In 1969, Jean-Luc Godard made British Sounds, a 54-minute, 6-part collaboration with his Dziga Vertov Group that aimed to present an analysis of both industrial production and the status of women in capitalist society. Its success as agit-prop is dubious in comparison to another polemic, Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), made with Anne-Marie Miéville in 1976 but legible now as a reflection, re-editing, reenvisioning, re-presentation (representation), and translation of a “failed” film called Jusqu’à la victoire (Victory), footage for which was shot in the spring of 1970 across Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who were invited by the Palestine Liberation Organization to make a film for and about their struggles.
Poet Anna Mendelssohn, then an undergraduate student at the University of Essex, was cast by Godard to be the “star” of British Sounds, or so I interpret. She would have been about two years from her arrest for purported involvement with the UK’s Angry Brigade, a militant leftist group that was held responsible for 25 bombings in England between 1970 and 1972, most of which resulted in property damage. Mendelssohn was tried, spent a day-and-a-half defending herself in a closing speech, and convicted to 10 years in prison.
I suppose you’d want to know what I’m thinking about and reading isn’t what there is to say
sparkle of the outside
I’m surrounded by Evergreen trees, set a few meters in from a wide, golden field and behind that, foggier, larger deciduous and, as edges go, it’s silver-blue sky, wet-through, and clearing, placid, darken.
Inside: oil-paint eggs dot our still life pics
Online compounding, composting, melding, synthesis, coincident, dérive, cascades, archives: I feel like an ice sheet encountering another one. “Hi mind if I sit”
Mendelssohn was released early, after only five years. She had fallen ill; she had staged Peter Pan. For decades after, while devoting herself unconditionally to her poetry, visual art, education, and to her children, she felt policed and surveilled. There was the “distinct possibility,” writes Sara Crangle, “that her past extremist activism might affect appraisals of her parenting.” She did lose them; prison is to blame.
Resisting “revolutionary fervor and outright condemnation alike” (SC) in her own “scabrous” roman à clef, What a Performance, now archived at the University of Sussex, seems not meant to please all parties AT ALL but reveals a serious wound … Anna was never believed innocent.
Her fingerprints on a Rolling Stone around a bomb did not mean she thought violence was the simplest or correct answer for those seeking revolutionary change but that people who live amongst each other share magazines.
Or was it a piece of paper near the Rolling Stone
It wasn’t a time-piece (British Sounds was a time-piece for listening)
In Ici et ailleurs: footage of a girl screaming a poem in the rubble
She is innocent, but maybe not this form of theater.
Q: Are the filmmakers truly looking for a “simple image,” a “simple form”; do they need that in order to understand the other? Is it a matter “simply” of turning down the volume? In 2020, I’d like to say we can indeed “look here before we listen here,” as the superimposed text later dictates; we can also see and listen simultaneously, and we can (must) distinguish here from elsewhere.
JLG’s question is more productive: “What words would she have said? In what order?”
It’s still hitting me: Mendelssohn’s closing speech took a day and a half to read, in which she detailed the Rolling Stone chronology—to read when we are out of place, and I can fly. We talk about it at dinner. How many hours is that? Could it be a play?
A physical visit to an archived, written way forward that went ignored. She thanks the 2 jurors who fought for her.
They are wishing they had not put words in the mouths of the subjects they originally sought to present. As if these subjects, women and children, were given just dialogue on a stage. The filmmakers can no longer see the way they wanted an audience to see, can no longer make propaganda; they can only make themselves complicit in wanting to speak for others, throwing any decolonialist impulse under the bus.
But for 1976, if the critique is that you are only capable of symbolic organizing because you’re placated by image consumption, then that’s a good critique. So, while it might have been better to just do the thing, to submit to a verisimilitude larger than yourself and make the propaganda film, at least the critique is good.
?
NEXT SLIDE: SILENCE.
NEXT SLIDE: LOSS OF SILENCE.
NEXT: POLITICAL MILIEU.
When Anna appears in British Sounds, she’s seated, holding a notebook the shape of a house. Her friends, fellow college-age activists, are drawing protest posters and rewriting Beatles songs. She’s donned a non-trivially floppy hat.
“It was with regret and a sense of democratic justice that I rejected the offer of the main female part in the French director’s film.”
The scene, wrote Jonathan Dawson in 2005, “confirms a possibly unconscious ironic impression that world political revolution will only come from the real workers who need it: and not from well paid academics – or indeed French filmmakers – who play at the game in what now seems a dilettantish and, indeed, rather privileged manner.”
A wild turkey trotted through the field
She knew it. She put the question of whether there should be a “main part” to a vote. Readily invested in the collective subject.
Honey pie, you are making me crazy
I'm in love but I'm lazy
So won't you please come home.
Oh honey pie, my position is tragic
Come and show me the magic
Of your Hollywood song.
“I was not satisfied with the compromise Godard had to make over the film.”
“He had to reorganise his plan because of my decision to put it to the vote. That’s probably why we had to sit around like lemons rewriting the lyrics to ‘Revolution.’ But listen to something I say in that film. ‘OUR position is tragic.’ That was ersatz ‘Honey Pie.’”
On the way to the cemetery, a police car a guard behind our caravan, he turned to me and motioned out the rear window, winked, “first time they’re not after me.” The cop that therefore I am.
I didn’t know what his nightly life was like. I didn’t know what it had been like in the early 1970s. Running from the draft, he told me he stole his girlfriend’s mafia dad’s prize shotgun and drove across state lines to sell it at a pawn shop in Texas. A felony. In 2010, when he went back in, I didn’t know what his life was like. I told myself a year would pass quickly. He had work release:
The grocery shop:
CLIVE CUSSLER in book holders cozied registers. “Already read them.” (In there.) He knew some of the guys working. Or is it that every worker in town knew him? It will have always felt that way. You meet them in jail or you give them a job driving a truck full of lettuce or one of them is building a plane in our garage. She’s 09 years old. One afternoon, this guy lets her take some sandpaper to brush at the raw gray wing while he mixes paint. She thinks, I am building an airplane.
“It is a well-known adage that prison workers complain about how they have done a life sentence too. They have not. The prisoners are their instruments of survival, their machine parts.” (AM)
Wish I were back in LA watching Lee Grant’s THE WILLMAR 8 (1981) ON BEAUTIFUL 16MM. Doris Boshart, Irene Wallin, Sylvia Erickson Koll, Jane Harguth Groothuis, Sandi Treml, Teren Novotny, Shirley Solyntjes, and Glennis Ter Wisscha picketed their Willmar, Minnesota, Citizen’s National Bank for two winters, from 1977–1979. Slush slush slush.
For equal pay for equal work.
Your lower back hurts, on left side. Later I’ll write a Today that it has finally stopped
“You” as “the voice”:
“Half the time you (meaning the voice) are starting from such a basic position you might almost be reiterating your father’s voice.” (AM)
You as lover’s voice instead of inheriting the sins of our fathers
A passage about my father, or I thought so before / after seeing Clara Bow in Call Her Savage, reliving her character’s father’s life as a kind of unsolved recompense for what he hadn’t got, what he had grieved. When I was in my 20s, I built myself a management office inside my 10’x10’ white-walled room, and I played WORK and wore a uniform and this was experimental living, said someone in Apartamento. I had some friends over in February to make calls for electoral politics instead of socialist competition and misheard one, a new one, a new friend, a new colleague, a new dewdrop, hypernym: “I wish I’d said my dad was a baker.” Corina’s great-grand was a glassblower. Her second banality was the improper use of focus. Pulling focus turns out to feel incredible once you move that problem into the auteristic sphere. I still see her at the end of the hallway we darkened, placid. Her face, gradually moving in, and gradually moving. A glass orb hovering.
Throughout Esfir’s mind, women’s faces in heat lamps, light bulbs, their eyes reacting. I want to give poetry a chance to build itself. She feels description is also analysis, but given poetry’s eyes on degrowth, the relationship to a reader is more important than dishes. I couldn’t select or add a word that would describe their eyes reacting. The tearing up was unreal, made of glue and highlighting cream. [plus the warm heat]
ALBA claps her hand over VALERIA’s mouth.
ALBA (into phone—to notify another member that they have JEAN):
The streams, oh how they tinkle
The sun, oh, how it shines;
The meadow is filled with flowers,
Intermixed with dandelions
CUT TO:
In a particularly forested, dense area, JEAN is lying on the ground beneath an ornamental plum tree, softly touching the blades of grass in front of her.
MUSIC: Prince Buster, “Take It Easy.”
SOURCES:
Poem 1: from “WATCH OUT” (“Habet acht”), Ingeborg Bachmann
Poem 2: Maya Deren, as Elinor Deren, first poem published
Names used to feel like affectionate points along an artistic continuum. But names are an impossible image. Dames’s choreography in the shape of a giant cog; matching dancers are not yet leaders of electrification. Perhaps I’ll feel differently once something else continues to be shock-working.
They’re told to leave the Peace (camps) and anger to the women. Even in the years she spent in the tree, fear was not an option. She ordered books from the Scholastic catalog, and read each one on a branch higher than the previous. Any, any time a fellow young person walked beneath the sunlit hardwood limbs, she’d cry out something about a folktale, something like, “HABET ACHT!” and they’d eventually join her, until everyone was mildly interested in changing society. The airwaves were thick with information, but their brains were too full, and at night they would talk to each other in a made-up language (inspired by the memory of choo-choo trains) that tempted small birds on pogo sticks to notate as they bounded around the dirt perimeter, never understanding but dying for recognition as a person, a translator, who is intentional—even intentionally awkward—a boing-ing yellow-feathered guard of sorts. I was writing about this community for a blog, when several lesbians gathered around me to see. One of them kept staring at a receipt. None of us could see, however, because you need a graduate certificate in Visual Studies for that. Do you think you’re going to work? Do you think voice and work are incohabitable? Do you think the acousmatic voice can be interrupted; if so, by what tone?
The use of “waves” as reductive modes for comprehending feminism historically
Revolutionary temporality means we look at tactics more than demands
“portable, in isolated actions, blow by blow,” tactics belong to no one and to no proper place (JR) … feminists are scattherd
A line here about systematic ducking-under
In 1996, Angie Zelter, 45, Joanna Wilson, 33, Lotta Kronlid, 28, and Andrea Needham, 30, going under the name the Ploughshare Four, did a million and a half pounds of damage to a Hawk Warplane by cutting into a seven-mile fence, breaking into a hangar and hammering the plane in 25 places. It was destined for Indonesia, where it would be used against the civilians of East Timor, who were fighting for independence. The women had been writing their representatives letters, trying desperately to gather attention toward their subject, for months.
Not guilty. A (slightest) part of women’s history in the anti-war movement, rather than East Timor’s long road to recognized independence (May 20, 2002).
A plea for an activated viewer, she who might listen and/or read, is placed in direct opposition to one who would passively consume images; this binary is duplicated and extended formally by the filmmakers’ intercutting of images of revolution and footage of Fatah strategy meetings or trainings with scenes of a French family watching television together. But this is not so simple a binary—what seems active and ennobling, has instead, we are told, become only part of a sequence of images placed into the temporal medium of film, thus throwing these soldiers into a different reality. This reality, or what Godard and Miéville call “space,” is the depressing chain-work of representation, what we are repeatedly told is “a vague and complicated system”; and this depression, this flattening of what should be activating is specifically the result of, here, the filmmakers’ inability to make the propaganda they were there to make, for the cause they purportedly left France to fight for. With our French leftist family, with its father not able to find a job because he’s too busy going to political meetings, we have an allegory of a mediated, failed Left post-1968. They also suffer from global deindustrialization and what is called “secular stagnation,” “an economy with a chronic lack of demand,” and as they accompany our filmmakers’ actual having-left the scene of a Global South struggle for liberation—we are left with … self-critique.
?
Ici et ailleurs doesn’t believe in its own ability to represent experience (what they call space) due to its temporal form (time), and so it tries out other formal strategies.
One of these strategies is looking back, in an attempt to reconstruct or rehabilitate “what went wrong.”
Wind, and heat-lamp hallucination, made from original footage instead of collected, dug for
[Shub heatlamps]
Moments of melodramatic excess occur as temporary closure
Frown when you hear a 10th-grader say critique and then pound
the German vending machine for a jar of pickles
Gardening’a boundied use for radical feminists; on sand for instance, Nicole Brossard calls for aerial roots. Ann Snitow wound, “I offer the following personal, potted history of feminist tones of voice.” One philosopher cast-iron skillet says phenomenon; she/her says aridity: the quality of solidarity is spreading across society, not causal yet, dissonant aches, so the question How I adapt the lass in tnight’s dream explaining what overdetermined meant and she had to tell it 5 times over because young-fictive-alzheimer, kneading the dough veins to chow the effect’s effect, which was…….I forgot. So until the lanyard politics spot the tiniest yellow tulip behind-in-growth-time their rigorous green petal, 1 poetry, as ever, sets up shop at dawn’s 10 risen bedouinhues to say, behind a long desk in front of a long window, the laptop meeting in countdown-time, to say: “poets for end of rent” … but long-word and bereft, having read altogether too much about restricting ourselves to the immediate in order to identify which solidarity, among whom (to trust), we approach not the question of how to find the voice of this time (the killing gaze tends to other, so description of honeycomb-ice kept breaking, his voice kept breaking) ... but how to find the tone: “Tone is an elusive subject. In each social context, feminists seek a language to be believed, using tones of voice that are currently available.” (AS)
Unless we have someone with a morally imperious tone, not going to cross the river. What image: Dead Man? Some “Western.” Poets are calling for end of rent. Philosophers accumulate. Poets see the graves opening, mawing: perish? Hurry: Public.
“Today.” The only “public-istic” films genre. “Today” consisted of docs made to reflect on critical issues of domestic and foreign police. Policy. Problem if reading how to “aerate,” when. Where, I say to . Where do . want me . to . aerate if don’t desire I read burnt copper-leaf edges of the Cadillac rusted. What ladder is expecting itself as method of finding, where, where have hidden all fumigants or I’s over. These are bulky leadership methods: how do you expect me to do this!—No, no… But we didn’t want leaders in the group. Only, some women could cook, some were naturals at clowning behind a soldier as he periodically returned to the shack for bigger and bigger bolt-cutters (the officers finally ripped their own gate down in a bewildered kind of suffering for others).
Now this tone was out of her way. She couldn’t really make films “public-istically” because her interest in non-played, nonstaged cinema made it hard when she was back at home, alone, and no material to cut but the American serials starring female action stars of the 1920s? Esfir remembered Greenham Peace Camp, that thing they used to say…“the only stars here are in the sky.” That if you have no hierarchy, it frustrates the authorities, the police of 1983, 2020. They have no one to follow and bother. Have I promoted “factography” enough? she asked herself before the fireplace, rolled up in her rag-rug with the sunlit bale-sticks of hay weft damply through from an earlier walk in the rain this moppy-climated afternoon, slush slush slush. What facts do I inscribe in this cultural product? How else can I unfail myself, unfail my revolutionary politics, but to inscribe some facts? My facts must give way to imaginary consolation like a’gardening = Anna singing.
The beginning of how it should be all the way through. “We will have had healthcare.” I watch the little dog helping to garden.
If any essay could only chill on beginning with a beginning of how it could be, but “This book deals with nothing other than hoping beyond the day which has become.” (EB)
I had a professor this year incredulous at my “endless prelude.” OK! I said.
The kind of thing you’d start.
A notebook in the shape of a same house.
The walls were closing in
I took one look out the window, and…
Yesterday seemed like any other day.
What politicians call a two-parter: being broke is first, surveilled is … remedial?
Inscribe. Wish being watched felt more like smoke.
You will have been sung, by your own public. prefer
to composes involves gut-miseries that’s carried by surveils
within the palm itself.
I wish that I refuse
to write, palm lines force-closing.
It’s as if
someone will take struggle-Dad’s palm
“For a woman who had served time, the scrutiny of her daily machinations by authority figures was a source of pronounced distress” (SC)
performative wrenching away and then, would hear what if I listened
here, dark where he’s unwatched (I can’t see it).
Orange-and-blue degrowth
you choose could be a tactic; most of all in prose.
dm if you can hear it in lyric you Greenham Ploughshare econ-tone
cult of the peace after seeing how-to violently
The questions we must ask ourselves as we start our proposals and our products start with tone and, like-MAD tone behind whichever other undead tone
Undead is available (XX)
No one is an artist at the moment it must function this way. I follow incredulity with plainspokenness, follow plainspokenness with inquisitive nature, that with conviction (midwestern tone). Answer to wherever = no, you are actually not a prisoner. This is where they have been dying. He told me through the plastic window on Christmas that they were giving out cherry pie,
thus mad.
The emergency funds forms say, if you have lost money, “How can we help you gather attention toward your work so sales will improve?” But don’t they also want to know if you can only do your artwork—“can you not work-work as usual in order to afford to produce art-work?” I thought pillow was a dog. Now we can’t afford the rent because ew store suck at home doing art-work! We have been dying for this day. I get to write, “look Man, it’s not that I wasn’t born with it, which I wasn’t, but nor the media, heaps part of our estrangement, nor, but that.” Die, orange propeller-labor of prime-time feminism “wave modes.” Is outmoded to sustain this much affection and curl into a silver river made of chain? I straighten it out along the edge of a family desk. I read. I barely. I react. Bare. Give little. Wishing. Want to write about their prices. Rehearsal Processes. I plant peas. Egg plays. Peas like Wozzeck. Carrot root for incommensurable. French leeks in purple clay bowls. Sure, peasant-try writing from the Reader. Wish I had that Reader on me. The food writing. There’s a PDF. Green eyes. “Shall I be too old to have a baby by the time I get out?” Anna M wrote. In what has been called carceral. I desire that I don’t write in esoteric shorthand like slimiest grassling who assumes so consistent a familiarity and if it reads that way, you never quite know, how to avoid pretension. I ask myself Newlywed Game questions. “What really gets her goat?” Coyness! If you’re a star there’s a script I’ll give you to put pressure on Cuomo to release the prisoners after it’s been spread, the solidarity I mean (a conch delay). The new activism means, “it’s a bit much to have professionalism shoved at you,” she wrote.
I hope those errors you come face to face with as a type for whom I’d talk can see needless confession, a desire to give up the mind’s position as scrutinized center of a professional setting. Leaf videos, thank you. There’s no home; not, not; even if I were commissioned to make a weekly habit of it, “from my own voice.” “there’s no real need to,” she thinks, and Esfir begins to film her own footage instead of cutting.
“Finally at the gallery, I saw her rush from that adorable lanky hank to the bathroom at which point her vomited! Finally God! We all fell in the back of thr Teuck, bumpy!! And who KNOWS where we were goooing, until R& M our heroes looked so stern something, futile and GRACE-theory into the global city pawned in this dialectic hibiscus I couldn’t SEE motherhood at my feet ort my dowell, how could I inless, can we fail in an ethical way?! Table! Made by WHO?? Marxist table having to avoid copying her I bathed myself in her light INSTEAD! The pride of bottom-up baecame our Detail! Suddently the walls were losing it, closing in, and my study of serenity concluded so I went back to SCHOOL… now, that was the Cold War!!”
With thanks:
(EB) Bloch, Ernst. The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986.
(SC) Crangle, Sara. “The Agonies of Ambivalence: Anna Mendelssohn, La Poétesse Maudite.” Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 461–497.
(AM) Mendelssohn, Anna. “What a Performance.” PMLA, 133 (3): 610-613.
(JR) Richards, Jill. “The Long Middle: Reading Women’s Riots.” ELH 85, no. 2 (2018): 533-565.
(AS) Snitow, Ann. “Talking Back to the Patriarchy.” DISSENT, Spring 2018.