One of the sad facts of life in the world of avant-garde film is the chasm that separates the american scene from the rest of the world. It’s easy to write off as typical US-centrism, but there are practical issues too – many of the films exist in only a few prints, so they’re unlikely to be deposited in co-ops a continent away, and shipping across the water is both prohibitively expensive (and given the fragility and scarcity of the prints, kind of nervewracking). So we live, on various sides of the various waters, much like our 18th Century ancestors, often knowing makers with substantial bodies of work only by reputation. Thanks to a touring package sent out by Filmbank earlier this year, I finally (hey, I’ve only been looking at a-g films for a few decades, and this was my first shot at these) got to see an evening’s worth of early work by Dutch experimentalist godfather Frans Zwartjes.
In Sorbet III (1968, 6 min.), we see a woman sitting in a room. In a short take, she fidgets a little, looks at the camera, perhaps seems flustered by its presence. Another shot, same angle, same behavior. The camera seems a little flustered itself, making jagged little movements, looking up, or down, jerking away to one side or another, glancing off her body. Slightly closer, now slightly back. Is she uncomfortable to be seen? The camera seems equally uncomfortable to be looking. The camera’s little looks seem to reflect the tiny movements of our own eyes, as they twitch about in our own rooms, making their miniature adjustments in focus and alignment to construct mental deep space from a mosaic of individual perceptions. Twitch left, twitch down, twitch away from eye contact. Caught again! Sitting on a divan of some sort, dark walls (or drapes?). Caught again! Like trying to catch little glimpses of an attractive stranger on the bus, peripheral looking, twitch up, away, is she watching us, or grimly watching us watch?
The image itself is degraded – black and white, grainy, contrasty, as if pushed several stops and duplicated repeatedly – like that other artifact of its time, also made “underground” (sometimes even sharing developer chemistry, in that small circle of labs that let these things pass): the fetish loop. Sometimes hard to even resolve the face, as it swings toward the light (or vice-versa) and bleaches out into overexposure, the dark corners of the frame muddy, unresolvable. The camera seems to think like a fetishist, the same small idea, over and over, look, away, look, away, but slowly progressing as well, wanting to get to the point, but not too soon, just in time; the shots a little longer, or starting a little later and extending a little further in “time” as the sitter moves into a gesture. She reaches to her right, cut, look, she reaches to her right, cut, she looks into the camera, she reaches to her right, still looking, cut ... and gradually the camera sputters into following her into her gesture ...
There’s nothing sexual here, really there’s not. But the seediness of the image itself makes us look for the sex, because surely if there weren’t something clandestine about this film it would look better, wouldn’t it? And an actual fetish film, how often there is no objectively sexual content ... some everyday object, or behavior, sexualized by its repetition, and its seediness ... by its viewer. By us. The sitter is playing the role of a participant in a fetish scene. That is, she plays the role of playing a role; she looks at the camera because the camera, what the camera does is itself a fetish, is a participant in the fetish scene, or rather is adopting the position of the participant in the fetish scene, the participant for whom the other’s role is played, or plays the role of the voyeur for the player of the role, or rather the shooter holding the camera is, or rather we. Is this working? And really, could the camera take its pleasure if its object were not a little ... uncomfortable? (At least as uncomfortable as the camera.) Or at least, if she were not so uncertain Like this? of whether the performance is working, or of whether Or this? the performance is an act.
You sure that’s a woman?
... and so we repeat the initiation of the gesture, the hand reaches for a glass, we cut, hand reaches for a glass of, we cut, look, away, reaches for a glass of, cut, what’s in the glass? Well, it’s some sort of black something. What would you like it to be? What do you dread it being? What would you like to dread it being? What would you dread liking it being? Looks in the camera, picks up the glass, cut, raises the glass, look away, etc. ... glass to lips, drinks, dark whatever oozing from the sides of the glass ...
But of course we know it’s a film. Of course she’s performing, of course she knows the camera is looking, why else is she there? It’s not a fetish loop, it’s a film that looks like a fetish loop, or is about them, or. Or. Or maybe we’re needlessly multiplying layers. It’s a film, of course it’s a fetish loop. To shoot, to view, these things are to fetishize. To be shot, to perform for a viewer, these things are to be a fetish. All performing – shooting – all viewing. Cue the inevitable digression into that damn Laura Mulvey essay, the one that launched a thousand CINE 472 term papers, every Intro to Theory deskfiller discovering their very own fallocentricphilm moment ...
... or just reflect that this is a full 8 years before Mulvey, and move on to the next film in the program, Spectator (1970, 11 min.), which literalizes it all for us anyway. Sorbet III’s collapse of the hypothesized POV participant and filmmaker and viewer is pried back apart, as we see the shooter, now unequivocally a character in a film, going about the matter of photographing a woman, with cuts to through-the-camera POV shots now plainly diegetic, the shooter of the film we are watching invisible as 3rd person cameras are always invisible, and we through his agency godlike as we are always godlike ... as if it were a documentary on the making of an experimental film (say, one of Dwoskin’s from the 70s (except again, it’s not the 70s yet)), but thereby somehow less implicated. Zwartjes makes much the same point here, but more clearly and thus more easily compartmented. We could just as well watch Peeping Tom again.
Living (1971, 15 min.), though, folds the argument back on itself one more time. A couple now, finally, both in front of the camera. An average-looking burgher (Zwartjes) and his wife (his wife, Trix) enter a nearly-empty, white-walled, many-windowed flat. They proceed from room to room, as if shopping for a place to live, or inspecting their new home (or making a home-movie souvenir of it, except they’re somehow in the home movie themselves); the camera follows them relentlessly, keeping them pinned in the center of the frame as they move around, and as it swoops and circles, always at the same distance. The camera has no hesitations now, it pursues its targets boldly, like the “presence” in Beckett’s Film. It is fitted with a very short lens, with the characteristic “fisheye” distortion at the edges, and seeming to press in on the subjects at the center of the frame ... as though we were inside the apartment looking through a security peephole, out at some intruder. But we’re inside looking in, as is everything else, and who are we? Um, technically we’re nobody, because Zwartjes (himself) is shooting Zwartjes (himself), holding the camera backward at arm’s length. He is now himself (well, and Trix too) his own object, and the subject as well (or there is no subject). The power of “his” gaze (the camera) is ruthlessly, inescapably focussed, short-circuited, on himself. The power that is exercised, the (fill in the 80s footnotes) sadism of the gaze, is equally short-circuited, because it is we gods “behind” the (now-)void behind the camera who are controlled, with no intermediary to control the object for us; it is we who are whipped wrenchingly around the room like satellites to the object’s planet (and one does tend to motion-sickness after a few orbits). We’d certainly like to get a better look here or there (what is going on with Trix’s bodice? There’s something unnatural about those clothes there but whoosh here we are behind her head...) but we’re under Zwartjes’ command (as we always are, but who notices?) and not our own.
The feature that closes this program, Pentimento, is from the other end of the decade, and a huge step outward in scope and complexity. There’s a lot to say about this (how can I possibly summarize it) disaster-film medico-sexual parody of Salò, but it’s much more than I can say in this space, at this hour, and about ever so much more than this scopophilic autodissection. Maybe after next viewing, should I be so lucky.
This post is part of the Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon. Please see the full list of links at girish’s site.
