Michael Sicinski
draft #3 / in progress
Working Through the City:
Ernie Gehr's Signal - Germany on the Air
In an unpublished interview conducted in August of
1978, filmmaker Ernie Gehr was asked about his place of birth. Gehr (said by Scott MacDonald to be
“unusually reticent about his life” [1993, 37]) replied, " 'Planet Earth' . . . I refuse to
acknowledge nationalistic or state boundaries.
I will recognize geographical boundaries . . . Earth; same planet as the
rest of the human race" (1978, 1).
One may well understand this answer as a form of sarcasm cloaked in
idealistic internationalism -- after all, does it really help us to better
comprehend Gehr's films to know that he was born in Wisconsin? It would also be possible to locate this
reply within a discourse of intellectual pan-nationalism. Such an explanation has been used to
characterize the aspirations of that segment of the avant-garde film community
with roots in European "high culture," for whom national borders have been somewhat irrelevant. Peter
Wollen, in his classic 1975 essay "The Two Avant-Gardes," has
described the issue in this way.
New York is clearly the capital of the Co-op movement. Consequently,
from New York,
Godard looks much more distinctively European than Kren or Le Grice, a
fact which
simply reflects the realities of power in the art world, to which the
Co-op movement
is closely tied. Indeed, there
is a sense in which avant-garde Co-op filmmaking in Europe
is closer to New York than Californian filmmaking is . . . (Wollen
1982, 93)
Such
a representation of the globe-trotting culture of "art-world"
filmmaking, however, is not especially favorable in Wollen's account. In contradistinction to that
"political" avant-garde embodied for Wollen in the work of Jean-Luc
Godard, whose films analyze international politics from within a concrete
national frame of reference, the unwillingness of the "formalist"
avant-garde to specify its collective enunciations from within a national
"place" becomes a marker of an ostensibly studied apoliticism, summed
up by Wollen as a "preoccupation with pure film, with film 'about' film, a
dissolution of signification into objecthood or tautology" (Wollen 1982,
97).
I begin my analysis of Ernie Gehr's 1985 film Signal
-- Germany on the Air with these somewwhat unflattering domestications of
the filmmaker's statement on borders, rather reluctantly, but necessarily, I
think, in order that I may leave them behind.
I also rather speciously call upon a personal statement by Gehr, a
statement retrieved from the archive, in order to allude to an implicit concern
with the transgression of national boundaries at that historical moment in
Gehr's career when, by popular account, his work was at its most
anti-referential.
"Anti-referential," here, is the least problematic term I can
think of with which to express an entire genre-identification of Gehr's work,
one with a phalanx of reductive labels and shorthands to which I allude at
present, again, in order to leave them behind.[1] Instead, I would like to recast Gehr's
comment as both a prescient statement of purpose, and as a dare. I believe that the filmic work performed by Signal
is accomplished, in part, by a refusal to "recognize" national boundaries, or the bounded
construction of "nation." Or,
if we are forced to recognize national boundaries, Signal seems to
demand that we do so deconstructively: to "re-cognize," to remap
those boundaries cognitively.
Signal is
located in a concrete space and time, that of Berlin in the early 1980s, and
the film subjects this location to relentless scrutiny. In the course of the film, the formal
properties of this physical space become articulated with that space’s
historical specificity, the active relationships between the two revealing a
shifting yet indivisible social formation.
But the film never pins the space down, or halts its evolution in order
to point at it and simply describe. Inevitably, Gehr finds history in Berlin,
but in Signal, he never delivers a deceptively clear image of that
history. The film’s power derives from
its unwillingness to offer its viewers familiar, consumable pictures of “the
Holocaust,” “the Nazis,” or “postwar Germany,” at which a comfortable audience
might simply nod in assent. [In the full-length essay, I discuss Bersani and
Dutoit’s reading of Resnais’ Night and Fog, and its relation to this
problem.] Gehr's film disarticulates
the stability of the nation, its imaginary coherence, as well as -- perhaps
most radically -- the imagined coherence of the viewer, who may well understand
him or herself to exist safely on the "other side" of that national
border which quarantines the past of Germany.
Signal physically inscribes an undecidable,
"unotherable" space, using filmic materials to construct a space
which resists total comprehension and, subsequently, comfortable consignment to
somebody else's past. Along these
lines, Gehr also issues an ethical dare: in order to occupy this earth, in
order to create the space for the possibility of humane dwelling, one must
disentangle and ultimately dismantle the boundaries of national division, as
well as the self / other demarcations of subjective mastery. One must risk one's illusion of safety in
the present, by plumbing the lingering uncertainties of the past.
I.
Signal as Counter-surveillance
Gehr's film consists mostly of a continuous
non-diegetic graft of image and sound, both recorded during a residency in West
Berlin. For the majority of the film,
the images are composed of fixed-camera, truncated pans of multiple views of a
traffic circle in a commercial section of the city. While pedestrians and motorists become visible in these short
sweeps, at least initially the film makes clear that they are incidental
players in a physical, geographical "drama." Jim Hoberman describes the film as follows.
Signal . . . is a
40-minute suite of "empty" compositions and puzzling pans, set mainly
in a summery, but otherwise nondescript, urban intersection where five
streets cross.
The movie is deliberately anti-dramatic. As Benjamin wrote approvingly
of Atget, Gehr's
landscapes "lack atmosphere." Like Atget as well, Gehr could
be said to photograph
the street as though it were the scene of a crime (Hoberman 1995, xvi).
The
simplicity of the single filmed views, aggressively frontal, is matched by the
utter dislocation of the fragmented multiplicity of these views, each presented
in rapid-succession montage. In such
sharp contrast to the classical construction of filmic space as to render it
practically irrelevant even as a point of comparison, Gehr composes this cubist
space as an exploded bombscape. The
depiction of the intersection's component parts is usually stabilized,
slightly, with such vertical anchoring points as lampposts and trees, which in
turn come unmoored in the tic-like horizontal pans.
Against this series of spaces, an audio collage of
apparently random radio broadcasts maintains a continual level of audibility,
if offering no more solidity of reference than the image track. Paired with some diegetically motivated (but
temporally disphased) audio from the intersection, such as footsteps
accompanying scenes with no pedestrians, we hear a tuner scan the dial: bits of
Radio Bavaria, some rock and roll, a waltz, and discussion in various
languages. While aurally disorienting
in its own way, the audio track does in fact provide an all-enveloping presence
which provides a counterpoint to the jarring, segmented vision of the
intersection images, this apparent presence in keeping with the normal sensual
contrast between sound and vision.[2]
In the above quotation, Hoberman likens Gehr's
intersection to the scene of a crime.
It is precisely the question of the culpability of Germany, in even its
most quotidian spaces, which saturates Signal's spatial inquiry. Spatial dislocation in the cinema is usually
something of a jolt in itself, given the film medium's typical use for the
soldering together of coherent, legible spaces. But Gehr's material
disarticulation of the space is of even greater concern to us as viewers,
because there is something "we" want to know, that we desire to learn
through seeing and hearing. “We” want
hard evidence. It is this transparency
of the space of German responsibility, and "our" typically imperious
spectatorial position in relation to it, which Gehr steadfastly disallows.
This space of the intersection is rife with storefront
signs, traffic signals, billboards as well as mobile ads on the side of the
occasional bus. These signs, as we
understand from our own urban experiences, are designed to alleviate confusion,
either by providing the directions necessary to attain a predetermined goal ("How
do I get there?"), or by offering forceful tips for the satisfaction of
lingering, undirected desires ("What do I want to buy? Where do I get it?"). On the face of it, these "benign"
navigational tools are rendered inscrutable by Gehr's compositional
method. However, Tom Gunning describes
the filmic scene accurately I think, as revealing a directional and locational
chaos implicit in the urban scene itself.
The overlapping vantage points of successive shots tease us with the
possibility of
mapping out the total space and finally orienting ourselves. At the same time the array
of directional signs and the tangle of urban objects which solicit our
attention increas-
ingly convey the bewilderment of anyone who pauses to contemplate this
intersection
rather than simply being channeled by it (Gunning 1993, 8).
Through
its distanced repetitions, perspectival shifts and unfixed glances, Signal,
in part, enacts a paradoxical meditation on the inability to think. But the search is not only for breathing room. Signal's camera is indeed looking for
traces of history, all the while employing a method of inquiry which obscures
the legibility of the "evidence" it compiles.
How does Gehr compose his filmic rhetoric of the
material scene of the Berlin cityscape?
Despite sharing certain affinities with the stationary
"realities" of the early films by the Lumičre brothers[3],
the camera of Signal alludes, I think, to a much more
"artless" form of image-making, the "empty" documentation
of the surveillance camera. For one
thing, the film's chief visual subject matter, noteworthy for its seemingly
unspectacular sights, invites viewers to recognize their own inability to watch
passers-by stroll, to count the various cars, et cetera. Moreover, the "scene of the crime,"
a crime with no visible traces and apparently no suspects, is visualized apart
from its "moment of truth."
We gaze at these multiple, partially random views either in the
aftermath, or in anticipation, of an "event."
In an essay delineating the invention of modern
photographic surveillance, John Tagg makes clear that simply placing a camera
in a square, or photographing an event of legal import, is insufficient for the
imbrication of image and truth, and that this imbrication is rhetorically
necessary for the constitution of "evidence." The photographic construction of a document
can occur only within a discursive context which deliberately eschews the
photograph's multitudinous other readings.
The image, then, is only legible within an historically specific
discourse.
If the instrumental camera was to operate as a controlled extension to
the expert or
supervisory eye, then the structured possibilities of its
representational system had
to be invested in the drives and desires of a constellation of apparatuses
of power. If
the photographs such a camera produced were to claim the status of
technical docu-
mentation, then they had to be differentiated from a field of
photographic represen-
tations. They had to shun the picturesque and sensational, disdain the
moralism of
philanthropic reformism, affect a systematicness beyond commercial
views, and
relinquish the privilege of Art for the power of Truth (Tagg 1994, 90).
Despite
the now-naturalized character of surveillance footage, such footage can only
perform its political work by inscribing itself within a specific set of
rhetorical moves. For instance, the
same multi-perspectival quality which, on first viewing, makes Signal so
spatially "incomprehensible" would not be at all jarring if we were
watching the television monitor mounted in the upper corner of a 7-Eleven. Within the rhetoric of surveillance, we as
viewers understand that the "need" to patrol space, to
optically control it, demands a spatial logic in excess of the coherent
180-degree fabrications of narrative space.[4]
Of course, one may well ask, apropos of Signal,
how far such a disjointed representation can go before it too becomes
illegible. Gunning comments on Gehr's
camerawork and its difference from the official camera-in-the-square. Signal "yields a more fragmented
image, less useful for mapping and surveillance than the various panopticons of
the modern age" (Gunning 1993, 10).
Signal marks out its difference with its too-rapid pans, its
elegant, intentional compositions, which exceed the rhetorical boundaries of
institutional discourse by drawing undue attention to the workings of the
apparatus itself, as well as the guiding intelligence behind it. And this, of course, is as it should be -- Signal
is a critical work of art, not a security tape. I want to argue, however, that Gehr's visual allusion to the
surveillance mode is not adventitious. Signal's
"record" of the scene of a crime is an act of counter-surveillance,
but one which reconfigures the meanings of both surveillance and
counter-surveillance.
The term "counter-surveillance" gained
currency in the 1980s, when relatively inexpensive video equipment became
commercially available, first in Japan, and then elsewhere in the
industrialized world. In contrast to
the ever-present security state maintained by the state apparatus and its
capitalist counterpart, which is designed to patrol the spaces of private
capital and the governmental / police activity which enables those spaces to
exist, counter-surveillance was a move by citizens to empower themselves by
watching and recording the police, the government, and big business. Of course the most infamous example of
counter-surveillance in U.S. history is the George Holliday videotape of the
beating of Rodney King. Another
example, one which gained extensive media exposure as well as marking the
beginning of the widespread discourse of counter-surveillance, is Paul Garrin's
camcorder documentation of police abuses during the Tompkins Square homeless
uprising. But while some countersurveillant
images become headline news, other such activities are scrupulously ignored by
mainstream media, most notably perhaps the international contingent of
independent telejournalists who have logged hundreds of hours of unseen footage
of post-Gulf War civilian carnage in Iraq.[5]
Signal too
constitutes an act of counter-surveillance, but one which disarticulates the
transparent truth-claims in which such documents typically are invested. Gehr accomplishes this with a number of
interconnected strategies. For one, he
is returning to the "scene" (Germany) of a series of state abuses of
the past. However, while Signal
does present a dilapidated factory-like structure which we discover, reading a
worn sign, to be the former Gestapo headquarters, the film actually unleashes
its primary scrutiny upon a "neutral" space, in which
"nothing" of note seems to happen in the present. Furthermore, there
is no hard evidence that anything specific happened there in the
past. As opposed to the presentist
"hard fact" of the Holliday or Garrin tapes, Gehr's film, on the one
hand, searches in vain for material
traces which would ratify our suspicions about the all-pervasive culpability of
"Germany," even at its most banal.
This aspect of the project, the material spatialization of Hannah
Arendt's famous truism on the "banality of evil," is described by
Gunning.
. . . the shadow of history, the recognition that the horror of fascism
and the nightmares
of history were always absorbed into just such every day urban
landscapes, that the
screams of the tortured never penetrated in an audible way into these
spaces. Gehr
returns to this tangle of streets, not simply to find his way around,
but with the suspicion
that signals still flash within the configurations of streets and traffic
and are borne invisibly
on the air (Gunning 1996, 15).
On the other hand, Signal inscribes the futility of such a search for the location of visible / audible blame, as well as formally undercutting that secure subject position of the detached investigator whose ability to locate blame is undergirded by his or her process of national and cultural "othering."[6] While the film clearly takes a stand in its very looking -- an assertion through the material of film that this space has a history -- Signal's inscription of the coeval character of present and past affirms two philosophical positions. The first is that, while Nazi Germany was an historically specific conjunction of circumstances, such a form of terrorist social control which saturates daily existence invisibly (floating "on the air") is not the sole province, historically or contemporaneously, of "Germany" or, worse, "the German mind." As David Sterritt notes, "even commonplace urban objects come to be seen as reflections of a manipulative mentality not limited to any one nation" (1985). Second, the past, in the present, of "Germany," as both national imaginary and geographical space, can continue to exist, to have such luxuries as a routine day of shopping, only by subduing those historical "ghosts" which walk unseen through these mundane spaces of the present. Gunning sums up the conundrum.
One recalls in the midst of this traffic how important an efficient
system of circulation
was to the Nazi final solution: the elaborate use of the railway to
transport Jews to the
death centers, the use even of mobile gas chambers mounted on
trucks. If this present
day traffic intersection carries the freight of so much past horror,
then how can we escape
it? And if it doesn't -- if the
traces are truly dispersed and lost -- then how can anything
be saved (Gunning 1993, 8)?
Signal
disallows an authoritative answer to
this question. Mimicking the visual
discourse of evidence-collection, Gehr undermines the dominating clarity of
standpoint which, to a great extent, has been inscribed in the cinematic
apparatus itself, with its triangulation from 16th century Albertian
rationalization and 19th century juridical methods. He subverts the medium while at the same time mastering it,
proving that nothing is inherent to the photographic medium. As Tagg has said, photographic practice is
legible only within specific social inscriptions.
[If it is granted] that the photographic always exceeded its
colonization, investment and
specification in institutional frameworks of use, it is not to concede
any intrinsicness of
"the medium." It is not to equate a discursive structure with
a technology. Nor is it to posit
any unity or closure to photography's discursive field. It is precisely
in this sense, therefore,
that I have denied that photography as such has any identity. . . A
technology has no
inherent value, outside its mobilizations in specific discourses,
practices, institutions and
relations of power (Tagg 1994, 91).
Rather
than denying the camera's imbrication with relations of power, Gehr works out
this discourse, refusing to allow it to speak him. Gehr's film unmakes the instrumental sense which is an
undeniable part of the Fascist horrors whose simultaneous unfathomability and
indelible memory the film "documents."
II.
Disarticulating the German Nation
The materialism of Signal does not rely on a
presumed documentary authenticity between image and sound. Gehr's film, as stated above, employs a
contrapuntal strategy which serves to further disarticulate the German scene
presented in the film, and this image / sound disphasure (until the very end of
the film) points the way to a more radical materialist project, the dissolution
of the confident fiction of the national.
The Berlin radio broadcast to which the title alludes
introduces a metaphorical thickness to the difficult scene of the
intersection. As people move or are
moved quickly into and out of the frame, they cannot hear the various messages
which are carried "on the air" that they breathe. Hoberman concurs, noting that "In Signal,
the radio serves to make the invisible world concrete" (Hoberman 1995,
xvii). In this respect, the discord of
the shifting audio represents the slippage between palpability and absence, not
only of those historical criminals of the Third Reich who haunt the square as
memories only, but also of centralized power of any kind, whose very effectiveness
lies in its simultaneous elusiveness and reach.
The use-value of communications technologies for the
Third Reich, particularly the radio, is well-known. The key to this effectivity was the building of an imaginary
unified body, "the nation," through homogeneity and
simultaneity. While one may debate
exactly how much attention was paid to the broadcasts (the radio in The
Marriage of Maria Braun, for instance, is ever-present but as background
drone), the necessity of binding the expanse of the nation with one
authoritative voice, and one language, was clearly understood by Goebbels as
part of official National Socialist policy.
But as Homi Bhabha, in his project of "DessemiNation," argues
persuasively, the unity of the nation must be continually maintained in this
way. Borrowing from but expanding upon
Benedict Anderson's work, Bhabha describes the time of the modern nation as a
"meanwhile," a vertical time-space which links diverse subjects with
conflicting interests within a geographically / linguistically bounded
"community" (Bhabha 1990, 308).
A paradox emerges in the process of activating the "national
imaginary": a unified "now" can be etched out by recourse to a
mythologized past.
For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement
of its irredeem-
ably plural modern space, bounded by different, even hostile nations,
into a signifying
space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the
nation's modern
territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. Quite simply,
the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning
Territory into Tradition,
turning the People into One (Bhabha 1990, 300).
The
effectiveness of such media mythologizing is ambivalently mocked and mourned by
Syberberg in a scene from Hitler, a Film from Germany, in which a fat
man in his Nazi uniform listens to an old radio broadcast, hugs his gun, and
weeps. Syberberg is correct in
emphasizing the aural as the most plangent site of mourning for the lost object,
"Germany."
Gehr's use of modern radio sound as the counterpoint
to his visual disarticulation of the legibility of Germany maintains the
all-pervasive menace of media in an administered (this time, capitalist)
society. However, underscoring the
breakdown of the fiction of racial and national purity of the Reich,
internationalism returns with a vengeance.
Blended with the recordings of street noises of dispersal and transit,
the sounds of German radio are hopelessly hybrid, incorporating English, French,
and Russian languages. The chauvinistic
desire for "pure" Germanness is cast adrift on the wind. In fact, the presence of English on the
German airwaves brings to anyone who is listening (and who is
listening?) an (inadvertent?) undermining of the comfortable forgetting of the
Nazi past which furnishes West Berliners with the official fiction of a
"zero hour." In the second
substantial portion of Signal, we leave the intersection to meander
contemplatively before the crumbling Gestapo HQ, along ominous disused rail
lines and boxcars, laden with a well-known history. "On the air," we hear a man and woman exchange phrases:
"You can't accuse me."
"I blame you."
"Who's to blame?"
"It's all your fault."
"Are you accusing me of all this?" "You people are all the same."
In this way, Gehr demonstrates the layered temporality
of modern Germany, which can be understood in Bhabha's terms to expose the
impossibility of the smooth functioning of the "national" fiction.
To be obliged to forget -- in the construction of the national present
-- is not a question of
historical memory; it is the construction of a discourse on society
that performs the prob-
lematic totalization of the national will. That strange time -- forgetting to remember -- is
a place of 'partial identification' inscribed in the daily plebiscite
which represents the per-
formative discourse of the people (Bhabha 1990, 311).
For
Bhabha, the eruptions of performativity within the activity of
"willing" the nation are moments of inevitable (though not inevitably
observed or exploited) slippage, reemergences of the suppressed force of
cultural difference which the work of the signifier introduces into the
nation.
The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation's self-generation
by
casting a shadow between the people as 'image' and its signification as
a differentiating
sign of Self, distinct from the Other or the Outside. In place of the
polarity of a pre-
figurative self-generating nation itself and extrinsic Other nations,
the performative
introduces a temporality of the 'in-between' through the 'gap' or
'emptiness' of the
signifier that punctuates linguistic difference (Bhabha 1990, 299).
This
temporality of the "in-between" militates against the ahistorical
self-evidence of the nation, but also against simple historicization or linear
archeology. Rather than tracing out the
trajectory of the national illusion -- "how we got here" -- Bhabha
insists upon a radical discontinuity which breaks through in the present
while also resituating the past. This
eruption, it seems, occurs within the fragmented time of Nachträglichkeit, as repetition with an as-yet-unvanquished
difference. "Historical"
time, Bhabha writes, becomes synchronic, in order to assert the vertical
homogeneity of the national "meanwhile." But does this project of exorcism succeed?
The narrative structure of this historical surmounting of the
'ghostly' or the 'double' is
seen in the intensification of narrative synchrony as a graphically
visible position in
space: 'to grasp the most elusive course of pure historical time and
fix it through unmedi-
ated contemplation'. But what kind of 'present' is this if it is a
consistent process of
surmounting the ghostly time of repetition (Bhabha 1990, 295)?
To return to Signal -- Germany on the Air, I
want to reiterate my claim that this film graphically articulates the space of
"ghostly" repetition, not in the simple sense of "past" and
"present," pancaked or interpenetrated, but as a demonstration and
opening up of the difference of temporality within an historical scene of
memory. Time and space in Signal
are subject to repetitions and condensations which are perceptible (we observe
the return of specific places if we look closely) but not apprehensible. Our ability to master or delineate this
haunted temporality is hopelessly compromised.
The people depicted in and out of the frame, we the viewers, and
possibly the subjectivity behind the camera, all enter a temporal
"clearing" in which the performative gesture of forgetting, which
undergirds the solidity of the national fiction, becomes critically
doubled. We can no longer forget that
we are obliged to forget. Those
fictions which authorize nationhood (a whole present in part one, a univocality
of language in part two) are thwarted by the material inscription of Signal.
III.
Signal is a Real Thing
As should be evident from the passages I have quoted
extensively above, Bhabha's theoretical project aims to allow the emergence of
an otherness which possesses the disruptive strength to disarticulate the
nation. The suppressed
"double" of history and language -- both understood as components of
an "other" temporality -- for Bhabha marks the way toward the
nation's unnarratability.
We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of
cultural knowledges
that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative,
teleological, or dialectical.
The 'difference' of cultural knowledge that 'adds to' but does not 'add
up' is the enemy
of the implicit generalization of knowledge or implicit
homogenization of experience
(Bhabha 1990, 313).
Signal -- Germany on the Air is a film which provides an example of
"different" cultural knowledge.
Gehr's creation of a filmic space which refuses to engage in the fiction
of coherence or to offer itself for mastery or specular subjection, is a
politically principled determination to "add to" but not to "add
up." The space of Gehr's Berlin is
a series of parts which will not comprise a whole, precisely because the
histories of absent memories, of the victims of barbarism, are temporally
present as absences. By carving
out this space of irreducible, irreconcilable difference, Signal resists
the cultural homogenization of the official narratives of postwar West Germany,
which attempted to substitute an Economic Miracle for a working-through.
Along with Gehr, I argue that film is a real
thing, and that the disarticulation of the spaces of the nation in the material
realm of film has substantial consequences.
The refusal to offer a clear-cut, stereotypical spatial impression, a
refusal which characterizes much of Signal, could be misconstrued as
simply a withholding, but nothing could be further from the truth. This material disarticulation of the
fraudulent wholeness of the German city provides an "other" space
through which we can, first, experience surprise and sensual pleasure, and
further, begin to rearticulate space from within a non-forgetting,
non-totalizing temporality. Gunning
characterizes the freedoms of the former.
We can not assume an assigned place before a Gehr film, ultimate
positioning eludes us.
But we never feel abandoned or ignored by these films. Instead they
directly solicit us
to entertain a number of often contradictory positions, to try them
out, and switch
between them. In this way Gehr
explores the interaction between those processes of
space, motion and time inscribed in the cinematic machine and our own
perceptual and
mental processes. Gehr's game
with forms of space explores possible contradictions and
tensions and invites us to experience zones of place that remain for
most of us terra
incognita (Gunning
1993, 7).
In pointing the way towards possibilities for the
latter, I would like to cite a passage from Michel Foucault on the negotiation
of spatial practices, as well as to discuss how Ernie Gehr concludes Signal
with just such a consideration.
Foucault, in an interview on space and power with Paul Rabinow, made
measured comments about the impossibility of total domination, the continual
crawl-space of tactics. He noted,
however, that those very sites of German history represent the absolute limit
of freedom, in which no possible negotiation exists.
There are a certain number of things that one can say with some
certainty about a
concentration camp to the effect that it is not an instrument of
liberation, but one
should still take account -- and this is not generally acknowledged --
that, aside from
torture and execution, which preclude any resistance, no matter how
terrifying a
given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of
resistance, disobedience,
and oppositional groupings (Foucault 1984, 245).
Foucault
is quite clear in admonishing that this "is not to say that, after all,
one may as well leave people in slums, thinking that they can simply exercise
their rights there" (ibid, 246).
Nevertheless, he insists that spatial power typically can be refigured
through practice.
As should be evident by now, this is what I believe
Ernie Gehr has done in Signal -- Germany on the Air. But moreover, he has gestured toward a new
articulation of the local in the conclusion of his film. Most of the critics who have written about Signal
(whose work I have repeatedly cited in this essay) have emphasized the
gradually growing legibility of the space of the intersection. This is partially a function of the viewer's
sustained attention, but also registered in a slight adjustment of approach in
the concluding minutes of the film.
First of all, the sound / image disphasure gives way for the most part
to images and sounds of a rain storm.
Compositions become smaller, yet less claustrophobic. The takes are longer; a noticeable change is
that pedestrians no longer vanish in mid-stride, but tend to make it across the
frame. Many of the shots in this final
portion look down the sidewalks rather than into the tumult of the traffic
circle.
One might well wonder why a film so involved in the
radical demolition of the masterable spaces of the national / historical
imaginary would resolve these tensions in the spatial equivalent of a happy
ending. But this is not what I think is
going on -- such a trite resolution would not be offered at the point of its
greatest incredibility. Instead, I
think that Gehr has attempted to remind us that ghosts of the past are not the
only occupants of the square. Real
everyday people navigate these spaces, and perhaps having undergone the trauma
of interrogating the in-between temporal space of the opening section, they and
we can look toward a new space in which this working-through itself becomes
quotidian. If so, this newly
articulated space points the way toward the eventual illegibility of those
authoritarian national fictions which demand purity and enforce forgetting.
The final image of Signal is not an
"image" at all, but a real thing.
A loud clap of thunder from the rain storm on the soundtrack coincides
with a popping yellow end flare, the end of the roll. Gehr informed me that he timed the end flare with the
thunderclap, allowing the rest of the soundtrack for the final portion of the
film up to that point to sync up as it may.
In addition to being a beautiful effect, this pairing of diegetic sound
and material filmic phenomenon seems a perfect metaphor for the hopeful
activity the film ultimately performs. A future moment of reconciliation has the capacity to
retroactively realign the sounds and spaces of our past.
[1] Commenting on
the formal readings of Gehr's work, which focus only on its alleged modernist self-reflexivity, John
Pruitt writes, "A misapprehension of this kind has given birth to a whole
school of filmmaking and a body of criticism in close attendance, both of which
for the most part prove embarrassing" (1982, 67).
[2] Sound, being
less distanced from the body than vision, has been discussed in terms of
providing a (false) plenitude for the hearer.
See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Indiana Univ. Press,
1988); Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema," and Pascal
Bonitzer, "The Silences of the Voice," in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology (Columbia Univ. Press, 1986).
[3] The perspectival
character of the Lumičres' early actualities are, as Richard de Cordova has
argued, not simply 16th century - derived views, precisely because their motion
disaligns the stability the Albertian model typically provides. "From
Lumičre to Pathé: the Break-Up of Perspectival Space." Thomas Elsaesser,
ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (BFI Books, 1990).
[4] I am drawing my conception of the material construction
of the space of classical cinema from Stephen Heath, "Narrative
Space," Philip Rosen, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (Columbia
Univ. Press, 1986) [essay originally published 1976].
[5] Most recently,
both “official” and countersurveillant images have been conflated by the media
in their reports on the police violence during the World Trade Organization
protests in Seattle. In this new
development, mainstream media outlets have appropriated countersurveilant acts
in order to inscribe them within a narrative of “peaceful protest” versus the
“illegitimate” destruction of private property, the latter apparently
justifying wanton brutality on the part of the Seattle police.
[6] This
"implication" of both filmmaker and viewer has led Hoberman to
jokingly refer to Signal as a "structuralist noir," and while
this is amusing, the analogy doesn't quite hold. Who's the femme fatale?
Germania herself?