Trauma

POST REMOVED This post has been temporarily removed prior to its publication in 2016. The article will be re-posted here in mid-2016.

CINEMA PERFORMING TRAUMA BOOK REVIEW: Dirk de Bruyn’s THE PERFORMANCE OF TRAUMA IN MOVING IMAGE ART Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014 Reviewed by Martin Rumsby In 2009, Dirk de Bruyn presented an hour long, multi-screen, live cinema performance, Retinex Reflux, in Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery. Employing up to five analog projectors, Retinex Reflux, expressed a lament of a conflicted self in cinema, casting itself across and intervening amongst projected images, filtering and masking parts of the image, almost as a laconic variation on Paul Sharits’ Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976). De Bruyn’s performance was born from his Childhood traumas, which included his transplantation from the Netherlands to Australia as an eight year old, his father’s subsequent mental illness then death, and de Bruyn’s lifetime involvement with cinema, a medium now allegedly dead. Throughout the performance de Bruyn roamed restlessly around the gallery in a shadow-play of flicker and after images, issuing a series of pre-verbal groans and utterances of half-remembered loss and pain. These pre-verbalizations coming back to us from a time before de Bruyn learned to speak English, referring to a developmental period prior to the acquisition of language; at a time when meaning registers in the body. His enunciations accomplish, rather than describe, traumatized dissociation and fragmented visual memory, here splayed out in discrete and overlapping frames across walls, screen and ceiling. The recent incorporation of trauma into cinema studies is the subject of de Bruyn’s book, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art (Cambridge Scholars, 2014). In this work, de Bruyn asserts Materialist film as an ‘analogy of trauma,’ replacing P Adams Sitney and Annette Michelson’s earlier claims of experimental film as representing ‘analogies of consciousness.’ Initially developed in literary studies, ‘trauma theory’ has been transposed into screen and media academic programs over the past decade. Theorists see a potential for the performance of trauma to create active viewing experiences akin to the originating aims of the American avant-garde cinema. For commentators such as Janet Walker, ‘trauma cinema’ is characterized by work that addresses cathartic public and personal events in fragmentary stylistic and narrative forms. A cinema that performs trauma can, according to E. Ann Kaplan, lock its subject into endless circular repetitions. Here, the subject is trapped within labyrinthine mental structures, just as a dreamer dreams in nightmares it cannot outrun. Trauma, then, can lead to errant subjectivities. For de Bruyn, individuality is a mass of embodied subjectivities playing out in time, all in fragmented relationship to one another. Our most primal thought processes are visual, they precede language and dreams. In trauma we are emotionally dismembered, we disconnect, our reality becomes a discontinuous mental version of Random Access Memory. The casualties of trauma, he tells us, are narrative, memory and symbolic thinking. Without them we lose control of our lives. This view grounds de Bruyn’s contention that certain experimental films perform traumatic experience. In his book, he reviews representative work from the European and American avant-garde cinemas in the light of recent neurological research into trauma, identifying its symptoms as uncontrolled hallucinations, flashbacks, fragmented consciousness, dissociation, and repetitious non-linear thinking, existing within a framework of mute unspeakability. These are, for de Bruyn, also characteristics of materialist and collage film. Materialist film occupies an important position for de Bruyn’s study precisely because of its hostility to continuity, narrative, and symbolism. In the 1970s the influential film artists and theorists Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal wrote of a visual pre-conscious that operated on a psycho- physical, rather than a psycho-interpretive, level. They rejected narrative cinema as an escapism divorced from the realities of art and life. From their stand point, materialist work could only ever be about itself, as a revelation of the conditions of its making. For them, a work of art was a representation of nothing other than itself. Gidal, in particular, postulated an Absolutist idea of cinema, one in which an ‘un-thought’ may come to be thought. De Bruyn senses the latent presence of trauma in Gidal’s rejection of semiotics and content as well as narrative, individuality and auteursim. De Bruyn argues that key materialist films actually explicate trauma theory. Further in the book, he proposes that materialist cinema can be recuperated by emergent theories of trauma. In a move to free up representations of women, a group of English theorists in the 1970s began to dislodge materialist film artists whose work they viewed as myopically rehearsing technique. Even worse, for these thinkers, materialist film allowed no place for the imaginary or desire. Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey and others proposed a critical feminist counter cinema which incorporated narrative, psycho-analysis and Marxism. Wollen in particular proposed the idea of ‘two avant-gardes,’ one materialist and abstract, the other more explicitly political. Alliances between feminists and the anti-(Vietnam) war movement led to an integration of trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder, into feminist readings of cinema. The feminist discourse on cinema successfully promoted a politically explicit counter-cinema, one which ultimately subjugated and displaced materialist film. For de Bruyn, Woolen’s concept of ‘Two Avant- Gardes’ is analogous to the Dual Processing Model of implicit and explicit memory systems associated with trauma theory. Citing the work of neurological researcher Chris Berwin, de Bruyn argues that Wollen’s ‘two-avant-gardes’ mimics the dual memory Systems of VAM (Verbal Accessible Memory) and SAM (Situational Accessible Memory). In trauma, which is dissociative experience, only SAM continues to function while the VAM system shuts down. Cinematic and mental cures of dissociation are sought in reconnecting fragments, re-integrated toward the wholeness and health of the utopian body (and mind). We are reminded of Baruch Spinoza’s belief that the ‘true’ forces of human nature are those that unite us as a wholeness, rather than separateness. A part of that wholeness may be context. Context defines a work of art, locating and giving it meaning within the art and film scenes. Wollen’s concept of ‘two avant-gardes’ led to a marginalization of materialist film. In Wollen’s framework, materialist practices seemed to be defined by their non-political character. In viewing such films as expressions and explorations of trauma, de Bruyn seeks to recuperate the political aspect of materialist cinema. In addition to revisiting theories of avant-garde film De Bruyn reviews key moments of avant-garde cinema though the lens of trauma theory. His fourth chapter, for instance, analyzes Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) as a poetic work that performs trauma. As an artist, Deren preferred the direct impact of an image over its symbolic meaning. For her, art was not so much an expression of, say, pain, but rather a form that could create pain in itself. De Bruyn contends that Deren points to a fundamental instability and destructiveness underlying human nature, a place where nature expresses itself through the human senses. Much like the films noir of industrial cinema, Meshes of the Afternoon explores violence and entrapment in the shadowy side of human relationships. The feminine protagonists of both psychodrama and noir push at their physical and psychological constraints. De Bruyn also turns his attention to more current offshoots of the materialist project that intersect with trauma theory, such as the work of James Benning. Benning’s films may look like landscape documentaries but are conceived of and executed in ways that closely paralell the stance of materialist film artists. By confounding viewer expectations in his use of paradoxical images set against off-screen sound and shrewd use of narrative Benning opens up spaces for unique ways of perceiving traumatic experience through film. In Benning’s Landscape Suicide (1986), for instance, the communities of Orinda, California and the appropriately named Plainfield, Wisconsin are traumatized by local murders. Surveying the depicted landscapes the viewer attempts to discern the geographical features that lend themselves to homicide. But as de Bruyn explains, even the residents of Plainfield don’t know. The community’s – shocked, unsettled denial and then erasure are, in his view, symptomatic of collective trauma. The collage films of Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, complete the materialist film project, fracturing story to tease out subliminal associations lurking beneath the Hollywood-style imagery. As a defining technique of twentieth century film, collage recontextualizes old images, often transforming the everyday into art and bringing latent meaning to the surface. As such, collage films are uniquely poised, de Bruyn contends, to reveal the traumatic through radical juxtaposition of sound and image. De Bruyn cites several examples to illustrate this claim. In Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), Martin Arnold reprocesses sequences from the Andy Hardy film series (1937-58). Here, movement is obsessively broken up and broken down in a visual analysis that reveals repressed, unconscious desires, binding together cinematic and psychological disturbances. Exploding in grating, tearing, abrasive audio and fragmented imagery, the paranormal space of Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), connects ideas of possession and alien abduction as distorted memories of traumatic recall. Reworking appropriated footage from Sidney J Furie’s narrative feature The Entity (1981), Tsherkassky dynamically collages sound and image as a self- destructing cinema which collapses all around its viewer, encasing us in Tscherkassky’s house of film. And, for de Bruyn, Mike Hoolboom’s TOM (2002) refigures collage in semi-documentary form. TOM is the artist Tom Chomont, who recounts living with HIV, Parkinson’s disease, memories of incest and infanticide as well as the prospect of his imminent death. Hoolboom’s bricolage of still photos, interviews, original footage, excerpts of experimental films, home movies and appropriated footage renders human consciousness as successive waves of memory which wash over the viewer like the flotsam of film, HIV, and trauma. The contemporary relevance of e Bruyn’s book does not stop with current avant-garde film practices. De Bruyn also identifies contemporary digital media as mirroring traumatic experience. For de Bruyn, those schooled in new technologies thrive in a simulataneity of multiple perspectives as pure, unadulterated Situational Accessible Memory. This digital consciousness marks a shift from text to image based thinking, from a consciousness which incorporates history to an experiential realm grounded in a non-reflective present. Postscript: For anyone interested in applying de Bruyn’s thesis to other avant-garde films may I suggest the following: Al Razutis, Visual Essays: Origins of Film (1973-1984) restates early cinema in terms of 1970s and 80s aesthetics. Additionally, it is film history as received in Vancouver, reworked and reflected back as Razutis’ personal genealogy of cinema, one that seeks to recover and overthrow the complex exchanges, hierarchies, and compromises that dominate film history. The artist re-constructs history, hoping to save us from subjugation Rather than a coherent narrative or mythopoeia Razutis presents us with a collection, almost a curated series of fragments in uneasy relationship with one another. Maybe they are interchangeable, any recombination of the parts leading to any number and figurations of a whole toward a unity that can only ever be provisional. The Lumieres are to be found here in their Train Arriving at the Station, Melies too, The Storming of the Winter Palace, even Artaud, all reworked by Razutis as structural or flicker films, step printed, film and video hybridization, broken down as far as the grain of the image. At least one part of Visual Essays, (Ghost Image), explicitly addresses psychology in the visual tradition. Believing that there was no future hope for humanity Christopher Maclaine made what is sometimes cited as the first ‘Beat’ film. In The End (1953) Maclaine depicts six people about to die, mostly by suicide. A prolific self-medicator unable to deal with life, Maclaine eventually descended into incompetency and madness. In Other Reckless Things (1984), Janis Crystal Lipzin reworks ideas of the body in film, cutting the body and film. Responding to a newspaper account of a self-inflicted Caesarian section, Lipzin collages text, primitive animation, hand-held footage of medical instruments and graphic footage of childbirth procedures with a poetic narration which tells of a woman with mental health problems performing her self-Caesarian with a pen-knife. The ethno-experimental films of Trinh T Minh Ha address the rupture and displacement inherent in the experience of indigeneity, colonialism and exile. History, memory and trauma have appeared as recurring themes in films such as Displaced Persons (1981) and Cooperation of Parts (1987) by Dan Eisenberg. Here, self and subjectivity are formed in lived experience and past events accrue new associations over time and with transmission. There are even a couple of little-known Australasian experimental films that perform trauma. In Michael Lee’s lyrical The Mystical Rose (Australia, 1976) a young man brought up strictly Catholic in Queensland struggles to come to terms with the bohemian alternatives he discovers in Melbourne’s metropolitan culture. He eventually rejects his religious upbringing. George Rose and Richard Adams made The Sadness The Post Intellectual Art Critic (New Zealand. 1979) Over several years in the late 1970s. A critic giving a lecture in an art gallery is overwhelmed by memories of his teenage sexual experiences. He roams through the gallery, just as de Bruyn does in Retinex Reflux, articulating an almost total emotional incoherence. Overwhelmed by flashbacks he struggles to define his trauma within art critical languages until he completely breaks down, just as a vinyl record skips along the soundtrack, repeating the same sequence over and over again, stuck in the groove of his errant emotional life. Not only does The Sadness of the Post Intellectual Art Critic explicate trauma but the the circumstances of its making and subsequent screenings were ignominious and traumatic enough for both Rose and Adams to withdraw from filmmaking. Objecting to the film’s content the laboratory seized it, refusing to release it to the film artists. Rose initiated a bitter and lengthy court case to retrieve the film. Later, it was pulled from the Auckland Film Festival ten minutes before it was to screen to a full house. A screening was later organized at a nearby independent cinema and the film subsequently played in Sydney, Australia before being independently screened throughout New Zealand. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 14