Merce Cunningham on Film

"The use of camera has extended the sense of what dance can be ... The two media do not compete, each abides in its own territory."

In a way, a piece such as 'Changing Steps' (choreographed 1978, filmed 1989) is ideally suited to film, it has a proto-cinematic quality to it. The indeterminacy of the piece - its various solo and group dances can be performed in any order, separately or overlapping as space allows - suggests the process of editing, offering up all sorts of possibilities for montage and juxtaposition. In the filmed version (of which an extract is embedded above), dances cut and dissolve into each other, sometimes hanging suspended in superposition. In the fragment above, the great wooden frame, separating the foreground dance from the background, suggests a cinema screen. Similarly, in 'Beach Birds for Camera', a sequence of the dance takes place on a soundstage, before a vast blue screen, suggesting the future presence of some fantastical imagery that is yet to be filled in. The film of 'Changing Steps', as presented in Amsterdam-based Total Film's 2003 DVD, The Merce Cunningham Collection, presents a collage of film and video, the latter is often severely degraded, blurring the dancers' features, and giving the whole an eerie, spectral feel. At one point we dissolve from the flickering lines of TV static to ripples on a pond, almost perfectly matched (but not quite).

'Deli Commedia' (1985) is Cunningham's tribute to the physical comedies of the silent era. While Pat Richter's Carmen-quoting music evokes the piano accompanist in a pre-war picture palace, the dancers movements frequently evoke, not just Chaplin, but also the not-quite-silent films of Jacques Tati. It is a curious feature of Cunningham's work for camera that, despite the presence of a non-diegetic musical score, a sound recorder is employed to record the footfalls of the dancers. In his introduction to 'Deli Commedia', Cunningham says, "One of the first things I saw through the camera was that you saw things faster ... That is, you caught the image quicker ... You did not have to dwell on it as long ... " For Cunningham, as for Paul Virilio, the emergence and mastering of new technologies is a question of speed. It is through speed that the twentieth century's artworks relate to its wars.

'Beach Birds for Camera' (1993) presents the human as but a brief mediating force between two non-human technologies: the Lifeforms software Cunningham used to choreograph the dance and the camera for which the staged version (entitled simply 'Beach Birds') was later adapted. But long before he began engaging with cinema and software, Cunningham had set out, in the words of Dee Reynolds, "to discover new parameters of the ‘human’ ... These assaults were frequently seen by contemporaries as attacks on the ‘human’ itself." The notion of the expressive human subject has always been extremely fragile in his work from the very beginning. As Reynolds continues, "Many critical comments on Cunningham in fact focus on the ‘undecidability’ of movements involving interactions between the ‘human’ the ‘natural’, and the ‘automated’." Perhaps nowhere is this slippage more uncertain than in the (1999) work 'Biped', for which motion capture software is used to allow the movements of the dancers to animate computer graphic lines and shapes projected on a scrim between the stage and the audience. Watching videos of 'Biped' (a piece not designed for camera), the scrim appears scarcely noticeable and the graphic lines and figures seem to take on an astonishing 3D quality, not just leaping out at the audience, but also effectively conveying depth, and drawing the audience further in to the performance.

"Like a wind-up toy, you stutter at my feet" : Towards an Aesthetics of Stammering

The Shows of London is a small reading group, based out of the King's College English department and interested primarily in the "entertainment and display cultures of nineteenth century London." Last week saw them mounting a half-day symposium in the King's old anatomy museum under the heading 'Stutter London'. London, it seems, has always stuttered, always been noted for its sounds and its machinic rhythms, and this brief conference set out to explore the stammering, spluttering sounds of the city as circulation and disturbance, synaesthesia and unrest. Can we speak of a radical stuttering whilst simultaneously maintaing due sensitivity to those for whom a stammer is a serious impediment?

Sara Thornton, in a presentation on Dickens's Bleak House, evokes Deleuze's paper, 'He Stuttered' in which the stammer is enlisted in the schizoanalytic opposition of the smooth and the striated, and for which, "Style is to stutter in one's own language." She opposes the smooth, oily discourse of Chadband to the ellipses and aporias of Krook, exploiting the potential for innuendo behind stuttering's pathological designation as a 'struggle behaviour'. Louise Lee, however, notes that Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies and Westward Ho!, was crippled by a paralysing fear of new and unfamiliar situations as a result of his speech impediment, suggesting that stuttering is perhaps just as likely to be an agent of conservatism as unrest. Kingsley went to great lengths to try and cure his stammer, frequenting the very same Harley Street specialist as another famous British stutterer, Lewis Carroll.

From my own perspective, the most fruitful of the day's interventions were those that drew the notion of stuttering out of the context of the Victorian novel and into the art forms of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus explored the cinematic genre of the 'city symphony' from Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures to Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice, via Ruttman, Vertov and Joris Ivens. The city symphonies of the late twenties sought to project a kind of isomorphism from the urban rhythms of their chosen city to the rhythms of film and montage. As each of the films under consideration were silent, their status as symphonies must be understood as figurative, synaesthetic (Germaine Dulac dubbed Ivens, "One of the visual musicians of the future," and in general it seems to be one of the ironies of history that film-makers tended to forget the close family relationship between music and film at the very moment the cinema becomes sonorised).

As 'symphonic' cinema, it is striking that such city films offer rare examples, for which they were highly praised by Ezra Pound, of a kind of object-oriented cinema (elements of which are taken up later, in very different ways, by Ozu and Tati). It is clear that the only protagonist of such films is the city itself, in which any human subjects are merely subsumed, participants in a rhythm which is not their own. In Ivens's Regen, set, though not obviously so, in Amsterdam, the city, as Marcus pointed out, "knows it is raining." We see the first raindrops strike the canal before we see a man's upturned palm, testing the air for precipitants.

Though containing as much as four months worth of footage, the narrative time span of such films tended to be compressed, in the edit suite, down to the passage of a day. In this respect, we might see them, as was pointed out by a question from the audience, as heirs to the late nineteenth century fondness for using stage lighting effects to recreate the sensations of dawn and dusk, common to Puccini and French realist opera. In other respects, the musical antecedents of Ruttman and Cavalcanti are not opera composers, but the Zukunftsmusikers around Franz Liszt whose programmatic symphonic poems would be the source of Liszt's break with Wagner in the late 1850's.

Following Laura Marcus's presentation, came Tom Fogg's exploration of the craze for 'stutter edit' and similar sounds in what he insisted on describing with the rather unfortunate American term, IDM. Ever since Karlheinz Stockhausen offered his 'Advice to Clever Children' in which, at the prompting of Radio 3's Dick Witts, he compared the repetitive beats of the Aphex Twin to being, "like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can't get words out of his mouth," electronic beats have stammered with an infectious aphasic arrhythmia. The use of the stutter edit in works by Matmos or Caribou, has a kind of anthropomorphic effect on the computer, claims Fogg, while insisting that, perhaps more than any other instrument, the computer was "always already anthropomorphic."

Fogg's paper restricts its attention to the use of specific stuttering software plug-ins in recent computer-based music, his conclusion that stuttering is then a consequence of spread of home computers and their domestification, is thus largely tautological. But what would a general theory of musical stuttering look like? One that would have to go way beyond the rhizomatic glitch techno of the Mille Plateaux label (and their various imitators, discussed by Fogg), to take in Steve 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', Paul Hardcastle's 'Nineteen', the "uh uh uh" of Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman', the voice phasing of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain', even the repeated staccato quavers tht comprise the colloratura of the Queen of the Night's "Der Hölle Rache" aria in The Magic Flute. Indeed, just think how commonly Italian opera singing (perhaps most obviously in Rossini) is characterised by precisely the repetitions, unnatural prolongations, and curiously placed (from a linguistic point of view) cessations that comprise Wikipedia's definition of stammering. And that is just to speak of the most obvious vocal stutterings, whereas Fogg has already shown the possibility of expanding the term to an anthropomorphic description of instrumental and machine-made sounds.

If any piece of music were to, "Der Hölle Rache", one of the most venomous, but also one of the most beautiful, and certainly one of the most difficult to sing arias in all opera, right at the very top of a soprano's range, sits well with Deleuze's notion of a language "so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence." But perhaps Fogg is a little overhasty in dismissing the possibility of a psychoanalysis of sonic stammering. In 'O Superman', in 'Nineteen', even in Matmos's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, don't we find precisely this re-mergence, this return of the repressed - as in the young Freud of his early Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer), stuttering as hysterical symptom, "effects and residues of excitations which have acted upon the nervous system as traumas." The stammer marks the horror of the past, a nervousness towards the future, and the block of the unsayable.

All images taken from last summer's 'Stutter' exhibition at the Tate Modern.

"Everyone has their half an hour of Hulotism every day." Jacques Tati

A new exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française, in Paris, celebrates Jacques Tati as modernist and deconstructionist. The curators have taken a still from the pharmacy scene in Playtime, wherein the green light of the shop's sign gives its wares and its customers a sickly pallor, and captioned it with a reference to Derrida's famous analysis, in Dissemination, of the crucial ambiguity of the word, 'pharmakon' in Greek, and the role it plays in Plato's Phaedrus. In Socrates speech in the Phaedrus, writing is offered to the king by the god Thoth as a "remedy" (Pharmakon) for his ailing memory, but the word pharmakon is inherently slippery, meaning as much poison as cure. “If the pharmakon is ‘ambivalent,’ it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed," says Derrida, "the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/ evil, inside/ outside, memory/ forgetfulness, speech/ writing, etc.).…The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference." 

Like middle period Chaplin, Tati's Monsieur Hulot is an (almost) silent man in a  world full of noises. Just as the little tramp in Modern Times, Hulot in Mon Oncle may sing and whisper in people's ears but almost never speaks out loud. In a scene early on in Les vacances  de Monsieur Hulot we discover why. Arriving in the hotel, laden with luggage, Hulot is unable to introduce himself until having the pipe pulled out of his mouth by the receptionist, like a baby's dummy. It is the pipe that has stolen his voice, one partial object effaced by what is, in a sense, another. Hulot's pipe, though not quite permanently between his lips, is none the less somehow in him more than himself, like Lacan's objet petit a, it is more a part of Hulot than his own body. Look at the famous silhouette on the poster for Mon Oncle, it is by the pipe that we recognise him, and by which he becomes a kind of phatic image. As his frame juts forward when he walks, once gets the sense it is the pipe leading the way, calling the shots.  John Towsen equates the removal of Tati's pipe for the exhibitions poster on the Paris metro (!) to the removal of Chaplin's cane.

Not that noise is threatening or disturbing to this quiet man, as they sometimes are to Chaplin, rather it is a source of endless wonder and amusement. In Mon Oncle he spends considerable time positioning his window just so to reflect a pool of light where a little bird is perched, encouraging it to sing. One thinks, also, of his seemingly endless fascination with the noises made by chairs in Playtime. Bazin speaks of Hulot's world as one of a "sonorous inanity" that is nonetheless "undeniably human," claiming it is the sound of Tati's films that give them their "weight" and "moral dimension." As such, it is through sound effects that Tati brings everyday objects to life, and by reducing speech to a meaningless chatter, makes objects of his cast. We find ourselves in the magical world of Disney's Fantasia, where each little individual noise that has been bestowed upon each individual object becomes its spirit. Tati's moral philosophy, then, as revealed by his sound world, is object-orientated.

Of course, if there was one country for whom the controversial personal life of Charles Chaplin could never besmirch the heroic status of his tramp, it was France, and Hulot is very close to Charlot. But it was Buster Keaton who named Tati as his heir. Like Keaton, Tati can be seen as a theorist of technology, somewhat in the mode of Paul Virilio. For Virilio, "The invention of the substance is also the invention of the “accident.” Seen this way, the shipwreck is indeed the “futuristic” invention of the ship, the air crash the invention of the supersonic plane, and the Chernobyl meltdown, the invention of the nuclear power station." In this sense, Hulot, in all his calamitousness, is revealing the truth of the objects he encounters. "You must learn to get along with modern technology," says his sister, Madame Arpel, "become more modern." But in his subtle détournement of the Arpel's lime green sofa, Hulot shows himself the true modernist by transforming it into the close cousin of a Le Corbusier chaise longue.

Unlike Keaton's hardworking young man, however, Tati seems to be permanently on vacation. In his use of the camera and in the editing suite, Tati is a very different director to both Keaton and Chaplin. In his long, still takes, and wide-angle framing, Tati is very much a post-Rosselini comedian, with the austerity of Robert Bresson. There is a stillness and calm to his frame, even as chaos reigns amidst its subjects. The impassive features of Monsieur Hulot are somehow reflected in his international style image of Paris. "The biggest star of all is the set," Tati once said, and his characters, especially the Arpels in Mon Oncle, frequently resemble nothing so much as cuckoo clocks announcing the time. Michel Chion credits Tati's films with a certain "awareness of the cosmos," citing a childhood memory of watching Mon Oncle, "what I really liked about it was that night fell, and you had the feeling you were breathing night air." This sense of space, of air, is complemented by the soundtrack - the ever-present tweeting of bird song in Les vacances, and the ebb and flow of traffic, coming almost to resemble the babbling of a stream, in Playtime. "But what would Mr. Hulot be without vacation?" Asks Bazin. "We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were — a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides."