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What is the pertinence of past events for the present moment and how can one open up history’s trajectory into the future?We were sitting in Orșova, a small town in Romania opposite Serbia, where the Cerna River meets the Danube. Just below, the Iron Gates and, long submerged, the tiny island of Ada Kaleh. Up to 1923, this island was a Turkish exclave, forgotten, as it were, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Because of the joint megaproject between Romania and (then) Yugoslavia, the huge Iron Gate Dam, the island became flooded in the early 1970s, and its inhabitants were evacuated. Settlements like Ada Kaleh can disappear under water, but rivers like the Drina and the Sava can also be dried to reveal the cruelties of war in the corpses dumped therein in the 1990s. These observations prompted me to consider the genealogy of images always already embedded within economies of the visible and the obscure(d). 

Days In Between

These complex economies of the in/visible, of uncanny encounters with the ghosts of the past, piqued my interest in Marianna Christofides’ 40-minute-long essay film Days In Between (2015). Shot on 16-mm, the film draws on Christofides’ repeated journeys to the Balkan region from 2011 to 2015. It makes use of slow camera, extended shots, operations of approximation, correspondence, metonymy, the uncanny, colour, tone, and rhythm; and what is not directly said or represented becomes palpable to the senses through such operations in rather oblique ways. By capitalizing both on the essay form’s “disjunctive ethos”1 and its “elasticity,”2 Days In Between opens narrative structure to modes of criticality, questioning, dialogue, and address. As an example of Gilles Deleuze’s time-image, this essay film is also characterised by a palimpsestic use of different temporalities. Furthermore, the film allows for the co-creative work of more-than-human actancies, occasioned by the documental interplay between vocal, sonic, and visual severalities at the juncture of images, but also in the image itself. 

The following thought-piece, itself bordering on the essayistic, draws attention to the multiply inscribed, at times contrapuntal affective and aesthetic movements that mark Days In Between and reflect the filmmaker’s own sceptical and ambivalent stance. Noticeable throughout this piece is a desire for direct address, resonance, and dialogue. Through a multiplicity of voices and entangled speech acts, we seek to familiarise readers with the threshold aesthetics of Christofides’ film essayistic work, which allow us to encounter the spaces of former Yugoslavia in socially critical and transformative ways. Days In Between expands, to speak with Claire Colebrook, “our capacities for ethically inhabiting time, for thinking, feeling, and affectively being with others, for generating productive syntheses in the differential fabric of the world, for becoming.”3

Days In Between

***

You were born in 1980 to a Greek-Cypriot father and a German mother and spent your childhood years in the divided city of Nicosia (Cyprus). In your work you have repeatedly drawn on the unresolved conflicts and long-standing stagnations of the divided island and, intricately related to it, also developed an interest in the exploration of things at the minute of erasure. This difficult-to-grasp moment of transition where the old does not seem to work any longer, and the new has not yet fully evolved, remains a recurring motif in your creative work; it has also radically defined your practice as film essayist over the last fifteen years. When your journeys took you through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, or Montenegro, and further through Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, you travelled mostly on country lanes or dirt roads, talking to people you met by chance, crossing one to two borders within a small radius a day. Days In Between reflects these fleeting encounters in haphazard ways. At times, your approach to the world appears to be fragmentary, at other times aimless, even wasteful.

We indeed started filming without any clear scope at the time. It happened a couple of times that my partner Bernd Bräunlich and I would drive several hundred kilometres in a day, only to reach the same place again that we had been before, to recapture a scene under different weather conditions or get the framing of a specific flock of sheep ‘right’. Random findings and unexpected incidents along the way, intuitive decisions made in situ later become manifest in the narrative. The historical specificities of places and events can be conveyed, I believe, not in degrees of the images’ ‘truthfulness’, nor in a chronologically faithful narration, but instead in a refracted approach towards the framing of missing parts. Disclosing the grades of ‘darkness’ that the filmmaker passes through can become a tool to apprehend the densities and thicknesses of history. It might be through the act of sharing with the spectator one’s incomprehensibility that meaning is allowed to emerge. 

Days In Between

Essay films are a performative and self-reflective mode of documentary film practice. They are notorious for their eclectic and random approach to the world and the heterogeneous material they usually cover. Film essayists, however, claim through their peculiar work with the documentary material a relation to the real that is marked by an ethos of ‘authenticity’ and responsibility. Emphasis on the affective – on that which is expressed and can be sensed rather than told and represented – reflects here a concern with the hitherto un-actualized potential this cinematic mode might have as a tool for broader social critique. This recalibration becomes particularly pertinent when we look at essay films as an aesthetico-political practice: one that should be valued more for what it can do, rather than explicitly show. 

Following the crash of your hard drive in 2012, which led to the irretrievable loss of all film material, then still shot on video, you revisited the Balkan peninsula again in 2013 and 2015. At some point you begin to shoot on 16-mm film stock, a medium that, unlike video, does not provide instant access to the footage and instead defers reconnection with the image until after the film has been processed. Concerns with time, process and deferral recur throughout your work. Long-term observations as a mode of working seem to reflect these concerns. Your camera can be seen repeatedly panning slowly across sites still full of the remnants of small now-defunct industries and derelict factories. From such movement, deprecated aeroplanes, rusty tanks and other less clearly identifiable remains of the industrial-military complex resurface as non-human ‘witnesses’ of the Yugoslavian wars. In scenes of prolonged duration, plastic waste or piles of rubber tires and wood can be seen to clutter the roadsides of contemporary southeast Europe. Do these decelerated observations provide, as you once said, the tools for approaching the complicated and fragmented histories of a place? 

Days In Between

Waiting with the material, worldly experience of the present engenders a gesture of being in the world. I like to use the term ‘open-ended’ to describe the various journeys through southeast Europe we undertook. ‘Open-ended’ engenders a question that cannot be answered with ‘yes’, ‘no’, or even ‘don’t know’. It is this formability and malleability of a processual notion that intrigues me. To resist taxonomies and rational systematization is also to be willing to expose oneself, even to failure. I sometimes read Days In Between as a recurring attempt of approaching and understanding, the constant failure and beginning anew as becoming an integral part of the narrative. Deceleration also enables background noise to gradually come ‘into view’. 

In March 2015, I was filming this pile of tires in the backyard of a service station in the town of Bihać (Bosnia and Herzegovina). For someone growing up in Cyprus truck tires are always subconsciously related to a borderline, a buffer zone. The sky was overcast, and some rubbish was burning on the bordering plot. As the wind was blowing from the north, the smoke was carried through the frame. Shortly afterwards, the sky cleared up and the Garavice memorial – then unknown to me – was rendered visible.4 The erratic rays of sunshine made the background look two-dimensional, transforming it into a backdrop as it were. It was only several weeks later that I had the processed film in my hands and its images on screen. The tires, the smoke, the dotted light like paint dabbed onto the hill, the stone blocks: all these elements came unintentionally together, creating a scene that viewers later called evocative. True, maybe – but evocative of what?

Days In Between

Essay films, whether philosophically inclined or politically inflected, often engender (and thus engage us in) thinking and arguing “through poetic affect and aesthetic form.”5 As early as 1910, Georg Lukács observes that the essay “faces life with the same gesture as the work of art” and ascribes to it “the nature and form” of an “intellectual poem.”6 In its cinematic variant, poetic affect and aesthetic form are mobilized for varied sensibilities to enter the film in a durational and “discordant play.”7 Such play also characterizes Days In Between as a practice that thinks disjunctively and anachronistically, and hence “interstitially.”8 The cut becomes “irrational” or, to put it with Louis Schwartz, “the passage from one image to another becomes ambiguous and the images proceed serially rather than sequentially.”9 In Days In Between, the durational character of these repetitive encounters with a changing region keep the gap open, allowing binary notions of self and other, history and memory, or concepts of space and time to become destabilized.

From 1992 to 1995, Bihać once again became the site of severe war crimes and atrocities.10 In Days In Between the narrator ruminates on this: “I have the feeling that I am stepping into Zeno’s ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ paradox – moving, yet motionless, always a step behind in my attempt to comprehend. Are plurality and change an illusion? I begin to ponder asynchronicity and different speeds, that of the travelling observer and that of the protagonists between the takes, who in turn have their own tempi. I am reminded of Amel, who lives in a brick hut in Bosnia with his small family. ‘There is no work here’, he says, ‘if the system doesn’t take you in, take another path.’ He tried it in Qatar, his body couldn’t cope with the heat. To begin all over again, continually – is that the characteristic feature of the whole region?” Forms of displacement that have inscribed themselves in physical space demonstrate one thing, after all: the growing incompatibilities in contemporary life. 

Days In Between

Days In Between also includes a sequence of shots of geological formations near Varna (Bulgaria), which seem strangely unhinged, out of place. Slowness is not narrated but cinematographically per-formed as pensive gazing, foregrounding a concern with time and process as well as the ways these long-term inscriptions make sedimentary traces of history manifest in micro-stories in the present. The slow form of onlooking made it possible for us to think about time as it is inscribed in human and other-than-human events. Encounters could hibernate and take their own time to resurface, or not.

Days In Between

Your encounters with a region in transition are also encounters with a region that has been colonized and mythologized many times over the last 500 years. At the time, I was interested in demarcation lines and liminalities: in rivers as invisible and politically instrumental borders, especially between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, that divide the peninsula even today. Rivers as transitional zones – where the course of a boundary remains indefinite – formed indeed the starting point for Days In Between. But over time you became more aware of the (im)possibility of portraying something so complex like ‘the Balkans’.

***

My research into transnational practices of contemporary essay films produced in a global context brought to light the fact that these films are often energised or haunted by a quest/ion or urgent matter of concern.11 Irrespective of who poses it and whereabouts in the world, this quest/ion usually originates from a concrete place or region but soon acquires a more abstract and universal quality within the essayistic argument. Comparable perhaps to what Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (1968) calls the “something in the world that forces us to think,”12 this quest/ion bears witness to “an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.13 In the essay film such an encounter-event is a source of potentiality, but it is non-summarisable. It provides the conditions for the narrative to unravel but ultimately remains an open-ended sign; it can primarily be sensed or encountered in the contingent process of unfolding, differentiating, and actualizing: the essayistic argumenting or questioning itself. Narrative disjuncture in the essay film is, therefore, not practiced for the quest/ion to be resolved, but to problematise and complicate it further. The essayist’s ultimate objective is not to search for an explanation but to deepen the encounter or, to put it differently, to allow the something/the conflict to become a resource for further speculating and fabulating. This encounter-event – virtually grounded in the cinematic image but not given or exhausted – requires viewers to engage in an active and drawn-out process of co-poïesis, that is, of co-creatively reconciling, through their senses, the proposed image of thought with matter and time.  

Days In Between

***

It is 1 August 2019, and I am flying from Berlin to Cyprus. I read an article about the cumbersome situation along the ‘Balkan route’. Bihać is once more the centre of attention, the place where all routes end. Five thousand refugees are now stranded in the town, the same number as there were casualties during the Bihać siege in the ‘90s. One of the biggest camps has recently been relocated outside the city to a former garbage dump, one kilometre away from a minefield laid during the Yugoslav wars – not far from where we met Amel the first time. The river Korana separating Croatia from Bosnia and Herzegovina performs anew as a hazardous frontier that must be crossed in what the refugees call ‘the game’ – the river’s durability as a border put, once again, to the test. Tragically, losing the game means momentarily becoming a subject of history.14 

The still shot in Bihać in 2015 could be imagined as photographic wallpaper in front of which every one of us could take their picture, a memento of ‘our share’ in inequity, of yielding to a shared sense of vulnerability. Before boarding that same plane mentioned above, I was halted at the baggage control of Berlin-Tegel airport. The X-ray device had mistakenly detected a piece of gammon in my cabin bag. While searching my stuff the eyes of the elderly inspector fell upon the title of the book I was carrying: Balkan as Metaphor. He looked up at me and reluctantly asked in broken German: “Are you from Serbia?”

***

Michael Rothberg coined the term ‘multi-directional memory’. In his eponymous publication he draws on both Holocaust Studies and Postcolonial Studies to argue, among other things, “that memory of the Holocaust has served as a vehicle through which other histories of suffering have been articulated.”15 Such articulations become palpably sensible in Days In Between through dispersed yet corresponding invocations of oppression, silencing and systematic violence against political opposition. They point us to historical material, such as the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s, but also transconnect us to fictionalized acts of travel writing from the 18th and 19th centuries: to voices who, unable to define the region with certainty, preferred the vague phrase of ‘lands in between’. Predominantly from the west, their readings defined the region as a liminal space, neither here nor there, neither west nor east. Your decision to draw on this poetic phrase suggests that the documentary material no longer aims at representing southeast Europe as a cartographic field with mappable points of reference but as an emergent entity of constantly shifting percepts and affects. 

Over the course of this film, I became increasingly interested in the way conflicts have been ‘naturalized’ by transferring them to a geological timeline, thus reducing complex configurations to their seeming essentials and fortifying social and political conventions by presenting them as part of the natural order. Vesna Goldsworthy has pointed out how political aspirations, alias ‘geographical terms’, take on their own metaphorical meaning and use in political jargon: fracture zone, fault line, epicentre of major tremors. Such a vocabulary of colliding tectonic blocks is applied to the people as if it were part of their nature. Hatreds become ‘ancient’ and thus timeless.16 Likewise, Lorraine Daston has aptly observed that “in both gender and science studies, naturalization is ideology at full strength, hardening the flimsy conventions of culture into the immutable, inevitable, and indifferent dictates of nature.”17

Days In Between

Days In Between, on the contrary, seeks to ‘de-naturalize’ fortified conventions by means of disjunctive montage and other formal-aesthetic operations that evoke process, fluidity, transience, and the ephemeral, rather than permanence, immutability, and fixed identities. In a meta-narrative gesture, Days In Between makes us aware of the fallibility of normative classifications. The film forms a rich articulation of encounters with ever-shifting forces and intensities, which can only retroactively be coded in terms of ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘identity’, ‘nation’, ‘history’ or ‘memory’. Moments of pause, hesitation, and self-awareness, made explicit, disrupt, and substantially slow down the narrating, the active flow of words. They allow us to experience, if ever so fleetingly, cinematic thought caught in the act of thinking itself. Through the interstitial movements of camera, sound and voice-over, southeast Europe resurfaces in Days In Between as a space of multiplicity, of folding and unfolding.

Endnotes

  1. Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 144.
  2. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1958) in Essays on the Essay Film, Nora M. Alter, Timothy Corrigan, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 80.
  3. Claire Colebrook, “The Sense of Space: On the Specificity of Space in Deleuze and Guattari,” Postmodern Culture, Volume 15, Issue 1 (2004), accessed 20 August 2022.
  4. In Garavice, 12,000 ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma were killed by the Ustaše regime in the summer of 1941. Forty years later, a memorial park, commemorating the victims of the massacre, was erected at the extermination site. It was designed by architect Bogdan Bogdanović who was forced into self-imposed exile in 1993.
  5. Rascaroli, p. 145.
  6. Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” in Essays on the Essay Film, Nora M. Alter, Timothy Corrigan, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 40.
  7. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 176. Post-WWII cinema is characterized by a different cinematic regime, according to Deleuze. Films of this regime usually lack a coherent rational narrative that would steer the temporality of the film towards an end or a closure. For him, modern cinema, in response to the upheavals of the Second World War, follows logics of fragmentation, displacement, dispersion, loss and disappearance.
  8. Rascaroli, p. 11.
  9. Louis Schwartz, “Deleuze, Rodowick, and the Philosophy of Film,” Film-Philosophy, Volume 4, Issue 1, n.p., accessed 20 August 2022.
  10. The town turned into an enclave that was under a three-year siege; surrounded on the west by the secessionist Serb Republic of Serbian Krajina and on the east by the proclaimed Republika Srpska, both cooperating to capture the Bosniak population living in, or having been displaced to, the region since the outbreak of the war.
  11. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić, eds., World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
  12. Deleuze, p. 176.
  13. Ibid.
  14. The voiceover in the film recounts: “He wrote me, ‘There are rivers here like the Drina that don’t tell you what their accorded role is, that for the past two thousand years, they’ve so often had to perform as the frontier between two ostensibly so different worlds. For centuries constructs of that kind fall into oblivion, only to be reactivated for a short interim.’”
  15. Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory,” Témoigner entre histoire et mémoire, Issue 119 (December 2014): p. 176, accessed 20 August 2022.
  16. Vesna Goldsworthy, “Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization” in Balkan as Metaphor: Globalization and Fragmentation, Dušan I. Bjelić, Obrad Savić, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
  17. Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context, Volume 5, Issue 2 (Autumn 1992): pp. 209–35.

About The Author

Brenda Hollweg is Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on contemporary documentary and the cinematic essay. In 2021, she co-published, together with Marianna Christofides, Days In Between (Hatje Cantz), a comprehensive art book on the artist’s long-term essayistic project across different media. In 2019, she co-edited World Cinema and the Essay Film (EUP, with Igor Krstić). She is currently exploring the manifold ways contemporary women artists and filmmakers engage with the malleable mode of the essayistic to resist systemic forms of violence in affective, aesthetic and thus also political ways. Marianna Christofides is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living and working in Berlin. What drives her practice is the urgency to remain attentive to disregarded undercurrents of sociopolitical, environmental and biographical thrusts. In 2011, she represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions, screenings and lecture performances: (2022) Celluloid Now, Chicago Film Society; 25FPS Film Festival, Zagreb; Akademie der Künste Berlin; mumok Kino, Vienna (2021) Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian (2020) Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp Memorial; VIS Journal, History Now (2019) National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.

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