HAPPY NEW YEAR
December 31st, 20092009’s BEST…
December 31st, 2009
FIVE NEW FILMS
• Two Lovers (James Gray)
• 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
• Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
• Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
• Facs of Life (Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson)
FIVE OLD FILMS
• Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975) at Anthology Film Archives
• Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963) at the Different Directions Film Festival
• J’entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel, 1991), bought at Kim’s Video & Music store
• Loren Cass (Chris Fuller, 2006) at the Cinema Village
• Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005) at the Bratislava International Film Festival
FIVE LIVE EVENTS
• Vivienne Dick’s “New York. No Wave. Super 8” event at the Cork Film Festival
• The projection of The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1965) at the 16th monthly Experimental Film Club in Dublin
• Ken Jacob’s presentation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and his own Blonde Cobra (1963) at the Millennium Film Workshop as part of the HOWL! festival, including Jacob’s own live soundtrack additions to the projection of Blonde Cobra...
• Arin Crumley and Kieran Masterton’s successful fundraising campaign for the Open Indie project on Kickstarter.com
• Ben Morea’s public talk at 16 Beaver
FIVE ALBUMS
• It’s Blitz, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Coat to Wear, Patrick Kelleher
• Actor, St. Vincent
• Lisa O’Neill has an album, Lisa O’Neill
• The Crying Light, Antony and the Johnsons
DEAR AUDIENCE, #15
December 31st, 2009
The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.
The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?
—Brian Massumi in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
[Image from here.]
DEAR WORLD, #14
December 31st, 2009
When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage—literally a pass, in the sense of this term as used in ball games. We start from a continuous and hazardous existence–continuous because it is hazardous–and not from an essence; we start from a presenting, and not from permanence. We start from the vinculum itself, from passages and relations, not accepting as a starting point any being that does not emerge from this relation that is at once collective, real and discursive. We do not start from human beings, those latecomers, nor from language, a more recent arrival still. The world of meaning and the world of being are one and the same world, that of translation, substitution, delegation, passing. We shall say that any other definition of essence is “devoid of meaning”; in fact, it is devoid of the means to remain in presence, to last. All durability, all solidity, all permanence will have to be paid for by its mediators.
—Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (1991).
LIST OF INTENTIONS
December 30th, 2009
It’s been a quiet year for this blog, mainly because it hasn’t been one for me. Travelling and filmmaking have taken precedence for the moment, and, alas, next year may not be so different. But this isn’t to say there aren’t lots of things I’d love to write about, and to prove it, here’s a list of fifteen things I’ve been meaning to write this year—notes for each of which have been sitting, neglected, in the draft box of this blog account for some time. I’m presenting them here in the hope that it may guilt me into knocking a few of them out in the new year. Fingers crossed.
- TO DIY OR NOT TO DIY: A discussion of the limitations and possibilities of the DIY film distribution movement, as exemplified by the likes of Arin Crumley and the Workbook Project.
- 10 REASONS NOT TO DESPAIR ABOUT DUBLIN CULTURE: An optimistic run-down of some of the promising cultural spaces, events and activities currently developing in Dublin.
- VISION: An exploration of the nature of directorial “vision”, particularly how directors like Garrel can make a film as if “through their eyes”, with a distinct singularity of perspective, despite not operating the camera and not micro-managing the composition of the images. Thinking about notions of images with and without “integrity”, perhaps bringing in Serge Daney’s notion of the image vs. the visual.
- DIRECTING ATMOSPHERES: Analysing and comparing the directorial strategies and peformances of some of the great auteurs that have been caught in the act, at length: Lynch, Tarkovsky, Cassavetes, Kiarostami, and a few others based on second-hand accounts: Garrel, Malick, Wong Kar-Wai.
- COPYRIGHT IS THEFT: An attempt to articulate and justify my instinctive disdain for copyright and intellectual property laws, and tease out some of my own contradictions that I’m sure are lurking in there somewhere.
- STOP: The critically acute and self-aware but ultimately self-defeating politics of the The Sopranos.
- COUNTER-WIRES: Looking for hints of alternatives to the institutional structures exposed so well in The Wire, from within the show itself—despite its admittedly “wholly pessimistic” creator’s belief that there is no hope of change.
- SWEET AND SOUR CAUSES: A comparative study of two recent films, each of which followed a boy and a girl from alienated family contexts as they wandered around together for a day—Kisses (Lance Daly, 2008) and Only (Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds, 2008). I want to link both back to the wandering and family-making of Rebel Without a Cause (Nicolas Ray, 1955).
- COMPLEX: Some thoughts on the bizarre mix of cinematic sheen and historical fidelity that was The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008).
- ROBERT KRAMER RESOURCES: A compendium of all the available English written material on Kramer, based on what I discovered during and since completing my thesis. (I really should have gotten this together for the tenth anniversary of Kramer’s death last month.)
- …THEN LET THEM SHOOT HDV: The pros and cons of filmmaking as both a tool and an end in itself in first and second level education, as well as in projects with “disadvantaged” communities—drawing on my own experience as a teenager filmmaker and subsequent involvement in the Fresh Film Festival and as a workshop facilitator for young people.
- WES ANDERSON (or I HAVE THIS “FRIEND” WHO HAS THIS “PROBLEM”): Trying to get to the bottom of my problem with Wes Anderson’s films.
- WHAT HEART?: Trying to get to the bottom of my problem with the Coen Brothers’ films.
- YOU AND ME, PROBABLY: Taking The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977) and extending its observations and implications on to my own generation’s lost and alienated.
- THE TIME OF DAY: This will be a hard one. The thing that got me into film: the ineffable emotional dividend of certain moods, tones, sounds, textures, shades of light… drawing out some aesthetic and philosophical ideas from the power of this, and using a lot of frame grabs from Terrence Malick movies.
DEAR AUDIENCE, #14
December 30th, 2009
In a society based on poverty, the poorest products are inevitably consumed by the greatest number.
—Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
DEAR WORLD, #13
December 29th, 2009
… Brakhage is often seen as typically American in his lack of social engagement. This view has been articulated most eloquently by Annette Michelson:
“It is a tragedy of our time … that Brakhage should see his social function as defensive in the Self’s last-ditch stand against the mass, against the claims of any possible class, political process, or structure, assuming its inevitable assault upon the sovereignty of the Self, positing the imaginative consciousness as inherently apolitical.”
One problem with this thesis is that Brakhage has made films that engage directly with social issues. He showed, and lectured around the U.S. on, his deeply disturbing, horrifyingly powerful meditation on war as perceptual violence, 23rd Psalm Branch, at the height of the Vietnam War. Re-editing film images of World War II, he made war as a media event part of his subject. The Governor, in which he filmed Colorado’s then-governor Richard Lamm, was a study in the exercise of power through physical gestures and body placement. Murder Psalm engaged with way mass culture reduces people, and even thought (personified in actual models of the brain taken from an educational film about epilepsy), to objects.
But Murder Psalm is the rare case in which Brakhage engages with the negation of his central aesthetic. Perhaps more to the point, the main line of his masterpieces, particularly those of his last three decades, offers an eloquent—and ecstatically beautiful—answer to the whole object-oriented ethos of American consumer culture, the fetishization of possessions and possessiveness, the location of pleasure in the world of manufactured things, by creating insubstantial patterns of light that seem engaged in an eternal dance. As well, his complex mix of techniques and use of irregular forms make the viewing of each film an “adventure of perception.” Is forging a cinema that seeks a more active, thoughtful, and even participatory role for the individual viewer “inherently apolitical?” To the manipulativeness and star worship of mainstream movies, Brakhage counter-offers films that distance one from both affections and objects, that turn the by now ritualized movie-viewing process from an answer back into a question, a question directed at each spectator. And in so doing, he becomes a poet of freedom.
[Still: Stan Brakhage at work.]
DEAR AUDIENCE, #13
December 29th, 2009
Generally, the first response generated by an avant-garde film is, “This isn’t a movie,” or the more combative, “You call this a movie!?” Even the rare, responsive viewer almost inevitably finds the film—whatever its actual length in minutes—”too long.” By the time we see our first avant-garde films, we think we know what movies are, we recognise what “everyone” agrees they should be; and we see the new cinematic failures-to-conform as presumptuous refusuals to use the cinematic space (the theater, the VCR viewing room) “correctly.” If we look carefully at this response, however … we recognise that the obvious anger and frustration are a function of the fact that these films confront us with the necessity of redefining an experience we were sure we understood. We may feel we know that these avant-garde films are not movies, but what are they? We see them in a theater; they’re projected by movie projectors, just as conventional movies are … we can see that they are movies, even if we “know” they’re not. The experience provides us with the opportunity (an opportunity much of our training has taught us to resist) to come to a clearer, more complete understanding of what the cinematic experience actually can be, and what—for all the pleasure and inspiration it may give us—the conventional movie experience is not.
These first avant-garde films, in other words, can catalyze what I would like to call our first fully critical response to a set of experiences our culture has trained us to enjoy, primarily as a process of unquestioning consumption.
—Scott McDonald, Introduction to Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993).
[Still from Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929).]
DEAR WORLD, #12
September 6th, 2009
[The Annunciation, Fra Angelico.]
DEAR WORLD, #11
July 11th, 2009
My own belief is that we need to produce both concrete projects and a vastly multiplied vision, if we want to make our lives count beyond ourselves and if we want to return some kind of future to the pasts of the Left with which we may identify. A radically democratic ecological critique of progress can yield a new understanding of modernization, one that includes cultural difference and self-determination along with a practical understanding of the cycles of the earth, far beyond the old narratives of an industrial proletariat in a national frame.
I think that all the great productive blocs now have their edges, their exploited or abandoned peripheries whose populations are leaving to become the laboring mainstays of the very center that helps destroy their homelands. Liberal fascism — a name for the present social order when it gets ugly — tries to divide into a hierarchy the people who could oppose its projects of destruction. It sets up a gradated system of inclusion and exclusion to divide classes of people from each and to set them against each other, with police, borders, barbed wire and militaries marking off ever more extreme gradations. Crucially, it tries to divide the precarious classes who have had some access to official education from the excluded classes who have had none, who have had to learn everything as they could, the hard way.
What the Left needs, in order to offer anything at all to huge numbers of people who no longer see it or hear it, is to envision something like ecodevelopment on a continental or regional scale, a political process for improving life and movement across the territory, through methods that are both collaborative and ecological, and therefore span the divides between classes and also transform the very linearity of the rationalized production systems. What the Left needs, what the world needs, is to be able to give both the precarious classes and the migrants an active role in building a better world, in a system where the most educated and capable can also participate on the basis of something other than a pure quest for personal profit. We need to envision a chance for the potentials of technological change to be redistributed by their root producers, beyond national borders and racism, in an economy of embodied and responsible flows that organizes itself in a productive relation to critique and to radically democratic debate. A modernization that carves out the places for localized decision-making, for the affirmation of communities of value, but also for artistic experiments with the process of becoming. It’s clear that nothing like this exists in reality and that many promises have come to nothing, so there is no use to be naive, for sure. But is it clear, in a unifying world society, that movements of political resistance can do without this kind of constructive proposal?
[Picture of Nam June Paik with his Zen for Film (1964).]
