MISSPENT DOTAGE

In his clever infomercial about how his films are as terrifyingly important as the other historical objects in the re-mix, Godard wants us to believe the image is history. Or, perhaps, that history graves herself on la PELI.

But history is an oath (that is, a word-act) upon the temporal and the eternal. As unsigned, be-winged avatars of the science fictional, images are at best contrapuntal to history, or more precisely, the inversion of history. In their brute insistence on THIS and NOT THAT, and in the barely noticed echoic reference to the invisible, they can't help but falsify, the poor things. And that is their virtue.

JLG thinks he's making Peguy's amende honorable, that this work somehow satisfies his debt to cinema, cinema's debt to history, purifies cinema from all it did not show. A chain of absurdities. He ain't understood nothing, it seems.

So it's rather convenient that the end of cinema has arrived to seal JLG in his mausoleum, his own private cathedral of erotic misery.

CANNIBAL FEROX

On the surface of the image, in principle a scenario that seems easy to mock. The bride, for a remarriage ceremony, has commissioned a fetish cake of herself. But the more you think about it, the more gossamer & mysterious and perhaps witchy the act becomes. The bride is forcing the celebrants to consume HER IMAGE, leaving the real person, triumphant and protected, and in more than one way, dominant over the social action. It's like something a schizophrenic would conjure for a poetic defense against the world. Eat yer heart out, Marina Abramovic!

VENEERS OF HEGEMONY, VOL. I

Those who fear systematically tend to disobey written rules while at the same time adhering to unwritten, so-called natural norms.

The lawless anarchist out-of-doors, the inner sycophant riding herd. 

THE HIPPIE EISENSTEIN

 

Look, so she likes smashing images together like rocks. She's not afraid of the blunt, the obvious, the over-reach. This is rare. Sam Fuller with art-ball Meyerholdian chops. But like him, that doesn't mean there aren't subtle or interesting things happening in her movies. Also, tedious bits. But one day, probably a masterpiece, or a Bezhin Meadow.

HISTORIES OF THE SUPPOSEDLY EXIGENT

And it is interesting to see that the same mind and temper which induced the first act of self-aggrandizement tend quickly to lead to another one, which is unobtrusive, indefinite, unavowed. The assertiveness which in the first place claimed the prerogatives of eternal justice now proceeds by a similar logic to a more subtle form of encroachment; for the whig historians have shown a propensity to heighten the colouring of their historical narrations by laying hold on some difference of opinion or some conflict of policies and claiming this as a moral issue. And indeed it is a propensity which requires great self-discipline in any of us to resist. It must be remembered that there are some things in the past which the whig is very anxious to condemn, and some of his views have a way of turning themselves into something like a moral code. There is at least a change that the real burden of his indignation may fall on things which are anathema only to the whigs. It is not an accident that he has shown a disinclination to see moral judgements removed from history.

And from the future, of course. The cinema. as mother-novum, is a futurology that is also an ontology. Its mode is science-fictional. It is an eternal home to our homeless utopian dreams. That is why it was embraced by Futurists from Vertov to Cameron. The concept of Progress, as a human invention, is a brilliant piece of propaganda that would have made the priests of old envious. The future always needs a placeholder, and images fullfill that function rather magically.

Every novum calls attention to the historical inertia of the reader's actual present. It includes in itself an evaluation of the inadequacies of history and of the potentials offered by critical reflection. Its primary aesthetic pleasure is seeing the translation of historical cognition and ethics into form. The true novum thus fuses aesthetic effect with ethical and historical relevance. The worthy novum stands in for and also stimulates the rational disillusionment that is a precondition for affirming utopian-socialist collectivism, the 'historical destiny of man'. Accordingly, a true SF novum, represents a decisive change, a change in the "front-line of history". A novum is a fake unless it in some ways participates in and partakes of what Bloch called "the front line of historical progress."

DROWNED SOJU BITCHES

The new film by Joe Swanberg. Synopsis: Pusan Film Festival. 2010. A visiting American filmmaker, played by Joe Swanberg, is screening, in competition, his new DV feature. He meets Hong Sang-Soo, (played by Korean actor Seung-Woo Kim), and over soju, they have a long, wary conversation about the styles of cinematic reflexivity. "Hong Sang-Soo" starts fucking Swanberg's real-life girlfriend, who explains wistfully to Swanberg that she always comes harder with Korean filmmakers. In a harrowing, emotional scene Swanberg grills her for details of the lover. Staying up late with his laptop, Swanberg re-edits his not-yet-screened film to include dialogic references to "Hong Sang Soo's" sexual practices. At some point, an attractive young Korean with the State Film Office explains to Swanberg that the character's name should be Sang-Soo Hong. The film replays again, this time with the name substituted in the "correct" Korean order. The Pusan jury, headed by Greta Gerwig and Philippe Garrel, awards Swanberg's film the laurels. At a press conference, Hong announces that his next film will be Hollywood reboot of LOL. "Swanberg" feels empty, hollow, in quotes, etc. He makes subtle "grimaces" before mirror. End.

SCOPOPHILES

A porn film that stars actors playing famous scientists like Marie Curie, Röntgen, and the famous and sad crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Some of the sex scenes are filmed with X-ray film stock. Incredible densities of eroticism are thus produced. At the end of the film, after the so-called "money-shot", we see the semen itself x-rayed and we see little skulls, a little inaccurately, inside the individual sperm. Then the principals are interviewed, without shame, about their experiences. The music is by Mihaly Vig.

SATANTANGOPALOOZA, or THE WHALE

The situation today offers great chances of success to the ambitions of conspirators of either the Right or the Left Wing. So inadequate are the measures proposed or adopted by governments to break down any possible revolutionary attempt, that the danger of a coup d’état should be most seriously examined in many European countries. The peculiar nature of the modern State with its complex and delicate functions, and the gravity of the political, economic and social problems which it is called upon to solve, make it the barometric index of the people’s hopes and fears, which increases the obstacles that stand in the way of its defense. The modern State is more exposed to the danger of revolution than is generally recognized. It is useless to object that even liberal methods of defending the State are obsolete, the conspirators for their part frequently show their ignorance of the very essentials of the modern technique of a coup d’état. Even if it be true today that conspirators in many cases have not known how to take advantage of circumstances favorable to their attempts to seize control, it is no less true that the danger of revolution exists.

In countries where order is based on liberty, public opinion ought to bear in mind the possibility of a coup d’état. In its present state Europe is everywhere faced with this possibility, as well in a free well-organized country—“policed” state, to use an Eighteenth Century expression, still appropriate in our day—as in a country infested with disorder.

The object of this book is (…) to show that the problem of the conquest and defense of the State is not a political one, that it is a technical problem, that the art of State-defense is guided by the same principles that guide the art of its conquest, and that circumstances favorable to a coup d’état are not necessarily of a political and social order and do not depend on the general condition of the country. No doubt this will not fail to create some anxiety amongst the Liberals of the most stable and best-policed countries of Western Europe. It is this anxiety, so natural in a lover of freedom, which gave birth to my desire to show how a modern State can be overthrown and how it can be defended. Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, who said, “They love not poison, that do poison need,” was perhaps a lover of freedom also.

Malaparte, The Technique of the Coup D’Etat

Revolution as therapy: these flashmob sort-of-virtual revolutions are notable because they bypass or are indifferent to the infrastructure of the state, which seems to exist to them in another world. They are “Performance Art” insurgencies, with all the attendant excitement, the feeling of rupture, of festival, much milling about, a demand that the people’s accedia be somehow solved by anybody willing to take the power.  

No one steps up. The accedia of the masses is shared by its leaders.

ALL-JAZEERA ALL THE TIME

The proper response to the pseudo-event regardless of "content" should be this -- yes, be moved by the art of it, as we are moved by the railroading death of the heroine in Anna Karenina, but if you want to change national railroad policy because of this, you force me to say: this is insane. It is applied Quijotism. You would be making a possibly irrevocable decision in the world based on what is, essentially, a beautifully articulated fiction. Maybe that is what revolution means.

THE IMPURE AND GIRLY

Dave Navarro, Media Theorist:

And then now as an adult, seeing it kind of come back into the forefront of culture even more so then it did back then, with young, adult women, generally speaking a lot of them have very secretive dark pasts that force them to embrace something unique and pure and girly, if you will. There's a duality that's inherent in that which is interesting and fascinating to me.

The image itself is more of a symbol of darkness to me than anything else. Because you can take one person who's really dark and they're into really dark things, but it's the person who gravitates toward the light to hide away from the darkness that's actually more intriguing. A good example of that would be the serial killer John Wayne Gacy doing paintings of Bambi or doing paintings of himself as a clown or the Seven Dwarfs. There's such a severe contrast between the dark and the light, that's the type of intellect that I find incredibly fascinating.

And also for me personally, my mother was murdered when I was 15 and I'm a recovering drug addict, and so I am no stranger to the darkness. And again, I don't want to make a blanket statement and upset anybody, but I would say in about 75% of cases, adult fans of Barbie and Hello Kitty and things of that nature, there's usually a past of either abuse or divorce or maybe sexual abuse, eating disorders, something that can easily be looked up in the DSM IV, which is basically the psychiatric diagnostic manual of disorders.

Yes, Kawaii insists on something to an insane or violent degree, but probably what it insists on can't be pinned down as easily as Navarro thinks. What is disturbing about it exists because of a defiant, liminal quality that lends itself so easily to projection.


It is monstruous. 

PIXELVISION

The experience of the work of art is now scalable. The Benjaminian gap between cult and intimacy is a slider, and can be adjusted with one's mood.

It's the Photoshopification of aura. The artist herself must provide the knobs.

THE HAUNTED WOOD

“I can't speak for Thierry, but I do not love Zodiac because of its adherence to the meandering facts per se, but because of the use it made of that adherence and what it led to — a very different matter. And, for me, it fed an extraordinarily haunting meditation on time and human effort. Assayas himself is a great admirer of the Fincher film and of Che as well, and he in turn made a film whose own adherence to reality led to another haunting meditation on time, albeit from a wholly different, geopolitical angle. Of course these are just opinions, so I can not offer them as any kind of proof.”  

--- the doubly haunted Kent Jones, Marshal of the Order of the Realist Star.

Adherence to reality is a sticky subject. The aesthetic of RR-Realismus, amigos, is not only the written language, the sacramental runes of capitalism, it is the way the system is PRODUCED and perpetuates itself.  What Comrade Jones and the others are being haunted by is their blind allegiance to that system, which presents, like the evening news, film-facts but without the poetic structure of their construction. Assayas is an odd, troubling case – he knows his Debord, and he often tries to make the spectacle a subject, to find a new way of storytelling that works in-between, but you’d never know it by watching Carlos. A too naïve faith in the totalitarian spirit of imaging/representation (which all cinephiliacs suffer from) is ultimately grotesque and barbaric. There are some realities, let’s remember, that will not be so easily captured. 

Below, be pleased to find some guidelines for the practice of realism.

Axiom 1: There is no abstract, materialist, or sociopolitical reality to be faithful to. Neo-realism is Chaplin, a sublime and sharp cut of a type of elevated humanist sentimentalism, but not yet a religion.

Axiom 2: There IS a reality that exists in objects, people, money, mise en scene, etc which go into making a film, regardless of subject. That is what perhaps should be honored if we want to fetishize the reality of something or other. The cinema is always and eventually about dead people and lost things. Be haunted by that.

13a. If there is a reality “out there”, outside of cinema, then making a realist film, perhaps any film, about “it” (assuming it yields any secret at all outside of its percerptibility) immediately distorts it and falsifies it metaphysically by forcing it out of ambiguous superposition into the measurable, and the actionable. Quantum physicists call this the observer effect. To film something is to make a kitschy souvenir of Your Tourism in Reality, in the Historic, etc.

9c. Realism: the tawdry, vicious and uncomfortable, but with better angles and better seats. No joke: Eisenstein’s images of the storming of the Winter Palace were used as period photographs of the actual event, which no doubt paled in comparison. A mistake? Or an aesthetic efficiency?

5b. The more films or images that can be made, that is, the more representable the world becomes, the less world/ly. Mimesis, as far as I can tell, is a vast solipsist trap, and always has been.

THE MALADY OF LOCATION

Pialat: Dressing a location is, of course, a necessity. You always have to do it at the last minute and too late. If I were shooting in this room, I'd start by moving this table, I'd arrange these chairs in a different manner, and little by little I'd arrive at the tableau, at artifice...    

Duras: Don't bother to go to Calcutta, to Melbourne, to Vancouver, it's all in the Yvelines, in Neauphle. Everything is everywhere. Everything is in Trouville. Melbourne and Vancouver are in Trouville. Don't bother to go looking for what you can find on the spot. There are always on-the-spot places that are looking for movies; all you need is to see them. 

FALLEN ANGELS

 SPECTACULAR GRIEF; 

Can there be any doubt that terrorists -- celebrants -- must engage periodically in A Black Mass of/and for state power? 

They lead the celebrations that people no longer have the heart for. 

 

THE METALEPTIC SOCIETY

Imagine a dystopia where:

Every reference is unstable, a half-sign, which makes crucial and tautological allusion to another half-sign, and so on. The primary labor in such a society is decoding, and to work in this way is to encourage a schizophrenic frenzy. 

Yet, it would not be wrong or unjust to call such a beautiful society cinematic.

LITTLE VALENTINE

Before. After.

Another sick little masterpiece from the good folks at Pakula-Mulligan.

THE TRAUMA SHOW

That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed.  Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future.  She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful.  She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model.  She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations.  I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. 

– President Obama, January 12^th, 2011.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The little child, in this case, being a useful symbol for the repressed trauma of 9/11.

The idea of 9/11 as some kind of vague, karmic punishment for cracked, varnished sins has a beautiful mirror-like symmetry in the popular culture of the Gringos.  According to the “Religious Right”, the punishment comes from God for tolerating sodomy, Viagra, abortion, Dr. Phil, etc.  For the equally puritannical Hairshirt Left, the gringos are being punished for years of nasty imperial adventures that have forever tainted the supposed “purity of their democratic ideals™”.  Amusingly, the gringos’ master psychologist, Osama Bin Laden, synthesizes both POV’s in the critiques of America found in his post-colonial communiques.  America is being punished for being an arrogant infidel state that has displeased and enraged Allah (the compassionate, the merciful, PBUH, etc.), and for being the humiliating replacement for the colonial powers whose sadomasochistic whips and kisses figure so prominently in the deeply wounded and narcissistic Pan-Arab mindset. 

Conveniently for the gringos, both ideas are also narcissistic defenses against a spiritual wound, and magically restore America’s place (despite much justified anxiety to the contrary) as the center of the newly globalized cosmos. And The War on Terror™ echoes yet inverts FDR’s famous motto: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If one must declare war on fear, then one can also guess that the battle is already lost. Ten years into it – exhausted by endless media exposure to propaganda -- people are more under the thumb of “terror” than ever, and Al-Qaeda is an old-time bogeyman who people have effectively forgotten. They have no choice.

Ellul, Propaganda: “We must also bear in mind that the individual is at the mercy of events. Hardly has an event taken place before it is outdated; even if its significance is still considerable, it is no longer of interest and if man experiences the feeling of having escaped it, he is no longer concerned. In addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion.  And as man's memory is short, the event that has been supplanted by another is forgotten; it no longer exists; nobody is interested in it any more….[ ] Actually, the public is prodigiously sensitive to current news. Its attention is focused immediately on any spectacular event that fits in with its myths.  At the same time, the public will fix its interest and its passion on one point, to the exclusion of all the rest. Besides, people have already become accustomed to, and have accommodated themselves to "the rest" (yesterday's news or that of the day before yesterday). We are dealing here not just with forgetfulness, but also with plain loss of interest…[ ] Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.” 

The beautiful challenge here (for the State, for culture workers at large) is to constantly relive the useful trauma of 9/11 without actually addressing it. So it’s the return of the repressed for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. More heaping helpings of irony: Both the gringos and Al-Qaeda are suffering from profound anxiety about Globalization. This globalization psychosis – the fear/reality of subcultures being dissolved into homogeneous and global mass techno-culture, drives on the War on Terror™.

And perhaps more interesting still is the power of the mythic idea that the wound is, in reality -- in truth, self inflicted:  things have gone so far astray from democratic ideals, that the State, in its’ neo-fascist arrogance and corporate lust for power, itself has orchestrated (or merely allowed to happen) these televised calamities. This is nothing less than a projection of fantasy power – the powerless explaining away their powerlessness and passivity before the screen (ultimately their lack of faith in democracy and the shirking of their democratic responsibility) through a fantasy of a sinisterly powerful yet secret cabal practicing secret violence (private, civil, economic, military) without limitation. A violence that can always be observed and mediated, glimpsed through the shadow, or in the "gap" of narrative. The perpetual representation of this mythic violence is more effective than its actual practice would be.

Living in the grip of remembered trauma is the necessary condition to certain aspects of tribal life. Because our memories are located in the technological, in the visible edge of the spectacle, like a patient with Alzheimer’s, we must always be reminded of what we would forget. We therefore live, gratefully, in the twilit space of myth.

The more simple and sinister truth: Nobody is riding the dragon of globalization…it is world-historical epochal chaos. Every man for herself. And Salafist Islam, so effectively characterized as an alien excrescence, is quite useful to calm globalization anxiety and thus to unite the world under the common banner of pluralistic progress and the sweet balm of techno-civilization – ideas which are the REAL SCARY stuff.

SEVENTIES NIGHT!

Christine Kaufmann at 32:07 in Schroeter's Der Tod der Maria Malibran.

NOT ALL THE FACTS ARE IN, BUT...

(How dull. Another one on spectacular grief:)

Attractive Representative of the People's Regime is shot.

Mass Grief Event ensues, naturally, spontaneously! Like is customary and usual with any state martyrdom.

Miracle Bullet -- the very one that missed us all, enshrined in bed of velvet.

Kronos Quartet commissioned to perform The Gabby Giffords Requiem for strings and auto-tune, despite the poor woman being inconveniently alive. And in a long distance relationship with an Astronaut.

Chastened Media Demagogues Of All Stripes Recognize Themselves Mirrored in Angry, Low Status Schizophrenic Language Obsessive. 

Try hard to stutter moral tales out from the bowels of the unhappy event, with little success. Invent new grammars of ever-muted outrage.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES

In the future, some avant-gardist will make a film consisting of clips from the filmography of the loathsome Keira Knightley, rearranged to form a narrative, something that her natural limits as an actress always prevented. The film may be called Keira Knightley Redux.

It will consist of black leader.

Speaking of the avant-garde, Mark Romanek manages an interesting trick of translation here, which is to play a single beautiful note of melancholy as a basso continuo, which almost made me forget about Ishiguro's snooty-slummy Blade Runner goes Coma literary superstructure, every lovely hair in place, the symbolism tastefully under control, everything a classy lit-adap is supposed to be. I kept wanting Val Kilmer to crash through the walls. But, no.

The film is also a neo-realist celebration of IngSoc's National Health Service, every chilling detail in place, as if directed by Terence Davies and Stanley Kubrick in some tense, awkward collaboration.

For that, it deserves something.  Well?