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A Conversation
Among
Ken Feingold, Coco Fusco, and Steve Gallagher
KF: The
two of you were asked to curate the Flaherty Seminar this
year, to create a program for what is usually perceived of
as a seminar on documentary film. We know that although Flaherty's
films were staged, they are rarely discussed as fiction films.
What frames of reference were you using for thinking about
documentary and for the works which you included? Why did
you feel that my tape Un Chien Delicieux was interesting
in this context, and what sorts of issues did you hope would
come up?
CF: Neither
of us as programmers were particularly known for working with
documentaries that are traditional in narrative structure,
with voice-over, etc. But we wanted to program Flaherty because
we were both attracted to the idea of presenting films to
an audience that would actually discuss them. Because of a
dadaist and kamikaze inclination we were enticed by the idea
of subverting what was something of a de facto tradition,
not something that had been prescribed by Flaherty or by the
original concept of the Seminar, but a practice that had fallen
into place in recent years. So how were we going to do that?
We wanted to introduce a selection from Arab cinema in North
Africa, which we felt was a cinema that had not received a
lot of exposure. Because of that lack of exposure here, and
because of that cinema’s approach to history and to its
representation of the region we sensed that there would be
a lot of issues for discussion. Also we wanted the entire
program to lead to a discussion of mixed genres - why filmmakers
known for experimental work might include "documentary" strategies
or techniques, or why a documentary filmmaker might employ
dramatic sequences or fictional strategies. We wanted to blur
these distinctions.
I don't think we
chose conventional Arab films. We were aware that there were
many documentary films dealing with the Intifada and
with the Gulf War, but we wanted more interiorized views that
would also give an historical perspective and a sense of the
stylistic diversity of this region's cinema. We didn't want
to comply with western conventions of associating the Middle
East with chaos.
SG: I've
been working on a film about Nikola Tesla, an inventor during
the gilded age. I've been researching this for the last year,
and that informed my desire to do Flaherty and the approach
that we took, in the sense that I became acutely aware of
the way that history is constructed, and of the construction
of the subject of the film through my research. There were
so many conflicting biographical points of view - in Tesla's
case because he was almost entirely obfuscated from the historical
records by industrial and corporate forces. When we were invited
to curate the Flaherty Seminar that became the central motivating
factor for me in terms of both looking at history and looking
at the subject. We tried to find films that were self-conscious
about their construction.
CF: I wanted
to be very flexible about how documentary was to be defined
in the Seminar. I didn't want to get into a kind of "U8 vs.
them" battle, where the people who "tell the truth" confront
the people who don't "tell the truth". We wanted to open the
discussion up to a number of issues which are very difficult
for those who have a certain investment in "the truth" to
adapt to or accept, because if you accept that partial nature
of what you believe to be an absolute truth, your world crumbles.
This is often traumatic for those who hold on to universalist
notions of truth - from humanist, modernist, or Eurocentric
persuasions.
SG: The
majority of the discussions at the Seminar in the past inevitably
centered on whether a film was being made about a culture
or from "within" a culture. It seems that there
was a very polarized perspective on that issue. If a white
anthropologist was going to a foreign culture and making a
documentary, then that was seen as "wrong." If people
were allowed to speak within that documentary, that was o.k.,
that was a plus. But there seemed to be a very implicit rule
about what was permissible within documentaries about foreign
cultures. That influenced our thinking about the discussions
we would try to foster at the Seminar, and your tape, Un
Chien Delicieux, was a very attractive tape because it
really homes in on this very specific point.
I didn't question
in the least whether it was fiction or fact. It didn't seem
important. Because in the context of the narration the tape
itself questions documentary practice, ethnographic cinema
and anthropology.
CF: Because
you're an outsider going to foreign culture and you've emptied
the form that would have allowed the audience to understand
what they are seeing in a kind of transparent manner, you've
invested it with a set of problems and tensions that refer
directly to yourself and your audience as outsiders. Because
you are taking a postmodern position that stresses your status
as well as theirs, your morality was questioned. The debate
was articulated in terms of what "right" you had to question
these icons, including the "sacred truth" of verisimilitude.
In a way, the idea of the Flaherty Seminar got reconstructed
in the process because we started to think about what a conventional
documentary was, even though none were shown.
SG: It was
an interesting reaction that our programming destablized people's
viewing relationship to the filmed material. To me it seemed
like this should be a normal position for anyone to approach
any representation with. It was surprising that people were
reluctant to take as a given that what we were doing in the
programming was simply reminding them that there is no such
thing as "documentary truth", that it is always subjective.
And your tape, Un Chien Delicieux, became the work
around which we built the Seminar, because that was the very
core question that your video tackled.
KF: It is
a very complex idea and it arose from a number from different
sources, not the least of which was the experience we all
had of watching the Gulf War on CNN. We knew as we were watching
that it was a fiction. As "information", as "news," as
"truth," it was clearly suspect, partial, and fragmentary.
This is not to say that some kinds of truths can't come through
these things, but that one should always question the seeming
transparency of media "information." As a reference point
for me, one of the more interesting ways of thinking about
"truth" has been Foucault's idea that truth is a kind of regime
within a particular discourse, and within individual discourses
"truth-effects" are produced by way of certain conventions.
One of these conventions is that of "documentary" cinema,
upon which we have relied so much for what we take to be knowledge.
We also have the experience of seeing what happens in our
lives, our city, and seeing how those events get turned into
media events, newspaper articles, etc., and we see the great
gap that opens up between the truth as we perceive it and
the truth as it is constructed in these documents. Each interpretation
of the truth constructs a different history. The problem is
that these forms can also carry very strong and important
information that one might not otherwise have access to, and
if one takes the nihilist extreme that no truths can
come through, then it devalues something which is done with
a motivation of actually giving someone a voice. The point
is not to say that there is no truth, but as you said,
that one should always question the source of this, how it
has been constructed, and the format itself. We have lived
with this thing all of our lives - seeing someone speaking
in a voice that we don't understand, hearing a voice-over,
and automatically taking that to be a truthful translation
of what was being said. What we take as knowledge includes
things that have been created in this form. There is no reason
for that person speaking and that voice-over to become fused
together except through the acceptance of this convention.
One of the other
points which was particularly relevant was the ethnographic
film tradition, which I had wandered through because my work
had gotten involved with asking some similar questions. I
found, at every turn, with the exception of a small group
of people, that there was tremendous resistance to my work.
One noted anthropologist told me that my work represented
everything which he had fought against for years. His concept
was that the purpose of anthropology, and of ethnographic
cinema, was to translate one culture for another. For me,
this raises profound questions about who can do this
- how this can be done, and what would it mean to translate
one culture for another. Again, buried inside of this
is the notion of "truth," and that somehow the anthropologist
or filmmaker can be trained to perceive the truth, to synthesize
it, compact it, to condense it into the context in which that
cinematic object is going to be received. It goes back for
me to the Flaherty model, which Asen Balikci has referred
to as "reconstructing cultures."It was at that point,
for me, that it crossed over into Surrealism, and also because
it had been raised as an object of desire by James Clifford
writing about "ethnographic surrealism," talking about
Breton and Leiris. And it was clear that this anthropologist
had found someone outside of himself on which to model a self-criticism.
It was the Surrealists' fascination with the Other and with
the exotic as a kind of mirror for his own conflicts about
the continuing practices of traditional anthropology.
One of the other
major influences for me was the notion of art as transgression.
One can only raise questions about a culture by transgressing
the limitations of that culture. If you "lie" in a believable
way you are stepping outside the limitations of a culture,
and violate all of the ethical codes from which its truth-effects
are produced.
CF: Many
of those who spoke up at the Seminar revealed what their limits
were, and what they would accept as "the truth" and "not the
truth." Sander Gillman, in Difference and Pathology,
discusses the formation of stereotypes, and uses something
of a developmental model to understand how people construct
systems of truth and morality to insure a stable sense of
identity and control of one's environment. A person must first
understand the difference between him or herself and "them,"
as well as what's true and what's false. Anything which disrupts
this disrupts the self. And when one gets destablized the
reaction is to project a stereotype onto the "other."
And so you, Ken Feingold the artist, and your tape/got labelled
as "bad objects" for disrupting a regime of truth.
SG: There
is a tradition of foregrounding the relationship between soundtrack
and image, between voice-over commentary and image. It seems
that in films like Robbe-Grillet's The Man Who Lies, or
in the whole body of work of Richard Foreman, or Godard --
people who explore this aspect of the relationship between
image and soundtrack -- that people are willing to accept
and enjoy that manipulation.
KF: If they
know from the beginning that it is a construction...
SG: Right.
The people at the Flaherty Seminar were extremely comfortable
watching a film which "translated" a culture for them, without
questioning the intervention. And the surprising thing about
Un Chien Delicieux is that you were actually confronted
with an act that is taboo in American culture - the act of
buying a dog from a pet shop, killing it and eating it. You,
Ken, as a videomaker, had not interceded to translate that
cultural practice for us to make us comfortable with it. It
made me acutely aware of how often that translation is done,
how comfortable we are watching films about Pygmies and aborigines
in other cultures, about body piercing and taboos, about all
these other practices, but shown in a way that never made
us feel really uncomfortable.
CF: Well,
many of those films serve to make us feel indignant sometimes.
A more recent trend makes audiences feel self-righteous about
widow-burning or clitorectomy, for example.
SG: Which
is also imposing a western morality upon another culture.
But you have allowed the act to stand on its own and to allow
us to be confronted with our very otherness to that culture.
For people to be hung up on whether or not they were being
"tricked" or manipulated by you is beside the point.
KF: At a
recent screening in Germany, when people found out that I
had written the voice-over in the first part, someone asked
"Did you also make them kill the dog? Was that a scripted
action?" It's funny, because that part of the tape is "documentary."It's
a normal thing in their culture to kill and cook a dog, just
as we do with pigs or chickens.
CF: I was
told by some who attended that they thought it was a "self-indulgent"
program, that it was self-indulgent on our part to pay attention
to these works that were self-indulgent because it didn't
promote any kind of "understanding" of "the other." It
might even have been perceived of as gratuitous to kill a
dog in order to make a point.
KF: What
was being raised was not just a matter of "nobody can tell
the difference between a truth and a lie," that wasn't
the point at all. If people don't question the forms that
they use and accept, and the conventions of the methods used
to convey ideas, then that is self-indulgent, because it is
assuming an authoritarian position. I find the self-conscious
foregrounding of the relationship between the filmmaker as
"the one who can't know" and the subject as very narcissistic.
The one whose authority has been taken away but still wants
to go on, so what do they speak about? They speak about their
inability to speak. It doesn't raise any questions, because
the question is already there for anyone who has ever taken
up a camera or written about cinema - it's a given.
Coco, something
you brought up at the "Show the Right Thing" conference -
you spoke about this confusion that is so prevalent in the
discourse between the big "O" Other and the small "o" other,
and how that was similar to confusion between the phallus
and the penis. Could you reiterate that? I think it's really
relevant.
CF: In the
course of multicultural debates, there has been a tendency
to literalize a symbolic configuration. There is a Lacanian
paradigm being alluded to when people speak about the Other.
But the Other in Lacan's work is not a person. It is an effect
of an individual's subjectivity, it's a fiction created by
the individual psychology to distinguish himself or herself
from the rest. The Other becomes a kind of verbal sign for
that which is not you. It can also take a visual or aural
form - that destabilizing sense that the Other with a capital
"O" has. It can really come in any form as long as it acts
as a threat to the stability of the sense of your self.
SG: But
it's formulated not around relationships to foreign cultures,
but around a relationship to your own mirror image.
CF: Exactly.
The possibility of your negation implies a disruption between
the relationship between yourself and your mirror image. What
has happened in multicultural debates is that people have
appropriated this paradigm and applied it to "other-than-white-people,"
or non-western people. As a result of that, people of color
become walking signifiers of that which destablizes a kind
of hegemonic white culture. But to do that is like saying
that men, because they have penises, are the embodiment of
the phallic order, and disrupt the stability of female identity
simply by being in the world. It's a very crude translation
of very complex psychoanalytic ideas that have to do with
perception and projection.
KF: For
me, the prevailing lack of distinction between those two is
what makes the perception of Un Chien Delicieux as
"truthful" possible. It is something which is desired within
this culture. One wants to hear the other acting like
an Other, reflecting back his perception of European culture
and about a period in our history, and offering a critique
of these western structures through an outsider's view. It's
this narcissistic desire of western culture to hear the other
acting as an Other, and speaking about a counter-history of
western culture. Had it been me in front of the camera it
wouldn't have been interesting to anyone in this culture.
It is because it was someone talking about his destabilization
of western culture, and through that created a desire on the
part of people watching to have it be true.
SG: You
presented him as an articulate spokesperson who was critical
of these visiting anthropologists; he spoke with a "western"
voice, which allowed us to identify with him and to be very
comfortable with him as a speaking subject.
KF: I would
hope that anyone involved with filmmaking would question these
same codes. They are the same that are used for all kinds
of propaganda, and other information which we take to be "untruthful"
because we don't share the ideological basis from which they
emerge. My point which was criticized in the recent Afterimage
article is easy to misunderstand. I said that, because of
the state of electronic technology, one could take the footage
of the white policemen beating a black motorist in L.A. and
make it look like black policemen beating a white motorist.
It means that we really have no way of knowing, without a
complex system of personal verification, whether something
we see in the media actually happened or not. I did not want
to say that all film lies, and that some kinds of films, such
as that one, don't have great significance. The things we
accept are the ones that we have witnessed, or that agree
with our own ideology, or are confirmed by someone or some
group who we trust, and the ones that are in conflict are
questioned. An example which would have been acceptable perhaps
is the endless debate over the veracity of UFO imagery. It's
a difficult idea to grasp, and has been misused by authoritarian
regimes and fanatics to assert that certain historical events
never took place, which adds to the difficulty of approaching
the thought. Because inside of that is the idea that it is
considered immoral to willingly manipulate the truth, but
it is moral to try to tell the truth even if you know that
it is not absolute. It is religious in the sense that it is
based on belief. Any film that is seen as being truthful by
one group may be seen as lying by another. There is a suspension
of disbelief in representation because of the intention, but
any framing always leaves something out, any time the camera
is turned on and off editorializes.
SG: I think
a lot of people simply wanted to be told what to think. In
being given space within contradictions in which to get lost,
they had a lot of problems. We felt that this was more representative
of reality than a film which attempted to present it in a
more straightforward manner. That gap may not be bridgeable;
it has to do with convictions, securities, and belief systems.
And that is why the question of morality kept coming up because
simply allowing and having this space to drift in was perceived
of as immoral by some, and something to be celebrated and
to get lost in by others.
CF: There
was a kind of moralistic rejection of whatever was identified
as postmodernist within the Seminar by those who are still
invested in notions of authenticity. To me that investment
bespeaks a need for stability that "realism" provides.
KF: Postmodernism
occupies a similar position to that of Surrealism. People
see it as a movement which will (or did) come and go. But
these are ways of looking at the world, and at history. There
is nothing more surrealistic than the media environment we
currently exist in. Yet we would rather see it only as something
to criticize and examine rather than to admit that we are
implicated within it, to understand that much of our knowledge"
is made up of these media representations, and to a large
extent, our own self-presentation and the construction of
our own identity is a surreal one, because it incorporates
these things that have come from the media environment.
Feingold / Fusco
/ Gallagher
Un Chien Delicieux
Ken Feingold
1991
(photo of Breton,
Peret, in apt)
This is a photograph
that I took in 1948. It was the last time I saw Breton. I
was living in Paris. This is a very funny story, really. I
was living in Paris for a few years, right after the war.
(Village interview}
Some anthropologist
had come here in 1945. One of them was named Ribort and the
other one was Gallimard. They had a filmmaker with them, too,
a guy named Rauchet. It was so funny, they had climbed over
the mountain and walked through the jungle to our village!
I guess nobody told them about the road! They were so exhausted
and beaten-up when they got here!
So they stayed
here for about a month, asking questions all the time, taking
photos, filming everything. I can’t say everybody enjoyed
it. It was interesting to see what they were doing, and to
ask them questions about Europe, but life was really different
with them around. like now, when you come to visit, or some
other people come to visit, it changes things when you have
guests right, just like at your own house. You enjoy having
guests don’t you, but you’re always happy when they
leave, aren’t you?
They kept asking
me if I wanted to go back to Paris with them. It seemed like
a joke. But they were really serious. They wanted me to work
in a museum, to help them write about the artifacts they had.
I told them that I didn’t know how to write, but they
told me that this was the reason they wanted me to do it.
It didn’t make any sense to me, honestly. Later on when
I saw them in Paris and met the other people they knew, the
Surrealists, I understood things better. But anyway, I finally
agreed. I guess everybody would go to Paris if they had the
chance, right? You’re too young to know this, but at
that time there was a kind of fever. Everyone wanted to go
somewhere. It didn’t matter where you were from, it really
took hold of everybody. So I had a chance to go to Paris,
and I did. I’m glad I did, really, I never would have
understood anything about the Europeans if I had just kept
seeing them in their jungle outfits here!
In 1946, there
was a lot of excitement among the people I was working with
because Andre Breton had just returned to Paris. I kept hearing
about him. People were always talking about him, about Surrealism.
The head of the museum was a Surrealist, too. They told me
that I was going to be really happy to meet Breton, because
he was very interested in people from distant places, and
especially in magic, and rituals, things like that.
Life in Paris was
hard for the people there. It was so cold in the winter, and
it was so hard to get any coal or wood. And there wasn’t
much food, either. I didn’t see the war, but people kept
talking about it. It must have been terrible. There were many
things that people had to explain for me. I was asking so
many questions all the time, I started to think that I was
becoming an anthropologist!
One thing that
made the biggest impression on me was this whole idea of money
and working. It was amazing to me that people would work all
day for someone else to get money so they could buy the things
that they wanted for themselves. I couldn’t understand
why people didn’t just make what they needed, or raise
animals for their food, instead of doing something else and
then buying it. The money system seemed strange to me. Here,
we all made things that we used, or we traded them with each
other for things we both needed. It was so much simpler. But
the city is different. I guess with that many people in one
place, there isn’t enough empty land. Whenever I asked
them about this money and job system, they kept talking about
a man named Marx who was trying to change it all, but nothing
ever happened while I was there. Now we have the money system
here, too, when we go outside of our village.
So I met Breton.
He was very loud, but I think that’s why people liked
him. He was always mixing everything together, you know? His
mind was like a crazy-person’s, but he wasn’t really
crazy at all. But you know how when crazy people talk they
go on from one idea to another and just jump around, and somehow
they connect all these things together with some theory they’ve
invented? That’s how he was. But there were some things
he was especially interested in when we talked. He wanted
to know about the things that we did here that were really
different from Paris. So he was always asking me to tell him
about spirits and things like that, and about my dreams. He
always wrote down my dreams, he told me they were poetry.
A few times when we were at cafes he read some of my dreams
to the other people. I didn’t like it so much, really.
But people read all kinds of things, and since I couldn’t
write, I felt that he included me with the group when he read
my dreams. people seemed to like them. {Laugh} What a funny
bunch of men!
One day the head
of the museum, Leiris, told me that our work was finished,
and asked if I was ready to return home. It was a shock. But
the truth is, I was ready to go home, I didn’t mind.
I missed everyone here, and I was tired of the Paris way of
life. It never really suited me.
Breton wanted to
have a special dinner before I left. He asked what we had
at home for special dinners, and I told him that we ate a
dog for celebrations. His mouth really opened wide! {Laughs}
He was shocked! In Paris, you know, they are really funny
about their dogs. They treat them like little children, and
they take them everywhere. It had always struck me as one
of the funniest things about the Paris people! I could see
that Breton was really trying to think of what to say! It
was the only time I have ever seen him so quite! Then he started
to ask me questions, like how we prepared the dog, what we
served with it, things like that. He was quiet again for a
moment and then he said, "OK, we will make a dog for
your bon voyage dinner. But we have to think of where to find
one." I told him that I had seen a shop for buying dogs
very close by, and I described it. He said, "But that
is a pet shop, not a butcher shop!" I asked him why the
butcher didn’t sell dog meat, and he said that people
there would never eat dog. It was hard for me to understand.
They ate cows, and horses, rabbits, and chickens and pigs
and deer, ducks, fish, almost everything. Why not dogs? I
suggested that we buy one at the dog store and kill it ourselves.
You should have seen him. {Laughs} But anyway, we did it,
and I showed him and some of his friends how to do it. They
were screaming and acting like little children.
{Breton apt. photo}
So I took this
photo right after we finished our meal. The other man is Peret,
he was around a lot. Look at his face, will you. He couldn’t
believe he had eaten dog. Breton, liked it, he said. He said
it made him feel good to break his own taboos, to do new things.
He looks pretty happy, don’t you think?
{interview}
So, since you’re
leaving in a few days, we’ll make a dog for you. You
don’t eat dogs in America, either, do you? So your butchers
won’t sell them either, right? You should film the way
we prepare it, because I think it would be useful for your
American people to know how to do it. You’ll see, it’s
very delicious. It’s much better than pig or chicken!
So we’ll show you how we prepare it for cooking, and
you can show the film to people at home, OK? We’ll go
over to the next village and buy good dog! With money! {Laughs}
You should make
it like a set-by-step guide, you know? Like one of those TV
cooking programs. Don’t start doing any special effects
or slow motion or anything like that. In fact, you shouldn’t
even edit the images together. Just leave the individual shot-
so people can follow the steps.
{ Villagers killing
and preparing a dog, sync-sound, no voice-over}
(Voice-over at
the last stages of cutting up the meat)
Then you can use
it like any other kind of meat. We usually make a stew with
tomatoes and chilis, but you can cook it over the fire, too
It’s very good.
Un Chien Delicieux
script Ken Feingold 1991
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