Justin Remes - Absence in Cinema

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

John Cage, Silence

The darkness that I like is the darkness of a movie theater.

Anouk de Clercq, Black (2015)

L uis Buuel and Salvador Dal were no strangers to scandal. In their first film, Un Chien Andalou ( An Andalusian Dog , 1929), the mischievous Surrealists assaulted spectators with a barrage of shocking and disturbing images: a razorblade slicing open an eyeball, a man fondling a womans bare breasts as blood pours out of his mouth, two corpses buried in sand at the beach. Yet, somehow, Buuel and Dals second film, LAge dOr ( The Golden Age , 1930) (1930), was even more provocative. In it, a father shoots his son, a mans fingers are bitten off by his lover, a woman fellates the toes of a statue, and Jesus Christ makes a cameo appearance as a pedophile and rapist. Critics denounced the film as a criminal heresy and bolshevik excrement, and at a Paris screening on December 3, 1930, it provoked a riot.

This scandal foregrounds a number of unsettling facts, from the rabid anti-Semitism that spread through Europe in the 1930s to the pervasiveness of film censorship throughout much of the twentieth century. I want to direct attention, however, to a less salient element of the LAge dOr riot: the tactics embraced by the Fascist mob. In addition to the aforementioned blackjacks and smoke bombs, at the sacrilegious moment when a monstrance is placed in a gutter, the rioters hurled purple ink at the screen. This is interesting for a number of reasons. To begin, if one were to splash purple ink on, say, Salvador Dals painting The Great Masturbator (1929), one would effectively destroy the artwork (and, of course, a number of Surrealist paintings were destroyed by the philistine mob that evening). But when ink is splashed on a movie screen, the film itself remains unharmed; it continues to circulate unmolested through the projector. Why hurl ink at the screen on which the film is projected rather than destroying the film itself? The purple ink is interesting for another reason: LAge dOr is a talkie, one that exploits highly complex sound-image relationships. To erase the films image does nothing to suppress its sound track: the music from Wagners Tristan und Isolde (1859), the crackling of a fire, the sound of a horse-drawn cart that barrels through a bourgeois dinner party for no apparent reason.

Just a few days before the Parisian mob attempted to turn LAge dOr into an imageless film, an intentionally imageless film was screened at the 2nd International Congress of Independent Film in Brussels, an event that took place from November 27 through December 1, 1930. The imageless film was Walter Ruttmanns eleven-minute intermedia experiment Weekend ( Wochenende ). To create this work, Ruttmann wandered through Berlin with a Tri-Ergon film camera and recorded his surroundings without ever removing the cameras lens cap. If a right-wing mob attended a screening of Weekend in 1930 and wanted to protest the film, would they still throw ink at the imageless screen? And if they did so, would the other members of the audience miss anything?

In my previous book, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis , I coined the term monochrome films to describe cinematic works that exploit the affective intensity of the empty screen. I also situate Weekend in the context of twentieth-century music history, arguing that Ruttmann has profound affinities with avant-garde composers like Luigi Russolo and Pierre Schaeffer since all three manipulate quotidian sounds in an attempt to create an art of noises.

Listening makes the invisible present .

Don Ihde, The Auditory Dimension

Walter Ruttmann is one of the most innovative and daring filmmakers in cinema history. His animated Lichtspiel ( Lightplay ) films Opus I (1921), Opus II (1923), Opus III (1924), and Opus IV (1925)are among the first abstract films ever made: colorful and carefully choreographed dances between rigid geometric shapes and sensuous blobs.

As forward-thinking and experimental as his films of the 1920s are, Weekend is Ruttmanns most formally radical film. In fact, it is one of the most formally radical films ever made. Discussions of imageless films tend to begin with works from the 1950s or 1960s, such as Guy Debords Howls for Sade ( Hurlements en faveur de Sade ) (1952), Peter Kubelkas Arnulf Rainer (1960), or Nam June Paiks Zen for Film (19621964).

However Weekend might have been projected, the film has had a powerful effect on audiences. It has been called stunning, thrilling, and alive with meaning. Such accolades are normally reserved for Ruttmanns most famous film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City , another work that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of Berlin in the early twentieth century. There is, of course, a crucial difference between the two films: Berlin foregrounds the sights of the great city, whereas Weekend foregrounds its sounds , from the pastoral soundscapes of the countryside to the industrial cacophony of cars, marching bands, and sirens. It is obvious why Ruttmann did not include sound in Berlin : synchronized sound was not yet available to filmmakers. (Alan Croslands landmark talkie, The Jazz Singer [1927], would be released two weeks after the German premiere of Berlin .) But synchronized sound clearly was an option when Ruttmann created Weekend . What are we to make of Ruttmanns odd experiment with sensory deprivation? Why eliminate sight from the cinematic sensory regime?