I
In one of the last
professional photographs taken of Marilyn Monroe by photographer Bert Stern,
the actress’s own mark of deletion remains visible in the form of “a cross drawn onto the contact sheet in
magic marker”. Published soon after her unexpected death, the Vogue
photograph was maintained despite Monroe’s
obvious desire for it not to be printed because by an eerie coincidence the ‘x’
evokes a sepulchral, funereal cross.
It uncannily expresses the shift in
function of the entire sequence, from a celebration (‘Marilyn Says Hello’, the
original title) to a memorial (‘Marilyn’s Last Sitting’).
1
It signifies that the actress herself is no longer; she has been deleted or
placed
sous rature, under erasure.
2 The image also implicitly
says something about photography and recording itself. Speaking on the subject
of spectacular production, Peter Whitehead commented that to turn somebody into
an image, to fashion them into an icon is to make them “sacred”, but following
the etymology of the word, suggests that the process also necessitates a level
of “sacrifice”.
Having said this, if we look
at the image again, we see that what is printed is in effect Monroe’s
distortion or, as Stern stated “destruction”, of her own representation. This positions
the adjusted photograph as a kind of
detournement,
a ‘hi-jacking’ or ‘re-routing’ of a pre-existing image. It is also redolent of
the manner in which placing a concept
sous
rature operates as a deconstructive tool: a strategy of “transformation”
involving not the creation of a new language but a “crossing out” of the old as
an act of liberation.
5 We see a
disruptive yet simultaneously creative engagement with the image so as to leave
a ‘trace’, a residual marker of the individuality which the production of the
image appears to eliminate.
Tempting though it is to
claim, this is not to assert that Monroe
was in fact a pioneering deconstructivist or member of the Situationist
International. However, the intersections established between the photograph
and pre-existing methods of visual subversion offer perspectives from which
Peter Whitehead’s 1969 film, The Fall can be analysed. The film is a
documentary charting the decline of the American counterculture and it amongst
other vox pops and vignettes, it features an interview with Stern focusing on
his creation and manipulation of the Monroe images. On the basis of this
synchronicity, I’d like to argue that Whitehead explicitly employs a process of iconoclasm similar to that implicitly articulated by Stern’s
photographs. Specifically, the film places emphasis on the operation of the
cinematic cut and the process of editing to establish a cycle of dismemberment
and rememberment. Images and objects are successively broken down and
reformulated to assert an individual subjectivity in a mediated, postmodern
milieu and also to expose ideas of documentary ‘truth’. The film foregrounds cultural
memory as a creative construct.
Similarly, this process also
extends to Whitehead’s novels particularly his 1990 work
Nora and… . Based
around the events of May 1968, it shares many of the same themes of
The Fall.
As a text it also maintains Whitehead’s preoccupation with editing and the
inscription of cuts. It is self-consciously presented as a plural textual
assemblage and as with
The Fall this collation operates as an act of
exposure, highlighting the potentially interpolative processes involved in the
act of writing. Overall then, when considering
The Fall and
Nora and…
one can see the enactment of that which Whitehead has identified as his “telos”,
an attempt to make “the unconscious, conscious”; to highlight that which has
not been seen before whilst at the same time revealing underlying mechanisms of
production.
6
II
At one point in
The Fall
there is a brief shot of car seat upon which we see a copy of William Barrett’s
Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1961). In this book
Barrett describes Heidegger’s concept of
verfallenheit
or ‘fallingness’, (generally translated as “falleness”), wherein
at
the level of everyday public existence we are each simply one among many. The
One is the impersonal and public creature whom each of us is before he/she is
an I, a real I […]
So long as we “remain in the
womb of this externalised and public existence”, says Barrett, “we are spared
the terror and dignity of becoming a self”.
7
In an advancement of this, for Heidegger, escape from a sense of fallingness
comes from the intellectual exercise of
destruktion,
what David Arnason has usefully glossed as:
A
combination of a negative analysis of today, the average everyday world and a
positive analysis of history that tries to achieve authenticity through the
rigorous questioning of accepted authority. Often, this means breaking a word into
its component parts in order to trace its history. 8
This process is operative in
the structure of Whitehead’s film.
The
Fall is broken down into three sections. We start with ‘The Image’, a
cacophonous montage of social discord and confused artistic responses: protests,
riots, and equally chaotic performance pieces. We then move to ‘The Word’, a
filmed account of Whitehead’s editing process, an attempt to impose form onto
the maelstrom. Then finally we are shown the concluding ‘Synthesis of Word and
Image’, which stands as the results of this exercise: Whitehead’s movement into
the film itself as a participant. What
The
Fall makes clear in the first section is that “the everyday world of
external objects” enclosing “the one” in Barrett’s understanding of Heidegger is,
(in the context of New York, 1968) entirely constituted by
images. We see the dominance of Guy Debord’s rendition of the
‘spectacle’ in that “all that was once directly lived has become mere
representation”.
9 We see ‘reality’ such as
it is consistently mediated through television, blurred images and changing
channels. Early in the film, Alberta Tirbuzi is framed watching television in
such a way that the set appears to superimpose itself over her head. It seems that no space of difference exists between
the individual subject and the content of broadcast media. John Lyle, writing in
After-Image at the time of the film’s
release observed:
Whitehead
has become aware that the media, no matter how honestly used, are a means of
insulation from a threatening world. He has experienced their paralysing
effect, sitting for a week in front of the television screen watching rioting
that he was incapable of either filming or joining although it was happening
around him. The media succeed in turning people into objects, people die on
screen and it doesn’t matter, because they aren’t people, and death isn’t
really death and it won’t happen to me now.10
Whitehead’s meta-cinematic
focus upon the process of editing in the second section functions as a
counteraction against this initially depicted spectacular paralysis. Whereas destruktion could be read as an attempt
to break down the word, in this section we are shown Whitehead consistently
attacking the image.
We see sequences already
viewed in the earlier part of the film, wound, rewound, cut-up and erased. In
particular familiar images are replayed in a new order, the viewer thus being
encouraged to make visual links between elements removed from their ‘original’
continuity. The sense of self-consciousness evident in these sequences suggests
that Whitehead is essentially
detourneing,
in the sense of ‘distorting’ and ‘re-routing’, the narrative of his own work in
order to create of, “a re-combination of existing sequences”.
11 The simulacral material constitutive of
a state of “insulating” fallingness becomes a resource for the development of ‘new’
connections. Subsequently, a parallel could be established with the possible
interpretation of the Monroe image as Whitehead’s inscription of a cut – like
the crossing of the photograph – evokes the active obscurity of concepts when placed
sous rature. For Derrida, working
after Heidegger’s struggle with the word ‘being’, the crossing of a word is “a
strategy of using the only available language while not subscribing to its
premises or operating according to the vocabulary of the very thing it
delimits”.
12 Similarly, Whitehead is
at this point in
The Fall recognising
that the techniques of cinema are instrumental in the production of spectacles
yet such is the extent of their penetration into everyday life there exists no
other form of communication. Thus, the images themselves become a source of
identity formation.
In addition to the generation
of new meanings from a pre-existing cinematic resource, Whitehead’s exposure of editing processes, also questions notions of documentary ‘truth’. We are shown image
facture and the connection between such a construction and the production of a
certain aesthetic effect. A cycle of dismemberment
and rememberment is seen to be in operation as an external,
phenomenal reality is shown to be cut, spliced and reassembled into a separate
visual presentation. From this perspective the film undercuts its own
hypothetical position as an ‘objective’,
factual record as it appears to preserve not the depicted events as such, but
Whitehead’s subjective perception: his memory of the occurrence. His comments
on the making of his 1965 film
Wholly Communion (a documentary charting
the 1965 Beat poetry reading at the Albert Hall) are helpful in this instance:
Anyone
seeing the film who thinks they have at last seen the truth of what did happen
are deluded. They have seen the film that also happened that night at the
Albert Hall...the film only further proves the selective nature of the medium
and can do nothing but exist as another impression of a unique evening. 14
Patrick Ffrench calls this
type of exposure an instance of “symptomal form”: the symptom being “an indication
of disorder, disease”, that which is taking place under the surface, but, as he
explains, “in the psychoanalytic sense it is also the sign of conflict, the
overcoming of a repression, of a crossing of boundaries, of a transgression”.
15 We are shown the process which
functions to produce meaning through montage but at the same time, the manifestation
of that which is conventionally invisible also results in the erasure of a
diegetic barrier, the line of semblance existing between audience and film,
viewing subject and perceived object.
This confusion of boundaries
is greatly important for Whitehead. In 1960 whilst attending Cambridge
University Cinema Club he saw a selection of war propaganda films, including
footage shot by a Nazi film crew inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Profoundly disturbed
at what he called the “necessarily absent” nature of “the invisible authors”,
Whitehead recognised the film as a work of dispassionate ideology, the
communication of “official state truth” via the maintenance of a total
separation between subject and object, a “death in life detachment”. Power and
control was seen by Whitehead to be generated by the ability to impose lines of
separation. In retrospect Whitehead states that seeing this footage prompted
him to resolve “never to see a film with the detachment necessary to make
objective documentary or convincing fiction films”.
16 As we see, this resolution is enacted
within
The Fall because by creatively
revealing the mechanisms of cinematic verisimilitude the implication is
conveyed that whilst the camera may not lie, it is never able to give access to
the ‘truth’. The presented image is always already a mediated, reconstructed
image.
III
When describing his response
to the Warsaw
film further, Whitehead stated that what disturbed him most was a shot of a
young girl digging in the frozen ground. This image is repeated extensively
throughout the novel Nora and…. The narrative concerns Raymond Faulkner,
a Cambridge immunologist meeting Nora Flood, the
daughter of a famous Psychoanalyst during the Paris ‘events’ of 1968. Nora is attempting to
complete from notebooks and manuscripts her father’s last major work, a case
study of the enigmatic Frau S who we gradually learn (in parallel with the
development of Nora’s textual work) was the young girl in the film footage. Her
desire for psychoanalysis is linked to unresolved trauma following this wartime
experience. In addition to functioning as an initialising narrative marker, the
reference in the text also maintains Whitehead’s conceptual concerns linked to
the footage. In particular, focus is constantly placed upon ideas of
boundaries, barriers and blockages. These words pepper the text and the concept
is also played out structurally as can be seen in the following early passage:
Raymond
was standing at the window, gazing intently at the laboratory garden. Inside
the high stone wall, the neat flower gardens were laid out in geometrical
patterns, resembling an Italian renaissance print. It couldn’t be simpler.
Inside the high stone wall there could be no life of any kind. Walls to keep
things out and keep things in. The good and the bad, the right and the wrong.
Everything singular and separate and alone was defined by those walls. There
was no freedom to live, to be a living creature without them. 17
In describing Raymond’s
preference for distinction and separation, Whitehead constructs the passage
using a series of binaries, inside and outside, good and bad, right and wrong.
Similarly there is also a tension between the city and the garden, the urban as
opposed to the natural environment. Also as a parallel is made between the
layout of the garden and cell construction, the passage implies a wider
comparison between the microcosmic body and the macrocosmic social world. It
appears that harmony and organization is dependent upon the existence of
clearly demarcated lines of difference. Additionally, the initial barrier
within the passage, the window through which Raymond gazes “intently” codifies
the character as existing at a distance from the world, withdrawn and
observant.
Having said this, soon after
this passage a correlative to this imagery appears via Whitehead’s use of the revolutionary
iconography of upturned cars and physical barricades familiar to the May 68
milieu. Here, the markers of separation and difference linked to Raymond’s
sense of harmony become indicative of violence and conflict. Similar language
is used to describe the mental blockage of Frau S and the accompanying writer’s
block that afflicts both Nora and Raymond. In contrast to this language of
opposition, there is an expressed desire for an unmediated communication
highlighted through a consistent register of liquidity that includes ‘flow’
(p.30) ‘overspill’ (p.42) ‘stream’ (p.56) and particularly ‘drift’ (p.35).
‘Drift’ is significant
because in contrast to notions of detournement
in The Fall here we see Nora and… absorbing the language
popularly associated with additional Situationist concepts of dérive and psychogeography. Explaining dérive, Debord stated that it was a
tactic of drifting through urban landscapes ignoring locks and barriers
following a trajectory set only by the subjectivity of the wanderer.
Psychogeography describes the
wider field of study in which the derive functions as a primary tool. The
psychogeographer makes use of the event that is the
dérive to develop an alternative urban topography, a re-formulated
“shadow city”. Debord would point to revolutionary activity such as overturned
cars and the use of paving stones for projectiles as a manifestation of this
radical urban transformation because in the transformation of these objects,
the conventional function of the environment is distorted.
18 The use of the paving stones especially
marks the discovery of
la plage, the
beach underneath the pavement. This revolutionary slogan is a key image within
Whitehead’s own self-conception of the text.
19
In addition to this, the
process is also evident at a textual level in the novel. Infected by the
apparent “virus” (p.86) surrounding analysis, Raymond begins his own act of
writing, yet “even when he tried he couldn't write the first words of the
narrative” (p.93). He finds himself left with “words dissolving away
continuously…losing every part of its obvious meaning” (p.94) rather than
encapsulating the concept he wishes to express. This vision of written language
in constant recession mirrors Derrida’s notion of language as a trace
structure. In Of Grammatology, he
proposes that significance is the product of différance, a referential process of deferral whereby each word
receives its meaning by virtue of its link to another. Derrida uses the word
‘trace’ in the sense of “track or footprint” to express this function, the
status of the sign being both “not there” and “not that”. Subsequently, ‘trace’
does not indicate an instance of permanency or preservation but is constantly
defined by a motivating lack. Self-present definition is systemically and
functionally withheld.
In opposition to this
process, Raymond engages with a pre-existing text: Nora’s annotated copy of
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953-1957)
by Ernest Jones. He copies into a notebook the passages she has underlined in
“red ink” (p.95). Due to the fact that when she speaks Nora is said to “hide
everything […] reveal nothing”, the annotations allegedly provide access to her
emotions, showing Raymond what she finds “significant…provocative” (p.95). As
we are told, it was no longer the biography he was reading but her selection of
it,
he was ‘
reading her’, (p.121). Subsequently, like the application of a mark
on the
Monroe
photograph, Nora’s underlinings convey a sense of presence
in her absence, rather than a total absence
of presence. Just as Whitehead constructs new combinations and
sequences from his film footage, so too when writing does he maintain this
strategy of illuminating assemblage. Raymond functions as a something of a
bricoleur, “making do with things that
were perhaps meant for other ends”.
21
In doing so, like the
exposing use of dismemberment in
The
Fall, his act is a highlighting and an admission that knowledge is not a
systematic tracking down of a single truth but is generated by the free play
and multiple interactions of disparate forms of information. We move from trace
as a signifier of a lost object to Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of
tracer meaning “to blaze a trail or to
open a road”.
22 Whitehead, through
Raymond, shows the dismemberment as an act in which creative juxtaposition
gives rise to hermeneutic force.
This process also occurs on
another level of the text through Whitehead’s interweaving of references to his
own films. The proposed title of Nora’s book is
The Blindman, (p.161).
This is an explicit signpost leading back to Whitehead’s 1973 film
Daddy
which uses the image of the Blindman as a key narrative marker.
Daddy tangentially gave rise to a
sequence of photographs called
Baby Doll (1996). Excerpts from this
sequence are included as inserts mid way through the novel. Their function is
to show the reader the photographs which are intended to accompany Nora’s own
text. The implication then is that of an autopoetic functionality, the
suggestion that the book we are told is being written is simultaneously the
book we are holding in our hands. As with
The Fall, Whitehead blurs
diegetic levels in the text, constructing the narrative but also recording its
process of composition, “exposing the invisible authors”. In the same way that
the film used this exposure as a means to oppose the insulating mediation
depicted, a similar “rearguard action” occurs in the novel.
23 As is indicated by Nora’s “angry”
reaction to the “theft of the book with her marks in it” (p.172), Raymond’s
attempt at analysis and interpretation comes across as intrusive and violating. However, as the passage continues, a
distinction is made between the roles of cameraman and the editor. Raymond is
said to be only “like” a cameraman occupying a voyeuristic position. His role
is highlighted specifically as an editor. He is active in “copying out all her
quotes, putting them in order, cutting them up, re-editing them like a
documentary film, a collage of sentences and phrases” (p.172). Whilst
acknowledging Raymond’s intrusion, the passage also functions to re-affirm his
creative role. He works at a distance, after the fact, to construct his own
‘reading’ of Nora.
Furthermore, Whitehead here
and elsewhere uses a type of free indirect discourse in relation to the
narrative voice which has the effect of producing an intermingling of the narrational
voice and Nora’s own: “[…] penetrating her mind despite herself, it was quite a
clever idea. Good for him. He was improving!” (p.172). This works as a useful
analogy to describe the interpretative transitions taking place in Raymond’s
mind. When speaking about Nora, the novel suggests that he cannot avoid
articulating his own voice. The character is written so that in telling her
story he also reveals a lot more information about himself and his own act of
interpretation. This whole movement can be summed up with the final phrase of
Raymond’s letter, “missing you” (p.172). By conjuring Nora in her absence, Raymond,
through his textual work, simultaneously erases her, establishing his own
meaning and superimposition. The ‘real’ Nora remains somewhere underneath this
erasure, still unknown and unseen.
In interpreting Nora’s text,
Raymond’s engagement offers not an illumination of the subject but gives way to
a re-organised construction. This mirrors Jack Sargeant’s interpretation of
Whitehead’s
Baby Doll sequence. Referring to the final image of a young
girl before a forest he states that it signifies her “moving off into the real,
singing a new world into existence”.
25
We see a clear photographic image but rather than designating objective truth,
it serves to generate a degree of difference. This approach assumes political
significance within the last section of
The Fall. The film concludes
with the student occupation of
Columbia
University. Whitehead
himself took part in this protest as the only cameraman within the institution.
He films the events from the inside in contrast to the majority of much media
reportage at the time that watched from outside. At one point in this final
reel Whitehead captures the carnival like atmosphere among the students which
follows the announcement that the police are about to force their way into the
university.
At this juncture, Whitehead is now a participant in the action he
initially set out to record. The result of this increase in subjectivity is
that it captures an intimate portrait of a counterculture gleefully and
momentarily allowed to exist at the intersection between the police and the
university authorities. We are shown what Iain Chambers describes as an atopia:
Another
place, a diverse way of inhabiting the world. The utopic is usurped by the
heterotopic, the proliferation of space into different places, languages, sounds
rhythms. It is a transversal journey, the building of temporal homelands.26
As with the non-objective act
of interpretation at work within
Nora and … , the result of Whitehead’s involvement when presented within
an edited structure produces an alternative vision. Within the context of
The
Fall, this specific act of “re-working, re-routing”
27 carries out a subversive role,
presenting a perspective at odds with that cultivated by the conventional
media.
Although
‘documentary’ film and novelistic fiction represent different semiotic spheres,
Whitehead’s artistic practices allow both
Nora
and… and
The Fall to be
considered as ‘texts’. The word has its etymological roots in terms such as
“texture” and “weaving”.
28 In the
same way, Whitehead, through editing and assemblage, creates his structures
through the conjunction of pre-existing fragments. To Whitehead, this activity
of dismemberment and rememberment constitutes a “Shamanistic” position. He is
here referencing the cultural figure who undergoes a dismemberment in order “to
move to the other side”, to gain new wisdom.
29
At the end of the documentary it is as if Whitehead has inscribed a cut upon
himself, allowing his own re-assembly in the film at the point at which he
accumulates powerful and unique footage. Within his novel, the exposure of
reading and interpretative practices works to subvert cover(t) operations of
textual power. We see then that Whitehead does not merely record but actively
works with and manipulates images and textual material. His work announces the
inability of accessing any kind of truth but also highlights that, to quote
Alexander Trocchi, “the acceptance of this could itself be a beginning”.
30
1 Bert Stern
interviewed in Hans-Michael Koetzle, Photo Icons: The Story Behind the
Pictures volume 2 (Italy:
Taschen, 2002), pp. 100-111. The actual photograph itself is titled ‘Marilyn Monroe, Crucifix, Last Sitting 1962’.
6 Whitehead
speaking in an interview with James Riley,
Kettering, 9
th September, 2005.
7 William
Barrett
, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Great
Britain: Heinemann, 1961), p.196.
9 Guy Debord,
The
Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p.5.
10 Extract
from John Lyle featured in
Peter Whitehead: A Singular Vision (Great
Britain: Hathor Publishing, 1996), pp.20-3.
14 Peter
Whitehead, ‘Notes on the Filming’ in
Wholly Communion (Great Britain:
Lorrimer Films, 1965), pp. 10-11.
16 Peter
Whitehead, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto Film’ (three page article gained from the author,
6
th January, 2006).
17 Peter
Whithead,
Nora and…. (Great Britain: Brookside Press, 1990), p. 8. All
subsequent quotations will be drawn from this volume.
18 Debord,
‘The Theory of the Derive’ in Ken Knabb (ed)
Situationist International
Anthology translated by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets,
1981) pp.30-5.
19 Whitehead
speaking in an interview with James Riley,
Kettering, 6
th January 2006.
21 Ibid, p.
xix, see also Dick Hebdidge,
Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Great
Britain: Methuen, 1979), p. 103-4.
23 Term
‘rearguard action’ from Aidan Day, ‘Ballard and Baudrillard: Close Reading
Crash’
in
English vol. 49 (
Great
Britain: The English Association, Autumn
2000), p.278.
25 Jack
Sargeant, ‘Introduction’ in Peter Whitehead,
Baby Doll (London: Velvet
Publications, 1996), p. 3-5.
26 Iain
Chambers,
Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (
Great Britain:
Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 76.
28
Etymological connection highlighted by John
D. Caputo in
Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with
Jacques Derrida edited with a commentary by John D. Caputo (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1997), p.88
29 Concept of
the Shaman discussed in an Interview with James Riley,
Kettering, 9
th September 2005.
30 Alexander
Trocchi,
Cain’s Book (Great Britain: Calder Publications, 1991), p.33.
In May I'll be in New York, speaking at the 2014 Congress of Curious Peoples. The Congress is a 10-day festival held at Coney Island USA featuring sideshows, performers and nightly lectures. I'm going to be speaking about William Burroughs on a panel dealing with 'Paranormal Technology'. The panel has been put together by Shannon Taggart and features additional talks by Doug Skinner and Anthony Matt. Shannon will also be demonstrating Kirlian photography on the night.
