Do It Again

The quarrel between word and image is, on the eve of the third millennium of an illustrious career, in a period of relative calm, one marked by a casual cohabitation which has produced gratifying results in the arts and considerable trouble elsewhere, where it tends to be mistaken for the decay of a consensus on truth, or at least the truth of a given matter. This trouble, felt acutely in America but resonant globally, gnaws at the edges of much of our times’ most sophisticated art. As the mid-century painters, who tracked flatness and presence towards an absolute clarification of the terms of their art, would likely be alarmed at the energies now given to modes of figuration both literary and illusionistic, so the filmmakers, led by Brakhage, who endeavoured to chase all traces of language from their work might be horrified by the pileup of words, thick and consistent, found in Sara Cwynar’s Rose Gold (2017) or Luke Fowler and Sue Tompkins’ Country Grammar (2017). If criticism is to go on having any use, it may be in guarding against the traps of dogma and nihilism by clarifying the ways in which the imagistic qualities of words and the wordy qualities of images operate within and without the fluid boundaries of what is recognized as art.

There is, of course, no shortage of artists whose work is primarily concerned with this critical task: though no longer directed towards the essential, the rigorousness of a work’s explication of its historical position remains one of the chief measures of artistic seriousness. Given the retreat of popular criticism into the role of a clergy tasked with assuring its audience that an object has a single, coherent point and that this point will not be missed or dwelt on overmuch, most criticism today is in fact done by artists in the name of art. Nevertheless, certain options remain available only to critical activity relatively unburdened (a term which opens the field to a variety of para-critical activities), is central to film’s short history, it is curiously the case that the American cinema, besotted at it was by the New Wave, has produced next to no noteworthy examples of this particular figure. We find instead either filmmakers whose writing cannot be called critical in any traditional sense (Deren, Markopoulos, Dorsky) or critics whose artistic practice was other than film (Farber, Adler).