Humanoids

The story goes that Creation of the Humanoids (1962) was Warhol's favorite film.  If Warhol himself had teamed up with Alain Robbe-Grillet to film a SF screenplay by a bright, nerdish 18-year-old, they might still not have dreamed up something quite so fierce or so stolid, so marble-slab-cool (but filled with bright colors).  The beauties of this film come from both being ambitious but also not at all trying to court any real standards of modernism (i.e., modernist critical taste) in nevertheless producing a quasi-modernist end product.

It "manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, often simultaneously, in its view of what it means to be a human being."  (Peter Nellhaus)

"To be a Warholian film means to be concerned with boredom and automation.  And for a film to be concerned with boredom and automation means not just that the film addresses boredom and automation as themes, but that it engages with or reveals boredom and automation in presenting itself to the viewer and through this process, 'the meaning goes away.'  As a Warholian film, The Creation of the Humanoids is, then, not just a film that represents an evacuation of meaning, but one that performs it."  (Chris Fujiwara)

Quote of the Day

"In 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recruited Charles Hitch of the think-tank RAND Corporation as his assistant secretary and undertook to streamline the Department of Defense through the use of systems analysis.  Before long, the defense personnel and methods filtered out of the Pentagon and into the civilian parts of government, not only on the federal level but on the state and municipal level as well.  In 1964, California governor Pat Brown called upon that state's aerospace corporations to use the new methods to study such problems as transportation, waste management, poverty, crime, as well as unemployment among California's aerospace engineers, and the systems analysts responded enthusiastically to the call, confident that with their computers and space-age techniques they could solve any mere earth-bound problem.  Convinced of the superiority of their formal methods over the "conventional" approaches of more experienced and knowledgeable specialists - and, as critic Ida Hoos noted, mistaking their ignorance for objectivity - the systems analysts appropriated all of reality as their legitimate domain, the social world as well as the physical world.  Perhaps no one epitomized this new breed better than Jay Forrester, the electrical engineer who is credited with developing the magnetic core memory for the high-speed digital computer.  Forrester moved on to pioneer the new field of "systems dynamics," which he applied, successively, to industrial, urban, national, and, finally, global "systems."  "The great uncertainty with mental models is the inability to anticipate the consequences of interactions between parts of a system," Forrester explained.  "This uncertainty is totally eliminated in computer models."  Whether the "system" is an industrial process, a manufacturing plant, a city, or an entire planet, its operations are ultimately reducible to a set of "rate equations" which become "the statements of system policy."  "Desirable modes of behavior" are made possible, Forrester insisted, "only if we have a good understanding of the system dynamics and are willing to endure the self-discipline and pressures that must accompany the desirable mode.""

(David F. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 55)

The Riddle of Steel

By Night with Torch and Spear (Joseph Cornell, 1942)

Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

It's Only Tashlin

It's well-known that Frank Tashlin's career started in cartoons.  This beginning is often thought (not wrongly) to have affected the way he treated his live-action images as plastic, pliable, either immaterial or too material.  The more I see or revisit Tashlin the more impressed I am at the ways in which the content and feel of his films actively engages with the borders and institutionalized ancillaries of (certain definitions of) cinema - animation, television, advertising, performance ...

"Are Video Games Art?"

I keep seeing this debate - not only in the film & media blogosphere, but in that too.  Are video games art?  On occasion the defenses of video game art read like uninspired recuperation.  Perhaps even more off-putting are pronouncements from those who would wish to be cultural conservators.  "Video games can not be art, because art is ..." 

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Aesthetics is so fragmented and bracketed off in "our culture" that the aesthetic experience itself becomes secondary (at best).  The age of the spectacle is highly aestheticized, no doubt, and aesthetic considerations have cleared out political questions. ... Strangely enough, when it comes to activities and objects meant for leisure, one confronts a range of false moves.  For instance, if one has taste, one is supposed to honor the aesthetic object.  This is on the basis of its aesthetics alone, presumably.  Whether it's a Fritz Lang film from 1953, or Rembrandt painting, or Heian scroll.  Its pleasure is the pleasure of enlightenment, improvement, distinction.  The valorized aesthetic object may bravely emerge from & struggle against something so ghastly as a material, commercial context (ripping free of it like a Little Engine That Could).  But it is never to be equated with same.  In fact the visible traces of efficiency amidst shoestring means is a sign of pride, a sign that some creator has "made do" despite limitations.  But this is not, actually, aesthetic appreciation.  It is in fact the aestheticization of the material contexts from which an object comes. 

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Stephen Dwoskin once wrote - and I'm sure I've already quoted this half a dozen times on this blog - that in a period when so many were torturing themselves with the question, "What is cinema?", Raymond Durgnat would, figuratively speaking, just show up at the movie house and say, "This is!"  I admire the impulse.  A major part of why I admire it is because it does not presume to know.

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The answer to the question, "Are video games art?" will either remain a deadlock, or the object of video games as art will be recuperated and become common sense to later generations.  But I cannot side with the group who assume the position of aesthetic guardians, contra video games, for the main reason that they seem to possess knowledge of what art - Art? - is and thus can proceed deductively.  Neither, though, am I convinced by the "logic" that states that anything that people enjoy must be acknowledged as art lest the naysayer be elitist.  (This too, if more implicitly, presumes that art - Art? - has a stable definition which can be known ... and its necessary & sufficient conditions can be met through inductive means of popularity and widespread pleasure.)

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I don't even play video games.  But I would be most satisfied if this debate were kicked out of the house and people started devoting the same energy to questions like, What's happening in these video games?  What do they provide?

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Image of the Day

The Lights

The flicker of a moving image has long and diffuse history.  Occasionally it has been put to use as an aesthetic effect or even a weapon - as the deliberately exaggerated by-product of early cinema's non-standardized frame rates. A feature of the historical deployment of the flicker effect has been its implicit reliance on the editing of frames - different colors, white/black, 24fps.  As a result, because of the 3:2 pulldown, it's difficult for video versions to approximate the precise effects of Arnulf Rainer or The Flicker or N:O:T:H:I:N:G.  Less specific to the material of celluloid, however, may be the aesthetic suggestion of the blurring of lines between image and formlessness, or between image and pure light / pure dark.  Colors or light bleed into an image, aestheticize it despite "identification" or "story" by pulling it outside those realms and denaturing it.

Some of the rare images in Paul Sharits' flicker work depict violent or sexual acts.  Sharits' films, and techniques, were not meant purely for their powers of provocation, however.  He indicated on numerous occasions his desire to use cinema to enhance consciousness. 

"In his flicker films, Sharits disrupts this process. He replaces the consecutive phases of action with solidly colored or black or white frames . The effect is literally dazzling . The viewer sees often violent bursts of light whose color and intensity are functions of the speed at which the colored frames and the complementary colors of spontaneously induced afterimages change. The oscillating colors not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexively remind the viewer of the physical limits of the frame and of the surface on which films are projected." (Stuart Leibman)

For Leibman's description of effects to make sense, of course, so much depends on this "viewer" glazed with modernist theory before the white screen.  But perhaps we can talk about the impulse to produce such effects.  What directs audiovisual creators to devise and deploy the flicker effect?  In one respect it might be a push towards a total, consuming aesthetic vision.  For Sharits, a mandala to "end war"; for today's pop artists, the mock-sublimity of an expression too big to fail (or too big for execution, craft, to even matter).

"Want you to see everything," sings Rihanna in "All of the Lights," the Kanye West track released a few months back.  Enlisting the vocals of a whole slew of pop singers (Elton John, Alicia Keys, La Roux, etc., etc.), the track is a bit monstrous in size, slightly indeterminate in direction.  This isn't simply a wall of sound, it's a wall of celebrity persona.  The video, by Hype Williams, uses numerous bright flicker effects that destabilize the images (if they ever were stable) from any purely "functional" role, like telling a story, or creating a mood through mise-en-scene alone. The images flirt with pure color, they appear to filter into and out of one another, they heighten the sense of color within some of the shots.  So many flashing lights - actually that phrase is, of course, the title of another Kanye West song.  Probably someone better versed in Kanye Studies than me could say how deep this trope runs ...

... I think this is particularly fascinating for a guy like Kanye West - the tropes of education that run throughout his work, "can't tell me nothing," even the way Taylor Swift called him "an innocent."  West: yet to be informed, yet to be instructed, yet to be enlightened.  Weighed down by the necessity of enlightenment, West associates these themes in his lyrics - pain or trauma, with education and illumination. "Cop lights / flash lights / spot lights / strobe lights / street lights."

"In 1945 a Western force greater than electricity descended on the Japanese arkheion.  The atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat and light of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive but the "mansion called literature," the literary archive.  It threatened to destroy the trace, to destroy even the shadows." Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), p. 25 (for Adrian)

(Still from Radiohead's video for "House of Cards," made without cameras.)

Previously on ... in 2009 ... (Light 1) (Light 2) (Light 3) (Light 4) (Light 5)

Image of the Day

Realization

A problem in thinking about taste hierarchies is the impulse for the reformed elitist to wish to embrace the low, popular, mass, vulgar, etc., and yet - in the process of vocal exculpation - recuperate these objects for the high.  Specifically, the low objects are (re)integrated into a kind of high grammar.  One of the privileged instances of this is the heroic mythos of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, who "realized" that Hitchcock and Hawks could be spoken of like Racine or Shakespeare. 

They realized it.  Apologies for the very poor Derrida imitation, but let me suggest that my deliberate use of this word (to realize) is meant to convey something of the double meaning that is buried in this mythology of taste.  The evident meaning of this "realization" is a recognition and subsequent acknowledgment.  But what it actually entails is the making real of a value judgment.  The Cahiers critics put these ideas into circulation.

The recuperation of the popular artist for high tradition (Shakespeare is the ultimate example) is, itself, an "always already" excavated gambit for anyone who wishes to defend the legitimacy of a particular, relatively contemporary piece of popular culture.  "Dude, you don't think Two and a Half Men has a particular type of genius?  You dismiss it just because tons of people watch it?  Well look, Shakespeare was popular, too."  Substitute Harry Potter or any number of objects for Two and a Half Men.  The logic at work here is that, time and again, prevalent elitist tastes have been shown to have "wrongly" dismissed or at least unfairly pigeonholed popular works of their era.  We see it over and over again.  Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Guiding Light.  "It's an objective pattern, don't blame me if I'm a little further ahead of the curve than you are.  It's history ... but as logical and predictable as a science experiment!"

I don't propose that a rigid, reductive high-middle-low scale is any better than this operation.  For my part, do bring on Bourdieu, and while you're at it bring on White Chicks.  (Coherence and reason are great things when discussing particularities.  But I neither require nor desire my own tastes to be subordinated to the laws of coherence or logic.)  But I do think this rhetoric of realization has survived too long as a truism, a crutch, a replacement for thought, and a lazy & unearned badge worn to denote anti-elitism.  And it's always convenient to pose as an anti-elitist in terms of cultural tastes when you exist in the heart of capitalism.  The signification of tastes is indeed a political question, but perhaps more politically pressing is when that question comes to eclipse any & all others as the only political question.

To the End of TV

In the dismally undercooked film Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010), the coming apocalypse is in one instance signified by an emergency broadcast signal on an old TV.  "This is not a test," it reads.  It's got to be a test, concludes one character.  No - but if the emergency was real, wouldn't there be instructions for us? asks another.  Perhaps.  The film indicates at one point that, in parts elsewhere, crypto-government forces are reaching critical mass to fight the god-zombies.

In this film, God can shut off TV transmission, send a storm of billions of flies, but cannot send a bomb into a roadside gas station.  (The roadside gas station out in the desert: from Detour, Ace in the Hole, Red Dawn, the first two Terminator movies, the Tremors franchise, etc.)  If you've read Meaghan Morris' "Banality in Cultural Studies" (here) you may recall her anecdote of a television newsflash in Sydney about how "something has happened" in Darwin - or to Darwin.  But, initially, the startling thing was that no information had come from Darwin.  The city, which it turned out was hit by a cyclone, had stopped communication, and this was the certain marker of disaster.  "This was not catastrophe on TV - like the Challenger sequence - but a catastrophe of and for TV."

The television set is a portal to the electro-ether that soothes a nation.  TV transmission operates like antennae of the social imaginary.  When it - it, not any particular TV set - malfunctions, one may conclude that the shit has hit the fan.

Apologies

... for extremely light posting lately.  I've been a busy fellow.  Expect a few posts to crop up before the month is over, though.

The Lawless

If you have not read Andy Rector's beautiful, compelling reflections from a few years back on Joseph Losey's The Lawless, you should do so.  (This work is available to stream on Netflix now, at least in the US.  It's not very long, and it is very good.)  Losey's film is in many ways similar to the roughly contemporaneous Ace in the Hole (also set out West, in the sticks), but while it is less ambitious than Wilder's excellent film, The Lawless seems deeper and more cohesively critical in some ways.  I will springboard from Andy's comments into some of my own notes.

-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.

A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch.  Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind.  The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc.  The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."

-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.

We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe.  Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.

-The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)

Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre?  The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system.  Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...

-The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.

I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product.  (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)

-The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.

And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description).  Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves.  It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.

-The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.

Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties.  Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.

-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into

She's amazing in the film.  Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc.  (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)

Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down...

... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy.  Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products.  (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)

With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.


Yes, and what sad state of affairs has befallen latter-day Wisconsin?  Exeunt.

Image of the Day

(for Ignatiy)

While We Work (2)

An extra note here, to help clarify things.  (When I'm as obscure & perhaps obtuse as in my previous entry, it's mainly because this is where I first sketch out some of my ideas.  I've not refined them for myself, let alone for you, hence the rambling sentences and unclear thought.)  This evening I got home and ate a snack, and Rudy was on TV.  I watched the last ~20 minutes.  This too is a film that basks in working class comforts, nostalgia for old days - home and factory job and nice town.  (Riding the bench for Notre Dame can be a boyhood dream.)  And it struck me then, a rephrasing of the phenomenon that I was trying to hint at before: this particular brand of working class nostalgia, which is not new, is possibly shifting its tenor, in new films or new viewings of old films, from being nostalgic to being faintly utopian.  (Even if the films themselves are not politically or thematically utopian.)  This is to say, we see reflected along the edges of filmic fiction the conditions of precarity which make this fantasy of an older working class life & culture (complete with its various other baggage, like nostalgia for whiteness in some cases) appear not simply as a lost origin, but as a sociopolitical arrangement which now looks pretty damn fine ... and unattainable.  This is a way of experiencing, in the background, the demise of even the imperfections of a welfare state as now beyond our grasp.  Maybe.

While We Work

Two movies from a couple years ago that I've watched in recent weeks - one a big arthouse hit by a major filmmaker, another a film that probably few readers of EL outside of Brazil will have seen.  They are Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum (her greatest achievement since Beau travail?) and Carlos Reichenbach's mesmerizing, perhaps slightly frustrating Falsa Loura (Fake Blonde). I want to say something about how both of these films imagine small communities and their daily existence, sculpted out of jobs which can ultimately be "left at work" (indeed it's the personal which enters the labor space), where one can have a satisfying life without having to worry too greatly about a paycheck or career path.  Both films indicate on numerous occasions that their characters are not rich - they must make choices as to how to spend their discretionary income - but the fact of their discretionary income is established at the outset.  (Not in the way that Hollywood routinely generates plenty of discretionary income for its characters.  Class is not at all an absent feature of the situations here.  Commercial films frequently cannot represent the working class except through caricature as a "working class," with accents, unfashionable clothes, etc.  Art cinema, particularly outside the US, is more privileged in this respect.)  Coincidentally, concerts appear in both films as a leisure activity.  In 35 Shots of Rum they don't make it to the concert, but they can relax in a bar after-hours, and then there's a wonderful music scene anyway.

I do not wish to give the impression that these films are utopian fantasies.  They are hardly that.  I would not want, even by inadvertent suggestion, to rob them of their sociopolitical criticisms.  But what compels me to mention these films together, here, now, is still something indirect and marginal - yet pervasive - in their total construction.  These are works whose projection of a certain type of existence under labor starts to dematerialize, giving rise to the strange blurring of nostalgic longing and waged mundanity.

No one reading this needs to be reminded of "flexible" labor - probably because a lot of people who read are themselves quite subjected to these shifts in a global marketplace, living on the rapidly disintegrating precipice of an imperialist center's "information economy."  Genteel impoverishment awaits so many of us that it hasn't already claimed.  And it surely may be tempting to imagine one's own variant on an honest day's work - mediated of course by nation, race, gender, age, etc.  Get home from a relatively safe, stable, union-protected factory job and relax over dinner with a shot & a beer?  Be able to relate to co-workers because you know that you share a strength in numbers which structurally balances against management?  (Having been a former union member, before going back to school full-time, this isn't always the feeling membership inspires, these days!  Here and there the whole project's being gutted, just gutted.)  However nostalgic, masculinist, etc. any particular image of a decent worker's life might be, the fact of the image - rather than the image - is what's at stake, along the edges, of films like 35 Shots of Rum and Falsa Loura. 

This is to say: the promise of a merely decent, moderately stable welfare state safety net is itself experienced as a comfort - almost a luxury! - in these films.  And both present foreboding hints of life after this labor - in 35 Shots of Rum, a retired worker commits suicide because he cannot figure out what to do with himself.  And the charming Rosane Mulholland's character in Falsa Loura, Silmara, comes to a sad, disillusioning, chilling realization in her own story - as a consequence of a weekend gig taken to earn supplemental cash.  There are two levels at work here, as I see it.  One, these basic and hard-won privileges for the lives of laborers are eroding.  Two, perhaps some of us have nevertheless come to experience this negotiation as a womb rather than as a prison, and now that we're being let out, the precarity is terrifying.  Neither of these developments at all constitute news.  Obviously.  What is interesting is how they are registering in recent cinema, as emotional and social canvas, even in films whose nominal focus may not be labor relations or precarity.  The workplace is in the film, around it, but not its main point ... and yet it's absolutely the point, when seen from another perspective.

I haven't seen The Company Men (that thing with Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, et al.) but I imagine this too participates in this kind of newly recognized desire to return to a working class cocoon.  In older films I feel like the iconographic counterpart was the home & village versus the sprawling, internationalizing tendency.  (Preminger's The Cardinal, a fairly excellent film with a dismal ending, embodies this tension really well.)  Now, there's no frontier to which we information workers in the imperial centers are told to guide our productive energies ... we are left with just a shrug, and a What's next?

History and the Meme

Just what is it that makes today's salads so different, so appealing?  (Look here.)

When I encountered this web page a little earlier, my first actual thought - aside from the initial reaction of "oh cool, this is funny" - was how close this amusing collection was to history.  And also how far.  On one hand we have an intriguing foray into the history of images - if not necessarily the history of form, then the history of gestures and positions, which provide material for history of forms anyway.  (Maybe take a look at this.)  (There is never truly a "purely graphical" comprehension of visual work; all understanding is in constant conversation with the porosity of forms and what they're attached to.)  But at the same time, we lack the history: though we can guess where these images of happy women eating salad come from, and we might be close to the mark, without the writing we do not know how these images were situated.  The meme is, in effect, harmless, toothless - because we cannot make real connections to the publications (print or digital) where they've been disseminated, to tie them to the obvious discourses of (feminine) health and (feminine) body images.  This is criticism which undercuts critique, in a sense: the instance where the laughing is finally squared solely upon these women in these pictures, with only a shadowy hint of "society" putting them there, so that one does not draw out information - one assumes one is "in on the joke," but gods forbid one uses boring old information to clarify a problem.

Shoot 'Em Up (Notes)

"We'll paint the town the color of pomegranates," says a character in Khyber Patrol (!), in one of the most interesting points of this mediocre 1954 adventure movie.  Another interesting feature is the introduction of automatic weaponry into the fold, as British lancers stave off evil, greedy tribesmen.  The machine gun in period pieces sometimes serves an iconic - or iconoclastic - function, cuing the arrival of a new and brutal regime.  Gangsters and outlaws and imperialists, merciless men, use this sort of weapon.  Filmmakers (like, say, Peckinpah) use it as a signal that a particular type of mythic perspective - and not just characters/bodies - is biting the dust.  [In John McTiernan's Predator, the almost total ineffectiveness of the machine gun against the Predator is a similar move: upping the ante.  Because we already know, in part from prior movies, that the machine gun is one helluva leveller.]

If the firing squad was a form of execution that at least feinted toward civility - because it was difficult or impossible to tell which of a group of men fired the lethal bullet - the machine gun invests not only the guilt of execution but the civility into the functioning of the machine.  As has been discussed elsewhere, by others like Virilio, the mechanics of traditional filmmaking (chronophotography) are tied to technological developments in weaponry.  Who's guilty for taking 24 frames per second?  No one: a single photograph may be a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.  Et cetera.

Films - typically action movies, mobster movies, films about greed - invoke Sun Tzu's The Art of War.  It gets name-dropped in The Sopranos, in Wall Street (by Gordon Gekko), and in, yes, the dialogue in The Art of War (directed by Christian Duguay, a film in the vein of generic De Palma but heavily diluted: like a middling Snake Eyes).  The text is usually handled in a shallow, talismanic way - mere orientalist exoticism repurposed, slightly, as a symbol for cut-to-the-chase strategics.  A thinking man's manual, but certainly a man's manual.  Vicious, Hobbesian state-of-nature stuff.  Having never read The Art of War except in idle excerpt, here and there, I make no claims as to what it actually is or could actually serve as.

White Swan

"Empire alone can create and sustain whiteness, despite the common fantasy of its self-sufficiency. The Black Swan must be mastered and absorbed to save whiteness from enervation and sterility. (As Odile in the poster, the heroine’s genuine essential whiteness is in question; having absorbed the whiteness-creating blackness of Lily, the Prima Donna is red-eyed like an albino and thickly painted white.) The bourgeois culture industry has deconstructed only to reconstruct as indestructible because ideal; it has discursively destabilized with “gynesis” the hierarchies of white supremacist patriarchy only to reaffirm them, killed them to give them the eternal life of spectres. Spectacle’s layerings – able to create the illusion of that DeManian “infinite” irony through a kind of seductive hypnosis – assist in the re-establishment of debunked mythology deploying a levelling operation whose main move is to place reality under an erasure it cannot re-emerge from entirely."  (Qlipoth)

People can't seem to agree on the basic properties of Black Swan, probably nominated for a bunch of Oscars by now.  [Some general spoilers follow here.]  Is it camp?  (If so, what kind?)  Are the laughs this movie draws intentional or symptomatic?  What about people who take the quasi-high romantic markers seriously?  Black Swan is what I'd call a "diffuse" film - a deliberately multi-layered construction.  In the work's complexity one is invited to bask in the codified indeterminacy of the entire affair.  It's like "art" (multi-faceted, mercurial, rich, impossible to pin down), and yet not. This film contains so many diverse elements in terms of plot, theme, and style ... the result isn't a new thing with a new structure, but a clever theme park ride through various codifications of genre or symbolism, and various registers.  A night out on the town?  It's like Gossip Girl.  High-pressure dance practice?  It's like Center Stage.  Frightful blurrings of fantasy and reality?  It's like Repulsion.  This sort of contained "surfing" can make for really interesting cinema (see here).  All art cannibalizes and repurposes previous cultural content; plenty of great art deliberately courts ambiguity. I wonder here about the meta-orientation of this particular expression of ambiguity. 

One generic ingredient in the Black Swan stew is the horror film - suspenseful editing strategies, the intense soundtrack, the overbearing generational conflict between mother and daughter (and absent father), horrific and animalistic CGI, and horror of one's own body and its involuntary changes - changes one both anxiously awaits and dreads.  (A thought that crossed my mind, but which I haven't hashed out in conversation with anyone yet: Black Swan is a film about sublimated menstruation anxiety made from a male point of view.)  Horror, Richard Dyer writes in White, "is a cultural space that makes bearable for whites the exploration of the association of whiteness with death." 

The horror trope of vampirism for instance - white, ghastly, consuming - is so menacing, Dyer goes on, that it is often represented by whites who are not coded or accepted as completely white (Jews, Southeastern Europeans, creoles).  Unsettlingly coincidental, then, that in this film's setting of a markedly moneyed, white subculture it is Portman and Kunis (both Jewish) who embody the emergent presence of this passionate, dionysian, destructive, selfish, unchaste thing, the black swan.  The "deaths" of these two characters in the film signify the pyrrhic victory of a newly tempered whiteness, which has been threatened & pushed to its limit by that evil blackness.

Contemptible Behavior

First person: "I really like [artist x]/[artwork y]."  Second person, without waiting or digging for elaboration, conversation, etc.: "Really?  Wow, I just lost so much respect for you."  I disdain this general pattern of behavior (and I also disdain it whenever I notice something like it in my own actions).  Taste, inasmuch as it acts as a meaningful social bond as well as lubricant, should never be confined to a checklist of proper likes/dislikes.  This otherwise transforms culture into a mathematical game, hemmed in on all sides by the finitude of  combinations.  What could be more boring, more deadening than this?  And, more, what could slot more neatly into a bureaucratic, niche-marketed society?

Colonies

"The colonial does not exist, because it is not up to the European in the colonies to remain a colonial, even if he had so intended.  Whether he expressly wishes it or not, he is received as a privileged person by the institutions, customs, and people. From the time he lands or is born, he finds himself in a factual position which is common to all Europeans living in a colony, a position which turns him into a colonizer.  But it is not really at this level that the fundamental ethical problem of the colonizer exists; the problem of involvement of his freedom and thus of his responsibility.  He could not, of course, have sought a colonial experience, but as soon as the venture is begun, it is not up to him to refuse its conditions.  If he was born in the colonies of parents who are colonizers themselves, or if, at the time of his decision, he really was not aware of the true meaning of colonization, he could find himself subject to those conditions, independent of any previous choice."  (Memmi)