观看读者
原标题：Watching Readers
作者：Madison Brookshire
翻译：小饰
…for centuries we have been overly interested in the authorand insufficiently in the reader. —Roland Barthes
“几个世纪以来我们都过于关注作者，而漠视了读者。”—罗兰·巴特
I am face to face with a young woman sitting cross-legged on a couch. She has a book in her lap; I have a notebook in mine. She is in a sunlit room; I am in a darkened theater. And yet somehow I feel as though I might disturb her. The couch and wall behind her divide up the background into thick horizontal bands: a nearly flat and abstract field were it not for the woman and her tote bag, which break and complicate the symmetry of the frame. She is reading her book; and I am reading her, or rather, an image of her. Together, and not, we sit quietly, studying.
我和一个盘着腿坐在沙发上的女人面对面。她大腿上放着一本书；我放着笔记本。她处在一个阳光充足的房间里；我坐在一个黑暗的剧院中。但不知为何，我感到我好像有打扰到她。她背后的沙发和墙把背景分成厚重的水平带：一个并不融合女人和她的手提袋的接近扁平和抽象的场地，这打破了框架的对称性并且使之复杂。她在读着她的书；而我在读她，或者说，她的形象。我们一起，也并没有一起，安静地坐着，学习。
I write in my notebook that I see so much as she looks away. This feeling will recur throughout the rest of the film—James Benning’s READERS (2017), which comprises just four shots of four figures: Clara McHale-Ribot, Rachel Kushner, Richard Hedbige, and Simone Forti reading quietly to themselves. Time and again, I find it is when a subject momentarily looks up from their book, that we are able, compelled really, to read them.
我在我的笔记本里写道 她看向别处时，我看到了更多。这种感觉会伴随着整部片子—James benning的 READERS ,由四个人物的四个镜头组成：clara mchale-ribot，Rachel kushner，Richard hedbige，simone forti 安静地独自阅读。时而反复的，我发现当一个主体短暂地从书中抬头时，我们就可以，其实是被迫地，阅读他们。
Later, in another room, I am reading Barthes’s essay “Writing Reading,” and I think again of these moments. “Has it never happened, as you were reading a book,” he begins, “that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?” 1
之后，在另一个房间，我在读Barthes的论文‘书写阅读’，然后我又重新考虑了这些时刻。‘它从未发生过，在你读一本书的时候。’他开始说，“你阅读的时候一直停顿，不是因为你不感兴趣，而正是因为你被吸引了：意识的浮现，刺激，联想？用一句话说，你难道没有偶然地从书中抬头时阅读吗？”
Still from READERS, 2017, courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, (pictured Clara McHale-Ribot)
For the viewer, READERS happens precisely at those moments that you look up from the film.Except that when you look up from a film, unlike looking up from a book, you are still looking at it. And so your attention may drift even as your gaze is fixed. This quality of attention, drifting to and from something as a way of being with it, may be familiar to viewers already attuned to the pleasures of James Benning’s body of work, a cinematic discipline whose rigor has only intensified since his shift to digital video in 2009 with Ruhr. But READERS takes this even further; it represents a limit case. And as such I am forced to abandon this notion of reading: the stillness is parallel, but not the act; instead we watch, as in keep watch. We are observers, on the lookout, maintaining a kind of vigil over the readers.
对于观者来说，READERS 恰好发生在那些你从一部电影里抬头的时刻。除了当你从一部电影里抬头的时候，不像从一本书里抬头，你还是在观看它。你的注意力可能游离在外，但你的目光还是固定的。这种注意力的质感，作为一种与之共存的方式，对于已经适应了James Benning作品的乐趣的观众来说可能是熟悉的，自从他在2009年的《鲁尔区》中转向数字视频以来，这种电影学科的严谨性只是加强了。但是 READERS 把这更推进了一步：它代表了一个限制性的例子。而且随着我被迫去抛弃这种阅读的动态：静态是平行的，但并不是表演；我们不是在观看，而是在持续观察。我们是观察者，在观察着，同时对阅读者保持一种警惕。
Later, I learn through an intertitle that McHale-Ribot is reading D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. I say learn—it is actually an induction, the proximity of the title to the preceding shot suggests a connection between the two texts. Eisenstein might have called this a collision productive of thought, but the language of collision seems out of place here, in so still and peaceful a setting. Instead, in retrospect, I think of Barthes’s notion of the intertext: there is the “text” of the film and the “texts” that overlap and intersect with it: Lawrence, George Bernanos, the neighbor’s Carole King record drifting in through the open window…. What is ostensibly flat and austere—four uninterrupted shots of people reading, the apotheosis of modernist documentary realism—becomes more dimensional, expansive, diffuse. The texts accumulate and color the way I view them.
之后，我通过字幕了解到Michael-ribot在阅读D.H.劳伦斯的《恋爱中的女人》。我说了解—它实际上是一种诱导，标题与前面的镜头相近，表明这两个文本之间有联系。爱森斯坦可能把这称为思想的碰撞，但碰撞的语言在如此静谧和平的环境中似乎不合适。相反，现在回想起来，我想到了巴特的互文概念：有电影的 "文本 "和与之重叠和交错的 "文本"。劳伦斯、乔治-伯纳诺斯、邻居的卡罗尔-金唱片从打开的窗户飘进来....。表面上看是平面的、朴素的--四个不间断的人阅读的镜头，现代主义纪实主义的神化--变得更加立体、宽广、弥漫。这些文本积累起来，并为我观看它们的方式着色。
The passage from Women in Love quoted in the intertitle describes a terrifying look, a hidden watcher whose presence is perilous—a man staring at a woman, suddenly noticed, and the fear this induces. I think of the presence of the filmmaker, of course, as well as the camera, its insistent unblinking gaze and the gendered violence inscribed therein; but I also think of my own presence in the theater, watching. Whatever I may have taken for granted while sitting with the preceding shot is suddenly foregrounded.
字幕引用《恋爱中的女人》中的一段话，这段话描述了一种可怕的眼神，一个隐藏的观察者，他的存在是危险的--一个男人盯着一个女人，他突然被注意到，而这引起了恐惧。当然，我想到了创作者的存在，以及摄影机，它持续的、不眨眼的凝视和其中的性别暴力；但我也想到了我自己在影院中的存在，观看着。当坐在影片中前面的镜头中，那些我原本可能忽视的东西，都突然成为了前景/焦点。
Most film writing acts as though the body is not present in the theater, in fact that the theater is not there at all. But watching READERS, I cannot write this way, cannot think this way. I am not only passively receiving this film; I am part of the movie as I watch it. My eyes, my posture, my position toward the screen: they are all part of the act. I am not watching a film about reading; I am learning what watching a film is.
大部分电影写作中的身体似乎都是不在场的，事实上影院根本不存在其中。但是对于 READERS ，我不能这样写，不能这样想。我不仅仅是被动地接受这部电影；当我观看这部电影时，我是电影的一部分。我的眼睛，我的姿势，我对着屏幕的位置：它们都是电影的一部分。我不是在看一部关于阅读的电影；我在学习什么是看一部电影。
Next, watching Rachel Kushner read, I begin to think of a certain tradition in postwar cinema that utilizes non-actors in its pursuit of realism. Because non-actors cannot (or do not) successfully reproduce the signs that professional actors use to code their performance as realist, this creates a paradox. The non-actor codes a film “real” by coding their performance as false—or failing to code their performance as realist, which amounts to the same thing. That these codes are in and of themselves mutable is beside the point; the non-actor is almost instantly recognizable as such no matter what period the film is from.
接下来，看着Racheal Kushner的阅读，我开始想到战后电影的某种传统，即利用非演员来追求现实主义。由于非演员不能（或不能）成功地再现专业演员用来将他们的表演编码为现实主义的符号，这就产生了一个悖论。非演员通过将他们的表演编码为假的，或未能将他们的表演编码为现实主义的，这等于将电影编码为 "真实"。这些代码本身是可以改变的，这一点并不重要；无论电影来自哪个时期，非演员几乎都能立即被识别为真实。
One way filmmakers have facilitated the use of non-actors is to engage them in a task they are intimately familiar with. This produces an image at an interesting intersection, something between convincing performance and candid portrait. This type of image, a portrait achieved through performing a task, a performance that is not acting, is just what I am watching.
电影制作人使用非演员的一种方式是让他们参与一项他们本身就非常熟悉的任务。这产生了一个有趣的交叉点的图像（图景），介于令人信服的表演和坦率的肖像之间。我正在观看的这种类型的图像，是通过执行任务实现的肖像，一种不是表演的表演。
This passing thought is reinforced by the intertitle following Kushner’s image that quotes Mouchette, the Bernanos novel Robert Bresson so completely transformed in his filmic adaptation. Bresson arrives at an excess of pathos 共情by completely eliminating anything pathetic from the performance. There is no acting, only a succession of incidents forming a narrative and the sounds, for as Bazin points out, Bresson devotes as much attention to the ambient sound as he does the dialogue.
Kushner的图像后面的中间标题加强了这一想法，它引用了伯纳诺斯的小说《Mouchette》，Robert Bresson在他的电影改编中完全地改变了它。Bresson通过完全消除表演中所有煽情的部分，达到了过度的共情。没有表演，只有一连串的事件形成的叙事和声音，因为正如巴赞指出的，Bresson对环境声音的关注程度不亚于他对对话的关注。
Like Bresson, Benning has chosen non-actors and a flat affect as his cinematic strategies; although unlike Bresson, Benning’s readers are far from non-entities. McHale-Ribot (daughter of composer-performer Marc Ribot), Kushner, Hebdige, and Forti are not empty vessels unaccustomed to the public’s gaze, but accomplished artists, authors, and scholars in their own right. Here again, I find the idea of the intertext illuminating: Kushner the author intersects and overlaps with Benning the auteur. If, at times when looking up from the film, we allow ourselves to consider (and why would we not?) the fact that Kushner has created Benning-like characters in her novels—characters he has playfully responded to by executing the fictitious film descriptions she writes for this alter-ego—we arrive at a further overlap and interleaving.
像Bresson，Benning也在他的影像手段里选择了非专业演员和一种扁平的效果；但是不像Bresson，Benning的读者们远离非实体的组织。并不是对公众的凝视感到陌生的空花瓶，而是艺术家，作家，学者。在这里，我再次发现互文的概念具有启发性。Kushner的作者身份与Benning的导演身份交集和重叠了。如果在看电影时，我们允许自己考虑（我们为什么不呢？）kushner在她的小说中创造了类似Benning的人物--他通过执行她为这个替代者写的虚构的电影描述来俏皮地回应这些人物--我们就会到达进一步的重叠和交织。
And how can I not think of Forti’s work while watching her read? At one point, she moves her fingers with great purpose along the table top, as though measuring something in her mind, giving the faintest echo of her decades-long performance practice pursuing movement, music, sound, and sculpture to the point that they fill, overflow, and commingle, dissolving walls between disciplines as well as audience and performer.
在看她朗读时，我怎么能不想到 Forti 的作品呢？有一次，她很有目的性地在桌面上移动手指，仿佛在测量她心中的东西，给她几十年来的表演实践带来了最微弱的回声，她追求运动、音乐、声音和雕塑，使它们充满、溢出和混合，消解学科之间以及观众和表演者之间的隔阂。
In so much stillness, even subtle changes begin to take on enormous import. The familiar din of cars, buses, and people I hear in Forti’s home is remarkable compared to the low hum of Hebdige’s. Likewise, next to Hebdige, almost totally still except when turning the pages of his book, Forti’s slight tremor is dramatic. And when, in that fourth and final shot of the film, she briefly reads aloud, it is incidental and unremarkable, just another point in a vast field, and at the same time, feels like a tectonic shift in the possibilities of the image. A voice! Who knew they could speak?
在这种静态中，甚至字幕的改变都很重要。我在 Forti 家里听到的熟悉的汽车、公共汽车和人们的喧闹声，与赫布迪格的低沉的嗡嗡声相比，非常引人注目。同样地，在赫布迪格旁边，除了翻书时几乎完全静止，Forti 的轻微颤抖是戏剧性的。而当在影片的第四个也是最后一个镜头中，她简短地大声朗读时，它是偶然的，不引人注目的，只是在广阔的领域中的另一个点，同时，感觉像是图像的可能性的一个构造性转变。一个声音!谁知道它们会说话？
And so I become keenly aware that there are rules to this game being played by the readers (not just the game of reading), just as there are rules to my watch as well. Once more I think of these as portraits and performances. Who writes the rules of the film we watch so carefully? Who is the author of this image, these sounds? How many authors? How many readers? The point is not whatever conclusions we arrive at, but rather what we learn in the process: we learn what it is like to watch a movie, to sit together in stillness and quiet, our bodies at rest and in action, observing. Again, I think, this is not a movie about readers or reading; it is about us.
因此，我敏锐地意识到，这些读者所玩的这个游戏是有规则的（不仅仅是阅读的游戏），就像我的手表也有规则一样。我再次认为这些是肖像和表演。是谁编写了我们如此仔细观看的电影的规则？谁是这些图像、作者？有多少个作者？有多少个读者？关键不在于我们得出什么结论，而在于我们在这个过程中学到了什么：我们学会了看电影是什么样子，在寂静中坐在一起，身体即在休息也在行动，观察着。我再次认为，这不是一部关于读者或阅读的电影；它是关于我们的。
[1] Roland Barthes, “Writing Reading,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 29.
注释1: 罗兰-巴特，"写作阅读"，《语言的沙沙声》，译者：理查德-霍华德（纽约：Hill and Wang，1986），29。
翻译：xiaoshi
自译｜【李起万&克洛伊·加利贝特-莱妮/短片】-《阅读绑定班宁》
其实这篇video essay里提到的影评，是过分解读了，但不难感受到作者的热情。观看本宁作品时，可能不用想那么多——感受观看本身就好，让身体下沉、凝固在那个静态的时间切片中。