Photography as Film and Film as Photography

J. M. Coetzee's first published work of fiction, Dusklands — published in 1974, the year Jeff Wall would later proclaim was "the last moment of the pre-history of photography as art" — consists of two novellas whose thematic relation to each other, while not immediately obvious, is not that interesting once we do figure it out. We are to understand Dusklands as allegories of the West as Abendland. What ties them together more interestingly is a formal symmetry. Each novella deliberately and violently breaks the continuity of the narrative surface with a single metatextual gesture. In "The Vietnam Project," the protagonist narrates in the present tense his own loss of consciousness. "A convention," he writes, "allows me to record these details" (44). At the core of the formally more ambitious second novella, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is a first-person narrative of an exploratory raid by Jacobus Coetzee into Namaqua territory, translated from the Dutch by J. M. Coetzee. The novella includes an appendix purporting to be the "Deposition of Jacobus Coetzee," who was indeed a historical "pioneer," with all the ambivalence residing in that word. But the "Narrator" (134) of the dictated deposition signs the document with an "X," suggesting that he is illiterate. Only on the very last page of the novella are we certain that what we have been reading in this first-person narrative are entirely someone else's words. Between Jacobus Coetzee and J. M. Coetzee stands J. M.'s fictional father, S. J. Coetzee, who is said to have given "a course of lectures on the early explorers of South Africa ... between 1934 and 1948" (59). The dates are carefully chosen to bracket the rise of the National Party, which would begin to implement apartheid in 1948. Thus, there is little question with what kind of salt we are to take S. J. Coetzee's version, whose sources presumably include Jacobus's three-page deposition but are otherwise obscure. S. J. has followed Jacobus's footsteps and undertaken a kind of popular-historical account of the journey but presents it as an "Afterword" and describes himself as an "editor" of a source text that is possibly, within the fiction (and certainly, outside the fiction) "a positive act of the imagination" (116).

As described thus far, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is architecturally dense, but its multiple framing is not obviously different in kind from recognizably modernist framing structures. The outermost frame is J. M. Coetzee; the middle frame is S. J. Coetzee; at the heart of the narrative is Jacobus Coetzee. All three, as far as the structure of the novella is concerned, are fictional, even if two share names with real people. One of the classically modernist functions of the frame was to separate out standpoints of enunciation: in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we encounter three distinct versions of imperial ideology, each emerging from a distinct position in social space and a distinct narrative level. Here, too, we encounter three distinct ideologies — the old explorer's, the nationalist ideologue's, and the modern translator's — but in the central narrative it is impossible to separate out distinct narrative levels. Is an unmarked, maladroit citation of Marx (92) the translator's irony at the ideologue's expense, or the ideologue's irony at Marx's expense, or is it, rather, the translator's lucky find, attributable in some form to the explorer himself? A reference to Borges seems most easily attributable to the translator and cannot belong to the explorer as a reference. But is the Borgesian dream that prompts it dreamed by the explorer, invented by the ideologue, or embellished by the translator? And so on. But the point is not that these ideologies are indistinguishable — each possible reading is in fact distinct — but that the texts that they inhabit are indistinguishable, in fact, unitary: a Borgesian point, it must be said, rather than a distinctively Coetzeean or meaningfully postmodern one.

At a certain point, Jacobus Coetzee's faithful servant Klawer is swept away by the current during a difficult river crossing, going "to his death bearing the blanket roll and all the food" (100). In the next sentence, however, Klawer is alive — though not for long, as he survives the river crossing only to be abandoned dying of a fever a page later. There is no way to understand this doubled death diagetically — there is no standpoint or movement between standpoints from which Klawer appears to die twice. Nobody is hallucinating, nobody is mistaken, nothing magical has happened. Rather, Klawer's two deaths have to be seen as taking place at the scene of writing itself — successive drafts, discrepant versions, embellishment by one of the authors, a spiteful "restoration" by the translator. As Coetzee (the real Coetzee, or as real as one can be in an interview) puts it, "All one is left with on the page is a trace of the process of writing itself." Such metafictional games have by now a decidedly period flavor, as Coetzee already foresaw: "Anti-illusionism — displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them — is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in the end there is only so much mileage to be got out of the ploy" (27).

However, there are two things to note beyond this first approach. First, what we find in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is nothing like the trace of the actual process of writing "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee." The metafictional break destroys the illusionism of the Jacobus narrative (already stretched to the limit in other ways) but draws our eyes to the other fiction — namely, the narrative of the three or more authors and the ideological and historical conflicts among them. The result is a peculiar sort of historical novel that imbues its narrative contents with the ineluctably ambivalent ideological valences of settler exploration through formal rather than narrative means. The nationalistic account of the heroic explorer as a law unto himself cannot obscure his genocidal monstrousness, and the critical account of the same figure cannot quite manage to obscure his heroism — a dialectic as familiar to the Schiller of Die Räuber as it was to the Brecht of The Threepenny Opera. The second thing to note is that Coetzee's procedure in these novellas in no way marks a radical break in the novelistic tradition. If, as Alain Badiou suggested in an early essay, the novel as a form is characterized by the thoroughgoing "inseparability" of all the statements it contains — the immanence of all of its viewpoints to the narrative space of the novel — then the source of its language is going to pose a formal problem that must be suppressed, evaded, or confronted. In certain novelists with whom Coetzee has engaged extensively — Ford Madox Ford and late Beckett among them — the problem of plausible narration, no longer of secondary concern to the problem of plausible narrative, is experienced as a kind of crisis. The narrator of Ford's The Good Soldier anxiously preempts the reader's question, "You may ask me why I write"; Beckett's Worstward Ho! virtually abandons the plane of the narrative for that of narration — but not quite, as the anxiety registered at the level of narration concerns the legitimacy of the narrative: "It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands." "It stands" is the axis of the narrative. "Yes. Say it stands" is the axis of the narration.

"The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" in effect produces a solution to the problem by rotating it ninety degrees: the novella is committed to plausible narration without being committed to a plausible narrative. The picture plane, as it were, is for most of the novella understood to be the illusionistic narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, framed by its disseminator and its translator, each of whom is progressively nearer to us the readers, both in time and in narrative space. The moment that illusion is broken decisively, the picture plane flips on its side: there is no illusionistic narrative, only an illusionistic narration, which now occupies the picture plane formerly occupied by the narrative. Despite its destruction of the narrative unity of the Jacobus narrative, then, Coetzee's early metafiction is as committed to formal closure as anything in the novelistic tradition: what is to be read is not Jacobus's journey but the struggle over the meaning of Jacobus's journey. It is only when metafictional technique becomes merely decorative rather than structural — something supplemental rather than something necessary — that Coetzee begins to look postmodern. Mrs. Curran in Age of Iron, for example, narrates her own death via the conventions of the epistolary novel, but that does not disturb the sentimental surface of its ethical fable. The later novel stubbornly or lazily maintains its narrative axis at the level of the narrative; the impossible narration just makes it arty.

What is at stake in this distinction? The question is whether Dusklands is an artifact that demands close reading, the discipline of interpretation as we developed its concept in the introduction. If Dusklands merely, in a playful or apocalyptic mode, stages a surface without a stable meaning (postmodernism as Coetzee seems to have understoodit), or if it, in a seemingly contrary mode, presents us with an extractable ethical fable (postmodern culture in a more common, everyday guise), it operates in a mode that is fundamentally perpendicular to the plane of the narration. In both cases there is something held out for the reader: an object or what we used to call, after Barthes, a "writerly" text whose meaning lies wholly in its playful appropriation, or a lesson laid over narrative material that is otherwise incoherent. In neither case is there a criterion available by which to judge the work. The third possibility proposed here is that Dusklands demands close interpretive attention — an activity that takes place along the picture plane, into which axis of narration has now been folded — that it proclaims itself as a self-legislating artifact whose individual moments can be understood only through the form of the whole. In this case, the work of art contains its own criterion — namely, the plausibility and internal coherence of the narrative conflict among three historical moments.

In sum, what looks like the exposure of plot to the operation of écriture, to use the period term, in the name of an open, un-totalizable text turns out instead to organize itself into a thematization of narrative as a site of struggle. This operation — the foreclosure of immediate appropriation by a reader, an appropriation we will shortly characterize as theatrical, in favor of a legible demand for close interpretive attention — will, of course, look rather different in art photography or Hollywood film, where the reader is replaced by a beholder or by an audience that is immediately a market. The ways theatrical immediacy can be forestalled in favor of a commitment to immanent form are presumably infinite, but that does not prevent us from seeking out family resemblances. In the rest of this chapter, we will be examining successful attempts to fold the appropriative line from artwork to audience into the immanent structure of the work. The readings are loosely oriented along two axes. Along the first, film and photography each borrow aspects of the other medium — avowed stagedness in Cindy Sherman's and Jeff Wall's work and thematized indexicality in Richard Linklater's and Alejandro Innárritu's — to foreground problems posed by its own. Along the second, film and photography differ in their almost diametrically opposed relationships to the market.

Not long after Coetzee published Dusklands, Cindy Sherman began producing the series "Untitled Film Stills." The individual images are easy to like, and just as easy to dislike; it may be that our usual reasons for liking them or disliking them have little to do what they have to say about their medium. Sherman's film stills do not lend themselves to close reading at the level of the individual image, an intuition that is confirmed by the fact that none of the images have individual names. The images add up to something substantial in a way that the individual images do not quite embody. In this sense the existence of the work takes place at the level of the series rather than at the level of the individual picture. But the temptation to relate the images narratively is rejected early on. The first six images are originally conceived as implying an inchoate, inaccessible narrative — the central figure has blond hair in each but otherwise the pictures are not obviously related — but this initial series is quickly broken up, and the first six pictures are not exhibited together. The meaning of the series, then, is not to be found in something exterior to the images, as a story that exists between and transcends them, but is something entirely immanent to them. Not only is it a series, moreover; it is understood as a series that is, in a sense yet to be defined, complete. "I knew it was over," Sherman writes, "when I started repeating myself." A concept is external to its examples, which are contingent and disposable; a genus, however, exists only in and through its species. Like Bernd and Hilla Becher's cooling towers or blast furnaces (figure 1.1), the untitled film stills are meant to be seen as a kind of genus, whose essence or meaning can be approached only through its mode of appearance as individual images.

The genus to which the images belong is, obviously, the film still. But equally obviously, what we are looking at is much more specific than that: images of women (a series of men was started and abandoned), staged and photographed in a way that evokes a set of cinematic conventions whose strongest and most easily legible element (specifically yet, as we shall see, paradoxically vaguely) is Italian neorealism (see plate 2). The crucial question here is whether Sherman is primarily interested in the film still as a form or immediately as a kind of content. Both aspects are essential. But if the content of the film stills is to be taken in its immediacy, we are dealing with a concept rather than a genus. What is exposed is a certain fantasy of the female figure and the camera as the embodiment of the male gaze: far from a trivial issue, but one that exhausts itself in the telling and one that, furthermore, does not fit the facts. The primary fact is that of the closure of the series. If the male gaze were the determining instance, one picture would be enough, and a thousand pictures would not be enough. One would be enough because the male gaze is a spurious universality that subtends all its instantiations; a thousand would not be enough because the movie industry has not failed to invent new ways to frame women as objects. The secondary fact is that of the vague specificity of the neorealist-ish aesthetic: if it is the specific that matters, why choose this specificity when there are plenty of other kinds of images of women out there? If it is the generality that matters, why stick to any specific aesthetic?

If, instead, we look first at the form, we begin to notice what makes the series a genus. First, the figure defines the space rather than the other way around. The mise-en-scène, which at a first glance seems like a defining aspect of the images, in fact plays an entirely passive role. The woman in a head tie and apron in Untitled Film Still #35 defines the space around her as domestic (see plate 2); the fact that she is standing on industrial diamond-plate flooring does nothing to dispel that sense. In Untitled Film Still #4, a massive exposed beam, which usually signifies, and probably is a real trace of, postindustrial live/work rehab, should comport oddly with the elegant figure slumped against a (hotel room?) door, but instead it recedes into insignificance. In other images, the background is generic (e.g., #58,#8), illegible (e.g., #36), obscure (e.g., #5 [figure 1.2]), or restricted to a tiny portion of the picture surface (e.g., #27 [figure 1.3]). In Untitled Film Still #10, no attempt is made to obscure the fact that inside a torn grocery bag are late twentieth-century American groceries. When one thinks of the obsessiveness with which contemporary culture tends to treat period detail — think of a television series like Mad Men, for example — one realizes how far historical pastiche is from the point (compare plate 4 and plate 6). There are counterexamples, but they are both rare and some of the least compelling in the series. In Untitled Film Still #50 (plate 5), for example, the central figure becomes a prop among the others, a signifier like the paired African and modernist sculptures in the background — or indeed, like the Erik Buch stools in Megan Draper's apartment in Mad Men (plate 7). The meaning of these images, then, resides in the central figure, which is capable of defining the space that surrounds it.