Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinsky’s “Indirect” | Jonathan Rosenbaum

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6/1/14, 12:mbiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect | Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect

From the September-October 1995 issue ofFilm Comment. I should stress that this

essay is very much out of date once one starts to consider Cozarinskys prolific

subsequent career as both a writer and a filmmaker although Ive anachronisticallyincluded a few recent book covers and film posters as illustrations, as well as a poster

and two stills from his most commercially successful film to date, the 2005Ronda

Nocturna, known in English asNight Watch, in part to help make up for the

impossibility of finding stills for some of the rarer films of his discussed here.

Let me also quote myReader capsule review ofNight Watch: With a few

exceptions, I prefer the literature of Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinean based

mainly in Paris, to his films, and his nonfiction in both realms to his fiction. But this

poetic, atmospheric drama, shot in Buenos Aires, challenged my bias, mixing the

natural and the supernatural, the cinematic and the literary, with such assurance tha

Cozarinsky no longer seems like a divided artist. Following a teenage street hustler

through the night of All Saints Day, he turns a documentary about his hometown and

its street life into a haunting piece of magical realism. (The original title,Ronda

Nocturna, translates more accurately asNocturnal Rounds.) In Spanish withsubtitles. 82 min.I should add that Cozarinsky a friend since he moved to Paris in

the early 1970s spends much more of his time nowadays in Buenos Aires. His most

recent film, which I saw at the Viennale this fall, both fascinating and haunting, is

Notes for an Imaginary Biography[see first photo below], an hour-long montag

composed of outtakes from many of his previous films. J.R.


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Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinskys Cinema Indirect

Critic and artist, filmmaker and writer, storyteller and essayist, Edgardo Cozarinsky is a

Paris-based Argentinean probably best known in this country for his film La guerre

dun seul homme(One Mans War, 1981) and his books Borges in/and/on Film

(1988) and Urban Voodoo(1990). A cursory account of these works would describe

the first as a documentary, the second as criticism (by Borges as well as Cozarinsky), anthe third as fiction; but a closer look, particularly at the first and third, suggests that

things are rarely quite that simple in Cozarinskys oeuvre. Working with documentary

materials French Occupation newsreels and passages from the diaries of Ernst

Jnger, a German officer posted in Paris over the same period One Mans War
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places itself somewhere between essay and fiction, whereas Urban Voodoo, described

by Susan Sontag in her introduction as an album of postcards made of words only,

consists of semiautobiographical narratives interspersed with quotations from other

writers, and might be said to breathe in a similarly ambiguous netherworld.
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Born in Buenos Aires on January 13, 1939, Cozarinsky made his first film there, the not

easily-categorizable(Dot Dot Dot, 1971), before moving to Paris more or less

permanently three years later. Since then, broadly speaking, his fiction features Les

Apprentis sorciers(The Sorcerors Apprentices, 1977, see photo above), Haute

mer (High Seas, 1984), and Guerriers et Captives(Warriors and Captives,

1989) have rubbed shoulders with a dozen documentaries or essays on film or video.

His most recent is Citizen Langlois (1995), about the French Cinmathques Henri

Langlois.
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The following article, written for a [then-] comprehensive retrospective of Cozarinskys

work curated by Danile Hibon for Pariss Jeu de Paumes in spring 1993, cant claim to

be exhaustive; it was written after seeing only seven of Cozarinskys films, some of them

many years apart. (I later saw The Sorcerors Apprentices at the retrospectiveitself.)At best it should be regarded as an interim reporton the work of a filmmaker

whose methodsshould be read as a series of strategies for dealing with both marginalit

and exile in relation to genres and forms as well as languages and countries.

1

Where all possibilities are plausible, perhaps none is true?

Around me, private history and public history cross each other without meeting.

Edgardo Cozarinsky,Boulevards du crpescule

Apart from a brief summary of Ernst Jngers life and career up to 1940 (when he was

posted as an army officer in Paris), the first section heading, 1. Andante con moto, an
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central to his ethnographic films many of which unabashedly incorporate elements o

fiction - in his only pure fiction film,Le Gare du Nord[see photo below], his

contribution to the 1964 sketch film Paris vu par) And as the Mythologies of

Roland Barthes (among related enterprises) remind us, news and documentary can

all too easily cloak their myths their ideologies and other unstated suppositions -

behind related signifiers of actuality.

From this point of view, the newsreel footage and the diary entries that rub shoulders in

One Mans Warare two forms of self-justifying fiction, and the motivation for

juxtaposing them is the desire to bear witness to the real sources and provocations

they have in common. Like the multiplication of two minus signs yielding a plus, this

multiplication of two fictions yields a common concealed space that each fiction strives

to rationalize and domesticate. Cinema indirect becomes the means for bringing this

concealed space to light.

Like the deliberately artificial and unstable spaces created between Paris and Buenos
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Aires in much of Cozarinskys work, between fiction and nonfiction, between literature

and cinema, between postcards and quotations, between native tongue and exile

tongue, and ultimately between politics and art, this cinema indirect is quite literally

founded on a theoretical impossible space - a realm of intervals, of in- betweenness,

paradoxically defined by its own conscious marginality and lack of definition. Its only

certainty, one might say, is a complete absence of certainty.

As Richard Porton has noted of One Mans War:

A currently fashionable tenet advocates the view that history can only be evaluated

within a textual framework, but this film moves beyond that by-now moldy truism to

demonstrate the instability and outright mendaciousness of textual evidence. The

newsreel sources are fascinating relics of societal bad faith, and this gargantuanexercise in self-deception is mirrored in the diary entries of Jnger that provide the

films ectoplasmic voice-over narration. (As Thomas Elsaesser remarks, the film is

interesting precisely because we know less after watching it than we did before.)

One reason why we know less is that even the satisfaction of being told a linear narrativ

is disrupted. Although the film begins with Jngers early days in France and ends with

the Liberation of Paris, the achronological arrangement of many of the diary entries thafigures in between confounds any possible sense of progression or development in his

thought. (In some segments, the entries even proceed backwards: in one portion devote

to 1941, we move from December to October to June to January.) And the nature of

Cozarinskys mosaic structure of both text and newsreel material, not to mention his

juxtaposition of the two - counteracted in turn by his disjunctive uses of Aryan (Han

Pfitzner, Richard Strauss) and degenerate (Arnold Schnberg, Franz Schreker)

musical accompaniment, and his division of the film into four chapters marked bymusical indications - compels us to regard the film-as-a-whole as an abstract

composition at least as much as a collection of documents. Thanks to these strategies, a

the film advances, our awareness of what it leaves out and refuses to say becomes every

bit as important as what it includes; it is in all the unstable spaces between Cozarinsky


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elements (newsreels, diary entries, music, punctuations of black leader) that his darkes

and truest meanings take shape.

2

Over the most pedestrian images of Buenos Airesthe commentary speaks of Calcutta

and a 30s dance band plays a Russian song. The commentary is delivered in the fake

Spanish of Fitzpatrick travelogues distributed in Latin America; behind that, one can

make out a fake English, a made in Hollywood Hindu.

from a sequence-by-sequence description of(my translation from the French)

It surely isnt by chance that Cozarinskys first film, made in Argentina, is named after

an ellipsis. Le regard de loutsider (The Gaze of the Outsider), the title given to his

brief critical study in Cahiers du cinmaof the role of ellipsis in Lubitsch an articl
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that begins suggestively by citing the careful reading of dirty dinner dishes by Lady

Barkers servants inAngel in order to intuit the precise mental states of the diners they

are serving - is an expression reflecting the particular and central roles of ellipsis and

synecdoche found in his own work. Not having seen for roughly two decades, I would

be incautious in attempting any detailed analysis of this independent, underground

feature, but one general observation about its structure seems worth making. Like

Godards 1+1, MakavejevsWR: Mysteries of the Organism[see photo below], and

Mark Rappaports Casual Relations among many other characteristic works of

roughly the same period Its overall method is to juxtapose disparate texts and

discourses rather than attempt to synthesize them. These texts and discourses, one

might add, are ones in which fiction and nonfiction are accorded an equivalent and

perhaps even interchangeable status an attitude that is to recur often in Cozarinskyssubsequent work, in film as well as in prose. (Admittedly, most of the films 17 sequenc

are devoted to an episodic narrative involving the same nameless male protagonist; but

if memory serves, the overall effect of the films breakdown into discrete sequences is

still largely one of gaps and discontinuity.)

This method of dealing with cultural and textual overload a specific legacy of the

political, philosophical, sexual, and artistic upheavals of the Sixties, perhaps best
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exemplified in the Sixties films of Godard invariably evokes some notion of synthesis

and praxis while simultaneously acknowledging the absence of any single unifying

system that might bring about such a fulfillment. This articulated impasse is reflected i

the very titles of these films, which refer to simple addition, mysteries, casual

relationsand, finally, intervals, the spaces in between. (Significantly, the use of black

leader as a form of cinematic punctuation an important element in One Mans War

was first becoming widespread during this period.)

Eighteen and 21 years later, after two decades of political exile, Cozarinskys two

Argentinean homecoming films,Warriors and Captives(1989) and Sunset

Boulevards(1992) are both concerned with the emigration of French citizens to

Argentina, thus comprising a precise reversal and mirror-image of Cozarinskys own

emigration and exile. This is explicitly acknowledged in Boulevards not only in sho

moving from the Eiffel Tower to a sign indicating Rue Buenos Ayres and, conversely,

from the Argentine mtro stop to the Arc de Triomphe, but also in Cozarinskys own

offscreen narration:

I went looking for traces of Falconetti and Le Vigan. What were they looking for so fa

away? Perhaps, very simply, they were chasing the most obstinate of mirages, trying

to start over at zero. The same thing that pushed me to make the opposite voyage. As

young man, I dreamt of living in Paris. Today in Paris, I think of the city of my
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adolescencethe cinemas which have now disappeared, where I learned to recognize

another world full of promises.Today the only films which make me dream are thos

I want to make.

On the other hand, as the deconstruction of a Buenos Aires travelogue in , describe

above, suggests, Argentina was already somewhere else for Cozarinsky, even before h

became a literal exile a cultural melting pot, as it already was for Borges, of European

and North American as well as more indigenous South American elements. Like much
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But these transactions are mainly dealt with thematically rather than formally, apart

from the bilingual dialogue and the generic references. As in Cozarinskys two other

fiction features, The Sorcerers Apprenticesand High Seas, the task of telling a

story with actors and mise en scne, which entails the viewers suspensuion of disbeliefon some level, necessarily obliges one to suspend part of the radical questioning of

documentary authenticity that lies at the heart of his more essayistic features. (It might

be added that Cozarinsky is on the whole more comfortable in dealing with texts than

with actors, as some of the awkward performances in both films suggest. One reason,
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perhaps, whyWarriors and Captives suffers less in this respect is that Sanda and

Caron are both partially used astexts that is, bearing the freight of their previous

screen appearances.) Clearly Cozarinsky is himself aware of this problem, as his recour

to certain documentary materials and methods in both of these European features

suggests.

In High Seas, indeed, it appears to be actuality itself that produces the need for fantas

Im thinking not only of the newsreel images of paratroopers that appear at the

beginning of the film and recur later, but even more of the literal assault of the news on

the protagonist, a Swiss insurance salesman named Eric Lint (Andrzej Seweryn)

vacationing with his wife in Rotterdam: the radio bulletins and the newspaper headline

about the CIA, the KGB, France to Arm Chad Against Libya Threat, and so on, all of

which distract him from his wifes chatter and seem to create a whirlpool of torment th
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The second homecoming film, Boulevards du crpescule, is a personal essay,

though one whose gaps and occasional ambiguities suggest at times some of the
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procedures of fiction. The films subtitle

on Falconetti, Le Vigan and a few others

in Argentina

accurately describes its subject. Yet the ellipsis of three periods, appearing on the

screen in a separate line between a few others and in Argentina, almost subliminally

introduces a sense of indeterminacy at the same time that it evokes, appropriately, the

title of Cozarinskys first film, where the rudiments of this indeterminacy are already

established.

The key historical event of Boulevards, the mirror-image (or reverse-angle) of the

event concluding One Mans War, is the celebration of the liberation of Paris onAugust 24, 1944, in Buenos Aires Plaza Francia. The event is first evoked in the film by

Adolfo Bioy Casares, then by Gloria Acorta, then by Cozarinsky himself, who notes othe

events occurring on the same day, including a performance by Falconetti in The

Childrens Carnival at the Casa del Teatro. But it isnt until roughly halfway through the
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film, after the same celebration is recalled by Andre Tainsy, another actress who knew

Falconetti in Buenos Aires, that Cozarinsky incidentally reveals that he too was present

at the same event: Hanging onto the hands of my parents, I did not understand people

joy, nor their relief. I heard singing in a tongue that I did not yet understand. Just

before he speaks these words offscreen, over the offscreen voices of Tainsy and Acorta

recalling the same event, we see Cozarinsky looking at an array of photographs spread

out on a table. When he arrives at his own memomy to complement theirs, the camera

moves forward to a boy in the crowd seen in one of the photographs a specific image

to go with his recollection. But is this boy in the photograph in fact Cozarinsky? We hav

no way of knowing, yet the fact that Cozarisnky immediately goes on to say,

Nevertheless, the child I was would grow up in a country seduced by some quite cheap

illusions, alerts us to the possibility that we have just been seduced by a cheap illusionourselves.

A little later on, after the films focus has shifted from Falconetti to Robert Le Vigan

another French actor who spent his last years in Argentina,in his case escaping from th

scorn and other repercussions of having been a Nazi collaborator Cozarisnky plays a

even more elaborate trick with his documentary materials. In the course of interviewin

the writer Nestor Tirri, a casual neighbor of Le Vigan in Tandil who is recalling his

fleeting impression of the man, the film suddenly cuts to footage of Le Vigan walking

through the woods in the same town, seen from behind. Then we see Cozarinsky himse

in front of the house in Tandil where Le Vigan lived for over fifteen years, interviewing

two of his former neighbors about their own recollections. In the midst of their replies,

he cuts to footage of Le Vigan at the same location, saying goodbye to his wife before

taking a short stroll, and the voices of Cozarisnky and the neighbors are allowed to run
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over part of this footage. Still later, the film includes an actual interview with Le Vigan

Tandil and then shows Cozarinsky visiting the gravesite of both Le Vigan and his wife.

From one point of view, this coexistence of past and present tenses in the same

locations is a standard documentary device. But to confess to a certain navit on my

own part, my initial assumption in viewing this film was that Cozarisnky had employed

an actor to play Le Vigan; it was only after I asked him about this that I discovered he

had drawn on an earlier television interview with Le Vigan that had never been shown.

Part of the significance of my error is simply the propensity of viewers to produce their

own images to correspond to events that are being recounted in films, regardless of

whether the films in question are documentary or fiction. Yet the passivity of the usual

film-viewing experience is such that if the film itself furnishes an image to replace the

imagined one, the viewer is likely to accept that replacement without protest, either

symbolically or literally. This is well illustrated by Cozarisnkys interview with two
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former French students of Le Vigan, both of them women, which is held in a former

Tandil movie theater that is now a discothque. Cozarisnky informs us at the beginning

of the interview that another former student of Le Vigan, the writer Jorge DiPaola,

would be joining us, and the point at which he appears in the balcony, when one of th

women below is describing to Cozarinsky Le Vigans plans to build a chicken coop, ther

is a brief moment or two when DiPaola becomes the figurative stand-in, or double, fo

Le Vigan himself.

Considering the degree to which Falconetti and Le Vigan are both presented to us as

lost figures, historically speaking formerly famous actors whose last years can only

be dealt with in fragmentary glimpses and impressions, mainly through the accounts of

people who knew them only slightly it is we, in any case, who have to furnish most of

the images, and the most that a documentary filmmaker can do in this process is to

guide us in this activity. Yet as my initial example demonstrates, Cozarinsky as a young

child in Plaza Francia on August 24, 1944 is every bit as inaccessible today, even to

Cozarinsky himself. Acknowledging such a mystery is, properly speaking, the point at

which his enterprise begins the moment of calculated reticence when cinema

indirect takes shape.
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_______________________________________________________

Footnote

*Significantly, Cozarinskys own study of gossip (Le rcit indfendable, published in

CommunicationsNo. 30, 1979) was developed under the tutelage of Barthes.

Film Comment, September-October 1995
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Ambiguous Evidence: Cozarinsky’s “Indirect” | Jonathan Rosenbaum

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