Whose fashion is it anyway?
On things, fashion, and humans in the films of Ulrich Seidl.
Research Master’s Thesis Media Studies 2015/2016 Absaline R. Hehakaya, student# 5654858 absaline.hehakaya@gmail.com Words: 22819. Thesis supervised by: dr. Marie-Aude Baronian Second reader: dr. Markus Stauff Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam.2
Table of contents
An introduction to film, fashion, and Ulrich Seidl. ... 4 1. The aims of this thesis. ... 5 2.1 Methodological and conceptual framework: fashion. ... 7 2.2 Methodological and conceptual framework: OOO-rereading the study of fashion and film. ... 9 2.3 Methodological and conceptual framework: OOO, alien phenomenology. ... 10 Chapter 1: Die Pornografie des Elends? OOO and the politics of aesthetics in Seidl. ... 13 2.1 A brief introduction to Ulrich Seidl’s oeuvre. ... 13 2.1.2 The reception of Ulrich Seidl: a director, provocateur, voyeur, producer, misanthrope, cynic, social pornographer, writer, pessimist. ... 16 2.3 The politics of aesthetics: film, fashion, philosophy and politics. ... 17 2.4 The aesthetic regimes of art. ... 19 2.4.1 Redistributing the sensible in the cinema of Ulrich Seidl: the politics of Import Export. ... 20 2.5 Fashion as a politics of aesthetics, and its distributions of the sensible. ... 21 2.6 The politics of aesthetics and things. ... 23 2.6.1 A cinema of objects? From Rancière to OOO and alien phenomenology. ... 23 Chapter 2: Fashioned worlds and alien phenomenology. ... 27 2.1 Sensing the radically alien? ... 29 2.2 Amongst the alien perspectives that make up film: ontography. ... 30 2.2.1 Alien phenomenology through metaphorism. ... 34 2.3 The carpentry of ‘fashioned worlds’. ... 36 2.4 Objects of fashion, film, and philosophy. ... 39 Chapter 3: ‘Stripped of clothes, dignity and shame’: exploring humans as things. ... 42 A closer look at objects: the intricacies between tropes of fashion and ontology. ... 43 The original sin. ... 45 Haptic visuality as metaphorism of haptic ontology. ... 47 Judgment day in paradise: Love and Hope. ... 49 Conclusions ... 51 Prospects for future research. ... 53 Final remarks. ... 55 Filmography. ... 56 Bibliography. ... 563
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An introduction to film, fashion, and Ulrich Seidl.
‘Repulsive and sublimely beautiful [...] it’s hideous and masterful all at once, SALO with sunburn.’ Leslie Felperin for VARIETY, on Paradise: Love. ‘A maestro of discomfort whose taste for confrontation masks a seriousness of purpose and a measure of compassion.’ Dennis Lim, THE NEW YORK TIMES.When you would cycle past the posters, upon its Dutch release in the winter of 2012-2013, you would not be able to miss it: paradise. A pearly white beach, against a stark blue sea and cloudless sky. White ladies sunbathing on their beach chairs in rows, and - behind a subtle chord that spanned across the width of the image, just in line with the horizon - small groups of men standing, in stark contrast, watching them. It was the release of the newest film of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl (Vienna, 1952), whose films always created the necessary “scandale du festival” at the bigger European film festivals. It was the first film of the trilogy called Paradise, which included Love (part one, 2012), Faith (2012) and Hope (2013), and it was the first film of Ulrich Seidl that I saw. Already its artwork sets out the parameters for the power play which negotiates distance and intimacy at the heart of the film. From the first encounter you could tell that this was a film that would be equally beautiful as it would be unnerving, maybe even racist, certainly uncomfortable to watch, and awkward.
It feels like a long time ago, watching Paradise: Love for the very first time. Although it was indeed a highly uncomfortable watch, I could not shake a certain affection for the troubled and unfortunate souls that dwell in these paradises. A sense of tenderness, encouraged by humorous moments, the soft tones of the films’ colors, the loneliness that fuels these searches for love and affection, and the harsh realities that are so hard to look upon. Beautifully shot on 16mm film stock, we see humans and things - humans more like things among things - in worlds where nobody really seems to be at home. Every image is fabricated with precision, interplays between either naked or brightly clothed human bodies, kitschy stuff, and an overload of things. These are weird and uncanny worlds, full of bright bikinis, unwatchable things, animal prints, reality, bellies and other ‘curves and swerves’, latex, appearances. The other, darker side of what we in everyday life come to think of as ‘fashion’: dress, the body, and the ideals and myths that surround how we are to experience these appearances. Can Ulrich Seidl’s stylized worlds be read with the tools of the conjoined field of fashion and film? With this thesis I hope to provide the reader with a (re-)orientation to the work of filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, and open up ways to think through the strange, alien beauty of his work. The humans we
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see on the screen are an integral part of the mise-en-scène, and whether it comes to either the documentaries or the fiction films, Seidl creates thought provoking images. This thesis seeks to trace ideas of fashion in Ulrich Seidl’s universes. Yet, these are not the average costume drama films, and nothing remotely resembling “fashion films”, films which are made to promote collections, items, brands of fashion houses. For example, “fashion and film”-theorist Stella Bruzzi (1997) explores how clothes are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities, but the everyday kind of clothing in a film like Paradise: Hope does not really render identity. It actually flattens it out as an element of a larger composition. The characters in all Seidl’s world look rather homogenous, alien, and mysterious in their ordinariness. How to set about this research?
I have come to encounter the subject of fashion as entangled with modes of knowing and exploring: ontological, speculative, aesthetical, political, and embodied. If Seidl’s films are ‘a mirror of our times’ (Seidl in Wheatley: 2008), this mirror reflects images back to us like a distorting mirror - magnifying things we might not want to see, bringing into view weird realities. These distorted images have given more way to the scholarly and film critical explorations of cruelty and degradation, instead of thoroughly examining their aesthetics, and the strange perspectives they entail. My research provides for a reversal of this tendency, and rereads Seidl’s oeuvre as one that is inexorably tied to issues of appearance. Who appears to have a say in what counts as “fashion”, and who and what appears when we study fashion in film?
1. The aims of this thesis.
This thesis aims to broaden the scope in which Ulrich Seidl’s films have been analyzed, firstly in paying attention to some of the under theorized films in his oeuvre. Although there has been (inter)national attention for his work, only a few critics and scholars have been writing within the scope of Seidl’s entire oeuvre, typically paying asymmetrical attention to the moments that cause(d) public outrage. As I will explain in the first chapter, this tendency is understandable, but it also provides for a rather lopsided perspective on the complexity of Ulrich Seidl’s oeuvre. 1 When watching earlier films, like Loss is to be expected (1992), Pictures at an Exhibition (1996), or The Bosom Friend (1997), the first thing one sees is how remarkably consistent Seidl’s oeuvre is over the years. The aesthetics of the films are strikingly similar, and although the different topics and themes of the films look incommensurable at first glance (cruelty, beauty, art, things, bodies, migration), they are closely interwoven in what Rancière theorizes as the politics of aesthetics, as I will argue in chapter one. Throughout this thesis, I will mainly focus on three of Seidl’s early works: the documentaries Pictures at an Exhibition, The Bosom Friend and Models (1999), and show tendencies,
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tropes and themes that tie in with his more recent feature films Paradise: Love (2012), Paradise: Hope (2013), and the documentary In the Basement (2014).2
Secondly, this thesis argues that the grouping of these specific films within Seidl’s oeuvre, asks for an altogether different focus, than pairing them with the cinema of the new extremism (Horeck & Kendall: 2011), which fosters an emphasis on Animal Love (1996), Dog Days (2001) and Import Export (2007). Pairing these films brings about different aspects of his work. In exploring these particular films and by letting these films think for themselves (Mullarkey: 2009), this thesis will be able to focus on the aesthetics of Seidl’s oeuvre. Through the prism of fashion I shall look at formerly overlooked entities, or the ‘things’, like costumes, washing machines, hunting trophies, SM-cages and more. In this I follow Joanne Entwistle’s (2000) lead in joining studies of fashion (as system, idea, or aesthetic) with studies of dress (as in the meaning given to particular practices of clothing and adornment). These films are thought-experiments for thinking through the relations of fashion and film to appearance. Fashion as a field of study designates things and tendencies that are at once deeply human, for example in creating sense of identity, place, civilization, as they are dehumanizing and nonhuman, through its objectifying perspectives and ‘looks’. Also in a literal sense, fashion is made up of nonhuman objects (dress, makeup) and take the body as its object. How do Seidl’s films make use of different perspectives and appearances to redistribute relations between nonhuman and human things - like bodies, clothes, washing machines, identity?
Thirdly, this thesis takes up fashion in the films of Ulrich Seidl within the philosophical project of object-oriented ontology (hereafter abbreviated as OOO), following the lines of thought of two of its main thinkers, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton, claiming that Seidl’s films provide for alien phenomenology (Bogost: 2013), with implications in terms of a ‘weird essentialism’ (Morton: 2007/2010a/2010b/2012/2013). Whereas Ian Bogost proffers the tools for understanding film as alien phenomenology, Morton provides for the context in thinking through the ramifications for ecological thinking. Not as something for nature lovers, tree huggers and hippies, but rather something that has to include everyone (the Goth teen who plays video games and listens to Black Metal all day, as Morton would have it) and every thing (mountains, underwear, ants, toothpaste, make-up, tea, Pokémon). Dark ecology is thinking identity, ‘being-in-the-world’, and the weirdness that pervades everyday life in the Anthropocene. The same weirdness forces itself upon us when entering Ulrich Seidl’s universe; the world without us is already here. Let us have a closer look at the theoretical and methodological framework of this research project. 2 Considering the images and writings I have found, I would have gladly included The Prom (1982), The Last Real Men (1994), and Fun without Limits (1998) in my analyses, but unfortunately these films were not available to me at the time of writing this thesis.
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2.1 Methodological and conceptual framework: fashion.
The study of fashion and/in film has in recent years grown into a diverse and increasingly prominent field of study, as it investigates the various connections between fashion and cinema. Among the topics and areas are the study of costume in film, especially related to gender and identity (Bruzzi: 1997), the collaborations between fashions houses and filmmakers (Breward: 2003; Uhlirova: 2013), and explorations into the spatial, aesthetic qualities of dress within the mise-en-scène (Wortel and Smelik: 2013; Bruno: 2014, 2010). At first glance, it might appear to make no sense to talk about “fashion” in a singular Seidl film, except perhaps for the 1998 documentary Models, which clearly deals with models, photographers, fashioning the body to ideals of beauty, and fashion as an exploitative industry, and is therefore narratively linked to “fashion”. I will argue that in Seidl’s oeuvre there are a lot of themes, components and aspects that justify this turn to fashion, for example looking at the recurring theme of striptease in Seidl’s oeuvre, is surely worthwhile. In her text on fashion and philosophy in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Marie-Aude Baronian points to the various forms in which fashion calls to our attention:
Be it an archetypal consumption product, a material object, a discourse, a system of rules, an experience, or a perceptive mode, we cannot embark on thinking sartorial fashion without considering its various layers, "outfits," and resonances. We must redress fashion for dressing and exhibiting its complicated portrait. Fashion is, at once, a homogeneous logical system and heterogeneous multiple sites. Surely, the contradictory logic of fashion is part of its own system and strategy wherein its constructed instability makes it desirable, appealing, and dismissive but also superfluous. Baronian: 2014, pp. 18.
Understood as a material reality of everyday life, fashion negotiates both our sense of identity - tied in with personal expression, social class, civilization - and of place - navigating the affordances of environments in terms of access, and a sense of ‘being at home’. It distinguishes what is common to our idea of self - culture, age, identity - from what is not accepted as common - chemicals, coloring, exploitative labor, the sexualized gaze. Fashion is interwoven with our agency in navigating the possibilities of our bodies, as well as with the limits of our agency in the moment when we meet the limits of our bodies, a spectrum that encapsulates compulsive eating disorders, wrong sizes, racism/sexism/xenophobia, as well as ripped tights, rules and codes, broken prostheses. The interesting point in case being, that fashion acts on all these different levels, interweaving ecological dangers with personal expression, alienation or objectification with everyday senses of self, the collapse of Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh, on Wednesday, 24 April 2013, with a late-night shopping spree, and looking beautiful with physical health issues and (dis)ability. Fashion reveals itself as a complicated phenomenon and as an object that is not even slightly exhausted by its
8 relations. This thesis redresses fashion and the ways in which it exhibits its complicated portrait in the films of Ulrich Seidl. Fig. 2: Still from Ulrich Seidl: a director at work (Constantin Wulff, 2014) The “costumes” in Seidl’s films appear as quite simple. They are more affiliated with the everyday kind of fashion than with, for example, the elaborate costumes designed for period drama films. Their first goal is to seem realistic and authentic, but there is a meticulously aesthetic component in their selection and presentation. In the “making of”-documentary Ulrich Seidl - a director at work (Constantin Wulff, 2014) we see Seidl working on the documentary In the basement. When he is making a shot of two women playing table football in their basement; they are wearing identical dark grey tracksuits and caps. He starts shooting, then interferes, and tells the women to change into their bikinis - it is too dark in the basement, and in these dark tracksuits they disappear into the background. They hesitate and resist somewhat (‘oh now, who would want to look upon that, that is nothing for ladies of our age’), but Seidl insists and in the end he makes the shot he was looking for: tableaux-style, symmetrical, two women, one of maybe fifty and the other around sixty years old, one bikini in hot pink and the other in bright blue, two grey caps and two bellies [fig. 2].
A scene like this discloses something that is prevalent in Seidl’s films, from The Bosom Friend and Paradise: Love, to In the basement: the composition of the tableaux governs the relations between dress and space, and to come to the characteristic aesthetics of the tableaux composition sartorial choices are made in both his fiction films, as in the documentary works. This explains that the powerful images of Rene Rupnik in his yellow turtleneck in The Bosom Friend [fig. 3], or the colorful line of kids in the gym in Paradise: Hope, are not a coincidence, but well composed. It might also not be a coincidence that Edward Lachmann, one of the cinematographers who has worked on
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Import/Export and the three films of the Paradise-trilogy, has also worked as director of photography on two costume films, that are strong examples of cinema’s “fashioned worlds”: Todd Haynes’ radiant, yet delicate films Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015).
Fig. 3: Mind the yellows.Screenshot of Rene Rupnik in The Bosom Friend (Ulrich Seidl, 1997) Although this thesis employs a broad and disperse set of theories and concepts, the end of this research remains providing a re-orientation to the oeuvre of Ulrich Seidl. Therefore, I allow myself to paint this picture of things, fashion, and humans in broad strokes. Let us for now descend into the theoretical body of this thesis that is OOO, and of what it is that these thoughts render as (im)possible considering fashion and film.
2.2 Methodological and conceptual framework: OOO-rereading the study of fashion and film.
To render all the different fields of study together, I will employ Rancière’s philosophy of the politics of aesthetics (Rancière: 2004, 2006, 2011). This enables me to explain how and why Ulrich Seidl’s films are generally read as a sensationalist cinema. Through a rereading of fashion and dress as a certain politics of aesthetics, I will be able to show how the characters from Seidl’s films are not allowed to be seen, said, thought, and experienced as beautiful. Ulrich Seidl’s films redistributes the sensible of the politics of aesthetics of fashion. This proposition renders the everyday-like dress and costume as of interest for studying fashion and film, as well as their aspirations, naked/clothed bodies, and the relations between their dressed bodies and the mise-en-scène. Secondly, I will
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propose the project of OOO and alien phenomenology in the sense of Ian Bogost (2013) as a redistribution of the sensible: exploring the flat worlds of things and humans through a politics of aesthetics and compare this to Epstein’s cinema of objects as referred to by Rancière as a film fable (2006).
I will use OOO findings to reread the conditions for studying fashion and the relations between objects: OOO sets the challenge for this thesis to rethink the functions of some of the theories, axioms and concepts that are used within the study of fashion and/in film. Most notably the Deleuzean axioms in the work of Giuliana Bruno (2014), building on “flow”, “becoming”, and the centrality of human desire in its reading of the surfaces of images, whereas Ulrich Seidl’s films are about stasis contra becoming, separate and non-communicating entities, bringing relationality to a minimum. These worlds are not fuelled by desire, but rather expose it as an object among other objects. While most (film) philosophies try to collapse the distinctions between the object and its appearance to consciousness, or the object and its qualities, the research program of OOO is precisely focused to magnify these tensions.
Seidl’s films are about bringing these tensions to the fore between appearance and “the real”, without resolving their suspension. Humans appear as things among things through an interplay of dress and mise-en-scène that nonetheless reminds us of Bruno’s “fashioned worlds”. Other theories and concepts that need appropriation, or rethinking, are Martine Beugnet’s notion of the ‘cinema of sensation’ which has been a seminal work in understanding Seidl’s films, as well as for exploring what film theory has come to term more generally the cinema of “new extremism” or “new European extremism” (Horeck & Kendall: 2011). What role does sensation plays in the terms of alien phenomenology, and what does Beugnet bring to the table of studying film in the theoretical framework of OOO?
Furthermore, we shall borrow Laura Marks’ notion of “haptic visuality” in light of Morton’s remarks on touching and the susceptibility of (hyper)objects (Morton: 2015a). In the final chapter, I will elaborate on the body as a thing amongst things, by exploring the connections of fashion to epistemology, by tracing how OOO understands objects, access and humans as objects, compared to what ideas and images Seidl proposes in his films.
2.3 Methodological and conceptual framework: OOO, alien phenomenology.
Object-oriented ontology is a materially invested,3 non-anthropocentric, flat ontology; things, and the things they do to other things, are not necessarily to be accessed by humans. It is therefore also referred to as “speculative realism”, since it speculates on the existence (how, not if) of real objects.
3 Graham Harman is explicitly not a materialist (Harman: 2015b, pp. 404). However, it could be argued that Bruno Latour, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton are.
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It problematizes a philosophy of access; the notion that humans (through cognition and sensation) can exhaustively know the world. Alien phenomenology can be thought of as a method, or philosophical orientation, that accompanies this flat ontology. Both the ontology and phenomenology counter what Quentin Meillasoux has called the correlationist view, an intellectual inheritance of Kant’s metaphysics, in which humans and the world are inextricably tied together, and the one never exists without the other. OOO-theoreticians like Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton and Quentin Meillassoux hail the end of correlationism; they see ‘speculative realism’ as an event in philosophy, after which these thinkers have gone their separate ways, rather than as a movement of some sort. The starting point for OOO was a particular symposium under the name of “Speculative Realism” at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April 2007,4 where a particular common ground was found: that it is now no longer possible, to ground reason in the human subject, ‘since science now knows things that are radically outside of cognition, such as events in the Universe before consciousness as such could have arisen’ (Morton: 2013, pp. 38, in relation to this ‘founding principle’ see also Bogost: 2013, pp. 4-9). OOO offers a critique of correlationism, and of the “modern constitution”, wherein theory has attempted to split the world into two halves, human and nature, and has evolved two strands of science, the humanities and the natural sciences, to singularly deal with either one or the other, a notion it adopts from actor-network theory and Bruno Latour’s critique of modernity in We Have Never Been Modern (2012, pp. 1-12 and 104-7). Human culture is allowed to be multifarious and complex, in terms of semiotics and critical theory, but the natural or material world is only permitted to be singular. However, this is a wronged position that privileges some beings (humans, the subject or Heideggerian Dasein) over other beings (dresses, dead zebra skins, lipstick, gravity). In this thesis the ‘fabric of sensation’, as conceptualized in different ways by Giuliana Bruno, Martine Beugnet, or Jacques Rancière, is surpassed by the findings of the pioneers of object-oriented ontology (OOO), and replaced by an altogether stranger fabric of things (Latour: 1988).5 Things have each other, as well as they have humans.
Alien phenomenology speculates on these phenomenal worlds of things, on how things experience their world. For example, describing how animals with or even without central nervous systems have their worlds. It must be noted that this project is limited in its approach of the dispersed field of OOO. The viewpoints of the frontrunners of this ‘movement’ share a common enemy in the form of correlationism, but differ in their approaches, terminologies and focal points: 4 This symposium featured presentations by Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillasoux, Ray Brassier and Graham Harman. Swiftly after this event, Timothy Morton and Ian Bogost also declared their sympathies for OOO. Their theoretical work shows the most affinities with Harman’s version of OOO. 5 Latour uses this expression to refer to networks in his actor-network theory.
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e.g. how they approach realism, how they position themselves to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and their conceptions of ‘nature’. It may be noted that the authors mentioned here do not seem to be too strict about using each other’s work or terms within their own projects, they mix the terms and specify when necessary. I will follow their lead and use both things and objects, and when I refer to a specific thing in either the filmed world or other, I will specify accordingly. When I use “objects”, I generally mean this in an ontological sense - human and nonhuman, parts and wholes.6 If we speak of object-oriented cinema, we are not referring to images of inanimate objects on screen. [...] ‘objects’ does not mean non-humans any more than it means humans. All entities are objects; all have an inscrutable inwardness withdrawn from direct access. And, furthermore, we have seen that cinematic images tend to be viewpoints on objects rather than objects themselves. Then what we seek are objects, human or otherwise, that are somehow split off from their accessible traits. Harman: 2015, pp. 407.
Ian Bogost offers tools for rendering visible the phenomenal worlds of things in the form of ontography, metaphorism and carpentry. Ontography is the name for a general inscriptive strategy, it is a record of things juxtaposed, to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation, without offering a clarification or description of any kind (Bogost: 2012, pg. 38). One strategy of ontography which I will be employing throughout this thesis, is making Latour litanies (Bogost: 2012, pg. 38). If we would make a Latour litany of film and the stuff that makes up film, it might look something like this: camera’s, costumes, festivals, emotions, lighting systems, popcorn, editing programs, sex, film stock, lipstick, mice, digital data, weather circumstances, food, bodies, marketing strategies, booms, and so on and so forth. Metaphorism renders the phenomenal worlds of things in terms of something else, as I will argue through the distributions of the sensible as theorized by Jacques Rancière. Carpentry is the making of objects that do philosophy, which I understand in terms of both fashion and dress, as well as cinema, and of cross-referencing and appropriation of these art forms from each other.
6 Within OOO different terms are used to refer to objects: Bogost uses “units” and “unit operations”, Harman speaks of “objects”, Latour of “things” and “networks”, Bryant used “objects” but now prefers “machines”.
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Chapter 1: Die Pornografie des Elends? OOO and the politics of aesthetics in Seidl.
7‘[…] the art and thought of images have always been nourished by all that thwarts them.’ Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, pp. 19 In this chapter, I will elaborate on the politico-philosophical dimensions of Seidl’s worlds and reread this politics as closely tied to what I in my interpretation of Jacques Rancière would like to call the politics of aesthetics of fashion. The political in Seidl’s films should not be understood as (dealing with) political issues or a call to arms; rather this politics reveals itself as the interwoven fabric of film, fashion and politics. The encompassing term for this fabric we might call ‘the politics of aesthetics’, politics as certain (re)distributions of the sensible (Rancière: 2004). This specific reading is best equipped to deal with the complexity of the films in Seidl’s oeuvre, since it considers the entirety of its aesthetics, instead of singling out the issues of representation and moments of cruelty. It does render these issues of representation and moments of cruelty within its scope as well, and therefore also capture the concerns of for example David Williams (2014) in his analysis of Import Export. With this chapter I will navigate the findings and pitfalls of his film’s politics and aesthetics. I will take into account that not every Seidl film will foster the particular distributions of the sensible we would like them to have. However, these critiques can be re-read as a certain politics of aesthetics as well. Firstly, I will briefly introduce the oeuvre of Ulrich Seidl, then I will address a broader tendency in the work of Seidl, accurately described by Williams (2014). In combining an analysis of the reception of award winning World Press Photo of a Ukrainian sexworker by Brent Stirton with Seidl’s Import/Export, Williams typifies the broader tendency of Seidl’s films to bring to the fore ‘the endlessly rehearsed questions over voyeurism and aestheticization - can art that depicts suffering also be beautiful?’ (2014, pp. 4). To rephrase and expand Williams’s question, this chapter asks: can art that depicts suffering also be about fashion? Since things do not have to be beautiful to be about fashion. 2.1 A brief introduction to Ulrich Seidl’s oeuvre.
Although Austrian director Ulrich Seidl (Vienna, 1952) has been making (television) documentaries since the 1980’s, it is only since the turn of the century, that his work received considerate attention from both international film festivals and film critics. This was due to the release of his first theatrical fiction film Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001), which won the Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film 7 ‘Pornografie des Elends’ is taken from the title of a review which appeared in Die Welt, on October 19, 2007, with the German release of Import/Export (2007). Full title of the review was ‘Ulrich Seidl und die Pornografie des Elends’, by Matthias Heine. http://www.welt.de/kultur/article1279225/Ulrich-Seidl-und-die-Pornografie-des-Elends.html
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Festival. Followed by a smaller television documentary Jesus, you know (Jesus, Du Weisst, 2003), the release of another theatrical fiction film Import Export in 2007 consolidated Seidl as a director to watch. With the release of the Paradise-trilogy over the course of 2012 and 2013, Ulrich Seidl established himself as one of Europe’s contemporary auteur filmmakers. All three films being feature fiction films for theatrical distribution, and all three premiering at the three major film festivals in Europe. Seidl and his work are often compared to, or named alongside, fellow Austrian director Michael Haneke, for they both share a rather pessimistic outlook on life and humanity. Another filmmaker who is named in relation to Seidl is Lars von Trier, because his films are also famous for their moments of shock and awe. Though Lars von Trier’s moments of cruelty are more oft and more visceral than Seidl’s. In the appreciation for his documentaries, Werner Herzog is named as akin to Seidl’s essayistic style. Like Seidl, Herzog works in the fields of both documentary and fiction film. Herzog is famously quoted in relation to Seidl’s work, for saying that he never stared into hell more directly, than when watching Seidl’s Animal Love (e.g. Brady & Hughes: 2008, Wheatley: 2008, Gilbey: 2013).
With its distinctive aesthetics, Seidl’s work can be typified as freely mixing elements of fiction and documentary, choosing topics that (notoriously) deal with people who live on the margins of society. His fiction films, which are the larger budgeted projects with more elaborate production scripts, are populated a cast of professional actors and lay people playing a version of themselves. However, his camera does not shy away from embarrassing or cruel moments in either genre, for either professional actors, lay people, and animals. Seidl’s films are famed for their characteristic style of composition: symmetric shots in a ‘tableaux’-style. Mostly working closely together with cinematographers Wolfgang Thaler (from Dog Days until Paradise: Hope) and Edward Lachman (Import/Export and The Paradise-trilogy). He is married to Veronika Franz, who has been a writer and assistant-director for several of his films, from The Bosom Friend (1997) to the upcoming Safari (premiering at the Venice Film Festival, in September 2016). Seidl has in turn produced her co-directorial feature film debut, the horror film Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh, Ich Seh, 2014, co-directed by Severin Fiala), a film in which two young twins suspect that their mother is an imposter when she returns with her head in bandages after having had plastic surgery.
The critical attention paid to Seidl’s work is shaped by both a slight bias in film criticism, which tends to pay more attention to feature fiction film than to documentary film, and the more practical aspect of availability. Since Seidl’s earlier work consisted mostly of documentaries made for
German speaking television, these films are not internationally available to a large audience of non-15
German speakers.8 The situation for Seidl’s films in The Netherlands is therefore quite exceptional, in terms of appreciation, as well as in terms of availability. It is mainly through the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which awarded Seidl a special jury prize for Loss is to be expected in 1993 (Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen, 1992) and made him a guest of honor at the festival in 2003, that Seidl’s documentary filmmaking became known to the Dutch audience.9 The Dutch public television broadcasting organization VPRO (a partner of IDFA), shows Seidl’s television documentaries relatively often since the 1990-ies, through retrospective programs like 2Doc (if possible, with Dutch subtitles, but also with English subtitles). Furthermore, the Dutch Eye Film Institute, formerly known as Het Filmmuseum, has acquired the theatrical and home entertainment rights for all Seidl’s films from Dog Days onwards to his most recent documentary In the Basement (2014, released as part of Eye’s Previously Unreleased in The Netherlands in 2015). Apart from this, several Dutch intellectuals and journalists, film producers and art critics master the German language (the largest neighboring country), and have therefore been writing about Seidl’s films from his earliest days as a filmmaker (when his works weren’t subtitled), on to his international successes. The latest wave of attention was in June this year, where Ulrich Seidl was one of the guests of honor during the Forum on European Culture, organized by Dutch Culture and De Balie, Amsterdam, where Seidl was interviewed by the nationally famous writer Arnon Grunberg.
Apart from either film criticism and scholarly attention, two exquisite photo books have been published including images from the Paradise-trilogy, accompanied by texts from renowned artists and thinkers, like Marina Abramović and Elfriede Jellinek, aimed at an international audience with texts in both English and German, and one other including interviews with Seidl on In the Basement (entirely in German). The larger part of the reviews, essays and academic works I have found in my research are actually only dealing with a couple of his films, most notably Dog Days and Import/Export, to a lesser extent the Paradise-trilogy, and in reference to either of these films we also find some mentioning of Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1996), e.g. Hilpert: 2012, Horeck & Kendall: 2011. Yet, we cannot understand Seidl, without understanding something of the storm of mixed reactions that has become familiar with the release of his films. Especially in relation to moments of cruelty, Seidl has garnered severe criticism of making ‘a pornography of misery’. Let us have a closer look at the trampled grounds of this battle field, before we enter any new one. 8 Ulrich Seidl’s translator, dr. Martin Brady [private communication] states that plans are in the making for the release of a collection box of all of Seidl’s films, including the earliest documentaries like The Ball (1982), but it is not decided that this collection will also have English subtitles. 9 Here I would like to thank the IDFA, and in particular Paradocs-curator Joost Daamen, for providing me with the opportunity to view archived screeners of The Bosom Friend, Pictures at an Exhibition and Loss is to be expected.
16 2.1.2 The reception of Ulrich Seidl: a director, provocateur, voyeur, producer, misanthrope, cynic, social pornographer, writer, pessimist.10 Acclaimed film critic and writer, The New York Times’ A.O. Scott describes Seidl in a short piece in relation to a small summer retrospective in New York 2009, as a ‘disturbing, paradoxical and difficult artist whose work proceeds from an almost naïvely simple premise.’ Seidl’s camera seems to dispassionately register what happens in front of it, sometimes capturing documentary subjects and then ‘non-professional actors giving semi-naturalistic performances - in the midst of daily life’. The results are in Scott’s view ‘funny, awful, upsetting, bizarre and enraging,’ and ‘That’s just for starters’ (Scott: 2009).
In the same short piece, Scott states that Dog Days turns ordinary existence into a comic nightmare and that it raises a series of impossible ethical questions: ‘Is the film motivated by compassion or contempt? Does it voyeuristically exploit its sometimes clueless, helpless characters (or “actors”), or does it critique the audience’s own prurience and comfort? It will be no easier to try to answer these questions than to forget what you have seen. Be warned, but go’ (Scott: 2009). Four years later, in one of the harsher reviews of Paradise: Love, the same well-articulated A. O. Scott seems less appreciative and forgiving when he writes that the Paradise: Love ‘subjects both its characters and its audience to a series of humiliations in a manner that is at once prurient and punitive.’ And then, tying his discussion of Paradise: Love to the intricate relations of fashion and film: ‘Mr. Seidl shows us human bodies stripped of clothes and dignity and then shames us for looking’ (The New York Times, April 25, 2013). Although it is understandable that Scott has become exhausted by the ethical japes and taunts of Seidl’s films, it also seems a little odd: did the stakes of Seidl’s work suddenly change with the release of Paradise: Love, or did a repetition of the same game of suspension that underlies Scott’s earlier ‘be warned, but go’ wear him out? Both in Import/Export and Paradies: Liebe the spectator is constantly tempted to regard the protagonists as somehow ‘other’, with a distanced camera position, one that gives overview shots rather than the close-ups we have come to associate with the establishment of an emphatic relation to a character. We might call this an ethical Seidl-paradox (one among many). And this is what Seidl’s films are famous for: to frustrate its spectators in their critical examinations. ‘The first images are of mentally disabled adults riding bumper cars at a Vienna amusement park. Like the patients with dementia that Mr. Seidl displayed in his film “Import Export” (2009), these non-actors function less as characters than as tokens in the director’s passive-aggressive blame game. If you regard them as grotesque, pitiable or in some way “other” - which is to say exactly as they are filmed - perhaps you should examine your
10 All the terms borrowed from film critics who have described Seidl, including his professions, that are recited at his official website: <http://www.ulrichseidl.com/usr_en.shtml>.
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conscience’ (Scott: 2013).
To claim that everything is fine in the film worlds of Ulrich Seidl, that they are ‘merely a mirror of their times’, and that that’s entirely okay - no harm done whatsoever! - would be rather naive, and risks (if it is not openly) underestimating (post)colonial cruelty, racism, misogyny, ageism, disability discrimination, the integrity of the body, victimization, and all the other crimes that are tiptoed around and plunged into in the Seidl-worlds, in favor of intellectual universalism and aesthetic enjoyment. Needless to say that this is not the path I will be setting out for this thesis. Therefore, I will scrutinize Seidl’s oeuvre in terms of aesthetics, and from this perspective reread social inequalities, cruelty, and Seidl as part of the tendency which is called the ‘new European extremism’ (Horeck & Kendall: 2011). In the following paragraphs, I will think through concepts and perspectives that are more favorable to keeping paradoxes intact and do justice to the complexity at the heart of Seidl’s oeuvre. I will elaborate on the ways in which fashion in/and film are interwoven with aesthetics as well as politics. This places Seidl’s oeuvre and our understanding of fashion within a political and film philosophical perspective, navigating the findings and pitfalls of interpreting Seidl’s work.
2.3 The politics of aesthetics: film, fashion, philosophy and politics.
Alain Badiou states that cinema can not only be conceived of as a mass art, but that it also has the opportunity of being mass philosophy (Badiou: 2009/2005). Could this be true for fashion, as it might be for cinema? And how must we understand this, when ‘cinema’ and ‘fashion’, naturally legitimizes a lot of connections? Films and fashion objects often neutralize the impossible relations that, according to Badiou, are the territory of philosophy. Not every film unsettles us, shifts our ideas about the world, society, or our perspectives on things. And also fashion negates potentially philosophical paradoxes, for example in Llewellyn Negrin’s analysis (2014) of the appropriation of ‘pauperist style’ by established fashion houses in haute couture:
By demonstrating that even the derelict can be aestheticised, it mitigates the disturbing nature of that which it appropriates, thus offering a non-threatening way of vicariously identifying with the dispossessed while leaving social inequalities intact. Through its uptake of that which has been associated with the proletarian, haute couture symbolically overcomes the gap between the upper and lower classes, while in reality these hierarchies persist. Although it gestures towards the erasure of class distinctions, its transformation of poverty into ‘chic’ results in a reaffirmation of these inequalities. Negrin: 2014, pp. 8.
Ulrich Seidl’s films bring about philosophical paradoxes that tie in with the complexities of both fashion and film. The complexity of Seidl’s oeuvre is both political and philosophical, although it may
18 not be in the moments we would want them to, or in the ways we had hoped they would. In that sense, what might be these paradoxes, these impossible relations within his particular films that are thought through by the films? In this respect, I agree with Mattias Frey that Seidl’s stylized mise-en-scène reaffirms the idea of the constructedness of European social space (although I would say, any space), ‘investigating the possibility of desire in a world intolerant of deviation from normality’ (2011, pg. 190). To think this through, it proves useful to introduce Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible as one of the axes on which our perspective on the films of Seidl might be turned. According to Rancière, film can potentially take up tensions between what is seeable and sayable, thereby proposing what he calls ‘(re)distributions of the sensible’, or le partage du sensible. ‘Sensible’ refers to what is able to be apprehended by the senses.
The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed […] it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the ‘age of the masses’ […] It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Rancière: 2004, pg. 12-3.
For Rancière, the redistribution or sharing of the sensible means at once exclusion, sharing as in parting or dissecting, as well as inclusion, sharing in terms of having in common or mutual having (Rancière: 2004, pg. 104). This sharing of the sensible or perceptible is as much tied to aesthetics, as it is to politics and democracy. Democracy, as well as something like Frey’s ‘constructedness of European social space’, is in Rancière’s work not merely literally defined as a political system (one among others), but as a certain sharing of the perceptible. It must be noted that Rancière’s focus on ‘perceptible’, ‘senses’ and ‘sense’ makes way for a reshuffling of the hierarchy of vision as the sense par excellence to nourish both art and thought (Jay: 1993), these terms encompass all senses and sensations in its rendering of politics as a politics of aesthetics. An assembly should be considered in all the ways it can be sensed, embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended: ‘[...] human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, I would say a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together and politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of the “being together”’ (Rancière: 2011/[2009], pp. 56, my emphasis A.R.H.). The politics of film, or of any art, is therefore not simply how a particular film ‘envisions’, but how it plays upon all of our
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bodily functions.11 This resonates with the understanding Seidl’s films as cinema of sensation (Beugnet: 2011), as well as with the connections of fashion to film and sensing (knowing as well as sensing), and a destabilization of the relations between subject-object:
[...] before or beyond the spectacle of human figures enacting a story, images and sounds impose themselves as matter, the fabric of the film, moulded and shaped into colour and rhythmic fields. Given precedence, the sensual and affective effect tends to pre-empt and largely condition the discursive and representational dimensions. Vision and hearing bring into play the other senses, moving the figurative and perspective-based organization of the filmic space towards an amorphous, sensory-based reality, allowing for the traditional relation between subject and object to become drastically destabilized.
Beugnet: 2007, pp. 61, emphasis A.R.H.
This politics of aesthetics is not so much about the spectacle of human figures enacting a story, depicting oppression and emancipation, or a stance on the economic and political history that is responsible for the miserable conditions of those living on the margins of society (Birrell: 2008). Even more so, as Rancière states in relation to the films of Pedro Costa, this politics ‘[...] is a stranger to that politics which works by bringing to the screen the state of the world to make viewers aware of the structures of domination in place and inspire them to mobilize their energies’ ([2009]/2012). 2.4 The aesthetic regimes of art.
There are several ways of being for art and they are political in several ways, which Rancière discusses as different ‘regimes’. The sort of film which tries to get us out of the cinema and protesting on the streets, functions as (or within) a certain distribution of the sensible which Rancière calls the ‘ethical regime of art’ (or of images) - reducing art to an ethical telos, art being made to affect the ethos of the spectator on moral, social or religious criteria. This is certainly not what should be attributed to Seidl’s films; his films are not straightforward enough to inspire action in the blunt sense of a call to arms, and he himself denies any wish to mobilize his audiences. ‘I'm not trying to make sure that the audience ends up somewhere particularly. I'm certainly attempting to grip them 11 It is customarily said that sight and hearing are public senses more assimilated to reason. Martin Jay describes this tendency in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought (1993) in relation to visual metaphors for knowing: the French word ‘voir’, which means ‘to see’, finds its way into terms as ‘savoir’, to know, and pouvoir, meaning ability, to be able to, as well as power (pp. 2) On the contrary smell, taste, touch, proprioception and the other senses are more related to subjective and personal perception because of their proximity to the body (Laine: 2006). In the contemporary attention for the senses in cinema and cultural studies, the emphasis lies not in the separation, but in the meaningful relation between sense-making and our sensate bodies; in cinema studies this leads to a rethinking of spectatorship in terms of the sensual and the mimetic (Laine: 2006/2015, Beugnet: 2007, Horeck and Kendall: 2011, Marks: 2002/2008 and to lesser extent Bruno: 2010/2014).
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(‘erwischen’, which also means ‘to catch in the act’), but I do not try to lead them to a specific place.’ (Hehakaya: 2016, unpublished) Seidl does not shame us for looking, to paraphrase Scott, he tries to fixate us with his images and catch us in the act of sensing.
In an interview by Wheatley for Sight & Sound magazine, Seidl claims that ‘[...] my films generally deal with what you might describe as ‘everyday fascism’. It’s something that is always there and is always going to survive in sexism, racism and xenophobia. My films are political, but not a priori. Rather, they are a mirror of the times.’ (Wheatley: 2008) ‘Mirror’ can be seen as a red flag signaling one of the other two regimes within the realm of aesthetics. This is a certain distribution of the sensible which Rancière calls the ‘poetic’ or ‘representative regime’. Here a work of art, rather than reproducing ‘reality’, functions in a way that it obeys to certain rules and codes that postulate an art’s “proper” form. These rules and codes are the fables that govern or plague the reception of an art form, for example not mixing high and low art forms, showing what is deemed decent to be shown, et cetera. The art of the aesthetic age is an art that undoes the links of representative art, for example by thwarting the logic of arranged incidents, for example films who thwart certain stereotypes, or by refiguring older artworks, for example fashion which re-appropriates trends or materials from the past for designs for future collection. Art in the aesthetic regime presupposes all past art to be available and open to being reread, reviewed, repainted or rewritten by any artform at will. It presupposes also that ‘anything and everything in the world is available to art: banal objects, a flake peeling from a wall, an illustration from an ad campaign, are all available to art’ (Rancière: 2006, pp. 6-8). 2.4.1 Redistributing the sensible in the cinema of Ulrich Seidl: the politics of Import Export. Rancière claims that it is the apparatus of cinema and the cinematic image that has the potential to “thwart” given meaning with an excess of sense impressions. Each image is, in effect, the potential site or limit situation of meaning. Herein lies the centrality of the concept to a politics of emancipation as demonstrated in Rancière’s reading of nineteenth-century workers’ literary journals – ‘the thinking of those not “destined” to think’ - as a ‘redistribution of knowledge and truth’ (Birrell: 2008, pp. 2). Within the aesthetic regime of art, cinema can affect and reshape who has a say in what is to be seen, experienced and thought: ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.’ (Rancière: 2004, pg. 13) Film can foster or re-imagine ‘the experience of a group of individuals whose lives and environment are typically only shown to signify misery and incapacity’, as Baumbach states (2013, pp. 31). Seidl’s films - the fiction films Dog Days and Import Export foremost, but also Animal Love -
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are notoriously accused of doing exactly that. This is certainly not the case of all the aspects of Seidl’s work, but it does resonate with the ways in which he depicts racial and ‘geoaesthetical’ stereotypes, in Williams’ terms, as attributed to Import/Export as well as to Paradise: Love by A.O. Scott. These films are accused of portraying a miserable life, lacking dialogue and any form of narrative development that is somehow directed to an improvement of the situation of the film’s protagonists - echoing a symbolic violence that is repeated outside of the cinema in newspapers, online media, photography and art. In the earlier mentioned piece on Import/Export, Williams summarizes the problem as follows: ‘Lowbrow or highbrow, for our entertainment or our engagement, these images all exist along the same lucrative continuum, reinforce the same patterns of thought, a montage and mirage of a triste and submissive Eastern European other. Nothing we should “get off on”’ (Williams: 2014, pp. 6). In an age where critical theory shaped the analyses of film studies, showing a people in the margins of society ‘whose lives are typically only shown to signify misery and incapacity’, as having a miserable life, no capacity for change and no voice, is a cynical, guilty thing to do. This political aspect resonates with the analysis of Negrin of the appropriation of ‘pauperist style’ in haute couture ( 2014). This is certainly not the case of all the aspects of Seidl’s work, but it does resonate with the ways in which he depicts racial and ‘geoaesthetical’ stereotypes, in Williams’ terms, as attributed to Import/Export as well as to Paradise: Love by A.O. Scott. Seidl replies to Wheatley (2008) ‘Things are dark like that because that's how things are. Obviously the protagonists in Import/Export want a better life. They're faced with a society that has no place for them, but they're out there looking. The idea that they're actually seeking something better is in and of itself optimistic, as long as they keep doing it. You could say that I'm the deliverer of bad news, but I'm not the one who actually makes it bad.’
Through this paragraph I have shown one way in which the politics of aesthetics in the cinema of Ulrich Seidl can be explored. However, while acknowledging the problems of Import/Export as discussed by Williams, there is more going on in Seidl’s oeuvre that is in tune with Rancières third regime, the regime of aesthetics. This thesis will therefore move to other works by Seidl, that propose other forms of redistributing the sensible: the politics of fashion. 2.5 Fashion as a politics of aesthetics, and its distributions of the sensible. In Paradise: Love, the social distinctions between tourist and locals, between the beach boys and the hotel staff, are not only navigated by ropes and barriers, but are also enforced by dress. However, how a spectator comes to terms with the ladies in bikini at the cocktail bar, or the nude scenes of Teresa’s/Margarete Tiesel’s body is also governed by the politics of fashion - that a spectator might find it unusual, or inappropriate even, to see a body like Teresa’s, is due to the particular distributions of the sensible that make up the status quo of who is to be seen naked, in what ways,
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and how this is to be experienced. It is fair to say that throughout the ages, a lot of things, people, media, perceptions, thoughts and energy, have been invested in policing the ways in which we experience bodies, looks, clothes, art, and misery. In terms of thinking through the politics of fashion, as certain distributions of the sensible, one could think of the ways in which uniforms designate the prisoners from the guards, the judges from the accused, the rich from the poor, the dressed from the exhibitionists, and also ‘the beautiful’ from ‘the abject’. Who gets a say in designating these differences range from fashion critics, designers, scientists, bloggers, pictures, advertisements, films, celebrities, and all the actors that assert and reassert the claim of these actors to distributing the sensible. The fashion system itself is a political system of aesthetics in the sense of Rancière: it deems what is to be seen and said, thought, worn or shown, how these things are to be experienced, and who is able to have a say in these matters. In short, the fashion system is a system invested in distinction, negotiating (saying it mildly) and enforcing that what is allowed to exist - what is (to be) common to the community. ‘Fashion is (like the culture industry) produced actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously; it simultaneously exhibits and conceals its mechanisms’ (Baronian: 2014, pp. 16).
Seidl’s worlds abolish the hierarchical distribution of the sensible: who is able to search for beauty and affection, who is to appear nude (and how), who is to play a lead part in a fiction film, and how one should stylize within the documentary, or in the fictional, genres. For example by favoring static photographic like shots, that break up a filmic flow, through offering only little narrative explanation or psychological depth to the characters, and by combining kitschy stuff with the clinical precision of the tableaux-style, Seidl rehashes the sensible in astonishing ways. It is in that sense, that the aesthetics of Seidl’s films is also politics. This is as much the doing of humans as well as objects. As hybrids, uniforms invest humans with authority, and humans exercise this authority over other humans as well as things: it is the one in the proper uniform, with the proper papers, also known as the prison guard who is allowed to hold the keys to the doors of the prison. These objects are important to Rancière only insofar as they are things to be experienced, but they aren’t really entities that should be respected in and of themselves - they are swept away in either ‘sense’ or ‘sense’. This thesis would argue in line with Bruno Latour that Rancière’s notion of ‘being together’, and that which makes up his ‘sensory fabric’, is mediated through and made up of both humans and nonhumans alike (Latour: 1988/1999/2005, Harman: 2009). ‘Emancipation’ and ‘democracy’ (flat ontology as a democratic ontology) can be claimed by all sorts of actors, like objects or animals, and not exclusively by humans as Rancière argues. In this thesis the ‘fabric of sense’, as conceptualized by Rancière,12 is surpassed by the
23 findings of the pioneers of object-oriented ontology (OOO), and by an altogether stranger fabric of things (Latour: 1988, pp. 199 and Harman: 2009, pp. 23): ‘Solid yet fragile, isolated yet interwoven, smooth yet twisted together, [they] form strange fabrics’. 2.6 The politics of aesthetics and things.
If we would frame the project of OOO and its ancestor of Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) in Rancièrean terms, it is their aim to redistribute the sensible in favor of the emancipation of objects. However, the reversal is not without problems. When Latour talks about ‘politics’ and ‘democracy’ in his introduction to Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Latour & Weibel eds.: 2011), a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of the same title, he uses these terms in the more everyday kind of sense, that is not automatically equatable with Rancières notion: ‘objects [...] are not really integrated in our definition of politics’ (pp. 6). Political space is crowded with overlooked objects: ‘[...] objects - taken as so many issues - bind all of us in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of the “political”.’ Latour then asks the question of what an object-oriented democracy might look like, and notes that many political philosophy has suffered from an object-avoidance tendency in their analyses (Latour & Weibel eds.: 2011, pp. 4-6) it is not necessarily a politics of aesthetics concerning humans and human experiences to look at the stuff that makes up a parliament or an assembly (things or networks that make up politics in the literal sense, that which Latour refers to in this introduction).
More importantly, the things in the compositions of Ulrich Seidl render the humans as things as well through dress and the objectifying perspectives of fashion. Dress, very much like OOO, negates the divide between human and nonhuman, being radically alien as a whole that cannot be reduced to its relations to humans, and hopelessly anthropomorphic at the same time - although the human exists at the center of its material form, it does not reside at the center of its ontological existence. Things are given for scarves and mascara as much as they are for humans. On that particular ontological note, we can assume that dress has the human, as much as humans have dresses. 2.6.1 A cinema of objects? From Rancière to OOO and alien phenomenology. Rancière acknowledges that cinema and fashion as art forms in the age of the aesthetic regime of art ‘want[s] to identify its unconditioned power with its contrary: the passivity of reasonless being, the specks of elementary particles, and the originary upsurge of things’ (2006, pp. 8). And in the prologue to Film Fables, he explores the claim by Jean Epstein that cinema is the art form par excellence to capture the existence of things. The matter seen and transcribed by the mechanic eye is equivalent sensation and new extremism (Birks: 2015), as well as in relation to Seidl’s cinema (Hilpert: 2012).
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to the mind, says Epstein through Rancière, ‘a sensible immaterial matter composed of waves and corpuscles that abolishes all opposition between deceitful appearance and substantial reality’ (pp. 2). The objects that cinema holds in its mechanical gaze provide the spectator with ‘adventures of matter lurking beneath the subject of figuration, to the glimmer of the epiphany and the splendor of pure reasonless being glowing just beneath the conflict of wills of the novel or play’ (pp. 8). This is what is usually referred to as the ‘cinema of objects’, the art of cinema which brings to life the dead and meaningless objects that in everyday life do not attract our attention, and dramatically brings them to the fore. Compare this cinema to the cinema of Sergei Parajanov where a table is never merely a table, but is brought to life in a sensuous and lyrical flow that stitches together images, close-ups, movements, memories and sensations. Here film is fashion: weaving together a fabric of sensations that touches upon the surface of things, and is in return touched by the surfaces of things. The ‘splendor of the insignificant’ and the ‘prose of the world’; romantic notions that take account of objects only insofar as they move us, human subjects, fostered by a cinema that put tremendous labor in its apparatuses to provide for these sensations and feelings.
However, this is a different kind of cinema and not remotely familiar to the statically composed universe of Seidl, with its emphasis on stasis, long-shots, non-communicating entities, staccato editing and nonrelational or collocating style of editing. Seidl does not explore things like tables in a lyrical flow, but rather confronts us with the table and keeps lingering at a distance. Instead of a ‘new found splendor’ (Rancière: 2006, pp. 9) of things, Seidl brings all things that make up his tableaus to the fore in an uncanny way. These things invade the space in their stillness, withdrawn from a lyrical movement of the camera. Confrontational. These objects are not swept up in anything (camera movement, feelings, flows of affect and memory), but rest in their own presence and their own relations to the other things present. Whereas Epstein gleefully ‘abolishes all opposition between deceitful appearance and substantial reality’, Seidl’s cinema renders the uncanny object-oriented ontological reality that all objects, human and nonhuman, are withdrawn and do not exist solely for a human consciousness. I do not claim that all cinema favors this object-oriented position that brings relationality to a minimum: ‘The fact is that the mechanic eye lends itself to everything: to the tragedy in suspense, to the work of Soviet Kinoks, and not at least to the illustration of old-fashioned stories of interest, heartbreak and death. Those who can do everything are usually doomed to servitude. And indeed it turns out that the “passivity” of the machine that supposedly crowns the program of the aesthetic regime of art lends itself just as well to the work of restoring the powers of the former regimes’ (2006, pp. 10). I partially agree with Rancière here - cinema does lend its camera eye to all kinds of purposes, genres, storytelling, rendering things visible/invisible, or establishing emotional relations. But Rancière, in his understanding of Epstein, describes the mechanic eye as an ideal machine - he reiterates a certain distribution of the sensible
25 that renders the ways in which objects like cameras are actors invisible and silent, this distribution of the sensible is thwarted by Seidl’s films.13 The problems of this would-be “passivity of the camera” come to the fore in at least the following objections inspired by Seidl and actor-network theory. It is untrue about cameras in an everyday situation (of filming) that they are passive, because camera’s show resistance all the time by malfunctioning, smudgy lenses, low battery, and so on. This shatters the idea of a camera as passive in itself, we must understand that the camera is less than its parts and its “passivity” is the result of labor within a network: without a proper lighting system, battery, film stock, lens and cinematographer this illusion of the ideal machine is easily shattered. Strangely, this is something that Rancière does acknowledge, ‘[t]he mechanical apparatus [of cinema], conversely, suppresses the active work involved in this becoming-passive’ (2006, pp.6). However, I would say that this is also not a necessary feature of the use of the cinematic apparatuses.14 Seidl renders visible the work of the cinematic apparatuses in his stylized documentary shots. These tableaus reveal themselves as being a composition of human and nonhuman things constructed in an assemblage for the camera, weaving together certain ideas of documentary film, with ideas of distributing fiction, style, playing upon the rules and codes of fashion, while also lending heavily from the photographic medium and painting. To conclude with the final objection, there is no “the camera” in an ideal sense, there are a lot of different camera’s that pose their own possibilities and boundaries for making images - this is why it matters which camera is used in a certain film or filmed situation. Here I would like to point out that in order to render things silent, this needs to be fostered by both the network of actors that makeup a film, the aesthetics of the film, and the ways in which the interpreter/critic/scholar/spectator is theoretically equipped to encounter what she sees on the screen. This is where I leave Rancièrean territories. Rancière’s conception of politics is fundamentally tied to the emancipation and experiences of humans in a polemical verification of equality (of intelligences, of cinema as art), for example the emancipation of the experiences of the working class. Yet, it is resembling a Rancièrean politics to propose a new distribution of the sensible that emancipates a group that was silent before, meaning here: bringing to the fore the phenomenal 13 Bruno Latour is of great importance for OOO, because he was one of the first to redistribute the sensible of the politics of aesthetics of science, through what has come to be known as actor-network theory (ANT). Nonhumans are actors too, and all action is distributed in a network of actors. In We Have Never Been Modern Latour attacks the modernist paradigm which separates ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, ‘nonhuman’ from ‘human’, and typically renders the latter as multifarious and complex, whereas the former is only allowed to be singular and passive. 14 This is a strange passage in the prologue of Film Fables, where Rancière seems to posit a certain understanding of the cinematic apparatuses, including the camera, while at the same time already leaving open other interpretations and uses. Here it comes to the fore what Rancière is after, that cinema thwarts its own fables: when we think to consider cinema as ‘a certain art form, which essentially does x’, he proves through that cinema is already thwarting this fable of its own existence.
