GRAPHIC GOES GLYPHIC

We quit the Official Thingified World of Things with its rational lexicon long ago. Away from objecthood into....a un-place where it has become improper to speak even of reification anymore.

This was what Antonioni was so relentlessly after in that fierce middle period from Red Desert to The Passenger:

Antonioni: What interests me now is to put the characters IN CONTACT with things, because what counts today are things, objects, matter.

Giuliana panics not at what the world of objects MEANS, (what you would find in the ordinary expressionist world of Stendhal or Flaubert, -- & of course, Hollywood's) but rather at its' cryptic, occulted non-messages. Because things now have a sort of animal spirit and they chatter incomprehensibly -- rather like Princess Raccoon, if you would encounter her in real life. Communication frighteningly without expression. Grandiloquent Blankness. Strange OMENS of Further Abstraction and Separation.

Marxist unease (Panic!) with the fetishism of the commodity lies with the suspicion that the idea hijacks the scientific and inevitable character of revolution and leads ideology into what is, frankly, animism. The superstitious world of magic, the occult, and the primitive.

Two basic polarities in language that also apply to cinema and to reality:
explicitness and ellipsis. And the spirit-substance halfway in between is The Glyphic, which splits the difference.

NECROPOLITANS

Filming something is already a rupture -- it is a ruin in potentia. But it can only become a real ruin through projection-destruction.

Precisely what is impossible in the digital shimmer.

SPEER: The building on the Zeppelin Field was begun at once in order to have at least the platform ready for the coming party rally. To clear ground for it, the Nuremberg street car depot had to be removed. I passed by its remains after it had been blown up. The iron reinforcements protruded from concrete debris and had already begin to rust. One could easily visualize their further decay. This sight led me to some thoughts which I later propounded to Hitler under the pretentious heading of "A Theory of Ruin Value". The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that "bridge of tradition" to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler had admired in the monuments of the past. My "theory" was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, and hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years, would more or less resemble Roman models.

To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler's entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler's closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this "law of ruins."

Godard's own weepy Necropolis of the Cinema is built under the dictates of this pretentious Law of Art-Directed Ruins. And the poor guy doesn't even have one tenth of the amused irony that Speer does.

Orale! Showbiz kids makin'  movies of themselves...yet again.

MAYBE PARTYING WILL HELP

Wittgenstein, the siren, led the Inorganic Intellectuals Who Shop at Whole Foods to the heroic barricades of language. A thirty years war ensued. Mostly because it was so EASY. Nobody ever realized that it was a mild civil war between technocratic jargons. Meanwhile, the people (in whose name this battle without consequence was being fought) were long forgotten in the ghetto of images.

BANZAI!!

To use a John Milius metaphor:

The public's attention is one of Nimitz's strike forces, a phantom, position unknown, and a blockbuster is a kamikaze attack -- in other words, a move of beautiful desperation.

Between them is the whole ocean.

Asked about the soul of Hollywood,
I would say
That it is
Like wild cherry blossoms
glowing in the morning sun.

BETWEEN THE DEAD

DESIRE FOR A LOST IMAGE

Realism in the cinema depends less on the flaubertian or balzacian -- let's call it homely -- detail than in reference to an entire history of filmic representation. What is Real in the movies is always in strong erotic(?) relation to another image. Implicit in a strong image is the love for an earlier one. The way one can't experience Rossellini, for instance, without hypertexting to Chaplin. None of this is articulable explicitly -- it's never at the level of an "hommage", because such crude obviousness would shatter the dream-signification of the film. And this is no small part of what Barthes calls the Third or Obtuse Meaning in the cinema.

UNCONSCIOUS RECOVERY & COITUS

Moving parallelly into the structures of narrative, pleasure is consummated in the opportunity for the spectator to flex her vast knowledge of the codes and draw phantastic pleasure from the overlays. This is nothing new, really. Don Quixote depends on the same "subversive" tactic (a mocking familiarity with knightly tales) and a flux between the dirty reality and the Don's vast imaginative capacity to distort it. Post-Auteurism is a Quixotic operation in this way. We take an unexceptional factory film and we look between the cracks for ruptures, which give us pleasure.

ANXIOUS AFTERMATH

And this also justifies a low or no-affect position -- "the ideology of cool" -- a conditionally suspended disbelief, towards the ontological status of the narrative. We are the sum of stories we believe about ourselves, but the modern subject can't ever be certain enough about their status to wholeheartedly endorse capital N narratives. The modern subject is paranoid & unconfident -- faced with a semiotic stew in private life where every object and image, like a politician on the stump is making some kind of private appeal to his identity -- the default position of the subject, awash in desire, is fending off affective response.

So Today's artist has to ritually genuflect to the paranoia, and assuage some of that anxiety before throwing the magic dust in people's faces. and letting them dream.

DEMAGAGARY

How many times do I have to tell you, joto, it's never Fascism if you AGREE with the idea...

VIRALITY

Malinowski: The sole purpose of the EXCHANGE is to draw relationships closer by strengthening the ties of reciprocity.

Communication: i.e. to make common the things of the tribe...

Pasolini: Naturally in the language of advertising as well, the homologizing, and I would say, creative principle is technology which is therefore the absolute supremacy of communication, and thus the slogan is the example of a type of "expressivity" so far unknown. Its premise is, in fact, expressive, but through repetition its expressiveness loses every characteristic of its own, is fossilized, and becomes totally communicative, communicative up to the most brutal finality. So much so that the way of pronouncing it also possesses an allusiveness of a new kind that might be defined with a monstrum definition -- expressiveness of the masses.

Expressiveness as the remains of a sclerotic disease once long suffered...the slogan-image needs only to streamline, discard its excess, & replicate itself, to just live a while longer.

This is CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. 
Or reversibly, BELIEF WE CAN CHANGE IN.

PERIPHRASIS

Debord: The reigning deceptions of the time are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not deliberately been separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge. 

And more laterally...
 
Makers of images must fight the image's own desire to express a cliché or axiom of truth.

Reality is already a prolific forger of crystalline certainties, and these may be undercut by a judicious use of photoshop. In the instance above, the imager, brutalized by the image, which says look HERE and not elsewhere, did not resist sufficiently.

This was the willfully misunderstood point of Errol Morris's film on Abu Ghraib. The truth, the vertovian one, is there in the INTERVAL of the FALSE MOMENT and the TRUE MOMENT, but you must show both in articulation.

SOFT POWER

Software is an interesting word, isn't it?

In briefest summary, I was writing programs on the SWAC in 1953 at UCLA.  At the time, the SWAC was one of about a dozen computers in the whole U.S.  When I first hoked up the word -- to distinguish programs from hardware, of course -- people said, "Huh?"  I explained that 'soft' meant changeable.   People then and for years later kind of sneered "Software...[pause]...I see..."

Digital turns all cultural durity into software.  I suppose that's what people mean by the New Age.

OSAMA THE SPECTANARCH

So, Osama bin Laden, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and Guy Debord walk into a bar...twenty seconds later, it explodes.

Detaching Islamic law from the grip of the nation-state and emphasizing its sacrificial nature, Osama bin Laden effectively transforms the militant's obedience of Sharia into an act of sovereignty. The law is no longer embodied in a set of institutions that must be submitted to, but manifests itself in militant acts that possess the force of law in their own right. Yet what makes these acts sovereign, more than their independence from institutional authority, is that they neither claim nor defend any interest, but rather destroy interest itself in spectacular gestures of sacrifice uniting both perpetrators and victims into a single humanity. In other words, militant acts are sovereign because they are spendthrift: deriding the protection that law normally extends to interests of various kinds and instead sacrificing life itself as the ground of all interest. In this sense, the militant act is law-making rather than law-abiding, albeit in the most anarchic of ways.

All true of course, with the slight caveat that the LAW that bin Laden is in submission to is not Sharia, but the Law of the Spectacle.  He is as much a servant of the spectacle as Rupert Murdoch. A guerrilla of separation. And his "followers" want nothing else but TO APPEAR at long last as True Muslims of the Spectacle, even if that means their erasure-in-the-world as carbon based life forms. After all, the militant is always uncertain of his status, his commitment is always in doubt, he might in his heart remain a secret, asthmatic, debauched playboy revanchist. Such things can only be settled by suicide in the eye of the camera.

NOVELISTS GIVE UP DESCRIBING SURFACES AS BENEATH THEM

It's official: 

We don’t need novelists telling us about the surfaces of being a human being. We’re bombarded with surfaces 24 hours a day now.  

 --------Jonathan "Tell em Johnny Boy is Here..." Franzen

The capitulation of the novel to reality television should bring me a sort of perverse joy. However, I suspect this post-modernist stand of principle is just a screen for the slobby laziness of today's novelists. I wish somebody better versed in the nonsense of writers would explain this to me.

Shouldn't it be more necessary for novelists to describe surfaces NOW than ever...?

They could also do worse than start where Gerhard Richter was at in the 60s...

The first time I painted from a photograph, I did so in a mixture of exhilaration and fear, partly because I was strongly affected by contemporary Fluxus events, and partly also because I once did a lot of photography myself and worked for a photographer for eighteen months: masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may have created a lasting trauma.

 

HUH...?

Ever since the coming of sound, filmmakers tried in vain to silence the pictures...

Tubbs: So whats going on?
Crockett: As in?
Tubbs: As in there is undercover and then there is "Which way is up?".
Crockett: What? Do you think I'm in so deep I forgot?
Tubbs: I will never doubt you.

Mann's ingenious solution: make the dialogue nigh incomprehensible in its extreme hieratic quality. You might be thinking that this is some pseudo-realist attempt to tackle the argot of these criminal-police tribes that he loves. You'd be wrong. He's been reading his Chion. When people talk in a Mann film it's about the rhythm, the sound of the words not the meaning. He just wants one word here and there to hit you like a stroke on a canvas. The approach to sound design is expressionist in the extreme -- which forces the TV weaned, -- yes, even them -- to fall back to the images, which ever since he's gone Digital, have become more the looser stuff of 30's poetic realism than the slicky-hard rubber style of the early Mann.

Stylized language is beautiful -- it is also more forceful cause it sneaks past the CPU.  

Take it to the limit one more time, etc.

SUBDIVISIONS

Sam Wood's movies are koans for auteurists.

Of course, everyone wants to blame Menzies or the DP's for what's good or interesting in them.

But I'm not so sure. And in the case of Kings Row -- the beloved Menziean flourishes are few and far between. The stolid languidity, flat staging, the perverse lack of engagement with the subject, the Wood-en solemnity is running at red-hot blazes. These are things that, for me at least, sustain the strangeness of the object that is Kings Row.

The fundamental energy of Kings Row is studied contempt for the material -- which everyone involved agreed was a major & unhealthy downer --  a Preminger movie in embryo:  incest, sportfucking, murder suicide, medical malpractice, neurosis, and cancer. A dismal swamp, in short.

What's eternally popular about Kings Row is that it takes a rather dim and surrealist view of the medical profession. And psychiatry, in a daring move for the time, turns out to be the perfect tool for repression of ugly community secrets -- voiced by a pair of lovely, damaged hysterics -- while Cummings, the "hero", is a satanic normalizing force.

Wood, not Menzies, emphasizes and undercuts the out-of-timeliness of Cummings in the performance. He is both the pale and false dream of hope, but also a link to an unsustainable past that must die. What's lovely and creepy (eternal...??) about Kings Row is that Cummings looks as if he's in a movie from 1925, while the rest of the movie feels uncomfortable with its perfunctory and modish expressionism. The film is as schizoid as the world it's portraying.

THEATRE OF SEMANTIC POETRY

Realism (Bazinian and Hollywood's both) in the cinema is like Themersonian Semantic Poetry -- a para-onomatopoetic impulse to capture the "speech" of the world, to use that "language" to reflect AGAINST itself.

It's as if you were forced by some natural law to write in two styles, legalese or Mickey Spillaneisms, and that, even more mysteriously, people couldn't tell the difference between them.

We know it WORKS. But must it?

HE'S NOT THERE

Perhaps, it is HE who throws off the table reading and then disappears in Inland Empire.

Like the politely obstinate ghost that he is, Schroeter keeps turning up everywhere, like Waldo or Bin Laden, working himself into the DNA of the next century. 

COMMUNIQUE FROM LOMMEL

There is no way, unfortunately, to establish the veracity of this for the moment:

I have decided not to make "Frankenstein in 3D" and instead make a musical comedy for the entire family entitled "CHOCOLATE AND GUMMI BEARS".

 My recent change of heart is based on the following revelations:

1. I am at this point uninterested in horror.
2. I never watch my own or anyone else's horror films anyway. I have had fun shooting horror films, but never watching them when they are completed.
3. This is a gift to all horror film fans who hate my kind of horror movies.
4. I have a new found belief in Christian values and family values.
5. Life can be beautiful.
6. I love America.
7. I love Los Angeles.

THE DYING GAULLIST HAMSTER

Objects being closer than they appear, it's impossible to judge this sort of stuff from any sort of (ironic) distance, but another After-School Special re-make of The Champ, starring a hamster -- that takes cojones, amigo!

THINGS TO DO

1. Eat. 2. Pray. 3. Love. 4. To be determined.

Authenticity is a sort of consumer index, even though it has no objective existence. We desire most to recognize it and rub it over us as a balm when we are feeling the most self-separated in the centrifuge of our lives.

For example: getting caught in the rain might be a minor religious exaltation for the suburban and desperate housewife ---  

it might just mean pneumonia to the gypsy.

ALTERNATE POLARITY

What's great about FULLER is that he always gives his ellipsoidal stories an alternate focus point -- which doesn't quite rise to the force of a subplot, but suggests another parallel universe with a dignity and weight of its own. We can imagine another, perhaps a better, certainly stranger and more secret movie about THIS GUY -- or about Van Cleef in China Gate or Thelma Ritter in Pickup, or Cameron Mitchell in Bamboo, etc. The engine that drives the movie is not necessarily what sustains his interest.

The lost art of the periphery...

INTERNAUTS AS NON-SITE TOURISTS

Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that "travel" in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site. The "trip" becomes invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Non-site. (robert smithson)