Essayistic cinema is permeated by an »instinctual energy«, which constantly works against the rules and conventions of feature and documentary film. That is why essay films can in a sense be described as the »Id« of cinema, to cite Jean-Pierre Gorin, who put together the 2007 Viennale retrospective on precisely that topic. Ruminating, meandering, absorbing all kinds of things in its environs without necessarily being subordinated to the voice of an authorial Ego in the process – essayistic cinema thus presents itself as quintessentially unruly and disobedient. And that’s not all: as a turbulent, restless unconscious, this form of cinema is a kind of visitation (»it haunts cinema«) – not just of film as we know it but also of the entire apparatus whereby film exercises certain ideological functions.
»The Way of the Termites«, the title of the retrospective, which echoes Manny Farber’s terminology, thus signifies the winding path via which this unconscious acts out its inherent contradictions and rejections, indeed the non-linear form of motion that hollows out the entrenched orders of visibility and pronounceability from within. Post-structural standards, such as dissemination and rhizomatics, are just as much part of this programmatic approach as the constant impulse to dismantle the sets of rules that apply in conventional cinema and to dissect the intractable remains of this process of fission – »black holes«, as Gorin says.
It is obvious that a retrospective of what amounts to just about 100 years of essayistic cinema must be rather unruly vis-à-vis this programmatic thrust devised post-factum. It is not simply that the roughly 60 examples screened, ranging from D. W. Griffith’s »A Corner in Wheat« (1909) to Godard’s »Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma« (2004), cannot easily be described in terms of a shared formula, let alone compared in terms of their formal approach. The critique of ideology, formulated, sometimes to a greater and sometimes to a lesser extent, as a negative movement of setting oneself apart from prevailing conventions, varies considerably throughout this historical net that is cast so wide. What could the connecting political element be between a film like Thom Andersen’s »Los Angeles Plays Itself« (2004), an opulent collection of materials on the topic of the city (Los Angeles) in film, and Luis Buñuel’s razor-sharp ethnographic study on the impoverished rural area of south-western Spain, »Las Hurdes« (1932)?
However, one of the many things that the roughly 70 years separating these two works reveal is the wide breadth and range of forms within essayistic cinema itself. It is rather surprising that astonishing parallels do after all crop up over and over again in the midst of the polymorphous acting-out of insubordinate social, media and self-criticism. In this vein, Fernando Birris »Tire dié« (1960), a short documentary piece on children begging in Santa Fe, Argentina can be seen as a direct descendant of »Las Hurdes«. The unrelenting poverty on the periphery of what is apparently the best organised city in Fordist and welfare state terms – the latter suggested by the aerial views at the beginning, accompanied by an ironic commentary – is described with an insistence comparable to that found 30 years previously in Buñuel’s oeuvre. »Tire dié« (»Throw a Peso!«) primarily shows children running along behind railroad trains and begging the passengers for change, day in, day out, following their own work rhythm. In the process their cry, together with the rattling of the coins, condenses towards the end into a real cacophony – in a sense into the disturbing sound of de-subordination.
The tipping point of de-subordination is something that a whole movement in Latin American cinema, known as »cine militante«, was aiming for at the time. It would have been marvellous to see more works from this context, but only a few documentaries were screened. For one of them – »Chircales« (1972) – Columbian filmmaker Marta Rodríguez and photographer Jorge Silva lived for five years with the clay tile makers (the »chircales«) from Tunjuelito, a poor quarter in Bogotá, in order to collect images and live sound from their everyday experience of exploitation. Although actually the exploitation stemmed not only from the large landowners and their tenant farmers but in the case of the working women, whose perspective Rodríguez primarily seeks to adopt, also from their violent husbands. »Chircales« shows women and children hauling high towers of tiles on their bent backs and yet nonetheless repeatedly contains hints of transcendence and poetry, like one girl’s enraptured First Communion, which in a sense points to a different life.
The militancy of »Tire dié« and »Chircales« was to be found in the fact that they attempted to offer an element of liberation – whether with or without »instinctual energy« – via the roundabout route of the images becoming unbearable. In the broad arc of the retrospective it was easy to understand that this form of cinema was soon to come to an end and survives at most in isolated offshoots. Perhaps also as the result of an unconscious blockade due to an over-extravagant past, one question that was not addressed is which paths can be taken to arrive at forms of dissent and militancy more in keeping with the spirit of our time.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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