SFF: "exergue – on documenta 14"
You say you want a revolution?
Prior to this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the longest film I had ever seen in a cinema was Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, the Hungarian filmmaker’s seven-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, which I saw with my friend Dave at MoMA in New York City over the course of a single day in 2009. There were two intervals and I ate two hot dogs. The experience—of the film, I mean, not of the hot dogs—affected me, and I believe Dave, profoundly. (Sátántangó later became the visual basis for The Tyger, the webcomic I started with my ex-wife, Melanie, a couple of years later. Unfortunately, we never got further than the beginning of the second chapter. As it turns out, writing a webcomic is a lot easier than drawing one.)
Until recently, the longest film I’d ever seen, in the cinema or otherwise, was Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. I watched Lanzmann’s film, which is nine-and-a-half-hours long, on DVD over the course of a day, back when I was at film school. This was in the days before smart phones, so I more or less endured it as it was intended to be endured. It, too, is a masterpiece, and incidentally one of the scariest films ever made about trains.
But time passes. As of June, the longest film I have ever seen, in a cinema or otherwise, is exergue – on documenta 14 by the Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis. At fourteen hours and eight minutes long, it is the second longest non-experimental film ever made. Over three days, in five-to-six-hour blocks, myself and a steadily dwindling group of die-hards watched how a contemporary art show is put together, begins to wobble, collapses under its own weight, and is torpedoed by the press for its troubles. It was fantastic.
I have a prickly relationship with contemporary art. This is to say that I have a tendency to hate it. When I first moved to Melbourne in 2006, I actually had to leave a show at ACCA after beginning to hyperventilate in rage. (I can’t remember what caused this: the caravan that had been taken apart and had its pieces laid out on the floor, or the prefab bird feeders that had been purchased from IKEA, painted different primary colours, and installed upon a wall. I suspect it was the latter.) From Warhol on, the idea of the thing—as opposed to actual skill or craftsmanship or artistry—became the thing itself, which is how we wound up with Hirst and his shark and Koons and his balloon animals and other frauds and furphies of that nature. I was not inclined to to like exergue.
It is true that not much of the art in the film did it for me. A lot of it was trash. But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t understand the passion of the show’s curators for that art. Even when they defend their curatorial choices in terms best left for an university seminar, you can’t but admire their dedication to the artists. This is not a spoiler, as the film opens with it, but documenta 14 was a critical and political disaster. (We’ll come to why this is funny a little later.) But at no point do you doubt their commitment, or indeed their vision. The film almost convinced me to do a Masters in Art History.
There is something about duration, in a cinematic context, that changes the way you experience the thing being watched, particularly when the thing being watched is properly, almost preposterously, long. I do think it’s funny how, in the age of binge-watch television, we think that films like Lawrence of Arabia, Once Upon a Time in America, Andrei Rublev, or anything else that maxes out at about three-and-a-half is “long”. The difference is only that, in the theatre, we are being asked to concentrate for that long. Obviously, we’re all quite content to watch a season of this, or of that, in a day if we have the time. (I recently watched M*A*S*H in its eleven-season entirety, and will be writing about it soon. I am already roughly halfway through Cheers.) But all of these things are often written and directed by different people. (Cheers, of which James Burrows directed all but thirty-four of nearly three hundred episodes, is an interesting exception.) They are series. More importantly, you don’t really watch them. You do a crossword. You do the ironing. You eat. You experience them largely as noise.
I do have a suspicion that you’d watch exergue the same way if it were, as it should be, released in serialised form. It seems almost designed for that: it’s broken up into more or less hour-long “chapters” and is, in a way that a film like Shoah is not, pretty televisual in its grammar. This is a slight, though not an especially cruel one. Some of cinema’s greatest documentarians—I’m thinking of the Maysles brothers in particular, and of Frederick Wiseman—read as televisual now, because they’re the filmmakers who created modern documentary’s grammar in the first place, and television adopted that style and ran with it. (Ken Burns, who I am also soon to be writing about, ran in a different direction, and is arguably even more important in terms of what television documentaries look like now. Like Wiseman, though, he’s also a duration-reliant filmmaker, albeit in a different way. That, however, is a discussion for another time.)
Why does exergue hold up, in a theatre, in the dark, without your phone, for days at a time? The answer is boring, but it’s this: its subject. Yes, I could take or leave the art. The politics—especially of Paul Preciado, who, in a remarkably funny (and sad) scene in Athens, has his academic continental philosophy served back to him on a platter of Mediterranean fuck-you—are often undergraduate to the point of childishness. (Preciado, I should say, is actually a very interesting writer, and I would urge you to check out Testo Junkie and Countersexual Manifesto. I just liked seeing Preciado get slammed by the Greeks for being the kind of leftist who doesn’t know he’s also a colonialist.) Athiridis, who met documenta 14’s artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, by chance in Thessaloniki in 2015, knew immediately that he had something special on his hands with this group. Whether he knew Szymczyk was a tragic figure or not, I couldn’t tell you, but he knew he had something, and he did. Szymczyk is a cross between Ian Curtis, Nick Cave, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Giorgio Vasari, and maybe Andy Warhol, with the emphasis on Ian Curtis.
Szymczyk is at once both so stressed out by the job that you worry for his mental health and yet the only one who seems to find the whole thing amusing and unimportant. He has a capacity for detachment—which, given the fortunes of documenta 14 in the long run, may or may not have been a good thing—that is, if not always admirable, very much always compelling. When he’s not actively travelling the world to see art—the passages in India, South Africa, Lebanon, Norway, and everywhere else the team manages to travel, were my favorites, for obvious reasons—he seems to be floating slightly above the muck, like an outsider in his own life. He’s never quite there. (There is a sequence in Johannesburg, where he sees a queer performance artist do his bit, and it’s the only time in fourteen hours where it’s clear that Szymczyk is so genuinely bowled over that he doesn’t know what to say. He otherwise always knows what to say, and it always has a quartz vein of disdain running through it.) It’s not that he doesn’t care. If you fuck with his chosen artists, he will cut you. It’s that he doesn’t care about the thing itself. Not its corporate relationships, not its relationship with the German government, not its legacy. He doesn’t respect the thing itself, or, rather, he respects it so much that he wants it to be better than it is, and doesn’t respect those who want it to stay the same. (Mind you, he chose to stage half of it in Athens, not because of the politics of the time—which was the argument—but because he had a girlfriend there and didn’t want to spend two years in Germany. It’s not as though I don’t understand. Athens is a better city than Kassel.) He is glad to be running the thing itself, but he’s also out to critique the thing itself, and if the thing itself ends with him, well, good, as far as he’s concerned. As a result, you can’t take your eyes off him. For fourteen hours, you never know what he’s going to do next. I don’t know a single documentary, outside of perhaps the Maysles’ Grey Gardens or perhaps Herzog’s Grizzly Man, where you dislike the people involved so much that you begin to love them. (Okay, yeah, there was the Jordan thing.) But then we get to hour thirteen.
Hour thirteen is pretty much in real-time, at least for the first half-hour. Szymczyk is heading to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST). I don’t want to spoil this very long film for you, but things have not been going well with the EMST for pretty much seven hours by this point. But that’s not the problem today. The problem is that Szymczyk, who is about to give a speech opening documenta 14, is hungover to the point of passing out in a cab. Luckily, he doesn’t, because he’s on the phone, apologising to someone (almost certainly Greek-Swiss choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis, pictured above) for his behaviour the night prior. He’s had maybe two hours of sleep. He’s in the clothes he slept in. We listen to the entire phone call in the cab. He gets out at the museum. He calls back and we listen to them talk again, and for the first time he talks about how depressed he is, and then about how much this show matters whether he’s depressed or not. I have some experience with narcissists, and I can assure you that he plays every fiddle available to him. Then he goes in, meets the Greek and German presidents, makes an unbelievably good speech—I mean, it’s actually remarkable, especially given his state—gives the dignitaries a tour of the exhibition, then finds a place to lie down. He’s listening to an indigenous Norwegian, a Sámi, sing. Then he gets into a fight with an art critic.
You couldn’t make it up.
The real point I want to make here is about duration. Tarkovsky said that cinema was “sculpting in time”. Gilles Deleuze wrote two books about cinema. The first was about the “movement-image”. This is a very basic explanation, but he was essentially talking about a Hollywood-style of cinema in which movement and to a lesser extent plot dictate screen time and thus duration. The second book was about the “time-image”. You can guess what the second term means: time dictating movement. (He referenced Tarkovsky, Ozu, Antonioni, Renais, and others.) It would be interesting to know what Deleuze—who I like a good deal, outside of the cinema books—might have thought had he not thrown himself out of a window in 1995. His examples are outdated now, and everyone he put up as an example is long dead, and cinema has changed.
Because of his suicide, Deleuze missed the most interesting thing that has happened in film studies since then, which is the increased interest, from around the early- to mid-2000s on figuration and the body, which I don’t think the “movement-image” or “time-image” quite capture. Nevertheless, cinema remains the only visual art in which duration plays an outsized role. (Obviously, duration is central to music, but music isn’t a visual art. I did have a paragraph written about comics, but while comics are visual, they are, like literature, a choose-your-own-adventure story as far as time goes.)
This does bring me back to where we started, though. Now that we’re in an age of indefinite time-shifting, where you can do everything at your own pace, duration means something different for everyone involved. To properly binge something—as I did M*A*S*H and am currently doing with Cheers—means not playing the New York Times crossword. Even then, it’s not the same. To be in a cinema, for hours and, in my case with exergue, days at a time, changes your relationship to the thing. You live in it. As a result, it changes your relationship to reality outside the cinema, too. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that have made me feel, whether I liked it or not, very present. I’ve been in war zones and I’ve run with bulls. I’ve been shot at by the Indian military and I’ve been, unfortunately, in love. Being in a cinema for six hours, fully focused, isn’t entirely different. It’s actually better. You are, for a moment, a horse wearing blinders.
In 2005, at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I saw James Benning’s 13 Lakes. This is a nearly two-and-a-half-hour picture in which Benning, one of the greatest non-narrative American filmmakers, sets up a camera and shoots, well, thirteen lakes, each for the length of a full reel of film. I drifted in and out of it. I am sure I took a nap. Benning’s sound design—always fantastically clever—is there to teach you how to look and listen and pay attention. But I still had a nap. I was watching thirteen lakes. This didn’t change my experience of it at all.
At a certain point, however, I was all-in. I entered the zone where you can watch people for fourteen hours—or lakes for more than two—and you begin to have a parasocial relationship with what you’re watching, even if it’s just water. This is obviously why peak television has been such a thing. But the impact of it in a cinema, in the dark, whether with a lake or with a weird Austrian gallerist, is so much stronger. Time spent changes our relationship to time lived.
The great irony of exergue is that documenta 15, which was curated by the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, was a proper, unmitigated disaster. Ticket sales were way down. Everyone—with good reason—hated the art. The politics were even further to the left than those of Szymczyk’s too-woke-for-its-own-good documenta 14. This is mentioned in a very brief title card before the fantastic episode about the losing of Szymczyk’s shit on the day of the Athens launch. What the film doesn’t mention, but is worth noting here, is that documenta 14 kind of set the standard for international art festivals going forward. Sister cities, parallel exhibitions, shared responsibilities: these are now all the rage. Szymczyk is doing just fine. Probably better, I suspect, than when he was directing documenta 14. In the very first hour, when we already know that things have gone entirely to shit, he gets up on stage at a German death-metal club and screams out a song. The man is broken.
After you’ve spent fourteen hours with him, you do actually kind of get it.