City

Sketching City Symphonies By Martin Rumsby I “There is no point in struggling; waiting is enough, since everything in the end will have turned into the street. It’s the street that counts in the long run. There’s no escape. It lies in wait for us.” -Louis Ferdinand Celine The city has held a fascination for filmmakers as far back as the Lumiere Brothers onwards through most genres of filmmaking. The cinema and the city became equal partners in shaping our dreams of urban modernity. The effect of rapid nineteenth century urban migration, industrialization, and communications, was to create a widespread sense of disorder and anonymity. The recently urbananized citizenry needed to be regulated as industrial entities, then rewarded with mass consumerism, entertainment and, eventually, surveillance. The mechanized speed, dynamism, and overlapping discontinuities of cinema came to represent metropolitan culture. To arrive at a place where cinematic and urban consciousness become one. Popular cinema propagandized the communal pleasures of urban environments and commodity consumption, as a means of escaping the drab repetitions of everyday life. According to James Donald, this cinema became the paradigm for public life in the modern metropolis. “One thing cinema … has continued to to do since the nineteen twenties has been to teach its audiences across the globe ways of seeing and … imagining … the modern city … The imagined landscape of the city has become inescapably a cinematic landscape.” James Donald: Imagining the Modern City. London. Athlone Press. 1999. p68 Cinematic city symphonies, films which amalgamate the documentary exploration of the physical world with an expression of inner realities as ‘a day in the life of a city’ first came to the fore in the 1920s.They were variously realized as works of visual music, abstracted graphic cinema, documentaries and urban anthropology. It has been a utopian form of cinema, one closer to the left than industrial forms of cinema. These films adopted a sociological perspective quite different from dystopian visions of the future city presented in popular science fiction films from Metropolis (1926) to Blade Runner (1982/1992) and beyond. Early ‘city symphonies promoted a ‘modernist triumphant’ point of view. This view could be characterized as a privileging of human achievement over nature, one in which the development of modern cities, humans and cinema are inextricably woven together. Just as significantly, since 2008, for the first time in history, over half the world’s population (3.3 billion people) now live in urban areas. Soon, Asia alone will have at least five cities with populations approaching 30,000,000. But the gleaming towers of commerce are not the most significant feature of urbanization. Increasingly, city centers are transformed into beautified theme parks of architecture, markets, tourist attractions, sometimes even movie sets. In a corresponding counter movement, industry, workers, unemployed, and homeless are moved out of view to the urban periphery. This has the effect of dividing the city within itself and its inhabitants from one another. GOTHAM The growth of cities has been accompanied by the even faster growth of slums, shanty-towns and squatter settlements. Instead of becoming a locus of growth and prosperity, cities are now dumping grounds for ‘surplus’ populations of unskilled workers, migrants and the marginal. In an era of connectivity the increasing urbanization in much of the developing world is disconnected from industrialization and economic growth. Rural people moving to cities are met by unemployment and homelessness and their complete social and economic marginalization. Today, about half the world’s urban populations live in poverty, half of those in absolute poverty. Governments promise to create low-income housing but often fail to deliver. In instances when this type of housing is built it goes to people other than the poor it was promised to. Infrastructure is largely non-existent in third world cities For all its gloss and bravado even the modern city of Dubai does not have a sewage system. and is coming under increasing pressure in the ‘developed’ west. This is leading to social and economic inequities of an extent that urban poverty now promises to become a defining issue of this century. Each year millions of poor people are evicted from their neighborhoods as their communities are destroyed by gentrification and other forms of development. Their eviction is almost always tied to the value of the land they inhabit. A value that all so often has been created by their presence and initiative. At the point that their land becomes viable, they are evicted. As this continues displaced populations increasingly resist their social and economic marginality. Soon, this will lead to low intensity wars being fought in the overcrowded streets of impoverished Third World cities. Mike Davis. Planet of Slums. London, Verso. 2006. According the Guardian newspaper, “The US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.” Accessed December 12, 2014 at www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-Breakdown?CMP+share_btn_fb Instead of war, the universal provision of safe drinking water, waste water treatment and primary education as basic human rights would go a long way to ending the suffering and privation of urban poverty. Given the chance for organization poor people can create solutions and opportunities for themselves. They can achieve this better than appointed officials whose timidity, arrogance or corruption often impedes progress toward achieving human justice and rights. What the disenfranchised need are a few basic rights, freedoms and services, from there they can begin to take care of themselves. SOCIETY The English philosopher A.C. Grayling tells us that early on in the tradition of western philosophy Aristotle defined injustice as, “”Doing injustice (is) getting more than one ought, and suffering injustice (is) getting less than one ought; and therefore justice is equity – to deal justly is to do what is fair. This applies irrespectively to social status or moral luck.” A. C. Grayling. The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century. London. Weidenfield and Nicholson. 2005. p188 According to the economist Jeremy Rifkin Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization. Accessed at http://youtube.com as social animals our natural human bias toward other humans is one of empathy. Competitive social norms, however, work against forms of socially beneficial collaboration. By reorienting society and economy along lines of collaborative commons we can create the conditions to actualize our potential as empathic beings. In empathy we can democratize economic life to ensure that diminishing resources are shared more equally amongst greater numbers of people. This would be a crucial achievement toward the goals of human justice and peace. Today we face the demands of rapid population growth, security of water and energy supply, climate change, and the erosion of bio-diversity and landscapes. Concentrations of human populations in mega cities with fragile infrastructure are vulnerable to pandemics such as Ebola. Our inter-connectedness through the networks of the World Wide Web, electricity grids and air traffic control also render us vulnerable to cyber and bio attacks by fanatics and fundamentalists. But even If we are able to rise to these threats can we still, at the same time, conserve our ideas of our freedom and rights within open societies? Or will these values come to be seen as mere inefficiencies not worth defending? What could our ambitions be and what can we usefully believe in and strive for? If our conception of our world is of ‘one planet’ then our aim would be for an egalitarianism between all people in a convergence of wealth and equality. Everything needs to be rethought and remade, including our conceptions of art, philosophy, architecture, human rights, land, community, and economy. If we are to change the world for the better then we must first re-think it and open our thoughts of a different future, an imaginative future. This would also involve re-thinking art and cinema. We aspire to the envisioning and creating of alternate futures that encompass human populations, the wider environment and technology. Futures that will embrace human equality within systems of economic and environmental sustainability. Herein lies a promise of renewal. In considering the above we arrive at three dilemmas, each worthy of a research project in itself. a): A conflict between notions of indigeneity and the avant in that neither may be able to engage the other on equal terms. Can one, for example, be both traditional and avant-garde? b): The gulf between artists’ cinema and experimental film as encompassed within the shift from cinematic projection to art gallery installation. Here, moving image installations demonstrate a bias toward still photography as ideas that can be almost immediately apprehended (if not understood) whereas the cinematic incorporates montage and other techniques to create meaning in duration and the unfolding of relationships. c): The end of ethnographic filmmaking as something inherent in the ubiquity of hand-held recording and communication devices with which users represent themselves. These may also signal a corresponding shift from objective to subjective modes of representation in forms of radically non-objective, intimate, non-verbal ‘sensory’ ethnography. In picturing the contemporary metropolis we desire wider definitions of city symphonies. Conceptions that not only accord with reality but which also picture viable human and planetary futures. Artists will profit when their work is no longer thought of and traded as real estate. For the market has compromised art and distanced it from the people. In his essay From City Symphony to Global City Film Keith Beattie lists three predominant types of city film: 1): City Symphonies of the 1920s. 2): Documentary representations of urban spaces. 3): Films on non-western cities produced from the 1960s to the present. Keith Beattie. From City Symphony to Global City Film: Documentary Display and the Corporeal. www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/city-symphony-global-city-film.html Accessed June 21, 2012 The arc of progression tracing over these categories is, according to Beattie, one where the focus changes from a poetic expression of modernist urbanity towards one in which the city is defined by the its people. This could be categorized as a movement from technique to humanism. A continuation of the city symphony can also be located in globally oriented symphonic films with high production values, which reflect developments in communication technologies. This type of work emphasizes the unity of human with all other living things and the transformative power of life (and cinema). Examples of the global symphonic works include Ron Fricke’s Baraka (88 minutes, Color, Sound, USA, 1992) set to rhythms of nature and ritual as well as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1998), and Naqoyqatsi (2002). These films infer that our planet and the wider universe exist independently of human cognition. In emphasizing an all embracing togetherness these environmental films stand at a point removed from ideas of otherness and difference that pervade, for example, recent French thought which may offer a way of thinking through past preconceptions and present realities toward future possibilities PHILOSOPHY Briefly, twentieth century continental philosophy sees truth as relational, contingent upon any number of premises and viewpoints. An idea of freedom is implicit in this thought, arising from nineteenth century philosophical assertions of the death of God. Without God humans are alone in a world without meaning, and reality is comprised of a network of texts. Here, culture replaces nature. This has led, in the west, to stronger assertions of individuality and human rights and a collapse into subjectivity. We are free, but unable to act out our freedom. As a way around this impasse the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that a danger of trivialized subjectivity lies within popular culture. This could lead to a moral subjectivism that denies the possibility of an authentic background horizon underlying human life. By authentic background horizon Taylor means a value or context, such as Christianity or socialism, which fixes the individual within society. There is a danger we need to be mindful of in this train of thought. The danger is of a relativism that could slip into the dogma of it not mattering so much what we believe but rather that we do believe – (In anything). As history has so amply demonstrated, humans are capable of believing anything quite often to their detriment. To believe in Christianity, for example, is to reject the public good for a private one. One’s citizenship becomes compromised by an adherence to something that lies elsewhere. Whereas our concern here is for the public good. All things being equal for the subjectivist, Taylor claims, then significance is accorded only to choice, the choice of what is significant to the subjectivist. (Say as an enthusiastic consumer hard at work in a shopping mall). But a reality in which everything can be equally significant threatens all to insignificance. Charles Taylor. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 2002. For our purposes then, let the significant background horizon of our thought here be western notions of individual freedom and human rights framed within the possibility of eco-poetic media cultures. We may go on from here by, provisionally, looking at recent French and Italian philosophy for some signposts to the future. The thinkers discussed below seek to create new ways to conceive of and engage with ‘sensibilities of the real’ as a means of transforming philosophy and therefore our conceptions of the real. They do this by employing techniques that affirm the material nature of existence aligning their thought with the life sciences in an affirmation of philosophy as worldly and materialist thinking. Alternately, the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno has argued that within the power of jokes and the unpredictability of humor lie the transformative powers essential for innovation in life. Paolo Virno. Multitude Between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e). 2008. But we are not going to go there, partly because the jokes he draws on are lame. His thesis, in a couple of sentences, is that humor offers unexpected deviations from normal human practice and in these deviations lie the possibility for innovation. Virno follows the path of linguistics which, for us, represents little more than a cul de sac. It is in the grounding of recent French philosophy in immanence and material reality that we may eventually find our way back to the cinema of city symphonies. A philosopher such as Jean-Luc Marion, for example, may ask Taylor if thought can be extricated from horizons of being to exist in a place other than being. Alternately, Jean-Luc Nancy proposed that ‘meaningfulness’ cannot be experienced in isolation. We are all in this together, in community we shift from being individuals to becoming human beings. According to Nancy our human ‘sense’ lies within a shared horizon of our interactions with the world and one another. “This world is not merely a correlative of sense; it is structured as sense, and reciprocally, sense is structured as world … Sense, in its sharing is … the being-of-all-with-each- other.” Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. Polity Books. 2012. pp43, 46. According to Bernard Stielger human life is tragic because it can only survive by means of that which alienates it from itself. That which he calls techne - as an unthought, absence of origin suppressed by western philosophy. Humans memorize the past by means of this techne: language, materiality, tools – structuring their thought of reality and projecting it into their future. For Stiegler, human life is dependent upon a history of technical objects ranging from cave paintings to writing to cinema to philosophy and cultural production. All aspects of contemporary cultural life and communal experience are swamped by the commodification of mass society. Here, the artist’s manifesto is displaced by the press release. As a factor within consumerist industrial society techne both demeans our individuality while simultaneously providing the means to our survival. To become successful as human beings it is necessary that we re-think a world transformed by techne so as to create new links between humanity, technology and society. The convergence of contemporary communications technologies and digital media alters both notions of the past as well as our anticipations of the future, to inaugurate an altered experience of time. Stiegler hopes that humans can develop strategies whereby technical, cultural and economic production no longer exclusively serves the mass market. This would be a politics of how we may best live, what we should do, in ways of desiring beyond the imperatives of consumerism. He poses an active thinking by which to open up spaces for engagement rather than passive consumption. This would lead to a type of artistic thinking and acting that is, first of all, intuitive. Our future equalities will be, for Jacques Ranciere, actively interventionist, concerned with their own affirmation and perpetuation. That is, they will not be something handed out or conferred onto communities by administrations or agencies. For Ranciere, the assumption of equality will be the starting point from which action, or intervention, will occur. Equality will be the basis upon which the arbitrariness of existing social inequities and inequalities will be challenged. Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Op.cit. 2012 p112. Italian thinker Maurizio Lazzarato contends that Ranciere’s idea of politics is inextricably bound to notions of truth and ethics. Maurizio Lazzarato. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e). 2014. p255. Seeking to liberate thought within a new democracy of knowledge Francois Laruelle found western thought too restrictive to be really free. He called instead for thinkers to embrace a democratic and egalitarian idea of non-philosophy that accords the ‘real’ The ‘real’ being an acceptance of ‘materiality’ rather than the play within the textural linguistics, signs and signifiers that pre-occupied preceding generations of French thinkers. the thought that it merits. “Our knowledge (philosophy) will always be conditioned by the real since it is always ultimately caused by it.” Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Op cit. 2012. p171. For Laruelle, non-philosophy is the inherently creative activity which may open the way to a new future. It is an active aesthetic. To non-philosophy we could also add amateur philosophy dragging the focus of our thinking, and films, back from professionalism to the everyday and the amateur. A major tendency in twentieth century western thought was toward an essentialism that became known as structuralism. Derived from the Platonic search for ideal forms it led to formal and classicizing tendencies in the arts. By mid-century this type of thinking arrived at practices of deconstruction which held that humans are trapped within a circularity of language. Here, meaning only exists between things at the level of invariant, deep-seated structures. No longer seeking meaning or knowledge, the deconstructionist strives instead to demonstrate that language and its uses are tied to self-interest. Lacking the possibility of disinterested thought and action humans are no longer able to act in the public good – and the specialized, technical language of professional philosophy becomes socially irrelevant. Believing that western philosophy had descended into an abstract metaphysics and mysticism Henri Lefebvre called for philosophers to embrace the familiar, everyday and insignificant. Here, consciousness would be rooted in real life and humans would affirm the forces of their being in their everyday life by, with and in other people. According to Lefebvre, human consciousness depends neither upon a timeless reason nor, “ … a permanent human nature, a ready- made essence or some indeterminate freedom … Consciousness depends upon … real life … everyday life. The ‘meaning’ of life is not to be found in anything other than life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. ‘Meaning cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more.” “All we need do is simply to open our eyes, to leave the dark world of metaphysics and the false depths of the ‘inner life’ behind, and we will discover the immense human wealth that the humblest facts of everyday life contain.” Henri Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life. London. Verso. 2014. pp 164, 165,152, 246. From tangible matter we may affect tangible transformations. In this we move from everyday life to theory, rather than imposing theory on everyday life. Maurizio Ferraris argues that the world precedes thought, existing prior to and independently of our cognition of it. Maurizio Ferraris. Introduction to New Realism. London. Bloomsbury. 2015 Humans respond to the world with inscriptions, language, gestures, scribbles, scrawls, drawings, paintings, photographs, movies, social media, and so on. For Ferraris, the basis of society is recording rather than communication. In recording and producing we structure our response to reality. “The simple act of recording leads to an incalculable increase in the reality we know. It is fundamentally inconceivable today to have an experience like the one described by Baudelaire in A une passante: a fleeting beauty that disappears perhaps never to reappear again … (Our age instead favors) repetition, retention and rewriting.” Maurizio Ferraris. Introduction to New Realism. Op cit. 2015. p 23. Our inscriptions combine as a vast archive which generates meaning and culture. This type of thinking is amenable to documentary, be they political or experimental, essay or ethnographic films - as they fall under the rubric of cinematic city symphonies. Cinematography is often thought of as reflecting material reality. The photographic lens lends itself to the depiction of everyday life, so much more in an age of social media and personal communication devices. Maybe an accord can be found between philosophy and cinema. Of interest here is how the material world ages before our eyes while our ideas and speculations persist as ever-present objects of the mind. What, in our cinematic consciousness, could those mental objects stillness be? II MODERNIST TRIUMPHANT Conventional histories of city symphony films revolve around a modernist canon of key works. The idea of modernism is to disrupt tradition, to see the world made anew by technology and rationality, leading us from the human to the post-human. A place where, as Henri Lefebvre tells us, “Bit by bit everything which formerly contributed to the elementary splendor of everyday life, its innocent, native grandeur, has been stripped from it and made to appear as something beyond its own self. Progress has been real, and in certain respects immense, but it has been dearly paid. And yet it is still there, this innocent life, so very near, but impoverished and humiliated, both strong and pathetic, creative but threatened, producing the future but beset with foreboding about all the imponderables the future has in store.” Henri Lefebvre. The Critique of Everyday Life. London. Verso. 2014. p230. The task for the urban film artist, then, becomes one of discovering the possibilities for other modes of everyday living and of creating viable and just human lives within new urban environments. Reputedly the first avant-garde film made in the United States, the romantically inclined modernist work Manhatta (11 minutes. B & W. 1921) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand presents lower Manhattan island as a place of diverse human multiplicity. The film opens on a shot of a barge passing the New York skyline. A ferry arrives at a pier. Commuters disembark, crowding onto city streets to be enveloped within architecture. An inter-title announces, “City of tall facades of marble and iron slender, strong splendidly uprising toward clear sky.’ The uprising is created by workers laboring away in dusty pits or balancing on narrow girders high above the skyline. Next follows shots of smoking chimneys, water towers, city and harbor views, smoking trains and ocean liners. Here, nature is covered, enclosed, overshadowed by human achievement. Anything is possible, even the future which the building of New York asserts. It is a self-invented future which contains the potentiality of no longer resembling the past. Often regarded as the archetypical city symphony, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (65 minutes, B&W. Germany. 1927) by Walter Ruttman presents an idealized day in the life of Berlin, as the epitome of the modern city. The film opens on shots of water, as if looking through time, dissolving into a space fragmented by the technologies of trains and cinema. Early morning crowds build along sidewalks as smokestacks billow, producing sustenance. Typewriters pound away a little hymn on communications technology; calls are routed through a telephone exchange as two dogs fight on the street. In the modernist metropolis a train emerges from a subway, workers toil at a construction site, airplanes fly in formation above the city, people and trams cross a bustling intersection and trains pass along elevated tracks. At midday workers break for lunch, horses feed from troughs and a lion dines at the zoo in associational montage which creates the idea of civic communion. Vertigo induced by a roller coaster ride is contrasted with a woman’s suicide, followed by a fashion show then more street fighting dogs . Next, people participate in sports and leisure activities before night falls revealing an artificially lit world of entertainments, distractions, and fireworks. Here, in the modern city, space is experienced, as in cinema, as time. Commodification and objectification in the city lead to suicide. Soon enough it would lead to world war. A composite portrayal of Russian cities infused with revolutionary fervor Man With A Movie Camera (68 minutes. B&W. Russia. 1929) by Dziga Vertov is informed by the Constructivist concept of the artist as engineer of the ‘new’ socialist society. Vertov invests the everyday with the hyper-charged kineticism of revolutionary cinema. He saw his kino-eye cinema not as a model for truthful representation but rather a new kind of seeing that created its own truth. The camera gains consciousness and the truth or reality of the film is socially constructed. Eschewing the industrial model of film production Vertov instead adopted domestic working arrangements, employing his brother on camera and his wife as editor. Both are also depicted at work on the film, as workers serving the revolution. Vertov’s ambition was to employ the poetically transformative power of film to create a vision of the ‘perfect electrical man’ Vertov quoted in Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man With the Movie Camera. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. pp 12-13 in cinematic representations of urban life. Instead, he was written out of Soviet film history. The Russian revolution failed, descending into authoritarianism, repression, censorship and mass murder. Vertov’s film survives at least as a picture of an early revolutionary ideal of people organizing themselves and a lesson for artists who would play in the political arena. The action ostensibly takes place in a movie theater which we see near the beginning and end of the film, almost in a self-referential unfurling of early cinema, accompanied by live orchestra and before an appreciative audience. At times the action is highlighted by extreme points of view and superimpositions that incorporate the film worker into the daily life of the people. From our latter day viewpoint these sequences also innocently anticipate the surveillance culture that mass society was later to arrive at. A cameraman works in the morning of a new day, filming the awakening city, people sleeping on park benches, public transport rolling out of terminuses, industry getting underway. Later, he gets out amongst the people following horse-drawn carriages, masses of pedestrians, communications technologies and the rites of passage of marriage, divorce, death and (re) birth. Other parts of the film depict workers at leisure enjoying healthy recreational pursuits, proletarian clubs and other entertainments. Described by its maker Jean Vigo as a rough draft for a future social cinema the partly staged, documentary travelogue A Propos de Nice (23 minutes. B&W. France. 1930) critiques and pokes fun at the leisured classes at a popular beach resort. Made on a small budget with money gifted by his father in law, the film is unique amongst early city symphonies in that it resists the usual modernist rendering of the city. Collaborating with Boris Kaufmann, Dziga Vertov’s brother and cinematographer, Vigo employed aerial photography and camera effects in a sardonic work infused with a political undercurrent. By concentrating his attention on people at leisure Vigo invoked the idea of the amateur moving image maker as an artist who resists not only the commoditized industrial film but also the bourgeois art market. Just as one can be an amateur artist a person can also be an amateur philosopher – one who uses the medium out of necessity. A working class city symphony Conditions in Los Angeles (15 minutes. USA. 1934) by A.L. Siminov surveys downtown and new city hall as edifices built by workers. A succession of apartment buildings, stores, oil refineries and middle-class homes are presented in a parallel montage separated by titles such as, “Workers build.” Until they exceed their use value and are cast aside in dusty shanties to wait in soup kitchen lines. “While the rich enjoys leisure.” The abundance of privilege and exploitation is contrasted with the dumpster diving of the dispossessed. “Once the creators of wealth,” are reduced to disabled and homeless panhandlers by the travails of labor, unemployment and the vicissitudes of financial markets. The song will remain the same until workers organize to stop their spiritual, economic and physical starvation. David E James: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005. p113. James also asserts the social aspect of avant-garde films that, “emerge from social movements, from identity groups, subcultures and the like, who find the medium valuable in their own self-production and self articulation. Their films similarly entail social reference and have a social function, however disguised or attenuated it may be.” p15. Henri Lefebvre would have much to add here, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. THIRD WORLD CITIES In his book The Predicament of Culture the American anthropologist James Clifford claims that both avant-garde art and ethnography were at their strongest when they paid close attention to and cross-fertilized each other. Sharing procedures of collage, juxtaposition and estrangement, as well as notions of identity as being mixed, relational and inventive, each contributed to the other’s relevance. Both practices excelled as active intruders whose interventions served to provoke responses. Ethnography and the avant-garde had both declined in influence since they went their separate ways. It would only be in their re-embrace, Clifford believed, that their potential may be reignited James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature & Art. Cambridge, M.A., Harvard University Press, 1988. The Californian film artist Chick Strand (1931-2009), who had studied anthropology in San Francisco and Los Angeles, made several poetic films that straddled the ethnographic/experimental divide. She stated that, “Ethnographic films can and should be works of art, symphonies about the fabric of a people.” Cited in, Maria Praggiore. Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography, in Robin Blaetz. Women’s Experimental Cinema. Durham, N.C. Duke University Press. 2007. p189 Philosophically, ethnographic films, whatever their future may be, could accord with the recent French and Italian thinkers discussed earlier in this essay. A founder of the French cinema-verite movement, Jean Rouch crossed the boundaries between fiction and documentary filmmaking in his quest for what he called a ‘shared anthropology’. Originally an engineer, Rouch went to Africa during the German occupation of France during WWII before later studying philosophy and then training as an anthropologist. As a filmmaker he developed an artisanal style that was to influence French nouvelle vague auteurs such as Jean Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. Influenced by Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov’s filming of ‘real-life’, Rouch believed that the camera could function as a provocateur to elicit revelatory behavior from the filmed subject. Briefly, his technique involved single-take improvised filming of non-actors performing spontaneously in natural settings, use of light-weight, portable recording equipment, and interactive filming methods. Moi, un noir (Me, a Black) (70 minutes. Color. Sound. France. 1958) by Jean Rouch Is an improvised ethno-fictional account of young unemployed Nigerian immigrants living in poverty in the Treichville quarter of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, West Africa. Reflecting the influence of western movies the main character Oumarou Ganda portrays himself as the film star Edward G Robinson who, along with his friends Tarzan and Eddie Constantine, seek casual employment on the docks. After work they dream of careers as F.B.I. agents, boxers and successful womanizers able to compete with and out-perform the colonialists who appropriate their resources. Hanoi, Martes Trece by Santiago Alvarez 37 minutes. Sound. Cuba. 1967) was filmed inside Hanoi at the time of the American war in Vietnam. Here, citizens unite against the mechanized warfare of an imperial power which asserts its own rights whilst denying the human rights of those it seeks to ‘bomb back into the middle ages.’ To deny others what they seek for themselves. Here, militarism and colonialism are seen as the unstated legacy of technocratic modernism. The artist serves here to document the struggle of the people. Loius Malle’s Calcutta (Kolkata) (99 minutes, Color, Sound, 1969) by Louis Malle (France) was originally shot as part of the mammoth seven part Phantom India (363 minutes, Color, Sound, 1969) Louis Malle found his footage of Calcutta (Kolkata), from February 1968, so compelling that he made it into a separate film as life in an overcrowded, depressed hangover of British colonialism. Opening on shots of people bathing and washing their clothes in the waters of a bustling port the filmmaker, as visual ethnographer, offers little commentary as his camera encounters hermits, lepers, workers, migrants, and political activists in the city’s slums and streets while Calcutta’s Anglicized elite play golf and attend horse races. People beg, wash elephants, marry, and are cremated, interacting with or ignoring the camera as they go about their everday lives. It is people, rather than power, that are important to Malle. A clue to his impetus is offered, not in Calcutta (Kolkata) but in the companion film Phantom India which begins with a series of Indian talking heads, conversing in English. Malle explains that only two per cent of Indians speak English but they talk a lot, often on behalf of everybody. Interestingly, when Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky visited India in the early 1960s they connected with a group of poets in Kolkata known as the Hungrryalists and, later, India’s beat poets. Born in the slums and seeing themselves as having no future these poets embraced an anarchistic revolutionary politics. In their search for a new language they employed the coarse vernacular of the streets, rejected notions of caste, and the fine feelings associated with earlier Bengali literature. India’s Beats – The Hungry Generation. BBC World Service, January, 14, 2015. In speaking English, we are told, they are governed by western concepts and a vocabulary reduced to meaningless clichés. Therefore, he believes, they offer little insight into the real depth and diversity of India. In a dynamic of intercultural inter-subjectivity Malle’s subjects play their part too, staring back into the camera that surveys them, reducing the film crew to spectacle, as a show for the people that they have come to film. One is reminded of those points of first inter-cultural contact between European explorers and indigenous people where, so often, each asked of the other if they were human. Malle is an intruder and whatever he records becomes that provoked by his intrusion. An outsider unable to penetrate the mysteries offered up by the Indian sub-continent. Malle’s India is a universe unto itself, one which calls our own worldview into question. A place, that for Hindus, where life is merely an illusion (Maya). Here The (western) notion of human rights could be examined here and also in consideration of films like Do The Right Thing and London – see later. people are defined, not as individuals, but in relationship to others. These relationships protect them from the solitude and alienation, so often a hallmark of western individualism. Unfortunately, because its depictions of poverty, caste and exploitation are seen as undermining the democratic aspirations of modern India, Malle’s film has been deemed, in India, as offensive to that country’s self image. Whereas for me, the work appeals in its depiction of tolerant diversity and tangible multiplicity. It would seem that westerners could learn much from India. Traffic Signal (130 minutes, Color, Sound, India. 2007) by Madhur Bhandarka presents a street-level view of the informal economy of the urban poor. Here, Mumbai street traders derive their income from semi-organized activity around a traffic signal, hectoring passing motorists who have stopped for a red light. They comprise beggars, cripples, prostitutes, rag pickers, addicts and others who sell clothes, newspapers, flowers and trinkets, most speaking in the coarse vernacular of the street. Between Kolkata and Mumbai lies the ancient city of Varanasi (Benares) the location of Robert Gardner’s (1925-2014) intuitive ethnographic film Forest of Bliss (90 minutes, Color, Sound, USA, 1986). Forest of Bliss depicts the on-going cycles of life, death and ritual in Varanasi on the Ganges River. Motifs such as water, wood, fire, boats, steps, marigolds, corpses, dogs, kites and birds recur throughout the film as depiction of the everyday commerce between the material ad immaterial words. If the street vendors of Traffic Signal pragmatically embrace an everyday world where consciousness depends upon real life and where meaning is found in that life, then those of Forest of Bliss regard it as little more than a mirage, an impediment to their progress through the immaterial world.. They are on their way to somewhere else. Indeed, Gardner’s photographic-realism may throw Benares into a type of relief that defies native belief. Believing that humans are ‘victims’ of meaning in a world constructed by themselves, Gardner depicts a Benares governed by religion and tradition. “The idea in this film was to look for some quite ordinary realities … trusting that they will provide an evocative journey into their meaning.” Robert Gardner and Akos Ostor. Making Forest of Bliss. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard Film Archive. 2001. p45. Regarded as a maverick by the American ethnographic community Gardner’s work Forest of Bliss is an example of, “aestheticized ethnographic film not adopted by the anthropological community,” Anna Grimshaw: The Bellwether Eye: Recent Developments in Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Anthropological Inquiry, in Cultural Anthropology 26, no 2. 2011. pp247-262 has been praised by poets such as Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney. As a young filmmaker he admired the work of Maya Deren and later became friends with Stan Brakhage. Gardner went so far as to assert that his favourite ethnographic films were Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), and Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (1937). Cited in Peter Loizos. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness 1955-1985. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993 pp139-168. After leaving his position at the San Francisco Art Institute the pioneering American avant-garde filmmaker Sidney Peterson formed Orbit films with Gardner, his brother in law, with the purpose of making ethnographic films. Steve Anker, Radicalizing Vision, in Steve Anker, Kathy Gerwitz, Steve Seid (Eds) Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010. pp39-47 His ambitions, then, were broader and more poetic than most Anglo-American ethnographic filmmakers. Gardner may actually sit more happily amongst those French thinkers who assert that Anglo-American empiricism applied to the social sciences constrains imaginative and empathetic readings of people, culture and situations. “Working at the borderline of what is and what no longer is anthropology one also knows that if one crosses that border, if one can depart from where one is, one can also return to it more freely, without attachment to the norms generated on one side or the other.” Trinh T. Minh-ha: Speaking Nearby with Nancy Chin in, Cinema Interval. New York, Routledge. 1999. p215 REPRESENTING OURSELVES In Water and Power (54 minutes. Color. Sound. USA 1989) Pat O’Neill focuses on the relationship between the metropolis and its hinterland and how human activity shapes nature into culture. Here, the modernist utopianism of the city symphony is reduced to despair in the face of environmental and human degradation. An intellectual may further elaborate this point as, “The only valid image of the future is the failure of the past.” Terry Eagleton. After Theory. New York. Basic Books. 2003. p175. “I was working in an area where the water was being removed … so the land was changing from farming to desert.” Pat O’Neill. Water and Power, 1989. Accessed at http://vimeo.com/6053909. June 27, 2014. O’Neill’s interests extend beyond the nature/culture divide to further encompass the movement of light in shaping perception and questions of representation in moving image making to remind us that a consciousness of economic and environmental factors must underlie our perception of metropolitan culture and politics. “I think I call into question the notion of image making … the history of entertainment, illusions and the industry of film and television as a force that inhabits the (Los Angeles) area.” Pat O’Neill.Water and Power, 1989. Op. cit. London (82 minutes, Color, Sound, UK. 1994) by Patrick Keiller (UK) is structured around a series of investigative walks taken by its two unseen protagonists: Robinson, a ship’s photographer recently returned home, and his lover, the narrator. Together, they visit historical sites associated with famous authors only to find them overcome by contemporary pollutions. Of Time and the City (72 minutes, Color & B&W, Sound, UK. 2008) by Terence Davies (UK) is a bittersweet collaged reminiscence of growing up Catholic then gay in Liverpool in the immediate post World War II era. From the grandiosity of imperial and religious architecture underwritten by drab working class dormitories his childhood cycles between home, school and God until imported Hollywood glamour offers an escape. In contrast to third world cinemas these English essay style films are premised on notions of human rights and entitlement, adopting a viewpoint that tends toward aristocratic reflection. Whereas Vertov may have directed his work toward a revolutionary future and many American artists locate their work in a present, these English documentarians evoke earlier eras when Britain was greater and literary giants strode its streets. Of course literary giants still stride English streets but these newer giants have more than likely transplanted themselves to England from Trinidad, Mumbai and other points of the British Commonwealth. Davies laments ‘his’ Liverpool whereas Silsila in Traffic Signal sacrifices himself for his community of fellow outcasts. The theme of self-sacrifice recurs throughout Indian mythology as duty and honor. Arthur Cotterell (Ed). Bath, U.K. World Mythology.Paragon Publishing. 1999. p144. The message, in the Indian film at least, is that even if we cannot expect much from our leaders, the poor and socially unworthy may still lead by example, even if that community, like those being bombed in Hanoi, has no expectation of human rights. The American film historian Scott MacDonald contentiously cites Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (120 minutes. Color. Sound. USA. 1989) as the greatest of American city symphonies. MacDonald maintains that Lee’s film combines crucial elements of the modernist European city symphonies with the democratic vision and personal expressiveness of earlier American city symphonies. Scott MacDonald. The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2001. pp170-182 It is by this criteria that we admitted Bhandarkar’s Traffic Signal to this study. Rather than urban vistas Lee focuses on neighborhood dwellings in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y. and uses individuals as motifs of ethnicity and character in the here and now. Even if their actions are hopeless or destructive they are still capable of acting on the present. Both Traffic Signal and Do The Right Thing depict small urban communities under pressure in what Freud termed ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ between ethnic, racial and national groups. Rather than waiting for happiness in the next world we can aspire to fulfillment for all in this life. The focus of our age can be on honoring humanity and its place within sustainable environments. Here, the artist’s role in the community would encompass all from anonymous participant to interventionist, governed by notions of service to the culture, and mistaken neither for propaganda nor advertising. The integrity of their work will continually challenge all those who would administrate or manage them. “Our … ideal of vital being, arises not in our identification in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the universe. To compose … a symposium of the whole … all the old extended orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetable; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure – all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider art.” ETHNOPOETICS: Robert Duncan. Accessed at http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/duncan.html September 26, 2008 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 22

Sketching City Symphonies By Martin Rumsby I “There is no point in struggling; waiting is enough, since everything in the end will have turned into the street. It’s the street that counts in the long run. There’s no escape. It lies in wait for us.” -Louis Ferdinand Celine The city has held a fascination for filmmakers as far back as the Lumiere Brothers onwards through most genres of filmmaking. The cinema and the city became equal partners in shaping our dreams of urban modernity. The effect of rapid nineteenth century urban migration, industrialization, and communications, was to create a widespread sense of disorder and anonymity. The recently urbananized citizenry needed to be regulated as industrial entities, then rewarded with mass consumerism, entertainment and, eventually, surveillance. The mechanized speed, dynamism, and overlapping discontinuities of cinema came to represent metropolitan culture; arriving at a place where cinematic and urban consciousness become one. Popular cinema propagandized the communal pleasures of urban environments and commodity consumption, as a means of escaping the drab repetitions of everyday life. According to James Donald, this cinema became the paradigm for public life in the modern metropolis. “One thing cinema … has continued to to do since the nineteen twenties has been to teach its audiences across the globe ways of seeing and … imagining … the modern city … The imagined landscape of the city has become inescapably a cinematic landscape.” James Donald: Imagining the Modern City. London. Athlone Press. 1999. p68 Cinematic city symphonies, films which amalgamate the documentary exploration of the physical world with an expression of inner realities as ‘a day in the life of a city’ first came to the fore in the 1920s.They were variously realized as works of visual music, abstracted graphic cinema, documentaries and urban anthropology. It has been a utopian form of cinema, one closer to the left than industrial forms of cinema. These films adopted a sociological perspective quite different from dystopian visions of the future city presented in popular science fiction films from Metropolis (1926) to Blade Runner (1982/1992) and beyond. Early ‘city symphonies promoted a ‘modernist triumphant’ point of view. This view could be characterized as a privileging of human achievement over nature, one in which the development of modern cities, humans and cinema are inextricably woven together. Just as significantly, since 2008, for the first time in history, over half the world’s population (3.3 billion people) now live in urban areas. Soon, Asia alone will have at least five cities with populations approaching 30,000,000. But the gleaming towers of commerce are not the most significant feature of urbanization. Increasingly, city centers are transformed into beautified theme parks of architecture, markets, tourist attractions, sometimes even movie sets. In a corresponding counter movement, industry, workers, unemployed, and homeless are moved out of view to the urban periphery. This has the effect of dividing the city within itself and its inhabitants from one another. GOTHAM The growth of cities has been accompanied by the even faster growth of slums, shanty-towns and squatter settlements. Instead of becoming a locus of growth and prosperity, cities are now dumping grounds for ‘surplus’ populations of unskilled workers, migrants and the marginal. In an era of connectivity the increasing urbanization in much of the developing world is disconnected from industrialization and economic growth. Rural people moving to cities are met by unemployment and homelessness and their complete social and economic marginalization. According to Mike Davis, about half the world’s urban populations live in poverty, half of those in absolute poverty. Mike Davis. Planet of Slums.London. Verso. 2006. Governments promise to create low-income housing but often fail to deliver. In instances when this type of housing is built it goes to people other than the poor it was promised to. Infrastructure is largely non-existent in third world cities For all its gloss and bravado even the modern city of Dubai does not have a sewage system. and is coming under increasing pressure in the ‘developed’ west. This is leading to social and economic inequities of an extent that urban poverty now promises to become a defining issue of this century. Each year millions of poor people are evicted from their neighborhoods as their communities are destroyed by gentrification and other forms of development. Their eviction is almost always tied to the value of the land they inhabit. A value that all so often has been created by their presence and initiative. At the point that their land becomes viable, they are evicted. As this continues displaced populations increasingly resist their social and economic marginality. Soon, this will lead to low intensity wars being fought in the overcrowded streets of impoverished Third World cities. Mike Davis. Planet of Slums. London, Verso. 2006. According the Guardian newspaper, “The US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.” Accessed December 12, 2014 at www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-Breakdown?CMP+share_btn_fb Instead of war, the universal provision of safe drinking water, waste water treatment and primary education as basic human rights would go a long way to ending the suffering and privation of urban poverty. Given the chance for organization poor people can create solutions and opportunities for themselves. They can achieve this better than appointed officials whose timidity, arrogance or corruption often impedes progress toward achieving human justice and rights. What the disenfranchised need are a few basic rights, freedoms and services, from there they can begin to take care of themselves. SOCIETY The English philosopher A.C. Grayling tells us that early on in the tradition of western philosophy Aristotle defined injustice as, “”Doing injustice (is) getting more than one ought, and suffering injustice (is) getting less than one ought; and therefore justice is equity – to deal justly is to do what is fair. This applies irrespectively to social status or moral luck.” A. C. Grayling. The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century. London. Weidenfield and Nicholson. 2005. p188 According to the economist Jeremy Rifkin Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization. Accessed at http://youtube.com as social animals our natural human bias toward other humans is one of empathy. Competitive social norms, however, work against forms of socially beneficial collaboration. By reorienting society and economy along lines of collaborative commons we can create the conditions to actualize our potential as empathic beings. In empathy we can democratize economic life to ensure that diminishing resources are shared more equally amongst greater numbers of people. This would be a crucial achievement toward the goals of human justice and peace. Today we face the demands of rapid population growth, security of water and energy supply, climate change, and the erosion of bio-diversity and landscapes. Concentrations of human populations in mega cities with fragile infrastructure are vulnerable to pandemics such as Ebola. Our inter-connectedness through the networks of the World Wide Web, electricity grids and air traffic control also render us vulnerable to cyber and bio attacks by fanatics and fundamentalists. But even If we are able to rise to these threats can we still, at the same time, conserve our ideas of our freedom and rights within open societies? Or will these values come to be seen as mere inefficiencies not worth defending? What could our ambitions be and what can we usefully believe in and strive for? If our conception of our world is of ‘one planet’ then our aim would be for an egalitarianism between in a convergence of wealth and equality. Everything needs to be rethought and remade, including our conceptions of art, philosophy, architecture, human rights, land, community, and economy. If we are to change the world for the better then we must first re-think it and open our thoughts of a different future, an imaginative future. This would also involve re-thinking art and cinema. We aspire to the envisioning and creating of alternate futures that encompass human populations, the wider environment and technology. Futures that will embrace human equality within systems of economic and environmental sustainability. Herein lies a promise of renewal. In considering the above we arrive at three dilemmas, each worthy of a research project in itself. a): A conflict between notions of indigeneity and the avant in that neither may be able to engage the other on equal terms. Can one, for example, be both traditional and avant-garde? b): The gulf between artists’ cinema and experimental film as encompassed within the shift from cinematic projection to art gallery installation. Here, moving image installations demonstrate a bias toward still photography as ideas that can be almost immediately apprehended (if not understood) whereas the cinematic incorporates montage and other techniques to create meaning in duration and the unfolding of relationships. c): The end of ethnographic filmmaking as something inherent in the ubiquity of hand-held recording and communication devices with which users represent themselves. These may also signal a corresponding shift from objective to subjective modes of representation in forms of radically non-objective, intimate, non-verbal ‘sensory’ ethnography. In picturing the contemporary metropolis we desire wider definitions of city symphonies. Conceptions that not only accord with reality but which also picture viable human and planetary futures. Artists will profit when their work is no longer thought of and traded as real estate. For the market has compromised art and distanced it from the people. In his essay From City Symphony to Global City Film Keith Beattie lists three predominant types of city film: 1): City Symphonies of the 1920s. 2): Documentary representations of urban spaces. 3): Films on non-western cities produced from the 1960s to the present. Keith Beattie. From City Symphony to Global City Film: Documentary Display and the Corporeal. www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/city-symphony-global-city-film.html Accessed June 21, 2012 The arc of progression tracing over these categories is, according to Beattie, one where the focus changes from a poetic expression of modernist urbanity towards one in which the city is defined by the its people. This could be categorized as a movement from technique to humanism. A continuation of the city symphony can also be located in globally oriented symphonic films with high production values, which reflect developments in communication technologies. This type of work emphasizes the unity of human with all other living things and the transformative power of life (and cinema). Examples of the global symphonic works include Ron Fricke’s Baraka (88 minutes, Color, Sound, USA, 1992) set to rhythms of nature and ritual as well as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1998), and Naqoyqatsi (2002). These are films that infer that planet earth and the wider universe exist independently of human cognition. In emphasizing an all embracing togetherness these environmental films stand at a point removed from ideas of otherness and difference that pervade, for example, recent French thought which may offer a way of thinking through past preconceptions and present realities toward future possibilities PHILOSOPHY Briefly, twentieth century continental philosophy sees truth as relational, contingent upon any number of premises and viewpoints. An idea of freedom is implicit in this thought, arising from nineteenth century philosophical assertions of the death of God. Without God humans are alone in a world without meaning, and reality is comprised of a network of texts. Here, culture replaces nature. This has led, in the west, to stronger assertions of individuality and human rights and a collapse into subjectivity. We are free, but unable to act out our freedom. As a way around this impasse the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that a danger of trivialized subjectivity lies within popular culture. This could lead to a moral subjectivism that denies the possibility of an authentic background horizon underlying human life. By authentic background horizon Taylor means a value or context, such as Christianity or socialism, which fixes the individual within society. There is a danger we need to be mindful of in this train of thought. The danger is of a relativism that could slip into the dogma of it not mattering so much what we believe but rather that we do believe – (In anything). As history has so amply demonstrated, humans are capable of believing anything quite often to their detriment. To believe in Christianity, for example, is to reject the public good for a private one. One’s citizenship becomes compromised by an adherence to something that lies elsewhere. Whereas our concern here is for the public good. All things being equal for the subjectivist, Taylor claims, then significance is accorded only to choice, the choice of what is significant to the subjectivist. (Say as an enthusiastic consumer hard at work in a shopping mall). But a reality in which everything can be equally significant threatens all to insignificance. Charles Taylor. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 2002. For our purposes then, let the significant background horizon of our thought here be western notions of individual freedom and human rights framed within the possibility of eco-poetic media cultures. We may go on from here by, provisionally, looking at recent French and Italian philosophy for some signposts to the future. The thinkers discussed below seek to create new ways to conceive of and engage with ‘sensibilities of the real’ as a means of transforming philosophy and therefore our conceptions of the real. They do this by employing techniques that affirm the material nature of existence aligning their thought with the life sciences in an affirmation of philosophy as worldly and materialist thinking. Alternately, the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno has argued that within the power of jokes and the unpredictability of humor lie the transformative powers essential for innovation in life. Paolo Virno. Multitude Between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e). 2008. But we are not going to go there, partly because the jokes he draws on are lame. His thesis, in a couple of sentences, is that humor offers unexpected deviations from normal human practice and in these deviations lie the possibility for innovation. Virno follows the path of linguistics which, for us, represents little more than a cul de sac. It is in the grounding of recent French philosophy in immanence and material reality that we may eventually find our way back to the cinema of city symphonies. A philosopher such as Jean-Luc Marion, for example, may ask Taylor if thought can be extricated from horizons of being to exist in a place other than being. Alternately, Jean-Luc Nancy proposed that ‘meaningfulness’ cannot be experienced in isolation. We are all in this together, in community we shift from being individuals to becoming human beings. According to Nancy our human ‘sense’ lies within a shared horizon of our interactions with the world and one another. “This world is not merely a correlative of sense; it is structured as sense, and reciprocally, sense is structured as world … Sense, in its sharing is … the being-of-all-with-each- other.” Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. Polity Books. 2012. pp43, 46. According to Bernard Stielger human life is tragic because it can only survive by means of that which alienates it from itself. That which he calls techne - as an unthought, absence of origin suppressed by western philosophy. Humans memorize the past by means of this techne: language, materiality, tools – structuring their thought of reality and projecting it into their future. For Stiegler, human life is dependent upon a history of technical objects ranging from cave paintings to writing to cinema to philosophy and cultural production. All aspects of contemporary cultural life and communal experience are swamped by the commodification of mass society. Here, the artist’s manifesto is displaced by the press release. As a factor within consumerist industrial society techne both demeans our individuality while simultaneously providing the means to our survival. To become successful as human beings it is necessary that we re-think a world transformed by techne so as to create new links between humanity, technology and society. The convergence of contemporary communications technologies and digital media alters both notions of the past as well as our anticipations of the future, to inaugurate an altered experience of time. Stiegler hopes that humans can develop strategies whereby technical, cultural and economic production no longer exclusively serves the mass market. This would be a politics of how we may best live, what we should do, in ways of desiring beyond the imperatives of consumerism. He poses an active thinking by which to open up spaces for engagement rather than passive consumption. This would lead to a type of artistic thinking and acting that is, first of all, intuitive. Our future equalities will be, for Jacques Ranciere, actively interventionist, concerned with their own affirmation and perpetuation. That is, they will not be something handed out or conferred onto communities by administrations or agencies. For Ranciere, the assumption of equality will be the starting point from which action, or intervention, will occur. Equality will be the basis upon which the arbitrariness of existing social inequities and inequalities will be challenged. Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Op.cit. 2012 p112. Italian thinker Maurizio Lazzarato contends that Ranciere’s idea of politics is inextricably bound to notions of truth and ethics. Maurizio Lazzarato. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e). 2014. p255. Seeking to liberate thought within a new democracy of knowledge Francois Laruelle found western thought too restrictive to be really free. He called instead for thinkers to embrace a democratic and egalitarian idea of non-philosophy that accords the ‘real’ The ‘real’ being an acceptance of ‘materiality’ rather than the play within the textural linguistics, signs and signifiers that pre-occupied preceding generations of French thinkers. the thought that it merits. “Our knowledge (philosophy) will always be conditioned by the real since it is always ultimately caused by it.” Ian James. The New French Philosophy. Op cit. 2012. p171. For Laruelle, non-philosophy is the inherently creative activity which may open the way to a new future. It is an active aesthetic. To non-philosophy we could also add amateur philosophy dragging the focus of our thinking, and films, back from professionalism to the everyday and the amateur. A major tendency in twentieth century western thought was toward an essentialism that became known as structuralism. Derived from the Platonic search for ideal forms it led to formal and classicizing tendencies in the arts. By mid-century this type of thinking arrived at practices of deconstruction which held that humans are trapped within a circularity of language. Here, meaning only exists between things at the level of invariant, deep-seated structures. No longer seeking meaning or knowledge, the deconstructionist strives instead to demonstrate that language and its uses are tied to self-interest. Lacking the possibility of disinterested thought and action humans are no longer able to act in the public good – and the specialized, technical language of professional philosophy becomes socially irrelevant. Believing that western philosophy had descended into an abstract metaphysics and mysticism Henri Lefebvre called for philosophers to embrace the familiar, everyday and insignificant. Here, consciousness would be rooted in real life and humans would affirm the forces of their being in their everyday life by, with and in other people. According to Lefebvre, human consciousness depends neither upon a timeless reason nor, “ … a permanent human nature, a ready- made essence or some indeterminate freedom … Consciousness depends upon … real life … everyday life. The ‘meaning’ of life is not to be found in anything other than life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. ‘Meaning cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more.” Henri Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life. London. Verso. 2014. pp 164, 165, 246. From tangible matter we may affect tangible transformations. In this we move from everyday life to theory, rather than imposing theory on everyday life. Maurizio Ferraris argues that the world precedes thought, existing prior to and independently of our cognition of it. Maurizio Ferraris. Introduction to New Realism. London. Bloomsbury. 2015 Humans respond to the world with inscriptions, language, gestures, scribbles, scrawls, drawings, paintings, photographs, movies, social media, and so on. For Ferraris, the basis of society is recording rather than communication. In recording and producing we structure our response to reality. “The simple act of recording leads to an incalculable increase in the reality we know. It is fundamentally inconceivable today to have an experience like the one described by Baudelaire in A une passante: a fleeting beauty that disappears perhaps never to reappear again … (Our age instead favors) repetition, retention and rewriting.” Maurizio Ferraris. Introduction to New Realism. Op cit. 2015. p 23. Our inscriptions combine as a vast archive which generates meaning and culture. This type of thinking is amenable to documentary, be they political or experimental, essay or ethnographic films - as they fall under the rubric of cinematic city symphonies. Cinematography is often thought of as reflecting material reality. The photographic lens lends itself to the depiction of everyday life, so much more in an age of social media and personal communication devices. But where photography may be imitative the setting, action, editing, and sound in a film can create a sense of a parallel or even a hyper-reality. Something that only exists in the artwork, or the mind. Maybe an accord can be found between philosophy and cinema. Of interest here is how the material world ages before our eyes while our ideas and speculations persist as ever-present objects of the mind. What, in our cinematic consciousness, could those mental objects stillness be? II MODERNIST TRIUMPHANT Conventional histories of city symphony films revolve around a modernist canon of key works. The idea of modernism is to disrupt tradition, to see the world made anew by technology and rationality, leading us from the human to the post-human. A place where, as Henri Lefebvre tells us, “Bit by bit everything which formerly contributed to the elementary splendor of everyday life, its innocent, native grandeur, has been stripped from it and made to appear as something beyond its own self. Progress has been real, and in certain respects immense, but it has been dearly paid. And yet it is still there, this innocent life, so very near, but impoverished and humiliated, both strong and pathetic, creative but threatened, producing the future but beset with foreboding about all the imponderables the future has in store.” Henri Lefebvre. The Critique of Everyday Life. London. Verso. 2014. p230. The task for the urban film artist, then, becomes one of discovering the possibilities for other modes of everyday living and of creating viable and just human lives within new urban environments. Reputedly the first avant-garde film made in the United States, the romantically inclined modernist work Manhatta (11 minutes. B & W. 1921) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand presents lower Manhattan island as a place of diverse human multiplicity. The film opens on a shot of a barge passing the New York skyline. A ferry arrives at a pier. Commuters disembark, crowding onto city streets to be enveloped within architecture. An inter-title announces, “City of tall facades of marble and iron slender, strong splendidly uprising toward clear sky.’ The uprising is created by workers laboring away in dusty pits or balancing on narrow girders high above the skyline. Next follows shots of smoking chimneys, water towers, city and harbor views, smoking trains and ocean liners. Here, nature is covered, enclosed, overshadowed by human achievement. Anything is possible, even the future which the building of New York asserts. It is a self-invented future which contains the potentiality of no longer resembling the past. Often regarded as the archetypical city symphony, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (65 minutes, B&W. Germany. 1927) by Walter Ruttman presents an idealized day in the life of Berlin, as the epitome of the modern city. The film opens on shots of water, as if looking through time, dissolving into a space fragmented by the technologies of trains and cinema. Early morning crowds build along sidewalks as smokestacks billow, producing sustenance. Typewriters pound away a little hymn on communications technology; calls are routed through a telephone exchange as two dogs fight on the street. In the modernist metropolis a train emerges from a subway, workers toil at a construction site, airplanes fly in formation above the city, people and trams cross a bustling intersection and trains pass along elevated tracks. At midday workers break for lunch, horses feed from troughs and a lion dines at the zoo in associational montage which creates the idea of civic communion. Vertigo induced by a roller coaster ride is contrasted with a woman’s suicide, followed by a fashion show then more street fighting dogs . Here, in the modern city, space is experienced, as in cinema, as time. Commodification and objectification in the city lead to suicide. Soon enough it would lead to world war. A composite portrayal of Russian cities infused with revolutionary fervor Man With A Movie Camera (68 minutes. B&W. Russia. 1929) by Dziga Vertov is informed by the Constructivist concept of the artist as engineer of the ‘new’ socialist society. Vertov invests the everyday with the hyper-charged kineticism of revolutionary cinema. He saw his kino-eye cinema not as a model for truthful representation but rather a new kind of seeing that created its own truth. The camera gains consciousness and the truth or reality of the film is socially constructed. Eschewing the industrial model of film production Vertov instead adopted domestic working arrangements, employing his brother on camera and his wife as editor. Both are also depicted at work on the film, as workers serving the revolution. Vertov’s ambition was to employ the poetically transformative power of film to create a vision of the ‘perfect electrical man’ Vertov quoted in Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man With the Movie Camera. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. pp 12-13 in cinematic representations of urban life. Instead, he was written out of Soviet film history. The Russian revolution failed, descending into authoritarianism, repression, censorship and mass murder. Vertov’s film survives at least as a picture of an early revolutionary ideal of people organizing themselves and a lesson for artists who would play in the political arena. The action ostensibly takes place in a movie theater which we see near the beginning and end of the film, almost in a self-referential unfurling of early cinema, accompanied by live orchestra and before an appreciative audience. At times the action is highlighted by extreme points of view and superimpositions that incorporate the film worker into the daily life of the people. From our latter day viewpoint these sequences also innocently anticipate the surveillance culture that mass society was later to arrive at. A cameraman works in the morning of a new day, filming the awakening city, people sleeping on park benches, public transport rolling out of terminuses, industry getting underway. Later, he gets out amongst the people following horse-drawn carriages, masses of pedestrians, communications technologies and the rites of passage of marriage, divorce, death and (re) birth. Other parts of the film depict workers at leisure enjoying healthy recreational pursuits, proletarian clubs and other entertainments. Described by its maker Jean Vigo as a rough draft for a future social cinema the partly staged, documentary travelogue A Propos de Nice (23 minutes. B&W. France. 1930) critiques and pokes fun at the leisured classes at a popular beach resort. Made on a small budget with money gifted by his father in law, the film is unique amongst early city symphonies in that it resists the usual modernist rendering of the city. Collaborating with Boris Kaufmann, Dziga Vertov’s brother and cinematographer, Vigo employed aerial photography and camera effects in a sardonic work infused with a political undercurrent. By concentrating his attention on people at leisure Vigo invoked the idea of the amateur moving image maker as an artist who resists not only the commoditized industrial film but also the bourgeois art market. Just as one can be an amateur artist a person can also be an amateur philosopher – one who uses the medium out of necessity. A working class city symphony Conditions in Los Angeles (15 minutes. USA. 1934) by A.L. Siminov surveys downtown and new city hall as edifices built by workers. A succession of apartment buildings, stores, oil refineries and middle-class homes are presented in a parallel montage separated by titles such as, “Workers build.” Until they exceed their use value and are cast aside in dusty shanties to wait in soup kitchen lines. “While the rich enjoys leisure.” The abundance of privilege and exploitation is contrasted with the dumpster diving of the dispossessed. “Once the creators of wealth,” are reduced to disabled and homeless panhandlers by the travails of labor, unemployment and the vicissitudes of financial markets. The song will remain the same until workers organize to stop their spiritual, economic and physical starvation. David E James: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005. p113. James also asserts the social aspect of avant-garde films that, “emerge from social movements, from identity groups, subcultures and the like, who find the medium valuable in their own self-production and self articulation. Their films similarly entail social reference and have a social function, however disguised or attenuated it may be.” p15. Henri Lefebvre would have much to add here, but that is beyond the scope of this essay. THIRD WORLD CITIES In his book The Predicament of Culture the American anthropologist James Clifford claims that both avant-garde art and ethnography were at their strongest when they paid close attention to and cross-fertilized each other. Sharing procedures of collage, juxtaposition and estrangement, as well as notions of identity as being mixed, relational and inventive, each contributed to the other’s relevance. Both practices excelled as active intruders whose interventions served to provoke responses. Ethnography and the avant-garde had both declined in influence since they went their separate ways. It would only be in their re-embrace, Clifford believed, that their potential may be reignited James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature & Art. Cambridge, M.A., Harvard University Press, 1988. The Californian film artist Chick Strand (1931-2009), who had studied anthropology in San Francisco and Los Angeles, made several poetic films that straddled the ethnographic/experimental divide. She stated that, “Ethnographic films can and should be works of art, symphonies about the fabric of a people.” Cited in, Maria Praggiore. Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography, in Robin Blaetz. Women’s Experimental Cinema. Durham, N.C. Duke University Press. 2007. p189 Philosophically, ethnographic films, whatever their future may be, could accord with the recent French and Italian thinkers discussed earlier in this essay. A founder of the French cinema-verite movement, Jean Rouch crossed the boundaries between fiction and documentary filmmaking in his quest for what he called a ‘shared anthropology’. Originally an engineer, Rouch went to Africa during the German occupation of France during WWII before later studying philosophy and then training as an anthropologist. As a filmmaker he developed an artisanal style that was to influence French nouvelle vague auteurs such as Jean Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. Influenced by Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov’s filming of ‘real-life’, Rouch believed that the camera could function as a provocateur to elicit revelatory behavior from the filmed subject. Briefly, his technique involved single-take improvised filming of non-actors performing spontaneously in natural settings, use of light-weight, portable recording equipment, and interactive filming methods. Moi, un noir (Me, a Black) (70 minutes. Color. Sound. France. 1958) by Jean Rouch Is an improvised ethno-fictional account of young unemployed Nigerian immigrants living in poverty in the Treichville quarter of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, West Africa. Reflecting the influence of western movies the main character Oumarou Ganda portrays himself as the film star Edward G Robinson who, along with his friends Tarzan and Eddie Constantine, seek casual employment on the docks. After work they dream of careers as F.B.I. agents, boxers and successful womanizers able to compete with and out-perform the colonialists who appropriate their resources. Hanoi, Martes Trece by Santiago Alvarez (37 minutes. Sound. Cuba. 1967) was filmed inside Hanoi at the time of the American war in Vietnam. Here, citizens unite against the mechanized warfare of an imperial power which asserts its own rights whilst denying the human rights of those it seeks to ‘bomb back into the middle ages.’ To deny others what they seek for themselves. Here, militarism and colonialism are seen as the unstated legacy of technocratic modernism. The artist serves here to document community action and, in that role, can therefore be anonymous. Loius Malle’s Calcutta (Kolkata) (99 minutes, Color, Sound, 1969) by Louis Malle (France) was originally shot as part of the mammoth seven part Phantom India (363 minutes, Color, Sound, 1969) Louis Malle found his footage of Calcutta (Kolkata), from February 1968, so compelling that he made it into a separate film as life in an overcrowded, depressed hangover of British colonialism. Opening on shots of people bathing and washing their clothes in the waters of a bustling port the filmmaker, as visual ethnographer, offers little commentary as his camera encounters hermits, lepers, workers, migrants, and political activists in the city’s slums and streets while Calcutta’s Anglicized elite play golf and attend horse races. People beg, wash elephants, marry, and are cremated, interacting with or ignoring the camera as they go about their everday lives. It is people, rather than power, that are important to Malle. A clue to his impetus is offered, not in Calcutta (Kolkata) but in the companion film Phantom India which begins with a series of Indian talking heads, conversing in English. Malle explains that only two per cent of Indians speak English but they talk a lot, often on behalf of everybody. Interestingly, when Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky visited India in the early 1960s they connected with a group of poets in Kolkata known as the Hungrryalists and, later, India’s beat poets. Born in the slums and seeing themselves as having no future these poets embraced an anarchistic revolutionary politics. In their search for a new language they employed the coarse vernacular of the streets, rejected notions of caste, and the fine feelings associated with earlier Bengali literature. India’s Beats – The Hungry Generation. BBC World Service, January, 14, 2015. In speaking English, we are told, they are governed by western concepts and a vocabulary reduced to meaningless clichés. Therefore, he believes, they offer little insight into the real depth and diversity of India. In a dynamic of intercultural inter-subjectivity Malle’s subjects play their part too, staring back into the camera that surveys them, reducing the film crew to spectacle, as a show for the people that they have come to film. One is reminded of those points of first inter-cultural contact between European explorers and indigenous people where, so often, each asked of the other if they were human. Malle is an intruder and whatever he records becomes that provoked by his intrusion. An outsider unable to penetrate the mysteries offered up by the Indian sub-continent. Malle’s India is a universe unto itself, one which calls our own worldview into question. A place, that for Hindus, where life is merely an illusion (Maya). Here The (western) notion of human rights could be examined here and also in consideration of films like Do The Right Thing and London – see later. people are defined, not as individuals, but in relationship to others. These relationships protect them from the solitude and alienation, so often a hallmark of western individualism. Unfortunately, because its depictions of poverty, caste and exploitation are seen as undermining the democratic aspirations of modern India, Malle’s film has been deemed, in India, as offensive to that country’s self image. Whereas for me, the work appeals in its depiction of tolerant diversity and tangible multiplicity. Traffic Signal (130 minutes, Color, Sound, India. 2007) by Madhur Bhandarka presents a street-level view of the informal economy of the urban poor. Here, Mumbai street traders derive their income from semi-organized activity around a traffic signal, hectoring passing motorists who have stopped for a red light. They comprise beggars, cripples, prostitutes, rag pickers, addicts and others who sell clothes, newspapers, flowers and trinkets, most speaking in the coarse vernacular of the street. Between Kolkata and Mumbai lies the ancient city of Varanasi (Benares) the location of Robert Gardner’s (1925-2014) intuitive ethnographic film Forest of Bliss (90 minutes, Color, Sound, USA, 1986). Forest of Bliss depicts the on-going cycles of life, death and ritual in Varanasi on the Ganges River. Motifs such as water, wood, fire, boats, steps, marigolds, corpses, dogs, kites and birds recur throughout the film as depiction of the everyday commerce between the material ad immaterial words. If the street vendors of Traffic Signal pragmatically embrace an everyday world where consciousness depends upon real life and where meaning is found in that life, then those of Forest of Bliss regard it as little more than a mirage, an impediment to their progress through the immaterial world.. They are on their way to somewhere else. Indeed, Gardner’s photographic-realism may throw Benares into a type of relief that defies native belief. Believing that humans are ‘victims’ of meaning in a world constructed by themselves, Gardner depicts a Benares governed by religion and tradition. “The idea in this film was to look for some quite ordinary realities … trusting that they will provide an evocative journey into their meaning.” Robert Gardner and Akos Ostor. Making Forest of Bliss. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard Film Archive. 2001. p45. Regarded as a maverick by the American ethnographic community Gardner’s work Forest of Bliss is an example of, “aestheticized ethnographic film not adopted by the anthropological community,” Anna Grimshaw: The Bellwether Eye: Recent Developments in Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Anthropological Inquiry, in Cultural Anthropology 26, no 2. 2011. pp247-262 has been praised by poets such as Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney. As a young filmmaker he admired the work of Maya Deren and later became friends with Stan Brakhage. Gardner went so far as to assert that his favourite ethnographic films were Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), and Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (1937). Cited in Peter Loizos. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness 1955-1985. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993 pp139-168. After leaving his position at the San Francisco Art Institute the pioneering American avant-garde filmmaker Sidney Peterson formed Orbit films with Gardner, his brother in law, with the purpose of making ethnographic films. Steve Anker, Radicalizing Vision, in Steve Anker, Kathy Gerwitz, Steve Seid (Eds) Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010. pp39-47 His ambitions, then, were broader and more poetic than most Anglo-American ethnographic filmmakers. Gardner may actually sit more happily amongst those French thinkers who assert that Anglo-American empiricism applied to the social sciences constrains imaginative and empathetic readings of people, culture and situations. “Working at the borderline of what is and what no longer is anthropology one also knows that if one crosses that border, if one can depart from where one is, one can also return to it more freely, without attachment to the norms generated on one side or the other.” Trinh T. Minh-ha: Speaking Nearby with Nancy Chin in, Cinema Interval. New York, Routledge. 1999. p215 REPRESENTING OURSELVES In Water and Power (54 minutes. Color. Sound. USA 1989) Pat O’Neill focuses on the relationship between the metropolis and its hinterland and how human activity shapes nature into culture. Here, the modernist utopianism of the city symphony is reduced to despair in the face of environmental and human degradation. An intellectual may further elaborate this point as, “The only valid image of the future is the failure of the past.” Terry Eagleton. After Theory. New York. Basic Books. 2003. p175. “I was working in an area where the water was being removed … so the land was changing from farming to desert.” Pat O’Neill. Water and Power, 1989. Accessed at http://vimeo.com/6053909. June 27, 2014. O’Neill’s interests extend beyond the nature/culture divide to further encompass the movement of light in shaping perception and questions of representation in moving image making to remind us that a consciousness of economic and environmental factors must underlie our perception of metropolitan culture and politics. “I think I call into question the notion of image making … the history of entertainment, illusions and the industry of film and television as a force that inhabits the (Los Angeles) area.” Pat O’Neill.Water and Power, 1989. Op. cit. London (82 minutes, Color, Sound, UK, 1994) by Patrick Keiller photographically depicts a series of walks around London by two unseen protagonists: Robinson, a recently returned ship’s photographer and his former lover, the narrator. Together they visit historical sites associated with several famous literary figures as they contrast the city they remember with that being architecturally and economically remodeled in alignment with revisionist political imperatives. Of Time and the City (72 minutes, Color & B&W, Sound, UK. 2008) by Terence Davies is a bittersweet collaged reminiscence of growing up Catholic then gay in Liverpool in the immediate post World War II era. From the grandiosity of imperial and religious architecture underwritten by drab working class dormitories his childhood cycles between home, school and God until imported Hollywood glamour offers an escape. In contrast to third world cinemas these English essay style films are premised on notions of human rights and entitlement, adopting a viewpoint that tends toward aristocratic reflection. Whereas Vertov may have directed his work toward a revolutionary future and many American artists locate their work in a present, these English documentarians evoke earlier eras when Britain was greater and literary giants strode its streets. Davies laments ‘his’ Liverpool whereas Silsila in Traffic Signal sacrifices himself for his community of fellow outcasts. The theme of self-sacrifice recurs throughout Indian mythology as duty and honor. Arthur Cotterell (Ed). Bath, U.K. World Mythology.Paragon Publishing. 1999. p144. The message, in the Indian film at least, is that even if we cannot expect much from our leaders, the poor and socially unworthy may still lead by example, even if that community, like those being bombed in Hanoi, has no expectation of human rights. The American film historian Scott MacDonald contentiously cites Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (120 minutes. Color. Sound. USA. 1989) as the greatest of American city symphonies. MacDonald maintains that Lee’s film combines crucial elements of the modernist European city symphonies with the democratic vision and personal expressiveness of earlier American city symphonies. Scott MacDonald. The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2001. pp170-182 It is by this criteria that I admitted Bhandarkar’s Traffic Signal to this survey. Rather than urban vistas Lee focuses on neighborhood dwellings in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y. and uses individuals as motifs of ethnicity and character in the here and now. Even if their actions are hopeless or destructive they are still capable of acting on the present. Both Traffic Signal and Do The Right Thing depict small urban communities under pressure in what Freud termed ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ between ethnic, racial and national groups. Rather than waiting for happiness in the next world we can aspire to fulfillment for all in this life. The focus of our age can be on honoring humanity and its place within sustainable environments. Here, the artist’s role in the community would encompass all from anonymous participant to interventionist, governed by notions of service to the culture, and mistaken neither for propaganda nor advertising. The integrity of their work will continually challenge all those who would administrate or manage them. “Our … ideal of vital being, arises not in our identification in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the universe. To compose … a symposium of the whole … all the old extended orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetable; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure – all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider art.” ETHNOPOETICS: Robert Duncan. Accessed at http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/duncan.html September 26, 2008 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 11