Political, or Not
From Issue 0: Commitment
1.
We live in parlous years. For so many of us, all that we most value, freedom and truth and reason and nature and life itself, is under grave threat. Many artists wish ever more urgently to speak out in the social and political spheres.
In considering the issues raised by politically engaged art, we might turn to that most famous of engaged films, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). Eisenstein's second feature, it caused something of a sensation among audiences in various cities, and some nations temporarily banned it, fearing unrest. The film depicts one of the attempted 1905 revolutions in Russia, in which sailors on a ship in the Tsar's navy rebelled against rotten meat, the rebellion spreading to the city of Odessa and to other ships. Made on the twentieth anniversary of these uprisings, the film looks toward the successful 1917 revolution, which led to the government under which the film was made, its praise of the 1905 attempt implicitly supporting the new Soviet regime.
The film's popular success likely resulted from the brilliance with which it accomplishes one thing cinema can do very well, appeal to raw emotion. As civilians are murdered in the famous Odessa Steps sequence, who can fail to sympathize with the mother carrying her wounded child toward the soldiers to ask them to stop shooting? Who can not be horrified by the runaway carriage transporting a baby down the steps on its own?
Cinema remains the least understood of major arts. So often film commentaries discuss mostly, or only, the plot. But to begin to understand any film, one must examine it as cinema, shot by shot, edit by edit, in terms of composition, lighting, movement, editing rhythms and juxtapositions, and more, because the way the viewer sees its depictions affects how one feels and thinks about what is shown. Most films are revealed as cinematically vacant under this approach, displaying only the first or most basic level of film style, getting the action on screen, perhaps with additions of superficial mood effects. The spectator is thus viewing little more than a picture book, and one with only mediocre illustrations. It is a minority of films, Eisenstein's among them, that use cinematic elements to add emotion and meaning to a film's narrative.
Often a thoughtfully-made film will contain within it key scenes that provide what might be called "viewing instructions," as do the opening five shots of Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein intercuts between two related compositions, both showing the sea shooting into the air as waves crash into rocks and concrete. There followed originally a quote from Trotsky, replaced in later versions by one from Lenin. The "rising" of the waves is intended as a metaphor for the revolution that both advocated, but it is just as important to notice the visceral graphic collisions created at the cuts, which to the viewer sensitized to such effects helps prepare one for the oppositions that occur throughout the film: the viewer is asked to notice the graphic effects of the cutting between different compositions. Indeed, as Eisenstein himself wrote, this film is organized as conflict. [1]
Like these first four, a cut can be a moment of intense perceptual violence, with one image instantly replaced by another of different, even opposing, design. Hollywood films use various techniques to try to hide the abrupt change, but Eisenstein here heightens it by juxtaposing two harsh, geometric compositions of concrete and smashing waves that are oriented somewhat differently, so that each edit creates an instantaneous clash that mirrors the smashing waves. Similarly, the film's second of five parts begins with a bugler intercut in three different positions. [2] Earlier, an angry sailor breaking a plate is shown in multiple very brief shots, vividly rendering his anger. Conflict is shown within single compositions, such as the horizontal shape of a big gun looming over a line of sailors, and also in the structure of the narrative. After Vakulinchuk, who sparked the shipboard rebellion, is killed, Eisenstein spends seventeen minutes at the film's center showing the buildup of the revolutionary crowd, finally coming together with many waving ecstatically at the ship for a half minute, until intrusion of the shattering massacre suddenly reverses the flow of the narrative, the unifying gathering of the people coming together suddenly flipping into chaos.
Sequence of frames from Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1926
This is masterful filmmaking, but to what ends? Every film defines its spectators. Most commercial cinema and TV defines them as passive receptors, to be pulled along almost mindlessly by all manner of manipulative techniques, so that it is no accident that people describe binge-watching TV as "vegging out." The editing in Battleship Potemkin manipulates too, but it also calls attention to itself, at least to alert viewers who are thus made aware of how they are being affected. This editing is also tied to Eisenstein's social and political philosophy in complex ways, as his writing, and a close viewing, make clear. But the viewer is at first swept along by the film's rhetorical power, not questioning that the Tsarist regime must be overthrown, or that it is just that the ship's officers should, even after the ship has been captured, be thrown into the sea.
What would it take for a film to give us enough information, history, and political theory to allow us to make up our own minds? I might propose a film of seven hours in length, of which six hours would consist of rolling titles of text providing such information. It is not recommended that anyone make such a film; reading books would likely be a better way. And there is the possibility that some might emerge from this seven-hour epic with views opposite those intended by the filmmaker.
To what extent can any visual art allow us to form considered opinions about social and political matters, and to what extent is it best suited, if the artist desires to advocate for a position, to stimulate raw emotions leading to foregone conclusions? Is there not a contradiction between the complexity of experience many of us desire from art and the creation of a film with a clear "message"? Is there a conflict between valuing the dignity and autonomy of an individual's consciousness and a desire to convince as to what is right and just? Yet while the argument that "I don't want to tell the viewer what to think" has populated artists' statements for many decades, we still have not achieved paradise on Earth.
Most of the greatest films also have a third stylistic level. Here, the combined effect of compositions, light, movement, and rhythms produce, along with the narrative — if any — some kind of "world," whether a way of seeing our world, a way of imagining another world, or, most often, both. Fritz Lang's films are haunted by ever-widening perspectives, with things entering from outside the frame within a shot or via a cut, functioning often as threats, the films' worlds becoming widening traps. Robert Bresson's films display, even when set in prisons, an unfamiliar neutrality, a strange weightlessness, through which, many have argued, some notion of the spiritual enters. And there is a kind of electrical energy and brutal poetry to the collisions in Battleship Potemkin. In this manner of abstracting a film's form, it becomes almost like a painting-in-time, shapes meeting rhythms to express the artist's deepest vision, attaining a level of complexity that is at least partly separated from the pity aroused by the falling baby carriage.
Eisenstein's evocation of conflict will not, whatever his intent, inevitably be taken as Marxist; it could be seen as psychological; it could even serve the interest of another political ideology. Indeed, since a cinematic "world" is a purely or largely visual one, it necessarily has a level of abstraction that cannot easily be translated into words. It is a tautologically necessary quality of the best visual art that it eludes such translation. When this is not the case, where the work offers little more than its "content," it is formulaic, didactic, lacking in aesthetic power, and without any significant reason for being visual at all. This truth illuminates the central paradox of attempting to make politically or socially engaged art that is also aesthetically powerful: its aesthetic level must go beyond any verbally expressible message, thus bearing a significant dose of the so often-derided "art for art's sake."
Still from Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1926
2.
In 1951, an eighteen-year-old American decided to become a filmmaker. When I asked him, 21 years and nearly one hundred films later, about his next step, Stan Brakhage told me that, finding the few film schools that existed at the time inadequate, he instead read everything he could find of the writings of Sergei Eisenstein. Later he purchased a print of Battleship Potemkin and viewed it many times, telling one acquaintance that this was a film one could really learn from.
Brakhage’s first two films were black and white narratives influenced by Italian neorealism, though there is also a rapid montage sequence in the second, Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953). Under many other influences from cinema and poetry and art and dance and classical music, Brakhage found his way out of drama and toward a more lyrical style. By 1972, he had not only worked through Eisenstein's influence, but made a film that was so non-systematic and elusive in its imagery and editing as to be an almost complete refutation. This achievement then seems to have freed him to call on Eisenstein's influence again in some works that followed — and not in others, making this case of an artist drawing on influence from another truly exemplary in depth and diversity.
One can observe Eisenstein's clashing diagonals in Brakhage's six-minute Cat's Cradle (1959). Like most Brakhage films, it is intentionally silent. One cannot always identify what is being shown. Images are out of focus, with off-center framing and dark or bright exposures, and connected by very rapid editing. The filmmaker described his film as "sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a ‘medium’ cat," but its shadowy human figures offer only the barest hint of a narrative. No obvious social or political point is made. Instead, like many of his films, there is a suggestion of a puzzle, or a riddle, in this case fragments of a narrative that is mostly hidden from view. Brakhage answers Eisenstein's explicitness with darkness, silence, and an implied refutation of the importance of stable character identity. Never does he seek an obvious emotional effect from the viewer. As is almost always the case with his films' titles, this one does not engage in naming what we will see, but provides just one possible way “in.” Here, the shifting lines, figures, and perspectives suggest some of the diagonal labyrinths of an actual cat's cradle, itself a metaphor for the film's dimly-hinted-at connections.
The collisions in the editing do, however, strongly echo Eisenstein's abstract level, without its ideology. Brakhage has learned to mine the power of cutting between opposing forms. More than once he intercuts images of himself in two different compositions, recalling similar moments in which characters change positions via editing in Eisenstein. Here, though, clashing forms do not propel us onward but create a metaphorical door that summons up darkness, barring entry to unrevealed, possibly erotic, doings. The collective image formed in the memory is as coherent as that of any film, if one can admit into the idea of coherence a dialectic of presence and absence.
Like Eisenstein, Brakhage also wrote extensively on cinema. In the often-cited opening paragraph of his first book, Metaphors on Vision, he speaks of his aspiration to recover the pre-linguistic seeing of a very young child, suggesting it contains greater freedom and variety because objects do not yet have names: "How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’”[4]
Yet Brakhage also writes of knowing that one can never “go back.” What animates many of his films is a tension between our knowledge of the names of objects, and the cinematic aspiration, realized through a variety of techniques, to discourage the viewer from reducing objects to those names, but instead to encounter each in “an adventure in perception.” Without identities imparted by words, political meanings in the usual sense seem hardly possible. But is there not also a statement in moving away from the fixity of language, of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lies, praise and condemnation, powerlessness and power, into a realm of silence and uncertainty and ever-renewing discovery? The world of forms and rhythms Brakhage constructs through cinematography and editing, kin to the “third level” of Battleship Potemkin, can be argued to be lacking due to its disconnection from immediate social issues, but is just as arguably deeply enriched by the ways that disconnection rescues shape and light from reductiveness, opening the viewer's eye and mind to “a world alive… shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color.” Would not such an awareness enrich us as humans? Viewing a Brakhage film may not cure a killer of bad impulses, but I would like to quixotically believe that if it is seen early enough there is a slight chance it might save us from the next one.
Sequence of frames from Stan Brakhage, Cat's Cradle, 1959. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper
Any art work is a product of its culture. It makes sense that the citizens of a nation who lived for centuries under Tsarist tyranny, which survived a revolution and civil war, will, only a few years later, see the world in terms of social realities, of citizens cooperating against oppression. It also makes sense that a young American in 1952, even one not from a privileged background, but who had never experienced revolution or war on American soil, and who was part of a culture oriented toward the self-invention of the individual, would produce films of more private explorations. But Brakhage saw his films in terms of a social mission as well. I had long known this when I heard him say, at one of his screenings, “If one viewer leaves the theater and sees the street in a new way, I will be happy.” (Quote, from memory, is an approximation.) He saw American mass culture as oppressive too, as deadening to the imaginative eyesight and thinking of the individual, and he connected it to larger disasters such as our participation in the Vietnam War, even making a filmic meditation on the subject of war, 23rd Psalm Branch (1967). Much later, he spoke in retrospect of his mission by lamenting that he and his colleagues had failed to “save the world.”
We are faced with contradictions. Make a work with specific references to political and moral battles, as Eisenstein did, and you are forced to deal directly with issues of power and persuasion, and of the crudest sort of lying. Eisenstein's visual exposure of the ship's doctor's obvious lie indeed resonates against lying politicians today. Follow Brakhage's path, and few viewers will see commentary on current issues. Indeed, few viewers will see your film at all. And yet, in his attempt to create a new viewer consciousness separate from that fostered by mass culture, his films could not be more relevant today.
In 1972, Brakhage made one of the landmark films of his career, The Riddle of Lumen. Here he creates an inventory film, showing us many different kinds of light in many different settings, but also many different kinds of editing. There are rhymes on shape, and cuts between objects of wildly different shapes. There are also cuts in which the second image seems related to but more complex than the first: a pail becomes a barrel with a cup on it; a geometrical shaft of light on the floor becomes a soft-edged cloud of light spilling down a stairway. There is an anti-didactic statement at the core of this least didactic of films: any pattern that you think you understand will be surpassed by a more complex and less describable one. By revealing the world as containing an almost infinite variety of shape and light, Brakhage stimulates the viewer's imagination while never telling the viewer what to think.
Both paths are necessary to a full life. That cinema is better suited to the second is I think proven by the difference between the power-struggle plot level and the deeper beauties of Battleship Potemkin. And those beauties, and the less immediately engaged work of Brakhage with its alternatives to naming and judging and power, might be the balm we most need for these most unbalmy times.
Sequence of frames from Stan Brakhage, The Riddle of Lumen, 1972. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper.
3.
Artists have responded to oppression in many different ways. In 1940, the French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen found himself in a German prisoner-of-war camp with three other musicians. He wrote music for them, eventually constructing a work of eight movements, and in 1941 they, and he, performed it for an audience of about 400 prisoners and camp guards. Quartet for the End of Time, a composition of sublime and ethereal beauty, has since been performed and recorded many times, and still seems a perfect answer to all brutal militarism, not just of the Nazis. While this very unconventional classical music caused “irritation” among some at the premiere, others listened with rapt attention. One witness to the performance called it a “masterpiece,” suggesting it was “like a bridge thrown towards the absolute, an attempt to go beyond time.”
Asked near the end of his life which two composers had influenced him the most, Brakhage named Johann Sebastian Bach and Olivier Messiaen. //
[1] Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form (Harcourt: 1949), 45-63.
[2] Running times are from the Blu-ray of the film, issued by Kino, and are, in the order discussed in this paragraph, 14:43, 14:00, 18:13, 30:25 to 47:45.
[3] Canyon Cinema Catalog, accessed July 5, 2020.
[4] Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1963, ed. P. Adams Sitney. Third edition published by Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2017, 114.