The title ‘(An)Other Irish Cinema’ - a project involving the films of Donal Foreman, Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi suggests and contextualises the films as primarily finding their home outside of the mainstream - in an alternative… as an other. This is found through and within experimental cinema. The very idea of creating an alternative can be seen at the heart of many theoretical and cultural projects:
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth propose an altermodern as an alternative to modernity, antimodernity and postmodernity. The altermodern defines the relationship and movement from singularity to the common to revolution. The altermodern for them acts as a viable possibility, as opposed the others, which have various negative outcomes. This is of particular pertinence to the another part of (An)Other Irish Cinema. The altermodern better supports an essential factor in the constitution of the common, which they call the ‘multitude’. This is a mass constituted by singularities, which because of its greater participation of more singularities is much more egalitarian. Altermodernity for them is inserted in the histories of antimodernism and modernism but essentially ruptures with the negative dialectics of resistance and sovereignty, which define them1.
Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist realism is founded on the problem of the non-existence of a viable alternative socio-political system to Capitalism and the inability to look beyond the surface of reality today - the subtitle to his book exclaims: ‘is there no alternative?’2
Alian Badiou’s book Logics of Worlds enforces a materialistic ethic, while acknowledging the contemporary condition of atony: the situation of today’s world is one that has no tone, no points or substantive co-ordinates… which are necessary for the existence of a world3. Therefore Logics of Worlds gives a hope and content to the ability to construct alternative worlds to our problematic contemporary situation of atonality.
What unites these three filmmakers is their engagement in experimental film; independent film; film for the construction of an-other space. So what type of alternative space can these films create? And how can they create them?
Slovoj Zizek in The Perverts Guide To Cinema hijacks the scenes of a number of films; in the Matrix Zizek inserts himself into the role of Neo in the scene where Morpheus offers him a choice of two pills. One will allow him to go back to his life, forgetting that he had ever experienced the Matrix and the other will allow him to enter the Matrix. But Zizek refuses that you can have one without the other; he refuses both pills and demands a third pill - one which will allow him ‘not to perceive reality behind illusion, but reality in illusion itself’. Zizek proceeds to provide us with the third pill via psychoanalytic analysis of sections of a variety of films… he shows us that our reality is constituted by illusions and imaginary fictions, which are compatible with those experienced in cinema. He thus claims: ‘cinema teaches us how to desire’4. Therefore cinema produces desire.
Utilising cinema then as a productive force, producing desire, the form of cinema as an alternative or experiment can gain a political nature. This politicisation of production is central for Deleuze and Guattari: their conception of ‘a body without organs’ is a body without assigned parts, where the body does not have pre-determined parts with functions and roles. It defines a kind of anti-production, which opens up the body to the flows of desire. Therefore they affirm a de-territorialisation of the body and the multiplicity of flows of desire. This is a deliberate evacuation of solid power formations, which disseminates power into flows and movements. Deleuze and Guattari conceive of these flows as being structured by machines; desiring machines. We can thus see from their use of the word ‘machine’ the properly productive and affective nature of desire5. Experimental cinema can then be seen as an effective power formation, one which forms power as it is in flux, rather than capturing it. The very nature of affirming alternatives, creating more, producing others, subverting and perverting is what constitutes the movement essential to an experiment.
But what is the productive role of perversion for Zizek?… it is that of utilising psychoanalysis to understand the way in which cinema constructs reality. It is a space to think about the productive, constitutive and constructive capabilities of cinema. So the filmmakers in (An)Other Irish Cinema open up new territories of desire utilising both the historical conditions of cinema and its formal mechanisms to produce and liberate desire. They create their own cosmos or world with their work through utilising one of the defining characteristics of cinema… immersion. In doing so they necessarily disrupt the mainstream characteristics of the cinema experience, disseminating its captured flows into the world while withholding onto autonomous cinematic machines and creating authentic alternatives.
Joseph Noonan-Ganley is a Dublin based artist and writer. Recent projects include: Radical Love, Co. Wicklow, 2010; Gracelands, Co. Leitrim, 2010; Scalar, Ormond Studios, Dublin, 2010. Recent writing includes essays to accompany The Paper Ball by Oisin Byrne and The Still Breath of Adventure by Martina McDonald (upcoming 2011).
Joseph Noonan-Ganley is a Dublin based artist and writer. Recent projects include: Radical Love, Co. Wicklow, 2010; Gracelands, Co. Leitrim, 2010; Scalar, Ormond Studios, Dublin, 2010. Recent writing includes essays to accompany The Paper Ball by Oisin Byrne and The Still Breath of Adventure by Martina McDonald (upcoming 2011).
1. Hardt, Michael. Negri, Antonio. 2009, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
2. Fisher, Mark. 2009, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? O Books, Hants.
3. Badiou, Alain. 2009, Logics Of Worlds, Continuum, London, trans. Alberto Toscano.
4. Zizek, Slavoj. 2006, Perverts Guide to Cinema.
5. Deleuze, Gilles. Guattari, Felix. 1984, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum, London, trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane.