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Abstract
Recent decades have seen the rise of film installation as a consequence of cinema’s displacement in the digital age. This expansion of film exhibition to the gallery has given rise to what Raymond Bellour terms an other cinema, or a cinematic praxis that opens new possibilities for the theorization of the moving image, its history, and its relation to other disciplines. In a cinematic landscape marked by intermediality and transnationality, expanded cinema offers a path forward for filmmakers and moving-image artists in and from Latin America. In this article, I study the relation between cinema and madness in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the 2004 film installation La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital) by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. I argue that through his citation of Dreyer’s signature close-ups, his direct intervention in the original work, and his staging of projection, Téllez theorizes the relation between spectatorship and an embodied unreason by enacting a mimetic encounter between the audience and the mentally ill. Téllez embraces the legacy of avant-garde cinema, which sought to highlight film’s ability to suspend a cognitively oriented perception. By experimenting with the material basis of exhibition, Rozelle Hospital imagines a new audiovisual politics that stages an ethical encounter with the mentally ill through an embodied spectatorship.
Notes
1 For example, Oedipus Marshall (2006) was commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum, Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008) by the Haus de Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and Nosferatu (the Undead) (2018) by the city of Rochester. The decision to select a particular hospital largely depends on its geographic proximity to the commissioning institution. In each work, Téllez follows the same method. After receiving a commission, he finds a nearby psychiatric facility that is open to collaboration. Téllez then selects a film or series of films relating to the main themes of the work. He organizes an extended workshop with the patients, screens the relevant film(s), and works with his collaborators on a script. Finally, Téllez films his collaborators’ performance and consults them in the editing process (Darblay; Faguet and Lehyt 28). Although Téllez includes references to the surrounding area or city at times, these are not site-specific works. The artist selects Rozelle Hospital not for its institutional history but because of its proximity to the Sydney Biennial and its willingness to collaborate. This weakened emphasis on institutional specificity results from Téllez’s need to navigate international funding schemes. As such, this gesture must be understood within the broader processes of cultural deterritorialization that define contemporary art.
2 That patriarchal ideologies determine cinematic form has been a central tenet of feminist film theory since the 1970s. More recently, Genevieve Yue has broadened the scope of these concerns to argue that the materiality of the moving image, as well as its form, depends on the suppression and violation of female bodies.
3 The term “expanded cinema” was coined by experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek in 1966, and later lent itself to the title of Gene Youngblood’s homonymous book, published in 1970 (Youngblood xiv).
4 Framed in relation to Téllez’s political and ethical intervention, the artist’s cinephilia does pose some limits given its history as a white, bourgeois, and male discourse. Nonetheless, Téllez does not turn to cinephilia as a political strategy in its own right. Cinephilia offers a point of departure in organizing the exhibition and tracing a genealogy of unreason that runs throughout film history, and by offering a model of embodied spectatorship. Rozelle Hospital’s political and ethical stakes emerge from the embodied spectatorship it stages, which destabilizes a set of boundaries—self/other, spectator/spectacle, reason/unreason—that contribute to the social construction of madness.
5 Like Téllez, filmmakers operating in the circuit of global art cinema often draw on intertextual practices to inscribe their work in a transnational corpus. For example, Carlos Reygadas explicitly references André Tarkovsky in Japón (2002) and Dreyer in Stellet Licht (2007), while Lucrecia Martel cites images from Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni in La mujer sin cabeza (2008).
6 In the paradigm described by Youngblood, expanded cinema is not limited to film. Electronic technologies such as television, video, and computer-based imagery were incorporated into installations to promote a synesthetic and embodied reception. The development of virtual reality technologies in recent years opens further possibilities for this intermedial practice.
7 Latin American expanded cinema likewise draws on a long tradition of experimental film that has only truly begun to be explored in recent years. A regional genealogy of expanded cinema would surely cite the engagement of film by the Latin American neo-avant-garde, such as the multidisciplinary and multi-artist installation Imagen de Caracas (1968). Hélio Oiticica’s quasi-cinemas, elaborated as a series of installations in New York throughout the 1970s, are another crucial precedent. The encounter between cinema and the gallery is made explicit in Museo de Arte Redondo (1978–1982) by the Mexican art collective No Grupo. While not entirely a work of expanded cinema – it is as yet unclear under what circumstances it was exhibited – this Super 8 film offers an early example of cinema’s gradual retreat into the gallery by bringing a camera into this space and parodying the performative elements of museum spectatorship. While reflecting on the discursive construction of the museum-goer—and thus on the disciplined gaze—this film intervenes in the architecture of the museum, as its title refers to the circular design of Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno.
8 In addition to the collaborative film projects already mentioned, Téllez’s work with patients also includes the 2005 video-performance One Flew Over the Void (Bala perdida), created in collaboration with the Centro de Salud Mental del Estado de Baja California in Mexicali and The Conquest of Mexico (2012), in which Téllez adapted Artaud’s scenario for a theater of cruelty alongside patients at the Fray Bernadino Psychiatric Hospital in Mexico City.
9 Téllez’s intermediality bears similarity to other collaborations between psychiatric patients and Latin American artists. For example, Florencia Garramuño highlights Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázurz’s El infarto del alma in her overview of the post-medium condition in contemporary Latin American culture. Completed in dialogue with patients at the Hospital Psiquiátrico Putaendo in Chile, this book dislocates both literature and photography. Rozelle Hospital similarly highlights the porosity of borders between media in our age of convergence. Like the multidisciplinary artists examined by Garramuño, Téllez’s installation questions specificity, belonging, and politics (14).
10 Susan Sontag first signals this misidentification in her 1996 article “The Decay of Cinema.” Crucially, Sontag concludes that for cinema to revive its past glory, new forms of devotion to the moving image – “a new kind of cine-love” must emerge. This is one objective of expanded cinema.
11 This anticipates Foucault’s argument regarding the continuity between the Church and psychiatry as disciplinary institutions (68).
12 Here I follow film theorist Jacques Aumont. In his genealogy of the close-up, Aumont argues that after the post-war crisis of humanism there can be no ethical identification by means of this cinematic device. The close-up decomposes the face. In Aumont’s words, “If there is a thesis, it is that the face ends up disfigured by the [cinematic] apparatus” (16). I add that if cinema erases the face by industrializing this element of the body through the close-up, then the fragmented body it produces leaves us with the image of a severed head.
13 Téllez’s gesture might be contextualized in a broader trend in contemporary art that reacts to the neoliberal denigration of the collective—and the correlated transformation of the art world, driven by the artist’s individual brand—by reaffirming collaboration as artistic practice. Participatory art, as Claire Bishop argues, becomes situation driven: “artists devising social situations as a dematerialized, anti-market, politically engaged project to carry on the avant-garde call to make art a more vital part of life” (13).
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Thomas Matusiak
Thomas Matusiak received his PhD from Princeton University and is currently Assistant Professor in the Institute of Humanities at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw. His interdisciplinary scholarship addresses the intersections of cinema, visual culture, and literature in modern and contemporary Latin America. He is completing a monograph entitled The Visual Guillotine: The Cinematic Cut and the Form of Violence in Latin America. His most recent work has appeared in Cuadernos de Literatura, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.