From Word To Word

It has been some time now since we screened Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze at the last Dinner and a Doc.  I had a fair amount that I wanted to write about the film, but I never seemed to find enough consecutive minutes to do this writing.  So, rather than leave it waiting any longer, I will just share a single image from the film and leave the rest for another occasion.

The image that I found most intriguing was a shot of a sandal floating upside down on the river.  In the dry centre of the sandal’s sole is a piece of food, a vegetable of some sort, and it is surrounded by ants, which are running back and forth between the food and the wet edges of the shoe.  They are surrounded on every side by water.  They must choose whether to float on the river until they are baked by the sun or to risk the water and drown.

This shot means on multiple levels, of course.  It allegorizes our limited planet with its limited resources and our seemingly unlimited demands.  It represents the way that the rising river has carried people away from their homes, has forced them to move or to drown.  It parallels the earlier shot where the female protagonist’s home is gradually surrounded and then engulfed by the river.   It symbolizes the tour boats on which this young girl is trying to make her living, where she serves rich tourists as they sail over the fields that her parents had once farmed.

I also wonder, however, whether this last level of meaning might be doubling as a commentary on the tourists themselves.  Perhaps, in one sense at least, the ants  represent, not the Chinese workers trapped by the repercussions of the flood, but the foreign tourists trapped by the assumptions of their wealth and culture and privilege.  Perhaps they are ones who are floating on the river, eating blithely from the buffet, unaware of the predicament that their consumption is creating.  I am both amused and disconcerted by this possibility.

This coming Saturday, May 9th is the next Dinner and a Doc, and we will be screening Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang.   The film follows Chang as he returns to China to travel the Yangtse River one final time before the Three Gorges Dam creates from it a reservoir for the world’s largest hydroelectric project.  The director himself describes the voyage as surreal, and the film has received accolades both for its cinematography and for its unique portrayal of the effects of industrialization.

Further information about the film is available at the official website, in the official trailer, and in this interview with Yung Chang.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

This past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc featured Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which explores the photographs and video clips that were taken of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Morris’ primary concern in the film is not, as one might expect, with torture as such.  It is not even with the sort of people who would commit these acts.  Rather, it is with the people who would film and photograph the torture, with those who would copy and share these images, and with those who would try to read and interpret this evidence.  In doing so, he attends continually to the visual frame, drawing attention to how this frame provides the limit of interpretation and even of legal culpability.

One of the ways that he draws attention to the frame of the image is by continually rematting the shots in the interview segments.  Both the sound and the image of the interviewees remain continuous as he does this, so that there is no interruption in the sense of what is being said, but the image becomes repositioned within the frame, slightly to the left or slightly to the right, so that the space around the interviewee’s face or torso is shifted .

The effect of this technique is twofold, I think.  First, it highlight’s Morris’ concern with what the frame of a picture includes and excludes, whether this frame be produced by a picture of torture at Abu Ghraib or by Morris’ own film footage.  In this sense, the rematting serves as a subtle reminder that the frame of the image is not absolute, that it is constructed, that it includes and excludes, and that it always excludes infinitely more than it includes, an idea that he also explores more explicitly elsewhere in the film.

Second, the rematting is also an indication that Morris is uncomfortable with how the frame of the film  tends to reduce the complexity of those being interviewed to a single authoritative perspective.  The shifts in matting present a kind of restlessness and uncertainty in the filmic gaze, as if the camera is never able to find a comfortable vantage from which to capture and understand its subjects.  This attempt to draw attention to the complexity of the filmed subject is characteristic of Morris’ whole body of work, and the rematting effect reinforces this idea visually.

These two functions of the rematting are connected, of course.  They both relate to the limitation of the image as a means to convey meaning, which is a significant question, considering how reliant our culture is becoming on the image and considering also how naively many people understand images to represent meaning.  By questioning exactly how seeing becomes believing, Morris is opening a question that extends far beyond the photographs from Abu Ghraib and far beyond the films that comprise his own work, a question, in fact, that is becoming an increasingly fundamental one in our imagistic society: “How exactly do images mean?” or, perhaps better, “How exactly do we read images?”

I think that the answer to these questions is of the utmost significance.  If it is indeed the case that our society is increasingly dominated by the image, then it becomes increasingly necessary for people to be able to read and to interpret these images critically, not with the purpose of producing absolute or otherwise authoritative  interpretations, but with the purpose of attending to the ways that these interpretations form and inform us.  I might even go so far as to say that teaching ourselves to read images in this way is the primary task of anyone who is interested in responding ethically to our culture as such.

I know that I will only be submitting once again to my Errol Morris fixation by showing Standard Operating Procedure at this month’s Dinner and a Doc, but I just bought my own copy of the film last week, and I have not yet seen it, so that is what we will be watching.  Those who have concerns about my obsessive relationship with Errol should feel free to direct them to my therapist.

The film explores the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Morris, who has described the film as a non-fiction horror movie, sets out to discover the meaning of the photographs of the torture that took place in the prison, not just their sensationalized and media produced meanings or their seemingly self-evident meanings, but their broader and more contextualized meanings.  Using the words of one of the soldiers that he interviewed, Morris claims that the film tries to ask what the pictures mean outside their frames.

Those who are interested in further information can check the
trailer, a clip of the first day at the prison, the official website, and the director’s website.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I have been distracted these last few days, so I am only just getting around to writing about this past Saturday night’s Dinner and a Doc, which is a bit unfortunate, because it was a memorable evening, even if partly for the wrong reasons.

The first of these wrong reasons was a slew of cancellations. Some people were away because of March Break, others were ill, others had commitments, and so the only visitors who were added to the not inconsiderable population of our own home was a couple who had not been able to join us for Dinner and a Doc in almost a year. I was not too distraught. My intention has always been to show films that I would like to see anyway, and to watch them whether anyone joins me or not, and besides, I have often found that fewer people mean better conversation, especially when I have not had a chance to really converse with these people in some time, and especially when they have brought a nice bottle of wine.

The second of the unfortunate reasons was that, about halfway through the screening of the film, Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club, the couple who had come were called away by a minor family emergency, leaving just my wife, my mother, my mother-in-law, and me. Though we enjoy each other’s company, it was not exactly how we had expected the evening to unfold.

Fortunately, there were also many good reasons that the night was memorable, not least among them being the Smoked Beer and Cheddar Cheese Soup that I made, and the homemade bread and cinnamon buns that my mother baked to accompany it. The soup was not universally acclaimed, some finding the smoky taste a little overwhelming, but I enjoyed it very much, perhaps as much as any soup I have ever made. The opinion on the baking, however, was undivided. Loaves of whole grain bread and cinnamon buns filled with cranberries, both fresh from the oven, almost always produce a consensus of opinion, at least in my experience.

The film itself was also memorable, of course. Having heard so much about it, I was worried that it might not match my expectations, but I was not disappointed. The music is what it is: vital and marvellous, even for me, though Latin music is not at all a part of my regular listening. It is the musicians, however, who make the film compelling. Wenders arranges them in the homes and the streets and the buildings of their city and allows them to reminisce about their lives, causing their stories and their personalities to carry the narrative weight of the film, and creating the sense that the music is merely symbolic of the people who have spent their lives creating it.

I think that Wenders reinforces this idea that it is the musicians rather than the music who are the focus of the film by portraying the Amsterdam concert in black and white. Wenders had used black and white footage symbolically in at least one earlier film, Wings of Desire, a drama in which an angel decides to give up immortality and become human so that he can be with the woman he has come to love. Scenes from the angelic perspective are all shot in black and white in this film, while scenes from the human perspective are all in colour, representing the lack of feeling and emotion that is the cost of the angels’ immortality.

Considering this earlier usage of black and white film, I think that Wenders might be making a similar symbolic gesture in Buena Vista Social Club, keeping the footage of the concert in black and white to represent how it lacks the human life and vitality of the footage that is taken of the musicians in their own city and in their own homes. That the final Carnegie Hall concert is shown in colour might argue against this thesis, and while it might be that the black and white footage is merely intended to visually remind us of the fifties, the period when the Buena Vista Social Club was alive and active, I would argue that the effect of this footage is to mark a difference between when the musicians are on the stage and when they are in their homes. In the light of Wings of Desire, the black and white scenes seem to say, yes, you can have these wonderful musicians come and perform for you, but only at the price of removing them from the lives, and the emotions, and the contexts that make them who they are.

In this way, the film calls into question the act of going to the concert, at least insofar as this act is understood as a way to see musicians “live and in person”. In other words, it raises the problems of performance and identity, and it seems to argue that a meeting in the home is more live and in person than a concert in a hall. The film itself, however, is obviously as much a performance as a concert, and it is perhaps illusory to think that it offers any greater degree of intimacy than a music hall, but the subjects of the film make it difficult to maintain this kind of scepticism. However much they may be performing for the camera, however much Wenders may be arranging and prompting and editing their performances, there are moments when they seem to somehow emerge from the film and approach the audience.

Perhaps this is the reason that the final concert is shown in colour. Perhaps this is Wenders’ own concession that, however much media might distort their subjects, there are moments when the people themselves transcend the medium and come forth to us. Whatever the case, it is in this coming forth that the film finds itself. It is in the lives and persons of the musicians that it becomes what it is.

There are several factors that went into choosing Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club for this month’s Dinner and a Doc. First, it is one of those famous documentaries that I should have seen by now but have not. Second, it is a film by another of the great contemporary documentarians that I want to introduce to people. Third, it is by all accounts a very positive film, and I am in the mood for something that will not be telling me how the world is coming to an end in one horrible way or another. We will have plenty of opportunity to depress ourselves in the coming months.

The Buena Vista Social Club was a Havana club that was a favourite place for Cuban musicians to meet and play during the 1940’s. It served as an inspiration for an album of the same name that featured several veterans of the club alongside guitarist Ry Cooder. The film explores the lives and music of these artists, following them from their home country to their acclaimed world tour in 1998.

Further information about the director and the film can be found at Wender’s official site.

Clips from the film can be found at the following links: Chan Chan and Candela.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I decided to screen something a little different for this Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc.  I usually show films that are addressing a topic that I think will stimulate some discussion, though I try to make selections that have some artistic value as well. This month, however, I decided to show Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which is a fabulous film, but one that has no single organizing principle beyond the life of Dieter Dengler and, therefore, no obvious place to begin a discussion.  Though I was certain that we would find something to interest us, I had no idea what shape our conversation would take.

As I expected, the interaction after the film was a little more scattered than it usually is.  A few shared their initial impressions, and then we followed several tangents, and then we got sidetracked altogether, but the end result was still interesting, at least to me, and the conversation did not come completely to an end until some time around midnight. Among the many ideas that were shared, someone suggested that perhaps the appeal of Dengler’s life is as much due to his narration of it, to the way that he tells it, as it is to the events that comprise it.  Someone else made another comment almost immediately afterwards, and I did not make an effort to return to this idea, but it intrigued me nevertheless, and I began to reflect on how the narrative is actually structured.

The film is basically divided between two narrators: Dengler himself, who is most often an on-screen narrator, and Herzog, who is always an off-screen narrator.  This approach to the narration is uncommon for Herzog, who usually prefers to do most of the narration himself, and who appears as a participant in almost all of his films to one degree or another.  The two voices, both male, both with German accents, do not contrast each other strongly, but they are clearly different.  Dengler’s less pronounced accent and more casual diction always distinguish him from Werner’s heavily germanic English and his tendency to rhetorical excess.  The two compliment each other, but remain always distinct.

Dengler’s narrative voice begins the film.  The opening scene has him speaking to an artist who has drawn one of the visions that he saw during his escape through the jungle.  Dengler explains to the artist how his drawing is inaccurate, and this explanation includes an expressive account of the vision itself, which he describes as hundreds of horses galloping through huge doors in the heavens.  This scene establishes his narrative voice in a way that the film continually reinforces, as both the authentic and authenticating voice of the one who was there and who has lived through a real event and also the mystical and mystifying voice of the one who is now here after having experienced the surreal and the miraculous.

Herzog’s narrative voice usually lies across Dengler’s.  It summarizes and informs, and it thereby abstracts from Dengler also.  It is the voice of the one who was not there, who has not experienced, but who therefore has the capacity to draw the narrative back from Dengler’s intimate voice and to examine that voice at a distance, as an object and as a specimen.  There is one fascinating scene that illustrates this function very clearly, where Herzog’s narration of a story is superimposed on a shot of Dengler, whose hand gestures clearly indicate that he is telling the same story at almost exactly the same time.  Here, the scene says clearly, Herzog thought that his directorial voice was more appropriate to the story of Dengler’s life than Dengler’s own, and I would argue that it is more appropriate, not because it is more authentic, but precisely because it is less authentic, because it is less intimate, because it forces the viewer to see Dengler rather than hear him, to watch his gestures rather than to be drawn into the intimacy of his narrative.

In this way, the two narrative voices function to continually reposition the viewer between the intimacy and authority and mysticism of Dengler’s voice and the distance and exteriority of Herzog’s voice.  Dengler’s voice alone would have told a story that was too compelling, too hypnotic.  We, as viewers, would have fallen into the illusion that we were not really viewers at all, not really observers, but somehow participants also in the narrative of his life.  We would have convinced ourselves that his narrative was adequate to his life, that it was somehow capable of giving us its essence.  This is the quality of Dengler’s voice, what makes it irresistible, and it is this that Herzog’s directorial narrative serves to disrupt.  It permits us to be enraptured with Dengler’s account only so long before it brings us up short, imposes itself between him and us, forces us to look at him from a distance and to see the man whose story and whose life has been allowing us to see the visions, both terrible and beautiful, that he once saw.

Graeme Ross, a friend of mine from soccer, dropped by on Wednesday afternoon to return a film that he had borrowed from me.  We had also arranged to watch a documentary over coffee while he was there, and we settled on James Longley’s Gaza Strip.  As we were watching, people were occasionally coming and going, patients of the physiotherapy and osteopathy practise that my mother-in-law runs out of our home.  One gentleman arrived a little early to pick up his wife, so he came to watch the film with us for ten minutes or so, and I was interested to see how his mere presence changed the viewing experience for me.

Prior to this gentleman’s arrival, I was focused mostly on Longley’s film, which is good but not terribly remarkable.  It uses some interesting editing techniques, including one sequence of high speed still shots interspersed with longer freeze frames, all depicting a Gaza city at night, but these experimental elements are largely outweighed by what is otherwise very conventional cinematography.  At times, it conveys surprisingly intimate moments, particularly with one young man, whose narrative forms a loose structure for the documentary, but I felt that its total effect was too loose, episodic, unfocussed, and disunified.  As I said, it was good, but not very remarkable.

The moment that our unexpected visitor arrived, however, I began to experience the film very differently.  Rather than being concerned primarily with the film itself, with its subject and technique and politics, I found myself attending also to the film as the element through which this man was first seeing me and coming to know me.  What was  he was thinking as he was sitting there with us?  Was he wondering why two grown adults were sitting around watching a documentary in the middle of a weekday afternoon?  Was he evaluating the politics of people who would watch a film that advocates so strongly for the Palestinian cause?  How, in short, was the film introducing us to him?

Suddenly, I realized how uncommon this kind of experience is.  Culturally speaking, we are not often confronted by another person first in the context of viewing a film.  We are frequently in the position of watching a film with strangers in the setting of the theatre, of course, but we are not usually confronted by these people.  They exist for us, and they help form our film experience, but we do not often recognize them in their particularity, and certainly not in a situation where the film has been selected by us in a way that it has not been by them, in a situation where the film might be understood to be representative of us in some way.

When we do watch film in a context that confronts us with others, we almost always ensure that it is in an intimate setting, with those we already know, where even the choice of film is most often made between us.  The film experience on these occasions is something that we construct among us.  It is not that we are able to determine all of the factors in this experience, but that we actively participate with each other in producing the event of the viewing, much in the way that Graeme and I arranged to meet together, chose the film together, and sat down to watch it as an event in our relationship.

When our visitor arrived, however, the viewing experience became radically altered.  Now, rather than an event taking place in an already existing relationship, it became the moment through which a relationship was begun, and a moment that was produced far more by us than by him, so that his introduction to us was almost entirely restricted to that of observation.  He was not introduced to us directly, where we might interact with him.  He was introduced merely to our choice of film, where he could only observe this choice and us through it, without over really entering into it.

I am uncertain what to make of this kind of interaction, though I think that it must occur in less obvious ways in almost every communal viewing of a film.  It is causing me to examine more closely the realtional elements that go into screening a film as factors in responding to film and to others in the context of a film viewing.  I have not yet thought very far through these ideas, and I am uncertain exactky how to procede with them, so I would appreciate any thoughts that others might be able to offer me.

I have decide to change how I go about offering online content for my Dinner and a Doc events.  Rather than posting it on my course website, which basically functions like a glorified blog for this material in any case, I will be posting information for upcoming Dinner and a Doc nights here, where it can also be more naturally linked to the other writing that I do on documentary.

This coming Saturday, February 14th, we will be screening Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the story of Dieter Dengler, a young German boy who watches Allied bombers destroy his village during World War II and decides that he needs to be a pilot.  He moves to the United States, becomes a pilot for the Navy, and is sent to Vietnam, where he is shot down over Loas and held as a prisoner for some time.  Herzog accompanies Dengler as he returns to the jungle and tries to come to terms with his past, creating an intimate portrait of a remarkable life.

Here are links to the film in four parts for those who want a preview or who cannot make the screening: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

The event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email to let me know that you will be coming.  We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.  I hope to see some of you there.

“Authority,” says Michel de Certeau, “is indissociable from an abuse of knowledge.”  This is because the knowledge on which authority is supposed to be based cannot be adequately translated to those over whom the authority is to be exercised.  In other words, in order for experts to communicate their expertise to those who are not experts, they must necessarily reduce, simplify, distort, and otherwise do violence to the knowledge that is the basis of their status and of their authority.  In this sense, the expert could perhaps be defined as the one who gains authority through the abuse of an inequity of knowledge.

This relationship between the expert and knowledge is produced because the one with knowledge only appears as an expert, only takes on this role, with respect to those who are not also experts in the same knowledge.  It is precisely this inequity of knowledge that creates the expert as such.  Where there is equality of knowledge, there is no expert.  The role of the expert only exists in relation to the role of the inexpert.  It is defined by this inequity of knowledge, and its function is to translate knowledge across this inequity, not necessarily to erase it, of course, because this would be to eliminate the expert’s own role, but more often to emphasize it and to reinforce the authority that it provides the expert.

I would argue, however, that the inequity that produces the expert is not always one of knowledge alone, but is often also an inequity in practise, in time, in access to tools, or in access to resources.  It may be sometimes that I will defer to an expert because I lack the expert’s knowledge, but it is just as likely that I will defer because I lack the practice to make this knowledge useful, or because I do not have the tools to make my practise applicable, or because I do not have the materials on which to use my tools, or for many other reasons. Expertise, in other words, is not merely a product of knowledge, but of many factors: experience, practise, reputation, equipment, materials, models, etcetera, all of which necessarily become abused when they become the basis of an authority.  The expert, then, expanding on my earlier definition, would be the one who gains authority through the abuse of an inequity in expertise

If, however, the expert is the one who abuses expertise by making it found an authority,  I would suggest that the amateur is the one who uses expertise by allowing it to found a humility. This means that the difference between the amateur and the expert is not based on the degree of expertise that they possess, or on whether they employ their expertise in a paid profession, but on the role that they play in relation to knowledge.  Where the expert occupies a role of mastery in regard to expertise and uses this role to underwrite an authority, the amateur occupies a role of humility in regard to expertise and uses this role to express a desire for knowledge.

This does not mean that the amateur never shares expertise.  Quite the opposite.  The amateur, driven by a desire for knowledge and by a humility in the face of knowledge, will be continually sharing expertise, but only in ways that do not seek to found an authority.  The amateur models rather than dictates, discusses rather than lectures, assists rather than demonstrates, and this is true with every kind of expertise, whether it be how to change the oil in a car, how to grow organic tomatoes, how to read a novel, how to bake a pie, or how to solve trigonometric equations.  Rather than permitting an inequity of expertise to become the basis of an authority that can only abuse what founds it, the amateur encourages this inequity to become the basis of a familiarity that is intended only to provide the model of the amateur’s own desire for knowledge.  Rather than maintaining a distance of authority, the amateur invites participation in the doing and learning and teaching of knowledge.

What this means, of course, is that many of the positions in which experts now function are not recuperable by the amateur.  Even the most innovative teacher, for example, is often constrained to function in the role of the expert, and many other occupations have even less opportunity to choose amateurism over expertise.  Wherever a person’s function is determined as a matter of economics, or of legality, or of governmentality, there will be a tendency to privilege the expert at the expense of the amateur.  Though it is possible for one to function as an amateur in a professional setting, therefore, amateurism is mostly expressed in the places where legal, professional, governmental, and cultural forces are least felt, in the cracks and crevices that these forces necessarily maintain within themselves.  It appears here and there, wherever there is space and desire and opportunity.

Amateurism, defined in this way, is related to the kind of intellectualism that I outlined a few days ago in my post on the difference between intellect and intelligence.  They are both ways to describe an approach to knowledge that is founded in desire.  The true intellectualism that I described in that post, the one whose primary desire for knowledge is neither an end in itself nor a means to an end but is a means to the self, this kind of intellectualism must always remain an amateurism also. Its relation to knowledge must always take the form of a fundamental humility that immerses itself in knowledge rather than trying to encompass knowledge in itself, from which it might be measured out as an education, sold as a commodity, or used to guarantee an authority.  A true intellectualism, a true amateurism, is never able to occupy this position, is never able to play the role of the expert, because this role does a violence to the object of its desire. It reduces the amateur’s eroticism to something it can no longer recognize and can no longer love.