Marie Jaeger
“Deleuze from A to Z”
The Mandrake Bar
November 12, 2006 (ongoing)
Formerly a heavy-duty gay bar called the Manhandler, the Mandrake sits squarely in the middle of Los Angeles’s newest metastasizing gallery district and serves as the informal meeting place for its art world. Though crowded during openings, the bar—founded by artists and funded by dealers—drums up business on off-nights by inviting a variety of culture workers to put together events. The Mandrake provides a space, the attendees hopefully buy a few drinks, and culture marches on.
The most ambitious of the events at the Mandrake so far has been “Deleuze From A to Z,” a film series that has attracted a dedicated audience to the bar’s ad hoc screening room on Sunday nights over the past fourteen months. The series was concocted by artist Marie Jager and Semiotext(e) editor Hedi El Kholti (an old friend and colleague of mine, who currently organizes the screenings by himself) as a way to showcase an exciting document almost completely unknown in America: an interview between the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the journalist Claire Parnet, shot in 1988 but only recently subtitled in English. Each screening begins with one portion of the eight-hour interview, and continues with a selection of films chosen by the curators to riff on the topics in each of its alphabetically organized segments.
I’ve been to almost all of the screenings—averaging roughly 2.5 drinks per screening—and I’ve noted the evolution of the audience from a handful of Semiotext(e) types to a broad sampling of LA’s culture sector: artists, editors, writers, musicians, cineastes, and freaks. I’ve also seen a trove of extraordinary artifacts from the organizers’ cabinet of curiosities: in addition to the revelatory footage of a candid, chatty Gilles Deleuze, I’ve watched, for example, an Iranian New Wave film from 1956 about lepers by Forugh Farrokhzad; recently deceased Canadian conceptualist David Askevold’s “Nova Scotia Fires” (1969); and “Germany in Autumn” (1978), a joint film by Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder documenting the events surrounding the deaths of RAF activists Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. The offerings have been so generous and well-organized that I’ve found myself wondering, at various points in the alphabet, if I might be participating in a historical event.
Though the screenings are open to the public and often end up standing room only, the conversations on the back patio before and after the films make the series feel collegial, like a gathering of friends. They might, in their own way, also come to resemble the pre-May ’68 French cinéclubs in which many of the actors in the subsequent uprising first met and honed their theories and praxes; time will tell. It’s a long way from the Cinémathèque Française to the back room of the Mandrake, but with this being the fortieth anniversary of that landmark year, and given its centrality to Deleuze’s work, it’s hard not to think of these screenings as a modest through line.
Erik Bluhm, poster for G as in Gauche. Courtesy Hedi El Kholti.
To organize the interview, Parnet chose the format of an ABC primer and asked Deleuze to speak with little preparation on a variety of themes: A as in Animal, B as in Boire (Drink), C as in Culture, D as in Desire, and so on. The conversational structure of the interview humanizes the thinker and his work. Deleuze meanders through biography and philosophy, speaking in one breath about his childhood and in the next about his complex, seminal collaboration with Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This format, as El Kholti has remarked, provides a point of access for anyone intimidated by the seemingly impregnable monolith of Deleuze’s writings.But that isn’t to say the philosopher’s ideas are any more sociable for being expressed colloquially:
“I don’t believe in culture, to some extent, but rather I believe in encounters. But these encounters don’t occur with people. People always think that it’s with people that encounters occur, which is why it’s awful.… Now, in this, that belongs to the domain of culture, intellectuals meeting one another, this disgusting practice of conferences, this infamy. So encounters, it’s not between people that they happen, but with things.… So I encounter a… painting, yes, or a piece of music, that’s how I understand an encounter. When people want to connect encounters to themselves, with people, well, that doesn’t work at all.… That’s not an encounter, and that’s why encounters with people are so utterly, utterly disappointing. Encounters with people are always catastrophic.”
“C is for Culture,” from which the above excerpt is drawn, neatly summarizes the strength of the “Deleuze from A to Z” project. As the films grouped around the interview are screened, each elaborates an aspect of the “culture-as-encounter” theme and reveals its unexpected angles and depths. The first film following the interview, Alain Resnais’s “All of the World’s Memory” (1956), enacts with lyrical precision and noir dread Resnais’s lifelong obsession with collective memory, time, and subjectivity. Coming across first as a public service short about a national landmark, the film explores the depth and breadth of Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, ultimately turning the library into a kind of Borgesian fantasy—almost fascist in its totality. The camera follows the itinerary of individual books through the library, accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack reminiscent of old Hollywood epics. But as the camera pulls back to reveal a labyrinthine system of hallways and endless stacks of moldering tomes, the music takes on a brooding tone. The filmed library becomes a fortress in which man protects himself from being “engulfed by a mass of words.” This obsession with accumulation and classification suggests how easily this fortress can become a maze—a fear of culture that brings us back to Deleuze:
“I am just terrified of a “cultivated person,” and this is quite obvious to “cultivated people.” It’s a kind of knowledge, a frightening body of knowledge especially.… One sees that a lot with intellectuals; they know everything. Well, maybe not, but they are informed about everything—they know the history of Italy during the Renaissance, they know the geography of the North Pole, they know… the whole list, they know everything, can talk about anything.… It’s abominable.”
Still from Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet: from A to Z, directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Courtesy Hedi El Kholti.
The third film, the rarely seen “Origins of the 21st Century” (2000) by Jean-Luc Godard, was originally commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival to be shown at its millennial installment. Godard’s twenty-minute short takes the viewer on a journey back through the twentieth century using an astonishing montage of source films, both documentary and cinematic. Accompanied by a minimalist piano score by Hans Otte, the film shows tragedies of the century—bodies piling up in Nazi concentration camps, a kimono-clad Japanese woman being assaulted and raped, the march of fascist soldiers—interspersed with fleeting images of happiness and beauty: a smiling girl, a dance from a Hollywood musical, violinists strolling along an idyllic country road. At first the differences between cinematic fiction and news footage are obvious, but gradually the distinction fades and scene after scene of marching men and flying planes begins to blend the real and the fictive.
The screening concludes with “Emeutes” (Riots), a music video by the French rapper Passi directed by Sébastien Caudron. Born in Congo-Brazzaville but for many years a denizen of France, Passi grew up—like many other prominent French rappers—in the Parisian banlieues, or suburbs. Shot in 2000, the video presages by a full five years the three months of riots by immigrants and their children that rocked France in the summer of 2005. Incorporating news footage from the May ’68 riots and graphics from classic Soviet propaganda posters, the video for “Emeutes” asserts a direct connection between the conditions that spawned the youth movement of the 60s and the pressures of contemporary life in the immigrant banlieues. After the measured calm of Godard’s retrospective montage, the song’s explosive energy shifts the mood of the room back to a present of unresolved political turmoil and unanswered questions.
Matt Fishbeck
Though artists in LA regularly mine French poststructuralist theory and New Wave cinema for ideas—with varying levels of success—the survey-like structure of these screenings suggests a return to simplicity and basic questions. The first and most obvious being, how exactly do these screenings speak to our current situation? The juxtaposition of the various short films with the extended interview encourages the viewer to make quick leaps between different times and topics: the frightening totality of the Bibliothèque Nationale, for example, could easily serve as the brick and mortar embodiment of the internet, bringing to mind contemporary projects to digitize all the world’s printed matter. Similarly, May ’68 is invoked by an immigrant rapper to discuss 2005’s powder-keg banlieues, and both events remind the present audience of LA in ’92. Godard’s “Origins of the 21st Century” states in its title what’s at stake in a project like “Deleuze from A to Z”: the ideas that shaped the history of the 20th century are the womb from which we’re born. But along with the many overlaps, one also gets an unavoidable sense of the disjunctions: What does it actually mean, for example, to talk about May ’68 and “Emuetes,” given our own history of riots? Will LA rise up again, and, if so, will our artists, writers, and students be among those who take to the streets? Are we merely “cultivated people” of the sort that once terrified the philosopher, the Mandrake screenings nothing but a case of “intellectuals meeting one another,” though with more beer? Are the screenings themselves merely elongating the horrible labyrinth of culture?
Perhaps the culture industry has evolved to the point where even informal spaces like bars have been fully professionalized: committed to networking and other catastrophic encounters. If so, then the discussions that spring up around “Deleuze from A to Z” are undoubtedly just a serendipitous byproduct, but I do still like to meet and drink with the friends and strangers who are attracted to this unique event. As for the historical questions that linger over these encounters, they seem useful to ask but impossible to answer. As with any collision of art and reality, the aftereffects—though possibly very significant—are always incalculable. In the last moments of “C is for Culture,” Deleuze summarizes the issue by borrowing an image:
“It’s a little like Nietzsche said so well, someone launches an arrow into space… or even a period, or a collectivity launches an arrow, and eventually it falls, and then someone comes along to pick it up and hurl it out elsewhere. So that’s how creation happens, how literature happens, passing through desert periods.”
I have often felt—and who hasn’t?—that we are walking through just such a cultural desert. But watching these films gave me the feeling that we were stumbling upon a very useful arrow.