Amsterdam Stories, by Eduarda Neves

by Eduarda Neves, 2017

“The fictitious is never in things or in people but in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between them: encounters, the proximity of what is most distant, the absolute dissimulation in our very midst. Therefore, fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” (Michel Foucault – Dits et écrits III, p. 225).

In Amsterdam via Amsterdam (2004) and Amsterdam Stories USA (2012), two films by Rob Rombout and Rogier Van Eck, to question becomes the hermeneutical tool that does not set out to deny meaning or succumb to it, but to make history be told in a different way.
We are not before a random inventory of American history, at which we would arrive through the narrative of history or narrated history. We hear voices that give us back the reality of the conditions of existence. In their essentially analytical dimensions and apparent simplicity, there is no place, in these images, for pure forms: it is about listening to those who have their own voice rather than to those who speak on their behalf, as we are told in Amsterdam Stories USA.
Overcoming the potentially normalising logic of the “window into the world”, of the referent and the simulacrum, artworks, as social systems of meaning, confront us with structured and structuring spaces through which we gradually organise and project meaning:

“Our two basic models of representation miss the point of this pop genealogy almost entirely: that images are attached to referents, to iconographic themes or real things in the world, or, alternatively, that all images can do is represent other images, that all forms of representation (including realism) are auto-referential codes. Most accounts of post-war art (…) divide somewhere along this line: the image as referential or as simulacral. This reductive either/or constrains such readings of this art.” (Hal Foster – The Return of the Real, p. 128).

The presence of the real does not mean to assert realism but to defend a poetics that finds in reality the truth of appearance or, in a Nietzschean manner, there is no truth other than appearance.
The “filmic text” is shaped as a space of complex intertextuality and becomes a place of dialogue: everyday life, social relations, urban violence, death, poverty, racism, multiculturalism, segregation, loneliness, freedom, happiness, ideals, ways of life, colonization, war. Texts that overlap in layers, through which we hear that, although America projects itself as a land of big cities, “most Americans are insular (…) they do not know what happens outside their borders”, although we can also speak of “a decent, generous, tolerant people”.

« In the wandering of these travellers who renounce certainty, is expressed what we are in becoming, our becoming-other, what we gradually become, but also what still separates us from ourselves. »

Likewise, in these Amsterdam Stories, if on the one hand there is no room for exceptional circumstances, on the other a certain geography of memory reminds us that, when we think we are already close to another place, to another time, we might have, after all, never left. In the wandering of these travellers who renounce certainty, is expressed what we are in becoming, our becoming-other, what we gradually become, but also what still separates us from ourselves.
As Michel Foucault noted, the ship is the heterotopia par excellence:

“the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place that exists by itself, that is self-enclosed and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea (…) you will understand why, from the sixteenth century until the present, the boat has been for our civilization (…) the greatest reservoir of imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates.” (Michel Foucault – Dits et écrits III, p. 46).

In the boats of Amsterdam Stories, dreams do not dry up and continue to plough across the sea.

A for Amsterdam. A for America. Actuality has announced itself. There are no happy stories.

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Amsterdam Stories