What happened in THE YELLOW

A dance performance
Choreography, concept, dance: Inka Juslin
Concept, dramaturgy, visual: Svitlana Matviyenko
Dance: Ronja Verkasalo
Music: 3 Songs without Words,
Part III: There is a solitude of space (2001)
and Kolomyika, a dance (1981) by Virko Baley
Sound: www.freesound.com
Sound collage and technical assistance:
Mick Lexington
Paintings by
David Burliuk and Vasyl Bazhaj. In the performance we use Inka Juslin’s reflections on Vasyli Kandinsky’s writing on art.

The Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. presents THE YELLOW, Inka Juslin’s collaborative multimedia performance, featuring two dancers and a visual artist. By telling the story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this building, Juslin’s choreography accentuates the architectural features of the Gothic mansion. The work asks how a strict division between public and private within one’s home affects the way life is lived there.

Special Thanks to
~ Virko Baley, Olena Jennings, jj higgins, Virlana Tkacz, and The Academy of Finland.
August 16, 2008 @ 8 p.m.
2 East 79th Street, New York, NY, 10075



Inka Juslin is a Finnish dancer and choreographer currently based in New York City, where she collaborates across artistic disciplines and genres. She choreographs her own works as well as performs for other choreographers. Juslin is a visiting scholar at the Performance Studies Department at New York University. Her scholarly interest is related to new technologies and media, and to their use in conjunction with the human body, dance and movement. Juslin has choreographed dance and video works in Finland, and also in Asia, North America and Europe. Her doctoral choreography Redress was presented at the Kiasma Theatre in the Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki in October 2002. She collaborates with companies, such as Melinda Ring Special Projects in New York, and continues a work-in-progress dance and new technologies project with Susan Kozel/Mesh Performance Practices, a company based both in US and Europe. She is currently working on a new research project on Dance in the Nordic spaces, which also includes elements of Yiddish film and theater.

Svitlana Matviyenko’s experimental video and photography addresses the medium as an essential part of an art work. She is a film, media and literary critic, she edited Literatura Plus, a newspaper of the Ukrainian Writers Association; she was a founder and an editor-in-chief of Komentar, a Ukrainian political and cultural monthly. Svitlana is a co-founder (with Virlana Tkacz) of ‘ROUND US poetry & performance series that has been on since 2002 in Kiev and New York. She is a Fulbright fellow, pursuing her PhD in new media art, visual theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Svitlana Matviyenko curates a new series of experimental performance, launched at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York.

Ronja Verkasalo is a dancer and an artist, with a strong focus on research in both performance work and teaching. She comes from a small island in the Gulf of Finland, surrounded by the sea. The sea and the weather conditions in the Finnish archipelago, while being the main source of her aesthetic, also teach perspective for her work as an artist in this time and age. Her work consists of choreographing and dancing, as well as writing, performance and conceptual art. She is currently a freelance artist, with previous posts e.g. at the National Theatre of Finland and the Riitta Vainio Dance Company. She began dancing after studying and writing much theory about the body and the politics of the body in the University environment. She still works with these same issues, but through the physical approach has come to a wider understanding of the work. She is continually in awe of how the body learns and teaches the mover.

Space : Inka Juslin

How can architecture be embodied in dance? Our intention is to not merely reinvent characters that lived in the mansion, but to animate and choreograph the different flows of movement reflecting desire, pain, hesitation, struggle and excitement.

Each room of the building has its private and public dimension, which means, it has a couple of different stories to tell. Our choreography presents the duality of each room, their real and virtual realms, fused in our experience of space.

Two other “folds” of space—exterior and interior—are not easy to distinguish. First of all, they exist only in relation to each other. Second, each of them carries its own exteriority and interiority. Our choreography grows from the intersection of these two dimensions of space—the inside and the outside. It shows how we simultaneously exist in both. In other words, this performance reminds us of what our body knows, even though we are not entirely aware of it…

Time : Svitlana Matviyenko

…And now we are in the dimension of time.

It was Eadweard Muybridge whose experiments on capturing the images of running, flying and walking animal and human bodies “folded” the movement into one tiny spot of a frame. This was where space shrank into time.

It could be a minute or two that we devote to viewing a short loop of animation during the performance. It has been a hundred and thirty years since Muybridge accomplished his experiment. Our short animation bridges the present and the past: a contemporary dancer meets a 130 year old moving image.

This performance involves the movement embodied by the dancers, and the movement recomposed from the traces of digital recording.

How different is the time of different media? What are the old media and the new media, when, with computer animation, as strange as it sounds, we are back to the moving image of Muybridge’s flip-books, a simple result of a quick change of layers?..

The mansion was built on the corner of 79th Street and Fifth Avenue a hundred and ten years ago. It was Isaac Fletcher, a banker and railroad investor, who commissioned the famous architect C.P.H. Gilbert to build a house using William K. Vanderbilt's neo-Loire Valley chateau as its model, on the property which was originally the Lenox farm. Since then, known as the Isaac Fletcher House, it became one of the most spectacular landmarks of Upper East Side Manhattan. Mr. Fletcher himself was so pleased with his new home that he hired Jean Francois Raffaelli to paint a portrait of it; the painting, the mansion and the Fletcher's extensive art collection were all eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917. However, as Christopher Gray points out in his book on New York streetscapes, anonymous critics saw the mansion as ecclesiastical rather than domestic in origin. One of them, Gray reads in the Real Estate Record and Guide of 1899, observes that the Fletcher mansion had “too much the air of an archeological reproduction to be accepted as an appropriate New York City house of 1898.”Later, in 1920, the “inappropriate” building was purchased by Harry F. Sinclair, the founder of the Sinclair Oil Company, and then sold in 1930 to Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant, Jr., a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. A bachelor and recluse, Augustus Stuyvesant occupied the mansion with his unmarried sister until her death in 1938, then lived out the remaining years of his life until 1953 with just his butler and footman to serve him.And finally, in 1948, William Dzus, inventor and owner of the Dzus Fastener Company in West Islip, Long Island, New York founded the Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. for the purpose of promoting Ukrainian art, culture, music, and literature. In 1955, the mansion was purchased by the Ukrainian Institute of America Corporation with the charitable generosity and support of Mr. Dzus. In June of 1962 the mortgage was paid off and subsequently the Ukrainian Institute of America attained landmark status. This year the Ukrainian Institute of America celebrates its 60th anniversary and is happy to open the doors of its 110 year-old home to admirers of experimental dance by which Finnish choreographer Inka Juslin choreographs a story of an imaginary woman, dwelling in this mansion. Ms. Juslin’s performance will lead the viewer to imagine this woman slipping through the crowds at receptions and dinner parties. She belongs to this Gothic space: she performs what it asks her to, lives the life it offers her. This is the time when a strict division between public and private is maintained within one’s own home. Her being there is architectured: she is a different person on the different floors of the house.

I recall

1

I recall my mom’s hips, toes, and breasts

step out come forward take off

the silver mirror no longer reflecting my goose skin but hers

what do you know about me in relation to how you care

what do you remember in relation to how you forget

the time in relation to when

I am in relation to where your voice

wires in relation to wireless telecommunication

your warmth in relation to the kilometers

where in relation to when

and always

in relation to the time you woke me up in the mornings

your gestures in reflection of

my mirror in relation to

your mirror

I am

in relation to where

and to you

2

I recall my grandma listening to the radio

I dial the number

to order her favorite song

but it does not ring a bell

Carousel. Rain

To my sister, who is not in the frame

my moods have identities

yesterday, i woke up into September 1, 1982

when the wet dark pavement was spotted with yellow leaves

my neighborhood friends –all of them – went to school

and me, too young to fall into the routine that autumn

could have sat near the window for the entire day, but suddenly

my father decided to take me to the amusement park.

the carousel was not working

too early, raining, first days of school

but my father – since we are already there – sits me on a horse

and, applying all his gigantic power, shifts it from a dead point.

squeezing the horse’s papier-mâché back with my legs

hiding from the rain under my tiny umbrella

listening to the hellish noises of the rusty machine of joy

i suddenly realize

things should not necessarily be measured by fun and excitement

nor by intensity and speed.

where i would have usually burst into tears

i started thinking.

the events like this

might as well have meaning and texture

when you want to just gulp espresso and move on

you better stay and babysit your mood

Visual poetry project: OJ-2

Olena Jennings' Art


...Now I find myself reeling
from the distance he keeps,
looking in the mirror without recognizing
my face. It is tarnished
with the hysteria of his touch.

Visual poetry project. SB

Sarah Barber's The Kissing Party


...birds asleep on their branches,
the sun as hot as a mouth,
and even under the shady leaves
nobody loves us, or will, ever.

Visual poetry project. OJ

Olena Jennings:

VOMIT

I am obsessed with the curve of my stomach.
The dizziness when I walk down the street
and everything loses its edges.
I brush against people, walk into bus stops,
feel the breeze of passing cars.

Vitruvian People

Vitruvian People

as if i am afraid to lose some of my body parts

on the way to where my dream delivers me

i curl

never saw men sleeping this way

but women no doubt do

how do we believe that if you want to square the circle, you need a man

does it mean that if you are about to circle the square, you should look for a woman?

Dwellings

i am someone who loves temporary dwellings for their forgiveness

for the transparency their white walls wall out

i am someone who should love them to be loved back

before they absorb seasonal color

their temporariness leaks into the soil and me

always astonished by my own bare-legged trembling existence

wondering

how can i not be someone who loves temporary dwellings,

be it a summer house, a chair in the cafe, a poem, or a life?

how can i be

what always escapes me is

what escapes–for better or worse–is me

other than that there is i who is someone

who owes

Discourage, discourse...

We discourse, we discourage.

Wordlessness, uncertainty, I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-my-hands-ness will be foreclosed. Awkward groundlessness will be cured with caffeine. We will powder blush off.

We discourse and reach balance. We discourse and keep face.

We discourage in-tension, intuitively. We better not.

We distill plain air to fill in airless spaces. We breathe aloud and translate; we discourse.

And then–a miracle–we have coffee and toss mundane stories. Discouraged, we speak like normal people; we talk as even we’ve never been idiots with those body language disorders.

We cannot make an eye contact yet; but we will, we’ve got lenses. And caffeine is on its way to our hearts.

Face this surface

i woke up at 5:05 am today. as never before i felt my speech was tangible. it had two sides and one surface, i swear. and–oh my god–it became so obvious to me that i covered with sweat. i wanted to immediately get it written down, but thought i better lay it through, motionless. so i did. but it did not go. at 7, i sent an email that now i think i should not have. it’s just i never send my crazy emails, so it felt like the moment. but it would not go. i mean this thing, the surfaceness.

i felt it

the way blind men feel

without fingering

objects on their way.

it would not leave me

it is here even now

an elephant

Minor wounds' reminder

I slammed my wedding ring finger in a car door. At such moments all my healed wounds stand out–scratches, bruises, blisters, swellings, and all mosquito bites.

The most impressive is the opening of my appendicitis scar–scary pulsating retina, ugly cut, no eye-lashes: I cannot take my eyes from its gaze, installed into the lower west side of my belly.

Minor wounds reveal the body’s surfaces. Major wounds reveal the body’s depths.

Minor wounds are the thresholds of tenderness, major wounds are devastation.

My fantasy in la minor is often interrupted by the accords of anxiety.

Perhaps, there are uncanny wounds, too.

They flourish beyond the surfaces. They have no depth at all. So real.

But even the minor ones remind me it’s not pain that I like.

It’s not pain where I stop.

Scales of being

i am losing my last scales, my fingernails.

while i am still on this uncanny stage from a fish to an angel, i am using this chance to torture my brain with unbearable thinking:

would i assume, looking back on my former life from a different scale, that these thirty three years of being a female human species can fold back to the moment i crawled onto the dry surface from that warm and comforting ocean? would i consider my numerous becomings a woman as a meaningless naive repetition? and if i touch the softness of seventh heaven with my bare angelic fingers,

would i be able to imagine that the lunulae and uneven cuticles hide the erogenous zones behind them? would i know the answer by then why this erasure of pleasures is happening to the body? would i remember how to trace them down–from that man to that woman, from that woman to that fish?

Variations on unheimich

i have yet to figure out how to deserve a home

that would let me in and out

and take care of my elephant

that would never leave it

a surprise

that i need to hide from myself

that gets clogged with the messages

that the grandlandlord offers

the homey home

that i neither need nor can afford

Balloon dream

when i am leaving i neither take MOEx nor ask my friends for a ride to the airport. instead, i blow a huge flying balloon in the yard behind my house. i pack all my belongings into the basket and cut the ropes. true, it is slow. but i need this time to think about what i’ve got. in a little while, for the sake of safety or speed–of course–i start throwing things out.

that’s what my dream last night was about. me watching my belongings floating back to the ground.

that’s what my dreams are about when i leave some places for other places.

i was trying to write a blog post about my dream. but it looks like another bad poem. i guess i can coin the genre.

Aquarium. Couch

no more couch.

i said it. and want to leave with it cut as it was.

i said it was

our best meeting

wordless, little touching. like in aquarium. limited space, no sharp lights, sounds and voices. its bottom and surface are both right here and yet

rarely but you are given the chance to realize that your mouth is not for speaking but for not letting water into your lungs.

no more couch. no more perforation.

Travel accidents. On the plane

at the airport, they asked me whether i prefer a seat near the window. it appeared to be near the white plastic wall, though.

i was unwillingly involved into a make-believe game.

there was no way i could pretend i was not. there was no way i could hide how good i am at it.

the highway was foggy, but i went as far as to see all the way through

the plastic and the titanium

i foresaw pretty much everything

except for, probably, the road signs

and the point of destination

The N train

waiting for a midnight N train at the union square subway station

i realized how many hours of my life were spent on platforms

not a complete waste of time, but definitely, a strange investment

once in a while one can meet there

a couple of vitruvian people

holding hands naively refusing to believe

that distance cannot always be measured by the body’s measures

that distance is an accessory of time

which only seems to be priceless

yet, when vitruvian people touch each other

spreading the tenderness over their bodies

i am about to accept

that time has at least a sentimental value

The Crystals of Time: Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Image and Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenyhora

Gilles Deleuze introduces his philosophy of cinema in two books: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In these two-volumes, Deleuze analyzes works by many eminent filmmakers, extensively discussing direct and indirect presentation of time in cinema. In his second book in a chapter entitled “The Crystals of Time,” he mentions Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Zvenyhora (along with works by two main representatives of the European modern cinema, Alfred Hitchcock and Alain Resnais) in his discussion of the time-image. What becomes obvious from Deleuze’s text is that Dovzhenko’s work calls for a new attempt to scrutinize the complexity of his films’ architecture.

1. To Deleuze, cinema is not merely one of the art forms, but a new form of thought: cinema does not exist on its own, it is always already in a “rare marriage” with philosophy. He regards the cinema of philosophy, a cinema of thought, which is totally new in the history of cinema and totally alive in the history of philosophy” (Cinema 2, 209). Since cinema responds to the cultural and social environment and, at the same time, is always in the process of development independent of social and cultural environments, Deleuze points out the “external” and “internal” reasons for the fundamental change that occurred in cinema after the Second World War. To discuss this matter, he defines the movement-image, as referring to classic cinema, and the time-image, as referring to European modern cinema after the Second World War. In the first, time is directly determined by movement, and in the later, time and movement in cinema are divorced, which results in the distortion of the film narrative, so that the image “comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image” (Deleuze, Negotiations 52). Since Deleuze does not give a clear definition of neither the movement-image nor the time-image, his challenging theory of cinema has been provoking scholars to speculate as to the meaning of the terms introduced by the philosopher. Regarding the time-image, Donato Totaro explains, it is where “rational or measurable temporal links between the shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives ways to ‘incommensurable,’ non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between the shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear (‘any-space-whatevers’)” (A1). As a result, the narrative form is no longer linear; more than that, it encompasses several nonlinear multilayered narrative forms. Often, it is a meta-narrative, a story in a story that opens into the different time-frames: past, present, and future, as well as mythological time. It is a journey into the realm of one’s fantasy, emotions, memories and traumas, the complexities and contradictions of which are represented by the twisted topology of the films.

As it has been pointed out by many scholars, Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, and specifically, the crystal-image, in many ways derives from Henry Bergson’s concept of duration. According to Bergson, duration allows for a simultaneous co-presence of different experiences as an uninterrupted flow of sensations in our consciousness, which, in its turn, constitutes memory. In his book on Deleuze’s “time-machine,” D. N. Rodowick mentions Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), which is a literary illustration of the “travels in time” as an inner unconscious experience of the main character. The scholar points out that “[o]nce chronology is pulverized, time is fragmented like so many facets of a shattered crystal. The chronological continuum is flayed, shaving past, present, and future into distinct series, discontinues and incommensurable” (4). What is true for Marker’s La jetée, is also true for Dovzhenko’s Zvenyhora, despite the fact that these two films were made in two different times. And it does seem reasonable to parallel Marker and Dovzhenko. Deleuze regards Dovzhenko’s film together with the most famous works of the modern post-WWII European cinema, and this is despite the fact that Zvenyhora was made in 1928, while Hitchcock’s Vertigo was released thirty years later and Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime came out in forty years later. Other films mentioned in this chapter are Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Huston’s Moby Dick (1956), Zanussi’s Camouflage (1976) and Imperative (1982), Losey’s Eva (1962) and The Servant (1963), Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979), and finally, Wenders’s The State of Things (1982). The majority of these films were released years after Dovzhenko’s death in 1956, and yet Deleuze considers 1928 Zvenyhora in this context. Deleuze’s inclusion of Alexander Dovzhenko’s films in his discussion of the time-image and his comments on the work of the Ukrainian filmmaker shed a new light on Dovzhenko’s work.

2. The narrative conventions in Zvenyhora are significantly violated, more obviously than in the two other films of Dovzhenko’s trilogy—Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930). The ruptures in Zvenyhora’s continuity have always been intriguing to interpreters willing to attribute meaning to them. In their attempts to analyze Dovzhenko’s films, the critics often focus on the symbolism of the story and images or intend to unwind the films’ tricky diegesis, or the story and the events that occur within it. However, this is not merely a difficult task, but hardly a reasonable one, since the nonlinear complexity of Dovzhenko’s films seems to require neither the hermeneutical approach nor the deployment of the theoretical aspects of its narrative. The raptures in Zvenyhora render the effect of the emotional and psychic breakdown; they belong to the non-narrative realm of the film. Meanwhile, neither narratology nor hermeneutics allow for a lack: scrutinizing the narration or pressing interpretive dilemmas, they both intend to bridge the ruptures in the fluency, because the raptures do not match the logic that both these approaches maintain. Besides, Dovzhenko’s films, and especially Zvenyhora, include numerous non-diegetic inserts, or the elements, for instance, random shots, which do not belong to the story. However, the lacks in continuity as well as the non-diegetic elements, which made the narration pretty “noisy,” were not the novelty of avant-garde poetics. The function and perception of raptures and non-diegetic elements in Zvenyhora appears to be significantly different from those in Lev Kuleshov’s and Sergey Eisenstein’s films.

To explain: according to Kuleshov’s random composition known as “Kuleshov effect,” the perception and the meaning of a shot was supposed to change, depending on the shot’s new placement in the sequence with the new preceding and following shots. In other words, Kuleshov’s experiment was an experiment with meaning, created by randomly reorganized order of shots. As for Eisenstein’s theory of montage or the “collision of independent shots” (49), the language of his editing aimed to be recognized and comprehended,[1] which, actually, in a way reminiscent of the hermeneutic circle when the process of understanding engages a common language, which is itself formed in the process of understanding. Therefore, in a number of theoretical essays such as “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” (1929), “Methods of Montage” (1929), “Film Language” (1934), Eisenstein discussed the principles of literacy achieved through the method of “dialectical montage,” when “from the shock of two factors a concept is born.” According to Eisenstein, cinema is an intellectual process: being “under the shock, [it] thinks the shock,” or as Deleuze’s explains: “…the shock has an effect on the spirit, it forces it to think, and to think the Whole. The Whole can only be thought, because it is the indirect representation of time which follows from movement. It does not follow like a logical effect, analytically, but synthetically as the dynamic effect of images ‘on the whole cortex’ ” (Cinema 2 158). In other words, Eisenstein aims to achieve a synthesis, the very effect of which is located in the cognitive sphere. “While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process, as well,” he states (62). In this regard, the way Eisenstein defines a goal for the “new epoch in the field of art” at the end of “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” explains his fascination with the clarity of expression. According to the filmmaker, his experiment leads “…[t]owards a purely intellectual film, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems, and concepts, without any need for transitions and paraphrases. We may yet have a synthesis of art and science” (Eisenstein 63). No wonder Deleuze regards him as “cinematographic Hegel.”

Even though Dovzhenko’s editing is reminiscent of Kuleshov’s and Eisenstein’s, the significant difference between his films and the works by the two representatives of Soviet school is obvious. While Kuleshov is focused on the causes that change viewers’ perception of the shots as well as on how the meaning is attributed to the effects achieved by editing, Dovzhenko is not concerned with the meanings of the effects: slow motion, the change of the aperture, double exposure, radical montage of shots—one could say Dovzhenko uses them intuitively, without an intention to establish any particular reading, any literacy. So, while Eisenstein respects clarity and synthesis, Dovzhenko strives to present the chaos of synchronic time, and this is especially evident in Zvenyhora, his most visually and intellectually challenging film. This is the reason why Eisenstein needs to theorize about his experiments, while Dovzhenko does not care for theory or rationalization of his affective style. Dovzhenko is not merely conscious of the film’s “stylistic disharmony,” he actually regards this effect as his achievement (Leyda 242). He is aware that this is a novelty, which the audience is not ready to perceive adequately. He writes: “What are audiences going to say when they see presented before them, in six reels of film, a thousand years? And, into the bargain, without any ‘story’, without passion, without Asta Nielsen?...” (Dovzhenko, Beginnings—Sources 156). For Dovzhenko, history, or rather the past, appears as “dreams and nightmares, ideas and visions, impetuses and actions of the subjects involved, while the givens of the situation merely contain causes and effects against which one could only struggle” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 190). In Zvenyhora, legends from Ukraine’s past reappear in the present time during the Soviet Ukrainian revolution. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise… [that] as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (35). In Dovzhenko’s cinema, the past does not undergo textualization or narrativization. According to Deleuze, the different times in Zvenyhora are not “interwoven”[2] structurally or semantically, but by virtue of affect. In other words, time in Zvenyhora does not have chronology and continuity. On the contrary, it contains multiple ruptures: this film is affective, it is “marked by the gap between content and effect” (Massumi 24), or in other words, the matter, or the movement-image, falls apart into the multiple crystals of the time-image, or memory.

3. As defined by Deleuze, the crystal-image, or hyalosign, is the “indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image” to the point where they can no longer be distinguished. “The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror” (Cinema 2 79), he assets. Deleuze defines this mirroring of the virtual image in the actual as the crystals of time, or the crystal-image. He quotes Henry Bergson who claimed that “our actual experience […], whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other” (qtd. in Cinema 2 79). The question that Deleuze, following Bergson, poses is the question on how we inhabit time. “In the novel,” he says, “it is Proust who says that time is not internal to us, but that we are internal to time, which divides itself into two, which loses itself and discovers itself in itself, which makes the present pass and the past be preserved” (Cinema 2 81). Deleuze continues, mentioning Dovzhenko’s film along with works by Hitchcock and Resnais, comparing the effect of their three films to the effect of Proust’s prose:

In the cinema, there are perhaps three films which show how we inhabit time, how we move in it, in this form which carries us away, picks us up and enlarges us: Dovzhenko’s Zvenogora, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime. […] what we see in the crystal is time itself, the gushing forth of time. Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, ‘the affection of self by self’ as definition of time.” (82—83)

So, how do we “inhabit time”? As noted by Deleuze, first of all, “we are internal to time,” we are immersed into its pure virtuality, when the past and present are the one, because, secondly, time itself is split, since we see “the present pass and the past be preserved,” and we see it in the crystal: “What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that is was but at the same time, time has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past” (Cinema 2 81).

New media theory distinguishes between real, actual, and virtual. The relation between the three can be explained in the following way: the actual is real, because it is what is happening here and now, in actuality; the virtual is not actual, because it is not happening here and now, however, it is real, because it allows one to undergo real experiences as even they are happening in actuality. Similarly, the virtual image and the actual image are different in several ways. First of all, the actual image is objective, while the virtual image is subjective. Unlike the actual image, which dwells in the present, the virtual image belongs to the past, yet it is “alive,” since it “returns” into the present as a “pure recollection.” In Zvenyhora, Dovzhenko presents “a whole anthology of legends” ranging widely through history: we see Vikings, Cossacks, and post-revolutionary Ukraine linked by the mystery of a hidden treasure. The way this visual “anthology” is composed, however, does not allow a viewer to “read” the chain of scenes: more often than not, they violate the fluency of film, which results in the fragmentary composition. The past mirrors the present enchanted by the past “recalled” into the actuality. This affect is what Deleuze refers as the “pure virtuality of time.”

For this reason, Zvenyhora, often regarded as the Ukrainian Intolerance, is, significantly different from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece precisely due to the way Dovzhenko presents time in his film. Intolerance has four distinct, although parallel, stories linked by the same theme, but belonging to four different times: the “Babylonian” period, the “Judean” era, the Huguenot persecussions in France, and finally, Modern America of 1914. In Dovzhenko’s film, however, time is presented as an “alltogetherness” of all times as they are being recalled into the present, which itself is passing. In his books on cinema, Deleuze points out that Zvenyhora’s presentation of the experience of time corresponds to what Bergson grasped earlier by intuition -- that “the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and the past which is preserved” (Cinema 2 82). The recurring appearances of symbolic representations of the past in certain scenes in Zvenyhora are often overly theatrical and/or presented in slow motion. Examples of such are the scenes depicting Vikings and the opening scene when the riders are slowly galloping thought the frame. These are some of the points at which it is made apparent to the viewer that the past is mediated or in other words, it is simultaneously linked with and dislinked from the present; it is now and then; it has its virtual and actual side, and so, it is real. That is what we see through the crystal image. Although the past may be different from the present in its intensity, and Dovzhenko does not go as far as denying that such a distinction exists, time, as we experience it, encompasses both. No one can tell which is more intense. In the chaos of revolution, when the past had to be hectically pulled out and then was erased again, Dovzhenko’s Zvenyhora, much earlier than many European films, reveals how we deal with the traumatic real that cannot be symbolized. With an eerie accuracy, his film displays the hope for memory and the fear of “total recall.”


Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image . Trans. Hugh Tomlinsom and Barbara Habberjam. 1983. London: The Athlone Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image . Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone Press, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles. “On the Movement-Image.” Negotiations: 1972-1990 . Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Dovzhenko, Alexander. “Beginnings—Sources.” Cinema in Revolution. Ed. Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin. New York: HILL and WANG, 1973. 154—160.
Eisenstein, Sergey. Film Form. Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: A Harvest Book, 1949.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1981.
Leyda, Jay. Kino. A History of the Soviet Film. A Study of the Development of Russian Cinema, From 1896 to the Present. New York: Collier Books, 1960.
Liber, George O. Alexander Dovzhenko. A Life in Soviet Film. London: The British Film Institute Pubsisher, 2002.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Totaro, Donato. “Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project.” Off Screen. 31 March 1999. Montréal. 10 October 2007 <>.

[1] On this, see Sergey Eisenstein “Film Language” in his Film Form pp. 108—121.
[2] George O. Liber. Alexander Dovzhenko. A Life in Soviet Film. London: The British Film Institute Pubsisher, 2002. 88.

Alexandra Fuller // Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

In Dogs, what I wanted to show people is that if you're a kid in war you have no
idea what's going on. You try to make sense of it the best you can, but you
can't really explain it; you don't have the vocabulary for it yet. I put in a
little bit of history in the first book so readers could orient themselves, but
I slipped out of my voice to do that. I took off the clothes of the child and
slipped into my adult voice, saying, "Here, for the record, is what was going on." [here]
-- Alexandra Fuller

What strikes me the most in this book is Fuller's imitation / recollection of her childhood fantasies / voice:

"Some of the children at my school are the children of well-known guerrilla fighters. We have the Zvogbo twin sisters for instance, whose father, Eddison, spent seven years in jail during the war for 'political activism.' He is a war hero now and very famous; he is in the new government. There are, it turns out, no white war heroes" (151).

Here, her adult voice [the logical narration -- in black] only echoes her child voice [the affects -- in blue]. My feeling is that despite the given order, the preceding (black) part is growing out of the paradoxical observation of her child mind (blue one). Not vice versa.

In this sense, the narration is full of enormous chronological and logical inflections that have not gone through the editing by the ratio...

Even when you are not entirely aware of this, the intense vibration of the text does not leave you untouched: it makes you reread or, at least, rewind the passage in your mind.

Besides, there the ambiguity of her presence is felt: she is there in the text as an adult and as a child. It allows for the effect of intermingled times. An effective technique.

Deleuze & Guattari: "We write not with childhood memories but through blocs of childhood that are the becoming-child of the present" (What is Philosophy?). Alexandra Fuller does it with an extreme explicitness.

The text is painfully pleasant due to the affects: the reading is self-interrupting. One needs to be a bit masochistic to proceed; I probably am. Enjoyment -- that's how Barthes called this type of reading with numerous ruptures of the flow. They do not stop you, on the contrary, call for repetition of experience (Barthes opposed this experience to the pleasure of the text, when the reading flows smoothly).

Let us go through her words again. That's what she writes on school for blacks and whites in Rhodesia:

"That year, there is a water shortage and we have to conserve water. Now we must pee on top of each other's pee. One cup of water each every day with which we must brush our teeth and wash our faces in the morning. We have to share bathwater. I am reluctant. [...] I climb into the bathwater, lukewarm with the floating skin cells of Margaret and Mary Zvogbo. Nothing happens. I bathe, I dry myself. I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black" (152).

You feel it?

Conversation with Keith Sanborn (Spring - Autumn 2006)

Keith Sanborn:

“…You had
to be there
at the time
to be truly seduced by them.”


Svitlana Matviyenko: The effect produced by film depends on how its image and sound get layered with my private: my memory, my desires, my fears, and my fantasy. To some extent, it depends on the social codes as well. The private and social distort one another.

You said your films are about filmmaking. But would you agree that they are even more about perception of films, about your experience as a viewer? For instance, I think of Joan’s face while she is burning at the stake -- the fragment from Karl Dreyer’s film you used. In your film, her face looks so erotic. That's how you saw her in Dreyer’s film. In your piece, you are working with a sudden effect of your perception. And it is very personal. It makes your film be not “about” Dreyer’s filmmaking, not “about” Joan of Arc [cannot believe, but I’ve just twice misspelled her name -- “Joan of Art” -- where is my Lacan?], but “about” Keith Sanborn.

How much do you depend on the material you work with? In other words, what is your starting point: your experience of film or an idea, thought, concept?

Keith Sanborn: My starting point is always a moment, an experience of a film. Sometimes that means a particular shot, sometimes it might be an image which repeats in a film, or just something which strikes me. The image of Joan of Arc which I took from the Dreyer film, in the original had actually been cut up into several pieces. I discovered this when I put them back together to try to extend the length of the shot. I also slowed it down of course. So, in this case, oddly, I reconstituted a part of the shooting of the film, which does not exist in the prints we have of Joan of Arc, even the best one. My experience, in short, my private experience of a film is always primary. Sometimes I try to work in terms of a theme, but this seldom pans out. As soon as I start to talk about it I lose sight of the language of images from which a film must come into being. So, in a sense these do come out of a personal experience of watching the particular films I include, but images always come trailing their historical baggage behind them. The problem is that the context of the original becomes invisible. Histoire du soldat inconnu by Henri Storck is a prime example. While we appreciate something about its form, as someone born in 1952, rather than 1900, the work simply does not have the immediate historical impact for me that it would have for one of Storck’s contemporaries. He was playing with the references, the meanings, the immediacy of the images he used. I have also show A Movie by Conner to a number of generations of students. It seems to come in and out of visibility: to some it’s merely a kitschy collection of images, or less. The concept of kitsch itself is almost completely outmoded as audiences loose consciousness of a sense of history, let alone admit the possibility of historically bounded modes of consciousness. Others have more sensitivity to the strangeness of the images he employs and to the nuances of his efforts at montage.


SM: In my next question, I want to bring up the issue of copyright that having been discussed widely. What does the copyright own? Do you see any contradictions of this low?

KS: Your mention of Lacan and Joan of Art calls attention here to low and law. There’s a slight deflection here; maybe just a typo, but it’s a starting point: how we enunciate words and how they exist beyond us; yup: parole and langue. We speak from the intersection of the personal and the social. We are plural beings in that sense, especially when we step across linguistic boundaries. When we move from one language to another, we always drag along with us, our experience of language, including and especially our “first” language, our regional dialects, etc.

Copyright is structured as a kind of mediation between the author of a work and his/her/its public. I include “its” because corporations, who can conceivably live forever, also “own” works, though they are only remotely the authors of them: they finance them—with the possible exceptions of works of collective authorship like Q and the Reena Spallings novel. Though in the latter case the authors are more properly called “collectives” than “corporations.” To return to where I started, it’s the “mediation” which is important and problematic. One starting point in my work would be “The Artwork in the Age…” I point to this problem: what is copyrighted: the message which interdicts reproduction or the work which follows? The injunction NOT to copy normally is understood as pointing to the work which follows it; if so, can it also point to itself, if it does not explicityly do so? I would argue not. How can something which points beyond it also point at itself. Artworks do this all the time, but in law such a point, I believe, must be made explicit.

This comes to bear as images proliferate and determine our worldview to the same extent as and in competition with language. We might say that “images have a language of their own” but we should never forget the medium of this observation: it is linguistic, and that is to say it is a metaphor, a transference of meaning. This is not just a relativist banality. We communicate through our structuring of images and through our structuring of language, but normally we only think of language as having critical status. My work attempts to argue otherwise. It is a kind of critical discourse via images and what makes explicitly critical is precisely the reuse of pre-existing images. Public images have more the status of “langue” than parole; they come dragging something of their public meaning, their public identify as signifiers, as part of a vast network of signifiers, along with them whenever they appear. I’m not sure if “aura” is translatable into “langue”; I like to think of “aura” has having more to do with what we might think of as the phenomenological, or less problematically, the perceptual existence of the work.

SM: Does an image or fragment you use get entirely uprooted and detached from its initial context and source?

KS: To answer your question about an image being uprooted, I would have to appeal to Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “A word means whatever I choose it to mean… It’s a question of who’s to be master, that’s all.” That is, there is an absurdity in the claim that we can use language in an utterly personal way. That’s a contradiction in terms: language has an inherently public aspect, an Impersonal one and at the same time we know that those who govern try to manipulate the use of language: War is Peace, Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, Iran is a Nuclear threat. And those who put images into the “public sphere”—mostly only corporations or governments—seek to control us through their images and through the use that is made of them, including the interdiction to reproduction them. In short, we can either master the language of images or be mastered by it.

These insights can be expanded somewhat prismatically: one can easily argue that any film participates in an entire history of representation, whether its explicitly acknowledges that debt in a legal sense. Scorsese speaks of “Dreyer shots” he’s included in various films, and yet he never copies them photographically or digitally at a literal level. His reproduction of Dreyer is see as licit, mine probably as illicit.

SM: I’ve been thinking about two different ideas -- Walter Benjamin’s “aura” and Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” –- they both suggest that the medium is what brings a viewer “closer” to a piece of art, although they see the way the medium functions differently.

SK: I’m not sure these two ideas are equivalent, though they may be related. Aura for Benjamin is first of all a function of scarcity: it derives from the hiddenness of the work, its not being available. A condition which is altered by technical reproduction and as he actually says reproducibility (Reproducierbarkeit). But the aura returns with the “star.” The star lends his or her numinous presence to the work; the star carries legends and myth which exist outside the film in the press above all. In a sense aura is reborn precisely within repetition: one sees a film repeatedly, the star becomes the object of personal fantasy (for millions), dreams, masturbatory reveries. Baseball trading cards are like Saints cards. Interestingly, there has recently been an extraordinary rise in touring by “big name” music groups. People want the “live” “real” experience to supplement their experience of the recorded work, which is how most people now experience music. Correlative to this is the lack of respect for musicians. No one wants to devote themselves to learning music (at least in the US) when they can turn it on like a faucet and more or less for free. I suppose the related phenomenon would be people vacating movie theatres in favor of DVDs AND in favor of seeing their favorite starts on Broadway. A lot of Hollywood movie actors, for one reason or another, have been doing Broadway shows in recent years, whether to shore up sagging careers, bring a change in their daily routines, or to make more money.

In a way McLuhan is a lot closer to the structuralist point of view than you might acknowledge. The structuralists were in any case interested in McLuhan and more or less read him as a kind of formalist. Thus, they felt he supported their investigation of cinematic form, as opposed to dramatic form in narrative film.

SM: In one interview you said: “I’m interested in how do you actually perceive things that are at the edge of your visual horizon, the horizon of your consciousness? I think that is really what motivates religious or mystical thinking. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it thinking, because it’s at once that and something more than that. Not to view it in a hierarchical way, but it’s about an investigation into the possibility for meaning.” It’s interesting to me in terms of Deleuze’s concept of a non-thinking-body: he refers to the body in its sleep or in its drunkenness (I would add the body having sex and the body watching, for instance, film and so on and on).

KS: I like the idea of the unthinking body; I think that many filmmakers have an experience parallel to this one: when I am working on a film, especially at the editing stage—which is most of the work, most of the time for me, though I do actually shoot film from time to time—that I can no longer impose my will on it. I am forced to listen to it; it tells me how it wants to be edited. This kind of experience of the unthinking body is a kind of dialogue with the unconscious, though often not a verbal dialogue—we must never forget this is a metaphor. Even to say “it tells me” is a verbal metaphor: I don’t hear voices, but the images or sounds just seem to want to go a certain way. This is a somewhat idealistic metaphor, because then we think about whether editing is more like solving a puzzle, or recreating the insights of an analytic session. My work is NOT therapy for me or anyone else, though it might investigate issues related to psychoanalysis. After this dialogue, finally one does step back, to frame the experience, to put it in perspective, to make certain that the unconscious elements have not betrayed the conscious project to the extent of subverting it completely. The unconscious always subverts the conscious to some degree, but it’s that “dialogue” between the two which is of interest precisely because of its complexity and because it is a struggle for power, for mastery in some odd Hegelian sense, this was what I was trying to get at in Semi-private sub-Hegelian Panty fantasy (with sound).


SM: How do you explain the “consensual hallucination” in the subtitle for your Zapruder Footage?

KS: "Consensual hallucination" is a kind of way of saying that those who see this and especially Americans, and perhaps especially American of my age who were alive for the JFK assassination, see it as a kind of religious myth. A document which is at once transparent and utterly opaque. The basis of a kind of mystery religion (see Frazer's Hanged God). A beautiful young man (Dionysos, Christ, JFK) is immolated as a public spectacle. A culture hero whose demise is ultimately an absurdity, a crime and a mystery. This 8mm home movie was the basis of the Warren [Commission] Report, the official US Government inquiry into the assassination which most people see as a white wash and a fraud. Governments are the same everywhere, no?

I don't know if I said this before but an Iraqui guy brought up in Morocco who I met in Holland asked me if there wasn't some kind of anti-arab sentiment involved. I explained that it was a kind of celebration instead. And he said, "Oh, yes, it's the kind of music we play at weddings and funerals." And so this is a recollection of the life together of JFK and Jackie Kennedy and a kind of funeral celebration, north african style. Or if you like, you might recall Dylan Thomas's poem entitled "The refusal to mourn the death by fire of a child." Similar sentiment in many ways.

SM: Working on my own videos in The Final Cut Pro, I try to figure out the combination of decisions – and this combination is art itself, it also may be understood as my medium. And I can only guess what effect might happen, when someone experiences this piece. I envision the effect, of course, but I can never be sure as to what kind of “aura” this piece may have (or produce?). This is what structural film is about, I think. It is so direct and open: everything that “big screen" film hides, structural film exposes for a viewer’s appreciation.

KS: I studied with Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits. One of the ways by which I consciously sought to distinguish my own work from their was by choosing images that were at one public and highly charged. For the most part—with the interesting exception of the use of pornography—the structuralists were explicitly concerned with using everyday content, banal content, or even emptying the work of content. There were exceptions in the pop world and in the committed filmmakers, such as Al Raziutis and to to some extent LeGrice. Odd to think of them as engage, no? But along with Conner, they used images that were popular and deliberately charged at least in some of their work. The use of “public” images in my case at least was an attempt to historically ground the work. I wanted my work to examine history rather than simply the modalities of the passage of time. To this extent my work is not formalist, though I am not anti-form; it’s just not the holy grail for me. In terms of the choices of the era: big budget narratives, or avant-garde, I agree: they show what the big films hide. But even then there were other choices, if bad ones: the films of Mulvey and Wollen, for example: 3rd rate Godard and Godard is not a filmmaker I esteem very highly, though he did make a couple of good pictures. Mulvey and Wollen and their ilk made none worth watching, though I may have missed some by other people since the genre became so predictable I didn’t find it necessary to repeat the experience that often. It was Debord who was following the more interesting path, though his work was not seeable in the US and had only limited accessibility in France. I first learned of his work through his Oeuvres Cinématographiques complètes, a book presenting his films as scripts in a rather unique form. But I didn’t actually see the work until it was broadcast on Canal+after his death in the 1990s. I was also very interested by Warhol, whose work was also out of circulation by the late 1970s. I was interested in his mixture of materialism with an exploration of the spectacular: creating his own stars, but in the context of the art world, creating an odd sort of bathos: you had to be there at the time to be truly seduced by them, to understand their auratic presence.


* Keith Sanborn, a media artist and a theorist, has taught Video Production and Special Topics theory course "From Montage to Game Hacks: Strategies of Cultural Critique" in the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton. His long term interests is in media critique through his theoretical writings and as well through the application of critical strategies of cultural critique in his media work. He has continued to pursue both his artistic and theoretical interests over the past two years.

Links: Sanborn's film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArzS7EX9Uwg
Sanborn & Marcus on Guy Debord http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=10275&pagenum=0

[this interview was translated into Ukrainian and published in KINOKOLO #30, Summer 2006]