The trouble with "Film as a Subversive Art"

Looking at the recently reissued, in a lovely edition with many beautiful black and white images of films it discusses, of Amos Vogel's 1974 book Film as a Subversive Art, leaves me only wondering about the organizing category of subversion. I wonder if "critique" might not be a more useful concept.

The work from which an image is reproduced on the cover of this book provides a good example of the problem. Like Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and Godard's "La Chinoise" (1972), which presciently skewers the radical student politics that would erupt a year later, Dusan Makavejev's "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" (1971) has been widely misread by carelessly enthusiastic critics with an ax they enjoy grinding as celebrating what it rather relentlessly criticizes. Makavejev in this film is no celebrant of the cult of sexual liberation and libertinism that Vogel, like, among more vulgar tastemakers, Pauline Kael, were so enamored of. It seems odd to fathom how they managed to miss this. Makavejev, whose dull sequel to this film, "Sweet Movie," juxtaposes satirized libertinism with both (as in "WR") Communist radical chic absurdities well-known to him (he was Yugoslav) but also the Soviet WW2 Katyn Massacre, which is shown in a wartime German film clip (!) as if to solidify the viewer's impression that no image is innocent even of what it opposes. (The Soviet army’s murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1940 was discovered by the Germans in 1943, and ideological dispositions long dictated who was to be blamed.). The obvious thesis of the essay film "WR" is that the sexual liberation of the 60s was as easily misused ideologically as the old Communist utopia with which it is clearly placed in some interesting, partly homological, relationship.

The key film that might persuade a careful viewer of both the many films Vogel describes and of the time during which his catalog was first published, came out the year after the book's publication, and so is not in it. This is Pasolini's Salò (1975). The problem Salò raises makes it both the most radical and far-reaching socially critical film of the most radical, politically and aesthetically, of the great Italian directors in the roughly 40 years after the war, is that of transgression as not a path to liberation but one to enslavement. The problem in the film is transgression as murderous sadism, as hatred. Misogyny is part of it, part of the misanthropy revealed in Sade's interesting prose, which Pasolini associates with fascism.

Nor does Vogel seem to understand the same director's earlier (1969) "Pigsty," which contrasts a Renaissance-era vagabond cannibal's joy, expressed, in an effortful overcoming of his own hesitancy, when his own execution by the society’s piously dutiful and equally barbaric revenge is imminent, at having transgressed the bounds of society and nature (“I have killed my father, and eaten the flesh of men, and I tremble with joy!”) with a son's will to self-annihilation as both ingenious and cowardly protest (he is said to be “neither obedient nor disobedient,” so that the father can want neither to reward or punish him, and in fact his act is in a way both a disobedience and a kind of obedience, or at least a disobedience on what are recognizably the father’s terms) against the wealthy bourgeois father's manic style of disavowing his own guilt at his complicity in Germany's recent past, which he misrecognizes as mere bestiality, as if his harp-playing humanism would save him when of course it is part of the structural misrecognition of willful complicity in a violence that is far more horrible than if it were merely distasteful, especially given that it was the victims who in being systematically dehumanized were effectively made responsible for the very crimes against them, as if guilty, as Giorgio Agamben demonstrates in his Remnants of Auschwitz, of their own shame at having been reduced to some kind of borderline of human and animal, and life and death, and thus deprived of the good citizen’s dignity. The father displaces his own self-hatred, manically, onto an image of the porcine which he aestheticizes as admiration of the painter Georg Grosz; the son carries this to the limit of its enactment in his own physical annihilation, the secret love of which he speaks to the hopelessly bourgeois Ida being the desire for death of someone whose rebellion extends equally to all of the available alternatives to what disgusts him. The father’s rival, whose reported abysmal wartime complicity in the production of corpses (and not only the father's of buttons, sausages, and shit) is only worrisome as a source of embarrassment, which as such can be countered with the more embarrassing situation of the father whose son is engaged in a dirty business with pigs, a fact that the rival uses this to persuade the guilty father to agree to a merger in lieu of his own public exposure, has the last word by announcing a cover-up. Those who have been annihilated will be removed from the record of memory, as the Nazis intended, saving everyone from further embarrassment.

Thus, like some rebellions, some transgressions lead only to a worsening of the general barbarism (or to its self-effacing but also affirming recognition). As indeed was true of fascism and Nazism. If it is true as Walter Benjamin said that every document of civilization is one of barbarism, it does not necessarily follow always that revealing that barbarism is liberating because enlightening.

At a much simpler and more easily legible register of the political, "Last Tango in Paris" similarly shows that some movements towards transgression only make things worse. In that film, Paul's (Marlon Brando) rebellion against the memories of his father's stupid provincial patriarchal authoritarianism, and what he thinks, somewhat puzzlingly, is the bourgeois lie of his marriage as revealed by the wife's suicide, only implicates Jeanne (Maria Schneider) as object of the violent expression of the will to transgression that ultimately must confuse its real object, the oppressiveness of a certain idea of society and family, with the very order of social identities and language, while Jeanne's final defense against an imagined rape (Paul now is to her a strange man pursuing her, therefore engaged in "violence," which bothers her (as a character, contrary to the later revealed reality of the filming) more than the actual violence of Paul's earlier "expressive" transgression that is also an abasement, using her body as object of the demonstration, of his idea of the oppressive family ideology), seems to be committed in the very guise of her late colonial officer father. As if to say, the violence of an oppressive social order can only be opposed by another level or kind of what is ultimately the same oppression.

What do you do when you are oppressed by something you can find no way of changing for the better, though you can imagine opposing it? Alas, Marcusean libertinism did not survive the wonderful, awful 1970s. Could it be that surrealism itself, that of Artaud and Bataille, had its limits? It must be a statement about the world we live in today that it is much easier to make a film coherently criticizing some aspect of it than to put in that film a character who not only understands this critique but is motivated to do something about it. Perhaps there is something useful in having the courage of such despair.