LANDSCAPE MEMORIES

Abstract

Chantal Akerman’s documentary Sud [South, 1999] investigates the brutal racist murder of James Byrd Jr that took place in Jasper, Texas in 1998. Sud is a socio-political documentary, but it is also, as the director explains, an experimental film about the relation between physical and mental landscapes, between social and affective ecologies. This article places Akerman’s film in the context of contemporary debates about non-anthropocentric ontologies. Whereas some critics have been keen to assert a strong distinction between socio-political analysis on the one hand and affective and ecological analysis on the other, Sud demonstrates not only how these approaches can combine but also how the ecological and the affective can extend a political critique of inequality. To explain how this is achieved, the article draws on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, and introduces the notion of the “spectator-environment.”

Keywords:

• James Byrd Jr
• Chantal Akerman
• non-anthropocentric ontologies
• Gilbert Simondon
• spectator-environment
• affect

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Even if Akerman did not set out to make a tetralogy, the documentaries D’Est [From the East, 1993], Sud (1999), De l’autre côté [From the Other Side, 2002] and Là-bas [Down There, 2006] belong together as politically charged explorations of specific geographical places (Russia and Eastern Europe, the American South, the border between the United States and Mexico, and Tel Aviv). The first and last of these titles also inspired installation works.

2 In watching these opening scenes, we may wonder whether the African-American citizens know that they are being filmed. Some spectators may worry that the camera objectifies the African-Americans, and more generally, that it is being intrusive. Akerman is aware of this danger, and her film quickly dramatizes the problem: in the first scene where the camera moves, an African-American man drives up to the side of Akerman’s car and looks straight into the lens.

3 In the following discussion, I am referring to the conference panel “Contextualising True Crime Narratives” that Staci Stutsman chaired at the 2017 SCMS conference in Chicago. In addition to Stutsman, Elizabeth Gailey, Tanya Horeck, and Melinda Lewis contributed to the panel.

4 Akerman explains that during a visiting fellowship at Harvard University, she would, on her way back and forth to classes, stop by the campus cinema and watch ten minutes of Gummo because it happened to be playing. She was moved and disturbed by Korine’s film. She understood it to be a film about nothing, set in a desolate town, and thought that she would respond by making a film about “something.” This something turned out to be more disturbing than nothing.

5 The distinction between non-human and non-anthropocentric is important. The first term is perhaps the commonest, having been promoted to the title of Grusin’s volume. It can be debated whether this term is helpful, but when it comes to the study of Simondon (who had no ambition to escape the human) it can only confuse.

6 Brian Massumi sums up:

affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. (Power 106)

7 In addition to revealing the multilayered nature of the images, the durational aesthetic also brings out the presence of death: “when most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment for them is to say, ‘We didn’t notice time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death” (qtd in Rosen 124).

8 Much more could be – and has been – said about this important question, not least about how her mother, who survived Auschwitz, did not talk about her experiences. This created what Akerman calls a “loud silence” and “childhood full of holes” (qtd in Schmid 2).

9 A more schematic approach to the idea of overlaid environments can be found in a recent video installation by Penny Woolcock: When the same road is a different road (2018). A point-of-view shot takes us through a neighbourhood in North London. The audio-track cuts between two accounts of what we see: the director narrates how she came to the neighbourhood, she speaks about where you can buy Prosecco on tap, and how the environment has changed over the years; a local gang member explains where drugs are sold, where friends were injured, what streets to stay away from.

10 Barnett sets out to demonstrate that “the combination of a rhetoric of manipulation with a strong ontological claim about the conceptual priority of affective registers over deliberative ones [generates] a normative blind spot in these political ontologies of affect” (187).

11 It is an exaggeration to claim that the final scene “can only be seen as a refusal of closure.” For Koehler, the final scene offers no less than an aesthetic redemption of reality – a reanimation in art: “Her camera maps a motion that signifies itself, a literal dance of death without bodies, a pure interaction of lens, light, asphalt, motion, and air, a reanimation of the dead” (20).

12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty was present at Simondon’s doctoral viva in 1958, and when Simondon published his dissertation in 1964 it was dedicated to Merleau-Ponty. It is remarkable how close the two thinkers are in the late 1950s, and I would argue that Merleau-Ponty’s second lecture series on nature in particular (1957–58) presents distinct overlaps with Simondon’s dissertation. Simondon is the only doctoral student that Merleau-Ponty ever mentioned in his writings (see Barbaras et al.).

13 Precisely because artists and aesthetic theory have such a rich tradition for thinking what we might call “degrees of agency,” affect-theoreticians have been keen to explore how art may inspire politics. Amin and Thrift, for instance, write about the Arts of the Political when seeking to outline their conception of a contemporary left-wing politics, and Massumi about the “art of the event” (see Power).