General Relativity, Take Two

Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves (still), 2024.

This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Greg de Cuir Jr on the occasion of the forthcoming film series he has guest-curated for e-flux Film online, which launches this Wednesday (January 7). Across six chapters, General Relativity, Take Two surveys film and video made collaboratively by artist duos, approaching shared authorship as an artistic and political method. The first chapter opens with a program devoted to Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Full series details are available on e-flux Film here.

The parameters of relational art are axiomatic when applied to the art of film. This is because, historically speaking, the production of a film required more than one person. That changed with the development of small-format film gauges like 16 and 8mm—so-called “amateur” film gauges—as well as the appearance of alternative genres and modes of cinematic expression. When film was approached as an art form, by artists, we might say that it became an art, where before it was primarily an industry.

As an industry, it functioned as a shared act, executed by a crew of people working in unison toward a common goal. But even a crew does not mean work in common—a single director is generally required to lead the overall vision. As Jean-Luc Godard wrote: “The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page.”1 When film was practiced explicitly as art, it was a private act, carried out by a sole creator alone before the blank frame. This was called personal film, first-person film, alternative film, or experimental film. The difference between this cinema and industrial cinema is both qualitative and quantitative. In recent years, this typology has gained a new title—“artist’s film”—which is perhaps another axiom.

For the purposes of the screen series “General Relativity, Take Two,” we will be less concerned with the relations that the art produces and more interested in the relationships that produce the art a priori. Our focus will be on how the bond between artist duos is manifested in the films they make together, in their shared politics and shared authorship. If we tend to think of relational art as primarily concerned with viewers and effects external to the work itself, then here we might attend to the internal process of directing as method, as praxis, as promise, and the specific relation of a director (or artist) and their creative counterpart. 

The relational aesthetic, after all, was born from cinema, and so it returns to cinema. At its earliest moment, with its first practitioners working in an industrial mode, cinema was distinguished by a shared authorship. The Lumière Brothers signed their invention, the Cinématographe, and the films they made exactly as such—as co-creators, as a duo of related individuals. At this formative stage, sharing authorship was already akin to a shared life.

Granted, it is perhaps simpler for two to function as one when they share a surname and a common upbringing. But beyond this assumption, what technical and aesthetic choices did they make in tandem? Who was responsible for framing the image? Who was responsible for mise-en-scène? Who projected the film? Who cut it? The answers to these questions cannot be fully known, and not necessarily because the Lumières are long deceased. The intent toward shared authorship is also a way of rendering the technical process of creation opaque. Shared authorship is a sublime mystery. One artist submits to a symbiosis with another—I is an other.

Either we work backwards from the finished text in an attempt to deduce intentionality, or we ascribe a compound identity to the authors and project it forward onto their creations. Relational aesthetics in this case are shared aesthetics. As Édouard Glissant wrote about the construct of Relation, it is “the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solidary and solitary.”2

When re-reading Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics (1998), one is struck by a passage suggesting that film artists may not actually make the best film art, which can instead be found in exhibition spaces. The cinematographic model is identified “not as subject but as plan of action, which permitted the development of the exhibition-form in the sixties.”3 He paid homage to this model in his 1996 exhibition “Traffic,” which was named after the film by Tati, and which for the first time presented the concept of relational aesthetics.

The 1971 film Trafic by Jacques Tati is also a film about relations and the networks that necessitate them. While it might seem concerned with the trappings of technological modernity (similar to the 1970 film British Sounds by Groupe Dziga Vertov, it opens with the ten-minute-long tracking shot in an auto factory), and Tati plays his iconic comedic character Monsieur Hulot as a car designer, the film is less about building automobiles and more about organizing an exhibition. Hulot must get his new camper to an auto show in Amsterdam, accompanied by Marcel, a truck driver as art handler, and Maria, an American press agent who, with her charmingly broken French, luxury clothing, fluffy dog, and bright yellow sports car, fits the role of a curator. We might identify Trafic as an early, if metaphorical, comedy of manners about the art world. 

Just as Hulot operates with his close-knit crew, so the factory workers in the opening of the film do their jobs in tandem, as in one visual gag where a worker paints a surface while sitting in a rolling cart that is pushed back and forth by another worker so that the first does not even need to move his arm or hand. The organizers of the auto show repeatedly step over an invisible network of wires in a strange dance of synchronized construction. The border police who inspect Hulot’s truck and his new model automobile work in an extremely large bureaucratic group. The Dutch mechanic’s wife and child are involved in the operations of his auto shop as much as in the operations of their home, which are fused here in a relation of private life and private entrepreneurship. Even the astronauts seen on multiple television sets throughout the film as a structuring motif—hinting at an apprehensive awe towards modernity and technological progress—work together to complete their lunar mission. Everything is networked in this film; everything is about inter-human relations. Trafic is both relational art and a reflexive representation of relational paradigms.

For this series, we will be concerned with the relational as an internal process, rather than the external transformation theorized by Glissant and Bourriaud. The focus is on life partners—for the most part because a great number of significant artist duos, through the generations, have also had intimate relationships. These have most often been heteronormative relationships (at least in the domain of film), though we should note that relationships that do not conform to these dominant configurations certainly do contribute to moving image culture. Do artist duos in heteronormative relationships shatter the patriarchal foundations of art or fortify them? And what does heteronormativity have to do with relativity? Quoting Bourriaud quoting Serge Daney: “form, in an image, is nothing other than the representation of desire.”4

Let us return to Glissant, the foremost theoretician of relation in the arts and letters. His landmark 1990 book Poetics of Relation is a study of culture and identity; it is also a falsifiable science that arcs towards the imaginary and works of imagination (of which human beings are the supreme examples, since we imagine ourselves and transmit that image-form to others as cultural identity). As Glissant writes of Relation, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”5

There is no stable identity save for that which exists in an inertial frame of reference. This can be illuminated by the foundational Rimbaudian equation of relativity previously referenced: i = (an)other. Directing teams function as compound bodies working toward a unified outcome (artistic production). They are both I and Other, and as such we must speak of their work in the context of relational theories. This means we must understand how these bodies act upon each other in the production of a work, which may also produce social relations in the receivers of that work. There has been a missing image in relational aesthetics, or rather a counter-image—it is the artist duo, who are social actors and producers ante factum. Of course not all relational art is produced by artist duos, but we need to think through the art that actually is—as a multiplier of interhuman relations, as a mirror image of the viewing audience, as doppelganger.

For Glissant, Relation is “a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry.”6 With this proposition, he fractures the original theory of relativity as developed by Albert Einstein. In a space-time field, a body cannot occupy two points simultaneously, but in our subject of interest, an artist duo-body can. In this new dimension that Glissant postulates, body + identity is always already hybridized.

In modern aesthetics, the artist duo can be considered the physical manifestation of this hybridization. With this dynamic body as constant we can now turn to the poetics that characterize the artworks, which are not themselves constant or uniform. In fact, we might be better served in turning to the politics of the artworks. It is a shared ethic that unites these political artist duo-bodies, and so it is an ethic that we will attempt to submit to the definition of relational aesthetics.

The ethic is clear in the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The first order of engagement is a dedication to social critique and action. The second order of engagement is their fidelity to the locations of their productions and the particular histories of those locations: the duo always shoots with natural sounds from the actual location as embedded materiality, with no post-dubbing of any kind. Film has a non-negotiable relation to a time and place for this duo. It is always site-specific—we can call it an inertial frame of reference. The artist duo and the cinematic apparatus are the external forces acting on this frame. The sound recording ingests objects both at rest and in motion, in 360 degrees, and the sublimity of the laws of nature can be observed in the Huillet–Straub frame. Their films are an invitation to establish a position relative to the laws of man. The superseding ethic of the Huillet–Straub film is their engaged politics. Theirs is a cinema of praxis. We might say that the artist duo and their relational aesthetics actualize the Godardian postulate that differentiates making political films from making films politically. It is a method, or a question of form and content. But as Susan Sontag once wrote: “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”7

Godard was the rare film artist who worked in two different duos. The first was with Jean-Pierre Gorin as part of Groupe Dziga Vertov, which was technically a collective (a different type of shared authorship and politics that we are not addressing here). Even though Godard and Gorin did in fact sign films together as directors, for the purposes at hand the focus will rather be on the duo that Godard formed with his life partner Anne-Marie Miéville. The Miéville-Godard duo worked with video and with television. We might say that their aesthetic engagement was post-cinema, and they were animated by a concern with the networked image and its semantics, how it travels, how it communicates. Their relation to mass media was a recurring subject—as was their relationship to each other—and certainly the politics of mass media was an area they made efforts to intervene in. 

Godard is unique in the context of this survey because we can conduct a tentative comparative analysis of his Relation with Gorin and his Relation with Miéville, and of course the work that this relativity produced. With Gorin, the work was often didactic and confrontational; with Miéville, it was more contemplative. We can perhaps say this coincided with a shift from political engagement in the streets to political engagement in the domestic setting. With Gorin it was about coming to terms with the epochal proclamation of the “end of cinema". With Miéville it was about grappling with a dialectic: to be soft and hard, to be here and elsewhere. This is Glissant’s métissage, which the video image interrogated with its propensity for soft montage. Godard lived with Miéville until his death, but they ceased sharing authorship very early in their relationship, though they never stopped collaborating on Godard’s later works.

Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian did not come directly from the field of moving images but rather from visual art. When they joined each other as life partners and began making work together, their shared practice resulted in them making films. They exercised their ethic through an interest in and deep respect for history, which manifested in a concern and care for film material. Ricci Lucchi and Gianikian worked with the archive, and their careers were marked by a continuous attempt to penetrate the surface of archival images, to excavate and critique the ideology buried within them. We must speak of an anticolonial and anti-imperialist stance when we speak of their work; we must also speak of a domestic mode of production, like Miéville and Godard turning their residence into a video production studio, and Huillet and Straub shooting films in their apartment. Ricci Lucchi and Gianikian invented a device that they called the “analytical camera” which they kept in their home and which became the basis for practically all of their work. This apparatus is a modified optical printer that allowed them to refilm very fragile celluloid material, and by extension to intervene in this material, most often with painterly color tints and studious close-ups on details in the frame. This general method is perhaps akin to Bourriaud's situating of relational aesthetics as part of a materialist tradition. Ricci Lucchi and Gianikian operated as historical materialists, and their conception of the analytical camera allowed them to stand history on its head in order to make it speak, to compel it to bring forth a new form of relativity.

We can consider these three teams previously discussed to be the early and outstanding examples of artist duos, and the foundational case studies for a relational film aesthetics. Theirs is an alternative, radical, nonconformist moving image art. There were duos that came before them, but those worked primarily in commercial feature-length narrative cinema—and they tended to be male-male partnerships. Of course, there are a number of recent directing partnerships worthy of close attention; these recent directing tandems are the subjects of this programmatic offering. In all cases, these duos represent an engaged political positionality in relation to both society and the art of film. In almost all cases, they are life partners. 

Where these duos diverge is in the formal strategies used in their art. In some cases, they work with cultural history as material; in others they work with the film apparatus itself as a material concern; or with the archive; or with the codes of nonfiction or the qualities of abstraction. They all display the rhizomatic thought that Glissant identified as the principle behind the poetics of Relation. And all of these contemporary duos are in the midst of careers that are flowering and primed to develop nodes for pushing the art of film into new and fertile territories.

Bourriaud proposes a crucial question early on in his book: “is it still possible to generate relationships with the world?”8 We should recall the conclusion of the film Trafic. Hulot is fired from his position: not for the quality of his automobile design, but because he failed to deliver it to the auto show in time, thus incurring a financial loss. A dejected Hulot descends the stairs to a metro station, now relegated to the purgatory of public transit. Suddenly a rush of citizens emerges from the station and pushes him back upstairs and into the arms of Maria, his impresario-curator, his salvation, who has evolved from businesswoman to a free spirit. The two of them walk away together, trying to navigate between a sea of cars in varying states of movement and stasis alongside their fellow citizens. Perhaps a new artist duo has just formed, generated by the network of humans and machines that constitute the matrix of the city. 

So yes, it is still possible to generate relationships with the world. The question now might be: what kind of relationships? Even more important, and not to be taken for granted in the age of the Anthropocene: does the world want to be in Relation with us? It takes two.