The Ontology of Windows and Cinema in the Pandemic: e-flux and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen’s Film Series 2020

WHOEVER leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere….. he will not be able to manage for long without a window looking on to the street.

-Franz Kafka¹

If only someone would write the history of the window – of this wonderous frame of our domestic existence, maybe his actual size, a window full, always a window full to the brim, that’s all we got of the world; and how does the shape of our respective window determine the nature of our minds: the window of the prisoner, the croisée of a palace, the ship’s hatch, the attic, the rose window of the cathedral –: are these not just as much hopes, prospects, uprisings and futures of our being?

-Rainer Maria Rilke²

Why windows are having a moment during this pandemic.

-Becky Kleanthous³

The metaphor of cinema as window/frame has been a persistent presence in film history and criticism since cinema’s beginnings. Interpreted differently by numerous theorists – cinema as a window onto the world, as an illusory projection, as a display window onto the commodity world – the metaphor has gained new currency in the digital age, defined by various kinds of “windows” and screens. As Elsaesser and Hagener point out, the ubiquity of display surfaces has “advanced the window to the status of a leading cultural metaphor.” Windows gained further importance during the pandemic and global lockdowns, becoming our artistic canvases, display boards to communicate with the outside, and theatrical prosceniums for neighbours to sing and perform in moments of anxiety and connection.⁴ The hunger for a vision through the window grew so intense that a website provided random views through the windows from various locations around the world.⁵ Filmmakers, armed with recording devices rushed to the windows to make short films and essays on a mere act of looking out of the windows.⁶ While formal studio film production came to a screeching halt, there was an explosion of cinematic output focused on the mediatory experience of windows and living spaces.

As film festivals moved online during lockdowns, a web-based art and publishing platform, e-flux launched a program of films in May 2020, in collaboration with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, From My Window/From Your Window. According to the organisers’ vision, “this collective record of the present will help us imagine a future we want to live in.” Addressing the conditions of isolation and programmed separately from the festival’s online programs, the project marks a distinct moment in its thematic presentation of existing and commissioned films. A polyphony of short films, the collection cues itself into reflections on cinema, windows, and spectatorship around the globe during the pandemic.

Setting up the premise of “Looking out the window”, the project combines two sets of films. The first set of classic experimental shorts includes La chambre (Chantal Akerman, 1972), Les mains négatives (The Negative Hands, Marguerite Duras, 1979), Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), Ten Minutes Older (Herz Frank, 1978) and Dirty Pictures (John Smith, 2007). The second set of “video-letters” of contemporary artists includes The Woman by the Window (Coco Fusco, 2020), A Letter to Marguerite (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 2020), 24 marzo 2020 (dalla mia finestra) (March 24, 2020, From My Window, Emily Jacir, 2020) and Vier Wände (Four Walls, Nicolas Wackerbarth, 2020). Together, the online series is meant to provide “windows to our outside, and inside, worlds.”

Although the theme of this program appears rather straightforward, the collection and the context, directly responding to the dilemmas raised by the pandemic, also foreground a number of important issues, from online exhibition, spectatorship, to the ontology of cinema – all recast through the context of the lockdown. Many film festivals moved online to make some of their films available for viewers while some commissioned filmmakers to make films that address the circumstances. Along with e-flux and Oberhausen, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival invited filmmakers to contribute short films on their shared experiences of isolation, inspired by Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces.⁷ Locarno Film Festival called for a competition of films called “Collection Lockdown” as it moved online.⁸ The experiences of confinement, lived space, and cinema motivated their festival programs. e-flux and Oberhausen’s inclusion of films made by Akerman, Duras, Faraldo, Herz and Smith makes this series the only one to include films made years before the lockdown, eliciting a re-reading of the films from the perspective of the present.

As festivals adapted quickly to the need to move online, it was evident that this new mode of exhibition would at least temporarily reshape a relationship between the viewer and the festival event. For cinephiles, the change was a valuable blessing. Films became available online, often with relatively little or no cost or accreditation, instantly altering the character of film festivals as remote and elitist events. e-flux and Oberhausen’s program on windows was particularly accessible, a feature missing from the main Oberhausen festival that presented an extensive selection of films within limited time.⁹

The series included two sets that may be characterised as omnibus and anthology films. Each film in the collection of classic shorts was produced in its own time and context, while their inclusion in the series requires that the films be read in the conditions of lockdowns and the pandemic. This omnibus collection is different from anthology films in the second set, which include films commissioned for the festival, all responding to shared conditions.¹⁰ It is necessary to watch the films together, for their assembly creates polyphonic signification, encapsulating their collective response to the conditions of the lockdown.

Watching a thematic collection of festival films online is a unique event in programming. When the films are freely available to stream on a website (as opposed to a structured online programming schedule), the viewer becomes a secondary programmer, able to watch films in any order. Each sequence of watching films is a creative act in itself and may well lead to a different set of reading the films. The practice opens up a new mode of spectatorship for online film festivals, different from a linear experience of cinema in a theatre. Watching this collection of interconnected films, the viewer is placed in a position similar to Jefferies in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In that iconic film, now central to our understanding of spectatorship, Jefferies watches through his own window a series of scenes unfolding in the windows of the apartments in front of him. As John Belton observes, the “quasi-theatrical” space in front of him offers “a series of little movie screens.”¹¹ Jefferies sets about the task of making sense of the whole experience, choosing his own entry points into each.

Both Jeffries and spectators in front of their digital screens and windows during lockdown are placed in the dispositif of competing screens in space, invited to construct perceptual and semiotic totalities from it. This is the emerging dispositif of the streaming age, where the spectator faces multiple sources of digital images, placed in the same broader field of perception of a living room, the window, and the view outside. The sensory and perceptual space of a living room is distinct from a relatively structured experience of a museum installation or a linear one of a film theatre, which has enriched the concept of the dispositif, adding to the growing battle of dispositifs.¹²

Rear Window, of course, also offers the central metaphors of window and frame for the ontology of cinema. As the protagonist watches the world through his window, a Bachelardian dialectic of the inside and the outside opens up. Jefferies is able to maintain his relative anonymity as he assumes a voyeuristic position in relation to the scenes unfolding in front of him. Not surprisingly, Rear Window became a pivotal film of the lockdown as viewers instantly identified with Jefferies engaging with the events outside of their windows. Experience of isolation within their own living spaces counterposed to the world outside where movement was limited enlivened and re-centered the dialectic of the inside and the outside.

As Gaston Bachelard sets out to formulate an extensive phenomenology of spaces, he speaks of windows as an object of geometric and metaphysical importance.¹³ The significance of window comes from its function to establish a separation of the inside from the outside, and public from the private. Windows are thresholds; spaces from which we extend our imagination and desires onto the world. Poets, painters, writers, artists and philosophers come to windows for contemplation, hope, and a distance from fear. Windows and cinema are metaphors and vehicles for each other, both media and technologies to examine the inside and the outside. Cinema is a window; it sees through a window; it is a window to other worlds; it comes to us as a window.

It is not surprising that the pandemic supercharged the materiality of window. An object of everyday familiarity, the pandemic turned windows into an important threshold to a world gripped by fear, rules, and caution. Millions rushed to their windows to peer into the world outside during lockdowns. The films in this series are significant in that they put the figure of a window at the centre of ontological questions of cinema during the pandemic. If the inclusion of classic films affirms the lasting relationship between cinema and windows, imagining a future for its spectators placed in a global condition of isolation, with cinema as its shared resource, commissioned films, provide a glimpse of cinema’s response to the realities of lockdown accessible through the windows. The collective focus on the two collections politicises the metaphor of the window and the act of looking by questioning the relationship between interiority and exteriority, our relationship to reality and to the other.

Omnibus Collection of Classic Experimental Films

From My Window

The central inspiration of e-flux and Oberhausen’ series is Józef Robakowski’s Z mojego okna (From My Window, 1978-99), a film he shot over two decades, editing and recording the voiceover in 2000.¹⁴ Filmed from the kitchen window of his 9^th floor apartment overlooking a series of high-rises in Łodż, Robakowski’s camera records the events in the concrete square in the middle of a cluster of buildings. He begins in socialist Poland in 1978, continues through the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, until the arrival of liberal capital that brings upscale construction of a five-star hotel in the same space he observed for nearly 18 years. Emblematic of his “personal cinema”, the film records “existence as a fact of life”, directly projecting “filmmaker’s thoughts…. freed from fashions and aesthetic rules.” ¹⁵

The everyday life of a community unfolds in Robakowski’s film as ordinary events that fill the view from his window: neighbours’ dogs roam around, pensioners take a walk, and churchgoers make their way through the snow. He records May Day parades, which get thinner as years go on. Snow falling, women crossing the street, a man coming home from work all register as filmic events. As time moves on, militia appears, the face of the concrete changes, the street broadens, and the square narrows. His recording stops as the construction of a new hotel makes the view unattractive.

Patricia Grzonka notes that the film “satirizes the voyeuristic style” of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.¹⁶ Robakowski is in a shared public space, his view not as intrusive as Jeffries’ in Hitchcock’s film. Yet he maintains a pleasurable interest in the happenings under his window, slowly assuming that the events unfolding in front of him are indeed staged for him. “I like to watch these so-called roundups that the militia arranged under my window”, he observes. Robakowski seeks a place in the world he observes through persistent focus over the years. Unlike Jeffries, Robakowski attempts to overcome the drabness of “everyday communist life” by playing up the minor “sensations caused by snow and weather.” He wants to record everything but without attaching himself to any object or event.

Reappearing from a lesser-known part of cinema history, Robakowski’s film gained instant currency during the lockdowns in different parts of the world, as a fortuitous combination of confinement in lockdowns and ubiquitous presence of cameras created millions of filmmakers/recorders.¹⁷ For filmmakers in lockdown, Robakowski’s film provided a striking parallel, as the world outside became too dull and recording each minor event became a way to both process and transform their mundanity into a tolerable state of engagement with the world. Filming the events outside their windows, no matter how ordinary, or absurd, allowed anyone with a camera to gain some degree of control and agency over their environment.

The Negative Hands

The most profound rumination on the gesture of looking out through the window of time comes from The Negative Hands, an abstract poetic short that unravel layers of signification on isolation, memory, and the responsibility toward the other. Duras places the 30,000-year-old voice (voiced by herself) emerging from Magdalena Caves of South Atlantic Europe at the centre of her poem, as the camera looks out of the window of a car moving through the streets of Paris in early morning hours. The voice comes from “negative hands”; named for black and blue imprints of hands in ancient caves, “screaming” for love from “whoever will hear.” It continues, “You who are named, who have an identity, I love you,” and it continues, “I love you more than you.”

The car moves along the Grands Boulevards from the Bastille to the Champs-Elysées watching Paris wake up to light. The dark blue light of the early dawn hours invokes a thin relationship to the cave that gives space to the voice reaching with a desire for love and a desire to love. The ancient desire sounds immediate, only the language of love traversing through a long trail of time. Dark figures of workers along the street become visible in thin silhouette; these are workers, migrants to the city, from outside of Europe.¹⁸ The voice from the loneliness of the cave is reaching out to the other, to break out of isolation, for human contact beyond its own time. This voice could be coming from souls isolated in their own worlds, or perhaps it is emerging to reach out to those separated by us. Duras reminds us that atop the cave is a European forest, an allusion aimed at Europe’s responsibility towards the other.

The film is aptly invocative of isolation of the moment. The desire for the other is the desire for our neighbour, but a relationship with the other is always an ethical relationship, invested in those visible from our windows but also beyond this field of vision. The predicament of the present requires that we reach out to the other on the margins, extend our humanity in common bonds to migrants, refugees, and those without means. When she says in the poem, “The refraction of the light on the sea makes the stone wall tremble”, Duras articulates the burden placed on our voice to reach beyond its own space, and the burden placed on cinema, which needs to take its primordial gift of light to others. The voice in the cave accompanies the refracted light; the voice needs to be heard, the light must be pursued, and seen. The voice reached out to us across thousands of years must continue to do the same with the light of cinema.

La chambre

If isolation makes Duras’ voice in the cave reach out to the other, the coordinates of orientation in La chambre are directed inward. Akerman is in a cave of sorts, a contemporary dwelling of a woman, a room in a city apartment offering a meditative study of still-life images of objects occupying her space. The camera and Akerman herself provide a sense of movement in that room where the light seeping through curtains of well-lit windows illuminates household objects. In the middle-class comfort of that room, Akerman exchanges her gaze from the bed with that of the camera’s, projecting a totality of isolation on record. Hers is a state of reflection. From a feminist perspective, this is a private and independent space. The director’s posture, the carefully chosen objects, and the determined circular pan suggest her ownership of the interior. Inversely, this space could be a space of confinement, a traditionally limited space of the feminine codifying her own status as one of the many objects sharing the dwelling. In either case, the inward-looking gaze of the film ignores the outside; windows are mere backdrops, gateways to the beyond that is beyond reach.

Akerman’s film charts the experience of the interior separation from the social either as a continuing condition with a deeper sense of gravity, or as a tragic reminder of the gendered social fabric that has limited their movement for ages. That others are now facing the discomfort all too familiar for women over the ages may present a moment of solace and a possibility of tangential empathy. While the plea for a recognition of and contact with the other invoked in Duras’ film is absent in Akerman’s, one can see her film as embedded in the voice of a woman as the other.

While Akerman’s film is a meditation on the state of being in the dwelling of the other, Dirty Pictures questions our complicity in confronting situations that are beyond the comfort of our living spaces. For Smith, discourses of interiority are too indulgent in the face of the urgency of the political outside our windows. A look out of the window from his cozy hotel room in Bethlehem opens up to the brute reality of walls and segregation. As he moves to the second hotel in East Jerusalem, the director recounts experiences of his travels. As a traveller from the West, he realises his privilege, the fact that he is not subjected to the process of othering imposed upon on Palestinians. The incongruity between the two worlds, the director’s and the Palestinians’ needs to be rendered commensurable if we are to make living a shared experience, Smith’s short suggests.

Themroc

In the context of the pandemic, these shorts highlight the question of justice as urgent and central if there is a future to be imagined. Themroc rejects the entire apparatus that allows one class the power of expression and means to speak for the others. Themroc screams subversive solution to the problems. Raucous, anarchic and orgiastic, Faraldo’s tale of a working-class man in Paris asserts that a new edifice requires a complete destruction of the current one. Michel Piccoli’s leading character Themroc rebels against the oppressive nature of menial work, the suffocating closures of his personal life and space, taking on the very premise that would allow him to be a member of the social sphere. Barricading himself in one room of his apartment by building a wall that separates him from his family, Themroc first smashes a window in his secluded room, then removes the external wall, opening up his existence to the view of the neighbours. From there on, he leads others into quick descent into uninhabited sex and cannibalism.

Themroc’s is a deep cry from within the depths of isolation and frustration. Everyone in the film speaks in grunts, growls and screams. They have given up on language of practical life, a language shared with others. Themroc’s slippage outside the realm of the social is so complete that the grunts and growls constitute an alterity, a realm inaccessible through our shared language. Parisians are facing creatures they do not understand. But the language spoken may not be without signification – it is merely not within our sphere of intelligibility. Themroc’s rebellion is similar to that of the central character’s in the short film, Merde (Leos Carax, 2008), where the central character and his attorney confound everyone with their gibberish-like speech. Seemingly unintelligible, the conviction and confidence projected in that speech afford it a status of independent language.¹⁹ Both Themroc and the odd character in Merde are like Wittgenstein’s lions: we cannot understand them, but their gnawing and stubborn insistence to speak demands that we rethink the alterity, and confront the limits of our own language.

The inclusion of this film into the series undercuts any assumption that “looking out of the window” is a romantic endeavour. Windows are mere boundaries that delimit the world inside. The existential condition of the inner spaces determines how the exterior world is seen. The isolation of lockdowns, unwelcoming for most, could well be a grave continuation of the already constrained present, opening up to a future that seems distant if at all possible. Themroc is a member of the precariat, with philosophical or aesthetic meditations on isolation far removed from his condition. Since there are no bridges to a vision of the future, he seeks a retreat from this society. Embodying the despair of his class, he prefers to claim an alternative space outside of the social, demanding to be understood on his own terms.

The narrative of Themroc involves the dissolution of the self and along with it, a possibility of the dissolution of the social. Language in the film is beyond the precipice of accepted norms of existence. The language of cinema is caught in the ambivalent space of encapsulating the imminent destruction of representation and accepting the possibility that representation beyond the codes of images may be impossible. In this sense, Themroc has deliberately taken the viewer to the realm of the pre-historic from which the primal screams may emerge again.²⁰ The film is closer to the moment in Duras’ cave, where the call emerges beyond its time yearning for representation. Awakened during the moments of isolation in our domestic caves, both films bring us back to the centrality of the cave in conceptualising the essence of cinema, to endow the most primal desires with representation.

Ten Minutes Older

Herz Frank’s Ten Minutes Older returns to the dark cave of a theatre, except here the walls of a cave take up the agency to examine the screens of reflection on the spectators’ faces. The camera watches the face of a single child, as other children also come into the frame, all watching a puppet theatre. The light from the stage illuminates a wide register of emotions on their faces, providing a striking evidence that the gaze of the spectator is reciprocal, that the spectator is the screen, the other locus of representation.

The film’s Heideggerian title emphasises the passage of time bound up with the human act of watching. Spectatorship is an experience of aging. The emotions elicited by humans are escapist masks to deny the inescapable process of passage of time. Here, the children are said to be watching a theatre show, but they might as well be watching a film screen. Written on their faces are the tracks of time, the invisible dimension of spectatorship. When we think of “cinema as a window”, Frank’s film reminds us that the window itself is actually looking at us. As millions turn to their digital screens, which in essence are sources of light, as McLuhan would say, a dystopian global tale unravels, a science-fiction spectacle of digital technologies watching our faces. In the age of digital screens, Frank’s film thus politicises the very act of watching in its surrender to technologies.

Anthology Collection by Contemporary Filmmakers

If the inclusion of classic films in the series announced during global lockdowns provides an invitation to watch these films in the context of contemporary moment, the commissioned films charge their own context with political-cinematic dimension.

The Woman by the Window

In The Woman by the Window, a journalist in Cuba faces the full weight of the law as she takes photographs of food lines visible from her window. The voice-over informs us that nearly sixty years after the Revolution, the country can export its medical talent abroad during a pandemic, but cannot feed its own people while dealing with COVID-19. The computer screen of the journalist in full view, the voice-over continues; “She may have a few windows from which to look at the world, but she has only one from which to say what’s on her mind.” Fusco contrasts the explicit political responsibly of a journalist to be engaged with the injustice outside the window with the tale of the protagonist in Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968). In that film, an aspiring writer watches the changes in his country through his window, embodying alienation and distance. The voice-over mentions that film critics are “endeared” to the character in the cherished art film even though “there is just enough newsreel footage to make him seem real as the city he looks down upon.” She suggests that the act of looking out the window is not merely an aesthetic choice, but an act of political responsibility.

Nicolas Wackerbarth’s short, Four Walls sets out to affirm Charles Baudelaire’s key observation that one sees more in the reflection of the windowpane than through it.²¹ Reality beyond the window remains masked because of the reflection of the window pane. Wackerbarth’s camera looks at the reflections in the window as the narrator recounts a story of a man without walls, or rather, a man without walls that resemble ours. When windows return our gaze, the gaze becomes introspective, awakening us to our complicity in the suffering around us. For Wackerbarth, as for Fusco, the burdens of our vision during a pandemic are political, attending to the injustices rather than the pleasures of gratification.

Away from the political import of Fusco and Wackerbarth’s films, lockdown also allowed for retreats into spaces of safety and indulgence. A thin line divides the reflective stance of Akerman’s examination of a living space of a woman and a hurried escape from it in a minute-long short, March 24, 2020, From My Window, directed by Emily Jacir. Her camera enters a room only to rush to a window-view of empty streets of lockdown, as the filmmaker greets the neighbours hoping to be heard. A quick postcard of the moment, the film neither examines the interior, as Akerman does, nor reveals the charged relationship between the interior and exterior, as in Fusco or Robakowski’s films.

In their A Letter to Marguerite, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s attempt to repeat Duras’ drive along the Champs Elysées from the windshield of their car. In a faintly imitative gesture that escapes the eloquence and the depth of Duras’ film, the filmmakers pack figurative allusions to the cave, to the voice that reaches out into the future, and the call for love in their short. The dispersed attention overwhelms the visual motifs that have the potential to charge the short film with depth; the rear-view mirror that brings the past within view and the darkened neighbourhoods of Paris on a rainy night that bring anxiety if not fear to the isolated spaces in apartments. Theirs is an interiorised world without alterity, incomplete and indulgent.

The Ontology of Windows and Cinema in the Pandemic

The ambivalence between immersive intrusion into the events visible from the windows and a distant reflection on that view marks hundreds if not more shorts made over the past twelve months around the world. The appeal of Robakowski’s film is to begin with a sense of intrusion into the events unfolding below, while slowly distancing himself from the events, making a voyeur into a dispassionate observer. In fact, there is sense of withdrawal from the events which turn out to be more routine as inanimate objects emerge into view while human activity is diminished. In films by Fusco and Smith, the act of looking out of the window is far from voyeuristic, as both filmmakers emphasise the observational-political stance toward what is seen and what is hidden from view. The ambivalence of the gaze through the window posits the dual agency in spectatorship. Viewed through the lens of lockdown and its restrictions, the films in the series offer reflective posture, keeping the window as a conscious frame that circumscribes the ontology of vision.

As we continue to make sense of the world during lockdown, it is worth keeping Hitchcock’s film in our “rear window” view. As Stam and Pearson note, “The title Rear Window, apart from the literalness of its denotation, evokes the diverse ‘windows’ of the cinema: the cinema/lens of camera and projector, the window in the projection booth, the eye as window, and film as a ‘window on the world.”²² These multiple windows of cinema expanded even more during the pandemic. Windows as architectural objects achieved a pronounced presence in our lives only to be transformed to mediate the dialectic with the camera. The images returned to us through windows on our monitors, televisions, and computer screens. The “apparatical” distinctions between them began to disappear.²³ The windows of our living spaces turned inward to attend to the meaning of the spaces of the interior, while they also extended our visions to document the events outside. Always appearing to frame our visions, yet transforming themselves into a series of different screens, windows became the mise-en-abyme of cinema during lockdowns.

Dirty Pictures

Endnotes