In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault tells us to look at the political and social margins rather than the center, at the ruled rather than the rulers, at the measured and disciplined body caught up in everyday techniques of power. The 1975 treatise can be interpreted as modeled on contemporary theories of vision and 1960s-1970s activist or dropout politics (two mutually exclusive techniques which were derived from the same premises). Although Foucault does not speak directly to this period or these events, given the after-effects of 1968 in France, this is hardly a novel assertion.

In the United States, it was an era, beginning in the late 1940s with McCarthyism, of governmental surveillance through wiretaps, infiltration, and photographic spying, all compiled in FBI dossiers. In the United States, women, blacks, and students organized and spoke up, taking local issues of daily life to the center of U.S. culture. They used the available and cheap techniques of bodily resistance in sit-ins, marches, and masquerade—hair length, blue jeans, and bralessness. Liberation from the disciplinary constraints of the family, corporations and work, school, the military, and the church, a nexus making up what Foucault calls “the disciplinary society,” was the hue and cry (and plan of attack) of the counterculture and protest movements. This local, personal, and generational rebellion internally addressed the civil rights struggle, the end the war in Vietnam protest, the women’s movement, endorsed personal life-styles of ecology, nonviolence, and peace, and sided with guerrilla and international struggles for political liberation. Silenced voices spoke with their bodies, bursting into the nightly TV news and newspaper headlines—places usually reserved for white men wearing suits.

The actions involved persecution, loss of jobs, and imprisonment; activism was documented by the number of arrests (which the Berrigan brothers are still compiling; Abbie Hoffman’s obituary listed his forty-two arrests). That imprisonment, along with capital punishment, became newspaper headlines and nightly news, with footage of protestors being carted off to jail, might have something to do with Foucault’s opening Discipline and Punish with a historical execution and the extraction of confession.

The key premise of both personal, everyday action and collective, global politics was repression, an hypothesis which included, perhaps privileged, the sexual; repression was taken out of the clinic and seen in every niche of everyday life. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault’s argument against Freud’s “repression hypothesis” can be read as a response, or a corrective, to the counterculture and such visions of liberation extolled, for example, by Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema. Like his model of power as productive, with positive effects and pleasures along with negative constraints, Foucault complicates the interpretation of so many actions and so many pleasures based on lifting repression. To put his argument simply: rather than sexuality being repressed or kept in the dark, it has been an ongoing obsession of the family and state, imagined as a key to identity, a definitive secret about which we constantly speak.

Thus, when taken together, these two texts, published within two years, provide a model which epitomizes and critiques the 1960s and early 1970s. One book echoes the other. Regarding repression, Foucault posits that “if sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.”¹ Avant-garde or underground films from Anger’s 1947 Fireworks on, in the United States, but including earlier films, for example, the censorship of Un Chien Andalou, are presented and defended as deliberate transgressions. As with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, legal court cases over censorship occurred after disruption of screenings, confiscation of equipment (the projector was perpetrator and evidence of a crime), and the arrest of viewers. If Smith or Anger had been caught seeing their own films, they could have been imprisoned. Going to underground films involved the threat of jail, the courage of one’s convictions, the excitement of risk.

Foucault assesses, correctly for this period, that speaking of “sex in terms of repression . . . is . . . to speak out against the powers that be . . . to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures” (7). Protest movements and avant-garde film alike sought “enlightenment and liberation.” What is not often noted is Foucault’s third term, “manifold pleasures.” The manifold pleasures of that period are all that is remembered in the innumerable 1980s revisions of the 1960s in criticism, films, and television. These often nostalgic references recall a time of youth when pleasure meant something—the linkage of personal pleasure to political commitment and concrete action, without risk of deadly disease. “The personal is political” was the politicizing of pleasure with one’s real rather than metaphorical body by having sex, by taking drugs, by sitting in, by marching, by recycling, by conserving energy.

As I previously described, “thirtysomething” is sentimentally located in that history as personal memory of friendship, as irrevocable loss and free-floating desire amid the familial ennui of present failures and daily mediocrities. Having been active in that period grants middle-aged scholars and television characters political credentials. (Paradoxically, activists who are still carrying on a 1960s politics appear as unsavvy, simpleminded, ineffectual anachronisms; long hair for men has returned but as style not protest.) Whether real or imagined, participants fondly remember occupying buildings and being gassed by local police wielding billy clubs and abusive language; the memory has lost specificity, along with fear, and become fuzzily, sweetly collective and apolitical; forgotten is the real terror of police brutality and the paranoia of FBI surveillance, the loss of jobs and imprisonment, the anguish of the struggle with family, the guilt of being polygamous after years of inculcated monogamy and virginity.

Candace Bergen as “Murphy Brown” and the canceled Mary Tyler Moore as “Annie MacGuire” were given sit-com pasts of being activists; on their 1988 series, they both attended the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 as lefties (we know, however, that Mary was on her way to Minnesota, wearing lipstick and dyed-to-match rather than blue jeans). Murphy’s former lover, a Tom Hayden activist, returns to her present in an episode which restages their instantaneous, hot lust, which is all they had then or now in common, equating precisely the sexual and the political pleasures of the protest movement; the sexual, the political all bound up in a libidinal flow that is youth, turned to memory, is also transformed into scholarship and theory.

On a 1988 episode of “Murder She Wrote,” a grandson who has been missing for twenty years is brought to life by a con artist in a look-like inheritance scam; however, aided by the ever-alert and all-seeing Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher (Foucault’s “speaking eye”), he recovers his memory, discovering he is the real grandson. He was in an automobile accident after protesting at the 1968 Chicago convention. Like many revisions of the 1960s, he had amnesia, remembers, and will now inherit millions, becoming a richer albeit more sensitive yuppy than he already is, to say nothing of reconstituting the family, bringing the protesting sons home, as it were.

The family structure attacked by the counterculture is the dream of the 1980s, emblematized by owning a single-family home, the other fetish of “thirtysomething,” which in the United States is becoming unaffordable for the first-time buyer (one can only afford to buy a home if one already owns one). In the 1980s, we recreate the 1950s and remember the 1960s, paradoxically keeping the radical goals and beliefs safe in the nostalgic past rather than anticipating an activism for the future. (We filled the students’ protest in China with our own memories, forgetting political differences.) We have, to a great degree, also forgotten that the ecology, women, and race were central issues, a clear and ongoing series of possible actions.

Because daily life and the sexual were founding terms, everyone could take action and be involved; the local and the global were elided; the personal was political. Along with domestic ecology, pleasure was granted a political agenda and assumed a noble purpose. Pleasure was taken out of the sphere of individual gratification secured by consumption, linked to a common cause which provided a specific plan of action. Along with speech as transgressive, one wore politics on one’s sleeve, adopting fashions of the third, Native American, working-class, or rural rather than corporate or high-fashion world. Friend and foe alike could see, immediately, which side one was on. Burning draft cards or bras took on equal significance; sexual repression and militaristic repression were part of the same package. The body—costumed, active, holding hands and linked collectively as nonviolently powerful—was the material and immediately visible landscape.

Critically, the movement had correctly assessed the proclivity of the media for events rather than discourse or argument; it was a theater of immediately visible and antagonistic actions, staging a visual theatrics of costume, slogans, song, and simple, repeated actions performed on, by, and with the body as much as language—a strategy which the antiabortion movement has adopted in the 1980s (in yet another of the crazy inversions between the 1960s and the 1980s with dizzying swings of political reversal). Video artists like Ant Farm staged performance events which used and critiqued TV.

In Media Burn, a customized dream car, driven by two art pros watching closed-circuit TV, crashed through a wall of flaming television sets at the San Francisco Cow Palace. This Fourth of July celebration included a speech by the Kennedy artist president, Doug Hall; local TV news coverage of the anti-TV event, which had the trimmings and hoopla of a sports spectacle, including play-by-play, programs, T-shirts, and junk food, was incorporated in the subsequent videotape. The sophisticated countercultural critique of media was employed to advantage—in art and political protest alike—and broadcast on local news, albeit with bemused, condescending confusion by the local reporters. Video art, like body art, performance art, and conceptual art, partook of a body politics with an eye to media coverage—a dilemma of documentation versus the ephemeral, preservation versus dissipation, product or book/print culture versus media culture.

The emergence in the 1980s of theories of the body is coincident with the revision of the 1960s where the body as much as speech and writing was the site of action, change, and politics. The body was a production, created outside of, and set against, consumption, endorsing an ecology which conserved, recycled, and sometimes “went back to nature” by living in communes. We can hear this emphasis on the body early on in Barthes, who “writes the body”; in Bakhtin’s grotesque, carnivalesque body; and in Foucault’s disciplined body.

To reiterate: Foucault links the discourse on sex to “the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come” (7)—an apt description of the euphoric claims of that period. It was believed that avant-garde films and video would alter not only our consciousness but the international institutions of filmmaking and broadcasttelevision, changing the very course of film and video history on an international (for film) and global (for video) scale.

Against the founding premise of repression, however, Foucault inverts the argument, insisting that instead of a censorship of sex, we have “installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (23). One apparatus producing discourse about sex was avant-garde film, which equated cinema with the erotic self. Avant-garde films were viewed by censors as pornographic. And, for the repressive hypothesis to work as a premise, sex must be viewed as outside of discourse; only the removal of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to the secret of sex. Thus, many films were posed as riddles, “outside discourse” or representation, including Brakhage’s The Riddle of Lumen; Nelson’s The Great Blondino concludes with a last quick shot of the Sphinx. Deciphering hidden meanings was the critic’s task, aided by the filmmaker telling us the truth, or secret, behind the film. The secret that is sex (with sex linked to male identity) can be read back over Bloom’s reading of romanticism, including visionary films.

Perhaps no one was more euphoric about liberation than Gene Young-blood. His passion over “expanded cinema” is orgiastic, downright orgasmic.² The key to the hyped, speeding, massively pleasurable future is the equation of sex and technology. His Expanded Cinema is a whoopee book of cybernetic/computer speak, with mind-boggling terms like “simultaneous synaesthetic synthesis.” A brief example of one very male Utopian fantasy of this futuristic technodreamer: in “Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism” he asserts that “underground” movies are “synonymous with sex.” “If we place any credence at all in Freud, personal cinema is by definition sexual cinema” (112). Later, invoking his guru, Norman O. Brown, he states that “we hold the radical primacy of the passions to be self-evident.” He rails against monogamy and “specialization of sexual activity.” He champions group sex, recording sex on videotape; in a breathless burst of sources he quotes R. D. Laing, Marcuse, Dylan, Fuller, and Joyce, then analyzes the Esalen Institute in Big Sur along with films (Fuses by Carolee Schneeman and Andy Warhol). He celebrates the fact that “within the last three years intermarital group sex has become an industry of corporate business, particularly in the Southern California area where a new world man is evolving . . . compiling guest lists for orgies at homes and private country clubs . . . many attend two orgies per week. . . . They discover the truth . . . that you must live outside the law to be honest” (115). Living outside the law at the local country club, after returning home from a day of executive vice-presidency, is a strange version of radicalism. Women or video, then, could be interchangeable, like Sex, Lies and Videotape; women, in multiples, in any size or shape, made of any materials, would be the replaceable fodder for these heterosexual, male ecstasies. Is that what happens when one moves to California? However outrageous the equation of avant-garde with the orgies of middle-class couples at Esalen appears today, Youngblood’s credo was taken very seriously into the academy—forming one premise of the avant-garde, the risk of abandoning ideology.

The secret of sex is the obsession of the classical film as well, although it employs different techniques. As a counterpoint, I will digress to Hollywood film, reviving an older argument. Within the historical parameters of the classic text, cinema is an everyday machine of the ideology of the family. It is an institution which relays and constructs objects of desire, finally conscripted within heterosexuality and the family through film’s endless creation of new, youthful couples. The representation of the erotic, promenaded female body—the figure of exploitation—then the denial and containment of that dangerous and unacceptable eroticism by death, marriage, or German expressionist lighting (of women living alone, i.e., without a man) in The End is both the paradox and obsession of classical film. These film discourses of (hetero)sexuality parallel Foucault’s analysis of the stated historical, rhetorical terrain: “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum while exploiting it as the secret” (35).

In classical film, the secret is embedded in the fade to black, protected by the safety and closure of “The End.” Foucault defines sexuality as “the name that can be given to a historical construct. . . one relay of which is the body that produces and consumes” (105-106). The on-screen female body is produced as a representation for male consumption (1) by the narrative and (2) through the eyes of the male protagonist, the male spectator. Foucault further describes this historical body, dating from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present and foreseeable future, as a class body: “One of [the bourgeoisie’s] primary concerns was to provide itself with a body and a sexuality . . . the endogamy of sex and the body. . . . The bourgeoisie’s blood was its sex” (124). (Which suggests why the protest movement, as it grew older, returned to the middle-class family, state legislatures, and corporate jobs, leaving others, such as blacks, who could not be so easily [re]assimilated, out in the cold.)

Thus, sexuality, conducted on the plane of the body, is a particular production, a historical construct, erected since the eighteenth century by the institution of the family. This version of the family is the locus of a critical conjuncture between what Foucault labels the “deployment of sexuality” and “the deployment of alliance” (106): the family, later supported by psychoanalysis, anchors sexuality and the circulation of wealth and reproduction, whereas before, these functions and discourses had been distinct. For example, the gloriously sexed and air-brushed body of Rita Hayworth, fashioned in gold lame for eroticism (the deployment of sexuality) in Cover Girl is, in the end, coupled to Gene Kelly’s middle-class Brooklyn body (the deployment of alliance.)

Splitting this alliance by rebelling against the institutionalization of the heterosexual couple and the nuclear family can be seen, then, as historically radical, just as the 1980s reconstitution of the nuclear family on television and in daily life must be thought of as a conservative move; whether argued in 1988 as the American dream by Republican or Democrat, there is little difference.

This collapse of two formerly separate systems within the family occurs because, among other reasons, mechanisms of power and knowledge are now centered on sex. Foucault’s analysis of power is of particular interest in relation to classic texts. He defines power as “a multiplicity of force relations, a process . . . a chain . . . with domination and subordination as its terminal form” (92). In his construct, “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of [its operations]. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its mechanism” (86). This depiction of an apparatus of sexuality matches analyses of the technical and narrative mechanism of classical films, as well as the relations between on-screen male and female protagonists as poles of the domination/subordination split—another binarism which is too restrictive. To place eroticism within the family and consequently to put women in their place of subordination within that family is often The End of the classical film. It is not insignificant that in order to accomplish this task of power, the apparatus must be masked.

Yet, paradoxically, and consistent with Foucault’s rhetoric of simultaneous inversion (or cultural dialectics), along with masking, a parallel tactic is accentuation or excess. Foucault locates one of power’s four major strategies as the “hysterization” of women’s bodies. This strategy constructs the female body as “thoroughly saturated with sexuality.”

Thus, in the process of hysterization of women, “sex” was defined in three ways: as that which belongs in common to men and women; as that which belongs, par excellence to men and hence is lacking in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself constitutes woman’s body, ordering it wholly in terms of the functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agitation. (153)

The history of classical cinema could be written as an agitation of women’s bodies. In cinema, sexuality becomes image—framed, fragmented, then unified for consumption. The addition of spoken language, in its historical subservience to the image, like the couple, marrying the image, increases the fragmentation, unified into a singular coherence, in the end. It is significant that spectator is the term for an individualized audience, with voyeurism, a perversion, as the acceptable concept describing the spectator’s process and position. There is no equivalent analysis of the ecouteur, of overhearing.

The main currency of exchange is the erotically coded image of the sexed female—highlighted, halo-haired, feathered, furred, air-brushed by Technicolor, costumed by Adrian, and made up by Max Factor. This gorgeous, tantalizing concoction (attractive to women as well as men) uncontrollably, often powerfully, circulates through eighty-nine minutes of the film, only to be contained/possessed in the privileged seconds of the end by usually a middle-class male/husband. The moment of metamorphosis from sexuality to alliance is an immaculate conception, keeping cinema’s virginal code intact in the unseen and the unheard of the fade to black—the secret that is sex. Sex “by itself constitutes women’s body,” and yet is “lacking in women.” This is film’s paradox and women’s historical double bind. Film’s solution—fade/family—keeps the secret of sex in the dark of censorship or romance while imaging its manifestations in the “agitated” female body. The couple’s passage through the film into the fade then into The End literalized Foucault’s analysis:

It is through sex—in fact an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility . . . to his body . . . to his identity. (155-156)

Without a word or a sound or an image, cinema places us within the family after a text of foreplay. As Barthes so aptly stated, “The dramatic narrative [was] a game with two players; the snare and the truth . . . nothing has been shown . . . what [was] shown [was] shown in one stroke, at the end; it [was] the end which [was] shown.”³

Foucault’s system, so perfectly applicable to cinema, can also be applied to avant-garde, but in another way: the secret that is sex as the drama of the individual maker, granting him access to his body, to his intelligibility, to his identity. The avant-garde text multiplied our options, creating what Foucault labels, after Barthes, “a multiple implantation of perversions; sexual heterogeneities” (37) operating outside like Don Juan: “There were two great systems conceived by the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires—and the life of Don Juan overturned them both. We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he was homosexual, narcissistic, or impotent” (39-40). Warhol did indeed operate outside the law of marriage and the order of desire. While Don Juan might be an apt metaphor for avant-garde (and Warhol), I will follow Foucault’s lead and leave it up to others to speculate whether homosexual and narcissistic are pertinent analyses.

For Foucault, instead of repression, the new persecution of peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As he paradoxically argues, power and pleasure had twin functions—one that “monitors, watches, spies, palpates, brings to light,” and the pleasure that evades this power or travesties it; there is also “power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, resisting . . . attractions and evasions” (45). The argument of “spirals of power and pleasure” concludes with “we must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression” (49). Instead, Foucault asserts the opposite: “a proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities” (49).

It should be noted that all this recorded multiplication within avant-garde had little to do with women, their pleasures, except perhaps repression. Rather than the backhanded (for Drummond, castrated) compliment of figuring woman as excess, as does Hollywood cinema, avant-garde criticism and films took up Foucault’s second strategy, defining sex as that which belongs, par excellence, to men, who then sacrifice themselves to their own desire, to art, which is legitimately sanctioned by and equated with male desire. Yet, this is also true of theory; neither Barthes nor Foucault paid much attention to women; their desire is not my desire. (That Warhol overturned this “law of desire” and art’s precious object status, being revealed after his death as the consummate, total shopper, with what should have been an estate or rummage sale of dishes and cookie jars turning into a mass culture/art auction, is more than a small irony—like a cosmic joke that also perfectly assesses the state of postmodern culture, and not a negative take at that.)

I will repeat a story well known in video circles, a parable which I will rewrite later on. In L’Invention de Morel, Casares tells the tale of an escaped convict who found refuge on an island with only a single building, “the museum.” One day the convict (soon to be a film theorist or postmodern art critic) saw people strolling and talking. After voyeuristically watching them, he noticed that these beautiful people repeating actions and conversations were complex projections, machine-made images and sounds. For this eternity as illusions in space and time, they paid with their lives. By falling in love with one of the imaginary women, the hapless convict again imprisoned himself; he renounced his life to become her lover, an image, gradually dying, day by day. Taken at face value, this tale is a metaphor for the great paradoxes of art and life: real versus fiction, illusion, representation, the imaginary, and simulation—dilemmas now pondered by film scholars as/and postmodern philosophers. Of course, crucial is the concept of life, not art, lived in a museum—the imaginary restaged as history in a perpetual present.

Casares’s tale details an apparatus of power (both a surveillance machine and a simulation), driven by desire and predicated on vision—love at first sight ensnaring film theorists and filmmakers, like the hapless convict. Modern film theory is predicated on a critique of vision—an enshrined circuitry of looks capturing the spectator and demanding textual deconstruction. Sight as knowledge, “I see” equated with “I understand” in Western representation, declares an ideology. Paradoxically, film theory first put the finger on this slippage and then perpetuated it. The look—of camera, character, spectator—was analyzed as the dominant system of narrative, wielded and controlled by men and directed at women. Film theory incorporated models of the visible from Freud to Lacan (from his writings on the mirror phase and Poe’s Purloined Letter) to Foucault to Baudrillard and dissected dominant cinema—what Peter Burger, from Marx, has differentiated as “system-immanent criticism” as opposed to “self-criticism.”⁴

Granted avant-garde’s oversight of female subjectivity, absenting rather than starring women, film theory has, in large part and for good reason, thrown the films out with their interpretation. Avant-garde films—their frequent disjunction of sound and image, their undermining of conventional representation, including, continuity editing, point-of-view structures, and emphasis on the human figure (to say nothing of video, which multiplies perspective and dimensions)—which presented alternatives to narrative conventions were overlooked. Narrative was the quintessential pleasure, and theory made narrative more interesting and academically respectable.

The history of cinema reveals that entrepreneurs early on recognized that narrative was a more profitable and predictable commodity than other forms, particularly documentary. The switch between 1907 and 1908 to narrative fiction is astonishing and thorough. By centralizing production (and eventually distribution and exhibition) in the major studios, narrative could partially be subjected to standardization and to efficient cost-accounting methods derived from the business practices of Taylorism and Fordism, detailed in what came to be known as the “continuity script” which broke down costs along with story and scene. Narrative had become a set of economic conventions that could be repeated and differentiated, remaining within its basic premises. Thus, from 1913 on (and ensconced by the 1950s as the dominant exhibition strategy), the feature film replaced “presentation cinema” which included a plethora of forms, styles, and lengths. Avant-garde film, on the other hand, involved not only a break with the classical style and narrative but also differences with other avant-garde films. Each single work was imagined without rules, as an invention rather than a reworking. Avant-garde is in many ways an alternative “mode of production” which remembers an earlier history.

As a series of textual collisions, abrupt displacements, avant-garde films shift the position of the spectator, the points of address and view through a vacillation between second and third person while acknowledging conspiratorial, intimate, and knowing collusion with the first person author/maker. As materialism rather than moral, the frequently comic, postmodern avant-garde is the practice where work is manifest. At the same time, the spectator/auditor has a marvelous freedom to skip over, be involved with, be absent from, or be unruled by texts which have only oblique and tangential relationships to real things, bodies and spaces. Avant-garde filmmakers have known about surveillance and simulation and unraveled both social metaphors in ironic, if unwitting, comic remakes of Foucault and Baudrillard. Working against mastery, against institutions of discipline, whether art or pedagogy, they play with rather than decry panopticons and simulacra, in an irreverence for their context—academia.

Along with illustrating Foucault on sexuality, many avant-garde works critiqued institutions of discipline—their own conditions of production. This is not the pleasure which comes from spying or from being in the center of the panopticon; this is the pleasure of evasion, of resistance, on a local level, to the family and the school. Perhaps it is a childish or adolescent more than adult pleasure. If this is so, then Freud, a relentless theory of childhood, would be perfectly applicable. (Snow’s evasion in So Is This is on another level—resisting by parody and absence both the censorship and the criticism of previous films.)

I will analyze several films which address their context of education, their conditions of production and reception within academia/art. These works are pedagogic (or game show) simulations which critique a “disciplinary society,” thereby biting the university context (unaware of the theory) that feeds them. Like all metaphors, this suggests a double bind: the Gordian knot of simultaneously being within and against an institution. Beneficent inclusion usually defuses. These works—Da Fort by Rob Danielson, films by Owen Land, Bleu Shut by Robert Nelson, and So Is This by Michael Snow (all avant-garde versions of Keaton’s College)—are microcosms of disciplinary intrigue and simulacra of educated banality. They move among image, copy, and model, thereby querying representation—there is no pretense of a real—and art—their shaky status as “precious objects.” They challenge originals, firsts, unique essences and perhaps “aura” while emphasizing reception and complicit audiences. Enunciation is compounded; reception is “theorized.”

Da Fort (1982) by Rob Danielson—an unfamiliar work, an assemblage of clips selected from some fifteen educational films—repeats the interminable return, in various guises and gray rooms, of “educational” relationships, hierarchies of power: parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient, male/female. The premises of this twenty-minute film uncannily parallel the power/knowledge theses of Foucault, giving everyday credence to his historical assertions. (I should add that theory is not inscribed in these films by their makers; rather, I lay it over, a different story from the way theory functions in the films I analyze later by Rainer and Potter. Those films are reconnoiters with theory but here coincidence is the rule.) Da Fort ensnares us as both subject and object within a living history lesson of the subtle operations of disciplines. Constructed in seventeen segments separated by slow, measured fades to black, the tape runs the gamut of power’s repetitive institutions—the school, the family, the military, the corporation. While preserving the integrity of each “scene,”⁵ Da Fort’s rigid, unwavering, sometimes plodding segmentation both portrays and undermines Foucault’s vision of a panoptic society of disciplinary space and disciplinary time—the very definition of things “educational,” including films.

“Disciplinary space is divided, partitioned . . . breaking up groups, collectives. Each individual has his own place,” wrote Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Thus, it is not surprising that educational films are rigorously partitioned and spatially confining. Every character has a narrow place, a claustrophobic space that curtails movement of body and camera. As Foucault explains, “the first of the great operations of discipline is, therefore, the constitution of ‘tableaux vivants,’ which transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities. . . .”⁶ (Lyotard takes the “tableau vivant” oppositely: as an immobile, static means of agitating rather than ordering the spectator.) Da Fort is a Hale’s Tour of tableaux vivants, living pictures of our educational histories which turn back and comment on each other as miniatures of everyday monotony; the tape walks a fine line between being monotonous and revealing monotony.

The deliberate, formal pacing, both within the artificially arranged scenes and in the metronomic timing of their duration, illustrates a punctilious temporality. “It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice . . . detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations (159). Da Fort both amplifies and rebels against the imposed times of “pedagogical practice” by condensing the films’ times and inserting wry comments on the tape’s soundtrack. However, the performers, linked to the spectator, are locked into disciplinary time—outside “adult time,” without power (like the adolescent counterculture and youthful avant-garde). They rarely see the agency of control; usually they (and we) only hear its imperious voice. We can almost feel power’s presence and know it as the films’ sponsoring agencies, as well as our parents and teachers.

By using off-screen, tonally constant, male voice-overs giving commands or guidance, the soundtrack reverberates Foucault’s assessment that as power becomes more anonymous, those over whom it is exercised become more individuated: “In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man . . . the madman and delinquent more than the normal” (193). (Think of the relative personal anonymity of powerful Hollywood moguls and the presidents of today’s conglomerates which own film and television companies compared to our minute knowledge of avant-garde filmmakers.) Four off-frame, modern voices, taped at the film theory events in Milwaukee, are somewhat defensively added by Danielson as ironic echoes: Stephen Heath delivering a machine-gunned, brilliant summation of family romance and cinema, Vivianne Forrester breathlessly speaking of French “femininity” and silence, Jacqueline Rose forcefully explaining Lacan’s mirror phase, and Jean-Louis Comolli arguing avant-garde and the apparatus (coincidentally with Peter Gidal, although neither auditor nor Danielson could know this).⁷ These famous voices of French, Italian, and British film theory (vocal overtones found in miles of tape from six conferences) are exotically “foreign”; their difference collapses the Midwestern monotones into a single entity. Or perhaps, on the contrary, these “educated” voices of continental theory are terrorizing intellectual authority; at the same time, their meanings are undermined by the bland mise-en-scene into which their words are edited. We are reminded that theory, too, is institutionalized discourse.

Da Fort begins in a classroom with a tracking shot over wooden desk tops to the student teacher, Bill. A 1950s gray-suited, cropped-haired supervisor tells this bland soul: “I’ll be at the back of the room. Pretend that I’m not there.” Thus is inaugurated a sardonic and perverse network of “gazes that supervised,” a system of film surveillance in which the performers are in a constant state of being seen (and dreadfully aware of that state—a difference from other movies, known as bad performances, bad actors) by the offscreen presence; their bodies are contained, measured, and scrutinized by “eyes that must see without being seen” (171). Controlled finally by voice, three gazes organize the videotape’s surface and parlay our identifications: the student performers, the teachers, and the unblinking, static, and rather bored stare of the mid-placed camera.

The spectator is simultaneously the surveyor and the surveyed, always in a split and uneasy allegiance between the off-screen authority and the onscreen performers. Thus we are held in a double identification (perhaps a simulation) between sound and image, between domination and subordination, between seeing and being seen. Historical clues—1950s fashions, domestic norms, and technical indications of film’s past, like television reruns—distance the segments from us. Yet like the performers, we still experience the recognition—or threat—of punishment and failure. Caught in the present of the tape’s polarities, yet made safe by the marks of history and the lowly status of the educational film genre, we are reminded that we have already been normalized. We are literally historical subjects, or merely objects. At the same time, we are superior; that was then and this is now and aren’t we smart—for me a serious problem of much TV history and compilation films in general (less so here, but including The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter; ameliorated by incorporating present-day segments, and The Atomic Cafe).

The tape’s enigma (and comic, hermeneutic question/answer)—the truth of language, of speech—is initiated in the second segment. An anonymous, off-screen male voice hypnotizes a man and a woman, who eventually fall asleep (suggesting delightful similarities between spectating, learning, and therapy—the danger of dozing off being endemic to all three endeavors). A later clip from this found film concludes the tape. Aided by a word from the therapist—“gum”—the couple resolve their confusion. The result is a satiating resolution for the couple, closure, and the end of the tape. Speech, a one-word answer (the conclusion of true/false tests), is both clue and cure which can be bestowed or withheld.

All of the segments suggest that testing is inseparable from teaching and therapy. In a scene set in a psychology laboratory, shocks are administered by an on-screen experimenter (a middle-aged and suited male) to an offscreen male subject whenever he fails to state the “correct word pairings.” Again the importance of one-word, correct answers is emphasized. The onscreen experimenter is given instructions from a deep-throated, off-screen male voice: “Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he learns all the word pairs. . . . You have no other choice, teacher.” “Teacher” eventually refuses. He swivels in his chair and addresses the voice off, and us. We then learn that he is the subject and victim being tested. He is being surveyed. The off-screen subject was merely a plant. This layering and multiple occlusion of gazes does indeed resemble Foucault’s panopticon as a continual spiral of observations emitted from a central point that knows all and sees everything but which cannot be seen in return.

A rhyming collage of micro-powers, Da Fort lays bare the strategies of educational films, their amateur yet insidious enactments staged in anonymous studio twilight zones. Gray living rooms with wobbly sets, minimal props, and delimited entrances and exits suggest that there is no exit from education. Discipline is as inevitable as death and taxes. The forced gestures of the performers, squirming with goodwill and awkwardly pantomimed professionalism, reinforce the disavowal of the opening line: “Pretend I’m not there.” (This disavowal structures all film, suggesting that Da Fort inadvertently pokes fun at film theory and its deconstructions of family romance and the psychoanalytic place of the spectator.) The mechanical actors are sample humans encased in monotone simulations as slices of studied lives. These recreations are doses of visual documentation which turn “real lives into writing” (182), thereby making these seemingly innocent tableaux vivants a means of control.

Da Fort (again unwittingly) is a play on Freud’s fort-da! scenario of a child mastering absence and loss by making the unpleasurable tolerable—if not pleasurable—through repetition. As Freud asked: “How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?” The same question could be asked of avant-garde film in general. Unpleasurable play, the “wish to be grown-up,” the movement of the child from “the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game,”⁸ all describe our process as spectators, or students in naive cahoots with the teacher. We are projected through simulation back into childtime, remembering that unpleasurable game in its many manifestations, including the present context of independent avant-garde film.

Since the late 1960s, the films of Owen Land (a.k.a. George Landow; he changed his name in the early 1980s, I believe) have punctured education’s pretensions and avant-garde premises and styles. His work stands comically against disciplines—artistic and pedagogic. This wry humorist deflates current fashion—avant-garde film tenets, audiences, and student films in Wide Angle Saxon; psychoanalysis and structural film in On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? In many ways, all of his work, including performance and then video, are critiques of avant-garde practices, including references to and reworkings of his own films (“Remedial Reading Condescension” in Wide Angle Saxon, with its references to Frampton’s Nostalgia, and the literal remake, from another subject position, of Institutional Quality: New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops).

Land uses the stuff of education, including the arbitrary pleasures of language’s puns and sounds, to marshal his attack on the lunacy of disciplines (Land, formerly Landow, was a teacher at the Art Institute in Chicago and tried for years to go on permanent sabbatical, trying to escape, like his films, the confines of disciplinary spaces). While Da Fort recontextualizes educational scenes, Land restages or reenacts them, often as television commercials, derailing their pretensions. His films depict simulations of simulations of “real” life that become increasingly fantastic and elaborate productions (for example, the astonishingly costumed, performing pandas as “panderers” in On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed?). Found objects are coalesced with recreations, sardonic updates which intricately negotiate a “real” while erasing history.

The pleasure and play of language—in the punning and ever-growing titles of his films, in the use of such palindromes as “A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama” (a funny example of found TV news footage, retakes and outtakes of a news announcer who flubs his lines, repetitively printed almost as a loop with only the slightest difference in Wide Angle Saxon)—shift us within enunciation. Sometimes we are the third person auditor of Freud’s joking process. Or we are the second person object. In either case, we are part and parcel of the film’s process. For Land, after meticulous artistry, the joke is everything. Like Deleuzes’s simulacrum, it’s not “on us” but with us. Land’s work is a playful theory of comedy and a compendium of the sound-image-audience triangle. His films address art with forms of popular culture, recycling old formulas into critique—of commodity culture and art, without the ponderous baggage of moral condemnation.

Foucault writes: “the examination . . . is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance . . . in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. . . . the superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations . . .” (184-185). In process with Land’s films, we are being tested or encouraged to rebel with the filmmaker against discipline. Institutional Quality (1969) shreds the power/knowledge stranglehold, parodying the “truth” of vision and the imperative voice. IQ (intelligence quotient) is a test in fourteen segments. As the female teacher informs us, “It is a test of how well you can follow directions.” After three closeups of her face and the back of her head, we hear only her monotonous imperatives in droning voice-over. Since her commands request the performance of physical tasks—“turn on the lamp next to the couch,” “dust the picture that is over the television set,” “put the umbrella away,” “have some fruit”—we fail as subjects. We are children arrested in the submotor state of Lacan’s mirror stage, quite aware of our immobile, silent spectating status at the movies.

Furthermore, we are instructed to perform tasks with objects not visible in the picture. The last command in segment twelve—“see if your face is clean”—completes the mirror analogy (possibly denying the application of Lacan’s “mirror phase” while paradoxically proclaiming the (im)possibility of Metz’s primary identification with self as the ultimate and final source of the gaze). For this film, the audience is essential. We would be the object of a reverse shot or point of view shot. Also, we are subjects, taking and failing the film while most likely sitting in an uncomfortable desk in a bland university classroom—the usual place of avant-garde film exhibition/education.

Segment two is a rephotographed long shot of a living room. Because the television in the room is banding, and because of our stolid adherence to film conventions, we believe—in spite of the teacher’s telling us it is a picture on our desks—that the screen image represents a real, normal-sized room, not a miniature, not a refilmed television screen. We repeatedly ignore aural instructions and depend on vision. But the movement of a pencil- wielding hand into the frame as if it were our own surprisingly distorts this false perception.

The instructor’s words are intimidating, reminiscent of our tested pasts as if we were multiple-choice criminals locked into disciplinary time for sentences ranging from twelve to twenty years in schools whose architecture and design intentionally resemble prisons. (While critiquing power’s domains, Land is also analyzing the conditions of exhibition/reception of avant-garde cinema. The clever ploy of turning the tables on education and audiovisual aid films, of turning education into art, then sending it back into an educational context, should not go unnoticed.) A sample of the teacher’s commands brings back some hauntingly familiar memories:

It is a picture of the house. Now listen carefully and do not look at the picture. This is how the test will go. I will tell you to mark something on the picture. Listen carefully and each time do exactly what I say. If you do not understand something I say, do not put any mark on the picture. Do not ask any questions. Just wait for the next thing I will tell you. Then try to do it. Remember, do not ask any questions. Just wait for the next thing I will tell you. Then try to do it. Remember, do not guess any answers. You will probably not be able to answer all the questions. Do not worry. Just do the best you can. Now listen.⁹

Was there not always something infuriatingly cloying and deceitful about the closing “Do not worry”? From our point of view, the hand enters the frame and writes a number 3 on picture, television, and movie screen, a tripled metaphor.

The claim by education for intelligibility is undermined by the film’s structure. The filmmaker ignores his teaching antagonist, inserting images of projectors, film reels, and psychological tests—all with no relevance to her contradictory game of imperative learning. This lack of obedience deflects us as well, while creating counterpoints and analogies between word and image. We are the object of the teacher’s gaze in the opening segment and the privileged viewer of the rest of the film.

We finally fail the film, a test which was impossible, just as turning on a television set which was already on was impossible. Yet, we have escaped surveillance, the teacher’s spying eyes on the lookout for gum (for various disciplines, gum seems to be a sticky issue—clue, cure, and crime), passed notes, and other studious felonies. We cannot be seen but are present and knowing. Neither do we survey a surrogate victim. By embracing simulation, we escape the normalizing and hierarchies of education and remain delightfully undisciplined.

Yet another “educational” title is Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970), a film loosely organized around negatively and positively printed images of a female dreamer/viewer, the spectator of the dream (a film or classroom audience, and in Land’s work there is little difference), and the runner, Land, the filmmaker and dream actant. The divisions between subject, dreamer/viewer (or spectator), and filmmaker are dissolved by two superimposed titles, “This is a film about you” (segment five), a phrase repeated by a voice-over announcer and concluded in segment twelve in print, “not about its maker.” “This is a film about you” echoes “This is a test” of IQ and anticipates Snow’s “This film will look just like this” in So Is This.

A male voice-over, an announcer/actor, says: “This is really a film about you. Let’s suppose your name is Madge and you’ve just cooked some rice.” We are exhorted to play yet another television game, a facsimile of education—a commercial. A closeup of a dark-haired woman, who looks directly at us, says: “This rice is delicious, Madge.” A dissolve to a closeup of two grains of rice is accompanied by a lush score plus the announcer’s words: “pure, whiter, cleaner, and rid of the coarse, hard to digest parts as seen in the unprocessed grain of rice on the left. . . .” A reverse shot would reveal us, the audience, already rhymed in the film as bored college students. We’ve been dreaming that we’ve been watching television, but now it’s time for this film’s test.

A printed essay on teaching begins its movement down and across the screen as a speed reading machine. The words in this illegible text are revealed only three at a time—first clearly, then blurred, then clearly—in a decentered and linear pattern. Comprehension of the whole is irrelevant to this inhuman apparatus, an editing machine of two-frame intercuts controlled by the frame and intensified by the white flicker and hovering words. The speed is electronic, yet suggestive of untapped potential for processes of viewing and reading. The problem of language, or words as image, a found text that answers the teacher’s imperatives of IQ, is again a critical concern of Land, who cherishes words, puns, their invention. A sample of printed text is a definition of “Hokum”:

It is words without meaning, verbal filler, artificial apples of knowledge. 9/10 of all teaching is done with words. Words should point to things seen or unseen. But they can also be used to wrap up emptiness of heart and lack of thought. The student accepts some pompous, false, meaningless formula, and passes it back on demand to be rewarded with appropriately enough—a passing grade.

Clearly Land would agree, at least partially, with the contents of this definition. Never the pedant, however, Land accelerates the rate of this segment into incomprehension. This sequence mimics the passage of film through the projector, thereby commenting on the standardization of speed with no possibility of looking forward or back. A caesura—the “Lights out” command in the film for that audience—is rhymed by us and the actual lights on after this film is over. In Land’s work, which depends on our presence but allows us to elude surveillance, there is always an exit. We can daydream, as do his protagonists, or we can leave, or we can play “simulation.”

Land’s films, moving through layered models of (1) photography, (2) film, and (3) television—media corresponding to the shifts from subject to subject’s fiction to dissolution; from trace to drama to screen; from spots to phantoms to the whole—all funneled through a pedagogical imperative gone berserk, are simulacra, “not simply a false copy, but [calling] into question the very notion of the copy . . . and the model.”¹⁰ Thus, I will digress to the writing of Jean Baudrillard.

In opposition to the arguments of Foucault, the socialist Utopias of collective access to the media—a redistribution of media/power advocated by Hans Enzensberger and the Frankfurt School (and invoking Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan on the same page of “Requiem for the Media”), Baudrillard declared the end of the panoptic system in Simulations. Authorized and divinely blessed by Ecclesiastes (“Requiem” invokes God as well by dividing the essay into stages of the Catholic mass), he begins the book with: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”¹¹ This riddle challenges the priority of systems of the gaze and representation. In his model of the contemporary world (based in part on a trip to the United States), there is no source of or for the gaze (neither the Renaissance convergent point for the spectator to occupy nor the infinite perspective in the image), neither seeing nor seen, only screen and surface. This loss of the real to screen and surface is ironically an apt description of the achievement of contemporary painting and avant-garde films and videotapes, including the work of Brakhage, Frampton, and Paik, to name only a few artists.

Just when film theory had begun to incorporate Foucault’s discourse analysis, Baudrillard comes along and imperatively tells us to Forget Foucault! The panopticon of surveillance has been transformed into a system of deterrence where the “distinction between active and passive is abolished . . . where the real is confused with the model . . . since you are always already on the other side. No more subject, focal point, center or periphery . . . no more violence or surveillance, only ‘information’ . . . and simulacra of spaces.”¹² If restated as a double bind, the contradiction of being in two places at the same time, “deterrence” is very familiar to women and artists. (It oddly resembles John Berger’s argument in Ways of Seeing, that women watch themselves being watched.) The quotation almost reads like a working premise for the films of Land, Nelson, and Snow.

For Baudrillard—willy-nilly scattering scientific concepts such as nuclear, astronomic, entropic, and genetic as metaphors, in hypotheses apparently generated by an encompassing model of a televised, computerized world (or derived from cold war rhetoric of nuclear defense rather than offense in which the effects of radiation, which could not be seen but only measured, were minimized, if not denied, for many years) which has eliminated the “social”: “The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency.”¹³ His by now axiomatic and famous claim is that “the space of simulation confuses the real with the model.”¹⁴ This is the imaginary as everything, Baudrillard’s “hyper-real” (another style of art in the late 1960s and the 1970s) in which all is model, statistic, memory bank and, miniature which, predictably enough, abolishes representation.

When it comes to commercial television (and 1980s U.S. politics), Baudrillard makes limited sense. Our images mask nothing, and thus it is dangerous to unmask them. Scandals such as Watergate and Irangate are uncovered and condemned only to conceal the loss of the real of politics, truth, and honor; Disneyland—a crucial place within this theory—is a scheme concealing that the entire United States is Disneyland. We have moved from appearance, an age of truth and secrecy, to an age of simulacra, by strategies of deterrence rejuvenating a fiction of the real. Thus, we prove the real by the imaginary and the truth by scandal; we prove the law by transgression. Bank tapes identified Patty Hearst as a gun-toting robber/performance artist; TV protected us in this “simulation of revolution” (perhaps a performance) from capital gone momentarily delinquent with desire. Baudrillard argues that the simulation is more threatening than the “real”; it revealed, in this instance, the absence or demise of radical action. The Oliver North hearings revealed a more blundering demise—the lack of any law, never mind logic and politics.

Because power can only exert itself on the real, the rationality of means and ends, of causes and effects predicated on a referential order, power is breaking apart; its exercise, using discourses of crisis or desire, is a simulation. The panoptic model is a “machine of truth, rationality, of productivity which is capital . . . without reason—a violence.¹⁵ The most disturbing assessment of culture is Baudrillard’s analysis of the mass audience: the silent majority, stronger than any medium, overshadows historical systems of power; they want fascination and pleasure rather than meaning; “For it is not meaning or the increase of meaning which gives tremendous pleasure, but its neutralisation which fascinates. . . .”¹⁶ This is a model which can partially explain the pleasure of the “David Letterman Show,” but it supplies only the first step, and a literal one at that. In many ways, this vaguely echoes the Frankfurt critique of commodity culture, taken from its time and context.

Finally, for Baudrillard the cultural forecast is bleak, and simulation the cause. There is no longer a staging of scenes, no spectacle, no mirror, no image or representation, all “effaced in a sort of an obscenity.” (I continue to wonder how.) The postmodern subject is not hysterical or paranoid, but schizophrenic, “no longer the player on a stage, no longer produced as mirror, but a pure screen. . . .”¹⁷ (This traces the historical passage from theater [the suspension of disbelief] to film [fetishistic disavowal] to television [avowal of contradictions]. It is technical and spectatorial history of a negative shift from person to image, from the live to its representation, from the tangible to the intangible.) I will return to Baudrillard in relation to postmodernism. Suffice it to say that fear of the loss of mastery is palpable; in simulations, it is impossible to discern subject from object, thereby vanquishing the stability of power’s poles of domination/subordination, potentially overturning the name and place of the father.

Unlike Baudrillard’s reading, in which simulation involves a certain perverse deception of an “image without resemblance,” Land’s simulations, like Ant Farm’s and Nelson’s, are playful pretenses. As Gilles Deleuze interprets the simulacrum, it has a radical or at least an anarchistic function: it circumvents mastery because it already includes the spectator. Simulacra “are those constructions that include the angle of the observer, in order that the illusion be produced at the very point where the observer is located. . . .” Thus, the spectator, shifted between second and third persons, in tandem with the first person narrator, “a double scandal and stroke of the enonce,” can transform and deform the images, which would be historical and contextual—produced “at the very point where the observer is located.” Deleuze argues that the simulacrum “subverts the world of representation” and is not a degraded copy but a positive one which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction.¹⁸

In one reading, this argument electronically updates Walter Benjamin, who distinguished between “aura” and “mechanical reproduction,” with the latter enabling the work to be taken into new situations where new meanings would be produced. Deleuze refuses to be trapped in hierarchies or bipolarities, refuses to bemoan the rapidly altering status and circulation of commodities, whether commercial or artistic products. For him, either subject or object, standing alone or taken out of context, on the side of Art or Commerce, are theoretical reductions. Thus, the one-way street of most arguments regarding “colonialism” (or power or sender-receiver communications models or notions of culture being imposed from above or radically being invented subculturally) in which, for example, U.S. cultural exports overrun the world, resulting in a silencing in which the “subaltern cannot speak,” is anarchistically upset: the simulacrum is produced, precisely, “at the very point where the observer is located.”

The simulacrum must, by this definition, be historical, be contextual, be connected to experience; at the least, it is a two-way street. It might also be a local strategy as well as an object, a series of acted-upon events. The simulacrum is a notion which includes time, perhaps more than space or place; it emphasizes the effects of time inscribed in space. It is a model which, in centering mutual enunciation, a certain reciprocity (which Baudrillard views as an impossibility for electronic media which “prevent response”), incorporates the possibility of change, over time and within context. After all, objects, like subjects and theories, do change, in time or in place, irrespective of truth or reality. One can imagine our film theories, produced within temporal contexts and for specific reasons, as useful and tactical simulacra. Thus, it’s not so much a question of whether de Laurentis, in 1984, or LeSage, in 1977, are right for all times and in all places about Freud, but rather from what vantage points and to what ends their diverent readings were produced.

The observer partakes of the process of producing cultural meanings, which are in turn transformed, contextually and experientially. Watching the “Today Show” in Sydney at 2:00 A.M., fifteen hours earlier than the United States, with reports of U.S. weather by a fat man wearing silly hats and crazy T-shirts, and news which has not yet happened in the United States, is an avant-garde event, as Meaghan Morris pointed out to me. Framed by Australian TV images, voices, formats, and audiences, “Today” (or “Yesterday” for Australia; “Tomorrow” for the United States) becomes a different program, more of a retroactive event (whereas in the United States it is predictive). Land’s restagings and facsimilies, with their moments of trompe I’oeil, denials of privileged points of view, “set up a world of ‘consecrated anarchy.’“ His films illustrate Deleuze’s argument that simulacra—affirming divergence and decentering in their destruction of models and copies—set up creative chaos, assuring a collapse of foundations which is a “positive, joyous event.”

Deleuze’s inclusion of the spectator’s point of view in the simulacrum is a position radically different from that of Baudrillard, who posits the “mass” outside the simulation. Deleuze’s model of creative reciprocity in a simultaneity requires work on the part of the observer, credited with knowledge, maturity, ability. Baudrillard conceptualizes the masses as a force of negativity, of silence. He writes of communication: “The myth exists but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it. That is the trap of critical thought which can only be exercised given the naivete and the stupidity of the masses as a presupposition. The mass media destroy the social with its pressure of information. . . . However, the masses refuse to participate in the recommended ideals . . . and silence is the ultimate weapon.”¹⁹ Silence, like the neutralization of meaning via fascination, has not, to my knowledge, ever proven itself to be an ultimate weapon, particularly for women and blacks. Whether the mass is being vilified or glorified is also up for grabs in this riddler’s prose.

In Land’s work, both spectator and filmmaker “refuse to participate in the recommended ideals” of pedagogy as surveillance, as mastery, with power poles of domination and subordination. To a degree, his work, like other avant-garde films, overthrows/critiques power by restaging it as a simulation—an impossible test, a confusion of levels of representation which challenges both the notion of the art object as autonomous and the institutions of art and academia—in the postmodern era, an amorphous duo.

Robert Nelson, the filmmaker/cyclist, celebrates his audience and unties power’s polarities by including them in the process of his films, in this instance, Bleu Shut—a funny simulation of a sublimely ridiculous test: a multiple-choice guessing game of naming “pleasure” boats. The film is an allusion to TV game shows and a microcosm of pedagogy; the testing moments are the Pavlovian real of school (replete with controlled buzzers, numbers, and clocks), and the cutaways are brief daydreams which simultaneously comment on narrative—its hermeneutic enigma/question prolonged by lies, detours, and delays of expectation and resolution; genres of cinema; the arbitrariness of language; and enunciation, address, and audiences.

As if ordained by Barthes’s analogy between cycling and film, Bleu Shut opens with home movie footage of two historical cyclists joyously pedaling to a friendly gathering in the country. Later, another cyclist—twice distortedly shot teetering on a too small bike while enclosed in a crystal ball matte—falls off into a mud hole, like the old “Laugh In” on TV. Carrying the cycling/filmmaking metaphor from Barthes to this film’s conclusion, the filmmaker begins to “tell us what this movie is about”: after attempting a scholarly, pedantic interpretation of the “two planes of involvement,” a treatise on film viewing addressed to a “you,” a second person audience as a classroom of students, the sound equipment fails, an interruption and an error, like falling off a bicycle (or teaching film). With irritation, the filmmaker asks “What’s wrong?” and walks toward the camera, blocking our vision with his body, rudely ignoring his students and inquisitioning the film’s technicians, there, on the set.

In the end, “we” are turned into a historical, absent, third person audience, while the filmmaker is silenced by technical difficulties. “Either the speaker chooses in all good faith a role of Authority, in which case it suffices to ‘speak well . . .’ Or the speaker is bothered by all this law that the act of speaking is going to introduce into what he wants to say . . . correcting, adding, wavering . . . to render less disagreeable the role that makes every speaker a kind of policeman.” (191-192) This ending, this film, and this filmmaker—currently a Milwaukee film teacher (formerly at the Art Institute in San Francisco) in constant pursuit of sabbatical (like Land) and “bothered by all this law of speaking” never mind theory—waver and correct, choosing the role of irreverent student rather than authoritative teacher.

Speech is interrupted (or “glotally” stopped) not only by faulty equipment or tails out endings but also by laughter and inserted shots. Language and film laws are unmade, just as is the truth of vision. Neither seeing nor hearing are serious believing. The film screen becomes pedagogy’s blackboard, painting’s surface or ground, and Freud’s mystic writing pad capable of receiving new impressions; going to the movies is equivalent to going to school. After a shot of an aquarium with a cautionary moral printed over as intertitle, followed by fingers and mugging faces playing with the upper right-hand corner screen clock, the film literally runs out, goes amok. (Going amok: “Among Malayans, the condition of being amuck,” according to Webster’s.) Cyclists and filmmakers don’t avoid the pratfalls of falling or scratching. “. . . The need is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating (the very form of the signifier); a floating which would not destroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the law . . . everything is there, but floating” (215).

Just as Barthes concludes “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” with this tranquil metaphor of floating, Nelson concludes his film with a shot of fish floating or swimming in an aquarium. The world beneath the static boats of the film’s test is a miniature ocean, a comic special effect’s simulation of the sea/see, perhaps a reference to the conclusion of Bruce Conner’s A Movie, an enigmatic, archeological, tranquil shot of a deep sea diver swimming into an underwater shipwreck, after catastrophe. On another level, the film’s past of the opening, home movie, cyclist footage catches up to the present: the once upon a time of all fiction and of history is taken into the present of watching and listening to this film and this filmmaker; the film moves from nostalgia to process, from distanced, ignored third person watching and overhearing to second person listening, then to dismissed viewer.

The film is systematically ordered: the rigorous, relentless segments of the test are derailed by insert (or escape) shots—of a condensed rock band/ dance (too bad we can’t stay at the party, but we’ve got to move along); of the filmmaker nakedly entrapped in a glass prism tower; of loops of a direct address dog asynchronously barking or not at the camera; of beans and a close-up hot dog loop—its repetitive circularity demarked by rising steam and its endlessness abruptly concluded by the synchronized finality of an aggressive, cutting fork; of musical performance clips from a B-minus Hawaiian musical; of a porno film; and a lengthy, overtly indulgent shot of rebellious brats in the crystal ball matte, maliciously and childishly misbehaving by sticking their knowing tongues out at the camera, the film, and us. All the segments are color keyed in a continuity palette of mainly sepia. The film is a “City Limits Film” musical comedy, “Presented” with defused fanfare and doses of narrative interrupted by presumedly pleasurable spectacle. Anything is better than school and discipline, even the worst (or best) movie.

The film’s literal test, taken by the off-screen voices and the audience, of matching silly boat names to the on-screen still images of the boats, is administered by a gentle yet firmly insistent voice of a female teacher who times the two gleeful student buddies, Bob and Bill (Nelson and William Wiley, although it is difficult to tell one voice or attitude from the other). A clock in the frame/classroom untimes us, just as the film’s subtitle lies to us about the thirty-minute length. The adult student buddies engage each question with dogged determination to master the illogical through logic and insight. “What fantastic boat names.” It’s “almost frustrating.” “I’m gonna take a long shot.” The filmmakers continually fail each question until Bill gets “Kant Budget” right—consoling Bob with “These are all very hard.” Then, prior to the porno insert, Bill gets another one right. When he fails on the next question, “May Be So,” he ironically replies: “I thought I was becoming an expert.” “Guys II,” yet another boat name and the real substance of this film celebration of friendship and collaboration, is failed, yet passed with dopey, “high” honors.

The film’s test segments (like all tests) are miniature narratives: the question is the hermeneutic enigma, and the students’ verbal musings are delays, snares before the closure of the end, the one word, correct answer of resolution and “truth” similar to “gum” of Da Fort’s ending. After the right answer places them in a kindergarten of intelligibility, the hysterically laughing students roar on track with relief at the mystery’s solution (putting the correct word with image), claiming, like novice Perry Masons, to have known or suspected (and what’s the difference in tests?) the right answer all the time. In retrospect, test takers are always right. “As soon as one has finished speaking, there begins the dizzying turn of the image: one exalts or regrets what one has said . . .” (204). Language and education are childish but pleasurable and collective guessing games—replete with punning, mispelled arbitrariness. The impossibility of correspondence (in this film, perhaps as logical as resemblance ever is) between the object and its signifier (the picture of a boat and its image or name) is the very definition of a simulacrum. Bleu Shut was made in stoned fun; it is also a model of education and film as simulations—of space, of time, of the presense of an audience, of art. Disavowal—film theory’s Freudian denial and guarantee of pleasure (“it’s only a movie”)—is a delightful actuality and thus a source of and for boyish play.

Pedagogy is an unabashed game, yet one which must be taken seriously: “Our intellectual debates are coded every bit as much as were the Scholastic disputations; we still have the stock roles . . . but where such roles would have been ceremonial and have displayed the artifice of their function, our intellectual intercourse always gives itself natural airs; it claims to exchange only signifieds, not signifiers” (202). (Contemporary film theory, which includes feminism, has an ironic blind spot: set against the biological or natural in favor of the historical, yet paradoxically arguing signifieds or absolutes when critiquing the avant-garde’s signifiers as empty of meaning and bereft of materialism—a critical tautology which also forgets history and context—of the films and our theories.) As hard as Bob, Bill, and teacher try to pretend belief in the exchange of signifieds and the correspondence between thing and image, they can only parody institutions, mocking the pedagogical transmission of significant meanings. Bob and Bill will play by the rules as long as the game is ludicrously ridiculous. And what could be more inane than naming boats?

The answers, printed on the screen, are often held over the inserted clips; thus “Bottoms Stup” renames the looped dog, and “Mick Stup Bunks” is printed over the beans and hot dogs—both segments commenting on sound and silence, loop and action. The direct correlation between sound and image, like word and object, is artifice, a game of learned conventions; learning, like art, is a random, lucky guess or simulation as much as it is a surveillance. The spectator/auditor is held in a compromising position—overhearing a test being administered and failed, after being brought into an initial conspiratorial position by the whispering, off-stage teacher (reminiscent of TV’s golf announcers), who informs us about the film in an excitatory, verbal trailer of feigned expectation.

Thus, unlike Land’s work, we don’t directly take the boat test (which might be analyzed via Saussure’s, Jakobsen’s, and perhaps even Benveniste’s linguistic models), although we do go along for the ride. The insert shots, recycled footage, are simultaneously our film test of genres, conventions, and history, and teasing, tantalizing tidbits of what we won’t see in entirety. For example, during the porno insert, two intertitles, interrupting intercourse, are intercut: “I love you, Irene. I will never love anyone but you.” Sex continues in closeup. Then, “And I love you, Andre . . .” Printed on the screen, presumably from this found footage, is “The end” followed by a logo, “An Official Film.” During Bleu Shut we went to a condensed dance, saw brief musical spectacles, and now a two minute porno film—summaries of all movies. Thus, we neither take, pass, nor fail Bleu Shut, just as the maker and cohort/alter ego could not logically name (or not) the boats. We don’t even get the filmmaker’s lecture at the end as an explanation or solution. We enjoy the elliptical experience but are constantly reminded that “we” are always outside pedagogy and cinema as spectators, overhearing private and personal sessions: “. . . the teaching relationship is nothing more than the transference it institutes: ‘science,’ ‘method,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘idea’ come indirectly . . . they are left-overs” (196). Transference could be a sweet concept to explain the triadic relationship of avant-garde film-maker-spectator, a process which would take the screening event into account.

This film has many “leftovers”—not the least of which is (the hot dog) laughter at our pasts and our present conditions of viewing. In complex ways, the spectatorial mechanism of Bleu Shut and of pedagogical simulacra might not be identification and disavowal (which the simulacrum already embodies) but transference. “How can the teacher be assimilated to the psychoanalyst? It is exactly the contrary which is the case: the teacher is the person analyzed . . . it is not knowledge which is exposed, it is the subject (who exposes himself to all sorts of painful adventures). The mirror is empty, reflecting back to me no more than the falling away of my language . . .” (194). Nelson the filmmaker—bare ass exposed and trapped in the cold, colored, and beautiful tower (a monument to Art? a womb and disorienting ledge of glaring exposure) of glass prisms (narcissism berserkly refracted into infinity)—humorously risks the “falling away” of language and image. His mock-epic film journeys are fraught with comic peril, last laughs before “falling off” life. We are reminded that the search for identity in art, no matter what the sexual difference or preference, also involves the risk of revealing the self, in public; or more frightening, of not being able to make art. Theorists might also take a cue from Barthes by displaying our artifices along with pointing to those of others.

So Is This by Michael Snow (1982) refers only to itself, to the sport of spectating, to the presence and subjectivity of “this” rather than the distance and objectivity of “that.” By referring to itself, this film paradoxically marks itself as theory, a Deleuzian simulacrum. As both history and theory through reversal, it not only recontextualizes reading, writing, and spectating but is also a comic turn on film language—starring writing, like intertitles in early cinema, the spaces between the image signs.

Writing has always been essential to cinema—in intertitles, subtitles, titles, and credits, all for the sake of ownership, narrative, and the location and intelligibility of the spectator. In silent cinema in particular (which this film is and commercial film never was), writing was an integral process with image (in many Douglas Fairbanks films, for example, almost half the time is spent reading lengthy intertitles). Writing in the intertitles was systematically part of the “continuity style,” but also potentially a break with it. But perhaps the most direct historical connection with Snow’s film is that intertitles frequently declared an enuciator with a position, a narrator (often the director) in collusion with the audience.

In So Is This writing is the only image, just as the only image is an iconography of language. Luminous, white-printed words are “flashed” for measured intervals. The size and duration of the words vary. The words repeat, reverse their order, speed up and slow down. The “look” as well as the sense of language is at stake. These imaged words, replete with potential stories, have their shadows, rhythms, and imaginary sounds—inflections, volumes, and accents. Signifieds slide into signifiers, sign into object. Letters become building blocks of pure light. The monologue which we read is transformed into silent dialogue.

Inner speech, that elusive psychoanalytic thing, becomes quietly heard, spoken in the imaginary of the film viewing. Are we thinking or reading? The split subject is caught somewhere between thing presentations and word presentations, between speech and silence. The split is also sealed by laughter, the momentary slip into the unconscious where all disruptive thoughts are stored for societal safekeeping. We are spoken and read to. Equally we are spoken of while we read in the dark privacy of a public ritual. Finally, we cannot talk back. However, we can block out language by closing our eyes. It’s only a movie, after all. This tour de force of filmed words plays with the silent look of language. Yet ironically, this silent reading is disconcertingly loud, suggesting that between speech and image is always language.

Snow’s direct “presence” (a postmodern version of avant-garde’s traveling circuit) is in the first person “I.” It’s as if Snow wanted to declare the life rather than the death of the author. Yet his voice is not over the film but rather in and on the screen, existing as printed words rather than synched with moving lips. This “I” is a presence, yet in its silence, absent. During the film, the point of address doubles: the enunciator “I” maps out a schizo narrative for an embattled protagonist “author” who has specific intentions, who will, for example, be “very confessional about his personal life.” Of course the system of the film is exactly that but not about that; it is always about this.

The horizontal string of words along the vertically moving film enacts a hermeneutic treatise: a stripped bare, meditative narrative play with and for the spectator who is suspended in the present while awaiting the promise of future pleasures, the satiation of closure, yet another variety of fort da! Thus, although So Is This does not use the content or “look” of things educational, the film, in its play with us, places us in a pedagogical position, in front of a blackboard, with all of our expectations of narrative pleasure intact. Snow’s narrative is solely process and expectation—not expectations created by narrative but rather by the promise of traditional narrative which ironically we are already in, now. The film tells us: “The rest of this film will look like this. This film will consist of single words presented one after another to construct sentences and hopefully (this is where you come in) to convey meanings.” After mapping out both the film and our options, the text then lies by reporting its length as “about two hours long.” Later we read: “How do you know this isn’t lying?” The viewer, constantly anticipating but surprised and amused by this question, is in a position comparable to that of the home audience for a television quiz show, excluded although illusorily coded in as present. This treatise on going to the movies is thus also about reception and the construction of the spectator as Snow’s ideal and real audiences.

This film denies its originality and perhaps the notion of ideas as property. Words on the screen honestly declare that “this is not the first time this has been used. This belongs to everybody.” However, just exactly what “this” is remains a question. Obviously, it is technique and cinema. “This” is a multiplicity, the arbitrariness of language, a beguiling present rather than an anxiously awaited and constantly delayed future. Retroactively we realize the political dimensions of “this.” In our present world of constant sound, talk, and speeded up imaging, the very preciousness of silence, in the gaps and quiet spaces between words, is endangered. This, the moment, the present, the here and now, belongs to us. The future is only a promise built on expectations: it is an illusion, perhaps a deceit; to believe we can control it is a conceit.

At the same time, one can almost feel Snow’s superior pleasure in evading representation and the audience, outrunning criticism by anticipating and thereby controlling our response, dominating the spectator precisely by his knowing absence; in many ways, this is a monologue, cloaked as a dialogic process, precluding any reciprocity. We laugh at ourselves rather than with the filmmaker, who might be laughing at us. On second thought, the joke might be on us.

Although not “red-hot,” So Is This, like Land’s and Nelson’s films is “receivable,” in fact, structured around reception. This film ensnares the spectator in a paradox when watching and referring to “it,” the film. A silent playwriting which we read amid laughter and bursts of recognition, it literalizes and unmakes Barthes’s dichotomous delineation between the readerly (simplified to the classical text) and the writerly (the modern or avant-garde text). It might have delighted Barthes, who had already undone his own polarity by introducing the intriguing third entity—the receivable, a concept particularly pertinent for a postmodern theory of contemporary avant-garde.

Certain “red-hot” films reek of a popularity, albeit a scandalous one. Like Manuel DeLanda’s Harmful or Fatal If Swallowed and Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller, reminiscent of the reception of earlier films by Anger and Smith, and the feature film by Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames, these films catch hold. Perhaps the receivable operates both at the intersection of art and popular culture and at the margins, within subcultures with distinct styles, fashions, audiences, and politics. The history of U.S. avant-garde practice, is a treasure trove for postmodernism, including questions of reception as historical. That we can ask the question suggests a change in our cultural conditions.