Ch-Ch-Changes

Just an announcement. I've been in New York since August 2001, and I will be leaving New York in August 2009. I've had eight great years—the longest I've ever spent in one place, and I consider NYC home. And I'll post more about that later this summer, I'm sure. Life will see me land on Chicago's North Side or thereabouts, once again as a full-time student, pursuing a PhD in the Screen Cultures department at Northwestern University, a place which (in addition to the film & media scholars) has a number of heavy-hitters (to cite a few) in political and social thought. I'm quite excited.

Chicagoans, past and present: I'd be more than happy to hear advice about restaurants, neighborhoods & apartments, the repertory film scene, bookstores (especially since the Seminary Co-op is going to be a hike), videostores on par with Odd Obsession or Facets, or how to cope with ungodly Midwestern winters. I do know Chicago a bit already, as my fiancée hails from the area and I've visited maybe 10 times, but it's a big town so I'm all ears.

Scratchpaper

Caught up in 'the game,' games, ratings games (media competition), emergent audiovisual formulations of aggressiveness (a loss of civility, the elevation of competitive aggression's manifestations over formally contained friendly rivalry). Bursts of rage. Deterministic antagonisms.

Spectator sports are a huge part of the social experience of the cinematic age. The fact of spectatorship according to bound rules, persistently reiterated, insists upon a particular truth-claim about how humans behave, particularly as they behave under pressure. More and more precariously, above the chasm of hellish anarchy, we cling to the brutal comforts of a socioeconomic system that has the privilege of defining (including obliquely) its alternatives.

Scouts

A revolutionary on the run goes to a new land where he, wielding powers, wreaks a bit of havoc. So it goes. So it may go.

Excursions into the vast wasteland may follow.

Desire of the Analyst

Readership, have you withered away? I don't blame you. I've been so boring here for such a long time. Last autumn was busy & stressful for me and I expected that much. Less prepared was I for the stress and exhaustion of more recent months. But things have been turning out just fine, and I think that new content will work its way back onto EL more often the near future.

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Recently watched the first two episodes of In Treatment (HBO). Interesting here how savvy the show assumes its viewers to be with certain aspects of therapy. But this familiarity comes across as a matter of textual reading more than of any intimate knowledge of psychoanalysis as a discipline. One recognizes, and delights in, the subtleties and red herrings of the process because one is steeped in an easily-worn knowledge and irony of the conventions of not only texts but their interpretation.

WB on BB

He created works for the dramatic stage and the opera, presenting his pieces both to the Berlin proletariat and to the bourgeois avant-garde of the western sections of Berlin.

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Epic theater moves forward in a different way—jerkily, like the images of a film strip. It basically operates through repeated shocks, as the sharply defined situations of the play collide.

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Each of these short acts demonstrates one thing: how ineluctably the reign of terror now swaggering before nations as the Third Reich is subjecting all human relations to the rule of falsehood.

(All passages from Benjamin's "The Land Where the Proletariat May Not Be Mentioned: The Premiere of Eight One-Act Plays by Brecht" [1938]).

Quote of the Day

"You are endangered more by your desire for community, even if it be the apocalyptic community of the revolution, than by the horror of loneliness that speaks from so many of your writings. To be sure, I am willing to stake more on that horror than on the metaphors you use to cheat yourself out of your vocation."

—Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin (May 6, 1931)

Image of the Day

I'm Still Predictable

James Gray makes movies that feel like the last movies ever made; films that were destined to be and to feel obsolete; his cinema is so good it makes virtually everyone else in Hollywood or Indiewood appear amateur. It's not that I really believe this—but I like the films so much that it's a thought that bubbles up sometimes.

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Obsolescence is part of the charm not only because Gray is making "old-fashioned" movies, or because movies like these are rare in multiplexes. His virtues are classical ones, in the bigger scheme of cinema; appreciating him is a Lukacsian endeavor rather than Brechtian. His appeal is textual, which is not to say that there aren't fascinating allusive and intertextual qualities here: for instance Two Lovers nails its loose but pungent deployments of Rear Window and Vertigo, if you ask me—the citations are neither pretenses for meta activity, nor are they banking on loaned-out gravitas. (Even if one were both cynical and unappreciative of Gray, one would be foolish to say he freeloads off of Hitchcock or any other filmmaker, for the simple reason that if he needs to appeal to older texts for weight and mythology, he feels supremely comfortable gesturing towards Greek tragedy, opera, Dostoyevsky: if it's authority and status he's after, Hitchcock is small fries...) The Hitchcock blonde is also the shiksa goddess is also the shrewd portrait of moneyed upbringing is also a specter (the final scene) is also ... i.e., Gray works all of his thematics, all his allusions, all his textual levels into a cohesive multi-layered pattern with dexterity most directors would, must, should envy.

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James Gray and whoever else was involved in casting Gwyneth Paltrow understand something essential about getting good performances from her: it is vital that one, at least in some way, works against the assumption that she is a wonderful, charming presence. Gray makes her a slightly obnoxious, loopy, fidgety rich girl and she's actually fantastic in the role. Joaquin Phoenix, too, could have delivered an insufferable performance (the role was ripe for it), but he balances all the necessary tics & mannerisms with a constant unfolding of a self—unraveling layer after layer of "character."

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"Behavioral beauties."

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And still the money flows. Constantly flowing around the edges, under the surfaces, sometimes right before our very eyes.

Internal Systems

Once in a while I get to go out and see films. Happy to see, lately, a program of work from the 1970s by Coleen Fitzgibbon, who has been showing these at various festivals and other venues in recent years, with the advocacy & preservation work of Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder helping her along.

Fitzgibbon is interesting, among other things, for having been a woman in the hardcore structuralist cinema scene. (There were not so many women making films in this idiom, as Fitzgibbon hereself testified.) And she said of Internal Systems, her 45-minute magnum opus, that back in the 1970s when more people were interested in this kind of rigorous experimental cinema, part of her incentive was: "You want structural film, I'll give you structural film!" Internal Systems (it also goes by Internal System, which is what is listed on the title card) is nothing but the recording of projector light, modulated according to mathematical adjustments to the camera's F-stop.

Pictured here is a frame from Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes, a 10-minute (!) film showing Fitzgibbon cleaning a big filthy sink. Eye-popping was Time Magazine (1974?), shot with a microfilm camera, an issue of Time from front to back, complete but in fragments.

Systems

"A code is a deliberately established, killed context."

—Mikhail Bakhtin.

Paranoia is a useful, malleable thing because it can work as an allegory with innumerable and immediate applications; paranoia is not simply a thing produced or maintained by our zeitgeist: it is a formal feature, too, which is constructed as a result of other processes.

(Self-critical question: when has 'ideology critique' itself served as a form of paranoia?)

The wheels keep turning ...

Technology

From the Onion: Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

The Best Buy featured here is in my neighborhood. If you look near the guy's left elbow, down the sidewalk, you can make out a street cart (where they sell hot dogs & knishes).

Not that I've been able to devote much of myself to EL lately, but I assure you that this, too, in its own humorous way, will be woven into something larger and more substantial ...

Been Thinking

(This is not an argument in images; this is a scratchpad for for some signposts around which one may do some studying ... which may eventually lead to an argument.)

Film History

A tangential post-script to the words below. I am often wary of giving the impression that I think that Hollywood was better (at everything) in the past, and is now nothing more than an imitative shadow-machine of its former self. I think that commercial cinema, in Hollywood or elsewhere, exists as a combination of truths and lies that come encapsulated along the terms of a "contract" (probably could use a better word here, but it would need unpacking: later maybe) between the minority who produce and the populace who view these products. The terms of this Hollywood/populace negotiation are themselves constantly being re-negotiated. In juxtaposition to whatever lies Hollywood told in the past, our present perspective gives us historical views of what the films did not necessarily lie about, but which are being covered over today. I think Hollywood had a lot more honesty about certain aspects of class and poverty until roughly 20-30 years ago; these aspects were able to come through with relative honesty because illusions about these things were not included to the same extent or in the same way in the ideological projects of classical and 60s-70s Hollywood. It is a matter of looking at our cinematic past—which is still living today, as these films are still "products" for the populace—obliquely, and understanding through the vantage points of structural shifts in the system how films (texts/products) come to say things that they were never initially intended to say; how they say things that may not have been noticed before.

This is not a matter of finding subversive or countercultural (in a broad sense) meanings built into films, which is a different issue. It's a matter of finding the things that a system did not take the care to lie about or stylize—at least not in the same ways as they finessed other things which we now clearly, in allegedly enlightened manner, see for ourselves. The negotiation of businesspeople, creators, and technicians to audiences crystallizes into specific film texts. Studying the changes in producers/audiences in tandem with the study of textual/generic/authorial productions gives us a better understanding of the long history of a commercial cinema, the history of the choices offered to every type of player at different points in the game.

Yo, Rocky

Yesterday being one of those days where one needs to take things slooooow (know what I mean?), I came upon the last half hour of Rocky and the first half hour of Rocky II on AMC, that once-estimable channel. I have gone on record arguing that Rocky IV is a telling crystallization of certain liberal-militarist public sentiment (or hegemony) but I don't recall if I've ever written a word about the other films in the series. (And I didn't see Rocky Balboa.) I don't want to argue in favor of the Rocky movies; I don't think they're underrated. But I do think that the first two movies exhibit some small virtues that were once common in popular film, and are now exceptional.

White ethnicity, that is, working class 'whiteness' that is markedly separate from WASPishness within that larger category, seems to get no play in movies anymore. (I welcome counter-examples: this is my impression, not a categorical claim to fact.) Irish kids from Southie seem to be the rare exceptions; but semi-literate neighborhood wiseguys (Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Greek) trying to make a buck? Puh-leeze. To represent a character like this today, I feel, one would need to forestall him having charisma, and one would try to tie all his intelligence to his literacy. But Rocky is the kind of people marked by slang, local dialect, streetwise ways of not only of communicating to other people, but of conceptualizing one's own relationship to other sentient beings. The scene with the realtor in Rocky II is entertaining for this reason. Of course American English is becoming ever more standardized (but not more beautiful or learned) and we are impoverished for it, though it suits the new business mold and its functions in global commerce, where various Englishes must cohere to aid transactions.

(Let's recall, too, that Andy Rector's blog is called Kino-Slang, and he explains why in one of his very first posts...)

The entire Rocky series is a fairytale but its roots are in the working-class everyday. It's a story about proletarian self-improvement, the kinds of things about which Jacques Rancière sometimes writes. Contrast this with Good Will Hunting, which is also about proletarian self-improvement, but on a much more fantastic level. The scene in the Van Sant film where Matt Damon tells off the ponytailed grad student by overwhelming him with knowledge is pure wish-fulfilment. The janitor-bricklayer asserts himself over the upper/middle-class guy via mastery of the area conventionally held by the latter. Rocky himself jumps into the wealth, too, but it's through a different route: work hard, keep your head down, and if you get lucky, you get lucky. Will Hunting, in the Clinton '90s, first holds a job where he cleans floors at MIT—of all the places to clean—and then when he quits it, he can work construction. Bills aren't a problem. Rocky Balboa, on the other hand, aspires to a desk job (and its concomitant financial security) which he can't get, and must beg around for menial labor in the recession '70s. He gets a job hauling beef and promptly loses it for reasons of budget. Choices are made, in Rocky and Rocky II, on the basis of a dream, sure, but also in light of setting food on the table; the latter in the contemporary-liberal "working class" Hollywood fantasy is more likely to be excised from the picture, replaced with pap about realizing one's true potential, etc.

One more thing: the scene in Rocky II where Rocky's got to read off of cue cards while he's filming an ad for aftershave. "It—makes—me—smeel mainly." When he's chastised for misreading, Rocky yos his way into a defense: 'Does this stuff smell manly to you? In my opinion it doesn't smell very manly.' This is something vestigial, and something which I feel like I never see in commercial movies these days (and perhaps not in culture more generally, as refuge from billboards and big box stores is, in America, the privilege of the rich only): working-class incredulity towards advertisements and commercialism. This is different from the middle-class activism against these things, which is often couched in terms of renunciation of an omnipresent vermin on our quotidian existence, a blight on the life we deserve. Working-class incredulity comes from the perspective of the little guy knowing full well he's on the losing end of a rigged con; it's more pessimistic, maybe defeatist, but has a harder core because it's not necessarily a "political" cause.

A Great and Mighty Walk

Rupture

"Even philosophy succumbed to the "terrorism" of innovation. When French philosophers began to look for an insurance policy against the greatest possible ill—fidelity to the past, the repetition of dépassé philosophies—one of their inventions was la rupture épistémologique. This miraculous concept made it possible for the communist Althusser to be an old-style aparatchik on the one hand and, on the other, one hundred per cent innovative, almost as much so as Marx himself, since Althusser was the first to take full measure of the prophet's innovative genius.

"The psychoanalyst Lacan pulled exactly the same trick with Freud. Very quickly, however, one single rupture épistémologique for all times and for all people seemed paltry. Each thinker had to have his own, and then the really chic thinkers had several in a row. In the end, everybody turned themselves into a continuous and monstrous rupture, not primarily with others, but with their own past.

"This is how inconsistency has become the major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde. But the real credit for the tabula rasa school of innovation should go to Nietzsche, who was tired of repeating with everybody else that a great thinker should have no model. He went one better, as always, and refused to be a model—the mark of genius. This is still a sensation that is being piously repeated today. Nietzsche is our supreme model of model-repudiation, our revered guru of guru-renunciation."

—Catty words from René Girard ("Innovation and Repetition," 1990) hip through sheer squareness, "radical" through Roman Catholic traditionalism.

"I Slipped"

If you haven't seen Once Upon a Time in America then you may want to skip these brief lines. I'm not discussing a serious narrative spoiler, but those who prefer carte blanche should look away.

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When Dominic meets his fate he tells Noodles: "I slipped." These words, which appear to quietly haunt Noodles for the rest of his life, blindside us. Like an iceberg set upon our Titanic, they come unbidden to catch us unawares—extraneous to plot development and not even immediately applicable to pathos, "I slipped" is like a perpendicular insertion into the linear progression of time and the narrative. Of course, Once Upon... is not a linear film and its conceptualization of time, memory, history, and diegetic reality is like a Möbius strip (and in this it has a common overarching feature with another great philosophical genre film of the time, Videodrome). There are many such perpendicular insertions, touches which seem to come from out of "nowhere," but which make prevent any such sleek gangster movie. This movie spreads outward, and more on that aspect in the future. But like icebergs and Titanics, the iceberg was always there first, and our own shortcomings of perception and planning, our habitual shackles, are truly to blame: the iceberg may appear out of the mist but it does not come to be out of the mist. So when Dominic says, "I slipped," we get a split second that's easy to accept, but hard to assimilate. For a moment the narrative line morphs into a sturdy horizontal cross-section of these big concepts, "America," "youth," "masculinity," "violence," etc. Almost all such narrative treatments of these kinds of Big Issues in film appear clumsy, shallow, obsequious next to Leone's film.

Time means something different for this moment; not a narrative time but an intrusion, a pause on narrative chronology to reflect upon the underlying experience that burns off the moment we comprehend a narrative through-line. What kind of cross-section here? Actually Once Upon a Time in America is not at all a cross-section of America, or of children or men, or of American Jews or New Yorkers. Its handling of all these things tends toward the narrow and specific, the personal, and if these are ever elevated to generalized principles (anecdotal, nostalgic, exemplary) it is only because the children's narrative, at the very least, is the one sure aspect of the story organized under the sign of memory. When one looks back one has to come up with ways to make sense of the fragmented and stylized slivers that comprise our private, experiential histories.

Hence "I slipped" means a lot of things. It tells us something about the miserable and admirable courage of these hustling street kids; Dominic, too proud to admit he got shot, but too close to death to be proud consciously, has to blurt out something that comes to mind—anything that might save face in front of his pals. It's the sort of explanation that comes to a sleepwalker's mind when she has been awakened; those of us who have been in this position ourselves will understand the weird explanations (neither lies, nor false, evasive but naked) that come to the lips, and we may fancy a guess that this is the sort of last hurrah of Dominic's experiential self we see. Of course: he slipped.

Image of the Day

Tomorrow's Clerks

The strong and stable institution is that which can sustain dissent from within—like the strong body that can withstand bacteria, viruses, and other toxins more readily than a body with a weak immune system. The exceptions are pyramidal institutions whose structures are made to allow for a downward cascade of authority (corporations, militaries).

Though I am aware that the New York Times tells me little of consequence, I read its content anyway. Some of it. Like some of you surely did, I read Fish's self-satisfied write-up of Frank Donoghue's book, The Last Professors. I get the same bewildering discomfort reading accounts like Donoghue's as any other young academic does. So if the liberal arts as we know them are in jeopardy (and boy do they always seem to be in jeopardy!) how do we humanities scholars survive?

The great university systems of the modern world existed within power structures which were national, protected and differentiated in both cultural tradition and laws of the state. The universities existed under the dominant paradigms of the system which enveloped them, and as with all capital, resources, and intellectual manpower, the game is rigged in favor of the owners. The great civilizations always maintain some activity for the advancement of leisure and learning. In some of these civilizations these activities are codified and restricted so that a great deal is the prerogative of the elite classes of people.

If tomorrow's age (which is already underway today) is that of transnational capital, will tomorrow's haven for dissent from within—the space it allows for a scholarly spirit of disinterestedness—be sustained by these very corporations and their for-profit institutions, operating through webs of virtual space and "global cities" and English (or some other lingua franca)? And I wonder if, as a corollary to this, the future of a strong liberal arts (or equivalent) education will revert to the privilege of a few or will remain viable on a relative mass scale.

More broadly: will that very scholarly spirit of disinterestedness remain or will it evolve into a new and unrecognizable thing altogether (i.e., in less optimistic words, die out)?

Saying Something

"... I can't tell you how the president handles the question of health insurance in America. But on the issues having to do with us he has a very clear worldview. Like Arik, he has a loathing of violence; a loathing of everything having to do with terrorism and the use of force. And he has a loathing for untruthfulness and for failure to carry out commitments. He doesn't accept the Middle Eastern political style in which you come and say something and then forget what you said. From that point of view he is very American. He doesn't tolerate nonsense. He can't stand the Middle Eastern jabbering with nothing underlying it."

—Dov Weisglass on soon-to-be-ex-President Bush. (Hat tip to the Colonel for the link.)

And by this time next year, will many of us forget our prior derision of simplistic Republican moral binarism (and a hypocrisy towards violence), and expound rational Democratic programs for humanitarian militarism in all pockets of the world in order to reach the exact same goals, i.e., the "spreading" of "democracy/peace/freedom" from our glorious bag of tricks? I wonder if there will be, can be, anything short of our economic downfall to prevent this.