What does modernism offer? Long live something, maybe not it ...
Macunaíma can help us out.
I'm not being cryptic here (honest). There's nothing to decipher. Just ask yourself what these images mean to you, how they make you feel or what they make you think about. Maybe it's nothing at all like what I'm thinking. How does our "visual culture" (whatever that may mean) treat space, and not only space, but all that which is within it. All that which constitutes it, in fact. Rocky Balboa punching beef in a factory (or, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre meathooks) tells us about something, gives us a piece of a puzzle, just as Antonioni's brilliant Red Desert does. What really does happen to our flesh? Animals' flesh? The entire sustenance industry? How is it presented back to us? How can we get back to the body, assuming we're alienated from it?—which we are, if we identify with or conform to the externalities depicted by the likes of (much) Antonioni, or any other artist who turned a cool eye on the bourgeoisie.
This Videodrome remake will almost definitely be the worst film ever made. (A few postures we might like to see embraced: to find a better balance between the serious & unserious; to be grumpy but not snarky [a truly Herculean feat for today]; to be able to scrawl a few lines down without worrying if in this particular instance anyone follows you, simply because the point is to record for personal posterity, and to share in the interest of lighting up someone else if at all possible, sparked by the words & connections & images ...)
P.S. Here's an off-the-cuff proposal for nobody. A full three-day weekend programming bill - Friday & Saturday: Rivette's Out 1 ('noli me tangere'), Sunday: Robert Kramer's Milestones, Coleen Fitzgibbon's Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes, Pere Portabella's El Sopar, and Sara Gómez's De Cierta Manera.
5 comments:
Antonioni has never struck me as terminal. Not even late Antonioni. There are no ends in cinema; just places where people choose to stop. There's still a lot to do with the body; it's a mysterious place. What's the last sequence of L'Eclisse if not the beginning of a new strain in cinema? That's really the beginning of space: to depict spaces, and how the flesh moves through them, instead of showing how the flesh moves through a space. We don't get back to the body by denying the space -- no stepping forward if we side-step first. I have this to offer, and Scott Walker's "Clara," off of The Drift.
Addendum: a video link.
I thought this was leading to a plug for Food Inc.
Hey man,what great and wonderful pictures , I think that these are so demonstration, so I think that in our society have neww flesh and old flesh in every place.
Thanks for your article, quite useful piece of writing.
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