By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.’ Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus ploughs only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
„Ich habe den Bau eingerichtet und er scheint wohlgelungen. Von außen ist eigentlich nur ein großes Loch sichtbar, dieses führt aber in Wirklichkeit nirgends hin, schon nach ein paar Schritten stößt man auf natürliches festes Gestein“ (Kafka 1996: 132).
Rahmungen in der Kunst
Kunstwerke im Allgemeinen weisen Rahmungen auf, die als Grenzen wahrgenommen werden. Ein Buch beginnt und endet – so scheint es zumindest. Und dazwischen nur spielt sich eine bedeutend phantastische Welt ab. Ein Bild hat eine Fläche, die von einem Rahmen umgeben ist und verdeutlicht auf ähnliche Weise, wo die Illusion und Interpretation ihr Ende findet. Solche Rahmungen markieren „Gegenstände“ und weisen Phantasiereisenden in der Kunst den Weg, ermöglichen den Austritt, auch deshalb, weil eine Abstand ermöglichende Grenze stets erhalten bleibt. Man mag Texte konkretisieren und Bilder verinnerlichen, stets bleibt ein materieller Abstand erhalten und wird plastisch dokumentiert durch irgendwelche Rahmungen. Sicherlich – Foucault hat zu recht die Einheit des Buches als Knoten in einem diskursiven Netz (vgl. Foucault 41990: 36) und das homogene Werk als „Gewimmel sprachlicher Spuren“ (ebd.: 37) verdeutlicht, gleichwohl bleibt die augenscheinliche Rahmung durch die prinzipielle Gegenständlichkeit des Interesses erhalten, was zumindest die Vorstellung oder Suggestion vom „Anfang und Ende“ am Leben hält.
Die Rahmung, die man in der Musik mit dem „Objekt“ der Partitur einst gefunden hatte, was der Musikwissenschaft die dem Auge geschuldete Analyse und Leben gab, erwies sich im 20. Jahrhundert mit neuen Aufschreibesystemen recht bald als instabil, als grenzerweiternd das Rauschen der Welt erforscht wurde, das sich in Partituren nicht mehr symbolisch festhalten ließ.
Seitdem ist eine Rahmung der Musik nicht so leicht mehr auszumachen, wo ein Abstand zur erklingenden Musik nicht möglich ist. Zwar hat auch die Musik Anfang und Ende, aber schon hier wird ein Unterschied zu den anderen Künsten deutlich, denn die Rahmung wird verkörpert durch ein „Nicht“, eine Negativität – allein durch die Abwesenheit von Klang. In diesen Rahmen ist dann die Fülle eines organisierten Klanges eingebettet. Bevor die Musik im Konzertsaal beginnt, verebbt folgerichtig das Stimmengewirr der Zuhörer; die kurz zuvor noch um ihre Stimmung besorgten Musiker halten ein und verstummen ebenfalls. So entsteht die Rahmung des „Nicht“, sodass – auf ein Zeichen des Zeremonienmeisters – aus dieser Ruhehaltung heraus Musik empor schwellen kann. Wir haben es also mit einem Rahmen zu tun, der gerade dadurch Rahmen ist, dass es keinen gibt.
The Bijou is perhaps my favorite space at CalArts. It’s a small theater. Seats about 120 people and an unspecified number of dogs. (invariably you be in the middle of some feature and hear gerrrrr-Rouffff … rowf ra-ra-ffff rowf) I spent many a happy evening and afternoon of my graduate tenure watching films amazing to abstruse. During that time I had the great fortune to meet Béla Tarr when he lectured and presented Sátántangó. It played twice and I deeply enjoyed all four hundred thirty nine minutes both nights.
Irimiás and Petrina go to the police station, where they have a meeting with the captain. At the same time in the village Estike goes out with his brother, Sanyi, to bury some money in the ground to make it grow into a money tree. Both events take place during the daytime when the rain is not falling. Later Irimiás and Petrina drink in the pub in town, where Kelemen sees them. Halics visits Estike’s mother. Estike tortures and finally kills her cat in the attic of their house. In the meantime a heavy rain starts. Halics leaves their house, and Estike finds out that the money has disappeared; someone has stolen it. Kelemen returns to the village, enters the pub, and reports to the bartender on his meeting with Irimiás and Petrina in town and on the road to the village. Halics is already in the pub.
MY FATHER kept in the lower drawer of his large desk an old and beautiful map of our city. It was a whole folio sheaf of parchment pages which, originally fastened with strips of linen, formed an enormous wall map, a bird’s eye panorama.
Będziemy wiecznie żałowali, żeśmy wtedy wyszli na chwilę z magazynu konfekcji podejrzanej konduity. Nigdy nie trafimy już doń z powrotem. Będziemy błądzili od szyldu do szyldu i mylili się setki razy. Zwiedzimy dziesiątki magazynów, trafimy do całkiem podobnych, będziemy wędrowali przez szpalery książek, wertowali czasopisma i druki, konferowali długo i zawile z panienkami o nadmiernym pigmencie i skażonej piękności, które nie potrafią zrozumieć naszych życzeń.
Będziemy się wikłali w nieporozumienia, aż cała nasza gorączka i podniecenie ulotni się w niepotrzebnym wysiłku, w straconej na próżno gonitwie.
Nasze nadzieje były nieporozumieniem, dwuznaczny wygląd lokalu i służby — pozorem, konfekcja była prawdziwą konfekcją, a subiekt nie miał żadnych ukrytych intencji. Świat kobiecy ulicy Krokodylej odznacza się całkiem miernym zepsuciem, zagłuszonym grubymi warstwami przesądów moralnych i banalnych pospolitości. W tym mieście taniego materiału ludzkiego brak także wybujałości instynktu, brak niezwykłych i ciemnych namiętności.
Ulica Krokodyli była koncesją naszego miasta na rzecz nowoczesności i zepsucia wielkomiejskiego. Widocznie nie stać nas było na nic innego, jak na papierową imitację, jak na fotomontaż złożony z wycinków zleżałych, zeszłorocznych gazet.
Hung on the wall, the map covered it almost entirely and opened a wide view on the valley of the River Tysmienica which wound itself like a wavy ribbon of pale gold, on the maze of widely spreading ponds and marshes, on the high ground rising towards the south, gently at first, then in ever tighter ranges, in a chessboard of rounded hills, smaller and paler as they receded towards the misty yellow fog of the horizon. From that faded distance of the periphery, the city rose and grew towards the centre of the map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense complex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of streets, to become on the first plan a group of single houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape seen through binoculars. In that section of the map, the engraver concentrated on the complicated and manifold profusion of streets and alleyways, the sharp lines of cornices, architraves, archivolts and pilasters, lit by the dark gold of a late and cloudy afternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of streets, drowning in a warm colour here half a street, there a gap between houses. They dramatized and orchestrated in a bleak romantic chiaroscuro the complex architectural polyphony.
A question and its answer … are the painters still those painters who are painting the great cave? Do they paint the buffalo on the wall as hunger, the eagle as freedom, and the woman with a big bottom as love? Do they paint the buffalo as the table that magically sets itself? Have they meanwhile left the cave, cleared out of the community, and forgotten all those universal, comprehensible agreements, because magic does not still hunger, because flying does not work and yearning for love does not breed love? Have they traded the cave for some other place? Propagandizing about needs, ‘What does man need?’ feeds upon a yearning for freedom and the fear of death and entices us into taking another way, off the painters’ course. The smart ones, hotshots, innovators, activists – in the forefront madmen and hotspurs – have remained within their own skulls. They proclaim plucky mottos: paintings should stick in the throat, eyelids should be nailed down, and hearts grabbed with pliers. Fish bone, air raid and separation. Well, one still sits together around the fire, warms up the studios, has had enough to eat, and is in love. On battered canvases are those sumptuous ornaments filled with jumbled lines and rich colours; crystalline galleries hang over the frames. All that once stood erect, the still life, has been knocked over, the landscape has been seized and uprooted, the interiors tangled, and the portraits scratched and pierced. Painting became music. Surrealism won. Everything durable has been kicked out of the paintings.
Now, the tone goes right through walls, the line stands upside down. Are the painters now unhappy and freezing? They dance and celebrate with their friends, they invite their fathers and drink Capri with them. A black painting is as white as the sky. The colours in the dark cave are aglow. Light is superfluous. Everything is utterly different, anyway. The paraphernalia of Venus, Zeus, the angels, Picasso were invented by the painters, as were the bull, the roast chicken and the lovers. The pear-wood palette became a pail, the brush a knife, an axe and a club. The largest paintings are larger, and the smallest are smaller than ever before. Someone painted a painting weighing five hundred pounds. A Chinese handwalked over the canvas. A Norwegian painted 168 acres of birch wood on one and one-half square inches of canvas. This is not the way I want to continue. Hygiene, I mean religion, is employed. Discipline is one thing, education another, and meditation, too. Intoxication is used to prepare or to stabilize an attitude. Some eat well, others purify themselves through fasting. While I see no point at all in bustling around, in being confused, zap, zap, my friend between New York and Cologne makes the best paintings in his trouser pocket, where his canary sits. Does one see more of the world by climbing a ladder, does one see still more by lying down flat on the field and by sticking one’s nose in the ground? Either way. The difference between a German and an Italian apple tree is enormously large. In Tuscany in the garden I made photos of such trees. Back home in Germany I was terribly excited by these exotic apple trees, these unpaintable fairy-tale-tree-inventions. I realized that I did not want to paint an apple tree at all. I was still under the mother and had stuck out only my nose. The world had not opened up, the secret remained hidden within the object, but now there was confusion. This is an experience, but not of the kind that broadens your mind through shifting horizons. The first la-la sounds and the first dot-dot-comma-dash are indeed vehement creations for the one who makes them. This is not theory. I composed Fidelio, I know precisely that as a six-year-old I conducted this very piece; hare and dog I painted when I was eight years old, signing them Albrecht Dürer. One of these watercolours is in Vienna, in the Albertina, the dog is lost.
The sense of display is abolished. The objects are inorganic and dateless: milky long-necked bottles and squat flasks, a biscuit tin, a fluted bowl, some long-beaked metal pitchers. They carry no marks, patterns or brand names. One thinks of them not as manufactured objects but as elements in a hesitantly ideal architectural scheme. Sometimes the slender bottle necks, leaning together, vaguely recall the towers of Bologna or San Gimignano. They look fragile and contingent, but they endure for decades, through picture after picture. (To make quite sure that nothing disturbed the precise relationships he put them in, he drew chalk circles around the the bases of his “models” on the surface of the table.) Occasionally their groups, bound together by some mutual gravitation of shape, might remind one of people insecurely huddled on the edge of a small flat earth, the tabletop.
1709 J. Addison Tatler No. 108. ⁋3 They give mean Interpretations and base Motives to the worthiest Actions. 1526 Bible (Tyndale) 1 Cor. xii. 10 To won is geven the vtteraunce off wisdom..To another the interpretacion off tonges. 1387 J. Trevisa tr. R. Higden Polychron. (Rolls) VII. 153 Ȝe auȝt for to soften þe opiniouns of fonde men wiþ better interpretacioun. 1450 Mirour Saluacioun 1027 After of this dreme herd he swilk interpretacionne. 1733 G. Cheyne Eng. Malady ii. viii. 203 And so the Fever terminates in a critical Abscess. 1807 Monthly Mirror Nov. 374 Mr. Elmsly is about to publish a new critical edition of Sophocles, with a text collated from the best manuscripts and printed editions. 1753 J. Lining Let. 14 Dec. in Ess. & Observ. (Philos. Soc. Edinb.) II. 372 That fever, which continues two or three days, and terminates without any critical discharge by sweat, urine, stool, &c. 1601 P. Holland tr. Pliny Hist. World I. xvii. ii. 500 The foure decretorie or criticall daies, that give the dome of olive trees, either to good or bad. 1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) Josh. Prol. If the oold oonliche interpretacioun plese to hem. 1871 J. C. Maxwell Theory of Heat vi. 124 M. Cagniard de la Tour estimated the temperature and pressure of the critical state. 1646 Sir T. Browne Pseudodoxia Epidemica vi. i. 279 Whatsoever Interpretations there have beene since, have been especially effected with reference unto..the Greeke and Hebrew text. 1447 O. Bokenham Lyvys Seyntys 44 Aftyr the reulys of interpretacyon Anne is as myche to seyn as grace. 1872 J. P. Mahaffy tr. I. Kant Prolegomena in Kant’s Crit. Philos. III. 62 I now retract it [sc. the word ‘transcendental’], and desire this idealism of mine to be called critical. 1654 R. Whitlock Ζωοτομία 186 He is not Criticall and exact in Garbes and Fashions. 1565 W. Alley Πτωχομυσεῖον To Rdr. f. 16v If these simple Prelections chaunce peraduenture to come into the handes of some scrupulous and captious criticall reader..let him know that it is a great deale more easie to carpe other mens doinges, then to giue better of his owne. 1841 J. R. Young Math Diss. Pref. 7 Even in the extreme and critical case of the problem. 1850 Morning Chron. 25 Dec. 7/4 His opinions..have weight; and we doubt not will be duly estimated by the critical and the judicious. 1719 W. L. Coll. Tunes Ded. sig. A2v/1 It has been the Fate of better Performances than this, to pass under the severe Censures of the Critical. 1909 Trans. Illuminating Engin. Soc. (U.S.) 4 717 f is the critical flicker frequency. 1899 T. O’C. Sloane Liquid Air i. 20 When a gas is at the critical temperature and at the critical pressure also, the least increase of pressure or decrease of temperature will convert it into a liquid. When in this condition, ready to be a gas or a liquid, it is said to be in the critical state. 1881 J. Russell Haigs of Bemersyde Introd. 3 It was not in his nature to be either critical or indifferent. 1605 F. Bacon Of Aduancem. Learning ii. f. 69 There remayn two Appendices touching the tradition of knowledge, The one Criticall, The other Pedanticall. 1867 E. A. Freeman Hist. Norman Conquest I. App. 617 He shows a good deal of critical acumen. 1931 Rev. Mod. Physics 3 347 Bohr’s theory was so quickly supported by the experiments on critical potentials. 1866 G. MacDonald Ann. Quiet Neighb. xi. 191 Perhaps I may have put a wrong interpretation on the passage. 1701 C. Cibber Love makes Man v. 53 Well, Madam, you see I’m punctual..I’m always critical—to a Minute. 1877 M. Oliphant Makers of Florence (ed. 2) x. 257 Things he had done which no charitable interpretation could explain away. 1869 T. H. Huxley in Sci. Opinion 21 Apr. 464/2 The knowledge..requisite for the just interpretation of geological phenomena. 1617 S. Collins Epphata to F. T. i. 5 Wil you blame me as too criticall for distinguishing betweene gerere and gestare? 1890 Church Rev. July 276 In company with most critical commentators on books of the New Testament, Bishop Ellicott has one fault. 1741 C. Middleton Hist. Life Cicero II. viii. 237 Cæsar was conversant also with the most abstruse and critical parts of learning.
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.
I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.
I am for art that spills out of an old mans purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.
I am for the art out of a doggys mouth, falling five stories from the roof.
I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.
I am for an art that joggles like everyone’s knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.
I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief.
I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.
