Thomas Korschil

AVANT-GARDE FILMS

IV
When the world addresses us without us being able to answer, we are reduced to silence, hence not free. 15

Besides Adorno and Horkheimer another philosopher and exiled European had been challenged to reflect and analyse quite early the impressing media reality of the USA. Among other topics, Günter Anders discusses extensively the new electronic medium of television in his major book Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956).

For Anders television is above all characterised by its “ontological ambiguity“. The broadcast images occupy a twilight zone between illusion and reality, are neither mere (mimetic) representations, nor independent realities. In short: television delivers phantoms, or “forms acting as things“ (Anders 1994: 170). This ontological ambiguity, the phantom-like nature of the images misleads the viewer. The images (forms) appear as pure facts (things), as something immediate, although always they have already been processed and mediated. Following Anders every message is a directed message, and hence contains a hidden, but already pronounced judgement. This deception must remain invisible for the viewer / consumer; it is caused by the structure of television.

What we consume sitting in front of the radio or the screen is not the scene itself, but its processed version, instead of the supposed thing T its predicate P, in short: a prejudice appearing as an image hiding its judgmental character like any other prejudice.“ (Anders 1994: 163)
According to Anders this is the way television modulates first the experience, then the needs of its viewers, depriving them completely of their own judgement and the articulation of their genuine needs. In a nutshell: television incapacitates.

This is exactly the point where — especially today — one might state an essential difference between the consumer goods of television (or any other mass medium) and works of art. A commercial article has to conceal its influence on the viewer, to shroud its inherent judgmental character, what Anders called prejudice, as convincingly possible — the medium itself and the mediating characteristics of the article have to be erased. Like the free subject they are destined to dissolve in consumption, i.e. they have to be cancelled in the act of consumption. Hence a work of art claiming autonomy in an effort to stand by itself instead of merely representing something else must never cease to foreground its own operations and must always reflect itself to a greater or lesser extent. A work of art wants to enter an open discourse with the viewer, not only about what it mediates, but also about how it mediates something, so that mediation as such (i.e. representation) is foregrounded. For example, the collage of documentary and fictional images in Report — each clearly decipherable as such — generates its own world with its own rules and inter-relationships between the elements laid bare to the audience. Moreover, it questions this artificial world´s relationship to the “real“ world, in this case the world of mass media.

Furthermore, Anders suggests that television not only fundamentally alters its viewers´ consciousness, but also the whole of reality as such. In the media age something is only real when it appears as an image. So reality is degraded to the matrix of an electronic simulation of the world.

The real, the alleged referent, has to be approximated to its eventual representations, or altered according to the image of its reproductions. Anticipating them, the daily events have to follow their copies. There are already numerous events which only happen the way they happen in order to serve a profitable broadcast, or even only happen at all because they are wanted or needed for broadcasts. ( Anders 1994:190f.)
The phantoms of television do not only burn themselves into our world-view as prejudices compressed to a matrix, they also become the model of the (real) world itself. “The embossing [has] a boomerang-like effect“, so that, in a perverse way, the prejudices are finally confirmed, “the lie lies itself true“ ( Anders 1994:179).

Rough works like those of Ken Jacobs break into the intact cosmos of a media reality we have long been familiar with. Perfect Film is a highly complex construct of TV-news material and at the same time a cinematic ready-made of a degree of purity and rigidity rarely to be found. Found Footage, a term frequently used in a rather general sense (usually, like in the case of Bruce Conner or Martin Arnold, the material is purposefully selected for processing), if at all, positively applies to this film. Perfect Film is simply a role of film Jacobs found in a second-hand shop and has left completely unaltered. He shows it exactly as he found it.

The film consists of interviews and atmospheric shots a television-crew filmed in Harlem after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. It is neither unedited “raw material“, nor a completed TV-documentary, but a mixture of edited and seemingly randomly ordered images. That is why Perfect Film overflows with fresh unsolved tensions. As a viewer, one finds oneself right in the process of the creation of a representation and — as one soon senses — the staging of reality, when it is, paradoxically, a historical event which happened decades ago. You see a complete unedited interview with a police commander (including “false start“, reprimand of the journalists, and repetition) and later a few fragments taken from it in a half-finished segment. You listen to an eyewitness and see and hear him repeat the same answers for another network. Suddenly and phantom-like archive-images of the living Malcolm X collected for an obituary flash up in the middle of all this. He is never seen dead. As in Report, the central event is missing — it remains invisible, unshowable. The commentary intended to make sense of the whole enterprise is completely missing too.

We are confronted with a wild chaos probably more likely to do justice to the incident than the TV producer´s completed, polished film in media reality did, or could have done. (Perhaps the material fell entirely prey to censorship and nothing has ever been broadcast.) As a film in progress, an unfinished film, Perfect Film shows the “work“ of film and TV, the processes of transformation superimposed upon reality, in a way in flagrante delicto.

The minimal nature of Jacob´s intervention allows the material to reveal not so much the essence of an event as a failed attempt to obscure and distort it. The mechanisms of manufacturing meaning are unmasked by simply showing their seams, the gaps within reality that they would seek to conceal. 16
Being shown the cracks we are made aware of the “ontological ambiguity“ of (TV) images. The otherwise veiled and secret judgmental interference of reporting is laid bare in actu. This is the way Perfect Film conducts its media criticism — not merely talking about, but involving its viewers in the process of meaning construction itself. If you want to enjoy this film and make sense of it, you are perpetually forced to order material, interrelate images, in a word: to interfere in order to make the chaotic fabric speak to you.

part five