New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2017

This chapter provides a close reading of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s cine-essay The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar) (2015). Through the use of figurative language, alignment and speculative narratives Guzmán creates a ‘multi-directional’ picture of Chile’s Tierra del Fuego, its indigenous population and violent history over the last three centuries. With his choice of the essay as cinematic form he seeks to hold together, in Isabelle Stengers’ sense, questions that are complex and multifaceted; questions that are of archaeological, humanitarian or ethical concern and that require the input of many human and non-human voices and forces. In her booklength essay, In Catastrophic Times (2015), the Belgian philosopher encourages the sciences to approach a matter of common concern, such as anthropocenic change, via an ecology of practices. I see such ecological thinking in practice in Guzmán’s cine-essayistic work, in which human-centred events acquire a larger cosmological dimension to the extent that abstract philosophical questions remain worldly, that is committed to the material and embodied realities of the earthbound.

This article examines Bernard Stiegler’s notions of cinematic consciousness and tertiary memory, developed in his philosophy of time and technology, in relation to the essay film’s aesthetic and storytelling features. I begin by illustrating Stiegler’s ideas in relation to cinema, consciousness, memory and technology; making use of the recent and widely acclaimed TV series reboot Westworld, I employ it as an allegory of the functionality of cinema as mnemotechnology. Furthermore, considering how the essay film questions cinema’s industrialization effect through Stiegler’s theorization of cinema qua tertiary memory, I look at the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (1999) to argue how the essay film is a radical practice that stages thought in order to de-synchronize the consciousness of cinema.

This article argues that by framing Manakamana (Spray and Velez, 2013) as a serial portrait, we illuminate the ways that the film situates its Nepalese cable car riders, its American filmmakers and its largely western spectators in an emergent and shared time, and that the sequencing of human subjects that is central to this serial portrait posits an alternative to that once ubiquitous tendency to cast non-western subjects into a time that is past. In 1983’s Time And The Other, Johannes Fabian decried the discursive and ideological effects of denying ethnographic subjects their coevalness, but in Manakamana’s formal experimentation and its strategic deployment of cinematic homologies and spiritual allegories, a reflexivity emerges to reframe the way representations of people can be organized in time.

Stemming from the concept of ‘enunciation’, here posited as an act of expression, self-depiction and reasoning, this article addresses the category of the ‘self-representational metacinema’, which is a self-reflexive variety of essay film as authorial discourse, and analyses the way in which Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008) is an opus about the world and thought processes of an artist as the artist is immersed in the world (of cinema). Firstly, by presenting herself, in her own body, as ‘Agnès Varda’, the director writes her identity into the film, as a first layer of filmic enunciation placed midway between reality and illusion, thus ambiguating herself as an objective person, on the one hand, and reinforcing her nature as a subjective creator (i.e. endowed with a specifically cinematic worldvision), on the other. The representation of the filmic artist at work (as ars poetica) embraces the self-portrait as a fully fledged art cinema aesthetic category. Secondly, by rethinking the world through (her) cinema, Varda adopts a phenomenological position in which the digressive nature of her cinematic writing is conveyed as a corporeal experience of being in the world, according to Vivian Sobchak with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Varda not only interacts with the world around her but also inscribes herself in the essay film as both representation and expression, that is, matter and thought. Thirdly, the reality and illusion dichotomy, which pervades the entire film, is particularly intense in the third and final layer of enunciation, which involves mnemonic rewinding. The division of Varda’s life in several coexisting stages from which the director can extract particular memories reconciles Gilles Deleuze’s chronosigns, which imply a non-chronological time structure, with a more traditional Augustinian time as an arrow, a conception of a threefold present, and immortality beyond that. Ultimately, The Beaches of Agnes is a discourse on the power of the image and creation.

The epistle has long associations with the essay film not only through the notable filmmakers who have used the form, but also in how it addresses an audience. This tendency reflects the lineage of the development of the Montaignian literary essay from private letter to public audience. In this article I explore the use of the epistolary address, both formally within the text, and as part of the filmmaking process in the construction of a subjectivity that is always relational and contingent. Framed by a number of essayistic works that make use of the epistle – the filmed correspondences of José Luis Guerin, Jonas Mekas, Fernando Eimbcke and So Yong Kim (2009–11), Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) and Ross McElwee’s The Photographic Memory (2012) – this article discusses the process of making my film, Closer Than They Appear (Munro, 2016). I also draw on theories of epistolary transcendence of time and space (Naficy) and collective subjectivity (Braidotti). Through these films I propose the letter film to be a transformative process that shifts the filmmaker’s subjectivity towards a more collective and relational position through the act of address.

This article explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical predicament of being a migrant intersect to create a form of cinema that could be best described as ‘minor’. It uses thereby Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ in regard to Jonas Mekas’s classical 1960s’ and 1970s’ diary films Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) – films that can now be regarded as important predecessors to autobiographical documentary film practices today. The article proceeds by first outlining philosophy’s difficult relation to autobiography, before situating the emergence of autobiographical documentary practices within the transnational cine-writing culture of the 1960s as well as within a genuinely American ‘culture of the self’ that stems from Romanticism and Transcendentalism. With figures like Mekas, not only a practice, but a whole ‘philosophy of autobiographical documentary’ emerges in the 1960s in America, one in which documentary filmmakers explore themes like accented or embodied authorship, the relation between images and words or autobiographical approaches to memory and perception. Taking all of this into account, the article explores, towards the end, Mekas’s oeuvre as an exemplary case of minor cinema.