‘All other possibilities’
Tara Forrest, Realism as Protest: Kluge, Schlingensief, Haneke
Columbia University Press, 200pp, £31.99, ISBN 9783837629736
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
A maxim routinely asserted by politicians when confronted with a future that does not simply perpetuate the present state of things is that one must be realistic. As the German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge observes: ‘Public opinion is very strongly determined by people who … furnish themselves in reality as if in a tank or knight’s armour.’ This realistic predisposition to the status quo is reinforced by a mainstream media that blocks any capacity to conceive of how reality could be different. Tara Forrest takes the title of her book, Realism as Protest, from Kluge, a phrase which encapsulates his persistent endeavour in furnishing a more ‘antagonistic’ concept of realism; one that exhibits an ‘obstinacy,’ not a passivity, to existing circumstances. Forrest takes Kluge’s working definition of realism in order to explore both its roots in Critical Theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno (Kluge was a student of Adorno’s who also served as a lawyer for the Frankfurt School), as well as its theoretical and practical elaboration in Kluge’s writings, films, and television programmes. In addition to Kluge, Realism as Protest argues for a further extension of this tradition to the two other subjects of the book: the German theatre director, performance artist and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief, and the Austrian film director Michael Haneke.
The opening two chapters are devoted to Kluge, with the first detailing the ways in which he links the potential of film to a theory of politics. Film, for Kluge, has the capacity to motivate feelings for repressed subjunctive realities. Kluge’s quasi-naturalistic category of feeling exerts an instinctive ‘practical critique’ of the hegemonic reality-principle, which conceives of politics as a ‘specialized area’ (an ‘anchorless intellect’) divorced from experience. This split, as Forrest notes, has implications ‘for how people relate to and participate in the political sphere.’ Focusing on Kluge’s films The Patriot (1979) and War and Peace (1982), Forrest analyses how his realistic method attempts to activate and sharpen this instinctive ‘anti-realism of feelings’ by reconnecting the viewer’s everyday experience with the political sphere, which is related to a critique of historical realism (or progressivism) that, as he puts it, murders ‘all other possibilities.’
Klugean realism crosses here with the Brechtian critique of documentary realism: the fact that, for Brecht, a photograph of a factory tells us next to nothing about the complex social relations of which it is part. Kluge’s experimental aesthetic attempts to actualise this complexity through an open montage practice, which mixes documentary and fictional material and typically features an eclectic range of quotation and images from disparate sources. Film, as Forrest notes, is ‘transformed from a medium that captures or fixes reality to a propaedeutic that hones and stimulates the audience’s own capacity to interrogate reality by encouraging them to form connections and draw distinctions.’
The ensuing chapter on Kluge focuses on his move into television, which was formalised in 1988 with the establishment of his television company DCTP. Kluge’s interest in television, as Forrest point out, was signalled previously in his and Oskar Negt’s 1972 book Public Sphere and Experience, where television is criticised for the way that it cultivates a sense of immediate comprehension. Conversely, Kluge’s TV shows seek to destabilise its inherent reality effects through unconventional, and often humorous, interviews and stories, which usually détourne stylistic televisual devices such as scrolling texts, fades/wipes and garish graphics.
Christoph Schlingensief is predominately known in Germany as the host of a series of controversial reality TV shows, which draw on popular TV forms such as the quiz show and singing contest. Internationally – particularly in the art world – he is famous for his notorious performance Please Love Austria (2000). For the latter, Schlingensief installed a series of shipping containers in central Vienna, which housed twelve asylum seekers/contestants and featured a large sign stating ‘foreigners out.’ Big Brother-style, the activity of the contestants could be viewed through peepholes and online, with an eviction occurring at the end of each day. As Forrest argues, what was ‘particularly effective about Schlingensief’s employment of the Big Brother format,’ was his ability ‘to mobilize public debate about anti-immigration policies,’ which was heightened by the performance’s ambiguous status. Schlingensief’s exaggerated mimesis of extreme right-wing rhetoric of the current Austrian government was a way for him to, as he puts it in Paul Poet’s film about the project, ‘produce contradictions.’
Forrest highlights an important lineage for Schlingensief in Joseph Beuys’s non-didactic approach, which he himself describes as a form of ‘self-provocation’ – viewers are provoked to work through the material themselves. For Quiz 3000 (2002), which is modelled on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Schlingensief highlights how the information-driven focus of television quiz shows stunt reflection and debate. Forrest connects the type of knowledge acquisition applauded on quiz shows to Adorno’s (more broad) category of information, which comes packaged as ‘pre-digested’ data and isolated facts ready for easy consumption. The disturbing content of Schlingensief’s questions in the Quiz 3000 attempt to disrupt what Walter Benjamin characterised as the ‘prime requirement’ of information – ‘that it appear understandable in itself.’
For Benjamin, the rise of information culture (specifically the newspaper) is related to the decline of the ‘communicability of experience’ (embodied in the storyteller). In the final chapter of Realism as Protest, Forrest examines Haneke’s 1994 film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, to show how both its content and form reflect the continuation of such issues in late 20th-century Vienna. The content of 71 Fragments is concerned with characters who are alienated from their immediate personal relations, as well as the mediated events that are glimpsed in the news items that appear throughout the film (fragments are inserted by Haneke at various moments, as well as populating the screens in many scenes). The pace and structure of the news – fashioned for a consumer oriented mode of engagement – has an anaesthetic effect for Haneke (what he terms an ‘emotional glaciation’). Yet as the title signals, the form of 71 Fragments – akin to the paper puzzle featured in the film – is presented as a fragmentary structure for the audience to put together (echoing Benjamin’s remark that ‘it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it’). The film’s fragmentary structure is further combined with several long takes, emphasising a slowing down of the speed in which we experience of televisual news. Haneke’s realism, for Forrest, however, is not the pessimism typically ascribed to his works. Following Haneke’s own statements, Forrest draws on Adorno’s concept of negative utopia, where what should be, can only be envisioned ‘by concretizing itself as something false.’
Oddly, there is no conclusion to Realism as Protest. Like the figures she examines, the single chapter on Haneke seems to abruptly cut to black, skipping the credits and leaving it to the reader to connect the dots. A conclusion could have been a place to return to, and problematise, the concept of realism, which remained, for me, too immanent to Kluge’s indeterminately formal definition (especially considering recent arguments, such as Rancière’s, that criticise automatically affirmative ideas about audience participation). Additionally, the history of disputes around the category of realism as both a documentary and fictional form, as well as the conflict between Adorno’s ‘torn halves’ of popular culture and art, remained underdeveloped. There was also a danger in Forrest’s method of relying too heavily on each filmmaker’s commentary about their works and influences: truth ‘is the death of intention,’ as Benjamin says. That said, Realism as Protest provides an excellent contextual and theoretical account of three figures too little known and discussed in the Anglophone world, as well as persuasive and revealing readings of key works that manifest, in distinct ways, an antagonistic idea of realism.
The opening two chapters are devoted to Kluge, with the first detailing the ways in which he links the potential of film to a theory of politics. Film, for Kluge, has the capacity to motivate feelings for repressed subjunctive realities. Kluge’s quasi-naturalistic category of feeling exerts an instinctive ‘practical critique’ of the hegemonic reality-principle, which conceives of politics as a ‘specialized area’ (an ‘anchorless intellect’) divorced from experience. This split, as Forrest notes, has implications ‘for how people relate to and participate in the political sphere.’ Focusing on Kluge’s films The Patriot (1979) and War and Peace (1982), Forrest analyses how his realistic method attempts to activate and sharpen this instinctive ‘anti-realism of feelings’ by reconnecting the viewer’s everyday experience with the political sphere, which is related to a critique of historical realism (or progressivism) that, as he puts it, murders ‘all other possibilities.’
Klugean realism crosses here with the Brechtian critique of documentary realism: the fact that, for Brecht, a photograph of a factory tells us next to nothing about the complex social relations of which it is part. Kluge’s experimental aesthetic attempts to actualise this complexity through an open montage practice, which mixes documentary and fictional material and typically features an eclectic range of quotation and images from disparate sources. Film, as Forrest notes, is ‘transformed from a medium that captures or fixes reality to a propaedeutic that hones and stimulates the audience’s own capacity to interrogate reality by encouraging them to form connections and draw distinctions.’
The ensuing chapter on Kluge focuses on his move into television, which was formalised in 1988 with the establishment of his television company DCTP. Kluge’s interest in television, as Forrest point out, was signalled previously in his and Oskar Negt’s 1972 book Public Sphere and Experience, where television is criticised for the way that it cultivates a sense of immediate comprehension. Conversely, Kluge’s TV shows seek to destabilise its inherent reality effects through unconventional, and often humorous, interviews and stories, which usually détourne stylistic televisual devices such as scrolling texts, fades/wipes and garish graphics.
Christoph Schlingensief is predominately known in Germany as the host of a series of controversial reality TV shows, which draw on popular TV forms such as the quiz show and singing contest. Internationally – particularly in the art world – he is famous for his notorious performance Please Love Austria (2000). For the latter, Schlingensief installed a series of shipping containers in central Vienna, which housed twelve asylum seekers/contestants and featured a large sign stating ‘foreigners out.’ Big Brother-style, the activity of the contestants could be viewed through peepholes and online, with an eviction occurring at the end of each day. As Forrest argues, what was ‘particularly effective about Schlingensief’s employment of the Big Brother format,’ was his ability ‘to mobilize public debate about anti-immigration policies,’ which was heightened by the performance’s ambiguous status. Schlingensief’s exaggerated mimesis of extreme right-wing rhetoric of the current Austrian government was a way for him to, as he puts it in Paul Poet’s film about the project, ‘produce contradictions.’
Forrest highlights an important lineage for Schlingensief in Joseph Beuys’s non-didactic approach, which he himself describes as a form of ‘self-provocation’ – viewers are provoked to work through the material themselves. For Quiz 3000 (2002), which is modelled on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Schlingensief highlights how the information-driven focus of television quiz shows stunt reflection and debate. Forrest connects the type of knowledge acquisition applauded on quiz shows to Adorno’s (more broad) category of information, which comes packaged as ‘pre-digested’ data and isolated facts ready for easy consumption. The disturbing content of Schlingensief’s questions in the Quiz 3000 attempt to disrupt what Walter Benjamin characterised as the ‘prime requirement’ of information – ‘that it appear understandable in itself.’
For Benjamin, the rise of information culture (specifically the newspaper) is related to the decline of the ‘communicability of experience’ (embodied in the storyteller). In the final chapter of Realism as Protest, Forrest examines Haneke’s 1994 film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, to show how both its content and form reflect the continuation of such issues in late 20th-century Vienna. The content of 71 Fragments is concerned with characters who are alienated from their immediate personal relations, as well as the mediated events that are glimpsed in the news items that appear throughout the film (fragments are inserted by Haneke at various moments, as well as populating the screens in many scenes). The pace and structure of the news – fashioned for a consumer oriented mode of engagement – has an anaesthetic effect for Haneke (what he terms an ‘emotional glaciation’). Yet as the title signals, the form of 71 Fragments – akin to the paper puzzle featured in the film – is presented as a fragmentary structure for the audience to put together (echoing Benjamin’s remark that ‘it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it’). The film’s fragmentary structure is further combined with several long takes, emphasising a slowing down of the speed in which we experience of televisual news. Haneke’s realism, for Forrest, however, is not the pessimism typically ascribed to his works. Following Haneke’s own statements, Forrest draws on Adorno’s concept of negative utopia, where what should be, can only be envisioned ‘by concretizing itself as something false.’
Oddly, there is no conclusion to Realism as Protest. Like the figures she examines, the single chapter on Haneke seems to abruptly cut to black, skipping the credits and leaving it to the reader to connect the dots. A conclusion could have been a place to return to, and problematise, the concept of realism, which remained, for me, too immanent to Kluge’s indeterminately formal definition (especially considering recent arguments, such as Rancière’s, that criticise automatically affirmative ideas about audience participation). Additionally, the history of disputes around the category of realism as both a documentary and fictional form, as well as the conflict between Adorno’s ‘torn halves’ of popular culture and art, remained underdeveloped. There was also a danger in Forrest’s method of relying too heavily on each filmmaker’s commentary about their works and influences: truth ‘is the death of intention,’ as Benjamin says. That said, Realism as Protest provides an excellent contextual and theoretical account of three figures too little known and discussed in the Anglophone world, as well as persuasive and revealing readings of key works that manifest, in distinct ways, an antagonistic idea of realism.