The Pinocchio Theory

Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism remains as stupendous and mind-shattering a film today as it must have been at the time of its first release in 1971. I hadn’t seen it for many years when I screened it for my class this past week; and, despite the fact that so many things in this film are burned into my memory, I wasn’t entirely sure how well it would hold up. But I needn’t have worried. WR is just as powerful as it ever was; indeed, its very untimeliness in our current cultural-historical context makes it even more disconcerting and destabilizing, perhaps, than it could have been when first released.

Many of the pre-1989 Eastern European films that I have been showing in my class are powerful in their evocation, and critique, of what living under “actually existing socialism” must have been like. Today, when that way of life has entirely vanished, even the negative aspects of these films work to display a fascinating otherness: to show us that political conditions, social relations, and cultural norms need not be eternally the way they are in today’s universal commodity culture. Though these films were intended, and indeed worked and continue to work, as powerful denunciations of the injustices and cruelties of Communist Party rule, they do not thereby comfort us in America (and in “the West” more generally) with the flattering thought that our own way of life, now triumphant worldwide (and under siege only by those whose desperation has driven them to cruel and barbarous counter-ideologies) is thereby justified. Rather, both these films’ depiction of other ways of life, and their protests against the miseries of those other ways, create a kind of opening. This process, which is implicit in so many of these films, becomes explicit and polemical in WR. Makavejev’s film is the only one on my syllabus that overtly proclaims itself as Marxist; in doing so, it dissects the ironies of both actually existing socialism and actually existing capitalism, and brings us elsewhere. WR is a “utopian” film, in Fredric Jameson’s sense of this term, less because of the sexual bliss (pornutopia?) that it promises, than because of its aggressive and stimulating disjunctions.

Much has changed, of course, in the years since WR was made. The film is deeply engaged with a particular location in time and space — America and Yugoslavia/Serbia at the end of the 1960s — and with a particular a constellation of ideas — the liberatory conjunction of Freudianism and Marxism, as seen in Wilhelm Reich’s theories and early “sexpol” work, and as promised in American countercultural ideals of self-realization via sexual freedom on the one hand, and Yugoslavian socialist ideals of samoupravljanje (“self-management,” or, as the film also calls it, “work-democracy”), on the other.

However, neither the American counterculture nor Yugoslavian socialism is much more than a (bad) joke these days. Sexual “liberation” has become ubiquitous, because it has been ubiquitously commodified. Sexual seduction and display are essential to the processes of marketing, advertising, branding, and economic circulation generally; the release of sexual impulses from repression, and their active solicitation in the marketplace, has not resulted in the liberation of human energies and potentials that Reich and Herbert Marcuse hoped for, but rather in a narrower confinement of desire within the circuits of consumerism and commodification than either of those thinkers could ever have imagined.

As for “self-management,” in practice it was little more than a cynical alibi for the same forms of regulation, regimentation, and corruption that existed in other, more orthodox, socialist countries — at least, this is what I am told by all the ex-Yugoslavs I have met who are old enough to remember it. It certainly didn’t result in, or correspond to, any liberatory change of consciousness, as the post-Communist disintegration of Yugoslavia attests. And if “self-management” still exists today, it does so, not as a socialist ideal, but, grotesquely, as a capitalist one. You can see “self-management” today in the exhortations toward “excellence” by business gurus like Tom Peters, who basically proposes that people become obligatory exploiters and entrepreneurs of themselves, and embrace their own precarity under the name of “flexibility”. You can also see “self-management” in the practices of “hip” and “innovative” corporations, which emphasize “flat hierarchies,” and encourage “creativity” and “decentralized decision-making” among their employees. One sees this in the emphasis upon the importance of the “creative class” for econimc growth today. But one sees it also in the way that even low-paid workers in retail are expected to absorb themselves in the corporate culture (whether of WalMart or of Starbucks), and to take the initiative in sales and promotion. In all these cases, workers are increasingly being charged with the task of policing and disciplining themselves, and (in Marxist language) actively exploiting (extracting surplus-value from) themselves. That is what “self-management” comes to today.

As for Wilhelm Reich himself, upon whose ideas and career the film is largely based, today he seems less like a sex radical than like a crypto-conservative without knowing it. Reich’s glorification of the orgasm is actually quite heteronormative and prescriptive, as well as being entirely caught up within the discursive deployment of sexuality-as-liberation, described and denaturalized by Foucault. (Indeed, as far back as the 1950s, Norman O. Brown had already denounced Reich’s privileging of “normal adult genital sexuality” over the multiple potentials of “polymorphous perversity”). Reich’s later ideas about orgone energy, for which he was prosecuted and persecuted by the US government, and which (in the late 1950s and the 1960s) had a correspondingly subversive prestige among writers and intellectuals (like Norman Mailer and William Burroughs), today seem little more than variants of today’s fashionable (and entirely conformist) New Age beliefs.

Where does all this leave WR: Mysteries of the Organism? I’ve been suggesting that the ideas and practices which make up the film’s subject matter have all been tarnished by the passage of time. In a certain sense, this means that what Makavejev proposed, in 1971, as images of liberation, have now become parts of everyday experience, in all their banality and obviousness, and have turned out not to be liberating at all. But I am trying to suggest that, in an important way, this only makes the film more visionary and more relevant. And this, of course, has as much to do with the film’s form and dynamics as with its overt content. WR begins as a sort-of documentary about Wilhelm Reich. But other strands quickly get woven in, and Makavejev’s montage becomes increasingly dense and delirious as the film proceeds.

In America, besides the materials on Reich, we see Tuli Kupferberg (of Fugs fame) wandering around New York City, dressed in military fatigues and waving around a toy machine gun, while on the soundtrack we hear The Fugs’ sarcastic song “Kill for Peace”; we see Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis wandering through the East Village, and speaking rapturously of the liberation s/he found in drag; we hear commercials on the radio for Coke and for Coppertone suntan lotion, among other products; we witness examples of Reichian body therapy in action; we visit the offices of Screw Magazine, and see one of the editors getting a plaster cast taken of his engorged cock.

On the Serbian side of things, we get the fictional story of Milena (Milena Dravic), a Party militant and Reichian, who believes that the Revolution is incomplete without free love. Milena has rejected her former proletarian lover Radmilovic (Zoran Radmilovic), whom she finds too macho and too crass. Instead she has fallen for, and works hard to seduce, the Soviet ice skating champion and “people’s artist” who goes by the Leninesque name Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidovic). This allegorical drama would seem to have much to do, therefore, with the strained relation between Stalinism and Titoism, between Soviet and Yugoslav Communism. To what extent did Tito represent a Third Way to socialism, beyond the deadlocks of the Cold War?

In any case, this all gets played out in a series of tableaus: Milena, dressed in partial military drag, haranguing the people of her tenement block on the necessity of sexual revolution; Radmilovic denouncing the “Red bourgeoisie” (one presumes he has read Milovan Djilas’ The New Class) , and breaking into Milena’s apartment to proclaim his undying lust and to shut up Vladimir Ilyich in the cupboard; Vladimir Ilyich alternating between lofty discourses on the beautiful ideal of communism, and physical brutality, as he tries to stave off Milena’s sexual advances; and finally, Vladimir Ilych’s murder of Milena after he accedes to her blandishments and she brings him to orgasm. These scenes are themselves intercut with Communist found footage, including scenes of the Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and (most amazingly) sequences from an actual 1946 Soviet film made in adulation of Stalin.

As these various “Western” and “Eastern” strands of the film are themselves intercut and scrambled together, we get a film that is amazingly rich and complex. WR: Mysteries of the Organism is perhaps the most brilliant example ever made of the “intellectual montage” theorized by Eisenstein and put into practice by Godard. Watching the film, we are bombarded with a massive overdose of information and implication. The strands of the film could not be more disparate, nor the styles (from documentary rawness to mannered, deliberate staging) in which these strands are presented to us; and yet everything seems related to everything else, everything in the film affects and is affected by everything else. Makavejev probably calls this dialectics; I was more reminded of the ontology of William James (very much taken up by both Whitehead and Deleuze) according to which relations are external to the things that they put into relation; but these relations are themselves every bit as real as the things to which they refer (for more on this, see here). The result is a kind of expanding multiplicity of potentials and encounters and juxtapositions and resonances.

Let me give one example of this, from WR. Vladimir Ilyich, just before he slaps down Milena in order to punish her for her sexual aggressiveness, speaks (the actual) Lenin’s lines about having to resist the (implicitly emasculating) beauty of art (Beethoven, specifically) because of the iron necessity of remaining hard, and cutting off the heads of the enemies of the people. A few scenes earlier (or later? I don’t quite remember), in the offices of Screw Magazine, editor Al Goldstein defends his publication of pornography as a perfect expression of “the American dream,” and of the ideals of free speech. [This will later become the major proposition behind Milos Forman’s fine film The People Versus Larry Flynt. Forman, like Makavejev, is an emigre from the Eastern Bloc, but he doesn’t come near Makavejev’s complex irony, or “dialectical” take on things]. These scenes resonate with one another, as well as with many other scenes, bits, or citations within the film.

In the first place, both of these scenes suggest a conflict rather than a harmony between the twin goals of sexual and political revolution. Vladimir Ilyich’s Lenin quote argues that aesthetic and sexual pleasure must be sacrificed in the name of revolutionary vigilance; if we let the tenderness of art, or the relaxing fulfillment that follows orgasm, fill up our souls, we will never have the ruthless strength necessary to destroy the bourgeois order. This is echoed in another scene, in which Milena reads aloud from a text of Lenin’s, to the effect that the State is necessary, not to give the workers what they desire (which can only be done by the workers themselves, when class society and the State itself have withered away), but to brutally repress the workers’ enemies. This, of course, is precisely the logic that leads (as Bakunin argued in the 19th century, and Djilas in 1950s Yugoslavia) to the Communist State’s self-perpetuation as a new organ of domination and exploitation. More generally, the political necessity to which Lenin appeals means the indefinite deferral of (sexual) satisfaction, in precisely the way that Freud’s Reality Principle does.

Meanwhile, Al Goldstein’s affirmation of the Americanism of porn resonates with other invocations of the “American Dream” in the film, most notably one by Reich’s daughter Eva, who contrasts American freedom with the enslavement that she sees as characteristic of Communist societies, who mold their children into “good citizens.” By extension, this gets linked to the evidence of commodification, via ubiquitous advertising on billboards and on the radio, which is a continual presence in Makavejev’s American documentary footage. It would seem that, in this way, Makavejev already anticipates the commodification of “free” sexuality, that I referred extensively to above, and that has only accelerated in the 35-odd years since the film was made.

On the more “micro” level, there’s a sequence that moves from a close-up of the dildo that is the final result of the “plaster-casting” process, to a shot of Kupferberg caressing his toy rifle like an enormous phallus, to footage (from the old Soviet film) of Stalin (actually an actor portraying him) receiving the adulation of the people as he speaks of the “arrow” that Lenin shot at the bourgeoisie (a phrase that Milena picks up as a sexual metaphor in her wooing of Vladimir Ilyich) to a shot of the “cloudbuster” (this Reichian invention is a sinister, multiply phallic-like device pointed to the sky, that is supposed to soak up and neutralize negative (deadly, cancer-causing) orgone energy). What do we make, then, of the power and signification, and the politics, of the phallus? How does commodification relate to authority, to war, to death and destruction, and to pleasure?
All this is just one small example (or series of examples) from the film. I have gone into it in such great detail only in order to suggest the way WR involves the viewer in spirals of mind-boggling, seemingly infinite, elaborations and ramifications. (Much more of this can be found in Raymond Durgnat’s excellent little book on the film). Eisenstein posited intellectual montage as a method for incorporating dialectical rationality (conflict and sublated resolution) into film. Godard extended intellectual montage into a principle of digression and discontinuity, not resolving conflict, but suspending the very narrative of conflict by a sort of indefinitely extendible parataxis, and thereby making possible a sort of meta-fictional, and itself potentially indefinite, aesthetic meditation. (Think of when he stops, in the middle of Two or Three Things I Know About Her to ponder the beauty and mystery of cream swirling in a coffee cup, and of what this implies about the encounter between subject and object. Or think — to emphasize how important this rapturous aestheticism is, even in one of Godard’s most explicitly “anti-aesthetic” films — of the Mozart sonata played in the barnyard in Weekend).

Makavejev, however, is neither as didactic as Eisenstein, nor as contemplative as Godard. Rather, he pushes intellectual montage in the direction of what I can best call a kind of energizing of potentialities (of what Deleuze would call the virtual, or what Whitehead would call the “mental pole” of a concrescence). Makavejev is concerned with multipying potentialities, even (or especially) when these potentialities (obviously) cannot all be realized (since they are “incompossible” with one another), and when they lead to an impasse. Which is why the film can both enthusiastically celebrate the potentials of free sexuality, and envision the way such a “liberated” sexuality is only a pseudo-liberation, as it issues either in rampant consumerism (the American way), or in the exaltation of a sort of phallic totalitarianism (which applies, in different ways, to both Stalin and Hitler), or to the panicked reassertion of male privilege via murder (Vladimir Ilyich loses his self-possession when he gives way to orgasm and to his desire for Milena; which is why, in classic masculine-domination mode, just like in all those American film noirs, he punishes the woman for having allured him).

That is to say, in comparison to either Eisenstein or Godard, Makavejev’s intellectual montage is… more intellectual, more world-significant in its ramifications. (None of this should be seen as criticism of Godard, for whom I maintain an undying love and allegiance). But, besides being more intellectual, Makavejev is also (how to best put this?) more material — no, rather, more corporeal, more deeply embodied, than Godard (or Eisentstein). This has much to do with Reich, whose insistence on the embodiment of affects and desires is perhaps the most significant and powerful aspect of his theories. Reich, for instance, thought and wrote at great length about how repressions and conflicts and erotic positions are manifested, not just in linguistic and intellectual symptoms (as per Freud), but also very much in bodily postures and gestures, in what might be called the visceral forms of expression. (This non-linguistic dimension is precisely what the Lacanians ignore, systematically and on principle). This aspect of Reich’s theory is in fact explained to us, on screen, by a Reichian analyst (Alexander Lowen, if I am remembering correctly).

Following this principle, Makavejev’s montage is as visceral as it is intellectual. The sexual scenes in WR have generally been the ones that have caused the most controversy: in the dvd of the film that I showed my class, during the plaster-casting scene the man’s erect penis is obscured by a ridiculous sort-of psychedelic efflorescence special effect. This is something that wasn’t there when I viewed the film years ago; it was added to the film by Makavejev in 1991 (he proclaimed it an “improvement” ) in order to satisfy British censorship regulations (is WR the only Eastern-bloc film that has been thus censored both by a Communist country and by a capitalist one?). But in fact, the most physically jolting scenes in the film are not directly sexual at all — they are documentary scenes of Reichian therapy, showing patients violently thrashing and convulsing their bodies while yelling things like “give it to me.”

This is supposed to be therapeutic: it is supposedly a way of breaking through bodily rigidities that are also psychological repressions, of cracking what Reich called the “character armor” in which we neurotically encase ourselves. But actually seeing this on the screen affects me physically in a way that is quite disturbing: it is hard to voyeuristically watch a body in such convulsion, it feels to me like pain even if I know that, for the person going through this, it is not supposed to be. And Makavejev heightens the ambiguity by juxtaposing a clip of another, much more overtly sinsiter, form of “healing” through the body: footage of somebody being subject to electro-convulsive therapy (“shock treatment”). It’s not in any sense automatically liberating to have done with Cartesian dualism, and to locate power and affect in the body: if we accept such an analysis, we must also ponder how fascism works in and through the body. (This is a lesson we very much need to learn, as we pursue work in Affect Theory. I think that recent theoretical writing by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning is exemplary in this regard).

Because of how it’s visceral and intellectual at the same time, Makavejev’s montage affects me in ways that no other work quite does. I’ve written in the past about visceral horror — even visceral/intellectual horror, as in the earlier works of David Cronenberg. But nobody approaches quite approaches Makavejev’s mixed intensities: the way he is utopian and darkly pessimistic at the same time. WR: Mysteries of the Organism is radically demystified and even disillusioned; the film has none of the naivete that characterised so many people’s utopian hopes and political and sexual (and pharmacological )dreams in the 1960s. Yet at the same time, it refuses to give up the radical potentialities whose difficulties and unconscious hypocrisies and ambivalences it nonetheless uncovers, and even mocks. There’s something so sweet about Jackie Curtis, as s/he describes his/her joy of becoming a “woman” (a joy that is very un-Reichian, let it be noted). And Milena’s harangue to the masses about sexual freedom is a hilarious send-up of a Party meeting, not to mention that it degenerates into a shouting match with Radmilovic, and then into some good-old-time Serbian singing and dancing; but the depth of Milena’s call for satisfaction, not in some future time, but in the here and now, continues to resonate throughout the film.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism ends with a scene of Vladimir Ilyich’s remorse, as he comes back to consciousness after murdering Milena while in the throes of orgasm, and becomes aware of what he has done. He sings a sad and oddly moving song, about loss and desolation and repentance, while wandering through a snowy landscape, past campfires around which (apparently) poor and homeless people are gathered. The song is addressed to God, which is a bit odd for a self-professed materialist and atheist. The song is moving, as I said, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking about how it was all very well for him to be sad, when (unlike Milena herself) he had evidently gotten through it all scott-free.

But before this, there’s another sort-of concluding moment. Milena’s decapitated head has been found in the river, and is set (facing the camera) on a platter. All at once the head begins to speak, of the cosmic joy of orgasm, and of regret (rather than anger) that Vladimir Ilyich turned out to be a “Red fascist,” unable to cope with the experience of pleasure. The last thing that Milena’s head says is, “in spite of everything, I am still not ashamed of my Communist past.” This is a motto that could apply to the film as a whole, with its multiplicities, its ambiguities, its understanding of the terrible ironies of history, and of the mobilization of the body, its rejection of closure, and yet at the same time its refusal to give way on its desire.

Marta Meszaros’ Adoption (1975) is a very special sort of “women’s film,” a naturalistic, understated melodrama — if that doesn’t seem like too much of an oxymoron. It’s a melodrama, because its focus is mostly domestic, as it deals with the emotional ups and downs of two women’s lives. It’s not that the film is detached from social and political concerns — quite the contrary — but these are reflected (or refracted) almost exclusively through the women’s inner, intimate feelings, the slender threads of hope they nourish amidst a general sense of constricted horizions, loneliness, and disappointment. The film is naturalistic, at the same time, because it shows nothing of the floridity and excess that we usually associate with melodrama; instead, we get the decors and surroundings of a small provincial town in Hungary, where people are free from abject poverty, but also not particularly well off. Most of the scenes are set in shabby apartments, on public transport, in various institutional settings, in the workplace, or in popular (not particularly luxurious) restaurants and cafes.

The two women are Kata (Katalin Berek), a 43-year-old woman, and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), a troubled teenager. Kata is a widow who lives alone and works in a factory; Anna lives at a state institution for troubled young people, as she is unable to get along with her parents. Kata has a lover, Joska (László Szabó) who is a married man with children; he professes his love for Kata, but he is unwilling to leave his wife and family for her. She accepts this more or less fatalistically, but it’s evident that she feels lonely and unfulfilled. At the start of the movie, she tells Joska that she wants to have a child by him, and that he needn’t worry, she will raise the child alone, etc.; but he absolutely refuses. She accepts this more or less fatalistically as well, though she clearly isn’t pleased.

Anna has a boyfriend, whom she wants to marry; but neither her family nor the institution in which she has been placed will give consent. She has the reputation of being something of a bad girl, always running away, or otherwise making trouble: but all we see of her, really, is vulnerability and need, and uncertainty as to what, if anything, she will ever be able to make of her life.

Kata and Anna get drawn together in the course of the film; Kata seems to regard Anna as the daughter she never had, though Anna fiercely resists being cast as the child — she is sick and tired of being dependent upon superior adults, and is looking for a friendship (or even, with this older woman, a sort of mentorship or sponsorship) that nonetheless entirely respects her autonomy. Given their disparate desires and emotional needs, the relationship between Kata and Anna, though intense, is marked by tensions, and is fairly transient. The plot of the film basically consists of Kata and Anna getting to know each other, Kata’s problems with Joska, and Kata arranging for Anna to marry her boyfriend after all. The film ends with a lengthy wedding party, in the course of which it is suggested that this marriage will not be the solution to all her problems that Anna has imagined it to be; followed by a shorter scene in which Kata adopts a baby (she looks 6 months old or so); the film ends with a freeze frame of Kata holding the baby, about to get on the bus that will take her home. So the plot comes to some sort of resolution for both protagonists, only Meszaros goes out of her way to remind us that this closure is provisional at best, and that the women have not really overcome their alienation, only transferred it to a new register. A husband and a baby represent decisive steps, or changes; but they are not final resolutions, because real-life experiences do not end (short of death), only stories do.

Adoption, then, is an affective film much more than it is a narrative one. None of the characters is loquacious; we don’t really know what they are thinking, most of the time. But we get a powerful sense of how they feel and think, nonetheless, because so much of the film is shot in close-up. The register of the face — and sometimes other parts of the body — is our main anchoring point. There are many shots and sequences that seem suffused with feelings of tiredness, longing, anticipation, and resignation; or irresolution and, conversely decision. We never see utter desperation, and only rarely do we see happiness — there is one wonderful scene in a restaurant, where the two women bond over cigarettes, cognac and a meal, laughing together as they simply ignore the men who stare at them, or politely but firmly refuse the efforts of the men to pick them up. (This is the only sequence in the entire film where we get a conventional shot/reverse shot structure; Meszaros is very aware of the gender politics of the gaze, I presume without having read Laura Mulvey, whose “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was published the same year that this film was made),

Yet Meszaros’ use of close-ups is not isolating in the way that close-ups usually are. And this relates to how the film is naturalistic, as well as melodramatic or affective. The most famous — and most radical — use of the close-up in world cinema is probably that of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, where all the shots of Falconetti’s face in extreme close-up not only emphasize the emotions she feels (or perhaps, more accurately, the waves of nearly impersonal affect — passion and ecstasy — that traverse her body and her spirit), but also serve to detach her from her surroundings (which in any case are already quite minimal), and thereby from the craven and entirely temporal judgment of those who condemn her. The close-up, here, is a gateway to transcendence — it bespeaks an affirmation of the spirit, and a radical rejection of the overbearing oppressions of the here-and-now.

Meszaros’ use of the close-up is, however, entirely different. The most common sort of shot in the film — I would almost call it Meszaros’ signature as an artist — is a moving close-up: a pan or travelling shot in extreme close-up. Dreyer’s close-ups are, of course, entirely still (which is a necessary condition for their intensity); but Meszaros’ camera is perpetually restless, even as usually stays close to emphasize the characters’ emotions. So the camera will pan from one woman’s face to the other’s, in extreme closeup — rather than either placing the two faces together in a two-shot, or isolating them via separate shots. This emphasizes a kind of dual (though generally not harmonious) subjectivity. It also connects the character to her surroundings: these are entirely fragmented, but nonetheless basic to the composition of the shots, since space is being emphasized by movement, along with the fixity of facial expression. A frequent variant of this sort of shot is one in which the faces are captured in shallow focus, while there are other objects or people, blurry and out of focus, coming in between the camera and the faces that it is contemplating with clarity. Yet another variant is where the close-up doesn’t rest exclusively on the face, but moves over different parts of the woman’s body. This happens, for instance, in a scene early in the film, where Kata sees a (male) doctor in order to make sure she is healthy enough at age 43 to have a baby. Her body (together with the hands of the doctor palpating it) seems to be extrmely fragmented, broken into separate parts — breast, arm, back — except that the camera’s movement, grasping all these separate parts without a cut, suggests rather a kind of tour of the body at very close range, something that feels disconcertingly intimate. (I’m reminded of a legendary film that I have read about but never actually seen, Yoko Ono’s Fly).

I think that Meszaros’ style emphasizes her protagonists’ closeness to one another, together with their experience of their social environment — which does not altogether determine them, since their alienation from it is precisely what gives them a sort of limited, but nonetheless actual degree of freedom — but which does limit or constrain them severely, and which is the major component of their experience, however much they would like to escape it. (Meszaros’ film is in this sense radically anti-escapist; it insists on the real experience of constraint, of unfreedom, of non-autonomy, as a necessary background to any autonomous decision or action). Rather than focus on massive social determinations, Meszaros is attentive to a whole series of micro-determinations. For all that Adoption is a kind of “domestic” drama, it emphasizes at every step the role of social institutions, from the institutions of Medicine and the Factory (both of which have their own hierarchies of command, relation, and appeal) ot the social institutions of marriage and the family (which comes up in two particularly excruciating scenes: one in which Kata visits Anna’s parents, to get their approval for Anna’s hoped-for marriage; and the other in which Joska brings Anna home to meet his wife and kids, to whom he introduces her as just his “co-worker”; while she colludes with him in keeping them totally unaware that he is having an extended affair with her) to (literal) Institutions for wayward juveniles, with their own bureaucratic structures and chains of command. But these institutional components of social life (and specifically, in Hungary of the 1970s, of socialist life) are themselves observed within the film exclusively on the micro-level, in terms of the particular experiences the protagonists have with negotiating them, the particular steps they are always compelled to take. For Meszaros it’s not a question of the global structures of socialist authority, so much as of the way this authority mobilizes, engages, demands, and produces affect.

The moving close-up is also a way of expressing intimacy; Meszaros is not just concerned with the affects within the individual, but also, and perhaps above all, with the flow of affect between individuals. Adoption is a film about transpersonal affect. It narrates, not so much a single plot, as the multiple, and subtle, shifts of affection, attention, and concern between Kata and Anna — and to a lesser extent between these two women and their men. You could call it a balance of passion, in contrast to the more commonly discerned balance of power in intimate and social relationships. Part of the uniqueness of Meszaros’ approach here is precisely that she makes us think and feel in terms of passion rather than power. Though Joska, in particular, is something of a jerk, Kata never questions her love for him, and the film doesn’t allow us to question it either. The film certainly casts a critical eye on patriarchal institutions, and demonstrates their ubiquity in the society in which Meszaros lives, and in which the film is taking place; and the film strongly suggests the importance of relationships among heterosexual women, as opposed to their relationships with men. But there is none here of the denunciation of male power per se that we find in Western feminist writing, theory, and art of the 1970s (and beyond). Instead, Meszaros displaces our concerns away from power relations altogether, and onto trickier, but no less important, terrain. She doesn’t ignore power so much as… she renders it less important than we often think, less important than other sorts of relationships, other affective dimensions. This might be thought of as the sole “utopian” dimension of a film that otherwise takes a grim look at things, seeing only continued, unpleasant constraints, and the necessity of trying to live on while adjusting to them.

Intimacy is hard in the best of circumstances, and Meszaros never lets us forget the dis-ease, the vague sense of discomfort, the troubling ambivalence that underlies any act of giving oneself over to intimacy, to an Other. This ambivalence also permeates Kata’s desire to be a mother, an emotion that a sterner feminism might want to question, but that Meszaros just gives us without explanation or psychological analysis, as a given of Kata’s condition. We are sometimes tempted to think of babies — of our children — as blank slates on which we can impose ourselves; but of course this is never actually the case, no matter whether we give birth to a child or adopt her. In fully inhabiting this dimension of experience, Adoption gives a different twist than is usually given to the truism that the personal is political. In exploring the politics of intimacy, and in understanding this politics in terms other than those of either power and domination, or liberation, Meszaros creates a new sort of film, one that I can only call (by another hopeless oxymoron) affective social realism.

Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) is the first of Jan Svankmajer’s films to use live actors almost exclusively; there are only a few brief animated sequences. But as Svankmajer himself says in an interview, “I work with actors exactly as I work with inanimate objects… I use the camera to photograph them as inanimate objects.” Svankmajer’s actors, like his marionettes and his stop-motion animations, occupy a strange half-world in between life and death, vitality and impassivity, subjectivity and objectness. The characters in Conspirators of Pleasure all inhabit the realm of what Mario Perniola calls “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

Conspirators of Pleasure doesn’t have much of a plot; rather, it documents the independent, yet intersecting, itineraries of six obsessed characters and what traditional psychology or psychoanalysis could only call their “perversions.” It is not for nothing that, in the final credits, Svankmajer acknowledges the inspiration of Sacher-Masoch, the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and Bohuslav Brouk (the latter was a Czech psychoanalyst with strong surrealist ties, about whom I know nothing — there’s an account of his life and work here, but I cannot read it, as I do not know Czech). Actually, one might well add Krafft-Ebbing to this list, as Svankmajer is much more concerned with symptomatology (the cataloguing and documenting of the minutiae of “perversion”) than with diagnosis (tracking the roots, and interpreting the meanings, of “perversion” as Freud does).

In any case, the film’s six protagonists are the following. A man makes an enormous papier-mache chicken’s head, and wings derived from five broken umbrellas sewn together, wearing them in order to perform a ritual in which he abuses and eventually destroys a life-sized mannequin representing his (female) next-door neighbor. The neighbor similarly performs a ritual in which she burns religious candles at a sort of altar, while she dresses in dominatrix gear, and whips and eventally destroys a mannequin representing the man next door. The postwoman who delivers their mail chews up bread and spits it out again to make a multitude of doughballs, which she stuffs in great numbers into her nostrils and ears, cutting off her senses and giving her a sort of meditative bliss. Then she delivers the doughballs to a woman newscaster, who uses them to feed some carp; these fish are kept in a pan of water at her feet, and trained to nibble her toes, which brings her to convulsive orgasm. The shopowner, from whom the first man buys the porno magazines that he uses for his papier-mache constructions, is himself obsessed with the newscaster; he constructs a complicated machine that strokes and caresses him while he watches (and videotapes) the newscaster on an enormous screen. The newscaster’s husband, meanwhile, constructs a variety of masochistic masturbation devices from fur from women’s coats, condoms, rolling pins, nails, and other such fetish objects. He turns out to be a cop, who, at the end of the film, is investigating the deaths of the two neighbors, whose mutual rituals of destruction against one another seem to have passed over from fantasy into actuality.

As this brief summary indicates, there are all sorts of links between the films’ six “conspirators.” But these links are all fortuitous ones. The two neighbors, united in mutual hatred, do not speak; neither do the cop husband and newscaster wife, whom at one point we see lying in bed together, not touching, until he gets up and goes to his workshop to tinker with his devices. Indeed, the absence of communication is emphasized by the fact that there is no dialogue whatsoever in the entire film. (There are lots of — often exaggeraded — ambient sound effects, and classical-music themes for each of the six main characters). Instead, we get — at most — knowing glances between them. The magazine vendor winks at the chicken-man, until the latter gets embarrassed and pays for his magazines, rushing out of the store without waiting to get his change. The newscaster wife weeps as she glances through the blinds at her cop husband’s workshop. The chicken man and the postwoman exchange looks as they accidentally bump into one another in the street.

Against these half-acknowledged looks, there are the furtive glances with which the conspirators check everything out around them, to make sure that nobody sees them indulging in their secret pleasures. For though these six characters are connected in various ways, to the extent that it seems that each of their perversions depends upon one of the others, or on other people more generally, nonetheless they are each alone. Their pleasures are all solitary and masturbatory. Even the newscaster, whose orgasm is (it seems — but this may only be a seeming) broadcast live on television for all the world to see, iis careful to hide her feet and the basin in which the carp are biting them. Each character, you might say, is like a Leibnizian monad, completely self-enclosed, without windows or doors, yet nevertheless in hidden, implicit communication with the entire universe. Svankmajer proposes a strange new sort of social bond, one that is irreducible either to Communist solidarity and communitarianism, or to capitalist atomism. There is no common interest, no togetherness; but also no competition of rationally calculating, autonomous individuals in the marketplace, and no Hobbesian war of all against all. Everything is irreducibly particular; but all these particularities are incomplete and uncontained, not to mention too compulsive and too partial to be recuperated as attributes of a “self.” We are faced, instead, with something like Agamben’s coming community, or Jean-Luc Nancy’s inoperative community, or Maurice Blanchot’s unavowable community — or better, to the common source of all these three, Georges Bataille’s “community of those who have no community.” The social bond is oblique and forever incomplete; it is embodied, not but public rituals and shows of empathy or solidarity, but precisely by the odd conjunction of private rituals, selfish passions, compulsions that can never be confessed, and that are characterized by shame and embarrassment as much as by orgasmic release.

Svankmajer’s formal strategy itself expresses these concerns. In one sense, the film is a deeply affective one: there are lots of close-ups, emphasizing the conspirators’ emotions. which range from furtive uneasiness to orgasmic release. But — contrary to the usual implications of cinematic syntax — these close-ups never lead to any sort of identification with the characters. This is partly because these characters’ practices are too singular, too compulsive, too intricately weird, in short too distant from common experience (or at least from any experiences that we are accustomed to avow in public, and see depicted on our screens) to allow for the usual sort of identification. It is also because, despite these close-ups, the characters do not really share their experiences with the camera — much of the time, they are masked as they perform their private rituals, or else they literally hide in the closet — diegetically away from any potentially prying eyes, and extra-diegetically away from the prying eye of the camera — at crucial moments in their process of self-gratification. And then, in addition, because Svankmajer tends so much to fragment space, and bodies, with closeups of hands and eyes and so on, as well as physical objects, that even these close-ups of emotional expressions in the face read more like exploded fragments than like points of concentration. This is one way in which Svankmajer indeed treats his actors in the same way as he does inanimate objects.

Throughout the film, there is an extreme emphasis upon construction and process: Svankmajer doesn’t just show us how his conspirators’ rituals of pleasure work, he also shows us — very materialistically — how the physical objects that enable these rituals are put together We really get to know the papier-mache chicken mask, the masochistic pleasure/pain brushes and rollers, circuit between bodily stimulator and video screen, and so on, because the film shows us in such careful detail how the materials for these instruments are obtained, broken down, repurposed, and put together in new combinations thanks to meticulous and lengthy handiwork (or, in the case of the postal worker, mouthwork). Finally, Conspirators of Pleasure is largely about machines: by which I mean, not industrial machines, but the conspirators’ ramshackle constructions. These are literally machines, but in the sense of the surrealist constructions of the first third of the twentieth century, or in the sense of Rube Goldberg machines, or in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom a machine is a concatenation of heterogeneous elements that interact precisely by virtue of their diversity, disconnectedness, and dysfunctionality. And the conspirators themselves are also parts or components of these machines that they have constructed, rather than fully active subjects who simply use the machines instrumentally. Their orgasms are functions of the machine, parts of its functioning, rather than autonomous ends for which the machines would be simple means. This is why they are Perniola’s “things that feel” rather than Kantian/existentialist moral subjects. Orgasms are not outpourings of the erotic body/soul, but convulsions inherent to the depths of inorganic matter.

In Svankmajer’s vision, the human cannot be separated from the machine, and inner desires cannot be separated from their physical instantiations. There is no “human spirit,” but only an intensive, affective materiality. And there are no wholes or unities, but only parts: units or components that are incomplete in themselves, always requiring conjunctions and collisions and ruptures with other parts, so that the combination of these parts is itself always incomplete, always an ongoing process without conclusion. Nothing is self-contained, “no man is an island”; yet there is also no communion, no higher community, no totality. Rather than pathologize the “perversions” that his camera so coolly tracks and records, Svankmajer suggests that there is no “normality,” no desire, no conjunction of bodies –whether organic or inorganic — that is not singular, contingent, fleeting, and disruptive: in a word, “perverse.”

Peter Bacso’s The Witness is a comedy about Stalinism, oxymoronic as such a description might sound. The film was made in 1969, but immediately banned by the Communist government of Hungary, and only released in 1981. The film is apparently famous and widely popular in Hungary, but it is not very well known elsewhere. The American DVD is marred by missing subtitles in a few scenes, though for the most part my class and I were able to keep track of what was going on.

In terms of form, The Witness is a thoroughly mainstream film, skillfully directed, but in no respect avant-garde or experimental. This, in fact, is part of the film’s interest. For one thing, it is what allowed The Witness to gain its massive popularity at home. For another, usually in the US (and, I imagine, more generally in “the West”) we generally only get to see art films from Communist Eastern Europe. As far as I know, there was a massive popular film industry in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; but almost none of these films are available subtitled in English, and on VHS or DVD. (All I know about Communist popular cinema comes from the wonderful 1997 documentary East Side Story).

So an additional benefit of seeing The Witness is that it gives us a sense of the stylistics of Communist Eastern European popular film: and in fact, this stylistics seems very close to its Hollywood counterpart. The Witness is in color and wide screen. Its production values are a bit more modest than those of standard Hollywood films of the same period. But its invisible editing style is entirely familiar (Bacso favors broad shots, and expression through mise en scene more than through montage — but not any more so than was typically the case in Hollywood from the 1950s until the innovations of the “New Hollywood”). And Bacso works his sight gags pretty much the same way as Hollywood studio comedy of the time did. (Though, alas, there is nothing as visually outlandish as some of the things we get in Frank Tashlin’s or Jerry Lewis’ comedies).

Anyway, what distinguishes The Witness is of course its political content, of a sort that one simply doesn’t find in American comedy (nor, I would imagine in the great mass of popular films produced in Eastern Europe prior to 1989). The film is set in the Rakosi era (Rakosi was the dictator of Hungary from 1948 to 1956; his regime was known as the most hard-line Stalinist and repressive of any in Eastern Europe). The comic protagonist, Jozsef Pelikan, is a hapless fool, a bit along the lines of the protagonist of Andrzej Munk’s Bad Luck. Pelikan is a naive, earnest, and loyal Communist, basically honest, and just wanting to do what is asked of him. Of course, his enthusiasm and “overidentification” get him in trouble time and time again. He starts out as a dike keeper on the Danube, striving to stop the river from overflowing, and also to keep his dog from pissing on the flower bed where the flowers are arranged to spell out a message of dedication to the Leader. But he keeps on getting promoted to higher positions, with greater responsibilities. Each time, he messes up in some way, and is sent to jail. But he is always released and given a yet better job. It turns out that he is being groomed to testify in a show trial against a friend of his, a former government minister, who has been purged from the Party and accused of being a spy in the pay of the fascists and imperialists.

The rhetoric of the Communist regime is one of the main targets of Bacso’s satire. The film features such incidents as the successful growing of the “Hungarian orange” (though one of Pelikan’s children eats it, and it has to be replaced with a lemon) which will make the imperialists quake in their boots; and the socialist amusement park, where the haunted house terrifies visitors with its vision of the Communist specter that is haunting Europe. Or again, firemen arrive hours too late to put out a fire — the house has already completely burned down — and explain that they couldn’t have arrived any earlier, because they were conducting an investigation to make sure that the report of the fire was real, and not an imperialist provocation.

When Pelikan is rehearsing the testimony he is supposed to give against his old friend, he meets (among other “helpers”) a speech therapist who uses what are basically Method Acting techniques to try to get him to take on the role of an honest, indignant worker, and a hard-drinking scriptwriter who never wants to repeat himself, and is very proud of producing confessions and testimony that are free of cliche (because they are filled with accusations so absurd that nobody has ever thought of them before).

The whole movie is filled with a twisted logic worthy of Lewis Carroll (“verdict first, trial afterwards”) and Groucho Marx (“who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”), but which sounds familiar even to me as classic Stalinist bureaucratese, and must have been totally recognizable to the original Hungarian audience. Pelikan provides the perfect foil, as he patiently tries to understand, for instance, just how it could have been that, when he thought he saw his friend the ex-Minister fishing on the river bank, the ex-Minister was really sending secret, treasonous messages to fascist frogmen.

The most interesting character in the film, aside from Pelikan himself, is his Party contact, the creepy Comrade Virag (Lajos Oze). Virag is a bit like a vampire, effete and neurasthenic, and continually manipulating Pelikan through an amazing (and no doubt carefully calculated) combination of seeming self-pity, an excessive assumption of intimacy and familiarity, continual pleading and wheedling, and subtle threats. It’s Virag who plies Pelikan with delicious morsels only available to the Party elite, Virag who bombards Pelikan with the Groucho-esque argument that he should believe the Party in preference to his own memories, and Virag who puts on an act of suicidal despondency over the fact that Pelikan has let him down (by not wanting to testify).

The testimony, when Pelikan finally gets to it, is of course another disaster. Despite his loyalty and eagerness to please, Pelikan simply cannot believe the contorted tale that he is supposed to be telling. He really loses it when he meets, in the courtroom, a former secret policeman under the wartime fascist regime, who had tortured him back then, but who is now being rehabilitated for the service of testifying that the Communist ex-Minister on trial was indeed a fascist collaborator.

From there we get a telescoped conclusion — Pelikan is on death row, but he learns he is pardoned just as his execution is about to take place. The film then jumps via a brief montage sequence from 1951 to the present (1969, when the film was made), a time of greater prosperity and less paranoia. This being a comedy, it turns out that nobody was actually executed — which means that the film ends up pulling its punches a bit, I suppose. But the main point, about Stalinism’s surreal and paranoid logic remains intact. (Apparently Bacso made a sequel in 1994, satirizing the capitalist logic that by that time had entirely replaced the former Communist one in Hungary. But this, like so many other Eastern European films, is unavailable in the US).

The rhetoric of Stalinism, and more generally of “actually existing socialism” before 1989, is quite different from the rhetoric of fascism, or for that matter from the hypocritical and falsifying rhetoric that is deployed for various nefarious purposes (cf. Bush and company) in our capitalist-liberal-democratic societies. Though I’ve cited Lewis Carroll and Groucho Marx in comparison — and I could have cited Kafka as well, of course, who is so over-cited in situations like this that to do so verges on cliche — what The Witness really captures is the specificity of socialist/bureaucratic discourse, the ways that it is tied in both to surveillance (there are several scenes where the secret police come to Pelikan’s house to investigate rumors — which are in fact true — that he has illicitly slaughtered a pig) and spectacle (the show trial, the celebration of the “Hungarian orange”) of a particular sort — one that is quite different from the “war on terror”, the “society of the spectacle”, and the reign of the commodity as we experience them today in America (and at this point, I imagine, in Hungary as well). The Witness is brilliant in the way it communicates this specificity and (for us) unfamiliarity through a form that in itself is entirely familiar and accessible.

Miklos Jancso’s The Red and the White (Hungary, 1968) is a film so distanced, so formally structured, and so dehumanized, that the effect of watching it is positively hypnotic, or oneiric. I won’t say hallucinatory: this is not a film of hallucinations, but one where, to the contrary, you’re always expecting hallucinations to blossom forth, only they never do. Everything is contained, without release; and that is a large part of what gives the film its power and tension.

The Red and the White is set in 1919, in Ukraine, during the Russian Civil War. It’s the Reds — the Soviets, the Bolsheviks — against the Whites (the reactionaries, the Czarist revanchists). Besides the Russians, there are Hungarians fighting on the Red side; and the movie switches back and forth (as far as I can tell) between the Russian and Hungarian languages. (1919 seems to be an important year for Jancso, as Andrew James Horton points out; it was the year of Bela Kun’s Soviet Republic of Hungary).

Jancso’s historical re-creation seems scrupulously naturalistic, when it comes to things like costumes and uniforms, weapons, etc. And the film could be called “epic” in scope, with its long-shot visions of large numbers of troops sweeping across vast landscapes. Nonetheless, The Red and the White is not a film that gives us a broad view of History. Nor is it (like so much other Eastern European cinema) a film about individual lives swept up by historical forces that they have no power either to influence or to evade. Both the collective/historical level, and the individual/existential level, are strangely evacuated of their significance

On the level of the collective or the historical, Jancso gives us no context, no explanation, for the battles he makes us witness. There is nothing within the film that tells us who the Reds and the Whites are, and what they are fighting about, or for. And the knowledge we bring to the film from the outside — knowledge about 1919, and about the Russian Revolution and the history of Communism — really doesn’t explain or illuminate anything within the film, and doesn’t make anything more comprehensible than it would be to someone watching the film without any knowledge of this history. We might as well be watching scenes from a war on Mars. (There is, however, one exception to this general rejection of historical significance, which I will get to later).

The irrelevance of history and ideology is related to the absence — and the implied irrelevance — of any synoptic overview of the events of the film. We have no idea where the battle lines are drawn, what larger strategic elements are involved, or even which side is winning and which side losing (if this is meaningful at all). We get, instead, a large (compared to the scale of the individual) but rather restricted (compared to the scale of the battlefield as a whole) stretch of territory, over which detachments of troops seem to roam almost at random. There is no overall sense of advance and retreat, and no suggestion of an organized chain of command on either side; rather, groups of soldiers simply appear — often from off-frame with no prior warning — and then disappear (leave the frame) again.

Now, there’s a whole tradition of war (or rather, anti-war) literature and film which treats combat from the point of view of the individual soldier, and shows, not only the grotesquerie and horror of death in war, but also shows that soldier’s utter confusion and alienation, as he is entirely cut off from any knowledge of the larger strategic contours of the battle (let alone the war as a whole). This tradition goes back at least as far as Stendhal’s account of the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). In film, the earliest example I can think of offhand is Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel); there have been many since.

What’s distinctive about The Red and the White, however, is that it doesn’t fit into this tradition, any more than it does into the tradition of glorious war epics. For the individual perspective is pretty much elided in The Red and the White. Though there are a few particular characters who show up again and again throughout the film, Jancso never shoots from any such character’s point of view. He doesn’t follow the story of any one protagonist. And he doesn’t give us the names, the backgrounds, the motivations, or the psychology of any characters within the film. Dialogue is sparse, and mostly functional — there are orders and commands and interrogations, but never any sort of personal expression. There would seem to be no time or place for this, amidst the continual hustle and bustle, and tension, of the war. Also, there are very few close-ups; the film is mostly long shots and very long takes, with the camera never getting close to the action, but making subtle movements of adjustment to keep things within the frame. The traditional cinematic empathy between audience and protagonist is never established; indeed, Jancso does everything in his power to prevent such empathy from arising. Instead, we get a strong sense of formal patterning, of the arrangement of human figures like chess or checkers pieces spread over space.

One might say (using Deleuze’s vocabulary) that The Red and the White is an entirely nomadic film; no territorialization ever takes place. The whole film seems like an exercise in landscape; human beings travel across the landscape (or above it: in one scene, the Red troops are attacked from above by one of those old World War I biplanes; this is the sole scene in which, as Krzysztof Rucinski notes, Jancso employs cross-cutting and jump cuts) but never get rooted within it, are never connected to the land. Occasionally, we meet peasant farmers; and there are abandoned buildings which have been requisitioned for military use. But for the most part, the landscape seems uninhabited. There are vast panoramas of grasslands with rivers running through them; occasionally, scenes take place in a forest. The landscape is almost entirely horizontal. Sometimes, there are long, gentle slopes heading down towards the river bed; but we never see any mountains, for instance (though the Urals are sometimes referred to verbally). Nature is present in the film as a vast plane, or surface, stretching horizontally in all directions, indefinitely, without limit. This Nature is utterly, placidly indifferent to the human carnage taking place upon it.

What’s more all the characters in the film seem to share this indifference. Everyon appears entirely Stoic and resigned. There is no hint of anguish before the threat and imminence of death (or, in the case of the few female characters, anguish before the threat and imminence of rape). Prisoners may try to escape if they see an opportunity; but once they are recaptured, or when they are lined up before a wall and faced with a firing squad, they show no reaction whatsoever. In one sequence, a group of White soldiers come upon a peasant family. They ask questions of the peasants, but nobody responds. The leader orders a young woman to disrobe; she does so, without enthusiasm, but also without resistance and without comment. Everything happens slowly; the ensign who orders the woman to strip, and who evidently will be the first to rape her, remains as stolid as his victim does, has her turn about and looks at her from various angles, shows no sign of enthusiasm or desire, and is evidently going to take his time. Then a higher White officer shows up, declares that local populations are not to be abused, tells the woman that she may get dressed again, and has the ensign shot. All this happens as calmly and affectlessly, on all sides, as the preparations for the rape did. The ensign utters not a word in complaint or self-justification. There’s no sign of humanitarian motivation on the part of the superior officer, no sign even that his command reflects a consistent policy. Rather, death and abuse seem entirely random and unmotivated, in this scene as throughout the film. Reversals of fortune, and changes of position from jailer to prisoner, or vice versa, happen without explanation, and without any signs of surprise or joy or relief or anguish on the part of the characters.

Often, death comes unexpectedly, from outside the frame, without any advance warning being given either to the audience or to the characters. There’s a striking sequence, early in the film, where a Red officer enters and explores an apparently empty building, on high alert, rifle at the ready. We see him search, go up the stairs,. search again. All at once, facing towards the camera, in utter silence (there is no nondiegetic music in the film) he raises his hand in surrender, and throws away his rifle. He’s been captured by White troops, who unbeknownst to him were already inside the building. But we don’t see the captors, because they are standing where the camera is, or behind it. And the camera cannot be said to give us the White soldiers’ POV: first, because we never get a reverse shot in which we would see them looking; second, because the camera has had, throughout the sequence, an impersonal, objective POV, and it’s only by chance, as it were, that, in the course of a long and elaborate tracking shot, the camera comes momentarily to occupy a spot from which these (presumed) soldiers are actually looking.

So Death usually comes from outside the frame. This means, in a certain sense, that it is always contingent and arbitrary; for it does not follow from any sort of narrative logic, nor even from any discernible chain of cause and effect. At the same time, though, this also means that Death is a fatality, an absolute Event that can only be affirmed, because it offers us no lines of defense, and no possibility of appeal. There is no freedom, and no transcendence, because there is nothing beyond the frame: nothing beyond the interminable landscape. The world is all that is the case. The destructive forces that enter the frame cannot be stopped, or prevented from entering, precisely because they can only be said to ‘exist’ insofar as they manifest themselves within the frame — and by then it is too late.

The Red and the White is therefore largely a work of formal patterns. One might even say that Jancso, or the film itself, were obsessed with formal patterns — except that this is doubtless too psycholgistic or intentionalistic a manner of speaking (even if one is referring to the director; all the more so if one is referring to the film ‘itself’). One must say even more, however: these patterns are not only the form of the film — constituting the icy beauty of Jancso’s arrangements of bodies before the camera, and long-distance framing — but also make up much of its content. Soldiers and prisoners are continually being given orders: we see them marching in formation, turning right and left, stepping forward and back, standing at attention or moving from side to side as they are divided into groups. In one oddly haunting scene, a group of nurses are taken by White officers into the forest, where they are ordered to dance, to the accompaniment of a military band. The women take each other as partners, and waltz amidst the trees, as the officers watch. The scene has no point, no meaning beyond itself: it just is, an evolution of formal patterns as arbitrary as random slaughter, or as military movement in strict formation.

Everything that happens in The Red and the White is sort of like a game: in the sense that, one definition of games (or of certain types of games) is a system of actions played in accordance with strict rules which have no meaning or use outside of the game situation itself. Such is indeed the case with the waltz scene that I have just described, as well as with most of the military activities (marching, standing at attention, etc.) that recur throughout the film. In addition, there are a number of scenes where White soldiers tell their captives (often after stripping them of some of their clothes) to run away, and then take turns shooting them as they try to escape. (In one case, the Whites give the prisoners 15 minutes to get away, and then come after them and pick them off one by one). It all seems very much like a “shooter” video game (even though such games had not yet been invented when Jancso made the film). The rules are as strictly enforced as they are arbitrary and meaningless; and human lives are the inconsequential stake.

The Red and the White, with its formal patterns spread out in long shots and in 2.35:1 widescreen, is an extraordinarily beautiful film: as beautiful as it is chilling. And the abyssal, inhuman arbitrariness, perfection, and “disinterestedness” of this beauty is very much the film’s point. Jancso takes the drive toward abstraction and formalization that is characteristic of most forms of 20th-century modernism, and pushes this drive to a nearly absurd extreme. Think of the exterminationist logic at work in Marinetti’s notorious praise of war as an aesthetic spectacle; or think of the overwhelming, brutal effect of a certain sort of modernist architecture. Of course it is unfair to reduce the complexity and multiplicity of modernist art and culture to these particularly horrible instances; but Jancso is very much pointing to this, I think, as the inescapable dead end of the fundamental modernist project. He pushes the modernist quest to the point where it implodes into a cold emptiness. And he refuses us any redemptionist escape from what he presents as modernism’s ultimate nihilism.

When humanist intimacy has become impossible, we are left with nothing but spectacle. And The Red and the White is a powerfully elaborated, but also unusually purified, sort of spectacle. It is spectacle raised to such an extreme degree as utterly to preclude any sort of affective involvement. As such, it becomes a counter-spectacle, criticizing, averting, and undermining the basis of spectacle in modern life: both the capitalist, Western (but now global) “society of the spectacle” (whose theory Guy Debord was working out at much the same time as Jancso was making this film), and what now appears as only a minor variant of it, the revolutionary or socialist spectacle that we see, for instance, in Eisenstein’s films of the Twenties. Even as Jancso utterly eschews Eisensteinian montage, so he demystifies and deconstructs the myth of the Masses that is central to Eisenstein’s theory and practice. It is important, I think, that we find in Jancso a socialist filmmaker who remains equally distant from Eisenstein and from “socialist realism.”

This is all summed up, I think, in another remarkable scene, nearly at the end of the film. The Red troops discover, or realize, that they are outnumbered and have nowhere to run. They are on the top of a hill or incline, at the bottom of which — near the river bed — White troops are gathered. (As I have already mentioned, this is one of the rare moments in the film when the landscape is not entirely flat). The Red troops take off their dark jackets, exposing their white shirts (which, I suppose, makes them better targets). They march down the hill, towards where the enemy troops are waiting to slaughter them, singing the Internationale (the Marxist anthem). The camera remains behind and above them, at a great distance. They shoot as they go, but only hit a few of the waiting White troops. Eventually, when they get close enough to the Whites, the latter start shooting, and the Reds all fall.

This is the one exception that I mentioned earlier to the generally decontextualized, non-ideological view of the war in the film. Can it be read (as one might expect of a Hungarian/Soviet coproduction, made at the height of the Cold War) as a heroic and tragic affirmation of the Red Army? Perhaps; it is likely part of the reason (together with Jancso’s art-house prestige in the West at the time) why the Hungarian regime allowed the film to be released (though apparently it was banned in the USSR). But at the same time, it is evidently nothing more than a futile gesture: distant from us, and swallowed into the immense indifference, of the landscape and of the “game” of war, that is the film’s major point of demonstration. The Internationale is a striking presence in the film, especially given the absence of any other markers. But it is also swallowed up by the void, without an echo. Jancso cannot affirm hope, without also affirming futility. The soldiers do not represent, or become, the Masses or the People. Instead, they are swallowed whole by the grim, contingent, and inhuman forces of what it would be too teleological, too order-imposing, to call History.

Jancso is an isolated figure in the history of cinema. He seems to have no followers, no history. His filmography is immense, and spans five decades; today, in his eighties, he is still actively directing films. But aside from The Red and the White, and a few other films from the late Sixties and early Seventies, none of his work is known, or available on video, outside of Hungary. (A rare collection of English-language discussions of his more recent work can be found here). Nonetheless, I find similarities between the Jancso of The Red and the White and two other directors working, in different countries, at nearly the same time. The slowness and distance of Jancso’s moving camera reminds me a bit of Antonioni, who similarly empties out modernist strategies in order to express a similarly poetic vision of anomie and alienation; although Antonioni’s characters are from the upper bourgeoisie, and they don’t dissolve in a multitude of actors, nor do they have even the negative relation to history that Jancso’s characters do. And then, perhaps more relevantly, there is Kubrick, whose cold formalism bears many similarities to Jancso. In a film like 2001, Kubrick (as Carl Freedman argues) empties out the genre of science fiction by means of a sort of “metageneric” reflection, which formalizes the genre and thereby reduces it to a self-confirming banality and emptiness (Freedman also mentions Barry Lyndon and The Shining as examples of how Kubrick does this with other genres). I think this process is quite similar to the one I am describing here in the case of Jancso. Both Jancso and Kubrick, working respectively from the socialist tradition in modernism and the capitalist one, deploy a sort of hyperformalism, which is at once the ne plus ultra and the reductio ad absurdum of modernist aesthetics, and perhaps of modernity altogether, as a social dynamic.

The Shop on Main Street (1965), directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos (but the film seems to be basically the work of Kadar) is often listed among the films of the Czech New Wave. But this is a bit misleading, and not just because the film is Slovak rather than Czech. Kadar and Klos were nearly a generation older than the New Wave directors, and had been making films all through the 1950s. (I haven’t seen any of this earlier work; none of it seems to be available in the US. Although online accounts credit at least one of their Fifties films as being mildly dissident, they would have had to conform to the censorship pressures then in place). Kadar and Klos undoubtedly benefited from the cultural liberalization of the early 1960s; but their filmmaking style remains more traditional, or classical, than that of the New Wave directors. Also, The Shop on Main Street deals with fascist Slovakia during World War II. (Rather than being directly occupied by the Nazis, Slovakia was placed under the homegrown Fascist regime of Jozef Tiso). Because it is thus set in the pre-Communist era, the film doesn’t challenge the Party line, or the official view of history, in any way (as far as I can tell); it was spared the political difficulties faced by many of the New Wave films. (It also won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1965, as the more innovative Closely Watched Trains did two years later. For Hollywood, as much as for the Communist governments of Eastern Europe before 1989, the War and the Holocaust are ‘safer’ subjects than any more recent historical or political engagement).

I don’t mean for these comments to have a snarky tone; I am just trying to place the film. The Shop on Main Street is a powerful and affecting movie, and one that compares favorably with certain more recent cinematic treatments, from East or West, of World War II and the Holocaust. The film is set in 1942, in a small town in rural Slovakia, during the time of the deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. (According to Wikipedia, Jews were deported from Slovakia from March 1942 until October 1942, at which time the Slovaks rejected German pressure to deport anyone more. Some more Jews were deported two years later, after Nazi troops occupied Slovakia in 1944. See the article here and the discussion here).

The protagonist Tono (Jozef Kroner) is an amiable and good-hearted everyman figure. He’s a carpenter. His closest emotional tie seems to be to his dog. He is continually being browbeaten and nagged at by his wife; he is also bullied by the wife’s sister’s husband, who is the local Fascist leader. Liike most of the other townspeople we meet in the course of the film, he doesn’t much like the Fascists, but also, prudently, doesn’t do anything overtly to oppose them. The film entirely downplays the issue of any sort of collaboration by the general Slovak population with the local Fascists and with the Nazis; though it also downplays any sort of active resistance or partisan activity, such as led to the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. Instead, Tono is a man in the middle, with decent impulses but no real understanding of politics beyond the sphere of his own personal life.

The Fascist brother-in-law appoints Tono as the “Aryan overseer” — i.e. the new owner, enabled to take over — of a “Jewish business,” a notions shop (selling buttons and such). Tono and his wife imagine that this will make them rich. But it turns out that the shop is owned by a senile old Jewish lady, Mrs. Lautmann (Ida Kaminska), who is poor, cannot make a living from her business, and subsists on charity from the Jewish community. She cannot understand that Tono has been appointed to take over her shop, and thinks instead that he has come to be a shop assistant, and help her. But Tono doesn’t really understand the way things are much better: he has no sense of what is really entailed by his new position, and no overall grasp of the monstrousness of what is going on all around him.

In the course of things, Tono becomes quite fond of Mrs. Lautmann. He finds himself in a strange double role: simultaneously working for the Fascists in their effort to de-Judaize the town, and for the Jewish community, which pays him to take care of Mrs. Lautmann. There are lots of semi-comic scenes — some brilliantly played, and some a bit corny — illustrating the foibies of the townspeople, and the growth of the relationship betwen Tono and Mrs. Lautmann.

Eventually, things come to a head, as the Fascists order the deportation of all the town’s Jews (to Auschwitz, we presume, though the Jews themselves are just told that they will be put to work). Tono, once again, doesn’t really understand what this means. He is torn between at leat three contradictory impulses: 1)a desire to save Mrs. Lautmann, perhaps by hiding her, 2)a fatalistic feeling that it doesn’t really matter, that there is nothing one can do anyway, and that the deportation won’t be all that bad, and 3)a fear that if he helps Mrs. Lautmann, or even just fails to turn her over to the authorities, he will be beaten, tortured, and imprisoned as a “Jew-lover,” as has already happened to another Christian character earlier in the film.

The most brilliant thing in the film is a long sequence near the end, where Tono seems to hold all these three positions nearly simultaneously. He’s in the shop, looking out at the central square where the Jews (all of them in the town, except for Mrs. Lautmann) are being assembled and taken away. As Tono, in his confusion and despair, gets drunker and drunker, he wildly fluctuates from one attitude to the next, at one moment trying to push the bewildered Mrs. Lautmann out into the square, at the next, locking her into a closet so she will not be found. It’s essentially just Jozef Kroner as Tono and the camera; and Tono gives an astonishing bravura performance, a display of hysteria that works powerfully not in spite of, but precisely because of, the fact that we are aware throughout of the actor behind the character, of the way in which this extended outburst is being performed or enacted.

The only other film performance to which I can compare Kroner’s tour de force is James Stewart’s filibuster in the US Senate at the end of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Both of these performances are brilliant displays of actorly hysteria; both display a bodily intelligence on the part of the actor which exceeds the capacities of the character, but thereby manifests the personal and social) forces that inhabit that character. The difference, of course, is that, in Capra’s film, Stewart’s character’s basic goodness shines through, and good triumphs over evil; while in Kadar’s film, Kroner’s character is ultimately impotent. For all of Kroner’s performative range, and rage, Tono can do nothing against the horrors of history, which he is never able to grasp or comprehend. The film ends with his suicide, after Mrs. Lautmann’s death. The final scene, though, is a nostalgic fantasy: we see Tono and Mrs. Lautmann, dressed in the finery of an earlier (pre-War and pre-Fascist) age, stroll peacefully together through the streets, the hazy, blurry lighting indicating clearly that such an ending is entirely wishful and counterfactual.

Cinematic depictions of the Holocaust are problematic, for two logically opposed, yet both entirely cogent, reasons. On the one hand, the horror of the event is banalized by any effort to represent it, which means to make it commensurate with other events. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is the only film I know of that properly directs our attention to the unrepresentability of the Holocaust as its subject matter. On the other hand, and at the same time, the Holocaust gets bandied about, precisely in its excess and incommensurability, as a token of high seriousness and good faith, and as a weapon to silence other concerns and other discourses. Holocaust films win Oscars, precisely because the subject matter itself is used to deflect any questions about aesthetic value and artistic integrity. Think Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, or even The Pianist. In fact, it strikes me that Spielberg exhibits both of these tendencies simultaneously; at the same time that Schindler’s List relentlessly and aggressively banalized the Holocaust — is there any more egregious scene in all of Hollywood filmmaking than the one where the Jews, having been shipped to Auschwitz, are sent into an ominous-looking building to take showers, only for us (the viewers) to discover that these are not gas chambers… but actual showers? — the film also claims a moral authority from its subject matter, that preempts all criticism in advance. The result is that Schindler’s List turns the Holocaust into a redemptive fable. To my mind, this is beyond all bounds of basic human decency. I don’t find it indecent or offensive or even shocking when Mel Brooks turns Nazism into a subject for crass comedy; I am not offended by the Nazi s&m chic of films like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter; but Spielberg’s turning the Holocaust into an allegory of redemption is perhaps the one thing that I do find utterly offensive without appeal (sort of what the Christians call the one unpardonable sin, the “sin against the Holy Spirit”).

In this respect, I think that Jan Kadar comes across, some 28 years before Schindler’s List, as the anti-Spielberg. Tono is arguably as decent a figure as Schindler, but without the latter’s superhuman powers. His good heart and good intentions are simply not enough, when arrayed against the monstrous forces of Fascism and Nazism. (The same could apply to Stalinism, or Maoism, or American slavery, or the many other horrors of the last several hundred years). The Shop on Main Street reminds us — and this is a reminder that Americans seem to need, more than Europeans — that a good conscience, and a basic human decency, are not enough to save us. Human beings indeed “make their own history, but –” as Marx goes on to say, “they do not make it just as they please.”

Jaromil Jires’ The Joke (1968) was released in the heady days of the Prague Spring, and immediately banned after the Soviet invasion of August 1968. The film is based upon a novel of the same title by Milan Kundera, and Kundera collaborated with Jires on the screenplay. Unfortunately I have not read the novel, but the film is consistent in theme, incident, and tone with other works by Kundera.

The Joke is set in the mid-1960s, with flashbacks to the early days of Communist rule, in the Stalinist early 1950s. The protagonist and narrator, Ludvik (Josef Somr), is an embittered and cynical man. In the past presented to us in flashbacks, he gets expelled from college and the Party, in 1951 or so, as the result of a (somewhat nasty) postcard he sends his girlfriend as a joke. He is frustrated by the way she puts her duty to the Party ahead of his desire to sleep with her. She is presented, in Ludvik’s recollections, as pretty, and also as quite naive, in her (Party-mandated) cheerfulness and enthusiasm and historical optimism. All this is what Ludvik ridicules in his joke-postcard. But she turns over the postcard to the authorities, who deeme it politically incorrect. Ludvik’s life is derailed by the incident. He loses a decade of his life to the army, to jail, and to work in the mines. It appears that finally he has been rehabilitated; this process is not narrated in the film, but in the film’s present he is some sort of researcher. (The film makes no comment about those who, despite the supposed classlessness of Communist society, never got the opportunity to go to college in the first place, and thus spent their entire lives in the mines or factories).

Now, in the present time of the film, Ludvik seeks revenge upon Pavel (Ludek Munzar), the former friend who led the tribunal that expelled him. Having met Pavel’s wife Helena (Jana Ditetova), Ludvik determines to seduce her, as a way of getting back at Pavel. He tells us, in his voiceover narration, that he has hated Helena from the moment he meets her, because she is Pavel’s wife; but that this hatred leads to an obsession that is not very different from love. Ludvik’s scheme succeeds, but it doesn’t have the consequences he had hoped for. After Helena sleeps with Ludvik, she reveals to him that Pavel won’t care, because they have been separated for a number of years. Therefore, she says, she is free to get involved with Ludvik. We see (though Helena doesn’t) the look of revulsion on Ludvik’s face when she tells him this. The fallout from the incident is ugly for both Ludvik and Helena.

Even though the film’s criticism of the Party is confined to the Stalinist past (the period before Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of the crimes and excesses of Stalin), it’s not surprising that the authorities after 1968 not only banned the film, but literally it excised from Jires’ filmography. For the film endorses Ludvik’s bitterness and negativity at least to the point that it throws into suspicion any suspension of selfhood in the interests of a higher cause, any devotion to higher duties and responsibilities, as well as any sort of (historical or personal) “optimism” of the sort that the Party (or the State) clearly demanded of its members (or its citizens).

Nonetheless, the film’s politics is not straightforwardly “liberal” and individualist by any means. It is rather almost a critique of the liberal conscience, a display of its impotence when faced not just by the horrors of history, but but also by the very passage of time. Ludvik is not a heroic individualist, standing up to the totalitarian pressures of conformity. Rather, he is himself an exacerbated symptom of just that totalitarianism; his struggles against it only perpetuate it in inverted form. Indeed, presenting Ludvik as an anti-socialist hero would itself have meant basically perpetuating the aesthetics of socialist realism, with its portrayals of heroic workers, peasants, and resistance fighters. (This is what, for instance — to take an easy target — Ayn Rand does in her anti-collectivist fiction). Jires and Kundera, however, are much closer to the self-lacerating sensibility of Central- or Eastern-European writers like Kafka and Gombrowicz. They deconstruct the very notion of heroism. Ludvik’s corrosive cynicism cannot avoid redounding back upon himself as well.

Even if this sardonic sensibility can be attributed to Kundera, it is expressed in cinematic form, through the ways that Jires structures the film. The flashbacks to the early 1950s are presented in a remarkable manner — something that I cannot recall having ever seen in any other film. It’s not surprising in itself that we should get an alternation between shots of Ludvik in the present, remembering, and shots of the past that he remembers. But these alternations are presented through the continuity convention of shot and reverse shot, which has a rather disconcerting effect. We don’t see Ludvik himself in the flashback shots; rather, we only see the other people in the scene (his girlfriend, his accusers). The camera is positioned where he stands, and shows us the events entirely from his subjective point of view. Even when he speaks, for instance when he tries to answer the sarcastic accusations of Pavel and the other judges, we only hear a voice off, as he remains entirely off-camera. But it is precisely at the moments when we would expect a cut to a reverse shot of Ludvik in the past, that we get a shot of him in the present moment instead. Sometimes the soundtrack from the flashback even continues over these present-moment “reverse shots.” The backgrounds of the shot and reverse shot obviously do not match, as they are not in the same location, either spatially or temporally. Nonetheless the grammar of continuity editing forces us to feel as if the shots belonged together in the same time and space. The result is a kind of contortion or compression, as if Ludvik were still trapped in his own past, as if time has somehow failed to progress for him, as if the gap separating memory from present-time experience has entirely, and stiflingly, collapsed.

(I can only think of a few other films that make analogously disruptive uses of film temporality, or of the conventions of continuity editing. In Cronenberg’s Spider, the adult protagonist actually appears on screen, as an observer — visible to us but not to the other characters — within the past scenes of his childhood that he is remembering, and in which he also appears as a child. In his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel scrupulously conforms to continuity-editing conventions, and yet subverts them at the same time, by having two actresses alternate in the role of a single character).

The implosion of temporality that I am describing is of course in the first instance psychological. It expresses how Ludvik is trapped in the past. He literally cannot progress. He has been traumatized, and forever marked, by the way that “historical necessity” (as the Party might pompously describe it) has impinged upon, and swallowed up, his private life. But this implosion also has an ontological dimension. Deleuze writes, in his Cinema volumes, about the ways that films is able to present other temporalities than that of the present. In general, the cinematic image overwhelms us with its presence and presentness (especially when the film is shown, as it traditionally has been, on a big screen — things may be different today, as we become more accustomed to small-screen video watching). Nonetheless, Deleuze says, there are certain films that manage to immerse us in the past (or the future?) rather than the present. Deleuze cites the films of Orson Welles and Alain Resnais as examples. (Chris Marker should also be mentioned in this regard). I think that Jires accomplishes something similar, inventing a new and different sort of non-present temporality, in the way that he edits The Joke.

There are far fewer flashbacks in the second half of the film, dealing with the seduction and its consequences. However, what we get here instead is a kind of collapse of narrative. There are lots of shots and scenes involving public celebrations: in counterpoint to the mass political rallies and marches we see in the sequences from the 1950s, here in the present time of the film the people in the small town where most of the action takes place have folklore festivals, dressing in traditional peasant costumes, drinking and dancing and so on. Ludvik feels no connection to all this, but it becomes the inescapable background to his story. The film spreads out in all directions, and ends abruptly, refusing us any sort of emotional resolution or catharsis.

Pavel actually shows up, and greets Ludvik as if there were no bad blood between them. And Ludvik goes along with this charade; he lacks the courage, as well perhaps as the means, to attack Pavel directly. Fifteen years later, Pavel has clearly profited from his loyalty to the Party — or, otherwise expressed, his craven, self-righteous betrayal of Ludvik. He’s had a successful and prosperous university career, goes around the country winning adulation for his lectures, owns and drives a car (still a relative rarity, or privilege of the nomenklatura, in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia), and parades about with a chic, much younger (20-something) girlfriend in tow, who massages his ego as well as servicing his desires. The closest he comes to acknowledging his injustice towards Ludvik (one cannot call it an apology) is when he offhandedly remarks upon how bad things were back then, everyone suffered, terrible things were done, etc.; and how, in contrast, the younger generation is refreshingly free of such attitudes — which is why, he says, he likes younger women so much. All this is delivered in the accents of someone who takes his own privilege so much for granted, that he utterly fails to question it (or even to contextualize it in any way).

Pavel has brought his young girlfriend along, among other reasons, in order to humiliate Helena. He succeeds in this — even as Ludvik has utterly failed to humiliate him. In despair, Helena throws herself upon Ludvik, but he humiliates her as well, scornfully rejecting her, telling her that the earlier sex between them counted for nothing. Helena tries to committ suicide; but the pills she swallows turn out to be a laxative, so she ends up just seated miserably on the toilet, her grand gesture ruined. A young man who is in love with Helena (but whose puppy love she does not take seriously) attacks Ludvik in revenge; Ludvik fights back savagely, wins the fight, and mutters over the prostrate young man “you weren’t the one I wanted to beat up” — and that’s it, the film is over.

My students were most interested in the generational aspect of the film — the difference between the Ludvik, Pavel, and Helena, who are 40-ish and were young in the Stalinist early 1950s, and the young people in the film’s present moment, for whom all that political stuff is merely a fairy tale — they seem to be more materialistically concerned with their own pleasures, and evidently find Ludvik’s bitterness as incomprehensible as they do the loyalty and dedication to the cause that was requisite back then.

On the other hand, my students didn’t seem that interested in the gender aspects of the film. They noted that, if Pavel has a younger woman, Helena also has (at least potentially) a younger man who admires her. But it seems to me that the film is far more asymmetrical than that would imply. Both Pavel and Ludvik are evidently womanizers of the traditional sort (Ludvik, in fact, gives his promiscuous habits as the reason why he never got married). But Helena doesn’t seem to have the same sort of latitude in terms of the behavior available to her, which is why she ends up playing the role of the humiliated victim.

In any case, women in this film are only go-betweens for the rivalries between men. This is something that the film doesn’t quite critique in (what we would call today) a feminist way; but at least it does call our attention to it, quite overtly and insistently. Throughout the film, action is only played out through substitution (as Ludvik’s remark at the very end clearly indicates). Ludvik’s bitterness and cynical rage are not appeased; he can only lash out at a substitute for the real object of his anger. In this way he gets a sort of comeuppance, although of course he is not humiliated quite in the way that Helena is. She is abused and abandoned by both men; Ludvik is really only destroyed by himself; while Pavel gets away entirely scot-free. In this way the crimes and oppressions of the past are perpetuated in the present, despite that present’s indifference to and ignorance of the past. The only character not indifferent to the past is Ludvik himself, who is oppressively enslaved to it. But the other characters, however oblivious, cannot escape the consequences of the past either. If Ludvik’s postcard was a joke that went astray, and had all sorts of unintended consequences, then all of history is such a cruel joke, and we are all the butts of it, even unknowingly.

Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966) manages to be both visceral and abstract, playful and savage, intellectual and infantile, all at once. Watching it last night, I was literally trembling with joy and exhilaration. I felt the same way when I first saw the film, nearly thirty years ago. in graduate school.

Daisies is a film of the Czech New Wave, but it doesn’t have much in common — aside from the rejection of traditional narrative, and of the aesthetics of “socialist realism” — with the other works of the movement. Chytilova, you might say, plays Godard to Jiri Menzel‘s Truffaut. (Chytilova and Menzel went to FAMU, the famed Czech film school together, become close friends, and occasionally worked together — see the biography of Chytilova here). Daisies is a riot of color, jump cuts and shock cuts and deliberate mismatches, garish pictorial inserts, incongruous nondiegetic music and sounds, and anti-naturalistic special effects. Sometimes the screen is in color, sometimes in black and white, sometimes tinted with monochromat filters, and sometimes awash in crazed pixelation (? — or whatever the pre-digital equivalent of this might be) effects. The film as a whole is a relentless assault — against film conventions and forms and indeed cinema itself, against social norms and rules and indeed society itself, and finally against the spectator. This assault is violently nihilistic, but it is also utterly joyous and gleeful: an explosion of affect, in which I share as I watch.

Daisies delights as well as shocks — probably, at this point, delights more than it shocks, if I can judge from the responses of my students viewing it last night. And yet, despite a certain degree of cult devotion, it hasn’t ever been given its rightful due in histories of film, or even in histories of experimental, radical, and avant-garde film. Owen Hatherley writes brilliantly about it (and I am deeply indebted to his analysis of the film); but his is the only discussion I have been able to find that is in any way adequate to the film’s astonishing force and radicality. Even those of us who love Daisies have trouble finding the proper terms to account for it.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the wake of Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), there was a lot of debate on the subject of what it might mean to break away from conventional cinematic pleasures. Such pleasures, as Mulvey compellingly demonstrated, are embedded in structures of heterosexual male domination and female subordination. Mulvey herself calls (somewhat ambiguously) for an effort “to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” But the main thrust of her essay was upon the “destruction of pleasure.” Mulvey called for a practice (both of criticism and of alternative filmmaking) that “destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege” of conventional film viewing.

Much of the debate, after Mulvey, was over the question of whether feminist filmmaking would therefore have to be didactic, “alienating,” and intellectualizing; or whether other regimes of pleasure and affect, besides the patriarchal one, were attainable (or even conceivable). Did anyone notice that, a decade before Mulvey, Chytilova had already answered this question, in the affirmative? For the sheer joy of Daisies owes nothing to the mechanisms of identification and objectification, sadism and paranoia, that Mulvey dissects in her article. Daisies works, it works very powerfully indeed; but we don’t have a good language to describe how and why it works, and that is a large part of the reason it has been relegated to the margins of film history.

So, we have two girls — or young women, if you prefer; the actresses (Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova) are probably in their early twenties. (The IMDB doesn’t list their dates of birth, and says that neither of them ever acted in films again, aside from a couple of minor roles just after Daisies, in 1966 and 1967). We don’t even know these characters’ names — indeed, they are both called by a number of different names over the course of the film — though most discussions, and the credits list on IMDB, call them “Marie I” and “Marie II.”

After the opening credits — which are printed against a montage combining, on the one hand, shots of something that looks like a 1920s Constructivist or Dadaist machine-sculpture, and on the other hand, grainy video footage of wartime bombings and destruction — we see the two Maries seated, side by side and facing the camera, in some sort of open box or proscenium stage. Their bodies are stiff, their movements are awkward, as if they were puppets. Every time either of them moves a limb, we hear a loud creaking on the soundtrack, suggesting a kind of clumsy mechanical animation. They are bored. They tell each other that, because the world is “bad,” their only alternative is to be “bad” too. (Another translation has “spoiled” instead of “bad”).

The two Maries go on to indulge themselves in various sorts of antisocial behavior. They continually complain to one another, and squabble. But they don’t seem to have any stake in these arguments, and it’s impossible to make any consistent distinction between their points of view. (One is blonde and one brunette, and that’s as far as their differences go). They go out on dates to fancy restaurants with evidently well-to-do older men (what does this mean in the Communist context? We know that socialist society wasn’t as classless and egalitarian, nor as gender-equal, as it was supposed to be). The men buy them expensive drinks and food, hoping (presumably) to seduce them, but instead finding themselves having to cope with the girls’ raucous behavior. Marie and Marie wear short dresses; one of them wears her hair is in ponytails; both of them put on lots of eyeshadow. They seem less like vamps than like little girls playing dress-up, or (more disagreeably) like objects of pederastic fantasy (do I have the right word here? what is the heterosexual equivalent of “pederastic”?). The men never get the sex they were hoping for; instead they are hustled off to catch a train, and abandoned. The girls just laugh giddily, and go off to make more trouble.

The two Maries gleefully trash their own apartment, as well as all the public spaces they wander through; they are constantly on the move, from the latrine of some lavish restaurant, to the banks of the river, to the train station, and finally through the corridors and up the floors (riding in a dumbwaiter) of an imposing official building, where they find food and silverware lavishly and meticulously laid out for (we presume) some sort of State banquet. In the climactic sequence of the film, they proceed to trash the banquet room, stuffing themselves with giant portions of meat and poultry, devouring cake and booze, smashing plates and glasses, having tumultuous food fights, and finally swinging from the ceiling chandelier. Meantime, the soundtrack music is either portentous or martial, taken from Wagner’s Ring among other sources. Surely this is the greatest “food” sequence in the history of film.

A word of distinction is in order. The two Maries’ bad behavior isn’t anything like the girls-can-act-like-raunchy-frat-boys-too stuff we’ve seen so much of in recent years, whether in TV shows like Sex and the City, or in fashionable public behavior like that analyzed in Ariel Levy’s recent book Female Chauvinist Pigs. These are situations in which women displace men in order to take over the dominating phallic role for themselves — and end up, therefore, behaving just as stupidly and oppressively as men do.

But the two Maries’ behavior works in an entirely different register. It is completely infantile. They seem uninterested in sexuality per se: they only dress up in swinging-sixties-“sexy” garb the better to confound and humiliate older men (something they are interested in) and to create general confusion and disorder. Instead of sex, they are interested in food. They lose no opportunity to gorge themselves. And they take a child’s pleasure in breaking stuff, shredding stuff, and burning stuff. In particular, they are continually cutting things up with scissors. This latter action resonates with “cutting” in the cinematic sense; their aggression is matched by Chytilova’s anti-continuity editing, which often cuts correctly on action or on an object, only in order to place everything abruptly into a totally different setting. In one sequence, the Maries cut up parts of their own bodies on screen — one’s arm suddenly disappears, followed by the other’s head; finally the screen image itself gets cut, breaking up into small squares squirming all over the frame.

In Freudian terms, one might say that sexuality has been repressed in favor of a regression to oral — narcissistic, incorporating, and aggressive — drives and pleasures. But I think the Maries’ behavior is better seen affirmatively, as a positive construction, rather than as a reaction or regression. The movement from sexuality to food is, precisely, a detournement in the Situationist sense, rather than a “failure of development.” It is also a Rimbaudian “systematic derangement of the senses,” and a Nietzschean movement, a striving “to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming — that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” Though certainly Nietzsche never imagined this happening in so delightfully “girlie” a manner as it does here.

The two Maries’ delight in gorging themselves on food and drink is intimately connected with their delight in cutting. Their play with scissors evidently implies castration. Besides newspapers, bedspreads, and their own and others’ clothing, they are also continually snipping up phallic objects like sausages and pickles — as well as presumptively feminine ones like apples. (Castration, figurative or literal, seems to be a recurring theme in Chytilova’s work. One of her far more recent films, Traps (1998), which unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to see, aroused much controversy for its story of a woman who castrates the two men who raped her).

Destroying the phallus doesn’t just mean undermining male power, but undermining the power of the whole “Symbolic Order.” Among othet things, it means destroying the opposition — or undermining the gap — between things and words, or more broadly between things and their representations (whether these be verbal or visual). At one point, one of the Maries cuts out a picture of food from a magazine, then stuffs it into her mouth and chews it up with the same avidity she shows for actual food. This is in the course of a scene where the two Maries roast sausages by setting fires and burning down parts of their apartment. Then they spear and cut the wieners with an enormous cook’s fork, and an equally enormous pair of scissors. All the while they laugh at the complaints of a jilted lover, whose pathetic pleadings are heard over the phone. During the entire scene, some sort of sacramental choral music plays, nondiegetically, in the background.

Everything the two Maries do is destructive. They revel in sheer waste, in “unemployed negativity,” in “expenditure without return.” Above all, Daisies expresses utter scorn for any sort of productivity, whether economic, social, or semiotic This, of course, is a major reason why the film was denounced by Party authorities for wasting the resources of the State, and insulting “the working people in factories, in fields, and on construction sites.” As production was the highest value in all the socialist states, the general derision which Daisies pours on the very concept is actually more disturbing to official ideology than a more explicit, specific, and immediate criticism of the social system would have been.

There is one sequence in Daisies in which the two Maries watch a farmer watering his crops. He doesn’t notice them, despite their outlandish attire. They then stand in a square they are passed by a squad of bicyclists, probably workers going off to their work in a factory. Once again, nobody notices them. They start to wonder whether they even exist: obviously, there is no place for them in the world of “actually existing socialism.”

(It’s dubious whether they could exist in “actually existing capitalism” either. Their orgies of expenditure might be seen as a sort of consumerist excess, except that they never pay for anything. They steal money, but they never spend it. They have no regard for, and no sense of, property; no sense of material goods as a source of power or prestige. Their infantilism, unlike that of the capitalist consumer, unegotistical. They have no interest in possession and accumulation).

After the Maries destroy the State banquet, the film ends with their display of remorse, and punishment for their bad behavior. This formulaic recantation is done so sarcastically that it only further accentuates the film’s overall childish glee in pure waste and destruction. (Is it worth noting that, after the Soviet invasion of 1968, Chytilova and other Czech New Wave directors were similarly forced to make critiques and recantations of their work?) The Maries mumble their sorrow, and say that now they are happy to be socially useful, as they ostensibly put everything back in order: this involves putting the shards of broken plates back next to each other, and throwing handfuls of crumbs back together on large platters. Finally they lie down on the top of the banquet table, wearing body suits made of newspaper and papier mache, murmuring that they are finally at peace… until the room’s enormous chandelier falls from the ceiling and crushes them in a final swoosh of multicolored pixelation. Though Chytilova claimed, under political duress, that this was a moral punishment for the girls’ transgressions, it seems rather to extend their reign of destruction, consuming not only the two of them, but the film itself.

What’s great about Daisies is that, even as it revels in negativity and destruction, and even as its protagonists are motivated (to the extent that such language can be used in a film like this at all) by a kind of malaise, there is no sense of lack or incompletion here, no alienated subjectivity, no Lacanian not-all, no Mulveyesque dialectics and detachment, and even no Adornoesque revelation of the work’s own insufficiency — but only a joyous plenitude, an overabundance that is both affective and material, embodied in the sheer exuberance and formal inventiveness of the film itself.

The early modernist endeavor to align radical aesthetics with radical politics came to grief over the horrors of Stalinism, not to mention the ultra-conservative aesthetics of “socialist realism” that Stalin imposed. In post-War, post-Stalin, Communist Eastern Europe, Dusan Makavejev is nearly alone in endeavoring to renew the link between radical aesthetics and radical politics. Chytilova’s late modernist radical aesthetics doesn’t share any such project. It is explicitly, not just apolitical, but virulently antipolitical. Rather than simply affirming the rights of the individual against the collective — a move which would still be “political” in the conventional sense — Daisies obliterates both individual and collective in its fervidly antisocial jouissance. (The two Maries cannot exist without one another; their duality is as irreducible to any sort of heroic or existential solitude and individuality, as it is to any sort of social bond or collectivity). And this antipolitical virulence is precisely the film’s (crucial) political import: one that perhaps we need today, in our “connected” world of inescapable networks and ubiquitous commodification, as much as it was needed 40-odd years ago in the world of “actually existing socialism.”

What would a history of film, or of modernism, or of the avant-garde, or an account of strategies of resistance and evasion and refusal, that took proper and full account of Daisies look like?