Just over a year ago I wrote a little on this topic (the last graf), but I was going through some old files on my computer and come upon these comparative private notes from a couple years back inspired by some Randolph Scott Westerns directed by three auteurist favorites. There's no real reason for this, and I haven't seen a Joseph H. Lewis, Andre De Toth, or Budd Boetticher film in some months so it's not like the issues are fresh in my mind. But I figured that, since I wasn't doing anything soon with these notes anyway, I'd post them here with a touch of editing and let people comment if they found anything of interest.
(Tangentially, I suppose, De Toth's Randolph Scott-less Day of the Outlaw got a recent DVD release, and so more people are getting a chance to see one of my all time favorite films by one of classical Hollywood's most underrated directors.)
* * *
Lewis is unusually fascinated with space and perspective: his films seem like they’re very concerned with pointing out the space between objects – between an actor and a table, from a bed to a dresser, from the saloon doors to the stagecoach. He likes to jut out an object, a head, a hand in the foreground even while our attention is focused in the background. What’s more, the ‘delineative’ streak in Lewis continues in his use of color, which tends to be exaggerated and bold, but is steeped within the particularities of décor: dresses and vests and rooftops are done in bright, distinct, solid colors.
De Toth likes to exaggerate color too, but for him these things aren’t organized by conceptual designation (“vest”); he acts as if the screen were a canvas and paints on it for the effect. Whereas Lewis is ‘theatrical’ and the colors’ meanings/effects are tied concretely to props and sets (i.e., the camera movement might not have any impact on the way we register color), De Toth is all about ‘painting,’ and thinks of color as one of many ways to present a flat rectangular moving image to the viewer – just as he thinks of motion and linear content in really striking terms that go above and beyond mere functional value.
Boetticher doesn’t strike me as distinctive, or at least as singular, as either Lewis or De Toth in terms of color and space. In fact, Boetticher strikes me as one of the most chameleon of directors – though I have an idea of a Boetticher universe in my head, it’s still not quite easy for me to reconcile Buchanan Rides Alone (energetic yarnspinning converging with smart genre irony), Decision at Sundown (feels like a taut minor De Toth), and Seven Men from Now (spare schematic methodical story with hints of the humor to come in Buchanan). Boetticher’s distinctiveness comes from attitude more than visual expression (though he’s no slouch with composition and pacing). I see Boetticher as standing back, amused, from his material, trying to poke it and rile it up through experimentation – he has a high-concept, highly intelligent streak like De Toth, but doesn’t invest himself emotionally and in upfront ways like De Toth does; so he shares an element of distance with Lewis, but Lewis (unlike De Toth and Boetticher) seems to be much more at home when he’s taking the emotions of his stories at face value: he’s the least critical of his material, and/or the least willing to be critical of it, of the three of them.
Lately I've been taking a look at a few contemporary Hollywood(ish) films I should have seen upon their release, but let slip through the cracks. I was shocked at how impressive I found Panic Room. (After liking this and Zodiac over the last eight or nine months, I should stop thinking of Fincher as an overreaching underachiever, and re-grant him status as a genuinely interesting filmmaker--i.e., the way I felt about his work in 1999, but a bit more detached.) Here's a paranoiac NY real estate fantasy, completely upfront about it, which dramatizes the stored-up fear accompanying the UES/UWS bourgie brownstone dream home. So many New York films just assume, or gloss over, the utter jaw-dropping financial prerequisites necessary for all the amazing apartments they exhibit. A favorite whipping-boy of mine in this respect is The Interpreter, in which Nicole Kidman plays a former white romantic-revolutionary in "deep, dark Africa" but has successfully hidden her past from the UN to work as an interpreter ... and she lives alone in a gorgeous, tastefully decorated Manhattan (or perhaps Park Slope [equally expensive]) pad from her presumably cushy salary. Such is the fantasy with films and TV shows in New York, of course, my complaint is just one among a million. But it's nice to see the occasional film that is relatively honest about this fact of real estate presentation. I do think the film starts to unravel, become (somewhat unpleasurably) predictable, in the last 45 minutes or so; I wouldn't call it a total success. But in terms of overlaying societal relations, interior space, and psychology it's pretty shrewd.
I'd suggest that the film treats the gorgeous UWS home as an analogue of the human (subject's) body; all the breathtaking trick shots, the ones that go from the top floor down to the first by means of an ostensibly acrobatic camera, drive home the unity of the space. But once it's invaded the subject must perform a kind of triage, retreat to the essentials to keep the whole pursuit going against the unwelcome harmful elements. This is one reason why the invasion of a home--and all the precautions taken to prevent it--are such powerful tropes: when one's identity is tied up into the property in which one lives, the assault on the property itself is like an assault on one's person. This is reinforced, I think, by the immense investment the film makes in corporeal or kinaesthetic identification--diabetic complications, one's fingers crushed, one's body beaten and broken ... but also the deliberate trade-off in exposing oneself to flame (in order to harm one's enemies), of invading one's circulatory and respiratory systems with drugs and chemicals, of hushing and stretching out the body to make not a peep when tiptoeing past one's assailants ... of surveilling others inside the home via its 'central nervous system.'
It seems to me that the film makes a jokey little play on the contrasting motivations of the three invaders--Jared Leto is simply a greedy privileged fuck-up; Forrest Whitaker a disadvantaged smart man driven by economic necessity; Dwight Yoakam a working-class dude with massive amounts of pent-up sadistic hostility. The degrees to which they're willing to go, the amount of pain they're willing to inflict on others or endure themselves, become a grid through which one can interpret the very justifications these guys have formulated for their own crime. Indirectly one could come up with a dense essay on why these guys assault the bourgeois home.
Some of the most worthwhile blog reading to be found currently is the "duel" between Marx (or rather his seconds, led by Le Colonel Chabert) and Derrida (or rather his seconds, led by Roger Gathman of Limited, Inc.). Since I have not read Spectres of Marx, or Stirner, or a lot of things, the conversation has been difficult to follow wholly intelligibly, and of course I can say nothing intelligent about the matter myself. Plus there is a lot of talking at cross-purposes. Still: worthwhile! Perhaps in a couple months I can return to the empty battlefield and offer a few reflections. To read: most posts at LCC from late April until the present; and at Limited, Inc., try thesethreeposts.
(Photograph: Farjana K. Godhuly/AFP -- Getty Images)
Let us recall that it was some of the great Islamic cultures that kept alive "our" Western antiquity; it was Islamic states that tolerated Jews and Christians (fellow religions of the Book); it was Muslim philosophers, scientists, statesmen, humanists, etc., with whom "our" European ancestors communicated and exchanged ideas. What we talk about when we talk of any religion is not a set of doctrines but a set of human, historical practices that produce the doctrines, over time, via collective and traditional intelligence rather than individual, logical intelligence. As such it is one of the great emptied-out truths of our media age that Islam, like every religion, has its "pros" and "cons." This is absolutely true, but it is emptied of its real truth because of its political function in media discourse, because the mixed bag that organized religion inevitably is gets stretched and distorted this way and that. We posit extremes, a polarity: there is "good" Islam, and then there is "bad" Islam, a perversion. Our politicians and media stress to us ad nauseum that these things exist in the thinnest possible sociopolitical context. By convincing enough of us that there is a mutation or perversion, a late predominance of the bad type of Islam, our owners basically cut out our feet from under us. They rob us of thinking of religion(s) in the historical and sociopolitical totality, of rationally coming to terms with the facts of a religion's goods & ills as a broadly cohesive set within global reality, and think of it instead as a kind of cancer, with mysterious origins from beyond, that can and should be kept at bay, and probably also attacked before it can spread.
Of course there are patriarchal and brutal theocratic regimes that have emerged (then and now) in the Islamic world--just as there have been in Christendom. This is the nature of mass, organized religion: beyond debating their truth content, clearly they are a form of social coercion & cooperation. No intelligent person could argue otherwise, one can only argue that these forms of social organization are beneficial and desirable. I think organized religion is very harmful in the long-term and on the macro scale, but can have a great deal of benefits in the shorter-term and on the scales of community, family & individual. Islam, like other religions, has its mystics and its mysteries, all its amazing human beauties--like Sufism, or the drums of Bedouin tribes. (In fact, most religions of civilization are at their most beautiful when they have aligned themselves to much older spiritual practices.) Islam has its relationship with bloodshed and pain (like Ashura, pictured above), as do other religions, because we must come to terms with sacrifice and with death. These are all common knowledge things that are just being blanketed over by the dominant framework of the liberal-hawks, like the worthless Martin Amis.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The newspaper said it has identified 250 cases in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees without medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes, the Post reported.
Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.
The Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) took over deportations in 2003.
ICE has stepped up the arrest and removal of foreigners who are in the United States illegally, who have been turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past, the Post reported.
A spokesman for the agency was not immediately available for comment. (Here.)
"Unlike those articulate elites who acted as voices of the political status quo, the tradition in film studies has always been enriched by an element of oppositionalism. The political persuasion of many influential writers on film was radical. The effort to legitimate film as a fine art, however, drove them to adopt the elitist discourse of traditional aesthetics. The populist aspects of mass culture could scarcely be appreciated in such terms. The demotic materials were threatening to elites--even progressive ones--because they challenged the status quo which elitist aesthetics presupposed. Overseas audiences saw displayed in American movies mores, values and attitudes they took to be subversive of local custom and political arrangement. American films were marked by an aggressive egalitarianism in dress, speech, action, relations between the sexes, and access to the basic necessities of the good life, as well as by an attitude implicit in their mode of address to the audience that they were out to please. This was and continues to be part of their attraction and of their threat."
-- Ian Jarvie, "Free trade as cultural threat: American film and TV exports in the post-war period" in Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity: 1945-95 (eds. Ricci & Nowell-Smith)
"The external aspect was less the model of better unified states, but rather the invasive and disruptive threat of movies from a nation that did not have a single culture--the United States. The vitriolic descriptions of the United States by European intellectuals, especially German and French, are some indication of how it was feared. Ignoring the snobbery of such arguments, there was a danger: American movies did depict a society that was emphatically egalitarian in outlook, even if not in outcomes, democratic to a populist T, and manifestly multicultural. Through all the distortions of American films, no audience could imagine that the Wild West, the southern plantations, the urban jungles and the idyllic small towns, all depicted so deftly, amounted to a single culture. One reason, perhaps, why the United States was so often denounced as a 'mongrel' society. In other words, the actual nation-building project under way in many recipient countries was not consonant with the national and cultural model of the United States. The American model de-naturalizes purificatory nationalisms and tends therefore to undermine them."
--Ian Jarvie, "National Cinema: A theoretical assessment," in Cinema & Nation (eds. Hjort & MacKenzie, 2000)
Coming across the claptrap at the top recently, I knew it sounded familiar--I read the other Jarvie article some months back. Whatever else Jarvie (a student & advocate of Karl Popper, and probably emeritus by now) has put out, these two articles despite their presumed subject matter ultimately function as little more than mindless rah-rah encomia to Hollywood cinema. He takes certain sound premises and half-truths and situates them just so. Then the blanket assertions he makes that seem downright ridiculous to anyone with eyes are just how decently open, egalitarian, democratic, and multicultural American cinema is and has been for years. The more devious thing he sneaks into the articles is the notion that Hollywood product = popular culture (no complications, no nuances, no ifs/ands/buts--H'wood "just" makes great fun movies for affordable prices), therefore resistance to that product (on the market and in economistic terms, in terms of indigenous cultural traditions, even in terms of aesthetics) is necessarily to embrace fearful elitism of good fashioned fun for all regular folks everywhere.
A proposition thrown out there for myself and anyone who would critique it. In today's celebrity youth culture almost all celebrity is bought on credit. One finds fame by
1) manifesting the epoch's own perceived image of its Zeitgeist, or 2) going to the extremes of this perceived image, or 3) selling oneself by virtue of a loan--a star provides his or her youth (or equivalent) to the machine, in exchange for fame. But there are two kinds of fame, the temporary and the durable. The grant of the former leads only to a chance at the latter. The machine enables the star-to-be to apply for durable status by means of a "trial period." If the investment provides no returns, the star is discarded along with her youth. In the case of someone like Britney Spears (who may yet pull off a comeback or two in her lifetime, who knows), her initial investment was so much that the machine can feed productively off of her unraveling as she struggles--unsuccessfully, it seems--for durability. Her increasing lack of success is at the same time the machine's energy source, and its manifestations about her (and her success, and lack of it) are strengthened by it. Or, at least, they are shown to be strong by it. They produce, for example, figures who fit into categories 1 and 2, like Chris Crocker. I first suggested an idea in this area in the very first film blog-a-thon. Elizabeth Berkley was a victim of category 3 but has a resurrected phantom career on the current popular surge that enables a surplus of category 1 (as well as 2)--hence she gets the hosting gig for the dance show on TV, because she is "visible" in pop culture precisely as a revenant from that early burnout, the failed attempt at a smooth path into respectable star longevity. Neil Patrick Harris did the same 3-to-1 move to rather hilarious effect with Harold & Kumar (I haven't seen his sitcom), which may have been first forged in his collaboration with Verhoeven in Starship Troopers.
I give Miley Cyrus a few more years. I don't say she'll be forgotten, but she'll be faltering and will have to manifest herself as a figure of category 1, probably, running of the fuel of her cat-3 burnout.
"I have begun to work again, and am making good progress. Only, I have to limit my working time, for after about three hours my head begins to hum and feel painful." - Marx to Engels, April 22, 1868
(I wind up my May Day postings, the break from a break, with a few oblique things on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.)
Keep in mind that Obama has distanced himself from Wright--out of political necessity, mind you--and the media are just lapping it all up. The media have provided us with a most blatant and easily disproved misinformation campaign regarding the "controversy" over Obama's pastor. Again, and again, and again ... and again ... columnists and pundits refer to Wright's "hateful oratory," his "bitterness." He has "praised" Louis Farrakhan as a "great American." He "mocked" the "regional dialects" of Kennedy and Johnson. He made fun of white people's dancing. He is just an old, uppity, sour grapes anti-white racist. Right? Wright? Wrong.
Perhaps it won't be available on YouTube that much longer ... but anyone with a broadband connection can see the entirety of Wright's "inflammatory" speeches to the press, to the NAACP. Not just the maliciously, intentionally decontextualized and recoded two-second soundbites that keep getting played. Regarding Obama's denunciation ... here are some of the awful, horrible, evil things that Obama wants to let us know he does not support and does not stand for:
Throughout its 99-year history, the NAACP has been built by people of all races, all nationalities, and all faiths on one primary premise, which is that all men and women are created equal. The nation's oldest civil rights organization has changed America's history. Despite violence, intimidation, and hostile government policies, the NAACP and its grassroots membership have persevered.
Now, somebody please tell the Oakland county executive that that sentence starting with the words "despite violence, intimidation, and hostile government policies" is a direct quote from the NAACP's profile in courage. It didn't come from Jeremiah Wright.
* * *
I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committing to changing how we see others who are different.
In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient. Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient.
Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient. And vice versa. Whites saw black as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw the "White Man's Burden" as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people as if whites were the norm and black, brown and yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level or deficient.
Europeans saw Africans as deficient. Lovers of George Friedrich Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart saw lovers of B.B. King and Frankie Beverly and Maze as deficient. Lovers of Marian Anderson saw lovers of Lady Day and Anita Baker as deficient. Lovers of European cantatas -- Comfort ye in the glory, the glory of the Lord -- Lovers of European cantatas saw lovers of common meter -- I love the Lord, He heard my cry -- they saw them as deficient.
In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different.
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Many of us are committed to changing how we see others who are different. Number one, many of us are committed to changing how we see ourselves. Number two, not inferior or superior to, just different from others. Embracing our own histories. Embracing our own cultures. Embracing our own languages as we embrace others who are also made in the image of god. That has been the credo of the NAACP for 99 years. When we see ourselves as members of the human race, I believe a change is on the way. When we see ourselves as people of faith who shared this planet with people of other faiths, I believe a change is on the way.
* * *
Please run and tell my stuck on stupid friends that Arabic is a language, it's not a religion. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. They are Arabic-speaking Christians, Arabic-speaking Jews and Arabic speaking atheists. Arabic is a language, it's not a religion. Stop trying to scare folks by giving them an Arabic name as if it's some sort of a disease.
* * *
But, since this is a nonpartisan gathering and since this is neither a mosque, a synagogue or a sanctuary, just let me say, we can do it. We can make it if we try. We can make the change if we try. We will make a change if we try. A change is going to come. Can you feel it? Can you see it? Can you imagine it? Then come on, let's claim it. Give yourselves a standing ovation while the transformation that's about to jump off. A change is going to come.
(These excerpts all from the CNN transcript of the NAACP talk.)
* * *
Keep in mind that Barack Obama, the public figure, has distanced himself from all of these comments. He wants nothing to do with them. He not only admits, he cheerfully insists that the above comments are not what he's "about." I would bet that, deep down, Obama is very upset with himself for playing this game--his denunciation a few days ago didn't ring very true to me, it didn't feel like it came from the gut. But to stay afloat, he didn't come out fighting and straight-talking, he played the game, he bent to one knee, he did what was politically convenient. Obama, "the Washington outsider," became that much more like Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
This is why it is vital to not put all our hope on this election, and why third party protest votes will be of very limited but real strategic worth--to let each other know we're not all duped.
In the future there will be no painters, only those who, among other things, paint. The coming epidemic may wipe out most of us; huddled in villages and cities our weakened immune systems and weakened social instincts will be easily defeated by superbugs. The fantasy of social breakdown suggests to us that it is through our "limitations" that we come to know strength. Moralistic structures on the self reinforce this truism, but it is only because they insist on the terminology of limits and not that of necessity. We feel and are perhaps terrified by the immense freedom of a life constituted by transparent necessity (and at the same time free for absolutely anything else). We fantasize about the apocalypse because it gives us a little of what we crave. But we are constantly required to understand this craving differently than, I think, it truly is. We interpret the limitation of a lack of technology, the constriction of an earlier stage of progress, as though we have landed on the wrong square of this board game, History, and must go back ten spots. We are told lies (we tell ourselves lies) about our violent, dystopic apocalyptic visions as expressions of all that is violent and consumed by appetite, as though true freedom were by necessity tied to this violence and unbridled consumption.
"Indeed, the moderation of genius does not consist of the use of a cultivated language without accent or dialect; it lies rather in speaking the accent of the matter and the dialect of its essence. It lies in forgetting about moderation and immoderation and getting to the core of things."
-- Marx, "Remarks on the New Instructions to the Prussian Censors" (1842)
I have no faith in humanity's arrival at a utopic result. But the impulse is a necessary one; we know that something is very wrong. This is at the core of cinema as Pedro Costa sees it, I think; who has closed the door in life, who may close it in the film? I cringe when I hear relatively privileged people talking in platitudes about how art should "challege preconceived notions," make people uncomfortable, etc. (For this is more often than not a marketing ploy, and is often trotted out by people who wish to sell their brand of trademarked subversion.) Art hasn't this social responsibility; aesthetics have the unavoidable function of providing us with experiences that suggest something about the life we cannot bring ourselves to admit we are fully owed: immediate, detached, cerebral, visceral, erotic, glimpsed, immersed, shocked, consoled, dizzied, expanded, stretched, adulterated, cleansed, and so forth. Some beauty is embedded in peril and disease, but I claim every beauty for myself & mine. It is our birthright. It is the salve to our shocks; it is the bridge erected so that we can cross over. C.S. Peirce saw language, signification, cognition, not only as a means of forming mental habits--but of changing them. This is called learning. The aesthetic experience rapels down and climbs through a dark crevice, and though "art" as we learn in textbooks is unnecessary for human experience, the aesthetic is, I think, inextricable from it.
The cave paintings on Lascaux are the expressions of the deepening gap between, on one hand, a life in perfect harmony with the necessity of history and nature (and thus with no history as such), and on the other hand, a life in which our ancestors are marked by historical record.
"One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs."
"The telling of the story, the young woman's narrative, is imposed on the action in such a way as to deny each scene any ordinary dramatic interest and instead to substitute a counterpointing between the description (which is very flat) and the actual realization (also very flat—and with dialogue subdued beneath the narrative voice). At first this method seems pregnant with understated tension, but in time you come to realize that nothing more is happening than appears to be happening, and the method begins to seem silly. And at a certain not exceptional moment, when the young woman, very disconsolate, stands by a tunnel and says: "I found a tunnel—a place where cars went in. They came out a bit further on."—at that moment I began to find the simple story rather silly, too.
"There is an overwhelming temptation to compare Hanoun with Robert Bresson, whose work Une Simple Histoire greatly resembles. But Bresson, for all the spare severity of his style, has never professed to tell a simple story, and (for example, in Mouchette and Une Femme Douce) has often tended to make more complex the fictions upon which he bases his films.
"Hanoun's simplicity—like his almost stationary camera (which is just stationary enough to make for some very fancy corner-of-the-frame interior shots that might have been centered), like his depressed view of Paris, like his leading lady's eyebrows—seems finally less a matter artistic asceticism than of artful calculation. And in the midst of the many deprivations that constitute his style there is a kind of pretentiousness — ostentationsness, really — as if he were taking pride in poverty."
In denunciations of 'the aestheticization of poverty'--it happens here to Hanoun, it happens frequently to Pedro Costa--the naysayers are the ones who spend so much time concentrating on the cheapness or the squalor depicted by the images. It is as though poverty itself were offensive, that to make beautiful work out of the lives of disempowered people in ugly settings--and let us remember that slums make up a massive portion of our current global situation--were somehow ethically wrong, and offensive. Hanoun's film is about stretching out food among meals, about walking on two feet, about the enforced necessities of a woman to take care of herself and her daughter. The class dimension against some kinds of 'aestheticized poverty' in art comes out strongest, I feel, not in art that actually aestheticizes immiseration and material lack, but rather in art that indicates the obscenity of people getting by despite it all. The woman in Une Simple histoire is a simple, direct, caring mother; she makes do; she slides down the straps of her slip each evening as she climbs into bed so as to be comfortable; when she beds with a friend the two of them rub elbows. The obscene thing is the "enforcement" of poverty; the "offensive" thing is that the crushingness of this poverty is kept at bay. The better-heeled viewer is offended because he will not approve of or identify with the means by which the poor characters do this. Walking around a de la Tour-lit room with a needle in your arm, like a character does in a scene from No Quarto da Vanda, is not something ah set dahz, mmy'know.
It is not as though poverty cannot be romanticized, or turned to beauty in order to peddle an ideological image. At the same time the objection to romanticized poverty can be used as a tool to rob the depiction of the impoverished of any beauty at all, as though all beauty itself were the rightful consequence of accumulation. Minimalisms are not, intrisically, counter-hegemonic. But sometimes the pared down can give us a glimpse of what we're missing, what we need not be missing.
I want to take a break from EL for a short time; I've actually been thinking and writing a lot lately but it is necessary that I channel that energy into particular academic projects. My blog, for all its benefits, has sometimes hindered my will to do other writing--writing that requires more time, concentration, and discipline than I practice here.
This hiatus will be measurable in weeks, not months, and maybe I'll even stockpile a few posts in the meantime. Of course I'll still be reachable via email. Until then,
The airy, slapdash, and politically angry Tinto Brass film L'Urlo ('70) proved worthwhile if not especially special. The only other Brass film I've yet seen is Caligula and I'm glad I tried out one of his "radical" works before sampling the softcore porn that's made his reputation. It will help put the later ones, whenever I get around to any of them, in a certain context ... if I'm lucky. What L'Urlo has, in addition to a narrative content that would not be out of place in a repertory program among Themroc, late Buñuel, the Panic movement, maybe an Ivan Cardoso film, and some Makavejev and Chytilova, is a loose charm and the lovely, late Tina Aumont (pictured).
(By the way, I saw the film on video without English subtitles, so really this is just a tentative impression, certainly not an actual critical evaluation. Cult Epics has or will put out a DVD of the film to which I look forward.)
"For years, Johnson & Johnson obscured evidence that its popular Ortho Evra birth control patch delivered much more estrogen than standard birth control pills, potentially increasing the risk of blood clots and strokes, according to internal company documents.
"But because the Food and Drug Administration approved the patch, the company is arguing in court that it cannot be sued by women who claim that they were injured by the product — even though its old label inaccurately described the amount of estrogen it released.
"This legal argument is called pre-emption. After decades of being dismissed by courts, the tactic now appears to be on the verge of success, lawyers for plaintiffs and drug companies say.
"The Bush administration has argued strongly in favor of the doctrine, which holds that the F.D.A. is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by courts. The Supreme Court is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted."
"In the valley of the Indus, I wandered among the austere remains of the oldest Oriental culture, which have managed to withstand the passing of the centuries, sand, floods, saltpetre and Aryan invasions: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, hardened outcrops of bricks and shards. These ancient settlements present a disconcerting spectacle. The streets are all perfectly straight and intersect each other at right-angles; there are workers' districts, in which all the dwellings are identical, industrial workshops for the grinding of grain, the casting and engraving of metals and the manufacture of clay goblets, fragments of which lie strewn on the ground; municipal granaries which occupy several blocks (as we might be tempted to say, making a transposition in time and space); public baths, water-pipes and sewers; and solid but unattractive residential districts. No monuments or large pieces of sculpture, but, at a depth of between ten and twenty yards, flimsy trinkets and precious jewels, indicative of an art devoid of mystery and uninspired by any deep faith, and intended merely to satisfy the ostentatiousness and sensuality of the rich. The complex as a whole reminds the visitor of the advantages and defects of a large modern city; it foreshadows those more advanced forms of Western civilization, of which the United States of America provides a model, even for Europe."
-- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (trans. John and Doreen Weightman, p. 130)
"Educated people--who are never entirely absent--have taken offense at the emergence of the Tiller Girls and the stadium images. They judge anything that entertains the crowd to be a distraction of that crowd. But despite what they think, the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate. Such movements are in fact among the rare creations of the age that bestow form upon a given material. The masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories; the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments in obsolete forms--even if it means nothing more than that."
--Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament"
"In this material world run on injustice and terror, where "popular" is confused with "industrial," any cultural expression that does not hurl an angry cry or wail a song of mad love (often one and the same) merely collaborates in the regulation and preservation of this world."
"Up until now we had done no more, at best, than denounce the mercenary character of government research, pointing the finger at a few ways in which this research works hand in glove with the mercantilism of the private-sphere poisoners. The method chosen, namely direct action, perturbed some. At bottom, though, the most vulgar boosters of the nanny State, of fair-play capitalism, or of the permanence of the industrial system could still feign not to understand or affect to believe that our uncivil behaviour somehow lent support to their arguments. In a word, no tenet of progressivist dogma was so much as scratched - least of all infallible science still defying eternity from its dusty tomb.
"All the "citizens"(5b) were still free to trot out their old saw according to which it is only the use to which some technical application is put that "causes the problem," whether that application happens to be DDT, high-speed trains, river-polluting polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), agent orange, asbestos, cloning, Monsanto's Round-Up herbicide, the Internet, cell-phones, nuclear power, or you-name-it. Once the alarm has been is raised, all that is required is to take more security precautions in the future; to reinforce the institutions of modern democracy - stepsister to techno-science; to help governments take decisions; to assert one's independence; and so on and so forth - with everything becoming more participatory by virtue of opinion polls, referendums and "consensus conferences." In this way an end will be put to the aberrations of "neoliberalism." Last but not least, "good" genetically modified organisms will thus become acceptable, however little they may be "public" in any sense of the word."
The radical utopic fantasy of these early decades of the 21st century will be quite unlike that envisioned by socialist-modernists a century before: not more technology but less, and not more State but less. No large buildings but rather converted caves, no smooth infrastructure but broken roads with sprouting plants overtaking asphalt. With Opinel & hatchet in hand, we shall retreat to secluded cottages and build community bonds with our crusty peasant neighbors down the hill, and bike mechanics and failed doctors and so on, and maybe, if we're lucky, we can lead rich and full and not entirely toxic lives. Guy Debord eventually chose to live in relative seclusion; he created a glorious and mysterious facade for those who hated him. He says he lived off the land; I'd like to think in his wooded home he and his friends hunted, smoked, chopped wood, picked fruits, tended a garden and canned vegetables, read books, had sex, and got raging drunk every night so they slept off hangovers constantly. How true this all was, I don't know. (I have been reading Ran Prieur's amazing website for some months now and I suggest my readers do the same if they haven't dropped by already.) A long while back I opined on the peculiarities of some of the leading lights of festival art cinema, how these 'profound eccentrics' of the world were creating feature films that seemed to really tap into something: Reygadas, Alonso, Apichatpong, Rodrigues, Guiraudie, and others--what I think I am starting to understand is a certain wilding depicted in their texts. Or a re-wilding. The secluded adventures, the attention to "lumpen" groups, and occasionally the unusual behaviors in broken-up cities (think again of Pedro Costa, or Guerín's En construccion) and in the beautiful wilderness of Japón or Tropical Malady are not picturesque landscapes but ventures into places one can bring oneself to live, amidst the people who have not totally been claimed by the failed experiments of the last two decades. (I really should catch up with Reygadas' last two films...) All manifest today's utopic impulse. Which is not a society built up, but one that's crumbling down and the elusive promise of good life falling perhaps at our very feet so that we don't have to sell our labor for it. All the protagonists and characters in these films are microlevel, local, trying to escape some things, trying to find some things. The thing that most struck me about Guiraudie's No Rest for the Brave is how it seems to exist in a world where time doesn't really matter, where clocks don't seem to exist or have much importance--there's simply the cycle of light/dark, and the duration it takes to get from one place to another. (This whole phenomenon could explain explain part of the renewed interest this decade in Tolkien, of which of course I'm considering the blockbusters films themselves, too, as symptomatic and not causal. But I'm not yet sure that Hollywood has really been very perceptive about catering to this particular mass impulse...) This is what I'm leaning towards right now.
(Addendum: Actually, regarding this fantasy and corporate entertainment, it's not that I want to say that the studios and networks don't cater to some of these very real fantasies and impulses in our "collective unconscious"--it's more that I think they're timid and behind-the-curve, so far, about dealing with the decomposition of at least some huge aspects of our global society. Lost may be a tropical fantasy of survival & community, V for Vendetta and The Matrix sagamay imagine a euphorically dystopic separation of society from the State, but they direct these energies back into old ways, and by extension old power structures. Sooner or later they will surely become more clever about exploiting not simply the possibility of rupture, but the thing that these profound eccentric art filmmakers are mining, i.e., the experience, the phenomenology, the direct freedoms and delights and terrors of these coming scenarios. More later.)
"The interpreter here "restructures" with the aim of registering and apprehending, words whose disciplinary overtones are difficult to ignore. The purpose of such restructuring is precisely to render the force-fields, the struggle and conflicts of History, appropriable by a contemplative, detached spectator, the traditional subject of scientific observation. History is thus to be made safe for cognition. Conflict is objectified but the process of objectification itself is held to be outside the Melee.
"How different the picture of interpretation that emerges in The Interpretation of Dreams, where, it is true, the "dialectical code" in which the notion of Darstellung is at home, is replaced by something more difficult to name, if not with the word used by Freud himself: Entstellung, displacement, disfigurement, dislocation. The interpretive process that it designates, however, provides a striking contrast to the academic serenity described in The Political Unconscious. "It should not be forgotten, Freud writes,
that the work of interpretation must struggle against the very psychic forces to which we owe the distortion of the dream (welche die Entstellung des Traumes verschulden). It thus becomes a question of the relation of forces whether one's intellectual interest, capacity to overcome one's self, (Selbstüberwindung), psychological knowledge and skill in dream-interpretation enable one to master internal resistances. [The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 563]
Interpretation, for Freud, does not reconstruct and resuscitate so that we may register and apprehend; it partakes of, and in a process of conflict that no totalization can ever comprehend. Which is why its effect is not simply the primitive or teleological accumulation of wealth, nor the "semantic enrichment" of the phenomena it interprets, but their impoverishment as well. Or rather, a transformation in which enrichment and impoverishment become very difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish. This is why, when Freud chooses a word to articulate the relation of Entstellung to "the forces" from which it proceeds, it is derived from "debt," Schuld (verschulden). The hermeneutics of Entstellung thus inscribe itself in a tradition which can be traced to The Genealogy of Morals, in which both history and interpretation are conceived as forms of a debt that is impossible to repay. By contrast, Freud--here and elsewhere--adds the implication that the debt in question cannot be construed as a static and stable obligation, but rather as an ambivalent and unresolvable tension. If the psychic conflict that structures the subject of desire precludes any enduring resolution, any kind of totalization, neither can the process of interpretation simply renounce such aspirations. For every interpretation (including, of course, this one) must necessarily seek to arrest and to dominate the conflictual process of symbolization it seeks to comprehend. In the text just cited, the ambivalence can on the one hand be retraced to the exigency of Selbstüberwindung--a term which means practically the opposite of its translation in the Standard Edition, which reads: "self-discipline," since what is both required, and stated, is the overcoming-of-self, i.e. of the ego--and on the other, to the fact that such "overcoming," the "mastering of internal resistances," still inevitably entails mastery, control, discipline, and hence, as such, appeals to the very ego that it seeks to "overcome.""
--Samuel Weber, "Capitalizing History: Notes on the Political Unconscious," Diacritics, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1983), pp. 27-28.
* * *
A good sign that you're encountering a writer who will teach you something, demand something of you, is that you feel humbled and at sea when you've read the work. I'm not referring to tone, as though only supercilious erudition will teach anyone. It's more about frames of reference, speed of connections, durability of concepts. Since my late adolescence I've been chasing after people smarter than I am, chasing after ideas too difficult or intricate or nuanced for me. (Hence the title of this blog, by the way: when I'm at my computer, writing, I'm either Tantalus or Sisyphus.) Fredric Jameson is one of the writers and thinkers whose work has taught me the most over the past 5-6 years.
What Samuel Weber offers in his long review essay of books by Jameson and Stanley Fish is what I think is a fairly rare occurrence--a critique of a major Marxist intellectual (Jameson) in terms that don't appear to me as a long and convoluted justification for codedly reactionary politics. I've encountered, in text and conversation, a lot of disdain for Jameson--because nobody likes totalizing theorists, nobody likes curmudgeons who aren't optimistic about pomo, and often, anyway, comes the old chestnut "Marx was proven wrong." Weber's account is not an angry howl against Jameson's political project but a complication of the means of interpetation by which our man FJ can say that History is our untranscendable horizon, that Marxism is something like the code by which all other codes can be properly placed and utilized (because it, historical materialism, properly understands History). The idea is not so much that the Marxist project is a wash or that its political aims are undesirable--but what precisely enables us to mediate the material before us if we sustain the integrity of our recognition of ideology, of class, of conflict? (And, what is the wisdom of loudly smuggling this tool into the scholarly marketplace, as Weber interprets Jameson as doing with his book The Political Unconscious, as a kind of intervention into the definable arena of ideas and academic politics?) This is not obfuscation Weber's offering--I don't think--as though the world were hopelessly "complex" and resistant to any kinds of organized comprehension & reistance so we may as well simply accept it (a common bourgeois reflex, peddling stretched-out half-truths). But, with Jameson, what is the wisdom, or what are the use-values, of essentially freezing this grandfatherly interpretive grid for the aim of US academic consumption?
Unfortunately I haven't any answers yet. Just thinking.
"There are of course specific characteristics of different media, and these characteristics are related to specific historical and cultural situations and intentions. Much of the initial appeal of McLuhan's work was his apparent attention to the specificity of media: the differences in quality between speech, print, radio, television and so on. But in his work, as in the whole formalist tradition, the media were never really seen as practices. All specific practice was subsumed by an arbitrarily assigned psychic function, and this had the effect of dissolving not only specific but general intentions. If specific media are essentially psychic adjustments, coming not from relations between ourselves but between a generalised human organism and its general physical environment, then of course intention, in any general or particular case, is irrelevant, and with intention goes content, whether apparent or real. All media operations are in effect desocialised; they are simply physical events in an abstracted sensorium, and are distinguishable only by their variable sense-ratios. But it is then interesting that from this wholly unhistorical and asocial base McLuhan projects certain images of society: 'retribalisation' by the 'electronic age'; the 'global village'. As descriptions of any observable social state or tendency, in the period in which electronic media have been dominant, these are so ludicrous as to raise a further question. The physical fact of instant transmission, as a technical possibility, has been uncritically raised to a social fact, without any pause to notice that virtually all such transmission is at once selected and controlled by existing social authorities. McLuhan, of course, would apparently do away with all such controls; the only controls he envisages are a kind of allocation and rationing of particular media for particular psychic effects, w hich he believes would dissolve or control any social problem that arises. But the technical abstractions, in their unnoticed projections into social models, have the effect of cancelling all attention to existing and developing (and already challenged) communications institutions. If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance. Thus what began as pure formalism, and as speculation on human essence, ends as operative social theory and practice, in the heartland of the most dominant and aggressive communications institutions in the world."
--Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, pp. 127-128.
I've been enjoying--as a way of staving off depression about it--the way that the media have been talking about the "white male" vote, and whether Clinton or especially Obama will scare us off. I suppose it's a good thing that we're not being conceptualized as an universal here, that we are demographically identifiable now. But I still have to laugh at insinuations that come through in reportage or interviews that indicate that we are the forgotten children of this campaign, with "no one to represent us."
Are we really so pampered we have to cry about this lack of representation in the Democratic nominee during this one election? Well, yes, I guess we are.
I didn't see the speech where Obama ended racism yesterday, but I saw clips of it. I don't get the furor over Wright's comments, which are generally tiptoed around in the articles I've read, not even saying what they are, only that they're "controversial." (Better to repeat that something is controversial, too hot to touch, than circulate the comments in context and let people decide.) As readers of EL will recall, I am not exactly won over by Obama, but I think it's disgusting the way he's been pressured into denouncing his pastor, assuring that all important white voting bloc he doesn't think in terms of "race" (those were the Sixties man!) but rather in terms of healing divisions in all of society. My girlfriend laughed as The Daily Show covered these issues last night at the fact that so many of us (white people) are shocked that black churches act as fora in which black people discuss issues relevent to them and their communities. The horror! Obama handled the uppity media's minor firestorm as well as could be expected, but I would have liked him to say, "A lot of what my pastor said was perfectly defensible. Deal with it."
An observation inspired by J'entends plus la guitare ('91), which could in fact be called Faces ... what strikes me about Garrel's cinema is a peculiar quality of light--the flicker in these films is, I swear to the cine-gods, more active and more palpable in these films than in most others. The thing that makes a Garrel close-up interesting is the pulsating light around the face.
In the moment of Amor de Perdição / Doomed Love where the spirit of Teresa appears before Simão on the ship, one sees the crystallization of a metaphysic previously submerged in the film's stagey style. Not competely unlike the historical cinema of late Rossellini or Rohmer's Perceval, Manoel de Oliveira's film--and presumably much of his historical/literary adaptation work of this period--puts into motion a story whose strange textures come from the tempo of the scenes and the spare, beautiful compositions. These compositions at first glance may often appear as "merely televisual," but which (like sudden shifts of sunlight entering your room from the window) can drastically alter into the most intensely felt kind of pictorialism. Where Rossellini moved his camera to restlessly investigate the space that the frame can't contain, one feels that Oliveira the hunter of images often knows exactly where to find his compositional quarry--and he pounces often when his companions, the viewers, least expect it.
Such arresting moments come to head in the scene illustrated above, where the film literally demonstrates the metaphysical dimension of this story. And I am still pondering the meaning of the presence of Mariana, the third woman in the triangle, the unrequited lover and angel, in this shot.
The Angel of Compassion
In the Movie Mutations letters, Raymond Bellour mentioned civilization, "a word far greater than cinema"; "There is a name that goes with this word: de Oliveira." This is not a bad proposition: is there a more civilized filmmaker than Oliveira? Well, of course we must define what we mean by this word, civilization, and that is no quick or easy task unless we invite glibness.
One of my favorite passages by one of my favorite bloggers (and I think I have quoted this before) follows:
The great poet of civility of the 20th century, Patrick O'Brian, proposed a code of civility whose central posture is not a soft voice, peaceable 'diplomatic' manner, or feigned flexibility of opinion, but discretion. The civil being controls his curiosity, permits the other his privacy and anonymity. Asking questions, interrogation, is in the novels of O'Brian a more serious transgression against civility than flinging an unblunted insult or even dealing a physical blow. The forced (or betrayed) confidence is the most heinous violation. 'Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation,' declares the wandering Catalan-Irish-Catholic (crypto-Jew) Dr. Stephen Maturin, United Irishman, physician, natural scientist, and British intelligence agent.
Oliveira's death kneel for (some part of) Western civilization, Um Filme Falado / A Talking Picture, is often if not exclusively interpreted as a conservative lament. It is my least favorite of the smattering of Oliveiras (from his very first to some of his most recent) I've managed to see. In it one sees this exercise of civilization sailing towards its inevitable doom. The Mediterranean legacy claimed as European by Europeans--from Portugal to the Middle East, the ship goes, its American comandante guiding a series of conversations with women Portuguese, French, Italian, and Greek.
This central question of the film is one of politics and cosmopolitanism. (Perhaps: to what point shall we embrace our adjacent Others as neighbors and allies rather than enemies?) If I too am inclined to tentatively read Um Filme Falado as a conservative artwork, as complicit in a Europeanist project I don't trust, I am placing it still in the context of Oliveira's work in general as I have slowly come to know its beginnings over the past several years. This is an artist concerned with, among other things, the representation of unrepresentable experiences the source of which exists in some unspoken spaces of social structure (hospitality, companionship, family ties, tradition) and the character of which finds its displaced representation in the likes of hierophanies and such. Espelho Mágico is a wonderful film and seems more wonderful each time I think about it. It is one of the most brilliant films, I think, about the nature of religious devotion both private and social, and the sources and uses of images that are not artistic (too often we forget this about the potential and the historicality of images!).
Amor de Perdição very gradually realizes this fundamental problem, which may or may not have its own brilliant treatment in Camilo Castelo Branco's novel, in depicting the metaphysical. The groundwork for this adolescent love story is an intense and ineffable experience; Oliveira conceptualizes and illustrates it as the intrusion of the everday by the rapture of utter beauty, something like the sublime but much closer to ourselves, a beauty that is not Other to oneself. (This is to say that I am referring to metaphysical experience, or experiential categorization. We may not have a spiritual or metaphysical realm as such; something like free will may indeed be an illusion: but their experience is real, or real enough, and socially recognized, and so its potential absolute truth is rendered almost meaningless, and its realized social truth is paramount. Oliveira documents the social and its conventions: his object and his framework are civilization.) One must not try to name this beauty, it can only be rendered and understood obliquely--such as the moment when Simão tells Mariana that he is unhappy because he cannot make her his wife, and the narration informs us that Mariana could not understand him but her spirit rose to meet his meaning. The truth of the intense experience of Simão reveals itself to her in describing, simply, what he cannot do--the urgency of his imperative makes itself clear to her, and in their embrace (one of the saddest shots in the film, as with Mariana's parting kiss) inheres this mutual comprehension.
If civilization, or rather the most honorable ethos behind it (and civilization itself is not, I think, honorable), involves the respect of the other person so as to avoid interrogation, I am beginning to suspect that Oliveira's cinema is about the passages by which truth is transmitted by means of conversation and other forms of intimacy, and not always asked questions. This doesn't mean nobody asks questions in Oliveira; I'm sure there are tons of examples. But the experience of his work I have, the way I think of his cinema that I've seen, is one in which conversation at its most discreet and attentive and compassionate becomes a unifying principle--not just talk, but form.
Sometimes the torrential emotion, transmitted through oblique intimacies, is indeed this sort of metaphysics--maybe not "true," but "true enough" because its characters believe. The spirit of Teresa is true, and real, because we know the parameters in which she appears.
I said to Jonathan Rosenbaum after the screening that rather than his claim about Dead Man, maybe this 262-minute film could be perversely suggested to be cinema's longest death scene. In a literal sense of course this is not correct, but the principle underlying the narrative, the "doom," makes it seem to me as though the death that eventually comes is more preordained than in just any old film, just any other film.
Full Circles
The NYU Responsibilities of Criticism conference (with Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin and the blogosphere's own Girish Shambu), about which there have been a few mentions and allusions on the blogosphere as of late, turned out to be a great success in my eyes. I think there was unfortunately some confusion as to just how "public" it was, and to tell you the truth after having attended every minute of it, I'm still not sure precisely how much it was both technically and realistically to be a university-centered event. At any rate the mix of people, from various levels of NYU (undergrad, grad, faculty, alumni) along with some other area cinephiles and writers and professionals, managed to make for a very congenial atmosphere. Kevin Lee, whom I had the opportunity to finally meet though we've surely attended the same New York screenings countless times, has already put up some summaries of the talks on his website. Aside from Nicole Brenez's last-minute absence (which broke my heart!) things went swimmingly.
Both Jonathan and Adrian spoke, on Thursday night, of coming full circle. Jonathan, in his time at NYU and living in the Village, talked about seeing films in this very area, buying his first issue of Sight & Sound practically around the corner from the building in which he was speaking. Adrian mentioned the pleasures of meeting so many people he knew and worked with in a great number of venues--journals, festivals, online correspondence, etc. As I told both of them, for myself and surely many of the other attendees my age, this was a very important culmination of roughly ten years of cinephilia, in which the Movie Mutations letters helped spark and maintain a certain passion and, I hope, broad inquisitiveness in the cinema and the world.
Those who came to the conference included former instructors and professors of mine, peers in the grad program, a few film critics and programmers, cinephiles-at-large whom I see all the time on the repertory circuit, some professionals and scholars from outside of NYU, and at least one ahead-of-the-curve undergrad film student. There were plenty of individuals, from NYU and otherwise, that I would have loved to see there and who may not have been able or aware to attend. But as a group, as a whole, I am grateful that there remained a certain measure of intimacy and bonhomie about the entire event, from the Thursday night talk and screening to the totally unofficial coda at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night, where many converged to see Amor de Perdição straight through. (Contrary to most showings, as Jonathan informed us, there was no intermission last night!) This motley congregation of people I often see at varying frequencies and in different modes of life (scholarly, socially, cinephilically, online) cohered with perfect and unforced looseness. Truthfully, for me, it was a decade of cinephilia and thought finding a certain closure and, more importantly, a certain renewal. In a way it was like coming home.
(Thanks to Paul Grant and Martin Johnson for organizing the Responsibilities of Criticism event. And thanks to Adrian, Jonathan, and Girish for participating.)
"Salvia's short-lasting effects and fact that it is currently legal may make it seem more appealing to teens, lawmakers say. In the Delaware suicide, the boy's mother told reporters that salvia made his mood darker but he justified its use by citing its legality. According to reports, the autopsy found no traces of the drug in his system, but the medical examiner listed it as a contributing cause." (Here.)
And just who would qualify as today's Dwain Esper, if anyone?
"A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month." (Here.)
Not news per se, but it's slowly becoming a topic one discusses in polite society.
"These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisements people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates."
And the gloriously elegant market solution that will soon perhaps present itself is that the consumer may herself shell out for the opportunity of "ad-free," or ad-minimal, or very likely "ad-invisible," cyberspace--adhering to the good taste (aesthetics, manners, anti-vulgarity) of very few ads, as though one were tucked away in the high green hills, far from the billboard-littered boulevards where strip malls and blocky superstores pollute our visual quotidian.
"Destined to a future diet of Euroschlock where rootless characters pass through sanitized and anonymous environments of international expense-account hotels, airport lounges and offices, make love in anonymous golden cornfields as the Eurowheat waves gently in the breeze and speak to one another in any one of half a dozen badly dubbed tongues."
--Vincent Porter worrying about the future of European co-productions in 1985, quoted here.
All things considered, the prospect of plenty of Euroschlock isn't so bad at all--and is it always so anonymous, so impossible to see rooted to specific nations, particular regions, specified collective interests or desires? The Euro co-production does represent one of the toughest puzzles but I suspect one can sort out the sediments given the time, tools, and inclination ...
My computer crashed over the past week, so my electronic life is a bit jumbled at the moment. I was able to salvage (most of) my files, which is the most important thing. Apologies for any scatterbrained or delayed correspondence. Things should, let's hope, be back to normal by next weekend.
Recent home viewing includes Michael Mann's Ali, Alfred Vohrer & Edgar Wallace's College Girl Murders ('67), and Jess Franco's The Sexual Story of O ('84). That last reminds me in more than a few ways of Borowczyk's Love Rites, though it was as uncomfortable for me to sit through as, say, Bigger Than Life (a great film I don't want to revisit for a long time) or The Last House on the Left. I am a total squeamish wuss, and frequently just can't handle long passages of people dominating and torturing (in some way or another) other people. Even when it's highly expressionistic, or highly psychological. Or, sometimes, blood in general is just too hard. (One day I'll steel myself for another go-round with Perfumed Nightmare and its group circumcision scene...)
The Mann is pretty good and I'm glad I caught up with it. Sooner or later I'll write something about his work. College Girl Murders struck me as low-grade competent autopilot; I think it counts as my first krimi film though. Any thoughts on the films in question?
“Planet of slums, an apt appellation. Right about now, we are crossing a planetary threshold: half of the world’s population lives in cities. This number, more than 3.2 billion, “is larger than the total population of the world in 1960.” By 2020, the number of people living in slums will be more than 2 billion. A single mega-city like Mexico City or Mumbai will soon have a larger population than the estimated urban population of Earth at the time of the French Revolution. Not only those who occasionally allow themselves to wonder about the fate of this emerging world of near starvation, bare-life, and effective non-existence with respect to representation and political economy, but even almost all of those who passionately warn of the horror that exists and the horror to come, believe that the existence of these huge masses of people is somehow extra-economic. While massive poverty is at times acknowledged to be caused by the contradictions of capitalism (particularly the structural adjustment imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in coordination with Euro-American foreign policy and military power in order to service debt), even most radical critics of capitalism believe that the existence of the slum dwellers, what Davis calls “the informal proletariat,” is really outside of and external to capital’s productive base. The slum people in Karachi, Jakarta, Maputo, Kinshasa, among hundreds of other cities, along with the rural poor whose traditional ways of life have been demolished by agribusiness and the money-system and who provide, as it were, the raw materials for slums (in the form of those who migrate to cities), are, from the prevailing economic point of view across the political spectrum, extra people—so much slag thrown off by the world-system. Economists are fond of pointing out that the entire African continent only accounts for about 1% of the world’s economic activity. How many times have we heard that Africa could cease to exist and it wouldn’t make any difference to capitalism? But, and here we must pause to wonder, what kind of economic operation is it when people’s (indeed a continent’s) sole function is to be rendered as data, statistics, information, that can be rendered as “meaningless” or as “a potential threat to stability?” Isn’t this a new moment of planetary organization when humans can, from an economic and representational point of view, be reduced only to the bodies that underlie information or a set of concepts or images—a new order of accounting? This data-crunching reduction and/or mantel of sheer invisibility, this brutal calculus that renders human biomass into a mere substrate for information, is symptomatic of the qualitative transformation of the cinematic mode of production into the world-media system, now organizing attention on a global scale in two distinct registers: that of the enfranchised, who are to “understand” and/or dismiss huge swaths of the planet in a few lines of symbols or in a couple of isolated images as they make their daily movements, and that of the radically disenfranchised, who must attend to this dissymmetrical order of representation through a continuous and lifelong struggle for sheer survival as they make their way through a life in which they count for next to nothing. Like the more familiar relationship to the image of the first-world spectator, this latter relationship too must properly be cast as a new form of work: just being there, staying alive to be counted in the spectacle or not, to be constructed in the world-media system as an infinitesimally small bit of the reasons required to build walls around countries, fund new weapons programs and surveillance technologies, institute new adjustment programs, and launch political campaigns and wars in the high-intensity illumination of the spectacle. This is work, mere survival beyond the frame of representation, to become a standing reserve of information, just as it is also work for the global spectator who must be constantly enjoined to see and therefore produce the world and itself in accord with capital’s accounting. The human has become the medium for information; put another way, the medium is human, despite the fact that human potential is foreclosed by its function.”
The 2008 Election run-up has been an exciting one so far, in terms of mainstream journalistic indeterminacy. Who's gonna get it? The Democratic primaries, in particular, have shown us a remarkable jumbling of image-concepts for whom we are supposed to voice our approval. All of the sudden we have a potential first female president and a potential first black president. And for a while we had a white Southern man, too, who strangely enough was perhaps the most progressive of the three--indeed, if he was, it was because our racist, sexist system permitted him to be. Obama has to walk the tightrope to prove he's neither a sellout nor a "danger." Clinton has to be strong enough to prove she could, well, castratingly lay the smack down onwhomever "deserves it" (i.e., Iraqis, Iranians, etc.) yet not so overpowering as to make poor little male Democrats and independents feel the threat of that castration extend to them and theirs. It's a vicious system, and I do feel a twinge of sympathy for Obama and Clinton for having to do what they do, and face the obstacles they face in our political process.
But the fact remains that none of them are progressive, none of them will come close to the "transformative change" we actually need to "heal this country."
Obama, in addition to gaining momentum by the day, has been cast as the progressive candidate. Clinton is the establishment candidate for the Democrats. I am still scratching my head over what is so progressive about Obama and his policy proposals. I can believe he has private, progressive ideals--Clinton probably has some of those, too. But publicly he's nothing but feel good maxims, a chain of well-delivered aphorisms and affirmations and promises. He's got the celebrities in his corner--Will.I.Am and Scarlett Johansson, for starters, not to mention the hot "crush on Obama" woman. But everyone who's getting behind him, all the young, well-educated, pro-change people who make up my peer group ... don't ever give me any insight into what is precisely appealing about his candidacy in terms of the changes they want to see happen. I know: "Obama is the future, the new, the change, the shit, the hope, the audacity of that very hope cuz he sticks it to The Man, and to top it off, perhaps he's even the messiah [thanks Tram]." The problem is that The Man, an image, a metaphor, is actually very real, whereas Obama's assault on the same social powers that people sometimes group (really or jokingly) as The Man is purely or almost purely symbolic.
What I am curious about, and have not yet tried to find out about, is how the Latino (esp. Mexican/Chicano) communities feel about Obama--who isn't getting the Latino vote, as commentators dutifully inform us--using "Yes, we can!"/"Sí, se puede" as a slogan. The hard work of organizing and demonstrating that Latinos and other immigrant groups have put into the struggle against "illegal alien" crackdowns is now appropriated by a candidate whose first point in his plan for immigration is to secure the borders.
* * *
Provided she is on the ballot in November, I plan on voting for a black, Southern woman--Cynthia McKinney. I am not trying to play the card of authenticity, as though she's "realer" than Obama, than Clinton, more black, more feminist. I am not trying to facilitate a rupture between these communities, so that I or people like myself can spew codedly racist or misogynist criticisms against the mainstream candidates and defensively console ourselves because we support a black woman politician ("so we can't be racist!"). My goal in this case is not to help divide & conquer disempowered groups on the illusory basis of supporting their less mainstream elements in a bid for appropriated authenticity.
It is not that the Green Party is my ideal of ideals, either, but insofar as my third-party protest vote will mean anything, I want it to mean that I endorse a shift leftward towards the equitable, more ecologically sound, anti-racist, anti-sexist, queer-embracing limits of the system I'm voting in. One doesn't "vote" for revolution, changes in the mode of production, or revolutionary wealth distribution parties, right? But one can cast a vote for social democracy, environmentalism, certain checks on corporate power, certain policies for urban renewal and reform--reform, and life, not murder--for immigration. I do not think our system can be reformed, but this does not mean I oppose the limited but real, and helpful, reforms that are sometimes offered by the system.
The system will kill us, and it is dying itself in its slow destructive symbiosis with the thing we call industrial civilization. But while it approaches its destructive obsolescence, some of its tools are still worth using, and some of those tools--political and electoral tools--may still reap benefits for the communities it is harming most deeply, and the generations to come who will pay for our and our parents' mistakes.
This is why I'll be voting for McKinney, and why I urge people to do the same.
* * *
I cannot express how viscerally frustrating it is to me to see so many people I know and respect, allies and comrades, who are taking the kool-aid and jumping on Obama's bandwagon.
I am not referring to people who will vote for Obama. I am not referring to people who would compaign for Obama. If I were living in a swing state, I'd think long and hard and might end up doing both, myself. My issue is not with casting a vote, even casting some optimism, Obama's way. My issue is with the wholesale buying of the image, casting even pragmatism itself aside and pretending that this is the ideal candidate, whose actions will deliver us from the nightmare that liberals delude themselves into thinking is purely the result of Reagan and the two Bushes. (This all applies to Clinton-supporters too, but since Obama is the "progressive" one, the "youth" one, I think it applies more comprehensively to him and his side.) Obama, the man with a trigger-finger on Pakistan (Clinton has Iran) is going to be our savior? And speaking of the savior to our national nightmares, one pithy essay from Qlipoth makes for fascinating reading and expresses some of what I wanted to say better than I'm able to.
But to question the Obama machine sometimes invokes fierce retorts from his supporters, as though the very idea that asking for anything more progressive might be desirable is unfathomable. Or as though the idea of anything more progressive in existence could be unfathomable. I've been dressed down before for it, and I've stomached enough of the mainstream, tunnel vision Democrat blogs to know how things operate in those communities, where huffing & puffing about "effecting change" is best put into action when US policy sees bombing Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of "humanitarian" and "feminist" liberation.
Barack Obama's an inspiring orator, true. But even his 2004 Democratic National Convention address was not, if you ask me, the highlight of that event. That was Al Sharpton--and I don't care if he's supposed to be "crooked" or "shady," when it comes to policies and pragmatic change within the system, Sharpton's realism is up there with Kucinich's hard work as one of the few--very few--buoyant aspects of the Democratic Party en toto. About "the black vote," which has favored Obama so mightly in '08, Sharpton said this:
Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African-American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question.
You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule.
That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres.
We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.
Insofar as we can constitute 'the black vote' as a demographic monolith, black voters will end up choosing whoever they think is right for them, for America, for any number of things. Just like any other discernible voting bloc. But it is imperative that we talk to each other about the ways in which are asked not only to hedge our bets for pragmatic reasons, but are encouraged to rip out the hedges for wholly idealist illusions. Not everyone sees, has seen, Obama as the one worth supporting for change. And not all of us will float along in the course of this election in a subdued manner.
However faintly visible the struggle may be in the media (broadly defined), we still have the option to pass over one type of candidate ...
... for another ...
(H/t to the folks at Qlipoth, again, for the McKinney video. Forty minutes long, but worth it.)
The Wire territory, but real. The above video isn't about tough love; it's not about turning adolescents into adults by means of showing them that life isn't easy, that respect for people is a necessity. It's about power, pure and simple, and a grade-A jackass whose overdeveloped upper body sure feels strong when he's using it on a skinny 14-year-old. The news stories say he's been suspended to administrative work, with pay, since the video (from last year) recently surfaced on YouTube.
Kyle Canterbury is a teenager whose work in video art has been very highly acclaimed by Fred Camper and Jonathan Rosenbaum. I think the "prodigy" line is most strongly worked when there's money to be made, status and a status quo to enforce. That's why Canterbury, a video artist but not one coming from the art world, probably doesn't have too many people fawning over him. But I would stress that Canterbury is the real thing.
Fragments from a Room is one of my favorites. Like Brakhage in Text of Light, Canterbury pushes the indexical potential of photographic images to their breaking point, or sollubility; colors bleed into each other, pixels eat away at the integrity of a line or a color field; when the 'vertical roll' reimagines each image so that even a 'shot' no longer seems quite like a shot. (The seminal work on the vertical roll, as far as I know, remains the video of the same name by Joan Jonas. But Fragments from a Room is pretty fascinating, and were I to ever teach a course covering these grounds, I'd love to screen both back-to-back.) The diffusion of the image into pixels and other video idiosyncrasies makes for an underlying foundation of Canterbury's work, but from there it goes in a lot of different places--ghostly b&w images of George W. Bush and war bombings (A Video), abstract Klee-like squares in Color Shifts, Gehr-like excavations of space. And though it's sometimes easy to spot what Canterbury is doing in terms of avant-gardists before him, the work never feels like retread (or hero worship). Instead I get the sense of artisanal devotion to craftsmanship--at any time Canterbury is traveling (relatively) worn paths, he's experimenting. He's learning the tradition he's claimed for himself, more than simply aping the masters of experimental film & video (which is what I would have done if I were his age trying to make poetic film or video). It's difficult to extrapolate that kind of judgment from more or less abstract works, admittedly, but I think what ensures the "innovative" feeling of the videos is that they are never predictable. At most they are working in an identifiable strain. Should Canterbury continue on this path I expect that the proportion of his work that feels totally new and strange will grow.
To top it all off, Canterbury is the kind of cinephile who will list Nick Ray's Party Girl and Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer as among his favorites. That's my kind of cinephile.
II. Ten Videos: 1
The great thing about Ten Videos: 1 is how alive it is despite its simplicity. Pulsing at a few different rates at any given time (the pulse of the video image, the pulse of the 'framed' image whose rhythm varies), with black, neon blue, fiery orange as the three main colors, it's almost eerily active for such a deliberately constrained image, whose only captured activity seem to be the movements of (Canterbury's own?) hands.
A spectrum comes into being in this short piece:
- a spectrum from the captured, indexical 'thing' (which exists on several levels: the monitor and its surroundings which do not appear very clear to me, or the framed image on the screen--both very square, but both also existing in three-dimensional perspectival roundness of space) -
- to the bristling boxes of the video signal on my own television or computer monitor. (An "organicized grid," I'm tempted to call it.)
Ten Videos: 1 gets its energy from the sliding up and down this spectrum, or more specifically, the allowance for the viewer to shift from looking at something captured to looking at the medium of capture itself. In this, the video calls to mind, slightly, even Gehr's Serene Velocity. One's perception awakens, whets itself. In the context of the discs of Canterbury's work, it's a matter of seeing new thing after new thing, but also a host of allusions.
This scanty piece has taken me a very long time to write, and unfortunately it is because I have not been satisfied with the words I've written and deleted and re-written. (I'm still not, but I've been meaning to publish this for so long that enough is enough.) Let it stand not as the careful and more critical analysis I had planned to provide, but a place-holder, a simple letter of recommendation. The lengthier analysis will come at a later time, when I've been able to focus and reflect on the work itself. For now I have tried to give a sense of what excites me about these videos: how they're experimental in a way that seems fresh but also cognizant of history. As someone who is interested in the idea of tradition and yet who also believes in the shedding of certain traditional ideas hoisted upon us in cinema (and art), Canterbury's work provides great promise, in addition to its immediate pleasures and excellence.
... events tempt one to take a rather dim view of human nature. Is it best to ride out contempt, like a storm (because it is not a natural & constant state of being, at least not for me), or to fight against it, overcome it like an adversary?
To all who read EL: thank you for bothering with my little public notebook. It means much. And thanks for reading this deliberately, contemptibly cryptic note. A new post coming soon, I think ...
