September 22, 2003
Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#20
Rick's twentieth post on Susan Sontag's book, Regarding the Pain of Others winds up his Sontag project. It started here. A very critical review of the Sontag book can be found here.
In this post Sontag makes the turn to media other than photography. The step to film (not the novel) is the path away from the sense of the end of art that I gestured to in the previous post. The text from Sontag's book that Rick quotes says:
"No photograph or portfolio of photographs can unfold, go further, and further still, as do The Ascent (1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, and the most affecting film about the sadness of war I know, and an astounding Japanese documentary, Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), the portrait of a “deranged” veteran of the Pacific war, whose life’s work is denouncing Japanese war crimes from a sound truck he drives through the streets of Tokyo and paying most unwelcome visits to his former superior officers, demanding that they apologize for crimes, such as the murder of American prisoners in the Philippines, which they either ordered or condoned.” (Sontag, pp. 122-123.)
Unlike Sontag I have seen neither film. Yet I can understand the shift and its significance. The shift is from single photo to narrative to capture the relativity of truth, the ethical complexities and the horrors of war. If the grand narrative of art history has come to an end then another narrative has risen to take its place.
And we do have complexities. Kazuo Hara’s interventionist documentary tackles cannibalism, the abuse of Japanese soldiers by their officers, desertion in the Imperial Army during the war in the Pacific, mad obsession with the war, the memory of the war and the resonance of the war years in the present. These cannot be captured by a single photo no matter how complex.
Kazuo Hara’s documentary film The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On retains the aesthetic capacity to provoke. It provokes in its depiction of Japanese militarism because it challenges the historical image of Japan. What the image of militarism and the atomic bomb victim image silence is the brutality of Japan's military aggression throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, in chronicling the activities of a half-crazed protester who challenges the status quo, becomes a critical voice that begins to break up the Japanese silence on the war years.
Film has replaced the narrative template of art---both representational and modernist (abstract). We know that old story. But it needs retelling because it provides a background context for Sontag's book.
Representational art had been marginalised and defensive during the hegemony of modernism in the art institution. Modernism was narrowly understood in terms of abstraction and representional art was seen as heretical (doing the figure); but both are now just a few of the possibilities of artistic practices. There are no directions anymore. You can do whatever you like.
Sigmar Polke Fastest Gun in the West 2002
Nothing---no style--- is more right than anything else. The history of art constructed narratively in terms of historical development towards purity had collapsed.
But in that story there is another one about representational art: painting was replaced by film because moving pictures could, and did, represent reality better than painting. In the light of that displacement, painting went abstractionist. Painters started talking about the essence of art, writing manifestos about what art really was and thinking they were shamans in touch with the primordial forces of the universe. This romanticism was connected to the modernist ethos of the purity of the medium: that painting is about painting and photography is about photography.
That narrative collapsed along with the modernist aesthetic in the 1980s, pluralism emerged from its ruins, and artistic practice was liberated from a modernism that said art progressively strives to achieve identity with its own material base. It is now possible for artist to appropropiate the forms of past art and use them for their own expressive ends.
However, it is film that has come to the foreground in our form of life.
If art considered in its highest vocation is, and remains a thing of the past and has lost for us genuine truth and life, then does film now replace art? Is it film that raises the deepest questions of what it means for us to live in contemporary society?
But modernism hangs on. I guess we will hear about symposium on themes such as Cinema:is it dead?; or lectures along the lines that Film is itself a form of philosophizing, of reflection, reasoning and argument.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 22, 2003 07:21 PM | TrackBack