kino fist

Kino Fist Salvagepunk Special!

2009-11-26T10:01:00.000-08:00

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 Hotshoe Gallery in Farringdon. It will feature two films of a rag & bone variety:

Richard Lester, The Bedsitting Room (1969)

Peter Sykes, Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973)

Introduction by Evan Calder Williams

Date: Monday 30th November 2009

Time: 7.00pm

Place: Hotshoe Gallery, 29-31 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8SW.

Here are posts by me on Steptoe and Son and Evan on The Bedsitting Room, just in case.

A Personal Apocalypse

2008-10-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

Mark Hancock

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

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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:

"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"

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.

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.

Threads

2008-10-06T18:25:00.001-07:00

Carl Neville

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.

Threads as Docudrama.

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.

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

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.

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.

Threads as cold medium.

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.

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.

Before and after the blast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Threads as horror

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.

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.

After the Earthquake But Before the War

2008-10-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

By Feathers Knox

It was the anniversary.

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.

A client came online.

“Hi, I’d like a tour.”

Motma climbed to his feet and strapped on the camera.

“Prefs?”

“Crushed bodies, poisoned aquifers, that sort of thing.”

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.

“Slower, please.”

Last year’s earthquake had never been cleaned up.

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.

“Wow,” said the client.

“So this was Denver,” said Motma. He was walking downhill now, towards the old downtown. It looked like piles of chunky snow.

“Are we going to a grave site?”

“Yes.”

Motma turned left at what he guessed had been Broadway.

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.

Motma could hear the client’s breath become heavier, quicker as he came to the northern edge of the pit.

“Shall I walk around it?”

“Yes… but slowly!”

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.

“Whoah, that is sweet,” said the client.

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.

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.

* * *

“You left more porn on the desktop.”

Motma was silent. It was hard to remember she used his computer.

“Did you hear me?”

He heard her. He always heard her. He just never did anything about it.

"Motma, you know I care for you…"

The conversations always began like this. She even sat across from him at the table, like last time.

“…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?”

“I looked for a job on Craigslist and did some videos.”

“And you watched porn!”

“Maybe one or two clips.”

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.

“Motma owes: $72,000.”

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.

“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.”

She came back in the room.

“You’re 27. Do something with your life or I am leaving you.”

The earthquake hit a day later.

* * *

The client had asked for a second tour after getting a glass of water.

“More skulls?” asked Motma.

“No. I’d rather see one of the office buildings up close. Can you show me the Wells Fargo Building?”

“Sure.”

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.

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.

The client was already panting as the Fargo’s pink stones came into view.

“Oh wow!”

Motma was careful to scan the entire corpse of the tower as he approached.

“Can I see into the windows? Are any of the offices intact?”

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.

“Cool!”

The client was panting harder. The lube made a soft sucking sound in the background.

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:

• buy bread
• call mom
• fire brad

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.

“Can you lift the woman’s arm?” asked the client, nearly breathless.

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.

“Too stiff.”

“How about her head?”

Things were shifting in the background. The client was close.

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.

"Ohhhhhh!" said the client. The sucking sound in the background had increased in pace, and then stopped.

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.

And this was before the war started.

Bio: Feathers Knox works in the service industry in a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana.

Anticipatory, Ordinary Apocalypse

2008-10-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

Michael Sayeau

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 doesn't 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.

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 San Francisco Chronicle in January 2002, but the idea soon after spread rapidly out to blanket the cultural and media spheres.

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.

You are probably most familiar with the trope from its appearance on the show 24, 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.

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.

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 Children of Men (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 irreversible fade to black.

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?

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.

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 [Erfahrung] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [Erlebnis]." 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.

Children of Men 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…

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.

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 The Arcades Project, “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is 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.

Living Vicariously in Uncanny Valley.

2008-10-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

Colin Ledwith

‘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)

The ‘uncanny’, which is the English approximation of the German word unheimlich, 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’ 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)

In his seminal essay on the subject of the uncanny, Freud uses Ernst Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (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 Der Sandmann 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Peanuts. 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 Is This Guilt In You Too (the study of a car in a field), 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.

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.

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 How to make a Refugee. 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 Camera Lucida, 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)

Today, this process of theoretical deconstruction has become cultural lyricism. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 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.

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.

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)

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.

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 The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In 2006 a short CGI movie entitled Elephants Dream 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.

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 28 Days Later, is significant because the attempt to capture realistically a hypothetical future only highlights the artifice of the medium. Ironically, the realism of films like The Blair Witch Project, 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.

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)

It would appear then, as with the human replicant in the film Bladerunner, 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.

Colin Ledwith

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), ‘Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, Vol. 4’, trans. and ed. Joan Riviere, Basic Books, 1959.

Mike Kelley, Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993), ‘Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism’, ed. John C. Welchman, MIT press, 2003.

Ernst Theodore Hoffmann, ‘Tales of Hoffmann’, trans. and ed. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 2001.

Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography’, trans. Richard Howard, Flamingo, 1984.

Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’, Verso, 1979.

Virginia Heffeman, ‘Camera Down a Hole, and the World Follows It’, New York Times, Dec.16, 2003.

As above.

Paul Virilio, ‘War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception’, trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 1989.

Keith Griffiths, ‘The Manipulated Image’, animateonline.org.

Nucular

2008-10-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

Matthew Munday

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cries and Whimpers: Hollywood’s Apocalyptic Ending vs Being-towards-Death in Haneke

2008-10-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

Boris Knezevic

‘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.'

-Nietzsche, The Gay Science

‘…he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.’

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Apocalypse as Shock Therapy

The basic thesis of Naomi Klein’s book on ‘disaster capitalism’, The Shock Doctrine, 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.

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.

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 Hidden, 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.

Similarly, in The Seventh Continent, 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 other people, who fit a certain pathological profile. It is pathology and explication that obfuscate the true picture, the slow trickle of Being towards Death.

It is the latter notion that Haneke conveys even more explicitly in the final scene of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 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 71 Fragments 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 Persepolis 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 in spite 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 over there – it extends into the apparent tranquillity of refugee life. Complementary to this insight is the inverse or vice versa operation in 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.

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 Schindler’s List and Amistad 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^th century New York but in the present-day ghettos of Philadelphia or L.A., for instance.)

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 hostis generis humani…”^¹ 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. ‘Evil’ is always partly hidden from view, the key struggle against it is always internal - 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.

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 true 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 71 Fragments 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….” While praying to avert the apocalypse-to-come, we avoid confronting the actual tragedy, the evil already in our midst.

The Banality of Death: Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears

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.”^² 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 The Trial, written in 1925, 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.

The courtroom thus yields the perfect metaphor. Even more than Hollywood films, 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.”^³ 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.

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.”^⁴ 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.

The muselmann, 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”^⁵ - the Muselmann “makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man.”^⁶ 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, not a utopian end-to-come, but a catastrophic failure of humanity that one must struggle against in every moment of the present. 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 The Hollow Men:

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

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.

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 musselmanner of Auschwitz, whose plight for Agamben documents “the total triumph of power over the human being”^⁷, 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 being, 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.

1 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), 253.

2 Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (2006), 223.

3 Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive (1999), 18-19.

4 Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (2002), 155.

5 Agamben, 17.

6 Agamben, 47.

7 Agamben, 48.

Mediated Apocalypses

2008-10-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Owen Hatherley

it's after the End of the World – don't you know that yet?'

Sun Ra

In the 20^th 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?'

Carter recognised that the apocalyptic impulse, at its inception, is an optimistic one – in fact, a revolutionary one. Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium 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^th century, the apocalyptic imaginary has largely been a series of horrific images, of horrendous catastrophes from which no-one can be safe?

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' Things to Come (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 Last and First Men, 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.

Things to Come 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 Godzilla to the giant ants of Them! One of the most interesting of these films is Roger Corman's self-explanatory 1958 shocker The Day the World Ended. 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!'

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 is no future', she replies.

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 Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). 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 Lord of the Flies pessimism about 'human nature', some abstract notion of inherent atavism – rather, what we see in these films is this society collapsing, one in which solidarity is already scarce. Near the end of Night of the Living Dead, 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 Dawn of the Dead points out, there are some who are actually enjoying this.

Romero's films are also extremely adroit in outlining the likely role of communications media in the apocalypse. The radio and TV in Night 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 Dawn 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.

From its first scene - a couple in a car on a hill, in a clinch to 'Johnny B Goode' - Threads 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 Night of the Living Dead. Near-total anomie, society stripped back to its Hobbesian bare minimum', wrote Mark Fisher on Threads' 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 Night, can't truly believe what's happened to it – what is most terrifying is that the world doesn't end in a flash, via Dr Strangelove's Doomsday machine, but somehow endures, in a grotesque, devastated form. The comparison made between Romero's trilogy and Threads seems especially appropriate in its portrayal of a mediated 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.

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 Naked (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 Threads 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 is') 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'.

Functional Apocalypses

2008-10-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Noys (2008)

Harry Cleaver’s 1987 article “Uses of an Earthquake” presents what we could call the optimistic Marxist view of crisis:

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.

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)

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)

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:

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)

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:

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.

S: No, you cannot say this in the book...
(99; the capitalised section is a quotation from Pure War)

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)

What we might call the political ambiguity of works like The War Game (1965) and Threads (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))

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.

References
Caffentzis, George, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse.” Midnight Notes 2.1 (1980).
http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfapoc16.pdf
___, “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.

Cleaver, Harry, “Uses of an Earthquake.” (1987) Libcom.org, 2005. http://libcom.org/library/uses-of-earthquake-cleaver.

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.

Frederici, Silvia and George Caffentzis, “A Review Play on Paul Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War.” Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987): 97-105.

Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. and intro. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.
___ ‘“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.

Apocalypse Where Or When? An Alchemical Reading.

2008-10-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

Andy Sharp

The phrase “immanentize the eschaton” made popular by Robert Anton Wilson, in his The Illuminatus! Trilogy 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.

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.

This short essay is an attempt to read the motif of immanence into the alchemist Fulcanelli’s exegesis of the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye.

The final infamous “inserted” chapter in Fulcanelli’s “Le Mystere Des Cathedrales” 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:

OCRUXAVES

PESUNICA

The common interpretation of O CRUX AVE SPE UNICA (O Cross they only hope),

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

Il est écrit que la vie se réfugie en un seul espace (It is written that life takes refuge in a single space), and that,

“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.”

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”.

This becomes more explicit in Fulcanelli’s rendering of the acronym INRI, carved on another arm of the cross,

“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.”

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.

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.

Fulcanelli shows how the Bible is infused with what are essentially pages from an alchemical lab book. In Ezekiel’s apocalyptic vision for example,

“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.’”

In final summary, he quotes St. Matthew’s gospel and shows by his poetic cabala that Matthew is ‘the doctrine of science’.

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.

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 Dreams and the Underworld. We enter the apocalypse as we enter a dream, through sleep, as immanent as Hypnos whose brother was Thanatos. 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.

kino fist: apocalypse

2008-09-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

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 apocalypse as part of this event:

'La Soufrière' (Werner Herzog, 1976) (something about it here)
'Threads' (written by Barry Hines/directed by Mick Jackson, 1984) (see here 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]

We will be here:

The Wenlock Building
50-60 Wharf Road, N1 7RN

We will screen:
October 5th
roughly 2-5pm

As always, there will be a magazine. Please send texts (200-2000 words), illustrations, images to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk
by September 24th (that gives you ten days!).

sf and the 60s

2008-07-24T03:43:00.000-07:00

Christopher Fraser

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In interpreting these films I think it is useful to include another work of speculative fantasy - Mechanix Illustrated's "What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?", also published in 1968. Here, a vision of the future is presented unquestioned with an air of inevitability and enthusiastic optimism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

.....................................................................

I'd also like to shamelessly plug a new non-fiction book group called the
Itchy Chin Club. If you're up for joining a central London book group
interested in arts, culture, politics, history and philosophy then
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.

when the earth is colonised by capital, what use is the cosmos?

2008-07-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Infinite Thought

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).

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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!

What Happened to the Future?

2008-07-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Robert Barry

In 1992, American neo-con philosophe, Francis Fukuyama, published a book, The End of History, or The Last Man, 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.

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 The Day The Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth and It Came From Outer Space, 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.

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.

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 Godzilla, War of the Worlds and Transformers.

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.

The Road to the Stars

2008-07-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

Martin Gittins

"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."
- Bruce Sterling, William Gibson - Red Star, Winter Orbit

For years, the location of Baikonur, the site of the Soviet space facility, was unclear. As Robert Oberg, writing in Omni in 1990, explained:

"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."

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.

Whereas Magnitogorsk was a city dedicated to producing steel, Baikonur's was dedicated solely to rocketry and space flight.

At Baikonur, nee Kosmograd, Sergei Korelev, the father of Soviet space program declared, "The Road to the Stars is open".

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, Burning Chrome. You can read it online here

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.

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.

'"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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Mir space station, on which Sterling and Gibson's space station is presumably based, was itself put into a decaying orbit in 2001.

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.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Sergei Krikalev was effectively marooned on Mir, spending 800 days in space, whilst no-one would take responsibility to bring him back to Earth.

"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."

Krikalev must have felt a lot like Korolev, drifting alone, abandoned, The Last Man in Space.

kino fist: red space

2008-07-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday 2pm for c. 2.30 start, E:vent Gallery, Bethnal Green, £2 for films and magazine.

Short: 'Inter-Planetary Revolution' (1924)
Long: Aelita (1924)
.................................
Short: 'Ajapeegel' by Jeremy Millar (2008)
Long: Red Planet Mars (1952)

Kino Fist goes in Search of (socialist) Space

2008-07-03T09:26:00.001-07:00

The next Kino Fist will be on the theme of RED SPACE, and will be held at 2pm, 20th July, in the E:vent Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6PU. The films we will be showing are: as the cartoon, Khodataev & Kollektiv's 1924 short Interplanetary Revolution, as the main feature, Iakov Protazanov's Martian Constructivist-Trotskyist blockbuster Aelita, from the same year; and as our B-Movie, Harry Horner's magnificently ludicrous McCarthyite farrago Red Planet Mars.

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 50 Fantasy and SF works every socialist should read.

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.

also from the work issue

2008-06-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Owen Hatherley on ' Work and Non-Work: A Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy' and Infinite Thought on 'How to exploit oneself and get away with it'.

on blue collar

2008-06-01T23:20:00.001-07:00

Carl Neville

In this world...a man himself is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.

You're wrong there, Top. I seen another world.

- Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line

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.

This is Blue Collar'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. Blue Collar 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 Blue Collar 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.

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?

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.

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.

...

In Blue Collar 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.

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:

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.

...

Blue Collar 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. Blue Collar, made in 1978, is colour-blind in a way that is inconceivable in contemporary cinema.

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. Blue Collar'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 Blue Collar 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.

...

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 Pickpocket 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 Blue Collar 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 Blue Collar there simply aren't enough of them.

Money, Militancy, Pedagogy: Godard 1967-72

2008-06-01T23:19:00.003-07:00

Alberto Toscano

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 Communism exhibition at the Project Gallery in Dublin, or the prominence of figures such as Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou in the pages of Art Press and Art Forum, 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 Radical Philosophy: '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'.

The two films discussed by Rancière and Badiou (La Chinoise and Tout va bien) 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 production – in Badiou and Rancière's 'subjectivist' treatments of politics and aesthetics.

Rancière considers La Chinoise at length in Film Fables, 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 'Un film en train de se faire' (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 (La Leçon d'Althusser) 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 Reading Capital, 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: 'La Chinoise 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'.

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 Le Petit Soldat, 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 pedagogic work of Letter to Jane, 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 Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, 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, within the image, 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 Le Petit Soldat) the requirement of the viewer-as-participant is induced by various ways of hindering the formal unity that would trigger a comforting, totalising knowledge. In Letter to Jane, 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 Ici et allieurs, 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.

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 metaphor, 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:

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.

Hence the protocol of separation that governs La Chinoise, 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 Les Carabiniers, 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 La Chinoise 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.)

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 Letter to Jane: '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'.

Badiou turns to Godard's political aesthetics in an article entitled 'The End of a Beginning', recently published in L'art du cinéma. 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.

The structuring category in Badiou's treatment of the film is that of periodisation (hence the title of Badiou's article 'The End of a Beginning'). Badiou reads Tout va bien 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 La Chinoise presented a filmic dialectic of political utterances and convictions, Tout Va Bien tries to make class struggle visible (in the arrangement of the factory, amusingly repeated apolitically in The Life Aquatic, 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 gauchisme 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 conversion, and one of the questions we may raise is whether there really is attention to the cinematic tools employed for this didactic/anti-didactic exercise.

The key question dealt with by Tout va bien 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 education 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.)

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 Les Carabiniers, but also one could argue of Breathless, 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 Letter to Jane) will only be resolved by a (re)turn into the image and its analysis. Pedagogy 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.

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 money 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 Contempt) 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 Vent d'Est. The opening sequence of Tout va bien, showing the cheque-signing for the various contributors to the film, especially Fonda and Montand, is emblematic in this regard.

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 British Sounds 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 British Sounds, Tout va bien, Passion and Sauve qui peut (la vie). In this regard, Godard's bitter 1973 letter to Truffaut, discussed by Richard Brody in the last issue of The New Yorker, is of interest. In that letter he mentions a film, tellingly called A Simple Film that would be the counter to Truffaut's Day for Night, a film that Godard regarded as a capitulation to a degraded Hollywood. Godard's film (which was never made) would be about

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.

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 The Story, with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton, a film about the tortured production of another film, on the mobster Bugsy Siegel, entitled Bugsy (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 The Story, 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 Breathless – 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'.

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 alignment (this is evident in Godard's contribution to the Chris Marker-organised collective film Far From Vietnam, as well as in his dispute with the Maoist filmmaker Marin Karmitz). The pedagogical drive of the films of the années Mao interestingly reflects the dispute between Badiou and Rancière. For Godard both employs a didactic-exemplary mode, as affirmed by Badiou with respect to the typologies of Tout va bien, 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 method of detour, 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 Letter to Jane, 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 Tout va bien go to Vietnam by staying in France – a question Godard and Miéville will pose about Palestine in Ici et ailleurs). 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?'

This Woman's Work: Chantal Akerman’s philosophy of work in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

2008-06-01T23:19:00.001-07:00

Dave McDougall

'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 La Chinoise, 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.

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.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 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.

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 S.C.U.M. Manifesto: '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 Jeanne Dielman, 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.

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 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 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.

In Front of the Camera, Behind the Commodity Fetish: Profaning the Cult of Work

2008-06-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

Boris Knezevic

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 – is not earned by work.
-Andre Breton, Nadja

Slavoj Žižek provides perhaps the most incisive critique of the depiction of work in cinema:

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 Metropolis, 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.

This invisibility, through which the fetishism of commodities is articulated, is already what Chaplin hints at comically in Modern Times, 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)

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.'

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:

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).

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 The Machinist, 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 Modern Times 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!'

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.

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.'

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.

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.

'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 The Great Dictator, 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.

References
Agamben, Profanations (2007)
Breton, Nadja (1999)
Stilinovic in Documenta Magazine 2007, no. 2, Life!
Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Misuse of a Notion (2002)

kino fist: work

2008-06-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

From the latest Kino Fist magazine.

Emmy Hennings on Franju's Le Sang de bêtes (Blood of the beasts)

kino fist: work

2008-05-05T04:42:00.001-07:00

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.

The next Kino Fist will take place on Sunday 1st June at 2pm at E:vent Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street, E2 6PU.

We will be screening Godard's 1969 'British Sounds', made for but ultimately banned by London Weekend Television (see here for discussion), followed by Schrader's 1978 'Blue Collar' (see Mark on this from a while back).

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.

Kierkegaard on Boredom from Either/Or

2008-03-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

People with experience maintain that proceeding from a basic principle is supposed to be very reasonable; I yield to them and proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring. Or is there anyone who would be boring enough to contradict me in this regard? This basic principle has to the highest degree the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries. If, then, my thesis is true, a person needs only to ponder how corrupting boredom is for people, tempering his reflections more or less according to his desire to diminish or increase his impetus, and if he wants to press the speed of the motion to the highest point, almost with danger to the locomotive, he needs only to say to himself: Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.

How corrupting boredom is, everyone recognizes also with regard to children. As long as children are having a good time, they are always good. This can be said in the strictest sense, for if they at times become unmanageable even while playing, it is really because they are beginning to be bored; boredom is already coming on, but in a different way. Therefore, when selecting a nursemaid, one always considers essentially not only that she is sober, trustworthy, and good-natured but also takes into esthetic consideration whether she knows how to entertain children. Even if she had all other excellent virtues, one would not hesitate to give her the sack if she lacked this qualification. Here, indeed, the principle is clearly acknowledged, but things go on so curiously in the world, habit and boredom have gained the upper hand to such a degree, that justice is done to esthetics only in the conduct of the nursemaid. It would be quite impossible to prevail if one wanted to demand a divorce because one's wife is boring, or demand that a king be dethroned because he is boring to behold, or that a clergyman be exiled because he is boring to listen to, or that a cabinet minister be dismissed or a journalist be executed because he is frightfully boring.

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse. To amuse themselves, they hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then they were dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And what consequences this boredom had: humankind stood tall and fell far, first through Eve, then from the Babylonian tower.

Is Boredom Always Counter-Revolutionary? On Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989)

2008-03-02T10:07:00.000-08:00

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
Raoul Vaneigem

Q. Who wants to watch a film of a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
A. The viewer of Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent [Der Sebiente Kontinent] (1989).

For the viewer of Haneke’s film supplementary questions impose themselves. If, as Debord and the Situationists contend, boredom is always counter-revolutionary, then should such a film have been made? That it obviously has been made, should we watch such a film? Isn’t a film like Haneke’s, in which we witness the reduction of the family of husband Georg, wife Anna, and daughter Eva, to mere appendages of objects, itself the most obscene ruse of the spectacle? The cynicism of the spectacular society would have reached such a level that it would now ‘entertain’ its audience with the spectacle of its own alienation in all its banal tedium. The studied repetitions of the rituals of bourgeois life, the drawn-out shots, the horror of the banality of consumer culture itself, would all figure that now, in Benjamin’s words, our ‘self-alienation has reached such a degree that [we] can experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’. Our decadence is such that we no longer even experience that pleasure in the ‘grand’ form of war, but only in the terrible banality of the slowly unwinding self-destruction of bourgeois existence.

Guy Debord’s own final film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) – a Latin palindrome meaning ‘We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’ – itself films the boredom of bourgeois existence. The film opens with a scene showing a cinema audience, leaving us to face the spectacle of our own passive viewing. Over images of (then) contemporary bourgeois life Debord intones a lugubrious and devastating critique of the misery of the cinema audience, composed of ‘the stratum of low-level skilled employees in the various “service” occupations that are so necessary to the present production system: management, control, maintenance, research, teaching, propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique.’ The audience Debord identifies corresponds closely to the class position, and situation, of the family of Haneke’s film; in Debord’s words ‘compelled to reside within a single space: the same circuit of ever-identical dwelling units, offices, freeways, vacation spots, and airports.’ But Debord’s own insulting of his audience of middle-ranking service professionals is broken by the dialectic of the film. These scenes are the opening to be negated by the banal filmic images infused by Debord’s commentary to embody the passions and adventures of the Lettrists and later the Situationists. Although these revolutionary passions have been overcome by the tides of time and counter-revolution Debord’s film is an act of memory posed against the boredom of service to the spectacle that denies any such passions except the passions of consumption.

Haneke breaks off the dialectic of Debord’s film. There is no moment of negation, at least not in any revolutionary form. This is a film of the stalled dialectic, decapitated from any revolutionary memory or hope – a film of 1989. What is retained is only the insult to the audience, not in the form of the insolence of Debord’s commentary but in the test with which we are faced with in trying to watch and make sense of the film. The repetitions of each year force us to an attention at the displacements that take place, the only variation coming in terms of the emergence of various explained and unexplained affects of anguish – Eva’s feigned blindness, the almost psychotic grief of Ana’s brother. The narrative ‘arc’ is here something like that of the Lacanian drive: an idiotic circling around the (absent) ‘Thing’, in which jouissance gains its true sense of pleasure in suffering. Our only ‘advance’ is not towards any re-starting of the dialectic of the negative but the negative of pure (self-) destruction. In this we face the most eerie moment in the film in which Georg reveals to his parents that, despite the seemingly ‘normal’ life with its daily trials we have witnessed, he and his family have lived an existence of utter horror. The negation here is inherent, but finally, and literally, fatal. This is the prelude not to any memory of revolution, but only the erasure of the traces of all the elements of bourgeois life, from money to clothing, fish tanks to the stereo.

The final lengthy sequence of the family’s destruction of their own ‘world’, and finally themselves, itself transforms the harrowing into the boring, and vice versa. As Haneke has commented:

They carry out the destruction with the same constricted narrowness with which they lived their lives, with the same meticulousness as life was lived, so I see this as the opposite of the vision of total destruction in Zabriskie Point. The sequence is portrayed as work. I have tried to portray it as something unbearable. As the wife says, “my hands really hurt from all that arbeit,” so all this hard work of destruction merely precedes the self-destruction.

We are denied even the pleasure we might take in this destruction. Instead Haneke offers us a kind of pure ‘labour of the negative’ in which the negative has become absorbed within the capitalist labour-process without any remainder. At the same time that labour process becomes the planned and methodical act of the taking apart of the world. Here we find a bitter and ironic reversal of one of the Situationists’ favourite quotations, from Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1943–5): the character Lacenaire says ‘It takes all kinds to make a world—or to unmake it’.

So, although the consumption of the scene of alienation is put into abeyance it is obvious that we are hardly left with a way out. Of course this reflects a desire to offer no false utopia, no simple reversibility of signs in which this suffering would be magically transformed into some sense of ‘revolutionary’ agency. The political affect of boredom is one of discomfort and unease against the blandness of the aesthetic of television and against the passive contemplation of suffering, even as we passively contemplate suffering. This equivocal affect is a sign of the non-responsiveness of the film to the alternative of ‘revolutionary’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’ – in the absence of any meaningful capacity to pose this choice. To use the language of Alain Badiou we could say this is the film of the saturation of the sequence marked by the passion for the real in the ‘drama’ of 20th century war and revolution. Not exactly a film of the restoration, this is rather one of the first films of the new pathology of the involution of that ‘passion’ – drained and turned inwards. It is the film of our bad times.

Benjamin Noys

References
Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

Debord, Guy (2003) Complete Cinematic Works, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press.

Sharrett, Christopher (2004) ‘The World that is Known: Michael Haneke Interviewed’, Kinoeye 4.1. http://www.kinoeye.org/04/01/interview01.php

Vaneigem, Raoul (1983) The Revolution of Everyday Life [1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press.

Hippies and Longhairs in the Capitalist World System

2008-02-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

'This September I was in the small city of Isfahan, in the heart of Persia. Persia is an underdeveloped country, as one horrendously says, but [its economy] is rapidly taking off, as one says in a likewise horrendous way. … One night, I was walking through the main street when I saw two monstrous beings among all those ancient, beautiful boys, full of an ancient human dignity: they were not really ‘capelloni’ [longhairs], but their hair was cut in a European fashion, long at the back, short at the front, straw-like, artificially stuck around the face, with two filthy tufts over the ears. What was this hair saying? It was saying: ‘We do not belong to this mass of wretched creatures, underdeveloped poor fellows who were left behind in a barbarian age! We are clerks in banks, students, sons of people who grew rich and work in the oil companies; we know Europe, we have read a lot. We are bourgeois: and here is our long hair that bears witness to our international modernity of privileged people.’

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The “Discourse” of Hair’, Corriere della Sera, 7 January 1973

There are those who have abundant, swollen hair … perfectly set and similar to the ‘perm’ that was popular with ladies in the forties … Others unintentionally quote even more distant eras: the twenties or early thirties: … their hair falls smoothly on both sides of the forehead, while over the forehead there is a small, long and accurate fringe. … Still others, whose hair is without resources, have let it grow wild: but it falls in extremely black and dishevelled locks: the exact hair of a neorealist hooker from the fifties. … There also those who quote men, rather than women: that is, they quote Great Men of the Past who are completely unknown to them: Christ, Cavour, a reactionary intellectual of the eighteenth century, a judge portrayed by an anonymous neoclassical painter.

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio

The town where these lines are being written is a small meeting place for hippies, mainly British, American and Dutch; they spend all day here in a very lively square in the old town, mixed in with (but not mixing with) the local population who, either through natural tolerance, amusement, habit or interest, accept them, exist alongside them and let them get on with life without ever understanding them or ever being surprised by them either. … [O]nce out of its original context, hippy protest comes up against an enemy far more significant than American conformism, even if this is backed up by security on the university campus: poverty (where economics coyly uses the expression developing countries, culture and real life use the more honest poverty). This poverty turns the hippy’s choice into a copy, a caricature of economic alienation, and this copy of poverty, though sported only lightly, becomes in fact distinctly irresponsible. For most traits invented by the hippy in opposition to his home civilisation (a civilisation of the rich) are the very ones which distinguish poverty, no longer as a sign, but much more severely as a clear indication, or an effect, on people’s lives: undernourishment, collective living, bare feet, dirtiness, ragged clothing, are all forces which, in this context, are not there to be used in the symbolic fight against the world of riches but are the very forces against which we should be fighting. Symbols (which the hippy consumes frenetically) are therefore no longer reactive meanings, polemical forces, nor are they critical weapons that we appropriate from a well-off civilisation that conceals its image of overnourishment by constant referral to it and that tries to make overnourishment’s signifiers look glossy; if we think of them as being positive, these symbols become, not a game, or a higher form of symbolic activity, but a disguise, a lower form of cultural narcissism: as is demonstrated by linguistics, the context overturns the meaning, and the context here is that of economics.

Roland Barthes, ‘A Case of Cultural Criticism’, Communications 14, November 1969

Konvolut B: Fashion

2008-02-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

Taken from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often – for example, in pictures – precede the perceptible reality by years. It was possible to see streets or rooms that shone in all sorts of fiery colours, long before technology, by means of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set them under such a light. Moreover, the sensitivity of the individual artist to what is coming certainly far exceeds that of the grande dame. Yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the female collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in the newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions. Here, surely, lies the greatest charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making the charming fruitful.

Here fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware – between carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard, serves as mannequin himself to save costs, and manages single-handedly the liquidation that in French is called Revolution. For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered through shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion. And that is why she changes so quickly; she titillates death and is already something different, something new, as he casts about to crush her. For a hundred years she holds her own against him. Now, finally, he is on the point of quitting the field. But he erects on the banks of a new Lethe, which rolls its asphalt stream through arcades, the armature of the whores as a battle memorial.

With Alphonse Karr, there appears a rationalist theory of fashion that is closely related to the rationalist theory of the origin of religions. The motive for instituting long skirts, for example, he conceives to be the interest certain women would have had in concealing an unlovely foot. Or he denounces, as the origin of certain hats and certain hairstyles, the wish to compensate for thin hair.

Who still knows, nowadays, where it was that in the last decade of the previous century women would offer to men their most seductive aspect, the most intimate promise of their figure? In the asphalted indoor arenas where people learned to ride bicycles. The woman as cyclist competes with the cabaret singer for the place of honour on posters, and gives to fashion its most daring line.

Hallmark of the period’s fashions: to imitate a body that has never known nakedness.

The impression of the old-fashioned can arise only where, in a certain way, reference is made to the most topical. If the beginnings of modern architecture to some extent lie in the arcades, their antiquated effect on the present generation has exactly the same significance as the antiquated effect of the father on his son.

In my formulation: ‘the eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea’.

In fetishism, sex does away with the boundaries separating the organic world from the inorganic. Clothing and jewellery are its allies. It is as much at home with what is dead as it is with living flesh. The latter, moreover, shows it the way to establish itself in the former. Hair is a frontier region lying between the two kingdoms of sexus. Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscapes of the body. These are already no longer animated, yet are still accessible to the eye, which, of course, depends increasingly on touch and smell to be its guides through the realms of death. Not seldom in the dream, however, there are swelling breasts that, like the earth, are all apparelled in woods and rocks, and gazes have sent their life to the bottom of glassy lakes that slumber in the valleys. These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it more deeply into the universe of matter.

Does fashion die (in Russia, for example) because it can no longer keep up the tempo – at least in certain fields?

A contemporary fashion and its significance. In the spring of 1935, something new appeared in women’s fashions: medium-sized embossed metal plaquettes which were worn on jumpers or overcoats and which displayed the initial of the bearer’s first name. Fashion thus profited from the vogue for badges which had arisen among men in the wake of the patriotic leagues. On the other hand, the progressive restrictions in the private sphere are here given expression. The name – and to be sure, the first name – of persons unknown is published on a lapel. That it becomes easier thereby to make the acquaintance of a stranger is of secondary importance.

Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical antiaphrodisiac imaginable. In this judgement it is not so far off the mark as might be supposed. Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love: in every fashion, perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means. Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, fashion defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve.

Where they impinge upon the present moment, birth and death – the former through natural consequences, the latter through social ones – considerably restrict the field of play for fashion. This state of affairs is properly elucidated through two parallel circumstances. The first concerns birth, and shows the natural engendering of life overcome by novelty in the realm of fashion. The second circumstance concerns death: it appears in fashion as no less overcome, and precisely through the sex appeal of the inorganic, which is something generated by fashion.

The detailing of feminine beauties so dear to the baroque, a process in which each single part is exalted through a trope, secretly links up with the image of the corpse. This parcelling out of feminine beauty into its noteworthy constituents resembles a dissection, and the popular comparisons of body parts to alabaster, snow, precious stones, or other (mostly inorganic) formations makes the same point.

Fashions are a collective medicament for the ravages of oblivion. The more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to fashion.

There is hardly another article of dress that can give expression to such divergent erotic tendencies, and that has so much latitude to describe them, as a woman’s hat. Whereas the meaning of male headgear in its sphere (the political) is strictly tied to a few rigid patterns, the shades of meaning in a woman’s hat are virtually incalculable. It is not so much the various possibilities of symbolic reference to the sexual organs that is chiefly of interest here. More surprising is what a hat can say about the rest of the outfit. Helen Grund has made the ingenious suggestion that the bonnet, which is contemporaneous with the crinoline, actually provides men with directions for managing the latter. The wide brim of the bonnet is turned up – thereby demonstrating how the crinoline must be turned up in order to make sexual access easier for the man.

Extracted from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trans Eiland & McLaughlin, Harvard, 1999)

The Subject and Kitsch: Costume as Language & Fashion as 'Essential Forgetting'

2008-02-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
-Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I – FROM BRAZIL TO THE HOLY MOUNTAIN: FASHION AND NUDITY AS DISCOURSE

The function of clothing in film differs from that of other theatrical elements in one critical aspect: unlike the elimination of props or elaborate stage sets, dispensing with costume as a dramatic technique cannot properly be termed ‘minimalist’. In von Trier’s Dogville the absence of scenery is reductive: by removing elements from the field of our contemplation it serves to shift attention to what is normally stifled or diffused by the absent scenery: action, bodies, pure drama. The absence of costume however does not erode the positive content or shift attention to the action; this absence draws our attention to a point half-way between background and action – nudity is itself a dramatic element.

Yet clothes do not simply conceal nudity: they also have the function of visually subordinating difference to identity. Clothing-fashion is the primary technique of visually constituting and representing the ‘fake’ identity of a fractured post-‘mirror-stage’ subject: as Joe Buck of Midnight Cowboy, decked out in a rodeo cowboy outfit, admits "I ain't a for-real cowboy, but I am a hell of a stud!" The principle of fashion is a hyperbolic extension of a primary function of clothing, homogeneity. It is no coincidence that the films and TV shows most noted for a certain fashion style tend also to be the most uniform: the futuristic outfits of Star Trek or Barbarella, the disco outfits of Saturday Night Fever, or the swinging sixties’ London of Blow Up. The underlying theme of fashion is uniformity, a profound uniformity beneath all affects of fashion. This theme is taken up in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which takes place ‘somewhere in the 20th century’ as we are told in a caption at the beginning; the costumes and sets in the film comprise a seamless melange of emanations thrown up by the century in question, a theme which neatly folds into the Orwellian 1984-esque storyline. From the viewpoint of fashion and historical ‘accuracy’ it may appear as an insignificant gesture – but there is a profound point here: actual trends in clothing are at bottom never definitive, it is always a matter of fixed boundaries imposed on an underlying field of overlapping intensities that traverse a network of singularities: if a whole decade can be boiled down to a ‘style’, why not a century? Brazil only takes this innate totalizing tendency of fashion a step further. Fashion implies fashioning, to fashion – fascio – ‘bundling together’ – fascism. It is one of the primary processes whereby our constitution as subjects is the very form of our subjection, to put it in Foucauldian terms.

This is not to suggest that nudity entails liberation: for the technique that produces our subjection is precisely the ‘incitement to discourse’, the call to express individuality through dress; and nudity is only another discourse amid a proliferation of discourses, another form of confession, another technique for producing the ‘truth’ that subjects us: “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down” (Foucault 60) This is the lesson we may draw from Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain when, for all its iconoclastic, surreal and grotesque imagery, short-circuiting nudity with high spiritualism and psychedelic trips, presenting a Christ-figure in the form of a thief who recalls the tarot card figure of The Fool; at the end leaves us with the cloaked immortals who turn out to be dummies, and in the final scene, the alchemist who reveals the film equipment outside the frame and reminds us that “Real life awaits.” This final gesture ruptures and discredits the work itself. After saying everything, it finally tells us that it has said nothing, confessed nothing – real life awaits.

II – TO THE LIGHTHOUSE AND BACK: THE SENTENCE-IMAGE AND THE EMPTY PLACE OF THE SUBJECT

If we conceive of clothing articles as words of a language, and fashion as discourse or statements (‘fashion statements’) in the sense deployed by Foucault – language not as semantic meaning-content or truth originating in a responsible subject, but the pure ‘taking place’ of statements that refer to a ‘vacant place’ of the subject that can be filled by any individual – ‘fashion’ in the broadest application of the term appears as the natural element of what Agamben calls a “metasemantics built on a semantics of enunciation.” There are affects of speech, ways of saying, fashionable and unfashionable statements, which anyone can adopt or ‘wear’; they do not originate in a subject, for anyone can adopt a particular fashion - ‘fashion’ is a perfect metaphor for this vacant place, the ‘I’ displaced in relation to itself, the “being reciprocally consigned to something that cannot be assumed by a subject”. (Agamben 130) We may even reverse the metaphor – language (meaning-content) is the clothing of the mind, equally subject to trends and affects of fashion. The “disjunction between the living being and the thinking being” that marks the “empty place” of the subject (ibid 143) – an antinomy or ‘parallax gap’ that precludes our access to the real, in Zizekian terms – is expressed in the disjunction between nudity and the clothed or ‘fashioned’ human body. This parallactic Real, the empty place of the subject, defies representation.

In The Future of the Image, Ranciere argues that contemporary art’s radical undoing of the representative relationship between text and image, the law of the ‘profound today’ or ‘the great parataxis’ – most powerfully expressed in the ‘young art’ of cinema – takes its cue in large part from the modern novel. Before Godard and the Marx Brothers, we had Balzac, Proust, Zola, and Hugo “could transform a book into a cathedral or a cathedral into a book.” (42) And indeed, some modern writers were aware of this potential long before cinema took up the project: Virginia Woolf, in a 1926 essay titled ‘Cinema’, spoke of a “cinema of the future” that would “make thoughts visible, like smoke pouring from Vesuvius.”

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is rife with cinematic imagery – one could even call it a cinematic novel, cinematic narrative transposed into text. And it is in light of the above comments that we may interpret the pervasiveness of clothing in the novel: the “reddish-brown hairy stocking” that Mrs Ramsay is knitting for the lighthouse keeper’s boy throughout the first half; her green shawl tossed over the edge of a gilt frame to conceal its worn state and prettify the drab surroundings, later worn when going for a walk in pregnant silence with Mr Ramsay, and still later wrapped round a scary boar’s skull in order to conceal it and effect a compromise between her children when putting them to sleep(“how lovely it looked now…like a bird’s nest…a beautiful mountain” 124); Mr Ramsay talking “by the hour about his boots”; the brooch that Minta loses on the beach when her engagement to Paul is cemented. (“How extraordinarily lucky Minta is! She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash-leather bag!” p 127)

The total depth to which this fetishism of clothing permeates becomes palpable in Woolf’s use of metaphor, as when Mrs. Ramsay reflects: “How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?”(55) In another case, Mr Bankes “felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that has been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his feet into them. He must make himself talk.” (98) In ‘Time Passes’, the lyrical, evocative chapter that ‘bridges’ a period of ten years between the first and last chapters, this theme comes to the fore: “What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes – those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned…”(141) It is clothing items and fashion accessories that in these passages are made to fill the role of speech, or of enunciation, the ‘empty place of the subject’ – the twisted finger of the glove that speaks of one’s essence, the obligation to observe social mores symbolized by a rigid pair of boots that one must ‘force’ one’s feet into – be subject, subject oneself; Minta, upon getting engaged and losing her brooch on the beach, starts crying, and although “she minded losing her brooch, she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else…She did not know what for.” (Does the brooch symbolize her freedom, while the two are both lost by the engagement?) What better way is there to render cinematically visible the fractured ‘I’ in modern society, the split between the enunciated content and the subject of enunciation, than through the speech of clothing, the talk of commodities – the deflection of a subject’s speech onto a visual object one wears and which expresses visually its thought but is not intrinsically part of it, does not emanate from its being? (Joe Buck eventually sheds his cowboy outfit saying “I ain't no kinda hustler.”)

III – FASHION, FILM, FORGETTING: THE SHROUD OF NUDITY AND KITSCH

Films that in cultural memory become associated with an era and its fashion very often have a retroactive element - Saturday Night Fever, the epitome of 70s disco lifestyle, was made at a time when disco was fast becoming a thing of the past. Scorsese’s New York, New York, which produced one of Frank Sinatra’s most iconic hits, was filmed in 1977, years after the heyday of both the age it depicts and of Sinatra’s career. This signals the invoking of a pure past, an always-was in the form of Deleuze’s virtual object which is ‘found only as lost, and exists only as recovered.’ One doesn't see people on the street wearing clothes such as those paraded by celebrities on catwalks. Yet when the history of our era is recorded in the decades to come – the official, popular history – it will be constructed to an overwhelming degree in this element of kitsch subtracted from our actual present – the already-was cultural output of film, TV, music videos, etc – and rehashed. In Hairspray (2007), a musical comedy about segregation set in 1960s Baltimore, the costumes are not so much those of the era in question as they are of the 1960s as construed in kitsch. It is said that “if you remember the 60s, you weren't there.” As an effect of the fractured ‘I’, the same could perhaps be said, on some level, of any era. (with or without the LSD, weed, amphetamines, and free love –)…Even death is turned into kitsch: one may recall Villon’s Epitaph - “Freres humains qui après nous vivez…” – as a plea of essential forgetting; or Jeff Wall’s photographic reconstruction ‘Dead Troops Talk’, in which dead Russian soldiers killed by Afghan fighters, with gaping holes in their bellies and slit throats, joke and laugh with each other.

Just as there are different fashions, different ways of being dressed (statements), there are different nudities (silences), different ways of being naked, of extending the uniformal discourse of fashion into its apparent absence or silence in nudity. “Nudity is a shroud”, as Kundera ponders in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, when a group of friends meet on a nudist beach, “their naked genitals staring duly, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand.” One of the group pontificates on the decline of Western civilization, and “for the time being those few feet of beach felt like a university auditorium.” (228)

The real split then is not between clothed and naked, but rather between the subject present to itself, the self-conscious subject of ‘shame’ confronted with the pre-individual inhuman core of its humanity, with its own emptiness; and the shrouded (nude or clothed) subject, fashioned and bundled, subjected, given a content that is not its own and which it can never fully assume; between pure presence and kitsch. In this broader sense, fashion finds in film, in moving photographic images, as hinted at in the modern novel by the likes of Proust and Woolf, its true home: cinema as the ‘pervert art’ that ‘teaches us how to desire’ (as Zizek puts it), as the “mystery machine” for “making something common…between the image that separates and the sentence which strives for continuous phrasing” (Ranciere 58), as the fluid form of the photographic image which itself is credited with carrying out a “Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility” (Sontag 51). It flashes back at us a vision of ourselves in the guise of an other – completing the shroud, cementing the two halves. This is not to suggest a relationship of negative opposition between a ‘fake’ subject and a real, or its flattening; rather, an conjunctive antinomy between the living being and an emptiness in which it remains trapped as a subject but can never truly assume itself, its kitsch. Fashion – in the visual form of clothing, but by extension one may also speak of fashions of the intellect, popular ideas, etc – is a language of kitsch, of what Deleuze terms memory as ‘essential forgetting’ or pure past; and it is by precisely this type of operation, one could argue – essential forgetting as ‘lack’ - that Laclau’s ‘chain of equivalences’ is constructed and the distance bridged between competing political groups in a popular movement. It is this surreal shroud of fashion, the subject of the enunciated that founds the virtual object as ‘eternal half of itself’ – that even the most subversive, surrealist art cannot truly penetrate or undress, and which is the deliberate target of Jodorowsky’s resigned closing gesture in the Holy Mountain: indeed, ‘real life awaits’.

By Boris Knezevic

References

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz : the witness and the archive (1999)
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London (2004)
Foucault, The history of sexuality. Vol. 1, The will to knowledge (1998)
Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980)
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1999)
Ranciere, The Future of the Image (2007)
Sontag, On Photography (1978)
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (2000)

Going Forward Looking Back

2008-02-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

Let us juxtapose two mechanisms of modernity’s mass culture: mechanically reproduced media and fashion. Both fields have “manna” narratives, in that the concerns and technologies of the early bourgeois-capitalist oligarchs filter and descend down to the masses. Segments of these same consuming masses are, however, productive of the manufactured needs in these fields (i.e., tastes). Pioneers on the figurative and literal streets—the DIY brigades—constitute a kind of research and design department. They are an unpaid vanguard whose activities may set the pace for the stylistic advancements of capital. The latest wave of fashion (which is cyclical) and the most fashionable development in “technoaesthetics” (which is linear) are frequently produced by those who do not capitalize on this production.

Ernst Bloch wrote that “not all people exist in the same Now.” Among its other functions, fashion (as distinct from style or clothing) always acts as a semiotic policing to ensure the proper manifestations of this nonsychronicity. Meaning that fashion works as a single contingent set of checks and balances upon the system of power relations in any given society. This is not to claim, of course, that there is a direct correlation visible in all circumstances—a cipher key for What People Wear. But fashion as a system is not, is never, strictly rhizomatic. It has its sources in economic relations. It has its first justifications in moneyed interests. Fashion, an instrumentalization of nonsynchronicity, is therefore complicit. This goes for clothes, and it also goes for stylistic trends in cinema, television, and video.

I am oversimplifying matters here for the purpose of a premise that in the culture industry all activities, even ones of critical resistance, are necessarily negotiations rather than pure negations.

In Liquid Sky the character Margaret (Anna Carlisle) tells her old art instructor (a part-time lover and apparently something of an aging radical) that his generation’s blue jeans, free love sloganeering, and revolution were a costume—a performance, a posture—as much as her own generation’s self-stylings. The only difference is that her generation knows and acknowledges this fact.

The way Liquid Sky imagines fashion breaks down according to the specific level of engagement we isolate. On one hand, there is the depiction of trends. For example, Dave Kehr notes that the film “capture[s] the neopuritanism of the new wave movement.” That is, one can read the film as a document or representation of a scene—a scene that exists in reality, independently of this film that depicts it. From there one might pronounce judgments on the subject matter of the film itself.

On the other hand, there is apart from representation, the participation in trends. For instance homemade aesthetics—literally homemade (Liquid Sky was filmed in and around a penthouse), but also participating in a ‘leftovers’ type of mediascape, that imagined (differently) by something like Videodrome or Stephen Sayadian’s work, too, wherein the B-grade parsimony of the images is a deliberate aesthetic effect. The text is part of a low-budget sphere of image-making—costing only a half-million dollars, lacking truly round and convincing sets and bursting with DIY decoration (descended from punk—very): the film has the neon fingerprints of its creators all over it.

It is precisely this “low,” inexpensive, pop-musical, youth-oriented aesthetic Soviet émigré Slava Tsukerman and his crew enact that connects this film in some kind of unspoken international fraternity, a Cold War counter-discourse.

Much American film production in the 1980s was marked by jingoism and interventionism. Even irenics were often of an authoritarian bent (Rocky IV truly, unironically, is one of the landmark cinematic texts of the Reagan era). The consideration of geopolitical violence carried with it only rarely a consideration of geopolitical history. The inverse of this unthinking, unflagging chauvinism is, I would argue, a range of conspiracy texts that mark the years from Nixon through George H.W. Bush. (Fredric Jameson has written cogently on this theme in a chapter of The Geopolitical Aesthetic.) The conspiratorial accusations of much low-grade genre coding in the 1970s and ‘80s made for rather fascinating cinema all along the high-low divide. I am thinking of David Blair’s Wax, or the Discovery of Television among the Bees (1991) and Mark Rappaport’s Chain Letters (1985), for starters. This tendency to make sense of politics as arcane and perhaps extraterrestrial, the workings of an omniscient order of powerful beings, extends weblike through much of cinema. At its root, I think, it expresses the concerns of a mentality which—unlike that of the Stallonist-jingoist—do not identify with government (or US) power and do not trust the benevolence of its operators. Conspiracy was the narrative mechanism by which new and inorganic communities were produced—all as results of shadow powers. The dual video age themes of conspiracy and cliques sometimes converged—they converge in Liquid Sky. The film’s fringe vanguard fashionistas being orgasmo-murdered by vampiric aliens (depicted only as optic nerves) makes for an interesting comment on the unwittingness of the pop avant-garde cliques—the R&D departments of capitalism—in the post-Nixon, post-1960s counterculture Cold War milieu.

The nodal points of the early video age have in fact proven to be a rich mine to vein. The mining started early enough, as commercial films soon became weird and neon-gritty, too: recall not only the street/youth films like Beat Street (Stan Lathan, 1984), but also Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind (1986) or Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984). If, by the mid-1980s, the “new wave” could be co-opted and “upgraded” to commercial cinema as a look, a feel, a selling point, then it isn’t until, say, 2008 that the unclean age of analog (the vital antithesis of neon new wave cleanliness) finds its synthesis realized. Meaning: the technology is as important, and as apparent, as the décor, the attitudes, and the mise-en-scène. Just look at the latest Snoop Dogg video, a brilliant work, “Sensual Seduction” (directed by Melina Matsoukas). At this point it is not simply the depicted image but the way the image is captured and produced that become a desired effect. To hold a screening of Liquid Sky in 2008 and to assume its continued relevancy or worth is, I think, a call to bear this technoaesthetic transformation in mind.

--Zach Campbell, January 2008

Elective Affinities

2008-02-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

Liquid Sky and the Soviet fantasy of Amerika

The person seeing Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky for the first time would have every right to ask – where on earth does this come from? It all takes place in some kind of New York City, but hardly one you might recognise. The clothes resemble something worn in Blitz or Club for Heroes circa 1980, a Neuromantic, Bowiephile fastidiousness; the conversations are rhetorical and stilted; the music, meanwhile, resembles little else made before or since, an idea of synthpop created by someone who can’t possibly have heard any. And by all accounts, this was its (alienation) effect on New Yorkers at the time – that isn’t what the scene looks like! Who dresses like that, who talks like that, what music sounds like that? Accordingly, its only in the late 90s, when the film briefly became an electroclash cliché (Adult. covering ‘Me and My Rhythm Box’ etc) that it started to be assimilated back into pop culture. Regardless of whatever Tsukerman and his co-conspirators – fellow Soviet emigres Yuri Neyman, Nina Kerova, Anatole Gerasimov, and American collaborator Anna Carlisle (writer and actor as both Jimmy and Margaret) – thought they were doing, their version of early 80s New York presented a strange and intense fantasy, not an American reality, although it derives from a warped version of it. In doing so, they were recapitulating a move that was as old as the USSR they had fled from.

There was always an intense elective affinity between the Soviet Union and the United States, one that the residue of the Cold War continues to obscure. That is, what was generally called Amerikanizm. This we could define as the critical, alienating use of American cultural, technological and formal tropes in order to create a distinctively Soviet and Socialist aesthetic. The history of Amerikanizm has yet to be written, and it encompasses everything from skyscraper design, scientific management, assembly-line production (all those quintessentially socialist realist tractors were spawn of Ford’s heavy investment in the Five Year Plans), and perhaps most famously, film. In film Amerikanizm takes on its own particular name – Eksentrizm. While Godard’s 60s youth in Masculin Feminin were torn between their mother and father ‘Marx and Coca-Cola’, Eccentrists were the result of a three way love triangle between Alexander Bogdanov, Frederick Wilmslow Taylor and Charlie Chaplin. We may never know which was the true father.

Their fantasy Amerika, encapsulated in the 1922 Manifesto of the Eccentric Actor, signed by the future film directors Gregori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich, was a meld of the mechanised movement of Taylorism (and in that, they were concomitant with Meyerhold’s contemporary experiments in theatrical ‘Biomechanics’) and the similarly unnatural stilted movements of Chaplin. As Walter Benjamin (a fan of the Eccentrists) pointed out on the release of Modern Times, Chaplin’s walking, dancing, and poetry of gesture was an immanent response to the very nature of film, which pivots on a dialectic between the Fordist, assembly-line continuity of image succeeding image; and the interruptive, discontinuous motion of montage, the edit, the cut and splice of entirely separate phenomena to create a ‘whole’. So his movement is jerky, yet fluid: balletic and awkward, smooth and graceless. The Eccentrist’s Manifesto spliced all these elements together along with a call for the total destruction of the old image order in favour of some combination of Hollywood’s slapstick disruptiveness and technological flair, Futurism’s iconoclasm, and the impossible movement of the onscreen comedian with Socialism’s promise of a world turned upside down.

Perhaps the most well known exponent of Amerikanizm and Eksentrizm (aside from Sergei Eisenstein…) was Lev Kuleshov, with a series of films beginning with The Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, in which a flag waving Yankee is baffled and overwhelmed by the vibrancy and excitement of the proletarian state. At this early stage the passage to the future and the attendant journey was always assumed to be in that direction. The Formalist critic Marietta Shaginyan created a sensation in the early 20s with Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd, in which she and the head of the Soviet state publishers concocted an imaginary author, ‘Jim Dollar’, a hero straight out of the pages of the crime thriller, for serialised stories of solidarity, derring-do and fantasy technology. The baton of the future would be passing inevitably from the USA to the USSR, which would in turn create a socialist America on the vast steppe. Every pole of the USSR, from Eccentrist, Anarchistic currents to Trotskyists and Stalinists believed in this until the mid-30s, when the dead generations completed their strangulation of the revolution. In 1924 Stalin defined ‘Leninism’ as ‘the combination of Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency’, while his enemy wrote that ‘the Soviet system shod with American technology will be socialism,’ a conjunction that would define the form of the new society: ‘it will transform our order, liberating it from the heritage of backwardness, primitiveness and barbarism.’ This desire, common to the revolutionaries and the earlier Thermidorians, was dismissed later by Boris Groys as a soft-headed desire to create a ‘better America’, replaced by Stalinism’s so much more serious expression of naked power (as with many ostensible critics of Stalinism, Groys seems incapable of writing about it without his admiration showing through).

Kuleshov’s America, meanwhile, soon got its own descriptor: Kuleshovism, denoting an editing style indebted to D.W Griffith with a cast of characters taken from the work of Jack London. Kuleshov would live long enough to become the teacher and mentor of one Slava Tsukerman, in the late 1960s. Whether the excitements of his youth carried over into the work of his young student we can only speculate. Yet there is Eccentrist pedigree in Liquid Sky too – the director of photography, Yuri Neyman, who transforms New York so vividly into an alien city, was the cinematographer on the elderly Sergei Yutkevich’s film about his fellow Americanist Mayakovsky Laughs. Tsukerman and Neyman would make the journey that their tutors only dreamed of, although it would be a fallacy to claim that in so doing they discovered the ‘real’ America.

Actually, it’s as strange, and as fascinated by American style as a typical Cold War product. The 1963 Soyuzmultfilm animation Shareholder ridicules the stock-market’s pretence to participation in the economy, but does so via the loving depiction of Eisenhower-era modernity: those extraordinary streamlined cars, the zoot suits, neon lights and jazz that were ostensibly signs of decadence. Style for its own sake was the forbidden, and this is what Liquid Sky luxuriates in, the potlatch of panstick. In this least Americanist phase of the USSR, when Khrushchev would envy Nixon his kitchens and the latter all those rockets, America was still an underlying dream presence. In that most Soviet of works Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky Brothers’ novel of an alien holiday creating the fascinating, rotting industrial wonderland known as the Zone, the setting had to be transferred to America in order to speak so plainly about the Soviet war on nature, the industrial instrumentalism that Susan Buck-Morss considers the fatal poison of the Amerikanist conjuncture.

In 1920 Trotsky, an ex-New Yorker, claimed that just one NY-style building in Moscow might help shake the poverty and torpor created by the Russian Civil War. Americanism in architectural design was a complex, vexed question, as Cold War politicking obscured the essential interrelatedness and affinity. The Soviet skyscraper designs of the 1920s were strippings and rationalisations of the USA’s huge, atavistic fantasy-palaces. Aware of the mystificatory absurdity of a Woolworth Building, the extension of the Gothic up into the sky, the USSR’s early architects took their cue from the factories behind the facade. In one particularly memorable instance, this centred on the 1922 competition for the Chicago Tribune skyscraper. Bauhaus director Walter Gropius proposed a tower based on the printworks at the back, extending their modules into a futurist vision of cool, precise technology. It was ridiculed, of course, in favour of flying buttresses and Gothicky ornament. So in another act of plunder, the Soviet architects Grigori and Mikhail Barkhin proposed to build a slightly modified version of Gropius’ Chicago in Moscow for the Izvestia newspaper – and got it built, albeit drastically reduced. Yet ten years later, in the contest for the notorious Palace of the Soviets, all the Soviet Modernists would be rejected in favour of a design by an obscure New Yorker, Hector Hamilton. The resultant design, modified by Boris Iofan, was a direct response to the Empire State Building. While it abhorred the art deco smoothness of the latter, it aimed to exceed its already ludicrous height.

It’s impossible to watch Liquid Sky without noticing the Empire State. Neyman’s camera lingers on it, caresses it, illuminates it as a neon needle or a futuristic phallus, as a correspondent to the queasy drugginess and bleak, loveless sex that pervades the film. The Soviet Empire State never got built, of course – but as Buck-Morss has pointed out, the colossal statue of Lenin at its pinnacle resembled nothing so much as King Kong hanging on to the Empire’s mast, swiping away the fighter planes. Cold War politics meant that when the USSR finally built its skyscrapers in the late 40s, they couldn’t resemble either Empire/Chrysler romantic futurism or Seagram/Lever Sachlichkeit, but instead reached back into the past – to the Gothick cakes that they had rejected as silly in their revolutionary period: ‘they preposterously decorate their fortieth storeys with some Renaissance piece or other, oblivious to the fact that these curlicues and statuettes are good enough at six storeys, but any higher they are completely unnoticeable. Of course, these high-class baubles can’t be placed any lower, or they’ll interfere with advertisements’ wrote Mayakovsky in My Discovery of America. Stripped of these objets d’art, technology might, in theory, have been more sachlich, and more socialist – yet the Soviet state took it on, baubles and all. Tsukerman and Neyman would only have known Americanism in the hidden forms of the 1940s Soviet Woolworth Buildings or in the bastardised Corbusier that surrounded all Soviet cities by the late 70s. Hence the real, original Skycity has a fascination for them, yet one pervaded with decadence and disappointment as much as the old live-wire excitement that their teachers had on the viewing of the latest Harold Lloyd film.

That’s where we find Liquid Sky: at the point where the collision of Soviet socialism and American technoromanticism had long, long since disappeared. Instead the film was made in the context where brutish geriatrics Reagan and Brezhnev waved their missiles at each other in the Cold War’s chilling early 80s sequel. Accordingly, it luxuriates in the glorious end. Though everyone moves through it as if in a trance, goes through their motions of scoring and screwing, it still conveys the sheer electric excitement of popculture, the gleeful destruction of gender boundaries, the transformation of ‘music’ into electronic scree and exhortations, and collectivity survives at least in a sense on the dancefloor. Dreams of equality become an aristocracy of the poor (everyone in Liquid Sky seems elegantly impoverished), where émigrés from the Midwest like Margaret are able to play out their fantasies on their body, via the masquerades and misappropriations of fashion. The world ends with a synthesised chill, but at least not with a whimper. There’s no hope, of course, and the only way out is up – like Bogdanov’s Red Star, the horrors of the terrestrial are transcended in the alien transportation. The logical conclusion of this reappraisal of Soviet Amerikanizm is that both are bankrupt, and the only escape is to disappear along with the aliens that feed on earthly jouissance.

kino fist: cinema and boredom cfp

2008-02-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who braved the transport problems yesterday to come to the Liquid Sky screening. Now we all know that the opiates resemble orgasms, the Empire State Building is a giant hypodermic and that aliens are the size of dinner plates...

Next screening will once again be at the E:vent Gallery in Bethnal Green on Sunday 24th Feb. The theme is boredom and we'll be showing Vera Chytilová's Daisies and Michael Haneke's Der Siebente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent).

We are looking for contributions - texts (200-2000 words), illustrations and images. Written pieces can be directly about one or other of the films, but also on the theme of boredom and cinema more broadly.

The deadline for submissions is: Sunday 17th February. Please send everything to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk. Any questions about submissions to me as well.

kino fist is back TOMORROW!

2008-02-02T08:13:00.000-08:00

Kino Fist is returning this Sunday at the E:vent Gallery, at 96 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green London E2 6PU, on the theme of Film & Fashion. The usual - 2pm, 2 quid, nibbles and booze and smoking, with a free zine and the following features: Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky with support from Chuck Jones' Hare Conditioned, and the video to Bowie's 'Fashion'. Come along, if you know what's good for you.

kino fist wants you!

2007-12-24T04:28:00.001-08:00

KINO FIST Call for Contributors

DEADLINE 14th January 2008

KINO FIST will return in the New Year on Sunday 3rd February with a screening of Slava Tsukerman's LIQUID SKY and others at 2pm at the E:VENT Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street
London E2 6PU.

We will be producing a magazine, but this time we are looking for outside contributions in the form of articles, photos and illustrations.

The theme for this issue is Film and Fashion. Pieces on Liquid Sky will be particularly welcome, though broader pieces on the topic will also be considered. Limit: 2000 words.

We can't promise to use all contributions, but we'll do our best. Pieces will also be published on the Kino Fist website. Those contributors who live overseas or can't make the screening will receive a mailed copy of the magazine. We don't have any funds for paying contributors unfortunately, but I'll send you a book or something.

Please send all texts and images to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk.

2007-12-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

We're so underground we didn't even get mentioned in this mostly-stupid recent piece about alternative film clubs in the UK. Still, I wish we had some catacombs...Kino Fist will potentially return in Feb 2008, most likely in Bethnal Green...we'll let you know...

socialism must not exclude human sensual pleasure from its programme!

2007-07-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

by Infinite Thought

Despite the claim that ‘there is no such thing as too much fun’, plastered all over the dirty teflon of the recently reopened Dome, we must sadly come to terms with the fact that we live in a world in which enjoyment has been profoundly circumscribed. Don’t be misled: The imperative to ‘Enjoy!’ is omnipresent, but pleasure, joy and happiness are absolutely and entirely absent. We can have as many vibrators as we like, and drink as much booze as we physically tolerate, but anything else outside the echo chamber of money-possessions-base-pleasure is strictly verboten. Communes, you say! Collectives! Alternative models of the family! What are you, mad?! It’s a weary indictment of the state of things when virtually every book on these topics has been removed from your university library. People can’t possibly have once thought that there might be more to life than Daddy-Mummy-Me...could they?

Whatever did happen to those dreams of living differently? To the radical Kibbutzim, co-housing groups, revolutionary cells? When the ‘queer’ comes to stand in for the right for everyone to own their own fuck-pad, and the family turns every inward upon itself (‘now we’ve finally managed to save up for a mortgage, how about we schedule in a child around 2010?’), when gay lifestyle magazines fill their pages with advice on how best to marry and adopt you know the restoration is truly upon us. Alternative living these days is more likely to refer to the fact that you’ve shoved a solar panel on your roof rather than undertaken any practical critique of the nuclear family.

Thus we move, just like theories of being in Medieval theology, from the many (a generalised sexual hedonia) to the one (the ‘life partner’ who agrees to share the mortgage) but with nothing in between, apart, perhaps, for some, a glimpse at possible alternatives – but the shared student house, or squatting with an anarchist group or pottering off for a few years to an ashram in one’s early twenties are scarcely more than temporary diversions, slotted in to an already pre-ordained telos of domestic and economic stability. They lack structure – and deliberately so.

Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism and The Switchboard Operator, whilst in strong part a metaphorical portrayal of the abusive relationship between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, simultaneously poses the question of what it might be to have a different attitude towards sex, and as a corollary to this, what it would be to live differently, to think beyond the apparently all-pervasive political separation of family and the world. What if every fuck was a kind of communism, egalitarian, joyful and for the good of all? This would precisely not be communalism, a kind of withdrawn fellowship, but a re-establishment of the link between sex and politics. This is the link that capitalism needs to obfuscate in order to hide its true dependency on the ordering and regulation of reproduction. The family in this sense is always precisely a question of the relationship between sex and politics, how it is that someone is fit and functioning enough to sell eight hours of their labour power a day. But the increasing dominance of the ideology of domesticity, shored up by endless televisual imperatives to clean, decorate or sell your home, increasingly strips all living arrangements, whether they be the single flat set up for a series of one-night stands or the nuclear household with kids and a puppy in the garden, of their real political role. Capitalism has to pretend that the world of politics has nothing to do with the home – one of the lasting achievements of feminism is to re-establish the link between household labour, reproductive labour and paid labour – from the cradle to the grave, a worker is infinitely harder to produce and maintain than merely turning up in the office might suggest.

From Sexoleftism to Deflationary Acceptance

There are perhaps two alternative ways of politicising sex, neither of which are particularly satisfactory. The first takes sex as being itself inherently liberatory. Makavejev’s films flirt with the powerful energies of a liberated sexuality, with particular reference to Reich, but tend to turn fatal when the question of what it would be to prolong such a project arises. When we look to actual attempts to put Reich’s ideas into practice, in projects such as Otto Mühl’s 1970s Viennese commune, we see one of the problems of something like an overpoliticisation of sex, an overcentralisation of its importance that eventually (inevitably?) leads to new forms of domination. Mühl’s ambitions for eventually realising a free society began with the declaration of war on one enemy in particular: monogamy. It was rather a popular choice, as by 1972 hundreds had joined and other sections were set up all over Germany.

Rather than our current many-to-one model, Mühl attempted something like a simple substitution – life-long fidelity was to be replaced by absolute promiscuity. Members were forbidden to have sex with the same partner more than once a week, yet all must have sex five times a day – romantic love was bourgeois, foreplay old-fashioned. Sex was to be performed as quickly and machinically as possible. The Weather Underground had their own militant take on this sexual critique of bourgeois morality: marathon criticism sessions, fuelled by LSD, which included forcing members of the group with no sexual attraction to each other to have sex, or making the boyfriend of one member watch his girlfriend have sex with another man. What is being invoked here is kind of sexual cognitive dissonance designed to shore up commitment to the group and ensure total subjective (and sexual) destitution. No more romantic dreams.

The anxieties and inequalities of desire seem to always rear their ugly head, however: not all members of the commune are equally desirable, some are in fact very undesirable, and one person in particular is incredibly desirable, Mühl himself, who takes on an increasingly phallic status. Hierarchy returns as the select few super-attractive people extricate themselves from the desires of the rabble – sexoleftism becomes a tyranny of copulation as Mühl is later accorded droit de seigneur over every young girl who comes of age. Mühl was eventually sentenced in the 1980s to seven years in jail for child sex offences.

The central problem of the notion of sex as inherently egalitarian emerges when it turns out that desire isn’t fair at all. Accepting the notion that desire is a tyrant forms the second attempt to link sex and politics: we could call this the tragic-psychoanalytic model, which at least has the virtue of speaking intelligently about itself. If there is no sexual relation, there is certainly no possibility of founding a community upon it, unless, precisely, it is a collective which is not one, which might describe something like the (very unsexily named) blogosphere.

The problem here is twofold: first, the relative ahistoricality of this model of sex, as if all maladapted animals with this peculiar relation to language will always wear their desire like a damaged mark of shame. The second problem involves the proximity of the tragic-psychoanalytic model’s conception of sex to the practical bourgeois performance of sex: here there really is no sexual relation! Only an economic, ossified and status-based one. Between isolationist sexual utopianism and a wry displacement of the importance of sex lies a poorly served desire for a collective sexuality that neither makes sex the be-all-and-end-all (as it were) nor a dirty little secret to be drowned in proprietary and hypocritical moralising.

Saturday Night Kino

2007-06-18T08:51:00.001-07:00

Kino Fist returns triumphant with a Sexpol special - Note Change of Venue.

KINO FIST
PRESENTS
SEXPOL
dušan makavejev’s WR – MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM and THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR
plus SEXPOL SHORTS
SATURDAY 30th JUNE 6PM
E:VENT GALLERY, 96 TEESDALE STREET LONDON E2 6PU
BETHNAL GREEN TUBE
kinofist.blogspot.com

For questions, directions and so forth email me (right-hand corner) or wearekinofist(at)gmail.com.

genet

2007-04-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Genet flyer gets a poetic tribute here.

Kino-Pamphlets

2007-03-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: ALL MAGAZINES HAVE NOW BEEN SENT.

If anyone would like a free set of all five KINO FIST magazines, please send me your address to infinitethought(at)hotmail.co.uk and I'll post them off to you.

Articles and extracts by: k-punk, Hector Kollias, Alberto Toscano, Owen Hatherley, Esther Leslie, Alain Badiou, Daniel Miller, Infinite Thought.

2007-03-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

See IT's contribution, and also:

The Chris Marker Kino Fist tonight was great (minus the severe chill): to all those who came to one, some, or all of them, talked to each other, read the magazine and so on - cheers! We adore you.

We might try and find another location that involves less pre-screening preparation in the future, and the eventual plan is to move somewhere more central (we are currently in discussion with a place near Waterloo that has a proper booze and entertainment licence and everything). Legal Kino Fist: trust me, the dirt will remain.

In the meantime, our next project is to hold a one-off Patrick Keiller screening with the deeply affable man himself in attendance. This will probably take place at Goldsmiths (New Cross). Details to follow.

A list of Things that Agitate the Heart

2007-03-26T06:14:00.000-07:00

Some montage cells on Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat

‘Editing, one would hope, restores history’s polyphony. No place here for gratuitous linkages or mean spirited attempts at forcing people to contradict themselves (who hasn’t contradicted himself at least once?)’ (Chris Marker, 1977)

‘There are endless themes to film in Capital: the one we want to film is Marx’s method…we know now that the basic proposition of Capital (its goal) is to teach the worker how to think dialectically. To show the method of the dialectic.’ (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)

Brothers! It starts with what is not a revolution, but its representation. This isn’t just any representation though: a voice tells us about the first time they saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and the familiar images fill the screen: the Tsarist soldiers advancing, the utter solidarity of the workers, the chop, cut, tear and roar of the editing, tinted Red by Marker to evoke not just the sepia of yesterday’s utopia, but to efface it yet more: make it familiar and strange. Then we see them making the same clenched fists, facing the same guns and bayonets (or CRS truncheons), the same gestures recurring. The voice in 1977 tells us that in 1967, his generation wanted their own 1917.
What we see isn’t 1917: it isn’t even the 1905 of the Potemkin mutiny in Odessa, a battle in a failed revolution whose ghost would take glorious revenge 12 years later. Then the montage shifts to the steps in Odessa where the famous massacre of the innocents was filmed, and an Intourist guide cheerfully talking about the attraction. Revolution is mediated two, three, fourfold. The question is: if a revolution has been transmitted through representation, and if the imitation of that representation is the image of revolution, does it stop being revolution? A Grin without a Cat’s answer is ‘NO!’

Methods of Montage. Irrespective of its opening with Eisenstein, in the fight between his ‘Kino Fist’ and Dziga Vertov’s ‘Kino Eye’, Marker is clearly a descendent of the latter. However, his work is one of the few genuine deployments of what Eisenstein considered cinema’s highest possible form. In his essays of the late 1920s he outlines the development of the method: Metric Montage, Rhythmic Montage, Tonal Montage, Overtonal Montage, and finally: Intellectual Montage. Eisenstein’s critics, then and afterwards, saw Intellectual Montage as confirmation of the dryness and aridity at the heart of Eisenstein’s theorising. On the contrary, Eisenstein was advocating an intellectual agitation no less fierce than the physical.
As he puts it, in terms rather more technocratic than Marker’s, ‘if under the influence of ‘jazz montage’ (the syncopated montage used in places in his October) one’s hands and knees rhythmically tremble, in the second case such a trembling, under the influence of a different degree of intellectual appeal, occurs in identically the same way through the tissues of the higher nerve systems of the thought apparatus’. As Marker asks (describing, in his own voice in the French version of the film, his inability to keep the camera still when filming the insurrection), ‘Why do the Images start to Tremble?’ Intellectual montage, as much as any other, is based on friction, and is physical. Eisenstein writes that this cinema will exploit the dialectical tension at the heart of this divide, not veer away from it in some utopian aufhebung. The intellectual cinema is kinaesthetic: somewhere where you feel what you are thinking and think what you are feeling. ‘Only an intellectual cinema has the power to resolve the dispute between ‘the language of logic’ and ‘the language of images’ – on the basis of a language of cinedialectics…a cinema with the utmost commitment to sensuality as well as investigation, and which draws upon its universal access to channels of action through visual, auditory and bio-motor stimuli’.
A fair description of what we have here. Images, played through filters and electronic distortion, chopped and reassembled, which offer immediate pleasure, soundtracked with electronic tonalities and sibilances providing psycho-sensual commentary, overlaid over (or is it vice-versa?) an allusive and formidably dense meditation on ‘the Third World War’ of 1967-77: one which, the Situationists thought, was a war against representation itself, which wouldn’t be over until the last bureaucrat was hung with the guts of the last capitalist.

Slow Motion. Marker must be the only director who has ever paid equal attention to the two antipodes of the Soviet cinema: the ferociously fast editing and agitation of the 1924-34 Leftist directors, and the meditative tracking shots and transcendental slowness of half a century later, in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Schematically, the cinema of World Revolution, and the cinema of Brezhnevian stagnation.
What links them is that the speed, whether fast or slow, is registered, never becomes something merely taken for granted: the tempo is all. The length of the montage cells, in the MTV version of kinetic montage, only lets up when it lingers over the platinum rims and the girls’ arses. Otherwise its motion can never slow, it can never use what the later Eisenstein described as ‘montage within the shot’: the becoming-montage of the cell/component itself. Marker’s montage is mostly careering, which makes the moments when it slows incredibly shocking. The scene where for several unedited minutes Japanese women from a village that had been poisoned by a company's dumping of waste in their water supply confront a suited shareholder, screaming with grief about their murdered sons: their furiousness and his immobility presented in uninterrupted footage. Or alternately, a long extract from Allende addressing a factory meeting, his patience before them, forcing the viewer to pause amid the melee, listen, evaluate.

A fireside chat with Fidel. Recently, on Hugo Chavez’s show Alo Presidente, its host received an unexpected caller. After a while its host twigged – ‘my God, it’s Fidel!’ He’d phoned in, presumably in order to inform its host that he wasn’t dead, or to talk about football, or whatever. If this film, in which, as with Eisenstein, the advancing crowd is the ‘hero’, has a ‘protagonist’ then it’s Fidel Castro. His repute as a militaristic Stalinist apparatchik is belied by footage, frequently inserted, from a film of Castro talking. Several things here are odd: his obvious shyness, his tendency to embarassedly hide his face after a particularly extravagant rhetorical flourish, his lengthy, explanatory mode of speech, and, frankly, the fact that he’s crouching in some grass during the whole performance.
This is in no way accidental: what this represents is a long-deceased mode of propaganda, a method which, like Eisenstein’s propaganda, is notable for the respect it gives to the recipient’s intelligence. The prototype here is actually Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats, where the head of state talks to you as an equal, explains complex political phenomena, goes on a bit. Fidel’s public appearances punctuate the film, and we see his obvious discomfort as he realises that power is slipping out of the hands of the likes of him, and back into the hands of the likes of Leonid Brezhnev. We see his torturous attempt to justify the crushing of the Czech humanist Communists, with a shrieking electronic drone reinforcing, commenting on (or providing) his discomfort; or we have a droll discussion of his nervous gesture of adjusting the microphones during speeches, then see him speaking in Moscow, wincing with horrified embarassment as he realises that these ones are stuck, immovable.

What is to be done? Much of the footage is taken from films made on the ground, and here the sources are frequently as remarkable as the montage that they eventually find themselves a cell of: some seem to be from the ‘Cine-Tracts’, the short films made quickly and edited in camera, and shown anonymously at meetings in May (Godard had to feature his own handwriting in his, presumably to stamp his identity as auteur even here). Marker had been working like this even before ’68, with A bientot, j’espere being a piece on the strikes of late ’67, followed by Critique/Autocritique, made with the strikers who disapproved of Marker's left-wing melancholia. One of the most fascinating components is William Klein’s Grands Soirs, Petits Matins. This is a film made on the streets of Paris in 1968, a montage of conversations.
Nothing really happens in Klein’s film: we see some fights with the CRS, the torched Stock Exchange, but this isn’t really the point, the real crux is everyone, ideologues, workers, students, schoolchildren, old men, all arguing – what do we do now?? Frequently the question is asked whether or not this is a revolution or not, and if it is, what they should do, seize the state, get the support of the army, not to mention what to do on the day after. But that isn’t all: there’s the voices, people who get up in the middle of huge crowds who explain that they haven’t spoken in public before and then go on to discuss the new society that they intend to create, their voices shaky but unafraid. Throughout there’s the sense that – isn’t revolution something that one might see represented, but doesn’t do? The shock of finding oneself in one: a way of dealing with this is to deny its existence, a train of thought that the Communist Party were all too willing to assist. Not that de Gaulle himself was in any doubt, as he fled Paris and begged the army for its support.

Televisionaries was Jillian Becker’s rather smug term to sum up the Red Army Fraction, a phrase taken up as a term of approval by Tom Vague in his appraisal of the ‘Baader-Meinhof Group’, who are in fact one of the groupuscules that turn up here and there in A Grin without a Cat: footage that would have been visceral to the 1977 viewer, at the time of the RAF’s endgame. After a description of a mock-‘Wanted’ poster for one of the Shah of Iran, whose visit to Berlin galvanised the German New Left, we see the real one for Ulrike Meinhof. Her fate was essentially that of a certain class, an intellectual Left doomed to suicidal confrontation or mere commentary: she was basically akin to a Maspero or Marker, a media intellectual and sympathiser with the students and workers of ’68, who gave up her lucrative career, her family, her life, in order to engage in praxis at its most extreme, unwilling to be a mere ‘commentator’ any longer, and accordingly earning the romantic respect of said commentators (‘for me, the terrorists are still the the inheritors’- Godard, 1980). Then we see women – an anonymous RAF member, then Meinhof herself – dragged along by German riot police, who try to present their faces to the camera. They struggle, desperately, not to become an image, and eventually fail.
The relationship of the Gauchiste to the media is a horribly conflicted one. It provides the images of revolt that they imitate, as in the rupture through repitition of the enacting of Potemkin, and yet its imitation can be horribly reactionary: the Jim Morrison posing of Andreas Baader for instance. David Caute’s 68: the Year of the Barricades cites a Black Panther, like those handing out the Little Red Book in A Grin without a Cat admitting that he’d watched too many films. But what is the alternative? To pretend the media doesn’t exist? To ignore it entirely and talk only to ‘our members’, as do even the most Left-wing Union leaders? Then again, television is not, ever, to be trusted: Marker’s dismissal of Watergate, over a montage of nonsensical US TV, is ‘it all happened on television’. The USAF bomber, cheerfully talking up the napalm he’s just spread over a Vietnamese village as if he’s a sports commentator.

‘A Montage of any old Trivia, taken up and Animated’ is how Eisenstein describes the methodology and the components of his mooted film of Marx’s Capital. Like Brecht, he knows that a picture of a factory tells us almost nothing about the factory itself, and instead its depiction must be made from fragments. His ‘Notes on Capital’ (also a source for Debord’s 1972 film of The Society of the Spectacle, which resembles A Grin Without a Cat in many respects) suggests that the montage cinema should take its cues from Marx’s method of dialectical juxtaposition, a method he likens to Ulysses: that it must ‘present the idea of exchange not by a depiction of the Stock Exchange, but by a thousand ‘little details’’. Lists. This is what we have in some of the finest moments of A Grin Without a Cat, as in an extraordinary chain which, over a Citroen bureaucrat posing, more explicitly than any of the Gauchistes here, the choice between workers' control and administered capitalism – shows us angled shots of factories and construction, a highway and the glacial, Corbusian new city, then advertising showing us the labour saving devices that accompanied the postwar settlement, then Marker’s ever-present quizzical Cats. Five years later in Sans Soleil, he will take as his exemplar of montage Sei Shonagon’s 9th century Pillow Book, a fragmentary construction made up of endless lists: in particular, ‘a list of things that quicken the heart’. In the future, he claims, everyone will make their own list of things that quicken the heart, ‘and poetry will be made by all.’

Kino Fist V and Final: Chris Marker

2007-03-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

Forwards, not Forgetting

2007-03-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation

Art forms also die. And the rotting corpse that is the theatre has, for the last 20 years or more, been involved in a comprehensive occlusion, distortion and demolition of the work of one of the only 20th century playwrights who attempted to keep it alive. But in that attempt, regardless of whether the theatre lives or dies, is a theory of the technological apparatus, and of production, that still speaks of demands that the proliferating media of today seem incapable of fulfilling. The theatre itself disdains these theories and these techniques. Why?

Round One: Godot vs. Galileo

‘Mr Keuner ran into Mr Muddle, a great fighter against newspapers. ‘I am a great opponent of newspapers. I don’t want any newspapers’, said Mr Muddle. Mr Keuner said ‘I am a greater opponent of newspapers. I want better newspapers.’
If newspapers are a means to disorder, then they are also a means to achieving order. It is precisely people like Mr Muddle who through their dissatisfaction demonstrate the value of newspapers. Mr Muddle thinks he is concerned with the worthlessness of today’s newspapers. In fact he is concerned with their worth tomorrow.
Mr Muddle thought highly of man and did not believe that newspapers could be made better, whereas Mr Keuner did not think very highly of man but did think that newspapers could be made better. ‘Everything can be made better’, said Mr Keuner, ‘except man.’

Brecht, Stories of Herr Keuner

A little juxtaposition might help elucidate this little conundrum. 2006 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, as well as being the 50th anniversary of the death of Bertolt Brecht. The difference between the receptions of these two anniversaries is striking. While Beckett was beset with tributes, seasons, retrospectives, those chiselled features looking out from arts centres all over, Brecht was very grudgingly acknowledged. A few productions have appeared, and each one of them has had the same mission statement: to take the Brechtian out of Brecht, to extract from it all that pernicious theorising and return it to the cathartic, realist stage. From the National Theatre’s Life of Galileo, which explicitly tried to make a regular middlebrow tale of compromised liberalism out of the alienation effects, to a Young Vic Big Brecht Fest which went so far as to expunge any works that post-dated the development of Brechtian ‘theory’ in 1926-7, there has been an unrelenting attack on Brecht’s technique- which usually accompanies rhetoric about what a Great Artist he was despite all this.

Brecht knew that Beckett was essentially his dramatic inverse, and was planning a ‘response’ play to Waiting for Godot at the time of his death in 1956. The Brechtian and the Beckettian are both paths that the post-war theatre could have taken, and it seems he at least was aware of this. Of course, since the 70s neither direction has been followed, but never mind. Nonetheless, while Adorno in his 1962 attack on Brecht and Sartre’s ‘Commitment’ argued that while these aspiring agitators could be easily reified and turned into cliché, Beckett or Kafka, ‘autonomous’ artists, could resist such treatment. The reverse has actually proved to be the case. What is perceived as Beckett’s depiction of a grim, sardonic struggle against an immutable human condition has an obvious appeal for a stagnant, fatalist and depoliticised terminal capital (alternatively, go to post-Stalinist Prague to find Kafka’s name emblazoned on anything with a price tag) while Brecht’s insistence on the critical stance is utterly anathema to its tamed culture. And this is usually stated in terms of pleasure, or enjoyment: the Brechtian technique is allegedly something that ensures aridity, its laying bare of the device merely leading to a dry formalism. It’s no fun. ‘Negation use, consider revising’ as Microsoft Word will tell you.

Really, Brecht has so little going for him here it’s almost comic: Marxist, German, Hegelian, his innovations summed up as either the rather grand sounding ‘Epic Theatre’ or theorised in imposingly Teutonic terms as the ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ which is seemingly designed to be oppressive: whether you translate it as ‘alienation’ or ‘distanciation’ or ‘estrangement’, it isn’t a phrase that promises a whole load of fun. But what is so frustrating about this is that it simply doesn’t square with any of what either Beckett or Brecht actually wrote. Beckett’s Late Review devotees seem to have an idea of him as some sort of amalgam of Zeno the Stoic and Father Ted, yet one can’t imagine Tom Paulin or Bonnie Greer relishing being assaulted by the panic attack of Not I or wading through the thick, impenetrable tangle of repetition and horror of How it Is. Beckett is not fun. For all his virtues, he is a supremely difficult writer, almost all of his mature works extremely forbidding: one might extract a quote or two from Worstward Ho, but few try reading the bastard thing. To be crass, people think they like Beckett and don’t, and think they don’t like Brecht- but, we will argue, they do.

Brecht’s works, curiously enough, are absolutely full of singing, dancing, rhythm, laugh-out-loud jokes, wickedly biting irony, and perhaps most importantly, a refusal to ever be boring. The obvious pleasures of the Kurt Weill assisted musicals of 1927-33 (Seven Deadly Sins, Threepenny Opera, Happy End, Mahogonny) almost seem to go without saying, their songs’ persistent presence in pop culture ever since being proof enough of that: yet this was the exact period of the development and deployment of the Marxist-Modernist Brechtian apparatus of interruption and interjection, the placards and projections that everyone seems to so object to. Even the lehrstucke (‘learning plays’) his most stripped down and didactically severe pieces – most notoriously the ‘wild roar’ (Adorno) of The Measures Taken – have an extremism, a starkness and violence, that prevent them from ever becoming mere academic experiments. So, we will have to ask, what is it in the Brechtian conceptual apparatus that makes people want to separate it from the work? Why is this device that must be laid bare so forbidding to the arbiters of taste? And more to the point, what are these theories, how do they work, and what do they have to do with film and the media rather than the stage?

Round Two: Who’s Afraid of the Verfremdungseffekt?

‘They are the enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production. Production is the unforeseeable’

(Brecht, on Socialist Realism)

Like any theory worth using, the Brechtian Methodologies morphed and changed to respond to new conditions, but perhaps most interesting for our purposes here is the period from the mid 20s to mid 30s, when the development of Brecht’s technique was explicitly linked with Technik (i.e. the German term for Technology). Walter Benjamin defined the alienation effect, the form of the Epic Theatre, as first and foremost an engagement with the new reified art forms of the 20th century, and specifically film and radio. In ‘Theatre and Radio’ a piece for the Blatter des Hessischen Landstheaters in 1932, Benjamin writes of the mass form of radio, its ability to reach a greater audience than even the most populist theatre, and that the very technological form of the radio itself gives it potentialities which the stage can’t approach.
‘Not only a more advanced technical stage, but also one in which technology is more evident. Unlike the theatre, it does not have a classical age behind it. The masses it grips are much larger; above all, the material elements on which its apparatus is based are closely intertwined with the interests of its audience. Confronted with this, what can the theatre offer? The use of live people – and apart from this, nothing.’
There are two possible responses to this. One is that of Great Artists, where this simply doesn’t matter because of the eternal nature of the human condition. The other response is to acknowledge that the theatre can’t compete with cinema and radio, but can however debate with them. And it does this, crucially, via Montage. The alienation effect is
‘Nothing but a retranslation of the methods of montage – so crucial in radio and film – from a technological process to a human one. It is enough to point out that the principle of the Epic Theatre, like that of montage, is based on interruption’
And via that interruption, the listener has to ‘take up an attitude towards the events on stage’: the laying bare of the device induces a stance. An early play of Brecht’s featured the banner ‘DON’T STARE SO ROMANTICALLY’: instead the audience has to assume a critical engagement.

Benjamin develops this two years later in ‘The Author as Producer’, where the properties of this montage are further discussed: ‘the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted’. So here we have a picture of the Epic Theatre where the Verfremdungseffekt is essentially an adaptation to new technological realities, and a harnessing of them specifically for the theatre (but not exclusively so) in order to disrupt its attempts to claim that the world goes on as before. The theory can in fact be adapted for the use in Film and in Radio: as Brecht was doing at the time, producing with collectives of collaborators, composers and designers radio productions such as The Flight of the Lindberghs. Here the most impressive new technological achievement of the time, the transatlantic flight, is made into a collaboration between collective producers building the plane, each one of whom is 'Lindbergh'; or in stage plays, an apparatus is introduced making prominent use of radio, newspaper headlines or projections of photographs and statistics.

Brecht’s theory and practice here was closely linked to two Soviet theoretical innovations, produced by the circle around the journal LEF. This was the far Left of Constructivism, usually calling themselves ‘Productivists’ (in the sense of productive, producing, and the product). First of all the notion of ‘making strange’, developed by the Formalist literary theorists Viktor Shklovsky and Osip Brik, who were also prolific screenplay writers for directors like Pudovkin and Room; and the development by Sergei Tretyakov and others of the notion of the Operative writer who is at once a sociologist, photographer, economist, filmmaker, producer, master of the new apparatus; and the linked experiments like the ‘Two-Way Newspaper’. The producers becoming artists and the artists becoming producers. Brecht wrote in 1927 that the new technological forms had just this radical potential for mass access and communication. In ‘The Radio as a Communications Apparatus’ he writes:

‘Among the obligations of the state’s highest official is the job of informing the nation regularly by means of the radio about his activities and their justification. The task of the radio does not end, however, with the transmission of these reports.
Beyond this, it must organise the collection of reports, i.e. it must transform the reports of those who govern into responses to the questions of those governed. Radio must make exchange possible.
Should you consider this utopian, then I ask you to reflect on the reasons why it is utopian.’
Capitalism has to prevent this apparatus from falling into the hands of all, a radical democratisation of cultural production disrupting the divide between art and life upon which the supremacy of its culture industry depends. The Epic Theatre can’t redistribute the apparatus by itself – but what it can do is present it in an objective manner, show its workings and effects as what they are, to resist the temptation of using it to represent reality or history rather than participate in it. He writes in ‘Suggestions for the Director of Radio Broadcasting’ that because the radio’s apparatus is portable, mass-produced, by its nature not exclusive, to attempt representation with it is inherently absurd. In the case of cinema, ‘I have seen with distress how the Egyptian pyramids and the Indian Rajahs’ palaces move to Neubabelsburg (the studios in Potsdam that were the centre of the 1920s German film industry) in order to be filmed by an apparatus that a man can slip comfortably into his backpack.’

The great mistake here is to see in this an inherent hostility to mass produced culture, and to the productions of that film industry. On the contrary, while the European cinema strained for Art, the American gangster film or slapstick comedy was already devising an appropriate form for the new functional media. Take for instance the 1936 fragment ‘V-Effects of Chaplin’, a little comment on the employment of alienation effects in The Gold Rush (1925):
Eating the boot (with proper table manners, removing the nail like a chicken bone, the index finger pointing outward).
The film’s mechanical aids:
Chaplin appears to his starving friend as a chicken.
Chaplin destroying his rival and at the same time courting him.
So the Verfremdungseffekt is here expressed by gesture, movement, the anti-naturalism producible by the human body itself (the Brechtian gestus, what Benjamin described as the actor’s critical stance towards his character) as well as by the technological apparatus. The Hollywood film, at its least middlebrow edges, is capable of being just as jarring as the Epic Theatre. In the scenes from The Gold Rush referenced above, a situation of poverty and abjection is Made Strange, while at the same time Made Universal. The absurdity of the situation is conveyed by the anti-naturalist gesture, and by the morphing of man into chicken achievable only via the device.

According to Hanns Eisler, Brecht disdained music in favour of the invention ‘Misuc’: a response to a Beethoven that ‘always reminds me of paintings of battles’, and ‘music ceremoniously produced in concert halls’, replacing it with a din that is ‘extremely close to the people’. And as any contemporary production of Brecht will tend to renege on all of this, the best place to encounter it today is on record, in the interpretations of Brecht’s songs by anyone from Lotte Lenya to Nina Simone, the Young Gods to Ernst Busch. This is fitting, as pop had its own Brechtian moment in the late 70s and early 80s, much as Cinema did in the late 60s and early 70s (note that both were in periods of intense political struggle). Some of the most straightforward statements of the Brechtian method are on the subject of music, whether in the ‘mass songs’ that he wrote for the Popular Front of the 30s with Eisler, or in his writings on film music. In 1942, while working on Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, Brecht wrote a short programmatic piece, ‘On Film Music’, as a contribution to Adorno and Eisler’s study Composing for the Films. This contains one of the most succinct statements of technique and technik. Under the heading ‘Function of Innovations’ Brecht writes of a technique ‘directed mainly against the narcotic function of art’, and one which of necessity has to be based on ‘Excitement – without which theatre today can hardly be imagined’. The use of music in this was totally paramount, for the same reason that the Musical, at its most extreme (Dennis Potter, Lars von Trier) is the culture industry’s most truly Brechtian form.
‘Music had the task of protecting the audience from a state of ‘trance’. It did not serve the enhancement of existing or anticipated effects but rather interrupted or manipulated them. So if there were songs in a play, it was not as if the story ‘dissolved into song’. The people in the play did not break into song. On the contrary, they openly interrupted the story. They assumed a pose for singing and presented the song in a way that did not fully correspond to the situation.’
Then the audience would be taught not to trust what they see: they can ‘discover the emptiness and conventionalism of certain events which the actors had played with unshakeable seriousness.’

Round Three: The Threepenny Lawsuit and the Threepenny Film

‘The Russian writer Osip Brik noted very cleverly that Brecht’s works are always court cases, in which Brecht proves himself to have litigation-mania’

Sergei Tretyakov, ‘Bert Brecht’ (1934)

So what happened when the Brechtian – well, when Brecht himself – was unleashed on cinema? Although in his quasi-expressionist youth Brecht had worked on unproduced screenplays and even directed a short film, the first opportunity for his mature theory to be tested was in an adaptation of his 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera. This was a cobbled together melange made up of a title of Lion Feuchtwanger’s, a translation and rewriting by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, plus adaptations by Brecht of that play’s original songs, poems by Francois Villon and Rudyard Kipling(!), and even some ‘original’ work, all honed via Kurt Weill’s self-deconstructing music into a viciously witty depiction of amoral capitalism. Famous variety tale of murder, rape and general gangstaism ‘Mack the Knife’ hails from here, and was included specifically as a measure against an actor who was making his villain rather too worthy of identification: better to make him ‘violate an old woman in her slumbers’ for cash rather than let him become a straightforward hero. This chaotic, disjunctive and discordant mess of syncopated cynicism and mercenary amorousness (see ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’) was the most popular play in the Weimar Republic. A vindication, if ever there were, that works created in the new manner could connect just as well, if not better, with a mass audience.

This already deeply hybrid work then gets very complicated indeed. Though the work was contemporaneous with Brecht’s turn towards Marxism and development of Epic Theatre, by the time the film was put into development in 1930 Brecht and his collaborators had shifted artistically and politically to the extreme left, and this was going to be for them a way of testing the new apparatus’ potentialities for both political efficacy and formal rupture. A screenplay was written, entitled The Bruise: a Threepenny Film, which quite explicitly called for the montage experiments of Eisenstein, Pudovkin or Vertov as well as a Gestural, anti-naturalist acting style indebted to Chaplin or Keaton, as opposed to the leisurely pace, fluid camera and subtle, insinuating acting styles advocated by the German Expressionist art film: one of whose number, G.W Pabst, fresh from the Weimar-Goth classic Pandora’s Box, was slated to direct. Needless to say, Brecht’s treatment was rejected, and a new screenplay was written partly by Bela Balazs, a prominent theorist of film at the time. Balazs is worth investigating here as another inverse of the Verfremdungseffekt, especially seeing as the fatuous affirmationism of Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy last year marked an attempt to rehabilitate him. Put bluntly, Balazs advocated that film learn from Art, that film become Art. Balazs’ invitation to show and discuss some French art films (Rene Clair, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir) in Moscow in the late 20s elicited a response from Eisenstein: ‘Bela Forgets the Scissors’. These works, for all their alleged innovation, really returned film to the canvas, and to the artistic spectacle, precisely because they ignored the principle of interruption and of montage. For Eisenstein, as for Brecht, they weren’t Useful.

Before going on to look at the film itself, we should have a look at the case Brecht assembles in his Threepenny Lawsuit. This tract, assembled after Brecht had already lost his lawsuit against the film’s producers, has very little to do with Pabst’s film: whether or not Brecht had ever actually watched it is a moot point. In fact, it is probably the most sweeping, manifesto-like statement of the Epic Theatre in its Productivist moment. Its first target is those who, over the lawsuit, claimed that Brecht and Weill should have expected the treatment they got: film is a commodity, is not art, and as such any attempt to try and make it so (which Brecht, as a noted playwright working in the cinema, must have been doing) was doomed to failure. These people want to
‘From the outset deprive us of the apparatuses which we need in order to produce, because more and more this kind of producing will supersede the present one.’
An alternative to either this sulky aestheticism or a total surrender to the demands of capital can only be enabled by an expansion of the apparatus: in a short passage pregnant with potentiality Brecht imagines that the Lehrstucke (learning play) participants (usually active Communists, staged anywhere other than a conventional stage) would all have to have their own personal cinema apparatus. The freedom outside the new technology is meaningless. ‘To say to the intellectual worker that he is free to renounce the new work tools is to assign to him a freedom outside the production process’, and hence utterly neutered and of no threat to things as they are.

Then there is the Third Way: film as art. This is based on a form that ‘establishes itself against the apparatuses with a vengeance’, the filmed theatre that Eisenstein feared the development of sound could create. ‘He violates the apparatuses with his ‘art’. This is linked in with the belief that if something is ‘faithfully depicted’, then it is in some way able to be critical, that representation can be critique. In an allusion to the lovingly shot machinery of the photographer Renger-Patzsch, he writes that a photograph of a factory ‘reveals almost nothing about these institutions’. A more bastard form is needed. Here, the forms produced by the culture industry’s disruptive wing are again a way of employing the apparatus, and against the claims of the art film he writes ‘the masses’ bad taste is rooted more deeply in reality than the intellectuals’ good taste.’ Cinema constantly exhibits a potentiality that, for all its employment as a mere money-making machine, can be turned on its head. Its essentially collective production is an exemplar of that: ‘it is the essence of capitalism and not something generally valid that ‘unique’ and ‘special’ artefacts can only be produced by individuals and collectives only bring forth standardised mass commodities.’ What if the collective and mass form could create something ‘unique’?

In one of the very few allusions to the actual film that resulted from this debacle, it is claimed that Pabst, as an artist seems to have ‘the right to stupidity, which is usually extended to poets, painters, musicians etc, and is in fact more of an obligation’. 76 years later, a look at Pabst’s film reveals it as a more complex and murky work than Brecht would credit (if indeed he ever saw it), although it is a perfect example of what happens to these works when the theory is stripped out. According to Tretyakov, Pabst told Brecht that he wanted to make ‘a beautiful fairytale’ out of The Threepenny Opera, and this is exactly what he did. On just one of those huge mimetic sets in Potsdam that so amused Brecht, this time of a Dickensian London rather than the Pyramids, is spread out a haunted landscape of passageways and posters, smog and alleys, rats and dirt, brothels and palaces: more or less an estrangement of Weimar Berlin itself, although crucially the illusionistic nature of this is never alluded to, and the device stays resolutely unbared. The film featured many members of Brecht’s collective, and the divergence of their acting styles with Pabst’s (sur)realist mise-en-scène is peculiarly fascinating. A terrific Carola Neher as Polly Peachum is all gesture, whether dismissing her band of gangsters or acquiring a proto-Thatcher pomp as she becomes a bank manager: sweeps of the hand, cocks of the head are what mark out her performance, for all Pabst’s focus on her pulchritude via the frequent close-ups. Ernst Busch’s street singer is wonderfully sardonic, and Lotte Lenya’s moment where on her own in the brothel she sings her still utterly chilling fantasy of class war and gory revenge ‘Pirate Jenny’ is shiveringly powerful. Pabst creates a seductively eerie filmworld, and one which does in its way exploit the new apparatus (all those lingering tracking shots, a regular feature of the art cinema). There’s only really one major problem with it. It’s boring.

There are several reasons for the inertia and longeurs of the film, and many of these are precise consequences of its occlusion of the Brechtian. Anything that contradicted the tangibility of the mimetic city that Pabst had built was anathema. It’s a mistake to see this as it’s usually posited, as a merely political question: Brecht’s expansion of the 1928 play into a general indictment of capitalism is actually retained by Pabst, who was at this point a committed socialist. But what he couldn’t countenance was the way in which The Bruise or the original play was so doggedly unreal: he cut over half of Weill’s songs (so he actually won his part of the lawsuit) as people don’t just break into song, do they? So somehow they have to be inserted into a realist narrative, so that they become static: rather than interrupting the narrative, a character will stand stock still and sing a song to occasion. The avoidance of montage, meanwhile, means that the film can start to stagnate, to ossify, and to induce the trance that the theorists of Making Strange most feared: the viewer is drugged by the slow, passive foggy drag of Fritz Arno Wagner’s camera through the fantasy London, and rather than being made to think or to engage, and rather than being excited, is induced to dream. When the film’s final reconciliation of the gangster, the capitalist and the state occurs, the effect isn’t agitational – it’s fatalistic. Without the theory the disruptive effect is neutered.

Round Four: A Short Course in Realism from the Perspective of the Police

‘Even if we saw the sun was shining
On the street and on the field
We could never really think that
This was truly our own world’

‘Solidarity Song’ from Kuhle Wampe (1932)

The first 15 minutes of the film that the Brecht collective made a year later in response, Kuhle Wampe, are like being in a different century, seem to be using an entirely different apparatus to Pabst’s film. First we have a stark intertitle, a montage of newspaper headlines, then we are thrown into a montage of factories and tenements, which, as Adorno and Eisler would later elucidate, had to be accompanied by a music that would not induce a picturesque aestheticism, a Hovis advert depiction of proletarian essentialism. Instead the music is sharp, scything, desperate. Then, intercut with this dilapidated city are hordes of the unemployed on bicycles, shots of their wheels, their faces as they search all over Berlin for work. Then one of the unemployed arrives home. The desperation slows, and is replaced by an unbearable inertia. A family argument, a procession of ‘get on yer bike’ clichés. Then our unemployed protagonist – the nearest thing we have had so far to a point of identification – takes off his watch and throws himself out of the window.

The way that politics and aesthetics intersected here is interesting. To the Censor who banned the film, this sudden suicide was proof of a Communist mendacity and avant-garde disdain for the human. The man was not depicted as a full human being. He was a type. The Censor, according to Brecht’s account, had said
‘As artists you must forgive me the expression we learn too little about him, but the consequences are of a political nature and force me to object to the film’s release. Your film proposes that suicide is typical, that it is not simply this or that (pathologically disposed) individual but rather the fate of an entire social class…no, gentlemen, you have not behaved as artists, not here. You were not interested in showing the shocking fate of an individual, which no one would prevent you from doing….Good God, the actor does it as if he were showing how to peel cucumbers’
This, of course, would have been seen as a total vindication. Brecht wryly notes ‘we had the unpleasant sensation of being caught red handed’.

The extreme hybridity of Kuhle Wampe has ever really been followed up since, in cinema or elsewhere. In just over an hour, we have here first an experiment in avant-garde montage and music: the alienation effects extending to cut-ups of decidedly experimental ‘Misuc’ over advertising and strangely threatening children (as a character contemplates an unwanted pregnancy), then second we have a kitchen sink drama: one of the collective here, Ernst Ottwald, was one of the ‘proletarian novelists’ of the late 20s, who included factography and sociological analysis in their narratives, much to the chagrin of Socialist Realists, and the depiction of working class life is extremely rare in being critical without patronising. The older members of the family at the centre of the play are beset with phrases and automatic reponses to events that stop them from ever having to truly think about their situation. Their tiny flat, and subsequently their tent in the film’s titular camp, is full of phantasmagorical objects, nick-nacks and shoddy Imperial remnants: leftovers of the bourgeoisie. This isn’t presented in the manner of a sniffy disdain for their bad taste, but its absurdity is calmly laid out. Their inability to make the connections between their fate and what goes on outside is encapsulated beautifully in the scene where the father laboriously reads from the newspaper a lurid article on the erotic adventures of Mata Hari, while the mother writes out a shopping list, her terror at her inability to make ends meet depicted through a montage of price tags and consumer goods.

Third, we have here a propaganda film on two fronts. Through the depiction of a Communist festival there is a demonstration of working class power; and through the escape of the film’s central character (played by Hertha Thiele) from a stifling, lumpen environment, there is a depiction of the radicalisation of alltagsleben. A politicised everyday life necessitates a new sexual politics, and with the help of her more committed friends, she is able to escape the future of drudgery that is usually reserved for women of her class. Then, fourth, we have an argument in a U-Bahn train. This is a precedent to one of the better elements in the Socialist Realist cinema of today, an analogue to the scene in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom where a room full of people discuss the nationalisation of agriculture without (remarkably) it becoming tedious. A political argument with wit, cut and thrust, inducing the audience to think about the issues critically rather than accept the director’s perspective. So in a public spat over coffee being burnt in South America, there are absurdist non-sequiturs, political agitation, and a variety of perspectives critically evaluated. The interruption ceases in this scene, but in order to induce thought rather, as with Pabst, than to occlude it.

The most remarkable thing about Kuhle Wampe though is the sheer joy of the film. In a similar (only so much less bombastic) manner to Eisenstein’s theory of the Montage of Attractions, where agitational cinema is achieved via a panoply of exciting effects, the film’s full-to-bursting turnover of styles and effects, wit and pathos, kitchen sink realism and formal experimentation keep it for the most part in a state of continuous agitation and libidinal charge. The scenes from the Communist sports festival are key here. Eisler’s music shifts from its peculiar special effects and grimly sweeping themes to stirring songs, stridently belted out by the impossibly poignant baritone of Ernst Busch, the ‘Red Orpheus’ (who also plays the male lead, an apolitical mechanic), which speak of movement, participation, of learning in preparation for taking power. The difference between the mass festival here and that filmed by Riefenstahl later in the decade is so huge it’s almost comic. Everyone is jostling, talking to each other, discussing, thinking and acting at once. These are the inheritors of history, and the future, marching ‘forwards, not forgetting’.

Conclusion: Alienation Affects

‘There are songs to sing, there are feelings to feel, there are thoughts to think. That makes three things, and you can’t do three things at the same time. The singing is easy, syrup in my mouth, and the thinking comes with the tune, so that leaves only the feelings. Am I right, or am I right?
I can sing the singing, I can think the thinking, but you’re not going to catch me feeling the feeling. No, sir.’

Philip Marlowe, in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986)

‘I have feelings only when I have a headache- never when I am writing: for then I think.’

Brecht

Except, they were not the future. The overwhelming tragedy of what would happen to these people within a few years is inescapable: Ernst Busch would survive the Nazi camps, but much of the supporting cast would not; while Ernst Ottwald (like Carola Neher), as a refugee from Nazism in the USSR, would be ‘purged’ by the end of the decade by Stalin. When these collectives reconstituted themselves after the war, usually in a critical alliance with Stalinism, there would be a new scepticism and melancholy about the potentialities of the late Weimar era’s politico-aesthetic co-ordinates. A haunting song by Brecht and Eisler from 1955, ‘The Way the Wind Blows’ is a meditation on the sheer disappointment of the fate of the apparatuses themselves: today ‘production and seduction can now be mentioned in the selfsame breath’, while the workers are beset by a media which ‘tells them what to do and say’, and ‘are so shy of action’ (except of course against Stalinism in East Berlin in 1953), that they are left to ‘take their basic pleasures’ where they can; while the Party, the centre of Brecht’s most jarring and disjunctive works, from The Measures Taken to Kuhle Wampe, which should supposedly be able to advocate a way out, is cut off from the workers. But what is advocated here is still essentially the same measure. There’s no hermeticism, no retreat, for all the air of weariness: to ‘go out where the people go’ is the only way out.

If Brecht was sceptical of the efficacy of the Productivist apparatus by the 50s, half a century later we should be even more wary. Soon before he died, Brecht spoke of how ‘all that remains of the Verfremdungseffekten is the ‘effects’, stripped of their social application, stripped of their point.’ While the theatre might totally disdain it in favour of realism, you can find this all over the 21st century cultural-political landscape: a kind of cynical Brechtian where the alienation effect’s insistence on the stepping in and out of roles is a way of avoiding ever actually saying anything, of ever committing: the ‘postmodern pathology’ of someone like Robbie Williams or Tony Blair (an association made intriguingly by Mark Fisher) resides in their utter inability to step back in after stepping out of Realism. Likewise, watch any video on MTV Base and see a kinetic montage enlisted in the service of slack-jawed ogling. This version of Brechtian technique is never truly dissonant or disjunctive, and is able to exist only because of the absence of two important components of the Epic Theatre’s Apparatus. First, the absence of the democratisation of the apparatuses, and second the absence of the political, educational project.

The first of these two, like the alienation effect, does have a strange presence in current mass culture. What is MySpace if not an utterly degenerated version of the LEFists and Tretyakov’s Two Way Newspaper? It is a mistake to assume that mass access to a means of cultural production necessarily results in an interesting product. When everyone is saying nothing we haven’t really moved beyond the point where only the elite can say nothing. This is because of the absence of another element of the theoretical apparatus: the Lehre of the Lehrstucke, the insistence on learning and education. The Productive writer for the two way newspaper or the radio of ‘exchange’ has to become an expert in everything from economics to photography to gesture, and is never allowed to be a mere dilettante. However, these technologies themselves have far more potential than they ever had in 1927. A radio apparatus or a film camera then was, for all the proselytising, essentially ungainly and expensive. Now, a huge quantity of people have some kind of means of cultural production at their fingertips, whether via their cameraphones, cheap DV cameras, blogs, easily stealable music making programmes like Fruity Loops. That the majority of what is produced by these forms is utterly inane is not necessarily always going to be the case. Capitalism is again mistaking its conditions for eternal ones.

What, then, if all these fragments of the Brechtian apparatus are extant and ineffectual, would it look like if they were combined and used in a manner befitting their democratising, agitational potential? Well, for one: the Scenius of Kingston, Jamaica in the 70s. Here you had a means of production - cheap 4-track studios, effects pedals and the manipulation of tape – which was technologically advanced and accessible; and a means of distribution, on the shoddily pressed 7 inch single or dubplate. This technologically disjunctive music is then used as communication, in essentially the same manner as the two-way newspaper: much as with Chuck D’s perception of Hip Hop as ‘Black CNN’ (also, its no coincidence that perhaps the most terrifyingly powerful version of Brecht on record is Nina Simone’s version of ‘Pirate Jenny’, relocating its class war to a ‘crummy Southern town’). And as this was a period of heightened political struggle, this communication frequently had a fierce agitational urgency: Brecht and Eisler would have given their teeth to have written something like Dennis Brown’s ‘What about the Half’. History is challenged, the familiar is made strange, thought about what is apparently self-evident is advocated. The potential is all still there, in every technologically advanced corner of the world (i.e., all of it) for the apparatus to be restarted. Without forgetting, we could again be marching forwards out of something which, no matter how much it might be normalised, how much it might co-opt us, ‘we know is not our world’.

kino fist IV: Genet

2007-03-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

90 Wallis Road
Hackney Wick
11th March
3pm (film to start at around 3.30), £1
tea, coffee, food, etc.

kino fist III: the brecht screenings

2007-02-19T02:36:00.000-08:00

Sunday 25th February
3pm
90 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick
£1

What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?

the seduction of chess

2007-02-12T02:55:00.000-08:00

by Infinite Thought

The history of the 20th century is the history of the strategically necessary misrepresentation of chess. The defeat of left-wing politics, of reason and seriality, and its replacement by the flows of capital and the madness of markets informs us that whichever side chess was on, the game itself has lost, and lost badly, relegated to the status of whimsical pastime for the terminally intellectually aspirational, the insane and the incarcerated. The hustlers that sit in Washington Square Park, playing for the odd five bucks against business-folk on their lunch-break are the last remnants of the chess vanguard. But how did chess get beaten so badly? One solution to this question lies in the wilful misunderstanding of chess, by both its defenders and its critics, as primarily a game of war, and not as a game of seduction. The denial of the seductive qualities of chess is by extension a refusal any longer to acknowledge or even contemplate the seductive elements of the avant-garde as a whole.

Chess is the game of modernism, and its many detractors revile and fear on a smaller scale in chess that which they abhor and recoil from in the broader battlegrounds of culture and politics. The reason and system of chess, and the purity of its oppositions, present a world of irreconcilable differences and stark, uncompromising hostility: class war, implacable antagonism, a miniature formal version of larger obsessive enmities. East versus West, the Cold War, spy vs. spy, Spassky vs. Fischer – the harshness of the black and white squares becomes the battleground for a protracted inter-cultural and theoretical hatred.

A strategist’s toy, a tool for the edification of the youth, the noble symbolism of class hierarchy. Of all games, chess is the least likely to be associated with simple enjoyment or distraction and its historical and cultural impact carries nothing of the levity of cards or backgammon, even in the midst of surges of immense popularity (following Fischer’s defeat of Spassky in the early 1970s, for example). It is no surprise that those champions of all that is non- and pre-modern, Deleuze and Guattari, compare striated, structural, state-bound chess to the smooth, anonymous space of Go. Theirs is not a model of peace against war, but of one conception of the terrain of war against another – nomos against polis, the war machine against the machinations of the state. ‘Chess is indeed a war,’ they write, ‘but an institutionalised, regulated war, with a front, a rear, battles.’ If chess is the wrong war for Deleuze and Guattari, it is because structure per se is loaded, corrupted by its collusion in the wrong history. Go is fluid, smooth, non-hierarchical whereas chess is the game of kings and queens played by kings and queens. The state is not sexy.

The peacenik critique of chess – as expressed in Yoko Ono’s mono-coloured, non-oppositional chess pieces – would prefer to see no war, ever ever, and no difference (partnered by Lennon’s thought that ‘if everybody wore sacks, then we’d get to know what people are really like’), again takes as its premise the idea that chess is a symbolic perpetual re-enactment of the reactionary forces at play on the larger geo-political stage. Similarly, Robert Filliou’s 1968 ‘Optimistic Box No. 3’ approximates a fold-up chess box, but with all pieces removed. A label on the outside reads ‘so much the better if you can’t play chess’. The stage, setting and the black and white contrast of chess are nevertheless all pilfered in the name of another opposition – anarchoid ‘play’ against austere rule-bound gaming.

From Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-Orientalist fantasy of nomadic, intensive war to the pacifist finger-wagging of Fluxus and co. in the name of a judgemental liberty, chess gets a firm kicking: it’s just not sloppy enough, just too upright, just not hip enough. Duchamp’s desire to win both against the art world and against his chess opponent (even if it had perhaps been, once or twice, Samuel Beckett) is just too damn teleological. Those uppity mavericks with their word games (Nabokov), misery (Bergman) and perversions (Carroll) – why can’t we all just get along in a meandering fuzz-out of slightly distracted, fragmentary amusement?! Chess is just that little bit too real, too close to serious passion to be anything other than the subject of contemporary derision – chess is for nerds, weirdos, obsessives. Pudovkin’s 1925 Chess Fever, even at the height of its comedy, understands the beauty of this obsessive quality perfectly: It’s either love or chess, or a love that is itself chess. In an odd linguistic and thematic prefiguration of Casablanca, the few minutes off screen where real-life chess champion Capablanca somehow infuses the heroine with an all-encompassing love of the game exist so that she may experience a new kind of joy with her previously estranged chess-infatuated fiancé. At the culmination of a chess tournament, they run off together to practice the Sicilian Defence. The greatest threat to love is not chess, says Chess Fever, but the denial of the seductive qualities of chess.

Fifty years later, Guy Debord too understood something of the wit of chess with the invention in 1977, of his board game, 'Game of War'. Played on a checkerboard of five hundred squares with two opposing armies of equal force, consisting of a number of regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with forts and arsenals, Debord created a kind of deranged chess proliferation that extends to absurdity the supposed agonism of ordinary chess. After Duchamp and Debord, we are left in a post-avant-garde era which operates with the sorry opposition hyper-chess or no chess at all.

The opposition of game against game, political model against political model, rivalry against rivalry, that characterises the war on chess is the revelation that there are to be no more avant-gardes, no more seductions at the hands of structure. We are certainly in the realms of the fluid and the flexible. Against those who would attack the supposedly instrumental logic of chess, its rigour and compulsive order, we would have to respond that these are no longer the techniques and strategies of 21st century governance and capitalism. Chess had to lose precisely because it revealed too much, precisely not with regard to the state, but of a world in which love, politics and games are taken seriously - the narrowly missed encounter between Lenin and the Dadaists in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and the chess game they never played, is the history of a world and a passion that would have no problem marrying the political avant-garde to the artistic, or love to chess, for that matter.

kino fist II

2007-02-08T15:45:00.000-08:00

[click flyer for details]

THE FUHRER

2007-01-31T09:17:00.000-08:00

By Daniel Miller

An airplane appears in the skies over Nürnberg. Accompanied by the strains of Wagner, slowly bleeding into the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Führer is descending, like an eagle, or a god. Upon landing at the aerodrome, he will emerge from his plane, to thunderous applause, thence to be driven into the town, through cheering crowds, and even a cat, entranced, will stop to behold him.

Upon meeting Riefenstahl in 1971, a swooning Mick Jagger told her that Triumph of the Will was his favourite film, “I've seen it fifteen times!” the singer enthused, and in fact the nature of his specific interest is not hard to comprehend. Even today, more than sixty years after his death, Hitler still remains the most televised man in the world, with whole banks of cable channels revolving their schedules around him. This is a magnitude of sustained exposure that Jagger could only dream about. To live inside the simulacrum is also to live by it, the transfixion traversing it, and the rigid hierarchy spun by that. Jagger is an intelligent man, and he appreciates his own status. Thus, with the wages of his own rapt attention, he submits to the superior star.

In his breakthrough 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo satirized academia, making his tired hero Jack Gladney a Professor of Hitler Studies at a small liberal arts college. In the grand conservative tradition of gruff common sense, “Hitler Studies! What a ridiculous pseudo-subject!” one initially thinks. And yet, the satire here is really double - on closer inspection, the question reveals itself for a good one. After all, what really is a Hitler? What does it do, what does it want: what really is the scope and source of its power? What follows is a dissection of the concept with needles.

THE FÜHRER IS THE ONE AND ONLY

“The party is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler,” Rudolf Hess declares, strident behind his podium. This statement, the very axiom of totalitarianism, suggests a situation far stranger than one of simple despotism. It is not just that the Führer is greater than his followers, he is his followers, everything they already are, and could ever wish to become. No deeper identification is necessary, even technically possible: one witnesses that the space between the mass and the man has here been closed down completely.

This suffocating closure expresses itself in the strained relation Triumph of the Will maintains with its viewers. Riefenstahl’s frames follow hot on the heels from each other, and between her long shots of the speaking, senior Nazis, and her quick fire cuts to their silent, handsome supporters, no real possibility of a perspective remains. Instead, one finds oneself compulsively swept away.

In marked contrast to Brechtian theatre, where a minimal alienation is maintained in the spectacle so as to force the audience to form a critical connection towards it, here, even the very idea of such a connection is mercilessly suppressed. Watching Brecht, one is encouraged to ask oneself engaged moral questions like “what would I have done in his situation?” By contrast, watching Riefenstahl, one is encouraged to simply nod along.

In this way, directly positioning itself against critique, Triumph of the Will works to foster a state of anaesthesia, or what Brecht called “sleepwalking.” In the manner of a summer blockbuster, this film asks you not to think about it, instead to simply let it flow over you.

THE FÜHRER IS YOU

As Owen Hatherley also stresses, with Riefenstahl, whatever we might see, the montage ultimately always takes us back to Hitler. Thus the singular importance of the Führer is emphasized. Yet, in fact the precise nature of this importance is surprising.

The fact that the montage always returns to Hitler does not represent a statement of his power, but a statement of his impotence. Like a dog pestering you for food that you do not possess, the montage always returns to Hitler because, remaining unsatisfied, it wants something from him that he cannot give it.

In true Slovenian style, a joke serves to make this last point clearer. A boasting new husband walks into a bar, and announces to the barman, “Last night I didn’t sleep a wink, I was up until morning making love with my wife.” “How many times did you do it?” says the barman. “Eight times in a row,” responds the husband. “You have my sympathies,” concludes the barman, “You could have slept fine if you had only done it properly once.”

Just as the temptation in the face of the pathos of Riefenstahl’s Hitler is to read it as some kind of artistic error, the temptation here is to read the shaming of this figure along the lines of somebody crushed by semantic slipperiness. In fact, this temptation should be resisted both cases.

The interpretation of the joke runs as follows: the husband has sought his own humiliation, or rather, to put it more precisely, has taken an opportunity to manifest it. Only the pathologically guilty start conversations with strangers by declaring the state of their sex life. Indeed, only the pathologically guilty hang around in bars so shortly after getting married for it still to be a novelty.

The pathos of Hitler conforms to a similar logic. The error when dealing with Nazism is to take it at its word, and understand it is an ethos of power. In fact, its real meaning is otherwise, carried beneath the breath of its statement. At the nerve centre of Nazism is a brilliant idealism of power that exists only to shine light on the hysterical, pathetic failure that deep down you are.

In his ceaseless struggle with the montage, Hitler incarnates this failure, and thus we acknowledge him, as one of us, as our legitimate leader. “Let’s observe above all the way he acts while delivering his big speeches that prepare or justify his slaughters,” Brecht noted. “You understand, we have to observe him at that point where he wants to make the public feel with him and say: yes, we would have done the same thing! In short: where he appears as a human being and wants to convince the public that his actions are simply human and reasonable, and thus to give him their blessing.”

THE FÜHRER IS YOUR MOTHER

Returning now to the joke: in effect, what has transpired here is as follows. Before the community of men, as incarnated here in the form of the barman, the husband has made manifest two different things. First, his profound shame for taking up with a woman at all, and deserting the community of men. Second, a latent resentment at the humiliating fact (which all men secretly know full well) that all relations between men are mediated by women, to the extent that no male fraternity is even thinkable otherwise.

This first affect, shame, in effect, serves as his affective passport back into the brotherhood. The barman recognizes it, registers it, and responds in kind. He too feels ashamed, frankly he prefers sleeping to sex with a woman. The pact, then, is resealed without difficulty. Or at least, would be resealed, were it not for the presence of this second affect, resentment. This feeling now suddenly appears, excessive over language, to the point where it threatens to wreck even all implied contracts.

Where has this feeling come from? In fact, the irony here is that it is nothing else but the form of the contract itself, forged, like the ring of the Nibelung, out of a possessive tension. In this context, a loose conversation elsewhere, the real wife of the husband, and the imaginary wife of the barman, both exist only as figures of speech. They are really two different fantasies with nothing to do with each other, two different products and bearers of two different desires. On account of the deceit of language, the flattening aspect of it that reduces two different things to one word, under the name of woman, they here collapse into each other, and form one single, illusory wife, now with one single, contested desire. And yet, given her ghostliness, who really has the right to decide what she wants?

This matter is more than simply particular. The problem is rather extremely generic. All male homosociality is mediated by contesting figures of the woman, each purporting to express what she wants. But the woman does not exist, and so the matter can never be settled. But the matter must be settled, because male fraternity demands it.

Thus the Führer is summoned from the heavens to mediate. His task? In effect, the mediation of the mediation itself. In the pursuit of male tranquillity, dancing for peace, Hitler must not only flatten particular difference, he must flatten the difference as such. This dilemma is serious, and taking every different matter in hand individually will obviously yield no solution to it. The cunning of desire will always conspire to outfox all floundering, retroactive attempts to trap it: difference must not even be allowed to arise in the first place. The sliding of the signifier must be halted at source. One idea of the woman must be sovereign beyond dispute. The endless series of libidinal substitutions must be stopped before it even begins. Desire must be arrested, before it even starts to stir.

This is to say, it must be arrested at some point before the loss of the original object, beyond even desire itself, at the very point of this object. What is it? An object that not is one: nothing less than the blissful lost unity enjoyed by the child with its mother, prior to its cruel cleaving away in consciousness from her.

This is woman as phallus: woman as a dereflexivized, mechanical servicer of demands, singularly untouched by desire, and driven to stifle it. At root composed of two elements, mother and child, assumed once to have been magically whole, self-enclosed and serene, the phallus is an autistic circuit of need. The child that needs, the mother that services needs. There is not an exit.

The model migrates. The need to mediate mediation is still a need, and thus it is clear that unhappy society belongs on the left side of this equation. In the meantime, recognizing our agony, and endeavouring to solve it, the Führer inserts himself onto its right side. He becomes our real mother, a mother more maternal than the mother itself. As for ourselves, we are left in the position of the eternal child. Society, meanwhile, is made fit for male bonding. A perfect contract.

ENJOY YOUR FÜHRER!

At the outset of Triumph of the Will, Hitler descends from the sky, and at the aerodrome, in the streets, the cheering crowd is already there, waiting for him. It would seem that some kind of call has been issued, sinuously put out through the buzzing tissue of this world. And yet who really has summoned whom? And how?

It will be noted that one single, striking schism runs down the middle of this film, along aesthetic lines. A manifest discrepancy in physical attractiveness inheres between the nameless Nazi followers who Riefenstahl shoots as a mass, and the prominent ones whom she frames as individuals. The former appear as identical, unblemished, unblinking flowers of Aryan youth, the latter all look, each in their different ways, as somehow distinctly wrong, weird, even disgusting. Like the seven members of the Council of Anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, each appears to bear “a demoniac detail somewhere... something about him... which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human.” From Hess and his mad, staring eyes, to Goebbels with his bony, death mask-like face, to the prominently pulsing vein in Julius Streicher’s shaven head, up to and including Hitler himself, and his high, wheedling voice, every prominent Nazi appears equipped with their own personal hideous quirk, unique to them alone, whereas their followers remain an essentially homogeneous unity of undifferentiated physical perfection.

The dialectic at work in this disjunction is a curious one, relating back, but now modifying, a point made above. Hitler and his henchman are you, in that they incarnate the worst of you, which is to say, to the extent that they incarnate your enjoyment. What is your enjoyment? In effect, the unique, obscene, inhuman, repellent core of you, mordantly lurking beyond your pleasure principle. As Lacan understands it, your enjoyment is spectacular, to the extent that is always performed before an audience, whether real or imaginary, and ductile, for the reason that it is socially produced, through semiological processes.

In this way, enjoyment, making up the substance of this world, can be seen to have sent for Hitler from heaven. Why might it have done so? According to Lacan, the explanation here runs as follows: from a certain perspective your enjoyment forms the most terrible part of you. It is the thing which is most unique about you, and hence most your own, and yet, it is also the thing which is least under the sway of your power, and hence a constant, painful reminder of your guilty impotent helplessness. Hence your enjoyment pleads to be quelled, sloughed off somehow, and this is effectively what has happened here. The mass have contracted their enjoyment out to the Nazi party. Thus the former has remained beautiful, innocent, pure and homogeneous, while the latter has found themselves, like experimental military mutants in genetic soup, twisted into terrible shapes.

THE FÜHRER EVEN KNOWS WHEN A SINGLE HAIR MOVES ON YOUR HEAD

Throughout much of Triumph of the Will, Hitler moves around spontaneously, delivering speeches, in a manner loosely resembling Christ. This poses a question: Christ, fine, but which one?

Riefenstahl provides a clue here. “[N]ineteen months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nürnberg,” she announces in her opening title card, drawing attention at once to the fact that the event has already begun. Here, at least, we are not holding our breath awaiting the main attraction of the crucifixion. Furthermore, Riefenstahl describes the event as a renaissance, some kind of rebirth of a prior event. Another way of putting this would be to say second coming. This puts us somewhere in the vicinity of the carnivorous lamb Christ of Revelations. Finally, in using the word beginning, Riefenstahl darkly implies that this is only the beginning. Thus we are given to understand that the climax is still to come.

What might this climax amount to? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer Triumph of the Will gives to this question sharply diverges from the millions of burning bodies that history supplied to it. At the heart of this film is really neither a social message, nor a political claim – indeed, not even a spurious one, like the one which forms the core of Mein Kampf, but rather, something closer to a drug experience. Unusually for a documentary film, after her introductory title card, Riefenstahl provides no further establishing context for her narrative. Thus the impression is formed that we are dealing, not so much with an edited series of contiguous scenes, but instead, with one unitary unfolding event. Hitler appears at the aerodrome, in the town, in a wood, the mass simply feels itself pulled towards him, the scenery arranges itself around him. There is no bureaucracy, no boredom, no waiting, no deferral, no plot – rather, just sublime, autopoietic creation.

Unmistakably it is, in a certain way, a little like Woodstock: this happening vision of a life without death, a world without borders and a body with organs. And indeed, perhaps this proximity is why Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea chose to set the denouement of the occult-Fascist plot in their novel The Illuminatus Trilogy at an international music festival. After all, where else do you find a more potent combination of the fey and the fake-redemptive, such as Nazism can clearly be seen to represent here, then in a sea of stoned hippies, doing capoeira, by the dawn’s early light?

THE FÜHRER: WHAT IS HE GOOD FOR

“Sixteen years after the beginning of our suffering, nineteen months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nürnberg to review the columns of his faithful followers.” So reads the introductory title card with which Riefenstahl opens Triumph of the Will. This text is the single concession that this film makes toward the cause of contextual understanding, and goes some way towards establishing how it depicts reality.
Three elements immediately stand out. Firstly, the fact that time, rather than being given according to an objective chronology, is instead charted against an imaginary index of vitality, ranging from suffering to renaissance. Second, the fact that the city of Nürnberg is here presented as directly militarized, presented as a garrison composed of military columns. Finally, the fact that the primary principle of military organization is posited here as faith.

This film was shot in 1934. The “beginning of our suffering” occurred sixteen years previously. Our suffering, then, does not begin with the beginning of the mechanized slaughter that was the first world war, but rather begins with its end. Is the matter simply that the Great War ended in humiliating defeat for Germany? Or is the objection more radical? Andrei Tarkovsky comments somewhere that it is easier to live in wartime than peacetime. As he understood it, in wartime the spheres of the private and public overlap with each other, rendering social life straightforward and clear, whereas in peacetime they cleave, creating social confusion. It will be noted that a certain irony buries itself in this dictum: it may well be easier to live, but it is also easier to die. And yet, perhaps this is precisely the point.

“What makes life worth living,” Slavoj Zizek notes in the concluding pages of The Puppet and the Dwarf, “is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life.” But what if there is nothing for which we ready to risk our lives? Under such conditions, we would be forced to invent something. This, effectively is the the origin of clinical depression, a simulacrum of truth contrived for depressives to live by, and the abiding function of fascism as well.

The more extreme subversion inheres to the latter case. In accepting the idea that at least some kind of excremental project is necessary, only erroneously taking for his own something so abstract (but not entirely abstract: after all, there are real psychiatrists, just as there really are art critics) the depressive still retains at least the basic form of orthodoxy. By contrast, the fascist renounces orthodoxy entirely by resolving that death constitutes the excess over life: thus he closes a perfect logical circle around himself, and death. “Long live death,” as the Spanish fascists put it.

A kind of spiral effect is produced in both cases: in the former a spiral of ennui, and in the latter, a spiral of murderous violence. One enters into a perpetual present, an entire synthetic environment arranged according to an aesthetic structure. “War and time and being are compounded into one great narcotic experience,” as Michael Hoffman puts it, writing of the proto-fascist poet Ernst Jünger. Meanwhile, writing of the same, Klaus Theweleit quotes Euripides. “A man in ecstasy becomes a violent storm, a raging sea, roaring thunder. He merges with the cosmos, racing toward death’s dark gates like a bullet toward its target.” All anxious matters of intelligence fade into irrelevance. The obscene torture of the cogito finally abates, shrinking to the space of a mutely chaotic equation, ultimately so simple that even a child could grasp it.

The idea of utopia, which began life with Thomas More as a principle of political rationality, finds expression in Triumph of the Will in the terms of a cinematic trajectory. Riefenstahl’s title, in fact chosen by Hitler, is extraordinarily precise in this respect. Literally, what is being depicted here is not the triumph of any particular will, not even that of the Führer himself, but rather nothing less than the triumph of will itself: this fateful stirring of this dramatic, supra-historical, transcendent force, now set to sweep the anxious, neurotic, empirical-transcendental doublet of man into historical oblivion. Such is the propaganda message of this film; disregard it at your peril.