Revolution-Restoration, 1814--

Revolution-Restoration, 1814— is a half-hour DV film composed of found footage, famous cinematic footage, and, to a smaller extent, shot footage. The cinematic material has been altered in all cases but (perhaps) one. These alterations include cropping, editing (cutting within a sequence), slowing, color change and removal, and sound removal and addition. None of the alterations is meant to be noticeable unless you are already hunting for it. Internet versions of films were used and copy degradations were not enhanced or regularized—this history of copying is noticeable. Between the evident and obscure changes, it’s difficult to know what exactly you’re looking at.

Two precedents that may be useful for thinking about the kinds of visual questions raised here are Luc Tuymans’s paintings of mediatized images (http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/405) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, which is composed largely of clips from previous films. Godard’s Histoire(s) is often discussed through debates about the intellectual property rights to cinema. Godard refers to the legal entanglements that Histoire(s) was forced to navigate at the end of his most recent work, Film Socialisme, in which the title “Si la loi est injuste, la justice passe avant la loi [If the law is unjust, justice comes before the law]” appears over a copy of the FBI copyright infringement notice. Clips from Godard’s Germany Year Ninety Nine Zero are the least altered of the materials that appear here. I believe that RR 1814's rearrangements and noncommercial scholarly purposes conform to fair use. At the same time, this fairness may be irrelevant both pragmatically and philosophically: many publishers and institutions do not feel that fair use standards provide them with sufficient legal cover, while for my part, I don’t believe in copyright. Unsaleable, un-institutionally publishable work, at any rate, has its own appeal.

The text of RR 1814 is drawn from work in progress, especially two articles: “Looking at the Stars Forever,” forthcoming in a special issue of Studies in Romanticism edited by Emily Rohrbach and Emily Sun; and “Hegel’s Bearings,” forthcoming in Romantic Circles Praxis Series’ special issue on Romanticism and Disaster edited by David Collings and Jacques Khalip. It may not be entirely comprehensible without them. In RR 1814, the verbal burden is borne almost entirely by subtitles, and it’s necessary to focus fairly hard on the subtitles to follow the text amid other sensory events. The text is a little simpler than would appear in an article, but not much. Part of the experiment here, then, involves the possibilities for philosophical reading within a visual frame and for the non-mimetic deployment of images therein.

In thinking about these possibilities, I found more relevant ideas in film itself than in the underdeveloped genre of multimedia scholarship. So far, the latter tends to remain within a mimetic model in which images illustrate or accompany text or vice-versa, while animation and HTML stamp the work with the semiology of multimedial generic belonging. That said, the image-text relationship is inescapably mimetic to the extent that mimetic relations are found by the mind always willing and able to connect the not-necessarily connected. Dialogue with mimeticism is both inevitable and interesting, but is so only if we are not driving for it. The film excerpts in RR 1814 are lifted from narratives, even when the sources themselves are only quasi-narrative, as in Godard and Antonioni. Loosened from their contexts, some may take on a magnified documentary function. Alessia Ricciardi pointed out to me that the effect is different in clips from Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, where the narrative teleology is very strong: Edmund, the boy who wanders the postwar wreckage, throws himself out the window of the abandoned building at the end of the film. Rather than seeming aleatory and documentary, the inclusion of sequences in the building seems to invite the question of what’s being said about Rossellini’s narrative or offered as an analogy to it. (Is the agoraphobia of globalization supposed to feel suicidal?). One way of looking at it is that this time Edmund does not jump out the window, but remains suspended in the time “before.” But it’s probably true that RR 1814 does not aim to answer this kind of question enough to justify seeming to bring it up in the first place. I was very glad to have provoked Ricciardi’s reflection, at any rate, and our exchange exemplifies the sorts of conversations I would like to enable.

It seems to add weight to the work to append acknowledgments to it, but (consistent with the point about copyright) I have a hard time ignoring the ambiguous property lines. Thanks to Ian Balfour for reminding me about the relevance of Germany Year Ninety Nine Zero through his paper concerning it; to Rebecca Comay, Erin Trapp, and David Collings for substantive conversations about related topics; to Nasser Mufti for the link to latent civil war; and to people in the fall 2010 seminar Politics after Expectation for many thoughts. Robert Wood, you’re right that Gramsci needs to be part of it, and he will be more so later.....

After having finalized this version (whose end titles credit the found as well as cinematic footage) I heard from Peter Molloy, a student of military history whose video of the Waterloo battlefield and Hougoumont Farm appears at the beginning. Molloy has kindly allowed this incorporation of parts of his video. The original video (which he didn’t consider to be videography, but research) is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQYTiD8DgzQ. He observes in the notes posted with it: “The two bare trees approached during the video are all that remains of the woods which existed south of the farm in 1815. This is the ground that French infantry of Reille's II Corps attacked over again and again during the late morning and afternoon of Waterloo. Could the indentations that scar one of the trunks mark the impact of musket balls nearly two centuries ago? Just in shot as the trees are approached is an area of ice and frost covered open ground which marks the location of one of several mass graves known to exist at various points around the battlefield (with at least two located in the immediate area of Wellington's crossroads, further east). It is likely that most of those who fell at Hougoumont, attacker and defender alike, ended up buried here.”

http://vimeo.com/25335771