First of all, eyes are not what we use to see, literally or metaphorically. Vision in this sense doesn’t actually exist. This is settled science, as the mystics would say. We don’t actually “use” anything to “see.” That’s not what’s going on. Sight is something that happens to us. When the second plane crashed into the tower and your mother, your classmate, your lover watching TV beside you said “I can’t look!” and turned their gaze away, what was actually happening was a futile attempt to reassert authority, Oedipus leaving Corinth (no coincidence he blinded himself). Contrary to what the half-educated may tell you, the seer is sight’s first victim. When an infant takes in its first bleary scenes outside the womb, that’s original sin. Michael Powell understood this, and when he dared to make a movie about it (Peeping Tom), it ended his career once and for all. That’s what the censors really objected to. Not the sleaze, the rape, the bloody fucking murder, but the observation that seeing is bad for your health. It’s “a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film” all wrapped up pretty with a bow, 15 years in advance. No, as a first definition, eyes are our first scapegoat, and we spill its hot blood thousands of times a year, privately and publicly, usually without even realizing it.

Okay, but what else? Eyes are also the lie we tell ourselves to let us believe we can have a relationship with God. They’re the empirical proof of the existence of vacuum. They’re, of course, what let Descartes exist. If you want to get anywhere with your thinking, it’s best to conceive of your eyes as machines whose job is to tell you one continuous lie for your entire life. Importantly, they aren’t malevolent, they’re merely tools of malevolence. For proof of this, study any projection of higher dimensional space and note that it only exists in your mind. Alternately, watch INLAND EMPIRE, which is a different approach to the same problem. This isn’t a lie we can ever actually reject, because our best friend is telling it to us, but we can learn some ways to not nod our head quite so vigorously (Deleuze learned this lesson from Bergson, I suspect, thus his fondness for the man). Recommendations:

-Renounce Renaissance perspective.
-Stop using clocks whose mechanism you can’t hear. An artificial tick won’t suffice, it has to be integral to the function.
-Stop celebrating your birthday.
-Read books in alphabets you don’t understand. Not “look at,” read.
-Choose a favorite dashcam car crash video. It’s very important that it be from a dashcam.
-Study speleology (the ethnography of darkness).

I am weak, and sometimes do not follow my own advice. But I have no doubt that doing so will help you understand the thing you think has told you about these words.

One of the more profound sicknesses of the human creature is the compulsion to consume art which mirrors in some way what they perceive to be the “character” of their the reality they find themselves in at the moment. The soldier plays Call of Duty, the suicidal depressive listens to The Smiths, and the “self-isolating” person watches The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Or Bug. Or Rear Window. Specifics differ, but everyone agrees on the basic premise, and everyone who considers themselves something resembling a “cinephile” has an opinion about what the best “quarantine movies” are, by which is almost always meant something along the lines of “movies where the characters are stuck at home.” The gravitational force is strong enough that even Anthology Film Archives sent out an email a few days ago with a “‘virtual’ film series” of “movies that take place almost solely – if not entirely – within the confines of the protagonists’ apartments or houses.” Now, as Anthology represents a “film culture” that actually deserves to be called such, this is easily the best such list I’ve seen, polyvalent and heterogenous with ample space given to “unconventional” work (i.e. Snow’s Wavelength, Gidal’s Room Film, five of Warhol’s pre-Morrissey films), but even their selections are dominated by films of the same basic category as is being recommended elsewhere (albeit a better class thereof). Clearly, the time is ripe for a consideration of the Single-Location Drama.

First of all, I suppose, it’s worth considering that the Single-Location Drama is not, in fact, a drama most of the time, but rather falls somewhere on the horror/thriller spectrum. This is maybe a minor point, but it’s worth briefly dwelling on. On the Anthology list, by my count 14 of the 27 conventional features it recommends obviously fit this description (I’m counting Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles because it’s obviously a horror movie). This majority, here and on similar lists, is probably to some extent just a reflect of the Spiegelian feelings this and all crises tend to inspire in most people, but it would not be so manifestly apparent were the source pool not already saturated with it. A movie confined to a single location, it seems, is comparable to a caged animal: some may acclimate well, but most become paranoid, neurotic, tormented by claustrophobia. This is certainly true of Rear Window, the only film of this sort to get the episode-length parody treatment from The Simpsons and thus the standard-bearer of the scenario (brief aside: long-time followers may be aware of the low opinion I hold of Hitchcock’s work, a subject I’ll probably write a post about one of these days, but Rear Window is a rare exception to this, and in my estimation his best movie). What can we learn from this? Without rehashing one of the most exhaustively analyzed movies ever made, or even worse getting into a discussion of “scopophilia,” let me make this point: Rear Window is a “one-room” movie that for its entire runtime is obsessed with finding ways to be anywhere other than in this one room. Quite literally, it’s a film built around staring out the window. Now for the purposes of the narrative’s metalogic this is obviously a whole psychosexual thing that I already said I wasn’t going to get into, but I want to draw attention to something much more basic about it, namely that it suggests there’s something inherently anti-filmic about the constraints of the Single-Location Drama, that when you confine this sort of narrative spatially it, in a sense, panics.

This is an interesting situation. We know better than to believe the character of a generic mode tells us anything about people themselves, so what does it tell us about cinema’s imagining of people that when you deprive a drama of spatial latitude it generates stories of loathing and paranoia? There’s perhaps a sort of smothered auto-Sarteanism at work here, a model of human interaction where sustained proximity inevitably leads to hatred (call it the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Theory of Human Relationships), but of course then there’s a work like Repulsion, which theorizes that in the absence of “real” people, the subject in confinement will invent tormenters out of the walls themselves. It’s not that there’s anything inherently horrible about being stuck at home just on its own; the non-dramatic selections on Anthology’s list are certainly not overloaded with doom and gloom, tending at most towards a fairly mild degree of claustrophobia. No, what the Single-Location Drama really reveals is the deep misery hidden within the seemingly harmonious marriage of dramatic narrative to cinematic form.

I understand like this might seem like a rather broad claim, but it really isn’t. There is, of course, no such thing as non-narrative cinema, but the dramatic structure which any hack screenwriting book will teach you is the foundation of narrative in reality represents only a small fraction of what is possible in cinema. All the way back to Aristotle, the dramatic is predicated on a model of action in which movement derives from the mechanics of narrative, but narrative intrinsically derives from movement in cinema. This contradiction is easy enough to disguise in a “normal” film, as suitably varied sets and locations are enough to generate a convincing illusion of grammatically coherent causality even from a slavishly Aristotelian script. Without this crutch for support, however, suddenly it becomes necessary to generate the same “dramatic intensity” (i.e. the same inversion of causality) almost entirely from the characters themselves, which is only possible with sustained emotional extremes. Thus crying and gnashing of teeth. This is, to be clear, not a slight on any of these films, which are generally excellent, but rather an observation on the perversity of the relationship which undergird them: dramatic convention positions itself as a disciplinary logic for narrative, checking its excesses and imposing rational structure (little wonder the field really came into vogue post-Enlightenment). This is continuity editing’s basic claim to legitimacy. But when locked in a room with the image and asked to take the lead, it’s in fact this staid, moderating force that turns hysterical.

A closing aside: a horror film, as so many of these single-location films are, can often (although not always) be characterized as an act whereby cinema goes through this hysteria, emerging out the other side bloody and victorious, carrying what it can use from it for its own ends. Thus, many of these aforementioned single-location horror films are, ontologically speaking, acts of murder, or at least of lethal force in self-defense.

This is the text of a presentation I gave at NYU’s 2020 Cinema Studies Student Conference, as part of a panel with two other presenters. I’ve slightly altered it for readability, but otherwise this is what I said in front of 20-30 people.

In 1837, in the Ninth Brigewater Treatise, Charles Babbage declares that “No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.” 135 years later, in the film The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Peter Sasdy, a character declares that “the room holds an image, and when people go in there they pick it up. […] It must act like a recording, fixed in the floor and the walls, right in the substance of them, a trace of what happened in there, and we pick it up, we act as detectors, decoders, amplifiers… it would have to be in the stone.” I aim to demonstrate how this film reexamines 19th century spirtualistic theories of matter such as Babbage’s in the context of 20th century technological empiricism and the generic conventions of folk horror, and how from this a model of both film spectatorship and its very materiality emerges that is, given its provenance, suitably spooky.

Kneale and Sasdy’s film popularized the idea that sensory impressions could be “recorded” by inert material, in particular certain kinds of stone, to the extent that it’s sometimes believed to have invented it, but as the Babbage quote should suggest, it can be traced back to far earlier sources. Its full history is obscure, complex, and beyond my scope here, but it could be thought of as a particular form of psychometry, a parapsychological practice based on “reading” the history of an object through direct physical contact with it. The term was coined in the 1840s by Joseph Rodes Buchanan, an American physician who believed “The Past is entombed in the Present!” and that in the future “the psychologist and the geologist will go hand in hand.”

There are two things I want to emphasize here: first, that a “stone tape” is essentially a 19th century idea, emerging from the same early modernist stew as photography and, by extension, cinema; and second, that the language used to describe it could, with only minor tweaking, pass for writing on cinema from decades later. It’s not that the concepts are inextricably intertwined, but rather that they must be recognized as emerging from similar sociocultural contexts, and embodying similar interests.

Given this, it should be clear that in the concept of a stone tape there is substantial potential for developing something akin to a theory of cinema. To see how we get from here to there, let’s look at Kneale and Sasdy’s film in more detail. Made for the BBC in 1972, it centers on a team of corporate electronics researchers who have taken up residence in a large manor house, disused since the war, to try and develop a new recording medium, superior to magnetic tape. When they arrive, however, they learn that the would-be computer storage room has not been refurbished. The workers refused. Enraged, the head of the project, Peter Brock, goes to investigate, and accidentally uncovers an old stairwell, leading to nowhere. Jill, the computer technician of the team, sees the image of a woman at the top of the stairs, and hears her scream horribly. Soon Brock and most of the others have has similar experiences in the room, although it is clear that Jill is the most “sensitive” to it. Brock, a driven, overbearing empiricist, becomes interested in the phenomena, and attempts to document it, and throws their entire state-of-the-art technological arsenal at it.

Note the divergence here from the conventions of stories of ghosts and hauntings. This is not a narrative of belief vs. non-belief. The “reality” of the phenomenon is quickly and readily accepted, even by those who can’t personally sense it. In this film, as in the writings of figures like Babbage and Buchanan, the paranormal is to be approached with a scientistic mindset, if not a strictly scientific one. But in the film, as is generally the case in real life, this approach yields little. Tapes record silence, cameras emptiness, sensors read normal, even though almost everyone there at least heard something. Soon, Brock has the breakthrough quoted at the beginning: that it must be a form of recording, picked up by the mind directly without conventional sensory interface. He becomes convinced that this is the breakthrough new recording medium they have been looking for, if only they can determine how the mechanism operates.

Jill has some doubts, as she is still troubled by the actual nature of the “recording.” They’ve long-since determined it’s the moments leading up to a servant girl’s death, falling from the steps. Jill can’t help but wonder if there’s still something of the girl herself left, if it’s really just an ephemeral trace. And furthermore, the stairway is not tall enough that the fall should have killed her. In their excitement over commercial potential, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something important they’re disregarding. But she pushes these fears down and Brock, having overstated to the head of the company how close they were to a working prototype, leads an all-night assault on the room, blasting it with noise and light in an attempt to manually trigger “playback.” At the end, though, the room feels different, empty, and it is clear that all he has succeeded in doing is “erasing” the recording. The project is given up as a failure by everyone except Jill, who still sensed something, something different, older. Learning that the stones in the room far predate the rest of the building, possibly by thousands of years, she develops a theory that the recording must “degrade” over time, and that although the servant girl’s recording has been destroyed an earlier one still exists in a more corroded form. Brock, frustrated at his failure, brushes her off and sends her on leave. Before she goes, however, she is drawn to the room one last time, and finds herself confronted by indistinct shapes which drive her, terrified, up the stairs into an impossible, towering ledge from which she falls and dies. The film ends with Brock visiting the room one last time, after it has been marked off as a site for historical preservation, and hears its new recording of Jill’s final moments.

As this synopsis should suggest, it’s difficult to not see the room as a sort of technological artifact, one with which comparison to cinema is essentially unavoidable. Film is, after all, itself a medium which captures ephemeral traces and plays them back to a semi-passive figure. In this context, what the stone tape, as realized in this film, does is manifest objectively what is implicit and unspoken in the subjectivity of the cinematic spectator, namely that the same phenomenal input can be received in radically different ways, and that it is fundamentally inaccessible to empirical measurement. But it goes a step beyond this, too: not only is it inaccessible, but there is a Faustian character to seeking it. It is more or less clear what it does, but “why?” and “how?” are dangerous questions. The danger of seeking or discovering certain kinds of knowledge is a common theme of folk horror, but by staging this lesson with an apparatus somewhere between the demonic and the cinematic and applying an overtly technological, empiricist framing to it, the film encourages one to think about cinema itself in these terms. One may be inclined to think of the early reputation of photography as a stealer of souls, entombing not only the past but its spirits with it. The real spookiness of the film, however, is that it suggests the exact opposite: that the human spirit passes, and only its empty shell persists, repeating itself until it degrades into shapeless horror. It resembles the degeneration of film itself, a record of life and action which in its slow decomposition becomes steadily more blurred and abstracted until the moments it once contained are rendered illegible. By depicting even the ancient and unknowable stone tape as incapable of flawlessly preserving that which it captures, the film suggests that, contrary to the ambitions of Brock and his team, and by extension the whole project of technological modernism, the ephemerality of movement and sensation cannot be overcome. All recording mediums contain within themselves their own reduction into base elements. Any humanly recognizable detail is contingent and temporary. Thus it suggests that in a recording something has always already been lost, and that that loss is exacerbated with each passing moment, the already-inaccessible Real receding further with each moment. It suggests a model in which cinema is a haunted echo of what it seems to depict, and the spectator a receiver which never gets a clear transmission.

I think I should state clearly first and foremost that I regard Michael Bay as, fundamentally, a fascist filmmaker. That’s the language his movies are written in, and to attempt to obfuscate or minimize that would be doing a disservice them. Any attempt at some sort of “left Bayhem” would be as misguided as an attempt at “left Heideggerianism.” But Bay, rather like Heidegger, is too important to ignore entirely. He’s arguably the most important filmmaker of his generation, in fact, and not for no reason: his films are singular, challenging, and above all else incredibly instructive about the culture which produced and elevated them. You can’t go around, you have to go through. Beyond my own personal fascinations, it is for that reason that I feel compelled to write about 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. 13 Hours is the film in which the paranoid myth-logic of Bay’s vision can be glimpsed most clearly. There’s no center to this vision, really, no coherent core idea, but in dealing with a real event, one which Bay obviously genuinely cares about the real participants in (something which was very clearly not the case in Pain and Gain, Bay’s other recent “based on a true story” film), many of the layers of abstraction which tend to coat his work (i.e. giant robots) are removed, and the internal cosmology can be seen more clearly.

Within the conservative political imaginary Benghazi occupies a strange double position wherein the US military is simultaneously hero and villain, and 13 Hours must necessarily embody this same contra-duality itself. Thus the film chooses as its heroes ex-military security contractors, rather than actual US government soldiers. By centering the narrative on these American mercenaries, assigned to a CIA compound near the embassy, the film solves the problem of how to disentangle the Troop-Patriot from the Obama administration. As “secret soldiers” they are set apart, avatars of the American Warrior as transcendental category. That some of them die, are mutilated, is a symbol of the wounds Benghazi caused to the Eternal American Empire’s vision of itself, aside from producing the ideologically valuable image of the martyr-icon.

Boris Groys has described Hitler’s theory of race and art (for him the two are inseparable) as one which casts himself as “a trainer, a coach for the German people” who “sought hidden, racially determined forces that had to be discovered and mobilized in the body of the German Volk,” something Groys positions as a sort of precursor to many of the “trainer” figures in recent Hollywood films who “try to get their charges to forget everything they have learned, heard, and thought and to trust only the inherent, hidden instincts of their bodies in order to discover the powers to which their bodies are genetically destined.” I bring this up because such a figure is noticeably absent from 13 Hours. Surely one must exist in the pasts of all of these American Warriors, but he’s “off-screen.” We have no window into process by which America produces its Warriors. It’s simply already happened. This is vital to the fantasy which Bay wants to, has to, create, as it allows him to “off-screen” the entirety of the apparatus which produces military contractors and CIA annexes and Wars on Terrors. We only see what the imperial machine produces, not the machine itself.

With that said, some attention should be paid to how Bay represents the Islamic militants as well. Like the rest of the film, the underlying logic is fascistic, but this has results one might not expect. The most instructive comparison might be with Starship Troopers. Verhoeven’s giant gooey bugs are, of course, a consciously constructed ideal of the fascist Other as that which must simultaneously be infinitely, contemptibly beneath the Volk and an existential threat to it. It’s subtextually obvious, of course, that these “bugs” are both no less intelligent than humans and probably didn’t initiate the conflict, but in the fascistic text they are an irreducibly alien foe with whom there is no hope of understanding or conciliation. 13 Hours sees the Islamic militant as no less irreducibly alien and hostile, but beyond this it diverges, as instead of disgust and contempt there is an unmistakable undercurrent of fearful respect for them as an adversary in war who may genuinely be superior. Like any true reactionary, Bay can’t help but admire the jihadist, the most wholly unapologetic imperialist in the world, as totally devoted to the Caliphate as the SS were to the Reich, as the Dutch East India Company were to the colonial empire. From the moment shit hits the fan, it is clear that the militants are the ones controlling the situation, that they can and will lay siege as long as they have the advantage and will melt away into air the minute they lose it, that they will never be caught, that the Department of Defense will never know who had had a missile locked onto the coordinates of the compound for months, or who actually fired it. The two paranoid refrains which dominate the film are “we shouldn’t be here” and, in any encounter with a non-American, “we don’t know if these are our allies or not.” These are not the words of indomitable Übermensch. Yes, it can be argued that the implicit purpose is to show how poorly the military is functioning under a usurper (read: a black Democrat), but the same process by which the war machine is hidden undermines this. If we are too close to the action to see why it is happening, we are too close to see it happening any other way, as well. In the first few minutes of the film, when two contractors find their truck stopped at a “checkpoint” and surrounded by potential hostiles, they get out of it by pulling a gun and telling the men there’s a drone above locked on and ready to massacre them. It works but, of course, it was a bluff: the lesson is that America is holding onto its control in the Middle East by maintaining a posture of control. If push comes to shove (as it did in Benghazi), that posture is liable to collapse very quickly (and now, of course, Libya is a “failed state” — it’s up to you to decide what that says about this film). Notably, that scenes ends without it ever being clear who was actually holding them up, and what group they were with.

It is not that the film “humanizes” the militants, quite the opposite. Their dehumanization in the form of being rendered as essentially interchangeable servants of God ready to die for their cause, though, is a case for them as warriors, not against. Even as we watch them get sniped over and over it is hard not to think that the US is unprepared for this threat. The Arab mind is as foreign and barbarous to Bay as it is to the average Western reactionary, but he isn’t so sure that means we can conquer them. The ending of the film is in a sense an inversion of Starship Troopers: images of the families of the alien victors scouring the fields around the ex-compound for their bodies, while the surviving heroic losers stand on around waiting to be evacuated, feeling very afraid.

A brief digression: it’s not insignificant, I think, that the star of this film is John Krasinski. Since getting a foothold with The Office (itself arguably a normalization of the fascistic social dynamics of the white-collar office), Krasinski has gradually positioned himself more and more overtly as the avatar of US imperialism in Hollywood, the guy who’s contributing his friendly, recognizable face to the worldwide fight for freedom and democracy. 13 Hours wasn’t the start of this transformation, but it is without a doubt what ensured the career move would pay off; he’s Jack Ryan now, the CIA analyst taking down Venezuela’s corrupt dictator, and proudly appearing in the Benghazi movie despite the (superficially) liberal climate of the Obama years had to help him a great deal in securing the role.

What’s fascinating to me, though, that it’s Krasinski who has come to serve this function in the culture industry. That roles which once would have gone to a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone now go to Dunder-Mifflin Jim signals to me that there’s been an important shift in how America chooses to represent itself, one that I think it’s necessary to understand if you want to wrap your head around the posture of imperial power now. It’s not that American imperialism is any less brutal or aggressive than it ever has been, but that since the collapse of the USSR it has become to its benefit that it appear not hyper-aggressive, but boring. In the absence of an enemy state superpower (or at least one with which the US is not intractably economically intertwined), the media image of the Superman becomes unnecessary, perhaps even counterproductive; better the “contractor” who’s nice to look at without being too memorable. Implicitly or explicitly, a Blackwater merc is just a guy trying to feed his family. He’s capable of heroism, but he himself is a non-entity, not worth paying attention to. No avatar of Western power has ever been human, per se, but Krasinski’s ascendancy shows that the non-humanity of the Company Man, who can be anything and nothing, has replaced that of the Terminator, who can only be Death.

Okay, digression over. As that should suggest, despite being a “true story,” this is a film populated by ciphers and phantasies, not people, and as individuals they are more or less interchangeable. The real heart of the film, its real purpose for Bay, if perhaps not his producers, is as an exercise in weapons fetishism. Bay shoots the impact of an RPG like a pornographer shoots a facial. 13 Hours is a film almost entirely devoid of women, and neither is it homoerotic in the way, say, quintessential Schwarzenegger film Predator (a full-on queer romance) is. There are plenty of sweaty, muscular male forms, but Bay’s eroticism is entirely the eroticism of the gun barrel and the bullet hole.

13 Hours is a work of military-industrial myth-making, but is unusual as such in that it is, at its core, about failure. And not valiant failure, heroic defeat in battle, but rather the utter humiliation of the outpost of a great Empire falling to ragtag local militants. But the choice of subject is not as surprising as it seems. In his study of iconoclasm, Groys speaks of “the image of destruction left behind by the iconoclastic gesture” (and the Benghazi attack is certainly an iconoclastic gesture; iconoclasm is fundamental to the aesthetic logic of jihadi terrorism) as something which is “quasi-automatically transformed into the victim’s image of triumph.” This certainly describes something like what 13 Hours does.

In another life Bay may have been one of the great war artists, he “who had the power to witness heroic action and inscribe it into the memory of humankind,” but in an era in which warriors can auto-mythologize with Go-Pros and media blitzes, Bay cannot fill this role, and in 13 Hours we see him try to compensate by reversing the process of the jihadi propagandist: he tries to turn his art into war. But Bay is not a warrior, much as he may wish he were. His efforts produce not more a more “real” experience but a hyper-artificial one; hard, physical impacts denting the walls of Call of Duty maps. But in an era where things like the Air Force’s tower defense recruitment game, this feels appropriate: the vision of American empire is abstracted, gamified, Farocki’s “war at a distance,” but that the reality of its administration still contains the irreducibly base. Americans still die in wars. Thus, almost despite himself, in this hyper-artificiality Bay (and cinematographer Dion Beebe, whose hard, digital images are invaluable in creating this effect) manages to schematize the encounter between the sublime illusion of empire and the material reality of its administration better than any other contemporary filmmaker.

I got the chance to watch Liberté, Albert Serra’s new movie, the other night. It was one of the most controversial movies on the festival circuit last year, and it still hasn’t (as of this writing) gotten any sort of public release. As such, I figure it’s probably worth setting down some my thoughts on it, since it’s still only been written about mostly by film critics and other people similarly unprepared for a movie like this. Like the work of Grandrieux or d’Agata (two obvious reference points for thinking about this film), it’s hard to write about this without lapsing into incoherence or pseudo-intellectual babble, so this is more a set of stray observations than anything conclusive.

The most basic gloss on Liberté would be that it’s about some libertines who get together in a forest one night a few years before the French Revolution to get their kicks. There’s obviously a political reading for this, but like The Death of Louis XIV (also a film with a very “political” subject) the point really seems to be the depiction of a physical process in breakdown. In Louis it’s the life-sustaining functions of the human body, whereas in Liberté it’s the life-reproducing ones. Or, more bluntly, it’s about not being able to cum. Serra has made anti-erotica: over two hours of depraved sexual debauchery where no one is actually getting off in any concrete way. The only semen in the film comes from horses. Even erections are rare. The vision of libertinage here is neither Sade’s sovereign passion nor Pasolini’s fascist analogue but rather a simulacrum of licentiousness, in which the practitioners are far too wrapped up in the idea of their own perversity to still derive any particular physical enjoyment from it. That most visible expression of pleasure in the film is on the burned face of the amputee getting his stump bloodied by the prongs of an iron fork says everything about the dynamics at work.

Despite a few extended monologues and conversations, Liberté very much resembles to me what cinema could have looked like if it had taken another 50 years for sound to come to it. Not that its sound design (a constant hum of crickets punctured occasionally by muted, fleshy thwacks and similar) is irrelevant, but rather that its function could, generally speaking, be accomplished equally well by rudimentary live accompaniment. This is a film which could make its point just as easily with some intertitles and judicious color tinting. I kept thinking about the early shorts of Keaton and Chaplin while watching it, specifically how they were framed as a set of of discrete, interconnected cells which defined the physical interactions within. Liberté is in many ways the inbred grandchild of those films, a series of self-contained pornographic tableaux put in relation to each other by the voyeuristic gazes of other libertines who drift through the shadows at their outskirts. Serra essentially turns the forest into a kind of pocket dimension with its own social structure and spatial logic, which can be apprehended by the viewer only through how figures move and interact within it.

Above all else Liberté is certainly an action film, and those are the terms in which it should be thought of. More than libertinage, or the French Revolution, or class society, or sexuality, it’s about the movement of forms in space, about coupling and separating, proximity and distance, freedom and constraint. I’m not an expert on Serra by any means but from my engagement with his work thus far an overarching there seems to be taking people and/or stories from long enough ago that they have come to exist only in the abstract, as ideas or emblems, and re-situate them in physical actuality, in movement and exertion and process. Films about fucking (the act of, not the desire for) are all in some way about “movement and exertion and process,” of course, but Liberté makes us especially aware of this because, unlike most films about fucking, it isn’t trying to seduce you. I suspect this is what drives the strongly negative reactions to it, more than anything. The hyper-libidinalized repressive impulse of hysterical Victorianism is alive and well in the commentariat class, after all.

Note: I wrote this back in Summer 2018 for fun but didn’t have anywhere to post it so it just sat on my hard drive. I’ve tried to touch it up a bit for presentation here but the core argument et cetera is fundamentally the same as I laid out way back then.

Tobe Hooper sets the scene in Mortuary against a background hum of death. Leslie Doyle (Denise Crosby) and her two children have just arrived at their new home, a huge, crumbling manor house where she plans to start a new life as a mortician. They are met by Elliot, a local official with the pronounced limp and aggressive laugh of a sinister carny. “You know they opened up another new nursing home since you were here last,” he says. “County-owned, cha-ching. Not to mention we’ve got the most dangerous highway in the state out there. Believe me, you’ll have lots of business.” Much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s opening minutes, with its radio broadcast of a seemingly endless string of horrific news bulletins, our protagonists and everything that will happen to them are placed within a landscape of ever-present death and violence. The crucial difference here is that while all this death simply happens around the hapless teens of TCM, it is on some level necessary in Mortuary; after all, there would, literally speaking, be no mortuary without bodies.

I feel kind of dirty beginning this piece with a comparison to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and yet it’s very hard not to. It is the reference point for any discussion of Hooper, the nasty, impolitic drive-in movie that crossed the blood-brain barrier and entered into the establishment film canon in a way nothing else of its ilk has been able to, save Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and perhaps Carpenter’s Halloween. It is the movie that put him on the map, at the cost, however, of any cartographical impact beyond that. Instead, the received wisdom is that TCM was a fluke, at least in terms of Tobe Hooper’s oeuvre. Admiration may extend to his gleefully gonzo sequel from more than a decade later, the smiling comedy mask to compliment TCM’s frowning tragic one, and perhaps even Poltergeist, although “everyone knows” that Spielberg was the real visionary behind it. Beyond that, though, there’s little to be found but wasted potential and inept absurdity, certainly nothing worth the time unless one is a “horror fan” (suspect, lacking taste, not serious about cinema) or the host of a bad-movie podcast (already dead inside). This is the common attitude towards genre filmmakers, especially those of Hooper’s generation, their most groundbreaking achievements accorded tokenistic recognition, the rest of their output ignored unless it is deemed sufficiently removed from the taint of the grindhouse and the video store, but none have gotten it as badly as Hooper. The reality, however, is that the vitality and creative energy Hooper displayed in TCM is present throughout his filmography, even as late as Mortuary, his last US-produced film, released direct-to-DVD in 2005.

In many ways Mortuary is a natural companion piece to TCM. Both deal with outsiders in small communities whose values and rituals are largely opaque to them. More importantly, they deal with the two modes in which dead flesh is commoditized: butchery and embalming. There is a fascination with the molding and transformation of bodies evident throughout Hooper’s career, from the space vampires of Lifeforce, to the literally imploding protagonist of Spontaneous Combustion, to predatory laundry machine folding hapless workers like bedsheets in The Mangler. Some outside force is always seeking to reconstruct our minds and bodies towards its own ends in Hooper’s films, the challenge is always to do something about it while there is still hope to remain yourself. In the case of Mortuary, this force is a Lovecraftian entity attempting to expand its domain into this world through a portal nested deep within the tunnels which run beneath the graveyard (which just happens to be adjacent to our heroes’ new house). It is not shown to possess any conventional physical form, acting rather through vine-like tendrils which spread and grow on contact with blood, capable of entering both living or dead bodies and controlling them towards its own ends. While in TCM the reconfiguration of flesh was carried out by other people towards libidinal and economic ends, here the same process is enacted by a force both far more and far less obscure. Far more, because its very existence is predicated upon principles beyond human understanding. Far less, because it is ultimately less disquieting to conceive of our butchery by extra-dimensional monsters than Texas farmers.

It was essentially inevitable, given this interest in the destructive remolding of the (human) body, that Hooper would eventually turn his focus to the mortuary, the one site where this practice is socially legitimized, where dead people are permitted to turn into dead bodies. This function works against Hooper’s empathetic program, his refusal to gloss over the loss entailed by this transformation, and thus out of philosophical necessity he must reverse the procedure. Thus he does not make a film of the mortuary as a stable institution, as well-functioning machine (see The Autopsy of Jane Doe for an example of this), but rather as a site of ritualistic power transference. “That which is dead… cannot eternal lie / With strange eons… even death may die,” as the plaque Leslie finds in the depths of her newly-acquired graveyard reads. The house she has bought was fitted with the tools of the trade long ago, but has sat empty for decades following the death of its previous operators. Local legend has it they kept a horrifically deformed son locked in the attic, in a room Leslie’s teenage son Jonathan (Dan Byrd), isolated and distant in the ambient manner of a teenager old enough to have discovered his parents fallibility but too young to know how to deal with it, takes as his own on the basis of some strange instinct, his fingers playing over the son’s name, Bobby, carved into the windowsill. This is important: the movie does not attempt to instill doubt that the legend is true, that Bobby is still alive, that he is killing people. Mortuary oscillates around a central point of unspecified, supernatural evil, and Hooper does not want us to be misled into believing it has not been present in the earth for a long time.

The crucial move, however, the one which links this deeply to TCM, is the way this entity is positioned within the social structure depicted by the film: like the cannibals of Texas, the murderous inhumanity of this entity is capable of existing entirely harmoniously with the local “civilization.” It is ostensibly pro-social capitalist enterprise, after all, which provides this entity with a new source for the corpses that it feeds on, complimenting the steady trickle of victims Bobby has been providing (out of a mixture of fear and alienation, it is strongly implied) since the mortuary closed down, and it is this which triggers the rapid escalation of violence by which the film is paced. Indeed, the locals are encoded less as psychologically nuanced “people” than as neurotic archetypes: The Sheriff (terrified of teenagers sneaking into the cemetery and making “graveyard babies”); The Sleazy Local Politician (makes repeated advances on Leslie); The Juvenile Delinquents (two girls, one boy, obsessed with proving to everyone how much they’re fucking each other). While Leslie begins as a real person, even she becomes The Mother after the tendrils of the entity get her, performing an aggressive, degraded pantomime of Christian Matriarch Presiding Over Family Dinner in a filthy kitchen, enforced prayer and all. Anyone else occupied by the entity similarly becomes a crude, brutal simulation of what the ostensibly autonomous person used to be. The only people “of the town” spared from this fate are Liz (Alexandra Ali) and Grady (Rocky Marquette), the only friends Jonathan manages to make, who are perhaps distinguished by the platonic ideal of their relationship (Grady’s homosexuality is revealed in one of the most admirably understated sequences of its kind), free of the psychosexual frustration evident in everyone else (even the owner of the diner, a woman constantly referencing her own long-gone youth, wishing she were still as sexually desirable as her niece). Thus the town in its entirety can be understood as a system which functions in accordance with that of the entity, although the entity’s designs exceed it. Where the township seeks merely to turn its own production of corpses to a profit (“county-owned, cha-ching”), the entity transforms the corpses themselves into tools by which to expand its power.

In the 30 years between TCM and Mortuary, what has changed for Hooper is that nothing has changed. The fundamental material of American society is still death, and it is that upon which all our social rituals are built and ultimately deferential to. Its day-to-day existence is still built upon a mountain of mutilated bodies. This is how it always was, of course, but it’s in Mortuary that he takes the time to make you understand that if the corpses came back all that would change is the distance between idea and action.

A few months ago a mutual of mine DM’d me in relation to a minor argument I had semi-accidentally instigated. While we were hashing it out he told me that, as an undergrad in cinema studies, he was “kinda having a crisis” over the value of filmmaking, even radical filmmaking, and asked me what, if anything, I think is “vital right now” in filmmaking as a political practice. We had a fairly scattered but fruitful conversation, which I’ve attempted here to flesh out and develop into something a bit more focused and coherent. I figure if you’re reading this it’s almost certainly because you follow me on Twitter, or at least move in the same general “spheres,” which means you almost certainly already have an interest in either cinema or left theory (or both). Given this, a brief polemic of sorts on the intersection of these subjects seems like a good way to inaugurate this new exercise in vanity. And so:

I once scrawled my guiding philosophy as a scholar of the moving image in the front of my edition of a particularly thick reference tome of some canonical cinema studies texts: “Cinema is an invention with no future.” Not just economically: the very material of cinema is the past; the “now” recorded is always a “then” by the time it can be seen. Time embalmed, etc. etc. In this sense it is the inverse of politics, whose material is of course the future. This is a rather substantial problem for any non-reactionary project of “political filmmaking,” but it is not an insurmountable one. All that is really necessary is to stage the images such in the act of viewing their temporality collapses forwards, towards the future, without losing their historical materiality (to see this in action, watch Fortini/Cani). So radical cinema is possible. But it’s difficult, and genuinely great, genuinely radical filmmakers have always been rare. What is unique about the present moment, though, is that most of those we have (Godard, Straub, Adachi) are very old. What will happen when they’re gone?

If we want to look for a cause for this situation, an important one is certainly the long, terrible left-melancholic hangover from May ’68, which turned much intellectual production towards thought that, whatever its merit (and I am not saying there is none!), was and is fundamentally non-threatening to capital. The institutional structures that distributed this kind of thought are today no longer able to exert the sort of hegemonic control they once were, but we’re still stuck with generations of artists/filmmakers who were raised on that stuff and, while some of them do manage to make good work despite it, how many of them have learned the lessons, say, Straub & Huillet did? How many have that commitment and that clarity or purpose? It’s not the sign of a healthy film culture when the most strident radicals working qualify for senior discounts at the multiplex, is my point.

I’m not someone who believes in the “death of cinema” (already dead; no future, remember?), but the old paradigm is outmoded and whatever new one is emerging has little use for “cinema,” that techno-ideological emblem of the 20th century. You can’t just start making movies like La chinoise again, much less Oktybar. The reality is that while cinema remains an important arm of the culture industry, it seems of little use for agitprop these days. The space for openly radical work in the “film world” (what little still exists) is becoming smaller and more isolated, despite the barrier to producing moving image work being lower than ever. Thus Connor O’Malley’s Howard Schultz videos, posted on Twitter and then edited together for YouTube, end up being a more incisive and necessary work of political art than pretty much anything screened at a festival last year (much less that had any sort of distribution). It seems to me the best cinema as-such can hope to do now, politically, is help create better, smarter radicals. No one is becoming a communist because of Film socialisme, is my point. This is not to denigrate Godard or any of the “old guard,” I love thorny, difficult art and would attribute a great deal of the development of my own political thought to repeated exposure to these sort of films. But any young filmmaker who wants their art to matter should probably forget about “the cinema,” and if they’re really fine just making challenging work for their fellow travelers they had better be sure they actually have the grit to challenge them.

The name of this blog is also that of a short by anti-colonialist filmmaker René Vautier, from 1974. It consists of a conversation between a film director and a younger woman (perhaps his mistress) in her apartment. He has just seen an Algerian man (“properly dressed, almost no accent”) attacked and savagely beaten by two police officers for tapping one on the shoulder to ask for directions. The director, watching, stood frozen in place, unable to move until one of the cops told him to fuck off, or he’ll be next. He says that he feels violé, that he was somehow “forced” to watch. Now, he has resolved that he must make a film about this outrage, to strike back against this injustice. But not right now, in five years or so, because, or course, if he made it right now it would be too incendiary, no one would finance it, he would have to sell everything he owned. If he was lucky enough to show it to some critics when it was all finished they wouldn’t dare say anything positive about it, and then his career would be over. Maybe a former colleague would buy him a drink in a café from time to time, in memory of the old days. So no, he has to wait. And when he does make it he has to make sure not to attack the police too directly, because of course police will still exist in five years and they’ll suppress the film if it’s too militant, so instead it will be about “the fact that I, right now, immediately, couldn’t do anything.” Vautier wrote the script for Le remords in 1957, but did not actually shoot it until 17 years later because, as the story goes, every actor he approached to play the filmmaker recognized in the character a real director they worked with, and refused out of fear of losing work. Ultimately, Vautier played the role himself, which in the final analysis might be the only honest way to do it, really. For me, this is the character that the “radical filmmaker” today most often resembles: the man who witnesses an atrocity, does nothing to stop it, and wants to do nothing but dissect his own inaction. It is not a universal condition, but it is an extremely common one, and, I fear, becoming more so by the year.