perto senza pena la finalità delle discipline.” Le sedute di formazione riprese da Harun Farocki (Die Be- werbung) rimandano sia all’ipotesi di Deleuze sia alla materialità ostinata di Rossellini. Lontano dal teo- rizzare le messe in scena del management, si tratta di riprenderne le varianti, gli ornamenti. Di fissarne (nel senso di fissare un colore) il discorso, di sequenza in sequenza, come i suoi effetti negli occhi e sui corpi degli alunni, tracciando così progressivamente lo schema manageriale; di scandagliare quest’«ani- ma» che domina più che animare coloro che non vengono più chiamati «salariati» né «lavoratori», ma «collaboratori».
Ed è alla sacralità del potere che si riferisce il lavoro del filosofo Pierre Legendre e del regista François Caillat (Dominium Mundi). Nello scontrarsi delle parate e delle feste del capitalismo manageriale, negli sguardi e sui volti degli «operatori di produzione», nel ricordo, attraverso il testo, della genealogia del potere globalizzato si svela la storicità (punto di sovversione) di un sistema che si vorrebbe «naturale», stato di natura («État de nature» diceva Rousseau) indiscutibile dell’umanità: perno sovversivo di un film che cerca le immagini di ciò che rende l’umano irriducibile ai poteri che si inventa.
IImmmmaaggiinnii //CCoonnttrroolllloo
Vediamo dunque che non esiste uno «stato di natura» delle immagini come non esiste lo «stato di natu- ra» del management.
È il campo in cui lavorano coloro che mettono in scena le immagini «già esistenti». Azioni come raccon- tare il mondo e scovare la verità si svolgono per loro attraverso l’utilizzo critico di immagini esistenti. Critico nel senso più profondo: nell’opera di Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci-Lucchi la liricità è spesso la guida proposta al pensiero dello spettatore. Images d’Orient – Tourisme vandale pone con grande po- tenza una problematica cruciale: quella del turismo, che si sa essere stato accompagnato da «prises de vues» («immagini-vedute») fin dai suoi inizi. Potere di filmare il mondo come cornice e gli esseri come comparse sulla scena fantasmata dell’esotismo. Non-potere dei filmati, che il lavoro di Gianikian e Ric- ci-Lucchi trasforma in resistenza, in inscrizione ostinata del reale, nei margini dell’indifferenza (il non vedere) dei viaggiatori. Inversione dei poteri: allo spettatore viene restituito il potere di vedere, alle im- magini dei turisti viene strappata la realtà degli esseri.
Viviamo nell’era diGoogle Earth. Un progetto europeo, che un esperto battezza “gli occhi degli internauti” proponendosi di aggiornarne le immagini, con dettagli a «meno di un metro». Vedere tutto. Da vicino. Ten- tazione dell’ubiquità, desiderio di vedere dove si rincontrerebbero (anche) il turismo e la sorveglianza? Quello che accomuna Manu Luksch (Faceless) e Christophe Cognet (Les Anneaux du serpent) è l’utiliz- zo dei video di sorveglianza. In una prospettiva comune (la critica del controllo) ma con due percorsi dif- ferenti. Faceless fa implodere il controllo per via dell’irruzione della finzione: un’attrice e una storia, cioè un racconto, nel mondo del tempo reale. Les Anneaux du serpent mette in crisi la sorveglianza grazie alla realtà dei luoghi e alla parola reinterpretata dei sorveglianti.
Da molto tempo ormai i documentaristi e i video artisti si sono impossessati delle registrazioni di con- trollo (ricordiamo il pioniere Michael Klier in Der Riese - Il Gigante - nel 1980). Queste immagini prov- vengono da macchine da presa dietro le quali non ci sono registi, ma gestori. Macchine da presa i cui angoli e scansioni di ripresa sono calcolati, per spazi che la presenza umana metterebbe in pericolo (umani-intrusi). Registi e artisti si rimpadroniscono (a favore dello spettatore) delle registrazioni che il potere moltiplica, riappropriazione che rende visibile a tutti ciò che doveva essere visto da un’istanza uni- ca. Che non ci si sbagli: la videosorveglianza non è priva di vantaggi per la protezione dei cittadini. Quel- lo che riportano i nostri due film-esempi è che la decisione di proteggere non ha granché di realmente civile. Il che forse li rende film autenticamente democratici.
1. In : L’Autre Journal n°1
2. Da non confondere con il savoir-faire del «visivo», sempre al servizio del commercio.
In May 1990 the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published a brief essay entitled Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle,1
in which he followed up on Michel Foucault’s analysis of «disciplinary societies» with an outline of «societies of control». His insight essentially amounted to a preliminary description of the new face of «power», and is highly comprehensive in that it can be applied to every level of human activity, from the family to the education system, from prison to the factory. “The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner – state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.” And he went on: “In a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.”
This perhaps gives an indication of the difficulties faced by the cinema when it sets out to describe and conceive of today’s world: the «gassy» nature of contemporary power systems represents a daunting challenge for the art of the «visible».2
Like concepts, this «spirit» or «soul» («terrifying news», according to Deleuze) does not impinge upon the concrete supports of the cinema, film or magnetic tape. It is also denied to the art of animators. One must, then, content oneself with the real.
Pursuing the ideas outlined in Deleuze’s essay, the programme of films brings together a number of ex- amples of this «making visible», which is the most important thing at stake in the cinema. As the title it- self clearly states, it will deal exclusively with faces (bodies) as they have been framed, presented, ac- companied by sound, edited. Narrated.
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Perhaps there was a time when everything seemed simple: there were those who had power and those who thought they should have it, the enemy and the ally (or possibly the «objective»). The goal of prop- aganda was to convey the message that the world is simple, divided in two, and that power is neither diffuse nor volatile. Palaces and monuments versus factories and streets. Groups of vested interests versus workers, class against class. Old against modern. Reaction against progress. That is how the film world operated at times in the years after the 1929 crisis, in the urgency of a world where what counted was immediacy, where the future was here and now: standing up to the Weimar police (Kampfmai), voting for Hindenburg despite everything (Einer für alle), getting the PCF into power (La Vie est à nous).
Consider Renoir’s political commitment. He believed in the Popular Front. His adaptation of Gorki (Les Bas Fonds, 1936) and his Marseillaise (1938) would once again rely on the support of the PCF and the CGT union. He was a believer, without, however, losing his taste for pulsating life (see the light in Toni, for instance), life as imagination or the absurd. Without stifling his keen sense of what was «changing» (La Règle du jeu, La Grande illusion). Without denying his perception that the theme of power is fraught with pitfalls when it comes to filming individuals. That what is filmed is the human being and not «good» and «evil», that a «badw» film offers viewers a disconcerting and upsetting image of themselves. That the in- herent nature of the «role» is the possibility of changing it. And that all «discourse» runs the risk of be- ing superseded by history. Is this the lesson of Fernando Cerchio’sVia dell’Impero? The imperial dis- course of the tragic era of Fascism manifests its reality, which was one of destruction and of the cancelling of historic authenticity through the control of that authenticity.
FACES OF THE POWER
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In an era in which television, that is flow, places the exaggerated expressions of quiz show competitors on the same level as pictures of massacres and has won a considerable number of contests for the «simplification» of the world, cinema (re)traces the original path, that of the evidence of bodies. «See- ing» power? More than anything else, Giuseppe Bertolucci (Panni sporchi) and the young Mirabelle Ang (Match Made) seem to say, albeit separated by time and culture, seeing its effects on the body. An entirely «political» trust in «being there», in the potential of time (of duration). A stubborn rejection of fascination, compassion, «humanitarian» impulses.
Faith in gestures, in silences, in the framing. A body, a place, a dialogue or story – commercial power is re- vealed in what it has destroyed. In the scars and expressions, in the forced smiles and grimaces of pain. The causes? It is up to the spectator to consider the thought animating these films: this body is his or her own. F
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«Humanitarian» attraction and compassion: documentary film-makers are exposed to the paradoxes of their practice: filming a person is filming humanity. Renoir was aware of this when he gave the brilliant Jules Barry the part of the «bad guy» in the Popular Front filmLe Crime de Monsieur Lange.
The other is a paradoxical “I”, sometimes despicable, an enemy, a disconcerting and awkward double when, for instance, one is dealing with a dictator. Some great films have run the risk of ending up being the «portrait of the dictator» (from José Maria Berzosa’s Pinochet to Barbet Schroeder’s Idi Amin Dada), experimenting with a range of «critical positions». Omar Amiralay chose a figure who was less easy to judge, perhaps because, as a Syrian, he is well aware that the portrait of the dictator must take account of the consensus supporting him (an unpleasant but indispensable lesson of history). He prefers what is a controversial figure in our democratic societies – the politician-businessman, the «low-key» master. But what he shows is the relation between a «critical» subject behind the camera and the filmed subject «placed at a distance», in other words, the possibility for cinema to resist seduction whilst grasping the charisma, addressing what amounts to a kind of «critical fraternity» with the man of power. At the centre of the story is the contradictory fabrication of the film (in which we can also see the chorus of critical in- tellectuals warning the director). Such contradictions are displayed in order to render visible the complex- ity of power and the reality of the «democratic debate», and to provide further scope for reflection. Johan van der Keuken has always been mistrustful of compassion for the «victims of power», preferring the energy of the word and the resources of editing. When he tackles the theme of high finance (I Love Dollars), he attempts to give a sensory dimension to powers and forces that have becomes «invisible», virtualized by the union between informatics and speculation. The power of financial flows can therefore only be «seen» in the «collision» between sequences organized in an implacable cinematographic map, between images and sounds (the violence of metaphors), between the hushed silence of the banks or broking houses and the noisy din of life. Van der Keuken prefers the anger of the editing to psychologi- cal illusion, aiming for a sensitive approach to intangible mechanisms.
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Why was Rossellini’s Louis XIV such a great success when it first came out in France? Perhaps the French found, in those pre-1968 years, the possibility of seeing power as a (sacralized) spectacle and show. Of grasping the modernity of the greatest figure of the Ancien Régime, while a celebrated satirical newspaper derided De Gaulle and his government by putting them in the guise of Louis XIV and his court. The exemplary value of the film can be put down to its precision, its exactness, its constant attention for the «material» meticulousness of the king’s actions, of politics.
Returning to Deleuze: “Many young people strangely boast of being «motivated»; they re-request appren- ticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.” The training sessions filmed by
Harun Farocki (Die Bewerbung) can be related both to Deleuze’s hypothesis and to Rossellini’s stubborn materiality. Rather than theorizing the ways in which management presents itself, the film is concerned with the variants, the ornaments, with fixing (in the sense of fixing a colour) the discourse, sequence by sequence, for instance its effects as discernible in the eyes and bodies of the students, thereby gradu- ally outlining the managerial schema. It is more a question of probing this dominant «soul» than of an- imating those who are no longer called «wage-earners» or «workers» but «assistants».
The sacralized nature of power is the focus of the work of the philosopher Pierre Legendre and director François Caillat (Dominium Mundi). In the collision of the parades and parties of managerial capitalism, in the gazes and on the faces of the «production operators», in the recollection, through the text, of the genealogy of globalized power, it is possible to discern the historicity (point of subversion) of a system presented as «natural», as humanity’s unquestionable state of nature («État de nature», to use Rousseau’s term) – the subversive fulcrum of a film that searches for the images of what makes the hu- man indomitable in the face of invented powers.
IImmaaggeess//CCoonnttrrooll
We can see, then, that there is no «state of nature» for images, just as there is no «state of nature» for management. This is the field in which those who use existing images work. For them, actions that nar- rate the world and uncover the truth are effected through the critical use of existing images. These are critical in the most profound sense of the term: the lyrical nature of the work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi is often what guides the viewer’s thinking.Images d’Orient – Tourisme vandale pos- es the crucial issue of tourism in very powerful terms. As we know, tourism has always been accompa- nied by prises de vues (views), by the power to film the world as a setting and human beings as extras on the imagined scene of exoticism. The non-power of the films is transformed in the work of Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi into resistance, into the dogged inscription of the real, in the margins of indifference (the non-seeing) of the travellers. There is an inversion of power: the power to see is restored to the viewer, and the reality of the lives of the human beings is freed from the images of the tourists. We live in the era of Google Earth, a European project described as «the eyes of internauts» by an ex- pert, who suggested updating the images with details down to «less than one metre». The possibility, in other words, to see everything from close up. The temptation of ubiquity, a desire (also) to see where tourism and surveillance might meet?
One thing that Manu Luksch (Faceless) and Christophe Cognet (Les Anneaux du serpent) have in common is their use of surveillance videos. They share the same perspective – a critique of control – but explore two different paths. In Faceless there is an implosion of control as a result of the intrusion of fiction, an actress and a story, that is a narrative, in the world of real time. On the other hand, Les Anneaux du serpent un- dermines surveillance thanks to the reality of the places and the reinterpreted talk of the watchers. It has been quite some time now since documentary filmmakers and video artists started taking posses- sion of surveillance footage (just think of the pioneer Michael Klier in Der Riese (The Giant) – in 1980). This kind of film is recorded by cameras behind which there are no camera operators or directors, but man- agers. The angle and sweep are calculated in relation to spaces where a human presence would be a source of danger (humans as intruders). Directors and performers take possession (in viewers’ interests) of the recordings, which power multiplies, a reappropriation that makes what should have been seen by a single body visible to everyone. There should be no mistake that video surveillance is not without its advan- tages when it comes to protecting citizens. What the two films show is that the decision to protect really has nothing civic about it at all. Which perhaps makes these films authentically democratic.
1. L’Autre Journal, 1
“Nell’estate del 1996 abbiamo filmato delle sedute di formazione nelle quali si impara a fare domanda per un posto di lavoro. Esclusi dal siste- ma scolastico, laureati, persone che avevano bisogno di aggiornare la lo- ro formazione, disoccupati da lungo tempo, ex tossicodipendenti e diri- genti di medio livello... tutti dovrebbero imparare come vendersi e mettersi sul mercato, capacità alla quale si applica il termine di «self- management». Il «self» in questione forse non è niente più di un gancio metafisico a cui appendere un’identità sociale. Kafka paragonava il fatto di essere assunti all’ingresso nel Regno dei cieli: i percorsi che portano ad entrambi sono totalmente casuali. Oggi si parla di ottenere un impie- go con il più grande ossequio ma senza grandi speranze” (Harun Faroc- ki). È proprio l’insegnamento, che rende visibile l’addestramento dei cor- pi e delle personalità, ciò che il potere manageriale esige ormai come preliminare a qualsiasi accesso al lavoro salariato. Questo addestramen- to passa attraverso la messa in scena di se medesimi, attraverso una pa- dronanza dell’«autorappresentazione» che tuttavia deve seguire le rego- le del «management» stesso. Il potere s'impadronisce così di una parte della dimensione immaginaria delle persone e della loro «immagine».