FILM
- AS A -
SUBVERSIVE ART

THE DEVALUATION OF LANGUAGE

Film purists have always been suspicious of the spoken word, considering
this a threat to the very essence of a visual art.  If one recalls the endless
number of Hollywood films that can comfortably be viewed with closed
eyes, their suspicions were certainly not ill-founded.  More significantly,
their concerns also relate to trends in contemporary thought and science.

The disenchantment with rationalism, the rise of a visual culture,
the vulgarizations of the mass media, the deceptions practiced by
those in power -- these have contributed to a growing disenchantment
with language as a means of perception or cognition, of intellectual
or interpersonal discourse.  There are too many words everywhere;
they have become empty, deceptive.  Far from clarifying matters,
language is seen as a means of concealment in human affairs,
business and politics.  In this regard, as in others, we seem to be
approaching Orwell's 1984 well ahead of time.  In its use of deceptive
language, "democratic" America ("waging peace" in Vietnam,
subjecting it to "protective reaction strikes") is no different from
"totalitarian" Russia which invaded Czechoslavakia to "liberate" it.

Simultaneously, non-verbal areas of practice and knowledge
in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and symbolic logic constantly
expand, with computer science entirely based on non-verbal symbols.

 Mathematics probably gives an image of the perceptual
world truer to fact than can be derived from any structure
or verbal assertion.  All evidence suggests that the shapes
of matter are mathematical.  The space-time continuum
of relativity, the atomic structure of all matter, the wave-
particle state of energy are no longer accessible through
the word.  It is no paradox to assert that in cardinal
respects reality now begins outside verbal language.  (1)

Goffman, Birdwhistell and Ruesch have revealed universes
of non-verbal communication more "truthful" than our
ritualized verbal exchanges corrupted by defense-mechanisms.

In art, Steiner relates the retreat from realism to the retreat from
language:  language, at the center of intellectual and emotive life, is
always  equated with reality.  From Rimbaud and Mallarme to Joyce
and Proust,  from Breton and Beckett to Robbe-Grillet and Burroughs,
the artist has attempted to break away from the tyranny of syntax
and conventional language in order to allow for the unconscious, to
express the simultaneity and unity of time and space, and to return,
as Artaud understood so well, to magic and incantation: "The theatre
should aim at expressing what language is incapable of putting into
words.  My principle is that words do not mean everything and that
by their nature and definining character, fixed once and for all,
they arrest and paralyze thought instead of permitting it and
fostering its development.  I am trying to restore to the language
of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding character."  (2)

Martin Esslin describes Ionesco's use of language as subversive;
in an attempt to revitalize fossilized forms, he employs veritable
shock tactics; "Reality itself, the conciousness of the spectator,
his habitual apparatus of thought -- language -- must be
overthrown, dislocated, turned inside out, so that he suddenly
comes face to face with a new perception of reality."  (3)

And the "meaning" of abstract, abstract-expressionist or
conceptual paintings, sculpture and music can no longer
be expressed in words:  "Most valuable art in our time has
been experienced by audiences as a move into silence
(or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility)."  (4)

Finally, says Steiner, confronted with the apocalyptic terrors
of our century, the artist falls silent.  As with Adorno who
believed poetry no longer to be possible after Auschwitz,
Steiner feels that Beckett is haunted by a similar insight
and strains towards silence:  "The writer, who is by defi-
nition master and servant of language, states that the living
truth is no longer sayable."  (5)  He continues with a chilling
parable by Kafka:  "Now the Sirens have a still more fatal
weapon than their song, namely their silence.  And though
admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is con-
ceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from
their singing; but from their silence certainly never."  (6)

And this silence is subversive.

Art itself becomes a kind of counterviolence,
seeking to loose the grip upon consciousness of the
baits of lifeless, static verbalization, presenting models
of "sensual speech" ... Silence, administered by the artist,
is part of a program of perceptual and cultural therapy,
often on the model of shock therapy rather than persuasion.  (7)

It is from the confluence of such factors that modern filmmakers
have begun either to use language in a new way or dispense with it alto-
gether.  It is appropriate that such efforts should culminate in a visual
medium, particularly capable of revealing insights that cannot be verbally
expressed.  Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Schroeter, R.W. Fassbinder,
and others now use language in film selectively, in counterpoint, semi-
abstractly (as does Ionesco), preceding (or following) action instead
of accompanying it; or, similar to music, as poetic, associative innuendo.

And silence begins to invade the stream of dialogue or narration.
For words, Susan Sontag points out, weigh more, become almost
palpable, when punctuated by long silences.  Thus dramatic, avant-
garde, or cinema-verite filmmakers retain silent passages in dialogue
scenes or interviews, a device rendered more powerful by our uncon-
scious acclimitization to continuous word-noise in television (possibly
the most language-ridden, anti-visual medium now in existence.)
Leading avant-gardists such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage resolu-
tely banish all sound from their works, contributing significantly to the
"visualization" of new poetic universes; Michael Snow, Tony Conrad,
and Scott Bartlett use only synthetic or electronic sound effects; and
some commercial commentators use entirely wordless sequences.
Antonioni does this at the end of The Eclipse, a visual montage of
city streets and street furniture, as does Bergman in Persona and
The Silence, in which the frequent absence of sound heightens
the hypnotic power of the ominous visuals.  It is the international
avant-garde -- ever the champion of visual cinema -- which has
most consistently eliminated language in the post-silent era.

REFERENCES

(1) George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967
(2)  Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 1958
(3)  Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961
(4)  Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence in Styles of Radical Will, 1969
(5)  Sontag   (6)  Steiner   (7)  Sontag