A Failed Spectator

In addition to other failures in my life, I’ve also become a failed spectator. Despite my best intentions to lose myself in films, to embody a mimetic gaze and imagine I’m looking not at an image on a screen but at an unmediated sight, I fall out of the illusion after brief moments of “being there”. Considering my general alienation from the male gaze, the colonial gaze, the white gaze, the corporate gaze, the state-funded gaze, et cetera, I shouldn’t be surprised not to be able to maintain the illusion of being in the scene when watching commercial films. But I can’t hold the illusion even when looking at a screen displaying film clips I recorded myself.

To try to understand what went wrong, I conducted an exercise: I committed to a different set of priorities. I wanted to look at films without the burden of looking. During the exercise, when I was in front of a film, I tried not to approach the work from the perspective of the camera, how it was positioned and oriented in relation to the fictional scene that was unfolding. In other words, I was not seeing a view of the world through the camera’. I wasn’t in the presence of a “recorded visual experience.” I turned off the part of my mind that constructs the sense of surroundedness within the spatial-visual. I wasn’t seated in what Daniel Dennet called “the Cartesian Theater”. I tried to disembed the gaze of the camera from the film, to not let it dictate the meaning of the relationships on screen and their values to me as a viewer.

It was an impossible task, but I still committed to doing it. Could this exercise help me with difficult visual objects? This was part of the purpose of the viewing practice—there are relationships in the film that are not defined by the gaze even as it presents them to us. Developed during an age of European colonial expansion, the medium’s discourse was immersed in the dominant political power’s way of looking at the world, and the photographic documentation was dictated by the Euro-colonial taste. But how can I look at those relationships in a way that decenters that gaze? This challenge arises, for example, when I examine photographic materials taken by Europeans in the 1800s who were traveling around the world, and I see images that were often taken by military personnel or religious missionaries who were not only enjoying their privilege to be able to travel and work with new technologies but also were actively part of the apparatus of colonization. The next time I look at the nice compositions in the album of photos taken by Paul-Émile Miot in the 1850s and 1860s in Newfoundland or Veracruz at the Branly museum’s archive in Paris, will I finally find a way to eject his gaze as a traveling French-empire navy vice-admiral? And will I be able to see the Tahitian family in the picture taken by the British Colonel Stuart Wortley in 1880, which he published in his 1882 book “Tahiti, A Series of Photographs”, and manage to eject Wortley’s gaze, which introduces the island with a Euro-centric, occasionally-racist opening text and describes the Tahitian family as “his” “family of servants” in the caption he added to the picture, despite being on the island of Tahiti for just a few days, as part of a honeymoon trip he made with his second wife? And even if I don’t succeed in ejecting that gaze from the picture, what might I get from imagining its impossible absence?

Now, practicing my looking-without-looking exercise, I stopped embodying the gaze. I shut off that part of my brain. Instead, I was only receiving information. I treated the film as a collection of relationships between things without a single point of view orienting them. I don’t mean that I was the recipient of an algorithmic flow of binary data nor that I was “reading the film as text.” The information I set myself to receive was messier, irregular and irregulated, multifaceted, and simultaneous. Then, I narrowed my intake further and refused most of what came my way. I refused any “static information” like descriptive facts about an object or character (a square, the word “yes”, a dead child, the color red) and only considered relationalities. I was open to many kinds of possible relationalities - how objects relate to people, how mimetic elements relate to non-mimetic ones, props to objects, stages to landscapes and sceneries, and personas to persons, or how an actor’s facial expression relates to another or to their character’s past and future, et cetera.

The difference was clearly and boringly expected when I watched the tele-shots opening Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974) in which the film indulges in the spectacle of a slow zoom from a bird's view of a San Francisco street to Gene Hackmann walking around. The difference was also not surprising in Hitchcock’s RARE WINDOW (1954), where the camera is explicitly and demonstratively imitating a person’s moving gaze. In those examples, it was all about the moving gaze, and if I let it go, I was left with a random street I couldn’t even look it as the superfluous over-chattiness of the moving camera became a distracting noise. But with the cliff scene at the end of the NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), when during Cabiria’s conversation with Oscar, the camera angle changes its position and proximity to the two, I was not constantly thrown from intimacy with Cabiria to distance and back and was now instead in the presence of the ritual of Cabiria’s desperation and its repeated performance by Fellini’s cast and crew. I was in the presence of Giulietta Masina, again and again reliving that moment in the character’s journey, and from that repetition, I came closer to them both. I kept thinking about the body of the cinematographer or the recordist. What were the cast and crew doing together before turning the camera on? What brought them together? I let certain elements in the story and dramatization consider other elements. And I wasn’t dissecting JEANNE DIELMANN through the camera’s gaze as she was dissecting meat on the cutting board but rather was there with Ackermann’s past and the present of her past in that film, together with the traces of that moment of contact in our own contemporary cinema. In the middle of this exercise, I was constantly busy dealing with questions. I examined the negative spaces and their relationship to what is revealed. Each mimetic representation — the set, a line of dialogue — only bore meaning in relation to something else.

At last, cinema was alive, in motion.

After a while, I re-introduced the element I discarded at the beginning of my experiment: The embodiment of the gaze. I tried to explore what I gained from bringing it back. It seems that I didn’t gain much new insight and only lost my ability to ask some of the questions I had before — to think and wonder and entertain myself during the viewing process. I was no more able to consider the crew and situate the story I was being told within a larger context. I had to ignore any extended temporalities. Now, I was once again forced to try to remain in the present, and interestingly this made me less in the present than I was during my non-gazing exercise. Embodying the cinematic gaze was revealed as a process of reduction, because it meant the passive consumption of the world it depicted on its terms. It meant forgetting looking at Jeanne Dielmann but having to forget Chantal Ackermann’s mother. To commit to cinema, it seems, I’m required to commit to an ongoing process of self-censoring. To identify with the mimetic gaze, there is a filter of not just fiction but a narrativized reality hovering over the visual landscape that censors my viewing.

Traditionally the result of an expensive production process, cinema manifested powerful mimesis, like the representation of bodies and faces in stone sculptures in antiquity. And similarly to the ancient stone sculpture, cinema has been exploited for its convincing lies and faux spirits. I enjoyed the illusion of an enhanced sense of distilled selfhood. I was reminded of how I felt when looking at stereoscopic images from the mid-1800s at the Getty in Los Angeles last autumn. These stereoscopic images were popular pastime entertainment in Victorian households. The specific set of photographs depicted a collection dedicated to different sites and landscapes in Palestine. Paradoxically, while the illusion of space that the twin photographs produced when viewed through a special device was surprisingly powerful and seductive, it didn’t feel any richer in detail than looking at a 2D, non-stereoscopic image. Each stereoscopic set had a title, often connecting the place it was depicted with a biblical location or story. The connection between the text and the place was sometimes true to the geography of Palestine, while other times, it was simply a projection made for the Bible-reading European audience. Here, too, meaning-making was sneaking through the caption into the mind of the spectator who was busy mimeticizing their gaze.

As the illusion of an enhanced sense of distilled selfhood is constantly breaking down, to watch a film is to keep being confronted with the threshold of the experience. It’s to be again and again judged by it and reprimanded for failure. As a practitioner, my filmmaking often engages with the threshold between the two “modes” — cinema as gaze and the cinema as a document of relationalities. This was why I messed with the image in my film and broke the illusion of cinematic space in my film JAPAN JAPAN (2008) by splitting the screen midshot or transitioning from shot-sequence naturalism to a trashy music video mid-scene while indulging in my most pressing difficulty at that time: how to break out of a place.

If I perceive the visual material of photos and films as “universal” or a “god view” of the world, I’m certainly a fool. But if instead I only see things through my own positionality and the relationality to what’s around me, I’m misleading myself into thinking that I’m lonelier than I really am. I’m the center of my world, but I’m not the center of all the worlds, and it’s worth committing to exploring the negative spaces of my selfhood sometimes. Sporadically ejecting my self-centered positionality does not mean falling into colonial-era universality. It can also mean something messier, an experience of living as existing somewhere between a me-centric world and other worlds - people, creatures, and things, outside and inside me. A universe in constant motion.

I’m thinking of ways other filmmakers engaged with the paradox of the cinematic gaze and treated the camera not as a machine that captures a gaze but as a record of relationalities. Going back to the gazes of travelers, I’m considering the “baggage” that is attached to images and to the camera obscura: the European “cartesian theater” (in which consciousness is imagined as some kind of a camera) and how photography was used in travels as a tool to define the world. In 1968, to make THE BALLAD OF CROWFOOT, Willie Dunn compiled images, almost all of which were taken by outsiders to the Indigenous communities each image depicts. The film, however, is anything but the gaze of those outsiders, even as those photographs comprise the material of the film. A threaded collage accompanied by Dunn’s titular song chronicles Crowfoot’s life from birth to death. It considers his legacy, and whether his signing in 1887 of Treaty 7 with the Canadian Crown was the right thing to do. What the film ends up sharing with us is beyond the images—beyond the product of a camera obscura. Willie Dunn, a singer-songwriter of mixed Mi’kmaq, Scottish, and Irish heritage, juxtaposes the oppressor’s images and forces the competing vectors of the photographers’ gazes to eliminate each other effectively. The film leaves us with the relational space of the people who were photographed and the communities that now reach out to Dunn (and by extension to us) from a time before he, we, or cinema were born.

Nina Menkes’ THE GREAT SADNESS of ZOHARA (1983) encompasses a powerful invisible bond between the person behind the camera (Nina Menkes) and the person in front (Nina’s sister Tinka Menkes). But instead of becoming a collection of framed gazes from behind the camera to where the character Zohara (Tinka Menkes) is placed, the film is really the journey of both sisters in foreign environments, whether an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, or a market street in Morocco. Both places sometimes feel hostile, and sometimes it looked almost as if the sisters were instigating the hostility. The film isn’t simply the documentation of their interaction. The film is the interaction with the spaces they visit and the people both encounter. A line is drawn between Nina and Tinka in each space that is documented. The gaze of the bystanders proves it: they move their eyes along this line between looking into the lens of the camera and looking at the performer. Tinka, too, occasionally gazes into the lens, and checks in on her sister as if she’s making sure that the camera is still running and the film ritual has not paused. Tinka maintains an ongoing trans-temporal bond throughout the filming process and through the finalized edited film. The duet whispering the voice-over binds the space behind the camera with the one framed by it, and breaking down what is supposed to be a the vector of the camera’s gaze.

Wang Bing’s DEAD SOULS (2018) gathers the story of a community that has been dispersed. His act of filming, more than an act of documentation, is that act of intrusion by the film’s protagonists, who remember in a land that might prefer to forget. It is the story of some of the victims of the “Anti-Rightist” campaign in Mao’s 1950s China. The film protagonists move in a landscape that erased the trace of their encampment, starvation, and torture. Their movement within the spaces is the movement of a flashlight roving in the dark, re-inhabiting and thus expanding a known territory. Here, too, not what is seen or unseen leads the path of the film, but rather the interconnectedness that is srecorded, even though the traces are erased and the land prefers to forget.

In Basma Alsharif’s OUROBOROS (2018) geography is encrypted and decrypted. Present-day Gaza is revealed with a strong sense of space. We see the view from a camera drone flying above the sea over the city's streets. Other parts in the film feel like a re-enactment and a revisiting of the filmmaker’s past relationships. Who is the audience for the entire work? Who is putting up this filming ritual? The film's scenes take place in Palestine, Italy, France, and California. The people who gather in a Los Angeles house and the woman who is seen walking in Gaza both feel as if they were simultaneously a re-enactment of memories, an interaction with their specific locations, and an exploration of their cultural identities. Why am I looking and why am I interested in looking at this woman or these reenactments? I experienced the film as if it’s not only the documentation of the process of an active search for a community but even the act of searching itself. What we are left with are the traces of the search.

Is the desire for a continuous embodiment of the gaze a romantic nostalgia for obsolete technology? Or is my failure actually an inherent part of the cinematic machine’s original design? I am put in mind of the lost systems of visual interpretation. In ancient Mesopotamian divination, the movement of the planets and stars in the night sky, as well as the position and movement of falcons and ravens in relation to a human spectator, were considered unprovoked omens and visual representations of superior forms of being as well as hints about what is to happen in the future. The seer was also able to provoke signs by throwing oil into water or looking into the liver of a slaughtered animal. Such entanglements felt natural for thousands of years, and now the connection looks artificial and arbitrary. This anthropocentric interpretation broke down and lost its meaning, even when the challenge this way of thinking poses to linear temporality is still valid. And similarly to how these divination systems were expected to represent the future, we often want cinema to do the same for us. Importantly - a belief in signs that can tell the future or a talisman that can prevent bad things from happening, even when unfounded and superstitious, is a belief in the possibility of knowing or changing. In that, it is a crucial fundamental first step towards further forms of knowledge and finding ways to change the future.

“Maybe the film is not for anyone else, just for him and the policeman.” So filmmaker Miko Reverza remarks on Makhmalbaf’s A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (1996) in a conversation about the film. In it, Makhmalfbaf finds the policeman he attacked in the late 1970s during the Iranian revolution and reenacts the incident. The camera there is a witness of the reenactment and it validating it, but not by creating a representation of it for the viewer. Rather, it is there to validate the event — the performance of reenactment. Reverza’s own NO DATA PLAN (2018) documents his journey as an ‘undocumented’ person from Los Angeles to New York. Unable to take a flight, he is in constant fear throughout his train journey that an authority figure will ask him to show his papers. Reverza edits together clips he filmed while traveling, accompanied by personal autobiographical stories about his family’s history, which appear in the form of (silent) subtitles. These clips, while documentary in nature, are almost ‘non-images’. More than a gaze, they are a documentation of an embodiment, of holding the camera and recording. Reverza’s gaze is hiding from the armed forces of a society that considers his presence illegal and sensationalizes stories about people in a similar legal state. Reverza’s journey transcends what a camera “captures” with its gaze. Thinking through the physical proximity of his body to the bodies around it instead gives me a fuller understanding of what the work is doing.

Perhaps as a result of being subconsciously aware that this is only an illusion, sometimes we psychologically give in to an opposite conclusion: that the image is or can be objective. We crave naturalism and believe it. I remember how my perspective of Michael Haneke's oeuvre changed after immigrating from the east Mediterranean to Germany. I appreciated CODE UNKNOWN (2000) and CACHÉ (2005) in my twenties before immigrating, and I enjoyed the gaze over the films’ “others”. I identified with Haneke’s “concerned” sociopolitical positionality. Arriving in Germany a few years later,  it dawned on me that it was me who was the “other” that these films portray. As part of the project of the Cartesian Theater, Haneke’s imagery is static and convincing in its gazing at the other. Haneke's oeuvre marks the border between insiders and outsiders. The high points of his career parallel the rise of “Fortress Europe.” He is not simply taking a picture of the wall. His pictures are bricks of that wall. The SEVENTH CONTINENT (1989) moans what is perceived as an upcoming fall of its empire. In the name of the goddesses, may that empire turn to dust and blow into the cosmos.

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Thank you to Elbe Trakal, Neha Choksi and Matt Polzin for the insightful comments, and to Jennifer Horne, Stacy Kamehiro, Thomas Waugh, John Greyson and Nina Menkes for their advice on some of the topics.

Photograph: Prise à la mer, Paul-Émile Miot, 1871