A blank stare — mysterious and blank

Steven Fama again writes in with some incredibly generative comments on my reading of the stroboscopic blank in Bruce Conner's REPORT. I have a couple of quick thoughts in response...

To begin, I want to return — apropos of Fama's comments — to the question of the physiological and emotional resonances carried by this passage of Conner's film. Between my posts and Fama's, we've read it as shocking, anxious, and hypnotic. As a heartbeat that quickens and stops. And Fama notes further that a mystery attends this "scene," writing: "Is the 'picture' ever coming back? Maybe this concern also creates anxiety, at least in some watching the film. Of course, this effect would be strongest on the first viewing." There's nothing much I can add here, really, except to note that he's right, and that much of the film's tension does in fact hinge on this dynamic within the passage in question. And to say that this sense of mysterious anxiety continues to attend the stroboscopic blank even on repeat viewings. Even after we know that the "picture" does in fact come back, it seems to take too long.

But this raises another emotional response — one we haven't mentioned — that is at play here. The fact of the matter is that this passage is also boring. It lasts for what seems an eternity, and that it compells me to stare deeply into it (though this may not be a universal response), makes it feel longer than it in fact is. And this boredom is integral to the particular anxiety produced by the film: we don't merely wonder whether the "'picture' [is] ever coming back" — we fear that it won't, and that we're suddenly watching something we didn't plan for. And it's frustrating, not only because nothing is "happening" (except, of course, in the audio track), but because what we want to see — the moment of national tragedy — is withheld from us. In a sense, the film's use of the blank, already a refusal of representation, is a refusal of our desires, perverse as they may be.

What is more, this sense of boredom, and of frustration, works throughout the film. Footage, chopped-up and repeated, works to frustrate forward progress, not only of narrative, but of physical movement. There's a resemblance to Gertrude Stein's use of "repetition," her confounding insistence on a continual present that, here, becomes ominous. And the Presidential limo begins its fateful journey, turning perhaps onto Elm St., perhaps onto one of many that lead — have already and irrevocably lead — to Elm St. And, though the voice-over's narrative continues unimpeded, the footage begins again and again, advancing only a few frames at a time. It staggers, and it reiterates the cruel inevitability of the past, almost to the point that the historical narrative, violent as it is, seems a relief. Later, the First Lady begins a walk — only a few steps — towards the ambulance that carries her husband's corpse, the uncanny analogue to the limo with which we began. Already "former," she never arrives, being blown back to the beginning of her movement, even as she comes closer to closing the distance with each successive attempt. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.


— - — - —

If we read, as Fama suggests, the stroboscopic and blank section of REPORT as containing a mystery, it's an interesting one. Certainly, we can read the JFK assassination — and either or both Conner or/and Fama may be pointing in this direction — as a murder mystery. Further, where the notion of mystery resonates on this level, it finds itself in direct and fascinating conflict with the fact that, whether the "picture" ever comes back, we know, and all too well, what happens next. A strange mystery, indeed!








[Read Fama's comments in full here, and my original post there.]

Sound + Image

Steven Fama remarks in the comments to my post on Bruce Conner's REPORT that the stroboscopic flicker of black and white blanks induces a state of heightened anxiety that he describes in physiological terms.

He's right, of course. In fact, I thought that I'd said this, but a review of the published version shows that I connected this dimension of the film exclusively to the soundtrack, and the newscaster's horror at what is unfolding. Fama's point is important because it elaborates what is at stake in the difference between the experience of a traumatic event of national urgency and the sutured and closed official narrative written after the fact. That is, an attention to the emotional response generated by the film's strobed blank reminds us that it is precisely this immediacy — experienced in a visceral, rather than "rational" or reflective way — that distinguishes the event from its analysis or intepretation after the fact.

At the same time, I think Fama overstates the role of the stroboscopic flicker in producing this anxiety-effect. Certainly, strobes tend to disorient, confuse, etc. And anxiety may well attend these effects. But I wonder if the film's particular anxiety is, in the end, an effect of the audio narration rather than the flickering crescendo that accompanies it. Certainly, the strobe works on the mind, and I can't deny that, in the rush towards its peak, it resembles a quickening pulse that corresponds to the breathlessness of the newscaster's report on the soundtrack. But when I watch the movie silently, the strobe, though disorienting, simply doesn't have the effect Fama describes.





[I should also note that Fama's comments allowed me the opportunity to correct my errant ways, and to render the title of Conner's film correctly. So, thanks!]

Report on Bruce Conner

REPORT, dir. Bruce Conner
1963-1967
16mm, b&w, sound.
13 min., ~ 9 sec.
~ 18936 frames





Something has happened — the audio track tells us as much — and what we see is interrupted by a chaotic scramble of images and text taken from film leader. Conner's title is a key: it lays out one of the film's primary purposes, and refers explicitly to the film's audio track, which presents recordings of live newscasts covering the events. At the same time, it recalls gunshots.

Bruce Conner's film, at once a found-footage documentary and an act of mourning, reports on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film often seems degraded: iconic images of the motorcade start and re-start, jump cut and broken. The mismatch between what we see and hear — or between the procession of images themselves — is jarring. We are interrupted by film-leader, blanks.






Everything centers on the film's blank spots. The filmic image — jump-cut newsreel of the Kennedy motorcade nearing Dealey Plaza — disintegrates at the most crucial moment in the film's audio narrative, the moment of murder. Images are replaced by "white expanses where we see hairs in the gate and wear and tear on the frames themselves," which, Matthew Wilder notes, are the film's "most startling moments" — they begin at the moment a voice on the audio track, having noted that "something has happened in the motorcade route," begins to describe the witnesses' panic in a tone equally panicked, breathless.

At this point, and for three minutes and twenty-three seconds, the film's diegesis is located entirely within its narration. A further replacement: the whitened screen becomes a strobing flicker of black and white frames, while the voice describes "a severe gunshot wound." Sirens, ambient sounds, sound like horrorshow Theremins. And the strobe doesn't sit still. Bruce Jenkins writes: "the rate of flicker begins to decelerate — shifting from its most kinetic and stroboscopic as the reporter from 'Mobile Unit 6' races to Parkland Hospital — to infrequent flashes, finally fading to darkness as the reporter arrives and is barred entry to the hospital."






This strobing of black and white makes the invisible blank visible, underscores its blankness, in its alternation of clear and black frames, representing both the absence of color and the absence of light. It employs the rhetoric, as Jenkins claims, of "those horror films where the monster remains offscreen and viewers are left to conjure up its unseen hideousness." As such, it is terrifying. It refuses, in its refusal to show, to allow violence to rise to the status of icon; this same act refuses to make us into witnesses, allowing the narrating newscaster to witness on our behalf. It points to erasure, and absence — not only the absence that is death, but also the inability of mourning to reconcile itself to the traumatic event.

The blanks are blindspots. As a historical document, REPORT covers the Kennedy assassination and the chaos and confusion of its immediate aftermath. The film was begun within days of the event, and updated and revised as history unfolded, as other reports (including the Warren Commission's) were begun and completed, over the next several years. According to Jenkins, eight versions were completed; only one is definitive. Or: one film was remade continually, as its author attempted to settle on a historical account satisfactory to the moment it describes. In many ways, Conner's film reports on reportage itself, on the gaps, absences, and erasures in the historical record. It investigates the contrast between history as it is lived — in the chaos of its unfolding, in its rupture — and history as it is rationalized and codified within and by social institutions.
















[NOTES: In my emphasis on the role of the blank in Conner's film, I've focused exclusively on the first part of REPORT. This is not to suggest that the film's second chapter lacks interest. As Jenkins notes, the shorter second section investigates — through layering of newsreels, commercials, and audio — the mythology surrounding Kennedy: it is "an astounding exposé of the ways in which the media creates meaning, constructs messages, and ultimately controls information" that "implement[s] Barthes' advice that the 'best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn."

Bruce Jenkins' article, "Exlosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner," published in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II, is an invaluable resource on Conner's filmmaking in general, and particularly on REPORT.

Stan Brakhage's lecture on Bruce Conner, published in Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers also includes excellent commentary on the film. Brakhage provides a detailed explanation of REPORT's genesis and the different shapes it took over the years of its production, as well as a thoughful discussion of the emotion elicited by particular segments.

Conner's REPORT is not currently available.]