Michael Sicinski
Austrian Conference
GENDERMATERIAL: Valie
Export's Spatial Logic
The metahistorian of cinema . . . is occupied with inventing a
tradition, that is, a coherent
wieldy set of discrete monuments . . . Such works may not exist, and
then it is her duty to
make them. -Hollis Frampton
In this paper, my aim is to delineate a possible
revisionary film history, which I see contained in Valie Export's film The
Practice of Love. I do not consider myself a film historian, and I stress
this point because I think that what follows could be considered a history of
sorts, but a rather unhistorical history -- a history, perhaps, of filmic
effects. While I would not be so
presumptuous, at this preliminary stage, to call this effort a genealogy, I do
attempt to organize my materials in accordance with Michel Foucault's
guidelines for "effective history."
He describes this process as follows:
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken
continuity that operates
beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to
demonstrate that the past actively
exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the
present, having imposed a pre-
determined form on all its vicissitudes. . . On the contrary, to follow
the complex course of
descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is
to identify the accidents, the
minute deviations . . . it is to discover that truth or being does not
lie at the root of what we know
and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents (Foucault 1984, 81).
Foucault
insists that an effective history must perform the work of disruption,
disarticulation and re-articulation, splicing and montage, in order to, as he
says, "introduce discontinuity into our very being" (88). Such an
approach to knowledge, acknowledging as it does the plasticity of temporality,
spatiality, and fiction, seems uniquely apposite to the consideration of the
social life of cinema. "Knowledge
is not made for understanding," Foucault cautions, "it is made for
cutting" (ibid).
The Practice of Love is at the center of this discontinuous history. I plan to discuss particular moments of film
history, in particular film noir and the European "art
cinema," and their generic spatial logics, which are inscribed in somewhat
explicit ways within the intertextual fabric of The Practice of Love. By treating this film as a political
analysis of filmic space, I hope to articulate Export's immanent critique of
these received filmic discourses. More
importantly, I plan to argue that Export pinpoints moments of spatial crisis
within these film styles, reinterpreting those moments by confronting them with
a politically engaged materialist experimentalism.
Valie Export forces a retroactive consideration of the
film histories from which she draws.
From an examination of the materialist premises of The Practice of
Love, we are able to read that film's present back into the past, allowing
for an historical realignment. To put
it another way, the inscription of the absolute limits of these cited film
genres within the spatial articulation of The Practice of Love results
in an occurance in the historical register of what psychoanalysis calls Nachtraglichkeit
or "deferred action." The
traumatic rent which Export's film rips within both narrative and purely
abstract space forces us to make meaning in reverse. This backtalk from the future, as opposed to a frontline
offensive, probably best characterizes the location of the avant-garde in
relation to the contemporary cultural landscape. Hal Foster describes the situation thus:
One event is only registered through another that recodes it; we come
to be who we are only in
deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit). It is this analogy that I want to
enlist for modernist studies
at the end of the century: historical and neo-avant-gardes are
constituted in a similar way, as a
continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of
anticipated futures and recon-
structed pasts -- in short, in a deferred action that throws over any
simple scheme of before and
after, cause and effect, origin and repetition (Foster 1997, 29).
If
we treat the allusions to spatial genre laws and their internal tensions within
The Practice of Love to be the ground-zero of our effective, traumatic
history, we can trace, across time and nation, the intersection of several
distinct filmmaking modes and their transfiguration across the space of
Export's film.
To examine how The Practice of Love engages
with the impossibility of film noir coherence, allow me to briefly
describe Robert Aldrich's 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, a film which is frequently cited as the limit-text of noir.
This is attributed in part to its refusal to temper its nihilism -- the film
concludes with the detonation of the atomic bomb -- as well as the film's
apparent representation of the visual modalities of noir pushed to their
outermost limit. Kiss Me Deadly
is a baroque implosion and denial of the chief tenet of noir's generic
promise: material must be subdued by the Law of the Father, returned to its
rightful place in the social hierarchy.
In response to this crisis of legibility and order, the film ironically
enfolds itself safely within devastation.
The incompetence of the masculine investigator, with the rather
overdetermined name of Mike Hammer, results in the bomb falling into the
feminine hands of one Lily Carver, who unleashes atomic annihilation in a
world-castrating seizure of fleeting power.
To sum up, Lily and the bomb are structurally identical, both
"matter" in their basest form -- woman as the unleashed materiality
of the body not subject to reason, and the free radicals of subatomic material,
turned loose to unlock the self-annihilating tendency dormant within every atom
on the earth. Moreover, Kiss Me
Deadly's crisis is designated as the failure of masculinity's metaphysical
charge, to keep the muck of spatial materiality at bay. Rather than to endure the decentering of the
male cogito, film noir destroys the world.
As Roswitha Mueller has observed in her exceptional
monograph on Export's work, The Practice of Love draws upon the
identifying tropes of the standard film noir. The film, however, radically departs from and critiques the noir
genre in some readily apparent ways.
Mueller notes that Judith Wiener, the investigating reporter, refuses to
discontinue her quest for the truth, even though it directly implicates one of
her lovers, Dr. Schögel in an arms smuggling deal -- making her, within noir
logic, simultaneously the "good dick" and the femme fatale (Mueller
166). However, Judith soon discovers
that the terms of noir are not reversible along gender lines. Her dual position results in an inverse
proportion -- the closer she as investigator comes to the truth, the more she
is punished for fatale transgressions.
To illustrate an admittedly obvious point, compare Sam Spade's triumph
in The Maltese Falcon, when he sends Brigid over, claiming that he
wouldn't let her get away with it, "precisely because every part of me
wants to." When Judith confronts Alfons
Schögel with her decision to crack the case despite her involvement with him,
he contemptuously tells her to stick to her "stories of abused women and
children," claiming she, being a naive woman, expects everything to have a
pat moralistic ending.
Nevertheless, Export's film does not leave the
position of Judith stranded within its double-bind. On the level of plot, we see Judith pack her bag, and as the
credits flash we hear an airport announcement for a flight to Chicago, and
finally see an rental ad, apparently for Judith's now-vacant flat. If we conclude that Judith Wiener is on the
flight to Chicago, as Mueller does, then perhaps she is both removing herself
from harm's way, as well as leaving Austrian political patriarchy behind.
Ceasing to be "Wiener" as a spatial identification, choosing instead
to enter the cultural negotiations of a Viennese in the American midwest, we
might optimistically consider Judith to metonymically displace the patriarchal
inheritance of her name and nation, even though neither can be fully shed.
On the level of mise-en-scene, The Practice
of Love alludes not only to noir but also to what for shorthand I
will call the European art film. By
this admittedly problematic term, I refer to selected films by Bergman, Resnais,
Robbe-Grillet, and Fellini, which could be said to share a preoccupation with
subjectivity and temporality within an idealist framework. That is, films such as Last Year at
Marienbad, Persona, and Juliet of the Spirits present
fragmented film time as representations
of subjective memory and of the interior lives of their protagonists. In these films, spaces are not spaces, but
are enclosed within a set of individual perceptions which, while filmically
jarring and innovative, remain anchored by a governing point of view undergoing
psychic extremity.
It is not incidental to my point that the three films
cited above represent attempts by male auteurs to convey female
subjectivity. But the fact that Valie
Export's film subverts the logic of the "art film" is not a matter of
identity politics. Export's feminist
materialism, specifically her understanding of the material properties of
bodies and spaces, presses against the confines of these idealist gestures
towards a stereotyped "feminine" psyche. The Practice of Love appears to contain visual quotations
from Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's 1961 Marienbad. The long tracking shot through the hotel
where Judith and Schögel have their trysts calls to mind Sacha Vierny's baroque
cinematographic mindscapes in Marienbad, although perhaps as filtered
through Chantal Akerman's stark, brutalist treatment of unpeopled corridors in
her 1972 film Hotel Monterey.
The spaces of Marienbad are explicitly linked with the fragmented
memories of the female protagonist, played by Delphine Seyrig, because, as
Maureen Turim writes, ". . . the repeated vague references to the past
that punctuate the film, to events from last year, could be entirely without
story behind them, no last year, no event, just an imaginary, fictive reference
with no referent" (Turim 217).
However, these memories are insisted upon by a man who claims to have
been the protagonist's lover. Within
this alleged depiction of female subjectivity, events are fashioned and imposed
upon the woman by a man who exhorts her to inhabit his fantasy within her own
interior life. Given this stacked deck,
it is appropriate that another moment in Practice of Love visually
rhymes with a scene in Marienbad, in which the man plays a parlor game
with matchsticks which, he claims, he can never lose.
The aforementioned hotel tracking shot in Practice
of Love is unsteady, initially seeming to be unproblematically aligned with
Schögel's point of view. The camera
follows him, then he leaves the field of vision, the camera moving
independently of a clear point of view but still presumably identified with
Schögel. But we then discover that the
uninterrupted point of view shot now belongs to Judith. She then enters the field of vision,
splitting off from the camera which nevertheless maintains its handheld
inscription of subjectivity. This
maneuver performs several tasks at once.
It can be seen as creating three consciousnesses for the apparatus, which
is both engaged in the erotic encounter between Judith and Alphons and also distanciated
from it. It can also be read as a
moment at which the subject positions of Judith and the film, momentarily
identified, are broken into two distinct indentificatory positions, with the
memory of our identification with Schögel maintaining the specter of the
third.
Until an embrace at the end of this scene, Judith and
Alphons do not appear in the frame at the same time (with the exception of
Judith appearing in the mirror as Schögel stands beside).. In this respect, assigning the field of vision
to a subject position is a tricky business.
Space, as constructed in an idealist film such as Marienbad,
belongs not only to a subjective position, but within the psyche of that
position. Here, the shifting back and
forth between Judith and Alphons makes the third option, identification with
the camera, the most unambiguous position to assume. This may at first sound like a move into "classical"
cinema, with its disembodied eye which, as Jean-Louis Baudry writes, "seems
to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the
"transcendental subject" (Baudry 1970, 537).
Export, however, inscribes embodiment and a subjective
observational standpoint with unsteady, intimate camerawork. We are not seeing ourselves seeing all, as
Baudry describes, but seeing the results of an obvious recording position. The handheld camera in this instance
underscores the cinematic inscription of the scene, making the typical idealist
indentification with the apparatus collide with a material, embodied location. Export makes the self-conscious recording
process the most stable, rational position for viewers to occupy. In this way, Export disallows both the false
mastery of the classical system and the all-in-the-head subjectivism of
"art cinema."
In addition to formally articulating a distinctly
human spectatorial position which avoids the traps of humanist illusion, The
Practice of Love provides a critique of the subjective encounter of women
and space as it is typically staged within the logics of both film noir and
the "art film." In a pivotal
scene, Export displays what I'd like to call the "spatial
unconscious" of the film. In this
scene, we see Judith on a bicycle, turning onto a deserted street. At first the street appears littered with
newspapers, but it soon becomes apparent that they are deliberately
placed. Large banners of newspaper edge
down the sides of buildings. Giant
reproductions of headlines cover billboards and the pavement. On the right, the facades of a series of
adjacent buildings contain unintelligible typographical symbols. Rounding the corner, Judith confronts the
embodiment of socially condoned female roles, in the person of the pregnant
wife of her other lover, Dr. Joseph Fischoff.
She is pushing a stroller and attempting to evade Judith. Finally, she -- or the position she
represents -- is annihilated as she and her baby are riddled with bullets while
Judith looks on at a distance, covering her ears. As the scene concludes, the motif of guns is contiguously spliced
between the personal and the social. An
investigating gaze enters the darkened space of a church basement, discovering
with a flashlight a cache of automatic weapons. Judith's subjective encounter appears to conclude with a series
of news photos and documentary film images of gun violence, concluding with a
repeated shot of a soldier aiming squarely at the camera.
I find this scene crucial to understanding the extent
of Export's materialist critique of the role of female subjectivity and its
spatial representation. For while we
may read this portion of the film as a "dream sequence" or more
generally as a spatial nightmare on the part of Judith, the construction of
this scene indicts the private idealism of a film like Marienbad or the
violent response to all-around threat which characterizes Kiss Me Deadly. In Practice of Love, Export thwarts
the Manichean spatial logic of noir -- either the aggressively
inscrutable space of the city is clarified through a sublation of emotion into
the Law, or, the unmasterable space must be eradicated. In fact, this is precisely the double-bind
of violence which it is Judith's aim to supplant. Here, space is not destroyed but navigated. For Judith, being an embodied material
"thing" among other things in space is understood as an axiom and a
starting point for action, and not in and of itself as a mark of impending
annihilation. Judith acts, and is acted
upon. This is not to say that she
resigns herself to passivity -- far from it.
Even as she is laughed off by the police and city fathers, even after
she discovers her trashed apartment, she relocates, perhaps striving to attain
distance -- following the logic of things, she takes control of her own
"circulation" and puts it to her own advantage. While she cannot effectively fight those who
control space from within their own power base, her own lack of an immediate
power base provides the possibility of regrouping, of resituating within what
Gramsci calls a "war of movement, war of position . . . underground
warfare" (Gramsci 229). Unlike the
masculinist Hammer, Judith is able to sublate the territorial spatial logic of noir.
At the same time, this most obviously subjective
moment of the film represents a determinate negation of the psychologized,
hermetic female (yet male-defined) interiority of Marienbad. The spaces traversed by Judith are best
characterized as a dialectic between a subjective, embodied perceptual position
and the social situation of space. This
"spatial" unconscious is an unremittingly social unconscious, marked
by Judith's engagement with the shared material meanings of the social
world. These are phantasmatic signs,
but they are not private fantasies or paranoid delusions. Rather, these material signs of political
violence, the marginalization of female desire, and the duplicitous character
of language, are simply the concrete materialization of what, although usually
invisible, is already concretely material. Export's film emphasizes the cultural materialist dimension of
even, and especially, our most seemingly private interactions with the
world.
To clarify, our subjective experiences, processed in
and through language, are irreducibly material. I draw from V. N. Volosinov, who writes, "The laws of the
generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual
psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of
speakers. The laws of language
generation are social laws" (Volosinov 98). Furthermore, he states, "A sign is a phenomenon of the
external world. Both the sign itself
and all the effect it produces (all those actions, reactions, and new signs it
elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience"
(11). (This statement is particularly
pertinent here, since Volosinov developed this materialist theory of language
by beginning with the issue of inner speech.)
Furthermore, the spaces we occupy and navigate -- and
I would argue that this must include filmic space -- are also material
things. Spaces constrain our bodies as
we navigate them, as we perform their cues.
Henri Lefebvre writes
Activity in space is restricted by that space; space 'decides' what
activity may occur,
but even this 'decision' has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it
implies a certain order -- and hence also a certain disorder (just as
what may be seen
defines what is obscene).
Interpretation comes later, almost as an afterthought. Space
commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and
distances to be covered
(Lefebvre 1974, 143).
The
materiality of these spaces, however, is only to be feared as long as we are
convinced that we cannot intervene in the material world of spatial
dispensation and the built environment.
Lefebvre continues,
. . . each living body is space and has space. This is a truly remarkable relationship: the
body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or
produces its own space;
conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of
discrimination in space, also
govern the living body and the deployment of its energies (Lefebvre 1974, 170).
Of
course, the coordination of these social-spatial energies requires political
engagement, a praxis of love. And
filmic space, like all signs and representations in the world, is itself
material. It has the power to fortify
or to dismantle either reactionary or progressive modes of perception,
interaction, and comportment. By
working through historical modes of filmic signification, drawing upon their
spatial logics in order to disarticulate their idealist blind alleys, The
Practice of Love is a materialist intervention into the political
landscape.
I conclude by drawing attention to a final scene, in
which Valie Export literally cancels out the spatial idealism of mainstream
narrative cinema at the site of its inscription of gender inequity. During an argument between Judith and
Joseph, he begins to bombard her with sexist taunts about her drunkenness and
physical appearance. Judith begins to
intervene by performing work on the material of his speech. Ever the journalist, she begins tape
recording his words, playing them back to him, forcing him to confront them as
she must, as estranged objects. Drunken
women, Joseph complains, "say the same thing five times and expect to be
listened to five times," but of course it is his speech which is
reproduced for such consideration.
But Judith's material intervention into the scene goes
further. After sweeping her arm across
a cluttered coffee table, she arcs her arm back, across our image of
Joseph. As she does, she (with the
help, of course, of Valie Export) scratches a cancellation mark into the
emulsion of the filmstrip, taking control within the diegesis of the
material substrate of the filmstrip.
Judith and Export, each within her respective register, denies Joseph,
this space, and its viewers the illusion of depth.
Such work upon the surface of the film is not uncommon
in the history of experimental film of which Export is a part. Too often, however, film critics who have
demanded a realist politics of signification have decried such work as
"apolitical." Nothing could
be more wrong. By insisting upon a
materialist recognition of the conditions of film representation, Valie
Export forces upon the typically
idealist site of film narrative a physical marker of the location of the
cinematic sign. This film -- a series
of sounds and images -- is a real thing, in the real world. So are we.
When we engage films and other things in this manner, we engage in praxis.
Works
cited
Hal Foster. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Michel
Foucault. "Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History." Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Hollis
Frampton. "For a Metahistory of
Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses."
Circles of Confusion.
Rochester, NY: Visual
Studies Workshop Press, 1983.
Antonio
Gramsci. "State and Civil
Society." Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans. Selections
from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. London: Blackwell, 1991.
Roswitha Mueller. Valie
Export: Fragments of the Imagination.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Maureen Turim. Flashbacks in Film. New York: Routledge, 1989.
V. N.
Vološinov. Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language. Ladislav
Matejka and I. R. Titunik, trans.
Cambridge,MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986.