Repetitions:

a discourse on Cinema and Performance

It is this democratic element of cinema which I am concerned with, its repeatability. For it is precisely this property which makes it Republican, or more precisely, Utopian and Platonic. It is cinematic space wit h which I am concerned, or rather its lack of space, its utopian nature, its lack of topos. I will eagerly grant that there is much to study in the empirical/imperical space of the cinema : the architectural phenomenology and social history of movie palaces (all those stars!) or of the backlots and locations of historical films. It is I am certain the artificial mediated nature of film which guarantees its verity, its truth. Likewise it is the lack of any mediation, the corporeality of live performance which denies it any claim to truth... even through method, even when it begins to compete with film , to strive toward the "realism" of the cinema. The distinction between the verity of film and the falsehood of performance is truly Platonic, incorporating all the contradiction of the doctrine of forms.

Film is a reifying medium (as it is currently understood), it does everything it can to nullify its history, its specificity, and above all its mediation: film is the most direct, the most immediate of mediums. Film does all it can to convince the spectator that what is seen is the same, is universal, is repeatable. The verity of film is not only an extension of the photographic, its presence as a chemical trace, as a "real" representation of life, but it also founded in cinema's consumption of the theatre as medium which goes beyond the still, whish is capable of movement, of a sort of pseudo life of it's own. But film consumes more than the theatrical, the false, if theatre doubles life, mirrors it, cinema consumes it , digests it: hence the gastronomy of cinema. Film only suppresses theatre as it consumes it.

One must ask, is there a difference between the false of the theatre and the false of the theatre and the real of life, does the cinema only consume one and the same thing, and if it consumes both, it is only more of the same, a second helping, for cinema is voracious. the answer becomes apparent in the republican nature of cinema, in Plato's cave which is utopian, no place. In this cave prisoners are chained to their seats and forced to watch in the projections of figures on the wall, both the other prisoners and bodies which yield the shadows are unable to be seen. this is of course the situation of the film viewer as well. One becomes still, uncomfortable, yet willing to remain in one's seat, both the other viewers and the actors are eliminated, all that is left is the eye and the consuming virtual image, reality shifts, one is engaged, consumed. the point of the Platonic story is that the images correspond with empirical reality and that the outside world (here empirical) corresponds to the ideal world of forms, the incorporeal, the realm of the mind. Here the ideal and the form becomes inverted, the ideal is given a (literary) body, and the body is removed from space, from itself.

This is fine enough if you believe it, or if you say it is just philosophy. But to do this is to accept philosophy at face value, to internalize philosophy while appearing to take an objective critical relation to it . But if one demands of this allegory a relation to history the inquiry yields some answers, in particular those relating to film, it s culinary preferences, what it is it likes to consume. the allegory of the cave is Plato's attack on the theatre (Aristophane's having shown him for the buffoon he was, perhaps revenge is a better word). The republic is all about political power, power over the polis and it is in doing so a conspicuously overt attack on the theatre. But why, why is it that a plaint for the political control of moral idealism should hinge on the repression of the theatre. It is because idealisms claim to power is dependent on systems of representation, a system which is the theatre, live performance breaks down. Platonist idealism must consume, moralize tragedy in order for it to set up its reign of judgement. But it is precisely because this mode of representation is shaped from living bodies, life itself, breaking down the idealists investment in the division between the form and content. What is more, Platonism preys on the subtle distinction between life and theatre: it it proclaims, "I am no cannibal, I prefer my flesh cooked!"

What is it that the cinema provides for idealism that eve the moralized tragedy, tied to the text, cannot even provide? It is that it completely devours the theatre and by devouring it I mean it devours it of life while taking its own sustenance from the corpse. Cinema takes a performance and fixes it, take the body and transfers it into a form in which it can exactly repeat the same movements again and again. The script, the platonic dialogue did this as well, but only through a transformation, the transfer] of one sense for another (McLuhan), the eye for the ear, but film does something different, plays through a different set of of mediations, representational modes. Film is a trace, and what is more it does not demand the sensual transformation which graphic reduction of speech demands. Cinema is the Platonic medium par excellence.

How is it that cinema was able to dislodge so easily the live performance of vaudeville, it is because ours is a Platonic culture, one which has embraced the contradiction known as the doctrine of forms, and embrace it in the form of spectacular (cinematic if you wish) capitalism. If film is a medium based in repetitions: in means, methods, distribution and technology, it is immediately a party to capitalist distribution and technology (video of course has taken film a step farther, into everyone's livingroom) exchange based on the universalization of value, the repetition of monetary value in diverse situations. The revolutionary potential live performance is here (negatively) revealed. Many have desired to see performance, and in particular, to speak from my own historical moment, performance art as an un- or less commodifiable means of making art than "object making". This is however a futile argument, anyone who has a passing knowledge of Marx should realize that all capital is the objectification of an act, not exclusively limited to acts of object making. (One can cite the case of the first profession, as a case where the act is central, despite arguments which would cast this as a lease on the woman's object-body... which would be internal to capitalist logic.

It is not a question of performance's commodification and objectification, (we have seen nothing but its commodification and objectification), but its in ability to repeat which makes it revolutionary. This potential has been all but ignored even as Artaud has said so clearly, "an expression does not have the same voice twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form once it has served , cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and that the theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture once made, can never be made the same way twice. If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces, it is because those masterpieces are literary, that is to say, fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time." (Artaud)

I have no intention to condemn film as a medium, although I have rather successfully done so. Nor is my intention here simply laudatory of theatre (I have seen too much really really bad theatre and performance art for such universal praise). Nor is to demand a revolutionary performative practice (although I do, even if I do not do so here). The intent is simply critical, and if this theoretical criticism informs revolutionary practice, well then, all the better.

One can conceive of a moment when theatre re- emerges (for it can never be eliminated, just suppressed: witness the necessity of theatre to the most and especially the most bourgeois films and television programs (i.e. bad method acting, "dramatic lighting", etc). The theatre can and will (the eternal return) return to consume film, the text, all the media which have objectified its production. This has already begun in certain literary and cinematic projects.

As I have said, the mechanisms of film work to repress the specificity of the screening situation, both from the subjective and psychological and the external aspects of cinematic display. Through textual and cinematic devices, the commercial film sets up an associative relationship to the gaze and person of the (male) protagonist and (inferentially to his values and desires). Likewise through physical architectural and lighting devices, the sense of viewing space is eliminated, as is the social, one's connection to other viewers {Mulvey} But my argument in defense of the possibility of a revolutionary film practice hinges on the possibility that we do not see the same film as one another, and one does not see the same film twice, and this knowledge can (and has) been played upon to produce a self conscious cinema, a cinema of revolutionary potential.

On the most base level, one can point to films which are edited differently by directors or moral censors for different audiences (not to mention the way films are mutilated into the two hour Procrustes Bed of television, FCC and Commercials). Beyond this gross level, the differnces in the object of the movie, the phenomenon of a screening is always different, the same movie is not ht the same on a VCR in your living room, as it is in a theatre in a shopping mall, as it is a week later in a discount theatre (for all the darkness, fear of a rat crawling over ones feet in search of fallen juju-bees and popcorn is not the same experience as mourning a weeks wages at the cineplex with 70mm projection and surround sound.). So, the material aspects of the performance situation do not vanish just because the lights are off. But it extends beyond this, Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind are not the same film on both sides of the Mason/Dixon line, even to he same spectator, one carries the whole social and geo-political, dare I say psycho-geographical world into the theatre, even if this is repressed actively by the film itself. The poor may feel rich watching film (which goes a long way towards revealing its popularity, even if this "lease" on the apparent aristocratic life style makes them really seven dollars and fifty cents poorer), but only through the repression of poverty. This is never the repression of the rich themselves (if they need to suppress poverty by rendering it invisible in cinema (as it usually is) or happy (in "liberal cinema") that is quite a different thing). Isn't there a whole genre of films recently that are about transient wealth? (most of them starring Eddie Murphy?). Lastly, even while a film is a medium of the subject, it consumes subjectivity, it never eliminates it. Male or Female, rich or poor, European or Asian, the film is simply never, never, the same.

This then is the secret of cinema: it is really theatre. Each film is different and each copy of "the same film", each theatre is different, as is each screening and every seat within it, each of your two eyes see a different film and every set of eyes carries themselves differently in relation to the film. Film is like all the arts, based on difference, not on similarity, and for this reason alone one must say all art is veiled theatre. More importantly here it is this theatrical quality, its difference, which gives film its revolutionary potential. The particularities of film can be used to play at difference, Artaud says that the Theatre of Cruelty must strive towards exact replication in performance in order to only and necessarily to fail: to be obviously different, things must appear the same; comparison must be forced through similarity, imagine paying keen attention to the dust on the film as it changes from viewing to viewing, even to the total exclusion of the "film".

In closing, I'd like to return to two moments within the nascence of film. Moments in Vaudeville, where at least for a time truth and falsehood, live performance and film coexisted to one aim: entertainment. For I am not concerned with privileging and judging, of placing truth over falsehood. I am more concerned with the production of desire and with the creating means to make the risk of revolutionary activity joyful, exciting and fun. When they act together they become perhaps more revolutionary than they are on their own. The moments I return to are the moments when each of these media are pushed rather beyond their conventional limits and become indistinguishable on the one hand and break down on the other, but work in both cases towards the liberation of desire.

As I said at the introduction, films (or at least projection films) were first seen entre-act in vaudeville shows. In relation to this particular mode of display, the nomadism of the vaudeville troupe, an enlightening anomaly occurred. Because of Edison's patent strangle hold on the basic cinematic apparatus, a number of entrepreneurs started manufacturing projectors and cameras in Europe of often eccentric design. One of these pieces of apparatus is notable, taking advantage of the similarity in operation of cameras and projectors (film moving in a stutter across a lens at a fixed speed) it was designed to perform with minor adjustments as both a camera and a projector. This allowed the projectionists for these troupes to take film of the places through which the show traveled, street cars, pedestrians, important buildings, landmarks all became part of an index of the travels of the troupe, an index more over which reversed the city which was being performed for into the show to be seen in the next town. At the time (this was given witness to also by the the combination of camera and projector), the camera was fixed, but recorded movement, but here for the first time the cinema touched at the root of the theatrical, precisely because, even in a fixed frame, it reflected its own production, the subject of these films became the projector/cameras movement. It recorded as an archive its own inscription into the history of the socious, its attachment to the movement of social groups according to traditional (now lost) patterns (Cleveland to Detroit, Detroit to Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo to Chicago...). Here film is an appendage to a social structure it is about to distroy, but it is also a great historian, the last and most insightful account of these lost moments.

The other moment is the films of one Eric Wiess, better known as Harry Houdini. Film was Houdini's downfall. As Vaudeville faded, largely bowing out to the cinema, Houdini attempted to transfer his act into this new media so as to continue his career and enlarge his fame. He made several films, soon learning that one must in some way guarantee the "actual", the escape tricks that were performed in his films, even surrounded as they were by fictional narratives, were performed live. Houdini went so far as to have the guarantee of the "actuality' of the stunts printed on the promotional posters. It didn't work. I say these films were Houdini's downfall, for anyone could, with a little editing, achieve the same "apparent" feats as Houdini, and without risk to life or limb, moreover, they could do even more miraculous and impossible things at less expense of time and money. Here in Houdini's films one sees the verity of film breaks down against the mortality of flesh and blood. Film is incapable of taking mortal risk. Ultimately there were only two traps from which Eric Wiess was unable to break free, celluloid was one, mortality was the other. Both could be said to be the material implications of the body. But why would Houdini film himself, because of economic and egoistic interest to be sure, but perhaps further, it represents an extension of his telling obsession with the bodies relation to the machine. Houdini's popularity as a performer could be attributed to, at least in part, his staging of what all the slaves of industrialization desired, the bodies escape from and mastery of the machine. To an extent then , his films proved unsuccessful because they were a contradiction, entrapped in the mechanism of film yet appearing (in the projection) to escape it. But rather than failure, I would say that Houdini succeeded at something he did not even realize. He proved that something remains and will always remain unfilmable.

Now, film could not have so easily usurped film had it not already been quite dead-- a spectacle devoid of the threat of bodily contact and mortal risk. Radical film with self conscious self references has gone farther of late towards actually breaking out to the body than the larger portion of performance art or theatre. What I think is important as aesthetic practitioners, be we acting as film maker or performance artists is to reincorporate the body, to remember it. This is at bottom a performative act, for in no other art is a moving, changing body in contact with an audience. At this moment of re-membering the performative re asserts itself in all the arts, taking over from cinema the "written language of reality" for at root cinema cannot devour life, it can only devour the reflections of life, for life is too big for its mouth and the cinematic apparatus is always contained within it. In the end all life, all art is performative, and it only appears otherwise when an aspect of life represses it, a repression however, which can only take place from within.