RUBBERNECKING!, PART 2.

(continued from http://semtexfollies.blogspot.com/2010/10/rubbernecking.html)

These works are fictions about factual events, and that they deploy their "factuality" as a formal strategy, like using medical language in a poem meant to be swooned over by doctors, precisely because they have some theologico-political function to play in the spectacle. In a closed, totalitarian system, the "subversive" artist would have to resort to aesopic language, that is allegorical presentation ala Animal Farm. In contrast, these films, like other media currently in prominence, allegorize using facts or "factuality".

Because of the symbolic freight they have to carry, why not call them factual allegories? Facts are one of the chief currencies of a technocratic state, maybe its’ life "blood". And facts are self evident and atomic, right? They need no decryption, you can't argue with them, they are envois straight from the Real. But they are rather dull and interchangeable, not that sexy. And so it's important today that facts become "sensualized" and textured through images so that people, citizens, can have propulsive, ideally uncontrolled, emotional responses to them. That might be a good working definition of Realism in the cinema: The sensualized, eroticized, fact.

Fact porno. To arouse the never-consummated “lust” of brechtian politics. The politics of froth.

If journalism is the first draft of history, certain filmed images (Images of Convention...) conclude the historic, foreclosing the possibility of analysis, or of reflection. Madonna is Marilyn Monroe and Evita Peron. And Lady Gaga contains Madonna now, in some way. 

I suspect that the russian doll quality of images is antithetical to history.

RUBBERNECKING!

1961. Rosi decisively re-invents the Process movie. Salvatore Giuliano is a film where a protagonist, even a story is mere pretext for exploring discharges and flux in a socio-political force-field, in history too. Protagonist-as-ghost, whose non-existence in conventional terms of narrative realist practice, is a structuring absence that makes other, more secret, things appear. The film is relentlessly anti-spectacular, wedging open spaces in its' narrative, even in Narrative itself. Rosi's film and the others that follow are ultimately poetically mysterious, a-definitive, requiring completion, even perhaps, action. 

“The raw material I had to work with when shooting Gomorrah was so visually powerful that I MERELY FILMED IT in as straightforward a way as possible, as if I were a passerby who happened to find myself there by chance.”

"I didn’t want to make a film against “the System,” but about “the System.”

2010. The process movie (Trafik, Zodiac, The Wire, Gomorrah, Che, The Social Network, Carlos) is now the fashionable realist symbol for complexity. These are coffee table movies, laced with moral and factual "demi-biguities" but whose energy, in the final analysis, is exhausting, neatly totalizing. They don't BURN, either. Their factualist fatalism is not earned, not a worldview, but just a style to meet and surpass their apathetic audiences. 

These movies make us zombie-voyeurs of zombie-systems. And what they absolutely can't show is their own fatal complicity in the only system that matters: the spectacle. 

more here: http://semtexfollies.blogspot.com/2010/12/rubbernecking-part-2.html