Afterall | Autumn/Winter 2007
On Transcript
On the night of 30 October 1953, Max and Annette Finestone hosted a small dinner party. Their guests, Vivian Glassman and Ernest Pataki, arrived at the Finestone’s apartment on 106 Bedford Street in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of New York City at 7:35 pm, and stayed until 2:40 am, 31 October. It was a casual affair. Annette offered her guests drinks, bringing them scotch on the rocks. Bebop jazz played on the radio. Several drinks later, well into the night, Annette told a funny story about a woman by the name of Betty Saunders and a man called Josh. The punchline was that Josh continually knocks over a wastepaper basket, leading Annette to jokingly refer to him as ‘queer’. Though the story was not particularly amusing, the atmosphere was jovial, and good-natured laughter ensued.
All things considered, this was a relatively uneventful dinner party. No arguments, no accusations, not even a broken dish. But unbeknownst to Max, Annette, Vivian and Ernest, they were being monitored by a ‘reliable informant’ for the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Throughout the evening, agent NY-964-S dutifully recorded as much of the foursome’s conversation as he (or she) could make out over the sound of the radio, including insights such as ‘I have had a camera no bigger than my stocking’. As far as eavesdropping goes, the night was something of a wash, except for one loaded, offhand comment: ‘But they have started on our organisation.’ Because of these seven words, according to official documents later procured from the FBI, ‘an attempt was made to obtain a verbatim transcript.’
And so the transcript, along with Annette’s corny joke and her obviously well-founded paranoia, found its way into a substantial archive at Columbia University pertaining to the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where it was subsequently unearthed by filmmaker Jenny Perlin and used as the basis for her 2006 film titled, simply, Transcript. After hiring actors to recreate the dinner party based on the script, Perlin recorded their voices only. She then layered the audio track over grainy 16-mm images of a hallway in a pre-war residential building much like that of 106 Bedford. During the 11-minute-25-second duration of the film, long, lingering shots of the foyer shift to shots of the stairwell. The film takes its time on each shot, giving us a chance to take in the dim lighting, the elaborate moulding and the marble-tiled floor, while the people inside the apartment carry on their lively, occasionally suspicious sounding dialogue. Some of the exchange is muffled, as though it were being heard through a thick wall, and the tinkling sound of the radio obscures key words.
As viewers, we don’t know who these people are or what their relationship to the Rosenbergs might be. In all likelihood they were probably harmless lefties with sympathetic ties to the Communist Party. Then again, who knows? Maybe they were key operatives working with the USSR in an attempt to overthrow the US government. We never find out. Perlin shows us little, revealing only the hallway where NY-964-S would theoretically have been lurking. Laura Mulvey famously observed that filmgoers have a voyeuristic relationship to cinema. What happens when the primary act is that of listening, as opposed to seeing? By emphasising sound in a medium that privileges sight, the artist upsets the usual order of spectatorship. Spectators are often assumed to be passive, simply absorbing the action happening in front of their eyes. In contrast, Transcript encourages participation, not passivity. The film is deliberately enigmatic, giving away no information that might influence or guide our thinking as we watch. As a result, the images we see make little sense at first, until we put the pieces together: the soundtrack is diegetic. The voices we are hearing relate to action within the frame of the film but outside of our range of vision. With this realisation, we find ourselves not exactly in the eavesdropper's shoes, nor amidst those being eavesdropped on, but somewhere in between.
There is a technical term for the audio treatment employed in Transcript. Pierre Schaeffer coined the word ‘acousmatic’ in 1966 to describe ‘the noise which we hear without seeing what is causing it’.[1] The word derives from the name of the followers of Pythagoras, known as the Acousmatics because they were not permitted to see the philosopher, who declaimed his ideas from behind a curtain (which was occasionally lifted for students considered worthy of seeing him). In cinematic terms, an ‘acousmatic voice’ usually belongs to someone who is both omnipotent and omniscient (like the Wizard of Oz). In Transcript, however, the acousmatic voices belong to people who are apparently powerless, unwitting performers for an unknown audience, unaware that their thoughts and feelings are being broadcast.
But are they powerless? Sound is often cited as a successful method of renegotiating the confines of physical space. Sound travels effortlessly, which makes it a handy tool both to instigate chaos and to control it. The human voice is no different: projected through megaphones, it intimidates; whispered to a confidant or through the window of a confessional, it inspires sympathy. Where the visible world enforces conventional understandings of distance and depth, the voice is elusive, ignoring boundaries, collapsing distance. ‘The acousmatic voice is so powerful because it cannot be neutralised within the framework of the visible,’ writes philosopher Mladen Dolar, ‘and it makes the visible itself redoubled and enigmatic.’[2]
*
I am your audience.
– Captain Gerd Weisler in The Lives of Others, 2006
Eavesdropping is an intimate activity. Because the visible does not come into play, the act of intense listening emphasises our ‘headspace’, activating the imagination and possibly the emotions as well. The idea of the eavesdropper developing an attachment to his assignment, feeling responsible for the people he is spying on, was the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1971), one of Perlin’s favourite films, as well as last year’s The Lives of Others (directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). In both of these movies the main character is a ‘bugger’ who is at the top of his field, a steadfast, quiet man who is utterly loyal to his client (in the case of the later film, he is loyal to the government, since he works for East Germany’s Stasi police) and is only interested in getting the perfect recording, not the people being recorded. Yet both films show the surveillant’s willpower slowly disintegrating as he grows to care about his targets’ well being. This identification, of course, mimics the audience’s own sympathy for the characters in the film. We are watching the watchers, seeing them in a more human light as they allow themselves to be humanised. At one point in The Lives of Others, Gerd Weisler, the Stasi policeman played by Ulrich Mühe, bravely confronts one of his subjects, telling her, ‘I am your audience’. In contrast, early on in The Conversation the lead character, Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman), brusquely admonishes his assistant for being bored: ‘We’re not here so that you can be entertained.’ But in both movies, once the technician gives in and actually listens to the people talking on the tapes, he starts to feel responsible for them. A sense of ethical conflict occurs when he allows himself to be ‘an audience’, to let go of his objective façade and admit that he is subject to the same drives and desires that afflict those he is investigating.
Watching Transcript we find ourselves listening for indiscretions, for moments when the speakers are afraid. Initially this seems like a simple ‘us versus them’ exercise. Indeed, throughout this essay, I have used dichotomous terms for power relations: sound is powerful, speakers are vulnerable; eavesdroppers are active, spectators are passive. But relationships are never so cut and dry. As we recognise our true role as audience members, the experience of watching Transcript raises several ethical questions: who are we to judge these people’s innocence? What do we stand to gain by invading their privacy, by depriving them of their civil rights? What price are we willing to pay for ‘democracy’? Asking these questions triggers a different question, related to the broader issues that got us to this point in the first place: who decides who judges whom? Such a query may seem hopelessly unanswerable, yet this quandary is at the root of the artist’s investigation and our own. It is no longer a binary dilemma of innocent or guilty, moral or amoral. Instead the situation proposed in Transcript creates a dynamic of power relations that is multivalent, complex, always changing. In Ethics (1998), his book-length essay arguing against an ethics built on the idea of cultural relativism, Alain Badiou conceives a counter-doctrine based on the notion that the Other – a concept that emphasises difference as a way to promote equality – is problematic, since the Other is often construed as a victim to be protected (or subjugated). In order for an ethical code to be truly effective, Badiou proposes that ethics should dispense with any belief in alterity, and forego the typically categorical language of religion or the state. Instead ethics should be based on an understanding that we are all the ‘same’ in our consisting of multiplicities, and should acknowledge that infinite multiplicity is the state of all beings. As audience members, we assume an ethical imperative, just as the 'buggers' in the aforementioned feature films felt no responsibility for their targets until they broke down and actually listened to those being taped. The experience of being part of an audience mirrors Badiou's description of multiplicity, of giving equal weight to multiple viewpoints. ‘The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural,’ he writes.[3]
*
‘Senator, you have the distinction of having coined a new word, namely McCarthyism. Now how do you define McCarthyism, sir?’
‘Calling a man a communist who is later proven to be one.’
– Television interview with Senator McCarthy, ca.1950
The dinner party at the Finestone’s took place five months after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were condemned as traitors for giving away top government secrets to the Soviet Union (supposedly they gave them plans for the atomic bomb). The parallel between the era of the ‘Red Scare’ and that of the ‘Orange Alert’ is obvious. Today the word ‘terrorist’ is used in exactly the same way the word ‘communist’ was in the 1950s: to incite paranoia and excuse a blatant disregard for human rights. Such systematised control is predicated on the assumption that alterity is a valid form of categorisation, that there is an ‘Other’ to be either protected or feared, and that we are not equal. When I met with Jenny Perlin in May, she mentioned an article in that day’s New York Times about the Bush administration pushing aside constitutional law in order to implement a program that would allow domestic eavesdropping without a warrant. (Again, what price are we willing to pay for ‘democracy’?) In a sense, Perlin’s film has as much to do with the National Security Administration as Pollock’s Full Fathom Five (1947) has to do with Shakespeare. Transcript goes far beyond the surface issue of surveillance. While many artists address the problems of surveillance directly, using the actual technology to reveal its sinister qualities, Perlin is less interested in rendering the mechanics transparent than she is in exploring the issue at a more fundamental level, one that deals with human characteristics rather than artificial ones. Yet Transcript fits well within an oeuvre that is quietly political by nature, never strident or obvious, exploring social and aesthetic issues with equal gravity.
A recent film screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art curated by Sally Berger emphasised a key recurring concern in the artist’s work – that of displacement, as felt by the artist during her travels, or by people forced to leave their native countries for political or economic reasons. Perlin is known for her simple yet effective animations. Shaky hand drawings, shot on a 16-mm camera, they are black-and-white films that document goings-on in the world through, as Perlin puts it, ‘cultural detritus’. In the recent film Flight (2007), for example, she documents various receipts collected during her travels through international airports, creating a complex map of spaces with indeterminate, permeable borders. The trail of receipts implies a world shaped by consumption and commodification, with consumerism creating its own territories and own sets of rules. Often these rules are blithely inhuman; their effect is beautifully, if heartbreakingly, spelled out in an earlier documentary film, View from Elsewhere (2002). This film looks at refugees from Kosovo and Sierra Leone who, having found their way to Geneva, face discrimination and, worse, the threat of deportation.
The same sense of injustice is the driving force behind Transcript. It goes without saying that, when dealing with anything even remotely political, an artwork should not condescend, should not be supercilious or presumptuous. ‘The problem is to define a way of looking that doesn’t preempt the gaze of the spectator,’ Jacques Rancière said in a recent issue of Artforum.[4] Along these lines, Transcript resists the usual roles of passive spectator and authoritative artwork. ‘An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us,’ Rancière continues in the same interview.5 In using sound to complicate power relations, both within the work and within the space of the gallery, Transcript makes no assumptions. As a work, it isn't univocal, but open to discussion, refutation, even confusion. Regarding the relative value of eavesdropping on the Finestone’s dinner party as a way of protecting democracy, Transcript is firm on only one point: there are no clear answers, the case can never be closed.
—Claire Barliant
1 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2006, p.61.
2 Ibid., p.79.
3 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (trans. Peter Hallward), London: Verso, 2001, p.28.
4 ‘Art of the Possible’, Jacques Rancière interviewed by Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, Artforum, March 2007, p.267.
5 Ibid., p.258.
Afterall, Issue 16, Autumn/Winter 2007, pp.115–19