Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinsky's "Indirect" - Jonathan Rosenbaum

6/1/14, 12:26 PM Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect | Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect
From the September-October 1995 issue of Film Comment. I should stress that this
essay is very much out of date once one starts to consider Cozarinskys prolific
subsequent career as both a writer and a filmmaker although Ive anachronistically
included a few recent book covers and film posters as illustrations, as well as a poster
and two stills from his most commercially successful film to date, the 2005 Ronda
Nocturna, known in English as Night Watch, in part to help make up for the
impossibility of finding stills for some of the rarer films of his discussed here.
Let me also quote my Reader capsule review of Night Watch: With a few
exceptions, I prefer the literature of Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinean based
mainly in Paris, to his films, and his nonfiction in both realms to his fiction. But this
poetic, atmospheric drama, shot in Buenos Aires, challenged my bias, mixing the
natural and the supernatural, the cinematic and the literary, with such assurance that
Cozarinsky no longer seems like a divided artist. Following a teenage street hustler
through the night of All Saints Day, he turns a documentary about his hometown and
its street life into a haunting piece of magical realism. (The original title, Ronda
Nocturna, translates more accurately as Nocturnal Rounds.) In Spanish with
subtitles. 82 min. I should add that Cozarinsky a friend since he moved to Paris in
the early 1970s spends much more of his time nowadays in Buenos Aires. His most
recent film, which I saw at the Viennale this fall, both fascinating and haunting, is
Notes for an Imaginary Biography [see first photo below], an hour-long montage
composed of outtakes from many of his previous films. J.R.
Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect
Critic and artist, filmmaker and writer, storyteller and essayist, Edgardo Cozarinsky is a
Paris-based Argentinean probably best known in this country for his film La guerre
dun seul homme (One Mans War, 1981) and his books Borges in/and/on Film
(1988) and Urban Voodoo (1990). A cursory account of these works would describe
the first as a documentary, the second as criticism (by Borges as well as Cozarinsky), and
the third as fiction; but a closer look, particularly at the first and third, suggests that
things are rarely quite that simple in Cozarinskys oeuvre. Working with documentary
materials French Occupation newsreels and passages from the diaries of Ernst
Jnger, a German officer posted in Paris over the same period One Mans War
places itself somewhere between essay and fiction, whereas Urban Voodoo, described
by Susan Sontag in her introduction as an album of postcards made of words only,
consists of semiautobiographical narratives interspersed with quotations from other
writers, and might be said to breathe in a similarly ambiguous netherworld.
Born in Buenos Aires on January 13, 1939, Cozarinsky made his first film there, the not-
easily-categorizable (Dot Dot Dot, 1971), before moving to Paris more or less
permanently three years later. Since then, broadly speaking, his fiction features Les
Apprentis sorciers (The Sorcerors Apprentices, 1977, see photo above), Haute
mer (High Seas, 1984), and Guerriers et Captives (Warriors and Captives,
1989) have rubbed shoulders with a dozen documentaries or essays on film or video.
His most recent is Citizen Langlois (1995), about the French Cinmathques Henri
Langlois.
The following article, written for a [then-] comprehensive retrospective of Cozarinskys
work curated by Danile Hibon for Pariss Jeu de Paumes in spring 1993, cant claim to
be exhaustive; it was written after seeing only seven of Cozarinskys films, some of them
many years apart. (I later saw The Sorcerors Apprentices at the retrospective
itself.) At best it should be regarded as an interim report on the work of a filmmaker
whose methods should be read as a series of strategies for dealing with both marginality
and exile in relation to genres and forms as well as languages and countries.
1
Where all possibilities are plausible, perhaps none is true?
Around me, private history and public history cross each other without meeting.
Edgardo Cozarinsky, Boulevards du crpescule
Apart from a brief summary of Ernst Jngers life and career up to 1940 (when he was
posted as an army officer in Paris), the first section heading, 1. Andante con moto, and
the opening credits, the first two verbal texts we encounter in One Mans War the
two bread slices sandwiching the three elements cited above concern the
documentary texts that comprise the films two principal ingredients: weekly
newsreels and personal notebooks, both dating from the early Forties. The brief printed
text about newsreels, written by Cozarinsky, tells us that in a period before television,
when cinema attendance was massive, weekly newsreels were the only opportunity for a
very large public to see moving images of current events. And the opening spoken text by
Ernst Jnger about his personal notebooks and diaries, read offscreen by Niels Arestrup,
tells us that he keeps them locked in a steel safe in his hotel room - a safe provided to
him to house confidential files about disputes between French army and Nazi officials.
Objects such as these safes, he notes dryly, are only symbols of personal status, and if
this status should ever be questioned, such precautions would become meaningless.
In the dialectical play between these two texts about texts a dialectical play involving
public versus private (and hence advertised versus secret), the masses versus the
individual, onscreen versus offscreen, printed versus spoken, supposed objectivity
versus supposed subjectivity, and open spectacle versus fear of discovery the
cinema indirect of Edgardo Cozarinsky has already begun to take shape. Whether
taking the form of popular, everyday spectacle or of private reverie, the two basic texts of
One Mans War are mechanisms for normalizing and justifying the intolerable, and
the means by which Cozarinsky chooses to expose these mechanisms are those of
indirection. I am only interested in `cinema indirect, if it exists, he remarked
parenthetically to Thomas Elsaesser (the emphasis is mine) in an interview about One
Mans War an interview significantly carried out in both Berlin and Paris.
Why cinema indirect and not cinema direct? Because, from one point of view, the
films, stories, and essays of Cozarinsky all tend to drift around the delicate and
paradoxical issue of how to deal with fiction and fantasy without lying, and cinema
direct, a form of film rhetoric and style that for many viewers automatically becomes a
signifier of truth and the real, falls too easily into the practice of lying. (Jean Rouch
undoubtedly had this point in mind when he employed cinema direct, a technique
central to his ethnographic films many of which unabashedly incorporate elements of
fiction - in his only pure fiction film, Le Gare du Nord [see photo below], his
contribution to the 1964 sketch film Paris vu par) And as the Mythologies of
Roland Barthes (among related enterprises) remind us, news and documentary can
all too easily cloak their myths their ideologies and other unstated suppositions -
behind related signifiers of actuality.
From this point of view, the newsreel footage and the diary entries that rub shoulders in
One Mans War are two forms of self-justifying fiction, and the motivation for
juxtaposing them is the desire to bear witness to the real sources and provocations
they have in common. Like the multiplication of two minus signs yielding a plus, this
multiplication of two fictions yields a common concealed space that each fiction strives
to rationalize and domesticate. Cinema indirect becomes the means for bringing this
concealed space to light.
Like the deliberately artificial and unstable spaces created between Paris and Buenos
Aires in much of Cozarinskys work, between fiction and nonfiction, between literature
and cinema, between postcards and quotations, between native tongue and exile
tongue, and ultimately between politics and art, this cinema indirect is quite literally
founded on a theoretical impossible space - a realm of intervals, of in- betweenness,
paradoxically defined by its own conscious marginality and lack of definition. Its only
certainty, one might say, is a complete absence of certainty.
As Richard Porton has noted of One Mans War:
A currently fashionable tenet advocates the view that history can only be evaluated
within a textual framework, but this film moves beyond that by-now moldy truism to
demonstrate the instability and outright mendaciousness of textual evidence. The
newsreel sources are fascinating relics of societal bad faith, and this gargantuan
exercise in self-deception is mirrored in the diary entries of Jnger that provide the
films ectoplasmic voice-over narration. (As Thomas Elsaesser remarks, the film is
interesting precisely because we know less after watching it than we did before.)
One reason why we know less is that even the satisfaction of being told a linear narrative
is disrupted. Although the film begins with Jngers early days in France and ends with
the Liberation of Paris, the achronological arrangement of many of the diary entries that
figures in between confounds any possible sense of progression or development in his
thought. (In some segments, the entries even proceed backwards: in one portion devoted
to 1941, we move from December to October to June to January.) And the nature of
Cozarinskys mosaic structure of both text and newsreel material, not to mention his
juxtaposition of the two - counteracted in turn by his disjunctive uses of Aryan (Hans
Pfitzner, Richard Strauss) and degenerate (Arnold Schnberg, Franz Schreker)
musical accompaniment, and his division of the film into four chapters marked by
musical indications - compels us to regard the film-as-a-whole as an abstract
composition at least as much as a collection of documents. Thanks to these strategies, as
the film advances, our awareness of what it leaves out and refuses to say becomes every
bit as important as what it includes; it is in all the unstable spaces between Cozarinskys
elements (newsreels, diary entries, music, punctuations of black leader) that his darkest
and truest meanings take shape.
2
Over the most pedestrian images of Buenos Airesthe commentary speaks of Calcutta
and a 30s dance band plays a Russian song. The commentary is delivered in the fake
Spanish of Fitzpatrick travelogues distributed in Latin America; behind that, one can
make out a fake English, a made in Hollywood Hindu.
from a sequence-by-sequence description of (my translation from the French)
It surely isnt by chance that Cozarinskys first film, made in Argentina, is named after
an ellipsis. Le regard de loutsider (The Gaze of the Outsider), the title given to his
brief critical study in Cahiers du cinma of the role of ellipsis in Lubitsch an article
that begins suggestively by citing the careful reading of dirty dinner dishes by Lady
Barkers servants in Angel in order to intuit the precise mental states of the diners they
are serving - is an expression reflecting the particular and central roles of ellipsis and
synecdoche found in his own work. Not having seen for roughly two decades, I would
be incautious in attempting any detailed analysis of this independent, underground
feature, but one general observation about its structure seems worth making. Like
Godards 1+1, Makavejevs WR: Mysteries of the Organism [see photo below], and
Mark Rappaports Casual Relations among many other characteristic works of
roughly the same period Its overall method is to juxtapose disparate texts and
discourses rather than attempt to synthesize them. These texts and discourses, one
might add, are ones in which fiction and nonfiction are accorded an equivalent and
perhaps even interchangeable status an attitude that is to recur often in Cozarinskys
subsequent work, in film as well as in prose. (Admittedly, most of the films 17 sequences
are devoted to an episodic narrative involving the same nameless male protagonist; but
if memory serves, the overall effect of the films breakdown into discrete sequences is
still largely one of gaps and discontinuity.)
This method of dealing with cultural and textual overload a specific legacy of the
political, philosophical, sexual, and artistic upheavals of the Sixties, perhaps best
exemplified in the Sixties films of Godard invariably evokes some notion of synthesis
and praxis while simultaneously acknowledging the absence of any single unifying
system that might bring about such a fulfillment. This articulated impasse is reflected in
the very titles of these films, which refer to simple addition, mysteries, casual
relationsand, finally, intervals, the spaces in between. (Significantly, the use of black
leader as a form of cinematic punctuation an important element in One Mans War
was first becoming widespread during this period.)
Eighteen and 21 years later, after two decades of political exile, Cozarinskys two
Argentinean homecoming films, Warriors and Captives (1989) and Sunset
Boulevards (1992) are both concerned with the emigration of French citizens to
Argentina, thus comprising a precise reversal and mirror-image of Cozarinskys own
emigration and exile. This is explicitly acknowledged in Boulevards not only in shots
moving from the Eiffel Tower to a sign indicating Rue Buenos Ayres and, conversely,
from the Argentine mtro stop to the Arc de Triomphe, but also in Cozarinskys own
offscreen narration:
I went looking for traces of Falconetti and Le Vigan. What were they looking for so far
away? Perhaps, very simply, they were chasing the most obstinate of mirages, trying
to start over at zero. The same thing that pushed me to make the opposite voyage. As a
young man, I dreamt of living in Paris. Today in Paris, I think of the city of my
adolescencethe cinemas which have now disappeared, where I learned to recognize
another world full of promises.Today the only films which make me dream are those
I want to make.
On the other hand, as the deconstruction of a Buenos Aires travelogue in , described
above, suggests, Argentina was already somewhere else for Cozarinsky, even before he
became a literal exile a cultural melting pot, as it already was for Borges, of European
and North American as well as more indigenous South American elements. Like much of
Cuba during the Sixties, it can be read as a cultural crossroads whose whose overlapping
influences, like a set of transnational filters, yields a sustained cosmopolitan irony with
certain ties to a camp sensibility.
The first of these homecoming films, a bilingual Western (though perhaps it should
also be called, given its geographical setting, a Southern) and French-Swiss-Argentinean
coproduction, set near the Patagonian border around 1880, is perhaps the Cozarinsky
fiction film that could most plausibly be called classical. Yet it is a classicism that,
properly speaking, still exists between quotation marks - which is not surprising
insofar as its scenario and dialogue are credited in homage to Borges (one of
Cozarinskys two most famous teachers, the other being Barthes.*) The film shares with
Sergio Leones Once Upon a Time in the West both an outsiders look at the
Western genre and a preoccupation with the coming of civilization to the wilderness
that is quite distinct from the garden-wilderness dichotomy found in the Westerns of
Ford. For civilization in this case largely refers to both Europe and the U.S., not only to
Buenos Aires, and the transactions between these forces and influences are
fundamentally what the film is about. Thus Marguerite (Dominique Sanda), the new
French wife of Colonel Garay, wants to escape her European past, while her husband
wants to turn Argentina into the most modern country in the world modern in this
case meaning as powerful as the U.S. and as civilized as Europe. And Madame Yvonne
(Leslie Caron), who establishes the first capitalistic brothel on the front, gives her half-
breed prostitutes French names in order to attract customers with her own brand of
civilization.
But these transactions are mainly dealt with thematically rather than formally, apart
from the bilingual dialogue and the generic references. As in Cozarinskys two other
fiction features, The Sorcerers Apprentices and High Seas, the task of telling a
story with actors and mise en scne, which entails the viewers suspensuion of disbelief
on some level, necessarily obliges one to suspend part of the radical questioning of
documentary authenticity that lies at the heart of his more essayistic features. (It might
be added that Cozarinsky is on the whole more comfortable in dealing with texts than
with actors, as some of the awkward performances in both films suggest. One reason,
perhaps, why Warriors and Captives suffers less in this respect is that Sanda and
Caron are both partially used as texts that is, bearing the freight of their previous
screen appearances.) Clearly Cozarinsky is himself aware of this problem, as his recourse
to certain documentary materials and methods in both of these European features
suggests.
In High Seas, indeed, it appears to be actuality itself that produces the need for fantasy.
Im thinking not only of the newsreel images of paratroopers that appear at the
beginning of the film and recur later, but even more of the literal assault of the news on
the protagonist, a Swiss insurance salesman named Eric Lint (Andrzej Seweryn)
vacationing with his wife in Rotterdam: the radio bulletins and the newspaper headlines
about the CIA, the KGB, France to Arm Chad Against Libya Threat, and so on, all of
which distract him from his wifes chatter and seem to create a whirlpool of torment that
a mysterious redheaded woman (Willeke van Ammelrooy), a captain on a three-masted
schooner, turns up to rescue him from a figure out of Isak Dinesen (perhaps by way of
Tay Garnett and Albert Lewin) who promptly whisks him away into adventure. Like the
blue-sheeted bed on the schooner where he makes love with La Capitaine, which
promptly turns white as soon as he gets up, the surfaces of this film are in a way as
mutable as thought itself and just as apt to evaporate on a moments notice. A
comparable relationship can be felt between the paranoid terrorist plot of The
Sorcerers Apprentices, the interpolated scenes from Dantons Death (played by
Niels Arestrup, jean-Pierre Kalfon, and Pierre Clementi), and the more documentarylike
rendering of Paris in fall 1976 underlying the main narrative - as if three separate
blocks of material were all competing for supremacy, each in turn overtaking the other
two.
At the heart of the matter, it would seem, is a deep-seated conviction that actuality and
fantasy are both matters of selecting and editing endless reams of material the
practice, in short, of a writer and a filmmaker. In this respect, it is worth citing the last
two sentences in a brief autobiographical text written by Cozarinsky for inclusion in a
Ph.D. thesis on One Mans War by Henry McKean Taylor a statement that
acknowledges the degree to which Cozarinskys sense of his own identity is a matter of
editing choices:
I always felt somewhat of a displaced person and once since I chose to live in Paris,
city of displaced people, I have been able to feel as Argentine as I do, because I no
longer have to put up with all the negative aspects of that country and am able to keep
only those that Im fond of. A notion, of course, highly comfortable, even a luxury, but
Ive paid for it by having put up with both incarnations of Peronism its original
populist, mildly-fascist one, and the second, senile, would-be Maoist farewell
performance.
3
The second homecoming film, Boulevards du crpescule, is a personal essay,
though one whose gaps and occasional ambiguities suggest at times some of the
procedures of fiction. The films subtitle
on Falconetti, Le Vigan and a few others
in Argentina
accurately describes its subject. Yet the ellipsis of three periods, appearing on the
screen in a separate line between a few others and in Argentina, almost subliminally
introduces a sense of indeterminacy at the same time that it evokes, appropriately, the
title of Cozarinskys first film, where the rudiments of this indeterminacy are already
established.
The key historical event of Boulevards, the mirror-image (or reverse-angle) of the
event concluding One Mans War, is the celebration of the liberation of Paris on
August 24, 1944, in Buenos Aires Plaza Francia. The event is first evoked in the film by
Adolfo Bioy Casares, then by Gloria Acorta, then by Cozarinsky himself, who notes other
events occurring on the same day, including a performance by Falconetti in The
Childrens Carnival at the Casa del Teatro. But it isnt until roughly halfway through the
film, after the same celebration is recalled by Andre Tainsy, another actress who knew
Falconetti in Buenos Aires, that Cozarinsky incidentally reveals that he too was present
at the same event: Hanging onto the hands of my parents, I did not understand peoples
joy, nor their relief. I heard singing in a tongue that I did not yet understand. Just
before he speaks these words offscreen, over the offscreen voices of Tainsy and Acorta
recalling the same event, we see Cozarinsky looking at an array of photographs spread
out on a table. When he arrives at his own memomy to complement theirs, the camera
moves forward to a boy in the crowd seen in one of the photographs a specific image
to go with his recollection. But is this boy in the photograph in fact Cozarinsky? We have
no way of knowing, yet the fact that Cozarisnky immediately goes on to say,
Nevertheless, the child I was would grow up in a country seduced by some quite cheap
illusions, alerts us to the possibility that we have just been seduced by a cheap illusion
ourselves.
A little later on, after the films focus has shifted from Falconetti to Robert Le Vigan
another French actor who spent his last years in Argentina,in his case escaping from the
scorn and other repercussions of having been a Nazi collaborator Cozarisnky plays an
even more elaborate trick with his documentary materials. In the course of interviewing
the writer Nestor Tirri, a casual neighbor of Le Vigan in Tandil who is recalling his
fleeting impression of the man, the film suddenly cuts to footage of Le Vigan walking
through the woods in the same town, seen from behind. Then we see Cozarinsky himself
in front of the house in Tandil where Le Vigan lived for over fifteen years, interviewing
two of his former neighbors about their own recollections. In the midst of their replies,
he cuts to footage of Le Vigan at the same location, saying goodbye to his wife before
taking a short stroll, and the voices of Cozarisnky and the neighbors are allowed to run
over part of this footage. Still later, the film includes an actual interview with Le Vigan in
Tandil and then shows Cozarinsky visiting the gravesite of both Le Vigan and his wife.
From one point of view, this coexistence of past and present tenses in the same
locations is a standard documentary device. But to confess to a certain navit on my
own part, my initial assumption in viewing this film was that Cozarisnky had employed
an actor to play Le Vigan; it was only after I asked him about this that I discovered he
had drawn on an earlier television interview with Le Vigan that had never been shown.
Part of the significance of my error is simply the propensity of viewers to produce their
own images to correspond to events that are being recounted in films, regardless of
whether the films in question are documentary or fiction. Yet the passivity of the usual
film-viewing experience is such that if the film itself furnishes an image to replace the
imagined one, the viewer is likely to accept that replacement without protest, either
symbolically or literally. This is well illustrated by Cozarisnkys interview with two
former French students of Le Vigan, both of them women, which is held in a former
Tandil movie theater that is now a discothque. Cozarisnky informs us at the beginning
of the interview that another former student of Le Vigan, the writer Jorge DiPaola,
would be joining us, and the point at which he appears in the balcony, when one of the
women below is describing to Cozarinsky Le Vigans plans to build a chicken coop, there
is a brief moment or two when DiPaola becomes the figurative stand-in, or double, for
Le Vigan himself.
Considering the degree to which Falconetti and Le Vigan are both presented to us as
lost figures, historically speaking formerly famous actors whose last years can only
be dealt with in fragmentary glimpses and impressions, mainly through the accounts of
people who knew them only slightly it is we, in any case, who have to furnish most of
the images, and the most that a documentary filmmaker can do in this process is to
guide us in this activity. Yet as my initial example demonstrates, Cozarinsky as a young
child in Plaza Francia on August 24, 1944 is every bit as inaccessible today, even to
Cozarinsky himself. Acknowledging such a mystery is, properly speaking, the point at
which his enterprise begins the moment of calculated reticence when cinema
indirect takes shape.
_______________________________________________________
Footnote
*Significantly, Cozarinskys own study of gossip (Le rcit indfendable, published in
Communications No. 30, 1979) was developed under the tutelage of Barthes.
Film Comment, September-October 1995

Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinsky's "Indirect" - Jonathan Rosenbaum

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6/1/14, 12:26 PM Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film Comment, September-October 1995

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