One of the main differences between observational and psychogeographical landscaping is the filmmaker’s degree of intervention: James Benning’s careful choice of framings is much less explicit than Patrick Keiller’s fictional narratives, but both reveal a gradual involvement of filmmakers in urban space. Autobiographical landscaping develops further this link between subject and object – or sender and message, in the usual terms of information theory – by combining the distancing effect of structural films with the subjective dimension of first-person accounts. In these documentaries, the autobiographical content becomes a key element to decode the meaning of the urban surface, despite the differences established by the way in which the first-person is used.
Prior to the 1980s, cinema was not perceived as a suitable medium for autobiography. Literary scholar Elizabeth Bruss asserted that ‘there is no real cinematic equivalent for autobiography’ (1980: 296) because filmmakers could not embody the filmed subject while they were behind the camera or, conversely, they could not film themselves if they were in front of the camera. She criticised early examples of this film practice such as Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), Joyce at 34 (Joyce Chopra & Claudia Weill, 1974), Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, François Truffaut, 1959), 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) or Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) for their lack of ‘truth-value’, ‘act-value’ and ‘identity-value’, three criteria that have been summarised by Jim Lane as follows:
Truth-value is associated with reference and autobiography’s empiricist claim ‘to be consistent with other evidence’. Act-value is associated with performance, ‘an action that exemplifies the character of the agent responsible for that action and how it is performed’. Identity-value is associated with the conflation of the roles of author, narrator, and protagonist in autobiography and ‘the same individual occupying a position both in the context, the associated “scene of writing”, and within the text itself’. (2002: 29)
Since Bruss wrote her article, non-fiction film has undergone a subjective turn that has led many film theorists to defend the opposite idea: the existence of mise-en-scène and editing resources capable of overcoming these problems. Philippe Lejeune, for example, pointed out the ability of home movies, film diaries, still photographs and voiceover narration to address the past in a cinematic way (2008: 19); Jim Lane added formal interviews and interactive modes of filming to those resources (2002: 94); Michael Renov reminded us that the filming subject could easily be before and behind the camera at the same time ‘thanks in no small measure to … the mirror and the tripod’ (2004: 232); and finally Gregorio Martín Gutiérrez enumerated up to five markers of subjectivity: ‘the inclusion of the filmmaker’s own voice … the presence of his body, his gaze bound to the camera’s perspective, [the presence of] documents or objects with his own name, or the indicative nature of certain images, such as recording his own shadow’ (2010: 372). One way or another, all these resources fit in with the three levels on which filmmakers can inscribe themselves, as defined by Catherine Russell: first-person voiceover, the origin of the gaze and their body image, to which she added editing choices as an indirect form of identity (1999: 277).
As these categories go beyond what Lejeune termed ‘the autobiographical pact’ – in which author, narrator and character are always the same subject (1989: 3–30) – it is necessary to make a distinction between purely autobiographical filmmakers and those first-person filmmakers who construct a socio-political discourse from their identity. On the one hand, autobiographical filmmakers would be those who strictly fulfil the autobiographical pact, such as Jonas Mekas, Ed Pincus, Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner, Joseph Morder, Alain Cavalier, David Perlov or Avi Mograbi. On the other, directors such as Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Werner Herzog, Harun Farocki, Thom Andersen, Michael Moore, Nick Broomfield or Terence Davies should be considered first-person filmmakers, because they ‘speak from a first-person position in the role of witness, and sometimes participant observer, without being centred on the autobiographical self’, as Michael Chanan has explained (2012: 24). There is even a third type of filmmaker, such as Nanni Moretti, Manoel de Oliveira or Guy Maddin, who practise self-fiction, a hybrid genre in which ‘the identity of the filmmaker is maintained, but the events referred to may be imaginary’ (Martín Gutiérrez 2010: 372). Self-fictions can be as fictional as fakes or mockumentaries, but their distance from the discourses of sobriety turns them into ‘a useful tool to explore what is beyond the appearance of reality’ (Catalá & Cerdán 2007/8: 17; my translation). Thus, in spite of distorting what is usually understood as ‘reality’, these fantasies can be interpreted as a subjective truth that challenges official accounts, because they convey the way filmmakers perceive their place in the world.
The boundaries between these three groups – autobiographical, first-person and self-fiction filmmakers – tend to be ambiguous, because they can change their style from one film to another, but they all are interested in showing the historical world through their own subjectivity. ‘The documentary maker,’ Antonio Weinrichter has written, ‘sets himself up as a character, as well as an active enunciator, resorts to tactics of identification … and filters our perception of the events that are presented’ (2010: 276). This subjective turn involves a double movement: first inwards, to the filmmaker’s personality and identity, and then outwards, to his or her historical context, due to the identification between the first person singular and the first person plural proposed by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). This idea, according to which there is no individual existence without coexistence with another, has been applied to the non-fiction field by Alisa Lebow, establishing a bridge between the individual and the collective dimension of first-person filmmaking:
The ‘I’ is always social, always already in relation, and when it speaks, as these filmmakers do, in the first person, it may appear to be in the first person singular ‘I’ but ontologically speaking, it is always in effect, the first person plural ‘we’. The grammatical reference reminds us that language itself, though spoken by an individual, is never entirely our own invention, nor anyone else’s. Despite the fact that we believe it to express our individuality, it nonetheless also expresses our commonality, our plurality, our interrelatedness with a group, a mass, a sociality, if not a society. This is as true about the expression of individuality and subjectivity in first person films as it is in language itself. And that is precisely what I find most arresting and fascinating about first person films. They are quite the opposite, in most cases, of the singular ‘I’; and can even be understood to be a ‘cinema of we’ rather than a ‘cinema of me’. (2012: 3)
Autobiographical landscaping echoes this double movement inwards and outwards by depicting the city as a lived space, using the filmmaker’s personal history in order to represent a collective experience. In these documentaries, directors embody all those residents who negotiate their relation with the places they inhabit every day through an account – their account – that might be interchangeable with someone else’s. In this sense, the two films analysed below,
News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977) and
Lost Book Found (Jem Cohen, 1996), combine an observational attitude towards everyday street scenes with a first-person commentary that provides a subjective reading of the images, thereby offering a portrait of life in the city from a collective and autobiographical perspective at the same time. In fact, both documentaries share a similar interest in exploring unusual variations of the first-person commentary: in
News from Home, Akerman reads up to twenty letters written by her mother and addressed to her during her 1972 stay in New York; while in
Lost Book Found, the narrator, who is not Cohen, tells a fictional story slightly inspired in the filmmaker’s first job when he settled in New York in the 1980s. Therefore, the commentary gives rise to an indirect autobiography in
News from Home (because Akerman uses her own voice but not her own words) and a third-person autobiography in
Lost Book Found (in which Cohen’s story is told by someone else’s voice).
News from Home: Urban Crisis from the Walker’s Perspective
Chantal Akerman filmed News from Home in the summer of 1976 under the confessed influence of the American avant-garde film (see Grant & Hillier 2009: 154-155; Koresky 2009: 1). A year before the New York City blackout of 1977 – the event that would later symbolise the city’s urban crisis – she depicted a cityscape of dilapidated buildings, closed stores, dirty alleys, obsolete infrastructures and graffiti on subway cars. The film can then be interpreted as an objective portrait of New York in the mid-1970s, but it is also something else: a hidden family portrait in which the dispassionate reading of the filmmaker’s correspondence creates a distancing effect that turns the cityscape into a state of mind. The contrast between the observational record of street scenes and the personal implications of such a commentary produces a subjective reading of urban space that reveals the emotional gap between the filmmaker and her mother, thereby giving an autobiographical meaning to the film.
The urban crisis had a highly negative impact on public space in the 1970s: streets, parks and even public transportation became dangerous places in which people – especially women – tried to spend the least possible time. Despite the open hostility of the city, Akerman decided to keep a ‘ground-level observational strategy’ that Jennifer M. Barker has related to Michel de Certeau’s walker’s perspective (1999: 41). This choice has a feminist background, since the
voyeur (the opposite figure to the walker) has historically been identified with a dominant male figure: its natural habitat – skyscrapers, penthouses, observation decks, etc. – is usually occupied by male characters, while the places identified with women – family residences, laundries or schools – remain at street level (1999: 53, 56). In order to counteract this gender division, Akerman paid particular attention to those spatial practices through which underrepresented subjects, such as women, children and African-Americans, appropriated public space: a good example of this logic would be a thirty-second shot of an African-American woman who stares at the camera while sitting on a chair outside her home, an image that claims both women’s visibility and the right to the city of low-income communities. The decision to emphasise this kind of non-event through duration is what Ivone Margulies has called Akerman’s ‘hyperrealist everyday’, a way of filming focused on those empty moments usually elided in commercial films:
The label ‘Nothing happens’, often applied to Akerman’s work, is key in defining that work’s specificity – its equation of extension and intensity, of description and drama. The inscription of subject matter neglected in traditional film tends to involve a corrective thrust, a setting straight of the image bank: if conventional cinema contains too few positive images of women and ethnic or other minority groups, it becomes the realist filmmaker’s task to represent these groups. The inclusion of such ‘images between images’ begets a spatio-temporal, as well as moral expansion of cinema. This interest in extending the representation of reality reflects a desire to restore a phenomenological integrity to reality. (1996: 22)
Women filmmakers are often interested in the representation of the everyday as a way to render women’s activities visible, especially those that are socially characterised as banal, mundane or ordinary. Akerman herself achieved worldwide recognition thanks to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film made just before News from Home in which she represented a single mother’s domestic routines through fixed frames and long shots. Such minimalist mise-en-scène serves in News from Home to draw the audience’s attention to transit spaces that are below the threshold of visibility, such as empty alleys, crowded intersections, parking lots or subway stations. There, Akerman attempted to embody all those invisible women who move across the city every day, representing their experience in both objective and subjective terms: at first sight, her images seem anonymous, because they show ‘what you see every day when you live there’ (Akerman in Grant & Hillier 2009: 154), but they also express her own self as a foreign woman filmmaker, given that they contain information about her attitude towards the filmed space. In this regard, ‘the construction of the self’, as Barker has suggested, ‘becomes a spatial issue’:
Through forms of architecture and urban planning, and through forms of
being in architecture and urban spaces, subjects of the city write and are themselves written in spatial, corporeal terms. […] The deep resonance between body and city, between corporeality and ‘city-ness’ … allows Akerman to cast her autobiography as a ‘tour’ of this city. By tracing the spaces of the city in which she now lives, for which she has left her family and home town, she seeks herself as a subject. (1999: 46, 48)
Akerman’s corporeal relationship with New York takes the form of a travelogue in which her body and her own words are absent both on the screen and in the commentary. Her voice, on the contrary, is heard from the third shot as she reads aloud her mother’s letters, whose text is usually trivial, repetitive and redundant. They all essentially tell the same story – conventional family accounts about work, money, holidays, illnesses and moods, besides motherly advice and comments on the weather – to the point that their most remarkable feature is the phatic function: the mother constantly asks about the daughter’s new jobs and addresses in New York, claims for news from her and complains about the delay of her letters, simple requests that actually mean, according to Janet Bergstrom, ‘I love you, I miss you, so please, answer me’ (2004: 181; my translation). Akerman’s fast, cold and detached reading conveys the growing distance between her and her mother, and ultimately erases the original signature of the letters, thereby creating a strange superimposition of roles that Margulies has interpreted as a response to the mother’s complaints (1996: 151).
Taking into account that the mother’s words end up being drowned by the sounds of the city, Akerman’s answer has to be necessarily in the cityscape. Her confusion, loneliness and alienation as a foreigner in New York can be found in the images that reveal her alien status there: in one of the sequences shot inside a subway car, two men react with clear discomfort when they realise that they are being filmed by a stranger – the first one gets off at his stop and the second blatantly escapes from the camera by changing to another car. Their returned gazes emphasise the distance between the filmmaker and the city, to which she does not belong and in which she cannot be recognised by anybody. Accordingly, Akerman’s gaze at New York can be compared with Ziolkowski’s foreign gaze at Los Angeles, in which the explicit gap between the perceiving subject – the filmmaker – and the perceived object – the city – establishes a strong sense of defamiliarisation towards the filmed space.
Inside the crowd, however, the filmmaker acts like a female
flâneur fascinated by the comings and goings of people, a character that is quite different from its male counterpart, as Maria Walsh has highlighted: ‘unlike that masculinist discourse, where the
flâneur’s vision is both possessed by and possesses the city, here the gazer becomes more and more absorbed by the image of the city’ (2004: 193). This is the reason why Akerman focuses on those places where anyone can go unnoticed, that is, ‘the “lived” spaces of everyday life, with which the city’s residents would be more intimately familiar’ (Barker 1999: 42). For example, there is a sequence made of twelve similar shots of people crossing the street at the geographic centre of Manhattan: the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street. There, Akerman moves her camera around the four corners of the intersection three times over the course of a day and a night, filming in both the crowded rush hours and the empty night time. Such an interest in the act of crossing a street recalls psychogeographical practices like the static
dérive, in which the observer had to spend an entire day without leaving a given place (see Debord 1981b: 52). Likewise, Akerman just settled down in that particular intersection in order to let her camera record what happens when people believe that
nothing happens, as she also does in subway cars and stations.
One of the longest shots of the film simply shows people waiting in a subway station to get on the trains (
Image 5.1). Passengers cross the platform at different paces, hurrying up or killing time, getting on and off trains that suddenly arrive, stop for a few seconds and then they go again, leaving behind a completely different scene. The unusual length of this shot – nine minutes – captures the real experience of waiting: how many trains and minutes have to pass before a change of view? Gilles Deleuze (1985) defined this kind of take as ‘time-image’, because they entail a more direct representation of time than the ‘movement-image’, the visual regime commonly associated with mainstream film. The main differences between these two conceptions of cinema have been summarised by Walsh as follows:
In the cinema of the direct time-image, the coordinates of the sensory motor schema of the movement-image are abandoned. Instead of characters being able to extend their perceptions into action, their internal mental states pervade the image, often immobilizing it or causing images to succeed one another by means of false continuity shots, thereby creating what Deleuze calls aberrant movement. […] In a cinema of the time-image an intensive, infinitely expanding duration or interval suspends action, whereas in the movement-image the interval no longer assures continuity in space and succession in time. (2004: 200)
Image 5.1: News from Home, micro-narratives in a subway station
The temporal logic of time-image is used above all in the shots filmed from means of transport, such as private cars, suburban trains and even a boat in the last sequence. The first carscape, for example, is a ten-minute tracking shot in which the camera remains static inside a vehicle moving up 10th Avenue. From that perspective, the West Side is depicted as a volatile cityscape: streets and buildings follow one another throughout twenty-one blocks of shop and garage fronts, parking lots, urban voids, parked cars and passers-by (Images
5.2 & 5.3). There is only enough perspective in the cross streets to make out some blurred skyscrapers, but the camera avoids landmarks to focus on the experience of driving through the city. The carscape can then be interpreted as a ‘cut’ in the urban fabric similar to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts, a series of artworks in abandoned buildings in which he removed sections of floors, ceilings and walls in order to reflect on urban decline. These interventions, according to Marta Traquino, demonstrate that ‘understanding the meaning of inhabiting depends on the observation and relation with the surrounding environment, as well as on recalling the possibility of transforming the space by showing new openings on old surfaces’ (2010: 55; my translation). This idea can be applied to
News from Home since its representational strategy also seeks to transform everyday spaces through new ways of seeing them. Furthermore, considering that Matta-Clark made most of his works in the years prior to the making of this film, the cityscape filmed by Akerman was practically the same on which he worked.
Images 5.2 & 5.3: News from Home, two instants of the first carscape
The iconic dimension of New York, meanwhile, only emerges in the final boatscape, another ten-minute tracking shot in which the camera is placed aboard the Staten Island ferry. This sequence begins with a confused jumble of buildings that gradually fall behind as the boat moves away from the city. After a few minutes, the well-known Manhattan skyline can be finally made out in the distance, although it immediately begins to fade in the mist like an impressionist painting. By leaving the city, Akerman seems to adopt the
voyeur’s perspective, but this frame also coincides with the immigrant’s perspective: it is the first panorama that Europeans who migrated to New York between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s could see on arrival.
News from Home ends with this view, but the filmmaker rewrites it in the reverse direction: instead of approaching the city, she moves away from it. This choice expresses her status as a misplaced immigrant in a hostile city, as well as her emotional distance with respect to her native country. The Upper New York Bay thus becomes a no-man’s-land that dissolves the lived city into an abstract mood related to the transnational experience of living simultaneously here and there, a mindscape in which the new home and the old one are superimposed.
News from Home is therefore a cinematic mapping of Akerman’s wanderings through New York City that not only shows where she was but also how she felt there. Such performative dimension comes first and foremost from the different roles that she plays through the images, each one associated with a particular emotion: walker / curiosity, passenger / routine, flâneur / fascination, filmmaker / creativity, foreigner / loneliness and, above all, daughter / weariness and affection at the same time. Akerman pretends to be tired of her mother, but she still shares a close intimacy with her: why else would she choose her letters as commentary for the film? As in a sketchbook or a diary film, the filmmaker’s subjectivity is behind every image, and consequently the film depicts the New York cityscape as an emotional experience, always unpredictable, instead of as a series of soulless views of iconic motifs.
Lost Book Found: The Subconscious of the City
Jem Cohen is a filmmaker who simultaneously comes from the New York tradition of street photography and the artistic and political spirit of the avant-garde. He identifies himself with ‘certain truly independent independents, often formally adventurous and deeply engaged politically, working outside of traditional social issue documentary but also not so easily placed within the so-called avant-garde’ (in Cerdán et al. 2009: 76). This kind of filmmaker, such as Jonas Mekas, Robert Frank, Peter Hutton, James Benning or Chantal Akerman, usually feels at home in non-fiction territory for its openness to different formats and styles, a key feature to explain the way they work, as Cohen has written in a text about the essay film:
This is a realm that simply makes sense for those who need to do most of it on their own; collagists and collectors, drawn to build from fragments of actuality (which are cheaper, after all); filmmakers who relish untethered histories, juxtaposed scraps, who make work indisposed to focus groups, pitch sessions, funder control, and even clear definition. The work then has always been an uncomfortable mix of documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches, something you can hardly claim to have pioneered, and which has certainly become more common in recent years. That said, the mixture of genres and approaches is not really the point; it is not so much about documentary techniques as about documentary
openness; being open to the world as it unfolds, being open to the film as it makes itself from that world. (2009a: 18)
Talking about his travelogues – Buried in Light (1994), Amber City (1999) and Blood Orange Sky (1999) – Cohen has defined his works as ‘sketchbooks in film, sometimes shaped into essays’ (in Cerdán et al. 2009: 45). Their final form is always conditioned by his method: he usually spends much time walking the city with his camera in hand as a postmodern flâneur and capturing raw images of unexpected events and unusual details of street life as ‘someone else might jot down ideas or quick sketches in a notebook’ (Halter 2009: 228), a never-ending process during which he also edits and writes the voiceover texts. This system has led him to create a huge image archive that threatens to exceed his working capacity due to its wide variety of formats: Super 8, 16mm, ¾” Umatic, beta SP, open reel 1”, D2, digibeta, dv, dvcam, audio cassettes, mini-discs and lately many hard drives (see Cerdán et al. 2009: 72–3). The use of the archive, as well as the overlapping of two or even more long-term projects, entails a clear tendency to the aesthetic of the fragment, which has a prime example in Lost Book Found. This film, according to Ed Halter, summarises much of Cohen’s work, because it explicitly theorises his method and philosophy of filmmaking (2009: 234).
Images 5.4 & 5.5: Lost Book Found, street vendor and urban fisherman
Its meagre plot tells the story of a pushcart vendor in New York’s West Side who receives a mysterious book from a man who fishes for objects through the underground ventilation system grilles (
Images 5.4 & 5.5). The book is full of hand-written lists and enumerations of ‘
places, objects, incidents, all having something to do with the city’, as the unseen narrator says; and suggests to him a new way of looking at urban space. This story is and is not autobiographical, because it is roughly inspired by Cohen’s first job in New York as a pushcart vendor, but many details are fictional, and, what is most important, the first-person narrator’s voice is not Cohen’s but Todd Colby’s. For all these reasons, the film can be considered an example of third-person autobiography, as the filmmaker himself has hinted:
I wanted it to be
somewhat autobiographical, but I still wasn’t interested in it being a
bout me. Many of the details are true and come directly from my experience, but that just wasn’t the point. The film is about attempts to make sense of the city, about ways of looking, and about the way the city operates in its hidden layer. But the details of the narrative and of the narrator as a particular person aren’t so important in themselves. So, the voice is somewhat like mine, but it isn’t mine. I preferred to stand back a little. (Cohen in Cerdán
et al. 2009: 64)
Similarly to the Robinson Trilogy, Lost Book Found documents the places where the filmmaker has been and the things that have caught his attention there. The film also echoes News from Home for several reasons beyond its autobiographical content: both are interested in street scenes and everyday environments, which are almost always showed from the walker’s perspective, and curiously they share a similar cinematic geography. In Cohen’s film, the narrator says that ‘on most days, I rode the cart from a parking garage to the same spot on 9th Avenue, near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel’, a place located just one block east of where Akerman shot her longer carscape. Therefore, there is a spatio-temporal continuity between News from Home and Lost Book Found, because together they cover two decades in the city’s history, from the urban crisis of the 1970s to the beginning of Rudolph Giuliani’s first term as Mayor of New York City.
Cohen’s experience as a pushcart vendor allows him to discover the gift of invisibility and extend his perception of the city: ‘
I discovered that simply by standing behind the cart and selling, I had put up both a wall and window, from which I could watch what happened on the street […]
And as I became invisible, I began to see things that had once been invisible to me.’ Sonia García López has related this awareness of urban life’s smallest details to Cohen’s apprenticeship as a filmmaker, given that he has applied the idea of becoming invisible to most of his films since
This is a History of New York (1987) (2009: 94–5).
1 In that short, the filmmaker tried to merge past and present in the same space by imagining ‘a flattened history … in which different eras exist simultaneously’ (Halter 2009: 232), a fantasy that somehow reappears in
Lost Book Found.
Cohen usually records his images in a few seconds, by chance, which identifies him with the character of the urban fisherman: both collect their materials from the depths and fringes of the city, they ‘glean’ them from the debris of late-capitalism, as Agnès Varda does in her documentary
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (
The Gleaners and I, 2000). Again,
Lost Book Found skips the landmarks of the city – the only one that briefly appears is Times Square through a steamed up windshield – and focuses instead on fleeting impressions of what the pushcart vendor might have seen and heard: ‘bits of paper and plastic swirling ghostlike in eddies of wind, weathered storefronts surviving from decades past, cheap and forlorn shop-window displays, notes on walls, passing conversations and the sounds of machines at work’ (Halter 2009: 225). These images are organised in descriptive series which go beyond the objective record of reality to become metaphors for contemporary society: the shot in which a man disappears through a trapdoor in the sidewalk, for instance, suggests the existence of a hidden city beneath its surface, and the fisherman’s book might be the key to enter it.
The narrator remains hypnotised by the content of the book, to the point that some of its lists and enumerations ‘
come back in flashes’. Suddenly, everything in the city can be interpreted as part of ‘a text waiting to be uncovered, read and deciphered’, as Halter has said, from the hand-scrawled broadsheets taped everywhere to the spatial practices of commuters and homeless (2009: 226). Cohen’s ability to discover ‘
signs hidden behind other signs’ allows him to capture ‘the subconscious of the city’ (Luc Santé quoted in Cerdán
et al. 2009: 120), an idea that seems to have been inspired by Walter Benjamin’s
The Arcades Project (1927–1940).
2 This work consists of hundreds of quotations from all kind of sources – from high to low culture – through which the German writer attempted to build an account of Paris’s cultural history in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, by structuring the film as a collage of non-hierarchical stories and testimonies, Cohen was actually updating Benjamin’s notion of the city as a repository of anachronistic objects, as Halter has explained:
Cohen’s way of seeing the city is … textual, archival, and archaeological. It is reminiscent of Benjamin’s concept of literary montage, an act of picking through ‘the rags, the refuse’ of past and present society, reading the city as a palimpsest, roughly layered with accretions of time, the castoff objects of many generations lying together like accelerated geological strata that have crumbled into one another with the speed of their never-ending creation. Rather than the epitome of modernity’s newness, the city becomes an essential instance of the ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ and ‘piles of debris’ of collapsed time. (2009: 232)
The places depicted in
Lost Book Found were far from their heyday when Cohen filmed them, as he has remarked: ‘when Benjamin’s talking about the arcades, they’re already passé, they’re already like [New York’s] 14th Street used to be a few years ago’ (in Halter 2009: 229). This fascination with retail stores, however, is precisely what reinforces the identification between narrator and filmmaker: while the first falls silent before the spectacle of consumption, the second records it in order to save it from oblivion. This attitude, on the one hand, fuels the documentary nature of Cohen’s work, as he has stated: ‘I believe that it is the work and responsibility of artists to create such a record, so that we can better understand, and future generations can know, how we lived, what we build, what changes and what disappears’ (2009b: 105). On the other hand, Cohen’s need to film the smallest detail allows him to develop a critical cinematic cartography through what Les Roberts has termed ‘an
archaeology of the city in film’:
This takes as its guiding metaphor the layering of urban cinematic geographies: that is, the city’s landscapes conceived in terms of a spatial palimpsest; constantly inscribed and reinscribed by multiple, imbricated forms of urban spatial practice (architectural, socio-political, cultural and aesthetic, psychoanalytical, environmental, planning and developmental, etc.). (2010: 198)
To the current viewer, these stores seem to belong to another time, but this impression is achieved, above all, by technical choices: regarding the film format, Cohen shot most images of Lost Book Found on Super-8 – except for one of the last sequences, which was filmed on 16mm – and later edited them in video, adding some visual and colour effects, such as slow motion. Super-8 images convey the imminent obsolescence that threatens the 14th Street stores, because this format was already obsolete in the 1990s: it was launched in 1965 and became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, so its grainy texture unconsciously transports the audience to that time. Sound, in turn, is another key element to give an anachronistic appearance to the cityscape: Cohen usually concocts the soundtrack of his films apart from the images, creating ‘ghost versions of real places’, because most of the time he films without recording sound (in Cerdán et al. 2009: 58). The New York cityscape is then depicted as if it had been perceived by a sleepwalker, someone who had really been there but who could only remember it as a dream. After all, Cohen is not so much interested in capturing the present as in revealing the permanence of the past in the present. From this perspective, all those places, objects and characters that were about to pass into non-existence in the 1990s recall a bygone era and bring the past to the present, as the narrator says towards the end of the film:
What is a city made of? Sometimes it seems as if the city is the rubble of stories and memories, layers and layers, and that objects, all of the layers of things, are like the city’s skin. Many of these objects, these leavings, are the relics of commerce, of the simple exchange of goods and services. Most people spend most of their lives earning a living. One man’s loss is another man’s gain. Time is money.
The last lines of this excerpt raise the issue of the objects’ economic nature, which the film attempts to replace with an archaeological meaning: if capitalism operates through a totalising allegory in which ‘all events and objects must ultimately correspond to commodities’, as Halter has written, ‘then Lost Book Found and its titular, mythical notebook provide a counter-allegory, an alternative way of ordering and understanding the artefacts of the city as an ever-expanding archive: a critical way of seeing’ (2009: 234). What if the real value of these objects is not in their price but in their symbolic component? Most of them embodied an earlier stage in the development of capitalism in which the spectacle of consumption was still in the streets, before being enclosed in shopping centres. Contrary to the latter, which are ‘drained of all history and regional character’, retail stores helped to define the identity of a place by encouraging the spatial practices of many types of people – vendors, suppliers, customers, flâneurs, etc. – that ultimately created a sense of belonging to that place, something hard to achieve in non-places and banalscapes because they exist ‘everywhere, repetitive, commonplace and anaesthetized’ (Cohen in Cerdán et al. 2009: 38).
The narrator of
Lost Book Found is an inhabitant of these commercial spaces, an insider, regardless of whether it is a vendor, a
flâneur or a filmmaker. These three characters are equally subject to the hostility of public space. The narrator complains that ‘
there are very few public bathrooms in the city and very few places that would even give you a free drink of water’, a situation that has worsened in the twenty-first century, in both the streets and non-places, as Cohen’s later films show.
Chain (2004) describes the behavioural impact of non-places on two female characters – Tamiko, a Japanese woman embarked on an endless business trip, and Amanda, a girl who has run away from her family home – while the act of filming itself takes centre stage in
NYC Weights and Measures (2005) and
One Bright Day (2009), as part of a strategy to claim the right to film in public spaces after the announcement of the Patriot Act in October 2001.
3In conclusion,
Lost Book Found offers another view from below that becomes an experience of engaged observation, in which the filmmaker embraces the usual markers of subjectivity in the essay film: the first-person commentary, an aesthetic of the fragment, a tendency towards reflection rather than narration, and a focus on atmospheres instead of events. Similarly to Benning or Akerman, ‘the distance between the subject who observes and the object represented gets narrower until it disappears’ (García López 2009: 103), although Cohen’s camera work is much more expressive than Benning’s or Akerman’s, as he himself has described it:
There are two main poles to my camera work. On one hand, I use the camera as a kind of extension of the body that can be handled roughly and instinctively. On the other hand my camera work can be very spare and simple – usually using a tripod and often with no camera movement. In the latter case there is the possibility for a kind of remove, a coldness even, where my own presence, the physical sense of self, is in some ways erased. One could say that I tend towards extremes of both subjectivity and objectivity, depending on the film, or even on the moment within one film. (Cohen in Cerdán et al. 2009: 37)
Thanks to this hybrid style, Cohen may simultaneously be considered a chronicler and a poet. His images, in addition to being a testimony of a particular time and place, teach the audience how to explore the imaginary worlds that exist within this world, either in New York or anywhere else. This approach makes the coexistence of the old and the new easier, documenting the city both in and through time, that is, as it was in the 1990s and as it could have been before, in an undated past closer to mythology than to history. The most remarkable feature of Lost Book Found is therefore its ability to feed the social imaginary of New Yorkers, establishing a set of guidelines to decode the urban surface that would then be applied by Guy Maddin to Winnipeg. Thus, autobiographical landscaping provides both filmmakers and audiences with a link between cityscape and mindscape, using images from the real city to actually depict an inner geography.
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