Sarah started "in the beginning," or close to it. The silent film era may seem ancient to some, but the thoughts of these filmmakers are still read and are very relevant in film classes today. Sarah starts off with thoughts from the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who invented the idea of montage as we know it (you can see how I grappled with this idea here). In Eisenstein's era, the films were silent, relying purely on visuals or very minimal inter-titles that Eisenstein himself detested. Sarah tells us this in her blog:
Eisenstein was almost as obsessed with the film-as-language idea as he was about montage. It then makes sense that he would assume that montage was the answer to all the world’s communication problems: if all the world could learn the language of film, than we would have universal mutual understanding. According to him, this worked – at least in the “developed worlds.”
So for Eisenstein, the politics of representation were universal to the developed (and film watching) world. By piling images on top of one another, meaning could be derived from their collisions and edits. Anyone with two eyes could understand this mode of representation.
Sound, however, changed all of this. Now film was supposed to mirror real life, something Eisenstein never intended to do in his famous finale in Battleship Potemkin. Some film thinkers, like Walter Benjamin, worried that all film would now conform to the same norms and all creativity would be lost. Steven says it like this in his blog:
When Walter Benjamin published his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he wrote that he worried that political message would soon control works of art and force them to conform to various standards, rather than allowing for the creativity.
Steven and Benjamin both have good points. If all film is just supposed to reflect what we see every day, where is the room for creativity?Thankfully, experimental film has risen up to fill this void. Experimental film uses experimental discourse, or in other words, it uses unconventional techniques to project the images that comprise the movie. In Reassemblage, a 1983 experimental documentary by Trinh T. Minh-Ha about the women in a village in Senegal, there is a lack of familiar filmic code, a lack of the familiar politics of representation. Is this uncomfortable? According to Wynn, it is for American audiences:
Over the last week, in watching Reassemblage (1983), Bontoc Eulogy (1995), and Xala (1975), I have felt varying degrees of discomfort that I trace directly to this awakening of my political reception with respect to the cinematic apparatus as well as the narrative content of the films themselves.
So then why shoot a film in this new experimental way? According to Minh-Ha in the article "When I project, it is Silent" this is not a new way to make film at all: "As I went along..creating consisted not so much in inventing something new as in rediscovering the links within and between images, sounds and words." So maybe this was the creativity Benjamin was talking about. Maybe for a film to be truly creative it must abandon the familiar politics of representation.Katrina hammers this point home with her pointed questions:
would an audience really know this Senegalese culture better if they knew what each of the men were making or what the children were doing? Do descriptions of cultural artifacts make a culture?
I don't know the answer to these questions. All I know is that if Benjamin and Eisenstein were alive today, experimental films such as these would make them smile and bring a wave a relief over them-film has not lost its edge.
