The Value of
the Parochial: Film and the Commonplace
(an excerpt from a larger article publication forthcoming) by Janine
Marchessault
I was still a young boy when I saw
my first film. The impression it made upon me must have been intoxicating, for
I there and then determined to commit my experience to writing…. I immediately
put on a shred of paper, Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life, the title read. And I remember, as if it
were today the marvels themselves. What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary
suburban street, filled with lights and shadows, which transfigured it. Several
trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting
invisible house façades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the
shadows, and the façades with sky below began to waver. The trembling upper
world in the dirty puddle—this image has never left me.
Siegfried Kracauer (Ii, 1960)
We can see
the development of strategies based on coincidence, accidents, indeterminacy,
endlessness, and contingency in documentary and experimental filmmaking of the
post war period expressly in this light. As a means
to work through some of Kracauer’s insights around cinema and the “whole
world”, let me turn to a specific work—the short ‘travel’ film Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) by Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman. The
film was shot under the influence of Jack Kerouac and inspired by the Beat
Generation. Kerouac went on the road in the fifties to wander and to have
experiences, to create a scene across cities, New York,
San Francisco and Mexico. ‘On the road’ refers
specifically to a mode of writing that is quite literally writing while en route. It is after The Town and
the City and through On the Road that Kerouac developed his art of
‘spontaneous prose’, an improvisational method of writing in time connected to
the flow of life like jazz. Famously he
used a full roll of Teletype paper that matched the road and typed the novel
almost continuously over three weeks. The roll enabled him to write without
stopping, without interrupting the flow of words, essentially mirroring the
experience of driving. Kerouac like Gertrude Stein before him, associates
writing with a phenomenology of the mind, a writing that is “composed on the
tongue rather than paper” (Ginsberg 74). Kerouac’s writing does not seek to
transcend mediation so much as it does to document its actions so that writing
becomes a record of the connection between inner and outer structures of
perception, binding bodies to places through time. As much as it pushes the
boundaries of presentness, writing like film, is always in the past. Although
the fact of mediation between word and image is altogether different as
Kracauer would stress.
Hoffman made Somewhere Between, after attending a
conference devoted to the legacy of On the Road in Boulder, Colorado.
Yet Hoffman’s film is not so much on the road (the highway) as it is on the
street, featuring two cities (Boulder and Toronto) and towns somewhere between the cities of Guadalajara and León. The
film cuts across various scenes in these places with lengthy (often
twenty-eight seconds) unedited sequences of action and black leader as
“measured pauses” (Kerouac’s silence or breath) between sequences. These
juxtaposed moments play out a reflexive rhythm that foreground the randomness
and stubborn indeterminacy of the images of everyday life, and of their
placement in the film. We are presented
with situations that are delimited without being explicated. The film opens
with a text on the screen: “Looking through the lens/ at passing events/I
recall what once was /and consider what might be.” Two early sequences in the
film give image to these words. The first is an image of what is now a cliché
of globalization. The static camera poised on a street corner in the centre of
a small town in Mexico, frames in long shot, a mule and buggy parked beneath a
large red Coca-Cola sign, a tangle of telephone wires above low rise
dilapidated buildings. The only movement in the frame is the cars, driving in
and out of it, and a woman and child crossing the street. Yet movement and
layers of interaction are implicit in the juxtaposition of the mule and the
global corporation, which co-exist in this place. This image is preceded by
another static shot of a church down the street, doubly framed between two
pillars of a Catholic arch. Looking in, the camera reveals someone deep in
prayer. After a motionless few seconds, a child interrupts the stillness of the
sequence, enters the frame and begins a game of crawling up and down on chairs.
The child’s sudden appearance is precisely that kind of “unexpected incident”
that Kracauer delights in—“the stirring” of nature and people that the Lumiére
films first captured. The kind of “spontaneous writing” that we often find in
experimental ethnographies favors a self-reflexive methodology.
In this instance, focusing on the physicality of the scene to include the
temporal structure imposed by the camera (i.e., the spring wound Bolex’s 28
second take) and the filmmaker. The acts of “looking through the lens” as
Hoffman’s text tells us, calls upon a time-based aesthetic where past and
future co-exist beyond the edges of the frame. Yet it is not only the film
strip/ flow of life analogy that foregrounds this temporality. It is also the
reoccurring themes of religion and children, of tradition and horizons that
Hoffman finds across the different places in the
film. Given that the film concerns the story of a Mexican boy run over
by a truck somewhere in Mexico,
these themes resonate throughout. The boy’s death is an event that the
filmmaker refuses to film (or include in the film) but instead conveys through
a poetic text on the screen that is intercut throughout the film. Filled with
black holes overwritten with the poem that remembers the boy’s death, the
film’s architectonics are structured by the words that never conflate the
commonalities between the situations. The poem embeds the boy’s death in all of
the images of the film so that it is not inconsequential to the corporate sign,
the superstructure in the opening images but rather stands in a contiguous
relationship to it as to all the images in the film. The melancholic saxophone
that draws the line from Mexico to Colorado to Toronto, seems to synchronize
momentarily with the musicians and children holding out cups to collect money
in these different places but then separates and floats over them from an off
screen space that leaves the frame open to a multiplicity of found
stories: children playing games on
different streets in different cities, a crowd kneeling outside a church, the
Feast of Fatima procession in a Portuguese neighborhood in Toronto, little
girls dressed as angels and streets lined with telephone poles, the beautiful patina of pealing walls aged by
the weather, graffiti palimpsests in different languages, a paint brush
sketching a likeness of Jesus from a painting of Jesus, a child crawling up and
down on a large sculpture of a sea shell in an outdoor street mall, a pond
surrounded by trees at dusk. The camera stages situations from a distance and
in long shot; sometimes the movements of bodies are slowed. But it is the
materiality of the built environment that is framed to equalize the human and
the non-human (trees, benches, windows, sidewalks, statues, cars, signs) which
are counter influencing and interpenetrating processes. We see here the
manifestations global cultures, national and urban idioms and technologies that
the film stages as commonplace.
In the study of localities, filmmaker and anthropologist David MacDougal
points out that it is not singularities but interconnectivities and flows
between particular cultures that lead to the cinema’s capacity for deeply
phenomenological and pedagogical gestures. Somewhere Between gives us the interval or the
interface between places where identities and experiences take up their
meanings in Hoffman’s memories of a shared world. Yet it is also the
characteristic of the “found story” that it remains open, fragmented, that it
burn through myths and clichés. It must resist the “self-contained whole” that
would betray its force by casting a tight structure with a beginning, middle
and end around its anonymous core. The found story Kracauer explains arises out
of and dissolves into the material environment, often in “embryonic” forms that
reveal patterns of collectivity (Theory
246). The found story comes from the aesthetic of the street and we should add,
holds infinite possibilities for the psychic investment in the whole even as it
takes it apart. In the end, Hoffman may well have broken with Kracauer’s
prescriptive visual aesthetics by staging reality with word, image and black
leader in a way that actively petitions the dreamer to envision what was and
what might be. What holds the spectator’s interest in Hoffman’s film is the
gap, the place of imagining: the black smoke from the truck, the children
weeping, the sky and the boy’s spirit as it “left through its blue”.