Critical Decoupage of the Film Archive
Reporting on a Berlinale Forum Expanded lecture by Harun Farocki, who tells the story of the Italian film that once deconstructed Hollywood.
LA VERIFICA INCERTA
“Tearing Hollywood Apart from the Understairs”, as one of the filmmakers put it, pretty much sums up the basic procedure of the pioneer Italian underground film LA VERIFICA INCERTA (Gianfranco Baruchello, Alberto Griffi, Italy, 1964). The film consists of a montage of bits and pieces of classic Hollywood genre films, a deconstruction of their clichés with the purpose of implicit critique. A lecture that was part of the Forum Expanded programme, German artist, filmmaker and lecturer, Harun Farocki, made his contribution to the revival of the political and aesthetic discourse surrounding the film.
The evening began with the screening of the film, which Farocki freely translated as “An Uncertain Study.” Afterwards he delivered a lecture on the montage techniques used by the two filmmakers and their political implications. He also showed clips from his and other directors’ films that used similar techniques.
Baruchello and Griffi’s film is a paramount example of the use of experimental formal techniques to create politically charged films. By using similar sequences from different genre films (spaghetti westerns, melodramas, historical epics, etc.) and gluing them together, making purposeful “mistakes” in the expected narrative sequences, Baruchello and Griffi produce comic and ironic effects. The film remains devoid of narrative, character development, psychological investigation or explicit message. That is what ties it to early avant-garde filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Hans Richter, both of whom opposed traditional bourgeois narration centred on the individual hero and opted for a panoramic dissection of a segment of the society or a whole city. The filmmakers deploy the artistic technique of the “objet trouvé” or ready-made, which adds artistic value to non-artistic objects (in this case mainstream genre film sequences) through recontextualisation. In LA VERIFICA INCERTA the recontextualisation produces a sharp critique of hegemonic clichés present in genre cinema, which usually conveys the point of view of the dominant class, race and gender.
The use of ready-mades is also an indication that the avant-garde believes that in film, montage is the key element of authorship. Hence Farocki’s lecture appropriately focused on that aspect of the film, investigating the theoretical and historical implications of techniques such as shot/counter-shot, repetition, mirror-reversal, etc., which were all carried out manually by altering the film stock, and not digitally, as we would do today. Farocki, who himself has worked with the editing of archival footage in his film-essays, took us on a journey through film history and theory, while also giving insight into the practical process of filmmaking and montage.
301 Moved Permanently