Keep up the good work!

Your conflation of the terms ‘indifference’ and ‘disillusionment’ is of great interest to me – and I agree that there is an obvious, though not entirely stable, association between the two. For me this is a pretty central area of concern – and I have to wonder whether my blathering on about disillusionment in the Polish bar contributed to your mixing of terms. I’d be the first to admit that my use of the term ‘disillusionment’ does not correspond to any straightforward dictionary definition – in fact I’m still trying to unpack what this term suggests for me in relation to my research, to art practice, to thought, politics, etc. – but I think one of the most important factors is its suggestion of a collapse, a kind of falling out or into another state – as well as a kind of stripping away. Of course, there is something of the sense of becoming ‘un-deluded’, so to speak, but I really like your simple reference to hope, and the fact that this reference was intuited and not immediately backed up by common usage. There is also, for me, something about being faced with the banality of things, perhaps the sheer material presence of matter, or some unbeating heart that seems to (not) tick common to everything. What interests me most is this sense of movement – a motion that might be conceived of as the non-movement of indifference, which again takes us into the paradoxical world of Blacnchot, where it is almost impossible to firmly grasp what is being spoken about indirectly.

Whilst Lisa Le Feuvre’s lack of interrogation of her use of ‘withdrawal’ is indeed problematic and worth bringing up, I think the references to Bartleby were relevant to what was being talked about, and in fact it seemed inevitable that the scribe would make an appearance at some point or other. [I was half-expecting Bouvard and Pécuchet to come bumbling in – and you might say that their ceaseless appetite for all things has nothing to do with indifference, but I wonder – there was a comment made by Lotringer where he referenced Consumerist Theory and a deadlock encountered when “all things are equally preferred”, which not only made me immediately think of Melville’s copyist, but also to Flaubert’s pair of clerks skimming the surface of all their various endeavours with homogenising haplessness, which might be a kind of indifference – that of the perpetual amateur, the grey of the middling – until finally they come back to rest in the neutrality of copying once more.] In saying that, I think that a number of words are problematic when it comes to Bartleby – not only ‘withdrawal’, but also ‘indifference’ itself. It could be argued that the scrivener is not subject to the same sense of withdrawal and indifference – that these terms do not apply to him precisely because he has ‘stepped out’ of any relation with their points of reference. It is just this kind of quandary – having to speak of Bartleby in terms that seem to have no relation to him, as if by his becoming-ambiguity (neither withdrawn nor fully present, but somewhere in between) he had contaminated the language one is resigned to using to either try to reach or describe him.

Though there were numerous points of interest in all of the presentations, as well as the summations / introductions made by the hosts, I agree that Lotringer was the most compelling speaker at the event. I enjoyed his references to Ballard’s Crash and Artaud as specific examples of routes though what he called the pervading indifference instituted by global capitalism. These two instances of going to extreme lengths to feel, or to embrace indifferentiation, living without affect, were linked by Lotringer to a sense of everything becoming fully exchangeable – a remark that he made on more than one occasion, and seemed to conjure a kind of grey world of anonymity in the face of the unrepresentable. Perhaps in relation to Artaud, the trajectory of Lotringer’s talk seemed to be the notion of working into, or working with, this pervasive indifference – which is not something that should be considered as subject or object (if I’m clear on this) but something like a (im)material substance (reference was made here to the expression, possibly in French, of being the equivalent to “I have hate.”) He suggested, perhaps again relating to Artaud (and to Crash?) another turning away, another fold into indifference – as if it were cookie dough, smoke to be stirred. Rather than extremes of violence – or indeed the lack of restraint that might be associated with Bataille’s general economy – Lortinger seemed to be advocating a refrain from disclosing, and the insertion of distancing through a kind of calculated indifference – or more specifically, a process of ‘complexifying’ indifference. I’m unsure as to the calculations that might be implied here and any obvious forms of strategy, etc. This kind of complexification is no doubt a difficult position to describe, but it seemed to be located outside any binary of passive (shield & obstacle) or strategic (pro-active, subjective?), or to somehow involve being indifferent to indifference. Such a process of exacerbation of indifferentiation, deepening it in order to anticipate some ungiven exit, or pushing it to a point where is reverses itself (a kind of ‘collapse’…?) was associated to the work of Baudrillard and Virilio by Lotringer himself.

There were other things I noted down – his references to inertia within speed fascinated me, and indeed I’ve been trying to write something that relates to this (at least in my head) for some time now, without success. These ‘ecstasies’ of collapse and catastrophe he described – and an image was conjured of someone with their fingers in an electrical socket, a bind between racing at high speed and being absolutely locked – related to a general ‘dispossession in relation to events’, also seems very important for me.

A question he raised, perhaps more generally related to capitalism, concerned the problem that, if obstacles are absorbed and used by the system, how might the system be otherwise displaced? He made some remark about allowing the system to generate its own poison, with specific reference to Alfred Jarry and Pataphysics – can anyone shed any further light on this. Obviously, I need to familiarise myself with each and every ubu as soon as I can.

I also enjoyed Adrian Rifkind’s references to Roland Barthes series of lectures of The Neutral, recently compiled into a book by Rosalind Krauss, especially when he made reference to Barthes use of a scene from War and Peace and a sense of making oneself invulnerable, which seems to be a underlying concern of my own project – the details of which I am still coming to grips with. Conflations between ‘indifference’ and ‘invulnerability’ might be my own problemtatic starting point for something! Rifkind’s references to the Baroque (was this via Deleuze?) and, as I think he put it, ‘twisting and squeezing out of indifference’, seemed to correlate with the complexification of indifference suggested by Lotringer.

Going back to Lotringer again – in the Q&A session I think he spoke about indifference in relation to the art world and a growing tide of undifferentiated matter – again related to what he called an ‘excesses of exchangeability’ – that not only demands a straightforward effort of resistance in the idea of ‘not being led’, but also, perhaps more complexly, of being prepared to fail, being left open to this capacity in the approach of ‘soft subversion’. [This reference to softness was linked in my mind to the edge of discernibility, so to speak – here I’m going to expose something of an inner geek – and made me think of The Third Policeman, where there is, at least in my memory, a pointed implement that tapers to a point so reduced in dimensions that it is possible for it to puncture matter on a cellular level… and to an edition of the Miracleman comic re-imagined by Alan Moore, where a seemingly invulnerable opponent can only be struck by a weapon when it is cast with the right slowness, somehow then free to pierce his layers of superhuman protection. These images of membranous screens and the methods through which they might be penetrated keep recurring to me – symptomatic of a relation to practice, no doubt…]

John Cassavetes

While watching A Woman Under the Influence I asked myself “Whose story is this?” The title suggests that the film tells the “woman’s” story; in this case, that of Mabel Longhetti. But because the audience has no access to Mabel’s interior world, to what’s bothering her, or to any sober and mature exchanges that reveal the kind of adult she might actually be, Cassavetes seems to be pursuing some other strand in trying to express something about marital and domestic disharmony that is difficult to put into words. This film seems to be about the breakdown of that communication.

I wonder whether asking this kind of question part way through this film one was a constructive exercise, or does it suggest that I was not invested in the story or the characters, that I was not absorbed in the film, and that in my state of distraction I used exploratory questions to pass the time or to try to re-invest myself, rather than simply admit distraction.

Though not certain why I started asking myself questions during the film, I recall being “aware” of the world I was watching, aware of its careful construction, and the way in which Cassavetes was steering my eyes and emotions. Did I find myself asking these questions because I was uncomfortable in this constructed world? Yes. I think that part of the issue stemmed from being repulsed by the Longhetti’s space. It struck me as strange to read this quote by Cassavetes:

I knew hard-hat workers like Nick, and Gena knew women like Mabel, and although I wrote everything myself, we would discuss lines and situations with Peter Falk, to get his opinion, to see if he thought they were really true, really honest.

Now, I’m not sure if the “awareness” of repulsion came in the way that “dream knowledge” comes – that is, the way that some people are capable of coping with anxiety in dreams simply by acknowledging the fact that the anxiety is NOT real, “this is just a dream,” or a nightmare. So, was my withdrawal from the film the way in which I sublimated the anxiety Nick and (specifically) Mabel were causing me? Unlike Cassavetes and Rowlands, I’ve never known people like Nick and Mabel, and I’m not convinced Cassavetes and Rowlands really did either. They weren’t entirely real characters, and this is partly where the film broke down for me, in ways that none of his other works have. Why did these characters seem “unreal”?

John Cassavetes’ approach to characterization is normally, albeit peculiarly, empowering, and his interest in human choices – particularly human “mistakes” – is what makes his work both challenging and compelling. But, what is most striking about his approach is that his process of “empowerment” is counterintuitive, and not the least bit traditional. He doesn’t endow many of characters with “power” in a conventional sense, they have “status” and they earn and lose it throughout the film, but most often his characters are adrift and powerless in the most humanly interesting way. And these people who normally seem so real, particularly his female protagonists (often portrayed by Gena Rowlands), find their greatest strength at moments of seeming weakness and despair. In this exposed human moment personal need emerges as honest, the character is vulnerable, and the moment is unstable. It is what makes performance a truly untouchable art.

Still, I’m not sure if the moments were too raw for me to see in A Woman Under the Influence, or if the film requires yet another viewing.

TL

Something about the near-ceaseless tension in much of Cassavetes films, A Woman Under the Influence in particular, seems to support the idea of the ‘coming together’ of attitudes in this sense – the unpredictable collisions of people’s behaviour, all the moving points of contact, resistance and pliability generating the form of the film on the fly.

Maybe something there about the Bunker School, too, but that, for me (when I got my head around it and our of my ass) is much more celebratory. Only 2 Jews to walk away from Chelmno…not much to celebrate, though someone told me no-one survived Belzec, which I find hard to believe. I think some people were transfered. Maybe that’s what confuses me.

Regardless, this notion of play, or whatever it is that Srebnik is doing — you can’t call it play. Wandering…dead play, because he looks bored, or listless, lifeless…but the fact that he is walking on the perimeter like that…it’s strange, and it’s interesting because, as you rightly comment, Srebnik is walking on a line he never could have walked when the camp was in operation.

I got to thinking he was navigating a no-man’s land…neither in nor out, present nor absent, alive nor dead. In between, which is what my Poland trip was looking at — that space between. On camera, Srebnik ambles between here and there, a kind of nowhere between past and present, absent and present….

The other scenes involving Srebnik were also compelling and I think we spoke about them a lot in Sussex. For example, when Lanzmann was filming outside the main doors of the church in Chelmno – a building where large numbers of people were held until being transferred to the gas vans. Lanzmann has Srebnik in the centre of the frame for pretty much this entire sequence – which consists of a crowd gather for the lavish Christian ceremony that is underway inside the church building. The crowd waits for the emergence of a procession from the main doors [In fact, thinking about it, I was really interested in the sequence when the local people tried to keep the view clear for the camera as the procession came out – moving people aside if they wandered into the sight line, with a strange respect for the camera, recording / witnessing impulse that seemed somehow off-kilter considering what had happened at that place and, more specifically, to the quiet gentleman who stood amongst them].

Anyway, Lanzmann film a growing number of locals as they surround Srebnik, who, all the while, seems poignantly, almost pathetically, distanced from the whole thing. Again he seemed a little like a child, this time at a social or family gathering, surrounded by relatives he doesn’t know, and whose terms of affection he cannot understand. The curious mix of Srebnik’s dignity, which his manner commands, and an exposed naivety is really interesting I think – his look half amused and half demeaned, lost in the crowd like a curiosity. His appearance is particularly powerful here too – given his near-constant ’surprised’ expression, emphasised by that jolt of hair, he stands out like a painful incongruence, and resorts to the uncomfortable, kindly but indulgent, smiles of the perpetual outsider. Lanzmann no doubt sets up this scene, but it seems that it quickly becomes something else, out of his control perhaps, as more and more people arrive and recognise the young boy they remember singing on the river. The emergence of these improvised recollections, counter-memories and cumulative testimony is no doubt exactly what Lanzmann sought to provoke, so he lets the camera run, occasionally prodding with questions from stage left.

I did notice the camera’s ‘blinking’ during the interviews of Leuchter, and didn’t really know how to read it at the time. Given what you’ve said about the stare, this device does seem to anticipate the transformation of Leuchter’s harmless stupidity into his invidious denial of the holocaust.

That first still from the film (above) reminds me of the sense I got that there is something wrong with the way this man looks at the camera. The connection between his eye and his brain seems to be malfunctioning. (Would a post-mortem discover his optic nerve to have lesions?) Leuchtar’s look, so to speak, is profoundly fearful. It betrays his inability to read effectively the reactions of his interlocutors. Unable to respond appropriately, neither is he able to maintain the listener’s interest. As a result he has developed unconscious (half-conscious) strategies of manipulation. One is an attempted hypnotism. Morris’s editing might be a warning, that we should look away from the stare from time to time, otherwise get captured by it.

We were talking about “peripeteia” the other week when this term came up in Ranicère’s essay (’Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’). The curious quality that the narrative of Morris’s film has of turning itself from one thing into another – from profile of harmless eccentric to inquiry into the phenomenon of latent right-wing extremism – may be a good example. It’s interesting to consider what kind of affective quality the unexpected turn of events has in this work particularly. It might be one that operates by exposing the assumptions in viewing, exposing also the particular regime of the image (to use Ranicère’s term) which produces the viewer or instates a perspective on what’s being shown.

This is another respect in which the two films we watched make a good double-bill. Morgenster’s ‘Ambulans’ is a piece in which there is no sudden turn of events or reversal. Indeed, it is a film the narrative of which might be defined by its inevitability. When we talked about the film afterwards, I was trying to question this aspect of the form of the work, which it seemed tempting at the time to talk about in terms of coercion: the film condemns the murder of children, the viewer would not wish to (and would not be able to) take a different position. So to that extent, his/her capacity is curtailed, etc. However, I think it might be more interesting to consider the sweep of the films narrative not as over-determination in this way, but as something more like a strategic use of inevitability: because we are aware of the fate of the victims, and to the place this story is taking us – or to the extent that we are aware of these – we are compelled all the more forcefully to negotiate our our own understanding of the work in relation to what seem like marginal details. Resistance to the inevitable direction of a narrative comes in the form of an all-the-more vital search for diminishing counter-currents. Morgenstern provides these – for instance the sequences in which the child launches his toy helicopter and the dog, distracted from its guard duties, can’t resist the desire to play fetch with the prisoner.

Though my first viewing of it was certainly ambivalent, I also think its a really interesting work – indulgent, messy, but certainly not unaffecting. I would totally agree that the film is quintessential Cassavetes, but it seemed to me to be working with a different kind of intensity to some of the other films we’ve seen – maybe Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Husbands. This film seemed to work in a more openly contrived mode, if you see what I mean. It seemed intentionally overblown, bombastic, verging at times on the ham-fisted, but of course these very qualities worked well as part of the portrayal of the damage and overload/paucity of the characters evidenced throughout the film. It fed into the super-saturation of the Gena Rowlands character especially, such as in the absurdist dream sequences – the opera mawkishness; the relentless, cringeworthy performance by the pool followed by the absurd, Buster Keaton high dive into the swimming pool! Perhaps this kind of ‘emblematic’ positioning – I’m not quite sure what I mean here – which didn’t seem something that emerged from character/actor-driven interaction, owes more to the original screenplay material that the film is based on…?

I was also thinking about the bold strokes of some of the imagery too – for example when Harman’s son smashes his head on the door of his mother’s house after the rather unsuccessful trip to Vegas, which of course harks back to the moment in the film when a drunken Cassavetes, crawling all over the young woman (was this the dancer?), falls down the stone steps outside her home. Both father and son emerge bleeding profusely from these incidents – both of the them incidentally desperately trying to get in, to reach sanctuary (and it might be said, though not without coughing hard, that both were running away from Harman) – and the wound in both cases seems suitably emphatic, over-the-top, with thick gloopy blood, from a Old Master crucifixion, streaming down their foreheads and over their faces.

I would totally agree with you about the moment of transition in the film and the fact that the absurdist arrival of the menagerie is, so to speak, the final straw. Also, all of the ark connotations we talked about, and Cassavetes looking like some mad Ahab figure (in fact I think I remember a shot when he was on the terrace of the house, amid the storm, as if he were on a ship’s bridge, fighting at the wheel) were really interesting. This was the point where, for me, it seemed the film was on the verge of imploding as it threw in countless half-formed allusions to a cinematic genres, over a few shots, always on a tangent & never quite engaged with – the disaster movie, the supernatural thriller, the medical drama, etc. It was really unnerving – and that’s probably my main response to the film – it threw me into indecision. Probably no better thing to say about a movie in some respects.

I’m still not sure about the appearance of the naked man in the living room – it seems there’s an opinion that the ‘man was the dog’, or so I’ve read on imdb, and somehow connected with the softening of Harman’s character, but I’m not sure. Maybe the dog was a mirror or something. It’s also quite interesting to think that, in some ways, Rowlands’ character somehow remained unchanged – in fact just goes to sleep and has a further false dawn in her dreams – and so Harman is left all the more isolated since she has not (after having been the one to have ‘gone too far’) led the way after all.