I BURN THE WAY MONEY BURNS, Part 2

by Victoria Brooks

In Joyce Wieland’s Solidarity (1973), we hear, rather than see, protest, and we hear it as a full family affair.

Men’s, women’s and children’s voices form a textured soundscape as the camera resolutely fixes on the demonstrators’ tired feet. They shift weight onto one heel, back onto the other. Holding steady, the camera brings out the monotony of the picket, deliberately eschewing the spectacular banner-waving images of political or militant cinema, leaving voice(s) to do the political work.

by Joyce Wieland, 1973
by Joyce Wieland, 1973

 

It is perhaps a gendered camera that bothers to look at such things in the first place – to be concerned for bodies, not just minds and politics, and to listen to what might otherwise be unheard. That is the fundamental and permanent labor expected of a housewife: to take care, and to be attuned to damage. Thus, we simply “hear” the collective in the familiar chanting of union songs before the microphone squeal marks the time for quiet concentration as the woman’s representative urges support for the strike. The impulse response1 of Wieland’s field recordings produce a sonic affect that transports us to the crowd. It catches the loudspeaker’s hiss and squeal and demands our attention, calls for silence to let a single voice be heard, as the reverb from the loudspeakers situates us in the open air. Rather than dramatic shots of the crowd, a static “Solidarity” printed across each frame provides the primary point of entry through which to read the film. A quietly defiant declaration that in no uncertain terms places the filmmaker in support and challenges us to do the same.

Solidarity privileges the sound and image tracks equally, an approach that pervades many of the films and videos under discussion in this series focused in the Cinenova and LUX collections of the subsequent decade. For Wieland, Solidarity marked the move towards a more direct, post-modern2 approach to political filmmaking than the structuralist influenced films she made in New York during the 1960s, a time in which she described being marginalized by the predominantly male avant-garde filmmakers. Thus, when watching the substantial number of feminist and labour- oriented moving image works held in these two collections (that range from traditional documentary formats and collectively-made videos, to visually and sonically complex experimental artists’ works) there appears to be a shift in the choice of language that is used in counterpoint to Wieland’s linguistically precise gesture. Apologetic, emotional, or self-censoring, the voices and slogans that pervade these materials begin to reveal the particularly gendered relation to solidarity. They show women to be the apparatus of support in labour struggles, the ones who provide productive care in their secondary position in the unions, their secondary position in society. The implied tonality, even in written form, posits a set of queries or requests rather than unified shout. To what degree could this be seen as an index of the available structures of “being political” as housewives?

by Barbara Kopple, 1976

“What does it take to move Duke Power’s Heart” reads the slogan’s of Harlan County miners’ wives3. “Please don’t say we’re wonderful”4 — the title of Steel Bank Co-op’s collaboration with the Nottingham miners wives morphs into a plea. A television series titled “Speaking as Women” was produced by Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) during the 1970s. Although crucially speeding the distribution of feminist thought through Quebec and Northern Ontario, it clearly presupposes that in order to speak as a woman you must fight precisely those patriarchal structures that relegate women to the unheard.

Read together, it is the polyvocal quality of the soundtracks, built up of many voices (whether expressed as a single narrator, or a group) and taking in all sides of women’s work (children, the home, waged labor, and organizing) that is of importance. The problem the films pose is that the very model of a single speaking subject, as in Wieland’s previous film Pierre Vallières5, is for the most part not operative here. Rather, the important issue is not that one cannot isolate a unified message – we might easily imagine a form of solidarity that was not predicated on reduction to a central category, like the wage. Instead it is that the group functions as an amplification of sorts, in which all the small and otherwise hidden labors of support and care become “audible” as polyphony. Not as a discernible content that could be placed in a political program based on the clear division of political time, family time, and work time, but one that, if attended to, seriously erodes the coherence of that division.

The acousmatic and polyvocal approach discussed in relation to Sandra Lahire’s Uranium Hex in my previous text is certainly exemplary of the desire to make films that determinedly attend to the auditory space of both the lives and landscape of the subjects. In grappling with the representation of the time of women’s work, the polyphonic is a strategy well suited to the complex issue at hand.

An early example of polyphonic music whose score still survives is Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes from 1198, but of course, this compositional structure is more famously heard in the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).6 Pérotin’s score combines a horizontal and a vertical axis. The horizontal drives the linear timeline with harmonizing melodies relatively freely modulated in parallel, but it is a series of vertical impulses that pull the multiple melodies together. This regular clustering of voices in unison punctuates the linear momentum.7 This history is of analytical use when approaching the relationship between sound and image tracks used by many artist-filmmakers under discussion here, especially in terms of the deliberate (albeit more compositionally fractured) tactic of an episodic or repetitive formal structure. In films as diverse as Uranium Hex, Berwick Street Film Collective’s ’36 to ’77 (1978) and Susan Stein’s She Said (1982), sounds cut between the acousmatic, the diegetic, and the environmental. Sometimes overlaid all at once, the sound moves in and out of sync with the image and frequent moments of silence fracture the melodic linearity, just as extended periods of black are used extensively in all three of these films punctuating the image to produce “commas” in time. Evan Calder Williams exposed this same vertical motion when translating and commenting on “On the construction of Feminist Committees” (1975). Here, the authors describe the time of women’s work, not as the usual two-tiered delineation of on —then off — the clock, but as a horizontal “flood” of labour interrupted by a vertical “comma” of time — the snatches of time socializing with other women on the stairwell, whilst doing the laundry, organizing.8

The feature-length ’36 to ’77 by Berwick Street Film Collective looks back to the night cleaners’ strike of 1970 by cutting extended silences through with the reminiscences of the women involved. The soundtrack collages the objects we attribute to such struggles — the crackle of the loud speaker, the joyful rendition of union songs followed by the reduction in amplification to localize the home, the male union voice drowned with multiple female voices providing the harmonized horizontal momentum of the picture. A sequel to Nightcleaners: Part 1 (1975), an aesthetically radical documentary that charts the attempt to create a women’s union of office cleaners and which became highly influential to feminist filmmakers throughout the 80s, ’36 to ’77 uses similar montage techniques as its predecessor, but with black and white archive photographs and footage taken during the strike overlaid with a woman recounting the collective potential of the win, and loneliness of the aftermath.

by Berwick Street Film Collective (Mark Karlin, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan), 1978
by Berwick Street Film Collective (Mark Karlin, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan), 1978

Hiding like Pythagoras behind the sheet9, the filmmakers restrict our visual access with long periods of black and single static images to compel us to listen. Switching from black and white archive footage to color, the film periodically cuts to a close-up of a woman staring into the camera. During an extended period of black this shadowed face fades in from the background. Becoming very slowly closer and clearer, this technique attunes the ear to the shifting sounds and voices that pitch in and out as if a memory while the static images loop, repeat, and jump cut. The camera’s gradual pull outwards reveals the woman whose voice lends itself to the narration and exacerbates the claustrophobia. Images of a domestic environment are shot though with lens flare abstracting the colors into fields of light. Halfway through, we focus again on the seated woman whilst her voice is dislocated, hovering over her body. The soundtrack is finally sucked into the radio, creating a vacuum-like shift from the multi-channel polyphony, to a localized domestic sound source. With this we move from many to one, from the collective jubilance of winning, through to the subsequent isolation of the family.

by Berwick Street Film Collective (Mark Karlin, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan), 1978
by Berwick Street Film Collective (Mark Karlin, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan), 1978

’36 to ’77 uses the union song throughout as shorthand for collective hope, literally joining voices together in action. A direct correlation can be charted between the polyphonic fugue, and the ‘round’ structure of repetition in folk songs that are handed down generation to generation. Trade union and protest songs are sung by women’s chorus’s in Une histoire de femmes, by a child in Uranium Hex, sung collectively in ’36 to ’77, and proclaimed in prose to address the crowd in Solidarity. This continuity of action represented by the same songs, themselves passed down through the struggles of the twentieth century, gestures back towards this question of time. The manifold time of a contract, of the family, of reproductive labor, and of solidarity is one that is structured continuous and unending for women from childhood until death, passed from mother to daughter.

“We’re the women of the union and we sure know how to fight.
We’ll fight for women’s issues and we’ll fight for women’s rights.
A woman’s work is never done from morning until night.
Women make the union strong! 

Solidarity forever, solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
For the Union makes us strong 

It is we who wash dishes, scrub the floors and clean the dirt,
Feed the kids and send them off to school—and then we go to work,
Where we work for half men’s wages for a boss who likes to flirt.
But the union makes us strong!”

Example of variations to Ralph Chaplin’s original lyrics for Solidarity Forever10 created by women in 1970s.

In an alternative approach that relied on the variety of vernacular tastes of the 1980s rather than the trans-generational flattening of the folk song, Lizzie Borden noted in a recent interview that in Born in Flames “I wanted the music to be part of the different voices that all the women use, because each of them has a different way of speaking and style of music… The multiplicity of voices meant that all voices were significant.”11 Borden’s “cacophony of voices” presents women through their differences rather than simply smoothing them into a single voice of the Phantom ‘I’. In contrast, the narration in the first few minutes of Une histoire de femmes uses the explicitly experimental history of this collective ‘I’ by extending it to absurd lengths. Within a few minutes, the documentary tracks a history of women’s labor of support from the earliest Sudbury communities to the 1979 strike. However, this is not the all knowing narrator but rather a transgenerational and transgeographical voice, “a traveling voice”, to paraphrase Kaja Silverman12.

Dir. Sophie Bissonette, Joyce Rock, Martin Duckworth, 1980
Dir. Sophie Bissonette, Joyce Rock, Martin Duckworth, 1980

Susan Stein’s She Said (1982) is also predominantly narrated by a single female voice. Here the camera stays on the threshold of the home with an extended close up of a front door. The voice that subsequently punctures the image stays off-camera and out of frame, an unsynched acousmatic voice that bridges between the opening shot and the subsequent cut to a black frame strewn continually with photographs. The camera is refused entry, functioning as a vampiric outsider that has not been invited in. Instead, the narrator (intercut with foley sound, and at times overlaid with a male voice) guides us through interior and exterior spaces of the city blurred by the continuity of waged and unwaged work. The image track regularly cuts back to the camera’s POV as it repeatedly attempts to gain access to the house before once-again being overtaken by black. On this background, Warburgian13 juxtapositions of images — maps, typewriters, a maid, and the supermarket checkout — speed across the frame, an analog to the daily circulation of women oscillating between domestic work and waged work, sex work and supermarket.

by Susan Stein, 1982
by Susan Stein, 1982
by Susan Stein, 1982

The voice recites a fractured poem, narrating this formal circularity between the images and between production and reproduction in a sort of stream of consciousness. The shopping list merges with Stein’s shot list, and the “real”14 moving images intersect the archive stills. The crash of cutlery, the gush of water, the beep of the checkout, and the circularity of reproduction are wound tight into the film’s form. Wieland, Lahire, Stein, Bissonette, Bordon, and BSFC all attempt to create film sound that is adequate to the multiplicity and complexity of women’s work, waged and unwaged alike. In the anthology Noise and Capitalism, Nina Power15 makes the point that noise is historically bound to women – the typing pool, the telephone exchange, the piece work of small hands, the operation of telephones and radios, and the whir and clunk of the machine. It even surfaces in men’s perception of women’s repetitive ‘chatter.’ Fortunati stressed “It is this great technological innovation introduced by capital — the ‘mechanization of the woman’s body’… A woman no longer uses her body, her body is a means of work and uses her.”16 In the intercutting across spaces, using maps to locate the body as it moves from home to work and across the city, She Said animates this process by positing the equivalence of the circulation of commodities with women’s work. A woman’s hand rings up a till as both shop-girl and consumer, and she enters the house as both mother and roving camera.

So does reading this disparate collection of films, related by their timely attempts towards representing labor struggles and women’s work through their phantom ‘I’s, their collective and individual voices, in fact gesture towards a linkage between an antagonistic historicity (a deep time) and a localized domestic time? What they certainly do is to suggest a gendered space, one, to use the words of Anne Carson, with “its own time zone, its own system measures, its own local names”17. Through the modulation of sound, recording processes and experimental techniques, these filmmakers in different ways create a proximity to the speaking subject. They do so by not only eschewing the authoritative male voice but also using field recordings, interviews, and a non-diegetic voice, often edited sequentially or overlaid. In this way, they gesture towards a transgenerational maternal voice, a polyphony that cuts across class, race, age, and geography. It is here that these films move past a simple metaphorical or illustrative relation to the questions raised by Marxist feminists of the time. While tracking through the cinematic history of what he calls the “I-voice”, Michel Chion situates the acousmatic narrating voice with the mother, treating her as “the very first image presence… before the child learns any written signs, her voice articulates things in a human and linear temporality”18. In this case, Kaja Silverman concurs: “Not only is her face the visual mirror in which the child first sees itself, but her voice is the acoustic mirror in which it first hears itself.”19


Victoria Brooks is is a curator and producer based in Troy, NY. As Curator of Time-Based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute she is currently producing new commissions with Rosa Barba, Lucy Raven, Charles Atlas, Germaine Kruip, Tarek Atoui, Patricia L. Boyd, Isabelle Pauwels, and Bloopers: Michael Bell-Smith, Sara Magenheimer and Ben Vida, among others. Recent projects include Time Squared, Ken Jacobs; Peradam, Robert AA Lowe + Sabrina Ratté; The Artists Theater Program, Erika Vogt, Math Bass, Shannon Ebner, Lauren Davis Fisher, Mariah Garnett, MPA, Silke Otto-Knapp, Flora Wiegmann, Adam Putnam, and Mark So; The Jaffe Colloquia, a new series of interdisciplinary seminars centered around the conditions of, and perspectives on, time-based arts, and Frieze Film 2013 – Erika Vogt, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Peter Gidal, Oraib Toukan and Petra Cortright, five artists’ videos for Channel 4 television.  Prior to EMPAC, Brooks was a London-based independent curator, co-founding the itinerant curatorial platform The Island with Andrew Bonacina, co-curating Serpentine Galleryʼs monthly artist-cinema program with Nicola Lees (2009-13), and producing Canary Wharf Screen (2011-13) for Art on the Underground. She was also adjunct curator for New York radio station ARTonAIR.org (2010-13), and in 2011 initiated a yearly series of performance, film, and music events for Calder Foundation, New York.

CINENOVA is a non-profit organisation dedicated to distributing feminist films and videos. For more information on the CINENOVA Collection please see: http://www.cinenova.org/


 

Footnotes

1 An impulse response refers to the acoustic characteristics of a location.

2 I am referring to “post-modern” explicitly here rather than designating a “postmodern” tendency, insofar as her work distances itself from the modernist fracturing of a subject.

3 Koppel, Barbara, Harlan County U.S.A.,1976, 16mm, 103mins

4 Steel Bank Co-op Please Don’t Say We’re Wonderful, 1986, Umatic video, 52mins

5 Wieland, Joyce. Pierre Vallières, 1972, 16mm, 32mins. For further reading about this film, refer to Anne Low’s text for LUX – http:// lux.org.uk/blog/joyce-wielands-pierre-vallières

6 With thanks to Argeo Ascani for alerting me to this score and recording

7 With thanks to Johannes Goebel for our discussions on the polyphonic structuring of time.

8 “On the construction of Feminist Committees” in <> (Marsilio eds, 1975). The text will be published in Evan Calder Williams book of previously untranslated feminist and radical Italian texts, co-edited with Maya Andrea Gonzalez: Against the Flood: The Italian Critique of Gender and Capital (Verso, 2015)

9 It is widely cited that the term acousmatic (in both terms of the musical form and in reference to film studies) comes from Pythagorus’s practice of teaching from behind a sheet so that his image would not distract his students, they would simply concentrate on his words.

10 Ralph Chaplin wrote “Solidarity Forever” in 1914 during the Kanawa coal miners’ strike in Huntington, West Virginia, and it was first sung during the Chicago hunger strike march led by Lucy Parsons in January 1915.

11 Borden, Lizzie. Interview with Kaisa Lassinaro in LABOUR ISSUE #1 (2011) eds. Melissa Gordon and Marina Vishmit, http://www.anagrambooks.com/labour-issue-1

12 Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: Theories of Representation and Difference. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana University Press: 1988) p.167

13 By Warburgian, I refer to the visual structure of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.

14 Stein refers to the “real” in the soundtrack as the footage of the front door as opposed to the photographic stills that move across the frame.

15 Power, Nina. “Woman Machines: the Future of Female Noise” in Noise and Capitalism. Eds. Mattin and Anthony Iles (Kritika: 2008) p.98

16 Fortunati, Leopoldina The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Labor, Prostitution, and Capital (Autonomedia, 1996) p.72

17 Carson, Anne. Men in the Off Hours (Vintage Reprint Edition: 2001) p.4

18 Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema (originally published as La Voix au Cinema in 1947) trans. Claudia Gorbman, (Columbia University Press: 1999) p.50

19 Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: Theories of Representation and Difference. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis (Indiana University Press: 1988) p.150

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