Gustav Deutschs Film ist.
Tom Gunning
"Found footage" -- the recycling of previously shot film, reworked by later filmmakers - defined a founding moment in both film theory and filmmaking. As is well known, Lev Kuleshov and his students in the revolutionary USSR intercut the same shot of the actor Mozhukin (with a rather neutral expression) with a variety of other shots (usually described as: a bowl of soup, a dead baby and a scantily clad woman) in order to produce widely differing affects (respectively: hunger, sorrow and lust). Referenced by theorists and filmmakers from Hitchcock to Deleuze, the Mozhukin experiment has particularly fascinated theoretically inclined filmmakers such as Godard, Pudovkin, and Hollis Frampton-appropriately so, since it was designed to instruct film students in the logic of their craft. For Kuleshov the experiment demonstrated the power of editing to create meaning through juxtaposition, demonstrating that cinematic shots must be read synthetically. Each shot in isolation remains neutral in its meaning; it can only be read through contextualization. The shot of Mozhukin gained its meaning from the cut that juxtaposed it to another shot. A single shot in itself means nothing - or potentially can mean anything. According to Kuleshov, a film's meaning therefore comes not from the act of filming, but from the act of splicing.
I want to shift the lesson of this demonstration from its intended QED about the power of montage, and focus instead on the material underlying its transformation: the preexisting shot of Mozhukin. Kuleshov's demonstration did not necessarily demand using found footage (although according to some accounts the scarcity of raw stock in post revolutionary USSR compelled Kuleshov to scavenge among the leavings from pre-revolutionary Russian cinema). However, the choice had strong effects. The use of the familiar face of émigré movie star Mozhukin gave Kuleshov's experiment a polemic edge. Editing not only imposed specific meanings on neutral material, but also overcame whatever reactionary bourgeois meanings the pre-Revolutionary footage originally intended to convey. One could claim that Kuleshov's iconoclastic (deconstructive?) hermeneutics also asserted a power over time, overcoming a fossilized meaning with the explosive dynamics of a new cut. While Kuleshov may not have specifically seen this renewal of old material as demonstrating montage's revolutionary potential, the other major advocate and theorist of the praxis of montage in early revolutionary USSR, Estir Shub, certainly did. In her compilation film The Fall of the Romanov Destiny, Shub's montage redefined pre-Revolutionary footage of the Czar's family and the Russian empire, as did the re-editing of foreign films to change their ideological message that she undertook with her pupil Sergei Eisenstein in the early twenties.
While the term "found footage" highlights the role of chance, the lucky trouvaillee celebrated in surrealistic aesthetics, to my mind the use of cinematic found footage primarily transformed the temporality of the cinematic image. As Robbe-Grillet once theorized, cinema seems restricted to the present tense: we see actions unfolding before us. However, cinema, at least in its photographic aspects, also partakes of the past tense of the photographic image, the trace of the past, the message that Roland Barthes claimed all photography proclaims: "This has been." The cinematic image therefore operates in two different temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, the moving image's present tense shows actions in the course of unfolding; while on the other hand, as a photographic trace, film consists of records of past events. The context, genre and stylistics of individual films privilege one aspect over the other (even to the extent of nearly repressing, although never totally eradicating, signs of one or the other). The fictional film usually foregrounds the present tense of unfolding action with effects of anticipation, suspense, and immediate involvement, while the documentary film tends to foreground the past tense aspect of recording an event which has already occurred.
Avant-garde or experimental cinema frequently plays on the tension between these modes of cinematic time. As William Wees has shown, in the past few decades especially, found footage has played a major role in avant-garde cinema in both North America and Europe, almost constituting a genre in itself. More than the chance-like nature of a lucky find, found footage in cinema tends to emphasize the pastness of the image: This image existed before this film, usually in a different context. Experimental filmmakers, of course, subject found footage to a range of technical manipulations and adopt a variety of tones -- from the pop-art satirical collage of iconic mass cultural images of the late Bruce Connors to the utterly transformed, nearly unidentifiable, oneiric working-over of found images in the Twilight Psalm series of Phil Solomon (especially such films as Walking Distance, or Night of the Meek). I do not want to reduce the complexity of this cinema of appropriation to a limited number of themes, since found footage refers to material rather than final result and that result can be wide-ranging. But the use of found footage, from the experiment of Kuleshov on, brings the paradoxical nature of cinematic temporality, its intertwining of effects of past and present, to a boil. The films of Gustav Deutsch have worked over a range of preexisting footage, from home movies, to educational and scientific films, to pornographic films, to fiction films from both early and classical cinema. Each film he has made has its own individuality, and even within his series Film ist. the variations are striking. But within these variations a meditation on cinematic time recurs.
Experimental cinema explores fault lines, slides down slippery slope, evades definition by definition. Rather than exemplifying theoretical issues of cinematic temporality, the films of Deutsch, like other found footage films, play with diverse possibilities. Therefore a critic like myself needs to avoid freezing this dynamic into a theoretical statement. But in this brief essay I want to explore the implications of Deutsch's found footage film for both temporality and the mechanics of meaning in cinema. To shift a bit from my initial focus on temporality to the more traditional semantic approach to Kuleshov's experiment, the use of footage implies a radical de-contextualization and redefinition. Whatever the meaning or intention originally tied to this footage, that tie has been loosened. Kuleshov's method was to supply a new context, to supply a new meaning. While the avant-garde seized upon this dynamic redefinition of meaning, from at least Bruce Connors early works, this redefinition often celebrated ambiguity and equivocation. Kuleshov demonstrated his control of meaning, while Connors (and others) liberated the image into a wide range of associations - political, sexual and anarchic. Kuleshov displayed the semantic power of editing; found footage films in the late twentieth and early twenty first century rerouted this power, multiplying rather than defining it.
In the segments 1-6 of Film ist., Deutsch radically separates images from the films he draws on from their original context. Since many of the films in this first part of the series are from educational or scientific films, this original exhibition context defined their original meaning. These films generally served as part of a course of instruction on such things as animal behavior, physiology or the nature of the larynx. In some avant-garde found-footage films (such as the extraordinary work of Abigail Child or Leslie Thornton) scientific footage wavers between metaphor and sensational attraction as a whole new context is created. In the Film ist. 1-6 series, one strongly senses the original purpose of pedagogy in nature of the footage. A tone of instruction dominates: from the subject matter focused on; to composition and lighting; to the devices used in the shooting process (slow motion or stop motion, x-ray photography); as well as the presence in the footage of scientific instruments of measurement. Yet Deutsch has stripped these films of the explanations of physiology or psychology that originally accompanied them. Without these reassuring explanations, much of the footage seems strange, dream-like, horrifying or amusing, grotesque. Instead of being processed for the information they hold, these images confront us in all their oddness. Deutsch seems to substitute his own pedagogic project for the original one. The series' titles direct our attention to an aspect that the original filmmakers may have considered transparent: the film medium itself. Liberated from the function of simply recording scientific data, these films display the nature of cinema as a moving image, cinema's affinity with the motions of physical bodies and scientific instruments, its control of time and vision. And the dual sense of temporality returns. The sense of surprise and discovery we experience as these images pirouette before us carries a strong present tense, as the movement unfolds before us. Yet our perception of the images as data, their role in recording scientific demonstrations that had already occurred, accents the past tense. Both these aspects appear defamiliarized; we are as fascinated (and sometimes repelled) by the motion of bodies as by the scientific regimen to which the image is subjected.
But the scientific context of much of this imagery evokes another temporal regime. Scientific demonstration strives to present an abstraction of time in which the unique moment disappears in favor of the unchanging laws of nature. However, in Sections 1-6 of Film ist. the images never rest simply in this abstract time. Time seeps into the images. The clothes people wear, the color of the film stock, the nature of décor -- all these background details tend to anchor these images in a specific time that otherwise the films strive to evade. The contingency of the scientific demonstration, its rootedness in certain styles of behavior and attitude as much as clothing or hairstyle swims before us. And yet the fundamental laws of motion and physiology do not simply disappear into this matrix of period reference. These contrasting elements of abstracted scientific laws and contingent filmic details twine about each other, defining a pas de deux that seems to underlie much of Film ist. as a whole: an interaction between fundamental laws, urges and forces, and their material manifestations and individual identities. Rather than simply recycling old scientific films, Deutsch demonstrates the double nature of cinema: its eye for general pattern and recurrence along with its affinity for the particular and unique.
Episodes 1-6 not only explore the scientific aspect of cinema, but Deutsch's own pedagogic project of laying out the fundamentals of cinema. The second group of Film ist., episodes 7-12, focuses on the historical dimension of cinema. The double aspect of history explored in this section can be expressed linguistically in French and German, but unfortunately is less immediate in English. German Geschichte, like French histoire, translates as both history and story. Section 7-12 of Film ist. takes up the cinematic aspect of this interrelation of narrative and history, evoking the telling of stories and the carrying on of tradition. Episodes 1-6 like all of Film ist. relies heavily on editing, sometimes preserving the sequence of original footage, and sometimes creating new juxtapositions. In Episodes 1-6, the succession of shots convey a sense of rhythm and process, rather than the devices of suspense, mystery or comic gags that dominate the second series. The material used in Episodes 7-12 comes from a different sort of archive than the primarily educational films that appear in the earlier series. Drawn primarily from the first decades of cinema history, these images, while including the actuality footage so essential to early filmmaking, presents films from a very different exhibition context than the first series. These films were primarily intended for theatrical audiences and address the pleasures of sight, the seductions of eye and fantasy, more than the discipline of education. Rather than forming part of a pedagogic demonstration, these images invited spectators to enter their cinematic worlds, whether as travelogues or fictional adventures. Although Deutsch pries these images loose from their original stories, nonetheless one senses them as part of a larger whole, fragments of an absent story. As fragments they refer to unseen future moments of narrative or revelation. Even separated from their original context, these images still have a narrative valance and momentum, an energy Deutsch abstracts from them, but does not dissipate.
Thus not only does a different sort of time operate in this section, but it creates a different dialectic between the pastness of history and the immediacy of the action. These images seem older, that is, more historical: we see their antiquated style not only in clothing and furnishing, but also in filmmaking devices and performance. The historicity of cinema displays itself before us. And yet in the midst of this powerful sense of the past, we also see an intensity of emotion, a compelling presentation of dramatic situations that fill us with curiosity to see what follows -the basic momentum of narrative film - to ask: what comes next? Deutsch both exploits and subverts this energy, withholding the expected satisfaction of narrative outcome by interrupting the story, or diverting our curiosity into other images. Like Kuleshov, Deutsch redefines the meaning of a shot by the shot which follows, but rather than completing a sequence, he often creates a simile, an echo, or a dream-like doppelganger for the narrative development we might expect. If traditional narrative operates like electrical wiring, sending current along determined pathways, Deutsch's Film ist. episodes 7-12 frays the insulation, short circuiting expected operations with a shower of sparks. Drawing on archival footage, Deutsch cares less about simply making new connections than about awakening energies slumbering in old material. This energy comes from chain reactions, splitting the cinematic atom of original meanings. Beyond simply recycling images of the past, the editing of found footage triggers a truly new moment, not only a new sense of presence, but a prophetic sense of future possibilities. While Kuleshov's lessons demonstrated how shots could be given meaning in relation to each other, finding their place in a logical order like links in a chain, Deutsch more frequently sets off a series of resonances that echo across shots rather than directing them to a specific end. Like ripples expanding a across a pond, one shot sets another vibrating. Kuleshov vectorized editing, but Deutsch seems rather to make it twine and untwine in a helix-like pattern.
If the first two sections of Film ist. invoke (without being limited to) science pedagogy and the narrative of history respectively, the latest episode - bearing the sinister number 13 - probes the secret forces of cosmology, sexuality and the drive towards death. Its title, A Girl and a Gun, refers to a definition of cinema offered by Jean Luc Godard. Godard's phrase identifies sexuality and violence as driving impulses behind the manufacture of moving images. But more than this, the phrase also invokes cinema's fundamental affinity with the dynamic that psychoanalysis calls displacement, in which one thing stands in for another. In the movies sex is never simply sex and violence is rarely simply violence; indeed, one substitutes for the other. The gun exerts a phallic force, but sexual desire is also channeled into national fantasies of dominance and conquest. Movies not only combine sex and violence, but fuse the energy of one with the other. But Film ist. Episode 13 A Girl and a Gun goes beyond a critique of film's exploitation of sex and violence, and fashions an overarching mythology from images of these primal energies. The episode extends from genesis to apocalypse, exposing the forces underlying modern history and perhaps the cosmos as well. Simultaneously a myth and an anti-myth, episode 13 stages the battle of Thanatos and Eros, using the imagery of cinema to create a new epic form with found footage drawn from pornography, historical documentary, fictional dramas and images of nature. A Girl and a Gun blends these varied modes of filmmaking and their different temporalities in order to fashion a cinematic myth in which the full course of time and history unwinds within a eternal process of union and division.
Episodes 1-12 of Film ist. derived a new ambiguity and range of meanings from found footage. Episodes 1-6 loosened the images of scientific films from their intended pedagogic purposes, while sections 7-12 liberated gestures, emotions and incidents from the narratives to which they originally belonged. But in Episode 13 the images are impressed into a context that endows them with heavily symbolic roles and meanings. Images that may have originally demonstrated the patterns of smoke or the flow of molten magma become embodiments of the titanic forces of world creation, the energies of growth and genesis. Pornographic films evoke copulating deities. These images become the vehicles of metaphor, cogs within a cosmic mechanism. Sexuality does not appear here as the erotic gags or double meanings that enlivened the previous sections, but rather as the force that moves the sun and all the other stars, the momentum that fuses images into metaphors, triggering explosions and transformations. The cultural weight of the inter-titles that quote religious and philosophical texts in this episode (as contrasted with the laconic section titles of the previous episodes) gives this succession of images a profundity that contrasts with the light-hearted puns and random associations the previous section often reveled in. Repetition, formal similarities, and actions that seem to flow across the cuts create a Tsunami of meaning that sweeps across the film. A series of twined bodies are intercut with the tale from Plato's Symposium of the primal separation of the original androgynous human into separate sexes (which then strive their entire lives to find their twin and reunite). This series of mirror images seem illustration for this mythic account of Eros, than to document the primal desire to recover a primal wholeness. The struggle of these bodies to merge rehearses the film's logic of juxtaposition, portraying the energy of editing itself, making visible the rhythm of a fission both nuclear and cinematic. Deutsch forces Kuleshov's montage beyond the simple creation of meaning to reveal a primal desire of images to unite and generate new figures of significance. The archive of cinema supplies the matrix of a new mythology, as the process of editing becomes a process of mythopoesis, manifesting the struggle between contraries and the conjunction of opposites.
A Girl and a Gun may not be the final episodes of Film ist., but it does constitute its alpha and omega, as these orphaned images unite to form a new cosmology of cinema. In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, creation began with a disaster, as the vessels of the cosmos shattered when divine energy streamed into them. This divine tragedy caused fragments of the transcendent energy to fall into a world of matter, seeding it with sparks from the heavenly realm. Religious meditation and rituals seek to restore the divine unity and heal this breach, liberating the captive sparks from their earthly container, and allowing them to re-ascend to their original source. I believe this process stands as an ideal metaphor for Deutsch's transformation of found footage, reworking archival material, seeking to release and gather the energy contained within them: from the scientific exploration of the laws of motion; to the enigmatic configurations of narrative and history; to the expansion and contraction of the energy of the universe itself in the rhythms of erotic union and deadly division. In Film ist., the past knits together and unravels before our eyes, demonstrating the way energy emerges from fission, worlds are created from disasters. Images of the past are refined and transmuted to yield a range of temporal experience, as a new present arises from fossilized films and the conjunction of shots revitalize slumbering meanings. The essence of film consists in endowing still images with movement and life. Film ist. awakes the archives of moving images into new discoveries.
Published in: GUSTAV DEUTSCH, Filmmuseum / Synema Publications, 2009