Film Democracy: Jem Cohen @occupywallstreet

Bennet Schaber

The time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives.

Giorgio Agamben, March 2009, Notre Dame de Paris

Before, I was watching television; now it is television that’s watching me.

Demonstrator, Cairo, Egypt

I DIDN’T SAY LOOK I SAID LISTEN.

Placard, Occupy Wall Street

In “Of Cinema as Democratic Emblem,” philosopher Alain Badiou, after briefly discussing the historical and conceptual twists and turns of the various ‘ontologies’ of the cinema, opts for what he writes is “an infinitely simpler and more empirical manner” of thinking about and with the cinema. “Removed from all philosophical preformation,” Badiou decides to elucidate a single statement: “cinema is a ‘mass art’” (Badiou 2009: 1). The phrase hails the philosopher because “philosophy is only possible insofar as there are paradoxical relations,” so that “when every connection is naturally legitimate, philosophy is impossible or in vain” (2009: 1). “Mass art” reveals itself, in Badiou’s account, as the bearer of very precise but paradoxical relations. First, ‘mass’ suggests a political category while “art” suggests an aesthetic category. More crucially, the conjuncture underscores the paradoxical relation between “a pure democratic element (on the side of eruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste)”(2009: 2). And finally, in a kind of “derived form,” cinema imposes paradoxical relations between “invention and familiarity, between novelty and general taste” (2009: 2). Thus the paradox of the emergence of the “greatest mass art that has ever existed” in the midst of the century of the avant gardes, with cinema seemingly incorporating the very division of the arts which is the division through which it lives, precisely, as mass art.

But of course this ‘paradoxical relation’ embodied in the (disjunctive) conjunctional phrase, ‘mass art’, is in some respect no paradox at all, insofar as the aesthetic phrase gestures toward a distribution of experiences that is already at the root of a political distribution. Thus Jacques Rancière, referring to the films of Pedro Costa, can write:

The politics of the filmmaker involves using the sensory riches—the power of speech or of vision—that can be extracted from the life and settings of these precarious existences and returning them to their owners, making them available, like a song they can enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences they can borrow for their own lives. After all, is not this what we can expect from the cinema, the popular art of the twentieth century, the art that allowed the greatest number of people to be thrilled by the splendor of the effect of a ray of light shining on an ordinary setting, the poetry of clinking glasses, or a conversation at the counter of a run-of-the-mill café. (Rancière 2009: 81)

The distance between Badiou’s “mass art” and Rancière’s “popular art” then, is the distance between “eruption and evental energy” and a certain dissensual opening within the sensuous itself, between a becoming universal or becoming true and a “precarious existence.” For Badiou, the promise of cinema is the “spiritual subjugation of the visible, available to all, without exception or measure” (2009: 5).

For Rancière, all cinema does, all it can do, as political art, is make sense, in the double sense of the determination and distribution of sensory experiences, that determination and distribution constituting, already, the frame in which they come to make sense. Thus Rancière will have to acknowledge the case that, in an age of multiplexes and ubiquitous computing, it has been some time since cinema has had to relinquish the dream of mass art, as an art of or for the masses as, in the famous phrase, “the creators of universal history.” Badiou, of course, in his enduring Maoism, has hardly relinquished the dream; indeed, for him the masses still make history, so that historical ‘sequences’ are very precisely dated by the dual awakening of the masses and, therefore, history.

What’s more, the apparent tension between Badiou and Rancière’s accounts of the mass or popular art can be folded back into each account itself. For instance, it can be located in the fate of the term ‘emblem’ in Badiou’s work. While in “Cinema as a Democratic Emblem” the term functions positively so that cinema’s “vocation is universal… because it is the active democratization of the other six [arts]” (2009: 4), the same term, in an essay published four years later, functions in the opposite way. Thus Badiou (2011) will write: “The only way to make truth out of the world we’re living in is to dispel the aura of the word democracy and assume the burden of not being a democrat and so being heartily disapproved of by “everyone” (tout le monde). In the world we’re living in, tout le monde doesn’t make sense without the emblem, so “everyone” is democratic. It’s what you could call the axiom of the emblem” (2009: 7). And this logic of not being in order to be, as it were, is located by Rancière in the divided heart of cinematic practice itself: “The art of cinema has been constrained, empirically, to affirm its art against the tasks assigned to it by the industry. But the visible process by which it thwarts these tasks only hides a more intimate process: to thwart its servitude, cinema must first thwart its mastery. It must use its artistic procedures to construct dramaturgies that thwart its natural powers…. The film fable is a thwarted fable” (Rancière 2006: 11).

And yet despite their differences—even of tone—the two philosophers seem to be in agreement on at least three points: 1. That cinema remains one of philosophy’s crucial interlocutors, just as the staged arts—drama, sophistics, political assembly—were for Plato; and 2. That what is at stake here are new forms of political subjectivation, “dramaturgies” for which questions of the masses, the people, democracy are hardly irrelevant, just as they were hardly so for Plato; and 3. That a certain division of cinema’s aesthetic regime is co-extensive with a certain division, conceptual and real, within the very notion and fact of the people: who are these people who emerge and are represented through an often obscure play of parts and wholes? And how does this bear on real democracy, “the power of peoples over their own existence” (Badiou 2011: 15)?

For the moment I’d like to keep Badiou and Rancière in a kind of suspended tension so that I can attend to a series of films in which the masses seem to reawaken to the stage of history and in all of their precarity. But first I want to discuss a short filmic sequence that not unambiguously seems to signal the close of one historical sequence—Jaws was released the same year: the conclusion of Robert Altman’s Nashville.

Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) ends with an image that functions as both a proposition and a question. In fact, the image is really three images and the time it takes to link them: first, the Parthenon, reconstructed in Nashville’s Centennial Park; second, the American flag; third, the open sky. The proposition: Greek democracy finds its translation, displacement, negation, or recapitulation in the Enlightenment form of American democracy, which finds its translation, displacement, negation or recapitulation in… what? The open sky is the open question. Thus Altman’s film posed the question of the fate of democracy after Watergate and Vietnam but also, with its creation of the fictional Replacement Party, presciently divined the coming conservative/neo-liberal nightmare and its pensée unique.

Crucially, the film announces a kind of interregnum, what Badiou calls an “intervallic period,” between two historical sequences, as the gospel refrain emanating from Altman’s montage proclaims, “You can say that I ain’t free, it don’t worry me.” Political pacification. Nevertheless, the images remained crossed by a certain ambiguity, in part because of their vertical arrangement in a film so otherwise and insistently horizontal, so that part of their lacerating irony is the effect of the nursing of a hope of transcendence, here supported by the same gospel voices. But in Altman’s film, each figure hears each song as if it were sung for him or her alone, giving rise not to amorous or generous solidarities, but to violent, imaginary rivalries (culminating in celebrity assassination) . Thus what Altman’s practice of images discerned was a dual logic at the moment of synthesis of his little dialectic. A play of two imaginaries, one moved toward increasing atomization, a pure personalization of musical messages (the SONY Walkman was already in development), the other toward the global cult of celebrity (and increasingly bigger screens) if not globalization tout court, itself powered precisely by miniaturization.

The question of democracy is once again on the global-cinematic agenda, suggesting an awakening from the nightmare Altman so accurately predicted, but also renewing the question of cinema as mass, popular or democratic art. Beginning on October 26 of 2011 and extending over a period of five weeks, The IFC Center in Greenwich Village exhibited five films, five “newsreels,” created by Jem Cohen at Occupy Wall Street. Cohen’s films, like Altman’s, also function as propositions and questions, although this time tailored to the new conditions of exhibition in which they are historically situated and with which they form their own paradoxical, micro-sensory relations. Thus, although the films encounter and register both the immensity and intense localization of their events and images, they are themselves destined for what the IFC Center designates as “short attention span cinema,” the small screens of the dis-located multiplex and Vimeo. And so they pose the question of their own localization and duration as the question of their own forms of signification as precisely, mass or popular art. Part of the interest here, lies precisely in the speed with which Cohen’s small films are made and distributed, the way they immediately return to the participants of the marches and encampments they film not their unified image, but the distributed and articulated elements of their immanent argument. And the newsreel form challenges, both formally and materially, the shameless and pathetic alternation of silence and sophistics that characterised the mainstream coverage of the events in New York and elsewhere. It is immensely satisfying then, when we hear, in Newsreel #4, Eric Cantor and Herman Cain on cable news, the first expressing his “concern” with mass movements, the second that the only way to understand the movement is as “anti-capitalist,” something that makes exactly no sense to him, of course.

As a group, the films seem to re-trace Altman’s itinerary, beginning at the New York Public Library, passing through Times Square and ending at the People’s Library in Zuccotti Park. Here, the Enlightenment project, resting on the space opened up by the neo-classical Greek architecture of the NYC Public Library, finds itself dis-placed and negated by the privatised messages of hyper-semio-capitalism, itself contested by a revised and revivified form of what Kant, in “What is Enlightenment?” called “the public use of reason,” the very ground of the possibility of collective human freedom and autonomy—a (nomadic) people’s library, towards which Cohen’s films draw us more than once.

If this remains a kind of overarching argument, however, it is worth attending to some of the density of its details. The first two films both begin with a kind of introduction: a group of young people, later identified in the credits as an ‘occupy affinity group’, gathered closely together on a subway train. Images from outside the train, for example the Kentile Floors sign, allow us to identify it as the F train of the Independent line of the NY subway, elevated as it crosses the Gowanus Canal on its way from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan to Bryant Park and the library. Thus the very first minutes announce themselves as a particular and rigorous tracing of a course through New York, a kind of cinematic occupation. In addition, they begin to sketch out the form of an argument inscribed in the texture and text of the city. From public transportation to the public library, independence and elevation, but also the subterranean drumming that will leave its underground to become the soundtrack of the first film. And the Kentile Floors sign, now part of the metropolitan artistic heritage, preserved despite the fact the Kentile flooring company has been gone nearly half a century. Thus is announced, in keeping with the vocabulary of mass public transportation, a kind of platform, a complex historical floor upon which a public gains its footing. And indeed, Newsreel #1 might be understood as a very precise meditation on the conditions under which something like a public can exist, exploring its own autonomy and its own limits without subjecting itself to heteronomous authority. And some of the answers are obvious: space, mobility, free access to free information, auto-determination of its own rhythms. And this public does find its rhythm, with the help of the drums, and despite the presence of the cops and their ubiquitous plastic handcuffs. And so the film then can juxtapose the change in scale from library to Times Square, from the inventiveness of the homemade signs to massive commercial messages on the skins of massive buildings. I could go on.

Newsreel #2 presents a kind of kaleidoscopic version of the first, the high-gloss surface of a building used to produce the effects of appearances and disappearances, splitting and merging. Here the filmmaker joins in solidarity with his subjects, asserting, to paraphrase Foucault writing precisely on the theme of Enlightenment, that “the high value of the present” the filmmaker records “is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it as otherwise than it is,” to “respect reality and violate it in a single gesture” (Foucault 1997: 311). This opposed to the vast commercial messages, dedicated to destroying that reality even as it is imagined as infinitely the same. Here it may be worth lingering, if only briefly, on part of Foucault’s account of Kantian Enlightenment, with which Cohen (and perhaps Badiou as well) signals his affiliation.

First, Foucault recalls that Kant initially defines Enlightenment negatively, as an Ausgang, an exit or way out (1997: 305). And he points out that this exit is first and foremost temporal, an interruption of time, a difference that “today introduce[s] with respect to yesterday” (1997: 305). Second, Enlightenment is also a Wahlspruch, a heraldic device, often translated into English as “motto,” but which might usefully be translated as “emblem,” that melding of word and image so popular, in the work of Francis Quarles or George Wither, for example, in the century preceding Kant. Of course, the Kantian Wahlspruch is well known: Aude sapere, dare to know. This audacity, an audacity both epistemological and temporal, is both individual and collective, but also, crucially, public. And it is, I think, with this third version of the word ‘emblem’ that we can best reach Cohen’s own notion of cinema as mass art. In its play of word and image, this emblem is neither muzzle nor mirage, precluding both knowledge and action. Quite the contrary, the emblem makes images speak (rather than kill) even as it gives words back to their admittedly obscure bodies.

Thus it is Cohen’s project, as it had been in previous films like Chain or Lost Book Found, to make the constructed, built environment speak, to reveal it as an emblem (in in another vocabulary, a dialectical image) in the actuality of a moment pregnant with its own alterations, alternations and alternatives. In Cohen’s handling of it, the demonstrators and the event or emergency their presence bespeaks, restore to but also create another legibility of the image of the city , a filmic, mass emblem that is an Ausgang, a way out and an awakening: “I awoke in a cold sweat from the American Dream,” two young women have written on a bed sheet, precisely.

The last three Newsreels are shot at Zuccotti Park, the site of the occupation itself, and demonstrate, if I may use that word, some of what it takes to imagine the present as otherwise than what it is: the General Assemblies, the posters, the discussions, but also eating, cleaning up, keeping dry and warm. Solidarity (with each other, with Tahrir Square, but also Syntagma Square and the Puerta del Sol, with Santiago and Montreal) but also fragility. Exposed to the elements and exposed to each other; but also exposed photographically, Cohen’s itinerary through architecture leads him to the architecture of the book, an exposition and expository writing. “You know things are messed up when even librarians start marching,” as one Occupy poster puts it.

The last images will lead back to Altman: the neo-classical columns and the American flag, under police guard and enclosed in the interior of a Wall Street bank; and the towers of the financial district, disappearing into the fog. Thus the obfuscation and interning of democracy, but also the supreme lack of clarity that seems to inhabit all of our present political concepts, including democracy. But more importantly, the transcendent and transcendental hope of Cohen’s films, unlike Altman’s, stretches horizontally, across the surfaces of the earth, the ground upon which the occupiers sleep. A dream of Kentile Floors, of the becoming public of the private, a ground upon which bodies regain their solidity and solidarity.

The films of Altman and Cohen are aesthetic-political responses to crises of sovereignty and governmentality, of legitimate power and its disposition. And they are symptomatic of the urgent need to re-excavate the very (non)ground of democracy, hence their attraction to classical architecture. But Cohen’s films, perhaps because of their lapidary and frankly pedagogical structure, also function as an excavation of a particular tradition of political filmmaking, each Newsreel dedicated to and resonating with the work of a great but hardly unambiguous documentarian: Dziga Vertov, Sandor Krasna, Humphrey Jennings, Joris Ivens, and Agnès Varda. A full engagement with these relations is beyond the scope of this article. Needless to say, Cohen’s films function something like their library, and offer them up on loan.

But it also seems to me that these five count among the great imaginers of cinema as precisely a mass art, the phrase with which I began. With each, a deep and absolute commitment to the contemporary situation is accompanied by an equally deep and absolute commitment to the elaboration of an alternative, formal and thus political, to that contemporary situation. Thus the crossing of the avant garde and the popular, of immanence and exteriority, if it can be put that way, from Vertov’s Kino Pravda to Marker’s time travel, Jennings’s Mass Observation to the agrarian Spain and France of Ivens and Varda. And this is the challenge Cohen takes up in taking up the challenge of mass art, film democracy, as an art of occupation. My challenge, in this brief article, has been simply this: to encourage you to watch Cohen’s little films and to think them within the difficult tensions opened up by Badiou and Rancière, but also by the very events these films record and which have not ended.

References

Altman, R. (1975) Nashville, USA, 159 mins.

Badiou, A. (2009) “Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,” trans. Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon, Parrhesia No. 6, pp. 1-6.

Badiou, A. (2011) “The Democratic Emblem,” in Giorgio Agamben et al. Democracy in what State? Trans. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cohen, J. (2011) Gravity Hill Newsreels Nos. 1-5,
http://vimeo.com/ifccenter/videos & http://www.vdb.org/node/14216, accessed December 31, 2012.

Foucault, M. (1997) “What is Enlightenment?”, The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1., P. Rabinow (ed). New York: The New Press.

Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, Trans. Gregory Elliott, London/Brooklyn: Verso Books.

Rancière, J. (2006) Film Fables, Trans. Emiliano Battista, Oxford/New York: Berg.

Image Credits

All images copyright of Jem Cohen, courtesy Video Data Bank - www.vdb.org