Alain à la recherche #8: La guerre est finie

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Riddled with overlays of misinformation and suspicions, to say projections and reflections, that act as interpolations, La guerre est finie is close to a second person narrative, calling "you" in almost every scene, putting you into Yves Montand's cluttered head of dead ends. Before all, the title is past tense: this fight is already done. What remains are fantasies, ideals, while reality continues and refuses these so-called revolutionaries. Instead, we see a rootless man (Montand), essentially homeless and process-bound—always moving, shifting—not even tied to a name. He's Carlos to start, then Domingo (Dimanche/Sunday), then Diego and back. And when he's Diego, we gather that's his Christian prenom, he's not: he lies to his wife's friends, his wife tries to lie for him, but he can't keep things straight. In fact, despite his ability to bed the too-yummy-for-words Geneviève Bujold, the film is about his fade. Everything is not in its right place. The game is up. His war has been over, he's a hanger-on, like his fat and/or stubborn comrades—a relic, even, relevant no more. But nobody will listen when he says so, when he says things should stop; he gets stopped, and then not. The halt's not halting: even in the end it's a relay, an ill-conceived gamble that we know won't work because of that dissolve to Ingrid Thulin—so desperate, trying not to run—that just hangs there. You feel the "FIN" before it emerges. After all, you felt it at the start.

The Che letters. Part Two: Canyons, Circles, Exiles

by Ryland Walker Knight

[A note: Here we continue what Mark began back in Part One. (To see all the letters, click here.) We hope the letters continue, as we push forward into 2009, because we find this epic so typical of our (yes, fetishistic) interests in cinema as a tool for and of history; and of our aims as intellectually curious people of and in the world in general. I should like to say that these missives are hardly "polished" for a couple of reasons but that should become transparent soon enough. For instance: we are not done. Stay tuned for Part Three in the coming weeks.]

Mark,

Your impulse to talk around the subject as a way to talk with the subject seems to mirror how Soderbergh's film works, of course, but what makes the film so curious to my eyes and ears is, first of all, how committed to its subject it remains. For all its distance, Che is rather intimate. For all its landscapes, the close-up figures into a large part of its argument. However, the close-up operates in (if not diametric then perhaps) divergent registers across the film's intermission rift. In Cuba, the close-up is pure affection, luminescent and loving expression; in Bolivia, close-ups catalogue and segregate elements of the whole. In both halves, these sets form a crucial part of Che's balance-equation in that their uses are explicitly related not just to form but how we witnesses will figure our "hero" at hand.

Reading Hoberman's essay in The Virginia Quarterly Review shortly after reading your first missive made me think twice about your preliminary assumption-declaration that "Che is not about Che." His essay begins with two weighty words for this man: "Ecce homo," which, of course, nods at Nietzsche and declares, with a colon, "this man." This man, Che, who means so many things. Hoberman lists a number of them, all fine labels, all fine in concert with each other, just as our sense of Ernesto Guevara is folded by so many forces of history and commerce and theory and philosophy and tradition and understanding and all tied to a single image appropriated (I want to say "abused" or even "slaved") into base, reductive, limited symbolism. My list here, as a response to Hoberman's, is an attempt to account for all those contradictory angles played in some name that really only means one thing at bottom: "man." It's redundant: this movie is about man, not just this man, but, of course, it can only ever be "about" this man in particular. And, as Hoberman astutely points, this man is a means for Soderbergh to explore personal obsessions such as process and technique. Look at any one of Soderbergh's films and you will find he is, indeed, or more than less, "a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it."


Again, your question: how, if at all, do we approach Our Man, That Man, This Che? If we may see Che as mathematics, as Soderbergh has arranged it to rise and fall like the sun, that ever-reliable reminder of our finitude, then perhaps we should do well to grant science its place at this martyr's table of conversation. No doubt the masses have silkscreened the Guevara myth to a new death, or depth. No wonder the aura is drained. No surprise Benjamin comes to mind. No way to get around the repetition of Che. No modulation subsumed in total, the differences are shifts, the revolution a series without end: a perpetual reformation.

Others have said we must let the singular stand free, we must cherish and preserve these rarities. This challenge has largely been ignored by many of our (intelligent and critically thinking) colleagues. The exciting thing about Che is that, as a hermeneutical situation unto itself (as any work of art is, or can and should be), it rejects a lot of the strict language of closed or isolated subjects—here I think of Sartre as the great mis-reader of Heidegger, and of Gadamer's lucid restorations—but rather an appeal to vulnerability, to the allowance for failure that participation wills us towards, or simply makes impossible to avoid. Here is my humble proposition that the freedom Che argues for, while not that of Che's per se, is one where (useless though it may resound) tragedy looms. However, I do not want to say the film is defeatist. It may deny, but it ends on a boat, looking to the future (from the past), past a spray of light that triggers a reverse shot back at Our Che, standing bowed on the starboard side sharing fruit and looking wary at us, we whose gaze forges him as we wish.

The film is opaque yet transparent. A typically "academic" double move. And, indeed, Soderbergh's work is attacked as "academic." When will this cease to be a pejorative? When will the many under-readers—it's funny that those who tread the surface are hardly interested in a hermeneutics of surfaces and seek only to uncover the unknowable with an arrogance unavailable to my wary posture—begin to appreciate the fact that over-reading is, well, a virtue born of thoughtful attention to the world and its multifarious blossoming forth? When might we see the "real" revolution something like our blogosphere provides? When shall we shuck the calendar's arbitrariness to slow our rollout? When a real Marxism props up somewhere? —When will we get around to talking about the film?

I often wonder if my interest in film has mutated into an interest in what film, or a film, provides in aftermath. I know this cannot be fully true as I do, indeed, keep watching. My watching has slowed so much in the past years because my watching now involves countless re-watching, revisions of my visions. I've said before on this blog (well, in a podcast) that the hermeneut's project is a compulsion, and it may not be healthy; I meant this to encompass cinephilia; this is old news. All of this to say: I do enjoy watching Che. I find Cuba gorgeous, if occasionally on the nose and a tad "cute," and I find Bolivia devastating, and quite often yet more beautiful than its counterpart for all its drain, its pale weight of time and its canyon-cinema-circles. I find Benecio Del Toro's performance pitched perfectly between sex symbol and myopic asshole. I find Soderbergh's mise-en-scène has not been this rigorous since his under-loved revision of Solaris—which features similar arguments about beautiful, stubborn men contending with martyrdom and love and the process of history, or memory-making (all themes shared by his great, deft The Limey; in fact these themes emerge present in all his films). I find the whole 257 minutes easily "too much" and nowhere near "perfect"—it's a "rush job" as much as Hoberman's "act of will" although it cannot nor should it ever be rushed. I find it impossible to recommend.

Che is foreign to itself like Che is forever foreign to his environment. His yearn for a united South America (present before Cuba, if hardly seen here, and announced throughout Bolivia) can never translate in practical terms for the simple fact that his fellows can never look past his face, his spectacle as a figure or a symbol. His comrades do not see his true singularity, his freedom of himself. Soderbergh may know he has no place in the world Guevara sought to build but he also knows that what we all look to Che for is that image of freedom that, as it is unavoidably poetic, comes only from exile. It's a negative freedom, if I understand, and, in a hilarious completion of one circle, a positively American picture that asserts our rights as humans to be a little crazy, to shuck rationale. Because, of course, freedom concerns our world, and not just humans; a space unanswerable to conceptual schemes, to maps of thought; a space given to productivity, to becoming made possible by our limits. Fitting, then, that Che is situated by a pair of maps. Boundaries mean something. Che sought transcendence and all he got was an ignoble death in a hut. His myth, on the other hand, necessarily separate, keeps gaining. If Soderbergh's film can do anything in that space, perhaps it can remind us that this was a man and that man, like this world, will pass into history; however, if we look to build something we have already taken a step towards something.

Until then,
ry

A revolutionary remix for a revolutionary day.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Here's a lil goof I made last night. It doesn't quite capture the moment as I'm sure other, better bloggers can and will. But, along with the others I made, which you can see both at freeNIKES! and at the OBAMICON.ME site, I think it gives a quick (albeit oblique) glimpse into how this day means a lot to me. It's an inspiration! It makes me think that we're on the upswing. It makes me think that, finally, thank Him, we have not just a smart guy getting sworn in, but, really, a cool son of a gun. It makes me think we will witness some change, somehow. It makes me think that the arts may yet be a place to build a life. It makes me think that home is just around the corner. It makes me think that color will not continue to trouble consent in many of the ways it has before. It makes me think that dreams can come true. It makes me think families are a good thing to foster and nurture and love. It makes me think that I should call my sister. It makes me think that I should hug everybody I come across. It makes me think that revolutions start someplace, like, say, in the street. It makes me think that our gutters will be swept. It makes me think that I'm nearing naive in my optimism. It makes me think that optimism can be thoughtful and aware and lively and honest and accountable along with audacious. It makes me think, America. It makes me think, world. It makes me think, Lisbon. It makes me think.

The Che letters. Part One: Questions, Declarations, Navigations

by Mark Haslam

[Ed Note: Here begins our ensemble attempt to wrangle our, let's be blunt, surprising enthusiasms for this film. Since the film is so large (without ballooning), we thought it appropriate to situate our understanding in this epistolary form, a series of calls and responses, that may speak to the nature of Soderbergh's film and its ostensible subject—and how these braided objects nail their aims across manifold divides. Our aim, it should be obvious, is to make the polymath sing. Update: Click for Part Two and/or the whole series]


[Preamble notes from Mark: (1) Bay Areans, CHE: THE ROADSHOW is coming to us, hitting the Embarcadero tomorrow, Friday the 16th. And as a special treat, cuz you're all special, Soderbergh will be in house to answer our questions. For those in the East Bay not willing to cross the bridge or duck into BART, it will open as two films at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley next Friday, the 23rd. (2) It may be useful to keep Pedro Costa's seminar (at ROUGE) on closed doors in mind. (3) Also owe a look to: The Cry at Zero.]



“Che is not about Che."
Ry,

After a single viewing of Che, this is all that seemed appropriate to say; the one thing that I (to whom confidence comes but rarely) am pretty damn confident of saying. And here it's remained, at the top of a piece of paper, awaiting the explication it seems to deny. And the question it implies produces a response both silent and choral, a nothing and an everything: “What is it about?”

Our first approach faulters. We stumble, or stop, and wonder, how do we approach Che? So much criticism up to this point, positive and negative, tends to description and observation (itself an impressive feat, given the scope and scale) over analysis or thesis; few attempts at a true approach to understanding the film have been made. But then: do we approach in the first place? And if not...? Aha, an avenue: only in resisting representation does the film approach its figure. The non-approach must be our approach, too.

—certain films...are like doors, even if there are no doors in them. They resemble doors that don't let you enter as the protagonist of the film. You are outside. You see a film, you are something else...

For distance is a thing: tangible, like numbers. Especially for Soderbergh. Gaps, spaces, in-betweens...these are bricks, mortar. An absence or offsetting of one thing in relation to another, we come to see neither—or both, but only in the periphery—as our focus lands on distance. Indeed, it is focus, which seems so central to the film's technique that calls our attention to this: a camera—zooming in, zooming out—enacting distance.

But distance comes in many forms. If Cuba gives us Che, at times, at a physical proximity, distance is produced elsewhere. Take the battle sequences that are overlaid with Guevara discussing the ideologies, tactics, or justifications for the images we're seeing. His words don't explicate but complicate. Che doesn't speak in terms concrete enough for explanation. He is all ideal, totally abstract. Indeed, few figures in recent history have been as subject to abstraction as Ernesto Guevara, because, with him, it's easy: a man so determined by his ideals, so apparently detached from the material world, from his own body, that he already seems a vessel....

So, these sequences which might've been exciting and rousing are emptied out, abstracted. Again and again the image becomes an image of distance.

—that also is very important in the cinema, to love at a distance.

None of this is not distancing. I mean, it isn't aloof to us. We're not cast into indifference. I feel Che precisely because I am not asked to—better yet, I am asked to not feel for Che. The camera builds distances and in doing so builds avenues—long entrances. Entrances that are also closed doors. We see a film, we are something else... And the film, I think, like its subject, finds its center in love. But love undergoes a revision: think of Che's line that nobody is indespensible. This isn't intimate love. It's a re-vision of love—and, for that matter, equally of pain—that requires a response more than just reflex.

Our next approach then is a careful step, in step with the film, backwards. The images are abstracted: image distanced from itself. Meaning has been displaced, and the images, even those of triumph, now emptied out, take on the form of a lament. This is made clear in Bolivia, where everything feels, literally, dry, tapped. Even a downpour has no sense of moisture. In Cuba, death was Guevara's neighbor; present but only in the abstract, as one beyond your wall. Here, death is his house. “To survive here you have to fight like you're already dead.” This is the precise cry, the lament, love—a distance from yourself, an exile from yourself.

I can't help but think of those lovely moments of Che taking photographs of Bolivians. This is how he sees—through people. His revision (a second viewing) of self. Watching his body being carried away in a helicopter, their upward gazes correspond to his gaze, on the boat to Cuba, directed at Fidel.

—...and there are two distinct entities.

I think, too, of a Caetano Veloso's lyric (one redeployed in Jorge Castaneda's Che biography, Compañero) that says, “Navigating is necessary, living is not.” This is a film to navigate. Because it's a film that navigates with no intention of arrival. It resists. Is itself and not itself. Is exiled within the very place of its exile. The non-approach is seeing the film from over there. And seeing the film as a door at best ajar. The farther back we go, the less that we see, the less that's shown, the more possible it is to open the closed doors. We have to recognize the two ever dividing entities, Che and Che, us and Che, Che and us.

I offer this up as a way, maybe, to begin talking about Che. A way of approaching, and if we're brave, opening, the closed doors. As Costa says, opening these doors is work. So let's work, Ry. I want to navigate. Tell me!

Ever one last re-vision,
Mark