What is Hollywood, you ask, dear children? A quorum of whores babbling endlessly on about fucking while the bordello is razed for a penny arcade -- Paul Bern
Showing posts with label Rhetoric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rhetoric. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

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.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Friday, August 6, 2010

RISK RHETORIC IN ART

Artists once said: "Uh, let me show you this -- you haven't looked at it quite this way. Useful? No, I don't think so. Let's just bring this old fuddy duddy Christ into the modern era, etc."

The humility of transposition.

In between, there was Warhol.

Artists now say: "I'm investigating this -- I'm exploring this like it's the Zambezi. What I'm doing is dangerous." They all adopt the persona of Indiana Jones, the intrepid scientist with the pistol, but they speak in Grant Writing phrases.

It's bullshit.