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May 30, 2004
towards a subrealism
...or, the necessary insufficiency of the technical
...or, the dancing skeleton
I've been reading Michel Chion's strange book about Jacques Tati. If you ever have the good luck to find a cinema showing one of Tati's films, don't miss the opportunity to see it - not just because he's one of the greatest filmmakers of the last century but also because he belongs to a select group of filmmakers whose films work with the vastness of the cinema screen in a way that cannot be reproduced in any other medium. When you see Tati you're admitted to a select club, you're party to a universal, hilarious, sad, moving way of seeing. They're something utterly unlike anything else you'll ever see. You'll never look at the world quite the same again.
I recently got hold of some DVDs, and you can partly appreciate the films, especially Tati's use of sound; but seeing 'Playtime' (originally shot on 70mm) au cinema is a once-in -a-lifetime experience. 'Playtime' was a financial disaster; Tati bankrupted himself building the set (rather than using Paris he built his own supermodernist 'tativille' artificial city). 'Playtime' (or 'Serious Playtime') is the joyous counterpart to the moody, ponderous pretentions of Godard's 'Alphaville'. Tati, to paraphrase Deleuze, attacks the modern world using humour. The uncanny movements he reveals under the skin of cosmopolitan life, are at once funny and sinister, like a dancing skeleton; a warning of sorts. They show humans as tiny gadgets hopelessly under the influence of a 'machine for living' with its own unfathomable vectors and desires.
Tati uses static shots to create massive tableaux, abstract diagrams where ten disconnected events may be happening independently of each other, in different parts of the screen, or where the alienation he engineers allows us to see the absurd interplay of apparently rational elements. There are no agents, even M. Hulot himself is just a set of traits, a vector, a machine; and yet the world Tati shows us is no different from the 'real' but for this deliberate step back, and the gags, which are always beautifully underdone, utterly plausible (Tati by preference used real people rather than actors, observing their traits and peculiarities, miming them back to the person, and then training the person to impersonate themselves.)
These tableaux mustn't be confused with 'wide-angle' shots, where space is compressed fish-eye style, this would distort the space around the viewer, make the viewer the focus of importance. Rather, like Andreas Gursky's massive photographs taken with a large-format camera, space is geometrically flattened out into a plane of consistency spotted with areas of differing activity, intensity, rhythm. It's the movie equivalent of Lyotard's imaginary infra-surgery in 'Libidinal economy', systematically destroying the theatres of interiority in favour of a flattened exteriority in which everything connects. 'Open up the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces...'. Beyond the organism and organization. The viewer is situated in this space primarily sonically: like the deleuzo-guattarian account of the subject, the viewer's attention wanders nomadically across a gigantic surface teeming with life, led by Tati's subtle shifts in the sound-mix.
The size of Gursky's images obviously aspires to the cinematic and renders them literally incommensurate with traditional domesticated gallery photography, where stark white borders on white walls lend an funereal, dogmatic authority that is death to the immediacy of the photographic image. Here there is more of the feeling of being overwhelmed and possessed by the images, as in tati's 70mm panorama. As you look into the image, you are immediately cut off from its physical context, but neither are you illusorily 'in' the pictorial space : rather, you find yourself on the surface of the image.
Human beings in Gursky' photographs, where they are shown, are shown in anonymous arrangements, distributions in space. Sometimes (Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Diptych) 1994) locked into place as if mechanically dropped into a grid; sometimes (Car Show, Paris 1993) swarming like an insect mass; sometimes (Albertville 1992, Engadine 1995) forming themselves into disparate bands or ribbons which hug the earth. Often (e.g. Klausen Pass 1984) humans are scattered, scarcely noticeable, like a handful of gravel thrown over the landscape, but nevertheless transforming the surface on which they crawl; making of it a territory, a map, a plan. Elsewhere we see animals, (Chickens, Krefeld) distributed across the surface of the earth with no 'pictorial' focus. A frozen diagram of chance distribution. 'Everything freezes for a moment'. How did these motile, intelligent particles come to this arrangement, and where will they go? What forces are at work creating and dispersing these elements? Tati's movies set out to defrost the same stasis, to solve the same mystery that lies at the heart of Gursky's photography.
The vast, detailed images of factories (Schiesser (Diptych) 1991, Grundig, Nurnberg 1993, PTT, Rotterdam 1995) could almost be taken for detourned corporate commissions were it not for this hauntedness, the sense that one cannot truly understand what state of affairs is being depicted despite its technically comprehensive depiction. It's not simply a function of the dehumanised, clinical surfaces. Although with such austere treatment of already stark locations, Gursky's images could easily slip into either irony or ideological cynicism, it is in the avoidance of both that their power and seriousness lies. For the plight of human beings, either absent and therefore by imputation banished by their own promethean creations, or present but beleaguered and reduced to machine parts, is here neither a matter of aestheticized futurism, nor a nostalgic commentary on the horror of technological depredations. There is no tragedy here; not the cheapened tragedy exemplified by the style press's deadpan use of decaying urban landscape (and people), nor a green counterpoint of nature and industry in polemical drama.
What the photographs reveal, anticipating and rendering irrelevant such judgments, is a materialist view of a cosmos where lifeforms and machines mark out and organise territory, running to a mysterious program; the abstract matter of the universe at work. As one commentatory notes of the monumental Mondrian-grid Gursky makes of a Montparnasse Tower block (Paris, Montparnasse 1993):
'The photograph, in limiting and formalising the intrinsic qualities of a place, can become an object truer to its spirit than the reality of the place itself'(Greg Hilty, 'Andreas Gursky - Images', Tate Gallery Liverpool 1995)
The spirit of a comprehensive technical articulation of the surface of the earth, whether through the medium of a crowd who ribbon-like, delimit territories on the ski slope or through the repetitive arrays of factory implements in the factories, speaks to us from a place not only beyond good and evil, but beyond aesthetics, beyond aesthetic judgement, to a contemplation of sub-reality, of the structure and structuring of reality.
There is more to this than being true to an 'inner sense' of the subjects/objects portrayed. In their formality, Gursky's images and Tati's films sometimes gesture toward diagram, the purely formal state of friction-free commutation to which post-industrial objects themselves aspire. But by their nature as photographic images, they always represent physical space, filled or emptied to a given degree.
In fact, Gursky never submits to the temptation to grant his objects (even humans) the self-image they aspire to. The reticulated arrays of factory equipment in Siemens, Karlsruhe 1991 are presented in all their brutal clarity and rationality, and yet in their procession across the image, in the diagonal rush of striplights into the distance, in the messy claustrophobia of cables piling one behind another toward the centre, we experience an oscillation between the pure abstraction of the virtual diagram of the equipment - its logical 'essence' - and its debased realisation in physical space - this dichotomy which constitutes our contemporary condition.
Likewise, Tati's humour often lies in the contrast between supposed efficiency (for instance the Courbusier house in Mon Oncle) and the stubborn complex messiness of reality, which always results in unforeseen consequences, functional and visual surplus values (in the night the house becomes a gigantic owl with backlit eyes). The most masterful depiction of this process is the new restaurant in 'Playtime' which we watch slowly disintegrate before our eyes - eventually the visitors begin to mark out their own spaces within it, like the beginnings of society a post-apocalyptic world (and perhaps this was what Tati secretly wished for most of all, that the mess would finally take over so we could start again.)
M. Hulot, of course, is the one who doesn't fit, his bloodhound nose and headlong gait the expression of an innocent curiosity, Tati's too-tall body and too-short trousers depict a person who no matter how much he tries (as in Mon Oncle where his sister tries to get him a job) doesn't fit, doesn't function in the right way. M Hulot's backfiring, juddering car is on, but not of the road, unlike the vehicular hordes in the grand finale of 'Playtime', when we see the entire roadsystem as a gigantic merry-go-round. A simple enough conceit, but carried off with unequalled elegance and beauty by Tati.
The technics of global virtuality, then, have not yet abolished space, yet they continue to alter it in ways which never adhere to its own strict plans, nor its champions' slogans, but unfold according to a mysterious unpredictable logic.
Baudrillard:
There's a duel between technical equipment and the world, and a collusion too (the one implies the other). Photography[...]might be said to be the art of slipping into that collusion - not to control the process, but to play with it and show that the die is not irrevocably cast.
Tati's films, and Gursky's images (though with a germanic high-seriousness inimicable to tati's gentle gallic humour), take us into this suspended state; The impossibility of the Plan, the recalcitrance of objects, the surprising emptiness and substantiality of things. In Tati's case through film we are able to move beyond the stasis and find a laughter and a rage at the stereotyped or apparently random, communicating or non-communicating rhythms that lie underneath meaning. (In Gursky's work, any such response is impossible, or always held in abeyance)
'Playtime' is a magnificent work exquisite in every detail, it's a rhythmic portrait of the unconscious of a modern city. Tati manages to strip away everything that makes up the meaningful surface of the real, and of a 'normal' film, leaving just teeming intensities, and yet somehow connects these back to everyday life. I don't yet have the words to describe it, neither does Chion, really; that's why you need to see the films...
However, as Chion remarks, once you're let into the secret, 'life is full of homages to Tati': yesterday we were briefly in 'carmody country' : The prom at Lyme Regis seen from the water's edge displays a stratification of leisure as fascinating as the more famous fossil-filled cliffs in the distance (nb. Lyme Regis is a lovely place, only nibbled at the edges by the pernicious heritage industry with its - now somewhat anachronistic - attempted Spielberg cash-in selling of the area as 'the Jurassic Coast'). From bottom to top, and layered as distinctly and crisply as in a modernist canvas : the beach, with its whoops and splashes (the soundworld that I can never hear again without it meaning Mr Hulot's holiday), then, the promenade where tribal parties wander falteringly, agonizing over the price of fish and chips for five; then above this and somehow defying perspective, a lush and well-kept park transected by gently curving pathways, where old folk sit on benches licked by the rising scent of carbohydrates slowly caramelising in hot fat. A vast blue sky at the top, as in the opening sequence to 'Playtime' where we see nothing but the sky, and a ribbon of dirty grey lapping beneath. In all, with the little diagonal walkways connecting each level to the next, it has the look of a platform-game, Mario goes to the Seaside. It's equally ready-made for a Tati film or a Gursky photo.
Posted by robin at May 30, 2004 02:54 PM