Questions of counter cinema and Sally Potter’s YES

by Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz

Sally Potter’s 2004 film YES is a point of intersection for some overlapping questions that have occupied counter cinema discourse, feminist film theory and discussions of postmodernism since the 1970s. These questions revolve around the politics of representation, particularly about how to navigate the role of ideology in the construction of our subjecthood, and accordingly, our representation. (Here I am specifically concerned with screen representation and I use the term “our” to refer to any human subject that is said to be represented on screen.) As both feminist film theory and counter cinema politically negotiate with the ideological apparatus (i.e. mainstream cinema), there’s generally a tension between rejection—and turning to and territorializing the concept of avant-garde as oppose to mainstream—and recognition—still seeking mainstream representation. Since patriarchal ideology is understood to reinforce specific subject positions through binary oppositions and to subordinate delineated others, for feminist and counter cinema scholars representational politics on the level of the mainstream generally has meant a self-defeating attempt at independence.[1] [open endnotes and references in new window] It is perhaps fair to say that that was the case in cultural and media studies until the (now-out-of-fashion term) “postmodern turn,” which welcomed hybridity and paradox.[2]

Potter’s film YES emerged at a time when the discussion of postmodernism (then on decline) seemed potentially helpful to discuss new feminist practices, ones that aimed to create signifiers and aesthetics that could speak beyond representational politics. I am talking about a historical, transitional moment during which paradoxical formations and fragmentation in art and life in general were welcomed, while gaps between cultural dichotomies such as avant-garde and popular or counter cinema and mainstream were relatively eased. I will argue in this article that Sally Potter’s cinema, and particularly YES, epitomizes this transition. The film offers us a cinematic experience that can help reflect on what happened to postmodernism, for that term is in crisis, and to reconsider the crisis of representation that still continues to infiltrate many discussions surrounding (feminist) cinema.

Situating Potter

In her cinema, Sally Potter has traced how representational politics work within a Western context as well as explored aesthetic-theoretical constructions of the gendered subject—which have been frequent topics of research for feminist film scholars for decades now.[3] As Sharon Lin Tay discusses in detail, Potter’s filmography has responded to turbulences within feminist film theory, from her earlier works, such as the mid-length Thriller (1979) which has been regarded as one of the ultimate examples of “feminist theory filmmaking,” to her later more “mainstream art-house” productions within which Tay positions YES (84-85).[4]

 The discussions around how to penetrate the sexist ideology of Classical Hollywood and how to create a feminist cinema have involved critiquing a rigid distinction between counter cinema and mainstream—a distinction feminist film theory also often reiterated within its domain. Tay suggests that a change in Potter’s direction reflects this, moving from experimentalism and formal subversion—found in Thriller and The Gold Diggers (1983)—towards an embrace of more traditional forms of narrative progress and visual pleasure in her later films. This artistic move can be seen as a sign of awareness in terms of how feminist thought involves ideas that can contradict and transform over time. On the one hand, some feminists called for an emancipated space through the concept of feminist counter cinema and rejected Classical Hollywood’s potentiality for such reclamation following the publication of Laura Mulvey’s influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975. On the other hand, there continued to be an ongoing call for mainstream representation. These perspectives have been in communication and later became closer to each other, therefore I don’t yet intend to make a distinct division between them. It is exactly the shifting of this feminist scaling that Potter responded to. [5]

In her analysis of Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997)—the forebearer of YES—Lucy Fischer underlines how Potter’s cinema involves some of the critical positions that “disputed Mulvey’s rejection of classical form and attempted to locate gaps and fissures in mainstream works that voiced female rebellion” (45). Arguably, these tensions in feminist film theory and practice were relatively loosened after the “postmodern turn” as Mulvey herself revisited her theories in 1989 in “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure.” There she proposed some combined effects of “tradition and mass culture” on narrative cinema that manifested alternative potentials for visual pleasure.

Similar to how Mulvey later embraced possible multiplications of “the look,” counter cinema discourse later also included into its territory some potential mainstream forms that could accommodate avant-garde elements (Perry). In this regard, it is important to remember that postmodernism was for a while the framework that helped to make sense of blurring of counter cinema’s borders, just as it was a useful concept for feminism as it negotiated reclaiming space and language within popular culture. We can still observe that struggle continuing in our post-postmodern time within public discourse since the issue of representation has become harder to differentiate from the tricky subject of objectification of women (which has specific trajectories in Hollywood and genre systems). The issue of representation has also been more vocalized in relation to industrial aspects of sexism, such as the gender pay gap (though this particular issue on mainstream media mostly involves the industry’s 1%).

Tay touches upon this point about blurred borders of feminist concepts, for example, in her delineation of feminist political film practices based on the contemporary poststructuralist rejection of sexual difference. Tay maps Potter’s film Orlando (1993) directly onto this feminist-political tension, stating that Orlando’s “budget, production values, and status as a European co-production situate it very much within mainstream cinema in British industrial terms” (88). Here, the postmodernist discussion of counter cinema-blending-into-mainstream coincides with the feminist problematization of essentialism and a potential “exit from a film movement that assumes the essentialist idea of sexual difference” associated with 1970s feminist film theory (Tay 89) (see the Orlando opening shots using internal voiceover/self-reflexivity as an ambiguous expression of gender). At this crossroads, we still face the question of representation that is supposed to decide what is the right way of representing an assumed subject, be it women, or other others.

Currently the question of representation, especially with respect to marginalized identities, seems to have become one of the most-attended-to issues in contemporary media. However, in the recent past, the idea of the “postmodern condition” used to seem potentially helpful to delineate the very process of marginalization itself, as postmodernism welcomed the concept of fragmentation when it came to identity (McRobbie). Now, even though discussions around how representation has replaced the concept of selfhood (e.g, we don’t actually have a “real self”) still resonate (Matthewman and Hoey), postmodernism as a concept has lost much of its significance. For example, in her article “Love’s Cosmopolitan Promise in Sally Potter’s Yes,” Jackie Stacey conceptualizes YES and the cultural binarisms that are put into scrutiny in this film in relation to “cosmopolitanism”—a term that seems to replace postmodernism.

Here I don’t intend to revive postmodernism or attempt to prove its usefulness in our current time. Rather, I would like to explore the mobilizations of signifying terms, such as the assumed subjects of postmodernism, feminism or counter cinema. This is the sort of mobilization Judith Butler talked about when they tried to avoid the trap of defending postmodernism in their response to the critiques of postmodernism, utilizing the concept of postmodernism in pointing out societal fears around the “loss of significance” in terms of self and subjecthood (“Contingent”). Butler used the critiques of postmodernism as stepping stones to trace how subjects can be mobilized away from regulatory limitations toward understanding the process of representation’s exclusionary practices. In that sense, “postmodernism” became a useful catalyst to question the limits of subjection. That is also why I retrospectively make use of this term, as there is still a lot to unpack in terms of why and how these discourses heavily correlated with each other and became unfashionable in time.

Judith Butler mentioned the rhetoric “What happens to materiality if everything is discourse?” which pervaded the postmodernism-critical perspectives in the 1990s. Butler also found sense in the tactic of deconstruction associated with postmodernism: a sense that deconstruction helps mobilize the meanings of terms commonly used to describe certain aspects of the materiality of human bodies, like “sex” (168). Perhaps now we can contextualize the disappearance of the term “postmodern” in relation to such mobilization, as it lost its signifying quality. What is it that postmodernism signified at the time and now is lost? I argue that the trouble lay with representational politics—the struggle to represent macro-level problems with micro-level stories.

Butler marked the image of the Middle Eastern subject as the ultimate other (during post-September 11) in discussing how the construction of certain subjects in popular U.S. media regulate what those figures signify in order for their image to perpetuate specific oppressive ideologies (160-161). Similarly, Potter made a film, YES, that carefully deals with the politics of representation by way of creating an abstract confrontation between the “Middle Eastern other” and the “Western feminist.” She made the film precisely as a response to this harmful war-on-terror media rhetoric of the post-September 11 era. And perhaps we can see that this era also marks the weakest point of postmodernism; the counter cinema argument also started to fail in its capacity to address the complexities of fragmented significations at work in mainstream media.

In the next section, I look back at what “political cinema” meant to the counter cinema theories in the 1970s and their connection to the later postmodernist take on identity as a schizophrenic position. I hope to highlight here how the distance between the “signifier” and “signified” in these early theories can be traced through the discussions of a subject’s representability in postmodernism. In particular, this is precisely the crisis that Potter visualized in her film YES as a response to contemporary politics.

From counter cinema to postmodernism

In his article “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’est” in 1972 (74), Peter Wollen differentiated through Jean-Luc Godard’s work “the seven cardinal virtues” of breaking with Classical Hollywood cinema. The border between counter cinema and Classical Hollywood was quite clearcut in Wollen’s theory: the unorthodox juxtapositions and re-contextualizations of film form should lead to a confrontation with cinema’s own economic conditions, resulting in the creation of a critical aesthetic, such as Godard’s, which describes counter cinema (Wollen 79). These defining features of the critical aesthetic of counter cinema have been revisited by film scholars who coined the term “new media” by looking at the changes in cinema-going cultures. For example, Guiliana Bruno’s reading of Ridley Scott’s now-more-famous film Blade Runner (1982) “as the metaphor of the postmodern condition” (“Ramble City” 62), shows that cinematic methods of juxtaposition can be adopted by certain Hollywood productions as much as by art-house. Bruno demonstrates that deconstructive cinematic approaches—especially with regards to subjectivity, selfhood and urban identity—that once were perceived as counter cinema can also be manifested in mainstream films, specifically in the form of post-industrial tech-noir aesthetics and postmodern architecture. Similar perspectives focus on various visual media as cultural documents of the fluctuating consumerist society whose relation to representation constitutes one of the major political concerns since the 1980s (Hutcheon 7-8); and these discussions around the representational methods of the consumerist society continue to engulf categorical discussions around political cinema.[6]

In conjunction with these developments, we saw that deconstructive effects of self-reflexivity, estrangement and reconstruction of reality (the effects Wollen identified as counter cinema virtues) don’t solely seem to belong to what is categorically assumed as the avant-garde. This shift towards theories around postmodernism in the discourse of ideology and cinema, perhaps partially if not entirely, blurred the border between counter cinema and the mainstream—a border more clearly visible for Wollen as well as for Cahiers du Cinema contributors. As time passes, the relevance of counter cinema terminology can be questioned when it starts to seem redundant—as Steve Cannon did in his article on “The Myth of ‘Counter Cinema’” where he considers Wollen’s approach reductive. But it still remains a strong milestone in film theory, especially for the purpose of uncovering the transitional moments, parallels and detours in the history writing of the politics of cinema.

Even though “political cinema” had a specific meaning, certain ambiguities remained in the counter cinema theories and Cahiers Du Cinema’s Marxist film critique. As Colin Perry observes, they aimed to produce “distinct readings of the real” while “both denying and asserting its importance” (Perry 23). Bearing this in mind, the cinematic elements I consider interconnect the ambiguity in depicting reality, identity and the role of ideology. This interconnection runs on the function of the reality effect which assumes “real” subjects through film form, mostly with acting and language. This realism has been also what Cahiers Du Cinema sought to explore in cinema, as well as the concern for postmodernists in relation to the experience of identity. Potter’s YES further adds to the discussion of counter cinema a perspective that detours from realism towards representation, and I would first like to contrast this approach with the canonical Cahiers approach to political cinema in the next section. Potter’s aesthetic in YES involves a self-reflexive fantasy in terms of resolving political conflict through narrative. In particular, I explore Potter’s choice of self-reflexive aesthetics and artificiality in this film–a product of how September 11 affected the filmmaker and the world, as she stated that “the destruction of the World Trade Center and its aftermath of suspicion and vengeance inspired her film” (Garrett).

Revisiting Cahiers Du Cinema

In “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” (one of the most cited texts in film politics), Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni describe seven categories of films according to the political nature of the cinematic engagement that a film can have with its own status as an agent of ideology. The authors then regroup the categories to lay out the films’ levels of critical functions by the ways in which the films tend to criticise their own commodification through form. Briefly, the first grouping refers to films completely integrated into the dominant ideology, hence oblivious to their status as a commercial product. The groups that interest Comolli and Narboni are the rest of the categories.

The authors differentiate films involving a political meaning directly or indirectly, or on the level of form and subject. These films seem to be the ones that offer a potentially radical practice to work within the doomed status of cinema as a hegemonic industry. For example, the second “political cinema” group is comprised of films that point to their political status both on the level of their film form and their subject matter—the former level is referred as “signifier” and the latter as “signified” (Comolli and Narboni 26). The third group involves films “that should be the chief subject of the magazine [Cahiers du Cinema]” due to their subtle politics that eschew the notion of realism. According to Comolli and Narboni, films in the third category don’t necessarily attack the dominant ideology by striving to represent ideological struggle directly on screen; they do it by their politically-clinched aesthetic choices on the level of form—Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) being one example. This group thus constitutes “the essential of cinema” without a commitment to depict reality. The fourth group categorizes films that convey political content on the narrative level but still remain within the regulated territory of dominant ideology that designates the limits of political expression. The fifth marks the films with certain powerful aesthetics—like genre films—in which ideology becomes “subordinate to the text” (Comolli and Narboni 27). While the films in the sixth category document the real-life events of struggle (i.e. documentaries on working class, political protests and social movements) but don’t point back to their own role in ideology as documentaries, the films in the seventh (and last) category are about, again “live action,” but this time they underline the film’s position as the documenting agent. These films, similar to the films in the second and third categories, are “not satisfied with the idea of the camera ‘seeing through appearances’” (Comolli and Narboni 28).
 
Comolli and Narboni’s categorization has been formative in terms of contextualizing the discussions around how to understand and create political cinema, perhaps due to the importance of realism in this formulation. This can be also due to the explicitly-defined-ness of these categories and the pronounced differentiation between the political and non-political in their theories. However, these categories also seem to run the risk of reducing radicalism to rejection of realism when this discussion comes to the more blurred contexts of avant-garde cinema, such as collage, ironic symbolism, citationality and parody. But such concepts can both work as a tool to obscure the “ideologically-conditioned method of ‘depiction’” (Comolli and Narboni 28) and as a self-aware method of providing alienation and discomfort in the consumption process.

Chuck Kleinhans detects this reading ideology in Cahiers based on a concept called “structuring absence” in cinema—a concept that “opens up analysis to not just mimicking or mirroring what a film says overtly, but to looking for that which it cannot address” (2). Even though Kleinhans’ project is to reveal the contradictions in Cahiers Du Cinema’s “reading ideology” regarding Young Mr Lincoln (1939), his critical re-evaluation nonetheless traces some of Cahiers’ theoretical contributions that can still be useful for us. According to Kleinhans, the concept of “structuring absence” (“something that signifies although it is not present”) is one of the most influential ideas they produced. Comolli and Narboni’s text, based on Cahiers’ conceptualizations that Kleinhans dissected, laid the foundations of the discourse around counter cinema. On the other hand, it revealed possible contradictions in believing the tangibility of classification methods. Thus, according to Barbara Klinger:

“the strong critical investment in designating and elucidating counter- or progressive cinema is financed through a staunch conception of classic textuality, against which progressive practice relies for its very definition” (Klinger 33).

Klinger’s standpoint, in this regard, works towards recognizing progressive art not only in terms of a text’s singularity but also in a more collective sense, such as can be found in the trajectory of genre films. She further points out that this classification influenced questions of authorship. Drawing from Klinger, we can find a similar collective sense in Sally Potter’s cinema in terms of playing with the tools of identity representations. The distinctive filmmaking choices in YES particularly use language and self-reflexivity to offer an intervention into the methods of realistic representation on screen, which then responds to the discussion around political cinema associated with the counter cinema discourse. Re-constructing reality was one of the criteria in differentiating counter cinema in Film Studies in the 1960s and 1970s (as can be seen in Comolli and Narboni’s work that followed André Bazin’s legacy). The critical positions towards the concept of realism within postmodernist thought went one step forward and questioned the singularity of reality, especially in “the age of digital media” where “the real me” is perpetually getting lost and refurbished (McRobbie 434, Poster 445). This paradigmatic move away from singularity in terms of the concept of reality made it hard to stick with “the essentialist notions of the self that suggest there is a natural, unified and hidden essence to the self.” This perspective has also mobilized art-house filmmaking into using deconstructionist approaches to representing identity, derived from the limitations of mainstream representation, for which Potter’s YES can be given as an example. In Potter’s filmmaking, representation comes across as a self-reflexively “emptying” method that emphasizes the constructed-ness of identity traits and societal pressures. I argue that this filmmaking constitutes a problem for realism-oriented perspectives and displaces the role of realism in political position-taking in cinema. Instead, it uses a type of cinematic scaffolding that surrounds the narrative to highlight fantastical connections between its fragments.

YES’ structuring absences

Catherine Fowler detects how camera movements create “distortions of perspective” in YES and the film has a certain symbolism carried through the adoption of a specific poetic language (98-100). The narrative structure of YES revolves around the generic arc of a love affair (meeting, falling in love, conflict and/or separation, resolution and/or getting back together) between an Irish-American microbiologist (Joan Allen) who unhappily leads a bourgeois married life and a Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian) who worked as a surgeon in Beirut before he migrated to London where he cannot practice his profession due to his immigrant status. However, this structure’s linearity is constantly fractured by self-reflexive compositions, such as double exposure and slow motion (among other features). Fowler delves into how the cinematic implementation of Potter’s love story constructs “artificial” representations of cultural and political dichotomies—including the gender binary, the rich and the poor, and the cultural war between “the West” and “the East.” Even though Fowler doesn’t directly compare the film with the politics of counter cinema, her focus is still on how politically-defined the protagonists are in the film; their dialogues mostly directly express political positions.

In addition to Fowler, Giuliana Bruno reflectively writes about the film in a very unusual form: a personal letter to Sally Potter, which can be found in Journal of Visual Culture; Bruno discusses YES in relation to her own personal engagement with the film blended into her critical reading. The reviewer’s choice of leaving the practice of textual analysis out of her personal-critical account is a sign of film’s resistance against textuality-focused approaches that try to pinpoint any realism in cinematic construction. Based on these writers’ accounts, we see that the film invites thinking about cultural dichotomies beyond issues of how to represent reality through the so-called integrity of textuality. Rather, the film engages with disintegration of textuality by its way of articulating the methods of surveillance, language, formatting, restriction and formula—which can be easily associated with Wollen’s “cardinal virtues” of counter cinema.

From the beginning of the film, we find a congruence between counter cinema discourse and YES. Counter cinema insisted on looking at the ways in which hegemonic structures at work are rendered invisible by the film industry, and the cinematographic choices in YES seek to expose what would be hidden elsewhere. The first instance of this is the film’s opening: a microscopic image of dust particles move across the image when the film title appears on screen. Then we see someone who is not necessarily the protagonist of the film, Cleaner (Shirley Handerson), who is the maid of the house where the female protagonist lives with her family. Cleaner’s poetic monologue on the role of dust and dirt with regards to their signifying function in terms of how a life is lived starts the film with the idea of accumulated knowledge through residues; this signals the organizing function of Cleaner in the narrative structure. Then, in turn, the role of Cleaner signals the invisible organizational role of social class. This invisible role can be associated with what Kleinhans called “the structuring absences” within the methods of narrativizing life which is at the core of the system of mainstream representation: what cannot be visible on screen is ultimately what organizes what can be visible there. In contrast to this system, Cleaner’s positionality in the film lays bare this structuration—what I call the outer scaffolding of the narrative. We can think about all the cinematic aspects that are touched upon in the rest of this article as the features of this structure in YES. As the definition of “scaffolding” signifies,[7] this visible structure presumably is temporally located, yet integral to the narrative’s grounded-ness and maintenance by completely enclosing it. The analogy for the relationship between “the West” and “the East” in the form of a heterosexual love affair arc then relies upon the support from this cinematic scaffolding that includes Cleaner’s unveiling function in the film in terms of “structuring absences.” She holds the position of the Greek chorus in tragedy who tells the audience the context within which the whole story should be understood (Fischer).[8] Some of the other features of this structure are

• the use of iambic parameter (to underline the role of language in representation),
• CCTV surveillance footage (to provide an added suspicion to the protagonists’ relationship),
• skewed camera angles and blurred visuals that trivialize the central subjects and
• the presence of the other cleaners who don’t speak, unlike Cleaner, but only are inserted into the foreground of the frames between narratively-motivated scene changes to disrupt a potential seamlessness in the film’s temporality.

These features actually resonate closely with Wollen’s counter cinema virtues, such as narrative intransitivity, estrangement, foregrounding, multiple diegesis, aperture, displeasure and reality (74). YES has a complex structure bringing together distorted camera movements and speeds, involvement of CCTV footage of certain moments, and the protagonists’ status as bearers of cultural binaries. In this way, it answers to what Wollen necessitated for revolutionary cinema that operates “at different levels—fantasy, ideology, science” (531). The revolutionary effect in cinema for Wollen relied on revealing subjection processes and how subjects constructed on screen are mobilized through signifiers. As he stated,

“the articulation of these levels, which involves different modes of discourse and different positions of the subject, is a complicated matter” (531).

I argue that the image of scaffolding here helps to explain this “complicated matter.” It gives the spectators access to demystifing how the levels of fantasy, science and cinema rely upon “structuring absences” by way of a heightened self-reflexivity. As such, Potter’s YES both constructs the fantasy of the love affair between “the East” and “the West” and displays the tools of such fantasizing activity. It does so first and foremost by way of starting the film with a moving image that is only viewable through a scientific tool (microscope) that displays the fragments of any so-called uniformity. Hence, the illusion of uniformity in terms of the coupling of “the East” and “the West” is dispelled from the start by the reminders of this cinematic scaffolding around the narrative that also includes this microscoping effect.

The signifiers of “the East” and “the West,” as well as the relationship between them (“the love affair”) can be found in the film, but that is all there is since, without the scaffolding, there is no structure to the “signified.” In that sense, YES can also be taken as what happened to the significance of postmodernism that used to serve as the potential melting pot of identities, offering a hopeful paradigm for marginalized identities to be integrated into society on an equal ground shared with the ruling classes. This is why Jackie Stacey discussed the film as an articulation of a paradoxical cosmopolitanism that both wishes for and fails at realizing the cosmopolitan match of “the Eastern immigrant” and “the Western feminist.” This paradoxicality was welcomed within the paradigm of postmodernism, and in that sense, Stacey’ article can be taken as another sign of the communication between YES and this paradigm through a cinematic exploration of its loss.

Another element that constitutes the backbone of this communication is the lack of character development in the construction of protagonists. This congruence between the loss of character significance in YES and the loss of significance of postmodernism might be better understood once we look at the use of language in the film as this is the tool it uses to rule out characterization, hence realistic representation. In all this, I don’t mean to say the acting is not realistic, on the contrary the realistic acting through language becomes conceptualized as an agent of fantasy about a realism that is actually not there.

The politics of language

All the monologues and dialogues in YES are written in iambic pentameter[9] reminding us of the artificiality of written text. This creates a sense of estrangement and unpleasure (the Brechtian elements of counter cinema according to Wollen) as it reminds us of how language is constructed, thus how self-expression is not free from social construct. Wollen proceeds by explaining Godard’s obsession “with the true speech, lying speech and theatrical speech”—while making a remark on how speech is not independent from the class content, i.e., “the bourgeoisie lies.” In this way Wollen emphasizes how actors and actresses’ act of embodiment of other people should be “distrusted for speaking other people’s words as if they were their own” (81). Hence counter cinema, in light of Godard, marks “the impossibility of genuine dialog and the reduction of dialog to reciprocal—or often unilateral—interviewing” (81).

The two protagonists, HE and SHE, in YES have no names, they only reproduce their social positions within their gender, ethnicity and class matrix. When these protagonists are differentiated solely by their pronouns, what is emphasized in the final moment of ending credits is their status of interpellation through gender-based language. Sally Potter sets them apart by the language of gender binary, stripping them off of any character but merely representations of their social status. This language makes bare the repressing structures, mainly the heterosexual imperative, that Cahiers Du Cinema writersdetected in Classical Hollywood. Potter’s method of not-naming the protagonists and setting scenes that are filled with cliché gestures of foreplay (which I take as a reference to the graphic-less acts of sex metaphors and Hays code in early Hollywood) as well as making them talk in an overbearingly poetic manner unearths the language of Classical Hollywood and its “structuring absences”—“things that are repressed […] particularly politics and sexuality” (Kleinhans).

Furthermore, there is another aspect to Cleaner (Shirley Henderson); she always looks at the camera while performing monologues about how “the truth” about human life can be learned through the dirt people leave behind. Cleaner conducts the temporality (“scaffolding”) of the film—starts the film, disrupts the drama and ends the film—all the while staring directly into the eyes of the spectator through the camera when she makes social and philosophical commentary on human life. As observed by Bruno,

“the performative position of the cleaner also echoes the ‘silent’ voice of the analyst. Such is a voice that can itself act as a projection of one’s own inner voice” (“It’s About Time” 32).

Ascribing an analyst role to the invisible organizational function of a housemaid, whose existence on screen has commonly been used to depict the reality of class difference, Sally Potter emphasizes what is classically in the background: ideological positioning of the working class. Throughout the film, it is not only Cleaner who looks at the camera, all the cleaners in the various locations of the film—house, hospital, laboratory (the workplace of SHE)—turn around at some point of a scene where some dramatic moment happens, and look at the camera, making themselves visible in a dramatic context that doesn’t directly involve them. The self-reflexive effect of looking at a camera may not be the most uncommon method for the effect of alienation. However, Cleaner (or cleaners) doesn’t reflect on their own position as working class directly while playing the role of an intellectual “analyst,” which again further strips off Cleaner having some sort of a self. Her reflexivity is an activator of the cinematic visibility of an ideological representation. It doesn’t reflect back on her character as a working-class person in the film’s world, nor her own development as a character with subjectivity. In that sense, this role of an activator is similar to how Bruno reads the replicants in the world of Blade Runner as having a schizophrenic condition. She explains the temporality of a replicant:

“the experience of temporality and its representation are an effect of language. It is the very structure of language that allows us to know temporality as we do and to represent it as a linear development. [...] Schizophrenia, [...] results from a failure to enter to Symbolic Order; it is thus essentially a breakdown of language, which contributes to a breakdown of temporal order. The schizophrenic condition is characterized by the inability to experience the persistence of ‘I’ over time.” (“Ramble City” 70) 

Cleaner, SHE and HE: these protagonists are constituted by the intersections of certain socio-cultural elements that are temporally ordered. HE is an immigrant, SHE is a grandmother as well as a scientist and a traveller, Cleaner is only seen during the activity of cleaning (except the ending). All are speaking with the same set of rules and rhythm to regulate their spoken language that doesn’t belong to their own subjective history, but to a non-diegetic world of literary tradition. These people are artificial, without character, connected to an outer language. All these features—not being a representation of a character, but being stripped off from a historical existence while having a body of a person—connect them closely with what was called the schizophrenic condition of postmodern existence. These protagonists don’t speak for other people, they speak for their positions, in a specific language and a rhythm that unifies them.

Fowler observes this as “perspective being played around” (Fowler 101). The construction of the perspective is another point that YES brings to the fore through the use of language and camera. As Giuliana Bruno elegantly expresses this in her “letter” to Sally Potter:

“In your film the rhythm of the language stays constant, while the visuals and everything else move constantly. But the semantic rhythm is steady, not static. In the face of the gender and ethnic wars that the film represents, the poetic pattern represents a form of containment. Only such a recognizable linguistic structure would be able to safely contain the self at war, to ‘hold’ psychic trauma. The structure of the verse enables the saying of what could not otherwise be said, the naming of what could not otherwise even have a name” (“It’s About Time” 31)

The “self” that Bruno mentions doesn’t refer to how protagonists construct a “self.” On the contrary, Bruno underlines how they foreground the experiential condition of having a “self.” They are able to “say what could not otherwise be said” precisely because they don’t represent the “real” conditions of exchange of self-expression in personal encounters. For instance, when the “Eastern” HE wants to stop seeing the “Western” SHE, they start an initially calm argument that turns into a heated back-and-forth fight, he says:

“It’s you, your people feel superior
you want to rule, you want to spoil
you want our land, you want our oil
you call that civilized
Your country is a dragon breathing flames
Land of corporate fantasies, brand names,
big mac, big burger, yes big everything” (Potter)

As evident in this passage, HE is not personal, they are not personal: they reproduce the ideological concepts that are actually what is left behind when “personal” is taken out of the formula of a social encounter within the cultural matrix.

“The impossibility of genuine dialogue” marks acting as another platform for ideology to obscure the tools of cultural production; this was one of the main things that should be problematized in cinema for Godard. In YES, Potter also eschews attaching a subjective “self” to the subjects of communication at hand, but she then attaches subjectivity instead to a counter-ideology that attacks the colonial-capitalist mind. The protagonists speak the words of their socio-cultural positions in a way that their conversation at times becomes a war between sexes, other times a fantastical unity of “the East” and “the West.” While the words of sex and romance are unifying, the words of class and ethnicity are discriminating. Therefore, the poetic language in the film, by precisely indicating its constructed-ness, demonstrates a method of political cinema where the struggle with representation in terms of gender, class and ethnicity is articulated only through a set of rules (iambic pentameter) on the level of spoken language.

Instead of trying to depict a genuine dialogue and romanticism of unity between such subjects, the film squeezes the promises and the words of “shared ground of love and healing” into an imposed closed-circuit language play—that is the iambic pentameter that roots from the early English history (and inevitably carries with itself its colonial connotations). This use of language in the film then makes the default invisibility of English being the “universal” language visible, and that HEhad to learn English for the fantasy of unity to emerge. As Dave Lucas writes, the history of iambic pentameter originates from the European colonialist effort to elevate Latin as superior to the spoken English; this marks “the troubling element of the history of pentameter and English—the function of conquest, colonization, and subjugation” (“The Deep History”). The language in YES is also an imposition that makes the cosmopolitan pairing possible in the first place, through which the representational promises ingrained in the narratives of love are parodied. This is what Jackie Stacey called “a liminal space between dystopia and utopia” (32) in YES – the possibility of healing resides in its utopic images of equal ground and the possibility of change resides in its dystopic images of surveillance and racism.

The leftism of YES both seems possible yet fantastical with regard to a “love affair” as well as an achievement of political unity. As I mentioned earlier, we find an easing of this type of paradoxicality in what has been described as postmodernist cinema. The cinematic spectacles of heterosexual love, bourgeois depression and unbinding catharsis strove to transcend the restriction of language in quite a number of mainstream pre-September-11 American cinema among which we can count Magnolia (1999), Fight Club (1999)or American Beauty (1999). However, YES resists such postmodernist aesthetic of slightly-optimistic catharsis which can be associated with what Jackie Stacey called the “cosmopolitan cure”. As Butler made it clear at the time, whatever was useful in postmodernism wasn’t necessarily a utopic transcendence of meaning, but the potential to resist the imposition of signification methods, such as media rhetoric and stereotypes, by way of revealing what they try to hide (i.e. classism and racism).  

Here in this context, I argue that the postmodern rejection of “the possibility of presuppositionless representation” (Agger 117) proved unhelpful since the transitional moment in politics of representation marked by September-11 (this rejection was sort of favoured as a method to de-universalize knowledge and recognize difference, for example by Ben Agger). Such as the Middle Eastern subjects in Western media since the early 2000s, the multiplication of subject positions through representation started to coalesce around the concept of terrorism and refer to emptied out signifiers (take for example, TV shows like Homeland or The Night Manager). Once there exists such dominant signifiers that move away from what they signify (i.e. actual subjects from “the Middle East”) and become empty shells of political distraught of the Western world, then the optimistic aspects of the postmodernist paradigm (that is, for marginalized identities) become harder to associate with the revelation of “structuring absences” in media. And for that matter, revolutionary cinema. Yes, YES underlines the impossibility of representing the “real” experience of self like a true postmodern text. Nonetheless, it still lays bare how this paradigm of “no real self but only context” can serve some of the dominant ideological positions that use the clichés of colonial language (the black-ish humor of SHE can be a reference to that). The film shows that the fantasies of interracial heterosexual love narratives that involve the concept of immigration in the background lack an engagement with how these subjects are actually signified in the systems of media representation.

According to Comolli and Narboni, cinema can become politicized by pointing back to their level of ideological integration: criticising films should present

“a rigidly factual analysis of what governs the production of film (economic circumstances, ideology, demand and purpose) and the meanings and forms appearing in it, which are equally tangible” (28).

They also determine the main role of a radical filmmaker:

“the film-maker’s first task is to show up the cinema’s so-called ‘depiction of reality’” (25).

All these features could be sought in approaching YES in the textual analysis tradition that would probably satisfy the requirements of a “rigid practice” according to the guidelines of Comolli and Narboni. However, the film’s critical comprehension might end up being quite nullifying, considering how impossible it would be to determine what governed the multiplied and detoured meanings appearing in YES as they are not tangible in the same way as the film’s production conditions. We know that Sally Potter wrote YES as a response to September 11 (Bruno, “It’s About Time” 30), but what it ended up responding to was how to tackle the gap between self and other. With regards to this background information, the sensibility and conceptualization of YES can be seen as a political reaction that finds it hard to locate itself in one perspective, but prefers to make its central political analogy (the love affair between “the East” and “the West”) subject to instability and mobilization. My contention is that this mobile political reaction provides an example of how counter cinema can be reformed on screen and enforces a different approach to a postmodern perspective that can re-evaluate counter cinema’s earlier, more rigid versions. In doing so, the discourse of counter cinema will not have to ease paradoxes for the sake of categorizations, rather its function can become an assessment of representational politics.

Notes

Agger, Ben. “Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism: Their Sociological Relevance.” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 17, 1991, pp. 105-131.

Bruno, Giuliana. “Ramble City: Postmodernism and ‘Blade Runner.’” October, vol. 41, 1987, pp. 61–74.

Bruno, Giuliana. “Yes, It’s about Time: A ‘Virtual’ Letter to Sally Potter.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27-40.

Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Questions of ‘Postmodernism’.” The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, edited by Steven Siedman, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 153-179.

Campbell, Duncan. “‘People Were More Afraid of the Poetry’.” The Guardian, 29 July 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jul/29/2. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.

Cannon, Steve, “Godard, the Groupe Dziga Vertov and the Myth of ‘Counter Cinema’.” Nottingham French Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, 1993, pp. 74-83.

Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Volume 1, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1976, pp. 22-30.

Constable, Catherine. “Postmodernism and Film.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Steven Connor, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 43-61.

Constable, Catherine. Postmodernism and Film: Rethinking Hollywood's Aesthetics. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Durham, Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas M. Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Fowler, Catherine. Sally Potter. University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Fischer, Lucy. “‘Dancing through the Minefield’: Passing, Pedagogy, Politics, and Production in Tango Lesson.” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, 2004, pp. 42-58.

Garrett, Daniel. “Dreaming Wide Awake: Sally Potter’s Yes, and In My Country, The Interpreter, War of the Worlds, Kings and Queen, Heights, Saving Face, Off the Map, and The Upside of Anger, with Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband.” Offscreen, vol. 9, no. 9, 2005.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002.

Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter cinema (UK, 1973).” In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie, University of California Press, 2014, pp. 347-356.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. Methuen, 1983.

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Young Mr. Lincoln and Ideological Analysis: A Reconsideration (with Many Asides).” Jump Cut, No. 55, 2013.

Klinger, Barbara. “’Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Text.” Screen, vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 30-44.

Lucas, Dave. “The Deep History of Poetic Rhythm.” Oxford Observer, 5 Apr. 2019, https://oxfordobserver.org/1708/briefs/the-deep-history-of-poetic-rhythm/. Accessed 7 Apr. 2022.

Matthewman, Steve and Douglas Hoey. “What Happened to Postmodernism?” Sociology, vol. 40, no. 3, 2006, pp. 529-547.

McRobbie, Angela. “Feminism, Postmodernism and the ‘Real Me’.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 433-441.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, 6-18.

Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Visual and Other Pleasures, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, pp. 29-38.

Perry, Colin. Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974-90. Intellect, 2020.

Poster, Mark. “Postmodern Virtualities.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 442-451.

Potter, Sally, John Berger and Pankaj Mishra. Yes: Screenplay and Notes. HarperCollins, 2005

Rich, B. Ruby. “Femicide Investigation: Thriller (1980).” Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Edited by Rich, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 227-232

Scott, A. O. “Adulterous Romance in a Fractious World.” The New York Times, 24 June 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/movies/adulterous-romance-in-a-fractious-world.html. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.

Stacey, Jackie. “Love’s Cosmopolitan Promise in Sally Potter’s Yes.” Camera Obscura, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-39.

Tay, Sharon Lin. Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’est.” The European Cinema Reader, edited by Catherine Fowler, Psychology Press, 2002, pp. 74-82.

Filmography

Anderson, Paul Thomas, director. Magnolia. New Line Cinema. 1999.

Fincher, David, director. Fight Club. Fox 2000 Pictures. 1999.

Ford, John, director. Young Mr Lincoln. Twentieth Century Fox. 1939.

Mendes, Sam, director. American Beauty. Dreamworks Pictures. 1999.

Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen, directors. Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons. 1974.

Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen, directors. Riddles of the Sphinx. 1977.

Potter, Sally, director. YES. Adventure Pictures.2004.

Potter, Sally, director. Orlando. Adventure Pictures.1992.

Potter, Sally, director. The Tango Lesson. Adventure Pictures.1997.

Potter, Sally, director. Thriller. Arts Council of Great Britain.1979.

Potter, Sally, director. The Gold Diggers. 1983.

Potter, Sally. RAGE. Adventure Pictures. 2009.

Scott, Ridley, director. Blade Runner. Warner Bros. 1982.