In the Beggarly Style of Imitation Read online

  The bustle of a crowd is like a thousand chiming bells drowning out every expression of thoughtfulness. People champion association as if it were the greatest human invention since the aqueduct, and although it is true that one necessarily flows from the other, as is the case with every itinerant step of progress, there is much to be said about the general result of coalitions, which is to have your resources absorbed into a vacuum. It is a good rule which states that most lives never bloom into harmony, and it is perhaps an even steadier maxim that one never really tires of their own company. The conclusion, if one is disposed to reach it, is not overly difficult.

  Superfluity Is a State of Mind

  All these hurried brushes with the misanthropic persuasion occasion one thought above all: if this is integration, then a pincushion is likely to prove an apt metaphor for the misanthrope’s state of mind. A misanthrope’s spleen waxes and wanes like her other humours, and she alternately feels compelled to feel the sun’s rays on her fingertips, the honeyed tones of her companions’ musings or even to smear the mud of Camarina that is the awkwardness of human interplay over herself. The important thing is that such a return to society does in fact occur to serve as a reminder of who she is, and not, contrary to Seneca’s admonition, always with minds that stand a likely chance to improve her own.

  She is animated by a principle that makes her wary and tentative, soured by both experience and memory, yet she is perhaps more human than those who have yet to be disabused of the many illusions that sap the planet with straits of confusion. She is not in a slavish manacle to one idea of her choosing, unable to engage other opinions or understand them cogently; rather, she is a consolidated individual with eyes to see, ears to hear and a mind that is perspicacious to the truths that reveal themselves.

  Howsoever a misanthrope appears symptomatic of a trend of receding civility, it is in fact far more accurate to describe her as a kind of woebegone pragmatist that feels entitled to speak plainly, if with a talent—a favour even—for brinkmanship. She shares in this respect the same claim to impertinence that both the simpleton and the iconoclast revel in, though to what degree she resembles one over the other we leave to the scope of her faculty and the tenor of her achievements. As a provident mentality, misanthropy is deficient in some respects, contrary to the natural gifts of communality; however, escaping the weaknesses of one’s temperament is not always possible. Misanthropy is not an ennobled state that rouses an individual’s movements, but more so a realization that it is better to be charged with condescension than charmless optimism under the conditions in which the world presently exists. Indeed, there are so few outworks against the incapacitating obstacles of the mind that one cannot begrudge an individual for finding sanctuary in an attitude that does not for once elaborate upon the human tendency to superfluity.

  * * *

  1These remarks may be conceived as a vindication by any other name; when someone affirms that they are a misanthrope, their words are immediately taken to be exculpatory: “She cannot despise people to an apogean degree”—a familiar bromide. “How can you be a misanthrope and not cloister yourself from the world?” “You are admitting defeat by refusing to stand against the injustice that daily attends our sorrows,” and more of the same vapidity, whether I have invited such an inquisition or not.

  Mahebourg

  Chantey

  Banne instructions

  Pena l’importance

  La vie pu fini tout to l’energie

  Romance ene

  Grand la guelle

  De toute facon…

  Mo vine ici

  Pu le plaisir

  Mone finne critique

  Pu banne desordre

  Mo pas fine ajoute li

  Dans mo compte

  Page sombre

  Pu tourner dans mo la vie

  Garde bateau salete

  Marque l’entree

  Avec ene la corde

  Raccroche telephone

  To fine prend mo la voix

  Allez mo bane descendants

  Dans l’obscurite

  Et quand soleil fine coucher

  Dialogues dans asoir

  Excitant l’esprit!

  Instructions compte toujours

  Sexe, carillons et ces balivernes

  Désirs de toutes limites

  To pe badiner…?

  Mo fine vine ici

  Pu so bon le temps

  Mo fine plein are stress

  Mo pas fine ajoute li

  Dans mo compte

  Page sombre

  Pu tourner dans mo la vie

  Garde bateau salete

  Marque bannes sorties

  Avec ene la corde

  Mahebourg pardonne

  Pour bannes vivants

  Et bannes damnes

  Eski to capave

  Separe la mer

  Si tous dimounes

  Ena connection avec sa crime la?

  Instructions

  Don’t matter

  Life will see to vigour

  Romance is wont to

  Blather about

  Anyway…

  I came here

  For the pleasure

  I got stick

  For the mess

  I didn’t count

  The ledger

  The dark page

  Will turn itself again

  Jailers of the junkboat

  Mark the entrance

  With a rope

  Lay down the receiver

  My voice is now your own

  Go forth my descendants

  Into the darkness

  And the gloam

  Dialogues in the dusk

  Excite the mind!

  Instructions still matter

  Sex, chimes and jive charisma

  Urges of every borderline

  You don’t say…?

  I came here

  For the weather

  I got sick of the stress

  I didn’t count

  The ledger

  The dark page

  Will turn itself again

  Jailers of the junkboat

  Mark the exits

  With a rope

  Mahebourg is forgiving

  To the living

  And the damned

  Can you be

  The parting in the sea

  If everyone’s

  Connected to the crime?

  All Songs by Kaartikeya Derwish (Mauritian Countryside Plenitude Publishing Company)

  Ah‑Sen and I

  Scholarly Style of Recitation

  The one they call Ah‑Sen is aggrieved by everything I do. My movements are marked by languor, unless ratified by our countless driven obsessions. For this, I am both feted and objurgated by the silence of a breath. I detest flattering gatekeepers for drops of their borrowed time, or puffing my chest out to castigators masquerading as writers; he endures these abasements, and at times, with rather good humour. I am better occupied in the company of my children, the films of Berlanga, the prose of Sitwell and Cendrars (Stevenson trailing not far behind). Ah‑Sen validates these habits, but presides over them with the oppugnancy of a judge. I read for pleasure, while he labours under the scriptible sun of a bastard formalism, having been born under a mad sign. He would go years without finishing books, drowning at the level of the sentence, until I liberated him from the prison of his foolishness. I provide him with workaday sustenance, and keep vigilant watch over neglected pocketbook, and still find a never-ending reckoning of drink and debt threatening to make a mockery of my resolve. He is regularly absent when a question of manual labour arises. There will come a time of obeisance to his custom of warping the world and populating it with our enemies’ drolleries. Voltaire wrote well when he said that if attacked on a matter of style, it is for the work alone to make its rejoinder. A style eternally grapples with the impossibility of its existence, the necessity of its destruction; it is an exercise in the parametrics of purity, the dialectics
of forgetfulness. It is a belonging of oblivion and a flight of life. My grandfather incarnated Ah‑Sen in 1949 to sustain himself in Africa. I incarnated him to sustain my appetite for vulgarism. I have no reason to unbridle myself from this tautological character who marshals my existence into something that is as “twisty and as hard to unravel as a Gordian knot.”

  I do not care which of us has written this page.

  Sous Spectacle Cinema Research Consultation with Bart Testa

  On the Viability of an Exploratory Business Expenditure in the Arts

  The one thing I’d say about my publications, oddly enough, is they’re not directly related to my teaching. I edited a book on Pasolini for example, though I’ve never taught Pasolini. The rank I hold is senior lecturer, an evolved position. I began as a tutor, then a senior tutor, then a senior lecturer. In a way, these positions were being invented while I was doing basically the same job. These titles all represent “the teaching stream,” which is differentiated from the “professorial stream” or “tenured stream.” I’ve not really been formally evaluated for my research and publications. That’s just as well with me because I put almost all my academic energy into teaching, though I’ve written a fair bit.

  I have done a wide range of teaching in film, and for about fifteen years I taught semiotics at Victoria College. Cinema Studies in the 1970s could be charitably described as an emergent field. It didn’t develop the bells and whistles of a fully armed academic institution until the end of the seventies. It was understandable people would have a home discipline where they took their training and then focused on this novel area or added it on to their specialization. And that’s pretty much how we got Cinema Studies going. The prominence of tutors in emergent fields of study, alongside professors who were experimenting outside their home discipline, was a result of this way of testing those fields, and college programs were a vital venue for all that.

  Our program and its faculty are somewhat divided. Some of the people are inclined to formal and textual analysis and others are interested in the cultural resonances of films. Most of us examine both, but it is a matter of emphasis. In the most broad, generic way, people are interested in thematics, and people are interested in stylistics. I’ve always been a formalist. And that’s, I think, really suitable for the place where I did most of my teaching—in the first- and second-year courses, teaching the rudiments of film analysis. I want to point out that this is the formal approach in literature by and large. I would assume that students in literature would be well grounded in the formal analysis of poetry, for example.

  Cinema Studies, to a large degree, was initially generated out of New Criticism, and its parallels in the study of visual art. My principal influence as a graduate student was P. Adams Sitney, as well as figures like Annette Michelson and William Rothman, a student of philosopher Stanley Cavell. The key figures in the history of film theory—Münsterberg, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Bazin, Metz, Mitry—theorize cinema on the basis of an idea, its character, and they get at that character largely through formal analysis. So for both reasons of the culture out of which North American film studies came—initially a literary studies culture—and because of the way in which cinema has been theorized from the 1920s until the 1970s, it has been rooted in formal method.

  Therefore, Cinema Studies has a multifaceted inheritance from formal analysis and that’s woven into how it exists as serious intellectual discourse. It’s how it announced to the world that it was worthy as an academic discipline in terms of its core methodology. My idea of purgatory would be to sit around with students who had just graduated from high school to get their interpretations of the movies. I can’t think of a bigger waste of time for me or for the students. Instead we work through formal questions. Why? Because their idea of interpretation has been an unholy alliance between what they should think about things in the world, and the treatment of works of art and social texts—social texts that have been pre-digested for their classroom consumption by social workers who call themselves teachers. That’s the drift in high school education, insulting as that might sound.

  There are all kinds of reasons for that. And I really don’t care about them. I only resist them. So there were two reasons, right? Academic respectability: if we’re going to do the academic study of cinema, let’s do it right. And secondly, it was the only way to take students out of lazy interpretive habits of mind—and take ourselves out of the corresponding lazy understanding that students are already wise. Sorry, I don’t think so. I don’t think of myself as wise; why would I think of them as wise? What I did think, though, is that if we worked hard at developing a methodology, people would have a richer basis on which to engage in interpretation, which is inevitable and desirable.

  The end goal is, in fact, the interpretation of films. Formal analysis is a means to an end. But the end should be postponed for a time. The idea that works of any subtlety or interest are actually subtle and interesting because they say the right things about the world and people in it seems to me immensely naïve and an unproductive way of thinking about it. When I began teaching we had an Athena Analyzer, which is a sixteen-millimetre film projector that would stop frame, go back and go forward to get close-shot analysis, and it became the basis of my teaching. It was also the basis of my graduate experience at New York University. Going through Eisenstein with Annette Michelson shot-by-shot was pretty illuminating. Going through Psycho or Mouchette with Rothman; Antonioni with Ted Perry. The films got illuminated and were allowed to stand as works of art. It was the same way you’d go through a Giorgione with Panofsky if you were an art student who had such a privilege. It was really the method of Wölfflin. This method spread out across the study of visual arts and came home to roost in the study of another visual art: film.

  For me, the films that are worth going back to repeatedly include key figures in the avant-garde cinema. All of that work has a formal dimension, but scholars also study film genres largely through the lens of some version of French structuralism. The genre course also involves issues of narration. And narration is largely understood by formal means, as critics do in literature, right? The models come from French formal critics like Riffaterre and Greimas, from writers like Mieke Bal, who does literary and visual arts analysis. These models have been adapted by people like Edward Branigan and David Bordwell for film study, and these critics announce such openly. So, the formal method has a lot of applications and they actually change how it feels in particular ways—that’s what we work on. The idea is to be in the dark with students and work the films in as much detail as we can, either through illustrative passages in films or working through longer stretches. That’s the basic teaching method. Sometimes it’s super-discursive and sometimes bit-by-bit.

  My own teaching otherwise tends to be pretty much lecture-based. I incorporate discussion components, but I’m basically one of those lecture instructors that’s never actually relied on the Socratic method as a primary method. I’m too impatient—it’s a personality flaw. I admire and envy teachers who are dedicated to the Socratic method. I’m too much in a hurry and I’m really a coverage guy. Like, I’m really anxious for students to get the most variety of films possible. I also trust that the students, when exposed, will be touched by things, inspired by them to do things on their own, and I think that’s worked out pretty well. Students who are any good—having any critical imagination and taking the program seriously—eventually go with their own insights and their own ways of putting ideas together. You can tell in their writing. And then every academic program has lots of people who are basically bumps on a log. And the log is floating them toward their degree.

  Now, there is always the question of whether an artist knows what he or she is doing, or whether their work was shaped by their biographies (which is a very popular idea in mainstream literary criticism). In film studies, critics are wary of this approach. In the case of filmmakers like Howard Hawks—those who work within a highly organized system like Holly
wood or Hong Kong—I don’t tend to go to a biographical explanation. It’s interesting to know who Howard Hawks is, how he behaved in Hollywood as a personality, but not helpful in grasping his films. Most narrative filmmakers in the classical tradition hide who they are as artists behind their work and at the same time, within the weave of their work, they reveal what it is about their sensibilities that makes them artists. This is easily understood when you realize Hollywood was always deeply suspicious of filmmakers who regarded themselves as more than salaried technicians and how Hollywood took it out on directors like Orson Welles who paraded themselves as artists. It was better to take caution and hide.

  On the other hand, I tend to take seriously the statements offered by experimental filmmakers. When you’re dealing with Hawks, he’d say, “It was fun to do it that way”—that’s pretty much all he has to say. Hitchcock will fulminate on the art of film, but his ideas of “pure cinema” are, to me, another way of hiding himself—even in the book he did with Truffaut. What’s interesting about Hitchcock, he does not tell you. When you read Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, you kind of get the sense of the project of an artist, at least the intellectual fictions that he found important to his work.

  The same goes for the writings of Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac, Hollis Frampton—these people have produced a significant discourse about their art, and art in general, that we can take seriously. If their thinking constitutes their biography, then yeah, I take their biographies pretty seriously. I have mixed responses when dealing with Antonioni, Kieślowski, Tarkovsky or Tarr—any European art-film figure. In ways, their project is as mysterious to them as it is to us. I don’t think Ingmar Bergman knows why he’s such an interesting artist and can only articulate himself through his work. Pasolini, well, he says a whole lot of interesting things because he’s a really brilliant essayist who gives us insight into his work—and there’s a lot of people in between those two.