Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 18, July 2002
Catherine Fowler
Darke Reading Light
Chris Darke _Light Readings: Film
Criticism and Screen Arts_ London: Wallflower
Press,
2000 ISBN 1903364078 206 pp. While many academic
publishers are turning to play-safe text book collections,
or bankable 'star' authors, Wallflower Press is forging its
way with far riskier and more interesting projects. _Light
Readings_, a collection of the writings of freelance film
critic Chris Darke, is one such risk. The book divides
itself in three: Chapter One, '21st Century Cinema:
Confessions of a Freelance Film Critic', collects together
film reviews (largely for _Sight and Sound_); Chapter Two,
'Cinema *sans papiers*: Writing on French Cinema', is again
largely reviews, though with three longer articles; and
Chapter Three, 'Cinema Exploded: Film, Video and the
Gallery', contains longer pieces which contemplate the
gallery art-film. Unlike counter-parts such as
Pauline Kael or Jonathon Rosenbaum, Chris Darke's reputation
has yet to ripen, and whilst he (as he himself insists)
follows in the footsteps of the late Serge Daney, the
review-format of most of his work means that any cohesive
statement of intent appears only via an accumulation of
details produced once one reads the reviews in one sitting.
Reading in-between the lines of the standardised film
reviews represented here we find a passion for lost,
over-looked, and undeveloped images, subjects, and forms. As
his 'front' these reviews are mere eye-candy for the real
task he sets himself: to make connections across film
culture, creating a startling Kuleshov effect that
originates in a juxtaposition of film with video and
television. This juxtaposition does not simply place these
media side by side, it is non-linear, as Darke layers his
influences, fading up and down and superimposing so that
what went before shows through, colouring what comes
after. Darke is frank about what he
sees in the layers of cinema history that he evokes,
somewhere in the past there is European Art cinema, and the
French new wave, as well as the life-work of Godard, Marker,
and John Cassavetes. In the present, though also passed, lie
the visions of Marc Karlin -- representing the moment of
_Nightcleaners_ (1976, Berwick Street Collective) and
British engagement with the continental avant garde emerging
from May '68 -- and Hrvoje Horvatic, a video-artist whose
work with Breda Beban was part of a more recent moment of
experiment; to both of whom the book is dedicated. What
Darke does with this celluloid cocktail is invite us to
gently sip it as we become his guest, and, in the words of
Walter Benjamin before him, 'calmly and adventurously go
travelling'. [1] Whilst he claims Raymond
Bellour and Serge Daney as his critical influences, in the
polemic that emerges from the longer pieces Darke has the
air of a Peter Wollen, circa his theory of 'Counter-Cinema'
[2] or the 'Two Avant Gardes' [3]: a critic
with a mind open to all those risks to which the mainstream
closes its doors. Chapter One firmly sets out his
preferences as European, Independent, and/or experimental,
within which a review of _Dumb and Dumber_ (Peter Farelly,
1994) sits uncomfortably. Revealingly, in his introduction
to this chapter, Darke talks of reviewers falling back on a
description of the acting as a cover up for disengagement,
and this is exactly what he does here, though the failings
of this film leads him to re-make it in his imagination:
'One wonders how soon it will be before someone tempts
[Jim Carrey] along the Hollywood-seeks-cred path of
a Shakespearean role' (29). In Chapters Two and Three
Darke seems to find more space in his reviews of French
cinema and writings on film, video, and the gallery to
expand on his preferences, and it is here that the books
finds its use value. As Darke himself points out,
Anglo-American film writing has not taken on board recent
French work on the 'passage of the image' (Bellour,
[4] Daney, [5] and Aumont [6]) -- if
it had, then the death of cinema scenario which it has
internalised over the past ten years would have been
rejected for a more philosophical (certainly on the part of
Jacques Aumont any way) contemplation of the cinematic image
as one of a variety of image cultures. This consideration of
cinema from amongst the throng of images -- several times
Darke uses the term 'image-storm' (e.g. 198) -- is conducted
in an extremely orderly manner. Darke refuses to succumb to
the cinema versus video game; instead, in his press releases
for video artists such as Cheryl Donegan, Daniel Reeves,
Bill Viola, Michael Klier, and Sophie Calle, all written for
the UK's Film and Video Umbrella, he sketches for them a
heritage informed as much by minimalism and 70's personal
filmmaking, as by video art and television. Through the
insistence on such a trajectory Darke's work can be read
alongside Malcolm Le Grice's _Experimental Cinema in the
Digital Age_, [7] however what separates Darke from
Le Grice, and from current film/video criticism (as
witnessed in the magazines _Vertigo_
or _Filmwaves_),
is the French connection upon which he constantly insists;
and it is here that Darke intervenes in contemporary debates
in Britain, offering a welcome corrective. If, as Darke's book
proposes, the work of Daney, Aumont, and Bellour was to
enter into Anglo-American vernacular, one could imagine
'moving image' studies taking over from 'film' studies. This
possibility is brought closer by the translation in the last
three years of Aumont's _The Image_ and a collection of
Bellour's early work, however Daney remains untouched by
most except Darke. We must look then to _Light Readings_ to
illuminate this area for us; such an obligation adds the
role of translator to those of dilettante, cinephile, and
freelance film critic that Darke sets himself, and his
success and persuasion as translator tend to reduce those
roles that follow to more commercial enterprises. This is
not to suggest that Darke is not an engaging and
enlightening film reviewer, or that his enthusiasm for
screen arts is not well placed, rather I would suggest that
the value of this book lies in its third chapter. The
sustained gaze that Darke offers to the film, video, gallery
triad yields many insights and delights. This chapter offers
not simply a theoretically grounded introduction to recent
screen arts; for those who are engaged in the scene it
challenges assumptions and forges connections, suggesting
how film theory might confront the impasse often posed (and
imposed) once moving images are taken out of the
auditorium. As well as the polemic,
Darke shows a sensitivity to the sensual, tactile qualities
of images found elsewhere in Laura Marks's evocative book
_The Skin of the Film_. [8] Like Marks, who is drawn
to film and video's 'haptic' qualities, Darke's writing is
alive to light, shadow, pattern, and generally non-narrative
experiences. For all those whose concern is with the
'alternatives' that film offers, and who are willing to
venture out of the auditorium to find those alternatives,
_Light Readings_ is not simply an addition to the field, it
is an intervention, though one which, like the films it
promotes, asks for sustained attention through which we can
extract a truly moving experience. Southampton Institute of
Higher Education, England Footnotes 1. Walter Benjamin, 'The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds, _Film Theory and
Criticism_, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
p. 690. 2. Peter Wollen, '_Vent
d'est_: Godard's Cinema and Counter-Cinema', _Afterimage_,
no. 4, Autumn 1972, pp. 6-16. 3. Wollen, 'The Two Avant
Gardes', _Studio International_, vol. 190 no. 984,
November-December 1975, pp. 171-75. 4. See Raymond Bellour,
Catherine David, and Christine Can Assche, _Passages de
l'image_ (Paris: Editions Centre Pompidou, 1991). 5. See Serge Daney, _Le
Salaire du Zappeur_ (Paris: Editions Ramsay,
1988). 6. See Jacques Aumont, _The
Image_, trans. Calire Pajackowska (London: British Film
Institute, 1991). 7. Malcolm Le Grice,
_Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age_ (London: British
Film Institute, 2001). 8. Laura U. Marks, _The Skin
of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the
Senses_ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000).
Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Catherine Fowler, 'Darke
Reading Light', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 18, July 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n18fowler>.
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