1. A Smooth Conversation - Grapes,
Pomegranates and Nail Varnish

Mandarin Ducks (Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, 2005) begins with a slow drift: the camera moves along a slick black leather sofa towards the right, to show the back of a woman and then her hand touching a man's. There is a faint murmur of conversation. The camera moves up, showing the woman's mouth, but not her eyes. It then continues its drift, along the man's arm - revealing that the two are holding hands behind another man's back - and on to a second woman. The camera lingers on her hair, as if entertained by the thin green leaves and small white flower caught in it. Slowly, it moves around her, suggesting that soon the first face in the film will be visible. Instead, what appears is the face of the young man who was holding hands with the first woman. These playful movements continue, showing more backs, hands and arms, wine glasses and plates with grapes and pomegranates. Snatches of a fragmented but pleasant conversation can be heard, about nail varnish and personal relations, fruits and pleasantries. The characters seem intimate with each other, but there is a certain restlessness in their manner of speaking, perhaps a sign of discomfort. The camera's confident, playful moves suggest intimacy tainted with an inability to remain with something or someone for long. For the viewers the situation also might feel ambivalent, as if they had been invited to take part, but they are now gently set aside, so they end up witnessing, eavesdropping - not completely integrated, nor wholly excluded.

The scene gracefully balances an elegant realism with a subtle exposition of how that effect is achieved. In that sense, these images continue the language and some of the motifs of de Rijke and de Rooij's work in the past. Mandarin Ducks was their last work together, before de Rijke's death in 2006.¹ Before that, they had produced a series of films, objects and installations that explored the relation between film, still image and abstraction; the cultural, social, political and economic conventions determining the construction of images; and the position of the spectator within a gallery space. Mandarin Ducks's opening five minutes of light conversation appear as a coherent development of these motives. And for the first time here de Rijke and de Rooij use voices to accompany the images, again to a similar effect as that of their previous work: an exposition of the constructive techniques employed in documentary or realist filmmaking and, simultaneously, the production of seductive visual material.

2. Sex and Domination - Carlo Interpellates Sabine - Carlo Interpellated Twice

The next scene interrupts the thematic and stylistic continuity. The camera slows down until finally pausing to frame a man in his mid- to late-thirties facing a woman of a similar age, whose face we can barely see. Both have handsome features - his angular, hers softer - and, in contrast to the previous section, the image is sharp enough that every single detail of his face is visible. To her suggestion that he take her out on a date, he responds with a three-minute monologue objectifying her as a willing subject of male domination, while obviously enjoying himself as he does so. If in the previous section a series of characters were hinted at with a remarkable lightness of touch, here two characters are constructed in detail: a sexist, cruel man and a passive, subjugated woman. And while both are constructed through the camera and script, she is also the result of his words and gaze.

During the late 1960s and early 70s, areas of French and British film criticism approached film practice by focusing on its political nature. In an essay published in 1971 in the journal Screen, Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, then co-editors of Cahiers du cinema, maintained that 'Every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing).'² This sentence, which set up the theoretical grounds from which Cahiers and Screen operated for the better part of the 1970s, is a straightforward paraphrase the words of the philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser's small number of writings on theatre and art provided the editors of these publications with the framework from which to understand, in critical terms, film's relation to ideology and from which to assess its emancipatory power. As Comolli and Narboni wrote, 'the vital distinction between films' is whether they 'disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function'.³

In this scene of Mandarin Ducks, the construction of the woman as a dominated subject constitutes a perfect example of what according to Althusser is the main mechanism of ideology: 'interpellation' or, in French, appellation. In his text 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1970) Althusser sketches out how ideology, which he conceives of as social practice, 'has the function (which defines it) of "constituting" concrete individuals as subjects'.⁴ The idea of subject here includes both a reference to a subjectivity (a consciousness, however partial) and to subjugation.⁵ The example Althusser uses is that of a policeman in the street hailing a passer-by. The effect - unavoidable according to Althusser - of this call is that the individual turns around and looks back. This looking back constitutes the hailed person as a subject - a subjugated subject.

The subjectivation of the woman by Carlo is followed by a female voice that comments on his words as 'a desperate statement'. The camera doesn't show the woman who is now speaking, but remains focused on the man, whose name, we learn, is Carlo. She frames him as a sentimental subject, one who 'needs' and 'wants' love but can't admit it. Immediately after, a new voice, this time male, condemns Carlo's thoughts as 'dark, repressive, medieval', and identifies in him a psychological need, which he offers to help him work through. If Carlo seems resistant to the woman's intervention, he responds to the man - his previously fierce gaze is now softened and, with loving eyes and in a cliched seductive tone, he professes his love for the woman he had treated as his prey, inviting her out for 'an ice cream, or something else'. Interpellation can, then, happen in different modes: if straightforward gender domination is one, another is the constitution of a bourgeois, sentimental subject or a psychological subject - or, better, a subject with a psychological condition. This, however, doesn't stop him from constructing his potential partner as a dominated female subject - although more gently this time.

3. Vanity - Questions - Aunt Sonya Interrupts

Althusser opposes this subject to what he calls the 'individual', but there is no elaboration of what an individual is in the text about the Ideological State Apparatuses or indeed in others. This lack seems to suggest that, for Althusser, the individual is an empty notion, both theoretically and politically. As he says, 'individuals are always-already subjects' and, although Althusser elsewhere discusses the emancipatory role of science and art, it seems difficult to combine both points in a coherent argument - in fact, the mode of that emancipation and what results from it is only hinted at.⁶

The seeming inability to escape interpellation is played out throughout the following scene in Mandarin Ducks, in which a fourth woman, sitting at a vanity, fixes her hair and make-up while talking to her daughter, who stands leaning against the wall, barely looking or speaking to her. The mother, whose back is to the camera but whose face can be seen reflected in the mirror, asks about life and its vicissitudes in a melodramatic fashion. The conversation is interrupted by a new character, Aunt Sonya, and the frame expands to show the rest of the apartment's modernist, sparse interior.⁷ The melodrama continues, with the mother (whose name is revealed as Martha) and Aunt Sonya quarrelling mercilessly, throwing hilariously pungent words at each other. These are stereotypical bourgeois subjects, shallow, self-focused and alienated; they show that the subjects constituted through ideology are not only those of the obviously subjugated, but that, as Althusser points out, all subjective positions are constructed in a similar manner. Even though these characters clearly belong to the dominant class, they are the 'victims' of equivalent mechanisms from which they can't escape. These mechanisms ultimately guarantee the reproduction of relations of production that grants these characters' class a dominant position - and they do so not by repression, but by ideology. Ideology, for Althusser, is 'a "representation" of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence'.⁸ But, as we have seen, this representation has a material existence - it is social practice itself. So it could be said that the social practices that are 'represented' in Mandarin Ducks are already 'representations' of imaginary relations of the characters to their real conditions.

4. Bloody Traffic - Man Ray - Two More Interpellations

A new character enters the screen - an older man, probably in his early sixties, with a strong presence and displaying conspicuous determination. He complains about an immigrant taxi driver who doesn't know his way around, and then begins a long histrionic rant about immigrant populations who, he says, are allowed to live in a society and take advantage of its services while not contributing anything in return. As he speaks his eyes are focused on the camera and, in a reversal of the vanity scene, his back can be seen reflected on a wall mirror. Through this set-up, the process of subjectivation is complicated further: in a Brechtian move the fourth wall collapses and the audience - instead of a character - is interpellated. At the same time, the reflection of the character's back in the mirror 'unfolds' him, hinting at a vulnerability within his own subjective position, as well as the (remote) possibility that he, camera and script have failed to produce a 'solid' subject. This vulnerability and double interpellation is repeated by the intervention of another character (the daughter from the previous scene) who, looking straight at the camera, addresses the man (whose name is now given as Man Ray) and accuses him (and the viewers) of selfish imperialism. Pointing with her finger, she says: 'It's people like you who create all wars.'

This discussion places the film in the context of the ongoing discussion of the integration of immigrant populations in the Netherlands, the artists' country, and the country they were representing in Venice. The process of interpellation jumps out of the screen to incorporate the viewers (Dutch or not) and expose their complicit relationship to both local and global issues of integration and cultural, social and political conflict, while questioning the notion of national identity within an exhibition that is structured around it.

5. The Benefits of Charity - Role Play - A Glass Is Dropped

These issues are further developed in the following scene, where Sonya and Man Ray argue about the benefits of charity and efforts to empower 'the underprivileged'. Taking an apparently anti-authoritarian position, Sonya questions the possibility of emancipation imposed from the outside, and instead advocates self-empowerment - a sort of emancipation of wills, rather than an emancipation through an education based on content. Her proposal has echoes of an anti-hierarchical model of education, in which a master doesn't communicate knowledge in order to address a lack in the student but rather a teacher reinforces the will of the students so that they can decide to learn by themselves.⁹ Whether they decide to learn or not, and what they choose to learn is completely up to them. But, perversely, her speech reveals a condescension towards the 'underprivileged', making clear she doesn't conceive of the emancipatory relationship as one of equals. Her next sentence - 'When truth is forgotten or repressed, role play is often the only way to heal the wounds of the past' - suggests that what is at stake is not emancipation, but conciliation. Role-playing is not here a critical movement of disruption or self-construction, but of acceptance and integration. The actors - in the film and in social and political life - are perhaps able to play with the subject-roles that seem imposed on them, but in a way that never dislocates or breaks through the status quo they are part of.

However, if the characters' words seem to dismiss the possibility of change, that illusion is disrupted by what goes on inside the frame. During the conversation, the frame widens, and a microphone and a character (the subjugated female from scene two) become visible in the scene. This interruption is followed by two more - an awkward moment of silence and the breaking of a glass as it drops to the floor. These disruptions completely remove any impression of reality created in the first scene - if there was any left by then - and constitute further examples of the Brechtian A-effect. The structure of the film itself, with its discontinuous chapter structure is another example; others include the strong Dutch accent with which the characters speak English and the noticeable changes of lighting throughout the film. These moves displace the continuity and the sense of recognition that, according to a conventional conception of the narrative form inherited from Aristotle, the film is supposed to offer, complicating interpellation once more.

6. They All Laugh - And Laugh

The epic theatre's spectator says: I'd never have thought it - That's not the way - That's extraordinary, hardly believable - it's got to stop - the sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary - That's great art: nothing obvious in it - I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.¹⁰

Brecht opposes his idea of epic theatre to the theatre of illusion, arguing for strategies that make it impossible for the audience to identify with the film and its characters, or recognise themselves in what they see on the stage. That is exactly what happens during the film's sixth scene. Individually and in groups, in front of several abstract monochrome backgrounds that could have been extracted from de Rijke and de Rooij's earlier work, several characters confront the camera and laugh hysterically for three minutes. The viewer who had felt partially included in the film in its first scene, then subsequently addressed directly, is now completely expelled from it, objectified, dislocated. His or her position becomes extremely uncomfortable, even untenable - neither a participant, nor an observer, not even a subject, but a mere object of ridicule. The actors are not only aware of being watched, they show no respect for those watching them. As Brecht says, they act 'in such a way that nearly every sentence could be followed by a verdict of the audience', but, in this case, don't even seem to care about it.¹¹

For Brecht, the function of such formal devices is to create a distance from the viewer. When there is no longer room for the illusion, empathy and mimesis characteristic of what Brecht calls 'Aristotelian theatre' (which is grounded on a notion of a passive spectator) the viewer is obliged to adopt a position, to take part. As Althusser says, 'the piece doesn't decide anything for him or her. The piece is not a ready-made costume. The piece is not a costume. The viewer must design his or her own costume from the fabric of the piece, or rather from the fragments of fabric that the piece gives him or her.'¹² A constructive spectator rather than constructed one.

7. A Vanity Split in Two - A Broken Mirror - Laughs Again

Brechtian references continue in the next scene, this time possibly in an explicit manner, in the form of a Chinese mask placed by the window.¹³ The young man, wearing female clothes, and Carlo sit in front of the vanity, their reflections fragmented by a mirror that is split in parts, first in geometrical sections, then broken in many uneven pieces. Their reflections overlap while the two discuss role-playing within gender identity and then laugh, this time joyfully. Carlo's dominant male subject is now challenged by a questioning of his sexuality, to the point at which it breaks in pieces.

The broken mirror offers not only an image of a fractured subject (that of the character and perhaps also that of the viewer), but of the film as a fractured work itself. Like the literary work according to Pierre Macherey's conception, the film has at its core an absence, a 'real determinate disorder (its disarray)'.¹⁴ It is not a matter of defects, but of a 'lack' that derives from its incomplete nature, and which points at the distance that the work has from ideology. And, by doing so, the film 'establish[es] an original relation to the real'.¹⁵ In the face of this, the role of the viewer is to pick up the pieces and assemble them, to fill in the gaps - an exercise of production of the work through the translation of what is there and the 'filling in' of what is missing. (This is exactly what Althusser, Macherey and Jacques Rancière did in the collective work Reading Capital (1968), where they offered a reading of Karl Marx's Capital (1867) from the starting point of a 'necessary absence' in the work itself.¹⁶) The work - and this includes the literary work, the artwork and the philosophical text - is seen as a fragmentary ensemble with gaps within it and no hidden meanings. These gaps, precisely because they can't just be deciphered, present the possibility of an intervention by a spectator who produces himself while constructing the text.

8 and 9. Screen - Fidelity and Mandarin Ducks - A Ghanaian Fable

Two men (one of them Man Ray) and the woman from the third scene discuss fidelity in front of a gold Chinese screen. 'Mandarin ducks never leave their partner! They never take another, not even if their partner dies.' They are joined by Carlo. 'The Chinese consider sex to be an art form.'

'Why is it so hard for me to make up my mind? I feel like I am stuck in a babushka of realities.' A white woman in African clothes stands on a balcony and tells a story from her childhood in Ghana. She says that the face of the old man from the fable is the face of every man she has ever dated.

10. Everyone Standing Still - Martha Leaves the Scene

Brecht defines realism as an attempt to 'make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered'.¹⁷

The way in which this living reality is put in the hands of the people by the artwork is described by Althusser in his text 'The "Piccolo Teatro": Bertolazzi and Brecht' (1962). The text focuses on a play by Carlo Bertolazzi, El Nost Milan (1893), which follows a story that takes place within a circus troupe, with the Milan underclass in the background. The father of a young girl harassed by a good-for-nothing kills the man in order to defend her virtue - but, instead of appreciating that melodramatic gesture, the girl rejects it and throws herself into the 'bad life' that the dead man represented for her (and for her father). What Althusser sees in this rejection, as well as in the foregrounding of the Milan sub-proletariat that occupies the stage during most of the play (instead of the actual protagonists), is a rejection of ideology which the play itself 'chase … from the stage'.¹⁸ The play doesn't do it by means of simple commentary, by the communication of knowledge following a non-emancipatory pedagogical model - as Althusser says, 'the spectator would already know the tune'.¹⁹ The play, instead, is the development, the production of a new consciousness in the spectator - incomplete, like any other consciousness, but moved by this incompletion itself, this inexhaustible work of criticism in action; the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.²⁰

In the tenth and last chapter of Mandarin Ducks the characters are standing in silence, on their own or in pairs and with blank expressions, while Martha slowly walks in between them, looking at the others but apparently failing to recognise them. She then walks straight towards the camera with a lost gaze, touches her face (almost a mask) and chest, and stands still, silent.

Her movement recalls the move that Althusser describes, from inside the play outwards into life: the production of a says in chapter nine, they might want to do something, but not know what or how. That uncertainty is perhaps the nature of politics itself.

An earlier version of this essay was presented as part of the conference 'Film as a Critical Practice', organised by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo on 8-10 November 2007.

— Pablo Lafuente