FILM HERITAGE AND THE CINEMATIC COMMON

Abstract

Abstract

This essay addresses the absence of the image in recent theories of the common by outlining a concept of the cinematic common. A “specter” of this common is identified in the contemporary discourse of film heritage. Here, the cinematic common begins to come into view as a living archive of communicative and cognitive procedures embedded in the networks of immaterial labor. In order to develop the cinematic common further, particularly in relation to the contemporary usage of Marx's concept of the “general intellect,” the essay presents an analysis of Harun Farocki's experimental film Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik [Workers Leaving the Factory] (1995). In a final section, film heritage is re-theorized in order to present the cinematic common in a prognostic capacity as part of the revolutionary project of the multitude.

Keywords:

• common
• immaterial labor
• general intellect
• experimental film
• heritage
• Harun Farocki

Notes

I would like to thank the editors and readers at Angelaki for their time in helping bring this essay to print. I would also like to thank Cesare Casarino, Christian Haines, and Sara Saljoughi, with all of whom I share much in common.

1 See, for example, Casarino and Negri; Casarino; Curcio and Özselçuk; Dyer-Witheford; and Read.

2 For one of the most compact and cogent descriptions of immaterial labor, see Lazzarato.

3 This is, of course, one of Walter Benjamin's main points about film vs. earlier arts in his canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

4 For an extensive legal analysis of the case, see Wagner.

5 The first twenty-five films placed on the registry are: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Casablanca (1943), Citizen Kane (1941), The Crowd (1928), Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The General (1927), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), High Noon (1952), Intolerance (1916), The Learning Tree (1969), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Modern Times (1936), Nanook of the North (1921), On the Waterfront (1954), The Searchers (1956), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Some Like It Hot (1959), Star Wars (1977), Sunrise (1927), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Vertigo (1958), The Wizard of Oz (1939). A complete list of films on the registry can be found at <www.loc.gov/film>.

6 See also Gracy.

7 In 2006, Farocki turned the film into an art installation titled Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten [Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades]. For an excellent analysis of the installation and the politics of cinema in the context of the museum, see Steyerl.

8 In History of Art, vol. 5, Faure writes of the “spirit of the forms”:

Whether one feels it or not, whether one wishes it or not, a universal solidarity unites all the acts and all the images of men, not only in space but also and especially in time [ … ] the affirmation of this solidarity is by no means the fruit of a mystical intuition. This solidarity really exists. It belongs to the development of universal history of which it was one of the driving forces, perhaps the strongest and most supple of all. (xii)

9 See Rancière, “The Ethical Turn.” For a similar line of argumentation, see Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights.”

10 The sections within this essay are specifically attributed to either Ernst or Farocki. All references are to Farocki's contributions.

11 See, for example, Virno and Hardt.