teaches the militant ! ! that it is possible to understand a text by lending oneʼs voice and body to ! ! it, just as he teaches all of them how to spell out words and to vocalize ! ! and visualize ideas. (150-151)

43

conclusion / realization

Kino-made! In this essay I have investigated Jacques Ranciereʼs notion of the ʻemancipated

spectatorʼ as both a consumer and producer of the cinematic object presented before

them. I have presented the theories and practices of Dziga Vertovʼs Kino-Eye and

Marcel Duchampʼs Readymades as complimentary artistic practices that view the world

as material constructions and an accumulation of languages and ideologies.

! Vertov and Duchampʼs complimentary practices were used as the theoretical and

practical basis to approach Jean Luc Godardʼs film La Chinoise. A film such as La

Chinoise is therefore presented as an ideal, or at least a fantastic example, of what

Kino-Made (a readymade cinema) could be; assembled from everyday images, words,

and sounds that have been previously worked and built upon from other theorists,

writers, histories, stories, and texts from societies.

! Through the collage-like film-object of La Chinoise, assembled as a collection of

fragmented words and images from the world, Godard de-centers the filmic montage

and thus de-centers any hierarchy of authority and uniformity of any central discourse.

Kino-Made is a cinema assembled from the sights and sounds of a known world in

order to study and analyze it through constructed cinematic images, open for spectators

to actively study and analyze that cinema through its realized production just as

Jacques Ranciereʼs pupil or scholar observes, selects, compares, interprets, and

composes the poem and its elements before them.

44

Works CitedBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction . 2002. Reprint. New York: Lukas & Sternberg,

2007. Print.

Brecht, Bertolt, and John Willett. Brecht on theatre: the development of an aesthetic. 2nd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Print.

Daney, Serge . "Theorize / Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy)." cahiers du cinema Jan. 1976: n. pag. THE T(H)ERRORIZED (GODARDIAN PEDAGOGY). Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle . 1967. Reprint. London: Rebel Press, 2004. Print.

Duchamp, Marcel . "Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act." IAAA, Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam.. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 May 2011. <http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/duchamp.html>.

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and literary criticism . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Print.

Henderson, Brian, Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen. "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style." Film theory and criticism: introductory readings. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 57-67. Print.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E., Francis M. Naumann, and Dalia Judovitz. "Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given." Marcel Duchamp: artist of the century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 184-202. Print.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E., and Dalia Judovitz. "Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade." Dada and surrealist film . MIT Press ed. New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1996. 46-57. Print.

La Chinoise. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Leaud. 1967. Koch Lorber Films, 2008. DVD.

Obalk, Hector. "The Unfindable Readymade." Tout-Fait: Marcel Duchamp Studies Online journal. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2011. <http://www.toutfait.com/articals.php?id=912>.

RancieÌere, Jacques. "The Red of La Chinoise: Godard's Politics." Film fables . 2001. Reprint. New York: Berg, 2006. 143-153. Print.

45

RancieÌere, Jacques. "The Emancipated Spectator." The Emancipated Spectator . London: Verso, 2009. 1-23. Print.

Vertov, Dziga, and Annette Michelson. Kino-eye: the writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984. Print.

Wollen, Peter . "THE TWO AVANT-GARDES." Media Art Net | Source Text. Studio International, n.d. Web. 10 May 2011. <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/100/>.

Wollen, Peter. "JLG." Paris Hollywood: writings on film. London: Verso, 2002. 74-92. Print.

46