A harrowing alphabetical excursion into the world of the rolled r. Milutis tracks—and, through sounds and videos, shows—the primal violence and utopian trill of 'the most rrresilient of locutions' in sound poetry, regional dialects, and televisual affects, from Kurt Schwitters to Georges Perec to Rodgers and Hart to Charles Bernstein.
This site between what Agamben calls "the infinite sea of mere sound" and articulate speech is the particularly generative, albeit ambiguous, site of sound poetry, if not of poetry itself. Yet sometime around 1950 (for poet Steve McCaffery), or even at the turn of the twentieth century (for media theorist Friedrich Kittler), something happened to take poetry away from the word, and by extension the letters that compose it, as recording technology allowed for an aestheticization of “mere sound.” Indeed, the rolled r—puncturing the line through its pure sounding—promised this return to the infinite sea of the real, presaging more effective disruptions of symbolic networks by way of the proliferation of reproduced sound.
F2F might seem retro to you. It struck me as very 1991. The idea of a hypertext that is heavy on the text seemed to lose its charm as soon as images, moving animation, video and sound could also be included. One of the downsides to the speed of the evolution of hypertext, is that whole possible genres and subgenres were not given the chance to grow. What happened to the web-film-essay? Well, it never happened. Sure, there are some text-book-market CD-ROMs and the like that do something similar, but they use video more as mere illustration. What about a film essay that would incorporate the mystery the moving image rather than try to compete with it? What about utilizing images and sounds that potentially resist the text? What about playing with the clips like a video artist would?
F2F gravitates towards Deleuze's theories of framing and the face, and brings into alignment filmmakers who, unwittingly or not, deconstruct the face. But it also spins off into links on Robert Smithson, mirrors, Issey Miyake, creative urbanism, Max Ernst, romance . . . . One of the plusses about doing this essay in hypertext form, is that it allowed me to incorporate or even memorialize various ambivalences I had while writing these ideas down in linear form. There were clearly at least two essays that could come of it all. But, rather than pairing up with one and bumping the other off, we're all still here.
"The city's relation to the face, the major trope of which is 'the faceless crowd,' is productive of one of the great cliches of the movies. . . ."
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