Essay in which there appear edges, hinterlands, peripheries, Etc / Part One

by Owen Vince.

In the winter of 1931, 27-year-old filmmaker Varick Frissell joined the crew of the SS Viking on their annual seal-hunting expedition off the coast of Newfoundland. It was here, on 15 March 1931, that a cache of dynamite (a brute-force instrument intimately associated with the reproduction of colonies and capital) stored in the ship’s stern exploded, killing 28 men and causing the vessel itself to founder and sink. Frissell’s body was never recovered. The crew, and much of their equipment (the industrial apparatus of Hollywood itself), went down with the ship.

It was only by coincidence that the film he was shooting, The Viking, told the story of two friends, and rivals, who survived the wrecking of their own eponymous vessel. Dissatisfied with how the film was progressing, Frissell had left the cosier confines of New York to capture ever more realistic footage for his project.

Ultimately, this tragedy would be exploited by Frissell’s financiers to market the film upon its completion; an instance of mass death adapted for commercial success. While the story itself was panned (“melodramatic,” “weak”), critics spoke approvingly of its cinematography. Life is not stranger than fiction; it merely bootstraps it. The news cycle moved on.

If the frontier—like Frissell’s fatal Newfoundland—is the territory’s edge, then what happens at or even beyond the edge; within the ill-defined space of the extra-territorial? You might think of a map whose known eventually merges into a morass of the unknown: a place primed for cartography—a vast, undifferentiated substance in which filmmakers (especially filmmakers) might find themselves on tricky ground. Somewhere, at the bottom of the Atlantic, in scraps and ragged tatters, all the equipment you need to shoot a film is silently waiting. If these machines were brought to the surface, their lenses might still receive light.

The Edge. Cinema happens here—or has happened here. Hollywood itself was planted within a desert; seeding a sleepy Californian lowland (vacant lots, ranches, fields) with the technical apparatus of hypnagogic imagery (studios, laboratories, storage sheds; cameras). Early film—as Kevin Brownlow has been quick to remind us—was packed with extra-territorial protagonists: gangsters, gunslingers, fallen women. The mass art of the cinema (big C) was—for a long time, in the figuration of the great Manny Farber—caught up in the attempt to “capture the unworked-over immediacy of life before it [had] been cooled by Art.” The early underground (B-movies or, later, the avant-garde) teased at the edge of formalisation. Film’s edgeland was always precarious: hungry for reification, it would eventually be ploughed over by industrial movie houses until it became sequestered into basements, studios, bedrooms and, eventually, digital archives. Cinema is its own moving edge.

Later (I mean, in the pre-talkie 1920s), when filmmakers were loosed from the confines of the stage and studio, they—like ethnographers—encountered (and imagined) ways of life very different from their own; bearing with them all the equipment of their still nascent industry (c-stands, tripods, generators, food trucks, etc…). Frissell wasn’t alone. For Robert Flaherty—grand docent of the quasi-ethnographic docufilm—the real was never quite sufficient; arguing that “you have to lie,” to “distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” What Flaherty found on the island of Savai’i (Moana, 1926)—and, earlier, in the Canadian Arctic (Nanook of the North, 1922)—was his own image of the beyond. In Newfoundland, Frissell had met his death. Later, Herzog found a gun pointed at his head. Film—and the cinema—imagines its own periphery. It throws back ghosts.

First principles. The frontier is a location that is being forever subsumed by the norms of the centre. But the centre can get muddled up in the process. In these spaces of confrontation, all manner of quizzical encounters might unfold—and not without a little risk. Today, in the cinema of the “long” 2020s—it doesn’t have a name, an era, an epoch—that same periphery is again being sought out; 100 years after Frissell. But it’s not quite exotic.

For Radu Jude, this periphery is Romania, his homeland (Do Not Expect too Much From the End of the World, 2023); for Sudabeh Mortezai, it is Albania (Europa, 2023); for Valeska Grisebach, Bulgaria (Western, 2017). Each of these places has only recently been captured by the organs of the European project (read: normalisation; integration). Here, workers flow inwards (back toward the centre), while cash—and those who administer it—flow outwards, sinking its roots into the soil. And the tarmac. 

Back. For theorist-filmmaker Harun Farocki, the edge—in his Parallel II (2014)—is a simulation; a computer-generated terrain in which the horizon “at once recedes and refreshes,” where the landscape, quite literally, comes into existence even as the avatar—for Farocki, a digitised charging horse—encounters it. “Where does the world end?” the voiceover asks; it is a world “generated by the gaze that falls upon it.” Put another way, the gaze itself creates the conditions of the periphery. This must come as quite a surprise to the people already living there.

Yet other filmmakers have tussled with the ontologies of the extraterritorial; like Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, who—across six features shot between 1994 and 2019—has explored the lives of Cape Verdean migrants living in the Fontainhas district, a shanty town located on the outskirts of Lisbon.

For Costa, Fontainhas is already under the process of dissolution; a network of crumbling, entropic spaces which are slowly being replaced by modernised housing developments (I’m thinking of 2000’s In Vanda’s Room, 2006’s Colossal Youth, and 2014’s Horse Money). For the inhabitants of this forlorn and decaying place, existence is “solitary”; the product of a “violent and painful separation.” The Cape Verdeans, uprooted and unmoored from their homeland, have brought their peripherality with them; a wavering figment-fragment of the colony returned to its coloniser, all bunched up at its edges. We never see Lisbon proper. We see the night, the expressively inexpressive—the shied-away edge.

Costa has been accused of romanticising his protagonists, their poverty and hopelessness. I think this betrays a lack of awareness toward his project, and how it dignifies—and deepens. By making it strange, he refuses the potted empathy work of realism; holding us at arm’s (and eye’s) length.

        Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, Etc (Owen Land, 1965).

Elsewhere (in this plodding, meandering circuit around edges and peripheries), I think of Owen Land’s Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, Etc (1965); a short work that conveys the indecipherable formal machineries that come into play in the very raw material(s) of film itself (film as film); giving life to the tangled mess that is film’s real edge, and reminding us of the messy existence of hinterlands; that they are built into the very properties of film. For Land, a sprocket hole is as much the “cinema” as a woman’s face. Thought through differently: there is always an edge, especially when we’re not looking directly at it. For Juan A. Suarez, who has written about Land’s film, it is defined by its “indeterminacy and open-endedness.” Land himself has confessed to feeling “very silly” whenever it is screened; and has stood up to point out details to the film’s audience. When we hit the edge, we find ourselves needing a guide… 

END OF PART ONE

Writer and filmmaker Owen Vince takes stock of cinema's anxious obsession with edges and peripheries, and the hinterlands that often violently shape them. He can be found(ish) here: https://linktr.ee/owenvince