Absence in Cinema
Justin Remes’ Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020) can be treated as the complement to the author’s earlier volume, also from Columbia University Press, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (2015), in that he deconstructs the art of the ‘moving image’ to its fundamentals: i.e., films that do not move; and films without an image or sound. Rather than examining only what is shown or heard in films, Remes approaches the ontological question of the medium by asking what is not found there. More so, what was a diptych will now become a trilogy, as Remes turns to found footage films in his new book project, which (to offer one descriptive example) will consider an ‘antiretinal aesthetics’ and ‘found sounds’ in such films as Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979).[1]
Many scholarly works in film and media theory published in the last decade testify to the shift in critical thinking from the logic of representation to the affective, the invisible, and the unseen. The comprehensive anthology Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011) scrutinises diverse theorisations of images set free from the representational function across a wide spectrum of disciplines.[2] In his single-authored study No Medium (2013), Craig Dworkin draws correlations between blank, erased, or silent works in literature, the visual arts, and music.[3] While Remes’ undertaking shares some common ground with these books, in his special emphasis on absence in cinema he finds more natural allies in a recent collection of essays, Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (2017),[4] which considers obscure and indeterminate elements in cinematic arts, or Vivian Sobchack’s and Julian Hanich’s work on monochromatic screens through a film-phenomenological perspective.[5] As a testament to the current interest in absence and silence in cinema, it is noteworthy that since the publication of Remes’ book Anthology Film Archives in New York has mounted a comprehensive retrospective on Imageless Films (1 April – 27 July 2022).[6] In four parts, the series featured programs on Structuring Absence, Emptiness as Image, Scratch Films, and Audioscapes, presenting ‘screenings’ of such avant-garde works as Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1928/30), discussed in Remes’ book as a case study.
The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once observed with respect to his film Through the Olive Trees (1994) that ‘there were moments in the film when we weren’t “doing” anything’. He confessed,
I was even sometimes tempted to put black leader in between the scenes – because I was constantly hunting for scenes in which there was ‘nothing happening’. That nothingness I wanted to include in my film.[7]
Searching for the moments of ‘nothingness’ in the cinematic medium, Remes compiles the many ways nothing canhappen on film, albeit ‘understood in all its radical relativity’ (p. 4). He argues that the unseen and the unheard can change our perspective on the visible and the audible in cinema and explores how protracted silence, erasure, or the black screen can stimulate a profoundly affective experience (p. 24). While one could be bored by films that lack either sound or image, Remes provocatively, even impishly suggests that the spectator’s curiosity and enjoyment may be piqued by the sense that something is missing, even if it is not always clear what. The major claim of Remes’ book, as a contribution to and reevaluation of existing scholarship, is his assertion of the power of absence in cinema on its own terms and for its own merits. While Remes’ case studies largely explore audiovisual voids in experimental cinema, he advances absence as a category necessary for consideration in cinema on the whole (as the book’s title implies). Throughout the book Remes notably treats absence in a distinctly cinematic way. He considers absence of both image and sound; introduces, defines, and develops such operative vocabulary as ‘monochrome films’ and ‘imageless films’; discusses filmic techniques related to missing elements; and provides a detailed filmography of cinematic absence.
Nevertheless, Remes considers it equally important to place the experimental films he discusses within an intermedial context of revolutionary art practice. As he remarks,
Absence never exists in isolation. An erasure can be understood only in relation to what has been erased. (p. 104)
And thus absence in cinema for him can also be understood in relation to homologous efforts in music, painting, and literature. For example, as Remes stresses, the radical silence in many of Stan Brakhage’s films is explicitly influenced by John Cage’s compositions and the latter’s book of lectures and writings, Silence (1961). To account for these connections, in his introduction, titled ‘Voids’, Remes situates the aniconic films of Ruttmann, Guy Debord, Nam June Paik, and Anouk de Clercq alongside the found objects of Duchamp and Dadaism, as well as the monochromatic paintings by Alphonse Allais, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein. In addition, Remes points to the existential quietude of Samuel Beckett’s plays; the literary voids and blank pages found in the Russian Futurist Vasilisk (Vasily) Gnedov and the French Oulipians Georges Perec and Paul Fournel; and the erasures, excisions, and deletions in Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1970-2016), and Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (2005). While stressing these intermedial relations in his introduction, in the body of Absence in Cinema Remes generally eschews earlier critical approaches to absence and silence in modernist aesthetics or psychoanalysis as negative void, abandonment, or abjection. Mostly relying on a phenomenological approach, Remes recounts personal experiences as both a film spectator and a film instructor, pointing out how often cinematic absence is passed over while watching or analysing films. In many of these recounted episodes, Remes highlights absence and silence as enabling forces for the viewer’s imagination. As he continuously emphasises, absence in cinema does not diminish but enriches; it does not subtract from but adds to our spectatorial experience.
Absence in Cinema treats three kinds of ‘missing’ elements in motion pictures: absent images in films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1928/30); the art of silence in films such as Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959); and cinematic erasures in found footage films such as Naomi Uman’s removed (1999) and Martin Arnold’s Deanimated(2002), in which parts of the original image or soundtrack have been redacted by analogue or digital means.[8] The book’s four chapters are framed by carefully selected and intriguing epigraphs on absence or silence – two for each chapter and one for chapter subsections – citing such philosophers as Henri Bergson, poets as John Keats, artists as Marcel Duchamp, and filmmakers as Woody Allen.[9] In Chapter 1, ‘Walter Ruttmann and the Blind Film’, Remes brings into focus the first category of ‘films without images’, stressing that Ruttmann himself often described Weekend as a ‘blind film’ or ‘cinema for the ears’ (p. 31). Ruttmann roamed Berlin with his film camera without ever removing the lens cap, recording on the filmstrip the cacophony of a modern city. While the film was originally broadcast from a gramophone transfer on the Berlin Radio Hour in June 1930 – and then essentially lost to film history until an audiotape recording was discovered in 1978 – Remes asks us to consider the phenomenological response of its audience. Because the original sound-film vanished, we are left with an experience of ‘hearing of sounds without seeing the source of those sounds’ (p. 43). Weekend is not a mimetic soundscape but an auditory construction that Ruttmann scored in six movements, demanding that its audience regard the concussive, blaring, shouting, or whistling sounds as sounds in themselves. Remes argues that because of the prevailing ocularcentrism in cinema, some spectators might fail to appreciate the intermediality of a blind film such as Weekend. Returning the film to a black screen (by projecting a version on DVD) provokes the synesthesia of seeing sound in one’s mind, or haptically viewing Malevich’s Black Square (1915), or hearing sound in three-dimensional space that is detached from two-dimensional images.
In Chapter 2, ‘Stan Brakhage and the Birth of Silence’, Remes turns to the second category of ‘films without sound’, highlighting the distinguished history of cinematic silence in experimental films by Brakhage, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Maya Deren, and Andy Warhol. In his analysis of Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, Remes underscores how the absent soundtrack in this film, which should be replete with a mother’s labored breathing, the moans of birthing pain, or the newborn’s first cry, intensifies the spectator’s apprehension of the medium rather than detracting from it. Brakhage’s explicit filming of his wife Jane’s birthing process is both subversive in content as well as visually avant-garde in presentation. Brakhage refuses a clinical documentation of childbirth by way of nonlinear editing of the images, reverse motion, extreme close-ups, inversions, and disorienting cuts. In his essay ‘The Silent Sound Sense’ (1960), Brakhage asserts the possibilities of a ‘musicality of vision’ (qtd. in Remes, p. 72) or the rhythmus of images as Hans Richter called it in 1921,[10] which is subordinated by the complacencies of synchronised sound in mainstream cinema. Taking his cue from Cage, whom he had met in 1954, Brakhage adopts a radical silence when one expects to hear a sound performance, whether in the concert hall or in the screening room, which encourages a heightened awareness of the ambient sounds in the environment. Remes acknowledges that when screening the film to students unaware of what awaits them, the gasps, pained utterances, and discomfited squeaking of furniture are, if anything, more potently affective than an unaltered reel of sound-image film (p. 85).
The final two chapters of Absence in Cinema focus on the third category of ‘cinematic erasures’, treating found footage films that have been subject to deliberate deletions of images and sounds. In Chapter 3, ‘Naomi Uman and the Peekaboo Principle’, Remes tells us that Uman’s removed takes as its base a German softcore pornographic film from the 1970s and removes the images of all female figures from its scenes. Uman does this by covering every part of the frame that she wishes to retain with nail polish and then dipping the filmstrip in bleach, which chemically reacts with the emulsion to (mostly) remove the images of women. What is left is an ‘animated hole’ in Uman’s suggestive description (qtd. in Remes, p. 109) that is not censorship as such or a feminist critique of the male gaze (though it is that, in part) so much as a provocative examination of what Remes describes as scopophilia and phonophilia in cinema (pp. 106-121). This meticulous, frame-by-frame treatment of the film – recalling the laboring by women who hand-colored early films by the likes of Georges Méliès (although in his case, adding material, not removing it) – entices the spectators to fill in the hole with whatever they ‘want to see’ (p. 109). Remes invokes the ‘peekaboo principle’ in psychology proposed by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, in which the appeal of an object is especially heightened when it is withheld from view. The climax of the film, so to speak, is a black screen from which the image of the woman and the sounds of her moaning have been entirely removed. Ultimately, as Remes laconically states, removed ‘finishes with nothing and leaves everything to the imagination’ (p. 119).
Reminiscent of the substitution splices and black mattes that Méliès employed in his films, Martin Arnold performs his own act of magical erasure in Deanimated. In Chapter 4, ‘Martin Arnold’s Disappearing Act’, Remes recounts how Arnold avails himself of digital software to remove characters, dialogue, and objects from a B-horror movie, Joseph H. Lewis’ Invisible Ghost (1941), starring Bela Lugosi.[11] Initially, little is missing from the found film, but gradually the visible is replaced with the invisible, the audible with the inaudible, and presence with absence, rendering the feeling of Freudian uneasiness and the uncanny. Remes suggests that while Uman’s removal of female characters is obviously seenby the viewer, the missing characters or lines of dialogue in Deanimated can only be sensed, heightening the viewer’s affective response (p. 130). The switch to a more productive understanding of absence in cinema becomes most evident in this chapter, as the author moves from the psychoanalytic readings of Arnold’s films to the treatment of emptiness in Deanimated through the concept of sunyata (shunyata) in Buddhist philosophy. As Remes explains, instead of thinking of emptiness as profound loss or existential despair, Zen Buddhism understands the ‘void’ of sunyata not as nothingness but in relation to fullness and the sublime (p. 146). The final six minutes of Deanimated achieve the complete erasure of image and sound, a black screen accompanied by silence, which for Remes should not be taken as ‘deprivation or lack but as a state of radical openness’ (p. 127). Discussing this coda and the inevitable question ‘Is it over yet?’, Remes reminds us with a touch of playfulness that watching experimental films can be an enjoyable and stimulating experience. He draws the chapter to a close by recounting that, having purchased a DVD of Deanimated from the distributor, there was a discrepancy in the running time of the film. Remes’ version included only 36 seconds rather than the full six minutes of blackness. Told by the distributor that he would have to purchase another version of the film with the full-length black screen for $60, Remes concludes with dry humor: ‘Never had I spent so much money on nothing.’ (p. 149)
As these four extended case studies suggest, in Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing Justin Remes highlights an archive of films in which something that should have been seen or heard is absent. Like Anthology Film Archives in New York founded by Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage in 1970, Remes carefully curates his main selections from infrequently shown or exhibited experimental films, while also extending the three categories of cinematic absence – Films without Images, Films without Sound, and Cinematic Erasures − into a comprehensive annotated filmography at the end of his book. Lest the readers of Remes’ book feel cheated of the missing content, the imageless screens, potent silences, and filmic erasures at the center of his discussion of ‘nothing’ in cinema promise to reward their purchase with a provocative, intellectual, and affective experience. After all, in the cinema of absence nothing is everything.
Author
Tanya Shilina-Conte is Assistant Professor of Global Film Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research has been published in Screen, Film-Philosophy, Frames: Cinema Journal, Studia Phænomenologica, Word & Image, Iran Namag, Leitura: Teoria & Pratica, Studia Linguistica, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and elsewhere. Her book manuscript, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Interstices of Cinema, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
References
Beugnet, M., Cameron, A., and Fetveit, A (eds). Indefinite visions: Cinema and the attractions of uncertainty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Brakhage, S. ‘The Silent Sound Sense’, Film Culture, 21, Summer 1960: 65-67.
Cage, J. Silence: Lectures and writings. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
Dworkin, C. No medium. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.
Hanich, J. ‘Omission, Suggestion, Completion: Film and the Imagination of the Spectator’,
Screening the Past, 43, April 2018; Dossier: ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media’, edited by S. Walton and N. Boljkovac: http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-dossier-materialising-absence-in-film-and-media/omission-suggestion-completion-film-and-the-imagination-of-the-spectator/ (accessed 12 October 2022).
Khalip, J. and Mitchell, R (eds). Releasing the image: From literature to new media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Lopate, P. ‘Remembering Abbas Kiarostami’, The American Scholar, 5 August 2016: https://theamericanscholar.org/remembering-abbas-kiarostami/ (accessed 12 October 2022).
Remes, J. Motion(less) pictures: The cinema of stasis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Sobchack, V. ‘Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue’, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 3, 2012: 19-38.
[1] Justin Remes, ‘Nothing to See Here: Antiretinal Aesthetics in Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture’, Lecture at NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal: https://www.icnova.fcsh.unl.pt/2022/03/14/nothing-to-see-here-antiretinal-aesthetics-in-louise-lawlers-a-movie-will-be-shown-without-the-picture/ (accessed 12 October 2022).
[2] Khalip & Mitchell 2011.
[3] Dworkin 2013.
[4] Beugnet & Cameron & Fetveit 2017.
[5] Sobchack 2012, pp. 19-38; Hanich 2018.
[6] Anthology Film Archives, Imageless Films, http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/54404 (accessed 12 October 2022).
[7] The interview with Kiarostami is quoted in Lopate 2016.
[8] Weekend, directed by Walter Ruttmann (Germany, 1928/30); Window Water Baby Moving, directed by Stan Brakhage (US, 1959); removed, directed by Naomi Uman (US, 1999); Deanimated, directed by Martin Arnold (Austria, 2002).
[9] As Remes demonstrated during his virtual talk at NOVA University, Lisbon, his new book project on found footage films will be based on the principle of ‘found scholarship’, experimentally remixing a wide variety of preexisting scholarly sources.
[10] Rhythmus 21, directed by Hans Richter (Germany, 1921).
[11] Invisible Ghost, directed by Joseph H. Lewis (US, 1941).