(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Georges Didi-Huberman:
Gruvgas
Daidalos, 2015
The gas species from mines is lethal, but difficult to sense. It is free of scent and color. It consists mostly of methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. It is non-toxic, but flammable, and thousands of miners have died as a result of explosions later described as disasters. A miner cannot even sense when the gas is coming. That is why earlier birds were brought in cages down the mine shaft. If they trembled or purred in their plumage, they sensed the danger approaching. It is not inconceivable that the little bird's reaction has been able to sharpen the miners' ability to "see" mining gas, see the disaster coming – like the angel of history.
French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman grew up around the Loire Valley at Saint Étienne. He was 15 years when 1968 broke out, where many miners also died in the local coal mines – but he has no memory of this. As he reads the accounts of the dead at the age of 63 in the national archives, it is as if afterwards he remembers the disaster of 1876 better than the one that occurred in 1968. In the wake of the mining industry, an industrial and social disaster emerged. People got sick and laid off, and there was great poverty among Didi-Huberman's classmates as well. It was on his nose, but he did not see it – the disaster. He now asks: How can we understand this memory loss? How to understand such an incident?
It's hard to see the father's movement; see the disaster that is coming. The task of the historian and artist is to create images that capture this condition.
The disaster has never occurred. Every day we can read and hear about war in the news. The epic dimension of war makes it an easy story to tell. But the disaster initially lacks a voice, first in that one does not believe it, then in saying that it was impossible to imagine. «A disaster rarely claims to be a disaster. And it is easy to say, in the light of an absolute past, that 'it was a disaster', since everything has exploded and many are already dead. Likewise, it is easy to say, if anything, about an absolute future, that 'it will be a disaster', because everything will someday disappear, in a lasting or sudden destruction. But it is much harder to say: 'There is the disaster, now it comes'. ”
The point is that the disaster never seems to have occurred, for every moment of disaster is “a secret conflict between […] at least two disasters. In the same way that every danger links at least two risks together, and every political intervention is a link between at least two things that are at stake ». Understanding the story is not about recalling a past, but weaving together the invisible forces that create a picture of the past candy as it appears in the father's moment (Walter Benjamin). But why is it so difficult to become aware of the dangerous? Because it's hard to see the father's movement; see the disaster that is coming. The task of the historian and artist is to create images that capture this condition.
The film essay and the poet's anger. Didi-Huberman goes into the book on Pasolini. Let's address his points: Based on the 90 000 meter film from the Italian journal film studio, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini created a film montage of what the world looks like after the war (2. World War II) – La Rabbia ("The Wrath"). By putting together various incomparable but coexisting historical clips, he traces what covers the disaster. It is the contrasts that make things visible and create the critical force – in this case the power of the film montage as a picture of the moving father. Montagens reorganizes the present and creates an understanding of the past; the present is being charged with new meaning, including a concerned feeling for the danger to come. Pasolini's double grip consists in maintaining a distancing gaze and an underlying anger that dares to take a stand. In an interview, he describes the difference between the power of the revolutionary and the angry man: Where the former sooner or later occupies a stable and conformable position, the latter always suffers from the conformity. It is Pasolini's critical relationship with the news journalism that gives the image a visionary, poetic force. The film essay is a critical genre because it is poetic. The critical potential of the genre depends on its ability to make something else visible. It is about, in Pasolini's words, "identifying the face of the unworthy" ... the smile of hope of the real, or "the unexpected beauty that is more pervasive when unexpected – the face of a child, a proletarian, yes, in the face of a cosmonauts. ". Or the miners' faces, broken bodies and corpses that emerge from the mine shaft (La Rabbia) following the Morgnano mining disaster. The mining gas exploded because the Terni limited liability company paid no attention to the safety of the miners.
The pain. The film essay gives an outlet for an unexpected beauty and truth effect, but the artist should not create art for the sake of art. Pasolini demythologizes the artist's role without sacrificing the power of visual poetry to seize the beauty of the sadness of human holdings. Beauty is not in the motifs, but in the materiality, in the deadly disease that grows along with the political anthropology of the montage. The close-up of Marilyn Monroe's face to the sound of Adagio in g minor by Tomaso Albinoni shows a painful beauty; first we see her as a child, then as a young girl, and again as a singer in the war in Korea, and finally as an international star. All of this emerges between images of processions of Christ's suffering, New York's skyscrapers, peasants and boxers, rockets and ruins, beauty pageants and nuclear explosions. At the same time, Monroe's poetic voice is heard floating between the ancient world and the future world. It is the constellation of beauty-disease (bellezza-male) that makes La Rabbia at once sad and critical. We need the poet, painter and filmmaker to show us the beauty of the dark times dominated by the indifference of the normal state. "It is then that the other beauty emerges, the marvelously beautiful beauty that lies in bearing the other, which is the very oldest pain." With poetic voice, Pasolini composes a cautious funeral anthem for the killed and destroyed miners. Minegas as an emblem of the character of the story and the documentary whose object is a painful life in motion. The anger testifies to the defeat of the poetic vision, and the film essay transforms the sterile anger into a poetic rage. The film’s poetry is always a film for the survivors. "It is an art of thought," as Didi-Huberman writes, "for there is no being without being open to being."
We need the poet, painter and filmmaker to show us the beauty of the dark times dominated by the indifference of the normal state.
Historieløshed. Didi-Huberman has written a powerful and important book that rediscovers literature and film art as a sensitive, engaging art. The book is written with passionate seriousness and points to the perhaps biggest problem of our time – the storylessness. The news stream's epic-spectacular stories of the refugee crisis, terrorist threat, economic crisis and climate crisis reproduce the indifference and lack of understanding of history that is the greatest threat to the democratic and critically informed conversation. The reliance on easy stories without a glance at the invisible threads of history is the drug that promotes the apolitical unreality of the normal consumer world. Mining gas (mine gas) in this book becomes a picture of the propelling gas that accumulates, the gas we cannot see, smell or feel, but which unfolds before our eyes, to end just around the corner in a violent explosion.
ac.mpp@cbs.dk
