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The International Journal of the

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

www.ontheimage.com

First published in 2016 in Champaign, Illinois, USA

by Common Ground Publishing LLC

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ISSN: 2154-8560

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The Image Out of History: Ben Russell’s Let Each

One Go Where He May and Cultural Memory

Giles Simon Fielke, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract: Ben Russell’s film “Let Each One Go Where He May” (2009) may not at first appear to recall German cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s idiosyncratic image organisation, “Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” (1926-29). However, their

investigations into the image and into gesture as it acts upon language draws the two works together. Considering the

emergent methodology of cultural memory, an analysis of Russell’s recent film in this paper argues that the film’s images appear ‘out’ of history in such a way that it allows for a reflection upon contemporary notions of historiality, particularly

as examined by Bernard Stiegler in his ongoing “Technics and Time” project. The phenomenological experience of the

discrete image, out of time, in the theatrical site of the cinema, is a question both of contemporaneity, in the sense of

being oriented alongside of time, and of the efficacy of the image as the basis for any historical project. The Warburgian

paradigm that recalls the Western concept of memory, and the science of culture (Warburg’s “Kulturwissenschaft”) allows for a critique of modern theories of the image, and art histories that seek to abbreviate the image for translation

into text. It is the resistance of both Warburg and Russell’s works to this dominant narrative of translation, challenging

taxonomic distinctions, which posits new modes for the archiving of visual concepts.

Keywords: Art History, Cinema, Movement, Gesture, Historiality

wo figures set the trajectory of Ben Russell’s 2009 feature-length experiment in cine-

ethnography, Let Each One Go Where He May.1 A shared path unites the brothers journey

upstream of the Suriname river system, from central Parimaribo to more isolated

communities at the fringes of the small South American country. There is evidence throughout

the film’s more than two hours that the characters have been instructed to, or have agreed not to

talk in the film’s thirteen long-take sequences – the only access we have to the figures of the

work is through their coordinated gestures. The paths taken by the brothers are the same as those

walked every day by these descendants of the Dutch colonies, first made by those who had

escaped their slavery by heading into the remote jungle.

Given this initial revelation, the question implied is a metaphorical reflection upon the oft

considered relationship between memory and history.2 Memory here, or more precisely artificial

or assisted memory, is perhaps a perfunctory definition of all art, but it positions my approach

from the dual perspectives of technics and poïeses. First of all: is there is a possibility that this

pairing is similar to the transduction and economy linking gesture and language? To consider

where these resulting productions could effectively take place is the aim of this paper. For these

two concerns, two techniques employed by two distinct but resonant approaches are considered

as illuminating examples of what is termed “the image out of history.” By understanding gesture

as the “other side” of language, it is argued that gesture is resistant to that which privileges the

literate form, namely history. As such, essential to the concept of historiality – the figures of

experience drawn from and by history – in the age of increasingly privileged speed (light-time),

is the technical inscription of the gesture.3 Tied to the concept of cultural memory – like writing

1 Ben Russell, 2009. Let Each One Go Where He May.16mm, colour, sound, 135’. 2 For one recent example, see Peter Osborne’s Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, the latest study,

to my knowledge, that takes as its question long-running concerns for the role art criticism plays in the politics of history.

‘This is a question,’ Osborne writes, ‘that goes to the heart of thinking about contemporary art, the privileged object of art

criticism, not least because it concerns the historical, rather than the merely chronological determination of

contemporaneity.’ Peter Osborne, 2013. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, p. 3. 3 Cf. Bernard Stiegler, 2010. “Memory,” Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen.

Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 64-87.

T


is to history – movement, in its ‘handing down of meaning,’ is originary to the gesture that is

being, and is the base for all historical sediment.4

To these concerns two figures correspond: the film, above-mentioned, is a contemporary

example of an approach to image-making that resists an easy precipitation into semiotic

readability – it is an example of an anti-narrative film about otherness. It offers an awareness of

cultural memory as against an event-led history. This emergent image-practice has a relevant

precursor and example in the German cultural historian Aby Warburg’s research, in particular his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne project, an atlas of images dedicated to memory.5 By investigating

expressive forces in the gestural specificity of the discrete image in history as orienting for

culture’s trajectory, Warburg presented, in the early stages of the 20th century and perhaps for the

first time, an iconology that suggested a ‘gestural language,’ which posited transmissions he

called pathosformeln (pathos formulas).6 Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May is a

contemporary instance of artistic work, suggesting what Warburg understood was ‘an international, indeed a universal language,’ founded in quietly moving representations – an

artistic strategy that defers history, in the event of the cinema as invoking cultural memory.7

With Let Each One Go Where He May, Russell (b. 1976) attempts a cinema that presents

both a community of images and foregrounds memory through a medium in decline, cine-film,

perhaps now exhibiting its historical, indexical ‘legibility.’8 As a American student of both the

experimental avant-garde and of post-colonial globalism, Russell’s work straddles the disciplines of both.9 At the time of its festival debut critic Michael Sicinski compared Russell’s film to Argentinian, Lissandro Alonso’s La Libertad (2001), but besides the fact both films were shot in

South America and eschew the familiar style of cinematic narrative, they ultimately have little

else than their contemporaneity in common.10 The influence of the slow cinema of Chantal

Ackerman’s D’Est (1994) is discernable in Russell’s film, as are other ethnographic documentary

strategies, and the medium refinements of structural cinema.11 By pursuing what may appear to

be a more idiosyncratic pairing of Let Each One Go Where He May with Warburg’s Mnemosyne

Bilderatlas, it is hoped an expansion and, as shall be seen, a redeployment of Russell’s initial intentions for the film, will be achieved.

4 Cultural memory is here opposed to theories of communicative or collective memory as much as it is opposed to

history. Cultural memory is perhaps most visible as a technics, or tertiary memory. See Jan Assmann, 2011. Cultural

Memory and Western Civilisation: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, p. 6; Bernard Stiegler, 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and

George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 4; pp. 140-1. 5 It is, as is the Warburg Institute, which has the word Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess and mother of the Muses,

inscribed above the entrance to the library. 6 Aby Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity” (1905), in Aby Warburg, 1999. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:

Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, introduction by Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt.

Los Angeles: Getty Publications, p. 553. 7 Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,” (1920) in Warburg, 1999, p. 598. 8 Following Walter Benjamin’s identity of the image in the Arcades’ Convolute N3,1: ‘this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a critical point in the movement at their interior… In other words image is dialectics at a standstill.’ Walter Benjamin, 1999. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; prepared on the basis of the German

volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 462-3. 9 Sven Lütticken’s recent study History In Motion, attempts to maintain an approach to the moving image through a

double notion of “historicity.” In this way it seeks to re-affirm historical narrative in a way that is fundamentally

antithetical to Russell’s proximity to Warburgian movement, which Lütticken counters with a more recently historical

theorisation of movement in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Sven Lütticken, 2013. History in Motion:

Time in the Age of the Moving Image. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 17-27. 10 Michael Sicinski, 2009. “The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May,” Cinema Scope,

http://cinema-scope.com/spotlight/spotlight-the-unbroken-path-ben-russell’s-let-each-one-go-where-he-may/, accessed

April 2, 2014. 11 For example the documentary-anthropology films made by Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty and Jean Rouch, in the

earlier part of the 20th century, alongside formal experiments such as those made by Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton

in the 1960’s and 70’s. See Brian Winston, 1995. Claiming the Real: The Grierson Documentary and its Legitimations

London: B.F.I.; P. Adams Sitney, 1971. Film Culture Reader: An Anthology, edited and with and Introduction by P.

Adams Sitney. London: Secker & Warburg.

FIELKE: THE IMAGE OUT OF HISTORY

Memory

Warburg’s ‘method’ for the Image-atlas (1926-9), was the planned final form of his life-long

research into the cultural history of the West and antiquity, consisting of an elaborate selection of

images with only marginal recourse to textual supplementation. As a particularly efficient

example of how one might go about allowing for an extension beyond the reduction of what

essentially remains a discourse on the visible, Warburg’s Atlas points to the site of the image in

its particular relation to memory as a technique, and therefore to experience – what has been

termed the ‘semantic void’ of the image.12 It appears, unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death

in 1929, as a collection of over 1000 photographic reproductions that seem to float within the 79

black panels they are grouped and tacked upon. With its clusters of themed antique motifs, the

appearance of contemporary images – crowd formations, golfers and advertising – stand out in

plain relief against the millennial artworks depicting gods and other lasting figures.13 Warburg’s part-montage strategy is important here. As a tactic the almost or pre-montage quality of the

work’s evolving configurations reveal the montage potential as one of selection and distinction

operating within a dissonance and anachronism between the photographic “image”-events.

Philippe-Alain Michaud has investigated the coterminous development of the cinematic form to

Warburg’s own studies into the continuing influence of antiquity within modernity.14 Most

importantly, this study conflates the camera and the cinema, as a room, or site: differing only as

two in-stances — one before or behind, the other within — a kind of holy trinity of image

production that emerges from the industrial revolution.15 This approach to the image poses a

contrast to the often overly positivist iconographies and histories that result from textual

abbreviations. Countered by Warburg’s Atlas, the emphasis on the recording of expression in the

work foregrounds a complex history of the gesture. These visual expressions of human

experience Warburg conceived as ecstatic productions, ‘engrams’ of memory.16

Leaving Warburg’s Atlas for the moment, the idea that gesture is indispensable to language

follows Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s influential anthropological study, Gesture and Speech (1964-

5).17 The second volume of which, “Rhythm and Memory,” suggests the temporal character of

our ability to retain information as a technical tendency we call memory. This study, so

influential upon subsequent 20th century theory, continues today, drawn upon here from the more

recent examination of the work by contemporary theorist Bernard Stiegler. Given the expanded

place we may afford the ‘Warburgian’ camera / room / or theatre, the cinema, as a tertiary memory apparatus, also follows Stiegler’s emphasis on man’s technical distinction (Stiegler, 1998). The cinema may then well be the productive zenith of Leroi-Gourhan’s notion of a “curtain of objects,” appearing to represent a correspondingly lucid contemporary organisation of

12 Giorgio Agamben, 2011. “Nymphs,” Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and

Robert Mitchell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 69. 13 See Aby Warburg, 2003. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Herausgegeben von Martin Warnke unter Mitarbeit von Claudia

Brink. Zweite, ergänzte Auflage. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 14 See Philippe-Alain Michaud, 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone

Books. At the end of his lecture on the zodiacal transmissions in the calendar room of Ferrara, Warburg likened his

method to catching the riddles of antiquity in the ‘cinematographic spotlight.’ Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and

International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia,” (1912) in Warburg, 1999, p. 585. 15 The thesaurus is perhaps the best literary trope here, or perhaps the stanza. There also resonates somewhat with Ariella

Azouley’s tripartite structure for the photograph as a political ontology. See Ariella Azouley, 2012. The Civil Contract of

Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 13-4. See also Hollis Frampton’s comments on the strange temporality of the cinema, where the cinema is not even physically, ‘“there,” before us,’ and where ‘the spectator’s future is the artist’s past.’ Hollis Frampton, 1983. “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in its Place,” Circles of Confusion:

Film, Photography, Video Text 1968-80. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, pp. 154-5. 16 Following German biologist Richard Semon’s 1921 text, Die Mneme and his idea of memory ‘traces.’ See Matthew Rampley, 2000. Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz

Verlag, p. 89. 17 André Leroi-Gourhan, 1993. Gesture and Speech (1964), trans. from the French by Anna Bostock Berger and

introduced by Randall White. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


inorganic matter: the screen as an exteriorisation of the ‘membrane’ of our technical mediations (cited in Stiegler, 1998, p. 57). This technical tendency is also exhibited in the ‘movement’ Warburg first diagnosed in his reppellant art historical response to the still grandeur of classical

aesthetics.18 This does not only work alongside the mechanical exploitation of the persistence of

vision employed by the cinema, however: it is the place of empathic productions in the art work

which requires its particular emphasis. Frances Yates, who published The Art of Memory in 1966

(contemporaneous with Leroi-Gourhan’s study), hinted at this potential, when she recovered how

the survivals of classical memory treatises suggested moving, stirring, images as of fundamental

importance to the artificial memory for over two millennia. By following Warburg’s earlier work in the field, Yates uncovered the conflation necessary to the art of memory and externalised

images.19 Moving in their pathos, as much as in their literal mechanism, there are therefore,

memorial antecedents for the cinematic image that operate across a longer duration of history

than merely industrial modernity.

Historiality

Let Each One Go Where He May, a completely realised work in so far as it stands alone in

Russell’s developing oeuvre, is premised upon the tensions between history, memory and

forgetting in its engagement with a post-colonially ‘global’ community living on the periphery of the developed world. Russell’s earlier experimental short films (for example the Trypps series

and his remake of the germinal Workers leaving the Factory20) had developed a complex

understanding of the cinema’s complex phenomenological relationship to experience and history. In his first feature-length work, the descendants of an enslaved people from Africa, whose

complex cultural identities, effaced by time, are shown through the quiet existence of their

casual, everyday gestures in contemporary time. It is upon the particular formulation – ‘out of history’ – that this work uses these images to represent the challenges faced by the medium of

film specifically, as not unlike those marginalised by the dominant discourses of cultural identity.

Following Russell’s double logic, which for him founds the very idea of the cinema, the images

may ‘both refer to the world but also constitute a world unto themselves,’ the work transcends more classically modernist postures in its awareness of modernism’s historical epochality.21

The film itself is anchored by a voice recording from outside, which it begins with, creating

an aural, environmental entrance to frame the images, not the other way around. Importantly, it is

not an inter-title that first appears as an epigraph upon the screen, but phrase by phrase, the

translation of the words spoken eventually reveal the film’s title: ‘…let each one go where he may” – the only stable linguistic signification scripted for the entire film. The date of the

epigraph posits the year 1978, but we hear the words spoken in real time and suspect the

arbitrariness of its historical deployment: in the cinema, in Saramaccan – a local dialect of

Suriname, a country situated on the northern coast of South America that exists today,

precariously maintaining, amongst other, the culture of a people marooned in history.22

Following this initial diachronic complex, a deliberate anachronism, seemingly simple

diegetic sound is employed for the remainder of the film’s 135 minutes. By calling on structural

18 See Warburg’s thesis ‘Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring (1893),’ in Warburg, 1999, pp. 89-156. 19 Francis Yates, 1992. The Art of Memory (1966). London: Pimlico. See Giles Fielke, 2013. “Conflation and the Art of

Memory: Frances Yates, Hermetism, and the Memory Theatres of Giulio Camillo and Robert Fludd,” Genre, Affect and

Authority in Early Modern Europe conference. Melbourne: The University of Melbourne, July 2013. Publication

forthcoming. 20 Ben Russell, 2005 – 10. Trypps 1 – 7, dimensions variable; Ben Russell, 2008. Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai).

16mm, colour, silent, 7’. 21 Ben Russell, 2010. “Cinema Is Not The World,” incite: journal of experimental media, 2 (Spring-Fall, 2010),

http://www.incite-online.net/russell2.html, accessed October 16, 2013. 22 The quote is from an oral history of the Abaísas, cited under the title ‘The Escape,’ and refers to the rebellion against 17th century Dutch slave colony, in Richard Price, 2002. First Time: the historical vision of an African American people

(1983). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 71.


elements for a work that also nominates cine-ethnography and documentary tropes as its strategy

for visibility, the work at once places itself between the institutional categories of modern art and

anthropology. The length of each shot, for example, seems to have been defined by the

standardized 400ft roles of film equating to each of the 13 ten minute scenes. It is by revealing

the structural edges of the filmic apparatus, as Russell does, that the work asks of us to recognise

the limits of these discrete images in an attempt at what filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky suggests

stages ‘the full energy of the present.’23 The image made, out of history, stands therefore, before

it.

In the year Russell’s film debuted, historian Tom Gunning made a curious presentation

regarding the older experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. Reviewing a republication of the

late artist’s writing, he says: ‘[Frampton] never abandons temporality for some timeless Platonic perspective, but he does indeed pull himself out of the linear and unidirectional narrative

commonly known as history. His work cannot, of course, exist outside of time or history.

Inasmuch as these constitute the very centre of both his films and his writings.’24 This, I would

argue, is the historial element of phenomenal filmmaking that continues in the works of

filmmaker-artists like Russell today. The modern tendency to both speed and delay is

constitutive of the works. ‘Being is historial,’ Stiegler writes, initially paraphrasing Heideggerian phenomenology, ‘and the history of being is nothing but its inscription in technicity.’25 In

Russell’s film, this historial being, aware of its place in the chronology of cinema, manages to be both: “outside of time” and “out of history,” the film takes its place alongside, or with, the

cinema in a contemporary instance of viewing. Unlike exhibited structural films before it, which

so often required your transfixion, so long as you ‘get’ the idea or concept of the work, Russell’s is a film which reaches as close to the ongoing doubling of real time, without repetition, as it

possibly can.26

The image pro-ducing history ‘shows’ its time as outside of time. The images also appear ‘out’ of history due to their refusal to offer initially recognisable historical signifiers: stable dates,

narrative effects, image/counter-image montages. The on-screen gestures of the film’s two primary figures, are mirrored by that behind them, the camera-work of Chris Fawcett (who

skillfully operated the steady-cam), literally carrying the film, the viewer, through time, now

outside of time. It is the attempt at this silently complex and anachronistic time that is

immediately challenged however, straight after its premier screening at the Toronto Film

Festival. The images are made by the film ‘out’ of history, but at once they re-make it, as is clear

from Russell’s answer to the first, most obvious ‘Q & A’ inquirer:

Right, where was I? That is even one of the questions — where does this film even take

place? What is the culture? Where is this place? What is its geography ? I know all of

these answers, but what’s really exciting for me as a filmmaker is setting up a

23 Nathaniel Dorsky, 2003. Devotional Cinema. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, p. 21-2. 24 Tom Gunning, 2009. “Frampton Comes Alive! (Review),” Artforum (April 2009), p. 54. 25 Stiegler, 1998. p. 4. Further, in the second volume of his study he posits: ‘Historiality means connection to the already-

there as the past: as anticipation after the already-there, as facticity within being-toward-the-end in which “being-there is

its past”.’ Bernard Stiegler, 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 41.

This is echoed in the double-nature inherent to the film medium: ‘historiality can only be initiated as the epochal

redoubling of the already-there’s technological suspension, which is also the only means of access to the already-there.

Deferred time, [also deferred action – the Freudian nachtraglichkeit] essential to orthothetic contextuality as constituted

by orthography, furnishes what the Occident will call “knowledge.” (Stiegler, 2009, p. 60) Knowledge then, according to

Stiegler, is suspended in technics. 26 In this way it is infinitely different and more easily viewed than, say, Michael Snow’s important structural and

rhythmic work, Wavelength. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 16mm, colour, sound, 44’, 1967.


proposition in which the audience doesn’t know and, in some sense, is forced to address their own assumptions about culture, location, and place.27

He must acquiesce, however, revealing what has been described already above: that the

brothers depicted follow a path taken by their ancestors to escape their Dutch slavemasters, it has

since been in use for over 300 years. This path describes the films historiality: a reciprocal

technique: “organizing” the film as cultural memory, as cultural memory supplies history with its

substance. History of course, is memory (as memory becomes history). Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan, that: ‘technics does not aid memory: it is memory, originarily assisted,’28 shows

how for Stiegler, history is just one apparatus of memory that is most readily demonstrated by its

literal orthothetic recording. Made available to us by creating tertiary memory objects, beyond

lived communications, the affront to history here however, is the analogue and real-time

recording capacity technology of the camera as leveling with the persistence of vision and sound

in perception. This doubling of reality may both orient and disorient history in light-time.

This approach to the work is a contemporary paradigm that younger artists such as Russell

understand well. It is the reflection upon the history of their productions, as a way of

encapsulating, of “folding-in” the history of their work, that at the same time transcends it.

Unacknowledged in Stiegler’s study is the precedent Warburg had set for addressing this

potentiality in the 20th century. The historial, in the gestural specificity of the cinema also

corresponds to a particularly lucid formulation by the thoroughly Warburgian, contemporary art-

historian Georges Didi-Huberman, to what he calls, ‘the alteration effected by images themselves on historical knowledge built on images.’29 Pointing to this interminable entwining of these

productions, it appears the image is always the image of an image.30

Movement

To orient history in language, like time, requires its outside, a gesture, dwelling in the ineffable

efficacy of images. Warburg’s Atlas is resistant to axiomatic knowledge, its selections reveal an

idiomatic and poetic potential in its maintenance of an interval between the site of the image and

history from the side of the work’s contents. Concerned with the distance, or deferral necessary

to legibility, a movement is required, the role of technical memory.

This “semantic gap” Warburg obsessed over — the image’s hesitation before signification — identifies an interminable activity. The present capacity of the image to act before historical

organisation in Warburg’s thought — to see movement in the static — is an important paradigm

through which more contemporary productions such as Russell’s are made possible.31 In the

cinema as the camera a technical externalisation of memory becomes the very site for the

displacement of the image, selected from the ‘an-archive’ of survivals – pointing to what is prior

to categorisation. Cultural memory could be understood here as identical with the after-life or

spectrality of images, held in their material form.32 Warburg’s Atlas nominates in this place a gap

27 Ben Russell cited in Livia Bloom, 2009. ““Participatory Ethnography” – Toronto’s Wavelengths 3: Let Each One Go

Where He May,” 15th September 2009, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2009/09/participatory-ethnography---

torontos-wavelengths-3-let-each-one-go-where-he-may/, cited 5 July 2012. 28 ‘…what [Leroi-Gourhan] terms, “retentional finitude”.’ Stiegler, 2009, p. 65. 29 Georges Didi-Huberman, 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends Of A Certain History Of Art, trans, John

Goodman. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. xxi. 30 Cf. Nicholas Heron (forthcoming). ‘Iconophilia: The Image of the Image,’ Emaj, 8 (November, 2014), forthcoming,

Melbourne: http://emajartjournal.com/. 31 Cf. Didi-Huberman, who takes up this Warburgian tendency to dislodge historical specificity, writing: ‘The history of images is a history of objects that are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined.’ Georges Didi-Huberman, 2003.

“Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” trans. Peter Mason, Compelling Visuality: The Work

of Art In and Out of History, eds. Claire J. Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

p. 44. 32 Cf. http://www.anarchive.net/, which points to a program for recognising the disorganisation of an overblown historical

archive. Accessed September 24, 2013.


that must maintain a necessary distance for an image to be efficacious, a gesture enabling

orientation.

In the cinema, Let Each One Go Where He May’s sense of immediacy is carefully deployed

through the careful selections Russell has made, any de-distancing is displaced by the artist’s care for the public reception of the images. We find traces of this orientation in the empathic

communications made between the film’s mythologised figures and the camera. This is not achieved through a particular activity but rather a gestural sympathy between the audience ‘in the labor of forgetting,’33 with the routinised labor of the figures in the screen. Coordination occurs

here in these reciprocal poses, producing cardinal orientations, eschewing narrative linearity. The

film’s long sequences — there is only one camera and twelve straight cuts used for its thirteen

scenes — depict marginalised labour, washing, mining, climactic rituals, traversing landscapes in

use, all the while incorporating the presence of the camera and its labour – circles of confusion

flare across the lens. At the end of the film we are left with the soundless images of the

cooperative navigation of the environment on a river by the brothers (our Epimetheus and

Prometheus). Exposed to the duration of this process, these images take on a particularly ghostly

quality for the observers, who remains ‘within’ the camera, following these silent figures who command recognition in their mute resistance.

During an early sequence that depicts the interior of a bus ride, we wonder whether the

silence of the commuters is due to the presence of the camera, or if the early morning monotony

often signalling another day of work in local centres is no different here than it is to the arteries

of the major metropolis. Walking down the bustling morning street of Suriname’s capital, Paramaribo, no-one seems to mind the camera that drifts through the street, following and

eventually losing one of the brothers in the mass — this is nothing like William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton, however.34 The incursion of the camera is not at all an unknown entity here,

but an everyday experience, a normalised co-operation with the global media environment

alongside automobiles and advertisements for Heineken. In a certain sense this sequence recalls

Standish Lawder’s brutally simple experimental film Necrology (1970).35 The films recognition

of its medium-determinacy, its recognition of the radical potential these discrete images serve as

analogues, simultaneously subverts any claim to the analogue, what for Russell is the cinema that

‘both refers to the world but also constitutes a world’ (Russell, 2010). Russell tests this form,

rather than adopting its spectacular, or attractive, modes of deployment. His minimal use of

montage highlights this strategy, it attempts to ‘break’ with the most basic element of the form itself.36

The camera then, as the present location for the film – both its audience and those subject to

its gaze, those captive in the exchange – is the constructed location that bears out the thought of

movement. It can be both static, as it is initially, and following – working on – the film’s main

subjects, the brothers Monie and Benjen Pansa. What this mechanical feature of the camera’s movement demonstrates — at times following and at others preceding and looking back-upon its

subjects, while following its own particular path — is the impossibility of the historical

‘documentation’ of a cultural memory, it merely “gestures back” to the spectator. This revelation

of a semantic gap doubles the gesture, creating its “in-between,” oscillating as Warburg’s un-

polarised image.

Gesture, according to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, exhibits the ‘pure mediality’ of people, a politics of representation must begin therefore with movement. Correspondingly, Stiegler’s desire for a politics of memory in its present mode of industrialization suggests the image is that

33 Jeff Wall cited in Michael Fried, 2008. Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before. New York: Yale University

Press, p. 12. 34 Stranded In Canton was an early video work that was shot on a Portapak, while many of Eggleston’s friends continued on around him, bemused by the arrival of a portable video recorder they were perhaps unaware of its penetration into

their social circle. See William Eggleston, 1973. Stranded In Canton, Sony PortaPak video, black and white, 76’. 35 Standish Lawdor, 1969. Necrology, 16mm, black and white, 12’. 36 In an expanded sense of montage, there are even no walls or interiors employed, the film is always “outside.”


which is followed by and follows history, as that which is recorded. Oscillating in the gesture, the

resistance that effects an ecstatic communication, is memory in its technical potentiality, as not

recalled. With the cinema as figuring the temporal mediation of memory, gesture, Agamben

writes, is ‘the site of the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language.’37 This “speechless language” apprehends memory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty formulated this thought in way that also implicates

the necessity of movement. ‘Language,’ he says, ‘bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body.’38 To think the image as language, the gesture must

make an impression. This inscription is that which is written by the body itself, and retains a

memory of its passing. The cine-film can collect this passing without monumentalising its

characters. It can record and represent any form of life.

Many have placed Warburg’s research alongside the emergence of cinema. It is not hard to trust this intuition, however it is worth reconsidering just what Warburg’s research of part-montage can offer to this form of art, given its contemporary declension. It is not a

characterisation by kind, or even by likeness that founds this proximity, it is at its core a complex

notion of movement, present from Warburg’s originary art historical thesis, of stirring and oscillating, memorial and technical survivals. Ernst Gombrich’s diagnostic classification of

Warburg’s fundamental “problem” could perhaps be posited another way: in ‘the image’s refusal to set,’39 gesture’s speechless language inflicts a corporeal production in the artwork. Memory’s reflection, out of history, is an after-life that becomes historical. Let Each One Go Where He

May, like Warburg’s moving images, remind us that without gesture, history is without a language. A language here established by cultural memory.

Acknowledgement

This article was developed from my honours year thesis at the University of Melbourne,

supervised by Felicity Harley-McGowan. I would like to thank her for her comments and

guidance throughout the writing process. I am also indebted to Francis Plagne for his editorial

suggestions and Madeleine Martiniello for reading the final versions of this paper.

37 Giorgio Agamben, 1999. “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy, ed. and trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 78. 38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1964. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. with an introduction by

Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, p. 44. 39 Ernst Gombrich, 1970. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London: The Warburg Institute and University of

London, p. 6. Gombrich’s identification of the very ‘problem’ Warburg’s approach suffered, which in fact reveals Warburg’s antithesis to the art historical direction, represented by Erwin Panofksy, towards a more positive epistemology

and subsequently developed in his wake.


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giles Simon Fielke: PhD Candidate, Art History Department, School of Culture and

Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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