Hito Steyerl - November

Hito Steyerl, November (2004)

Amongst many other things, Hito Steyerl's film November (2004) provides – within the realm of contemporary art practice – a startling reflection on some of the themes that I have been starting to explore on this blog.

The film traces the enigmatic figure of Andrea Wolf through a series of circulating media representations. Wolf - the film tells us - was a teenage friend of Steyerl, and the star of Steyerl's first movie, a home-made teenage feminist appropriation of martial art and exploitation tropes, shot on super-8 back in the 1970s. Only the action scenes were ever made, and the film involves a group of girls seeking out and beating up men for reasons that no longer seem clear to Steyerl herself, reprising imagery from Russ Mayer's Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!, a film that Steyerl notes is "tacky," and which is ideologically dubious to say the least, but which nonetheless seems here to have provided a model of identification within which feminist (or at least proto-feminist) desires could be negotiated by the young, somewhat radical, women who took part in Steyerl's shoot.

A still from Steyerl's early movie, reproduced in November shows Andrea Wolf,  age of 18. 

Wolf, however, also went on to lead a life involved in rather more actual radical politics, becoming involved in far-left groups in the orbit of the Red Army Faction, and ending her days in Turkey as a guerrilla with the Kurdish PKK. It was there that she met a tragic death, executed by the Turkish authorities. The fantasy violence of teenage identifications with media images are transformed into the messy real life violence of war. Wolf, however, was turned once again into a media image, in the guise of a political martyr, and made to circulate once more in the realm of imaginary identifications and kitsch fantasies.

Kurdish propaganda poster celebrating Andrea Wolf (with her assumed Kurdish name of Sehit Ronahi) after her death as a revolutionary martyr. These images were used on marches by PKK-sympathetic groups. 

Within her exploration of the power of images – in their continual circulation and with their continual transformations of meaning, to feed into reality, producing myths that are then performed – Steyerl's film includes a meditation on the martial arts cinema with which she and Andrea Wolf alike were obviously so fascinated as youths – Steyerl making a home-made B-Movie homage to the genre as her first directorial experiment, and Wolf taking up karate as a part of her self-creation as a militant, as an act, if you like, of self-empowerment. In November, Steyerl also recounts the myth of Bodhidharma travelling from India to China and founding the Shaolin Temple, creating the archetype of the lone, wandering warrior, dedicated to truth and justice and fighting the strong and the tyrranical with bare hands alone. It was a myth spread globally by the martial arts movies that boomed in the seventies, even finding its way into avant-garde texts such as René Viénet's Situationist classic Can Dialectics Break Bricks? – a film I've started to discuss elsewhere on this blog, and which Steyerl quotes at a number of points in her own twenty-first century revisitation of the "kung fu" moment.

Still from Steyerl's early film, as reproduced in November.

Of course, as much contemporary scholarship has set out to show, the story of Bodhidharma and the story of a Shaolin rebellion is so much myth, constructed largely only in the twentieth century, under the radical modernising programmes of the Nationalists and Communists, which sought to co-opt the physical cultures of martial arts into a nationalist revival of the body politic. Much of the discourse around the martial arts (and out of which martial arts cinema emerges) seems to hinge on the obsessive and contrary acts of making and unmasking myth. It has recently become something of an industry to debunk the Chinese martial arts' claims to older and more subversive histories, with writers in particular such as Peter Lorge and Stanley Henning in the forefront.

But this, for me, is where Steyerl's complex negotiation of the territory trumps the demythologisers. Her film at once criticises and lays bare the treachery of images and myths, their mutability, their seductive but dangerous power, and their ability to never quite mean what you want them to mean, even in your own acts of appropriation; but it also seems to embrace the productive power of myth, and of popular culture as a site of its circulation. Myth is the very power (the puissance, as Lacoue-Labarthe put it)[1] to produce a self and a position in the world, however compromised such a position may become by the instability of representation, and the powers that already colonise the image. The grasping and active, critical renegotiation of myth, rather than its simple rejection, becomes an important emancipatory activity.

In marking this complexity and ambivalence, Steyerl manages to avoid the trap into which the martial arts mythbusters fall. Such mythbusters fail to grasp the mythological power of their own acts of demythologisation. Thus when the Jingwu academy, back in the early twentieth century, broke the image of the Shaolin Temple as the fount of martial arts (a myth at that point not actually that old), it was only to replace it with the myth of the patriotic Huo Juanjia and his death at the hands of Japanese oppressors. And similarly it seems hardly co-incidental that at the moment when there is a rage for Western Scholars such as Lorge and Henning who (to put it a little crudely and to exaggerate just a little) deracinate the cultural aspects of Chinese martial arts in order to turn them into objects of comparative study, this is actually also the moment of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), perhaps one of the most reactionary forms of martial artistry since the kung fu craze, in its gender politics as well as its spectacularisation of violence as pay-per-view spectacle, and one that also pretends to a "scientific" and trans-cultural neutrality in order to assert its suppose superiority over backwards forms of ("foreign") traditional practice. Such a scientism is in its own way an ultimate form of magical and mythologising gesture, set now under capitalist imperatives for making money.

(Some interesting analysis of the mythical nature of MMA and the like has recently been given in the "Martial Arts Studies" edition of JOMEC, to which I also contributed – see in particular Paul Bowman's reflection on "realism" in contemporary martial arts, and Daniele Bolelli's analysis of the role of "Gladiator" movies in the forming the nature of the visual spectacle of MMA. But I digress...)

Steyerl's film is called November. Within the film, the title is explained through the contrast to the revolutionary moment of October, a moment where things appear simple and true, and revolutionary action can be grasped confidently. By November, things are looking much more tangled and messy, the revolutionary enthusiasm shown as always already compromised by – and fallen into – the false images on which it depended. Steyerl doesn't retreat from problematising a radical legacy in her self-construction as a critical leftist, noting the ways in which in real history the "good guys" (even Andrea Wolf) are often not nearly as innocent or lilly-white as their mediatised images. November is a time of distrust and scepticism. It's a time when identifications need to be rebuilt, but also when they need to be guarded against.

It seems to me that martial arts cinema as a global phenomenon was always a cinema of "November" - a cinema of the aftermath – springing up in the wake of the global wave of decolonisation and the protests of "1968." It was always a cinema where the real had passed into its simulations and its uncanny (and untrustworthy) imagistic doubles. The question might remain, however, of the "truth" that such images nonetheless might carry into the present.

November, then is a time of haunting. A time, as Derrida might suggest, quoting Hamlet "out of joint." (See his Spectres of Marx.) Steyerl seems to capture this haunted and haunting quality of media images very well, neither there nor not-there. To live in the realm of media images is to live a haunted existence.

Perhaps this is the point, more generally, with the martial arts film, too. Even if the myths they recount don't simply tie us to a simple continuity with the past, in the way that official Chinese Communist Party histories sought to imagine the Boxers Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, the uprisings of the Hongmen (Tiandihui), or further back peasant revolts such as that of Li Zicheng, in their own image, there seems to me to remain the question of what it is that returns in them, what haunts them, from elsewhere, as it were.

Steyerl's film can be seen here:
http://vimeo.com/88484604

Note
[1] According to Lacoue-labarthe, myth "is a 'power' [puissance], the power that is in the gathering together of the fundamental forces and orientations of an individual or a people, that is to say the power of deep, concrete, embodied identity." See his Heidegger, Art and Politics, p.93.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Yesterday I was telling a colleague about the film La Dialectique, peut-elle casser des briques?, known in English as Can Dialectics Break Bricks? It was made in 1973 by Situationist René Viénet, and has been counted as the first full-length détourned feature film by the Situationist group. Similar to the Situationists' recaptioning of cartoons with anti-capitalist analysis, it involved the re-dubbing of a then-recent kung fu movie – Crush – with Situationist slogans and with commentary on recent world events. In the film's re-engineered narrative, the good guys become 'the Proletarians' and the bad guys become 'the Bureaucrats' (c.f. the 1968 slogan: 'We will not rest until the last capitalist is hung with the intestines of the last bureaucrat!')

The effect aimed at is, of course, largely somewhat comical, and undercuts any narrative involvement with a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

From YouTube: excerpts from Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

As I was saying to my colleague, I've not managed to dig up much about the background of Viénet's film, or why this martial arts movie was chosen for détournement, and I find myself with some perplexing questions about this, and about how the original film (directed by Tu Guangqi) might have been understood by Viénet and the Situationist group. Wikipedia (that great authority!) suggests that the aim was 'to adapt a "spectacular" film into a radical critique of cultural hegemony,' and the general strategy of détournement would indeed seem to suggest that it was precisely the most crude and commercialised products of Spectacular society which were targeted by the SI for appropriation, to be refitted as weapons of revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, in the 70s, at the height of the kung fu craze, these films often tended to be regarded by critics as cheap, worthless, contentless, exploitative and mind-numbing products of a culture industry seeking to distract its popular audience and brutalise its sensibility.

However, Crush might also have been a strange choice on such grounds. Like many Hong Kong productions of the early seventies (in particular in the wake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury) the scenario of the original film is clearly one in which colonial exploitation and resistance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japanese occupation that lasted much of the first half of the twentieth century, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into 'the Proletarians') are the members of a martial arts school who start to resist the colonial violence of the militaristic Japanese forces. However potentially conservative the nationalistic dimension of its narrative, this is also a work about struggle and liberation from tyrranny in some of its most typically modern forms.

This is to say, the film was already highly suited to the new story which Viénet constructed. Crush is not just a tale of conflict and violence, but also a tale of (revolutionary?) struggle against oppression, and of the violence of an imposed bureaucratic regime. Viénet's 'Proletarians' are, in matter of fact, already very much proletarian in Tu Guangqi's original movie. The native martial arts they train in are antithetical to the violence and deculturation imposed by their oppressors, and in this much, and within the colonial context of the film's setting, whether or not dialectics really breaks bricks, brick-breaking is certainly a kind of a dialectic practice. In this regard, the détournement works so well only because the film was at least some distance towards being the critique which the Situationists wanted to make it into. The refashioning of the film thus starts to appear a little less devastatingly witty than it might appear to those for whom the historical situation alluded to in the original film is obscure. For evidence of such an audience, one can look at the comments on the film on its IMDB page, one of which, completely muddling the national origin of the film, mistakes the film as 'a hokey Japanese karate movie', hence not only missing the anti-colonial premise of the original, but even showing a complete blindness to the differences between Asian nationalities on the basis of which such might be read. Another comment wonders 'what the hell' the original was about, and a third proposes that the détourned film is 'a standard martial arts movie with all its gratuitous, relatively content-less violence'.

From today's perspective, it would seem strange if the Situationist group, with the history of anti-colonial struggle in France's own colonies (from Algeria to Vietnam) still fresh, and with the attention that these gained from the French left – and even within the Situationists' own critiques – would not have picked up on the political dimensions of the film which these IMDB reviewers miss. Viénet, in particular, was trained as a Sinologist and spent many years in China before being ejected for his opposition to Mao. However, there seems little in its redubbing which would seem to exploit or thematise such a relation to a pre-existing narrative of struggle and revolution. Could Viénet and colleagues possibly have been blind to it? What were, exactly, their attitudes to the film?

One might, for example, more generously set out to read the task of détournement here as attempting to 'liberate' a hidden subtext, to dredge it up to the light of day. This would fit the film into a certain tradition of critical theory which has attempted to look at (popular) cultural products as at once carrying the ideological purposes of the dominant class who control their production, but as also depending on a kernel of 'truth' and genuine need or desire which it must address in order not to entirely fail to interest its audience. However, this, too, would not seem to quite hit the mark: the 'anti-colonial' theme in Crush is so prominent as to hardly seem even a 'sub'-text, let alone something that anyone who has noticed it would think of as a repressed content which would need to be made conscious.

Alternatively, perhaps we might conceive of Crush – or more generally of the Parisian movie houses where 'chop-socky' flicks may have been playing matinee double bills – as a special site for Situationist pleasure, rather like the inner-city streets where Debord and his colleagues liked to drift in search of 'moments' of desire and truth within the everyday, places of special ripeness for the engineering of a 'situation' or an 'event'. Does Viénet's film thus mark the kung fu movie, then, for them, as one of the privileged locii in which one might go on a sort of a cultural dérive?

So in the end, I find myself running up against a question I cannot very simply answer (since my knowledge of Viénet and the Situationists is only rather general): what kind of a reading of Crush would have been available to the Situationist group? Would the status of such a product as 'schlock' have entirely determined their response, or might they have viewed it generously? Are we to read those more recent comments on the film which see it as deliberately refashioning a piece of the most debased cultural production for new ends as having missed a set of subtleties in its relation to the original, as having rather caricatured quite what such a détournement was supposed for the Situationists to do? Would the kind of 'postcolonial' discourse that might highlight themes of insurrection in the original film have been current? (Fanon had after all been writing since the 50s, but in many ways the kind of reading I am thinking of might be more associated with the wake of British Cultural Studies and the like from the later part of the 70s on...)

If anyone reading this blog knows more about this – or knows of anything written on the film – I'd be VERY glad to hear from you!

The full film is, by the way, available on UBU-web, at the following address:

http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_dialectics.html

(Given that Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, in its very title and in its content too, sets out a certain discussion of revolutionary force/violence, the other question one might pose would be how Crush might open into such debates, too. What might it be like if we were to turn things around and imagine Crush as a redub of or a commentary on Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, rather than vice versa? How does Crush's depiction of violent resistance unsettle the arguments which Viénet attempts to impose on it? Would the understanding of Viénet's film that would emerge from such an analysis tell us something more generally about the attitudes and ideas of the European avant-garde?)