The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities

6. Interzone Xperimental: Migration and Moving Images

Chapter 6 Interzone Xperimental Migration and Moving Images Interzone: Contact, Communication, and Avant-garde To describe the interzone as communicative space, much as a communicating door unites two rooms, points to an experience of contact. It makes sense to scour our immediate borders for places where people cross and come into contact with those on the other side. Yet the border between states is only a single and limited example of the possibilities of communication. Indeed, as Derrida’s discussion of communication reminded us, the propensity of communicationistoreachacrossspaceandtimewithacertaininfinitegrasp .1 And inhissublationofthedifferencebetweenspokenandwrittencommunication, Derridaalsopointedobliquelytothefactthatcommunicationalwaystakesplace withinastructureorapparatus.Luhmann’ssystemstheoryfocusedsolelyonthe structureorapparatusandsuggestedthatcommunicationfunctionsexactlylike communicating rooms.2 It was a focus on the structure and not the iteration of communication.Communication,however,isnotjustcommunication“somehow ”; rather, communication is always communication of “something,” and it is a communication of that something to “somewhere” and “someone.” Communicationtakesplacebecausethecommunicatorcanimagineacommunicant . Thisactofimaginationcallsforththeapparatus,buildsit,andelaboratesit,and in turn the apparatus expands the possibilities and calls forth new imaginative potentials.Theapparatusofcommunicationexistsinasmuchasitdoesnotjust 152 • Chapter 6 make ready but actually sends across, shares, imparts, informs, joins, unites, and literally makes common. The interzone exists inasmuch as it is that space into which the imagination reaches out and seeks contact. Either there are various apparatuses of communication or the apparatus of communication takes on various shapes. If the border between states is an apparatus of communication that divides out and imparts information discriminately in a particular location, the cinematic apparatus is more casual, heedless, mingling, and indiscriminate, promiscuous in its potential contacts. Thecommunicationofthecinematicapparatusisnotboundtoformsofphysical contiguity, as is a border drawn in geographic space or as in a building where communicating rooms exist in immediate proximity. Indeed, cinema as a medium of communication can diffuse contact in all directions. Cinema as an apparatus of communication can do so both in its representations—its projections or its moving images—and in its technology as well—its material organization and systematic treatment, its tekhnē, its art and skill. Editing, jump cuts, montage, collage, and so forth can bring into contact the distant in timeandspacejustasproductionorbroadcastnetworks,recordingmedia,and display devices can also enable contact across physically discontinuous and noncontiguousexpanses.Whynot?Humanbeingsthemselvescanmoveacross greatgeographicdistancesandenterintocontactwithotherpeople.Moreover, they have the capacity to experience ideational connection regardless of their own physical position. Why shouldn’t their means of communication be able to reflect and even elaborate the propensity of complex connectivity that is a very human quality? Humans experiment with communication. In his discussion of communication , Derrida ruptured the distinction between written and spoken word and opened up an understanding that communication has always been an experimentation with contact, a reaching out, an utterance carried beyond to excess. But why limit our considerations of communication to the spoken and the written word? There is what we might describe always as the avant-garde of communication, a vanguard of human contact, that advanced group that reachesoutinnewways.Theavant-gardeofcommunicationshiftsthecolonial contact zone to interzone. In 1895, a truly radical new potential in communication began with the introductionoffilm .Whatmadeitavant-gardethoughwasnotjusttheinvention of a new technology but the new arts of communication it made possible, the new imaginings of contact it called forth. Avant-garde is simultaneously the experimentation with new tekhnē, an aesthetic enhancement in the system of signification and an immanent social communion.3 This chapter considers the Interzone Xperimental • 153 avant-garde of communication, the moments in which there have been new and radical leaps in the potential of communication. By radical leaps, I do not mean simply the quantitative expansion of communication, for instance, the speed of communication associated with globalization. I mean more specifically qualitative shifts: e.g., the invention of telephony or the development of visual communication through the moving image. In1906,recognizingnewexpressivepotentialsinvisuallanguagethatbroke withlongtraditionsofpictorialrealism,ErnstLudwigKirchnerannouncedDie Brücke,proclaiming,“Believingindevelopmentandinanewgenerationbothof thosewhocreateandthosewhoenjoy,wecallupontheyoungtocometogether, as young people, who will bear the future, who want freedom in our work and inourlives,independencefromolder,establishedforces.Anyonewhoconveys directly and without falsification the powers that compel him to create is one of us.”4 This manifesto for DieBrückebecame a central document of the historic avant-garde, and I draw on it programmatically as an explicit understanding of an interzone. It placed a freedom of movement and expression as core to avant-garde art, calling for a youthful transformation of entrenched cultural conventions. Die Brücke came together as a group under the name “the bridge” seeking not just to cross but to span shores. Taking this manifesto as its orientation, this chapter explores a number of significant experiments with the moving image that opened up new...