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Journeys from Berlin/1971
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Journeys from Berlin/1971 – sometimes Working Title is added at one or other
point of that scan – may be the most Freudian movie ever made, even in the
already rather psychoanalytic realm of avant-garde cinema. Not only on the
level of its content – a long, tortuous monologue from a patient (noted
critic-scholar Annette Michelson) to a chameleon analyst (regularly changing
age and size) occupies perhaps half the total running time of 125 minutes – but
also in its entire formal conception and structuring.
It is like an extended, elaborate exercise in free
association, founded primarily on the interrelationship of personal life and
political struggle. One always leads to or sets off the other, without clear
cause-and-effect hierarchy: Rainer clearly wants to shove Freud at the Marxists
(and post-Marxists) and Marx at the Freudians (and post-Freudians). The
individual is lost in a sea of historical determinations; yet, at the same
time, it is the (abstract) individual’s anguish and impotence that the film
registers so powerfully at pinpoint moments. The difficult topic and scary aura
of modern terrorism is the central, attracting magnet holding this force-field
of fragments together; all journeys start from the Berlin of our nervous reality,
as well as the Berlin of our disturbed, fascinated, at-least-century-old dreams.
Journeys attempts to mimic the workings of
the unconscious, with its non sequiturs and criss-crosses, its condensations and displacements. Or, to use the hipper,
more modern parlance of that hoity-toity New Yorker magazine October when it champions this director,
it is an art of shifters, all the structures of linguistic referencing (and every goddamn thing is considered a
language these days, even the unconscious, thanks to Jacques Lacan) always
sliding out of place. Rainer wants to replace conventional narrative economy,
where every element has a precise and functional place, with the libidinal economy of which Jean-François
Lyotard speaks (and dreams): objects (toys, photos), words, situations are
distributed across the entire textual span of the work, attributed or belonging
to no single character or time-space. Sometimes, Rainer appears to be harking
back to Surrealism, with its (equally Freudian, but from another time and
place) techniques of automatic writing – and all the humourous strangeness and
incongruity that can result. It’s no wonder, for instance, that Patricia
Patterson & Manny Farber have always valued Rainer’s art for its comedy element.
But for all the admiration I feel for Rainer’s bold,
conceptual project, and the numerous insights it produces along the way, I do
feel, ultimately, that Journeys is a
failure precisely where her previous films such as Lives of Performers (1972) were so successfully radical and
genuinely, thrillingly progressive. Too much of the historical raw material
here – reported facts, written documents, newsreel footage – is taken
unproblematically as direct presentations of reality (or so it seemed to me); all
we need do, it appears, is discover the profound, obscured connections between
these various fragments in political practice and in our psyches. Beyond the Fragments! – a fine modern
slogan, courtesy of Sheila Rowbotham.
Naturally, Rainer does not presume to arrive at an
explicit, concluding formulation such as this. However, the pieces arrayed here
possess another, equally important and equally material history: the history of
the language, rhetoric, conventions employed in order to speak and address us
in a certain way. The film sometimes tries to ignore these layers, but they
weigh, heavy and unanalysed (unproblematised, as the politicos say), right on top
of the manifest intentions. Maybe not nearly enough shifters, after all.
I get the feeling that Yvonne Rainer went for broke in Journeys, attempting to produce her
Great Artistic Statement. As she proceeds in her own, multiple “journeys from”
whichever life/work origin (dance, performance, etc), she dallies longer, and
in increasingly convoluted ways, with “theory” (capital T) and its critical
demands on identity. That’s understandable – and why not? She does as she
pleases, she’s earned that right. But her less pompous or pretentious works
are, in fact, her more sophisticated, not to mention more pleasurable.
MORE Rainer: MURDER and Murder, Privilege © Adrian Martin August 1981 |
