a few things for themselves

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A Few Things for ThemselvesAlfred Guzzetti

New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 251-258

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Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0029

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New Literary History, 2008, 39: 251–258

A Few Things or Themselves

Al red Guzzetti

A ew things or themselves,Convolvulus and coral,Buzzards and live-moss,Tiestas rom the keys,

A ew things or themselves,Florida, venereal soil,Disclose to the lover. 1

I

In documentary called Tupamaros , a shot o a bird in ight brie y interrupts the testimony o a ormer political prisoner. 2 At frst I am

puzzled, then realize that the bird must represent the reedom that the man once longed or and now may—or may not—have won. As a fgure o flm rhetoric, the shot is hardly unusual, illustrating as it

does what the interviewee is saying. Pro essionals even have a name ormaterial o this kind, material which a ords relie rom the supposedmonotony o the talking head; they call it the “B-roll.”

Neither is the metaphor itsel uncommon. In Yeats’s “On a PoliticalPrisoner,” a bird ies down to a woman’s cell and eats rom her hand,recalling her lost wildness and youth. In the poem, the bird is “a grey

gull,” a category. In the flm, it is, inevitably, a particular bird. In makingthe metaphor, the flmmaker profts rom our lack o acility in identi y-ing individual birds as we do dogs or people; or us a bird in ight isclose to the generic.

Despite this, the shot cannot be but o an individual bird, unless it were to depart rom the photographic or an animated or still drawing(not a promising idea). The attributes that the image records may evenbe su fcient to support the antasy that, i we could mobilize the neededresources and act quickly, we might locate and identi y this individual. We

could put its mug shot on a “wanted” poster and see what turned up.In act, being good viewers, we have no interest in the bird as anindividual, since it is, we understand, only a term o comparison. It isthe interviewee whose individuality is o interest. But the image, given



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its photographic nature, does not entirely cooperate. Wedded as it is tothe particularity o things, it resists and subverts our good intentions. It awakens an interest o its own.

“A ew things or themselves,” Wallace Stevens writes, “Convolvulusand coral, / Buzzards and live-moss, / Tiestas rom the keys.” How dothings get to be on such a list? Are these things or themselves becausethey possess a special power or because they are the object o a certainregard? Does this regard, I ask mysel , resemble that o the camera?

II

André Bazin didn’t like metaphors in flm. He thought o them asthe baggage o montage, atavisms, and remarked on how old- ashionedthey seemed even by the early 1930s. They are the flmmaker’s inven-tions and rest on his authority. Against them Bazin set the authority o the real, by which he meant, more o ten than not, the spatial. We canmore easily accept the bird as metaphor i it is in the same shot as theTupamaro or even in a separate one, providing we are convinced that the shot shows a contiguous space. In this case the meaning originatesnot rom the flmmaker but rom either the mind o the viewer or the

order o the real, depending on whether or not one’s view o things,like Bazin’s, has religious overtones.Stevens may not be so ar rom this himsel , though in speaking o his

poem one would have to use the word “physical” rather than “spatial.”It is the physicality o things that he is celebrating, and the destinationo his celebration is, this time at least, the erotic. O course we need not go there too every time we take an interest in things or themselves. Noris every thing equally capable o awakening such an interest, erotic orotherwise. The bird can hardly compete with “convolvulus,” a word that

I have to look up and that, even as a sound, has a commanding allure.

III

My glance alls upon a bird in ight. What I see provokes a re ec-tion, a thought, an interpretation. I could not claim that the sight has ameaning but I could say that I give it one. I have ways o attempting toconvey this meaning i I thought it worth the trouble— or instance by

making a moving picture.In act, this is not a good model o what happens in Tupamaros . As aras the viewer is concerned, whether the viewer be mysel or someoneelse, the glance and the bird are gone, out o play; the point o origin



253a few things for themselves

is the moving picture. In the presence o the bird in ight, I might havethought about reedom, and, viewing the moving picture, I might thinkabout the same thing, but the picture adds to my contemplation elements

that belong only to the photographic— or instance, the boundaries o time and o a attened space, the relation o fgure to ground, perhapseven the attributes o the animal as an individual and o the space sur-rounding it.

Looking to recruit Stevens as an ally, I am tempted to say that thepicture by its nature cannot do otherwise than number the object, thebird, among the ew—or, or all I know, the many—things or themselves.Bazin says something o the sort when, in celebrating the impersonal,physical link o the photograph to its object, he claims that the photo-

graph alone, as opposed to the painting or drawing, presents the object “in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.” 3 Though his account may rehearse a common experience, it is morethan a bit puzzling. Words may be able to invoke visible objects—theconvolvulus, the buzzard—without bringing along what is around them,but the camera ordinarily does the opposite. It embeds the object, orone aspect o it, in a daunting tangle o surrounding elements. In thisrespect, I may have been careless in describing the shot as “o a bird.” Ishould have said, “a shot that includes a bird” or something even more

lengthy and awkward. But here I am on the verge o being overwhelmedby the problem o using words to think about pictures—a problem, by the way, that is oddly asymmetrical: do we ever use pictures to thinkabout words?

I may also be misreading Bazin. When he says “object,” he may not mean the equivalent o the bird in the image. He may mean the totality o what, be ore the lens, gave rise to the image, rather than the elementso that totality which his phrases speci y: “here a re ection on a dampsidewalk, there the gesture o a child.” Theorists sometimes name this

totality, this object, the proflmic. It becomes such an object, o course,only a ter it has been flmed. It is defned, even constructed, by the pic-ture made rom it. For until the picture comes into my sight, I ordinarily have no occasion to experience or imagine its object.

IV

Since our frsthand experience o the proflmic is only occasional,

our comparison o it to the picture constitutes something o a specialcase. We are disappointed that the motel room is smaller than it looksin the brochure and pleased that the Grand Canyon is bigger. For themost part, we see images o objects to which we have no other access.




We know the objects only through their images. We seldom doubt that the objects exist, and, in seeing their pictures, we imagine them: that is,

we imagine the real. One might even describe the camera as a machine

or turning the real into the imagined. What happens to the real when it is imagined in this way? Is it signif-cantly trans ormed? Certainly, it cannot rid itsel entirely o the attributeso the pictorial—the rame limits, atness, or the privilege given to aparticular spatial viewpoint. It acquires the trace o an author, a fgure

who shaped our access to it, selected the viewpoint and the limits o therame, and who meant something by these choices, even i that something

is vague or ephemeral. The ghost o this fgure haunts us. We do not somuch imagine the scene as reimagine it, repeat an act whose vestiges

constitute the image.But the real, as imagined, is commanding in its own right. As view-ers we cannot entirely sti e the temptation to slip the author’s leashand conjure up, whether in a rigorous or casual way, the proflmic inall its depth, continuousness, and opportunity. Is this impulse perverseand pointless, inter ering with our comprehension in the same way asmnemonic irrelevancies such as the possible resemblance o the bird toa pet I may once have had? It might seem so, yet i we do not make thee ort to imagine the spaces beyond the rame-limits o the interviewee

and bird, spaces to which we have no independent access, how can weask what relation the two might have? The relationship o metaphor, that is, o the nonspatial, depends, as a structuralist might say, on a signi yingopposition with the spatial, which, though it here turns out to be absent,is nonetheless a lurking and indispensable possibility.

V

Unschooled in botany, I search or a photograph o convolvulus onthe Internet. Less tropical and erotic than I envisioned, neither theowering plant nor the photograph that portrays it conceivably belongs

among the ew things “ or themselves.” Rather, what I have be ore meis an illustration o a botanical category. I might sever the photograph

rom this unction by printing it out and putting it on my wall, where Icould regard it more in the way Stevens recommends. The intention o the photographer, and o the Web page editor, to present a paradigmuse ul or the identifcation o living examples, will have receded. But

the thing in itsel , or rather, or itsel , will not be quite in evidenceeither. The author o the photograph leaves upon it a trace that is ir-reducible, one that has been described by semiologists as indexical, agesture o pointing, and by Roland Barthes as signi ying “look” or “there




it is.”4 My act o viewing has no alternative but to reproduce this gestureimaginatively.

O course flms are not photographs. Neither are they concatenations

o photographs. My possible contemplation o the owering plant isunbounded, or, to misappropriate another term rom Stevens, “unspon-sored.” 5 No one has pointed at it or inscribed the gesture o pointing ina medium; or i someone had, I would know something o the personand the reason. The photograph allows me to imagine but not experi-ence unboundedness in my contemplation.

A motion picture erects urther obstacles. However long a motionpicture might present the plant to my gaze, I cannot escape the aware-ness that this time will end—and, more to the point, that I will not be

the one who ends it. A hand alls between the thing and the invitationto regard it or itsel .I am tempted to say that there is a radical di erence between this

case and the one I earlier called “metaphor.” While the elements o themetaphor derive rom the spatial, the metaphoric relationship itsel doesnot. In contemplating a lengthy shot where there is no such relation, Imay have the impression that the thing is presented or itsel . But thepassive voice o the previous phrase masks something important—namely,the agency o the flmmaker, the one who points and who, by pointing,

disappointingly reduces the di erence between this case and the caseo metaphor to one o degree.

VI

Wallace Stevens tra fcs in categories, too. He invents one, “thingsor themselves,” then places convolvulus in it. We soon realize that this

is a rhetorical gesture, or in the poem the plant illustrates something

as unmistakably as it does on the botanical Web site. Photographers orflmmakers might indulge in the same rhetoric, collecting images underthe title “A Few Things or Themselves.” But each o their things willbe situated in space and shown in relation to other elements, however

vague, such as the background. Like the maker o Tupamaros , they canpresent us only with things that are parts o felds.

Is this di erence consequential? Might we simply say that these irre-ducible felds, along with the attribute o particularity, are constituentso the medium and that the flmmaker can do with them what the poet

may do with nouns or the botanist with photographs? As viewers o theflm called “A Few Things or Themselves,” we will in one way or anotherbe directed to regard an element in each shot—a convolvulus plant orbuzzard, say—and to disregard the rest.




The injunction to disregard, so characteristic o the cinema, has nocounterpart in the poem. Wallace Stevens need not entreat the readerto overlook certain elements o what his words express. His turns o

phrase, his vocabulary, his diction evoke a speaking voice, just as the words on the page, though printed, evoke the writing hand. He, or hispersona, is not hopelessly remote. The same is not true o the author o the image. When I speak o that author’s hand, I am conscious o usinga metaphor, or I need not envision the hand—or the body o which it is part—unless the author chooses to reveal it to me; it is distant romthe phenomenological acts be ore my senses. At the same time, the

lmmaker, remote as he or she may be, is more aggressive, directingmy attention not only toward but away. It is this doubleness that colors

the experience o watching lm—the things or themselves in contest with the agenda the director must pursue in ashioning a discourse romthem or even simply presenting them to my gaze.

VII

At a screening o a videotape I’ve made, I sit next to a riend who ina whisper asks where this or that shot was taken. I am annoyed, thinking

that my riend should understand that what I most wish is or attentionto be directed ully to the sounds and pictures. Watching Abbas Kiarostami’s Five Dedicated to Ozu , I nd mysel preoc-

cupied with the unidenti ed locale. In the rst take, sur is seen romabove and I wonder i the cinematographer is on a cli or a dune. Inanother, I scrutinize the passing people to see i they are Japanese, or i not, what their nationality might be. The sun is low behind the camera,and the camera looks out beyond a boardwalk to the sea. I the time isnear evening, I calculate that we must be looking east and try to gure

out where one may see such large breakers while acing in that direction. Japan, in homage to Ozu? France, where I know Kiarostami has been liv-ing? The answer is probably to be ound on one o the DVD’s extras.

I am aware that Kiarostami has an agenda, akin to Stevens’s, whichleaves no room or such questions. It is not easily put into words but has to do with the contemplation o the real, the accidental, beyondthe customary limits set by the cinema. He, a ter all, is the director who

or an un orgettable minute in Close-Up turns away rom the narrativeto ollow an aerosol can, an incidental element in the rame, erratically

rolling down a hilly street.Like my riend, I am remiss as a viewer. Distracted by details outsidethe rame, I am not entirely available to accept Kiarostami’s invitation toattend to the rich details o ordinary li e within it. My imagination wandersinto the spaces the image portrays and seeks out the hidden lmmaker.




Are these divagations inevitable? Might there be a wholly command-ing cinematic poet o things or themselves? Might that lmmaker nda better viewer than I?

VIII

Watching another lm with a numerical title, 66 Scenes from America , Ihave no need to identi y locations. At the conclusion o each scene, thedirector, Jørgen Leth, obligingly includes a brie spoken phrase namingthe subject and place. As the lm progresses, I am aware that I miss cer-tain words, then realize that the dialogue is in Danish, which contains

enough cognates and place names to have given me the illusion that the language is mine. I become absorbed in what this oreigner choosesto lm, what he nds remarkable, and I speculate about who he is, theroutes he has chosen, why the scenes he includes strike him as signi cant.My mind is on all this as much as on the things or themselves.

Leth’s lm, like Five Dedicated to Ozu , stakes out a territory at the otherend o cinema rom the metaphoric cutaway to the bird. Its posture isto point at the real, at the tissue o visible things woven into space. Yet the purity o the gesture is subverted by the seductive, even ineluctable,

path rom what we see on the screen, the possible instances o things orthemselves, to the real spaces we imagine, and to the authors, howeverretiring and sel -e acing they may be. The obstacle in the end is not intention or rhetoric. It is not the ailure o the spectator’s attention. It is the medium itsel .

What is cinema a ter all? Contemporary theorists have reached aconsensus that this question—Bazin’s question, Eisenstein’s question,

Arnheim’s question—makes little sense, that the quest or the medium’sessence is quixotic. Yet there does appear to be some irreducible, ener-

gizing, obstructing character to cinema. Inscribed in the image is theexhortation to regard. Inscribed in the fow o images and sounds isthe concomitant injunction to disregard, without which the discourserisks opacity, even meaninglessness. In the end, the thing that must beat least partially disregarded is the continuum the image orms withthe spatial world, which is, paradoxically, the spring o cinema’s powerand seductiveness. It is only in that world that things o er the entirepromise o being or themselves. As the processes o optics, chemistry,and electronics allow them to pass into the realm o the moving image,

they acquire the attributes rom which the mind makes metaphor andall its ancillary mechanisms o meaning. O these attributes they cannever be ully divested.

Harvard University




NOTES

1 Wallace Stevens, “O Florida, Venereal Soil,” in The Collected Poems o Wallace Stevens (Vintage: New York, 1982), 47.2 Tupamaros , directed by Heidi Specogna and Rainer Ho man (Berlin: Specogna Film,1996).3 André Bazin, “The Ontology o the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? , trans.Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. o Cali ornia Press, 1971), 1:15.4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography , trans. Richard Howard (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 5.5 Stevens, “Sunday Morning” in The Collected Poems , 70.

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