Introduction: Film Festival Report

In the Rotterdam Film Festival of early 2024, a theme developed among a network of three films which all looked back, in different ways, to the Pan-African movements of liberation in the early 1960s. Billy Woodberry’s Mário was probably the best-publicised of the trio, due to the director’s presence at the event (he is now 74) and his illustrious past as a participant in the “Los Angeles Rebellion” collective of black filmmakers in the 1970s and ‘80s. 

But no less striking was Nome by Sana Na N’Hada, which I will discuss further below. Even an entirely mainstream film from Sweden, Hammarskjöld, the biopic of a progressive statesman within the United Nations, gave some insight into the turbulent struggle inside African countries and regions at that historic time.

In the span of festival reviews I randomly consulted post-Rotterdam, this network of films was never identified, and the individual titles (apart from, occasionally, Mário) never mentioned. We know how festival reportage often works: a journalist appointed by Cahiers du cinéma or Film Comment flies in for a few days, catches a few designated ‘highlights’, maybe walks into a random Virtual Reality art installation, has a couple of drunken chats with old friends from around the world, and then flies out. Subsequently, perhaps a 750 or 1,000-word piece appears online or in print. Very little of the total festival program thus gets documented or reflected upon for posterity, due to this unfortunate system of coverage.

I want to particularly retrieve and underline here the significance and power of Nome, which I assert to be among the best films from anywhere in recent years. In it, Na N’Hada, a veteran director from Guinea-Bissau, revisits the years of his youth and the turbulent struggle of Africans against the Portuguese colonial army from 1969 to the mid ‘70s. The approach is minimal and stylised, yet bursting with lyrical beauty and frankly spiritual mystery. A man named Nome leaves home to join the guerillas and becomes a heroic leader – but the personal relationships he has abandoned return to haunt him during the complicated and confused post-revolutionary period.

Both Nome and Mário probe, from their distinct perspectives, the hopeful, Utopian dimension of African revolutionary movements. Both confront, with the wisdom of hindsight, the seeds of corruption and betrayal that always existed there. But neither film embraces despair. A unique feature of Nome is the archival footage from the time originally shot by Na N’Hada and his comrades. These images do much more than guarantee documentary authenticity; in their very fragility, they allow the film to elevate the materiality of scratched, battered frames into a full-blown, poetic language. 

Flashback: An Encounter with Gilberto Perez

Watching Nome moved me to, once again, consider the legacy of the great, Cuban-born critic-scholar Gilberto Perez (1943-2015). I recall, particularly, a discussion with conference participants following my presentation on Sidney Furie’s horror film The Entity (1982) and Peter Tscherkassky’s experimental ‘remake’ of it, Outer Space (1999), at Reading University (United Kingdom) in 2008. [1] Gilberto, another keynote speaker at the event, took the lead in this far-ranging discussion. The conference was, in fact, the first time I had met him in person, after several years of distant, email correspondence.

Gilberto was especially intrigued by the material marks of the filmmaker’s presence and intervention in Tscherkassky’s work: silhouettes of small shapes of sharp objects dotting individual frames, dancing in and through clusters of shredded imagery. This was not a case of rote ‘reflexivity’ – the artist reminding us that we are watching a film, which is a fact all of us could easily verify for ourselves – but, for Gilberto (and for me) a more intense and eloquent form of self-inscription, brimming with the forces and drives of the unconscious.

It struck me at the time that very few of the most revered film analysts of a certain empirical tradition – such as Robin Wood, Victor Perkins or the recently deceased George Wilson – would likely have any interest in a frankly avant-garde, short work such as Outer Space. It is even less likely that the oft-quoted stars of the contemporary ‘film-philosophy’ movement – like Stanley Cavell (deceased) or Robert Pippin (living) – would ever deign to concern themselves with a film like this, let alone its tiniest, most intricate and fleeting details. Narrative fiction – usually at feature-length – firmly remains the Gold Standard of serious film criticism. This amounts to a form of apartheid. (Referring again to the Rotterdam program, the short films were frequently more forceful in their considered condensation than the features – but, once again, no reviewer that I consulted bothered to see or mention any of them.)What does this anecdotal memory of mine tell us about Gilberto Perez? That he focused his generous attention, with an open mind, on whatever was presented to him; and that he cared about the materiality of cinema: about what goes into each frame (as well as into the soundtrack). We are too used, in the 21st century, to hearing the term formalist wielded as a grand-slam insult: ‘You are looking inward, solipsistically, to the technical or stylistic details of a film, instead of urgently looking outward to the wider social, cultural and historical context! You are a formalist, trapped within formalism!’ This division of realms into ‘text versus context’ was pointless to Gilberto (and to me). 

To discuss the materiality of films, how they are made and the effects that each creative decision has on the spectator, is always, immediately, a reflection upon social reality. The materiality of cinema (of any art form) is part of the entire, complex, material fabric of the world, after all! Conversely, to bypass style or form and simply jump to a discussion of the Big Themes reflected on screen – power, gender, decoloniality, capitalism and so on – results in an inhibited, broken, insubstantial mode of critique. 

The ‘hot takes’ of thousands of people on social media (professional film critics included) about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) will be (already have been!) swiftly forgotten; what Gilberto painstakingly and lyrically wrote about Jean Renoir or John Ford, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub or Bruce Conner, will be remembered and worked-through for decades to come – if the world manages to survive that long.

I suspect that, were he still with us today, Gilberto would wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of Eugenie Brinkema’s polemic in her recent books on cinema, The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022). She argues that, rather than anyone being ‘too formalist’, the fact is that, as film analysts, we are not yet formalist enough! We have not yet pushed our critical accounts far enough to the frame-by-frame level, savouring every material detail of image and sound. [2]

Filmmakers, after all, do exactly this in their practice: they weight up the impact, the function, the shape of every edit, every mix of sounds, every rhythmic cluster that accelerates or decelerates. A recent biography of Elaine May tells us that, during prolonged months (even years) of editing her films, her memory of the shooting was so precise that she could assemble a sentence of dialogue not as it was recorded live in one burst, but reconstituted from individual words taken from numerous, separate takes! But would anyone dare say to the maker of Mikey and Nicky (1976) that she is ‘too formalist’?

In this light, Gilberto had more in common with the mature, 21st century work of Laura Mulvey in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019), or Raymond Bellour in Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (2009) and Pensées du cinéma (2016). Or – to take a sideways swerve into today’s DIY cinema forms – the short ‘audiovisual essays’ of film criticism made digitally by Cristina Álvarez López, Catherine Grant, Johanna Vaude and many others.

Argument: Cinema’s Paradox

Let us return to the nexus, in Perez’s critical work, between formal effect and the complex process of spectatorship. Form matters in cinema because it shapes a mode of address for its audience – and this is what Gilberto called a rhetoric.

If we look at the main titles and subtitles of his two books, we can trace an interplay of terms. The Material Ghost (1998) and The Eloquent Screen (published posthumously in 2019); ‘films and their medium’ and ‘a rhetoric of film’. He was always endeavouring to interrelate and fuse what might at first appear to be paradoxical terms: the ghostly projection that is cinema is not only fleeting in its immediate effect, but also material; the screen is not something flat, a mere frame, window or repository, but it becomes eloquent through its means of style. Cinema is a medium – a channel of communication, like television or radio – but it is also a rhetoric, a full and expansive mode of discourse (once we understand that discourse is not only verbal and literary, but also auditory and pictorial, performance-based and rhythmic). And its discourse is not individual in its effect or address (as literature generally is), but trans-personal, collectively unifying (at least potentially so).

Perez’s work can, in 2024, be put into fruitful dialogue with Anna Kornbluh’s important book of cultural diagnostics, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023). She argues that the all-pervasive tendency to immediacy (in art, writing, theory, TV streaming, and lifestyle) is “fundamentally negating mediation”, an “instant replay of emanative intensity in continuous flow”. The result is a massive logjam: we celebrate the ineffable present moment in an increasingly microscopic, individualised way, because we can no longer even imagine a possible, collective future. Everything that smacks of an old-fashioned ‘critical distance’ is castigated and hurled aside by the hip auto-theorists, object-ontologists and ‘flat materialists’ of the current intellectual scene.

Perez would have agreed with Kornbluh that “mediations are connective collectivisers, and ideas are social things” – that is precisely the foundation of the rhetoric of film in The Eloquent Screen. ”Representation”, Kornbluh writes, is a “social activity”; and mediation is a process of offering context, commentary, perspective on a described, evoked and dramatised situation.

The positive models for Kornbluh range from the complex point-of-view structures of 19th century literature to the epic-mosaic canvases of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad (filmed by Barry Jenkins in 2021) and the TV series Succession (2018-2023). Fredric Jameson (the avowed model for Kornbluh) and his notion of ‘cognitive mapping’ is never far from the argument of Immediacy – we need, as spectators, to be able to observe and then connect pieces and levels of a complex reality, to make some deep sense across the scattered networks of contemporary experience.

Perez has a richer and more varied grasp of aesthetics than Kornbluh’s sometimes over-generalised picture allows. He realises (as any good critic should) that immediacy – or immersion, to cite the currently popular term – is a filmmaking option with a long, diverse history, used to significant effect by, for example, John Cassavetes or Terrence Malick and, in even more contemplative setting, Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang (who has explored 3D virtual reality installations). The style reaches its nadir (as Kornbluh discusses) in the Safdies’ Uncut Gems (2019) or the cinema of Gaspar Noé, but a dead end is neither an origin nor a destiny. Filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann and Bi Gan regularly alternate, within a given work, immersive sequences and those that step back to gauge a critical distance.

Ultimately, Perez is on the side of mediation as a social and artistic good. In The Material Ghost he distinguishes between drama and narrative. Drama involves the direct enactment of unfolding action; narrative, by contrast, is an ordering, an account, a report of action. The beauty and complexity of cinema arises from the way it overlays both modes. Perez deepens this conceptual framework with a consideration of Bertolt Brecht’s principles of theatre. For Perez, Brecht’s plays “clearly engaged the space of life from a space clearly marked out as a theatre stage, the site of illusion rather than reality, the autonomous space of art”. He adds: “Maybe the autonomy of art is an illusion, but an illusion that allows space for standing back from what is and entertaining the alternative, constructing not just fantasies but the possible realities to which fantasies may lead.” 

Conclusion: Back on the Chain Gang

Where is contemporary cinema – and how can Gilberto Perez’s work help illuminate it for us today? These are the questions that the editors of Material Ghost posed to me. I believe we are at a unique juncture in the mid 2020s. There is no use in decrying every effect of screen-immediacy at a time when we are desperately trying to understand and articulate what (for example) computers, social media and Artificial Intelligence are doing to reshape our emotional lives, our working hours, and our innermost, unconscious psyches. 

We have to get right inside that entire complex, and cinema can help both to guide us in and ease us out of it. For there are sparkles of Utopia – dreams, visions, slivers of hope, new possibilities of thought and action – in even the spookiest, most disembodied manifestations of ‘digital subjectivity’. The old Marxist concept of alienation can only take us so far – because some effects of alienation can actually be productive, turning reality around and allowing us to see it from another angle. Jane Schoenbrun’s films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024) are all about that possibility, as they explore a generalised trans state: identity transition, and not only in the sex/gender sense.

Strange, new collectivities can be formed between the disembodied cine-spectators who move (as Thierry Jousse once described this phenomenon) past each other like ‘fish in an aquarium’, in and out of flickering screen interfaces. This is a political state of fragmented being explored, for example, in the queer-punk splinter-cultures of Colombia as evoked by Theo Montoya’s Anhell69 (2022), or in the marginal Brazilian productions of Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta. States of being that are, all at once, both ghostly and material.

Ultimately, the question is: how can we get all the way from the brute materiality of cinema to its expressive eloquence? How can films help us to truly see and hear something, to grasp something about our contemporary condition? In The Eloquent Screen, Perez proposed many tools for this work. Much of the book is devoted to an illuminating consideration of formal tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche in cinema. But what really matters for Perez, finally, are those special moments in films that give a twist to these tropes, adding a surplus level of meaning or feeling to typical, conventional procedures. His condensed, mini-essays on an astounding range of works – from City Lights (1931) and By the Bluest of Seas (1936) to All My Life (1966) and Ceddo (1977) – are frequently breathtaking; even canonical classics like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Citizen Kane (1941) come up fresh and revivified. Perez gave renewed meaning and vitality to the notion of allegorical interpretation of films: it is not an obscure, arcane or elitist procedure, but goes to the very heart of how we all process the trans-personal, generalised, collective, rhetorical address of cinema.

I wish to conclude ‘back on the chain gang’ (as the splendid 1982 song by The Pretenders says) by plunging again into the global Film Festival circuit and the random, hidden, exciting discoveries that a critic can (and should) make there. Leïla Kilani’s Indivision (aka Birdland, 2023) conjures a world that is both enchanted and filled with danger. Mansouria near Tangier is an area that combines an abundant forest, the wealthy homestead of the Bechtani family, and villagers who have squatted there for 40 years. An announced wedding triggers a splitting of paths: while the matriarch of the Bechtani clan wants to sell and clear out the land, her son Anis and granddaughter Lina live within nature in a fully mystical way, paying heed to coincidences and signs that announce a coming social revolution. 

Yet, far from relegating its dreamtime visions to a nostalgic, prelapsarian past, Indivision fuses its depiction of nature with the new means of communication and creation engendered by the Internet. The mute Lina, who writes keywords and questions all over her body, emerges as a paradoxical teenage warrior for our troubled times: she believes herself to be a superheroine, gifted or cursed, who holds the fate of the whole world in her hands. Ultimately, the film radically combines an intrigue-filled family melodrama with transcendent lyricism, and the far-sighted political wisdom born of Morocco’s Arab Spring movement.

Indivision is a film that, I firmly believe, Gilberto Perez would have championed.

July 2024

[1]  See the chapter “Entities and Energies” in my book Mysteries of Cinema (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020) for the text of this talk.

[2] An informative lecture from 2022 by Brinkema, which discusses this issue, can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46dMe5VJT04.