For Jean Louis Schefer (round nose, swept aside hair, cigarette’s tip just about balancing in his hand), there are certain films — he doesn’t say precisely which — “that have watched our childhood” (The Ordinary Man of Cinema, 1980). You skim these words; sensing something strange in their texture, like catching your sleeve on an exposed nail. Films that have watched us. But, I thought I was doing the ‘watching’?
Later, Serge Daney — grand docent of Cahiers du Cinema — found this seemingly (but not actually) thrown-away phrase to be so sticky that he remixed it, in 1994: “it’s one thing to learn to watch films 'professionally’ [and] quite another to live with those films that have watched us grow up and that have seen us”. What were they (Schefer and Daney) talking about, fourteen years apart? Daney always wore a very large hat; this is immaterial, probably.
Idly, I suspect that both writers were attempting to rummage through the costume cupboard of ‘theory’ and ‘experience’ in order to locate the prehensile, prehistoric structure of spectatorship itself; that which is unburdened by knowledge — by the received wisdom (and lexical armament) that comes with writing about — or even making — film. When we refer to technique (tracking, panning, montage, mise-en-scene), are we not really deferring our own response — our (mmfh) living-with them? We’ve watched films; but we’ve also been watched by films. Daney, with his folded little face, tangle of hair, begins to open his mouth. He stops himself.
If this sounds a lot like Brakhage (remember: he sought to reveal-uncover “an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic” [this is 1963; he’s just finished the prelude of Dog Star Man — he’s on the cusp of Mothlight, its three sprawling-refracting-disorienting minutes]), then that’s probably not a coincidence. Schefer might have watched him; Daney, certainly. By the way, didn't Brakhage and Tarkovsky fall out — or at least not get along? Was Brakhage too certain of his uncertainties? Scowling, Tarkovsky folds his arms.
Right. But it’s not just about childhood. Sometimes, as adults, we encounter a film that is so different in (its) effect(s) that we find ourselves unequipped to properly think about it; we’re caught off guard. I had this feeling when first watching Gance’s Napoleon (1927); sensing that he was at the bleeding edge of a machine that didn’t yet exist; laying track before a train that was barrelling mercilessly behind him, albeit never quite catching up. Here, we can sense that this film is ‘doing everything wrong’, insofar as it doesn’t look like a film we’ve seen before. Perhaps that’s why we remember them; Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) having become the ur-text on the life of the soldier-saint, while de Gastyne’s (grand but ‘expected’) adaptation of the same moment of history — released only a year later, in 1929 — has been memory-holed; and nobody now remembers it.
Films spectate us, or can spectate us; peering through the mass of skin and bone and muscle and synapse that constitutes our grey-pink mind; all the electricity it contains. They rummage around in there. When this happens to us (when we feel ourselves being observed), it can feel like Knausgaard when — in My Struggle — he reflects on the work of the impressionists: people who were painting “so as to learn how not to think” (my emphasis); through watching, we’re made interestingly dumb (even if for the briefest of moments). Brakhage again. “Imagine a world before the beginning was the word”.
Film happens to our eyes, but it doesn’t just dabble with the surface; it plunges deeper. Think about the closeups of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, a film that happens inches from our faces; we can smell the sweat, feel the flesh; the sweep of history collapsed to a tight and fragile point. The cutting of Joan’s hair — it’s like we’ve never seen shorn hair swept up, even as it reminds us of every occasion in which we’ve been seated in the barber’s chair. In 1928, people had never really seen images like these; in 2024, we’ve still never really seen them. This is impossible, of course; we’ve all had our hair cut. I think that’s why they exert such a powerful influence upon us. We stop seeing the film; it starts looking at us. Now, we start looking at ourselves.
Differently, when Gance offers his cacophonous rendition of the la Marseillaise, the massed faces of his singers plummet and flicker together and, even without hearing their voices, the song rattles around our heads; precisely how Napoleon, borne upon his horse, disappears in the middle-distance, stage left, only to reappear — further along the track — mere feet from our faces; we are suddenly in a field in which we’ve never before stood, but it also feels as if we’ve been standing here for years. You feel dizzy; you want to sit down. But aren’t I already sitting down?
I think you might call this defamiliarization (hello, waving to Shklovsky; he rests his hands, foldingly, on his walking stick), but that doesn’t quite capture the effect that Schefer and Daney are talking about; a kind of shock-to-the-system that makes the unfamiliar familiar, but we don’t quite know how (it escapes explanation; is shaking hands with our most primitive and buried senses). Was I here, in this room — in this field? Only then do you smell the popcorn again, or glimpse the smeared green light of the fire-escape. Yes, I’m in a cinema; and I think I’m being watched.
If we ‘train’ ourselves to watch things, it might follow that — with an armful of books, indexes, references — we might fall down the stairs. Thinking about another writer who was good at this; Manny Farber. From the other side of the tracks, Farber wanted to shuck the oyster of what he called ‘underground’ movies, b-movies; the kind of stuff that was shown in porno theatres, in frotted basements beneath Times Square. The kinds of films that were — or, have always been — treated with a kind of upturned-nose disdain. Insufficiently artistic. &Etc. The “termite-art tendency” which chews always ‘blindly’ (again; unseeingly) ahead of itself. Forget your ‘white elephants’. He preferred things which hadn’t yet congealed.
Is this what makes Mekas so singular, and Kuchar after him? The ‘untrained’ (or; consciously de-skilled) hand of a filmmaker who wants to unburden themselves of all the calcified habit-trappings of film ‘proper’ (as an institution); amateurs can ‘get at’ the meat a lot faster, they’re less delicate. I think about Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline (1930), where — here’s a star-shocker — Paul Robeson stars alongside H.D. In fact, H.D. was part of the Pool Group that produced the film, and it was she who articulated the concept of the ‘clatter-montage’ that Macpherson and his collaborators had stumbled across; a kind of so-fast-you-can-barely-see-it editing method that sort of sidesteps the eye’s normative ‘persistence of vision’; creating an ‘in-eye’ form of superimposition, the brain lagging behind the light that pummels it. Here, in a roundabout fashion, is another way in which films watch us; literally, arriving into our bodies before we’ve had a chance to get a proper look at them. We can only try to keep up.
If you liked this newsletter then please consider liking, sharing or subscribing. It’s lonely here.