In/Between Spaces by Darrell
Varga
Every story is a travel story—a
spatial practice.
For this reason, spatial practices
concern everyday tactics.
-Michel de Certeau
I think childhood is so traumatic we
sleep through most of it.
-Phil
Hoffman
The play of
light and dark in Phil Hoffman's river
(1978-79) is formed in a tension between film and video, water and land,
silence and sound, nature and culture in an invocation to awake from the trauma
of personal history. These tensions are not simple dualisms but are dialectical
processes enmeshed in the experiences of space and time suggested in my opening
quotations. river opens with a series
of images shot on film from a small boat drifting down the Saugeen
River, a suggestion of tranquility even as the calm flow is unsettled by the
absence of sound.3 We are presented with the frame as signifier of absence
rather than window onto the world. The subsequent sequence realizes this
landscape surface in the altogether different texture of black and white video,
but now our relationship to this framed space is overdetermined
by the presence of sound. While the technology of reproduction shifts from
tactile and mechanical photography to its electronic counterpart, there is no
longer human intervention in the steering of the boat, which now drifts
according to the riverís current. The boat's surface
amplifies the sound waves as it floats over the water's surface in a movement
of becoming simultaneously free and confined. The microphone rests on the boat
seat recording the bump and grind of collisions with tree branches jutting out
from the riverís edge. The sound is both jarring in
exaggeration while hollow in artificiality. Likewise, the images are at once
tranquil and interlaced with sudden reframing movements.
The camera enframes the liquid surface which in turn reflects the
clouds floating in the sky above, at once an opaque sheen and permeable depth
always mediated by the touch of photo-mechanical process. The easy contrast of
the human intervention in nature is complicated by the subsequent scene in
which the first segment is rephotographed. Here, the
edges of the frame are evident and the space on-screen where the dissolve
sutures together transitions from one shot to another is effaced. Instead, we
see the white screen on which this re-photographing process is projected. This
deferral of meaning is further destabilized in the final segment, a return to
the river to film underwater. In this sequence, silent images move quickly
between lightness and dark in an onward flow through the liquid surface and
across the textures of sand, rock, and light, marking a reterritorialization
of our relationship to this space in front of the camera. Movement no longer
confined to the shape of the boat merges with the object of the image, the
water as both surface and depth, recalling Gilles Deleuzeís
commentary on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934):
On land,
movement always takes place from one point to another, always between two
points, while on water the point is always between two movements: it thus marks
the conversion or the inversion of movement, as in the hydraulic relationship
of a dive and a counter-dive, which is found in the movement of the camera
itself...Finally, a clairvoyant function is developed in water, in opposition
to earthly vision: it is in the water that the loved one who has disappeared is
revealed, as if perception enjoyed a scope and interaction, a truth which it
did not have on land.4
In drawing
out the relationship between Deleuze's thinking and
Phil Hoffman's film practice, it is important to recall that for Deleuze, philosophy is not theoretical abstraction but is
vital conceptual practice, a kind of assemblage
in which the engagement with cinema reveals the practice of thought outside the
confines of Cartesian dualism. Hoffman's filmmaking practice similarly depends
upon the immediacy of intuitive and physical response. For Deleuze,
cinema is a primary determinant of our understanding of space and time, and
must be met outside of the constraining technical-interpretive methods of
psychoanalysis.5 Like the hollow sound of the boat
bumping into the shore in river,
Hoffman's films grind against normative conventions of documentary and genre
categorization. They offer a reconfiguration of indexical presence emerging
against assumptions of fixedness: of the borders of the frame, of order,
finality, Truth. They can be understood, following Deleuze's
fluid metaphors, as experimental process: "no longer measured except in
terms of the decoded and deterritorialized flows that
it causes to circulate beneath a signifier reduced to silence...embracing all
that flows and counterflows, the gushings
of mercy and pity knowing nothing of means and aims."6 By disrupting the
ordered measure of images toward a coherent teleology, cinematic
experimentation serves a necessary critical function. But its function is not
simply as corrective to the positivist tendency of realist narrative and
critical discourse; instead, it is the creation of an alternative space
in-between that which is simply given and the idea of art as transformative and
in which the act of seeing cannot be made co-extensive with believing.
That which
is within the frame is never fully known and always points to absences beyond
the border, and it is this space which is both celebrated and mourned as
simultaneous site of possibility and nothingness. While the commonplace
understanding of space, of the landscape around us and within our movie frames,
is as something which is simply a location for action and in itself simply
given and neutral, it must be better understood as something which is socially
produced and which can only be understood through our systems of cultural
encoding. This image-making no longer presumes to offer an unmediated window
onto the world. Deleuze describes the importance of
contemporary cinema as engaging a new realization of thought in three ways:
"the obliteration of a whole or of a totalization
of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted
between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole of the film, in favour of free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure
of the unity of [hu]man and
the world, in favour of a break which now leaves us
with only a belief in this world."7 What cinema offers, when it breaks
free from the relentlessness of the culture industry and systems of measure, is
an image of thought outside of the commodified
containment of difference.
Hoffman's
films engage this thought-movement by confounding easy distinctions between
documentary and experimentation. These films exist in the spaces in-between
film forms, in between image and text, place and space, the body and its
absence, photography, history, and memory. As Blaine Allan
indicates of several films, including Kitchener-Berlin
(1989): "The slash and the hyphen in the titles suggest both a
severance from the past and connections to it, an ambivalence that is
especially poignant for the descendants of the areaís
German settlers. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses
to bind it or restrict it from free association."8 The landscape which is
the surface texture of Hoffman's films is overlaid with a discourse of
territorialism, of personal and political struggles over the domain of space.
The Canadian town of
The performative hyphen of Kitchener-Berlin
both links and keeps apart these spaces, and it is here that personal history
is uncovered through film images which
play against the borders of static photography, the moving image, memory and
forgetfulness, and the creative process of immersion engaged by the
multiplicity of overlapping images. The personal is complicit with instrumentalized destruction whereby the silence
institutionalized by the change of the townís name is
voiced through cinematographic technology, itself enmeshed in the brutality
which is the history of the twentieth century. Hoffman explains this unresolved
contradiction in his use of the Steadicam for
present-day images as both free-floating spirit and masculine aggression:
...you're
floating in a world where the sky and the ground are equivalent. It's something
we can't do with our bodies, except through technology. So it's a metaphor for
the spirit released. I wanted to contrast that with the low technologies—the
home movies which take a familiar form and subject. The Steadicam
provides a solitary and other-worldly stance, an emptiness and separation from
anything it shows. There's something that separates the people sitting in front
of these old buildings, that separates the remnants of German history from the
present, and the camera signals this. This relates to masculinity. The Steadicam is part of the technology that can take us to
far-away places or destroy the world. I wanted to show different aspects of
technology through the century, using the Steadicam
to create a feeling of introspective space where one can look back and account
for what's happened.9
This
process of movement is not a re-writing of history but an evocation of its
absences following Walter Benjaminís demand that we
"brush history against the grain."10 The relation to Benjamin is not
incidental as his writings are filled with the concept of the shock effect of
images and experience which flare briefly and then disappear but which, if
recognized, fundamentally transform spatial and temporal understanding.
Hoffman's archeological process is a Benjaminian
translation of the past and casting forward into an unnamable future. There is
no synthesis of this dialectic; instead, it is an offering which includes the
necessary absences of forgetting and misconception haunting the reconfiguration
of memory, realizing Hoffman's assertion that "the possibility of mourning
lies in the unseen".11 To think critically about Berlin is to look into
the disaster of history and, in this case, to recognize the silent complicity
founded in such acts as the erasure of the name Berlin from what is now called
Kitchener. The art process which takes memory as canvas requires the failure of
recognition (which is not the same as the absences of official history) to
suspend instrumentalization and engage thought, as Deleuze describes:
When we
cannot remember, sensory-motor extension remains suspended, and the actual
image, the present optical perception, does not link up with either a motor
image or a recollection-image which would re-establish contact. It rather
enters into relation with genuinely virtual elements, feelings of deja vu or past 'in general'...[as
in dream and fantasy]. In short, it is not the recollection-image or attentive
recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the
failures of recognition.12
Hoffman's
use of silence and the abrupt stasis of still photography disrupts
the flow of movement as teleology of action and reaction and acknowledges the unsayable: a mourning which cannot be reduced to the
awkward gestures of language, but instead emerges in chance relations.
The overlap
of image and experience in the opening segment of Kitchener-Berlin confounds the instrumentality of space. Under the
simultaneously hypnotic and menacing drone of church bells mixed with intermittent
construction machinery sounds, images of nighttime bombing in
The
photographs are ordered in temporal reverse (images of
Hoffman's
films circulate with documents of a past which can never be wholly known, and
are overlaid with a present which itself has already begun to fade. Out of what
Bruce Elder, in his description of a tendency to investigate the nature of the
photographic image in Canadian experimental film, calls this"double-sided
nature of the concept of representation"13 in which presence is always
bound to absence, Hoffman's film practice brushes assumptions of photographic indexicality against the grain. Our relationship to these
temporal and spatial domains is determined by structures of power out of which
emerges the photographic trace. The towering trees of the Canadian forest
circulate beneath images of imposing European cathedrals. Tourists gaze upward
while their bodies legitimize the commodity-conquest of space. Simultaneously,
First Nations peoples gaze into the camera as the Pope moves through the crowd,
an image reproduced from television from which the relentless flicker of video
transferred to film reminds us of the invasiveness of systems of power even as
the seduction of the image evades naming it as such. The dialectical process of
negation in the overlap of these images forces recognition of absence without
reconciliation.
The notion
of cause and effect, of a teleology of history, is
blasted apart and recognition is forced in the space of absence. There is no
longer a totalizing unity in which thought is contained and experience is
managed. Deleuze describes the importance of montage
in the contemporary film as engaging the new by evading causal association of
images:
What counts
is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images: a spacing
which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it.
...Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an
interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of
differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say:
given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in
such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which
will be productive of a third or of something new.14
Where the
cinema frame, for Deleuze, once allowed a stable
system of measure in which disparate elements are brought together, the
contemporary screen is one of chance and simultaneity. Like the overloaded
frames of experience and detritus of Robert Rauschenberg, it arises out of a
social and historical context in which faith in grand narratives has dissolved.
Where we may see something new, it is in the unfixed, unstable terrain of the
in-between.
The final
section of Kitchener-Berlin is titled
Veiled Flight, evoking the recurring
tension of simultaneous movement and the obstruction of vision. The final image
of the film is of an unfocused figure bathed in washed out red, a home-movie
image superimposed over the cave walls and appearing at first glance as an
irregular beam of light. That which is given in memory and history has
dissolved into waves of colour and a deferral of
narrative mastery. This image follows a sequence in which the camera moves into
a darkened cave where candles and a flashlight illuminate wall carvings,
photographs, and other static images. Some of these images are similar to those
found in primary school history texts, such as drawings of dinosaurs and early
explorers, but from which the concluding dissolve of light sets us free. If we
are bound in chains within this Plato's Cave, they are chains of our own
making, images of power and discipline cast onto the earth.
This cave,
in a town called
Hoffman has
called this complex image-collage "polyphonic recitations",15 evoking an aural contrapuntal multiplicity in the
telling of stories through the entanglement of personal memory and history. It
is interesting that the term privileges sound within this complex layering of
images, perhaps to suggest an ephemeral musicality to the visuals in order to
circumvent the instrumentalized relation between word
and image common to conventional film reception. Likewise, it evokes another
kind of absence. If the images from old home-movies are obscured by the fading
of the film surface and the scratches from many passes through the family
projector, they speak as well of the impossibility of figuring the family as
united by the law of the father, even as the film is explicitly described as
marking the paternal side of the Hoffman family, its patterns of dispersion and
settlement.16 It does not present a simplistic nostalgia for a prelapsarian age, for it is a movement caught up in the
blinding gust of the present combined with a masculinist
desire to both know father and get out of his house.
The middle
"Prologue" of Kitchener-Berlin
is in fact a masculinist journey/progress narrative.
It is composed entirely of edited material from an archival film called The Highway of Tomorrow or, How One Makes Two made in the 1930s by a Canadian
businessman named Dent Harrison. Hoffman describes being moved by the
inventiveness of this film which depicts a dirigible flight across the Atlantic
in which Harrison photographically creates a double of himself to facilitate
photography from both the inside and the outside of the airship. Harrison then
falls into dream in which we see the double moving out of
Experimental
practitioners are likewise accustomed to having their work derided as
"amateur" by some elements of the mainstream. Harrison's film is a
story about travel and technological achievement, engaging Deleuzeís
understanding of movement as the central concern of pre-WWII cinema, a
reflection of technocratic will to mastery combined with a belief in the
possibility of unity: "The mobile camera is like a general equivalent of
all the means of locomotion that it shows or that it makes use of—aeroplane, car, boat, bicycle, foot, metro... In other
words, the essence of the cinematographic movement-image lies in extracting
from vehicles or moving bodies the movement which is their common substance, or
extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence."19 The use
of this footage here is to embrace the everyday and the idiosyncratic personal
experience of time and space, but it likewise asks whether
Travel is a
recurring motif in Hoffmanís films. His first, On the Pond (1978), is a reflection on childhood
memory engaged after having moved away from home and how photography provides
traces of the past while enframing absences
impossible to recover. His next, The Road
Ended at the Beach (1983), is the failure to enact Kerouac's On the Road in the unfreedom
of the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney era, as Hoffman explains: "We're all
waiting on an experience that isn't coming and no one's sure why. It has a lot
to do with how men relate to each other, dealing with outer realities, getting
the job done ...The guys on the road are caught in dead-end jobs, and nobody's
relating to each other in the van. ...The Beats were the fathers I took on the
trip, but their roads are closed now."20 One thread of their destination
is a meeting with Beat-era photographer Robert Frank to ask about the spirit of
those times and the nature of his images. They end up, instead, talking about
his living life beside the ocean, and lend a hand with the renovations to his
cabin. Frank admits to an earlier innocence of the Beats which allowed a sense
of freedom, but then bluntly states that Kerouac is dead. Memories of other
journeys intercede. The travellers encounter a man
who has been continuously cycling since 1953 and has spanned the world numerous
times with only the material baggage he can carry on his bike. In contrast, the
van these friends are driving in is cercarial and
subject to frequent breakdowns. Yet the film persists with the question of what
it means to travel, to document, and to exist within homosocial
structures of power.21 Spontaneity and the poetry of free movement emerges when
Hoffman is alone with the camera dancing on rocks at the waterís
edge. Here, the images swirl, making tactile the visual plane in a celebration
of looking unencumbered by obligations of language and social discourse. Yet
the film refuses an easy privileging of this image, while it offers a moment of
pleasure and intensity it exists within the borders of the social.
Sweep sifts through the imperialist
legacy of travel. It is a journey north to the remote
The camera
gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and
place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of
The
colonial project requires the landscape to be empty and unnamed in order to
legitimize the narrative of discovery, conquest, and exploitation. This
counter-narrative displaces that prescriptive and exclusionary project of
imagining community in which difference is displaced by the construction of
unity under the banner of tradition. In this way, my use of the concept of
in-between spaces intersects with Homi Bhabhaís use of that term to describe the intersection of
theory and practice. For Bhabha, the hybrid subject
position within colonialism, where the act of production is overdetermined
by the spectre of the West, at the same time subverts
these hegemonic and binary assumptions. As Bhabha
states: "Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase
its totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given
essentialist identities. For the political unity of the nation consists in a
continual displacement of the anxiety of the irredeemably plural modern
space."23
Sweep opens with a silent archival film
of white explorers interacting with the indigenous Cree people. They are on the
deck of a ship posing for a photo when the white men begin to playfully fight
with each other. The image fades to black but this spectre
of homosocial aggression continues to hang over the
landscape as the camera pans in a sweeping gesture of our technological view.
The final passage of the film weaves together images of the landscape with that
of a cultivated flower garden, memories of family and childhood experiences,
the looming hydro-electric structures, and archival footage of the Cree in
front of which stand the filmmakers in silhouette. This intertwining of
history, structures of settlement, of looking, and landscape suggest how all of
these spaces are produced within a given cultural context and how they overlap
and change in the process of engagement.
In-between
framed space are the desires and betrayals of the
body—caught in the photographís decisive moment and
in the relentlessness of time. Destroying
Angel (created with Wayne Salazar, 1998) is, on the one hand, a mourning for the death of Hoffman's life partner and
collaborator Marian McMahon, while also a celebration of
"Memory
derives its interventionary force from its very
capacity to be altered—unmoored, mobile, lacking any fixed position. Its
permanent mark is that it is formed (and forms its 'capital') by arising from
the other (a circumstance) and by losing it (it is no more than a memory).
There is a double alteration, both of memory, which works when something
affects it, and its object, which is remembered only when it has disappeared.
...Far from being the reliquary or trash can of the past, it sustains itself by
believing in the existence of possibilities and by vigilantly awaiting them,
constantly on the watch for their appearance."24
What de Certeau asserts for memory follows his understanding of
space as a network of transformative possibilities which emerge in movement
rather than in the fixedness of property, casting back to the treatment of
space and travel throughout Hoffman's films.
What is
necessary for
The father,
in a moving speech during the wedding reception, celebrates
A Klee painting named Angelus
Novus shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This
is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.26
As tragic
as the news of Marian's death is, the film does not sentimentalize or mystify.
It is instead put in the context of life as a process which necessarily
includes struggle and suffering beyond individual control. The title, Destroying Angel, recalls Theodor Adorno's interpretation
of Benjamin's angel as caught up in the destructiveness of the present: The Angelus Novus,
the angel of the machine...The machine angel's enigmatic eyes force the
onlooker to try to decide whether he is announcing the culmination of disaster
or salvation hidden within it. But, as Walter Benjamin, who owned the drawing,
said, "he is the angel who does not give, but
takes."27 I have made earlier references to Hoffman's use of images
"caught up in the blinding gust of the present" to evoke what is a
central concern of his work so well encapsulated in Benjamin's angel: the
impossibility of totality and reconciliation in any move into the future.
Like the
history of territorialism which constrains the potential for freedom in travel,
memory harbours suffering, and its presence can
unwrap the protective veil of forgetfulness. Destroying Angel concludes with
1. Michel
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), p. 115.
2. Phil
Hoffman, interview, "Pictures of Home," Inside the Pleasure Dome:
Fringe Film in Canada, ed. Mike Hoolboom
(Toronto: Pages-Gutter Press, 1997), p. 140.
3. I am
indebted to the published description of the making of this and other of
Hoffman's films in: Hoffman, Pleasure Dome, p. 145.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 79.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989). The concept of 'assemblage' comes from the
translator's introduction, p. xv, while Deleuze's
relationship between philosophy and cinema is best articulated in his
conclusion, p. 280.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
7. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 187.
8.
9. Hoffman,
Pleasure Dome, p. 145.
10. Walter
Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 256-257.
11.
Hoffman, Pleasure Dome, p. 142. The comment refers to the decision not
to photograph the body of a dead boy encountered during the filming in
12. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 54.
13. R.
Bruce Elder, "Image: Representation and Object—The
Photographic Image in Canadian Avant-Garde
Film," in Take Two: A Tribute to Film in
14. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 179.
15.
"An Interview with Philip Hoffman on his film, passing through/torn
formations," Cantrill's Filmnotes 59-60 (September 1989), p. 41.
16. Ibid.
17. The
film is from the Dent Harrison Collection of the National Archives of Canada in
18. Phil
Hoffman, personal interview, August, 2000.
19. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 23.
20.
Hoffman, Pleasure Dome, p. 141.
21. The
place of desire in the relationship between homosociality,
homosexuality, and homophobia is explored in Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
22. Phil
Hoffman, Sweep catalogue description, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre,
<http://www.cfmdc.org>.
23. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 149.
24. de Certeau, Everyday Life, p. 86.
25. Phil
Hoffman, personal interview, August, 2000.
26.
Benjamin, "Theses", p. 257.
27. Theodor Adorno, in Ernst Bloch et. al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed.
Ronald Taylor (London: NLB, 1977), p. 194.