by Madigan Haley
An appreciation for opacity is essential to the essay film's speculative mode, a correlative to the photographic practice of using light to write.
This essay speculates on a contemporary movement within the age-old play between word and image. What seems to me significant in some recent artworks is the emphasis placed on the idea of a writing that happens nearby images. In other words, there is no subordination of one art to the other—the image is not corroborating the always slightly equivocal sound of words; words are not speaking up for the mute splendor of the imaged world. Nearby instead tries to name a space or a relation that allows for different modes of artistic inquiry to take on a special shape because of their co-existence. In the introduction to their recent collaborative photo-essay, Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole write:
“We have called the book Human Archipelago to underscore the mutual dependence that we believe underpins all human arrangements, but also to suggest that these texts and photographs are a kind of island chain, semi-independent entities within a single ecosystem.”
Figure 1: Akuot Nyibol, pregnant (center), with her daughter Athok Duom and sister Riak Warabek, Sudanese refugee camp, Lokichoggio, Kenya, 1993. From Human Archipelago by Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole.
The archipelago, of course, is not the island chain itself; it is the environment—the arch-sea—in which the islands appear as constellated; it is a metaphor for the notion of nearby. When Cole's writing occupies the verso nearby Sheikh's photographs of refugees in Human Archipelago (2018), or nearby his own photographs of everyday life around the globe in Blind Spot (2017), his words rarely describe the images. Instead, they pursue meditations or reflections that are occasioned by their nearness to photographs. These reflections could also be called speculations (the words seem to mirror each other), as Cole suggests in a short text from Blind Spot:
“Aristotle says the soul never thinks without images. Giordano Bruno, following, says to think is to speculate with images. A view turns out to be a view of a view, as though reality had been caught unawares, half-naked. 'Speculate': for the first time I notice there's a mirror in the word.”
Thinking with images, Cole's work suggests, is a way of speculating about the world that emerges from the interplay between its verbal and visual reflections.
The mode of speculation pursued in works like Cole's has been less central to the photo-essay as a genre, arguably, than it has been to the essay film, a cinematic genre born at the intersection of art film and documentary whose proliferation has attracted increasing attention. Scholars approach the essay film as an artform defined by the practice of thinking with images.[1] Essay films are animated by the interaction between visual images and a "textual stratum," in Nora Alter's words, that can range from a voice-over commentary to filmed speech to sub- or intertitles. The oblique, reflexive, and even disjunctive relationship between word and image differentiates the essay film from documentary film, as does the drift of the essay film's aims away from the impulse to record reality to a more searching, speculative engagement with the world and the images that are made of it. Today essay films range from widely streaming films, such as Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, to multi-channel art installations by the likes of John Akomfrah and Hito Steyerl. Increasingly ubiquitous, the genre crystallized in the decades after 1945, when artistic attempts to articulate the experience of a world in crisis were channeled through the new mass-cultural technology of film. In a canonical statement from that era about one of the genre's touchstone works, André Bazin argued that Chris Marker's Letter to Siberia (1957) had developed a new form of “horizontal montage”:
“Here, a given image doesn't refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.”
Lateral reference opens up a gap or interstice between seeing and saying that provides the genre with its unique Denkraum, its thought space. Thus the essay film is often described as an “in-between form,” an art that takes shape from within the nearby.
Just as the genre's aesthetics are animated by the relations between word and image, essay films characteristically parse the relationships that undergird and render natural the world pictures that we live with, at the same time as they compose new cognitive maps through counterintuitive juxtapositions. That ambition is expressed in the genre's origin: it was first dreamed up when Sergei Eisenstein wondered how to make a film version of Marx's Capital. Eisenstein's concern with how to mediate the fragmented, interconnected, and opaque modernity of the world runs through the history of the essay film, making it a decidedly global artform, both in its proliferation and its orientation. A commonplace of the essay film is an observing, thinking, speaking figure who seems out of place, who finds themself in relation with a people, a history, a culture that is not their own. In Trinh T. Minh-ha's first film, Reassemblage (1982), the image track of everyday life in rural Senegal is accompanied by a voice-over track whose accented English marks its speaker's distance from both Senegal and white Anglo-America. At the beginning of the commentary, she states “I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby.” (Trinh's “speaking nearby” is echoed in this essay's title.) To speak “about” the Senegalese people featured in the film, it seems, would be to surround them with a discourse that presumes mastery, a presumption that Trinh finds in the practices of Western anthropology and documentary film going back to Flaherty. Trinh's refusal to “speak about” her ostensible subject illustrates why some scholars view the essay film as an essentially deconstructive genre, an audiovisual form of critique.
Yet to “speak nearby” is a way to articulate a relationship; critique, I would argue, is only one aspect of the essay film's fundamentally relational practice. Edouard Glissant, the great artist-philosopher of the “world-as-relation,” argued that just relations with other beings requires us to acknowledge and even appreciate their opacity: the fact that they are not merely transparent objects of our knowledge. All of us have a “right to opacity,” Glissant claimed, which first came to light through the resistance of oppressed peoples to the dominant Western systems of knowledge. But Glissant's notion of opacity is not a celebration of difference for the sake of separateness. The phenomenal experience of opacity only arises through being in relation with others. All people and peoples need to have their opacity respected, Glissant argued, in order to participate equally in what he called the “global Relation”—a conception of the world as a matter of ramifying relationships, which requires new ways of acting and thinking. Glissant juxtaposed what he called “continental thought,” which seeks to render phenomena transparent for the purposes of classification, with “archipelagic thought,” which takes a more suppositional and speculative approach to particulars, acknowledging that everything has a hidden side.
Archipelagic thought arises from the nearby (Cole and Sheikh signal their affinity with this way of thinking in the title of their collaboration); it is, Glissant suggests, "the thought of the essay.” Archipelagic thought is also, I would add, the kind of thinking that characterizes the essay film. Essay films by Emily Jacir, Hito Steyrel, and the Otolith Group share a concern with "the opacity of the image," according to T.J. Demos (2013), who cites the Otolith Group's engagement with Glissant's ideas in their essay film Nervus Rerum (2008), which focuses on the Jenin refugee camp. The essay film's generic concern with opacity is not the overwrought gesture of invoking others only to sequester them in difference. Opacity, rather, is the precondition for the essay film's practice of relating widely, across enforced divisions. An appreciation for opacity is essential to the essay film's speculative mode, a correlative to the photographic practice of using light to write.
Figure 2: Shamso, Zahara, and Alima, Somali refugee camp, Liboi, Kenya, 1994. From Human Archipelago by Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole.
Some essay films have figured their concern with what Glissant called opacity by dwelling upon the space between frames on the film reel: the black emulsion leader itself, "opaque film," as the glossaries put it. Trinh's Reassemblage opens with a one-minute presentation of black leader, which is figured as blankness, a temporary withholding of vision, by the festive music that accompanies it on the sound track. If the opening sequence withholds the documentary promise to make the world appear, it also attunes spectators to the space outside the frames—between them—as the space from which the voiceover commentary will speak. The presentation of black leader, then, is a visual representation of Trinh's notion of “nearby.” Chris Marker also draws attention to this space between images in the opening sequence of Sans Soleil (1983), considered by many to be a pinnacle of the essay film genre. The film's voiceover commentary begins with the speaker relating one of the letters sent to her by a globe-trotting cameraman:
“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.”
Marker's cameraman's “image of happiness” is a Utopia (or Eden) set off from the film that it commences. The image, in its purity and plenitude, is beyond all relations: it cannot be linked with other images; and although the image is placed at the beginning of the film, before the title sequence, it is also outside of it, a counterpoint to all that will follow. The image is a counterpoint, specifically, to the black leader that follows the short sequence of the Icelandic children. To "see the black," then, is to see the true subject of Sans Soleil: the opaque relational space between images, the space that conditions the vertiginous montage (vertical and horizontal, to use Bazin's terms) through which Sans Soleil mediates and meditates a fragmented, constellated conception of the world. An archipelagic conception, we could say, since the stopping points that punctuate the cameraman's wandering—Japan, Cape Verde, San Francisco, and (that verbal trompe-l'oeil) Ile-de-France—connect separate territories into a kind of global island chain. Insofar as the film's subject is the difficulty and necessity of reconceiving of the world through global relations, the black leader presents this opaque, relational, in-between space as the ground of our post-Edenic (or post-1968) historical condition. Sunless was Marker's special name for that condition.
The essay film's concern with the relational space between images, figured by the black leader, has been shared by some of the contemporary writers engaged in the practice of writing nearby images. Recent books by Susan Howe (2013), Claudia Rankine (2014), and Teju Cole (2017), for example, not only draw upon the practices of the essay film, they also cite the opening sequence of Sans Soleil. Rankine uses Marker's words as the epigraph to Citizen—“If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black”—marking the relation between her intermedial lyric and the essay film. Cole spoke the same lines from the stage during the performance of his 2017 work Black Paper, which draws upon the essay film's migration into the space of multi-channel installation and then takes it even further, into the realm of performance art, building the relational aesthetics of the essay film into the architecture of a multimedia Theatrum Mundi.
If Rankine's and Cole's citations of Marker signal a formal affinity, they also draw out and deepen a concern with the racial coding of blackness that is implicit in Marker's and Trinh's use of black leader (and explicit in Glissant's account of opacity). To see blackness, their work suggests, is to see, among other things, the crux of the relationships that undergird not only life in the contemporary United States, but the modern world. Achille Mbembe describes how
"Blackness and race have constituted the (unacknowledged and often denied) foundation... from which the modern project of knowledge—and of governance—has been deployed.”
The racial category of blackness has not only provided an alibi for white supremacy's denial of any ethical relationships with the human beings that it brutalizes, it has also been the negative against which modern political categories have been posited, such as the citizen. In a passage from Human Archipelago that seems in dialogue with Rankine's Citizen, Cole asks with exasperation: "Can blacks be neighbors?" A neighbor is someone who lives nearby (the words share the same etymon). Cole and Rankine suggest that to think the meaning of neighborliness and nearbyness now entails “seeing blackness”—recognizing how black lives matter as well as reconceiving models of ethical and political relationship by "seeing" the history of what Mbembe calls “the Black.” Glissant had in mind the discovery of such a mode of relationality when he argued that in the world-ending violence of the middle passage was also born, through the experience and practices of the African peoples who lived through it, a new archipelagic way of thinking the world: “Not just specific knowledge of, appetite, suffering, and delight of one people, not only that, but knowledge of the Whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of Relation within the Whole.”
The artistic practices of the essay film and the philosophical traditions of the Black Atlantic can be understood to converge on the imperative that to speculate on the Whole today requires one to “see the black.” Cole channels both of these traditions into his work. Blind Spot, which is composed of photographs taken in over fifty locations on six continents, carries on the itinerant efforts of the essay film to think the world as a whole. Cole has described the texts that accompany the images in Blind Spot as “voiceovers” (2019). And the thinking “voiced” in the texts is versed in the “common language of the Black Atlantic” (270). The final two image-text pairings in Blind Spot frame its project by returning to and reworking the opening sequence of Sans Soleil. The penultimate image, taken in Rivaz, Switzerzland, is analogous to Marker's image of happiness. Cole's image is of a landscape suddenly and luminously revealed, a site wholly given over to sight (the text even includes, as an echo of Marker's Icelandic children, a pair of boys who “come laughing up the road”). Alongside this moment of instantaneous illumination, the final image-text pairing describes a different mode of seeing by returning to a photo from earlier in the volume, taken in Brazzaville, Congo, in which a boy grasps a railing as he stands on a bridge or embankment above raging water. In the earlier photograph, the boy's face is opaque. But his pensive regard is now apparent in the final image. The text comments:
“Darkness is not empty. While preparing this book, I rescanned the negative of the boy by the Congo. 'His eyes disappear,' I had written. But all of a sudden, with slightly altered settings, I could now see his face, his eyes. Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest.”
As a reflection on what is involved in “seeing black,” the narrator's need for “altered settings” refers back to an essay by Cole, published elsewhere, where he describes how “the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin”:
“The dynamic range of films emulsions, for example, was generally calibrated for white skin and had limited sensitivity to brown, red, or yellow skin tones.”
Yet the aim of Cole's essay is to describe how this limitation of the medium—an allegory of larger constraints—was transformed by Roy DeCarava into the means for aesthetic innovation:
“Instead of trying to brighten blackness, [DeCarava] went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories.”
The kind of patient seeing cultivated by DeCarava's photographs brings to mind, for Cole, what Glissant meant by an appreciation for opacity. In Blind Spot, the final image actually reduces the opacity of the earlier processing, insofar as it had been the accidental mechanism of effacement. But the wise light that shines forth in the boy's now visible face is also opaque, in Glissant's sense, resplendent with intimations of what “darkness may contain.”
The conclusion of Blind Spot suggests that to speculate about the world now requires “patient seeing” and an attunement to the different shades of opacity. Opacity does not simply reside in others, Cole's work implies, it is also a blind spot that conditions our vision—of the eye, first, but also the mechanical vision of the lens and the mental visions expressed in words. It is at the limit of these modes of vision, where they give over to re-vision in the intimate opaque nearby, that, paradoxically, our world comes into view.
[1] Consider as representative the titles of recent studies of the genre by David Montero (Thinking with Images [2012]) and Laura Rascaroli (How the Essay Film Thinks [2017]). Nora Alter (2018) and Timothy Corrigan (2011) also approach the essay film as a distinctive, audio-visual mode of thought.
Works Cited
Alter, Nora. 2018. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bazin, André. 2017. "Bazin on Marker," translated by David Kehr. In Essays on the Essay Film, edited by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cole, Teju and Fazal Sheikh. 2018. Human Archipelago. Gottingen: Steidl.
Cole, Teju. 2017. Blind Spot. New York: Random House.
---. 2016. Known and Strange Things. New York: Random House.
---. 2019. "Teju Cole Interview: My Looking Became Sacred," interview with Tonny Vorm. Humlebaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. https://vimeo.com/315634928
Corrigan, Timothy. 2011. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Demos, T. J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Glissant, Edouard. 2009. Philosophie de la Relation: poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard.
---. 1997. Poetics of Relations, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Howe, Susan. 2013. Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker. New York: New Directions.
Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent DuBois. Durham: Duke University Press.
Montero, David. 2012. Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema. Bern: Peter Lang.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Madigan Haley is assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. His writing has appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, the minnesota review, Translation and Literature, and A Companion to the English Novel (2015), which he co-edited. He is currently completing a book titled "The Global Work of Literature: The Art of Making Another World, 1848-2114."