tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20390961986791393612024-02-18T21:05:58.432-08:00kino fistwearekinofist@gmail.comUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-7753911248168116662009-11-26T10:01:00.000-08:002009-11-26T15:13:13.535-08:00Kino Fist Salvagepunk Special!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMZcjmP-XHQBcE8Yim3DoA2dfp2DCDb5WI9pSVES5Eqt9ZPXe6en7FRb2OlcONb2FH_xR0iBOcdaRy_-_9JHICku_R3rCqwchOYvzd6-0VyuhxbqM62yPNie6UVPyprVmOAdRNI2f-F3A/s1600/Rita-Tushingham-The-Bed-Sitting-Room-Police-755x502.jpeg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMZcjmP-XHQBcE8Yim3DoA2dfp2DCDb5WI9pSVES5Eqt9ZPXe6en7FRb2OlcONb2FH_xR0iBOcdaRy_-_9JHICku_R3rCqwchOYvzd6-0VyuhxbqM62yPNie6UVPyprVmOAdRNI2f-F3A/s320/Rita-Tushingham-The-Bed-Sitting-Room-Police-755x502.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408471785545245490" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Kino Fist will be making a slight, last-minute return to tie in with the Historical Materialism conference. Due to mine and Nina's current workload may unfortunately lack a zine, but it will be in the salubrious environs of the <a href="http://www.hotshoegallery.com/">Hotshoe Gallery in Farringdon</a>. It will feature two films of a rag & bone variety: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Richard Lester, <em>The Bedsitting Room</em> (1969)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Peter Sykes, <em>Steptoe and Son</em> <i>Ride Again</i> (1973)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Introduction by Evan Calder Williams</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Date: Monday 30th November 2009</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Time: 7.00pm</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Place: Hotshoe Gallery, 29-31 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8SW.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here are posts by <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/04/poverty-and-partitions.html">me on Steptoe and Son</a> and <a href="http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/search?q=bedsitting+room">Evan on</a> <em>The Bedsitting Room</em>, just in case.</div>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-87377274824918657102008-10-07T10:02:00.000-07:002008-10-07T10:15:53.668-07:00A Personal ApocalypseMark Hancock<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAEiFpzzMC2ej6zsHLAjbRaPHi0-4Eib7fkLKJVwGtJQk-rZgI8SEZLHA5hUULcK04l5iJMU6F_Fw9asist_Ro3Qk_XYJ4toP5XGO5OPU6XNm4DU07q11a_HZKn-hwOFNNzikTtZ7h9Sw/s1600-h/Blade%20Runner%20sky.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254461787461843698" style="CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAEiFpzzMC2ej6zsHLAjbRaPHi0-4Eib7fkLKJVwGtJQk-rZgI8SEZLHA5hUULcK04l5iJMU6F_Fw9asist_Ro3Qk_XYJ4toP5XGO5OPU6XNm4DU07q11a_HZKn-hwOFNNzikTtZ7h9Sw/s320/Blade%2520Runner%2520sky.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov<br /><br />When we try to imagine the end of the world, we tend to conceptualise it in terms of a grand scheme that encompasses a global or universal ending to existence. We ask ourselves: “Surely, there can be no cessation of the individual without a shut down of the whole of existence?”<br /><br />But there are more personal and certainly more existential forms of ending available to mankind. The subsuming of the individual ID that takes place in certain Buddhist belief systems may seem a viable option and within the understanding of most people. It isn't that hard to approximate an idea of what it would be like to 'not exist', but only from the safe and comforting position of the existing identity.<br /><br />Perhaps this difficulty is one of the reasons we create art works that give us a window though which to view this ending? It's easier to divorce ourselves from the ending of existence through art than it is from the reservoir of ideas, preconceptions, memories and assorted ephemera that make us, 'us'. We can switch off, turn away and walk out while still retaining a firm grasp on the self.<br /><br />Within the many paths of Buddhist philosophy, the idea of the death of the self lies at the end of the path of enlightenment. To really understand the nature of the universe, so Buddhist thought goes, you have to allow yourself to be consumed by it without the pretensions of the self. Sounds straightforward enough. Except what we most often imagine as being a relinquishing of the self, is actually a replacing of the self with another identity. It's easier to place another self in the position of our body than it is to imagine there being nothing at all. This attainment of Selflessness, known as Anatman, is the gradually becoming aware that there is no fixed identity and that once we've let go of it, we're free to fully understand the universe or attain Nirvana.<br /><br />Philip K. Dick approaches the idea of the death of the individual in much of his writing, but in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner) he has his anti-heroes exploring what it means to know you are facing the end. What measures would you take and where would you end up? Although different from the novel, the film explores these same themes. The famous showdown at the end between Roy Baty and Deckard, in which the actor Rutger Hauer (as the dying android Baty) improvised the final speech where he recites a litany of the fantastical, life-affirming things he has seen in his life:<br /><br />"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those... moments will be lost in time... like... tears..in rain"<br /><br />A lyrical and positive viewpoint, which is probably at odds with the reality that most of us would experience in the face of imminent death. In train fires in the London underground, passengers scramble and crawl over each other to escape the heat and flames of destruction. Despite the heroic and selflessness in the stories arising from the events of September 11t h 2001, there are bound to be numerous stories of selfish actions and people turned against each other trying to survive the collapse of the towers. But these aren't the stories we want to hear about. We want to know that our ending will be glorious and a positive statement about mankind and more importantly, ourselves.<br /><br />Roy Baty's ending is an ideal one, in which the beauty of existence and the importance of life is revealed to him. Facing death and annihilation of the psyche, he realises that life is an amazing glorious, wonderful thing. Perhaps this is the reason we dwell on the idea of the apocalypse and try to envision it within the arts? We want to hope that life is a reaffirming experience and that the ending will be worth looking forward to, being the one unavoidable experience guaranteed to us. If the attempt is futile and we ultimately just fizzle out without any glory or dignity, washed away by an orange flare of nuclear rage or just petering out in the cold dark night of a solar winter, the one function our imaginations can give back to us is to remind us of how alive we are and how much more we all have to live for.owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-55414972130148789112008-10-06T18:25:00.001-07:002008-10-06T18:25:57.078-07:00Threads<div align="justify">Carl Neville<br /><br />Ostensibly a straight if harrowing made-for-TV docudrama about the run up to and aftermath of a full-scale nuclear strike on England, Threads is also one of the great examples of the dramatic and representative powers of television as a medium. </div><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0fIuWwKBAb3VdeB9GGL0JQM9_Siw9vALCSUmBhMtZHch7uV2WpVlVNNh2nI3GCK3NRBHesHVOta6JClLs_yoFGaBgcXhqLJsQsUfd15uZUZ7Yt-WDAi98BlMNUSYmNo3omk-26jymYw/s1600-h/threads+1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254016444896880994" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0fIuWwKBAb3VdeB9GGL0JQM9_Siw9vALCSUmBhMtZHch7uV2WpVlVNNh2nI3GCK3NRBHesHVOta6JClLs_yoFGaBgcXhqLJsQsUfd15uZUZ7Yt-WDAi98BlMNUSYmNo3omk-26jymYw/s400/threads+1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><br /><strong>Threads as Docudrama.</strong><br /><br />Threads lays claim to the imagination through a number of exegetic and diegetic strategies. Firstly there is the solidly professorial voice-over that ushers in the action and reappears at key points to explain the difficulties of particular situations, considerably more so in the more speculative second than first half. There is also the use of text overlaying images in order to establish location and population levels etc, hammered up onto the screen and accompanied by the whirring of an electric typewriter, as well as a more dramatic series of inter-titles. These provide the outer shell of Thread’s verisimilitude, enclosing the fiction, the main dramatic action of the piece.<br /><br />But there is also a far more subtle intrusion into Thread’s fictional realm; from within. The use of Lesley Judd, a familiar face as a real-world newscaster within the film’s fictional world, allows the outside access. The TV as a portal or a trapdoor through which reality leaks frighteningly into the fiction. There is no safe, hermetically enclosed fictive world in Threads. The use made of television is vital to Threads’ power, without it we would simply be contained within the horizon of the docudrama. Here the fiction is put under pressure from both without and within<br /><br />There is also a slow leakage of footage from the TV into the films real-world frame: all the genuine documentary footage within the film is initially contained within the TV screen, but slowly as the panic spreads and the television news becomes a more central focus the film begins to inter-cut stock footage with the filmed drama, until during scenes of protest and the blast itself the two schemes of representation have collapsed into each other. The stock footage is also complemented by what might be termed “realia”, the use of government emergency broadcasts and films to pressure the fictional realm further.<br /><br />In Threads the creation of a world is more important than the creation of characters. This does not mean that the identification with the characters is weaker, quite the reverse. We identify more deeply with them, despite the lack of time the film can spend on them, precisely because the factors considered extraneous to most drama, the setting of the protagonists within a richly realized world, a world we recognize absolutely as our own and which is partially composed from the fabric of our daily lives forces a deep and immediate identification. The terrible poignancy in Threads is not what happens to its central characters, Ruth’s eventual death is dealt with perfunctorily, but in watching a world fall apart. It’s neither plot nor character driven, it is instead an act of assembly and disassembly on a cosmic scale. The making and unmaking of a world.<br /><br /></div><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3l3xrhzXvSl2FjYrKjYE8hW1f2ZsInEjeb4yeiTCm2xKKXxxDxVySoh1rzMeisQBNQTy7IU33ycgNe4pLBK_bRgtIRiDsqikIGdpSm5zxzG0bRm44sGY0P2N3xafchCY5aBCjTohfRA/s1600-h/ruth_jimmy_470x352.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254016447210409090" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3l3xrhzXvSl2FjYrKjYE8hW1f2ZsInEjeb4yeiTCm2xKKXxxDxVySoh1rzMeisQBNQTy7IU33ycgNe4pLBK_bRgtIRiDsqikIGdpSm5zxzG0bRm44sGY0P2N3xafchCY5aBCjTohfRA/s400/ruth_jimmy_470x352.jpg" border="0" /></a> </p><p align="justify"><strong>Threads as cold medium.<br /></strong><br />Threads power is dependent on its status as that most reviled of cultural artefacts, the Made-for-TV movie. Here, rather than simply producing neutered Cinema Threads exploits its own inherent and richly persuasive set of dramatic and diegetic possibilities to the maxim. Threads is to TV what “Man with a movie camera” is to cinema.<br /><br />The cold medium forces a greater attention on the part of the observer, a deeper engagement of his interpretive abilities. This is why Thread’s seemingly underfunded apocalypse is so powerfully felt compared to the spectacle of New York being overwhelmed in, say, “The Day After Tomorrow.” The cold medium demands a suspension of disbelief that spectacular cinema can never enlist. This is why science fiction has been so much more effective on television, not despite but because of all the budgetary constraints. The symbiotic relationship between the viewer and the televisual world is the true and vital interactivity in the TV form, and it’s in it from the start. </p><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"><strong>Before and after the blast </strong><br /><br />With the blast itself comes a moment of total erasure, an unrepresentizable access to the real of the nuclear strike. Whiteout. Soundless, imageless, an overwhelming surplus of reality. The film itself winks out of existence for a moment and when it returns nothing is the same.<br /><br />The blast divides the film technically into a before and after. The first half is filled with matching shots, beginning with the spider’s web and the shots of power lines and phone cables hanging over Sheffield, reaching a brilliant apex with the shot of Ruth opening a tin of cat food cutting into a letter from the ministry of defence being typed up. The shots are used as a way of reinforcing the interconnectedness of all lives and social spheres in the pre-apocalypse. In the second half of the film, with humanity scattered and divided, there are none.<br /><br />The second half of the film also reverses the stealthy assimilation of found footage into the drama. Exploiting still, black and white images of ruined cities and civilian casualties the filmmakers slowly begin to use black and white freeze frames from the film itself, which then spill forward into movement and colour. Here, rather than reality invading the fictional frame in the speculative second half the fiction begins to take on the character of stock footage.<br /><br />The first half of the film repeatedly focuses on hands, the hands that have been instrumental in building the world that is about to be laid low, knitting, keeping birds, playing games, the second is a portrait gallery of ravaged faces straight from Bosch or Brueghel.<br /><br />In one of the few moments of hope in the film the hands reappear, sewing together the purple threads that have been salvaged from the ruins. Another world may be coming into being, but if so it will carry traces of the first. There is a deeply ambiguous snatch of Chuck Berry as Ruth’s daughter flees through the city, echoing the opening shot of her mother and father in the car the day she was conceived and the bad news from Iran was still just something to spin past as you hunted down the football scores.<br /><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDYy87BWYSJvacP7Bhie4gh1TllW3Mg62LuorPy_TjXUAJBofIgigH3GKEWBsT1QG7f2W4TVc4lPgrrmlPMLrTpsFsgah2el2GPCM-ZmpJYnNeiACRtaYCpfea3ii0rq4Sfv8Ulqc9Zw/s1600-h/threads3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254016459064076962" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDYy87BWYSJvacP7Bhie4gh1TllW3Mg62LuorPy_TjXUAJBofIgigH3GKEWBsT1QG7f2W4TVc4lPgrrmlPMLrTpsFsgah2el2GPCM-ZmpJYnNeiACRtaYCpfea3ii0rq4Sfv8Ulqc9Zw/s400/threads3.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><strong>Threads as horror<br /></strong><br />Threads begins with an image of a spider. Hung in a void and spinning out its web, the sounds of an unseen nature chattering around it, the spider is gradually inter-cut with establishing shots of Sheffield. It is this first shot that suggest a more radical reading of Threads. Throughout the piece there is little suggestion that the events can be overturned or intervened in and this first shot is the only overtly symbolic moment in the piece, the only moment that stands outside Threads’ remorseless real world and seems to ground it. Some extra-human agency spins the world into being, crouched in the void at the centre of all things. The spider is there, endlessly spinning, throughout every sequence in Threads, the dark, alien engine of history itself. Even up to the final sequences of Ruth’s daughter giving birth in the semi-abandoned hospital the spider is invisibly present.<br /><br />And that last scene is Threads' coup de grace, its masterstroke. After the excess of horror that has preceded it we are cruelly denied the catharsis of the girl’s final scream as her stillborn baby is delivered into her arms. The image freezes, there is no escape or release. Instead, we scream for her.</div><div align="justify"> </div>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-46115982421976758022008-10-06T18:19:00.000-07:002008-10-07T23:23:56.362-07:00After the Earthquake But Before the WarBy Feathers Knox<br /><br />It was the anniversary.<br /><br />Motma was lying in a plastic tent in an open field, where he had been tugging at himself all day beneath his thin cotton bedclothes. His PDA lay on a pillow of wadded rags. He had been watching his newest downloads, and now bathed in a post-coital glow. <br /><br />A client came online.<br /><br />“Hi, I’d like a tour.”<br /><br />Motma climbed to his feet and strapped on the camera.<br /><br />“Prefs?”<br /><br />“Crushed bodies, poisoned aquifers, that sort of thing.”<br /><br />Motma secured the tent and set off across the lot, sweeping his head from side to side. He was careful to keep his head and neck panning in a smooth, jitter-free arc.<br /><br />“Slower, please.”<br /><br />Last year’s earthquake had never been cleaned up. <br /><br />Collapsed parking garages, office buildings, shopping malls and apartment complexes stretched out in every direction. Cement and rebar, bricks and shattered windows: it was all covered under a film of beige dust. The sky was a brilliant blue.<br /><br />“Wow,” said the client.<br /><br />“So this was Denver,” said Motma. He was walking downhill now, towards the old downtown. It looked like piles of chunky snow.<br /><br />“Are we going to a grave site?”<br /><br />“Yes.”<br /><br />Motma turned left at what he guessed had been Broadway.<br /><br />A pit had been dug in the middle of Congress Park, in front of the Capitol. Bodies had been thrown in and burned. When the workers ran out of fuel, the bodies were just tossed in and covered with rubble. One could still see arm bones.<br /><br />Motma could hear the client’s breath become heavier, quicker as he came to the northern edge of the pit.<br /><br />“Shall I walk around it?”<br /><br />“Yes… but slowly!”<br /><br />The average client required about 20 minutes to cum, depending on the extent of the wreckage. Two weeks ago, a man in China had requested to see the Tumor Mill. The government had sealed it up after the ‘quake was triggered, but Motma broke in with a length of pipe and a sharpened rock. Bloated bodies hung from meathooks: Motma was careful to keep the neoplasms in focus as he highlighted them with his flashlight.<br /><br />“Whoah, that is sweet,” said the client.<br /><br />WretchedLives.com paid Motma 3 RU an hour for 60 hours of work a week. It was enough to buy him a few moldy ears of corn at the Work/Aid station. By saving 10% of each payment transfer, he would be able to afford a spot in the cargo hold of the service bus when it made its trip through the Midwest next winter.<br /><br />Motma climbed down into the pit for a better view. There was a skull lying out in the open, a small woman’s skull with a dent in the left temple and a large, spidery crack on the forehead. The client moaned in delight. The skull still had red hair.<br /><br /><br /><br /> * * * <br /><br /><br />“You left more porn on the desktop.”<br /><br />Motma was silent. It was hard to remember she used his computer.<br /><br />“Did you hear me?”<br /><br />He heard her. He always heard her. He just never did anything about it.<br /><br />"Motma, you know I care for you…"<br /><br />The conversations always began like this. She even sat across from him at the table, like last time.<br /><br />“…but this isn’t fair! I worked at the office all day long, I went to the gym to work out, I went shopping, and I just cleaned the bathroom. What did you do today?”<br /><br />“I looked for a job on Craigslist and did some videos.”<br /><br />“And you watched porn!”<br /><br />“Maybe one or two clips.”<br /><br />She stormed out of the kitchen. He followed her with his eyes, then saw the figure she’d scrawled on the dry erase board by the front door a few weeks ago.<br /><br />“Motma owes: $72,000.”<br /><br />He thought about his videos. They had not been shot yet: they were in script form. The script lay in a notebook on the coffee table. A bag of weed and a pipe rested on a page opened to a description for the opening scene for the second video.<br /><br />“Hero is standing on a platform. Music starts. Hero walks from left to right. A first level Death Drone comes in from the right and walks towards him. Hero raises his Spree Shooter and pulls the trigger. The Death Drone is dissolved in a spray of blood.”<br /><br />She came back in the room.<br /><br />“You’re 27. Do something with your life or I am leaving you.”<br /><br />The earthquake hit a day later.<br /><br /><br /><br /> * * * <br /><br /><br />The client had asked for a second tour after getting a glass of water.<br /><br />“More skulls?” asked Motma.<br /><br />“No. I’d rather see one of the office buildings up close. Can you show me the Wells Fargo Building?”<br /><br />“Sure.”<br /><br />Motma’s neck was cramped. The soles of his Sauconys were getting thin: every pebble he stepped on sent a flicker of pain shooting up leg.<br /><br />The Wells Fargo once stood halfway up the hill to Five Points. When the quake hit it had shifted to the right, and then to the left, and then toppled down the hill as a single, salmon-colored unit, like a tree falling with thousands of screaming secretaries inside. It was the one video that made it out of Colorado that day.<br /><br />The client was already panting as the Fargo’s pink stones came into view.<br /><br />“Oh wow!”<br /><br />Motma was careful to scan the entire corpse of the tower as he approached.<br /><br />“Can I see into the windows? Are any of the offices intact?”<br /><br />Somehow, there were. Motma shuffled up the cragged surface of the dead building, and paused to peer over the edge into a ravine that had formed where a storm sewer was uprooted. Two rats were licking the bones of a dog that died months before.<br /><br />“Cool!”<br /><br />The client was panting harder. The lube made a soft sucking sound in the background.<br /><br />Motma continued up the building. A hallowed-out cave of broken glass and cement sat towards the top of one of the piles, at what would have been the 6th or 7th floor. Inside there was a desk, and a woman was pinned between it and the wall. She was clutching a Post-It note. It was a list:<br /><br />• buy bread<br />• call mom<br />• fire brad<br /><br />Motma remembered when they found Wenda, his girlfriend. She was working overtime that night, hoping to earn him a lien on his loan before it defaulted. Her cubicle was on the 28th floor of the Qwest building, the one that caught fire. She didn’t look that bad: some burned skin, a gash on her neck, a broken arm bone.<br /><br />“Can you lift the woman’s arm?” asked the client, nearly breathless.<br /><br />WretchedLives.com didn’t like it when Motma touched the corpses – they had another contractor to do that for NecroPussy – but the client had paid for a double, and Motma was feeling generous. He tried to lift the woman’s arm by the wrist but it wouldn’t budge.<br /><br />“Too stiff.”<br /><br />“How about her head?” <br /><br />Things were shifting in the background. The client was close.<br /><br />Motma leaned over, placing both hands on either side of the woman’s head and forcing it into view with a few crunching noises. The left eye was missing; the rest was intact.<br /><br />"Ohhhhhh!" said the client. The sucking sound in the background had increased in pace, and then stopped.<br /><br />Motma thought about his unfinished videos, sitting in a notebook under the 30 feet of rubble that had once been his apartment complex. It would have only taken a few days to hire the actors, shoot the footage, edit it all down or upload it to the Internet. Now it lay in a tomb of pulverized concrete, twisted steel, and decayed human beings.<br /><br />And this was before the war started.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Bio: Feathers Knox works in the service industry in a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana.</span>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-54229822060492476962008-10-06T18:12:00.000-07:002008-10-07T12:30:26.992-07:00Anticipatory, Ordinary Apocalypse<span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">Michael Sayeau</span><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span></div><div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpWUQpYE4sSeKNTykTSpr42qAhRgaZjkSNFyDk_hvX1RZinLI5YBkUzd7q8rYkZFnftZa_Z4sboVMY7_aEa0ulf4qSoiTUZxYhTgUFcghEG1RNiM0rH05gAt6dclCYo2qViMnRNUDLTc/s1600-h/sayeau+1.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254451361016359762" style="" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnpWUQpYE4sSeKNTykTSpr42qAhRgaZjkSNFyDk_hvX1RZinLI5YBkUzd7q8rYkZFnftZa_Z4sboVMY7_aEa0ulf4qSoiTUZxYhTgUFcghEG1RNiM0rH05gAt6dclCYo2qViMnRNUDLTc/s320/sayeau+1.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">In an age of deadened aesthetics, there is at least one narrative trope that has come to life during the past seven years as a site of political negotiation. The seemingly simple matter of the representation of passing time - the ticking of the clock while something </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>doesn't </i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">happen - has proven itself both to possess propaganda value and potential as a tool of critique. Above all else, it is in the way that the passage of ordinary time has been deployed in the apocalyptic visions presented in films and television programmes (both fictional and factual) that we can best see the way that it materializes some of more important and complexly ambiguous ideological developments of our period. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">The most obvious manifestation of this trope is by far the most sinister - and, disastrously, perhaps the most politically effective. In the months and years after the attacks of 2001, a pseudo-philosophical meme began to circulate around the American media and punditocracy that is usually referred to as the "ticking time bomb scenario." The most famous enunciation of this scenario came in a column that the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote for the </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>San Francisco Chronicle </i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">in January 2002, but the idea soon after spread rapidly out to blanket the cultural and media spheres.</span></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">The scenario goes like this. Somehow, the authorities have learned that there is a Weapon of Mass Destruction hidden somewhere in or on its way to a Major American City. Fortunately, these authorities have captured a terrorist who happens to know the secret location of this weapon, but of course said terrorist won't talk. Tick, tock, tick, tock. It's not even a true bind; there's only one answer. The authorities are forced by the situation to abandon their better principles and torture the information out of their captive. It is a modest but bloodthirstily utilitarian logic, and one that perfectly combines the adaptability of loose metaphorics (for "ticking time bomb" one can substitute... just about anything) and the audience-capturing grip of a stirringly noir-ish fictional situation. </span></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">You are probably most familiar with the trope from its appearance on the show </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>24</i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">, where it was not only the guiding conceit of the programme (literalized in the ticking clock pictured above which appeared before and after each commercial break), but also an incessantly deployed plot device. In the course of almost every episode, the troubled hero Jack Bauer, against his principles but for the benefit of the many, would torture the bad guys in order to obtain the just-in-time information needed to save the president's life / the city of Los Angeles / America itself. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHNhHL9oR4HkaBGnUfy1fky14k7OPIxSdyw1d3gCAKBOKhcJdqSrIKmPOpupI0txAo9u8ixkDW2jme7RXpjGVZRL0870hHlps2BJ9cImg4KtAfekjhopGqFeVZolmhe7ueUu69Dz_KsJ4/s1600-h/sayeau+3.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254451085314427090" style="" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHNhHL9oR4HkaBGnUfy1fky14k7OPIxSdyw1d3gCAKBOKhcJdqSrIKmPOpupI0txAo9u8ixkDW2jme7RXpjGVZRL0870hHlps2BJ9cImg4KtAfekjhopGqFeVZolmhe7ueUu69Dz_KsJ4/s320/sayeau+3.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">In this scenario, the passing seconds are indexed toward an imminent event, but they are only eventful in and of themselves in that they are filled with an extreme form of police violence that is summoned by the ticking of the clock itself. A secondary apocalypse - a soft catastrophe of illegality, ethical compromise, and human bruise and blood - is required to keep time ordinary, to keep the clock ticking. And, as we have seen time and again in the real world, the anticipated event that throws the whole process into motion is able to recede, indefinitely draw back, or even disappear altogether without disturbing the ticking of the clock and the brutality that it enables.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><br /></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIEW41eNmAGrvZVL4azaPhzfy7MaAkeziK2UkaZkqGSQ0Z4XQVrfenzpYtbyigjOIWuvpKRbz0HCpQKmZU0_Nn1tQQXE_pKWjm2SSE9Q0FbB1ksnzpHbwhrQy4lLfv_O3TYnJhcSqPtco/s1600-h/children+of+men.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIEW41eNmAGrvZVL4azaPhzfy7MaAkeziK2UkaZkqGSQ0Z4XQVrfenzpYtbyigjOIWuvpKRbz0HCpQKmZU0_Nn1tQQXE_pKWjm2SSE9Q0FbB1ksnzpHbwhrQy4lLfv_O3TYnJhcSqPtco/s320/children+of+men.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254496264645716802" border="0" /></a><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><br /><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">The second form - less pervasive but much more interesting - is a bit harder to spot. It can be found in almost any representation - fictional or otherwise - of catastrophic events from the past seven years. It can be found in the opening scene of </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Children of Men </i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">(http://tinyurl.com/4lh3yr) or the footage that you can find on YouTube of the first minutes of CNN's coverage of the 2001 attacks (http://tinyurl.com/4tkmm3). But I don't even need to refer to a specific film or television show for you to see it. The family, at home, is settled into their quotidian affairs. They are eating or readying a meal to eat. The children are playing, or everyone's settled into the living room to watch tv. The scene is actionless, nothing is happening but the ordinary things that happen everyday. Everything is OK, OK, OK. But the longer we stay with the scene, the more unsettling it becomes. When we spend more than a certain amount of time with this family, when it starts to become clear that we've exceeded the customary time that it takes to deliver a telegraphic visual rendering of normality, everything tilts on axis, and suddenly we know that we aren't watching so much as waiting. We are waiting for the tv set to go funny, for the breaking news graphics to appear, for the distant rolling thunder that breaks through a cloudless night, for the lights to flicker, for the knock at the door, or for the sudden and irrever</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">sible fade to black. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">We are canny enough, by now, to pick up on this even before we get the punch line.The still shot on the news, the movie's trip into the coffee place, gives us all that we need to know that the explosion is on its way. In fact, one might start to wonder whether the blast, the crash, need arrive at all, so prepped and ready we are to read the ordinary as run-up, to presume that the shock is on its way. The family in front of its television, the tourists gaping at the skyline, the plane bissecting the city's airspace during its final approach, the routine shopping trip, the subway ride into work - when we stay with any of these scenes, in mind or on screen, the anticipatory faculty rustles, the reflex draws us tight and down. Why would these everyday events be happening - why are they showing us these non-eventful happening - if they aren't about to be interrupted, interrupted by their end? </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZDxTQ8VsWcu33Es8cZDvI5owXB8P07LBEiEZgxtB_yymhzjQcPiu9Jb7ZMJG_7k69vh3zcsJYowfV8lj3K4paBmC2GrcwcQ0IqJ1Lfdqckm2bOvXIWr0a7UowygIOsP4zUJw2bvnZSXk/s1600-h/sayeau+2.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254450911792222290" style="" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZDxTQ8VsWcu33Es8cZDvI5owXB8P07LBEiEZgxtB_yymhzjQcPiu9Jb7ZMJG_7k69vh3zcsJYowfV8lj3K4paBmC2GrcwcQ0IqJ1Lfdqckm2bOvXIWr0a7UowygIOsP4zUJw2bvnZSXk/s320/sayeau+2.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">Of course, in one sense, these related forms of rendering the passage of time are simply contemporary versions of the oldest bylaws of narrative construction. It might be a bit reductive to say that this trope used to live in the genre that we call "horror," before horror grew tired of it, drifted into self-referential pastiche, and loaned it to the renewed genres of apocalypse and catastrope. (The blonde combing her hair in front of her mirror, at night, in a big house, alone. We wait too long, we have seen this film before - we know what is about to appear in the window behind her...) Narrative, at its essence, relies upon a rhythmic relationship between ordinariness and eventfulness. A novel that is all climax isn't a novel at all. The crisis and the material in which it swims (all that local color, all that slow development of character and scenario, all stuttering elaborations of the realistic "reality" of the thing that we're consuming) are dialectically related, can't be broken off from one another. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">But sometimes - and this may be one of those times - the rhythm becomes confused, the dialectical dance turns in on itself, the ordinary can't quite find it's way to the event that makes it what it is, that makes it ordinary. As Walter Benjamin noted in his essay on Baudelaire, the most interesting thing about shock isn't what happens when it arrives, but what the anticipation of it does the the anticipator. "The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the most efficiently it does so, the less these impressions enter long experience [</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Erfahrung</i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Erlebnis</i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">]." We slip swiftly from the baffled pain of the unexpected shock to the probing anticipation of it - our consciousness itself is transformed by the process into an index of traumas past and future, Similarly, as a culture, we are perhaps in the process of sliding from the anticipation of the imminent apocalypse to the immanent registration of the apocalypse that is already here, the apocalypse right now. </span></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCY8Yhxt-99iTzE7jzTbEcmCX6DEmkJ5zrRF-vCaPA7j4cP29jo_YHAHRzOO-vzItMWD-d9SN3hI5t3RjP4yXe7yJaQ0HeM79eNhgctel7NXMD-pPw9PGwzZOvxBUKUUiPShnrwd3zG0/s1600-h/sayeau+5.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254450657943231090" style="" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCY8Yhxt-99iTzE7jzTbEcmCX6DEmkJ5zrRF-vCaPA7j4cP29jo_YHAHRzOO-vzItMWD-d9SN3hI5t3RjP4yXe7yJaQ0HeM79eNhgctel7NXMD-pPw9PGwzZOvxBUKUUiPShnrwd3zG0/s320/sayeau+5.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Children of Men </i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">enacts this shift in the relationship between its first scene (the coffee shop, the television news, the protagonist steps outside, and the shop he was just in explodes) and the rest of the film, which stages the end of the human world not by terrorist bomb blast or heavy weather, but rather by the simple cessation of life, the animal reproduction of the species. Despite the fact that human life itself is dwindling out, that these people are living in either the aftermath or the final stages of what looks to be the ultimate catastrophe, one which will surely culminate, within a few years, in the end of the human race, they go about their business - commuting to work, stopping for coffee, watching tv, etc. The film pounds us with the savage uncanniness of the thought of rejiggering our retirement accounts, redoing the kitchen, and, of course, seeing movies as the world quietly ends around us…</span><br /><br /></p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Sq7P3pkkCycsVbevicl4EtNoccxjcrAIKikGm5Lj5AzLSwUL4r2CjDwg3XU92mmaM3dcI3cAFkXn8G1woj8jh43mJVMfHRjTJXfnUHk8Op4KkJKD-kC_b7YeWGOGRcDxB0x5mp1hu1Y/s1600-h/sayeau+4.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254450136370381042" style="" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Sq7P3pkkCycsVbevicl4EtNoccxjcrAIKikGm5Lj5AzLSwUL4r2CjDwg3XU92mmaM3dcI3cAFkXn8G1woj8jh43mJVMfHRjTJXfnUHk8Op4KkJKD-kC_b7YeWGOGRcDxB0x5mp1hu1Y/s320/sayeau+4.bmp" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">This temporality has spread out beyond the borders of movies and television to the point that it's hard to see whether the representation is driving the reality or vice versa. The current financial crisis, to pick just one example, is quickly revealing itself to be another film in the same genre. Collapse is promised daily by pundits and analysts. Collapse has been promised for a decade now. But the collapse never comes, the fissuring event never quite happens. Perhaps it will - perhaps it has happened by the time you are reading this - but every indicator points to the fact that the charts will hold their lines, sink and then rally. And they will do this because, just beyond the edge of the chart, something else is afoot. They will not let it fall; they will not let the crisis come. The remnants of the state, the remaining strength of the currency, the jobs and spending power of the citizen - all will come to their own apocalyptic end, out of view, in service of maintaining the forward progress of that thin, vibrating line. As all else fails, the numbers will still tick up and tick down on the screen of the world, perhaps even if there weren't a soul left in the world to see them. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"></span> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; widows: 0; orphans: 0;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">We are shattered, our perceptual apparatus is on the blink. We look around us, at any thing at all, and find reflected all these premonitions of disaster. It is not, I think, a good thing to be this way - it is not a happy thing for the world to take on the dark red tone of apocalypse. It is the mark of an unhealthy time, and a signal that the hope of change is so buried that perhaps we can't even anticipate change for the worse, let alone for the better. On the other hand, the lingering theology of consequence, of telos, may well be losing its hold, giving way to a sliver of perspective on a secularly "Messianic cessation of happening." As Walter Benjamin writes in </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>The Arcades Project</i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">, “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>is </i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” That may be what we are starting to learn, and learn the hard way, from the films that run outside us and the films that run within. </span></p></div>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-12435797657581724732008-10-06T18:08:00.000-07:002008-10-07T09:58:25.129-07:00Living Vicariously in Uncanny Valley.Colin Ledwith<br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><b><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5huA7dMkcCcPwe4FREQlTz_iYfev4ygv5_x2RsVKaIrBlANN0vsJl1KpFbpY5CaMNdZQB1VjdnV4uKBPjDgFnQQIex31PVUP8ZIfnFQax7_jDBsgDpHrvp-ouU0AUi4W-EnPpJWpK1oE/s1600-h/brandt+blitz.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254213015532914338" style="CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5huA7dMkcCcPwe4FREQlTz_iYfev4ygv5_x2RsVKaIrBlANN0vsJl1KpFbpY5CaMNdZQB1VjdnV4uKBPjDgFnQQIex31PVUP8ZIfnFQax7_jDBsgDpHrvp-ouU0AUi4W-EnPpJWpK1oE/s320/brandt+blitz.jpg" border="0" /></a></b></span><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm">‘<span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.’ (1)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">The ‘uncanny’, which is the English approximation of the German word </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>unheimlich</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, was described by Sigmund Freud as an especial form of fear. Difficult to define, the term provokes philosophical debate, reaching far beyond everyday shorthand for the ‘eerie’ or ‘strange’</span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">to re-examine central ideas concerning perception, identity, narrative and language. ‘Freud writes that the uncanny is associated with the bringing to light what was hidden and secret, distinguishing the uncanny from the simply fearful by defining it as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar.’ (2)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">In his seminal essay on the subject of the uncanny, Freud uses Ernst Hoffmann’s short story </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Der Sandmann</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> (1816) to illustrate the central, yet subliminal phenomenon associated with the uncanny; the unsettling sensation of the familiar discovered at the heart of the unfamiliar, or vice versa. Nathanial, the protagonist of </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Der Sandmann</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> is troubled to the point of hysteria by fears developed in childhood, which he embodies in the nursery tale figure of the sandman. Nathanial’s arrested child-like terror is further augmented by his inability to separate the imagined figure from actual occurrences in his own house, thus elaborate constructed fiction and reality converge and blur as the story proceeds. (3)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">In Freud’s recounting of Hoffmann’s work, other important factors in defining the uncanny are revealed. There is the sense of the bizarre, foreign and ungraspable. It is present when involuntary patterns repeat. It can arise from a sense of déjà vu, when inanimate objects appear to be conscious. It is felt in the presence of doubt, in the company of ghosts, and in the dark, alone. In contemporary life, it is perhaps present in the glitch and hum of modern technology; disembodied voices on the phone, computer generated imagery and virtual realities. The uncanny can be ugly and horrific. But it can also be disturbingly beautiful and verge on the ecstatic in complexities; the shifting and unstable gap between narrated past and narrating present, the fallible, selective and manipulative nature of memory, the subjective and relative status of the ‘reality’ of past experience in constant temporal and narrative slippage.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Film theory historically stresses temporality at the expense of spatiality, promoting complex narrative rather than compelling visual environments. Contemporary digital filmmaking overrides these conventional frameworks and assimilates the uncanny through the manipulations of environment, form and narrative. These creative possibilities have been unleashed relatively recently and reflect a shift from the computer as a tool, primarily understood in terms of information storage and numerical calculation, to the computer as one-stop medium for creative production, communication and global distribution.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">The effect of computers in the motion picture industry has been profound. Until recently, external image montage, in which shots are inter-cut for emotional and associative impact (think of an impressionistic series of rapid edit shots in a movie, often used to convey a dreamlike, drunk, or drugged sensation to the viewer), were the only visual tool available to subvert narrative in film.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Now, through the work of computer generated imagery companies such as ILM and Digital Domain, we can experience the unsettling disquiet of the uncanny as montage within a single film frame. The traditional warning signals we are subconsciously trained to look for to alert us to the artificiality and construct of the manufactured image we see on the screen are now often absent; no matte lines, differences in film stock grain, or inaccurate image-scaling. Images within images are a visual language we recognise. Images seamlessly bonded to images within the same frame are not. We are no longer aware of any manipulation of the filmic image precisely because of the perfection of CGI manipulation; film becomes ‘unreal’, ‘unnatural’ or uncanny.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">This paradoxical effect has a name: the ‘uncanny valley.’ A concept coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the uncanny valley argues that computer created simulacra of reality seem alive and convincing as long as they’re relatively low-resolution. Think of a comic strip for instance; with only a few lines on a page Charles Schulz created a vivid world and convincing emotions for his characters in </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Peanuts.</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> When simulacra are low-res, the human brain fills in associative detail to help the image seem real. But when the CGI image approaches photo-reality, a reversal occurs. In Ryan Gander’s </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Is This Guilt In You Too (the study of a car in a field)</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, we subconsciously scan the image in much greater depth and begin to focus on missed detail. The image realism suddenly plunges into a valley and becomes uncanny: unnervingly real, yet flawed and alien in an indefinable sense.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Freedom of image manipulation with film footage shot in the ‘real world’ and ‘cut and paste’ appropriation of archival footage through sophisticated computer editing is also freely accessible to anyone with time and a little money to spare. The rapid advancement of technology and recent availability of affordable-yet-powerful digital cameras, image capture equipment and editing software create complex narrative possibilities in the box-bedroom. As little as a decade ago similar possibilities would have been near impossible to achieve in a high-end post-production studio. The same technology further provides an instantaneous global distribution point for grassroots cultural production and self-publishing, as web outlets such as YouTube and flash file sharing sites proliferate. </span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">The divide between documentary and artistry is blurred by technology, yet the credibility of a lens-based image still often relies upon the concept of ‘truth’ or reliable reportage. If a scene is constructed to appear real or spontaneous, or to provoke a specific reaction from the viewer, truth and honesty will be disputed. At the same instant, capturing a scene ‘as it is’ is impossible, as the photographer ultimately determines the look of the image, as in the Phil Collins film </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>How to make a Refugee</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">. When it comes to photography, agency, truth and representation are often discussed in moralistic terms, as dilemmas, and artistic freedom is not readily granted. In his last significant work </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Camera Lucida</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, Roland Barthes reflected on this symbolic meaning of the documentary photographic image, and its subjective quality, ‘that which pierces the viewer.’ Barthes explained that a photographic image is not a solid representation of ‘what is’ as ‘what was’ and therefore ‘what has ceased to be’. The photographic image does not make reality solid but serves as a reminder of the world’s inconsistent and ever-changing state. (4)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Today, this process of theoretical deconstruction has become cultural lyricism. In </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Subculture: The Meaning of Style</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, Dick Hebdidge defined punk’s ordered anarchy: ‘The punk subculture… signified chaos at every level, but this was only possible because the style itself was so thoroughly ordered.’ (5) Recently we witnessed a global saturation of the personal camera through the convergence of technology in the cell phone. Nowadays, nearly every citizen in the developing world is armed with a powerful recording device, and with the addition of a laptop, a powerful editing studio. It is this ordering or administration of newly deployed reality, signified by raw camera work and imperfect images (imperfections which confirm their status as ‘real’ images), that we witness the final codification of destruction.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Ironically, the radically deconstructive narrative and aesthetic possibilities of our digital age are currently almost entirely absent from mainstream cinema. The more experimental, raw aesthetics of filmmaking emerge in some strange quarters, the most startling cinema of recent times perhaps coming from the Iraq conflict: the 2003 United Sates military film of a dishevelled, recently captured Saddam Hussein in what looked like the prologue to a snuff movie, or indeed, the grainy colour saturated footage of Hussein’s undignified execution in late 2006 recorded on a cell phone camera. </span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Sergeant Wesley Wooden, a combat cameraman has said that ‘Basically, what we’re trained for is that the camera is our first weapon… We’re lucky enough to carry pistols. It gives you some more protection. You can shoot and shoot at the same time.’ (6) In a surreal culture clash, the joint Combat Camera Program, part of U.S. Military Visual Information Directorate, adopts the tactics of guerrilla filmmaking, the New Wave and the shoot-and-go immediacy of post-punk film in it’s ‘Video Flyaway Kit’, described thus: ‘All items are fitted into one case which can easily be handled by one person. It provides a single videographer with the capability to acquire video imagery, edit and compress the imagery using the laptop, and transmit the video clip via INMARSAT. This is an ideal system for use by a two man documentation team.’ (7)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">The military producing some of the most arresting cinema verite of our age is something Paul Virilio predicted, writing that the gestures of surveillance, speed and vision have for a long time linked cinema and the military: ‘one could go on forever listing the technological weapons, the panoply of war, the aesthetic of the electronic battlefield.’ (8) The pre-eminence of the military as a movie production company using guerrilla film-making tactics is understandable given the collision of theory and irony jamming the channels of cultural distribution during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. The self-aware, ironic statement by Sgt. Wooden, who recognises that the languages of warfare and perception are bound together, is made possible because cultural theory has been extensively mainstreamed into popular culture over the past twenty years. Post-modern theory, which essentially worked to make visible the codes that underpin cultural production, has been replaced by a context that has assimilated and ingrained theory into cultural production. Thus divisions such as avant-garde and mainstream, theoretical and naïve, are rendered practically meaningless as filmmaking in the digital present struggles to define its fluid, hybrid multiplicities. </span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">The assimilation of cultural theory into the material of popular culture is evident not only in production and content, but also the permanently archived format of the consumer DVD, easily available and garnering publicity in multiple virtual cultural arenas, ranging from Amazon.com to personal blogs. Films are permanently demystified, stripped of their aura with the addition of a wealth of extra material: out-takes (often produced specifically for the DVD), production notes, secondary narration, cast and crew interviews, in ways described by Walter Benjamin in his prescient 1935 essay </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">. In 2006 a short CGI movie entitled</span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i> Elephants Dream</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> was released for mainstream theatrical distribution. Made entirely with ‘open source’ (copyright free) software, it was also released on DVD under creative commons licensing. The film was groundbreaking in that all 3D models, animatics and software are included on the DVD free for any use. In a further model of cultural assimilation, the Warp record label recently released advertising promos and short experimental films in the ‘Director’s Label’ DVD series by Spike Jonze, Michael Gondry, and Chris Cunningham, illustrating the extent to which film culture has changed: both media and content melding into a powerful new cultural form that exists at the far edges of what used to be called film or video.</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">This assimilation of theory not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of self-deconstructing format such as the DVD, suggests that digital video has the potential to archive the breakdown of the real, in real time. A feature film such as </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>28 Days Later</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, is significant because the attempt to capture realistically a hypothetical future only highlights the artifice of the medium. Ironically, the realism of films like </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>The Blair Witch Project</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, the output of the experimental Dogme ‘95 group, and even to an extent the Saddam Hussein footage, rests precisely on their uncanny momentary anti-realism. </span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Contemporary films deploy shaky, hand-held cameras and self consciously hard lighting as shorthand for realism, but this only serves to reinforce the sense of bizarre ‘otherness’, and of the camera behind the image. Keith Griffiths has said that what ‘gave cinema part of its value, a confident, assured and unchallenged recording of reality, and one that was extremely difficult to modify or manipulate; has now been changed by the new digital technology.’(9)</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">It would appear then, as with the human replicant in the film </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Bladerunner</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">, the closer digital technology takes us to the ‘real’, the closer we must re-examine that ‘reality’ and the more seamless and uncanny constructs will become. Image and narrative can no longer be trusted. </span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Colin Ledwith</span></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Sigmund Freud, </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>The Uncanny</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> (1919), ‘Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, Vol. 4’, trans. and ed. Joan Riviere, Basic Books, 1959.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="2"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Mike Kelley, </span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"><i>Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny</i></span><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;"> (1993), ‘Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism’, ed. John C. Welchman, MIT press, 2003.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="3"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Ernst Theodore Hoffmann, ‘Tales of Hoffmann’, trans. and ed. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 2001.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="4"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography’, trans. Richard Howard, Flamingo, 1984.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="5"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, Verso, 1979.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="6"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Virginia Heffeman, ‘Camera Down a Hole, and the World Follows It’, New York Times, Dec.16, 2003.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="7"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">As above.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="8"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Paul Virilio, ‘War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception’, trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 1989.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><br /></p><ol start="9"><li><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Keith Griffiths, ‘The Manipulated Image’, animateonline.org.</span></p></li></ol><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.64cm"></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0cm"></p>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-15281779112056580312008-10-06T18:05:00.000-07:002008-10-06T18:08:00.227-07:00NucularMatthew Munday<br /><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoysS02Jer7C6gZYo3pjYmvWIs0JeLPmUJdXTXSu1hU5bcUwS2W6FapnVAIBCX4iRhZjEVlil_Vk2va0aiuoHs8Yf5qYvNxD3O3cvNuMpPsr6f0XFUDidBntTHEZWdM2xmFu80CbFOQCk/s1600-h/constancy.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoysS02Jer7C6gZYo3pjYmvWIs0JeLPmUJdXTXSu1hU5bcUwS2W6FapnVAIBCX4iRhZjEVlil_Vk2va0aiuoHs8Yf5qYvNxD3O3cvNuMpPsr6f0XFUDidBntTHEZWdM2xmFu80CbFOQCk/s320/constancy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254212342944670434" border="0" /></a></p><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">As he walked along, the carrier bag hung heavy on his fingers. He had tried resting his hand inside his pocket with the handle twined around his wrist, but the bottom of the bag only clunked rhythmically against his knee as he moved. There seemed to be no other way but to endure one cold hand. He stopped. At the end of the road, in the distance, where the cracked tarmac dipped away, he saw a greygreen band of light on the horizon. The sun was coming up. The light which melted upwards showed a bare morning sky: no milky wisps of cloud, no winking Cinderella stars. Just an upturned bowl.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">He shifted the bag from his right hand to his left, looking at the stripes of bloodless skin it had left across his fingers. As he blew into his fist, the tins he’d bought clinked against his thigh. A car sped past. Treating his right hand to a spell inside its pocket, he wiped his wet nose on his other sleeve and carried on, hunching his shoulders against the cold, and whistling vapour into the freezing air.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">As he strode along, he looked down at his feet, picking his way through the oily puddles in his path. Presently he looked up and, with something of the squint, peered forward to see where, far up ahead, a figure moved jerkily towards him. No harm in being careful, he thought, and crossed the road. A streetlamp, bent at the base by some collision, arched awkwardly over the road and flickered silently to itself. He stopped again to change hands.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">He could now see the figure was pushing something in front of it – something like a pram or a small trolley – and that it was the erratic jumping of the wheels on the potholed ground which caused the person to move so strangely. The figure itself looked short and robust, and was zipped up from knees to head in a thick jacket. He stood and watched as it drew closer on the other side of the road. Over its head was a large fur-lined hood, leaving only a small porthole. The figure kept this hole constantly focused on the ground in front, making sure to pre-empt the more violent bumps of the pram with see-sawing arm motions. At the crossroads ahead it stopped and stared fixedly downwards, its hands never leaving the pram’s handle-bars. All lights showed green in all directions. The figure hesitated a moment, listening he supposed, and then abruptly began again, pushing out with confidence into the empty road. As the pram trundled crazily past he saw its contents – a huge plastic bottle of water, the kind which he’d once seen bubble and gurgle in the corner of an office. Around twenty litres, he guessed.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">As he approached the crossroads on the other side, with the pram now moving off some way behind him, he glanced both left and right. Nothing coming. He took a light step down the kerb and spun around, letting the bag’s weight and momentum take it in a wide circle around him. With his arm extended fully, the bag swung in a circle wide enough to encompass both lanes of the road, its loose plastic fanning and rippling in the wind. He slowed down, stopped, and then stood for a moment, looking south down the huge hill towards the motionless rubble of the city. A pigeon flapped lazily along. It was getting light. Setting the bag down at his feet, he wrapped one fist over the other and blew warm air into both of them. It made a broken duck-call noise. He did it again. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">He picked up the bag and skipped up the far kerb towards home, staggering happily from one side of the pavement to the other like a drunk. Far behind him the streetlamp stopped flickering.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">At the corner of his road a bus lay on its side. None of its windows had survived, and scattered around were a few remaining cubes of glass. He kicked lazily at one of the wheels, trying to make it spin. It didn’t move - it never did. Clambering onto the side of bus, he sat down and fished about in the bag, eventually pulling out a tin of tuna. This he opened slowly, pulling the ring-pull back, enjoying the feeling and sound of metal scraping on metal. He dug two fingers into the oily contents and brought them quickly up to his mouth. He did it again, licking his lips. After scraping out the remnants and sucking his fingers clean, he threw the tin off to the side and jumped down from the bus, landing with a glassy crunch. Yawning and scraping his boots against the tarmac, he set off towards home. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">In his front garden a path led from the gate to the front door through a large patch of bare earth. The gate had long ago disappeared, as had its hinges, leaving four rusty holes in the stone pillar which had once held it up. He looked up at the first floor windows. They were tinted brown at the edges. Through a small gap in the curtains he could see the piles of newspapers that they kept up there. These were vast, like haystacks – bundle upon bundle of grey paper right up to the ceiling.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-indent: 1.27cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">He made his way along the path, inspecting the contents of the bag as he went. Everything seemed to be there. Tinned this and that, wads of cloth, sterilising powder. When he reached the door he shifted the bag to his left hand and with his right pumped the door handle three times, up and down. After a ten second pause he did it again. Through the frosted glass he saw her moving towards him down the hall, laying her hand on things to steady herself as she went. And after a moment he listened contentedly to the rattle and clicks of their seven locks being carefully undone.</p>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-75829630474395081872008-10-06T18:02:00.000-07:002008-10-07T16:19:57.776-07:00Cries and Whimpers: Hollywood’s Apocalyptic Ending vs Being-towards-Death in Haneke<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Boris Knezevic</span></span> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfoFky4Im4jfAx4dbTEIo36XYAV136sti0Gcb6pY7oBwTaSaD9T53HWZCh8uPQs949qfig8OSWABQVq3TMO6q07IqFrOO-p6Sy6Eeh3uaDRg0PyIFllZFggQmJaC2Dl0sub5-LxAqftgI/s1600-h/seventh+continent.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfoFky4Im4jfAx4dbTEIo36XYAV136sti0Gcb6pY7oBwTaSaD9T53HWZCh8uPQs949qfig8OSWABQVq3TMO6q07IqFrOO-p6Sy6Eeh3uaDRg0PyIFllZFggQmJaC2Dl0sub5-LxAqftgI/s320/seventh+continent.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254211593452638082" border="0" /></a></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">‘<span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.'</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;">-Nietzsche, </span></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>The Gay Science</i></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">‘…<span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;">he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.’</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;">-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, </span></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Love in the Time of Cholera</i></span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><b>Apocalypse as Shock Therapy</b></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">The basic thesis of Naomi Klein’s book on ‘disaster capitalism’, </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>The Shock Doctrine</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, can be paraphrased thus: the real disasters of our age are not the wars, natural disasters and economic crises that occupy the daily news, but the more lasting tectonic shifts that pass unnoticed beneath these phenomena; the surreptitious elimination of the public and the democratic, the brutal remaking of the world in the neoliberal capitalist image. The cataclysmic shock of the surface phenomena functions to distract and pre-emptively extinguish dissent and opposition. Collectively immersed in the act of mere survival, in world events, mesmerized by the forces of nature or of evil and tranquilized by our powerlessness as individuals, by our fear of being taken over by aliens, murdered by nuclear-armed terrorist thugs, swamped by floods, etc – we fail to see the gradual and hostile takeover carried out under our noses by the very people whose job is to protect us.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">It is through this politicised version of Heideggerian Dasein that we may read the proliferation of apocalyptic themes in cinema in the past two decades: contrary to the conventional wisdom that apocalyptic cinema is an expression of ‘millenial fears’ and anxieties about the future, the fear of apocalypse is a psychological tranquilizer that shields us from a revelatory Angst in the present. As the ultimate objectification of biological death in the far-off spectre of some final fantastic showdown between humanity and its other – aliens, nature, God, etc - it blinds us to the true nature of Dasein, our being-towards-Death. By obscuring the way that death intervenes in life at every point, it hides the true cost of our obedience to power, and exaggerates the cost of resistance.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">In the films of Michael Haneke, by contrast, the external spectacle and the subterranean Angst have reversed roles: existential dread derives from the pervasive sensation that the cataclysmic event, which has always-already occurred, intrudes unnoticed into ordinary everyday reality, while the latter takes centre stage. Death is no longer the objectified finality external to life; it is a reality embodied in the present. In </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>Hidden</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, the life of an ordinary French middle class family is disrupted when they receive anonymous tapes and children’s drawings that evoke the personal repercussions of a massacre of Algerian immigrants in Paris 30 years before. We never find out who sent the mysterious tapes and child’s drawings, let alone who made them. The guilt cannot be explicated or objectified; the ethical position is deliberately left ambiguous, and we are permitted no distance.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">Similarly, in </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>The Seventh Continent</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, based on a true story, a family inexplicably destroy all their possessions and commit suicide. One can easily imagine a Hollywood version of this film: some pathological explanation would inevitably be provided – the family were in financial trouble, or the father was an abusive monster, or one of them had a fatal and incurable illness, etc. Yet it would be a mistake to treat Haneke’s subversive gesture as one of mystification. It is precisely the opposite – it is a revelatory step which sweeps away the cultural debris and clutter of cliché, pathology and explication to reveal behind our immersion in the world, our ‘fallenness’, the true state of Dasein. Haneke’s aim is to permit no distance; one cannot leave the cinema comforted by the knowledge that ‘that’ happens to </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>other</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> people, who fit a certain pathological profile. It is pathology and explication that obfuscate the true picture, the slow trickle of Being towards Death.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">It is the latter notion that Haneke conveys even more explicitly in the final scene of </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, as we watch for an entire minute or so the slow oozing of blood from the body of one of the victims in the bank; a body which is not dead, but dying. It is not simply TV that objectifies historical events, we collectively objectify them, and have done so long before TV existed; even the notion of ‘war’, as illustrated in </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>71 Fragments </i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">with the news footage of global conflicts (Bosnia, Somalia) interspersed throughout, is ultimately a quasi-apocalyptic objectification suggesting the simple dichotomy war/peace, which shields us from an acute awareness of the ever-present threat of violence in our midst. As the heroine in Marjane Satrapi’s </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>Persepolis</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> declares, “I had been through a revolution and a war, half my family were either dead or in prison, yet this trivial love affair nearly finished me off…” This is not a simple contrast, and there is no real irony here: it is not that </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>in spite</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> of having experienced the terror of revolutionary Iran she cannot handle a ‘trivial love affair.’; rather, the emotional trauma has deprived her of the ability to cope rationally with a betrayal, leading her to homelessness, starvation, and near-death from bronchitis. The war is not only </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>over there</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> – it extends into the apparent tranquillity of refugee life. </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">Complementary to this insight is the inverse or vice versa operation in </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:Tahoma;" ><i><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"></span></i></span>71 Fragments, where among the footage from wartime Sarajevo we see a boy and girl decorating a Christmas tree at home during a relative ceasefire.</p><div style="text-align: justify; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">It is thus by pervasively undermining all forms of objectification that Haneke provides the most effective critique of ideology. In mainstream cinema, cataclysmic historical events, especially when they involve human guilt, are portrayed from a safe distance. Films such as </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>Schindler’s List</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> and </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>Amistad</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> leave us content in the knowledge that the tragedy at hand – the Holocaust, slavery, etc – has been properly dealt with, safely buried in the past, never to repeat. This is complementary to the apocalyptic film, which objectifies the threat of the future. In Haneke’s work, on the other hand, the past and future are always-already here; the historical burden must be continually reassessed. (A Haneke film dealing with slavery, one suspects, would not take place in 19</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> century New York but in the present-day ghettos of Philadelphia or L.A., for instance.) </span> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">This is the point about what Arendt calls the ‘banality of evil’ - it is neither the blind systemic or objective violence of a bureaucratic machinery nor simply the subjective violence of guilty individuals; any such concretization of evil is ultimately an objectification that safely distances it. It is Eichmann’s “normality” that was “much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together”; this was a “new type of criminal, who is in actual fact </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>hostis generis humani</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">…”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote1anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote1sym"><sup>1</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> </span>There is no clear pathological reason why the student in 71 Fragments decides to go on a killing spree, or why the family in The Seventh Continent decide to commit suicide, or why Georges in Hidden lies about his adopted half-brother.<span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> ‘Evil’ is always partly hidden from view, </span>the key struggle against it is always internal<span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> - the very gesture of totally isolating it in an object is what ensures its re-emergence. When Bill Clinton declared ‘never again’ at the opening of the Holocaust museum in New York in 1992, a genocide was taking place at that very moment in Bosnia – with concentration camps, mass rapes, and the like – and was quietly ignored for several years.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">It is Haneke’s embrace of Heideggerian temporality that is most subversive: what gives his work such terrifying immediacy is the fact that everything takes place in a pure present, the terrifyingly ‘normal’, eternal now. Irredeemably trapped in the moment, his characters are on one side haunted by a tragedy that has always already-occurred, on the other overshadowed by a repressed anxiety about what will happen next. Yet this </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>true </i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">picture is to the characters themselves obscured – for the most part and most of the time - by their ‘fallenness’, their tranquilized immersion in the world mediated by the notion of apocalyptic death. In one scene in </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>71 Fragments</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> the bank security guard secludes himself in the bathroom before bedtime to say a prayer; after asking God for the usual – good health for himself and family, etc – he pleads “please do not let a nuclear catastrophe or a third world war happen….” </span>While praying to avert the apocalypse-to-come, we avoid confronting the actual tragedy, the evil already in our midst.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><b>The Banality of Death: Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears</b></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">This always-already aura of apocalyptic time is tacitly or even unwittingly (subconsciously) deployed in mainstream cinema. As Mike Davis points out, Hollywood’s “pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction” with their carceral inner cities, high-tech police death squads, sentient buildings, urban Bantustans and the like, only “extrapolate from existing trends” in urban development in “post-liberal Los Angeles.”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote2anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote2sym"><sup>2</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> These post-apocalyptic dystopias do not reflect anxieties about the future, but about the present as a future that has already taken place. It is in this sense that we can reformulate (or twist) Primo Levi’s claim that Kafka’s </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>The Trial</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, written in 1925,</span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i> </i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">foreshadows the Holocaust. The Holocaust appears in Kafka in the same way in which apocalyptic death appears in Haneke – not a foreshadowed death-to-come, but Death that is always-already here. The horror of Kafka’s world is not merely the horror of modern totalitarian bureaucracy – it is the horror of a world in which the Holocaust has already taken place. </span> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">The courtroom thus yields the perfect metaphor. </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"></span></span>Even more than Hollywood films, <span style="font-family:Tahoma;">the language of the law is the objectifying mirror that limits any possibility of an authentic ethics: “Despite the necessity of the trials…they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote3anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote3sym"><sup>3</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> This is the gist of Bob Dylan’s ballad ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol’; after repeating “now ain’t the time for your tears” with each verse, it is only when he delivers the court’s decision that Dylan cynically urges, “bury the rag deep in your face, for now’s the time for your tears.” When the crime is objectified in legal judgment (and precedent), the tragedy is no longer only that of ‘Hattie Carroll’; it is the tragedy of a society in which a certain kind of (class) crime is partly pardoned in advance. (always-already) It is only with this collective, unchallenged submission to power that Hattie Carroll truly dies.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha urges his followers to ‘practice charity without abiding in the notion of practising charity.’ By the same token, Slavoj Žižek holds that “the moment democracy is no longer 'to come' but pretends to be actual - fully actualized - we enter totalitarianism.”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote4anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote4sym"><sup>4</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> This is just the kind of insight Haneke is after: by abiding in the notion of apocalyptic death-to-come, or inversely that our being is synonymous with biological existence, we obscure the way in which death conditions our entire being, regardless of external threats. When we avoid death at all costs, we risk a death-in-life, whole or partial; we risk submission to power. To rephrase the standard existentialist wisdom in the Buddha’s terms, in order to be truly alive, one must live without abiding in the notion that one is fully alive; one must take risks when necessary, and live each day as if it were the last. The moment we pretend that life is fully actualized in biological existence, we enter death.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">The </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>muselmann</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, the ‘living dead’ of Auschwitz, is the epitome of a life fully surrendered to death, shocked into submission (‘abiding in the notion’ of living) by the cataclysmic spectacle. In Auschwitz - “the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote5anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote5sym"><sup>5</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> - the </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>Muselmann</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> “makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man.”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote6anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote6sym"><sup>6</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"> It is the point where the division between subject and object (man and non-man/victim and executioner) dissolves in a perverse culmination of the liberal notion of equality before the law - the Hegelian ‘end of history’. The apocalypse has already occurred, is occurring – the ‘end of history’ is always-already here, </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 50%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;"></span></span>not a utopian end-to-come, but a catastrophic failure of humanity that one must struggle against in every moment of the present. <span style="font-family:Tahoma;">The terrifying voice that haunts much of Haneke’s work, that emerges in the background of all those pregnant dinner table silences, passionless routines, and clicking movements of machinery like a slow, bewitching incantation, sounds very much like that final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>The Hollow Men</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">:</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">This is the way the world ends</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">This is the way the world ends</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">This is the way the world ends</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">Not with a bang but a whimper.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">A whimper – a sentence. (“now’s the time for your tears...”) The entire poem, written in the aftermath of WWI, can be read as a tribute to Haneke’s themes…”Paralysed force, gesture without motion…Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone…In this last of meeting places/We grope together/And avoid speech…” We are all post-apocalyptic ‘hollow men’. Our fear – fear of death – is what prevents us from truly living.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">Yet this conclusion is not quite as dismal as may at first appear. For if we accept the possibility of a death-in-life – its most concrete form being the </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>musselmanner </i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">of Auschwitz, whose plight for Agamben documents “the total triumph of power over the human being”</span><sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote7anc" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote7sym"><sup>7</sup></a></span></sup><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, we simultaneously invoke the inverse possibility, of life-in-death – the revolutionary possibility that death is not purely and simply the end; that through love one may continue </span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><i>being</i></span><span style="font-family:Tahoma;">, not in some religious ‘afterlife’, but in this world, beyond the limits of biological existence – Love, the total triumph of the human being over power, over mere death.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote1"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote1sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote1anc">1</a> Arendt, Hannah, <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</i> (1963), 253.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote2"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote2sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote2anc">2</a> Davis, Mike, <i>City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles</i> (2006), 223.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote3"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote3sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote3anc">3</a> Agamben, Giorgio, <i>Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive</i> (1999), 18-19.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote4"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote4sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote4anc">4</a> Žižek, Slavoj, <i>Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (2002), </i>155.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote5"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote5sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote5anc">5</a> Agamben, 17.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;" id="sdfootnote6"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote6sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote6anc">6</a> Agamben, 47.</p> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div id="sdfootnote7"><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="text-align: justify;" class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote7sym" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2039096198679139361#sdfootnote7anc">7</a> Agamben, 48.</p> </div>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-81829409930189004432008-10-06T17:51:00.000-07:002008-10-07T12:28:09.553-07:00Mediated ApocalypsesOwen Hatherley<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7tLhk4PM70uV-Ib0CfZxejrb3zz4gEM8KzFJvbaLfdfC4gtBbrFB4XVsV4xEaRIHGp7QWN5RtgMXzOL4pkJW1q8lET_cQ9fI69-eT_DH6kW-zvQFe_De6HCDEj7hLVyn9qyePv5A99rY/s1600-h/a+day+the+world+ended+roger+corman+PDVD_003.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7tLhk4PM70uV-Ib0CfZxejrb3zz4gEM8KzFJvbaLfdfC4gtBbrFB4XVsV4xEaRIHGp7QWN5RtgMXzOL4pkJW1q8lET_cQ9fI69-eT_DH6kW-zvQFe_De6HCDEj7hLVyn9qyePv5A99rY/s320/a+day+the+world+ended+roger+corman+PDVD_003.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254209347598333442" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>it's after the End of the World – don't you know that yet?'</i></span> <p style="margin-left: 1.25cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">Sun Ra</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">In the 20</span><sup><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> century, the apocalypse happened more than once. In a perceptive 1978 essay on Surrealism, Angela Carter wrote: 'the 1914-18 war was, in many respects, for France and Germany, the end of the world. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917 suggested the end of one world might mark the commencement of another world, one in which human beings might themselves take possession not only of their own lives, but also of their own means of expressing the reality of that life, i.e. art. It is possible for the true optimist to view the end of the world with sang-froid. What is so great about all this crap? Might there be something better?'</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">Carter recognised that the apocalyptic impulse, at its inception, is an optimistic one – in fact, a revolutionary one. Norman Cohn's </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>The Pursuit of the Millennium</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> makes quite clear that eschatology emerges from the religion of the poor, in the context of oppression and betrayal. From the book of Daniel onwards, the apocalyptic mode is based on denunciations of Rome or Babylon, of Priests and false prophets, and lurid descriptions of the various misfortunes that will befall the evil, and the pleasures that await the righteous ones. So why is it, that in the 20</span><sup><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> century, the apocalyptic imaginary has largely been a series of horrific images, of horrendous catastrophes from which no-one can be safe? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">The short answer is that, after 1918, a vision of apocalypse took form in the imagination that was very closely based in reality. In 1914-8, millions directly experienced a blasted landscape in which it was impossible to discern the corpses, with all life obliterated by the most advanced technology. One of the earliest cinematic apocalypses takes immediate inspiration from this. William Cameron Menzies, Alexander Korda and H.G Wells' </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Things to Come</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> (1936) stages a series of Hegelian catastrophes, in which first, 'Everytown' is obliterated in a (still horrifying) blitzkrieg, then we have a decades-long war in which aerial bombing manages to destroy all of the world's cities. By 1970, the remnants of Enlightenment civilisation are just about legible as the backdrop to an atavistic, tribal world of local chieftains, disease and obscurantism. What follows this, in a manner familiar from the similar apocalypses and rebirths in Olaf Stapledon's </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Last and First Men</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">, is a rationalist Bauhaus world beneath the surface of the earth, in which finally nature has been mastered and war eliminated. The film ends with the prospect of that world too being destroyed by its restive inhabitants, demanding that technological development be ceased.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Things to Come</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> establishes many of the conventions of apocalypse cinema – the blasted post-apocalyptic landscape, the terrifying depiction of instrumentalised slaughter – but what is missing in its successors is the utopian element, the promise that technology could, in the right hands, promise a paradise as much as a hell. After Hiroshima, the apocalyptic imagination was provided with the genuine scientific and geopolitical possibility of destroying civilisation, and after 30 years of the arms race, all life on earth. This prospect is luridly visible in hundreds of 1950s Cold War schlock films, in which usually some sort of atomic contamination has literally created a monster, from </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Godzilla</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> to the giant ants of </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Them!</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> One of the most interesting of these films is Roger Corman's self-explanatory 1958 shocker </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>The Day the World Ended</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">. This film is heralded by the magnificent introduction 'what you are about to see may never happen...but to this anxious age in which we live, it presents a fearsome warning...Our film begins with...THE END!'</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">Cue a succession of nuclear explosions, and images of depopulated, devastated cities (no doubt taken from stock footage of Coventry, Dresden, or Tokyo), and then we come to the survivors. Our leading protagonist has built a (rather Eames-like) house in the only geological area in the USA which can withstand an all-out nuclear war. He has been planning this for a decade, making sure that he and two others have exactly enough food to last through the fallout. The radio doesn't pick up any signals, from New York, San Francisco, Paris, or Moscow. Yet as the house begins to fill up, this post-apocalyptic serenity is broken. In a Cadillac, not far from the house, are a young couple, a gangster, and his girl, a burlesque dancer. Nearby, a drifter with accompanying donkey. Initially, none of them seem able to imagine the catastrophe that has occurred. Corman makes grim comedy out of this inability. 'When are we going to be able to get to San Francisco?' asks the hood. 'There is no San Francisco any more.' 'No Frisco!? I don't believe it'. The survivors quickly fall into atavism, with fights, sexual rivalry, battles for supremacy and the house's gun. The only moment when the horror of what lies outside really occurs to the characters is when the dancer gives them a run through of her act ('here's where I would start to peel') and collapses into tears. Meanwhile, the survivalist tries to interest his daughter in one of the men, telling her she must bear children for the future. 'There </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">is</span></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> no future', she replies.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3WvHpR5mZuS0uhsCP0ikQjtu2c6bYPyhik40ad2w-O5VCmZugggBMvfS12663QfXImpaCU5uFgJc1iAgo6Ko5C5DwmSdd1NcGBlRDGvn-sIfIvI-KMAVKyOE_mcU38xRIw3wDZ3gmrU/s1600-h/worldended3.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb3WvHpR5mZuS0uhsCP0ikQjtu2c6bYPyhik40ad2w-O5VCmZugggBMvfS12663QfXImpaCU5uFgJc1iAgo6Ko5C5DwmSdd1NcGBlRDGvn-sIfIvI-KMAVKyOE_mcU38xRIw3wDZ3gmrU/s320/worldended3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254209205496147778" border="0" /></a><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">Corman's film doesn't manage to sustain this relentlessly claustrophobic atmosphere, resorting soon to the requisite (and here, fairly silly) radioactively modified humanoid monsters - but the first half of the film prefigures what are the undisputed masterpieces of apocalyptic cinema, George Romero's trilogy </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Night of the Living Dead </i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">(1968)</span></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">, </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Dawn of the Dead</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> (1978) and </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Day of the Dead </i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">(1985)</span></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">. The house bunkered in against apocalypse is here, as is the speculation that radiation has caused some strange and horrifying change in the human race, into a bestial creature of reflexes – but most of all, the films attack any notion that the best side of humanity will surmount and fight out the apocalypse. The trilogy shows society completely collapsing, with any notions of solidarity falling apart in a wave of violence and martial barbarity. This isn't mere </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Lord of the Flies</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> pessimism about 'human nature', some abstract notion of inherent atavism – rather, what we see in these films is </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>this</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> society collapsing, one in which solidarity is already scarce. Near the end of </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Night of the Living Dead</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">, we see vigilantes and national guardsmen combing the countryside for zombies, shooting them all on sight with glee – as one of the horrified protagonists of </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Dawn of the Dead</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> points out, there are some who are actually </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>enjoying</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> this. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">Romero's films are also extremely adroit in outlining the likely role of communications media in the apocalypse. The radio and TV in </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Night</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> offer regular updates on the catastrophe, films-within-films that are compelling and convincing in their dread and matter-of-fact awfulness – the unsteadiness of the camera as government spokesmen are interviewed, the uncertainty of the newsreaders. By </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Dawn</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> this has become even more horribly compelling, perhaps to reflect the attendant brutalisation of television in the intervening decade. One of the film's most memorable images is the talk show discussion of the massacres, where a presenter with an eyepatch repeats, as if to himself 'we have to remain rational. We have to remain rational'. Later on, even this signal has disappeared. By the third film, there is no radio, no television, no communication at all with the outside world – the implication being that the final breakdown of society can be ascertained from the non-existence of the media.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">From its first scene - a couple in a car on a hill, in a clinch to 'Johnny B Goode' - <span style="font-style: italic;">Threads</span> is wholly conscious of its status as scientific, geopolitical horror film. 'The early post-blast scenes - with survivors huddling into barricaded-in basements, fearful of and hostile to outsiders - were reminiscent of nothing so much as Romero's </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Night of the Living Dead</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">. Near-total anomie, society stripped back to its Hobbesian bare minimum', wrote Mark Fisher on </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Threads' </i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">unbearable, truly nightmarish vision (backed up here by with a veritable list of scientific advisers in the credits, rather than zombie folk tales). In Mike Jackson and Barry Hines' TV film, we see a humanity which, like shell-shocked protagonists of </span></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Night</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">, can't truly believe what's happened to it – what is most terrifying is that the world doesn't end in a flash, via <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr Strangelove</span>'s Doomsday machine, but somehow endures, in a grotesque, devastated form. T</span></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">he comparison made between Romero's trilogy and </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Threads</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> seems especially appropriate in its portrayal of a </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>mediated</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> apocalypse. The ambient televisual noise in the film provides an ever-more terrifying countdown to Armageddon as a counterpoint to the quotidian worries of the characters themselves, who are largely either unaware or incapable of reacting to the approaching horror. Both films share a documentary realism that seems particularly apt for the depicting the unimaginable.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtzNwbWVMaHqfVtSt8t0avHAyIyd1XEbWIR8tHi3CAe9ZHfe-69d38c88E1upn59Jj262RYSihEx5fSlEJwi4-3nIelLfBZNo9wZ3Q1I-8HWDU23W3HA3r8N0LH3W23m8FqwkLnmKTydQ/s1600-h/Dawnofthedead4.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtzNwbWVMaHqfVtSt8t0avHAyIyd1XEbWIR8tHi3CAe9ZHfe-69d38c88E1upn59Jj262RYSihEx5fSlEJwi4-3nIelLfBZNo9wZ3Q1I-8HWDU23W3HA3r8N0LH3W23m8FqwkLnmKTydQ/s320/Dawnofthedead4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254209018662147058" border="0" /></a><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">The apocalypse is particularly mediated today, in the queasy expectation of something appalling (nuclear, climatic, economic?) being announced every time the 'BREAKING NEWS' strip appears on News 24. In essence, the tropes of apocalyptic cinema are borrowed by every news bulletin. Yet one of the most convincing apocalyptic films of the last 15 years doesn't feature so much as a radio. In Mike Leigh's atypically brilliant, relentless </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Naked</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> (1993), where the setting is merely an unflinching but televisually realistic depiction of London, we return to the source of the apocalyptic imaginary - the force and fervour of the prophetic voice. Only here, there's no sense that the apocalypse will lead to the smiting of the evil and the ascension of the righteous. Here, we openly hear discussion of what even </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Threads</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"> can't countenance – the total elimination of the human race itself. 'By the very definition of apocalypse, man will cease to exist!' Johnny yells at a hapless security guard. The sermon ends with two images – God ('who </span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>is</i></span><span style="font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;">') as a malevolent, amoral force, initiating the apocalypse for his own amusement; and the possibility of transcendence, of an evolution out of humanity into something else, 'a species of pure thought, are you with me?' This is what the optimistic apocalyptics are reduced to, in a world where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 'There is hope, but not for us'.</span></p>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-53778981297131490412008-10-06T17:46:00.000-07:002008-10-07T23:28:44.902-07:00Functional Apocalypses<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SOxS6pkGpCI/AAAAAAAAAVU/i9aeN78ynpU/s1600-h/rationing.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SOxS6pkGpCI/AAAAAAAAAVU/i9aeN78ynpU/s400/rationing.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254666032777700386" /></a><br /><br />Benjamin Noys (2008)<br /><br />Harry Cleaver’s 1987 article “Uses of an Earthquake” presents what we could call the optimistic Marxist view of crisis:<br /><br />Crises are not to be feared or “solved”; they should rather be embraced and their opportunities explored. We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us. Only those who benefit from these structures should fear such cracks. For the rest of us, they are openings through which we may gain access to more freedom.<br /><br />What “use” can be made of nuclear war, or any other global end of humanity scenario (at least for us “humans”)? Very few could probably share the confidence of heretical Trotskyite Juan Posadas that “Humanity will pass quickly through a nuclear war into a new human society – Socialism.” Posadas provides a truly Marxist eschatology, in which the revelation or unveiling of truth (the meaning of the word “apocalypse”) is socialism itself. In its own way equally weird is the bracing class-struggle scepticism of George Caffentzis, for whom “everybody dies and even if everybody dies at the same time (I mean everybody) what’s the problem? The earth becomes a cleared tape and why should the angels grieve?” (“Work/Energy” 1)<br /><br />Putting that scenario aside with admirable sang-froid, Caffentzis regards apocalypse as the indicator of the crisis of capital’s regime of accumulation: “whenever the ongoing model of exploitation becomes untenable, capital has intimations of mortality qua the world’s end.” (“Work/Energy” 1) These “functional apocalypses” are the revelatory signs of the rupturing effects of class-struggle, the unveiling of the old mole. From this perspective there is little time to be wasted on outbursts of nuclear paranoia or anxiety, instead we have “the simple indifference to the whole world-historical drama of Nuclear Apocalypse experienced by many because the rent’s going up, the job is ending, the children are hungry and the electricity is about to be turned off.” (“Power and Terror” 308)<br /><br />Certainly this position allows Caffentzis to have some fun at the expense of the death-obsessed philosophies of nuclear terror, and what he regards as their common roots in the Heideggerean philosophy of technology. No Heidegger debate for him:<br /><br />Defeat can lead to despair, but must it come to this grovelling before the Nazi philosopher? Many a NY leftish intellectual who would be horrified to touch a PLO leaflet quotes this philosopher of the death camps with slavish delight. History is a nightmare, but must its jokes be forever so cruel? (“Power and Terror” 314)<br /><br />Even better is his and Silvia Frederici’s parody of the discussion between Lotringer and Virilio concerning the publication of Pure War, in which Virilio’s musings on the revelation of the essence of nuclear technology is presented as a thinly-disguised lust for the final day of judgement: <br /><br />True, A BILLION CASUALTIES ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH WOULD NOT BE NEGLIGIBLE. BUT WHAT MATTERS IS THAT THEY WON'T HAVE DIED IN VAIN, as we will have learnt to CONTROL what we PRODUCE. <br /><br />S: No, you cannot say this in the book...<br />(99; the capitalised section is a quotation from Pure War)<br /><br />Of course the irony is that the distance between this kind of Marxist reading and Heidegger is not perhaps as great as Caffentzis would like to imagine. What is shared in common is a certain structural eschatology of unveiling, of the transformation of crisis into opportunity – although of course very different in each case. The revelation of the essence of Gestell in atomic power is configured by Hölderlin’s line “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also”. (“The Question Concerning Technology” 28) As Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview suggested this could take a more “directly” religious turn as “only a God can save us”. Caffentzis, unlike Posadas and Heidegger, abandons any direct revelation through nuclear war, but he still reads the “danger” as “saving”. In his case the “Bomb Apocalyptics” of the early 1960s was ended by the refusal of the movements of the time to be intimidated by these threats: “[t]he grip of terror could not constrict the new class movements, their desires and disgusts.” (“Work/Energy” 28)<br /><br />What we might call the political ambiguity of works like <span style="font-style:italic;">The War Game</span> (1965) and <span style="font-style:italic;">Threads</span> (1984) is their quasi-refusal of this structure of revelation. This lack of consolation refuses any element of hope, and while obviously both films function as powerful (if not overpowering) critiques, and embody a left position, this “blankness” makes them all the more disturbing. The threat here is of what Derrida called “remainderless destruction” (30). In both cases, of course, the remainder is there; they concern the aftermath of nuclear war. Yet, this is an obvious ruse as the implication of both films is that of non-survivability – they have recourse to necessary, as Derrida points out, fables or fictions (“I have recalled that a nuclear war is for the time being a fable, that is, something one can only talk about.” (23))<br /><br />Unveiling still functions, but the “truth” revealed is the end of humanity should a total nuclear war take place. There is no opening here to “more freedom”, and unlike many other post-apocalyptic films they lack the “utopian” element – the imagination of some functional future society “arising from the ruins”. It is this trace of remainderless destruction that makes these films so disturbing, and which complicates and runs against possible “ideology-critique” readings: The War Game as critique of ruling-class complacency and the security measures by which it believes it will survive any crisis; Threads as the fantasmatic representation of social collapse and the possible non-reproducibility of capitalism. While these films by now may function as objects of a perverse nostalgia, they carry in them this inassimilable moment that threatens any functionalisation of the apocalypse.<br /><br />References<br />Caffentzis, George, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse.” Midnight Notes 2.1 (1980).<br />http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfapoc16.pdf<br />___, “Power and Terror in Bomb Philosophy: A review of Joel Kovel’s Against the State of Nuclear Terror.” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988): 305-314.<br /><br />Cleaver, Harry, “Uses of an Earthquake.” (1987) Libcom.org, 2005. http://libcom.org/library/uses-of-earthquake-cleaver.<br /><br />Derrida, Jacques, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 Nuclear Criticism (Summer 1984): 20-31.<br /><br />Frederici, Silvia and George Caffentzis, “A Review Play on Paul Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War.” Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987): 97-105.<br /><br />Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. and intro. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.<br />___ ‘“Only a God Can Save Us”: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.’ In The Heidegger Controversy. Ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1993. 91-116.owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-84773148821005570762008-10-06T17:41:00.000-07:002008-10-06T17:46:22.382-07:00Apocalypse Where Or When? An Alchemical Reading.Andy Sharp<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUXnjasH_HBflw85fy_F66nF_LdcGImvnxDm4PTSod3CMMnRsd_lVscd3BQIEOHrigI455BvdEABw0n5vE58AvI4z9sSgVKUR2rB6Qfx-hSX_mjI6dv6Y4X403fp2zz1SADnJgfWrDtUE/s1600-h/469px-Holbein_Danse_Macabre_40.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUXnjasH_HBflw85fy_F66nF_LdcGImvnxDm4PTSod3CMMnRsd_lVscd3BQIEOHrigI455BvdEABw0n5vE58AvI4z9sSgVKUR2rB6Qfx-hSX_mjI6dv6Y4X403fp2zz1SADnJgfWrDtUE/s320/469px-Holbein_Danse_Macabre_40.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254206588107410690" border="0" /></a><br /> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The phrase “immanentize the eschaton” made popular by Robert Anton Wilson, in his <i>The Illuminatus! Trilogy</i> is thought to be derived from Gnostic ontology. The Gnostics espoused immanence in opposition to the fear ridden literalism of Christianity’s imminence. Following through this logic, the end of the world is accessible at any single point in time, in other words it is a psycho-spatial realm not a temporal event.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">If we accept this hypothesis, then we are able to trace some interesting correlates in transpersonal and archetypal psychology, psychiatry, alchemy and the careers of eschatologically driven visionary artists.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">This short essay is an attempt to read the motif of immanence into the alchemist Fulcanelli’s exegesis of the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The final infamous “inserted” chapter in Fulcanelli’s <i>“Le Mystere Des Cathedrales”</i> is a spectacularly hypertrophied discussion of a seemingly humble stone cross in Hendaye, a small frontier town in the Pyrenees. Fulcanelli makes the astounding assertion that the “Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism, the rarest symbolical translation of chiliasm”. Chiliasm, the doctrine of belief in the millennium was part of the esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy. Fulcanelli then goes onto cunningly deconstruct a phrase on the transverse arm of the cross. The phrase is spread over two parallels of raised letters in the following sequence:</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"> OCRUXAVES</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"> PESUNICA</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The common interpretation of O CRUX AVE SPE UNICA (O Cross they only hope),</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Fulcanelli proposes, is by intention of the stone mason actually a cipher (using a cryptic form of cabalism and word play – ‘the language of the birds’) for the phrase</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i>Il est écrit que la vie se réfugie en un seul espace</i> (It is written that life takes refuge in a single space), and that,</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">“<i>As for the geographical location of this Promised Land, from which the élite will take part in the return of the golden age, it is up to us to find it.”</i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">From an hermetic perspective, the “point” represents, the golden age, the point is where there is no time. The marriage of opposites raises its mischievous alchemical head as Fulcanelli states it is our mission to find the point. Of course, such a place cannot be found by a linear hunt because it exists outside time, it can only be accessed in a single moment. The hermeticist sets himself this impossible task. Fulcanelli’s prophecy of the coming of the nuclear age and that alchemy had been aware of the dangers of atomic theory for centuries is clearly evident in his concern that man would literally attempt to search for this ‘golden age’, by splitting the atom. The alchemists already had the knowledge of accessing no-time, of the consequences of creating the chain-reaction, manifesting the apocalypse, but chose to “KEEP SILENT”.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">This becomes more explicit in Fulcanelli’s rendering of the acronym INRI, carved on another arm of the cross,</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">“<i>the inscription INRI, exoterically translated as Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), but which gives to the cross its secret meaning: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra (By fire nature is renewed whole). For it is by fire and in fire that our hemisphere will soon be tried. And just as, by means of fire, gold is separated from impure metals, so, Scripture says, the good will be separated from the wicked on the great Day of Judgment.”</i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Here we see direct a correlation between the alchemical process and the apocalypse. It is by the literalisation of the hermetic tradition, in the material world that “our hemisphere will soon be tried” by fire. So the conundrum arises. Is Fulcanelli really a literal believer in the imminence of the apocalypse, with his use of the word “soon”? But that is to forget that the Fulcanelli’s work is not “about” alchemy it is alchemy. His punning, volatile cabala, explosions of meaning, ideational (as ‘fire’) chain- reactions from nonsense and absurdity is the alchemy of chiliasm: at once an instruction guide for circulation “between” the four ages and a warning of the perils of literalising and abusing this esoteric doctrine.</p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioffmr9N9hurUJj4nk0Iw6EuPUGtA2xsFxutu1WVaOkCz0IT4p8lJBMo0_OSGZ9WxXaeOZAphyphenhyphenWzane3WF0PtWwppwnb5MOeR4zjTuKquZYsJcNwfFdB_MQiJhLJil_Z7w9wqMjiC-AJE/s1600-h/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer,_Apocalypse_of_St_John,_The_Dragon_with_the_Seven_Heads.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioffmr9N9hurUJj4nk0Iw6EuPUGtA2xsFxutu1WVaOkCz0IT4p8lJBMo0_OSGZ9WxXaeOZAphyphenhyphenWzane3WF0PtWwppwnb5MOeR4zjTuKquZYsJcNwfFdB_MQiJhLJil_Z7w9wqMjiC-AJE/s320/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer,_Apocalypse_of_St_John,_The_Dragon_with_the_Seven_Heads.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254206794220159378" border="0" /></a><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">The would-be fear mongers with the current KaliYuga of the ‘Credit Crunch’ (The Age of Iron – in alchemical parlance, and related to the Hindu age of misery, misfortune and decrepitude by Fulcanelli), are also aware of exploiting this formula as a means of social control: that the apocalypse does exist as a real time event.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">Fulcanelli shows how the Bible is infused with what are essentially pages from an alchemical lab book. In Ezekiel’s apocalyptic vision for example,</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">“<i>And I looked, and behold… a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself and brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures…. As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’”</i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">In final summary, he quotes St. Matthew’s gospel and shows by his poetic cabala that Matthew is ‘the doctrine of science’.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;"><i>The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its heiroglyph is the skeleton, bearing: the attributes of Saturn: the empty hour-glass, symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven, which is the number of transformation, or destruction, of annihilation.</i></p><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">So, we see that with the empty hour-glass, there is no time, in the Age of Iron. If we are not in time, then we are in a place curiously similar the notion of dreams as revealed by James Hillman in <i>Dreams and the Underworld</i>. We enter the apocalypse as we enter a dream, through sleep, as immanent as <i>Hypnos </i>whose brother was<i> Thanatos</i>. But, the Age of Iron is also a rich alembic of images revealing truth and essences without codification and dogma, standing outside time. In other words it is but a dream of death.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p>owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-7666105908054361132008-09-14T08:54:00.001-07:002008-09-14T08:54:31.122-07:00kino fist: apocalypse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/apocalypse-734664.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/apocalypse-734332.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />After a 'summer' break, Kino Fist returns in a different place. In the wake of financial disaster, constant rumblings about nuclear perils and the many discussions about how the Large Hadron Collider might polish us off for good we will be showing films about the <span style="font-weight:bold;">apocalypse</span> as part of <a href="http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/1710">this event</a>:<br /><br />'La Soufrière' (Werner Herzog, 1976) (something about it <a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/06/41/soufriere.html">here</a>)<br />'Threads' (written by Barry Hines/directed by Mick Jackson, 1984) (see <a href="http://www.btinternet.com/~pdbean/threads.html">here</a> for more details) [Warning: 'Threads' is very likely to be the single most depressing film you'll ever see. Please don't come if you're feeling a bit down or weird - seriously, I'd feel awful about it]<br /><br />We will be here: <br /><br />The Wenlock Building<br />50-60 Wharf Road, N1 7RN<br /><br />We will screen: <br />October 5th<br />roughly 2-5pm<br /><br />As always, there will be a magazine. Please send texts (200-2000 words), illustrations, images to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk <br />by September 24th (that gives you ten days!).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-14298864245539641822008-07-24T03:43:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:00:55.745-08:00sf and the 60sChristopher Fraser<br /><br />1968 will be remembered for many events, but in the world of film there were two notable occurrences: the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled and science fiction stormed to the top of the US Box Office.<br /> <br />Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey may have perplexed audiences and critics alike but clearly captured the imagination of the audiences, in the US finishing the year with second place in total takings.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIheuNwfvhI/AAAAAAAAATw/X0bt10y9UHY/s1600-h/2001gravityferris.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIheuNwfvhI/AAAAAAAAATw/X0bt10y9UHY/s400/2001gravityferris.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226531515623521810" /></a><br /><br />This was first time in over a decade that a science fiction film had finished in the US box office top ten, a result not repeated until A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Even more remarkable was that it not alone, with Franklin's J Schaffner's Planet Of The Apes also making the list at number seven.<br /> <br />Whereas the other science fiction films of the early 60s which spring to mind (specifically La Jetee and Alphaville) were of more economical means, both these films were lavish and technically sophisticated productions, with Kubrick picking up an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for and an John Chambers an honorary Academy Award for outstanding achievement in make-up.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhe6TeOvvI/AAAAAAAAAT4/CjIvLxtZuH4/s1600-h/robert_f_kennedy.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhe6TeOvvI/AAAAAAAAAT4/CjIvLxtZuH4/s400/robert_f_kennedy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226531723315953394" /></a><br /><br />Viewing 1968 solely through the lens of history it is useful to take a moment to reflect on some of the tumultuous events of this year. As well as the unrest in May 1968 which lead to Cannes being cancelled, a series of worldwide protests spawned new political activity on all sides of the political spectrum. In the US the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and at time Johnston's administration at times struggled to maintain domestic peace. The assassination of Martin Luther King resulted in widespread rioting and later that year Democrat Presidential nominee Robert Kennedy was also assassinated, his killer citing Kennedy's support for Israel in the Arab Israeli conflict. In the cold war the stand off continued unabated, with the main change being the Soviets approaching Nuclear parity with the US. Finally, despite widespread opposition the Vietnam War grew in intensity, and by the end of 1968 US deployment reached its peak of over half a million troops.<br /> <br />Against this backdrop it is not hard to imagine how, quite aside from intrinsic artistic merit of these films, the chance to peer into the future, both of humanity and film making itself, must have been tantalising.<br /> <br />At this point I would like to suggest that both these films present what amounts to optimistic view of the near future. 2001 may have an ambiguous conclusion, but as an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence it's definitely not Alien and Dave's journey is more one of transcendence rather than into the dark heart of man - certainly no trip up the Mekong River at any rate. Recognisable corporate and nation identities cement this universe as a linear progression of ours rather than some parallel existence.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhfLCZ3BtI/AAAAAAAAAUA/Drd49PzrzRA/s1600-h/pofa.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhfLCZ3BtI/AAAAAAAAAUA/Drd49PzrzRA/s400/pofa.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226532010791995090" /></a><br /><br />Planet Of The Apes may have elements of a dystopian nightmare, but the calamity revealed at the end of Schaffner's film is something which befalls some future human civilisation years after it had mastered the capability of space flight across hundreds of light years. The warning is clear but the signs are there's plenty of time for cavorting around the universe before we have to start to worry.<br /> <br />In interpreting these films I think it is useful to include another work of speculative fantasy - Mechanix Illustrated's <a href="http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/">"What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?"</a>, also published in 1968. Here, a vision of the future is presented unquestioned with an air of inevitability and enthusiastic optimism.<br /> <br />For me the most critical essence of this optimism is the sense of cultural continuity - the prospect of replacing the drudgery of work and preparing meals with piloting spacecraft and driving 250mph cars is intriguing, but real reassurance comes from protagonists of the future being just like us and a vision of the present the political, social and scientific apparatus continuing to function and serve us. This vision is made all the more intoxicating by being rendered with a careful attention to scientific plausibility.<br /> <br />What is particularly interesting about the Mechanix Illustrated story is that, beyond just a sense of cultural continuity, it has a tone of celebration - the triumph of science over nature and the ability of capitalist to deliver a homogeneous, happy civil society.<br /> <br />So my thesis is not just that the form and popularity of all these works was in part a response to the political and social turmoil, but that the specific anxiety was one of continuity of the dominant ideology.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhfXy1kDLI/AAAAAAAAAUI/zrZ51BCajUw/s1600-h/bladerunner.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIhfXy1kDLI/AAAAAAAAAUI/zrZ51BCajUw/s400/bladerunner.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226532229951524018" /></a><br /><br />Following on from this I find it interesting to speculate whether audiences would have been willing to accept science fiction with a more dystopian world, say A Clockwork Orange or Blade Runner, prior to the détente of the early 70s.<br /> <br />In concluding I feel I should admit I'm not entirely sure I've actually seen the 1968 Planet Of The Apes and that perhaps my indistinct recollection of a large number of films with people in monkey suits is missing some other important interpretation, but somehow I think the brief monkey suit cameo in 2001 is probably the high point of this particular special effect.<br /> <br />.....................................................................<br /><br />I'd also like to shamelessly plug a new non-fiction book group called the<br />Itchy Chin Club. If you're up for joining a central London book group<br />interested in arts, culture, politics, history and philosophy then <br />please drop me a line at chrisf (at) goop dot org. There's a blog at itchychinclub.blogspot.com to give some background and keep everyone up to date.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-931914510850574382008-07-22T10:23:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:00:57.398-08:00when the earth is colonised by capital, what use is the cosmos?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYb3O8M4YI/AAAAAAAAAR4/SJ1f014EqR0/s1600-h/Mars1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYb3O8M4YI/AAAAAAAAAR4/SJ1f014EqR0/s400/Mars1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225895053327393154" /></a><br />Infinite Thought<br /><br />Whilst Stephen Hawking's announcement that colonization on other planets is imperative to ensure the continuation of the human race is not quite as unusual as the media have been making out - 'it's like science fiction!' - the reception of Hawking's claims reveals at least two things: One, the death of the cosmic imaginary and two, the science fictionalisation of capital and the military-industrial complex itself. Despite the fact that the first man-made object to orbit the Earth (the USSR’s Sputnik 1 on October 5, 1957) was launched less than fifty years ago and even though the capacity to extend our exploration further is technically better than ever, the socio-political horizon of the possibilities of space exploration have been almost completely destroyed, replaced by the Terrestrial (dis)comforts of self-colonising Kapital and a world turned inwards (outdated satellites endlessly beaming back nought but our own chatter and image a case in point). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYccmhCPAI/AAAAAAAAASI/IgzO8OTvQgE/s1600-h/paperclip.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYccmhCPAI/AAAAAAAAASI/IgzO8OTvQgE/s400/paperclip.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225895695311059970" /></a><br /><br />Whilst both the USSR and US space programmes were also basically projects of geo-political belligerence, from the post-war US employment of Nazi rocket scientists via (the still mostly classified) Operation Paperclip, there was always the possibility that the human space exploration could transcend the bellicose and nationalistic projects they were inevitably captured by - here we must defend the sheer anti-economic and non-militaristic pointlessness of certain endeavours - a kind of expansive space humanism - the probes sent to Mars, Venus by the Soviets in the 1960s, the successful living in space for a year on the first permanently manned space station, Mir, and so on.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYcsjto5DI/AAAAAAAAASQ/547KGQGpc0g/s1600-h/gagarin.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYcsjto5DI/AAAAAAAAASQ/547KGQGpc0g/s400/gagarin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225895969436525618" /></a><br /><br />Gagarin's famous 1961 space flight demonstrated not only the superiority of the Soviet space program but also that manned space flights were achievable without the sacrifice of human life. It was the US who declared the 'Space Race' in 1957 - a cosmic parallel to the 'arms race' on Earth - a cold war for the 'hearts and minds’'of a splintered post-war public.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYdVKRKJnI/AAAAAAAAASY/KggQgJdJ9tk/s1600-h/spacecommand.gif"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYdVKRKJnI/AAAAAAAAASY/KggQgJdJ9tk/s400/spacecommand.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225896666980820594" /></a><br /><br />Today, however, we are left with nothing but the desire for the militarisation of space: The Project for the New American Century repeatedly stresses the necessity of a US controlled space: the desperate wish to 'control the new "international commons" of space and "cyberspace," and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - U.S. Space Forces - with the mission of space control.' They note, in fact, that space has been militarised for decades, as if this was justification in itself for turning everything beyond Earth into a potential battleground - weather, communications, navigation, reconnaissance satellites 'are increasingly essential elements in American military power' they write, looking forward with doomed hypothetical glee to 'the application of force both in space and from space'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYdjytP3MI/AAAAAAAAASg/gVwAFeNqdTo/s1600-h/fermi.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYdjytP3MI/AAAAAAAAASg/gVwAFeNqdTo/s400/fermi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225896918354222274" /></a><br /><br />Part of the original impetus behind the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence was a keen awareness of the implications of Fermi’s 'Where are They?' argument. His point was that if intelligent life was common in the universe, then the Earth would have been colonized by aliens by now: 'if they existed, they would be here.' Part of his argument is the relative youth of the Earth and the idea that if life were common, there would be many other civilizations in the universe, most likely more advanced than us. One of the possible conclusions of Fermi's hypothesis is the depressing thought that civilisations might only have limited life-spans - such that by the time they achieve technological capacity for space exploration they'd probably have used the same scientific advances to destroy themselves - Brown's recent backing for Trident, costing 25 billion, is a sorry omen in this sense. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYd5XwFOeI/AAAAAAAAASo/pz6UJUfk7rc/s1600-h/moon.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYd5XwFOeI/AAAAAAAAASo/pz6UJUfk7rc/s400/moon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225897289075472866" /></a><br /><br />The question of cost is a critical one, though - one of the major objections to space exploration is of course its massive expense, reflected in certain tracks from the 60s and 70s: Gil Scott Heron's 'Whitey on the Moon' (The man jus upped my rent last night/cause Whitey's on the moon) to Phil Ochs' 'Spaceman' (Way high, so high/Spaceship made of steel/Spaceman, look down: Tell me what you feel/Can you feel the money gone/As you sail through space?/Can you feel how many die/When you win the race?). However, as a proportion of Government spending on space exploration is nearly always under 0.5%, nothing compared to the war, incompetence, etc.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYen6mSLWI/AAAAAAAAASw/Wfne4-8rYjw/s1600-h/cosmuseum.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYen6mSLWI/AAAAAAAAASw/Wfne4-8rYjw/s400/cosmuseum.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225898088703602018" /></a><br /><br />Tatu's more recent post-Soviet 'Cosmos' proffers a different model, and one that fits with the desires and dreams of a new Red Space: 'Our home forever is outer space/Black stars and endless seas, outer space/You hold your destinies, outer space/Forever we’ll be in/Outer Space, outer space.' To the beyond...and beyond!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-64381095983230715032008-07-22T10:14:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:00:58.946-08:00What Happened to the Future?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcrFX2zdZI/AAAAAAAAATY/SyYuja9XW0g/s1600-h/FORBIDDEN_PLANET.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcrFX2zdZI/AAAAAAAAATY/SyYuja9XW0g/s400/FORBIDDEN_PLANET.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226193263889970578" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Robert Barry<br /><br />In 1992, American neo-con philosophe, Francis Fukuyama, published a book, <span style="font-style: italic;">The End of History, or The Last Man</span>, which claimed that, with the fall of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, the world had reached the 'end of history' in its current state of liberal capitalist 'utopia'. Of course, it wasn't long before history came along to bite Fukuyama from behind. In the meantime, fifteen years later, it does seem like something is missing. Not history, but in a sense, the future.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYXWTDnycI/AAAAAAAAARw/r22JflJrsqU/s1600-h/SpaceOpera.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYXWTDnycI/AAAAAAAAARw/r22JflJrsqU/s400/SpaceOpera.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225890089450064322" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In the middle of the last century, when people were first preparing to go into space, and electronic music was being produced by modernist composers and enterprising outsiders alike, the presence of 'actually existing socialism' in the eastern bloc provided a locus for both the utopian dreams and the dystopian nightmares of several generations. All of this came together in American science fiction films like <span style="font-style: italic;">The Day The Earth Stood Still</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">This Island Earth</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">It Came From Outer Space</span>, in which space travel, electronic music and invaders from a red planet, formed a kind of symbolic unity. The scarcity of information about socialist society, as well as public knowledge of the tendency for what little information there was to be distorted by both sides, only added to its ability to act as a kind of fantasy space.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYWnxjur-I/AAAAAAAAARg/GohKPNu104Q/s1600-h/lost-astronaut.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYWnxjur-I/AAAAAAAAARg/GohKPNu104Q/s400/lost-astronaut.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225889290183946210" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In today's post-political society in which the public are systematically discouraged from taking an interest in politics, and political decisions are always presented as ideology-free, technical, administrative choices, we seem to have lost our grip on the future. Without a broad-based popular opposition to the status quo, we are left with the rather grim sense that there is no alternative. The future, as J. G. Ballard put it, is boring.<br /><br />Walking into almost any live music venue in Britain today, be it jazz club, concert hall or rock gig, one could be forgiven for thinking that, since the 1970s, history had in fact taken a few steps in retreat, or that a pan-generic cult of conservatism had taken hold at the root of all musical activity. Lecturers in 'Innovation Studies', surely a forward-looking discipline if ever there was one, write papers on the 'post-original' – a term suggestive of the idea that the very attempt to do anything new is now thoroughly passé. Even our science fiction films are remakes of old favourites like <span style="font-style: italic;">Godzilla</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">War of the Worlds</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Transformers</span>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYW6gVawcI/AAAAAAAAARo/-RvIA0sVec4/s1600-h/godzilla.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIYW6gVawcI/AAAAAAAAARo/-RvIA0sVec4/s400/godzilla.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225889611978031554" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And so what, you might say. The modernist demand for relentless innovation led to an art that lost touch with its public and the socialist 'utopia' in eastern Europe led to large-scale butchery and corruption. Good riddance to the future, I hear you carp. But behind these empty clichés concerning the Twentieth Century, what kind of baby are we throwing out with the avant-garde bathwater? Isn't the messianic promise contained, in different ways but equal parts, in revolutionary societies, stories about other galaxies, and music composed purely of electronic sounds, in a sense, the only real possibility of hope and transcendence: the promise of a better world in this world, i.e. before death and without the support of any mysticism or theocracy.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-62880431914070154942008-07-21T04:07:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:01:00.434-08:00The Road to the Stars<a href="http://newsfeed.kosmograd.com/">Martin Gittins</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcobATm4hI/AAAAAAAAATA/vS_E5oEo8dc/s1600-h/bajkonur+city.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcobATm4hI/AAAAAAAAATA/vS_E5oEo8dc/s400/bajkonur+city.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226190336990568978" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. Moscow is the greatest power in history. We must not allow ourselves to lose the global perspective."</span><br />- Bruce Sterling, William Gibson - Red Star, Winter Orbit<br /><br /><br />For years, the location of Baikonur, the site of the Soviet space facility, was unclear. As Robert Oberg, <a href="http://www.astronautix.com/articles/inskonur.htm%20">writing in Omni in 1990</a>, explained:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"In an attempt to mislead spy plane pilots, Soviet cartographers three decades ago borrowed the name of the distant town of Baikonur for this space center near Tyuratam. Baikonur was misspelled "Baykonur" when it was taken for the spaceport. Then arriving rocket workers began calling the settlement Zarya, or "Dawn." As it grew it became known as Kosmograd -- Space City. Soon the city was officially named Leninsk."</span><br /><br />As the Soviet space program expanded, so did Baikonur, until it spread over a vast area of the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan. In 1960 Gary Powers photographed Baikonur from his U2. Built along the Syr Darya River and between highway and a railway, Leninsk and the Baikonur Cosmodrome is a prototype distributed settlement, a speculative disurbanist city, less planned but perhaps more vividly realised than Magnitogorsk. Mikhail Okhitovich would have been proud.<br /><br />Whereas Magnitogorsk was a city dedicated to producing steel, Baikonur's was dedicated solely to rocketry and space flight.<br /><br />At <a href="http://www.russianspaceweb.com/baikonur.html">Baikonur</a>, nee Kosmograd, Sergei Korelev, the father of Soviet space program declared, "The Road to the Stars is open".<br /><br />Jump cut forward, to the late 21st Century. Kosmograd, a floating space station consisting of five docking spheres, each with 3 connected Salyut pods, is a fading, decaying outpost of the Soviet conquest of space. This is the setting of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's masterful short story, Red Star Winter Orbit, also first published in Omni, and part of Gibson's collection of short stories, <span style="font-style: italic;">Burning Chrome</span>. You can read it online <a href="http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/r_star.txt">here</a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcoj2sxDoI/AAAAAAAAATI/J7BEB9jUOsc/s1600-h/gagarin+the+cosmos+will+serve+people.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcoj2sxDoI/AAAAAAAAATI/J7BEB9jUOsc/s400/gagarin+the+cosmos+will+serve+people.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226190489030561410" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The protagonist, Colonel Korelev, the first person to set foot on Mars, has been in space 27 years. His bones have withered by the effects of radiation and micro-gravity, and crippled by an injury to his hip, means he can never return to Earth.<br /><br />As with all great SF short stories, we are given glimpses of the alternate future history that has preceded this moment in time, and left to fill in the gaps.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcsYrNZ4rI/AAAAAAAAATo/cUYvLqfyNKg/s1600-h/chernikhov+fantasy+2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcsYrNZ4rI/AAAAAAAAATo/cUYvLqfyNKg/s400/chernikhov+fantasy+2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226194695014179506" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">'"The sun balloons!" cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth. "Look!" Kosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines; they had been a cheaper substitute for a grandiose American plan to build solar-powered satellites. The things worked, Korolev supposed, because for the last decade he'd watched them multiply.'</span><br /><br />With the Soviet Union controlling most of the Earth's resources, especially oil, the United States is no longer a dominant economic power on Earth. The Soviets have won the space race, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Nations have turned inwards and no longer look towards the stars.<br /><br />Overtaken by Japanese robotic techniques, the manned exploration of space is no longer a project the Party can believe in. Kosmograd is to be put into a decaying orbit, and all its inhabitants returned to Earth.<br /><br />But General Korelev has been on the station so long his limbs have atrophied, he would not survive re-entry. His destiny is to die aboard Kosmograd.<br /><br />The story ends with a re-colonisation of Kosmograd by a band of Americans, daringly propelling their floating sun-balloon to the station. In homage to the home-brew hacker activism of Southern California, Kosmograd becomes a new homestead for a new frontierspeople.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcsEunecCI/AAAAAAAAATg/uubcgQ7KKew/s1600-h/OKHITOVICH.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcsEunecCI/AAAAAAAAATg/uubcgQ7KKew/s400/OKHITOVICH.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226194352331452450" /></a><br /><br />The story exhibits the classic prescience that makes Gibson such as great writer, exploring the idea that a space race and the colonisation of space is already an outdated conceit. As always, when Gibson writes he uses the future as a way of reflecting the present.<br /><br />Jump back to the near past, and the Russian space project lies tattered. Baikonur has become a graveyard of dreams as much as working spaceport.<br /><br />The collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequent abandonment of the Buran project (a Soviet version of the Space Shuttle) consigned the idea of a permanent manned Russian space station to the past rather than the future. Only the International Space Station remains, a joint effort between the American, Russian, Japanese, Canadian and European Space Agencies.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcoVl925dI/AAAAAAAAAS4/nTNqVDRP36c/s1600-h/baikonurone.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcoVl925dI/AAAAAAAAAS4/nTNqVDRP36c/s400/baikonurone.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226190244020676050" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Mir space station, on which Sterling and Gibson's space station is presumably based, was itself put into a decaying orbit in 2001.<br /><br />On May 12, 2002, one of the hangers at Baikonour, housing a Buran orbiter (the Soviet version of the Space Shuttle) and a mockup of the Energia booster rocket, collapsed due to incomplete maintenance, destroying the vehicle. Eight workers were also killed in the collapse of the building's roof.<br /><br />In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Sergei Krikalev was effectively marooned on Mir, spending 800 days in space, whilst <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5312746.stm">no-one would take responsibility to bring him back to Earth</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcp1u5R67I/AAAAAAAAATQ/yjtoMpX55NU/s1600-h/Mir_reentry_photo.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SIcp1u5R67I/AAAAAAAAATQ/yjtoMpX55NU/s400/Mir_reentry_photo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226191895684836274" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"It was a strange experience in 1991, leaving the Soviet Union and then being brought back down to another country, called Russia, because your old nation had simply ceased to exist."</span><br /><br />Krikalev must have felt a lot like Korolev, drifting alone, abandoned, The Last Man in Space.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-77041753830178252362008-07-15T15:02:00.000-07:002008-07-17T03:49:53.832-07:00kino fist: red space<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/redspacecover0001-715299.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/redspacecover0001-715214.JPG" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Sunday 2pm for c. 2.30 start, <A href="http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/">E:vent Gallery</a>, Bethnal Green, £2 for films and magazine.<br /><br />Short: 'Inter-Planetary Revolution' (1924)<br />Long: <span style="font-style:italic;">Aelita </span>(1924)<br />.................................<br />Short: 'Ajapeegel' by Jeremy Millar (2008)<br />Long: <span style="font-style:italic;">Red Planet Mars</span> (1952)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-18601131145438108472008-07-03T09:26:00.001-07:002008-12-10T18:01:00.620-08:00Kino Fist goes in Search of (socialist) Space<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVN1OqRSGVfpwSgk1nAfY7UnceyojdJMjYmgff0LbBr17lMm3WkrBJB420vowGvwdRB4dJgleMzNTHbWNP24sQOo07kIGykYpplSk7YCo3JG2dhYys5yh_4GgJYkiDJL9IWzRvxl3CnIU/s1600-h/136054315_2139a179da.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVN1OqRSGVfpwSgk1nAfY7UnceyojdJMjYmgff0LbBr17lMm3WkrBJB420vowGvwdRB4dJgleMzNTHbWNP24sQOo07kIGykYpplSk7YCo3JG2dhYys5yh_4GgJYkiDJL9IWzRvxl3CnIU/s320/136054315_2139a179da.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5218791556695755874" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">The next Kino Fist will be on the theme of <span style="font-weight: bold;">RED SPACE</span>, and will be held at 2pm, 20th July, in the <a href="http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/about/visiting">E:vent Gallery</a>, 96 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6PU. The films we will be showing are: as the cartoon, Khodataev & Kollektiv's 1924 short <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSE14cMsDtY&eurl=http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/search?q=interstellar+revolution">Interplanetary Revolution</a></span>, as the main feature, Iakov Protazanov's Martian Constructivist-Trotskyist blockbuster <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://blog.voyou.org/2007/08/12/101/#more-101">Aelita</a></span>, from the same year; and as our B-Movie, Harry Horner's magnificently ludicrous McCarthyite farrago <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.conelrad.com/conelrad100/c100.php?id_num=71">Red Planet Mars</a></span>.<br /><br />Anyone who wants to contribute anything from 500 to 6000 words on the general themes of science fiction, cinema and socialism is encouraged to fling it in our direction to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk, no later than 13th July. To get you started, here's China Mieville's <a href="http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist/full/">50 Fantasy and SF works every socialist should read.</a></div><br /><br />By the way, Kino Fist are looking to start screening short non-commercial films before the main feature. If you would like to send us something you've made (no dead animals) for potential screening (preferably 20 minutes or shorter and related to the general themes that KF are into), then send an email to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk.owen hatherleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06943115307136493045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-15346874280923267912008-06-08T16:13:00.000-07:002008-06-08T16:15:29.470-07:00also from the work issue<a href="http://themeasurestaken.blogspot.com/2008/06/work-and-non-work.html">Owen Hatherley</a> on ' Work and Non-Work: A Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy' and <a href="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2008/05/how-to-exploit-oneself-and-get-away.asp">Infinite Thought</a> on 'How to exploit oneself and get away with it'.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-62589384217770024642008-06-01T23:20:00.001-07:002008-12-10T18:01:01.227-08:00on blue collar<span style="font-weight:bold;">Carl Neville</span><br /><br />In this world...a man himself is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.<br /> <br />You're wrong there, Top. I seen another world.<br /><br />- Terrence Malick's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Thin Red Line</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEWybV8mG7I/AAAAAAAAAPo/lXSs-IYRnPk/s1600-h/bc.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEWybV8mG7I/AAAAAAAAAPo/lXSs-IYRnPk/s400/bc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207764726941359026" /></a><br /><br />Blue Collar's determined refusal of the mythic is evident from the very start. A series of shots of an assembly line set to Beefheart's 'Hard working man,' the title sequence plays with and undercuts the conventions of heroic representation, freeze framing and then allowing the image to curdle, holding on it a little too long as the track clanks emptily in the background. A reflective pause, just long enough to deliberately sour the iconicity. The whole film takes place in that gap. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEW1O-tQCWI/AAAAAAAAAPw/thBLuwwN9lU/s1600-h/bc1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEW1O-tQCWI/AAAAAAAAAPw/thBLuwwN9lU/s400/bc1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207767813079435618" /></a><br /><br />This is <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span>'s founding gesture, a pointed ambiguity, a refusal of the foreclosure of either sentiment or dogmatism. It's neither a hymn to the authenticity of the working man, nor a paean to the historic majesty of the industrial process. <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> wants you to understand that for all the power of solidarity and wit, all the pride and skill, all the tenacity, all the beauty that a sentimental eye of any disposition might find, there is a slow, empty pulse of panic behind it all that resolutely resists aestheticization. This integrity spills over into Schrader's mid-Atlantic style, spare but without longeurs, the camerawork and framing discrete and unfussy without sliding over into cinema verite, all melodrama skilfully sidestepped. While Springsteen and Mellencamp on the radio might address your fears and sell you the Capraesque romance of the small man against the mighty Corporation, the dream of escape, the open highway, 'Thunder road,' the only Promised Land that the working stiffs in <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> are going to case is the local Union Office and its ungaurded safe. No-one is going anywhere here and there is only one real concern, money, and the desperate need for more of it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I take home two-ten a week man, goddamn. I gotta pay for the lights, gas, clothes, food... every fuckin' thing, man. I'm left with about thirty bucks after all the fuckin' bills are paid. Gimme a break, will ya mister?</span><br /><br />There is no heroic individualism, no swaggering, no idea that the blue collar tough guys 'really live.' Pryor and Keitel have to lie to their wives to go out on a rare debauch and money worries run all the way through their attempts to get their rocks off, culminating in a despairing, early morning confessional on Smokey's couch. And it's precisely Smokey's superspade toughness, how badass he is, how prepared to go against the system, that has him killed.<br /><br />Blue Collar won't let you escape the ugly reality of borderline poverty's constant pressure, the bills that just won't add up, the needs that can never be met. Its most telling symbol comes with Keitel's daughter who has tried to make the braces that he can't afford to buy her even though he's working two jobs, out of wire. The constant pain of it, like a metal barb in your flesh. <br /><br />...<br /><br />In <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> the factory itself is largely an irrelevance, it isn't lingered over, there's no sense of its being exotic or exciting, fetishized. It's mundane, background. The director’s and the character's eyes are aligned and this is one of the ways in which Blue Collar manages to maintain fidelity, in locating us directly within the men's concerns rather than trying to appeal to any extra-diegetic or meta-critical level.<br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEW2dz3wDnI/AAAAAAAAAP4/GIbZ8j3oIz8/s1600-h/carfactory.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEW2dz3wDnI/AAAAAAAAAP4/GIbZ8j3oIz8/s400/carfactory.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207769167380352626" /></a><br /><br />The only moments of overt directorial commentary are in the title sequence, the montage of machinery drowning out Smokey's attempt to escape, a highly symbolic, impersonal murder in which it is the factory itself that is used as a weapon of destruction, and again when the film freeze-frames in the final shot, a deliberately composed socialist-realist tableaux, which might be entitled 'The Workers Divided' and over which Smokey's justifiably famous lines are reiterated:<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.</span><br /><br />...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> has two highly sympathetic black leads, unusual enough for a Hollywood movie (the bad guys are exclusively white), but also two roles in which the blackness is largely incidental. Again we're back in the characters' world. Bounded by their position as workers, there are no racial distinctions, none of the grueling attempts to address the 'issue' of race that characterizes more recent Liberal Hollywood. <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span>, made in 1978, is colour-blind in a way that is inconceivable in contemporary cinema. <br /><br />In the final scene of Keitel and Pryor hurling racial abuse at each other, the implication, along with the quote that overlays it ('they pit the young against old...') is that identity politics begins to appear once economic solidarity is undermined, that identity politics is at best a form of misrecognition, just one more potential weapon in the bosses arsenal. <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span>'s guiding assumption runs counter to most Hollywood: under the thin veneer of self-interest lies a deep, primal reserve of solidarity and understanding which must be actively broken up and partitioned. You thought you were both just workers but actually you're a nigger and he's a honky. The essence of the three-way relationship in <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> is solidarity, and if that solidarity dissolves it is not due to an irruption of the inevitable human venality à la Treasure of the Sierra Madre and a million others, or due to the countermanding claims of race and blood, it is concerted and imposed. The shock and tragedy of the final scene is the recognition that once the epithets start flying around, the bosses really have won. <br /><br />...<br /><br />The fatal flaw for almost all of Schrader's characters is belief not that moral action is possible in an irredeemably corrupt world, but in the myth of the heroic individual, so remorselessly recycled throughout American culture. It's a form of tragic moral naivete. The naivete is a failure to recognize the systemic nature of the problem, the necessity of others. Within the 'Night Workers' series, the concluding, tentative redemption that Schrader lifted from Bresson’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Pickpocket </span>sees the central character begin to realize his dependence on others, a move toward a recognition of his social character rather than the traditional atonement-as-redemption of standard Hollywood fare. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> that dependence is already there, the tragic naivete of the group in question resides not in their misunderstanding the nature of reality but in failing to understand its scale and power. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Blue Collar</span> there simply aren't enough of them.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-47873522645487285382008-06-01T23:19:00.003-07:002008-12-10T18:01:03.802-08:00Money, Militancy, Pedagogy: Godard 1967-72<span style="font-weight:bold;">Alberto Toscano</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVz7fEPsPI/AAAAAAAAAOI/PtCBtAWym5c/s1600-h/communists.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVz7fEPsPI/AAAAAAAAAOI/PtCBtAWym5c/s400/communists.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207696009912627442" /></a><br /><br />Whether we're dealing with the recent vogue for 'relational aesthetics', the curating of avowedly radical or committed exhibitions such Documenta 11 or the more ironic <span style="font-style:italic;">Communism </span>exhibition at the Project Gallery in Dublin, or the prominence of figures such as Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou in the pages of <span style="font-style:italic;">Art Press</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Art Forum</span>, it is evident that the entanglement between aesthetics and politics has been a major practical and theoretical preoccupation as of late, both in the artworld and in academia – indeed one could argue that thematising this link has been one of the principal ways in which galleries and museums have organised affiliations with centres and departments, and vice versa. One of the ways of approaching this phenomenon is through a narrative of ebb or even defeat. Take, for instance, the following declaration by the British philosopher and critic Peter Osborne, from the pages of the journal <span style="font-style:italic;">Radical Philosophy</span>: 'With the decline of independent Left political-intellectual cultures, the artworld remains, for all its intellectual foibles, the main place beyond the institutions of higher education where intellectual and political aspects of social and cultural practices can be debated, and where these debates can be transformed'. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV0UzQS0yI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/rLsOVy6iUaI/s1600-h/chinoise.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV0UzQS0yI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/rLsOVy6iUaI/s400/chinoise.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207696444828603170" /></a><br /><br />The two films discussed by Rancière and Badiou (<span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span>) in a sense book-end the period of the Dziga-Vertov group, that is to say the period of Godard's attempts to match his political commitment with forms of filmic production adequate to his sui generis Maoism. As I will suggest in the conclusion, this absence of any but a cursory discussion of Godard's experience of collective political and aesthetic militancy may be regarded in some sense as symptomatic of a certain absence of the political economy of cinema – of the question of <span style="font-style:italic;">production </span>– in Badiou and Rancière's 'subjectivist' treatments of politics and aesthetics. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV0zcsaLrI/AAAAAAAAAOY/qMOXiG-_2p4/s1600-h/althusser.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV0zcsaLrI/AAAAAAAAAOY/qMOXiG-_2p4/s400/althusser.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207696971348455090" /></a><br /><br />Rancière considers <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> at length in <span style="font-style:italic;">Film Fables</span>, revealing much both about his own understanding of the articulation of politics and aesthetics, and about the specificity of Godard's 'Maoist' moment. Affirming the very impurity that he elsewhere uses to unhinge Badiou's contorted modernism, Rancière, picking up on the film's key caption <span style="font-style:italic;">'Un film en train de se faire'</span> (A film in the making), identifies as the stakes of the film the combination of an exposition of the montage/production process and of a Marxism staging itself. Marxism in La Chinoise is both what is represented and the principle of representation. But where does Godard find his principle of representation? In Althusserianism, the key reference (or material for excerpting) in the film, not to mention the target of Rancière's brutal break of 1969 (<span style="font-style:italic;">La Leçon d'Althusser</span>) and the object of a mixed fidelity and polemic in Badiou himself. For Rancière, Godard's whole method may be located in a paragraph from <span style="font-style:italic;">Reading Capital</span>, and grasped as the experience in cinema of the difference, to use a constant Maoist distinction, between that cinema which divides one into two and the one that fuses two into one. The latter, according to Godard, plagues 'correct' Marxist cinema, which always unites words and images by subjecting the latter to the former. To put it otherwise, Marxism tends to feature as a voiceover that directs the consciousness and affects of the viewer into the proper stance vis-à-vis the images flowing on the screen. Althusserian simplicity is portrayed as the antidote to Marxist dogmatism. As Godard put it in a discussion in California in 1968: '<span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> had to be very simple, because they were very simple people trying very modestly to learn about simple things. So I had to be the simplest I could. It was the beginning of a new alphabet, so I didn’t even know how to speak'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV1Jf7B6iI/AAAAAAAAAOg/--mg13yl-QI/s1600-h/ps.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV1Jf7B6iI/AAAAAAAAAOg/--mg13yl-QI/s400/ps.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207697350172207650" /></a><br /><br />If Godard's films can be said to be political even when their subject-matter is not, it is because they undo this relationship. To stay with his more explicitly 'political' films we can think of the bizarre short-circuits in <span style="font-style:italic;">Le Petit Soldat</span>, where he constantly wrong-foots our expectations of the 'right' images: thematising the problem of torture by showing the torture of a right-wing militant by a sympathetically portrayed FLN, depicting him making raised fist salutes in memory of the Spanish Republicans, and so on. More explicitly, the <span style="font-style:italic;">pedagogic </span>work of <span style="font-style:italic;">Letter to Jane</span>, or Godard's earlier short-circuiting of political expectations in Far From Vietnam fit this bill. In effect, following Colin MacCabe's pioneering analyses in <span style="font-style:italic;">Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics</span>, we could go further and track the various manners in which Godard's didactic anti-didacticism constantly frustrates that organisation of the image which would allow the overlay and imposition of meaning from director/producer to viewer/audience. One of the key aspects of Godard's films, in this respect, is the suspension of the illusion of knowledge, of 'oversight' provided to the viewer by the alignment of the perspectives of the camera, the spectator and the characters, a critical misalignment that takes place by refusing, <span style="font-style:italic;">within the image</span>, some of the key technical tropes that make possible a totalising organisation – the pan where the camera pivots on its axis, the complementarity of shot and reverse-shot. Thus, beyond the difficulty of identifying political content (as in <span style="font-style:italic;">Le Petit Soldat</span>) the requirement of the viewer-as-participant is induced by various ways of hindering the <span style="font-style:italic;">formal </span>unity that would trigger a comforting, totalising knowledge. In <span style="font-style:italic;">Letter to Jane</span>, we can see how these two analyses (at the level of form and of content) are conjoined. Likewise, with Godard's own self-criticisms – especially in his work with Miéville on <span style="font-style:italic;">Ici et allieurs</span>, the principle will be similar: to undermine the fusion of the right image with the right sound under the aegis of a non-filmic transcendent idea. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV1edDDotI/AAAAAAAAAOo/kwPm2hV5mlQ/s1600-h/carabiniers.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV1edDDotI/AAAAAAAAAOo/kwPm2hV5mlQ/s400/carabiniers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207697710177821394" /></a><br /><br /><br />In Rancière's terms, when the word 'lets you see' you can no longer understand, and when the image allows you to understand, you can no longer see. This two-in-one can be summarised for Rancière under the principle of <span style="font-style:italic;">metaphor</span>, whereby an abstract idea is incarnated in a concrete image, and a concrete image can be identified by the abstract 'voiceover'. In discussing Godard – despite having put him in the register of the very Althusserianism he famously repudiated (perhaps thereby showing a surreptitious fidelity) – Rancière states one of the key principles of his understanding of the convergent work of politics and aesthetics: <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">This is the common work of art and politics: to interrupt the scrolling, the ceaseless substitution of words that make you see and images that speak, imposing belief as the music of the word. The One of the representational magma must be divided into Two: to separate words and images, to let words be understood in their strangeness, and images seen in their stupefaction. <br /></span><br />Hence the protocol of separation that governs <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span>, which involves cutting off political discourse into the incongruous domain of the bourgeois flat in Paris: the aim is to produce an artistic understanding of political speech (not a suture of politics and aesthetics, but a critical-didactic dialectic, one could say). As Rancière puts it: 'The work of art is to separate, to transform the continuum of the sense-image into a series of fragments, of postcards, of lessons'. Think of the protocol of separation and estrangement in <span style="font-style:italic;">Les Carabiniers</span>, where the brutality of war is conveyed through the conjunction of written placards (poems, quotations, declarations); farcically simplistic representations of battle; and the presence of a whole archive of postcards, of plundered territories as mere images, in one of the film’s most effective scenes. In <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> it is dialectical comparison or dissociation of images and sounds which for Rancière constitutes Godard's unsparing artistic work on politics. (We could think of how this disjunction in politics eventually becomes a disjunction from politics, as if Godard loses all hope of a critical politics that would also be a critical practice of the image – or we could recall the brutal Situationist critique of le plus con de pro-chinois suisses position would be that he was on the wrong track to begin with.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV2KVPloPI/AAAAAAAAAOw/yFX14HBvyvQ/s1600-h/ltj.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV2KVPloPI/AAAAAAAAAOw/yFX14HBvyvQ/s400/ltj.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207698463997141234" /></a><br /><br />Godard's own estimation of his Dziga Vertov group is uncannily close to the very framework and terminology employed by Rancière. As he and Gorin remark about <span style="font-style:italic;">Letter to Jane</span>: 'This is an aesthetic, this is a movie dealing with aesthetics understood as a category of politics. We prefer to speak of aesthetic and no longer of politics. We are only interested in knowing about a kind of expression. If I were in Vietnam, looking at a dead Vietnamese child, I would have exactly the same expression, as would Nixon or John Wayne...The term "proletarian revolution" in our country has become so misused that we prefer to say we are interested in aesthetics'. <br /><br />Badiou turns to Godard's political aesthetics in an article entitled 'The End of a Beginning', recently published in <span style="font-style:italic;">L'art du cinéma</span>. Like Rancière, he seems to skate over the Dziga Vertov works, strangely concurring with the consensus whereby in 68-72, Godard entirely subordinates his film to political imperatives, suturing his art to his politics. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV2ZvDJIQI/AAAAAAAAAO4/uIltyqIxABU/s1600-h/tvb.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV2ZvDJIQI/AAAAAAAAAO4/uIltyqIxABU/s400/tvb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207698728622301442" /></a><br /><br />The structuring category in Badiou's treatment of the film is that of <span style="font-style:italic;">periodisation </span>(hence the title of Badiou's article 'The End of a Beginning'). Badiou reads <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span> as an attempt to make the gauchiste or Maoist 'real' of French visible in the midst of a situation of severe reaction and political closure (this is the sense in which he reads the title as a reference to the Chinese sayings in times of crisis: 'the situation is excellent'). If <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> presented a filmic dialectic of political utterances and convictions, <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout Va Bien</span> tries to make class struggle visible (in the arrangement of the factory, amusingly repeated apolitically in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Life Aquatic</span>, as well as in the long pan at the end dealing with the intervention/expropriation in the supermarket, which as Badiou wistfully notes, repeated one of his own group’s actions). The film, for Badiou, aside from the historical referents of <span style="font-style:italic;">gauchisme </span>stages the juxtaposition between the claims about objectivity (by the integrationist rhetoric of the boss and the PCF/CGT representatives) and a subjective possibility embodied in the workers' revolt. According to Badiou, Godard's focus is the issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">conversion</span>, and one of the questions we may raise is whether there really is attention to the <span style="font-style:italic;">cinematic </span>tools employed for this didactic/anti-didactic exercise. <br /><br />The key question dealt with by <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span> for Badiou concerns the link between the vicissitudes of the couple, the politics of aesthetics (cinema, TV) and the aesthetics of politics (the presentation of revolutionary politics), and the political situation in France. The question that Badiou sees the film posing are subjective: what does the completed political beginning allow by way of subjective transformation? Note the question of the <span style="font-style:italic;">education </span>of the characters. 'The film's conclusion regards the fundamental historicity of all things, the division of all that is, and therefore the resource in concrete possibilities of every experience, in particular that of the couple'. Badiou too is attentive to the formal dimension, which, alongside Rancière, he sees in the Brechtian dimension of Godard's work (Brecht is an explicit reference throughout Godard's work.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV24VWlPcI/AAAAAAAAAPA/fTXVMwX5LsE/s1600-h/fonda.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV24VWlPcI/AAAAAAAAAPA/fTXVMwX5LsE/s400/fonda.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207699254300458434" /></a><br /><br />Badiou cites seven elements as structuring the film: 1. Figural minimalism (the typological reduction, in the staging, of the action to a few representatives and key settings); 2. Typical gestures (running, fighting, etc. – following burlesque – already a principle of <span style="font-style:italic;">Les Carabiniers</span>, but also one could argue of <span style="font-style:italic;">Breathless</span>, where it is linked to advertising and spectacular stereotypes); 3. The monologue in front of the camera; 4. Documentary fragments linking typology to historical complexity; 5. Exteriors, indicating the outside; 6. symbolism of colours, indicated also by Rancière; 7. Again, dialectics, great symmetries: strikes and work, the office of the boss and his sequestering, the factory and the filming of adverts. We might wonder whether Badiou doesn't miss other aspects of the dialectic – for instance the significance of cheque signing at the beginning (to which we'll return) and the disjunctive placements of Montand and Fonda in the factory (as well as the background story regarding the choice of actors for those roles, to exacerbate a sense of struggle). This dialectic of cinema and politics (see <span style="font-style:italic;">Letter to Jane</span>) will only be resolved by a (re)turn into the image and its analysis. <span style="font-style:italic;">Pedagogy </span>is again at stake – since the film's theme is viewed as re-education, as the transformation of life, indirectly, by struggles. For Badiou, Fonda is the heroine because she draws from the declaration of the workers' novelty in situation the possibility of her own novelty in love. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV3GcOtMrI/AAAAAAAAAPI/JWVLhwb-a34/s1600-h/money.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV3GcOtMrI/AAAAAAAAAPI/JWVLhwb-a34/s400/money.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207699496664642226" /></a><br /><br />Politically, both at the level of the entanglement of politics and aesthetics, and in terms of the concern with political pedagogy, Badiou and Rancière seem rather unconcerned by the prevalence of the theme of <span style="font-style:italic;">money </span>in all of Godard's films, and those of the Dziga Vertov period in particular. Godard had been employed by Fox's publicity department in Paris for a spell and was always insistent about the centrality of currency to cinema – this is evident in his relationship to the star-system (think of the casting of Brigitte Bardot in <span style="font-style:italic;">Contempt</span>) and also comes to the fore in his tactical and manipulative relation to film funding – from using his notoriety to garner commissions for the Dziga Vertov films from European broadcasters that would then refuse to show them, to putting 32 'political directors' from disparate left-wing factions on the payroll of his Marxist-Leninist Western <span style="font-style:italic;">Vent d'Est</span>. The opening sequence of <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span>, showing the cheque-signing for the various contributors to the film, especially Fonda and Montand, is emblematic in this regard.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV3U1a7bNI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/2e4f-5mrCNo/s1600-h/cheque.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV3U1a7bNI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/2e4f-5mrCNo/s400/cheque.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207699743944961234" /></a><br /><br />It is worth noting that Godard was emphatic in this period, both in his programmatic statements and his practice, about the primacy of the process of production over the moments of distribution and consumption in what he called the making of films politically (as opposed to the making of political films). Production should here be understood in a number of ways – in the sense of the function of the 'producer'; in terms of the mode and relations of production dominating the filming itself (the role of the collective in the Dziga Vertov group for instance); but also in terms of technique and technology, as when Godard powerfully argues that ideological relations are already embedded in the material apparatuses of film, the editing table for instance. (Not that Godard ignores the link between production and distribution, such as when the voiceover of <span style="font-style:italic;">British Sounds</span> famously quips: 'If a million prints are made of a Marxist-Leninist film, it becomes Gone with the Wind'.) A further and very significant sense in which production is at stake for Godard is the extent to which film is capable of entering, to put it with Marx, the 'hidden abode of production', a problem Godard will encounter in different ways in <span style="font-style:italic;">British Sounds</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Passion </span>and <span style="font-style:italic;">Sauve qui peut (la vie)</span>. In this regard, Godard's bitter 1973 letter to Truffaut, discussed by Richard Brody in the last issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">The New Yorker</span>, is of interest. In that letter he mentions a film, tellingly called <span style="font-style:italic;">A Simple Film</span> that would be the counter to Truffaut's <span style="font-style:italic;">Day for Night</span>, a film that Godard regarded as a capitulation to a degraded Hollywood. Godard's film (which was never made) would be about<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The other people who make movies, and how those 'others' do it. How your intern dials the phone, how the guy from Éclair carries bags, how the old man from Publidécor paints the ass [in the ad] for [Last] Tango [on a billboard] and each time, we compare the sound and the image… the sexual output of the old man from Publidécor and that of Brando. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV30RHiKgI/AAAAAAAAAPY/ioQ-Z2RzLpU/s1600-h/bugsy.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV30RHiKgI/AAAAAAAAAPY/ioQ-Z2RzLpU/s400/bugsy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207700283955751426" /></a><br /><br />Among the image's conditions of production, it is the relationship with money that particularly preoccupies Godard. As Colin MacCabe recounts, in the late 1970s Godard planned a film called <span style="font-style:italic;">The Story</span>, with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, a film about the tortured production of another film, on the mobster Bugsy Siegel, entitled <span style="font-style:italic;">Bugsy </span>(which of course will later be made by Warren Beatty). In the script for this film about a film that is not made, which itself will never reach production, we find the following line, spoken by Bugsy's imaginary producer: 'Let the images flow faster than the money does.' As MacCabe notes, contrary to the producer in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Story</span>, who seeks to hide the 'financial determination' of images, 'Godard's project is the direct reverse – to slow down the images until the money appears and the phantasy displays its very constitution’. For MacCabe, Godard's initial images of money – in particular the juxtaposition of money as normalising social function to criminal money in <span style="font-style:italic;">Breathless </span>– will give way to a concern with 'the money in the image', a problem that as MacCabe notes is primarily mediated in Godard by the image of women and the economy of looks this image depends on ('the problem of the look is inseparable from money'). The Dziga Vertov films, on this account, despite their purported 'unwatchable' character, permitted Godard to formulate with greater precision the strategies for breaking with the manner in which the order of money dictates the order of the image, or better, to try and break with 'the order which crystallizes in a set of money-relations'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV4JmjAfII/AAAAAAAAAPg/XPbaE_BbTaY/s1600-h/ldv.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEV4JmjAfII/AAAAAAAAAPg/XPbaE_BbTaY/s400/ldv.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207700650485382274" /></a><br /><br />This problem is both financial and formal. Against the classical alignment of the look of the characters, the look of the camera and the look of the spectator (to which we can add the crucial alignment of the sound) Godard and Gorin's films seem to oppose a practice of dislocation, with more or less overt Brechtian resonances. To show the money in the image, to make possible the concrete audio-visual, to enable the concrete audio-visual analysis of concrete audio-visual conditions this dislocation is crucial. For film to become a political tool – the aim of the Dziga Vertov group – it is thus necessary to suspend its mere instrumentalisation, its aesthetic and political <span style="font-style:italic;">alignment </span>(this is evident in Godard's contribution to the Chris Marker-organised collective film <span style="font-style:italic;">Far From Vietnam</span>, as well as in his dispute with the Maoist filmmaker Marin Karmitz). The pedagogical drive of the films of the <span style="font-style:italic;">années </span><span style="font-style:italic;">Mao </span>interestingly reflects the dispute between Badiou and Rancière. For Godard <span style="font-style:italic;">both </span>employs a didactic-exemplary mode, as affirmed by Badiou with respect to the typologies of <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span>, and seeks to short-circuit the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics by slowing down, dislocating and disjoining images. But crucially, it is his attention to cinema's conditions of production – especially the role of money in the image – which allow him, while sharing Badiou and Rancière's egalitarian politics, to work through the enormous difficulties that beset the production of egalitarian images and image-relations, whether exemplary or critical, emblematic or dissensual. In this perspective, political prescription and aesthetic critique can only be attained or prepared by a <span style="font-style:italic;">method of detour</span>, a way of making films politically which, while not necessarily generating political films, will permit a political reflection on the aesthetics – the visibility, audibility and legibility – of politics. As in <span style="font-style:italic;">Letter to Jane</span>, this involves a certain subjective stance (not speaking in another's name) and also a certain claim about the situated character of political and aesthetic interventions (how does <span style="font-style:italic;">Tout va bien</span> go to Vietnam by staying in France – a question Godard and Miéville will pose about Palestine in <span style="font-style:italic;">Ici et ailleurs</span>). This is not a prescriptive but a preparatory work of art on politics, whose aim, as Godard and Gorin argue, is to explore the aesthetic preconditions for the following conundrum: 'How can new political questions be asked?'Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-25940322637460280952008-06-01T23:19:00.001-07:002008-12-10T18:01:04.890-08:00This Woman's Work: Chantal Akerman’s philosophy of work in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles<span style="font-weight:bold;">Dave McDougall</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqMqkwMPI/AAAAAAAAANg/PB60yotqMXs/s1600-h/godard.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqMqkwMPI/AAAAAAAAANg/PB60yotqMXs/s400/godard.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207685309943263474" /></a><br /><br />'Work,' for the Jean-Luc Godard of the late 1960s and early '70s, is a necessary component of revolutionary struggle, a value because it is the necessary response to jobs that need doing. In <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span>, Juliet Berto's character espouses a similar ideal, doing dishes because the dishes need to be done. This is both a revolutionary metaphor and a statement of fact about work’s necessity (for JLG, revolution is one of the necessities that must be addressed). Work, for Godard as for Mao, is a force that must be harnessed in order to achieve revolutionary progress, but neither escapes abstract concepts or struggles with the human cost of work. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqg73P2eI/AAAAAAAAANo/6lp7t0Olfi0/s1600-h/carabiners.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqg73P2eI/AAAAAAAAANo/6lp7t0Olfi0/s400/carabiners.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207685658181622242" /></a><br /><br />The failure of the (nearly) revolutionary moment of May 1968 and its successors encouraged a belief amongst European intellectuals of the left in the imminence of another (successful) revolution. At the end of this fast-dissipating revolutionary hope lies another set of tasks in need of work: the tasks of liberatory reformation of a society no longer under threat of revolution. Even Godard, by 1972 abandoning the Dziga Vertov Group's particular brand of cinematic militancy, recognizes the need for a critical reevaluation of values and methods from a revolutionary perspective. This broader reevaluation of values and goals across the European left included a shift toward concrete marginal action against societal oppression. Some subgroups of European society are now emphasized in a platform of marginal reformism that approaches their struggles as disparate rather than united. The liberation of women, the end of racism, and other causes are now separated from class status and made independent. This end to solidarity is both the failure and success of the First World left. By fracturing their causes, concrete marginal action is made possible – in a reformist way – through the methods of capitalism and representative 'democracy.' The side effect of this fracturing is a loss of the possibility of unified actions or indeed any form of revolution, leaving individual interest groups to fight their own battles and also leaving individuals free from conceptually unified class interests. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqrZ7wvFI/AAAAAAAAANw/EL5RvR0UH6w/s1600-h/jd.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVqrZ7wvFI/AAAAAAAAANw/EL5RvR0UH6w/s400/jd.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207685838052310098" /></a><br /><br />Chantal Akerman's <span style="font-style:italic;">Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles</span> is a critical essay on the corrosive nature of 'work' – specifically, the invisible work performed by women. J. Hoberman once described this 200-minute-long film as an extended version of the first scene of a Hitchcock film, in that it takes Hitchcock's distilled sense of foreboding and stretches it back to something resembling real time. One of the radical elements of this representational mode is the way it restores work to its place as work. Work occupies time, demands effort and concentration and is oppressive precisely because it is necessary. Akerman's protagonist does most of her work in silence and isolation – which are also forms of anonymity. The film exposes her anonymous, invisible work and makes it an unmissable, all-consuming experience for the viewer – as it is for the character herself. For Akerman, 'work' is quotidian rather than abstract and theoretical. Work exists in-the-world. Invisible (female) work is rendered visible by observing the painstaking necessities of process. Tasks like peeling potatoes, washing dishes or vacuuming are presented in something approximating real time. This emphasis on process is contrasted with the dramatic elision of Akerman's other subject: the equation of sex, from a feminine perspective, with work. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVrB5GgTCI/AAAAAAAAAN4/d5spQWE-SxA/s1600-h/housework.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVrB5GgTCI/AAAAAAAAAN4/d5spQWE-SxA/s400/housework.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207686224375991330" /></a><br /><br />Sex in the film is a form of work and an act of exchange that happens in even further secret than the 'woman's work' that makes up the rest of the film. Akerman doesn't complete this connection until she has fully opened up her examination of housework, but a few hints are scattered in the film. An early moment of closed doors and exchanged bills hints at prostitution; a conversation with her son shows his understanding of the difficult place of the female body in the sex act. At another moment, Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) spends just a bit too long straightening her bedsheets as her grip on performing her household duties starts to slip. The final revelation of the relationship between sex and work quickly turns into a violent revolt, with a shocking quickness that expresses the stifled power of the female. This last moment is a moment of individual revolt with no explicit claims to collectivity, but one could easily see a female-class consciousness develop from the same impulses. It's related to the radical female class consciousness of Valerie Solanas's <span style="font-style:italic;">S.C.U.M. Manifesto</span>: 'Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time' (In 1976, the year after filming <span style="font-style:italic;">Jeanne Dielman</span>, Seyrig directed her second of 3 radical feminist films, an adaptation of Solanas' book written by Solanas herself). This suspicion that sex is on some level 'non-creative' work for the female is the link between Akerman's feminist readings of sex and of work. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVraX9vN-I/AAAAAAAAAOA/wXdXVRoRR3M/s1600-h/dishes.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVraX9vN-I/AAAAAAAAAOA/wXdXVRoRR3M/s400/dishes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207686644977580002" /></a><br /><br />Akerman's film uses two major conceptual frameworks for 'work' that contrast with the cusp-of-'68, Maoism-inflected works of Jean-Luc Godard. First, the film opposes the Godardian/Maoist idea of work as a means to class power, instead recognizing the fact of work as an impingement on leisure and thus a counterrevolutionary action (a strand of thought more prevalent in strains of anti-work anarchism than class struggle communism). Both the Godardian position and the concept implicit in Akerman attempt to undermine 'work' as it is currently constituted, but they start from different definitions of that constitution. Akerman's 'liberationist' idea holds a more inclusive definition of 'work' as the activities necessary for life in the physical world, moving beyond the factory to including the home (and even the bedroom). The second major reevaluation of work in <span style="font-style:italic;">Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles</span> combines the leisure-oriented wing of leftist thought to the particularly feminist dissection of the nature of work that Akerman presents. Work – again in contrast to Maoist glorifications thereof as components of the revolutionary struggle – is very frequently a purely maintenance activity, a form of 'non-productive' work that produces itself as it produces its own negation. Washing dishes and cooking are both necessary and 'non-productive' work in this sense. Akerman's broader conception of 'work' moves work away from the productive/revolutionary/abstract concept and toward an understanding of work as a necessary component of being in the world. Akerman’s more inclusive definition of work reframes our philosophical understanding of 'work' – and thus also of revolutionary liberation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-73444624064951483622008-06-01T23:17:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:01:06.306-08:00In Front of the Camera, Behind the Commodity Fetish: Profaning the Cult of Work<span style="font-weight:bold;">Boris Knezevic</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVYTRT1IAI/AAAAAAAAAMo/E07COUap_IE/s1600-h/nadja.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVYTRT1IAI/AAAAAAAAAMo/E07COUap_IE/s400/nadja.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207665632211181570" /></a><br /><br />There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself – <span style="font-style:italic;">is not earned by work</span>.<br /> -Andre Breton, <span style="font-style:italic;">Nadja</span><br /><br />Slavoj Žižek provides perhaps the most incisive critique of the depiction of work in cinema:<br /><br /><i>In today’s ideological perception, work itself (manual labour as opposed to 'symbolic' activity), not sex, becomes the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition which goes back to Wagner's Rheingold and Lang's <span ;style="font-style:italic;">Metropolis</span>, the tradition in which the working process takes place underground, in dark caves, culminates today in the 'invisibility' of the millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories.</i><br /><br />This invisibility, through which the fetishism of commodities is articulated, is already what Chaplin hints at comically in <span style="font-style:italic;">Modern Times</span>, perhaps one of the earliest film depictions of a capitalist technological dystopia. In one famous scene, Chaplin's Little Tramp, desperately struggling to keep up with the increasing speed of the assembly line by screwing in more and more bolts (as the factory boss instructs a machinist over a then-futuristic video screen intercom to 'speed her up'), is literally swallowed by the machinery: trapped in a steel jungle of cogs and gears, the worker becomes part of the machine. (Not to mention the 'Bellows feeding machine' for which he is used as a test subject) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVYlEvrIjI/AAAAAAAAAMw/dCKEG2wbzRA/s1600-h/cc.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVYlEvrIjI/AAAAAAAAAMw/dCKEG2wbzRA/s400/cc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207665938075951666" /></a><br /><br />Even more to the point, when the Little Tramp takes a break for lunch, his hands and arms spasmodically repeat the activity he has been performing on the assembly line, holding imaginary spanners and screwing in imaginary bolts. Doesn’t this abstract mechanization of the human being already hint at the fetishized product of labour, as the human worker is mysteriously submerged, made 'invisible' (as human) in the process of being turned into just another machine attached to the production line? As Agamben points out in a recent essay ('In Praise of Profanation'), 'If the apparatuses of the capitalist cult are so effective, it is not so much because they act on primary behaviours, but because they act on pure means, that is, behaviours that have been separated from themselves and thus detached from any relationship to an end.'<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVY5reEDnI/AAAAAAAAAM4/bxPlHmXtGII/s1600-h/sc.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVY5reEDnI/AAAAAAAAAM4/bxPlHmXtGII/s400/sc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207666292068454002" /></a><br /><br />If in the early days of Hollywood (and of film) it was still possible to depict the production process in all its misery, it is because the industrialization of labour, and the ideological mystery-making machinery of global capitalism, was itself less sophisticated, its reach further from total. As the production process disappears from the view of consumers in the West, its disappearance is 'recorded' on film, indexed by its absence. What is even more sinister here is the 'equation of labour with crime' as Žižek further elaborates:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The only points in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity are when the action hero penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labour (distilling and packaging drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York).</span><br /><br />When the production process does appear in contemporary films, it is stripped of all political meaning, reduced to background or setting, without commentary, or as in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Machinist</span>, pictured through the eyes of a paranoid delusional factory worker wracked by guilt over a hit-and-run car accident. In another visionary precursor to this cinematic mapping of ideology, Chaplin's Little Tramp in <span style="font-style:italic;">Modern Times</span> is arrested and jailed after accidentally participating in a workers’ riot and being mistaken for the 'leader'. When he is subsequently offered release for good behaviour (ironically and foolishly performing his duty as a citizen by successfully foiling a prison break), he asks 'Can’t I stay a little longer? I’m so happy here!'<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZHbicODI/AAAAAAAAANA/SNjH339xIcI/s1600-h/riot.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZHbicODI/AAAAAAAAANA/SNjH339xIcI/s400/riot.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207666528310016050" /></a><br /><br />This is no laughing matter – stuff like this actually happens. As a matter of fact it happened just last year in Franklin County, Ohio, USA when a 62-year-old man robbed a bank and then proceeded to hand the cash to a security guard saying 'Here, be a hero today,' then waited for the police to arrive. His purported aim: to land in prison until the age of sixty-six when Social Security kicks in – on account of financial trouble and age discrimination in the employment market. The judge, on hearing his plea (case of Ohio v Bowers), accepted Bowers' story and gave him three years in prison as a 'birthday present'. And we’re not even talking depression-era America, merely post-September 11 recession-era.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZW15pIOI/AAAAAAAAANI/mqBBWjZmpWQ/s1600-h/marinetti.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZW15pIOI/AAAAAAAAANI/mqBBWjZmpWQ/s400/marinetti.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207666793084690658" /></a><br /><br />Work in capitalist society is thus on one hand concealed/criminalized, while on the other idolized in a 'cult of work'. The corporatist dream of the Futurists, who were known for fascist sympathies in Mussolini’s Italy, as expressed in a 1913 pamphlet by one of the movement's key figures, Filippo Marinetti, sounds like something straight out of Naomi Klein's 'shock doctrine' (and this from an artist, not an economist, decades before Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys): 'We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers...We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind…We will sing of great crowds excited by 'work.'' Marinetti spoke of a new age of 'negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes’ that would 'ridicule ... the "holy green silence" and the ineffable landscape' – an age enamoured of 'the passion, art, and idealism of Business.'<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZnRyJ1TI/AAAAAAAAANQ/KHldY3IDDIc/s1600-h/laziness.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVZnRyJ1TI/AAAAAAAAANQ/KHldY3IDDIc/s400/laziness.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207667075447379250" /></a><br /><br />This double movement of mystification/glorification is precisely the site of the fetish – the glorification of 'work' through a puritan work ethic is the ideological counterpart of the fetishism of commodities, concealing from immediate awareness what we nevertheless 'know' is there: the production process, surplus value. Given Breton's Communist sympathies, we may then interpret his remark (at the top) as referring to 'work' in this specifically capitalist sense – as the activity of wage-labourers who produce surplus value for the owners of capital and whose labour is mystically concealed by the commodity produced. Similarly, when artist Mladen Stilinovic speaks of laziness, this does not mean simply 'doing absolutely nothing', but rather exempting oneself from the system of commodities: 'virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected. Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something…Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art...There is no art without laziness.' In the capitalist economy, leisure is not opposed to work, for it is still within the system of production/consumption. What is not permissible is idleness, laziness, non-consumption.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVeHERtzjI/AAAAAAAAANY/YE1aawbge_g/s1600-h/staring.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVeHERtzjI/AAAAAAAAANY/YE1aawbge_g/s400/staring.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207672019623988786" /></a><br /><br />The answer to the fascist/corporatist creed is therefore not one of simple opposition, but rather to profane the cult of work and debunk the mystery of the commodity. Agamben concludes with an analysis of the evolution of modern pornography as a realization of the capitalist dream of 'producing an unprofanable': 'in the very act of executing their most intimate caresses, porn stars now look resolutely into the camera, showing that they are more interested in the spectator than in their partners...Into the Marxian opposition between the use-value and exchange-value, exhibition-value introduces a third term, which cannot be reduced to the first two.' The 'apparatus of pornography', with its 'solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic image', in a sense freezes the profanatory, liberating potential of a sexuality freed from immediate ends. The profane, at first liberated by the 'promise of a new use', once captured by an apparatus of power (apparatus of pornography as industry), is 'diverted from its possible use'. This unprofanable profane can be viewed as an articulation of a process of deterritorialization-reterritorialization – having freed sexuality from 'immediate ends' through pornography, capital immediately reinscribes it with a purpose through the process of consumption. <br /><br />'The profanation of the unprofanable,' Agamben concludes, 'is the political task of the coming generation.' Profanation here means not merely to desecrate, but more broadly to 'return something to free use', to de-instrumentalize. Given his emphasis on play as an 'organ of profanation' and his lamenting of its decline in the modern world, is this not precisely where Chaplin provides an instructive model? Isn't his 'play' on the similarity between his appearance and Hitler's in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Great Dictator</span>, for instance, precisely an act of profaning, of returning to free use, say, the toothbrush moustache? And isn’t profanation ultimately the answer to the commodity fetish, especially given the religious origin of the latter term in Marx's usage? The political task is to desecrate, debunk the cult of the commodity, of work, through play, in order to reclaim the surplus value of possible uses subtracted from the image by its inscription in the system of production and consumption.<br /><br />References<br />Agamben, Profanations (2007)<br />Breton, Nadja (1999)<br />Stilinovic in Documenta Magazine 2007, no. 2, Life!<br />Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Misuse of a Notion (2002)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-73103107932806600742008-06-01T22:54:00.000-07:002008-12-10T18:01:06.471-08:00kino fist: work<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVX7-crjEI/AAAAAAAAAMg/XT95eg0BBG8/s1600-h/sdb.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6mGHoKxDQK8/SEVX7-crjEI/AAAAAAAAAMg/XT95eg0BBG8/s400/sdb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5207665232011037762" /></a><br />From the latest Kino Fist magazine.<br /><br /><a href="http://fangrrrl.blogspot.com/2008/06/cattle-pens.html">Emmy Hennings</a> on Franju's <i>Le Sang de bêtes</i> (Blood of the beasts)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2039096198679139361.post-23106055240242452062008-05-05T04:42:00.001-07:002008-05-05T09:41:20.996-07:00kino fist: work<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/british_sounds-752756.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/uploaded_images/british_sounds-752747.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><i>Everything they do, the way they pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the blacks against the whites, is meant to keep us in our place.</i><br /><br />The next <span style="font-weight:bold;">Kino Fist</span> will take place on Sunday 1st June at 2pm at <a href="http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk/about/visiting">E:vent Gallery</a>, 96 Teesdale Street, E2 6PU.<br /><br />We will be screening Godard's 1969 'British Sounds', made for but ultimately banned by London Weekend Television (see <a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/05/37/british_sounds.html">here</a> for discussion), followed by Schrader's 1978 'Blue Collar' (see <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007023.html">Mark</a> on this from a while back).<br /><br />If you would like to contribute something on the theme of either (or both) of these films, or on the theme of work and cinema more broadly, please send illustrations, photos and texts to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk by May 20.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3