Jem Cohen’s Chain, or The Cinema of Public Space

By Chuck Tryon

In a famous passage in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin writes, “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of the second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”1 Benjamin’s comments call attention to the ways in which Benjamin saw the motion-picture camera as a potentially liberating tool for looking at the fragmentary objects and the public spaces that inform our experiences, that shape our relationship to mass culture. Although Benjamin’s work focused primarily on the Paris Arcades of the 19th century and transformations of urban space under industrial capitalism, his work still speaks to us as we witness not only the continued expansion of consumer culture but also the potential changes represented by digital technologies. Benjamin was attentive to the liberating potential for technologies of mechanical reproduction, and his work provides a useful model for thinking about how visual media can be used to interpret contemporary transformations in commodity culture, identified now with suburban sprawl and online “stores” rather than the department stores of the modern era.2 While this utopian potential of movies has rarely been realized, Jem Cohen’s lyrical, observant documentaries, Chain and Building a Broken Mousetrap, offer a fleeting glimpse of how we inhabit public space in the early 21st century, well over a century after the Paris Arcades that Benjamin so attentively studied throughout the last two decades of his career. Cohen’s films self-consciously evoke a Benjaminian approach to mass culture that builds upon and extends the cine-essays of Chris Marker, focusing his lens on the contemporary equivalent of the Paris Arcades, the shopping malls, theme parks, and chain restaurants that dominate our landscape.

Pictures from the film “Chain”, Jem Cohen, 2004, 16mm, 99 min. Courtesy of Jem Cohen Films / Gravity Hill.

The use of documentary to explore our experience of public space is crucial to Chris Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil, in which a woman, Alexandra Stewart, reads letters sent by the fictional filmmaker, Sandor Krasna, a stand-in for Marker himself. The letters—or cinematic postcards—are sent from the far-flung locations of Guinea Bissau, Tokyo, and San Francisco, with Marker’s camera observing the vicissitudes of public space, especially the marketplaces and department stores where commodities are purchased.3 This attention to public space and its relationship to the collective dreams of mass culture is best represented in a dramatic scene in which Kransa comments on the fact that many Tokyo subway stations are named after the department stores where they are located, thus linking navigating the city with navigating the consumer spectacle of the department stores themselves. In one of his letters he observes that his dreams are increasingly set in these Tokyo department stores, leading him to wonder if his dreams are “part of a totality, a giant collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.” This depiction of Tokyo’s department stores as a “giant collective dream” is dialectically linked to Tokyo’s mass culture, specifically to the television as an instrument for shaping human attention, much as Benjamin saw the cinema as producing new forms of distracted attention.

Marker’s interest in these “collective dreams” very much echoes Benjamin’s fascination with the Paris Arcades, and both Marker and Benjamin inform the poetic, observational sensibility witnessed in Cohen’s films. Like the flaneûr often described by Benjamin and the traveling filmmaker in Sans Soleil, the two main characters in Cohen’s sublime 2004 film, Chain, inhabit the public spaces, the malls, hotel lobbies, and restaurants, observing the events that unfold around them. Significantly, unlike the bourgeois, male flaneûr described by Benjamin, Cohen’s subjects are both female and experience public space from two distinctly different class positions. The stories of these two characters, Tamiko (Miho Nikaido), a Japanese businesswoman studying retail spaces around US theme parks,4 and Amanda (Mira Billotte), a runaway drifting between temporary jobs, never intersect, although they seem to inhabit somewhat similar spaces. The mise-en-scene of Chain is dominated by the empty parking lots, towering hotel lobbies, shopping mall food courts, and other settings that call attention to the commodification and homogenization of public space. The result is a sense of postmodern disorientation, leaving us unable to ground ourselves in a specific place. This disorientation is fully intentional, as Tom Charity points out in his Cinema Scope review: “Chain is a movie in establishing shots. Except that these shots serve the opposite purpose: obscuring and disorienting— dis-establishing, if you will”.

Pictures from the film “Chain”, Jem Cohen, 2004, 16mm, 99 min. Courtesy of Jem Cohen Films / Gravity Hill.

In fact, at the end of the film, we learn that Chain was filmed in eleven states and five countries, suggesting the ways in which chain stores have begun to colonize public space, often crowding out the older stores that no longer represent the “collective dreams” of the present but have come to seem outmoded, unfashionable (significantly, among the stores that have closed, we see several locally-owned video stores, presumably run out of business by the larger chains). However, instead of looking at these places with simple derision, Cohen finds unexpected beauty in many of these spaces, recognizing the utopian aspirations embodied in the architecture of shopping malls and theme parks. Like Marker in Sans Soleil, who recognized the dream-state produced by the department stores of Tokyo, Cohen’s camera depicts the shopping mall as a kind of dream space, showing the ways in which commodities are displayed. However, we also see the run-down hotels and derelict shopping centers, the slightly older buildings that have been abandoned for newer and often larger malls.

At the same time, he is careful to avoid simply reducing the experience of sprawl by seeing it solely through the eyes of the consumers. Amanda, the teenage runaway works in the hotels near shopping malls, often getting paid under the table, and can recite the stores—in order—that lead up to the shopping mall where she hangs out during her spare time when she isn’t working, listing the stores as a kind of litany. Establishing shots of the stores themselves remind us that these stores could be anywhere, that Amanda’s story could be taking place in virtually any city in the United States. Amanda’s experience of sprawl often contrasts sharply with Tamiko’s, as she negotiates the city on foot or by public transportation, making it virtually impossible to obtain more secure employment. Amanda’s story has its theoretical basis in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, a book that describes the challenges of surviving while working low-wage jobs, often without the benefit of health insurance. Ehrenreich’s book documents her efforts to live for several weeks while working minimum wage and part-time jobs, and in several places Amanda explains the difficulty of securing employment without a permanent address and the impossibility of getting a permanent address without having a job. In short, the system itself often works against those who are trying to find secure employment. In fact, Cohen cites both Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed as recommended books during the closing credits of the film, suggesting a possible dialectic between the two texts.

The connection to Marker is established in other ways as well, most directly in the scenes in which Amanda records a kind of epistolary video diary using a video camera she found. Amanda records video letters for a friend, reporting on her experiences and her struggles to get by. The video letters loosely structure Amanda’s narrative and recall the epistolary structure of Sans Soleil, in which Alexandra Stewart reads the letters ostensibly sent to her. Many of Amanda’s “video postcards” are recorded on a night-vision setting, giving her a ghostly, almost haunted, presence in the film, and defamiliarizing even further the abandoned dwellings where she temporarily lives. As Michael Renov argues in The Subject of Documentary, Cohen’s cinematic vision is one that “embraces the fragmentary, the miniaturized, and the metaphorical, one that might well have pleased Benjamin.”7 Cohen’s films, like Marker’s, ask us to pay attention to the ephemeral, to the discarded, to the lost objects and forgotten spaces that might help us to make sense of our everyday lives, and Tamiko and Amanda, both of whom function as outsiders, as observers, provide us with the lens for seeing these lost objects, these spaces in new ways. At the same time, as the end-credit nod to Ehrenreich suggests, Chain is attentive to the concrete lived experiences of the retail workers who inhabit these spaces and the challenges they face in getting by in America.
Cohen’s attention to public spaces is reflected in one of his more recent documentaries, Building a Broken Mousetrap, which I had a chance to see at the 2007 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. While Building a Broken Mousetrap focuses primarily on documenting a September 11, 2004, concert by the Dutch punk band, The Ex, Cohen crosscuts between the concert and footage filmed outside the 2004 Republican Party convention, which had taken place only a few days earlier. These scenes not only depict the often unrepresented anti-war movement, but we also, again, see the role of the streets and sidewalks as a public space. But the key moment of the film is a sequence filmed in front of an electronics store in which a destitute, possibly homeless, man remarks on the expensive price of radios, commenting that he would never pay $200 for a radio, setting up even more vividly the contrasts between rich and poor that often characterize urban space.

As I write these words, however, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting is considering regulations that could severely restrict the ability of documentary filmmakers to record these fleeting events, to provide us with new ways of seeing the public and semi-public spaces we inhabit, issues that Cohen has addressed in a one-minute short entitled “Free,” which briefly encapsulates the importance of being able to film in the streets of New York.8 The original proposed rules, which provoked tremendous public outcry, would have required film crews of five or more people filming with a tripod at a single location for more than ten minutes to get a permit. Film crews of two or more working in a single location for half an hour would also be required to get a permit. Anyone obtaining a permit must also have $1 million dollars in liability insurance, making it prohibitively expensive for “smaller” films to be made. To be fair, after the initial public response, the Office is revising the rules to make them less restrictive; however, these proposed rules would have had the potential to severely curtail the kinds of observant, lyrical documentaries that Cohen has produced throughout his career. Cohen’s films offer a kind of Benjaminian materialist historiography of the present, calling attention to the ways in which public space continues to be eroded by commodity culture while also acknowledging the ways in which those who inhabit that culture manage not only to navigate it but also to make sense of it through a variety of interpretive frames.

Chuck Tryon is assistant professor of film and media at Fayetteville State University (USA).