Communicative Activism in Eugene V. Debs' Statement to the Court

A while ago, Debs was brought to my attention, and I fell in love with his speech. As it turns out, I have more socialism in me than even I would have previously suspected. When I was given the option of doing a term paper in my rhetorical theory class -- an option I could forego at meager expense to my grade in the class -- I jumped at the chance to critique Mark Twain. I had just bought a nice volume of his essays.

And then I remembered Eugene V. Debs, to whom I was introduced in this fine essay by local media artist Lucas McNelly. What follows is a first dig at ideological criticism. Please be kind.

Statement to the Court (Par. 1, 5-6)

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth...I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free...

"I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.

"In this country – the most favored beneath the bending skies – we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child -- and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity..."

-- excerpt of Debs’ Statement to the Court for Violating the Sedition Act [1]



Background: A Revelation of Class Struggle


His earliest thoughts shaped by the French and German romanticists of the Enlightenment, due to his father's guidance, the chronology of Debs' life could be encapsulated (by someone more ambitious) as a study in dialectical reasoning. In 1869, the fourteen-year-old Indianan began working in a railroad shop. Within six years, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen elected him secretary and he became editor of the group's magazine, devoting himself to the union's success. After being laid off, he found work as a city clerk, ascended to the Indiana legislature and eventually founded the American Railway Union, bypassing the inflexible unions already in existence. As the Union's President, he headed a strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894 and won. The Union disintegrated in 1895 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to obey a federal injunction to cease the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company strike. He began reading Marx while confronted with the prison conditions and soon concluded that labor and social issues were one and the same.

1898 found Debs organizing the Socialist party of America, running for the U.S. Presidency in 1900 on the party's ticket and winning a weak but encouraging 96,000 votes. He would run again four more times, garnering 800,000 votes for his third campaign in 1912. But it was during his second prison sentence in 1920, while serving ten years for his outspoken criticism of Wilson's handling of both foreign and domestic affairs – specifically, the U.S.'s participation in WWI and the imprisonment of many conscientious objectors to the war for sedition – that Debs gained 915,00 ballots, or 6% of the popular vote. His crime was communication, clearly forbidden by the 1917 Espionage Act that accompanied America dipping its oar into the brewing European firepot. During the trial, Debs gave a speech that compelled world figures – Lenin and Shaw – to argue for his release, but he remained behind bars until 1921 when demonstrators crying for amnesty for "prisoners of conscience" gave Warren G. Harding little choice but to meet their overwhelming demand. [2]

Often described as "magnetic," Debs' character and ethos was a tangible and apparent fact. "Straight from the Indiana heartland of America, lanky and bald, his forehead weighted with worry and his cheeks crinkled with laughter, Debs was the symbol of integrity," John Patrick Diggins wrote of him. "His life history reads almost like a socialist morality tale." The forces surrounding and shaping him in a time of great violence reflect most readily in his study of Marx. Although the union leader would claim later and often that the bloody events of the Pullman strike precipitated his conversion to socialism, democratic reformism remained his political leaning until 1896. His very description of the conversion betrays him. "At this juncture there were delivered," Debs said of the strike, "from wholly unexpected quarters, a quick succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then my eyes opened – and in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle revealed itself." Not until having discovered Marx while in prison in 1895, though, would he have been able to draw that connection.

Debs' literary background informed his eloquence, but his time as a common worker gave him greater breadth and credibility with which to wield it. "Debs had the martyr's charisma, but he also possessed tremendous oratorical power." Those who heard him address a crowd recall the way he spoke well. "His tongue...would dwell upon a the or an and with a kind of earnest affection for the humble that threw the whole rhythm of his sentence out of conventional mold, and made each one seem a special creation of the moment." [3]

At New York's Grand Central palace on December 10, 1905, Debs delivered his Industrial Unionism speech to great applause even as he discussed dehumanization: "When the capitalist needs you as a working man to operate his machine, he does not advertise, he does not call for men, but for ‘hands’; and when you see a placard posted ‘Fifty hands wanted,’ you stop on the instant; you know that that means YOU, and you take a bee-line for the bureau of employment to offer yourself in evidence of the fact that you are a ‘hand.’ When the capitalist advertises for hands, that is what he wants. He would be insulted if you were to call him a ‘hand.’ He has his capitalist politician tell you, when your vote is wanted, that you ought to be very proud of your hands because they are horny; and if that is true, he ought to be ashamed of his." [4]

Comparing the tone of his Grand Central palace address with that of the opening statement of his sedition trial leaves little doubt as to Debs' audience consideration within his discursive practices. Oscar Wilde biographer Frank Harris noted the quality in his tribute to Debs in Pearson Magazine in 1919, after having sampled some of his writing on literary giants that Harris later published as the book Master Spirits. "His writings reveal the man: he deals in nothing but praise and yet his praise say of Ingersoll is subtly differentiated from his praise of Wendell Phillips and his admiration of the Hoosier Poet has different roots from his admiration of Eugene Field."

Harris' respect afforded Debs some literary respite from the political persecution he suffered at that time, while also augmenting anti-administration sentiments that arose from or were exacerbated by his imprisonment. "As Bernard Shaw wrote to me the other day his sentence is a disgrace to America and a disgrace to republican institutions," Harris declared. "We are all ashamed by his punishment, disgraced, all of us, save the justices and President Woodrow Wilson who is chiefly and forever responsible for punishing one of the noblest of men." [5]

Considered to be one of the most influential socio-political voices of the twentieth century, Debs' oratorical power has spread far and wide, impacting literature, government policy and the evolution of labor practices. In 1976, after the union leader's death, President Carter reinstated the U.S. citizenship that had been abrogated for the exercise of First Amendment rights. His speech made to the court during his trial for sedition remains his best-known and deserves some scrutiny.



Habermas, Cassirer and Marxist De-evolution


Because Debs invoked mythical and spiritual figures and not strictly socialist themes with his 1918 sedition trial speech, it will prove more rewarding to use two main lenses, one examined by Jürgen Habermas and the other fashioned by him. When the second generation Frankfurt scholar considered Ernst Cassirer's contribution to humanism with The Liberating Power of Symbols, he noted that the German professor's particular "philosophy of symbolic forms" – the means by which humans relate to each other symbolically – rests upon "the four worlds of myth, language, art and science." Habermas believed that this philosophy divested humankind of its subjugation to the discursive practices of those he would deem irrational and less-than-enlightened. "The humanistic legacy which Cassirer bequeaths to us through his philosophy," he wrote, "consists not least in sensitizing us to the fake primordiality of political myths. Cassirer makes us wary of the intellectual celebration of archaic origins, which is widespread today, as in the 1930s."

Habermas' words concerning Cassirer have as much relevance to Debs' situation before the 1930s as they do to the decade. The significance of a mass culture reveling in archaisms manifests itself in an evidential pertinence to the evolution of communication as a social theory, especially as the advent of the Great Depression and the continued heightened prevalence of capitalism over socialism held repercussions for subsequent symbolic interaction and its control in such forms as the rooting out of suspected socialists through blacklisting, McCarthyism and the increasingly ubiquitous operations of the inextricably linked political and economic spheres.

In the context of Debs' speech, it will be essential to give deference to Cassirer's thoughts on the worlds of myth and language – specifically, on his attention to historical allegories. "Cassirer derives philosophical thoughts from allegories – changes in the philosophical concept of freedom, for example, from the transformations of the symbol of Fortuna: 'Fortuna with the wheel which seizes hold of man and spins him around, sometimes raising him high, sometimes plunging him into the depths, becomes Fortuna with the sail – and it is no longer she alone who steers the ship, but rather man himself who (now) sits at the rudder.'" [6]

Habermas’ own ideological contribution can be overviewed in the study of his Theory of Communicative Action by Yugoslavian philosopher Ljubisa Mitrovic, who separated the German philosopher's neo-Marxist tendencies within critical theory from his movement towards a new post-Marxist social theory. "Despite Marx's paradigm of production and social labor as the basic category around which the social Marxist theory was constituted, Habermas founded the paradigm of communicative action, that is, of communication. In his work there is a distinct requirement for convergence and synthesis of the action theory with the system theory; thus, the traditional type of rationality is offered an alternative as communication mind, intersubjective reality." [7]

En route to building his theory of communicative action, Habermas contributed Communication and the Evolution of Society, which provides some useful theoretical genesis. Dubbing culture a "superstructural phenomenon," it calls for a reconstruction of Marxist theory attendant upon renewed historical materialism and examines "linguistically established intersubjectivity."

"The structures of linguistically established intersubjectivity – which can be examined prototypically in connection with elementary speech actions – are conditions of both social and personality systems. Social systems can be viewed as networks of communicative actions; personality systems can be regarded under the ability to speak and act. If one examines social institutions and the action competences of socialized individuals for general characteristics, one encounters the same structures of consciousness. This can be shown in connection with those arrangements and orientations that specialize in maintaining endangered intersubjectivity of understanding in cases of action conflicts – law and morality. When the background consensus of habitual daily routine breaks down, consensual regulation of action conflicts (accomplished under the renunciation of force) provides for the continuation of communicative action with other means. To this extent, law and morality mark the core domain of interaction."

Also of critical import is his discussion of the connection between ego and group identity: "There are also homologies between the structures of ego identity and of group identity. The epistemic ego (as the ego in general) is characterized by those general structures of cognitive, linguistic, and active ability that every individual ego has in common with all other egos; the practical ego, however, forms and maintains itself as individual in performing its actions. It secures the identity of the person within the epistemic structures of the ego in general. It maintains the continuity of life history and the symbolic boundaries of the personality system through repeatedly actualized self-identifications; and it does so in such a way that it can locate itself clearly - that is unmistakably and recognizedly - in the intersubjective relations of its social life world. Indeed the identity of the person is in a certain way the result of identifying achievements of the person himself." [8]

Mitrovic took care to delineate further between Marx and Habermas. Both theorists "believe in good human nature," and both eschew capitalistic means of organization; but Marx grounded his principles in the solidarity of communism, while Habermas roots his theoretical explications in communication processes. Their difference is slight but fundamental. "The normative basis of Marx's theory is formed of the value theory and the theory of exploitation and alienation, discarded by Habermas, while he, at the same time, speaks about alienation in terms of privileges and deprivation. The normative basis of Habermas' theory is related to speech and communicative action."

Marx's influence upon Debs is as undeniable as Debs' impact upon social theory. Thus, it will be necessary to reflect upon both theorists in order to critique Debs in a proper light.



Debs as 'Communicative Activist'


In the opening five paragraphs of his statement, Debs uses the first person singular and sonorous repetitions to advance his belief that "all men are created equal," while simultaneously asserting his maturity, which he then wraps in a tone of humility. He declares the Espionage Law a "despotic enactment of flagrant conflict with democratic principles" and restates his belief in the necessity for change, adding that peaceable change is preferable and leaving the sentence unfinished on purpose. His comparison of the workplace to prison as he recalls his boyhood reminds the court of his conscious choice to remain a working class member and advocate, despite his proven ability to have ascended to political power in Congress. In the fifth paragraph, he introduces the working class – men, women and children – and blasts Christianity for both inviting and condoning modern industrial labor conditions.

In the sixth paragraph, Debs strategically changes the point of view. He sets himself up as representative not of himself but of the working class that he has introduced. As their advocate and using the same humility in which he swathed his earlier words, he addresses the governing officials. He speaks of the material wealth that "we" have, if only the full potential and rights of the "they" – the working class – can be recognized.

Habermas discusses ego identity in terms not mutually exclusive with group identity. "No one can construct an identity independently of the identifications that others make of him. These are, naturally, identifications that others make not in the propositional attitude of observers, but in the performative attitude of participants in interaction." With this in mind, Debs' opening declaration that "while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free" clarifies his understanding of his own identity, especially in light of his later words, "I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison..." By identifying himself as a man of the people, he sets the stage for promoting the ideology of socialism through a series of deceptively simple introductions.

By the sixth paragraph, in which Debs glories in the abundant material and resources America possesses, he switches from the first person singular to the first person plural. Habermas defines these pronouns' relational values in terms of audience. "The expression 'we' is used not only in collective speech actions vis-à-vis an addressee who assumes the communicative role of you, under the reciprocity condition that we in turn are you for them. In individual speech actions, we can also be used in such a way that a corresponding sentence presupposes not only the complementary relation to another group but that to other individuals of one's own group." This "asymmetry" enables two audiences that can be mutually exclusive – but don’t have to be – to be addressed at once.

In this example, Debs accomplishes that task: "In this country – the most favored beneath the bending skies – we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to produce in abundance for every man, woman and child..." By using the first person plural, Debs extends the invitation to his captors to become involved in a labor force that they are not necessarily already a part of, and makes it the responsibility of individual members of his audience to decide to which group he or she wishes to identify.

Because of its open-ended quality, such an invitation acts rather slickly. It does not single anybody out as oppressor, but merely raises the question of responsibility and choice. It might be difficult to notice the effects of the point of view switch at all in so smooth a transition, except that Debs also refers to those for whom he has appointed himself to speak: "they" – the working class whose voice has been denied. Habermas spoke of language and choices in 1965 when he said, “The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us.” Thus Habermas renders language the source of individual responsibility. In this sense, Debs can be seen as not only exercising his responsibility but also providing a framework for others to do the same. That his speech is an exercise of his rights for having previously, similarly exercised those same rights should not be dismissed; if the only thing we can know is language, and that ability is crippled, then the state imposing such regulation falls outside of the knowable. [9]

Debs hinges the rest of his statement not upon his advocacy of the working class or on Socialism itself or even (directly) on the hypocrisy of the State. These words are meant to inspire, encourage and bolster the Socialist movement. His pivotal joint, the focus he uses to separate his representation from the framework of his speech, is an allegorical introduction: “Mammon” and “the Almighty.” The epic, timeless struggle between good and evil serves as an analogous metaphor for the ongoing class struggle that has brought Debs to trial; but, more importantly, it acts as a red herring to pull attention away from his true motive: to prove that all men are created equal and free, and that any government not reflective of this truth shall justly, rightly perish.

The original word Mammon is the Aramaic rendering of "riches," but its Greek counterpart, mamonas, was personified in the parable of the Unjust Steward, in Luke 16:9-13. Its appearance in the gospels laid it open to various scholarly usages, interpretations and translations into other languages. Augustine entitled the Sermon on the Mount "Lucrum Punice Mammon dicitur" and Gregory of Nyssa claimed Mammon to be a pseudonym for Beelzebub. Throughout the Middle Ages, the word would continue to symbolize the connection between avarice and demonization. Later, it would collect a wealth of metaphorical garments, such as the guardian of a "cave of world wealth" in Spenser's Faerie Queen, or the fallen angel with similar duties in Milton's Paradise Lost. "For Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present, the 'Gospel of Mammonism' became simply a metaphoric personification for the materialistic spirit of the nineteenth century." [10]

Cassirer sheds light on the processes by which the acceptance and incorporation of Mammon even into the modern age occurred. "As soon as the spark has leapt across, as soon as the tension and the affect of the moment have been discharged in a word or mythical image, then a reversal can start to occur within the mind...Now a process of objectification can begin which advances ever further. As the activity of human beings extends over an ever wider area, so a progressive subdivision and ever more precise articulation of both the mythical and linguistic world is achieved."

Were Debs' usage of Mammon implicitly secular, a simple line could be drawn to Carlyle's more vernacular treatment of the word; however, Debs' schooling in classical texts and his invocation of "the Almighty" goes beyond the association of capitalistic tendencies with man's nature, a factor he brings to denouement as readily as God's part in man's state: "...it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live." His argument ties the capitalistic forces that have sentenced him to money as the "root of all evil," and not as a merely harmless, secular pursuit. His distinction between modern Christianity – or, more accurately, what passes for it -- and the gap between evil and good is as clear as his connection between money and godlessness, which he equates with "the high noon of Christian civilization."

Debs' avoidance of calling upon God as a Savior or of denouncing man for his inaction strengthens his words as both an appeal to man's better nature and as an epic metaphor for which, Habermas asserted, there is no response. “Mythology permits narrative explanations with the help of exemplary stories; cosmological world views, philosophies, and higher religions already permit deductive explanations from first principles (the originary actions of myth having been transformed into "beginnings" of argumentation, beyond which one cannot go)..." In this way, Debs calls for responsible living and action, both by way of rhetorical prowess and by example. By so doing, he reaches beyond the first three forms of action that Habermas outlined -teleological, norm-regulated and dramaturgical - into the fourth form: communicative action.

As in Cassirer's allegorical presentation of Fortuna, which depicts the surrender of captainship to man in such a way that man's responsibility to free himself from bondage is self-evident, Debs reaffirms his belief in man's similarly conscious role by taking the power of Fate away from not only Mammon but from the Almighty as well. In this sense, the denuding of mythological forces strips man of his dependence upon Divine intervention, his ability to blame his misfortune upon others, and attempts a fulcrum point for catalyzing "the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand, and on the other, the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," as Debs characterizes the class struggle towards the end of his speech.

This reference to an epic class struggle should not go unnoted. Habermas took exception with the evolution of myth into the political realm. "Only with the transition to societies organized around a state do mythological world views also take on the legitimation of structures of domination (which already presuppose the conventional stage of moralized law)." He argued that the usages of myths were legion, serving as a solid basis upon which rationalization could be achieved through dogmatization. "The further transition from archaic to developed civilizations is marked by a break with mythological thought. There arise cosmological world views, philosophies, and the higher religions, which replace the narrative explanations of mythological accounts with argumentative foundations. The traditions going back to the great founders are an explicitly teachable knowledge that can be dogmatized, that is, professionally rationalized."

It is here that Debs' communicative endeavor and Habermas' more secular ideal speech situation part ideological ways somewhat. Debs returned to the romantic notion of "the Almighty" as a benevolent promise to man that his actions are not in vain when he alluded to Psalm 30:5 in the last paragraph of his speech: "For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." Man's responsibility to action and the betterment of the world through the workforce is clearly as earth-bound, by definition, as the Habermasian struggle towards rationality, but his reward may yet lie beyond the horizon of the rational world.



1. Debs, Eugene V. “1918 Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act.” AmericanRhetoric.com. Transcribed by John Metz and David Walters, E.V. Debs Internet Archive. Online. Accessed: 4 Oct. 2006. Available: http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm

2. Young, Marguerite. Harp Song for a Radical. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

3. Diggins, John Patrick. The Rise and Fall of the American Left. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

4. Debs, Eugene V. Debs Speaks. Ed. Jean Y. Tussey. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.

5. Debs, Eugene V. “Pastels of Men.” Pearson’s Magazine, Inc. 1919: full article.

6. Habermas, Jürgen. The Liberating Power of Symbols. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2001. Translated: Peter Dews.

7. Habermas, Jürgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Translated: Thomas McCarthy.

8. Ljubisa, Mitrovic. “New Social Paradigm: Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.” Facta Universitatis. Vol.2, No 6/2, 1999, 217-223.

9. Burleson, Brant R. and Susan L. Kline. “Habermas’ Theory of Communication: A Critical Explication.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech. 65, 1979, 412- 28.

10. “Mammon.” Wikipedia. Online. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon . Accessed: 29 Oct 2006.

Unspoken Cinema: Music & Experience as narrative force...

Anticipation of a Video Collective's Project


Yesterday evening, as part of my promise to myself to extend my visual foray into foreign lands, I ventured over to Melwood Avenue, that tiny dead-end street that only those familiar with Pittsburgh know to rest within city limits. Come to think of it, rest is a funny word, really. It sort of hunkers in the nether regions of the city, as disconnected from its "suburb" of Oakland as it is from the greater Three Rivers area. You know that alley that doesn't go anywhere in that B horror film with the zombies and the sunglasses and the shopping? Existentially speaking, that's where Filmmakers crouches on the psychic map -- disintegrating curbs, fire hydrants and all.

I parked my car as I used to do routinely only a few years ago and prepared myself for an evening of short videos collected by a hodge-podge of local filmmaking hopefuls who had gathered in the even seamier suburb of Braddock under the banner Film Frenzy. The spearheaders of the grassroots co-op wish to see the thing take off in a not-yet-envisioned way that lends itself to collaboration in a way not-yet-defined; and, you can read more about the specifics of their overall vagueness in Bill O'Driscoll's write-up on it in last week's City Paper. Although somewhat more like an exercise, the idea held enough interest -- at least in terms of what young people are doing with and thinking about video these days -- that I'd decided I could spare the scant dollars and even looked forward to the event despite my disconnection with a school I had once had great hopes for, but with which I so quickly became disenchanted.

[Yes, intrepid, self-sacrificing supporter of the arts...that's me. Plus, I had a ton of work which I decided I wouldn't get to after pacing between my kitchen and living room for half an hour.]

Although I was certain I was right on time, projection had already begun when I found the room. I walked to the nearest easy-on-the-neck seat, well in front of the majority of the sparse audience, and contritely breathed silently and stayed still. Within seconds, the fellow sitting a half a row down in the same row began clicking his pen. The room was quite dark and I could not actually see him, but the way he clicked the pen decidedly made him a man. Don't ask me how I knew this...I just did. The remainder of the evening's proceedings will be an alternating dialogue of my impressions of the film in plain type and my italicized impressions surrounding the man who -- to aid you visually as you read -- looked a hell of a lot like Sideshow Bob, but in dockers and tweed, and sporting more neurotic ticks than just pen-clicking.

Audience as Interaction in Non-Narrative Film


The screen to which I am first introduced is filled with somber but hopeful cityscapes in which buildings shape unique corridors and reflect time-lapsed skies. It reminds me a great deal of the architecture photographs used to advertise Filmmakers at local theatres like the Waterworks in the good old days, before advertising became the mainstay of pre-movie watching and waiting. As someone who considers movie theatres to be her only church, I have often thought of that ten to twenty minutes before a show as meditation time in which to sip coffee and reflect on all the events of a week which conspired together to bring me to that particular moment. Such meditations have a naturally soothing and invigorating effect that put me in the right frame of mind to not only watch the film but to tune out nearly everyone around me. Pleasant stuff.

Seeing something that reminded me of cinematic life before "the Reel thing" put a smile on my face. The smile lingered; the reverie vanished almost instantly. A fairly steady stream of collaged images began to take on uniformity and compression. Rows of brownstone filmed from the back revealed unending lines of windows, fire escapes and framework, all alike, all static.

Click, click. Why is he looking at me? This is fascinating.

Click.

The camera traveled over unidentifiable rubble -- decomposed building materials, presumably -- to expose the parts of urban life most cameras avoid in the U.S. The pictures look like shots from third-world countries, and the sight of the indistinguishable architecture of unidentifiable metropolitan area after metropolitan area turns oppressive.

Dresden. This looks like what the government tried to do in Dresden after the war. It's not a suburb, and these aren't developments, but this is the imposition of uniformity upon a society.

Click.

My society. Not that it matters, but where the hell is this? Click, click.

Buildings start imploding, and it occurs to me for the first time that the "Film Frenzy" folks have really outdone themselves. I begin to wonder, as the implosions become more elaborate -- high rises set in difficult nooks between vulnerable buildings, and even a bridge -- if what I'm actually seeing is stock footage. If it is, I want to know where they got it from because it's not just that this isn't Braddock. It's beautiful -- and not just the capturing of these moments because, by themselves, I wouldn't think much of the shots. The compositions lack judgment, creating a somewhat pretentious neutrality; the juxtaposition of the framing with the score, though, strikes whole sets of emotions in the viewer. Instructive musical composition, if you will, sears these images of destruction with an acute sense of medieval-like exuberance. The oppression, like the Dark Ages, can not go on forever, it sings. These buildings must fall, were meant to fall.

Within moments, people on the sidewalk are incorporated into the collage matrix.

They're all wearing heavy, starched polyester.

Any suspension of disbelief that this could have been shot in the digital age corrects itself, and I look more closely at the blurriness and decide the film was probably shot on 16 mm. It's still quite blurry in places on purpose, but occasionally even the diminished screen gives itself away.

Click, click. Legal pad page turning. Hmmm...I'm guessing that this isn't a Film Frenzy production after all. This must be the opening act. Hell of an opening act. Click. I wonder if he's upset because I got here late or because I haven't paid yet. Hmm...

The filmmaker -- who I find out later is Geoffrey Reggio -- recreates the concept of mass movement over and over again with Ron Fricke's incredible cinematography. Some of the shots are just generally blurry and planeless. People pass by in slow motion impressions of themselves. They fast forward up escalators and through fast food meals in waiting stations, giving away their nervousness and inability to stay still even when talking to each other, eating or simply watching the masses of people around them. The camera plays with both fast and slow motion in such a way that the lives of the people, the character of the people and any other identifiers that mark them as humans who interact in any way besides movement gets stripped away. These aren't people at all, throughout most of the film. They are predictable, unstoppable vectors that have no destinations, no motivations, only kinetic reality.

Fricke soon switches to fixed focal plane shots on the sidewalks, and faces come into sharp relief for a moment before stepping back into anonymity. As the film moves into an area that I realize was once considered to be visually stunning, I recall a lot of the photography work I used to study, as gathered by John Hedgecoe in The Photographer's Handbook. Instead of opening the shutter to allow car lights to blur, though, the film camera uses time-lapse and more sped-up footage to show the traffic patterns at night, the infrastructure coilings. All the while, the music cues and instructs the facial muscles and other various pressure points. I should have realized why at the time, but it has been too long since I listened to Philip Glass, and I must admit that I don't speak a word of the Native American Hopi language.

In case you haven't guessed it by now, the film I am watching turns out to be Koyaanisqatsi (1982), nine years in the making and the first of what Reggio is still finishing: a trilogy of collage films. His subsequent film, Powaqqatsi (1988), was much less well-received, and he is currently working on Naqoyqatsi. To curtail my brief effort to encourage viewership of at least the first film, I'll mention what Reggio's short bio (linked above) does not: he was disrobed in 1968 by the Roman Catholic Church for what Ephraim Katz cites as "ideological insubordination" in The Film Encyclopedia. As should be expected from someone so outcast from the mainstream, each of his films hinges upon a central theme: life out of balance, life in transformation and life as war, in respective chronological order.

Many frames in the film held powerful symbolism.

Some moments were so hard to handle that at one point in the film, I only stayed for the credits. It's not my style to walk out of a movie that I know to be well made, even when I find its study of dehumanization to be overwhelming. I just don't like pain that much. But I was glad that I stayed. At the end, after the oppressive images finally ended, after the last person on the street who obviously didn't want to be filmed and leered at the camera with suspicion and hostility, the camera focused on an ancient Native American sketch and informed the viewer of the word which had been sung repeatedly in Gregorian-style chants a la Glass' cruel conductor's wand:

Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning 1. crazy life, 2. life in turmoil, 3. life disintegrating, 4. life out of balance, 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

The lights come up to reveal this jittery filmmaking instructor and a scant class that I did not turn around to viddy. He looked at me but once or twice as he talked about how he hoped that everyone had gotten something out of the film, and that it should give them a fairly solid idea of what film -- although undeniably containing a point -- without narrative does, letting the story happen in the viewer's mind to a great extent, etc. He points to the dehumanization of mass culture and to the textual shots of the people on the street, noting that these cuts have interfered somehow with these people's lives, and that we see the frays.

He's obviously very disappointed that his class isn't engaging him in conversation about it, and he's nervous about that, too, and my heart goes out to him. And then his cell phone goes off. He's got one of those nature sounds instead of a digital tonal, and one of the class members snickers. It recalls all the reasons I don't miss being a student at Filmmakers. I prefer wide open spaces and quiet repose and, failing that, I'll take my modest apartment and a cup of tea.

...All of which is a polite euphemism for I'm too old for these reindeer games.

When it becomes excruciatingly clear that his students have nothing to say, I stand up and apologize for crashing his class and tell (lie to) him that I had gotten bad directions. This was the mini screening room. I had wanted the other one. I also tell him that this was probably a much better viewing than I could have hoped for that night, and thanked him. He seemed relieved, and told me that he was glad I had gotten something out of it.

Indeed I did, Sideshow Bob. Indeed I did.

Conceptual Conflicts in Non-Narrative:
Music & Expectation

Two major factors arise as I consider the open-ended qualities of a non-narrative film like Koyaanisqatsi. The first is the addition of musical score. Whether the score acts as a driving force to the film's visual composition or as a counterpoint to the visual workings, the score instructs the viewer in ways less open-ended than the visual text. Tensions resulting from internal and external rhythms, reliefs provided by harmonies and dynamics of tone and pitch all provide rich and complex texts of their own. While this may seem like a passé reiteration for a study of "contemplative cinema," the fact remains that films like Koyaanisqatsi have been and still are considered to be non-narrative film despite their heavy reliance upon an inherently narrative-producing medium engulfing an entire realm of scholarship and technique all its own.


The second major factor I see as inherent in the non-narrative experience remains the consistent human expectation of story-telling in art forms. Because it is a natural and fundamental human process to relate through narrative, when we are approached by and engaged with an art form that purports to (or that scholars identify as) being non-judgmental and solely experiential that an audience will inevitably -- as a collective or individually -- try to arrange the film as a narrative to make sense of it. In and of itself, this process feels right, but it also trends toward a deeper aspect of human narrative expectations; i.e., because the director has selected material and arranged it in a certain way, the audience will not be satisfied with a narrative structure that is arrived at solely through experience, but seek to determine the author's intent, the author's point of view and what the author is trying to say.

The very act of experiential non-narrative viewing, in this sense, has the ability to negate the wishes and efforts of the director to create a freely interpreted form as the audience seeks to find the narrative through the film's various elements -- both what's used, and what is not.

Unspoken Cinema

After weeks of procrastination, I've moved on to considering several films for the upcoming 8 January Unspoken Cinema Blogathon. I'm also currently mired in two term projects, a couple of unpleasant assignments and Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, though, so...