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ONTHEIMAGE.COM

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

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TheImageOutofHistory:BenRussellsLet Each
One Go Where He May and Cultural Memory
Giles Simon Fielke, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract: BenRussellsfilmLetEachOneGoWhereHeMay(2009)maynotatfirstappeartorecallGermancultural
theorist Aby Warburgs idiosyncratic image organisation, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1926-29). However, their
investigations into the image and into gesture as it acts upon language draws the two works together. Considering the
emergentmethodologyofculturalmemory,ananalysisofRussellsrecentfilminthispaperarguesthatthefilmsimages
appearoutofhistoryinsuchawaythatitallowsfor a reflection upon contemporary notions of historiality, particularly
as examined by Bernard Stiegler in his ongoing Technics and Time project. The phenomenological experience of the
discrete image, out of time, in the theatrical site of the cinema, is a question both of contemporaneity, in the sense of
being oriented alongside of time, and of the efficacy of the image as the basis for any historical project. The Warburgian
paradigm that recalls the Western concept of memory, and the science of culture (Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft)
allows for a critique of modern theories of the image, and art histories that seek to abbreviate the image for translation
intotext.ItistheresistanceofbothWarburgandRussellsworkstothisdominantnarrativeoftranslation, challenging
taxonomic distinctions, which posits new modes for the archiving of visual concepts.
Keywords: Art History, Cinema, Movement, Gesture, Historiality

wo figures set the trajectory of Ben Russells 2009 feature-length experiment in cineethnography, Let Each One Go Where He May.1 A shared path unites the brothers journey
upstream of the Suriname river system, from central Parimaribo to more isolated
communities at the fringes of the small South American country. There is evidence throughout
the films more than two hours that the characters have been instructed to, or have agreed not to
talk in the films thirteen long-take sequences the only access we have to the figures of the
work is through their coordinated gestures. The paths taken by the brothers are the same as those
walked every day by these descendants of the Dutch colonies, first made by those who had
escaped their slavery by heading into the remote jungle.
Given this initial revelation, the question implied is a metaphorical reflection upon the oft
considered relationship between memory and history.2 Memory here, or more precisely artificial
or assisted memory, is perhaps a perfunctory definition of all art, but it positions my approach
from the dual perspectives of technics and poeses. First of all: is there is a possibility that this
pairing is similar to the transduction and economy linking gesture and language? To consider
where these resulting productions could effectively take place is the aim of this paper. For these
two concerns, two techniques employed by two distinct but resonant approaches are considered
as illuminating examples of what is termedtheimageoutofhistory. By understanding gesture
as theothersideoflanguage,itis argued that gesture is resistant to that which privileges the
literate form, namely history. As such, essential to the concept of historiality the figures of
experience drawn from and by history in the age of increasingly privileged speed (light-time),
is the technical inscription of the gesture.3 Tied to the concept of cultural memory like writing

Ben Russell, 2009. Let Each One Go Where He May.16mm,colour,sound,135.

Foronerecentexample,seePeterOsbornesAnywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, the latest study,
to my knowledge, that takes as its question long-running concerns for the role art criticism plays in the politics of history.
Thisisaquestion,Osbornewrites,thatgoestotheheartofthinkingaboutcontemporaryart, the privileged object of art
criticism, not least because it concerns the historical, rather than the merely chronological determination of
contemporaneity.PeterOsborne,2013. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, p. 3.
3
Cf. Bernard Stiegler, 2010.Memory,Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 64-87.
2

The International Journal of the Image

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

is to history movement, in its handing down of meaning, is originary to the gesture that is
being, and is the base for all historical sediment.4
To these concerns two figures correspond: the film, above-mentioned, is a contemporary
example of an approach to image-making that resists an easy precipitation into semiotic
readability it is an example of an anti-narrative film about otherness. It offers an awareness of
cultural memory as against an event-led history. This emergent image-practice has a relevant
precursor and example intheGermanculturalhistorianAbyWarburgsresearch,inparticularhis
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne project, an atlas of images dedicated to memory.5 By investigating
expressive forces in the gestural specificity of the discrete image in history as orienting for
culturestrajectory,Warburgpresented,intheearlystagesofthe20th century and perhaps for the
first time, an iconology that suggested a gestural language, which posited transmissions he
called pathosformeln (pathos formulas).6 Russells Let Each One Go Where He May is a
contemporary instance of artistic work, suggesting what Warburg understood was an
international, indeed a universal language, founded in quietly moving representations an
artistic strategy that defers history, in the event of the cinema as invoking cultural memory.7
With Let Each One Go Where He May, Russell (b. 1976) attempts a cinema that presents
both a community of images and foregrounds memory through a medium in decline, cine-film,
perhaps now exhibitingitshistorical,indexicallegibility.8 As a American student of both the
experimental avant-garde and of post-colonialglobalism,Russellsworkstraddlesthedisciplines
of both.9 At the time of its festival debut critic Michael Sicinski compared Russells film to
Argentinian, LissandroAlonsosLa Libertad (2001), but besides the fact both films were shot in
South America and eschew the familiar style of cinematic narrative, they ultimately have little
else than their contemporaneity in common.10 The influence of the slow cinema of Chantal
AckermansDEst (1994) is discernable inRussellsfilm, as are other ethnographic documentary
strategies, and the medium refinements of structural cinema.11 By pursuing what may appear to
be a more idiosyncratic pairing of Let Each One Go Where He May withWarburgsMnemosyne
Bilderatlas, it is hoped an expansion and, as shall be seen, a redeployment of Russells initial
intentions for the film, will be achieved.
4
Cultural memory is here opposed to theories of communicative or collective memory as much as it is opposed to
history. Cultural memory is perhaps most visible as a technics, or tertiary memory. See Jan Assmann, 2011. Cultural
Memory and Western Civilisation: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p. 6; Bernard Stiegler, 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and
George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 4; pp. 140-1.
5
It is, as is the Warburg Institute, which has the word Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess and mother of the Muses,
inscribed above the entrance to the library.
6
Aby Warburg, Drer and Italian Antiquity (1905), in Aby Warburg, 1999. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:
Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, introduction by Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt.
Los Angeles: Getty Publications, p. 553.
7
Aby Warburg,Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in theAgeofLuther,(1920) in Warburg, 1999, p. 598.
8
Following Walter Benjamins identity of the image in the Arcades Convolute N3,1: this acceding to legibility
constitutesacriticalpointinthemovementattheirinteriorInotherwordsimageisdialecticsatastandstill.Walter
Benjamin, 1999. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; prepared on the basis of the German
volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 462-3.
9
Sven Lttickens recent study History In Motion, attempts to maintain an approach to the moving image through a
double notion of historicity. In this way it seeks to re-affirm historical narrative in a way that is fundamentally
antithetical to Russells proximity to Warburgian movement, which Ltticken counters with a more recently historical
theorisation of movement in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Sven Ltticken, 2013. History in Motion:
Time in the Age of the Moving Image. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 17-27.
10
Michael Sicinski, 2009. The Unbroken Path: Ben Russells Let Each One Go Where He May, Cinema Scope,
http://cinema-scope.com/spotlight/spotlight-the-unbroken-path-ben-russells-let-each-one-go-where-he-may/,
accessed
April 2, 2014.
11
For example the documentary-anthropology films made by Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty and Jean Rouch, in the
earlier part of the 20th century, alongside formal experiments such as those made by Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton
inthe1960sand70s.SeeBrianWinston, 1995. Claiming the Real: The Grierson Documentary and its Legitimations
London: B.F.I.; P. Adams Sitney, 1971. Film Culture Reader: An Anthology, edited and with and Introduction by P.
Adams Sitney. London: Secker & Warburg.

FIELKE: THE IMAGE OUT OF HISTORY

Memory
Warburgs method for the Image-atlas (1926-9), was the planned final form of his life-long
research into the cultural history of the West and antiquity, consisting of an elaborate selection of
images with only marginal recourse to textual supplementation. As a particularly efficient
example of how one might go about allowing for an extension beyond the reduction of what
essentially remains a discourse on the visible, Warburgs Atlas points to the site of the image in
its particular relation to memory as a technique, and therefore to experience what has been
termed thesemanticvoidoftheimage.12 Itappears,unfinishedatthetimeofWarburgsdeath
in 1929, as a collection of over 1000 photographic reproductions that seem to float within the 79
black panels they are grouped and tacked upon. With its clusters of themed antique motifs, the
appearance of contemporary images crowd formations, golfers and advertising stand out in
plain relief against the millennial artworks depicting gods and other lasting figures.13 Warburgs
part-montage strategy is important here. As a tactic the almost or pre-montage quality of the
works evolving configurations reveal the montage potential as one of selection and distinction
operating within a dissonance and anachronism between the photographic image-events.
Philippe-Alain Michaud has investigated the coterminous development of the cinematic form to
Warburgs own studies into the continuing influence of antiquity within modernity.14 Most
importantly, this study conflates the camera and the cinema, as a room, or site: differing only as
two in-stances one before or behind, the other within a kind of holy trinity of image
production that emerges from the industrial revolution.15 This approach to the image poses a
contrast to the often overly positivist iconographies and histories that result from textual
abbreviations. CounteredbyWarburgsAtlas, the emphasis on the recording of expression in the
work foregrounds a complex history of the gesture. These visual expressions of human
experience Warburgconceivedasecstaticproductions,engramsofmemory.16
LeavingWarburgsAtlas for the moment, the idea that gesture is indispensable to language
follows Andre Leroi-Gourhans influential anthropological study, Gesture and Speech (19645).17 The second volume of which, Rhythm and Memory, suggests the temporal character of
our ability to retain information as a technical tendency we call memory. This study, so
influential upon subsequent 20th century theory, continues today, drawn upon here from the more
recent examination of the work by contemporary theorist Bernard Stiegler. Given the expanded
place we may afford the Warburgian camera / room / or theatre, the cinema, as a tertiary
memory apparatus, also follows Stieglers emphasis on mans technical distinction (Stiegler,
1998). The cinema may then well be the productive zenith of Leroi-Gourhans notion of a
curtainofobjects,appearingtorepresentacorrespondinglylucidcontemporary organisation of
12
Giorgio Agamben, 2011. Nymphs, Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and
Robert Mitchell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 69.
13
See Aby Warburg, 2003. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Herausgegeben von Martin Warnke unter Mitarbeit von Claudia
Brink. Zweite, ergnzte Auflage. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
14
See Philippe-Alain Michaud, 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone
Books. At the end of his lecture on the zodiacal transmissions in the calendar room of Ferrara, Warburg likened his
method to catching the riddles of antiquity in the cinematographic spotlight. Aby Warburg, Italian Art and
International Astrology in the PalazzoSchifanoia,(1912) in Warburg, 1999, p. 585.
15
The thesaurus is perhaps the best literary trope here, or perhaps the stanza. There also resonates somewhat with Ariella
Azouleystripartitestructureforthephotographasapoliticalontology.SeeAriellaAzouley,2012. The Civil Contract of
Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 13-4.SeealsoHollisFramptonscommentsonthestrangetemporality
of the cinema, where the cinema is not even physically, there, before us, and where the spectators future is the
artistspast. HollisFrampton,1983.Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everythinginits Place, Circles of Confusion:
Film, Photography, Video Text 1968-80. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, pp. 154-5.
16
FollowingGermanbiologistRichardSemons1921text, Die Mneme and his idea of memory traces.SeeMatthew
Rampley, 2000. Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz
Verlag, p. 89.
17
Andr Leroi-Gourhan, 1993. Gesture and Speech (1964), trans. from the French by Anna Bostock Berger and
introduced by Randall White. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

inorganicmatter:thescreenasanexteriorisationofthemembraneofourtechnicalmediations
(cited in Stiegler, 1998, p. 57). This technical tendency is also exhibited in the movement
Warburg first diagnosed in his reppellant art historical response to the still grandeur of classical
aesthetics.18 This does not only work alongside the mechanical exploitation of the persistence of
vision employed by the cinema, however: it is the place of empathic productions in the art work
which requires its particular emphasis. Frances Yates, who published The Art of Memory in 1966
(contemporaneous with Leroi-Gourhansstudy),hintedatthispotential, when she recovered how
the survivals of classical memory treatises suggested moving, stirring, images as of fundamental
importance totheartificialmemoryforovertwomillennia.ByfollowingWarburgsearlierwork
in the field, Yates uncovered the conflation necessary to the art of memory and externalised
images.19 Moving in their pathos, as much as in their literal mechanism, there are therefore,
memorial antecedents for the cinematic image that operate across a longer duration of history
than merely industrial modernity.

Historiality
Let Each One Go Where He May, a completely realised work in so far as it stands alone in
Russells developing oeuvre, is premised upon the tensions between history, memory and
forgetting in its engagement with a post-coloniallyglobalcommunitylivingontheperipheryof
the developed world. Russells earlier experimental short films (for example the Trypps series
and his remake of the germinal Workers leaving the Factory20) had developed a complex
understandingofthecinemascomplexphenomenologicalrelationshiptoexperienceandhistory.
In his first feature-length work, the descendants of an enslaved people from Africa, whose
complex cultural identities, effaced by time, are shown through the quiet existence of their
casual, everyday gestures in contemporary time. It is upon the particular formulation out of
history that this work uses these images to represent the challenges faced by the medium of
film specifically, as not unlike those marginalised by the dominant discourses of cultural identity.
FollowingRussellsdoublelogic, which for him founds the very idea of the cinema, the images
maybothrefertotheworldbutalsoconstituteaworlduntothemselves,theworktranscends
moreclassicallymodernistposturesinitsawarenessofmodernismshistoricalepochality.21
The film itself is anchored by a voice recording from outside, which it begins with, creating
an aural, environmental entrance to frame the images, not the other way around. Importantly, it is
not an inter-title that first appears as an epigraph upon the screen, but phrase by phrase, the
translation of the words spoken eventually reveal the films title: let each one go where he
may the only stable linguistic signification scripted for the entire film. The date of the
epigraph posits the year 1978, but we hear the words spoken in real time and suspect the
arbitrariness of its historical deployment: in the cinema, in Saramaccan a local dialect of
Suriname, a country situated on the northern coast of South America that exists today,
precariously maintaining, amongst other, the culture of a people marooned in history.22
Following this initial diachronic complex, a deliberate anachronism, seemingly simple
diegeticsoundisemployedfortheremainderofthefilms135minutes.By calling on structural
SeeWarburgsthesisSandroBotticellisBirth of Venus and Spring (1893),inWarburg, 1999, pp. 89-156.
Francis Yates, 1992. The Art of Memory (1966). London: Pimlico. See Giles Fielke,2013.Conflation and the Art of
Memory: Frances Yates, Hermetism, and the Memory Theatres of GiulioCamilloandRobertFludd, Genre, Affect and
Authority in Early Modern Europe conference. Melbourne: The University of Melbourne, July 2013. Publication
forthcoming.
20
Ben Russell, 2005 10. Trypps 1 7, dimensions variable; Ben Russell, 2008. Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai).
16mm,colour,silent,7.
21
Ben Russell, 2010. Cinema Is Not The World, incite: journal of experimental media, 2 (Spring-Fall, 2010),
http://www.incite-online.net/russell2.html, accessed October 16, 2013.
22
ThequoteisfromanoralhistoryoftheAbasas,citedunderthetitleTheEscape,andreferstotherebellionagainst
17th century Dutch slave colony, in Richard Price, 2002. First Time: the historical vision of an African American people
(1983). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 71.
18
19

FIELKE: THE IMAGE OUT OF HISTORY

elements for a work that also nominates cine-ethnography and documentary tropes as its strategy
for visibility, the work at once places itself between the institutional categories of modern art and
anthropology. The length of each shot, for example, seems to have been defined by the
standardized 400ft roles of film equating to each of the 13 ten minute scenes. It is by revealing
the structural edges of the filmic apparatus, as Russell does, that the work asks of us to recognise
the limits of these discrete images in an attempt at what filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky suggests
stages thefullenergyofthepresent.23 The image made, out of history, stands therefore, before
it.
In the year Russells film debuted, historian Tom Gunning made a curious presentation
regarding the older experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. Reviewing a republication of the
lateartistswriting,hesays:[Frampton]neverabandonstemporalityforsometimelessPlatonic
perspective, but he does indeed pull himself out of the linear and unidirectional narrative
commonly known as history. His work cannot, of course, exist outside of time or history.
Inasmuchastheseconstitutetheverycentreofbothhisfilmsandhiswritings.24 This, I would
argue, is the historial element of phenomenal filmmaking that continues in the works of
filmmaker-artists like Russell today. The modern tendency to both speed and delay is
constitutive of theworks.Beingishistorial,Stieglerwrites,initiallyparaphrasingHeideggerian
phenomenology, and the history of being is nothing but its inscription in technicity.25 In
Russellsfilm,thishistorialbeing,awareofitsplaceinthechronologyofcinema,managestobe
both: outside of time and out of history, the film takes its place alongside, or with, the
cinema in a contemporary instance of viewing. Unlike exhibited structural films before it, which
so often required your transfixion, solongasyougettheideaorconceptofthework,Russells
is a film which reaches as close to the ongoing doubling of real time, without repetition, as it
possibly can.26
The image pro-ducing historyshows its time as outside of time. The images also appear
outofhistoryduetotheirrefusaltoofferinitiallyrecognisablehistoricalsignifiers: stable dates,
narrative effects, image/counter-image montages. The on-screen gestures of the films two
primary figures, are mirrored by that behind them, the camera-work of Chris Fawcett (who
skillfully operated the steady-cam), literally carrying the film, the viewer, through time, now
outside of time. It is the attempt at this silently complex and anachronistic time that is
immediately challenged however, straight after its premier screening at the Toronto Film
Festival. The images are made by thefilmoutofhistory,butatoncetheyre-make it, as is clear
fromRussellsanswertothefirst,mostobviousQ&Ainquirer:
Right, where was I? That is even one of the questions where does this film even take
place? What is the culture? Where is this place? What is its geography ? I know all of
these answers, but whats really exciting for me as a filmmaker is setting up a

23

Nathaniel Dorsky, 2003. Devotional Cinema. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, p. 21-2.
Tom Gunning, 2009.FramptonComesAlive!(Review),Artforum (April 2009), p. 54.
25
Stiegler, 1998. p.4.Further,inthesecondvolumeofhisstudyheposits:Historialitymeansconnectiontothealreadythere as the past: as anticipation after the already-there, as facticity within being-toward-the-endinwhichbeing-there is
itspast.Bernard Stiegler, 2009. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 41.
This is echoed in the double-nature inherent to the film medium: historiality can only be initiated as the epochal
redoubling of the already-therestechnological suspension, which is also the only means of access to the already-there.
Deferred time, [also deferred action the Freudian nachtraglichkeit] essential to orthothetic contextuality as constituted
by orthography, furnishes what the Occident will callknowledge.(Stiegler,2009,p.60) Knowledge then, according to
Stiegler, is suspended in technics.
26
In this way it is infinitely different and more easily viewed than, say, Michael Snows important structural and
rhythmic work, Wavelength. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 16mm, colour, sound,44,1967.
24

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

propositioninwhichtheaudiencedoesntknowand,insomesense,isforcedtoaddress
their own assumptions about culture, location, and place.27
He must acquiesce, however, revealing what has been described already above: that the
brothers depicted follow a path taken by their ancestors to escape their Dutch slavemasters, it has
since been in use for over 300 years. This path describes the films historiality: a reciprocal
technique: organizing the film as cultural memory, as cultural memory supplies history with its
substance. History of course, is memory (as memory becomes history). Stieglers reading of
Leroi-Gourhan, that:technicsdoesnotaidmemory:itis memory,originarilyassisted,28 shows
how for Stiegler, history is just one apparatus of memory that is most readily demonstrated by its
literal orthothetic recording. Made available to us by creating tertiary memory objects, beyond
lived communications, the affront to history here however, is the analogue and real-time
recording capacity technology of the camera as leveling with the persistence of vision and sound
in perception. This doubling of reality may both orient and disorient history in light-time.
This approach to the work is a contemporary paradigm that younger artists such as Russell
understand well. It is the reflection upon the history of their productions, as a way of
encapsulating, of folding-in the history of their work, that at the same time transcends it.
Unacknowledged in Stieglers study is the precedent Warburg had set for addressing this
potentiality in the 20th century. The historial, in the gestural specificity of the cinema also
corresponds to a particularly lucid formulation by the thoroughly Warburgian, contemporary arthistorian Georges Didi-Huberman,towhathecalls,thealterationeffectedbyimagesthemselves
on historical knowledge built on images.29 Pointing to this interminable entwining of these
productions, it appears the image is always the image of an image.30

Movement
To orient history in language, like time, requires its outside, a gesture, dwelling in the ineffable
efficacyofimages.WarburgsAtlas is resistant to axiomatic knowledge, its selections reveal an
idiomatic and poetic potential in its maintenance of an interval between the site of the image and
history from the side of the works contents. Concerned with the distance, or deferral necessary
to legibility, a movement is required, the role of technical memory.
This semantic gap Warburg obsessed over the images hesitationbefore signification
identifies an interminable activity. The present capacity of the image to act before historical
organisationinWarburgs thought to see movement in the static is an important paradigm
through which more contemporary productions such as Russells are made possible.31 In the
cinema as the camera a technical externalisation of memory becomes the very site for the
displacementoftheimage,selectedfromthean-archiveofsurvivals pointing to what is prior
to categorisation. Cultural memory could be understood here as identical with the after-life or
spectrality of images, held in their material form.32 WarburgsAtlas nominates in this place a gap
27
Ben Russell cited in Livia Bloom, 2009.ParticipatoryEthnography TorontosWavelengths3: Let Each One Go
Where He May, 15th September 2009, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2009/09/participatory-ethnography--torontos-wavelengths-3-let-each-one-go-where-he-may/, cited 5 July 2012.
28
what[Leroi-Gourhan] terms,retentionalfinitude.Stiegler,2009,p.65.
29
Georges Didi-Huberman, 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends Of A Certain History Of Art, trans, John
Goodman. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. xxi.
30
Cf. Nicholas Heron (forthcoming). Iconophilia: The Image of the Image, Emaj, 8 (November, 2014), forthcoming,
Melbourne: http://emajartjournal.com/.
31
Cf. Didi-Huberman, who takes up this Warburgian tendency to dislodgehistoricalspecificity,writing:Thehistoryof
images is a history of objects that are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined. Georges Didi-Huberman, 2003.
Before the Image, Before Time: TheSovereigntyofAnachronism, trans. Peter Mason, Compelling Visuality: The Work
of Art In and Out of History, eds. Claire J. Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
p. 44.
32
Cf. http://www.anarchive.net/, which points to a program for recognising the disorganisation of an overblown historical
archive. Accessed September 24, 2013.

FIELKE: THE IMAGE OUT OF HISTORY

that must maintain a necessary distance for an image to be efficacious, a gesture enabling
orientation.
In the cinema, LetEachOneGoWhereHeMays sense of immediacy is carefully deployed
through the careful selections Russell has made, any de-distancing is displaced by the artists
care for the public reception of the images. We find traces of this orientation in the empathic
communications made between the films mythologised figures and the camera. This is not
achieved throughaparticularactivitybutratheragesturalsympathybetweentheaudienceinthe
laborofforgetting,33 with the routinised labor of the figures in the screen. Coordination occurs
here in these reciprocal poses, producing cardinal orientations, eschewing narrative linearity. The
filmslongsequences there is only one camera and twelve straight cuts used for its thirteen
scenes depict marginalised labour, washing, mining, climactic rituals, traversing landscapes in
use, all the while incorporating the presence of the camera and its labour circles of confusion
flare across the lens. At the end of the film we are left with the soundless images of the
cooperative navigation of the environment on a river by the brothers (our Epimetheus and
Prometheus). Exposed to the duration of this process, these images take on a particularly ghostly
quality for the observers, who remains within the camera, following these silent figures who
command recognition in their mute resistance.
During an early sequence that depicts the interior of a bus ride, we wonder whether the
silence of the commuters is due to the presence of the camera, or if the early morning monotony
often signalling another day of work in local centres is no different here than it is to the arteries
of the major metropolis. Walking down the bustling morning street of Surinames capital,
Paramaribo, no-one seems to mind the camera that drifts through the street, following and
eventually losing one of the brothers in the mass this is nothing like William Egglestons
Stranded in Canton, however.34 The incursion of the camera is not at all an unknown entity here,
but an everyday experience, a normalised co-operation with the global media environment
alongside automobiles and advertisements for Heineken. In a certain sense this sequence recalls
StandishLawdersbrutallysimpleexperimentalfilmNecrology (1970).35 The films recognition
of its medium-determinacy, its recognition of the radical potential these discrete images serve as
analogues, simultaneously subverts any claim to the analogue, what for Russell is the cinema that
both refers to the world but also constitutes a world (Russell, 2010). Russell tests this form,
rather than adopting its spectacular, or attractive, modes of deployment. His minimal use of
montagehighlightsthisstrategy,itattemptstobreakwiththemostbasicelementoftheform
itself.36
The camera then, as the present location for the film both its audience and those subject to
its gaze, those captive in the exchange is the constructed location that bears out the thought of
movement. It can be both static, as it is initially, and following working on thefilmsmain
subjects, the brothers Monie and Benjen Pansa. What this mechanical feature of the cameras
movement demonstrates at times following and at others preceding and looking back-upon its
subjects, while following its own particular path is the impossibility of the historical
documentationofaculturalmemory,itmerely gesturesbacktothespectator. This revelation
of a semantic gap doubles the gesture, creating its in-between, oscillating as Warburgs unpolarised image.
Gesture, according to philosopherGiorgioAgamben,exhibitsthepuremedialityofpeople,
a politics of representation must begin therefore with movement. Correspondingly, Stieglers
desire for a politics of memory in its present mode of industrialization suggests the image is that
33
Jeff Wall cited in Michael Fried, 2008. Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before. New York: Yale University
Press, p. 12.
34
Stranded In Canton wasanearlyvideoworkthatwasshotonaPortapak,whilemanyofEgglestonsfriendscontinued
on around him, bemused by the arrival of a portable video recorder they were perhaps unaware of its penetration into
their social circle. See William Eggleston, 1973. Stranded In Canton, Sony PortaPak video, black and white,76.
35
Standish Lawdor, 1969. Necrology, 16mm,blackandwhite,12.
36
Inanexpandedsenseofmontage,thereareevennowallsorinteriorsemployed,thefilmisalwaysoutside.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

which is followed by and follows history, as that which is recorded. Oscillating in the gesture, the
resistance that effects an ecstatic communication, is memory in its technical potentiality, as not
recalled. With the cinema as figuring the temporal mediation of memory, gesture, Agamben
writes, is the site of the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankinds very
capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language.37 This speechless language
apprehends memory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty formulated this thought in way that also implicates
the necessity of movement. Language, he says, bears the meaning of thought as a footprint
signifiesthemovementandeffortofabody.38 To think the image as language, the gesture must
make an impression. This inscription is that which is written by the body itself, and retains a
memory of its passing. The cine-film can collect this passing without monumentalising its
characters. It can record and represent any form of life.
Many have placedWarburgsresearchalongsidetheemergenceofcinema.Itisnothardto
trust this intuition, however it is worth reconsidering just what Warburgs research of partmontage can offer to this form of art, given its contemporary declension. It is not a
characterisation by kind, or even by likeness that founds this proximity, it is at its core a complex
notion of movement, present from Warburgs originary art historical thesis, of stirring and
oscillating, memorial and technical survivals. Ernst Gombrichs diagnostic classification of
Warburgsfundamentalproblemcould perhaps be posited another way: intheimagesrefusal
toset,39 gesturesspeechlesslanguageinflictsacorporealproductionintheartwork.Memorys
reflection, out of history, is an after-life that becomes historical. Let Each One Go Where He
May, like Warburgs moving images, remind us that without gesture, history is without a
language. A language here established by cultural memory.

Acknowledgement
This article was developed from my honours year thesis at the University of Melbourne,
supervised by Felicity Harley-McGowan. I would like to thank her for her comments and
guidance throughout the writing process. I am also indebted to Francis Plagne for his editorial
suggestions and Madeleine Martiniello for reading the final versions of this paper.

37
Giorgio Agamben, 1999. Kommerell, or On Gesture, Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy, ed. and trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 78.
38
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1964.Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, in Signs, trans. with an introduction by
Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, p. 44.
39
Ernst Gombrich, 1970. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London: The Warburg Institute and University of
London, p. 6. Gombrichs identification of the very problem Warburgs approach suffered, which in fact reveals
Warburgsantithesistothearthistoricaldirection, represented by Erwin Panofksy, towards a more positive epistemology
and subsequently developed in his wake.

FIELKE: THE IMAGE OUT OF HISTORY

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giles Simon Fielke: PhD Candidate, Art History Department, School of Culture and
Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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