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Beyond Representation
Vered Maimon
Published online: 08 Jun 2012.
To cite this article: Vered Maimon (2012) Beyond Representation, Third Text, 26:3, 331-344, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2012.679041
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Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 3, May, 2012, 331– 344
Beyond Representation
Abbas Kiarostami’s and Pedro Costa’s
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Minor Cinema
Vered Maimon
1. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Recent philosophical and political writings convey the ‘return’ of ideas of
Žižek, eds, The Idea of
Communism, Verso,
emancipatory politics. This return of the ‘communist imaginary’, best
London and New York, exemplified in the recent conference and anthology The Idea of Com-
2010. See also John munism, organised and edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek,
Roberts, ‘Art, “Enclave
Theory” and the
also underlines the writings of Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and
Communist Imaginary’, in Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy.1 Badiou, in par-
the special issue ‘Art, Praxis ticular, calls for the urgent re-instalment of the communist hypothesis,
and the Community to
Come’, Third Text 99, vol which he defines as a pure universal Idea of equality. He argues that
23, no 4, July 2009, the communist hypothesis has been actualised in different ways through-
pp 353 –367. out history and that ‘it is not the victory of hypothesis which is at stake
2. Alain Badiou, ‘The today, but the conditions of its existence’.2 Yet, while emphasising the
Communist Hypothesis’, necessity of the ‘return’ of the hypothesis, Badiou also stresses its
New Left Review 49,
January/February 2008, impossibility because of the inadequacy of the specific model of the com-
p 42 munist state-party to the current political context. The re-opening of the
3. Issues of collectivity and communist hypothesis therefore demands the experimental invention of
political subjectivity also new collective forms of political subjectivity that will move beyond a rep-
pertain to contemporary
artistic practices,
resentational model of politics in which the party ‘represents’ the
particularly those that workers or the sovereign state the people. Thus, in order to bring into
employ video and film. See existence the claims of emancipatory politics, one must take leave of rep-
my essay ‘The Third
Citizen: On Models of
resentation but not of creation or the powers of the imagination. In this
Criticality in regard, the need to move beyond representation is aesthetic as much as it
Contemporary Artistic is political. Consequently it is contemporary cinema (among other
Practices’, October 129,
summer 2009. See also the artistic forms) of the kind created by Abbas Kiarostami and Pedro
anthology Beth Hinderliter Costa, this essay argues, that offers the possibility to imagine new politi-
et al, eds, Communities of cal forms of subjectivity.3 After all, as the historical ‘art of the masses’,
Sense: Rethinking
Aesthetics and Politics, cinema was the site for the most spectacular visual representations of
Duke University Press, the idea of equality, for example in the films of Sergei Eisenstein.
Durham, North Carolina,
and London, 2009; Grant
It might therefore also become the site where this idea is no longer
H Kester, Conversation represented but enacted.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.679041
332
Burchell, trans, Columbia present and absent, actual and virtual, real and fictional.
University Press, By formulating the problem of political forms of subjectivity in terms
New York, 1994, p 108
(emphasis in the original).
of becoming rather than being, these debates surrounding the term
See also their classic A ‘people’ seem to reverberate back to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
Thousand Plateaus: urgent statements in What is Philosophy? That:
Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Brian We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of con-
Massumi, trans, University
of Minnesota Press,
cepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do
Minneapolis and London, not yet exist.14
1987.
While the political philosophy of Negri and Hardt is underlined by the
15. Paul Patton, Deleuze and
the Political, Routledge,
vitalist philosophy and terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, it is striking
London and New York, that they left out its major political terms: majority, minority and, most
pp 47 –48 important, becoming-minor or minoritarian. Minority is not a name for
16. See Sylvère Lotringer, ‘We, a marginalised social group but for a transformational group which, as
the Multitude’, op cit, Paul Patton explains, is defined by the gap that separates its members
p 5. See also the exchange
between Negri and Deleuze from a standard model or norm in the same manner in which the simula-
on these issues in Gilles crum challenges representation.15 Regardless of the fact that Deleuze and
Deleuze, Negotiations,
1972 –1990, Martin
Guattari’s political philosophy is inseparable from their ontology of
Joughin, trans, Columbia immanent difference and in this regard cannot be ‘re-coded’ without sig-
University Press, nificant difficulties into an antagonistic form of political struggle, their
New York, pp 169 –176.
analysis makes it clear that they qualitatively differentiate between a capi-
17. On the films of Abbas talist form of deterritorialisation and a minoritarian one and of course
Kiarostami see Mehrnaz
Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan
completely refrain from assigning any ‘telos’ to these processes.16
Rosenbaum, Abbas It is in his cinema books, in particular The Time-Image, that Deleuze
Kiarostami, University of gives a sense of what ‘inventing’ the people will consist of; not that cinema
Illinois Press, Urbana,
Illinois, 2003; Alberto or any form of art can create a people, but modern cinema can allow one
Elena, The Films of Abbas to imagine a form of political subjectivity that constantly hovers between
Kiarostami, Belinda belonging and not belonging, the real and the fictional, the present and
Coombes, trans, Saqi,
London and Beirut, 2005; the future. Following Deleuze, I argue that the films of Kiarostami and
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Costa constitute a ‘minor’ cinema in which the simultaneous absence
Evidence of Film: Abbas and presence of the people is manifested most clearly.17 What dis-
Kiarostami, Christine
Irizarry and Verena tinguishes their otherwise very different films is the fact that while they
Andermatt Conley, trans, focus on marginalised groups such as immigrant workers, drug addicts,
Yves Gevaert, Brussels, the poor and the illiterate, they resist representing them in either a ‘docu-
2001. See also the chapter
on Kiarostami in Hamid mentary’ manner in which their mode of existence is predetermined in
Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian advance in a pseudo-anthropological or sociological manner, or in a ‘fic-
Cinema, Past, Present, and
Future, Verso, London and
tional’ form in which personal identities are granted ‘interiority’ in the
New York, 2001. On Pedro form of deterministic biography and simplified psychology. In their
Costa’s films see James films ‘real’ characters play themselves rather than simply being them-
Quandt, ‘Still Lives: On the
Films of Pedro Costa’,
selves. The idea of ‘real people’ filming and directing themselves has
Artforum, September become a major marketing strategy for what is called ‘reality TV’, yet
334
2006, pp 335 –359; Jean- what often underlies these programmes is precisely the logic of represen-
Louis Comolli, ‘Frames tation in which characters try to conform to a ‘model’ rather than diverge
and Bodies – Notes on
Three Films by Pedro
from it by presenting their ‘true’ self beyond ‘fictional’ or ‘false’ appear-
Costa: Ossos, No Quarto ances. Yet, in minor cinema of the kind that Kiarostami and Costa make,
da Vanda, Juventude em the issue is not to eliminate fiction, but, as Deleuze argues, ‘to free it from
Marcha’, Afterall 24,
Summer 2010, pp 63 –70;
the model of truth which penetrates it, and on the contrary to rediscover
Jacques Rancière, ‘The the pure and simple story-telling function which is opposed to this
Politics of Pedro Costa’, model’.18 The issue is not to become-conscious by adhering to prevalent
available online at: http://
www.pedro-costa.net/ models of subjectivity and ‘truth’, but to become-Other by opening
download/TATE- oneself to ‘another order of time’ to which one simultaneously belongs
PEDRO%20COSTA.pdf, and does not belong.
accessed June 2011. See
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also the booklet of essays What facilitates, but in no way initiates, Kiarostami’s and Costa’s
that is included in the DVD specific modes of film-making is the use of digital video cameras. In
box set Letters from their work the shift from film to video is inseparable from the invention
Fontainhas: Three Films by
Pedro Costa, The Criterion of forms of collaboration. The use of digital cameras enables them to
Collection, 2010. create films with limited crews, no sets, no professional actors and no
scripts. Most importantly, it enables them to work outside the pressure
of production time and budget. Video enables time: time for observation
and for the slow unfolding of stories which evolve out of the process of
working together and which are then restaged. In this regard it is a
cinema of double becoming in which, as Deleuze argues, the director
expresses himself through ‘real’ characters, while the characters speak
as if they are reported by a third person. Write for the illiterate,
Antonin Artaud said, and Deleuze interprets this comment as ‘not for
their benefit’ or ‘in their place’, but as ‘before’, as a question of becoming
in which the author becomes illiterate, while the illiterate becomes ‘some-
thing else and tears himself away from his own agony’.19
Critics often debate whether the films of Kiarostami and Costa are ‘docu-
mentary’ or ‘fiction’, but the sense of indeterminacy which underlines
these films is not simply stylistic, generic or rhetorical, the result of inten-
tional and scripted mixture between so-called ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’
points of view. Rather it emerges out of a much more radical reciprocal
and reversible movement between the actual and the virtual, the real
and the imaginary, the present and the past, which marks what Deleuze
defines as the ‘crystal image’ in modern cinema. With this kind of
image, the crucial issue is not to suppress the distinction between these
18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: poles, but to make it indiscernible or unattributable. Relying on Henri
The Time-Image, Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert
Bergson, Deleuze explains this mutual coexistence in terms of the
Galeta, trans, University of relations between present and past: ‘The image has to be present and
Minnesota Press, past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it
Minneapolis, 1997, p 150
(emphasis in the original)
was not already past at the same time as present, the present would
never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it is no longer
19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, What is
on, it coexists with the present it was.’20 What is especially fascinating
Philosophy, op cit, p 109 in this formulation in relation to the films of Kiarostami and Costa is
20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
that Bergson himself explains it in terms of acting: ‘Whoever becomes
The Time-Image, op cit, conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception
p 79 and recollection. . . will compare himself to an actor playing his part auto-
21. Ibid, p 79 matically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.’21
335
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Abbas Kiarostami, still from Close-Up, 1990, colour thirty-five millimetre film, ninety-eight minutes # The Institute for the
Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults – Celluloid Dreams, courtesy Celluloid Dreams
25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: . . . what is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is
The Time-Image, op cit, p always that of the masters or colonisers; it is the story-telling function of
150. On Deleuze’s concept
of fabulation see Ronald
the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a
Bogue, ‘Fabulation, memory, a legend, a monster.25
Narration and the People
to Come’, in Constantin V The forger, Deleuze argues, is the most emblematic character of this kind
Boundas, ed, Deleuze and
Philosophy, Edinburgh of cinema because he constantly transforms himself and in this way
University Press, mobilises the story. What therefore makes Sabzian a ‘real’ character is
Edinburgh, 2006, pp 203 –
223. See also his book
not his subordinated adherence to a model of pre-existing subjectivity,
Deleuzian Fabulation and even though he pretends to be a specific famous person, but the way his
the Scars of History, singular impersonation marks an affirmation of fiction (and of cinema)
Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, 2010.
as a power of becoming rather than a model of truth. What this kind of
cinema demonstrates, Deleuze argues, ‘is not the identity of a character,
26. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, op cit,
whether real or fictional’ but ‘the becoming of the real character when he
p 150 himself starts to “make up fiction”’.26
337
Abbas Kiarostami, four stills from Ten, 2002, colour thirty-five millimetre film, ninety-four minutes, # Abbas Kiarostami
Productions
Pedro Costa, still from In Vanda’s Room, 2000, colour thirty-five millimetre film, 178 minutes, # Pedro Costa
the specific reality which is depicted, but on the other hand the focus on
autonomous objects and empty or evacuated spaces leads to what
Deleuze calls ‘pure optical and sound situations’ in which it is no
longer possible to separate Costa’s mode of filming from its object of
depiction, the residents and their living environment. That is, the neigh-
bourhood does not function as a setting that presupposes or promotes a
specific action that Costa’s camera then ‘documents’. Instead what is
filmed is the very crisis of action, the inability to act or respond in
situations that overwhelm the characters’ capacities, such as the demoli-
tion of their houses. As Nhurro (also named Yuran), one of the main
characters, states, as he sits in a dark decrepit room that he will be
341
The immobility of Costa’s camera and its pure optics constitute not an
arbitrary stylistic choice on the director’s part, but what Deleuze calls a
break in the link between ‘man and the world’, which ‘makes man a
seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world’.34
In this regard the problem Costa’s films face is not that of giving ‘knowl-
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edge’ about the economic realities of the current moment but, as Deleuze
emphasises with regard to the time-image of modern cinema, of restoring
belief in this world.35
In Vanda’s Room makes an extraordinary use of ‘pure sound’ that
exists independently of the image. Through the room’s thin walls, the
viewer often hears sounds issuing from Vanda’s mother’s shop but does
not see their source: music from the TV and radio, her sister’s baby
crying, people stopping by, the sound of bulldozers, children shouting.
The sound in the film functions as an image in itself that adds a mental
dimension to the visible image by opening it to the outside. This
additional framing constantly splits the film’s visual and acoustic registers
into the actual and the virtual: the still-present of the neighbourhood
coexisting with the already past of its demolition as the film unfolds,
and the future of its residents still to come.
Their future is depicted in the last part of the trilogy, Colossal Youth,
which focuses on the character of Ventura, an immigrant worker from
Cape Verde who fell from scaffolding while working on the construction
of the Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon. The film follows him as he visits the
former residents of Fontainhas, whom he names my ‘sons’ and ‘daugh-
ters’, including Vanda and other characters from the previous film, in
the homes they have been allocated in a newly built neighbourhood of
tall white modernist buildings. Throughout the film Ventura’s gestures
are stiff, his face expressionless, and his manner of speaking impersonal
as if he were reciting lines even when he is telling his own life story of
immigration, hard work and mishap. This mode of speaking about the
past as if one’s words are reported by a third person, or what Deleuze
calls ‘free indirect speech’, also underlines the mode of filming in which
scenes that seem to belong to a different time other than the filmed
present are not marked in any way that suggests a shift in time.36 For
34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
example, after Ventura talks about his accident, he appears wearing a
The Time-Image, op cit, head bandage in scenes with his fellow immigrant worker Lento, and
p 169 they seem to be returning from work to their shack in Fontainhas,
35. On the problem of belief in which the viewer knows no longer exists. In one of the scenes Lento
relation to Costa’s films see talks in the present tense about the military coup in Portugal that took
Jean-Louis Comolli,
‘Frames and Bodies’, op cit.
place in 1974, a long time before the diegetic present of the film. Just
as words cannot be attributed to a specific consciousness, although
36. On Deleuze’s notion of free
indirect speech see my essay spoken by an individual voice, images of the past are not filmed as specific
‘Towards a New Image of individual or collective flashbacks. Like Kiarostami, Costa creates crystal-
Politics: Chris Marker’s line images that oscillate between the past and the present of places and
Staring Back’, Oxford Art
Journal, vol 33, no 1, people (Portugal, Fontainhas, Ventura, Vanda and other characters)
March 2010, p 90. that evade clear attribution or identification.
342
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Pedro Costa, still from Colossal Youth, 2006, colour thirty-five millimetre film, 155 minutes, # Pedro Costa
The past in Colossal Youth is also that of the very idea of collectivity
and freedom. In another scene with Lento in their shack Ventura plays a
record of a popular song from the Cape Verde war of independence led by
Amı́lcar Cabral against Portugal in 1975: ‘Raise your arms and shout
freedom/shout oh independent people/shout oh liberated people/July
5th means freedom/July 5th the road to happiness/shout, long live
Cabral/freedom fighter of our nation.’ This song, played on a now obso-
lete turntable, sounds like a relic from a different long-ago time. The song
draws power from its clear sense of political agency and the national
coherence of the people as a unified ‘We’ combating a colonialist oppres-
sor, but the film marks the disappearance of this collective consciousness.
In a historical condition in which, as Deleuze famously stated, ‘the people
are missing’, the only possibility is to make a ‘minor’ cinema, following
the model of Kafka’s minor literature, in which ‘the message does not
refer back to an enunciating subject who would be its cause, no more
than to a subject of the statement who would be its effect’.37 This explains
37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Kafka: Towards
the film’s interest in ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’, such as
a Minor Literature, Dana stories, legends and songs that are singular but not individual, collective
Polan, trans, University of in a performative sense but not in a symbolic or representational one.
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London, Throughout the film Ventura often recites from a love letter that at first
1986, p 18 seems to be written by himself on behalf of an illiterate Lento. Yet
343
viewers of Costa’s films immediately recognise this letter from his earlier
film, Casa de Lava (1994), in which the identity of the writer and the
addressee could not be established. And as Ventura goes on reciting
this letter about immigrating to a foreign place and missing his loved
ones, wishing he could buy her dresses and cigarettes, and the challenges
he faces of hard work and learning a new language, the feelings of fear
and hope and the unbearable waiting for a return letter, it becomes
clear that the letter’s power lies in its potential inter-exchangeability
and lack of exclusivity. Costa created the letter by combining lines
from a letter by an actual immigrant worker and a poem by the French
poet Robert Desnos, written from a Second World War concentration
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39. See for example Thom The idea is not that all these subjects are the same but that they all have a
Andersen, ‘Paintings in the right to belong regardless of their different religions, cultures, languages
Shadows’, Film Comment,
March/April, 2007, p 59. and so on. The right to belong should not be conditioned by conformity
to a hegemonic model, yet it also should not involve a fixation on identities
40. Jacques Rancière, ‘The
Politics of Pedro Costa’, but a fascination with becoming in which one constantly invents new modes
op cit of subjectivity. Costa’s films allow one to imagine what it would be like to
41. Antonio Negri, Time for live in a world where ‘other’ people ‘exist exactly as I do myself’.43 What
Revolution, Matteo would it feel like? What would it be like to inhabit a world where the
Mandarini, trans,
Continuum, London and
universalism that underlines the communist hypothesis becomes not a mar-
New York, p 190 keting slogan (‘we are all friends’), but a political proposition?
42. Alain Badiou, ‘The
By asking real marginalised individuals to play themselves rather than
Communist Hypothesis’, be themselves, Kiarostami and Costa make films that echo the mode of
op cit, p 39 being specific to the concept of the ‘people’: real and imaginary, actual
43. Ibid, p 39 and virtual, past and present. Their cinema is one that insists on ‘the
344
power of the false’, where the false ceases to be an appearance or lie, but
what allows a character, as Deleuze argues, to cross a limit, to become
another ‘in an act of story-telling which connects him to a people past
or to come’.44 In this regard their films are inherently political not
because they are about marginalised groups or because they challenge
conventional documentary or fictional forms of representation, but
because they move away from representation by opposing any notion
of identity thinking that presumes the ‘common’ or the consensual
rather than contesting its inequalities and violence. Contemporary
cinema cannot create a people, but it does share with those who suffer
44. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: a common resistance ‘to death, to servitude, to the intolerable. . . and to
The Time-Image, op cit,
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p 275 the present’.45 In the current political context, where resistance to vio-
lence and racism often hinge on the unimaginable, these films allow
45. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, What is one to imagine new forms of political subjectivity and to restore belief
Philosophy?, op cit, p 110 in the possibility of a common world.