kagablog

4. Hyper reflexivity: superficiality intensified

The thematic line pursued in the dead man 2: Return of the Dead man is present from our very first glimpses of the film. The theme of death in life, present in the very first impressions of the film through a highly kitschy pseudo-religious metaphor, is foreshadowed in the impossibility of communication and loneliness - and not as some believe indifference - which form the ground bass of the three films with which Kerkhof has established his dubious fame during the last three years. In Kyodai and The Mozart Bird the protagonists seem to be driven apart, through their inability to reach each other, and in Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers the most harrowing pseudo-rituals are depicted in which this inability, in an attempt to nullify itself, makes the return to human society forever impossible.

It is perhaps tempting to interpret every ecstatic body on the screen, even the film-maker’s, and every perverse kind of behaviour as simply a cry for communication. This rather too easy ‘vision’ enables the critic to dismiss this beginning ‘oeuvre’ as the filmic exhibitionism of a lost and frustrated soul who has never risen above his pubertal auto-eroticism: food for psychologists, but not for self-respecting film critics. Excused from the need to satisfy my fellow critics by felling an obvious ‘critical’ judgement, I permit myself the luxury of describing these tasteless, auto-erotic performances in a somewhat different way. It would seem obvious, faced by such an impelling attempt at communication, to interpret the thematic content from the pseudo-ritual viewpoint described above, rather than from a very limiting and limited psychological perspective. In accordance with the film-maker’s own vision, therefore, I want to distance myself as far as possible from all psychologism in order to approach the medium as closely as possible. In this way I can analyse his monomaniac auto-eroticism as a necessary consequence of the reflexivity inherent to this filmic corpus.

What kind of reflexivity am I referring to then? I am certainly not pointing to Kerkhof’s dallying with philosophical one-liners or titles of cult books — ‘Booze and fucking are the fatal strategies’ — says the pedant Howie in The Mozart Bird; nor am I referring to his somewhat forced attempts to gives his films a Greenaway-type resonance, as when, for example, Selene, Howard’s partner in misfortune, has met a certain Kyodai handing out photos of himself which were made in Kyodai makes the Big Time by a photographer played by Kerkhof himself. Here, Kerkhof hardly rises above the trendy craze for quotation and playful urge to systematize, characteristic of a superficial postmodern approach.

The reflexivity I am referring to must be sought elsewhere. It is partly inherent to content and partly to form. Whereas for example in C’est arrivé pres de chez vous the obscene violence of the filming emerges mainly in the content as a seemingly objective registration of facts - whereby laughter, or in other words parody and caricature are equally indispensable - in Kerkhof’s work this self-critical reflection is present in two ways: firstly in the content through the depsychologizing of C’est arrivé’s objective cynicism so that the violence lacks any psychological embedding, and secondly, in the form, through the ‘violation’ of cinematic devices. This makes his film Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers radically reflexive, because the cinematographic procedures and means are brutally exposed ‘to view’. One of the most striking examples of this is offered by the ending scene of the last monologue. Not so much because a film camera is present, but because the erupting emotions of the narrator are cut off by the voice of the director. At the moment that the emotions, and therefore the suffering, of an individual ‘really’ break through, in other words when the psychological dimension opens up, the sudden opportunity for the viewer to identity with a psychological subject is immediately nipped in the bud: the means of production intrudes into the film. Here, perhaps even unknown to himself, Kerkhof here realises his filmic pretension ‘to avoid … specific psychological reasoning and psychology’s attendant obsession with motivation’.

Against this perspective based on the interplay of form and content I situate Kerkhof’s auto-erotic interventions. This reflexivity is multiplied and transformed into hyper-reflexivity when the film-maker himself, or rather his body, is made into the object of the pornographic gaze. When he applies the intertwining of content and form to himself and when in full view of the spectator, he unashamedly exposes himself.

Just like Madame Edwarda he lifts his skirt and says; “I am the Great Director’. The projection of sado-masochistic scenes onto his masturbating body in Ten Monologues illustrates this well as do even more so the porno images on the screens in The Solipsist. It is not until this filmic impression that the knife radically cuts into his own flesh.

5. Pornological filming and hyper reflexive embodiment

Perhaps the short film The Solipsist is Kerkhof’s most instructive film. Its pornographic content is continually reinforced and as it were, refracted onto itself. Just like Bataille who, as active writing subject and thus originator of the text, mutilates himself, so Kerkhof castrates himself. The almost surgical activity of the film-maker, who fragments and dissects reality, has in the end to be applied to himself, in a gesture which is as empty as it is equal-handed. The fact that the film-maker — to quote Peter van Bueren — can’t ‘leave himself alone’ and constantly has to show this, is based on methodical rather than psychopathological grounds. In other words, in a period when the authenticity of the artist as creative subject has disappeared, together with God and the Great Stories, the artist can only be ‘true’ if he puts not only his medium but also his own physical embodiment, in the broadest sense of the word, on the line.

These intentions and his obsession with fragmented and ecstaticized bodies, formed by his filmic gaze, place Kerkhof as, in part, a descendant of the performance culture of the sixties. And yet the emphatic presence of his erotic scenes cannot entirely be compared with the (filmed) Aktionen of, for example, Hermann Nitsch. Kerkhof’s pornography, his pictorial images of violent physicality, go beyond the cramped attempt to cling to that last refuge of a culture in panic, the body, as a material presence in an increasingly volatile world.

Although it may be possible to defend the assertion that Kerkhof tries to compensate for the increasing volatility of the world through continually intensified self-reflection and an overabundance of violent physicality, his ‘exhibitionism’ is better interpreted as an excess of reflexivity. His pseudo-pornographic auto-eroticism is then not a denial but an inescapable consequence of the hyper-reflexive quality of his films. What is important here is not some psychologically analysable individual together with all his frustrations making use of a medium, but the medium itself in its total pornographic presentation: “I am the medium, the medium is the message”.

Let us forget the rather loaded term ‘pornography’. To do justice to the methodical character of (auto)eroticism, let us choose instead a term which Gilles Deleuze once used in an essay on the work of Sade and Sacher-Masoch: pornology. Speaking about Sade and Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze remarks that ‘Pornological literature is directed, above all, to confronting language with its own limits, with what is, in a certain sense, a “non-language” (violence which doesn’t speak, eroticism which remains unmentioned)’. If we then replace ‘literature’ with ‘film’ and ‘language’ with ‘cinematic language’ and accept Deleuze’s additional comment that this confrontation can only take place ‘through an internal splitting of the language’, then it becomes clear that Kerkhof’s ‘obscenity’ forms an integral part of the hyper-reflexive character of his work.

6. Pornological acinema: filmic desubjectivization

In Ian Kerkhof’s films the actions of the main characters seem determined not by their own will but rather by forces which at most they manage to manipulate in such a way that they become bearable. Only on a superficial glance do they possess a will of their own. Time after time they risk losing their subjectivity violently, whether or not this is made visible, possessed by powers which they are trying to control. In the cinematic metaphor of The Return of the Deadman these forces display themselves as the elements of earth, water, fire and wind. The real ’subject’, the fifth ‘element’ or the quint-essence then turns out to be exactly that empty space which, like the eye of the storm, is to be found inside every individual. And this emptiness cannot be conceived as anything but what, to modern eyes, seems to be a reprehensible lack of will, a Bataillean aimlessness or ‘motivelessness’.

How can this emptiness be filmed? Or to pose this question more precisely: how can this immobility, this inertia, be enacted in a medium whose essence is precisely the depiction of movement? Given this paradox Kerkhof’s work can be described in the words of Jean-François Lyotard as acinematic: ‘The acinema’, according to Lyotard ’should be situated at either end of the extremes of film, where film is conceived as the depiction of movement: thus extreme immobility and extreme speed.’

Although these two modalities seem to exclude each other, they are ‘only in theory …incompatible’. When it come to libidinous aspects, where the viewer is disturbed by the intensity of the images, both moments are seamlessly joined: the excess demands an exponential acceleration which through its ecstatic quality at the same time immobilizes.

The slow, excruciating, discontinuous and diffuse images in The Return of the Deadman have a tendency to solidify themselves into tableaux vivants, as is found particularly in the work of Pierre Klossowski. From this perspective the fact that Lyotard, in the passage quoted above, is here referring to the phantasmagoric effect of Klossowski’s slow-motion ‘perverse’ images and the fact that Ian Kerkhof has filmed one of Klossowski’s short image sequences, La séquence des barres parallèles is not entirely coincidental. This deceleration is then depicted against a speeding up which is called into being by the mutual effects of form and content, medium and maker or in short hyper-reflexivity. Lyotard sees in the work of abstract-expressionists such as Rothko, Pollock and Newman this acceleration come into effect through the self-referentiality contained in their art, where the material of the work has itself become the subject. The conscious mis-handling of artistic means affects the viewer’s experience. If the spectator wants to undergo the ambivalent pleasure of these abstract works, to quote Lyotard, this implies ‘the rejection of his own physical unity and the coordination of his movements which provide the conditions for its existence: these art objects demand (..) the paralysing (…) of the ’subject’-consumer, the decomposition of his organism’. In this sense, The Return of the Deadman is pornological acinema. And it is because of this dubious quality that enjoying the film remains a precarious undertaking. Not least because the film-maker consciously focusses on that diffuse area, by morality and politics deemed unconscious yet consciously shunned, that area where rape and intimacy, violence and union - and in an artistic sense, kitsch and art - imperceptibly merge into each other.

Translated from the Dutch by Liz Savage