(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.
