


Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015), I argue, produces a sensorial registration of the presence of scattered subalterns. More importantly, an ‘aesthetics of indirection’ (con) gures the disturbing island-space between Italy and North Africa, where the intermittent appearance of subaltern subjects disturbs normative understandings of place and produces counter-intuitive understandings of relationality. The lmic construction of ‘intermittent adjacencies’ between subaltern presences and narrative protagonists produces gurations of disturbing relationalities between privilege and destitution, pleasure and pain, life and death. The logic of intermittent adjacencies left conspicuously un-integrated by the plot provide a sensorial and political provocation for thinking through the geopolitics of globalization in the context of the displacement of people.



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The Aesthetics of Indirection: Intermittent Adjacencies and Subaltern Presences at the Borders of Europe
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The Aesthetics of Indirection: Intermittent Adjacencies
and Subaltern Presences at the Borders of Europe
Sudeep Dasgupta, University of Amsterdam




Abstract

    Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015), I argue, produces a sensorial
    registration of the presence of scattered subalterns. More importantly, an
    ‘aesthetics of indirection’ (con)figures the disturbing island-space between
    Italy and North Africa, where the intermittent appearance of subaltern subjects
    disturbs normative understandings of place and produces counter-intuitive
    understandings of relationality. The filmic construction of ‘intermittent
    adjacencies’ between subaltern presences and narrative protagonists produces
    figurations of disturbing relationalities between privilege and destitution,
    pleasure and pain, life and death. The logic of intermittent adjacencies left
    conspicuously un-integrated by the plot provide a sensorial and political
    provocation for thinking through the geopolitics of globalization in the context
    of the displacement of people.


   The location of the subaltern subject is intrinsic to its political importance.
One influential theorization of subaltern subjectivity placed it within the ambit of
incipient nationalism in decolonizing space.1 Whether resistant or unreadable,
erased or subjected, the subaltern subject’s relation to globality was both national
and colonial. Gayatri Spivak’s later intervention in the work of the Subaltern
Studies group’s further complicated this spatial matrix by noting the disruptive
place of the female subaltern subject.2 Recently, she marked a transition in her
work on the figure of the subaltern from a figure ‘removed from all lines of
social mobility’3 to the new subaltern, ‘a global subaltern’, which functions
as a ‘source of intellectual property without the benefit of benefit-sharing’.4

1
  Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. by Guha and
Gayatri Ch. Spivak (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 45–87.
2
  Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in Race, Writing and Difference, ed.
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 262–80.
3
  Spivak, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular’, Postcolonial Studies, 18.4
(2005), 475–86 (p. 475).
4
  Ivi, p. 483.

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                        Sudeep Dasgupta


Subaltern space shifts from nation-space exclusion to physical immobilization
combined with global value extraction. Hence, she argues that an understanding
of the subaltern is ‘reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space’.5
   ‘Scattered subalternities’ signals the shifting spatial coordinates of the
subaltern subject under contemporary globalization. This form of subalternity
focuses on contemporary forms of forced physical displacement of the subaltern
subject beyond nation-space. Secondly, this understanding of scattering does not
assume the subaltern subject’s forced withdrawal from institutional protection
(e.g., citizenship rights). The scattered subaltern embodied in stateless refugees
is not an example of ‘bare life’ or ‘mere givenness’.6 This understanding of the
scattered subaltern is crucial since it centralizes the relational and rights-bearing
subaltern body’s movement beyond nation-space.7 The scattered subaltern’s
displacement from nation-space under globalization requires comprehension,
and a sense of how its shifting spatial reconstitution is intrinsically related to the
spaces, peoples and territories it moves through. That is, it is crucial to understand
the scattered subaltern not in isolation, but as a form of embodied subjectivity
that is continually adjacent to, imbricated with and relationally implicated with
others, such as ‘legal’ subjects enjoying the rights of citizens, as well as geographical
spaces and shifting borders such as islands in the Mediterranean or land borders
between countries. Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015) provides a
disturbing cinematic experience of precisely this relational understanding of
the scattered subaltern with other, more privileged bodies and subjectivities.
By continually interrupting a narratologically-enabled, cognitive experience of
cinematic meaning-production with sensory apprehension, through sound and
image of the scattered subaltern’s disturbing presence, the film provokes the
viewer to confront the cruel reality of a world of extremes.
   Lastly, understanding scattered subalternities throws up intellectual and
political challenges, not least since the complex dynamics of globalization are
continually reduced to familiar formulas such as the ‘clash of civilizations’, the
‘end of history’, or ‘The West and the Rest’.8 The refugee as one embodiment
of scattered subalternity is neatly conceived by scattering its meanings within


5
  Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 310.
6
  See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), p. 297. For a convincing critique of
this argument, see Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, in Dissensus: On
Politics and Aesthetics, ed. by Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 62–75.
7
  The right to family reunification for minors, for example, established in the United Nations
Refugee Convention of 1951, applies to refugee children. The systematic denial of this right in
many camps illustrates both the rights refugees possess to be unified with family, and their denial.
Arguments based on ‘bare life’ are haphazardly complicit with this denial, however powerful the
pathos generated by such discourses of abjection.
8
  Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2011), Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon
Books, 1992), Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2014).

42
                                  The Aesthetics of Indirection


multiple frameworks, including the threatening cultural other, the welfare
scrounger, the potential terrorist or the Absolute Other. Spivak provocatively
states that ‘Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else
is damage control’.9 When figured as any or all of the above, the threatening
figure of the scattered subaltern is also controlled but paradoxically, this ‘damage
control’ is effected precisely through converting the refugee into statistical data
(refugee numbers) and a source of information (potential terrorist). That is
why Judith Butler is right when arguing that ‘the point is not simply to scatter
geographically, but to derive a set of principles from scattered existence that
can serve a new conception of political justice’.10 Rather than the insertion of
displacement within capitalist globalization as data generated for damage control,
the politics of scattering thus resides in its provocations for re-conceptualizing
the meaning of justice.
   Counter-figurations of scattered subalternity imply a crucial aesthetic dimension.
The importance of an aesthetic consideration of cinematic experience resides
precisely in understanding how the drive for meaning-making (comprehension)
and sensory registration are configured. Both intellectual comprehension
and sensory apprehension are needed when making sense of a world whose
coordinates are being displaced by contemporary forms of subaltern scatterings.
Counter-figurations of scattered subalternities and the politics of globalization
are inextricably linked. From a partly Kantian-inspired critique of postcolonial
reason, Spivak, for example, argues that the comprehension of globalization must
entangle itself with the sensory dimensions of aesthetics through Schiller’s notion
of Spieltrieb, i.e. the play-drive.11 Jacques Rancière, too, argues that the aesthetic
dimensions of political experience are less connected to artistic questions: ‘it is
not a matter of art and taste; it is, first of all, a matter of time and space.’12 That is,
aesthetic experience derives from deranging the normative alignments of certain
bodies with certain spaces. Aesthetics has less to do with taste than with how
bodies and spaces can be sensorially figured to break with the norms that govern
social orders, such as the alignment of a citizen within a nation, and an outsider
beyond the nation-space. Spivak and Rancière’s linking of aesthetic experience
and politics to questions of globalization and spatiality can be extended and
deflected in an analysis of A Bigger Splash.
   From early cinema’s roving gaze on exotic locales and peoples to the mosaic
film and other forms of cinematic cartographies of the world, and to the
migrant-as-protagonist films of recent years, the relation between cinema and


9
  A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 1.
10
   Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), p. 117–18. Butler’s focus here is on the political deployment of diasporic
displacement in relation to the Zionist discourse of the state of Israel. Yet, the relevance of her
argument can be extended to understand how displacement and political justice continually
rework the latter.
11
   A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 14–29, esp. p. 27.
12
   Rancière, ‘From Politics to Aesthetics?’, Paragraph, 28.1 (March 2005), 13–25 (p. 13).

                                                                                                43
                                         Sudeep Dasgupta


globalization (including dimensions of migrant experience) are well-known.13
However, A Bigger Splash constructs a specific form of relationality between the
figure of the migrant and the privileged subject in the West. The film provides
one configuration of scattered subalternity through an aesthetics of indirection,
which produces intermittent adjacencies between the figure of the migrant and the
film’s well-heeled protagonists. Intermittency is one mode of disturbing narrative
integration, since the brief appearances and disappearances of the unnamed
migrants on the island of Pantelleria prevent the viewer from any sustained
understanding of their function within the plot. The term ‘adjacencies’ implies
a side-by-side rather than implicated and integral relation between subaltern
presences and narrative protagonists. The film plays out between the desire to
understand and the disturbing, often soundless presence of the migrant. This
form of aesthetic play between unelaborated presences and overly narrativized
protagonists provokes a reconsideration of the cinematic establishment of
relationality between the migrant and the vacationing legal resident.


Cinema, Displacement and the Poetics of Relation

   A Bigger Splash reproduces exactly the title of a documentary on the
swimming pool paintings completed in Los Angeles by British artist David
Hockney, when he migrated to the United States from his native Yorkshire (via
London).14 Guadagnino’s film, however, is advertised as an adaptation of La
Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969). Indirection and displacement begin even in the
framing of A Bigger Splash, where Deray’s swimming pool drama is explicitly
cited but then displaced to another watery source, whose painterly character
in Hockey’s work Guadagnino describes as ‘this beautiful lightness [which]
carried so much depth’.15 The viewer is seduced into expecting an adaptation of
Deray’s La Piscine in a film which draws its inspiration from another work, the
Hockney documentary and painting (of the same title), where lightness bears
the burden of much depth. The waters and the depths that the film constructs
are depicted by displacing and then relating multiple storylines. Moreover, these
storylines are more opaque than enlightening: the lightness and clarity of water
are cinematically rendered by obfuscating clear relationships.


13
   See Exotic Europe: Reisen ins frühe Kino: Journeys into Early Cinema: reizen in de vroege film, ed.
by Connie Betz and others (Berlin: Fochhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft, 2000), Patricia
Pisters, ‘The Mosaic Film: Nomadic Style and Politics in Transnational Media’, in Art and Visibility
in Migratory Culture: Conflict Resistance and Agency, ed. by Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernãndez-
Navarro (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 175–90, Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
14
   A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, 1973).
15
   Gaby Wood, ‘Tilda and Ralph in Heat: The Making of A Bigger Splash’, Daily Telegraph, 3
February 2016, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/a-bigger-splash/interview-luca-guadagnino-
tilda-swinton-ralph-fiennes/> [accessed 26 August 2016].

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                                    The Aesthetics of Indirection


   Water and disturbing relationality have a long history, of course. Édouard
Glissant’s term, ‘the poetics of relation’, was constructed to confront specifically
the complex histories of displacement (slavery in the Antilles) without giving up on
thinking relationality and totality16 in the context of ‘errantry’ (a particular form of
scattering of peoples borne by boats across waters).17 The complexity of this form
of scattering, for Glissant, resides in the multiple and shifting relations between
different abysses in the depths of water. A Bigger Splash’s own displacements into
the depths of waters across films and artworks are constructed through a specific
poetics of relation which I call ‘an aesthetics of indirection’. Just as Glissant insists
on opacity as integral to comprehending a poetics of relation in the context of
displacement, the film produces a sensory experience of opaque relationality
through the intermittent adjacencies of those it brings together. This indirection
implies an absence of deixis, of pointing clearly and directing which path the
viewer must follow to set up a relation between the migrant presences and film’s
protagonists. The preservation of opacity had a crucial political goal for Glissant
of preventing the complex subjectivities of those scattered by slavery from being
reduced to crude stereotypes. Likewise, the film provokes the viewer to confront the
brute realities of wealth and desperation, the luxury of Mediterranean vacationing
and the reality of offshore drowning, while preserving the opacity of the migrant
presences without explaining what they mean. The opacity of their presences is
political precisely because their aesthetic apprehension forces a relation with the
protagonists without explaining this relation.
   Guadagnino transposes the film from La Piscine’s Côte d’Azur to the island
of Pantelleria, the closest spot in Italy to the Libyan coast. The island and the
villa with swimming pool form the setting for a psychological drama between
four protagonists: Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), a rock singer recuperating
after losing her voice, her lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a cameraman to
whom she was introduced by a former lover, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), who joins
them uninvited along with his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). The erotic
tension between the former lovers is matched by a growing attraction between
Paul and Penelope. This intense foursome takes on sinister overtones through
elliptical dialogues while the editing and camera glides over and away from them
rather than cutting and suturing sound with image. This aesthetic strategy invites
involvement, speculation and suspense. The sensorial experience of this erotic
quadrilateral is linked to cognitive speculation to know who is related to whom,
how and where this will all lead. The suspense-filled narrative momentum will
lead to a death, when Paul forcibly drowns Harry after a fight in the swimming
pool. The title of the film, however, suggest another splash.
   What bigger splash does it refer to? Evidently nothing in the narrative itself
suggests the homoerotic paintings in Hockney’s A Bigger Splash. Here, the
depths below the lightness of water take on a relevance when conjoined with

16
     Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
17
     Ivi, p. 11. See also pp. 11–22.

                                                                                              45
                                          Sudeep Dasgupta


the displacement of the locale to Pantelleria. For Glissant, the specific opacity
of the poetics of relation is partly related to the three abysses of displacement,
the abyss of the ocean floor on which the corpses of dead slaves lie, the abyss of
the ships where they died on the middle passage, and the abyss of an indefinite
future confronting slaves as they approached the shores of the Caribbean islands.
Guadagnino’s questions ‘What is behind — what is beyond, what is before —
the crashing of the surface?’ prompted by viewing Hockney’s painting frame the
crashing about of Paul and Harry in the swimming pool in Pantelleria, and point
elsewhere, precisely because of the ‘bigger’ splash the film promises but does not
explicitly elucidate.18
   Pantelleria’s waters produce a different set of abysses, rendered to construct
a form of opacity that is only approachable through an aesthetics of indirection.
It is precisely here that intermittent adjacencies can help understand how the
politics of location (Pantelleria) and the aesthetics of indirection figure one
form of scattered subalternity. The first visually explicit encounter between
the protagonists and migrant presences takes place roughly halfway through
the film, when Paul agrees to show Penelope a deserted lake across a mountain
on the island. As they climb up the mountain, they encounter a small group of
men. The frontal shot-counter shot sequence lasting less than a minute has no
dialogue. When they meet, they all halt, and Penelope covers her almost bare
torso with her hands. The sequence ends when the men whisper to each other in
Arabic, with no subtitling, and disappear. Within a minute or two, the extended
sequence ends with Penelope naked on a rock by the lake, gesturing to Paul to
come near, and the camera follows him. It is the first explicit rendition of her
desire for him in the film.
   The silent, frontal visual construction of the confrontation between the two
white bodies on the one hand, and the group of unkept unknown men suddenly
appearing on the mountain, provokes a tension in the viewer. The difference in
number, the markers of skin colour, and the implicit threat of (sexual) violence
deliberately invite apprehension and fear. But, just as the barely audible ‘jalla
jalla’ (Come come) uttered by one of the men to the rest to usher them away, the
film provokes and then ushers the viewer away almost immediately into another
encounter, an explicitly sexual one between Paul and Penelope. The cinematic
experience promises and then deflects attention from one scenario to another. The
establishment of a relation between the protagonists and the migrant presences
is a provocation fraught with tension, which is deflected quickly into another,
unrelated one. The intermittency of this sudden appearance functions as a plot
excess: that which being repressed in a story of erotic luxuriating on Pantelleria,
which appears only through opaque figures that are deprived of audible meaning.
Jacqueline Rose suggests ‘something arises in excess when there is something
else you cannot bear to think about.’19 The excess cannot be thought within

18
     Wood, online.
19
     Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2013), p. 55.

46
                             The Aesthetics of Indirection


the plot because these presences are not narratively integrated. Rather, they are
simply sensed through image and sound (or lack thereof). The sensory works as a
counterfoil to the cognitive, the thinking of scattered subalternity is blocked and
transferred to the sensory register.
    This cinematic poetics of relation indirectly constructs an opacity with its own
specific abysses: the abyss of the Mediterranean, from which corpses arise and
are deposited on the beaches of Pantelleria; the abyss of the boats from which
they drown; and the abyss of the uncertain futures of those who survive and get
presenced cinematically on the island and in the film, though not in the narrative.
These abysses are constructed through an indirect, lateral movement of sound
and image across time and space. The film plays on the tension between the
time of the narrative and the space of the island, both fleetingly populated by
presences who appear but do not speak. The aesthetics of indirection between
sound/image and time/space, constructed in the above example, also takes other
forms in the film, when the narrative is disrupted by the intermittent appearances
of unexplained adjacencies.
    The abyss in which Harry is drowned is strikingly rendered in the glittering
water of the illuminated pool, by night. A long overhead shot of his crouched
body at the bottom is followed by a long tracking shot at eye level. It is uncertain
if it represents the point of view of Paul, who wanders in a daze along the beach,
and whose presence is blocked by the striking upturned hulls of wrecked boats
lined up on its edge. The absence of any establishing shots can be read as a
visual accompaniment of the psychic state of Paul, who is in disarray after the
unplanned murder of Harry. But that fatal splashing about in the swimming pool
is laterally linked through the temporality of the sequence to a space where the
wrecked boats signify another kind of drowning: an absent presence. The vessels
are abysses, whose broken bottoms plunge migrants to the bottom of the sea,
only to be washed up later on the island’s shores. Scattered subalterns are figured
through the multiple abysses they traverse. What ‘comes after the crashing of
the surface’ of the swimming pool are the physical remnants of the lives that
splashed into the ‘bigger pool’ of the Mediterranean.
    When Penelope, Marianne and Paul are summoned to the local police station
for further questioning following Harry’s death, the cinematic presentation of
this indirect relation between presences and protagonists is given to the viewer
through a strikingly disjunctive sound-image composition. The three present
their passports while in the background a group of people in a caged enclosures
are seen playing basketball. The three passports are shot in extreme close-up,
appearing in great detail on the screen as they are photocopied. A dialogue
between two nearby but unseen policemen is layered over this visualization. A
voice from an unseen body is heard saying, ‘We put them all in an enclosure
here, but it’s inhumane. It’s shameful’. ‘School isn’t in session. Can’t we put them
there?’, another voice adds. ‘They’re human beings, at least theoretically’, a third
voice adds. The inspector argues on the phone to arrange refrigeration of Harry’s
corpse, and Penelope angrily interrupts him, speaking Italian for the first time in

                                                                                 47
                                    Sudeep Dasgupta


the film, and asking him to show some respect for her father. Later we learn that
the corpses of seven migrants have washed up on the beach. The deliberately
disjunctive conjunction of sound and image in the passport sequence violently
juxtaposes protagonist and absent presences. The disjunction of voice and
image is confusing and jarring in its obvious breaking of the rules of cinematic
sound-image coordination. The meaning of the words ‘They’re human beings’
could apply to either the protagonists or the migrants, or to both, producing
confusion. This aesthetic experience of indirection is political precisely because
it disrupts the normative understanding of humanity through the production
of a disjunctive sensorial experience. The ‘aesthetic experience’ produced here
through cinematic spectatorship ‘suspends the commandment of form over
matter’ by deforming the sound-image conjunction: ‘it is a revocation of the type
of “humanity” […] implied by the distinction between the men of coarse senses
and those of refined senses.’20
   That the category of the human does not apply equally is rendered brutally in
Marianne’s suggestive ‘help’ that she offers to the inspector, once he mentions the
dead bodies found on the beach. Marianne responds by saying that there is a path
from the beach to the pool through which ‘anybody could have come up’. This
is the one and only moment in the narrative when the intensely psychological,
erotic hot-house drama of the four protagonists is linked to the presence of the
refugees. The inspector sardonically replies that he will interrogate them, since
‘they cannot be offended more than they already are’. His cutting dismissal of her
attempt to incriminate the refugees severs any narrative link between the splash
in the pool and the bigger splashes ending in the abyss of the Mediterranean.
   This severing of the narrative link, accompanied by the implied connection in
the word ‘Bigger’ in the title is a specific form of adjacent relationality. The adjacent
relation without a plot connection exemplifies Adorno’s famous rejoinder —
Andre Gide’s statement ‘les extrèmes me touchent’ — to Benjamin’s essay on
cinema.21 The extreme differences between wealthy vacationers and scattered
subalterns are brought together adjacently on the same (film) surface, and they
touch the spectator. This provocation, unmitigated by causal didactic arguments,
forces us to acknowledge the relationality mentioned earlier, since both groups
are equally entitled to the rights which have been withdrawn for subalterns, in
their scattering. The latter are not abject creatures, men with ‘coarse senses’
or exemplars of ‘bare life’.22 They are bearers of rights too, including police
protection, decent burials and humane relocation, rather than pitiful creatures
worthy of our benevolence.




20
   Rancière, Dissensus, p. 176.
21
   Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 130.
22
   See footnote 7.

48
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An Other Ending in Medias Res

   ‘Globalization’, Spivak argues, ‘can never happen to the sensory equipment
of the experiencing being except insofar as it always was implicit in its vanishing
outlines.’23 The scattered subaltern is both the cause and effect of heterogeneous
global space and its outmoded cartography. Specifically, ‘an aesthetic education
[…] can prepare us for […] thinking an uneven and only apparently accessible
contemporaneity that can no longer be interpreted by such nice polarities as
modernity/tradition, colonial/postcolonial.’24 An aesthetics of indirection diverts
thinking from the temptations of precisely these polarities. It constructs disturbing
adjacencies whose intermittent presences block both the aesthetic contemplation
of distant suffering and the engaged, almost pornographic involvement in the
detailing of the other’s plight.25 Both strategies reinforce dichotomies based on
distance and proximity, safe viewing and violent representation.
   How we know is partly a question of how ‘we’ are located in a world that is itself
a sensory construction. This is as much about cinematic ‘experience’ at the level of
the senses as it is the exercise of understanding through the construction of neatly
concluded arguments.26 The film constructs a relation between the human and
the non-human by exploiting cinematic ‘conditions of representability’, deploying
aesthetic experimentation toward political epistemology and social critique.27 For
example, Guadagnino deliberately avoids what he calls the ‘pre-ordained moulding’
of the three-act arc structure, ending the film in medias res, somewhat like the bodies
whose journey are interrupted by the ‘bigger splash’ in the Mediterranean.28
   This aesthetics mimes rather than represents the scattered subaltern’s tracing
of heterogeneous global space.29 The film’s deliberately elliptical style deploys an


23
   A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 2.
24
   Ibidem.
25
    Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 25 (2005), 951–66 (p. 965). Discretely approaching objects of suffering, whether drowned
subalterns whose scattering is halted, or victims of torture (Butler’s example is Abu Ghraib) is a
form of aesthetically constructing a relation which avoids a penetrative and voyeuristic involvement
by the viewer.
26
   Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W.
Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), esp. pp. xvii–xviii. Hansen reads all three
authors as theorists of cinema’s capacity to alter the human sensorium through counter-intuitive
and non-narrative formal experimentation. She calls this ‘a materialist phenomenology’ (p. xviii),
hence her focus more on the experiential than the literal and thematic dimensions of cinema.
It is precisely this experiential dimension of the cinematic (sound and image) construction of
intermittent adjacencies that describes what I call an aesthetics of indirection.
27
   ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, p. 953.
28
   Wood, online.
29
   Gertrud Koch, ‘Mimesis and Bildverbot’, Screen, 34.3 (August 1993), 211–22. Using Adorno,
Koch convincingly reformulates mimesis as the sensory relationality between film and spectator
rather than meaning-production through thematic engagement. See pp. 219–20 in particular. An
aesthetics of indirection describes exactly this mimetic understanding of cinematic experience. See
also footnote 26.

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                                 Sudeep Dasgupta


aesthetics of indirection, where scattered subalterns intermittently appear through
specific forms of sound/image and time/space relations. Their appearances are
adjacent to, and accompany, the cinematic experience of the film, yet they are
deliberately kept out of narrative integration. They are symptoms of an excess in
contemporary globalization. The human cost of the repression of this excess is
contained through neat polarities. However, an aesthetics of indirection through
cinematic experience has the potential to configure their adjacent presences in
contemporary globalization.




50
