(A version of the paper that follows was delivered at the conference "The Moving Form of Film: Exploring Intermediality as a Historiographical Method" held at the University of Reading in November 2017. It hasn't otherwise seen the light of day; I post it here in memory of Phill Niblock, 1933-2024.)
The
following paper is, I'm afraid, a little speculative. I have some thoughts to
offer rather than any solid conclusions to present. But it does have its basis
in something concrete enough, namely an interest in two filmmakers that to my
knowledge have never been discussed together: Phill Niblock and Pedro Costa.
The senses of intermediality I will address here will be, for the most part,
rather abstract; I'm interested in the notions of betweeness, of
crossing empty spaces, that the concept seems to me to imply. I want to explore
some of the ways betweenness can manifest in film; an awareness of
intermediality can help to sensitise us to such issues, even if, as will be the
case in this paper, relationships between different media are not our primary
concern.
Phill
Niblock has long championed the notion of intermediality. The foundation he
inaugurated in 1968 is called Experimental
Intermedia. Born in 1933, he has had a diverse career
involving photography – of, for example, notable jazz musicians (he
photographed the legendary Money Jungle sessions featuring Duke
Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach) – filmmaking and musical composition. Central
to Niblock's most extensive practice is the concurrent performance of
high-decibel drone music with simultaneous projections of multiple films. The
music is produced by overdubbing multiple recordings of one or more musicians
playing sustained tones, which are played back at extreme volume, sometimes
with the musicians adding more layers by playing live. I've watched him at soundcheck
– he uses a decibel meter to check that things are deafening enough! In the
interests of full disclosure and context, I should say that I have performed
one of Niblock's pieces for double bass and met him on a few occasions, but I
don't know him at all well.
In
performance, then, Niblock breaks down distinctions between concert and
installation settings by playing a number of pieces over a long duration, in
parallel with projection of his film works. Any focus on individual films is
decentred by having two or more films projected simultaneously; one gallery
performance in London I attended involved I think twelve projections, three on
each wall. These films are very often from the series The Movement of People
Working, which he made between 1973 and 1985 in rural parts of countries
including China, Brazil, Mexico and Hungary. They show exactly what the title
implies: images of one or more people at work, often at repetitive – though
frequently highly skilled – tasks. Niblock claims that the shots are presented
quite simply in the order which they were filmed, that his editing decisions
extended only to which shots to include, not in how they are to be arranged.
It seems to
me that critical discussion of this work has been rather excessively respectful
of Niblock's proclamations regarding its meaning and implications. (And in fact
significantly more attention has been paid to his music than to his films.) A
case in point is an article by Juan Carlos Kase, "Phill Niblock's
Observational Cinema". Kase quotes Niblock as saying that '[t]hese films
are about moving bodies; they're not about people.', and observes that 'by
foregrounding the contingency of the human body in all its sweaty, twisting
musculature, these films are about people, but understood as historical
[data], not psychological subjects' (432). We might agree that there has been a
form of subtractive activity at work; in an interview accompanying the DVD of The
Movement of People Working Niblock observes:
"So in film,
I am interested in eliminating film time (editing time) and montage,
sequencing, narrative line,
development, plot, all off the things usually relevant to film, and concentrating on stasis, reiteration on
a single idea. So, I think that is abstract although at first sight the films appear to be figurative and documentary.
But they have nothing of documentary
film form."
But does
this subtractive activity render the films' subjects not people, not
psychological subjects, or might this very absence activate our curiosity and
speculation? I'm suspicious of Kase's further claim that '[t]he Movement
of People Working films suggest no ideological agenda' (431); the ideology of being non-ideological is evidently one
of the most ideological positions possible. In contrast, Mathieu Copeland has
claimed that 'The Movement of People Working offers a strong social and
political comment, as highlighted by the title and represented by the closeness
with the workers' (Working Title 107), but he fails to elaborate on the
nature of this comment. The parallel he draws with Godard and Chris Marker who,
as he puts it, 'gave workers the cameras and informed them of cinematic
techniques so that they could actually make their own films' (ibid.) is
puzzling because this comparison underlines nothing so much as Niblock's difference
from such politically engaged practices.
One possible
response would be to label these films as exploitative and politically
regressive. The labour of people working at great distance,
both geographically and economically, from the filmmaker's own usual milieu,
are transformed into objects of aesthetic consumption. Niblock uses relatively
long lenses, foreshortening and flattening out spatial relationships. No heed
is paid to the difficult questions this raises; it is claimed that political
questions can be avoided simply by stating that they do not form part of the
artist's own agenda. I have a certain amount of sympathy with this view, at
least as regards Niblock's own claim that his work is apolitical. But I think
the works themselves are robust enough to stand alternative lines of enquiry. I
want to read Niblock's films against the grain of the filmmaker's own
stipulations, in part by performing my own act of subtraction, bracketing out
the way his exhibition practices discourage close attention to individual
films.
I've chosen
to focus on a single film: Trabajando Una. which we saw an excerpt from
earlier The film was shot on 16mm in Mexico in 1973/74 and shows agricultural
work – hoeing, sowing, ploughing, harvesting, etc – mostly by men (though we
also see a woman and a boy). What is initially most striking about this film is
the richly intense green of the plants and foliage, which surround the workers,
comprising at times a ground on which they are figures...
... and at other times – in
close-ups – almost a range of figures against which the humans become
the ground...
... and at still other times a pervasive enviroment that threatens to
swallow everything up. It is possible to see Niblock's use of long lenses as an
investigation of distance. As well as the aforemention investigation of figure
and ground, the film includes both close-ups...
... some very long shots...
... and medium
shots...
... whose foreshortening allows us to perceive the cameraman's
physical distance from his subjects. The images certainly have a rhetorical
neutrality or coolness, but they also allow us to perceive something about the
relationship between the cameraman and his subject, a play on both literal and
metaphorical senses of "distance". It is crucial to note how Niblock
avoids "commenting" on the visuals with the sound by his parallel use
of drones on the soundtrack. The music has no rhythmic qualities to interact
with the movements or the editing. Rather than swamping the images, however,
the presence of abundant masses of sound – the volume of which renders them, in
performance, intensely physical – generates a kind of parodoxical absence via
superabundance. The profound disconnection of the images from the music renders
the images more independent; far from encouraging us to see only bodies in
rhythmic motion, the music creates a space within which we can engage with the
images on their own terms. The very absence of sonic connection emphasises the
images as images, and hence the spectator is freed to speculate on any
aspect of them: their rhythmic, plastic or chromatic content, certainly; but also
their denotational content and the circumstances in which they were produced.
I want at
this point to confront Niblock's work with Pedro Costa's film In Vanda's
Room (2000). In constrast to Niblock it might seem that a large portion of
Costa's shows the lack of movement of people not working! Vanda
Duarte and other inhabitants of the Lisbon slum of Fontainhas are shown sitting
in darkened rooms taking heroin and coughing horrendously. Costa's practice is
very different from Niblock's, but also involves observation of people at a
significant remove from himself economically, if not geographically. Costa has
often told the story of how, during the production of his 1995 film Casa de
Lava in Cape Verde, he was given letters by the islanders to take to their
relatives living in the Fontainhas area of Lisbon. His subsequent work –
including the feature films Ossos (1997), In Vanda's Room (2000),
Colossal Youth (2006) and Horse Money (2014), as well as a number
of shorts – has explored ways not only of representing these people, but also
of working with them. This process has followed a certain trajectory. Although Ossos
featured non-professional actors from Fontainhas, it is a relatively conventionally
produced film. The more recent films are produced using digital cameras and a
minimal crew, over long periods in close collaboration with their subjects. Colossal
Youth and Horse Money feature a very distinctive blend of the
apparently documentary – narratives originating in the experiences of the
subjects filmed – and the dreamlike, fantastic or surreal. In Vanda's Room
is in a way the cusp between these extremes. As the first film Costa made
digitally over a long period, it is the closest of these films to a
documentary, but still contains a great deal of artifice that seems to follow a
different agenda; the soundtrack, for example, is extremely highly wrought,
though this may not at first be apparent.
The notion
of "betweenness" can very easily be conceived either as empty or as
occupied. Perhaps paradoxically, it is an empty space between that
allows for a connection, for a relationship. There can only be a relationship
between things if nothing obstructive comes between them. Filmmaker
Ulrich Köhler describes the normal processes of film production ("die
Logik der Filmherstellung") as something that "could come between
[Costa] and his heroes" ("sich zwischen ihn und seine Heroen stellen
kann") (Film-Konzepte 41, 52). An obstruction needed to be
removed to make space for a relationship. But Costa, like Niblock, has
engaged in other "subtractions" as well: neither his image nor his
voice feature in his films at all. The relationship between Costa and Vanda –
and his other subjects – is not itself represented as such; the film as a
whole (which includes our sense of how it was produced) represents these
relationships. Köhler describes the film as 'the result of an encounter – at
eye level' ("das Ergebnis einer Begegnung – auf Augenhöhe") but
immediately goes on to point out, rightly, that this image does not exactly fit
(53). For him, 'Pedro Costa dissolves the asymmetry of this relationship'
("Pedro Costa löst die Asymmetrie dieser Beziehung auf"), ensuring
that his camera 'never becomes an instrument of power' ("wird die Kamera
nie zum Machtinstrument") (53). We should, however, perhaps treat this
claim with a certain scepticism. Surely the camera always has power over,
even when an attempt is made to show an exchange between instead?
Jean-Louis
Comolli has written that '[t]he visible aspect of things and of relations
conceals the other dimension, the other scene, obscured, dissimulated by the
very movement of representation' (Comolli 1998: 20). But one might equally well
argue that by not showing the process of filmmaking Costa manages –
again paradoxically – to not conceal it. Film often works with complex
interplay of the literal, the metaphorical and the not-quite-either, and never
more so that when we are dealing with questions of what a film
"shows". In Vanda's Room can be seen to put relations of power
into question; it is a positive quality of the film that we are given the time
and space to interrogate them, whereas another filmmaker might have gone to
greater lengths to insist on the equality of their relationship with their
subject, which might well be more likely to generate suspicions of bad faith.
Köhler is right when he says that as well as seeing Vanda, we also see in the
film "Pedro Costa at work" ("bei der Arbeit") (53). This
labour, however, is itself often perceived via absences, emptinesses, negative
spaces. Yes, we have a sense of the time Costa spent together with Vanda in her
room, but also of how little of that time we are actually shown, of how much
that was recorded was then excluded from the film. The language of
'subtraction' I have been using throughout this paper brings to mind the
subtractions that Alain Badiou finds characteristic of cinema. For Badiou, '[a]
film operates through what it withdraws from the visible' ('False Movements',
78). That is to say that it "extracts" certain visible things from
the "real world", leaving an invisible remainder. But it also
withdraws invisible things from the visible: though cinema is made of
the visible (and the audible) it deals with, manipulates, presents things that
are invisible – like the cameramen/filmmakers Niblock and Costa in Trabajando
Una and In Vanda's Room, or the relationships between the people we
watch in both films. (Can one say that a relationship is literally
"visible"?)
Subtraction
can do two things, then: it can heighten our attention on that which remains,
which is not subtracted, and it can emphasise absence, that which is not
there. I noted above how some of Costa's subtractions nevertheless do not
act to conceal. I want at this point to note how much Niblock does not
subtract, how much he leaves legible, which he could have obscured. In Trabajando
Una, although faces are certainly not emphasised, they are nevertheless
clearly visible at times. Gestures are also included that point towards
emotions and interpersonal relations, and not without a sense of humour: the man
in shot 11 pauses from his work, looks directly towards the camera and exhales
wearily:
In shot 14 a man lifts his hat to cool his head, almost as if greeting
an unseen figure:
The activities are organised by abstract notions of right and
left (which hand is a tool held in?), as well as horizontal and vertical
(horizontal ground and vertical figures, which often join the two axes by
bending double), but they also clearly hint at human relationships and
characteristics. Watching Trabajando Una I become conscious of the lack
of precision in my own knowledge, of its gaps and empty spaces. I know roughly
what is being done and why, but no more than this, any more than I know exactly
what plants I can see.
In an
interview with Niblock Seth Nehil proposes to him – rightly, I think – that
'there is a kind of suppleness to the hands [shown in his films] – a sort of
personality', to which Niblock simply underlines how conventional documentary
would always show you the person's face at some point, whereas his work 'was
simply not a documentary, in the typical documentary form' (Working Title
126). But the absence of the faces only removes expression if we think that the
face is the only expressive part of the human body. Its subtraction or
deemphasis, rather than removing all documentary information as Niblock thinks,
might rather concentrate it elsewhere. We can easily enter a realm of paradox: In
Vanda's Room is a documentary of its making (as Rivette said all films
are), which means it is not a documentary, precisely because what is being made
is not a documentary! (In a recent interview, Jacques Rancière refers to the
film as a "chronicle", which is an interesting choice.) Trabajando
Una is both a concrete and an abstract film. It is abstract because it
organises the concrete abstractly, but concrete because the abstractions at
work cannot (or at least do not) fully subtract the concrete.
In lieu of a
real conclusion, then, I will simply say that if intermediality is to do with betweenness,
does this not require some form of negative space across or via which
relationships can be formed? If this is so, then the kinds of subtractive activity
that I have shown Niblock and Costa to be interested in might be seen not
merely as tools for generating a concentrated minimalism, but as means of
carving out spaces across which – by means of which – relationships can be
established. In doing so, these films help draw attention to what we might call
the intermedial paradoxes that are latent in many – perhaps even in all – works
of cinema.
