Film versus narrative

Film versus narrative. Interview with Nöel Burch

Nöel Burch: I have worked basically in France and in Britain. In France I made a number of projects on television, films about filmmakers, film history and so on and in England I made a number of mixed documentary fiction films – various things like that. But I’m most known for my books, which are about film history and film theory, some of which are published in Spanish.

My first book, which is indeed Praxis du Cinema, was, basically, how should I say? I hadn’t succeeding in making films. I went to film school in Paris in the early 1950s, but I had not succeeded in making films. Breaking into the industry, I’d been an assistant, but I wasn’t very good at it. So, basically the book is a kind of theory about the films I couldn’t make and what films should be like, etc.
But in those days I had a completely formalistic approach to films. And that book, which today I on the whole reject – I do not stand by that book anymore very much – was a reflection of that.

El tragaluz infinito, which originally was an attempt to show that before narrative cinema set in, there was a sort of innocent pre-narrative cinema which justified my idea that cinema is essentially an abstract medium. But in the course of writing that book, I began to realize that this was all bullshit and that it was more interesting to talk about the relationship between film and society.

The form of institutional representation. Film, Hollywood, narrative convention

The point is that that concept was forced, precisely to show that – you see, it’s hard to go back on all that stuff because I don’t believe it that anymore.
The point is the idea there was that there was this common language which people who go to the movies have learned since their childhood and it enables them to read, or for a film to communicate, let’s say, that system of representation, which involves, for example, the incorporation of the body of the spectator in the imaginary space of the narrative, to put it very briefly.

When I formulated that idea, in a way it was a negative idea; it was meant to be as bourgeois cinema and opposed to that was on the one hand, avant-garde cinema, or let’s call it that, in the present of the writing of that film, and there was this primitive cinema, which I saw as a kind of avant-garde ‘avant la lettre’. But that’s all nonsense to me and the point is that there is, I feel, indeed today – though to say it’s eternal is absurd.

I’m very hostile to the cinema of today. I find it’s become very routinised, standardised, repetitious. I don’t see why they need to be made, the cinema of countries like Spain and France are totally redundant, totally useless. Countries like Korea or Palestine – they still need to make these films. It’s really a social phenomenon, but to the extent that they need to make them, they also need them to be seen and read and therefore they are necessarily using the common language of film. That’s my outlook on these questions today.

The Forgotten Space. A Film Essay by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch.

We’re both Marxists. We both have the same vision of the horrors of capitalism and we’ve been friendly for a long time. When in 1995, or around then, I translated an essay by Allan called Dismal Science. It’s part of a big work called Fish Story involving photos and essays. It was an exhibition and a book. I translated this essay and I was enthralled by this essay, which is a very great piece of writing. It was about the history of the imaginary and the political economy and the sea and its role as a victor of productivist capitalism.

It’s the kind of film I used to want to make and then suddenly there was a possibility of getting some money in Holland, a foundation called SKOR, which produces public act, contemporary art.

He brought his literary talent – he wrote the commentary. Allan’s years and years of research on the sea, his photographs and his writing over the past twenty years, have dealt with various issues of the political economy of the sea. And I brought to it a certain experience of filmmaking to this project. So basically we pooled our various competences and we made this film.