Ian Kerkhof's Cinema of Silence By Immanuel Stammelman Immanuel Stammelman studied literature at Wits University. He is a freelance writer, currently at work on a book-length study of Kerkhof's film and video oeuvre.

Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers

"Is art always an outrage - must it by its very nature be an outrage?" Lawrence Durrell once asked. This outrage is metaphysical revolt and at the same time metaphysical surrender, which is the desire for nothingness: "the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion" as Camus puts it. In outrage, then, the very being of man is put on trial. What ensures is a dialectic of violence, demonic action and demonic reaction compressed into a terrible unity which becomes finally a naught.

This violence is absurd in the sense that no meaning or value can be assigned to it. Its function is to turn men into things. Under its pressure, the metamorphosis of the human form is downward, towards the worms of Beckett, the insect people and sentient ooze of Burroughs. It is not temporal but spatial, not historical but ontological, an inescapable part of the landscape. This metaphor of violence as landscape or inscape is the extreme definition of outrage which Kerkhof postis in Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! We can begin to see such a landscape take place in the surreal Broadway scenes of Miller's Tropic books, and we can see what is left of it, as violence recedes into death, in the empty spaces of Beckett's Endgame.

Precisely at this point, a reversal of motive may take place in Kerkhof's cinema of silence; a new term may come into play. For if outrage is a metaphor of the void, may it not also serve as an appeal to being, and thus beget its opposite, which is a metaphor of apocalypse?

Apocalyptic violence can be perceived by the oppressed as retribution rather than reward, and even the millennium can be understood by them as an idea of power rather than of love. Implied thus, in Kerkhof's cinema, is something close to a total rejection of Western history and civilization. Implied, too, is a rejection of human identity, the image of man as the measure of all things. Indeed, revulsion against the Western Self strikes deeper than the repudiation of history and civilization.

Revulsion against the self serves as a link between the destructive and visionary impulses of modern apocalypse; it prepares for rebirth. Apocalypse is now! The term recovers its original sense, which is literally revelation; vision penetrates the perplexities of the moment to the heart of light. In current parlance, this antinomian belief is sometimes called the alteration of consciousness. This is the constant hope of Kerkhof throughout his apocalyptic harangues in Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!, and the object of parody in Ten Monologues From the LIves of the Serial Killers, both of which project antithetical states of wordless perfection.

Outrage and apocalypse, then, provide mirror images of Kerkhof's imagination, images that contain something vital and dangerous for our experience. They are also mirror images in the sense that Kerkhof reflects inverse worlds in his cinema. For Kerkhof leaves us with a world so depleted of life that nothing short of a cataclysm can renew it (The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man); we are close to the absence of outrage. And Kerkhof presents us with a chaotic world constantly on the verge of transformation (Wasted!; Shabondama Elegy); we are witness to the rage of apocalypse. What both worlds share is the degree of silence. For the human tongue is speechless in fright and ecstasy.

Yet if Kerkhof's cinema can be delimited by the extreme metaphors of outrage and apocalypse, other ideas help maintain the silence at its center. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the idea of absurd creation which compels the filmmaker to deprecate or even spurn his own activity. "Creating or not creating changes nothing," Camus said, "the absurd creator does not prize his work. He could even repudiate it."

Cinema for Kerkhof is absurd play. In a certain sense, all his films may be thought of as a parody of Wittgenstein's notion that language is a set of games. Kerkhof's parodies, which are full of self-spite, designate a general tendency in anti-cinema. This absurd game of closed field permutations was already fully evident in his Golden Calf award-winning debut feature, Kyodai Makes the Big Time, made when he was still in the second year of the Netherlands Film & Television Academy.

It is easy to understand that in a culture given to sexual repression, protest may possess the motive and ring of obscenity. The cinema which exposes this motive is thus a cinema of revolt. Obscenity, however, is cruelly reductive; its terms, counters and cliches are sharply limited. When the anger behind it it chilled, obscenity appears as a game of permutations, relying on few words and fewer actions. Surely this is the double impression we take from the writings of the Marquiz De Sade: that his protest is monstrous and his game is finally numbing. Sade, nowadays considered the first avant-gardist, projects a curious stillness; his obscene and repetitious violence muffles language. In bequeathing porno-aesthetics to art, he also made it possible for Kerkhof to develop parodies of sexual violence. The excremental obsessions of Kerkhof parody themselves and deny all love. In the game of parody, as in the act of obscenity, anti-cinema rules; and Kerkhof's debt to De Sade suggests the mannerisms of anal and snuff pornography.

But Kerkhof's cinema of silence manages to deny the time-honored functions of narrative cinema in yet another way: it aspires to an impossible concreteness. The new literalism emerges from the concrete compostitions of Stockhausen, from the collages of found objects of Robert Rauschenberg, from the environmental sculpture of Kurt Schwitters, and under the combined influence of Schwitters and Apollinaire, from that hybrid form of verbal and visual effects which relies on the alphabet to make pictures. Stated crudely then, the true self is unknowable and, perhaps like Kerkhof's anti-heroes in Nice To Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!, unnameable. (Rapist 1, Rapist 2, Rapist 3 in the script).

How does this conclusion affect the film? The old principles of causality, psychological analysis, and symbolic relations, principles on which the bourgeois cinema once comfortably rested, begin to crumble.

It follows that Kerkhof the filmmaker can only be a literalist naming the names, or entertaining pure images. Without character, plot, metaphor, or meaning, without any pretense of "interiorness", the anti-cinema of Ian Kerkhof has the effect of a silent reel. Cinema's rhetoric is silenced.

Silence in Kerkhof's cinema is also attained through radical irony. The Cretan who claimed that all Cretans were liars may serve as an example; the machine of Tinguely, which has no function but to destroy itself, serves as another. Radical irony, in other words, requires not a collage of found objects, but an empty canvas. Heidegger's idea of "the mystery of oblivion" suggests a theoretical underpinning for much of Kerkhof's cinema; what is harder to discern in Kerkhof's radical irony is that it disguises genuine aggression against art. Kerkhof makes his devotions to, and desecrates, the Muse at the same time.

Finally, Kerkhof's cinema strives for silence by accepting chance, and improvisation; its principle becomes indeterminacy. By refusing order, order imposed ro discovered, this kind of cinema refuses purpose. Its forms are therefore non-telic; its world is the eternal present.

Every subject Kerkhof touches - rape, serial killers, drug culture, incest - is fired by his sense of outrage and transfigured by his hope of apocalypse. Kerkhof demands an end to history and turns cinema into autobiography of a special kind; his work is less an attempt to record and comprehend life than to live it. Over and over again. He is the Saint of Repetition. Unable to redeem his life in art, he calls for an abnegation of both. He tries bravely to be both the first and the last author of anti-cinema.

Thus cinema becomes the inaudible game of a solipsist. It is no coincidence that Kerkhof's first short, made in his first year at the Film Academy, was simply called The Solipsist. He was never a film student. He merely used the academy as a production vehicle. He arrived full-blown, a consummate filmmaker with a program, a mission. That mission is accomplished. Kerkhof has stretched cinema beyond its usual limit and Kerkhof shrinks it back to naught. The function of silence in Kerkhof's work is clear. He has systematically explored the "dead" sound of absolute silence in all the films (most effectively in Signal To Noise and la sequence des barres paralleles, both with soundtracks by Merzbow).

Obscene idealist, satiric and visionary, Kerkhof is finally let not only to deny the Word but also the Image and the Flesh. He literally cuts himself open in The Solipsist. His aim is to make men bodiless and language silent. Utopian or nihilist, he demonstrates the passion that feed both in a form which compels cinema to move beyond its accepted limits. Kerkhof's cinema forces us to reconsider the traditional terms of cinema.

Silence is the metaphor of Kerkhof's complex rage. We are tempted to ask, what does he offer when all is said and done? Camus, and Nietzche before him - Kerkhof was bankrupted self-producing his disastrous 4 hour magnum opus Nietzche Inna Babylon - knew that the act of negation is an assertion of value. Outrage and apocalypse are two faces of the same reality. Kerkhof's hope is that Silence and Love may recover their ancient connection. Silence is his mother tongue.

Filmography:

• Kyodai Makes the Big Tiime
• La Sequence Des Barres Paralleles
• The Mozart Bird
• De Enge Knijperman en de Onderstebovenvrouw
• Ten Monologues From the Lives of the Serial Killers
• The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man
• The Turner Revelation
• Minnamanna
• Reflections on Dead Weight
• Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me
• Naar de Klote (Wasted!)
• Femme de Siecle
• Shabondama Elegy

Videography:

• The Solipsist
• Stations of the Cross
• The Boy Who Masturbated Himself to a Climax
• Egmond Ghost Poem
• Crash
• 1991-Bloodbath
• Carnage in the Charnel House
• Reqiuem
• Ein Zwei Drei
• Men Are Pigs
• Baby Kain
• Matthew Barney in the Emperor's New Clothes
• The Crossing Border Tapes
• Techno: Space and Flow in the Radical Frame
• Lift Your Hands Up
• Ron Athey: It's Scripted
• Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow
• Digital Popcorn
• Signal to Noise
• Ron Athey is the Trojan Whore
• Sylvia Kristel Years Later
• Bonnie et Clyde
• Mondo Roxy: No Other Drugs Required
• The Ghost Sonata
• Nietzche Inna Babylon (Unfinished)
• Nostalgia for the Future
• Goya's Grandad Dead (Not)
• The Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002