Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Sum­mer has thus far been a lot of projects hov­er­ing in the pro­duc­tion stage. Above is some video I took while work­ing on a project and eat­ing expired Peachy-Os with my friends Sol, Jason, and Brit­tany (who is not in the video) called This Is Nutella. The video was prob­a­bly the most pro­duc­tive thing I did dur­ing that day’s round of construction.

In the mean­time, I’ve been get­ting in the habit of drop­ping off my rolls of film.

Thanks to the many dol­lars the UW is able to devote to under­grad research, I spent my sum­mer work­ing on an inde­pen­dent video project over the sum­mer. Here’s my speech and the video, oh boy oh boy.
______________________________________________________________________

My name is Claire Fox and I’m from the Com­par­a­tive His­tory of Ideas and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture pro­grams. I’ve been in both depart­ments for nearly a year now, so I’m pretty firmly rooted in the human­i­ties and cul­tural stud­ies. About this time last year, I was study­ing print jour­nal­ism pretty seri­ously, but I was in the process of com­plet­ing an inten­sive media stud­ies and social change pro­gram in Port­land that fea­tured a strong video com­po­nent. When work­ing with video, I real­ized that there were a lot of artis­tic oppor­tu­ni­ties in jour­nal­ism that I had yet to explore.

With that in mind, I’ve spent the past year caught between medi­ums; still work­ing on my writ­ing, but keep­ing an eye on other forms of artis­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So, since I’ve entered this Sum­mer Insti­tute, I’ve been try­ing to cre­ate a visual lan­guage that par­al­lels the ideas I’m already artic­u­lat­ing rooted in lin­guis­tic or the­o­ret­i­cal traditions.

The name of this research project is “Ampli­fied Present: The Delayed Beauty of a Bizarre Locale.” Toward the end of this pre­sen­ta­tion, I’ll show a video I made which was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Sym­bols.” This is my attempt at visual language-making.

“Signs and Sym­bols” essen­tially traces the rela­tion­ship between an elderly Russ­ian immi­grant cou­ple and their incur­ably deranged son on his birth­day when the cou­ple vis­its him in the sana­to­rium. I ini­tially was attracted to this story because of the son’s con­di­tion, which in the story is termed “ref­er­en­tial mania.” This con­di­tion is an acute form of para­noia where the son thinks that all inan­i­mate objects and all of phe­nom­e­nal nature are con­stantly engaged in a mali­cious com­men­tary on his life. This sort of psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion seemed like an excel­lent set of images to unpack in video.

In video, I can approach the nar­ra­tive through a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal lens, by pick­ing out indi­vid­ual ges­tures, moments, or objects in nature from Nabokov’s writ­ing and med­i­tat­ing on those images to com­mu­ni­cate a story instead of using tra­di­tional chrono­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive struc­ture. This allows me to look at the inter­ac­tion between phe­nom­e­nal nature and arti­facts on one hand with per­cep­tion, imag­i­na­tion, and mem­ory on the other, this all done with­out hav­ing to deal with words as a bar­rier, or even hav­ing to depend on them by default as an anchor.

In addi­tion to my fas­ci­na­tion with ref­er­en­tial mania, there was one par­tic­u­lar image in “Signs and Sym­bols” that held my atten­tion. The struc­ture of this story is shaped around the elderly couple’s rou­tines, all which have com­ple­men­tary sets of ges­tures or sounds embed­ding them into our sen­sory mem­o­ries. At one point in the story, how­ever, the hus­band makes a sud­den, inci­sive deci­sion that launches the cou­ple out of their rou­tines into unknown lifestyle territory.

What was even more fas­ci­nat­ing to me, though, was what hap­pened imme­di­ately after this deci­sion was made. As Nabokov writes, “They sat down to their unex­pected fes­tive mid­night tea.” On my first read of this story, this sen­tence was unre­mark­able. It was only when I con­tin­ued to re-read the story that the image of the “unex­pected fes­tive mid­night tea” became a famil­iar space where two char­ac­ters cre­ate a bizarre locale in the weary famil­iar. The space was also very present: the hus­band sev­ered the cou­ple from their past, but they hadn’t yet taken any steps to orga­nize the future. This was another instance of per­cep­tion worth addressing.

Yet again, video seemed like the prime medium for image inter­pre­ta­tion. In addi­tion to its abil­ity to pull apart and med­i­tate upon images, video allows the abil­ity to choose one pri­mary image as a plateau and have a struc­ture that lends com­ple­men­tary images the impor­tance of that pri­mary image. That in mind, when I started plan­ning this video, I wanted to cre­ate and decode my own fic­tional locale and unearth an image-based, psy­cho­log­i­cal space from Nabokov’s lin­ear narrative.

Before shoot­ing the video mate­r­ial, how­ever, I forced myself to choose another medium as a fil­ter to inter­pret cer­tain images fur­ther. The medium I chose was paint­ing. Con­cen­trat­ing on sketch­ing and paint­ing allowed me to both engage with and detach from the images: as I painted, I had to think about very spe­cific details in the ges­tures and phe­nom­ena I chose to rep­re­sent, but I also had time to let the images pass through my mem­ory and inte­grate more with my sub­jec­tive per­cep­tions of them. I dis­played these paint­ings along with some note­book pages and rough sto­ry­board sketches at the In-Progress exhi­bi­tion at the Jake. I also took some pho­tos that I ended up not dis­play­ing at the exhi­bi­tion, but they still helped me fur­ther con­sider ideas in com­po­si­tion, just in more of an impul­sive man­ner than painting.

When I finally started work­ing on the actual video, I had a cou­ple of goals in mind. I wanted to con­struct a world where arti­facts and phe­nom­e­nal nature are oppres­sive, and then make that feel­ing move. And, as I said before, I wanted to cre­ate my own fic­tional bizarre locale, and I wanted that locale to aid in decon­struct­ing the weary­ing feel­ing of the arti­facts and phe­nom­e­nal nature sequenc­ing. The result­ing video works to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment rooted in the present, simul­ta­ne­ously engag­ing and chal­leng­ing the viewer to appraise the value of a sin­gle moment.

I like to pref­ace videos with a quo­ta­tions, so here’s one from “Signs and Symbols”:

“He must always be on his guard and devote every minute and mod­ule of life to the decod­ing of the undu­la­tion of things.”

ampli­fied present from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

In inhab­it­ing this boy’s per­spec­tive, I attempted to turn his sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence into some­thing to be col­lec­tively expe­ri­enced. Though I’m pri­mar­ily approach­ing the work from his per­spec­tive, we as view­ers have our own attach­ments to the images we see, so we strug­gle to inte­grate the two as we gaze at the images on the screen. In this way, I invite view­ers to engage in that per­spec­tive along with me, and decide for them­selves based on their inter­ac­tion with the piece whether the pres­ence of nature and arti­facts is oppres­sive, or maybe lib­er­at­ing, relax­ing, or some­thing else com­pletely. And, by way of the bizarre locale, I hope to engage view­ers’ mem­o­ries, allow­ing the images to linger and take on beauty later.

So, with that in mind, I want to leave you with one final quo­ta­tion from Chris Marker’s gor­geous film, Sans Soleil:

“I think of a world where each mem­ory could cre­ate its own legend.”

I’m a diehard Port­lander, but I spent two years of my high school career at Phillips Acad­emy, a school out­side of Boston, learn­ing the ways of the East Coast. I had some pretty rad teach­ers at that school, in par­tic­u­lar a dude named Edwin Quat­tle­baum, who taught my 8:30am mod­ern Euro­pean his­tory class. He was the very first teacher I expe­ri­enced at ol’ Andover. Because of that, I felt that he always had my back. I was a lit­tle out of my league back East, and I think he under­stood my West Coast sen­si­bil­ity more than most peo­ple did, maybe since he was a Berke­ley stu­dent when the city was under mar­tial law.

Here’s the email exchange. Things worth not­ing: we often ref­er­ence the Rolling Stones in emails, Palmer is one of the edi­tors of the his­tory book we used in his class, I played a lot of vol­ley­ball in high school, and I <33333333 Dr. Quattlebaum.

from Claire Fox
to equattlebaum@andover.edu
date Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:28 PM
sub­ject amer­i­can his­tory, james spader, research
mailed-by gmail.com

hey dr. quattlebaum,

i have a ques­tion for you in the name of arts and human­i­ties research. i have this mem­ory of his­tory 340 when you were describ­ing james spader to us kids, and you men­tioned that you were teach­ing a par­tic­u­lar time period (in hist 300, i think) where mr. spader became obsessed with a par­tic­u­lar event within that time period and researched it with a cou­ple bud­dies, never really mov­ing on from that moment, even as the course pro­gressed and even­tu­ally left him behind.

if you remem­ber what i’m talk­ing about (and i real­ize this is a pretty inane ques­tion): do you remem­ber what that moment in his­tory was that con­sumed james spader’s atten­tion? i’m indi­rectly using it to jus­tify some research i’m doing.

also: HI! how have you been? what’s new? i hope all’s well in andover.

it’s only rock n roll (but i like it),
claire (fox ’06)

from Edwin G Quat­tle­baum
to Claire Fox
date Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 11:46 AM
sub­ject RE: amer­i­can his­tory, james spader, research
mailed-by andover.edu

Dear Claire,
Great to hear from you.
You have an amaz­ing — Palmer-like — mem­ory, for the IMPORTANT things of His­tory 340.
Your rec­ol­lec­tion is absolutely cor­rect. The topic was the scan­dal in the Andrew Jack­son admin­is­tra­tion, from 1829–1837, and it involved the alleged loose morals of one Peggy Eaton, in about 1830. I think one of Jackson’s cab­i­net mem­bers, per­haps John Tim­ber­lane?, wanted to marry her, and all the other Cabinet-members’ wives devel­oped catty hatred for her. But Old Hick­ory him­self stuck up for her, partly because his beloved late & lamented dead wife had suf­fered sim­i­lar cat­ti­ness from Cab­i­net wives?
Some­thing like that.
Google it. Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine had a big arti­cle on it, I think, and JT [my nick­name for him] obsessed in a hilar­i­ous fash­ion about
the whole scan­dal, although he may not have done a whole lot of research about it. But he sure talked a good game.
As for Rock ‘n’ Roll, it was Billy Joel: “It’s All Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me.” Itunes it.
Hope you are still liv­ing in Port­land, Ore­gon, and still spik­ing a mil­lion vol­ley­balls.
As ever,
Ed Q.

I made a video awhile back and wrote an essay about it.

famil­iar, yet absurd from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

When­ever I attempt to cre­ate a piece of video art, I con­sider the respon­si­bil­i­ties I have both as an “artist” and as a twenty-year-old in 2008. When con­sid­er­ing the writ­ings of the­o­rists like Camus and Sartre, I attempt to cre­ate vis­ceral con­nec­tions between their writ­ings from mid-20th cen­tury France to the con­tem­po­rary social cli­mate of 21st cen­tury Seat­tle. In this par­tic­u­lar video, I worked with my friend Michelle Avery to cre­ate an exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary that med­i­tates on ideas of famil­iar­ity, alien­ation, sin­cer­ity, time, and space in the uni­verse of the absurd.

To begin mak­ing any kind of con­nec­tion between the­ory and con­tem­po­rary indi­vid­u­als, I started with a very gen­eral con­sid­er­a­tion of exis­ten­tial­ist themes: how do we define our­selves as indi­vid­u­als? Video seemed like a par­tic­u­larly fit­ting medium for this con­sid­er­a­tion for two rea­sons. The first is that video is viewed (at least by me, since I’m new to the medium) as a new, fresh, and fun­da­men­tally democ­ra­tiz­ing method of the artis­tic expres­sion of ideas: any indi­vid­ual can rent a cam­era and take dig­i­tal video with­out hav­ing to shell out a large sum of money or hav­ing to exer­cise a high level of skill. The sec­ond is that video con­sid­ers images dif­fer­ently from film. Again, I have a very rudi­men­tary skill and knowl­edge level when it comes to video, but it seems as though this medium rests largely on the tran­si­tions between images (i.e. it depends largely on choices in edit­ing) than the images them­selves (choices made in pro­duc­tion). This idea of the impor­tance of tran­si­tions over images helps illus­trate one of Camus’ ideas about time: “Like­wise and dur­ing every day of an unil­lus­tri­ous life,” he writes, “time car­ries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it”. Since I view edit­ing as a process that oper­ates on a much more indi­vid­ual level than pro­duc­tion, and the addi­tional manip­u­la­tion of time can make for an espe­cially dis­ori­ent­ing envi­ron­ment where we are forced to con­sider con­tent out­side a sim­ple and auto­matic frame­work, it seems as though the video medium is an ideal method for med­i­tat­ing on themes in existentialism.

When it came down to express­ing the absurd in video, I felt that I’d either need to make a highly con­structed fic­tional space where I was respon­si­ble for every detail, or I’d need to go some­where where the spa­tial and aes­thetic ele­ments of my space as well as the actions of my sub­jects were com­pletely out of con­trol. I went into this process from the start with two pri­mary quo­ta­tions in mind. From Sartre: “We are alone, with no excuses”. From Camus: “At any street cor­ner the feel­ing of absur­dity can strike any man in the face”. Con­sid­er­ing those two quo­ta­tions, I decided to make my video into what can be called an exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary. I was espe­cially enam­ored with the idea of the absurd hap­pen­ing with­out warn­ing on the street and I don’t feel that that kind of sin­cere real­iza­tion can be con­structed (at least not yet by me, with my ama­teur level of video skill), so I decided to take one sub­ject — Michelle — and put her some­where on the street (“alone, with no excuses”) and make her talk.

This type of footage was both sim­ple and dif­fi­cult to take. Though there was no setup involved, I had essen­tially taken a friend who was more or less aware of my inten­tions, put her in an open psy­cho­log­i­cal space over which she had rudi­men­tary con­trol, and waited for some­thing absurd to hap­pen. It was likely that noth­ing would hap­pen, and arguably, that’s the way events panned out: for Michelle, there was no wide-eyed moment of men­tal lucid­ity where she stopped speak­ing and con­sid­ered her set­ting with the eyes of some­one newly set adrift. We had, how­ever, a very spe­cial set­ting work­ing for us. We shot the footage in George­town, which is very close to the Boe­ing air­field. Michelle has always been a plane enthu­si­ast and even owns a book of air­planes, which she stud­ies for the sake of being able to iden­tify them from the street. She is highly aware of air­plane pres­ence in any neigh­bor­hood, but in George­town, this aware­ness was acute. George­town func­tioned as a sort of exac­er­bated envi­ron­ment, one where planes flew low over­head and couldn’t be ignored by any­one: when­ever a plane passed over­head, peo­ple (who lived in the neigh­bor­hood) would all look up, whether they were sit­ting on the curb, dri­ving in a car, or what­ever else. Michelle couldn’t stop laughing.

That type of set­ting rep­re­sents a fun­da­men­tal idea in Camus’ thought.

“A world that can be explained even with bad rea­sons is a famil­iar world. But, on the other hand, in a uni­verse sud­denly divested of illu­sions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is with­out rem­edy since he is deprived of the mem­ory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his set­ting, is prop­erly the feel­ing of absurdity”.

I aimed to make the struc­ture of this video hinge on the moments when Michelle is dis­tracted from the inter­view by planes fly­ing over­head. This idea lent itself to fur­ther­ing the con­tem­plat­ing of indi­vid­u­al­ism in two ways. One was that when Michelle turned or looked up to observe a plane or cov­ered her face after it went by, we got to know Michelle through her ges­tures and actions in addi­tion to the ideas she artic­u­lated ver­bally. The other more impor­tant idea was that these moments where she couldn’t help but look up, Michelle was removed from her very self-aware method of speak­ing or con­sid­er­ing ideas. She couldn’t help but look. She couldn’t help but smile. She was briefly divorced from her life and her set­ting and put into an exac­er­bated, unfa­mil­iar, and very present space. She was with­out words or mem­o­ries and could only focus on the sounds and sight that over­whelmed her senses.

In terms of the aes­thetic of the actual shot, I took some inspi­ra­tion from a Sartre quotation.

“It is nec­es­sary that his very thought should at every instant sur­pass the inti­mate con­tra­dic­tion which unites the com­pre­hen­sion of man-as-agent with the know­ing of man-as-object and that it forge new con­cepts, new deter­mi­na­tions of Knowl­edge which emerge from the exis­ten­tial com­pre­hen­sion and which reg­u­late the move­ment of their con­tents by its dialec­ti­cal procedure”.

I’m almost pos­i­tive that I’m assign­ing incor­rect mean­ing to this quo­ta­tion, but when I con­sid­ered my image com­po­si­tion, I looked for dis­tinctly com­pet­ing images to work with to func­tion as a sort of dialec­tic. I real­ize this sounds super­fi­cial and naïve, but I needed my shot to be ani­mated. What I mean by this is that there was a lot of respon­si­bil­ity weigh­ing on that par­tic­u­lar shot because it was the only shot I had to work with for the entire film. While I hoped that the sta­tic imagery would lend itself to our focused con­tem­pla­tion of Michelle as a human indi­vid­ual, I knew I couldn’t be lazy about her back­drop. The com­pet­ing left and right sides of the image have their own story, even with­out Michelle present, which can arguably place Michelle in a con­text where she can both be con­sid­ered “man-as-agent” (in the con­tent of her ver­bal inter­view) and “man as object” (some­thing that is sub­ject to and reacts to its setting).

On the left, we see many angu­lar, mechan­i­cal, life­less images with dull col­ors. In the back­ground, the large, black side of a truck bed reads “ALL METALS. There’s a piece of cor­ru­gated steel cut­ting Michelle’s image in half, where she rests her belong­ings. There’s a rusty old pickup in the back­ground, giv­ing some idea that these angles, which lead about 45 degrees to the upper right-hand cor­ner of the screen, and impos­ing struc­ture, as it were, are get­ting old and tired. What ani­mates this image is the vis­ceral organic pres­ence on the right side of the screen. There’s a lot of wiry, unre­lent­ing black­berry bush over­growth, which seems to be get­ting the best of the old machin­ery on the right side of the screen, and there’s an espe­cially wiry this­tle that sprouts up in the mid­dle of the screen and stands among the over­growth and the other slight angles with Michelle. Michelle is inter­sected by old lines of struc­tured metal, but in her more vul­ner­a­ble and unguarded moments, she some­times stands among the over­growth and more organic images that char­ac­ter­ize the right side of the screen.

One thing in par­tic­u­lar in the image knocked both me and Michelle out from the time I was shoot­ing: the dead bird in the lower left hand cor­ner. It’s lying there, unac­knowl­edged, in front of Michelle in one of the indents of the cor­ru­gated steel. In the dual­ity of this image based on the struc­ture and the over­growth, this bird adds the ele­ment of death to the image. There is so much ani­ma­tion in the space just based on the col­ors and the stark con­trast in com­po­si­tion from one side to the other, and then that lit­tle bird, which can go so unno­ticed at the bot­tom of the screen, not really even rec­og­niz­able in the gra­ni­ness of the image, gives a sense of final­ity. We can ignore death, we can ignore dead organic things, but they’re still there as objects and they still rep­re­sent the end of a lifespan.

The actual con­tent of the inter­view was extremely dif­fi­cult to edit and pair with Michelle’s ges­tures. As said, I hoped that we could get to know Michelle through her ges­tures in addi­tion to her speech, and so to oper­ate on these two lev­els, the con­tent and the ges­tures needed to be very clearly linked. In addi­tion, I knew that the video would need to be short because as ani­mated a char­ac­ter as Michelle is, a viewer can only stay with a sin­gle image for so long. I ended up divid­ing the video into two loose sec­tions: one where Michelle is describ­ing her­self (“I wish…I think…I don’t give a shit…”) and another where Michelle is describ­ing other peo­ple, or the “they-self” (“What you’ve seen…what you’ve been told…people don’t real­ize…”). The idea of the air­plane is used in this sequenc­ing again. In the first sec­tion, I try to imply that Michelle is more self-aware in that she only mim­ics the plane and we don’t feel its actual pres­ence. In the sec­ond sec­tion, I try to imply that Michelle is being removed from her set­ting and forced to artic­u­late other per­spec­tives by show­ing her actual reac­tions to the air­plane fly­ing over­head, even though we never see the actual vehicle.

These two sec­tions are book­ended by Michelle’s con­tem­pla­tion of her fam­ily. We begin the piece with her bit­ter con­tem­pla­tion of the idea that her fam­ily may never under­stand her. This poses the ques­tion: Should we care about express­ing our­selves to peo­ple whom we think will never under­stand us? In the second-to-last clip, I return to this idea where she explains the process of con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing her­self within her fam­ily, but she is inter­rupted by a par­tic­u­larly low-flying air­plane. At that point, we dis­re­gard the ques­tion and tran­si­tion to her analy­sis of the other things she said in the inter­view: “Maybe that’s my way of being an indi­vid­ual: not being an indi­vid­ual.” The impli­ca­tions of this state­ment are pretty huge and poten­tially con­tra­dic­tory with the ideas rep­re­sented by Camus and Sartre. I’m still unde­cided what she means by that state­ment: is she giv­ing up on human­ity and shirk­ing the respon­si­bil­ity of exis­tence pre­ced­ing essence?: “When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does like­wise; but we also mean by that that in mak­ing this choice he also chooses all men”. Or is she turn­ing inward and re-contextualizing Camus’ “con­stant con­fronta­tion between man and his own obscu­rity” in a media-saturated-21st cen­tury way?

All I know for sure is that she’s sincere.

Here’s my essay on Godard’s La Chi­noise, as promised. It’s so fresh that I haven’t even read over it since turn­ing it in to my pro­fes­sor.
____________________________________________________________________

Real­ity of the Reflection

“The social­ist lit­er­a­ture and art must fight on two fronts. Art doesn’t reflect real­ity, but is a real­ity of reflec­tion.” — Kir­ilov in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise

In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard released La Chi­noise, his thir­teenth fea­ture film. The work fol­lows four French youth who align them­selves with Maoist com­mu­nism in their search to find mean­ing in their lives. Through a series of documentary-style vignettes col­laged with pop art and arranged into a lin­ear nar­ra­tive, La Chi­noise shows the char­ac­ters seek­ing great leaps for­ward based on Mao’s phi­los­o­phy and aim­ing to coor­di­nate a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in France for the ben­e­fit of its citizens.

In May of 1968, the stu­dent protests and gen­eral strike con­sid­ered to be the cat­a­lyst for France’s shift in social moral­ity occurred. Now, in 2008, La Chi­noise does not exist on DVD, and is only avail­able for view­ing when its film print is shown in theaters.

There is a very real pos­si­bil­ity that the release of La Chi­noise, the protests in 1968 France, and the cur­rent inac­ces­si­bil­ity of the film are not con­nected; how­ever, the three ideas in a group can rep­re­sent the role of art in social impact.

After a recent view­ing of the film at Seattle’s North­west Film Forum, a middle-aged man asked me if I’d liked it. I answered him sim­ply: I thought the film was fan­tas­tic. Despite the dra­matic irony sup­plied by its dat­ing, the story felt fresh and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and gen­eral artis­tic risk-taking was unlike any­thing I’d seen. The man scoffed at me, and I real­ized he’d been look­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more scathing. I asked him what he thought, and he response was some­thing to the extent of

“I found it self-indulgent and narrow-minded. You know who the main char­ac­ter was? The direc­tor. And I think he’s got the wrong idea about the value of col­lec­tive action. You can’t just go around killing peo­ple and think that it will solve society’s prob­lems. The peo­ple in power don’t always do what they should, but indi­vid­u­als can’t change that. You know Barack Obama? He wants to send more troops to Iraq. There’s no one we can trust any­more, and those self­ish kids in that movie set a bad exam­ple of social action.”

Though I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have been sur­prised, the man’s out­burst had me floored. Incor­rect asser­tions aside, that inter­ac­tion can rep­re­sent a com­pli­cated idea that’s present in most socially-conscious work of today. The film, which is clas­si­fied as a fic­tional work (though it could eas­ily be argued oth­er­wise) seemed to soften the inter­sec­tion between social respon­si­bil­ity and beau­ti­ful art in a method of chang­ing peo­ples’ per­spec­tives on the causes they address. In the case of the man I spoke to, this pur­pose was clearly not achieved: he only reacted to the social con­tent. Though the film could prob­a­bly stand alone on either side of the argu­ment (social com­men­tary vs. piece of art for art’s sake), it pro­vides a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what is referred to in La Chi­noise as “the strug­gle on two fronts”: the attempt to make a work that suc­cess­fully addresses a social issue while mak­ing it avail­able to a larger audi­ence through artis­tic accessibility.

DEUXIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

La Chinoise’s level of suc­cess as a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of the two sides of the strug­gle and gen­er­ally as an artis­tic piece of social com­men­tary can be exam­ined through the the­o­ries of Kant and Niet­zsche. Both the­o­rists write on the pur­suit of truth’s ani­ma­tion through the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of two dif­fer­ent worlds — for Kant, noumena and phe­nom­ena, and for Niet­zsche, for the Apol­lon­ian and the Dionysian — which relates directly to Godard’s strug­gle on two fronts. Relat­ing more specif­i­cally to redemp­tion aside from truth, how­ever, both the­o­rists also advance the idea of going through and then destroy­ing beauty as a method of lib­er­a­tion that res­onates well with La Chinoise.

TROISIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

We can first take a look at beauty and respon­si­bil­ity in the one of the documentary-style inter­views with Guil­laume — one of the film’s prin­ci­ple char­ac­ters — in the sec­ond por­tion of the film, where he begins rehears­ing the first few lines from a play he’s prac­tic­ing and then stops, laughs a lit­tle, and then explains “Yes, I’m an actor.” At this point, we are intro­duced to the idea of “true the­ater,” which Guil­laume advances as the idea that every­one is an actor at all times reflect­ing on true sit­u­a­tions, and that just because he is an actor (which we see by the ques­tions asked of him off set and the turn­ing of the cam­era on the cam­era­man) we should never doubt the sin­cer­ity of his words.

He fol­lows up this beau­ti­ful idea of sincerity’s neces­sity in social cri­tique and art with the asser­tion (in the same breath) that you also need vio­lence. He takes one idea, for exam­ple by rehears­ing an idea of the cul­tural Marx­ist, Louis Althusser: “I turn around, and sud­denly the ques­tion is the words I’ve just said are part of a greater play con­tin­u­ing through me,” and then makes it his own: “the play of the worker in the theater.”

We can begin to under­stand Guillaume’s asser­tions through Kant’s think­ing. In his Cri­tique of Judg­ment, Kant writes on new meth­ods of judg­ment as well as a new method of look­ing at the move­ment inspired by beauty and truth. We see a def­i­n­i­tion of two dis­tinct worlds of exis­tence: one of nat­ural neces­sity, and one of free­dom. This divi­sion between nature’s objec­tive, deter­min­is­tic laws and moral freedom’s sub­jec­tiv­ity is not unlike Plato’s divi­sion between the sen­sory and intel­li­gi­ble realms; how­ever, it is not based on a dialec­tic where an indi­vid­ual can ascend or descend within those two realms on their jour­ney toward a sin­gle One. Here, the two worlds — the sen­sory, sub­jec­tive world of the noumena and the intel­li­gi­ble, objec­tive world of the phe­nom­ena –are ani­mated via their need for some sort of unity, which can occur through a super­sen­si­ble sub­strate: art.

Through­out this film, we sense a need for the stu­dents to be able to apply their the­o­ries to real life; they need to find a way to apply their facts, which are based on the objec­tive asser­tions of the col­lec­tive work­ers ethos and Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book, to the rest of the world. They become obsessed with the idea of devot­ing them­selves to a cause and being com­pletely engrossed in their endeav­ors, ensu­ing in a fanat­i­cal study of Mao’s doc­trines and sub­scrib­ing to the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion in China. In so doing, how­ever, we could doubt their sin­cer­ity just due to the fact that they are try­ing to “strug­gle on two fronts”: that they are focus­ing their energy both on their art — act­ing — and on sup­port­ing their cause.

Guil­laume pleads that we don’t doubt, and instead only real­ize that a film can be the work of a col­lec­tive group of peo­ple who share in sim­i­lar ideas and should there­fore be taken very seri­ously in their meth­ods of demonstration.

Kant’s dis­tinc­tion between the ana­lytic of the beau­ti­ful and the sub­lime also lends itself to an exam­i­na­tion of this film. “[Nature] excites the ideas of the sub­lime in its chaos or in its wildest and most irreg­u­lar dis­or­der and des­o­la­tion, pro­vided size and might are per­ceived,” he writes (Kant, 84). And as for its redemp­tive value? “[In] gen­eral, it dis­plays noth­ing pur­po­sive in nature itself, but only in that pos­si­ble use of our intu­itions of it by which there is pro­duced in us a feel­ing of pur­po­sive­ness quite inde­pen­dent of nature.” The idea of a strange kind of uneasi­ness lead­ing to great joy con­nects to another of the film’s inter­views where Veronique, arguably the leader of the group, looks the cam­era in the eye and explains that she would dyna­mite the Sor­bonne (edu­ca­tion), the Lou­vre (visual art), and the Come­die Fran­caise (the­ater) if she had the courage, just for the sake of start­ing over from zero and recon­sid­er­ing our morals from the present, based on the col­lec­tive (size-based) ethos. She tells us that the Rev­o­lu­tion can’t be art: it can’t hold the ten­der­ness or finesse of a piece, but rather it rips away all that we know and forces us to begin from the present, start­ing from scratch.

We can also see a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this ide­ol­ogy Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where he pro­vides us with the exam­i­na­tion of the Dionysian-Apollonian dual­ity within Greek tragedy. The Greek tragedy, Niet­zsche writes, is the only instance where the mutu­ally exclu­sive Dionysian and the Apol­lon­ian are united — and are united only for a moment — and in that moment of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion we have a glimpse into what­ever real­ity we can con­ceive (though Niet­zsche writes that we can never know the thing itself). As said in the film: art isn’t a reflec­tion of real­ity, it’s the real­ity of reflection.

The Apol­lon­ian wis­dom is that of dreams, which is purely based on images and allows appear­ances to appear at all. These images, which are also referred to (among other things) as masks, are able to cloud the dark chaos that Niet­zsche believes char­ac­ter­izes the world. As such, for­get­ting is a fun­da­men­tally Apol­lon­ian char­ac­ter­is­tic, which also allows indi­vid­u­als to trust in their own indi­vid­ual frame­works via their faith in their own autonomous ego. The Dionysian wis­dom, on the other hand, is the wis­dom of ter­ror and is specif­i­cally char­ac­ter­ized by the awe of and result­ing drunk­en­ness relat­ing to that ter­ror. As said, Niet­zsche believes the uni­verse is ulti­mately is irra­tional and wants to devour every­thing. Diony­sus, as the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this belief and the pri­mal heart of the world, breaks down the bar­ri­ers devel­oped and sus­tained by the indi­vid­ual trust in Apol­lon­ian aes­thet­ics: “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaf­firmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hos­tile, or sub­ju­gated, cel­e­brates once more her rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with her prodi­gal son, man […] Now the slave is free; now all the stub­born, hos­tile bar­ri­ers, which neces­sity, caprice, or ‘shame­less fash­ion’ have erected between man and man, are bro­ken down” (Niet­zsche, 501). When the bar­ri­ers between man and man (and man and Nature) are bro­ken down, man senses his par­tic­i­pa­tion in uni­ver­sal har­mony and a higher com­mu­nity and expe­ri­ences a “redemp­tion through release” (Niet­zsche, 508). This redemp­tion, Niet­zsche writes, is deserv­ing of a “rap­tur­ous vision” and fur­ther fuels the Dionysian energy as it is the clos­est por­tal to real­ity man can possess.

Kant finds some unity with Niet­zsche based on the con­cepts of the sub­lime with Nietzsche’s idea of the redemp­tion of Dion­y­sis. Dionysian unity tears down Apol­lon­ian prin­cip­ium indi­vid­u­a­tio­nis, thereby rip­ping away the Apol­lon­ian masks to expose real­ity. As Niet­zsche writes, there is a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion to this decon­struc­tion: “The hor­ri­ble ‘witches’ brew’ of sen­su­al­ity and cru­elty becomes inef­fec­tive: only the curi­ous blend­ing and dual­ity in the emo­tions of the Dionysian rev­el­ers remind us — as med­i­cines remind us of deadly poi­sons — of the phe­nom­e­non that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us” (Niet­zsche, 504). We see fur­ther appli­ca­tion of Veronique’s the­ory in the film in her long, sta­tic scene on the train with her pro­fes­sor when she dis­cusses, in com­plete earnest, her inten­tions to bomb the uni­ver­si­ties as a method of reeval­u­at­ing their abysmal sit­u­a­tion which is tired and com­pla­cent, even in the face of the Viet­nam War. Her pro­fes­sor, who was involved in the Alger­ian War, explains that she will never find any last­ing sup­port unless she has pop­u­lar back­ing at the time of her bomb­ings, and she only had con­trol of three peo­ple in a movement.

DERNIÈRE MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

As sug­gested before, the idea of the strug­gle on two fronts as well as the idea of rip­ping way apa­thetic, indif­fer­ent exte­ri­ors in favor of the real­ity that lies beneath and start­ing from scratch at the present isn’t just applic­a­ble to La Chinoise’s con­tent: it’s also applic­a­ble to the film’s aes­thetic and tech­ni­cal elements.

Godard’s inno­v­a­tive film­mak­ing ethos expertly walks the line between social com­men­tary and work of art. From the begin­ning, the film doesn’t let the viewer a rest or retreat into a stream­lined nar­ra­tive. Though the nar­ra­tive pro­gresses in a some­what lin­ear fash­ion, we are often sub­jected to a dif­fer­ent form of blur­ring fic­tion and real­ity. As said, this film is based on a fic­tional nar­ra­tive of four stu­dents liv­ing together in a com­fort­able Parisian apart­ment over the sum­mer, and the nar­ra­tive works in a cir­cle that begins and ends on the same image of their apart­ment doors, giv­ing us the per­cep­tion that noth­ing has been accom­plished in the film, but within that rev­o­lu­tion (as in a cir­cle), we are engrossed in var­i­ous vignettes. To fur­ther com­pli­cate ideas, the art of the film varies between scenes full of jump cuts between images of the actors as well as col­lages of pop art. Though the align­ment of visual art with images of human actors may prompt some explicit ques­tions, they do more to excite a feel­ing rather than actu­ally pro­mote any fur­ther under­stand­ing of the subject.

Godard addi­tion­ally cre­ates a new sphere with his audi­ence as viewer-listeners rather that just view­ers alone, which is a hugely sig­nif­i­cant part of his film­mak­ing. Rather than just being able to lose our­selves in a pro­gres­sion of images, the sounds he uses keep us off-balance, never let us sit back, make sure that we’re still extremely present. It makes us expe­ri­ence the rejec­tion of pas­siv­ity that he’s try­ing to sup­port. This expe­ri­enc­ing of emo­tions is what makes La Chi­noise so riv­et­ing, and what gives it a redemp­tive power that even the man who talked to me after the film had to under­stand. Which brings us back to Kant’s orig­i­nal point: we don’t nec­es­sar­ily all have to agree that La Chi­noise is a great film, but we should all feel a cer­tain way about its effects.

There is a notable scene relat­ing to the power of music which may be a car­i­ca­ture, but still raises a valu­able point. As Kir­ilov, another of the com­rades, lec­tures the oth­ers on social­ist art and literature’s need to strug­gle on two fronts — in other words, to have a moral pur­pose behind its beauty, just as Godard attempts to do — Guil­laume con­sid­ers the idea and then claims that it is much too com­pli­cated, assert­ing that he wouldn’t be able to make sense of two things at once. At that point Veronique, his girl­friend, asks him if he loves her, as she had done before in the film.

“Of course I do,” he responds.

“Well, I don’t love you anymore.”

He stares at her, bewil­dered, and says that he doesn’t under­stand. “You will,” she replies, and she lets a record drop and aligns the nee­dle. As the music begins to play, she says,

“I don’t love you any­more. I don’t like your face, and I don’t care for your sweaters. And you bore me ter­ri­bly.” She removes the nee­dle from the record. “Under­stand now?”

He responds in the affirmative.

“You see? You can under­stand two things at once — you’ve just done it.”