There’s much to process from Thomas Elsaesser’s hour long talk on “The Cinema of Abjection” at the 2017 IFFR – much of which will be expanded upon in his forthcoming book on the topic. I wrote ten pages of notes, and reviewing them takes my thoughts in several directions, such as:
- The central question that frames Elsaesser’s argument, about how the notion of the abject might possibly revitalize art cinema and film festival culture (I’m a bit skeptical of this claim but it would take a lot of space to properly unpack this);
- What exactly defines “abjection” in cinema (at one point a film as mainstream as Inception was labeled abject); one audience member posited “alterity” as a term Elsaesser might actually be meaning when he uses “abjection”, especially since he seems to use it more in social and political terms than psychological;
- How the abject might find a place in video essays (since most video essays are expressions of love of cinema, with a tendency towards normalizing and domesticating our understanding of cinema through explaining and expressions of affection – how might the video essay instead be expressions of abject inarticulateness and incomprehension, to the point of dread?).
- That abjection ultimately doesn’t reside in the film, but in the viewer’s regard of the film. Elsaesser provides a long list of films that he considers “abject” but my response is “to whom?” Afterwards I told him about my experience as a teacher in China in 1997 showing rural college students Star Wars for the first time, and they were baffled and distressed by its depiction of a world that was completely alien to them. From this example I am convinced that the abject doesn’t reside necessarily in a work, but in the space between a work and its viewer.
These issues are remarkably relevant to my current project, though to discuss it here may be to divulge too much. Instead I’ll offer six quotes from Elsasser’s sixty minute presentation that I found particularly striking and, when strung together, give a loose impression of the arc to his argument (though the actual presentation is much more in depth, to be sure):
The film festival network is in a crisis: there are too many festivals, chasing too few films that deserve the quality label “world premiere”, and thus inadvertently a race to the bottom has started, in order to hang on to exclusivity as the mark of festival prestige.
To this crisis scenario, the cinema of abjection offers a silver lining, bringing a measure of distance, resistance and a change of default values.
The abject is also the narrow gap that separates the useful from the useless, and marks the radical negation of the human, when seen merely as material object. It is therefore as much a perspective and a perception as it is a situation and a state.
In this way, abjection can also be seen as one of the horizons and degrees zero of what it is to be human today, as well as how the values of a community or society are defined by how it deals with its limits.
A cinema of abjection is also a cinema that foregoes identification, resists sympathy and blocks empathy.
Abjection strategically upholds the human against the post-human, but also accepts there is no easy return to the inclusive ideals of bourgeois-liberal enlightenment. The abject is a placeholder for something we suspect is now a mere crinkly skin and probably dead matter, but still too much part of us and too deeply needed to be buried yet.