7. Dezember 2024

On fathers, quotes and the Kloß Alexander Horwath 60

Actor as auteur. What does he act? The act – stimulation, ignition, bearing – of the public, in the public sphere and to the people. He works within the given, he originates its presentation. The presentation of the world, which is «not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.» (Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition) He enacts a script, which was blown away by the wind and dragged down by the tide, he originates the recollection and reappropriation of the pages to seek their truth. He produces, as often in the case of auteur-actors. By speech and gestus, the bearing, the carriage of pages, he brings them to the surface and washes away the debris, crystallises the notes, sentences and images that have been blown and dragged. He illuminates the obscurity of the falsely naturalized world, of headlines, of unbending histories not with natural light but the light of the projector, which bends the strip, the imprint, the truth, but also offers it for constant revisiting, reconsideration, for new lights and gazes and thus offers a new mechanism of thinking, which frees itself from the naturality of appearance in the art of appearance, fraud, fakery. The stage is the projection booth and the narrow space between the screen and the audience. The actor is a film curator.

Alexander Horwath once described curatorship as an act of generosity. One of many contradictions may arise here already. Generosity denotes noble origins, birthright, which distinguishes its actor from the people. Cinema, the bastard, the plebeian, the art of workers, flâneurs and tramps knows no birthright and no biology. Curatorship is an act of sharing, of involvement, but also an act within magnitude, the magnanimous (generous) distribution of the indigent, poor artform – poor in terms of production (such as amateur films or cinema povero), prestige (such as infantile innovation, anti-technical-rationality) or ancestors (self-originating film forms, mayflies, hermaphrodites without unbending film historical genealogy).

Generosity (magnitude) is accomplished when the collection and its presentation reflect an image of cinema and history, invent a tradition, by way of Hollis Frampton’s metahistorian, and stand as reminders that even within one tradition, histories of film intertwine.

Cinema disenthralls biological bondages, it’s an existence of constant transition, clowning, coming to life whilst decaying. Generations – Henry and Peter Fonda, or Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas von Sternberg – are separated by the shift in production and aesthetics. It’s a patrilineal history, unless the curator enacts otherwise. It’s a history of chosen families, chosen sons and fathers, of François Truffaut and André Bazin, then Jean-Pierre Léaud and Truffaut, J. Hoberman and Jonas Mekas, Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese, Alexander Horwath and Peter Kubelka etc.

A few of the film histories the act of Horwath bears witness to and represents. He represents the words and gestus of the actors who represent the virtues, the mindset, the spirit of the origins – the script, the people, the creative force etc. The curator-actor’s mask is film history. But according to Jacques Derrida (and Paul Celan), the witness is the one who cannot appeal to representation, he has to be personally present, speak in the first person, he has to be the active subject in front of the pulpit, only he can responsibly authorize his words and testify on his own behalf. Again, an ability that culture ascribes to adult men with self-determination. Kubelka ascribes this ability also to something else: analogue film, which cannot request its digital distortion to bear witness in its place. Another film history and chosen inheritance of Horwath’s act.

The curator can bend this association by threading the strips of others who spoke in the first person. Exiles uprooted from home and biological inheritance, in forced search of a second life. Amateurs. Wanda by Barbara Loden. And by the common constructive effort of various institutions, curators and writers, academia and cinephilia may hazardously take it for granted that as of today film noirs of poor production quality, amateur films and feminist film histories can be viewed and researched.

Horwath speaks in the first person through the veil of film history. A similar duality to the performative authorship of Henry Fonda. It is him who has to step forward in mask, be absorbed by the represented, film history or the people, the absorption takes place, the represented takes the place of the self with his participation, a wilful subordination to the magnitude (of film history and the people), in which he remains the subject, who chooses what, how and for whom.

Horwath’s film history seeks a totality to acknowledge the bastard origins, the cosmology. In a way, it’s the opposite of Kubelka’s film history, which – in the richness of all these (seeming) contradictions – fundamentally influences it. It’s not essential, an alchemical perfection, an ideally contoured reduction. That cosmos is complete, like the 35 mm filmstrip itself, the motif of its creation is specificity, it can grow, but it fertilises its own fruit without interbreeding.

«The historian of cinema faces an appalling problem. Seeking in his subject some principle of intelligibility, he is obliged to make himself responsible for every frame of film in existence. For the history of cinema consists precisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatever. Of the whole corpus the likes of «Potemkin» make up a numbingly small fraction. The balance includes instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography, and much, much more. The historian dares neither select nor ignore, for if he does, the treasure will surely escape him. The metahistorian of cinema, on the other hand, is occupied with inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art. Such works may not exist, and then it is his duty to make them. Or they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And then he must remake them.» (Hollis Frampton: For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses.)

Interbreeding (daring to select in the treasury and in the debris) is the inner force which coheres and disperses in Horwath’s understanding of cosmology, both in film history and within single works.

«This experience is alive or should be alive, alive to all aspects of historicity. It does something to you when the time comes to look at the Western again, or to look at New Hollywood again or to look at an individual artist again, or the cinema as such, which we often enough did too. «Die Utopie Film» was also a constant, revolving, not like Kubelka’s, but a revolving and evolving movement in me.» (Horwath in conversation with me)

Film (in the wide sense of Horwath, less in the perfection of Kubelka) itself weakens the opposition of high and low, self-expression and industrial means, private and public, virtual and actual, possible and real. Film relies on binary oppositions and denies them by devouring.

The ambivalence of film's role since the mass-production of art and art history is that it is the most spectacularly subordinate artistic discipline to industry, producing vulgar commodities of pleasure and entertainment from the outset. It is an ideology, a regime of representation, but for this very reason it does not acquire social prestige, it is not only physically unpossessable as a single, unreproducible, original artefact, but the intellectual possession of its knowledge doesn't guarantee the promotion and status that the art lover can hope to derive from attending concerts, exhibitions and literary salons.

The utopia of film. The film image is selective, it excludes the world outside its composition, but the promise of the ensemble of all film images is that it captures and represents all realities, including the reality of reflection, narration, falsification, mimesis, acting. Not only the history of the twentieth century, but all the memories and forms of re-enactment, oral traditions, archaeological artefacts. These will then become the memories produced by film, which will be rearranged by further films. The utopia of film proclaims that it records history in its entirety, all genocides and resistances, struggles and ecstasies, scientific experiments and creative flashes. This way, it catches up with the event itself, eliminating the delay of the recording, the delay of the imprint in relation to the event. Simultaneous production, perception, interpretation, transmission. The utopia of film is the permanent cross-contamination of films with each other, with the modern city, with society. Films imbued with movement, labour, war, freedom, fear, sexual desire, exploitation, rebellion, exile and solidarity. And vice versa. Yet, the utopia of film is the utopia of a reality that refuses to let itself be revealed or represented. It is also the utopia of an artefact that does not allow itself to be confused with reality. In other words, it is not only a new art, a new mode of production and consumption, a new historical document, a new scientific instrument that penetrates the invisible world, but also a mystery that takes on a life of its own. A thought that forms a thinking form. The utopia also offers new forms of life, which become part of the recorded, reconstructed, created, filmed totality, which carry the idea of film as a behavioural typology beyond the field of cinema. This personification is then re-recorded by the film, distributed and so on. (As various sources such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge and Horwath imagined it.)

«Nicole Brenez once said that the best criticism of a film is another film, which means that the best film critics and historians would be the film-makers themselves – at least those who place their film-making in relation to cinema as such. And this is also how Godard sees it when he says that ‹there is no difference between making cinema and writing the history of cinema«, that »cinema writes its own history as it is being made›.» (Alexander Horwath in an interview with Álvaro Arroba and Olaf Möller)

This utopia devours the first, second and third cinema – to use the words of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas –, the avantgarde, pedagogical and scientific film, propaganda, amateur film, advertisement and so on, while also denying them as strictly separable categories.

Film is a cannibal, or rather the Kloß in the folk tale that enlarges itself while the dough is rising and greedily swallows the family that made it.

And Horwath’s act is similar, his words, his speech act is a syndetic action without pre-existing or prejudicial hierarchy. It’s not an act of synchronicity or homogenisation, it preserves the specificity of each element, curated work, but allows to recognize common and contradicting ideas between films that may not stand each other or wouldn’t even regard the other as film. It illuminates involuntarily synchronous momentums, while countering the synchronicity of the market.

«We travel a lot, we move toward the films if they are not taken up by the market; we are ‹hunters-gatherers› of information (and we exchange it). We try to closely watch the small and the regional in cinema, what Deleuze calls a ‹minor literature›. Jonathan says we are rebels against amnesia. But I think we also try to resist the process of economical and cultural globalization (another kind of ‹synchronization›) which is a major cause of this amnesia. In the framework of film-cultural globalization, two fake alternatives to Hollywood have evolved: the Miramax idea of U.S. ‹indies› (mentioned above) and the reduction of European and Asian cinemas to a few ‹masters› who can transcend all national borders and dance on all markets (Kieslowski and Zhang Yimou might be two good examples). I am much more interested in filmmakers who speak in concrete words and voices, from a concrete place, about concrete places and characters.» (Horwath’s letter in the correspondence, Movie Mutations initiated by Jonathan Rosenbaum between Nicole Brenez, H., Kent Jones and Adrian Martin)

To hold on to concrete places through works of those who are uprooted from them. To hold on to the concrete place of the cinema, and appeal to the fixed position of sitting, the contrast of light and darkness, the hidden projection booth not as instruments of oppression, but means of concentration and intensity that all films require including those that engage with the fixed position of sitting, the contrast of light and darkness, the hidden projection booth.

To enact this continuously every four years (The Utopia of Film, Österreichisches Filmmuseum), like a syndetic Olympia without competition, that celebrates diverse activities at once, whether disabled or excessively potent. To enact this by telling the history of the 20th century in one hour (The Clock, Courtisane).

Megalomania and scrupulous detailedness, the voice of an alpha male and the sporadic associations of a child.

John Ford and Marie Menken, Andrzej Munk and Phil Solomon, the emancipation of surrealism and Nazi triumphalism, a fragment from Josef von Sternberg and a mechanic mosaic engaging with the fragmentation of all imagery. Henry Fonda.

If cinema indeed writes its own history as it is being made, and since the actor is a producer, the curator-actor takes on filmmaking.

Simultaneous production, perception, interpretation, transmission. In traditions dear to Horwath, filmmaking seems to be the inevitable continuation of curatorship or vice versa. The works which carry and express the ethos of the collection have to be made, and their ethos have to be guarded by works in kinship in a collection, not guarded from the public or accessibility but from predatorial appropriation.

«I would like to name just three examples of this shift – three terms which, parallel to the development of Digital rhetoric, have massively entered our language: content, access, and user. Of course, all three are very innocent terms, and they signify a number of positive things – for instance, certain democratic, anti-élitist forms of behaviour, and the ‹opening› of formerly ‹closed› institutions. I would, however, like to draw your attention to the way in which these terms are also being used to install a market logic at the cost of the critical and political functions of the museum. Firstly: content – in other words, our collections. This rhetoric doesn’t say artefacts, but content, much like the Hollywood industry uses the word product for films. In this sense, content is a combative term to somehow get rid of the material artefact with which every content is irrevocably joined. This use of the word content desires a kind of ‹free flow› of content, much like the ‹free flow of capital› in contemporary finance capitalism. Secondly: access, meaning the way in which archive and museum collections are being presented to the public and are enriching public knowledge. The way access is being used in the neo-liberal rhetoric, it mainly means consumption. Not creating and curating various forms of engagement with the artefact, but turning the collections into image-banks for intermediary dealers and end-consumers. Thirdly: the user, meaning the person who comes in contact with our institutions and our collections. By user, market-style rhetoric does not really mean the interested citizen who is met at eye-level by the museum and who in turn is called upon to meet the artefacts and collections at eye-level. Quite the opposite – in this rhetoric, user stands for the disinterested consumer, or the overly-interested intermediary dealer or ‹provider›. The consumer plugs into our image-banks to graze on them like a cow grazes on a meadow, whereas the intermediary dealer or provider plugs in and grazes on our image-banks like corporate raiders graze on various smaller businesses, inhaling them in the process.» (Horwath: The Market vs. The Museum)

«At the end of such a process, this kind of archive would be fully aligned with and affirmed by the market, and would therefore represent a kind of nothingness. In political terms, it would be the actual conservative – or better, neo-conservative – place. The other type of organization would be an archive which is also a ‹critical museum›; a confrontation of concrete artefacts and social practices; an actively and poetically constructed collection; a place in which curatorial thinking and work can be felt and argued with. It would stand counter to the ideology of the market. I must admit that the latter type of organization will probably bring a lot of grief – the grief of having to endure, engage with, and survive current cultural politics, which run on the fetish of the Digital and Digitization. On this point, however, I would like to quote William Faulkner, by way of Jean-Luc Godard: Between grief and nothingness, I will take grief.» (Horwath: The Market vs. The Museum)

To take grief by way of the palimpsest thinking mechanism of cinema, quoting from someone who made a new artform out of quoting technique, to cite a film citing a novel in a speech.

Grief and the battle against this rhetoric and process also channel curatorship into filmmaking, digital filmmaking in Horwath’s case.

It is in the ethos of Kubelka, that he takes over the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, but it is in a film historical era when interbreeding intensifies by digitization – which Kubelka describes as genocide –, and adequate responses are required vis-à-vis new forms of creation, «archive», imagery, consumption. The museum of film engages with the ever-contemporariness of film, it can invite any work from any era to be our contemporary, but it also comments the calendar-contemporariness. Again, Horwath’s response here is less that of Kubelka, and is rather analogous with Harun Farocki’s description of his film, Ein Bild, which «documents» a Playboy photoshoot. Farocki says: «The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I'm making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that's being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both.»

Let’s not be satisfied with refusal or moral outrage but inspect the object of one’s research. How does it work? What kind of human labour and abstract will constitute it?

The everlasting dilemma. Karl Kraus created singular literature out of the daunting language of mass media. Guy Debord made films.

Horwath undertakes filmmaking in this manner, to inspect and interbreed, to look at sources and archives of all forms, not just cinema and national collections, but painting, television, clips – in the tradition of the essay film, the way of the termite. Deep hole drilling and détournement.

Horwath’s first film, Henry Fonda for President premiered this year at the Berlinale, and it credits two collaborators: Michael Palm and Regina Schlagnitweit, who has been a partner in crime on many curatorial endeavours as well.

Actor as auteur, genetics and disenthralment, fathers and sons, subjects and veils, diverging and repetition.

To act otherwise. To diverge from Henry Fonda to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Margaret Fuller, to slavery and exploitation, to lynching and the dreamlife of the nation.

To make a film about a man with a famous name and his obsession with anonymity. A film about the elusive and ephemeral form of myth, of truth, of democracy. About graves, the solidity of resistance and settlement, and a man who has no grave. About the wind that carries away his ashes and mobilises the birds of the ocean to fly around. About the history of cinema as a history of exile. About the history of colonialism and the history of the proletariat. About the history of the United States and what it imposes on the world in form electrifying and oppressive images, in form of liberation and occupation. A film about the awe-inspiring experience of majesty, landscapes, glimpses of art and politics, and the big screen itself.

To create a model of one’s own thinking method – as in curatorship. And as in curatorship, appealing to the ecstasy of rhythm, montage that motorizes the thinking machine but cannot be verbalized. To question whether grief and ecstasy are communicable in the first place.

«Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all. Not only is it perhaps the only experience which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance, it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything else. There seems to be no bridge from the most radical subjectivity, in which I am no longer ‹recognizable›, to the outer world of life. Pain, in other words, truly a borderline experience between life as ‹being among [inter homines esse] and death, is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men that it cannot assume an appearance at all.» (Arendt: The Human Condition)

Why does one hide his face with the hands if he proclaims to wear a mask anyway? Why does he proclaim to wear mask if he champions actors who are so «real (common? familiar? truthful? authentic? actual?)», they make the viewer forget about acting.

The persona hides and expresses its bearer. A persona for truth. Larvatus prodeo. As Descartes says: «As actors put on a mask (personam), lest they be shamefaced, so I, on entering the stage of the world, in which hitherto I have been a spectator, come before the audience masked (larvatus).»

«The persona – of course – hides and expresses. It can hide the »real«, but it can also serve (since the empirical self is inadequate) to present something better, truer, superior. (Not necessarily to depict the thinker in a better image than he deserves.) Impersonality is a powerful rhetorical instrument: it portrays the thinker's thought as the self-reflection of the objective world order (‹objective truth›), and thus puts the vastest authority in his hands (the precursor of which is the divine inspiration of the prophet). On the other hand, it presents the thinker as a servant of the ‹objective truth› which tells of the objective world order, as a speaking instrument – instrumentum vocale – thus as selfless. And impartial.» (Tamás Gáspár Miklós: Larvatus prodeo)

Henry Fonda for President is about a man who obstinately holds on to him having nothing to say and being an instrumentum vocale – thus, as Horwath argues, involuntarily and inevitably claims divine inspiration.

But the people want him to take the place of worldly power, the US presidency. He refuses the offer with very few words. Nonetheless not only the oppressive imagery of Hollywood and the US military, also the divine (Steinbeckian) inspiration on the screen takes the form of reality in the dreamlife of the nation. Tom Joad’s monologue from The Grapes of Wrath by John Ford can be anyone’s rhetorical instrument.

«Virtual is not opposed to real; what is opposed to the real is the possible. Virtual is opposed to actual, and, in this sense, possesses a full reality.» (Gilles Deleuze: The Method of Dramatisation)

In this aspect, Horwath is clearly the opposite of Fonda. In the narrow space between the screen and the audience, and in the film, he uses a lot of words. Deep hole drilling and détournement – his speech act vivifies the action of constant self-hijacking, to insist on the possibility that a sidetrack should always appear as one drills himself deeper and deeper into his own mind.

«A certain fashion of making programs would suggest a notion of history that’s more closed or packaged, like a book that says World War II. It goes from explaining what led to World War II, then the main bulk is World War II, and it may have an epilogue about 1945 and after. These film programs or books are all gestures, the question is what type of gestures are they? Do they enclose their substance in a vitrine or do they look at the core of their subject and distribute its elements into new directions, allowing the elements to coalesce for a certain time, with certain stability around the topic? It needs a kind of coalescing force, but in my view of history or programming, which in that sense is the same thing, it also needs to allow the recipient to see how these elements disperse. In the German word, auseinanderstieben, the tempo of this dispersion is also suggested – like when the ants quickly run in all directions after a mean person throws a stone at their hill. This is the other energy, next to the coalescing one, which allows the person to understand history, as I think it should be understood, as never something that’s over. Historicity is not only something that adheres to all things, even to the elements that were and are perceived as the most eternal, the sky, for instance, the heavens, which are very different in the post-industrial age and our climate phenomena.» (Horwath in conversation with me)

One history that seems to be over is that of film as a primarily relevant art of the masses, and that of cinephilia as urban, on-site ritual. To whom does the curator-actor-filmmaker appeal? Which public can look at the images as their own, as unpossessable, common ignition?

While the physical, public, pervasive cinephile has disappeared together with its historical conditions, the (authoritarian, famous, characteristic, male) film curator is often assigned a kind of public task, a public intellectual function, which anachronistically seems to replace the social significance once attributed to film itself. Film museums are ruined by the global antagonism towards culture expressed in state budgets, and festivals are overrun by commercialists. But the liberating ars poetics of curatorship, of informal historical inquiry exists in a few places, and a few exceptional festivals and screenings are able to be ritualistic, liberating, passionate, detaching themselves from capitalist time economy. They are still inexhaustible sources of knowledge, but as curatorship has become a profession, it is the professionals who come together to learn, to show their best face in front of each other, and their organisation is not spontaneous, romantic or whimsical.

How to take part in this? What does it mean when the 90-years-old Jean-Luc Godard after all the radical shifts, new phases and denials, recommends Mizoguchi and Hitchcock to the resistant youth?

How does one claim the intensity of cinema, of the dark room and fixed seats in face of the fancy, marketized expanded cinema, when an ethos such as analogue projection becomes a commodity itself, an experience advertised with vintage neon lights, when the shrimp cocktails look as greasy in Bologna as they do in Cannes? How does one make the resistance greater than an incident, a programmed error in the system?

«Needless to say, the system today is much better protected against such incidents. And that, throughout the great ideological and social doldrums of the world in which I have lived the greater part of my youth and adulthood, throughout its torpor, be it chemical or media-induced, indifferently, the thought of Guy Debord, his art, his writings have remained the only space where I have always felt that life, revolt, and History subsisted intact, and therefore, through him, an ever present possibility that stimulation had not fully blanketed the world and that by means of movement, somewhere, something might soon rekindle the fire. Of which Debord was the guardian.» (Olivier Assayas: Under circumstances eternal. From the depths of a shipwreck.)

More film histories from the act of Horwath. Different historical conditions enable and require a different vita activa. Grief and self-education, the artistic enactment of one’s obsessions and the mourning of losses, fearless thinking and self-hijacking may not ignite total participation and total art – these mental processes are among the possibilities in a world which exterminated both the post-Enlightenment notion of Bildung and the romantic, whimsical cinephile who didn’t give a fuck about it.

Not only in the narrow space between the screen and the audience, but also in the fixed seats of the dark room, one is free from the household, the despotism, the viewer becomes a living being capable of speech. In the bar and in front of the cinema, while smoking in the cold under the lights of the Filmmuseum. Not only the films, the act of speech, of passion, of self-hijacking from linear film histories and linear conversations are shared too.

Jerry Lewis and Peter Lorre, Stephanie Barber and Lisl Ponger, Ritwik Ghatak and Gene Kelly can always be summoned in need of ecstasy, and the way of summoning – watching them in the cinema or on a laptop, having a conversation about them, or listening to Horwath’s speech before one of their films – can always be an act of ecstasy.

According to Derrida (and James Joyce) fatherhood is always a hypothesis, a legal fiction, unlike motherhood which at the moment of giving birth is its own undoubtable evidence – at least before the possibility of surrogacy.

Film did not abolish the notion that the witness has to be depicted with male genitalia (like on hieroglyphics) because it wouldn’t be a sexist mode of production, but because it abolishes the very idea of originality, of the possibility to clearly trace back an idea – of a script, of a composition, of a film program. It’s the palimpsest, it’s the Kloß.

It’s the art form of quoting techniques, fraud, of impostors, people in transition, like Lorre, Sylvia Sidney, Erich von Stroheim, Jack Smith, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Orson Welles.

Horwath is a very sincere man, Antje Ehmann once told me. He quotes properly and acknowledges the genealogies of his programs and of his film.

Sixty lines surely won’t suffice to even hint at all the film histories and program ideas, which, as I acknowledge in my introductions or writing, his actor-as-auteur-performances shared with me.