EVERYDAYNESS IN FILM ETHICS

Abstract

Taking its cue from discussions on religious fundamentalism in the Netherlands, this paper resists the temptation for film scholars interested in ethics to present their work as investigations into front‐page moral dilemmas. Alternatively, it explores a film ethics along the lines Stanley Cavell has proposed in Cities of Words (2004). With Cavell, the paper argues for a reconsideration of everydayness as the characterizing domain of film ethics. Cavell is explained as claiming that Hollywood comedies and melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s are resources for the transgression of the confines of everydayness, notably from within everydayness itself. To update Cavell's canon, films addressing the reflexive, political constitution of cultural identity are described as present‐day transgressions of everydayness. The paper's case in point is Heddy Honigmann's documentary P®ivé (2000). Honigmann's film presents a Dutch protagonist who has been able to escape the everyday confines of his own fundamentalist community using the resources of that same community.1

Notes

1. This paper is a substantial revision of a paper presented at the Migratory Aesthetics conference organized by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and CentreCath Leeds, Amsterdam, January 2005.

2. The council's report is entitled Values, Norms and the Burden of Behavior, my translation of Waarden, normen en de last van het gedrag (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid 2003).

3. Kracauer's theory of redemption is said to be related to Walter Benjamin's appreciation of the technology of film. Ben Highmore points out that both Kracauer and Benjamin were students of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) whom Highmore considers to be a founder of the tradition that ‘has often tried to register the everyday as the marvellous and the extraordinary (or at least to combine dialectically the everyday as both extraordinary and tedious)’ (Highmore 2002, p. 17). Benjamin describes the dialectics of, on the one hand, the camera's intervention and surgeon‐like penetration into everyday life ‘with its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions’, and, on the other hand, film's ability to mobilize absent‐minded masses (Benjamin 1983, pp. 237 and 240–241). Kracauer emphasizes that films do not so much mechanically penetrate the everyday nor mobilize the masses, but rather virtually extend our everyday environment.

4. In European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (2001) Ian Aitkin points out that Kracauer's theory of cinematic realism often was dismissed as ‘naïve’, ‘conservative’ and/or ‘ideological’ particularly by Anglo‐American critics. Aitkin's book in part is intended as a remission of European film realists, besides Kracauer notably John Grierson (1898–1972) and André Bazin (1919–58). Remarkably, Kracauer's redemptive reality expresses a concern, Aitkin claims, about modern industrial society dominated by instrumental rationality. Kracaucer's expectations regarding film were expressed as an optimism not only about the film medium's capacity to first show the fragmentation and abstraction of modern life, but also about film's ‘ability to disclose the sensuous and ephemeral surface of reality, [offering] the possibility of transcending the abstraction inherent within modernity’ (Aitkin 2001, p. 170). Kracauer is like a Romantic thinker for whom the everyday transcends modernity. Cavell, not concerned with modernity in this way, is less inclined to embrace the redemptive qualities of everydayness.

5. Cavell characterizes the relationship between Hildy and Walter, and all other remarrying couples for that matter, as an Aristotelian friendship, described in the Nicomachean Ethics. Getting out of Plato's cave apparently means getting into Aristotle's treatise on virtue.

6. ‘[T]he equal friendship of character … is what Aristotle calls friendship for virtue, the highest form of friendship’ (Cavell 2004, p. 363).

7. One could argue that Cavell here adds another chapter to an exploration already started in the 1970s. William Rothman points out that already in The World Viewed (1971), one of Cavell's ‘guiding intuitions is that American [films] of the 1930s and 1940s … are about the human need for society and the equal need to escape it’ (Rothman 2003, p. 208).

8. There is a complication that I will not go into, but that is worth considering when thinking through an update of Cavell's favorite films. In The World Viewed Cavell characterizes the films he values as having ‘avoided the fate of modernism’ (p. 15). For Cavell, this means that film ‘is the live traditional art, the one that can take its tradition for granted’ (p. 16). The particular tradition that Cavell's Hollywood comedies and melodramas take for granted, we might surmise, is American, Emersonian perfectionism. Now that in the twenty‐first century according to Cavell ‘the cultural role of film has dwindled’ (2005, p. 342), we may wonder whether perhaps modernism has caught up with contemporary film. We should perhaps not take it for granted that we should look for Hollywood films, if we want to consider the relevance of steering clear of front‐page moral dilemmas.

9. In Willemen's words: ‘the analyst's own socio‐cultural formation is brought into focus as an historical construct, … in need of transformation. The engagement with other cultural practices can (and in my view must) thus be geared toward the unblocking, or transformation, of aspects of the analyst's own cultural situation’ (1994a, p. 216).

10. Given the need to understand alterity in a non‐exotic way from within one's own cultural identity, I hesitate following Willemen in his description of the analyst's position. In keeping with a terminology inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, Willemen calls it ‘a double outsideness: the analyst must relate to his or her situation as an other’ (1994a, p. 216). The analyst would then be outside his own community, just as he/she would be outside the other film culture. As should be clear from my analysis of Cavell's understanding of habit change in the everyday, I would support the description of reflexive, transgressive distance as necessary for the recognition of cultural identity, but I would want to avoid the connotation of moral guidance inherent in outside positions.

11. Inspired by what Krzysztof Kieslowski did with fiction film in Decalogue, Dutch public broadcasting organization IKON commissioned 10 documentaries, one for each commandment. Ten prominent Dutch documentary filmmakers were asked to make a 50‐minute documentary. The films were shown on public television in the winter of 2000–2001. Four out of the 10 filmmakers would probably fit Naficy's category of exilic/diasporic filmmakers: Heddy Honigmann (1951) born in Peru, daughter of Holocaust survivors from Austria and Poland, Dutch citizen since 1978; Vuk Janic (1953), born and raised in Sarajevo, living in Holland since 1994; Fatima Jebli Ouazzani (1959), born in Morocco, living in Holland since 1970; Fiona Tan (1966), born in Indonesia, daughter of a Chinese father and an Anglo‐Saxon mother, raised in Melbourne, Australia, living in Holland since the late 1980s.

12. In an interview Honigmann explains: ‘I wanted to work toward more abstract forms of stealing. From candy, to the art of pick‐pocketing, the life of a real criminal, to stealing love, or stealing the possibility to live a good life’ (Doude van Troostwijk 2001, p. 10, my translation).

13. The materialization of values in the shape of a normative codex, here the Ten Commandments, can be recognized analogously in Rousseau's depiction of the principle of the people's sovereignty, holding that the expression of the general will of the people (la volonté générale) is the law.

14. Remarkably, Dutch newspapers have not reported on this ‘front‐page moral issue’. But even if Scholtes' representation of the controversy were contrived, Honigmann's hypothesis would be no less relevant for documentary filmmakers interested in a truth that is not the truth of journalists.

15. ‘Toen loeide ik als een koe’ (my translation).

16. ‘Als kind is mijn hart gestolen en verbrijzeld door één mens in de opdracht van God’ (my translation).

17. ‘Laat uw woorden weinig zijn, want vele woorden is het venijn des doods’ (my translation).

18. ‘Toen was mijn emotionele ontwikkeling nog in gang, en ik meende dat dat de liefde was, om iemand te slaan’ (my translation).

19. This is not to say that the political does not interest her. In a 1995 interview on the occasion of her fiction film Tot Ziens (1995), in De Groene Amsterdammer, a Dutch current affairs weekly, Honigmann was asked about what seemed to be a dwindling interest in politics. Her first films, about Israeli oppression and about the nuclear arms race show a direct political commitment. Now Honigmann's films are less explicitly political. Honigmann replied: ‘When I made my first films, I thought I had to say things as clearly and directly as possible.… I don't have that adolescent need anymore … Poetry and Humor work much better. Moreover, my interest has shifted. Politics still interest me immeasurably, yet one way or another “big politics” no longer fit my films’ (Amsberg & Steenhuis 1995, my translation).