Filmmaking is an incredible feeling; it’s like you decide to create a country to live in for a while [and] you decide on the population and invent the rules for that country.
—Leos Carax, from an interview with Geoff Andrew for Time Out.
[Image: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).]
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
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.]
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).
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.
In a society based on poverty, the poorest products are inevitably consumed by the greatest number.
—Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
… 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.]
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).]
[The Annunciation, Fra Angelico.]
Latest News