Page 38 - Studio International - November December 1975

more characters. These internal connections between than a problematic. The ramifications of the essential,
viewer and viewed are based on systems of identification core question are very limited. Narrative is an illusionistic
which demand primarily a passive audience, a passive procedure, manipulatory, mystificatory, repressive. The
viewer, one who is involved in the meaning that word has repression is that of space, the distance between the
taken on within film journalese, ie to be not involved, to viewer and the object, a repression of real space in
get swept along through persuasive emotive devices favour of illusionist space. The repression is, equally
employed by the film director. This system of cinematic importantly, of the in-film spaces, those perfectly
functioning categorically rules out any dialectic. It is a constructed continuities. The repression is also that of
cinematic functioning, it should be added, analogous on time. The implied lengths of time suffer compressions
the part of the film director to that of the viewer, not to formed by certain technical devices which operate in a
mention the producer, who is not a producer, who has no codified manner, under specific laws, to repress
little investment in the staking out of the economics of (material) film time.
such repression. What some of the more self-defined
'left wing' directors would rationalize in terms of Narrative and Deconstruction
dialectic are merely coverups for identification, selling A further point on narrative : while the deconstruction of
the same old wares, viz Antonioni and the much less narrative as an academic exercise is not of vital import, it
talented Bertolucci, Pasolini, Losey, not to mention would be in any case a useful function towards
committed right-wing directors like Ford, Kazan, expropriating the ownership of the codes of
Bergman and Russell. Thus, if a character is somewhat narrativity. Which means that the meanings formed by
more complex, or if the acting is of a higher order, or if the certain filmic operations could be analysed and no more
lighting cameraman does most of the work (as in most be the privileged possession of the owners of the means of
first-rate movies) then the director rationalizes the work production, in this case, the means of production of
which would seem to imply that he is as taken in by the meaning in film. Thus deconstruction exercises, in their
fantasy as the viewer. Whether he is or not (there are few limited way, are not irrelevant as sociological insight into
shes in such a position) is in fact irrelevant. The certain filmic operations. Deconstruction exercises,
ideological position is the same. maintained filmically (ie on film, in film) are direct
translations from the written into film, and are thus
Dialectic filmically reactionary, though illustrative of certain ideas
There is a distinct difference between what can be about film. The retranslation back into language (words)
termed the ambiguity of an identification process4 and a would seem to negate the necessity of narrative-
dialectic functioning. Ambiguity posits each individual deconstruction being undertaken on, or in, film, rather
viewer (or reader, listener, etc) as subject. The subject, than in writing. This has now dawned, perhaps, on the
that is, who forms the interpretation. One becomes overzealous graduates who wish to make statements
posited, formed, constituted, in fact, as the subject of the about certain narrative usages.
self-expression and self-representation through the Apart from work in deconstruction, there is also that
mediation of a repressive ideological structure. That filmwork which is interpreted as deconstruction, works
ideological structure is in this case narrative cinema, part which have as their basic project an overhauling (not a
of which is the process of identification. Ambiguity aligns criticizing and not a smashing) of narrative, such as the
itself as a concept (and therefore as a reality) with the pseudo-narratives of Robbe-Grillet's appalling films, or
concept of freedom and individualism. The two latter Straub's post- (and sometimes pre-) Brechtian exercises
concepts are extremely rigidified in late capitalism. The in distanciation and reflection. (Even here the Brecht of
individual also thus becomes posited as static, as the theatre is mistaken for the Brechtian theorizer).' Other
essence, as ideal (or referring to the possibility of such). examples are Dreyer's purist set-pieces of dramatics,
The individual becomes posited as unitary, 'free' view, straightforward identificatory narratives, the
centred in deep perspective space away from the screen, identification merely shifted from the psychological/
and invisibly solidified, ever-present. Our whole emotional to the psychological/rationalistic. The
formation towards, and in, filmic enterprises is dominated identification into the narrative is into the thoughts, the
by such ideological strangleholds. ideas about the actions, the decisions, the ratio, instead
of the melodramatic unthought motivations of
Identification characters propelled by unthought 'fear', 'desire', etc, as
The commercial cinema could not do without the in most other films. An essay is urgently needed on the
mechanism of identification.5 It is the cinema of theme of narrative versus non-narrative form and on the
consumption, in which the viewer is of necessity not a inadequacy of the mechanistic deconstruction approach
producer,6 of ideas, of knowledge. Capitalist consumption which ends up illustrating rather than being, which ends
reifies not only the structures of the economic base but up static, time-denying, posited as exemplary rather than
also the constructs of abstraction. Concepts, then, do not relative, contradictory, motored into filmic, durational
produce concepts ; they become, instead, ensconced as transformation through dialectic procedures.
static 'ideas' which function to maintain the ideological
class war and its invisibility, the state apparatus in all its Art Movements
fields. Two art movements had their special effects on the current
The mechanism of identification demands a passive avant-garde structural/materialist film, and on those
audience, a passive mental posture in the face of a life structural films which are working in that direction. The
unlived, a series of representations, a fantasy identified art movements were : the aesthetics of Abstract
with for the sake of 90 minutes' illusion. And that Expressionism (though not necessarily the imagist
'fantasy' is often not even the insipid utopian romance of results) and Minimalism (to include such work as
'what should be' (Marcuse's justification for Goethe's Stella's).8 A major problem erupts here : that of making
poems) nor the so-called 'intervention' in bourgeois visible the procedure, presenting such as opposed to
morality that at moments may be approached in de Sade, annexing, using such. Throughout this essay, virtually
Lautreamont, Sacher-Masoch (never without intensely every problem centres on the opposition between usage
counterproductive repressions and paranoiac violence and presentation, incorporating versus foregrounding, etc.
stimulating and appeasing the bourgeois' tastes and There exists also the problem of the 'sensitive' artist,
tolerances). ever-present in the final object, which can be one end,
Identification is inseparable from the procedures of the means to which is an art which may record its own
narrative, though not totally covered by it. The making. But the other end, and the division must be
problematic centres on the question as to whether carefully analysed and researched with each case in
narrative is inherently authoritarian, manipulatory and question, is that of an art which is not an imagist
mystificatory, or not. The fact that it requires creation, a decorative object (narrative or otherwise)
identificatory procedures and a lack of distanciation to separated-from its means of production without a trace -
function, and the fact that its only possible functioning is left. If the final work magically represses the procedures
at an illusionistic level, indicates that the problematic has which in fact are there in the making, then that work is
a clear resolution. In that sense, it is more of a problem not a materialist work. This is a crucial point as to usage
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