Quote of the Day

The question of politics and the method of my “shifts” are closely linked to each other. For me, the political always comes into play in questions of divisions and boundaries. I chose the title La nuit des prolétaires for my book on the emancipation of the worker in nineteenth-century France because at the heart of this emancipation was the breaking of the natural division of time that dictated that workers must work by day and sleep by night and have no time left over for thinking. The workers’ emancipation came about through workers who decided to devote their nights to other activities than sleep, to give themselves this time that did not belong to them in order to enter into a world of writing and thinking that was not “theirs.” To take this into account, I needed to break the boundary that is supposed to separate genres—history, philosophy, literature, political science. In principle, my workers belonged to “social history.” In other words, their texts were read as documents expressing the condition of workers, popular culture, etc. I decided to read them in a different way—as literary and philosophical texts. Where others were attempting to read about workers’ problems expressed in the language of the people, I saw, on the other hand, a struggle to cross the barrier between languages and worlds, to vindicate access to the common language and to the discourse on the community. As opposed to culturalism, which sought to restore a “popular culture,” I valorized the attitude of those workers who challenged that so-called “popular culture” and made an attempt to appropriate another’s culture (i.e. that of the “iterate”). The idea of a “poetics of knowledge” that would cut across all disciplines thus expresses a very close relationship between subject and method. La nuit des prolétaires was a “political” book in that it ignored the division between “scientific” and “literary” or between “social” and “ideological,” in order to take into account the struggle by which the proletariat sought to reappropriate for themselves a common language that had been appropriated by others, and to affirm transgressively the assumption of equality.

—Jacques Rancière (interviewed by Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh, 2000)

Throwaway

Real elitism entails, subordinately, forcing other people's leisure to conform to your idea of leisure.

Reference Please?

Readers—a while back I recall coming across a reference to what I believe is a book or an article about race, culture, and environmentalism. I think the title was something along the lines of, "Before It Was Green, It Was Brown"—something comparable to this. I want to say that the gist of the book was that a lot of traditional and indigenous communities used common-sense "green" methods in their everyday life, well before the environmentalist movement as such. But I've been Googling in vain. Would anyone have any idea what I might be thinking of? Or am I just crazy? Thanks in advance.

Les Oignons

Marcel Hanoun is one of the rare filmmakers who tries not at all to define his work in relation to a dominant cinema. As Marx said about the future promising people who would paint (rather than "painters"), Hanoun is—like Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet—a filmmaker who lives. The power structure that most insists upon all cinema everywhere being a cinema for as many people (as large a market) as possible is the same power structure that benefits from the actual institution of this way of thinking about cinema. Thus, people here and there make "small" films, neither exactly amateur nor industrial, sacrificing cosmetics in order to strive in the way of aesthetics.

Je meurs de vivre (1994) is a 52-minute* dialogue-skimpy work about a priest and nun in love. Surely made for less money than a lot of student films, it is nevertheless a very powerful film: deftly edited, economical, with a giant cumulative impact. My possibly incorrect impression is that Hanoun is a political radical and an atheist, but here is another film about believers by (presumably) a nonbeliever that captures and expresses something about the emotions that course through veins, and the behaviors that corral and contain them—or try to.

An amazing passage: a shot of three onions on a plate (like most great representational filmmakers Hanoun attends to the things we ingest), which we then understand that the nun is cutting as we see her face in close-up. (I would guess she is actually cutting those same onions in her close-up.) What we have is an element of fiction, the impression of the nun's tears. At the same time we are shown directly the tools for achieving this fictional effect: the onions which will be cut. But the actuality of the onion-cutting is there, it's both indexically recorded and dramatically performed. What is causing the woman's (character's/actress') tears? We cannot say with real certainty, and this ambiguity is what makes for a palpably felt moment. The long-term internal feelings one carries with oneself over time collide, coincide with the very plain daily activities of life, and become immanent there.

Je meurs de vivre was also listed by Luc Moullet, for Film Comment, as one of his top ten best/underrated films of the 1990s.

* The ending on Hanoun's website, where I viewed the film, seemed quite abrupt but I haven't found any information on whether the running time is actually longer than the ~52 minutes it runs online and that is supplemented (copied?) by the IMDB. If someone has information to clarify things I'd love to hear it.

Hands/Robe/Slippers

“I just couldn’t see Barry again, could I? I’d feel—I’d feel unclean.”

In the mediocre mood-thriller She-Wolf of London (Jean Yarbrough, 1946) the heroine, June Lockhart, believes she is victim of an old family curse—murderous lycanthropy. In one sequence her "aunt" tries to comfort her in the bedchamber after Lockhart concludes she has gone out on another noctural rampage. First she awakens in her bed to see dried blood on her fingertips; she then notices the wetness on the hem of her robe; finally she sees caked mud and dirt on her slippers. Of course it's a blatant signification of menstruation as well as the imposed/reinforced shame of women's biology engendered by our patriarchal culture and our patriarchal cinema. I wonder if, pedagogically, this film could be used as a good example of showing that utterly serious issues can be found in minor films—that "decoding" them neither necessarily justifies a major demolition job on an ideologically illegitimate (or unsavory) artwork, nor does it necessarily underline a supposedly greater complexity or "latency" that ennobles the unassuming artwork. All artworks contain complexity because all artworks are propelled into one's awareness through the discursive borders of human relations.

The film is marked by a premise and set design that John Brahm might have done justice, as he did with a couple of other low-budget Britain-set films I like from the same period (The Lodger with Laird Cregar, The Undying Monster). Somebody—persumably Yarbrough or DP Maury Gertsman—decides to tilt the camera a bit for some "menacing" climactic scenes. But there's no organic or interesting progression to the images and the way the shots come, one after another, the way the themes creep out of each other, grow large through economy of image and totem and audiovisual relations. It's just a bit of cheap technique, and as such the film has the same enjoyable low-key, low-budget charm as most b-movies from the era seem to. But not here the coherence of a Brahm, let alone an Ulmer, who did manage to evoke beyond means (cosmetics) deeper and more complex aesthetic movements.

Fourth of July

What Is Cinema (For)?

To what all can we equate the cinema? For starters: lost causes, mirror images, failures, dream-food, a drug, a certain form of reality, lèse majesté, toadying, bullying, pleading, pornography, a captured sequence of sounds/images that may give a reasonably identical experience to the viewer over multiple viewings, a substitute for action, a displacement of life, a patriarchal funhouse, today's Grand Guignol, faith, celluloid, maybe pixels, beginnings and ends, a two-lane blacktop.

(The more I disregard “dominant” cinema and try to distance myself from it, the more refreshed I think I am in looking at it, finding more clearly its parameters, its strengths and weaknesses. For those movie-mad folks who watch only television shows and feature-length narratives [brought to you by DVD]: don't you ever get bored? Staring at the image of my former self, my adolescent self, that I hold in my own head, I am furious. How, why, did I have no sense of foundations, of supplementation? I was a very smart child and am spending my twenties trying desperately to reclaim some of that freedom and some of that focus, against the obstacles of deeply worn-in damage caused by my teenage years. This is why pedagogy matters to me: I am convinced I, and others, have been robbed of a proper education—I'm hardly using this as a synonym for schooling—and must grab it back by force, inches at a time, before it's too late. Too late for what? What makes it too late? I don't know and yet feel compelled, propelled all the same.)

The suspicion is that the best way to answer the question, What Is Cinema?, is to ask, What Is Cinema For? Which means: for whom is the cinema (and the true answer is complex but this doesn't mean diffuse beyond interpretation); how the cinema got to be; why; how it has developed—all of which is inseparable from the prior question of for whom.

The fundamental issues of cinema & politics are neither content nor form but, underlying it all, ownership and use. They set the terms of debate for form/content; they inform them. Of course I do not mean to say that they replace or displace form/content (though frequently we may find the prior manifest in the latter). Obviously, form/content matter. The playing field has not always been correctly identified, however.

In late 1940s Italy, as in 1960s Brazil, people were hungry, and the powers weren't always able or willing to help, and the films said something meaningful about this hunger, spurred by this hunger. Out of desperation they could reach beauty and intensity and significance. The poverty of means of production eclipsed the merely cosmetic to arrive at genuine aesthetics. (This is why a routine Hollywood production will look "better," "more professional," than Killer of Sheep but Burnett's film is more powerful, more aesthetically gripping and richer, than all but a tiny, tiny handful of Hollywood's finest masterpieces. It's not merely "superior content" or "intelligence"—it is also a clear difference muddied by a common confusion about the references available to us from our word, aesthetics.) Spurred by the recognition of hunger, people like De Sica and Zavattini and Rossellini and Rocha made films—some good, some bad, some masterful. They weren't always produced with pure anti-imperialist money, either. (For shame to expect such angelic origins always!) Still we see the popular, the resonant, quickly co-opted, transformed. To see the "vulgar" pink neorealist film of the 1950s, or the hip-exoticist poverty film of Brazil (like City of God) we must not think them only as products of a perverse, empowered sociopolitical motion, though that they are. We must understand that they are origami, sculpted garbage heaps, reactions as much as appropriations. This is as true of them as it was of the films which they twist and distort and perhaps even mock (perhaps even from the vantage point of the capitalists themselves).

Retro/Nostalgia

* * *

The course of history is merciless but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy ourselves digging around in the sale bin. While I'm generally not a fan of the 1980s revival that's marked this decade in everyday fashion, I really like these two videos (and the songs for them). I've remarked already, once or twice, on the palpable 'videosity' of the Snoop piece: the tracking, the color. Feist's typical low-key choreography captures what can be fun about cheesy late '70s pop, and an ironic or campy latter-day appreciation of it: it's honest and allows one to let loose and be a little awkward simultaneously. Like enthusiastic karaoke of a song you're supposed to be embarrased to even know ... in front of both friends and strangers.

Islands

Walter Benjamin lived for a while in Capri and later in Ibiza. I find oddly resonant the little resort towns and islands (to which I've never been) where so many British and Continental writers/scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century vacationed, which in the age of cinema were obliquely monumentalized in the cinephile's eye by the likes of Godard (Le Mépris) and Welles (F for Fake). The same sorts of places that make a vacation for Garrel's addicts in J'entends plus la guitare are earlier seen in cheap softcore Franco films and L'Avventura and Darling and Il Sorpasso. Pound's Rapallo resembles more than slightly the little Mediterranean every-village where Radley Metzger's Score! takes place.

At the bar one could sip a negroni while reading Proust, staring at cats. When I'm an old man perhaps I could spiff it up to look like this fellow. This is the romantic wish promised by the dreamy part of my self that thinks humanistic activity, and the study of cinema, could ever really be lucrative and alluring.

* * *

“He's a sculptor,” he told me, “an old acquaintance from my travels. I met him in Capri in 1924, in Rhodes in 1926, at Hiddensee in 1927, and recently on Formentera. He's one of those curious people who spent most of their lives on islands and never feel quite at home on the mainland.”

“For a sculptor, that mode of life seems doubly surprising,” I said.

—Benjamin, “Conversation above the Corso: Recollections of Carnival-Time in Nice” (March 1935)

Schoolmasters

Not long ago I finally read my first full book by Jacques Rancière (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). I admit I was a bit wary, not for what I'd already read by the philosopher himself, but from the way he's frequently discussed, his role as the sort of radical French thinker taken up by bobos and artists and impressed humanities grad students: post-Marxist and still "viable" now that we are post the peak of postmodern theory's power. (Or is that a grand narrative? Help!) I think the unfortunate thing about people like Rancière, Žižek, even the late great headscratcher Deleuze is that they don't really piss anyone off. Not really, and not the right people one should want to piss off. I don't use this to paint all of these contemporary philosophers with otherwise the same brush: Žižek is only very intermittently worth reading, whereas Rancière seems to be very worthwhile. (Deleuze has fantastic stuff too, but he's got his limits, as Luc Moullet's sly deflation shows with respect to the Cinema books.) It's more a matter of staying realistic about the alleged radical potential of these figures' works. People sometimes talk about continental theorists like they're talking about indie rock bands. (I admit I've done it myself.) It's a pointless game; it's a form of philosophizing taken from its unsexy envelopment in actual society.

Marx still creeps under a person's skin. His words, his ideas, can rub the right people the wrong way.

The basic argument of The Ignorant Schoolmaster is an echo, refashioned, of Jacotot, a radical egalitarian who tried to demolish pedagogy as such so as to reach the fundamental (equal) intelligence open to all humans. The constantly reinforced division between the learned instructor and the ignorant pupil is stultifying; the point of an emancipated education is not to help people along the continuum of progress but to assume equality as a premise, and to help the pupil realize not the gains that signify shed ignorance but the equal potential which is inborn. The ignorant schoolmaster need not know the subject, only how to act as interlocutor to the pupil who guides herself (more or less). It's an interesting polemic, and as translator Kristin Ross points out, the majority of the text is Rancière subtly mimicking, overlapping Jacotot. Who's ventriloquizing who here? It's a fairly well-written book, a breezy read but also a substantive one.

One of the most important lessons I took away from college about teaching, as a student, was for the instructor to regard the class with forthright, uncomplicated respect for its intelligence. In the context of the system, which is set up with hierarchies and thus hardly amenable to Jacotot's emancipation itself, there is no use downplaying or disguising one's own superior knowledge or even more sharply manifested intelligence. But to tacitly require that student use his intelligence to meet you in the same arena (by wordlessly acknowledging this very intelligence), the instructor takes a vital step in keeping the classroom alive.

(Still to read: Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That's been sitting on my shelf, beckoning, for slightly too long.)

Summertime

The character at the center of A Summer at Grandpa's, it seems to me, is not the boy but his younger sister, Ting-Ting. At least, she is the one who seems to manifest the intelligence of Hou Hsiao-hsien himself: observant, focused, not always predictable, compassionate but not particularly sentimental, intermittently happy, always subtly searching (and watching). The film doesn't have the "masterpiece tone" of later Hou but there are numerous impressive shots and sequences that exhibit a deep intelligence. Many images, as is by now quite typical of Hou, require elucidation after we're first exposed to them. The highway truck robbery, for instance, takes several long moments of roving camera to insinuate with perfect grace and clarity.

(Taiwanese auteur connection: coincidental and meaningless, I'm sure, but I couldn't help but link the highway robbers' rock-to-the-head attack, not shown in the film, to the brick-to-the-head Edward Yang has one of his neighborhood gang boys suffer at the hands of a rival gang in A Brighter Summer Day. Growing up summers one witnesses painful things.)

Tough to See Him Go

George Carlin (1937-2008) - he'll be missed.

Image of the Day

Plan, La Saline Royal d'Arc-et-Senans (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux)

Sentiment

I desire and I feel the need to live in a society other than the one surrounding me. Like most people, I can live in this one and adapt to it, at any rate, I do live in it. However critically I may try to look at myself, neither my capacity for adaptation, nor my assimilation of reality seems to me to be inferior to the sociological average. I am not asking for immortality, ubiquity or omniscience. I am not asking society to ‘give me happiness’ I know this is not a ration that can be handed out by City Hall or my neighborhood Workers‘ Council and that, if this thing exists, I have to make it for myself, tailored to my own needs, as this has happened to me already and as this will probably happen to me again. In life, however, as it comes to me and to others, I run up against a lot of unacceptable things, I say they are not inevitable and that they stem from the organization of society. I desire, and I ask, first that my work be meaningful, that I may approve what it is used for and the way in which it is done, that it allow me genuinely to expend myself, to make use of my faculties and at the same time to enrich and develop myself. And I say that this is possible, with a different organization of society, possible for me and for everyone. I say that it would already be a basic change in this direction if I were allowed to decide, together with everyone else, what I had to do, and, with my fellow workers, how to do it

I should like, together with everyone else, to know what is going on in society, to control the extent and the quality of the information I receive. I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chessboard, and that, ultimately, my life and death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind.

I know perfectly well that realizing another social organization, and the life it would imply, would by no means be simple, that difficult problems would arise at every step. But I prefer contending with real problems rather than with the consequences of de Gaulle’s delirium, Johnson’s schemes or Krushchev’s intrigues. Even if I and the others should fail along this path, I prefer failure in a meaningful attempt to a state that falls short of either failure or non-failure, and which is merely ridiculous.

I wish to be able to meet the other person as a being like myself and yet absolutely different, not like a number or a frog perched on another level (higher or lower, it matters little) of the hierarchy of revenues and powers. I wish to see the other, and for the other to see me, as another human being. I want our relationships to be something other than a field for the expression of aggressivity, our competition to remain within the limits of play, our conflicts—to the extent that they cannot be resolved or overcome—to concern real problems and real stakes, carrying with them the least amount of unconsciousness possible, and that they be as lightly loaded as possible with the imaginary. I want the other to be free, for my freedom begins where the other’s freedom begins, and, all alone, I can at best be merely ‘virtuous in misfortune’. I do not count on people changing into angels, nor on their souls becoming as pure as mountain lakes—which, moreover, I have always found deeply boring. But I know how much present culture aggravates and exasperates their difficulty to be and to be with others, and I see that it multiplies to infinity the obstacles placed in the way of their freedom.

I know, of course, that this desire cannot be realized today, nor even were the revolution to take place tomorrow, could it be fully realized in my lifetime. I know that one day people will live, for whom the problems that cause us the most anguish today will no longer even exist. This is my fate, which I have to assume and which I do assume. But this cannot reduce me to despair or to catatonic ruminations. Possessing this desire, which indeed is mine, I can only work to realize it. And already in the choice of my main interest in life, in the work I devote to it, which for me is meaningful (even when I encounter, and accept, partial failure, delays, detours and tasks that have no sense in themselves), in the participation in a group of revolutionaries which is attempting to go beyond the reified and alienated relations of current society—I am in a position partially to realize this desire. If I had been born in a communist society, would happiness have been easier to attain—I really do not know, and at any rate can do nothing about it. I am not, under this pretext, going to spend my free time watching television or reading detective novels.

-- Cornelius Castoriadis (all credit for the excerpt goes here).

I have been skirting a bit in and around Castoriadis this weekend and it's been refreshing. The above excerpt (I have not read Imaginary... so I can't comment on its source) hardly "comes off" in a critical sense. It moves me, though, in a way not unlike that of great religious writers and mystics. When I was younger, a practicing Catholic, my favorite prayer was Thomas Merton's. Castoriadis strikes something of the same rhetorical tone—as though this normative speech instills meaning, via performance utterance, in one's own life, this moment. The acknowledgment of potential failure (Even if I and the others should fail along this path, I prefer failure...) is simply clearheadedness, but it is also a trope, a gesture, whose predetermined rejection makes the enunciating sing. (Castoriadis is doing what I think art often does, as I've said before: he is testifying to our promised lives, our stolen lives.) This all relies on sentiment, of course, emotion. On one hand emotionalism is not a substitute for rationality, it will not replace any other tools for social change we have at our disposal. At the same time, what people would seek to change society in a way that excludes emotion (in both the struggle and the end result) as an afterthought, as mere biochemical pap determined by other instances. (Because if emotions are mere biochemical pap, so is everything else, in which case what is the point?) This can be tricky: can anyone recommend good writings on the emotional content and character of revolutionary social change? There's been a lot of writing on utopianism and the utility of 'the utopic impulse,' but beyond this not much has been springing to mind.

Overheard at Mondo Kim's

Two customers leaving the rental floor a week or two ago ...

Dude 1: "Who directed this, Lumay?"
Dude 2: "Yeah, Sidney Lumay."

I wonder if they were renting Le Network?

Image of the Day

Georges de la Tour, St. Sebastian Tended by St. Irene, 1634-1643.

Hollis & Jonas

"Item: that I do not live in New York City. Nor is it, strictly speaking, "convenient" for me to be there during the period you name. I'll be teaching in Buffalo every Thursday and Friday this coming Spring semester, so that I could hope to be at the Museum for a Saturday screening. Are you suggesting that I drive down? The distance is well over four hundred miles, and March weather upstate is uncertain. Shall I fly, at my own expense, to face an audience that I know, from personal experience, to be, at best, largely unengaging, and at worst grossly provincial and rude?"

—Hollis Frampton to Donald Richie (then of the Museum of Modern Art), January 7, 1973

The indispensible UbuWeb recently put up some fantastic Hollis Frampton material, only to seemingly have taken some of it down just as soon. I hope that in writing a few words about it I'm not violating anything. Included were a video of the Screening Room interview between Robert Gardner & Frampton (which I watched, and had long wanted a chance to watch), a PDF of his amazing writing collection Circles of Confusion (which I hear we might reasonably expect to be reprinted in the near future), and a PDF of a letter from Frampton to Richie, excerpted above & below. The question of the letter is that Richie wrote to Frampton apparently to ask for his blessing & participation in a MoMA retrospective of Frampton's film work, for which he would regrettably not be paid. The world's most erudite filmmaker (alleged) responded that absolutely anyone was free to organize a retrospective via his prints in the Filmmaker's Cooperative, and without his express consent. Frampton goes for the kill in the letter—expertly slicing into Richie more than Richie himself probably deserved (but who knows)—explaining at length the incongruity of everyone's payment but his own, and the fact that he's the one who has to travel at his own expense to reach MoMA for the retrospective should he so participate.

(A few years ago, MoMA notoriously projected Frampton's film Lemon on DV in ambient light, like it was a throwaway installation, a sign of the wince-inducing carelessness or ignorance with which a huge, prestigious museum treats some of its artwork.)

* * *

This evening I saw Jonas Mekas' Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971), which I would have counted as one of my "humiliation" films. I should have seen it years ago. (I'm not just being coy here; it screens at Anthology a few times a year and anyone living in NYC and interested in experimental cinema has no excuse to let it slip by their fingertips for seven years, as I have.) This is one of the greatest films ever—pure, unadulterated heterogeneity! Unstable images, jumpy fast editing, a dreamlike stream of steady focus upon the object. "My Mamma ... waited twenty-five years..." Or to watch footage of Peter Kubelka eating lunch, and holding out his hand at the table to let a sparrow alight on his finger—poetry! There's a difference between becoming drunk on art because the aesthete turns art into life, and using art so that its highest, noblest aesthetic goals become indistinguishable from its simplest, barest use-value: that life and art themselves become mixed, that the practice of making art is in fact a way of living well, not escaping the world by means of aesthetics but burrowing into it via same. Who could fail to be moved by the scenes of Lithuanian family meals, cooked outdoors, or Kubelka & Annette Michelson drinking water from an old stone fountain in Vienna. The images are captured with off-the-cuff straightforwardness: Reminiscences is composed in the key of everyday movements, but it generates beauty from the concordance of its images (the mostly-moving camera, the quick cuts) to its depicted activities, which themselves bear an organic grace to them: Mamma cooking potato pancakes, Kubelka taking the spine out of his fish at lunch.

Speaking of drinking—drinks, they show up a lot, beer (at least I think it's beer) as well as fresh cow's milk, imbibed on the farm with readily apparent enthusiasm. When I got back to my neighborhood I swung by a bodega on the way home and grabbed a big bottle of Ballantine's, the ale of choice for mid-century American artists. It seemed only right.

Mekas' cinema consists largely of "diary films," maybe the world's greatest home movies. Nicole Brenez wrote of one of his more recent works (As I Was Moving Ahead...) that he simply went out and shot beauty—that today nothing is more revolutionary. Definitely to find a quotidian pocket of surpassing beauty and capture some part of it, make it a beacon or a bulwark of life against the onslaught of our destructive world ... it is in a way revolutionary. Art won't ever change the world of course. Not in the way it needs changing. It may however remind us of what we are missing, what we can afford to promise ourselves but do not. It helps us through our days (prescriptively, I prefer a "companion" model of art to an "escapist" one).

* * *

The artist at the margins, or in the sticks, of some more dominant model (geographically, institutionally...) will sometimes produce amazing things not because she is a lone romantic figure but because of the regular ties of quotidian life: community. In fifty years, if the Internet survives in some form, we may all be looking at Jen MacMillan's blog and tracing the connections formed by the New York avant-garde today, the people who are not talked about as enshrined masters, but the everyday shooters & developers of beauty.

* * *

"I'll put it to you as a problem in fairness. I have made, let us say, so and so many films. That means that so and so many thousands of feet of rawstock have been expended, for which I paid the manufacturer. The processing lab was paid, by me, to develop the stuff, after it was exposed in a camera for which I paid. The lens grinders got paid. Then I edited the footage, on rewinds and a splicer for which I paid, incorporating leader and glue for which I also paid. The printing lab and track lab were paid for their materials and services. You yourself, however meagerly, are being paid for trying to persuade me to show my work, to a paying public, for "love and honor". If it comes off, the projectionist will get paid. The guard at the door will be paid. Somebody or other paid for the paper on which your letter to me was written, and for the postage to forward it.

"That means that I, in my singular person, by making this work, have already generated wealth for scores of people. Multiply that by as many other working artists as you can think of. Ask yourself whether my lab, for instance, would print my work for "love and honor", if I asked them, and they took my question seriously, I should expect to have it explained to me, ever so gently, that human beings expect compensation for their work. The reason is simply that it enables them to continue doing what they do.

"But it seems that, while all these others are to be paid for their part in a show that could not have taken place without me, nonetheless, I, the artist, am not to be paid."


—HF to DR.

Concentration

"Recently a new bank building went up in the urban wasteland of downtown Lexington. It is very tall: some thirty storeys. It is a steel skeleton with a glass skin. The top three storeys are beveled with a raking forty-five degree angle (I suppose this must not be called the roof), so that the building seems to be modeled on a plastic kitchen trashcan. That's fine. What I want to ask about is the nature of this building's being. First, I have never looked at this building, which I must see daily, when there weren't workers on a plank suspended by ropes from the top washing it. To wash the second storey they must lower themselves twenty-eight storeys by rope and pulley. I presume this building is to be washed forever, much as the Golden Gate Bridge must be painted forever.

"To comment on this astoundingly primitive idiocy (I mean the word), I must come at it from another angle. Whether from the inevitable disillusionment of middle age or from an accurate perception of reality, I began to notice a decade ago that the spirit of our times indulges in an inordinate amount of gratuitous meanness. Meanness: a withholding of generosity, a willingness to hurt, a perverse choice of the bad when the good is equally available. Journalism proceeds thus: the worst possible light is the one that sells newspapers and magazines. The blinding type we must read nowadays in books is another example: before computer generated-type the various sizes were designed individually, the proportions of smaller type being different from those of larger. Modern type designers draw one font and reduce and enlarge it photographically, not caring that the smaller reductions are anemic and an awful strain on the eyes.

"It is difficult to distinguish gratuitous meanness from greed. The thin wall that is not a boundary for noise, the rotten concrete that collapses on New Year's Eve, the plumbing inside walls that requires the destruction of a house to be repaired, the window that could so easily have been designed to swing around for inside washing rather than requiring a ladder. You can think of a hundred more examples, but whether they are the result of indifference or stupidity is a nice question."

—Guy Davenport, "A Letter to the Masterbuilder," in The Hunter Gracchus, pp. 150-151.

* * *

Davenport wrote that so many of the great American poets and writers and artists lived in the sticks—Olson, Welty, Meatyard, and so on. As is the case throughout the history of civilization, the major cities tend to draw in & product, support, the cultural capital. Benjamin warned that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. This sentiment can be used as a snappy aphorism but I believe it is one of the richest sentences on the summation of human culture. If major metropolitan centers—the ancient capitals, the new "global cities" (cf. Sassen)—are nodal points, of course a thriving accumulative society provides a material basis in which the identities of 'artist,' 'intellectual,' 'amateur,' 'dilettante,' etc., put down roots. The thriving society may have these bustling nodes but, if indeed it thrives, the sticks themselves will produce and retain noteworthy producers of this cultural product as well. In the time period when Dickens first started writing in London, schooling for children was a massive concern—mediocre educators could make a decent enough living by overseeing a few dozen pupils in a cramped, dirty room. (Allowing for differences in pedagogical philosophy, these schools provided students with lessons in Scripture, history, geography, Romance etymologies--but J.L. & Barbara Hammond's book on the time period quotes amusing records which indicate how much this education was rote, and how easily you could spot its flaws simply by tweaking the schoolmaster's questions to the scrubbed, obedient schoolboy. "Who was David?" "Son of Jesus.") A few decades after Dickens died, Ezra Pound could actually make a living in London by contributing to avant-garde poetry magazines!

Sculptor Forrest Myers discusses his migration to New York, his settlement in SoHo:

"I consider myself a SoHo Pioneer. I came [downtown] in 1962 and they were building the world trade center where I and other artists were living and I actually got run out of there too, they were going to demolish buildings… And so I moved to SoHo and people said why are you going to SoHo there’s nothing there but a bunch of trucks. Well at that time there were a lot of spaces for rent, not only in SoHo, but other places. Artists lived downtown… there were so few artists when I came to New York it was just odd. There were about 400 artists."

Now there are tons of artists, tons of galleries. Plenty of money. Is this saturation? If so, is the saturation of metropolitan centers a sign of cultural decline? (I dislike that word but there's an inherited vocabulary when discussing civilization; I don't consider "decline" a bad thing a priori.) Are still Olsons and Weltys and Meatyards, and Davenports for that matter, making a living in Gloucester, Jackson, and Lexington? How much longer will New York remain the playground of the rich, a place where urban gardens are reclaimed by real estate owners after communities make them attractive, where almost any beautiful and humane block is too expensive for most people to inhabit? In America, places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco present people with great cultural riches. Perhaps though we should be wary when the riches become too great, too concentrated. My city may have thriving "scenes" but almost every suburban place I have visited in recent years looks exactly the same. Speaking as a bit of a nationalist here (which is against my general inclination): what Americans could fail to be outraged at this theft of our people's rights and liberties, this drab enforced homogeneity underwritten by the even greater theft of resources & labor of people elsewhere?

Quote of the Day

Nothing, nothing can keep me from my love
Standing on the other shore.

Not even old crocodile
There on the sandbank between us
Can keep us apart.

I go in spite of him,
I walk upon the waves,
Her love flows back across the water,
Turning waves to solid earth
For me to walk on.

The river is our Enchanted Sea.

-- from "Love Lyrics," in Come Swiftly to Your Love: Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, trans. Ezra Pound and Noel Stock.

Jean Rollin & Political Modernism

(La Vampire nue, 1970) / (WR--Mysteries of the Organism, 1971)

There is a 70-second lateral tracking shot of office spaces in La Vampire nue, about a minute after the shot above occurs, which recalls what Godard was doing in the same time period.

Plus, of course, Maurice Lemaître plays the evil scientist father-figure.

Glimpse of Greatness

A long clip from Robert Gardner's phenomenal Forest of Bliss ('86).

GI, prelude

"Even the objects of the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit trees, was, as is well-known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become "sensuous certainty" for Feuerbach."

--Marx (and Engels), The German Ideology

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."

-- Ditto.

So, turning from Marx (and Engels), I'm unsure how there could then be ruling ideas if not also, self-evidently, simultaneously, ideas that do not rule (and thus are ruled) ... more on The German Ideology and maybe a few tentative intrusions on the Marx/Derrida debate in the near future.

Bleak Leisure

I have been reading the Hammonds' The Bleak Age, which documents the particular forms of immiseration in 1830s and '40s Britain. Partly it's an account of a moment in the history of leisure, which means it is also an examination of the ways in which misery and exploitation were organized. The same rule applies as always in our industrial saga--masses of people are lowballed for their basic needs (space, air, water, commons, time) and then, when minor concessions are made at the discretion of liberal-minded patrons (and upon the sweat & blood of protesting mobs), the people are instructed to feel grateful for these pittances. In the developed West, perhaps the quickest way to wake certain people up about the horrific situation we are all being led into is to set alarms around the visible ways in which our leisure, our comforts, are being abrogated. At the same time of course is the obvious truth, that we are already in a horrific situation, that our leisure and comforts are in many instances based upon so many enshrined immiserations that we could not possibly just backtrack. This fact has no novelty for much of the world. But how to target the opinions of the fringe bourgeoisie intellectual consumers of which I am myself part? This is the (sub)class who will help cling to and perpetuate a lot of the dangerous ideas; they will help smooth over a lot of the policies and trajectories of our social system. Point out shrinking privileges, first, and then start talking about them more broadly. This is to be a goal.

* * *

In Rivette's Out 1 there are characters who can afford leisure (like the Thirteen?) and those who eke out their efficiency apartment living on the other side. As an historical document Rivette's film is actually pretty fascinating, this period in the welfare state where one could spend one's days making avant-garde theater, according it all seriousness, and not necessarily being a bourgeois figure of leisure. Some are. Michel Lonsdale, who acts/lounges/nibbles his way through Out 1, shows up three decades later in a Spielberg film, Munich, where he plays a secretive weapons dealer (if memory serves?) who lives out an idyllic patriarch's existence on a family villa in the French countryside, like he's the Dreamworks cross of both Guy Debord and Don Corleone. It's hard to make a good case about a complex and playful 13-hour film I've seen only once (twice if you count the 4-hour Spectre); perhaps pointless, really. Still I have been meaning for some time to start writing a few things on Rivette and his treatment of class and history and not only about the more familiar tropes of realism, performance, and conspiracy. I am convinced somehow they mesh together. It's about duration, the leisure of unproductivity, the pleasure of unstructured productivity*, the BUM-bum-bum on the soundtrack that slips you into each episode like a theme song, the world of suggestion embodied in that amazingly (not-)banal final shot. Rivette is essential here.

* Termitish?

Quote of the Day

"I never held very rosy views of this communistic Eldorado."

--Marx to Engels on Flerovsky, 1870 (here).

Cultivating the Close Face

The close-up of female persecution, immortalized cinematically perhaps beyond improvement in Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. The trope finds itself re-interpreted within the broader context of the Bressonian aesthetic in his Trial of Joan of Arc. Rossellini in his own way sought to pare things down at least as much as Bresson (for different reasons, to different ends*). He made his own Jeanne d'Arc film, with Ingrid Bergman, but the work I'm including a screengrab from is Blaise Pascal, his 1972 telefilm--this is not Joan, but an unimportant peasant woman. Working hard to do away with "acting," Rossellini, who used close-ups sparingly in this late period, nevertheless tried to imbue in the very grain of the image, in the contours and colors of the face, something of the substance of humanity. This was not to better illustrate a story but to pinpoint the essence, manifest in a body, of the worldly continuum called History of which we were all part. The progress of Man, as he would have termed it.

* Not altogether different.

















A different strain of cinema reflected upon the image of female suffering--persecution in the courthouse, and destruction at the stake. (Below this paragraph are stills from Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General and Jesus Franco's The Bloody Judge.) These images reconnect the suffering to their purpose in the narrative: the exploitation at work is of human empathy for the depicted object--another human--exhibiting pain whether real or fictional. (In Preminger's Saint Joan the flame that engulfed Jean Seberg's face for a split second, causing her to scream, was real.) To infuse sexuality into the violent act (that is, to visibly re-infuse it); to turn the rule of authority, of the state, into a rule over bodily pleasures as well as pain. Some of the charge of the more-or-less modernist images of Dreyer, Bresson, Rossellini comes from the same place tread openly by Reeves, Franco, Piers Haggard, countless other schlock practicioners. The ingenuity with which a film treats this 'figuration' has little to do with its genre placement or its place in the brow-level scheme of things. What is vital is that Dreyer and Bresson, though "minimalists" whatever that means, were still including shots that emphasized not religious austerity but economical simplicity. If these films are like a case of connect the dots, it is worth noting what connected the shot-to-shot. These filmmakers were not stupid men; they are arranging elements in the frame and shots in time to deliberate effect--to impart something about the social order in which these women suffered, something about the corporeal, emotional, kinaesthetic experiences amidst the trappings of Law (produced by a chirographic society, with exegesis & rhetoric). These films are nothing if not palpable. If the exploitation film is sometimes more direct than the art film, it does not follow that it is always more honest or even more forthright about its sources. Rossellini, too, in making his spare, simple images, was trying to illumine an entire social order--his vision of "Man" in time and space--by means of ostensibly a few elements. The complexity, though, adds up from concept to concept, gesture to gesture, shot to shot, sound to sound, very quickly. It is because the elements these particular master filmmakers (D, B, R) have chosen to use are those which are so fraught with meaning, so ... elemental. They are also the raw material of exploitation.

Image of the Day

Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton.

Meme

I missed that I was tagged until just tonight--thanks Ali! The meme is a very popular one:

1) Pick up the nearest book. 2) Open to page 123. 3) Locate the fifth sentence. 4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing… 5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The book nearest me is actually a slim primer-style book called Contemporary World Television, and p. 123 is bibliography. So I grabbed the book on the shelf right next to it, For Ever Godard. I didn't count the first few lines of text on the page, which were the bulk of a sentence began on the previous page.

"This is the ultimate lesson to be learned from Histoire(s) [du cinéma]: the imaginary museum is also an embodied museum, i.e. the cinema has made flesh the history of this century. It is a body in every sense of the word: a place where the century could take faces, movements and gestures, genitals and utterances. It could also take ideas, references, works, concepts, so as to enable the century to think."

The book is a collection of essays, as many of my readers will know--this one is Antoine de Baecque's "Godard in the Museum." Anyone who wants to be tagged, consider yourself tagged and let us know in the comments if you've participated.

Lewis, De Toth, Boetticher

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.

Quote of the Day

“Étrange phénomène: l’art, rétrograde dans sa substance, est profondément révolutionnaire dans sa forme et son langage.”

-- Roberto Rossellini, Pesaro, 1966

The Lonely Villa

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.

This Whiner Is a Radio Show Host?

Image of the Day

Marx v Derrida

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 these three posts.

"Beware the Islamofascists!"

(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.

FYI

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.)

Hollywood

"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.

Worthless Rag

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

The Wright Wing

(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.

* * *

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.

Origins of Art

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."

-- Boccaccio on the Plague.

A Kiss Is Just a Kiss

(Top: Godard's Nouvelle Vague, 1990. Bottom: his Le Petit soldat, 1961/1963.)

A Simple Story

"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."

-- Roger Greenspun, NYTimes, 1970 (here)

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.

(Taking a break from my break for May Day...)

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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,

L'Urlo

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.)