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No Vietnamese ever called me nigger
vs.
FAR FROM
VIETNAM
Objectives
and limits of late 60’s documentary films
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by ©
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Caroline Koerper and |
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Benoît Blanchard |
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Berlin, Paris, 2002.
Please do not quote
without prior consent
Contents
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Introduction
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David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger |
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How does the documentary
deal with a problem and show a minority ? |
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The influence of
cinéma-vérité |
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■ Introduction
“Documentaries tell us
more about the look than about the thing we observe, and much more about the
meaning of this thing than about an objective, utilitarian and used aspect. It
shouldn’t deal with a documentary, but with a documented point of view” (Jean Vigo).[1]
ver
since the origin of its success around 1920, the documentary genre wore out in the
1930s and knew a revival after World War II. The audience needed a coming back
to the documentary authenticity. No more exotic, the viewers want to believe
what they see and their trust is controlled by their other means of information
(books, radio, press). This revival was essentially due to the renewal of
exploration, whose mystic could constitute a variant of after-war exotic.
The generalisation of the
objective cinema of reportage has rectified in a significant way what we expect
from a documentary. Many documentaries whose goal is to report facts lose their
interest if the event didn’t happen really in front of the camera. Like the
news.[2]
But this doesn’t concern the exclusively didactic documentaries, that don’t aim
at representing but at explaining the event.
The 60’s was in many ways a
golden age of documentary film. Decades before there were reality-based TV
shows devoted to police car chases, filmmakers such as Richard Leacock, the
Maysles Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker, Robert Frank, Frederick Wiseman, and Life
magazine correspondent Robert Drew borrowed elements from newsreel journalism,
handheld cameras, intimate point-of-view, natural sound, minimal editing to
invent the documentary genre called cinéma-vérité. The ciné vérité style was
also often distinguished by a social awareness that provided its own
editorialising despite the lack of voice-over narration and talking-head
analysis. Cinéma-vérité does still exist today, on public broadcast and TV news
coverage as well as in such phenomena as guerrilla video projects, but its edge
tends to get dulled in the general oversupply of information. The '60sas we've
been told time and again were different. Which is why the '60s-era
documentaries that Yerba Buena curator Joel Shepard has dug up still seem so
fresh and exciting, years after their ostensible hard news value has expired.
Then, as now, the riddle of race relations was perplexing, at times
all-consuming.
In the 1960’s,
Martin Luther King had just been the new hero of the Black population and given
entrance to the Black issue in the media. The Black population is very hopeful
about getting the same rights as the Whites. They express themselves very
clearly and freely. They don’t fear to say something they should or should not
say. They are not afraid to express their feelings. This has something to do
with an anger that has grown very strong. Through this documentary, we can see
an almost perfect image of the feelings and attempts of this population. In
comparison with Far from Vietnam, we
will try to show how, according to different social political contexts, whereas
documentary films deal with the same subjects completely different forms of
expression arise.
■
The
film-maker-ethnographer
t
is because of the sociology and ethnology that the French cinema turned itself
to the direct cinema. Very soon, ethnographers et sociologists needed to use
light technical tools to make their investigations and works of observation
easier.
And such were Rouch’s methods[3].
For him the only way of filming is to walk with the camera, to lead it where it
is the most effective and to improvise for it a sort of “ballet” where the
camera becomes lively as the men it films. The director shoots as he feels
like; he’s the heart of the camera:
“The director that holds it is its eye, its ear,
its legs. He is its brain, unique master of its movements, of the plans’ scale
and length. He chooses them according to information perceived by its senses
and immediately translated into emotions.”
Rouch’s films are not shot by a
cold entomologist, they are made with men and women, that have consented to
live their daily life in front of their white friend’s camera; they are full of
exchanges, fraternity, familiarity and humour. Some consider this attitude as
antiscientific, for an ethnographic film’s objectivity is based on the divorce
of the couple film-maker-ethnographer. But Rouch, claims to be both, and answers them that as
long as the film-maker-anthropologist, out of scientism, or ideological shame,
shan’t keep hiding behind a comfortable incognito, for he condemns its films
so.
As mentioned above, for Rouch the
protagonist’s effective and conscious participation to the making of a movie is
wished. This is perfectly conform to the traditional techniques of the
ethnographic observation. The camera on the place doesn’t introduce any
specific changes. On the contrary, the acting it implies may sometimes cause
spontaneously psychological reactions that any other method of investigation
would avoid.[4]
■ David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger
othing
demonstrates this quite as succinctly as David Loeb Weiss' 1968 documentary No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger. The
title, sometimes attributed to Muhammad Ali, is seen as a slogan on placards
carried by marchers in the Harlem Fall Mobilisation March in 1967, an
anti-Vietnam-War procession in New York to which filmmaker Weiss and his crew
took their 16mm camera 
and sound recorder and got an earful of what African
Americans thought of the US government's war on the Vietnamese people, of black
Americans' role in that war, and the inescapable conclusions therefrom.
"My boy is over there fighting for his rights," declares one woman,
"but he's not getting them." One of the marchers' chants cuts to the
chase even quicker: "The enemy is whitey/ Not the Viet Cong!" Weiss
and his crew (apparently all white) heard a variety of impassioned responses
from onlookers and march participants that day in Harlem, but the predominant
African-American viewpoint was essentially, "This is not our war."
Intercut with the on-the-street footage is a remarkable interview session with
three articulate, thoughtful, and very angry black Vietnam War vets. If the
civilians are outraged at the injustice, these young men are somewhere beyond.
Throughout this film, we can't help but marvel at the high level of political
discussion, even among characters hanging out in front of bars watching the march
pass, in comparison with what we might see if a similar march were covered
today. In some ways, the '60s were a much more violent and unpredictable time,
but we sense a difference in the mood of the people; they're disgusted, but not
hopeless. The righteous indignation in their voices is like music to our ears,
compared to the cynicism we'd likely encounter in 2000. As loud and rebellious
as it might seem, 1967 was almost a time of innocence. We can see that one of
the three young vets, in particular, wants to believe the civics lessons he
learned in school, but his brutal experience in the Army has shaken his beliefs
very nearly out of him (another soldier talks of giving C-rations to a begging
Vietnamese woman, out of pity, and then being mocked by his white comrades).
"Keep your word. GI-trained black men won't stand for racism back
home": That's the admonition from the three vets, all of whom relate the
disillusionment of seeing the naked face of race hatred (toward Asians and
blacks, white America's foreign and domestic enemies, respectively) in the war,
and then coming home to be turned down for jobs on racial grounds. "It's
gonna escalate right here," warns one of the vets. We wonder where they
are now, thirty-three years later. Loeb's 16mm black-and-white film has that
fast-film vérité quality to it, in which the edges of the image almost appear
to be in full colour, so deeply saturated are the black and white tones. It's
beautiful to look at, and the faces are unforgettable in this time-machine trip
back to the corner of 125th and Broadway in 1967. A solemn group of Black
Muslims dismisses the marchers out of hand, saying that the "Muslim five
percent" believes that the government is always right. That's puzzling
enough, but later on the antics of a claque of white supremacists heckling the
marchers reminds us that maybe we have, indeed, come a small distance from the
days when people chanted, "Kill peace creeps!"
Something is happening in front of the camera. The
speeches may have been prepared but the anger we can sense is true.
■ How does the documentary deal with a
problem and show a minority ?
he look
in the camera
When the interviewed speak, we see their faces right in front of the camera. From time to time they look in the camera while they are speaking and there is no intermediary between their feelings and us. We can “get” them (their feelings) directly and don’t need any comment of the interviewer like it is the use in TV news reports. They speak very spontaneously and we don’t see the interviewer. We get them right in the face.
escription
of what is to be seen :
The documentary delivers to
us a very clear testimony of the feelings of the Black population of Harlem.
Those are very francs, sincere and direct when the journalists ask them to
express themselves on the question:
-
Refusal
of what the United States of America seeks to impose to them, to leave for the
war.
-
Anger
because they must fight as well as the White, in the name of the United States
of America whereas this one does not do anything for them (to take again their
terms) and does not grant the same rights
as the Whites to them. Not only their situation is precarious, but also
the State did not promise any change for the Blacks veterans of the war of
Vietnam.
The documentary is made of an interview with three African-American Vietnam veterans and of a footage of the 1967 Harlem Fall Mobilisation March. The interviewers ask as well Black as White people for their opinions and we hear different points of view.
The first scene of the documentary is that of one of the veterans telling a story (…), then we move on to the street. The camera shows a White man being asked by a Black man why he’s marching for the war in this area. The White man answers that this is his community but the Black man can not understand how one can be in favour of the war…Then we see a black woman apparently sharing his view, taking his arm and walking away with him. So Black people are not only seen disagreeing the government but also supporting it. Like this Black woman who seems talking like she were another person and who painted her eyebrows much higher than they actually are. While she says her son fighting in Vietnam is right, we feel surprised and can’t help but think about the fact that she had wanted so much to integrate that she doesn’t think as a part of the Black community anymore.
Still, a lot of people are against the war in Vietnam. Two young Black men don’t see the point of marching because for them what matters is what they believe in, that means the law of God “who is Black”. The funny thing is that their women are seen in the background and not asked about what they feel, while another young man standing next to them is being interviewed too.
There is another woman who speaks
very angrily about this. Her image is very pregnant and her anger so strong
that she becomes a bit defying. She states that the Whites took everything from
them (the Blacks) and promises that they are going to get it back. She says
“believe me, we’re gonna get back”, looking straight and strong into the eyes
of the interviewer. Just like another Black man who carries a placard with the
slogan on it: No Vietnamese ever called
me Nigger addresses straight to the interviewer including her in the White
community. He says “you took things from us” and so on instead of saying “the
Whites” or “the White Community”.
We can see several Black women talking with passion and anger about their sons fighting while the State of America is doing nothing for them. They are angry first because they are not in favour of the war and second because their sons shouldn’t have to fight for a country that won’t get them a job back home.
We also see a young White man who
is carrying an American flag and who as being interviewed is more shouting than
speaking out is support for his country and seems quite hysteric.
He’s very hysteric and seems like
an animal wanting to kill or to be killed.
Another very surprising young
American held an immature theory in a too serious way. His young age added to
this makes him look stupid. He thinks that if nature had meant the races to be
mixed, they would be. He’s member of the NRP and wants America for the Whites.
He won’t say he’s a racist. He only thinks Blacks should be part of the Black
empire and America should be for the Whites only. When we hear this, we
remember right away the Natives American being deprived of their own country by
Europeans. He’s talking very seriously and we can’t believe what we hear
because it is so stupid.
There is an opposition between
what look like businessmen and marchers. The firsts are shouting at the others
that they should be ashamed of this march and support their country instead of
this.
This documentary doesn’t depict
us an event, it shows us a population’s feelings and want to change a
situation. It sounds like there is something to follow. In the last scene we
see one of the Black man anger growing. Like a resume of what we’ve seen just
before, he tells us intensively the feelings of the Black population who’s fed
up and who is going to change a situation that has become unbearable.
■ Joris Ivens as a symbol
Joris
Ivens’s ”Rain”
he first
images of the film are typical of Joris Ivens. Like Alain Resnais, who also
worked on this movie, Ivens was a member of the founding committee of the
“International Federation of experimental Documentary and of Film of Avant-garde” (Fernand Léger, Bunuel,
Mc Laren, among many others were part of it.)
But he was also a member of the
group Medvedkine (like Marker and Godard who took part in the film).
Ivens always claimed he had been
deeply influenced by Vertov and Ruttmann. Therefore his first impressionist
documentary[5] films were
considered as “pure poetry”[6],
where he expressed a pride, a naive faith in the future, a confidence in
progress. But as an antimilitarist, he is a Marxist and he quickly oriented
himself towards the social documentary:
Nous construisons,
for the syndicats des travailleurs du bâtiment, Zuiderzee (1930-1932) sur les travaux d'assèchement de la Hollande:
Zuiderzee (1930-1932) brought him
international fame. In 1933 he shot Borinage with Henri Stork, a documentary
on the consequences of the failure of a strike in the miner region of Borinage in Belgium. After many journeys to
the U.S.S.R. and the United States, Ivens directed with Hemingway The Spanish Hearth, a documentary that deals with the Spanish War
atrocities.
Joris Ivens is probably among the
first documentary directors, who used light, handy cameras, but without
dropping the traditional technical. Most of his films may be considered as
films that, anticipate direct cinema or, that announced the new shooting
equipment. Nevertheless, even if the search of the truth was the main line of
his films – because of their ideology, the deliberate organisation of a
premeditated message – they belonged rather to the documentary school of the
thirties.
Knowing Joris Ivens’ work,
influence and ideology, the message is clear. Far from Vietnam can only be a socially and politically engaged
film, whose moral relies on a particular cinematographic language.
■ The montage as first effect
ziga Vertov
supported a cinema with no fiction nor actors, where the camera eye records a
universe that would be reconstructed by the cutting. And as a matter of fact,
the main cinematographic characteristic, that defines Ivens’s point of view is
the cutting.
Ever since the experience of
Kulechov[7]
with the actor Mosjulkine and his totally inexpressive face, the
« productive » or « creating » aspect of the
cinematographic cutting is known, which means that the images, thanks to their
relationship with one another, communicate information to us, which they don’t
contain on their own. If the association, arbitrary or not, of two
cinematographic motives (visuals, sonorous or audiovisuals), always produces an
intellectual or affective meaning in the viewer, that was not comprehended
separately in the motive itself, the notion of “cutting-effect” may be
considered as a real definition of the principle of the montage: to produce an
effect.
Scene from “Far from Vietnam”
Other experiments, based
on the same associative principle, produced similar effects. Therefore we can
add two complementary facts :
1)
an image has no meaning
« itself ». It only has a sort of general semantic virtuality, whose
particular treatment in the present is due to its relationship with other images.
Or: images taken separately have no strict meaning; they only have
« uses », due to the place where they belong in a system and their
relation with those that come before and after them;
2)
the real meaningful sector
in films is not at the level of the plan, but of the cutting of the plans. As a
result, cinematographic realism, cannot be confounded with photographic
realism, that is with analogy.
And we could say that most of the
sequences of the film are based on these principles. For it was not only sufficient,
but it was necessary to make this movie “with the cutting”. The cutting in its
original naivety is not seen as an artifice.[8]
The voice says: “rich material against poor materiel, rich technique against
poor technique”. The commentary is the redundancy of the visual montage: a
simple alternation from one camp to the other, from the Americans to the
Vietnamese. Almost the whole film relies on this regular opposition: the
American power and agitation, against the Vietnamese poverty and calm.
■
The identification
ut the cutting is not enough to
make sure, the viewer will stick to a camp. Cinema
uses identification.
The cinematographic dispositive
makes the viewer identify himself with its own look, but there are two kinds of
identification:
-
The primary identification
to the camera indicates the process, thanks to which the look of the viewer
during the projection seems to take the place that the camera occupied during
the shooting. The viewer sees the image, that took shape in the camera.[9]
-
The secondary
identification indicates the phenomenon, according to which the viewer (conform
to the ordinary psychological process) assimilates himself imaginary to the
people in the movie.[10]
Obviously, Ivens had a great
interest in the secondary identification. Whereas the Americans are always shot
in the back or from far, the Vietnamese are filmed at a human level, very
closely, the camera remains insistently on their faces, their movements. The
same principle is applied with the sounds: We never hear the American
protagonists talk, we only hear the
roaring sound of their planes, boots, whereas the Vietnamese literally “have
their say” - we are even present at one of their plays (Johnson cries). As a consequence they are so close to us, so human,
that we seem to take part in their activities, to share their life. And on the
contrary the Americans, who are less filmed than their missiles, remained
indistinct, submerged by all their artillery. No identification is possible
with them for the director doesn’t give them a face.
“Cinema
personalize the « fragment », it frames it and it is a « new
realism » whose consequences may be unimaginable.”[11]
At the beginning, the close-up
had a dramatic and narrative function (Griffith), but soon it also became the
basis of a cinema conceived as an instrument of the ideological discourse
articulated by the montage (Eisenstein, Vertov).
But whatever its function, the
close-up is always seen as a rupture:
-
a rupture in the
enunciation: just like any image, the close-up shows, but it shows in a very
insistent way, as it limits the look of the viewer to a single motive that is
abnormally big. With this effect[12],
the close-up has a function of assertive focalisation and of showing
interpellation.
-
A time-rupture: the
close-up resembles a frame and functions like photography.
-
A space-rupture: as the
close-up removes a fragment from its support, its environment, it gives it a
new dimension and a specific autonomy.
With this double rupture (space and
time), the close-up disturbs the viewer’s usual orientation and places him in a
position of quasi absolute proximity with the fragment, the detail. Thus the
close-up takes part actively in the process of “fetishism” that cinema can
create.
■ The influence of cinéma-vérité
he
episode where the writer Claude Riddler expresses his feelings about the
Vietnam war is one of the worst moments of the film. Nevertheless it draws my
attention for it is mostly influenced by the cinema-vérité. Its nullity isn’t
really surprising, for ever since its official birth in 1961 the cinema-vérité
had been imitated many times for the best and for the worst[13] . As a matter of fact, this failure is
mostly due to a misunderstanding: its appellation let assume it dealt with the
recording of the Truth (la Vérité) –
inside the Human Being, beyond the appearances –, whereas its ambition was only
to capture the lived. (p.254)
Looking back on it today, the
main particularity of the cinema-vérité was its proximity to the figures, as
Serge Daney put it:
“Here is a
character; if I film it from far, it’s a musical; closer it’s a melodrama; and
more closer it’s cinema-vérité. Everything is true. Anyone choose what he
likes.”[14]
But what a camera “sees” is not
what a man sees: close-ups, cutting, editing, everything conspires to isolate,
to underline, to enhance – whereas in life, a human look would have rectified,
appeased, reduced. What distinguishes a camera look of man’s vision is the fact
that the man can participate. The cinema-vérité is “short-sighted”[15],
non realistic. If we want to make the "reality" appear
"realistic" in the Arts, then it’ll probably have the following
objective: to give the vision that an intermediary
observer – neither too close, nor too far - would have of a milieu, a costume,
a rite, a spectacle, a gesture, a life.
Thus this episode of Far From Vietnam classically mixes the
fiction with a realist constat and with a documentary relationship. But
surprisingly, uses one of Jean Rouch’s tricks: Just like -for example – Amadou
Demba in I, a Negro[16],
Claude Riddler, who played himself, says its own text where he wants and the
director follows and films him. For once, there is no commentary in this
episode, except the useless introduction that says: “With his contradiction,
Claude Riddler is the voice of Europe’s bad conscience and hypocrisies”. Here
the technique is similar to Rouch’s: the protagonist can say whatever he wants,
the viewer can take its distance easily and judge, and make its mind up.
Chris Marker’s participation in
the film may partly explain this. Marker was used to shoot engaged films (Un Dimanche à Pékin (1956) in communist
China, Lettre de Sibérie (1958), La Description d'un combat (1960) for
Israel; or Cuba si! (1961) on the
castrisme), and he early adopted the cinéma-vérité’s techniques. He knows that
the truth never shows, even hunted. For him, the image is a trap. He never
believes, but he always doubts. Therefore the text never comments on the images
in his films, and the images never illustrate the text.
■
The reality-problem
Screenshot from “Far from Vietnam”
inema,
as a system of representation, is the form of Arts that conveys the strongest
impression of assisting to quasi real show (Metz). The image represents a sort
of "juste milieu" between the excess (the theatre too real) and the
insuffisance (the language’s arbitrary signs).
But the biggest weakness of Far From Vietnam is probably in its too
heavy and biased search for the truth. There are two ways of apprehending the
reality, and each one has its risks: to pursue the immediate reality, and run the
risk of turning one’s back on the true reality or losing it. Thus we only have
a duplicate of the appearances. On the other hand, to fade out totally behind
what is recorded, and thus to create an impersonal work, whose only interest is
“the event” that was filmed.[17]
We can easily argue that Far From Vietnam
unfortunately failed in those two attempts.
Jean Rouch was blamed for
interfering in reality, for refusing to be a simple witness, but it seems, at
least in his case, that his films remain documentaries and at the same time
turn the fiction into reality, thus paving the way to a method that would
change the fiction film into a « possible reality » (réalité) and not into a « made up
reality » (réel).
“The couple cinema/reality, that
fuelled every idealist obsession in the film’s critics and theories, contains a
death phantasm.”[18]
Basing his theory on Freud’s
writings that links obsession to death, Bonitzer affirms that the impossible
and obsessive search for reality is only due to a metaphysical and phantasmal
desire to capture what cannot be
seized, which means the desire to get rid
of the antagonisms in a reconciliatory way.
However different in their way to
apprehend the reality, the Living Camera,
the Candid Eye and the direct cinema all have the same purpose:
to establish a direct contact with the man acting in a precise situation,
without any esthetical (or other) intermediaries that could falsify or change
the lived spontaneity.[19]
■ Godard and an engaged cinema
hen Godard shot the episode Camera Eye[20],
his work was at a turning point. Until 1967 he shot film after film (fifteen
long and seven short in less than ten years). He films quickly, with emotion,
until he finds the objectivity, to capture from the reality a few moments of
Truth.
"It’s while shooting, that I
discover what I must shoot. Immediately it is the hazard. And at the same time,
the definitive. What I want is the definitive out of the hazard.”
Jean-Luc
Godard
His separation from his
wife Anna Karina coincides with the appearance of political (but always
abstract) ideas in his films. In 1967 he had already shot Made in USA, Deux ou trois
choses que je sais d'elle, la
Chinoise, and Week-end. These
films had privileged the concept on the experience, to express people’s
alienation in the society of consummation, their submission to the conservative
ideologies. But it is only after Mai 68 that Godard will completely evolve to
militant cinema, whose objectives and legitimacy are in Mao’s writings.
Godard has always attempted to
show the scare between the “image itself” and its “signs”, between its “discourse”
and the dull background on which it relies.
Here he questioned himself on the
way he could be helpful to the Vietnamese cause. He is aware that the force of
the cinema is to seize the event, a
moment of reality. So he starts telling a story, or more precisely, describing
an event, but we don’t see anything except him with his camera. Eventually
Godard explains with no bitterness he’s still in Paris, for the Vietnamese
didn’t allow him to come because of his too dull ideology. Therefore he can only
evocate concrete things. He has decided to make films on the Vietnam through something and he prefers:
“Instead of invading the Vietnam out of
a generosity, that would force the things, to let the Vietnam invade us and realize
what place it takes in our daily life. That is, to create a Vietnam in
oneself.”
Godard attacks the myth of the
direct political film (cinema-vérité, interviews, etc.), that is linked to a
certain mythology of the direct cinema,
which is, to film “without interfering” so as to let the political content
appear. The political content does appear then, but masked, blind, deaf and
stuttering (or mute).
“The image
resolves nothing. To film with no political analysis is only a way to add to
the society of spectacle without
permitting intervention”.[21]
However the director’s
intervention is basically unavoidable (at least with the cutting). Should this
intervention be void, then the whole film would be void. To film “purely and
simply” (but nothing is ever pure or simple) what happens, means purely and
simply redoubling the dominant ideology.
■ The political film
ack then Godard hadn’t really
experienced the political film, compared to the other directors like Ivens,
Marker or Varda. (With her style made of this mixture of document and fiction,
real and imaginary, constat and reflection, Agnès Varda had already shown her
interest for the evolutions that look like liberations, for instance in Cuba,
with Salut, les Cubains (1963).[22])
Nevertheless Godard is the one whose point of view
arouses the problem of the political cinema.
The documentary cinema assumes
the other’s acceptance or complicity to make a film together. It is the
opposition between the documentary cinema or between cinema and political caricature,
that exaggerates in order to disqualify the adversary. On the contrary, the
adversary must be qualified, in order to have the opportunity to talk about
him/her politically and, if it’s possible, to destroy him/her politically. And
this requires something that separate radically photography from the cinema:
the duration.
During the long shootings, that are analytic, something happen in the relationship between what is filmed and the person that films. What appears is far more human than the protagonist’s ideological discourse.
“To film the
politicians, including the enemies, is to remake ordinary men of them. This is
very important, for one of the mediatisation’s perverse effects is precisely to
dehumanise the politicians, to suppress their bodies, to change them into
icons.”[23]
There is an effect of the cinema,
at the same time therapeutic and critic, that enables to realize we are not
confronted to a pure narration. This narration is made of flesh, of passions,
of censorship, of many sorts of things that create topics, instead of letting
us in front of monsters.
■ The secret camera
he
direct cinema’s most common failure is to let itself be invaded by the reality.
That is to say by events that are themselves already full of meaning. No doubt
that the result is seizing because of its authenticity. But as far as the
artistic creation and interpretation is concerned, the movie is very often just
a “recording machine”, a vehicle to communicate an already-made and/or exterior
reality.[24]
Claude Lelouch’s sequence of the secret camera corresponds exactly to Noguez’s observations. From an artistic point of view, this moment is totally uninteresting. But it’s impossible not to be attracted by it.
However, it is very interesting
to see how it creates this impression of authenticity. Of course the fact that
the camera is hidden among the crowd, which means at a human level and in the heart
of the event, contributes mainly to it. But those are the details that are more
important, especially those linked to the notion of “hors-cadre” and not
“hors-champ”
The "hors-champ" (out of field) is the space that is not
included in the field. It generally refers to the portion of space that is
“non-visible” and immediately contiguous to the field, like its “natural”
prolongation. This is what is not visible anymore, but what supposedly still
exists.
Whereas the
"hors-cadre" (out of frame)
is the space that doesn’t enter the frame. With such a definition it must be
difficult to distinguish hors-champ and hors-cadre. But the hors-cadre contains
a dimension that the hors-champ doesn’t have: the space of the camera and the
space where all the technical operations take place. The hors-cadre always
refers to the space where the image is produced. The fact that sometimes some
of its elements appear in the very image (shadow, reflection in a mirror, etc)
doesn’t change its status. It is the space of the enunciation, it remains
distinct from the space of the story given by the image.
And this is exactly what happens
during the sequence of the secret camera. Because of the precipitation, we see
microphones or other cameras in the image. The image is not stable and then a
policeman put his hand on the camera screen to prevent Lelouch to shoot, and so
at once reminds the viewer of the authenticity of this moment.
This is a more authentic approach
from the reality, this is an objective
- or as objective as possible – capture of the human behaviour. For even
the secret camera technique contains the question of objectivity. For Chris
Marker, "objectivity isn’t right,
what matters is the dynamism and the diversity".
The images, that are considered
as « objective », really materialized on the screen (otherwise the
viewer wouldn’t perceive them) have also their share of subjectivity. But their
subjectivity is not due to the significant (cinematographic), but to the
signified (story). These images refer directly to the camera’s look, that is
the director.
■ The limits of the commentary
fter
Godard’s reflections, it’s probably the last episode of the film that is the
most effective. Its strength is due to a right intuition; the intuition that it
was an historical moment.
It’s called Vertigo and this time the commentary voice disappears and let the
images speak.
There are two other episodes of
demonstration in New York: the first we see is the Veteran Day (29th April 1967) and the second takes place
two days later for May 1st.
However, even though Vertigo took place on 15th April 1967, this
sequence is the last we see. As its directing identifies itself absolutely with
the action it relates imperfectly (because it is only one aspect), these strong
and trembling images are just like the protagonists’ objective memory.
According to the strength that arises from this episode, this small anachronism
is easy to understand. Compared to the two other demonstrations, the simple act
to record and to show what happens is enough, for the goal is here not to judge
but to enhance a latent malaise.
The narrator is often confounded
with the author. In cinema, the voice must be considered in a metaphoric way:
the image "stricto senso", doesn’t
speak, it shows; however in showing it says and so can tell. We must then
distinguish different levels of recite. The narration, contrary to the recite,
refers fundamentally to single act of enunciation.
Very often the fact of
enunciating is included in the enunciate itself. The fiction-effect that the
discourse produces, is handicapped by the discourse itself. As the presence of
the enunciation in the enunciate reminds us of another reality, it betrays my
adhesion to the fiction.
As far as the cinema relies
on the priority of the image, it is fundamentally mimetic: cinema tells by
showing, or more precisely, it first shows and can use this showing to tell.
The question is to know if the
narration implants itself – as coming from outside – on the showing or if it is
already partially registered in it. For some (Genette, for instance), to show
is not to tell, and only words can be considered as a narration.
For example, Chris Marker
represents a very significant illustration of the relationship between images
and commentary. The artist “orientates”
deliberately (or disorientates) the image meaning with a brilliant, but
invading, commentary that uses the film’s information to take a "verbal
signified" out of it, instead of supporting the visual signified or
creating with it significant relations.
The notion of “relay” refers to
the language’s specific power of adding meanings to the image, that whether it
cannot transmit, or can transmit with great difficulty, like abstractions,
generalisations and, of course, the protagonist’s words or thoughts.
Usually the language is presented
as essentially informative, and the information as essentially an exchange. But
most of the time, the language is not an exchange of information but an order.
Deleuze illustrates this opinion by the example of a professor that explains an
operation or teaches the orthography:
“He gives the
syntax to the children, like a master gives instruments to the workers, in
order to produce enunciates conform to dominant meanings.”[25]
The language is a system of
orders, not a means of information. To talk, even of oneself, is always to take
someone else’s place, to pretend to talk instead of him/her, to deny him/her
the right to talk. An image is represented by a sound, like a worker by his
delegate. A sound takes the power on a series of images. Thus it is difficult
to speak without commending, without pretending to represent something or
someone. It is difficult to let talk those who haven’t the right to, and to
give back the value of struggle against the power to the sounds.
■ Conclusion
hus as
we can see, whereas No Vietnamese…
and Far from Vietnam were shot
exactly at the same moment and dealt with the same subject, they arise
different aesthetic problems : cutting, point of view, distance,
commentary, etc.
The only thing one could reproach
these films (reproach which, in fact, is only a simple observation) concerns
the cinematographic creation. It’s not that there is no "creation" in
these films, but that creation is only a choice, only an organisation of the
what has been recorded. When they seize thus what has been said and what has
been done, then they certainly record a “happening” reality, but as well as a
“self-significating” and “verbally significating” reality. In other words, they
record a “signified” that “takes itself its meaning” (as the verbal expression
dominates), whereas art consists in creating meanings (by means of the images,
words and sounds, but according to a implicating or semiotic layout) and by no
means in reproducing them just the way they are: "made-up".
We could object then that these
films have nothing to do with personal creation, but with an objective capture
of reality. Then the only subjectivity
is in the director’s point of view and his ability to report the facts in their
totality.
Thus Dominique Noguez tries to list, what today is
expected from a documentary, otherwise no one could be legitimately qualified
of essay. It always lacks to these films at least one of the following
characteristics:
1)
a decision of
non-narration and, on the contrary, an abundant use of the citation under all its forms (images, sounds, texts);
2)
an obviously subjective
aspect (which means uncertain, open);
3)
an exclusive attention to
the present or coming reality;
4)
the will to influence the
viewer’s opinion with rational means, to make him aware of something, or to
change its life.
Here is what is looming : a
cinema neither just didactic (for the esthetical preoccupations are not absent
of it), nor just experimental (for the unforeseen successions of images of all
sorts, of all status, have a non esthetical finality: the appearance of a
certain meaning); a cinema whose new
and free form, evokes the exigency of a liberation and of a thinking revival; a
cinema of the doubt, or etymologically strictly speaking, a pedagogic cinema.
■ Bibliography
·
Les Cahiers du Cinéma n°568 (mai 2002)
·
Nouveaux cinémas, nouvelles critiques, Ed. Cahiers
du cinéma, Paris, 2001.
·
La Passion théorique, Ed. Cahiers du Cinéma,, Paris
2001.
·
Dominique Noguez; Trente Ans de Cinéma
Expérimental en France [1950-1980]; Ed. A.R.C.E.F., Paris, 1982.
·
Dominique Noguez, Le Cinéma autrement, Ed. 7e Art,
Paris, 1984.
·
Stephan Hoffstadt; Black Cinema,
Afroamerikanische Filmemacher der Gegenwart, Hg von Hitzeroth, Marburg, 1995.
·
Marc Henri Piault; Anthropologie et cinéma,
Nathan, 2000.
■ Filmography
Far from Vietnam
France
Format : 35 mm,
Color
Length : 115 min
Year : 1967
Directed by : Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude
Lelouch, Jean Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda
Cinematography by : J. Lacouture, M. Loridan, C.
Marker, F. Maspero, R. Pic, M. Ray, J. Sternberg
Music by: G. Aperghis, M. Chapdenat, M. Fano
Producted by : Slon
No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger
USA
Format: 16mm, Black & White
Length: 68 min
Year: 1967
Producted and directed by: David Loeb Weiss