The Return of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"

I tried to post a link before but then the clips were removed; but here they are back up on YouTube. I'm unsure whether the BBC had removed them in anticipation of a dvd release, so for now I recommend making the most of them while they last.

Generalizing the Grotesque

Staying with the "Ways of Seeing" theme for a moment, I was particularly struck by another provocative critique of representation in Senses of Cinema, which attempts to work through some of the implications of Susan Sontag's observation in On Photography that "surrealism is the art of generalising the grotesque". If we remain attentive to the issues accruing around such a strategy, particularly those pertaining to failures to specify adequate prescriptions of use, it becomes easier to typify the symbolic violence that follows on from decontextualisation. It occurs to me that a tremendous amount, and perhaps even the majority, of independent cinema purporting to reveal suburban or small town life as a thinly veiled cabinet of horrors, takes its cues from the aforementioned surrealist convention. What initially comes to mind are films such as Gummo, the minimalist aesthetic of which parallels Michael Lesy's work. It would hardly be surprising if it transpired that Harmony Korine is also an admirer of the Dogme manifesto, and such an elective affinity would certainly prove complementary to the critique featured in Senses of Cinema.

But in a more expansive frame of mind, I wonder if further unpacking might trace a common ancestry back to certain musical genres as well. Remember Big Black's track "Kerosene"? What "way of seeing" came into play in this instance? I am confident that further examples along these lines could easily multiply at an exponential rate?

Note though that I regard it as highly unlikely that the work of other figures, such as Witkin, or Arbus, could be characterised in the terms used here. It seems to me that greater care was exercised in such cases to document or situate the rarefied milieus in which marginalized subjects were made to exist, and the same might be true to some extent of Mapplethorpe's queer gaze.

I paste below an overview of the film adaptation of Wisonsin Death Trip, followed by an excerpt from a critical appraisal of the associated generalizing strategy:

"Writer/Director James Marsh's first feature, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP, is an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. The film is inspired by Michael Lesy’s book of the same name which was first published in 1973. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890’s and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town’s newspaper from the same decade. The effect was surprising and disturbing. The town of Black River Falls seems gripped by some peculiar malaise and the weekly news is dominated by bizarre tales of madness, eccentricity and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder are commonplace. People in the town are haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists.
Like the book, the film is constructed entirely from authentic news reports from the Black River Falls’ newspaper with occasional excerpts from the records of the nearby Mendota Asylum for the Insane. The film also makes use of the haunting black and white photographs taken by the resident portrait photographer of Black River Falls at the end of the 19th century. The film unfolds over four seasons and certain characters feature throughout the film as their criminal behavior lands them in the newspaper again and again. Jo Vukelich portrays Mary Sweeney, a cocaine snorting school mistress with a compulsion to smash windows, who frequently runs amok in the area. Another eccentric is Pauline L'Allemand (played by Marilyn White), a mildly famous opera singer who gets washed up in the town with no money and ends up going more and more crazy. A 13 year old boy (Marcus Monroe) murders an old man for kicks and then engages in sporadic gun battles with a pursuing posse. All the while, buildings are being torched by a bored teenage girl, a diptheria epidemic devastates the town’s infant population and all manner of strange suicides are being reported in great detail.
Presiding over the chaos of the newspaper stories and providing a linking device for the intricate screenplay is the character of the newspaper editor who is portrayed by actor Jeffrey Gordon. The stories from the newspaper are narrated by award-winning actor Ian Holm (recently seen in THE SWEET HEREAFTER). Director James Marsh notes “the newspaper was run at the time by an Englishman called Frank Cooper, so Ian was a perfect choice for us - his voice conveys an incredible range of moods - incredulity, moral indignation, sly humour - while remaining both authoritative and soothing."

http://www.wisconsindeathtrip.com/photos.html

“Colorado Death Trip”:The Surrealist Recontextualisation of Farm Security Administration Photos in Dogville

"While the human objects of Maharidge's report are identical to those portrayed by Williamson (and Evans), in Dogville the juxtaposition of the photos and the film's narrative is, of course, rather wilful. This combination is more of a “surrealist montage” (12) similar to the one in yet another classic photo book. Thirty years before von Trier took FSA pictures out of their context and combined them with a narrative that ended in serial rape and a massacre, Michael Lesy had combined historical photos from an earlier economic depression, that of the 1890s, with textual fragments from newspapers, documents and literary works which mostly dealt with murder, suicide, serial arson and all kinds of lunatic behaviour.
“Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque” (13) – Susan Sontag remarks on Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (14) and similar books, which place historical photos in new contexts. According to her, Lesy's book “argues that the whole country has been crazy, and for a long time” (15). In a similar vein the photos in Dogville's credit sequence have regularly been understood to generalise the bizarre milieu of Dogville and to imply that they are somehow indicative of the whole country. For example, Michael O'Sullivan writes in the Washington Post:
Over a montage of archival photographs of impoverished U.S. citizens, director Lars von Trier […] blasts the David Bowie song “Young Americans”. It's his way, it seems, of hammering home the message that the town we have just visited, and the bad behavior of its residents […] are meant to be taken as allegorical versions of our country and, by implication, us (16).


Quite a few American critics regarded this kind of generalising the grotesque as provocative, whereas another aspect of this surrealist montage of photos and film narrative has been completely ignored in the critical discourse on Dogville. “[E]ventually we look at all photos surrealistically” (17), Sontag concludes with regard to Wisconsin Death Trip and similar books. And Dogville indeed provocatively subscribes to this prognosis. In contrast to Lesy, von Trier does not appropriate undistinguished pictorial souvenirs which were produced by an obscure provincial photographer for commercial purposes. Instead, what is subjected to a surrealistic view in Dogville are examples of one of the most famous bodies of work in the history of photography, products of a federally funded project that had the “purpose [...] to demonstrate the value of the people photographed” (18). That precisely such photos are recontextualised in Dogville within a surrealistic pandemonium of rape and massacre – what might be called a “Colorado Death Trip” – is maybe the most irritating aspect of von Trier's provocative film".
© Holger Römers, October 2004

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/34/dogville_farm_admin_photos.html

"Ways of Seeing" youtube.com clips

I searched every possible combination of "John Berger" and "ways of seeing" on youtube yesterday and came up with nothing, but derridata has just tipped me off about youtube clips of the series featured on the following blog. I can't verify them till I get broadband access next week, but many thanks to derridata in any case (who has probably already watched them by now):

http://imomus.livejournal.com/294695.html

Also worth noting another observation posted on the [above] site:

For the record, what I believe to be the complete Ways of Seeing series (4 parts?) is available as a torrent on--http://karagarga.net

Vile Bodies: Ways of Seeing

Another year draws to a close, and I reflect on the usual failure to dutifully follow my "Must Read" list. Consequently I'm putting this up here as a prompter, "read John Berger's Ways of Seeing!". My former academic supervisor, currently handling a proposed journal article of mine with kid gloves so it seems, told me a few weeks back that the university library has the original BBC series on video, ready made as a teaching resource for the course he co-teaches with the chap responsible for the piece on the history of Australian electronica, which was earlier posted on this blog. Unfortunately, I'm not so well resourced, and my borrowing/viewing privileges have now lapsed at that venerable institution. I spent some time yesterday scouring the Net for any clips of Ways of Seeing, but came up empty handed. Sure, there's stuff available from a more recent series featuring Berger, which has to do with scientific creativity, another way of seeing I suppose, but I don't know at this stage how complementary it might be with my other interests in Joel Peter Witkin, Gunther Van Hagen, visible human project, as [possible] symptoms of our bioculture (for starters, I'm not sure off the top of my head if Berger talks to any biologists in the series, letalone how sympathetic the featured scientists are to the holistic systems building form of science most germane to the growth of a bioculture). I'd really like to test Berger's hypotheses, and certainly this seems plausible, in light of the reverential tones with which the accompanying book of the same name is still spoken of today in the circles of cultural sociology (I can't speak for cultural studies).

I've had to settle instead for posting a couple of sections from the series Vile Bodies which concentrated on Witkin. I also found a good overview of Berger's lasting influence which I thought worth archiving here as well:

http://www.johnberger.org/season.htm#press