Manifestos in Action: Progression, Deviation and Lived Experience

Introduction:

This article has been developed to support a lecture/workshop hosted on 24th October 2017 at Concordia University, Department of Art History, for the class, Art and Its Changing Contexts: The Manifesto.

Despite the title only some of the examples mentioned in this essay are defined as manifestos. In order to make my argument I wish to also address methodologies and policies. Like a manifesto, they involve rules which are created with the intent of influencing behaviour in the future.

This article is split into three distinct sections. Firstly, the Hegelian Dialect will be unpacked to reveal how movements are connected despite their differences. Secondly, the disparity between the intent of an author and the real world application of a manifesto will be explored. As the poet Robert Burns wrote, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men often go awry.” Finally, attention shifts towards autoethnography, a useful method for documenting the application of a manifesto. I will mostly be using documentary examples to illustrate my points but this article also touches on politics, economics, fine art and fiction cinema.

PART 1 –  The Hegelian Dialectic

A dialectic describes a discourse between two or more people who hold different points of view about a subject while wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments. The Hegelian Dialect, although associated with the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was first attributed to Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus.

How it works: The dialectic is composed of stages of development. A thesis is proposed, a conceptual starting position. This gives rise to a reaction which forms into an antithesis. This position will either contradict or negate the thesis. If the tension between the thesis and antithesis resolved to produce a new position this would be a synthesis.

Using Chinese political history to demonstrate the Hegelian Dialectic:

Capitalism emerged in China in a way that was interlinked with the legacy of feudalism. There was a strong class structure which built on both heritage and personal wealth (thesis).  Marxist ideology spread to China leading to the formation of the Communist Party in 1921. They promoted the ideal of a classless society and criticized capitalism as a corrupting force (antithesis). In 1949 Mao Zedong led a successful revolution, establishing China as a communist state taking charge of all property and businesses. However, in the late 20th Century the impracticality of strict communist rule led to some Chinese citizens creating black markets. This led to small pockets of prosperity. In 2003 the leaders of the Communist Party of China amended their constitution to permit a degree of private enterprise. The result was a hybrid form of communist style capitalism (Synthesis).

Tracking the Hegelian Dialect in the methodologies and manifestos of documentary practice

It could be argued that documentary filmmaking developed as an antithesis to fiction film. While Hollywood produced forms of escapism, documentaries addressed “reality”.

John Grierson coined the term documentary, defining it as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. This definition helps us understand the agency of a director when crafting a documentary. Mark Cousins placed emphasis on the balance between creativity and actuality when he characterized documentary filmmakers as having to ‘co-direct with reality’.

The Dogme 95 manifesto is an example of how the tension between hollywood fiction (thesis) and the realism of documentary (antithesis) was resolved to form a synthesis. In 1995 Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg wrote and co-signed ‘vows of chastity’. Their goal was to purify fiction filmmaking by placing specific and strict limits on directors. Such chastity prompted circumstances that mirrored some of the limitations of documentary production and promoted a form of realism in fiction film. The Dogma group specifically rejected expensive and spectacular special effects, post-production modifications and other technological gimmickry. Instead they wanted emphasis to be placed on story and the performance of actors.

The Dogma 95 Vows of Chastity

1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Only movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut, or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur).
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now).
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.

Within documentary practice the pendulum swing from thesis to antithesis is visible. Bill Nichols, the eminent documentary theorist, identified distinct modes of documentary practice, each of which developed as a result of a particular time and context but also in response to previous modes. The majority of these modes developed without the explicit creation of manifestos, however each adear to distinct principles, rules or boundaries.

The table below is an overview of the modes of documentary practice according to Nichols:

The expository mode of documentary making (thesis) was developed in the 20s and remains to this day one of the more dominant modes. Optimised by what Nichols refers to as the ‘voice-of-God’ exposition, these films are structured around an informative and authoritative narrator who delivers a carefully written script over footage.

In the West a climate of liberation was fostered in the 1960s. In the context of social, political and sexual counterculture movements, figures of authority were being questioned. The two documentary modes which emerged in this decade, observational and participatory, represented a loss of faith in the authority of the narrator. In its place an emphasis fell on capturing footage that could speak for itself (antitheses). Another reason this shift happened at this time is because technology permitted it. All of a sudden cameras were portable, more affordable and were quiet enough to record synchronized sound.  

The observational mode, also known as fly-on-the-wall documentary, took influence from ethnography.  This is a qualitative research method used by anthropologists usually involving a process of embedding with a community for extended periods of time. Researchers aim to gain the trust of the community in order to get access and insight into how the community operates. An ethnographer may conduct their research in secret but generally this is not possible when creating a documentary. Ethnographic subjects range from small tribe communities, to psychiatric institutions and criminal gangs. The aspiration of observational documentarians is for the filmmaker to blend into the background and quietly film as the events unfold around them.

Asylum, directed by Peter Robinson (1972) was filmed over a period of 7 weeks while he was living at one of the controversial P.A. community houses in London. Psychiatrists, disillusioned with the medical establishment, lived with liberated patients, many of whom were schizophrenic. Each housemate had a say in the running of the community while sharing responsibility for their own wellbeing and that of their housemates.

In this clip we see a father of one resident visiting the house and struggling to let go of his preconception about what a young man’s priorities should be.

The Participatory Mode, also known as Cinéma Vérité (truth cinema), was characterised by the visible participation of the filmmakers in devised interview scenarios. Like the observational mode, narration was rejected. However, this mode occupied an antithetical position against observational documentary by negating the fly-on-the-wall metaphor. Several crew members and a camera can be quite disruptive and are more likely to capture spectacle rather than natural behaviour. Cinéma Vérité prompts filmmakers to be reflexive and expose the artificiality of a filmed scenario. Interviews were devised carefully before filming, often being planned in partnership with the subject of the interview. Cinéma Vérité nullifies the pretense of observed reality in film, instead capturing  authentic testimony.

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is an epic Cinéma Vérité documentary series in which survivors of the Holocaust are interviewed. Despite the fact Abraham Bomba had not worked as a barber for years he agreed to cut hair while describing his experience of shaving the heads of holocaust victims before they were gassed. This scenario powerfully links the subject and the audience to the topic being discussed. Bomba’s complicity in planning the interview permitted Lanzmann to press Bomba with difficult questions.

15 years after Shoah, Werner Herzog wrote his own antithetical manifesto, The Minnesota Declaration (1999) which explicitly debunked Cinéma Vérité.

This lyrical 12 point manifesto is at times hard to digest but I believe it’s essence emerges in points 1 and 5.

“1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.”

Here Herzog is arguing that the sort of testimony produce in a Cinéma Vérité style interview is akin to that of a courtroom. No matter how accurate the description, the nature of these interviews are unlikely to evoke in the viewer the sensation of the crime that instigated such a trial.

“5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

Herzog’s concept of ecstatic truth mirrors the notion that poets provided some of the most authentic documentation of the horrors of the First World War.

The synthesis of this particular Hegelian Dialectic is the emerging practice of animated documentary, my own discipline. For the past two years the Royal College of Art has hosted a symposium on animated documentary entitled Ecstatic Truth. Herzog’s liberal definition of how actuality can be imbued in documentary has helped animators to cover topics which live action footage could not reach, either literally or in terms of evocation.  

PART 2 – The Rule of Unintended Consequences

Returning to the example of communism, I would like to highlight how impossible it would have been for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to predict how the Communist Manifesto would have been put into practice and the contemporary outcome.

After a violent revolution the Soviet Union gained some stability as a functioning communist state under Lenin. However Stalinism seemed far from a Marxist utopia. During the despotic leader’s reign a famine struck Ukraine killing 7 million citizens. Some historians argue this was a deliberate genocide designed by Stalin to crush ethnic uprisings.  After decades of decline, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 leaving a handful of technocrats to pillage the remains of infrastructure resulting in today’s Russian Federation which is controlled by a elite class of fantastically rich oligarchs.

 

The rule of unintended consequence is a common theme in economic theory. Economics isn’t necessarily the study of wealth. It can be the empirical study of behaviour in the world through data sets. Please follow this link and listen to The Cobra Effect, an episode of Freakonomics Radio: (Listen from 00:05:00)

In summary, the cobra effect is named after an instance when the Imperial British government, which was ruling India, created a bounty for cobra heads to incentivise a cull, Local people breed cobras for the bounty. When the government figured out their mistake they canceled the bounty and the farmers released the cobras into the wild. The net result by the time the policy was rescinded was an increase in the cobra population.

Manifestos function in similar ways to well meaning government policies. Whether written by a political party or a practicing artist, a published manifesto intends to shape behaviour in the future. It is impossible to predict how a well meaning manifesto policy may be interpreted or executed.

Adam Curtis’ documentary The Trap: The Lonely Robot, (2007) addresses the unintended consequences of the policies introduced by the New Labour government in Britain in 1997. This party rose to power on a manifesto that stated specific targets as measures of success.

Watch from 00:36:36 to 00:43:00

Curtis argues the rigid target systems introduced by New Labour were reductive and distorting, serving to distract the institutions of state from their general remit. The incentives were high enough to make cheating the system a rational response.

An unintended consequence of the critical acclaim that befell the early Dogma 95 films was the appropriation of the manifesto by cash strapped studios and advertising agencies. As the Danish group came into vogue, producers around the world took notice of how much success was achieved on such small budgets. By the early 2000s the Dogma label was used to describe all mannerr of small budget productions. This could be viewed as a measure of success for the manifesto, however the cynical appropriation of the Dogma ethos and distinctive aesthetic led to proliferation, dilution of its meaning and ultimate decline.

These examples demonstrate that misappropriation and misinterpretation can result in outcomes which may horrify the authors of a manifesto. However, I would argue the rule of unintended consequences can be re-framed to describe these deviations as creative. The farmers in India, managers in the British civil service and low budget film producers are simply innovating in response to circumstances that were defined by a set of rules. The unpredictability of how manifestos will be executed may explain why they have endured as a motif in art and cinema.

Andre Breton, the author of The Surrealist Manifesto, was aware of the potential of unexpected outcomes. The text willfully insights transgressive and impulsive behaviour. Breton is daring readers to do something irresponsible and unpredictable:

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.”

André Breton, (1924) Manifesto of Surrealism

Exquisite corpses is a surrealist drawing exercise designed to utilize the inconsistencies between interpretations. Two or more artists would fold a piece of paper, taking turns to draw on one section. The folded section would reveal nothing more than where to join the lines at the edge. This exercise stitches together a multitude of aesthetic approaches producing a single work that is both coherent and fractured.

Nude  (1927.)- Cadavre Exquis with Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky)

This method has been appropriated by the animation community many times. The most recent example I came across was a online promo for Rick and Morty. Each animator starts their segment using the last frame of the previous artist.

Rick and Morty Exquisite Corpse (2017) multiple directors

 

The musician and producer Brian Eno collaborated with the artist Peter Schmidt to develop a system that would prompt innovation by incorporating unpredictable elements into a creative exercise. Oblique Strategies consists of a deck of cards. Inscribed on each one is a phrase or cryptic remark. When a music he was producing felt stuck or inhibited he would randomly select a card and attempt to put into practice it’s suggestion. They functioned like micro manifestos, prompting the user to change their approach in a way that on their surface seems meaningless, but in practice was liberating in its unpredictability.

Examples of oblique strategies:

• Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
• Take away the important parts
• Faced with a choice, do both
• Use an old idea
• What is the reality of the situation?
• Pay attention to distractions
• Ask your body
• Honour the error as a hidden intention
• Work at a different speed

This tool functions  like a randomised manifesto, the blind selection of clauses plorifiates the variety of future outcomes and the vagueness of the content broadens its applicability and as well as potential for interpretation. The most famous application of Oblique Strategies was during the creation of David Bowie’s critically acclaimed albums known as the Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes, and Lodger), which Eno produced.

 

PART 3- Documenting a manifesto’s execution

Ethnographers, like the fly-on-the-wall documentarians, were confronted with the dilemma that their presence was most likely distorting the natural order of the communities they wanted to research. Reflexivity, the notion of contextualising observations with critical self-awareness, became an essential consideration when collecting reach. The greater their insight into how they were impacting a community, the better equipped they were to minimise that impact and and see beyond it.

Autoethnography emerged as an extension of the reflexive method of critique. It combined ethnographic research methods with autobiographical subject matter. The researcher attempts to collect and organise qualitative research about their own lived experience, in this way the researcher, and the circumstances they experience, are both primary subjects of the investigation. For instance, an autoethnographic investigation into alcoholism is likely to contain first hand records of struggling with addiction.

Keeping diaries and writing memoirs is nothing new. However by setting key research questions, formulating a method of collecting and processing qualitative data, and prompting self reflexive critical analysis autoethnography brings rigour to this common human instinct.

Susan Young is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. She had a very successful animation career that was severely disrupted by a hand injury as well as difficulties in her personal life. The Betrayal is a product of auto-ethnographic research into a period of her life where she was abusively controlled by a doctor who was responsible for her becoming addicted to medication. The images in the film include leftover pills, as well as medical and court documentary specific to her case.

The Betrayal – trailer (2015) Susan Young

Autoethnography can be a useful tool to record first hand experience of enacting a manifesto. The following passage is a brief given to students at Concordia as a class exercise:

PART 4 WORKSHOP – One-week manifesto exercise (for field notebooks)

You have 30 minutes to form groups and co-write a manifesto that will influence how you live or work in the following week. For example:

– You could write a manifesto on how to best exploit social media (or to not use social media!)

– Your manifesto may push you to work outside of your comfort zone in a particular way

– You could prompt significant changes in you social life

Your manifesto should involve:

– A theme or focus of intent agreed upon by the group

– Context for this decision

– A praxis or statement of action how to be agents in said context

– A list of undersigned

Breakdown:

This is a group activity so after deciding a theme you must debate and agree on your manifesto points as a group. Consensus may be difficult, and negotiation is part of the process.

Consider your manifesto ideas in context. What ideological, cultural or personal concepts inform your choices? Do they occupy a thesis, antithesis or synthesis dialectic position? If it is hard to reach a consensus on your manifesto points don’t forget each individual is free to interpret the manifesto through their own practices.

After you have agreed on your manifesto’s position and praxis, nominate one member of your group to read them out to the class.

For the next 6 days you must try to put your manifesto into action.

While doing so, use an auto-ethnographic methodology to document the experience. This must involve keeping a record of your experience in you field notebook, but feel free supplement your written notes with experimental, expressive, or innovative ways of recording experiences but you must insure remain reflexive. Documenting how a manifesto affects you (or not!) is part of this workshop.

You will have an opportunity discuss and share parts of your autoethnographic research in class.