objects in motion: "zidane, a 21st century portrait"; or, sharkskin gets her academic on before actually talking about how very very cool this film is

Film offers an interesting challenge to the ontology of performance, not only as it becomes ever more prevalent in stage productions (the Wooster Group's Hamlet, for instance), and, as well, in installation and performance art, but also as it takes on some of the qualities of live performance. Walter Benjamin writes in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera ... [T]he film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person"--a scenerio which puts the audience automatically in the position of "critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor" (and damns the critic forever, it would seem, to a particularly depersonalized and objective role)--but he also posits the screen actor as experiencing, when confronted with her or his image before the camera, "the same kind [of strangeness] as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mirror."

The suggestion of the Lacanian relationship the film actor maintains to the image resonates in Peggy Phelan's 1993 "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction"--which famously (okay, famous may be relative here) begins with, "Performance's only life is in the present"--and resonates in that moment, within live performance, wherein one might lose oneself, or the sense of self, to the experience of the object at hand. For me, this is a fundamental aspect of the intersubjectivity so reified in post-World War II performance art and the point at which the dichotomy of subject/object collapses. It's a moment, and, forgive the slight one-with-the-earth-ness here, a precious one, by which the sense of another's body precludes the sense of one's own.

This may occur in a moment of spectacle, but I think it is more often present in the banal. And that it is within the presentation of the banal, the quiet moments of everyday-ness, that the space between film and performance might be traversed. Artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's "Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait" accomplishes this with grace and beauty--and a remarkable amount of perspiration; traversing not only divides between portraiture, film, and (live) performance, but also between sport and art.

French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane, infamous (not quite so relative here) for his red-card head-butting of Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup, is the subject of Gordon and Perreno's 90-minute piece, which, as Manohla Dargis describes in the New York Times review, "use[s] a large crew and 17 synchronized film and video cameras to track him during an April 2005 match at a Madrid stadium between two Spanish teams, Villareal and Real Madrid"--yet it is less a documentary of its would-be star than a choreography between the mechanisms of film and body. Dargis writes:

On one level, “Zidane” is a celebration of the body in motion and an acknowledgment of our pleasure in watching bodies in motion, a pleasure the movies have been cultivating since Muybridge’s 19th-century locomotion studies. (The history of cinema is, in a sense, also a history of the modern body.) The movie’s close-ups demonstrate that Zidane’s body is more spectacular than most, though, notably, he spends much of his time waiting and walking. The game unfolds in fits and starts, with none of mainstream narrative’s orchestrated rhythms. For soccer fans, the game is probably inherently suspenseful; for the rest of us, suspense arises from our hope (expectation, anticipation) that this body will cease waiting (like us) and starting moving (like a star).

The tension is complicated by the fact that the point of view remains so fixed on Zidane’s body — his restless feet, sculptured calves and shaved head — you often don’t see what is happening elsewhere. This effectively makes him not just the subject of our attention but also a kind of mirror: we largely perceive the game through his expressions (his unmoving face, beaky nose and hooded eyes give him the aspect of a hawk) and his far more animated movements. It’s worth noting that the male filmmakers avoid the athlete’s groin and rear, which suggests that while Zidane is an object of desire (including as an athlete and celebrity), this desire has been carefully circumscribed. Zidane might not have cooperated otherwise.

Zidane is, indeed, an object of desire, though less the type of desire generally afforded by the camera's gaze than a desire of focus. By constantly shifting between parts of Zidane's body in close-up, a blurred vision of the field, and, during the break, or halftime, a brief montage of other subjective and therefore random moments occuring simultaneous to the match, Gordon and Parreno make explicit the player's focus during the game; in doing so, the constant movement of the camera, contrasted with Zidane's relative stillness, narrows our focus as much on Zidane's own concentration as on the physicality of the image.

"Zidane"--a conflation of both man and film--accomplishes the dual, and often contradictory, tasks of painting and movie; as Benjamin describes: "The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has the eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested." It also accomplishes the tasks of both live and mediated performance. That is, film has always allowed for a sense of the close-up that generally bespeaks a certain intimacy with the object, but this intimacy--akin to that experienced between lovers and often used to underscore such a relationship onscreen--is twice mediated: the spectator experiences the closeness of the gaze via the camera, which, in this moment, is functioning as a stand-in for the gaze of the offscreen character. Performance art, however, often allows for a similar intimacy unmediated (or, as a caveat to Tweed, at least less mediated)--allows for the spectator to directly engage, sometimes not only visually but also tactily.

Throughout this postmodern portrait one feels the potential of being that close to Zidane; experiencing not just the moving image, but also the simultaneously total and fragmented corporeality of his body. There is, for sure, a strangeness here, but it does not arise from the estrangement Benjamin imagines the actor having before his mirrored image. Rather it arises from the strange sense of stepping through the mirror toward the object itself.

Comments

[sharkskin girl]

Thank you for your thoughts, Tweedster, though you know I will, to some extent, disagree.

First, re: "the piece seems to violate Phelan's basic tenets--'Zidane' is a reproduced commodity that relies upon a whole cultural fixation that exploits ideas of community, competition, Greatness, and violence. It therefore exists in a number of spatio-temporal planes that goes way beyond the life of the film, the 90 minutes of the game, and the build up to 2006's World Cup (not to mention the drama of Zidane's imminent retirement from the game)."

My point here is that it actually doesn't violate Phelan's basic tenets -- which was a surprise to me. You know how true blue my affection for Ms. Peggy is. What shocked, and thrilled, me is that it manages to tread the very fine line between reproduced and reproducible object and liveness itself. Yes, it is Zidane, and was his head doing the butting, but via the cinematography employed throughout the film, it becomes less about him than about the physical capacity of his body; it simultaneously encapsulates the particular and universal, which is no small feat. Also, like the head-butt that lost France the World Cup, and like performance, it "clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital." This is not a sports documentary, nor is it documentary in any real sense. We do not follow the game, we follow Zidane following the game, and hence it functions outside the usual state of spectatorial anticipation, as Dargis notes. Further, and finally, there's one line in Phelan that speaks most loudly about this film: "[I]n the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else--dance, movement, sound, character, 'art.'" It is in this sense that "Zidane" exceeds its own limits (in the age of mechanical reproduction) to become something more akin to live performance: Zidane's body in all its plenitude disappears as Zidane to become something else from Zidane, and this is what is so very captivating.

Second, re alienation: Again, this is what "Zidane" the film -- and it's important to remember that it was originally a two-screen installation -- does that's so innovative in the history of film and video art. It does not alienate but rather brings the viewer closer in. And, in fact, in its lack of attention paid to the match and its choreographic cinematography, begins to play into the same sort of game of missing that one necessarily experiences in the act of watching a live performance. Perhaps one could even discuss an "affect of that which is missed."

And as regards Benjamin's thesis re the Fascist potential of film (and apologies for the reduction here), it's also important to note the political significance of Zidane's own ethnicity as the son of two Algerian immigrants, and the political uproar that followed the 1998 World Cup. Focusing on Zidane is not just participating in star worship, but actually bringing to some light the multifaceted and often problematic aspects of sport culture--and how it plays out on the field the multifaceted and problematics of culture in a broader sense.

Third, and finally, I always appreciate your comments, but I have my own caveat. Unless I am mistaken, you have not yet seen the film, which makes it a bit tricky to argue with you about the spectatorial experience of viewing it when you have not in fact partaken of the experience. Perhaps we could have a little video date.

xoxo,
ssg

[Tweed]

SSG,

I certainly appreciate the caveat. Degrees of mediation is an interesting in here. I think that this idea needs to be reexamined as a socially constructed phenomenon--indeed, Dargis even implicitly points out how film is constructed by and reconstructs the modern body.

Even Benjamin was ultimately concerned with the sense of alienation from an aura, that prevents the average Joe (Johan?) from a direct engagement with a work of art--an alienation that would lead to a pliable mass to give in to fascism. This becomes incredibly complicated when one thinks of sport and the star system we've become obsessed with, invest so much emotion and pride in. Zidane's wasn't the "headbutt heard round the world" because of the act itself, but because it was Zidane, and Zidane's head. So I'm curious as to where, exactly, this feeling of intimacy comes from: is it the side-door aspect of the action? Is it the close-up (in which case lets bring the always fun Laura Mulvey into the picture)?

If anything, the piece seems to violate Phelan's basic tenets--"Zidane" is a reproduced commodity that relies upon a whole cultural fixation that exploits ideas of community, competition, Greatness, and violence. It therefore exists in a number of spatio-temporal planes that goes way beyond the life of the film, the 90 minutes of the game, and the build up to 2006's World Cup (not to mention the drama of Zidane's imminent retirement from the game).

I believe there's a point in here somewhere, but perhaps I need a pint and some facepaint before I can make it clear. Ah well--fascinating post!

Tweedy