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
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
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 Cambridge immunologist meeting Nora Flood, the
daughter of a famous Psychoanalyst during the Paris
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
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.
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
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’.
2 Defined by
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Introduction’ in Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology trans by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (USA: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), p.xvii.
5 Spivak, p.
xvii.
7 William
Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Great
Britain: Heinemann, 1961), p.196.
8 David
Arnason, ‘Derrida and Deconstruction’ online article http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.html
(1st March, 2006).
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.
11 Guy Debord
and G.J. Wolman, ‘Methods of Detournement’ originally published in Les
Levres Nues Number 8, May 1956. Reprinted in Ken Knabb (ed) Situationist
International Anthology translated by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public
Secrets, 1981), pp. 20-24.
12 Spivak,
p.xvii.
14 Peter
Whitehead, ‘Notes on the Filming’ in Wholly Communion (Great Britain:
Lorrimer Films, 1965), pp. 10-11.
15 Patrick
Ffrench The Cut / Reading Bataille’s Histoire D’Oeil (Great Britain:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.30-2.
16 Peter
Whitehead, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto Film’ (three page article gained from the author,
6th 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.
21 Ibid, p.
xix, see also Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Great
Britain: Methuen, 1979), p. 103-4.
22 Brian
Massumi commenting upon his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus (Great
Britain , Continuum, 2004), p. xvii.
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
27 Ibid.
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
Fascinating stuff.
ReplyDeleteHi Evie,
ReplyDeleteGlad you found it interesting!