And all the Rest is Cinema 2

Continuing from here:

Several points need to be made at this point. To begin, the definition of “cinema” in its specificity (that is its distinction from theatre, painting or literature) was one of the central motifs of the 1950s Cahiers group. That such-and-such a film is “Cinema” was the highest term of approbation that Godard, Rohmer, Rivette or Truffault could bestow; the later famously declaring that Boris Karloff’s death scene in the bowling alley from Howard Hawkes’s Scarface “isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.” Or Godard himself on Nicholas Ray:

If cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to. While it is easy to imagine John Ford as an admiral, Robert Aldrich on Wall Street, Anthony Mann on the trail of Belliou La Fumee, or Raoul Walsh as a latter day Henry Morgan under Caribbean skies, it is difficult to see the director of Run for Cover doing anything but making films. A Logan or a Tashlin, for instance, might make good n the theatre or music hall, Preminger as a novelist, Brooks as a school teacher, Fuller as a politician, Cukor as a press agent - but not Nicholas Ray. Were the cinema suddenly to cease to exist, most directors would in no way be at a loss; Nicholas Ray would. (Godard on Godard 43)

This is high praise indeed and one can see the beginnings of a sense of vocation - Brody will speak of the “religious conversion” that overtook Godard as he sat in the various movie theatres around Paris catering to cinephiles. Not only is cinema an utterly distinct, if not superior, art form, the Director is the Artist Hero who can do one thing and one thing alone - make movies, and in making them, create this thing called “Cinema.” This is clearly the underlying aesthetic that forms at least part of the background of all Godard’s films and should not be pre-emptively dismissed as Romantic Auteurism. (Brody is, it must be said, very good about pinpointing what la politique des auteurs was really about, not so much as a theory of interpretation but as a kind of filmic poetics for the New Wave). All arts define themselves by their specificity, even if, or especially when, the boundaries of the artistic practice are perforated or ill formed.

The second observation to be made is that the contention of cinema attributed the Brody (correctly, I think) to Godard is not necessarily a conservative, right-wing or Anti-Semitic concept. And to be fair, Brody does not suggest that there is some inexorable logic that leads from auteurism to the Anti-Semitic conservatism that Brody argues lurks at the heart of Godard’s films. What Brody will do instead is indicate how the details of Godard’s fundamental conservatism lead him, or at least point him in the direction of, an Anti-Semitism that will sometimes shield itself in Anti-Americanism.

So what are the details of this cultural conservatism? Brody does not come right out and say it, but he implies that the germ of this tendency incubates at the heart of the New Wave itself. To begin with, Brody takes very seriously the culture wars that took place in the late 1940s-early 1950s, with the Communist denunciation of film intent on “depraving our [French] children by the glorification of gangsterism or erotic images, propagating the spirit of submission to the great benefit of religiosity” (12). That a certain chauvinistic theory of nationhood is present here should go without saying. Truffault writing film criticism, and getting good and much-needed money to do so, for the nationalistically right-wing Arts, as well as Joe-College type stunts played by the young men hanging around cafes and cinematheques are glossed by Brody as being connected to a sense these young men had of being extra-territorial in terms of the dominant cultural landscape:

The [Cahiers du Cinema] band’s right-wing stunts and sympathies, so soon after the end of the German occupation, suggested a wilful association with evil, a punk-like overturning of values. They also suggested the seemingly insurmountable distance between the young movie lovers and the official culture in which they desperately sought their place. Although they were, in practical terms, outsiders, intellectually they were insiders whose autodidactic fury suggested their craving for mastery of the canon. Godard’s own political provocations, which included his German pseudonym, Hans Lucas, and his article on political cinema [where he drew no qualitative or moral distinction between Soviet or Nazi propagandistic depictions of fervour], pointed to the underlying problem that the young future filmmakers of the CCQL/Cinematheque circle faced: despite their intellectual sophistication, they were condemned to anonymity, obscurity, marginality, unless they found a radical way to break into the French film industry, unless they found a way to attract attention. (23)

Effectively, these young men were, Brody insinuates, Left-baiting out of resentiment (going beyond the reasonable statement that films from America were perfectly good films from the point of view as aesthetics to brandishing right-wing or even pro-Nazi leanings in order to epatez les bien-pensants). However, Brody suggests there is more to it than that: there is the also the question of the Cahiers group’s defence of “classicism”, which Brody leaves largely undefined, but seems to suggest a certain, yes, cultural anti-modernism vis-à-vis narrative, character, order of plot, and, most of all, the primacy of the emotional truth of a film as opposed to its conceptual framework.

That Godard’s work should be seen as “anti-modernist” seems counterintuitive at best, and the emphasis on the “emotional” reality of film seems as un-Brechtian as one can coherently get. But at least in the early Godard, Brody suggests that Brecht was not an influence at all, claiming instead that it was the “philosophical modernism of Sartre and Camus” (29) and that Godard’s trajectory was a “conservative” revolution:

Based on the preservation, or restoration, of classical values. The cinema that Godard was praising aroused a direct emotional response through a traditional, nineteenth-century novelistic and naturalistic approach to character [c.f. Godard’s esteem, noted by MacCabe, of Balzac]. For Godard, paradoxically, this classicizing approach, as exemplified in such Hollywood films as the harsh melodramas directed by Hawks or Preminger, yielded a more authentically modern art - as a result of its forthright confrontation with the existential crises of death and the human condition - than the more formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica or Wyler, which Bazin endorsed. For Godard, the cinema would be the definitive repository of a traditional idea of humanity as represented in art. (29-30)

And there is a lot to be said for this: the focus in Godard, even at his most narratively distended, tends to be on what happens to the main character(s) and how (t)he(y) respond to what happens - in effect, the ethical core of a certain kind of existentialism. This is clear enough, certainly, in Godard’s early criticism as such, but what happens when he starts making films? (Godard would hardly be the first or last artist, modernist, postmodernist or otherwise, whose statements of aesthetic intent did not gibe with her actual artistic practice.) One could also add that the one important aspect of Sartre that Godard seemed to avoid at this point in his career was the concept of engagement - a girl and a gun do not a political statement make, at least, not necessarily. One could better say that the cinematic framing of character as such, or, even better, the relations between characters, standing as a representative of “humanity” represents the ontology of film for Godard here; hence Godard’s defence of editing and montage to “provide the experience of reality itself” (39).

So what about the films and their relation to Brody’s thesis? Brody goes through the early shots (Beton, Un Histoire d’eau, Tous les garcons s’apellent Patrick and Charlotte et son Jules) in fairly, well, short order, and Godard eventually meets Breathless’s producer Georges de Beauregard “who made films on small budgets under eccentric and risky circumstances and barely scraped by - and whose sympathies were openly rightist” (48).[1] And so, with a lot of people’s help, they start making a film about “a boy who thinks about death and…a girl who doesn’t” (58) - Breathless. Brody regards Godard’s first feature as an application of the “classical”, “novelistic” aesthetic that Godard championed in his criticism, taking the structure of the generic film noir. The results, though, were none the less revolutionary: “Breathless would be an ‘action film’ in the sense of ‘action painting:’ the art and the moment of making the film were as much a part of the work’s making as its specific content and style. As such, it would be the first existentialist film” (59). I should note that I don’t follow how the last sentence follows from the preceding; in fact, its hard not to see the aspect that Brody isolates, rightly, as being most exciting about Breathless - the spectacle of thought thinking itself - is, if anything, proto-Brechtian. But more pressingly, how does this relate to the aesthetic Brody claims that Godard espoused?

It is in this context that Brody introduces an as-yet unexplored aspect of Godard’s version of la politique des auteur - that a film by Jean-Luc Godard will primarily about Jean-Luc Godard: in Breathless, Godard composed the dialogue on the morning of the shoot. The result was that:

Godard’s spontaneous method deliberately frustrated the actors’ attempts to compose their characters in any naturalistic or psychologically motivated way. …In effect, Godard’s actors were quoting Godard. Rather than becoming their characters, they were quoting him. (63)

Of course, non-naturalistic acting is essential to Brecht’s concept of theatre, and one could even argue that Godard may have been beginning to make a version of :earning films”, as it were, although what the audience would learn whatever it was that Godard was thinking or feeling during the time of the shooting, at least at this stage of his career. Brody systematically de-emphasizes Godard’s tendency towards and appropriation of Brechtian modernism in favour of what might unfairly be called Godard’s cult of personality and commitment to classicism. When faced with the radically “amateurish” lack of crowd-control (people gawking into the camera) and jump-cuts, Brody states:

Godard removed the scrim of convention by which the cinema transmits time and space to the viewers; however, by flouting the principles on which the classical cinema is based, he in fact ended up emphasizing them. In appearing amateurish, the film calls attention to the codes of professionalism, and in the end highlights the fact that they are merely conventions: it denaturalizes them. Breathless presents standard aspects of the classic cinema, but mediated, or quoted. Paradoxically, this interpolation of Godard’s directorial authority between the viewer and the action does not render the film arch, distant or calculated, but rather produces the impression of immediacy, spontaneity and vulnerability. Godard’s presence s invoked as a sort of live-action narrator who calls the shots as they unfold, with as much potential for accident and error as any live performance. But here, the “errors” only reinforce the illusion of immediacy. (69)

This illusion of immediacy, Brody argues, encourages us to identify not with the fictional character as such, but with the director; the modernist techniques are used to create an Author (or rather a Director) - Godard - on whom the audience transfers their affect.

But where is the right-wing neo-classicism in all of this? Identifying conventions as conventions is surely, pace Shlovosky et. al., the first step towards their deconstruction. Furthermore, beyond a vague ethos of “every man (and woman) for him (her) self”, there doesn’t seem to me to be anything essentially conservative at work here in with either the form or content of the film. (You surely don’t have to be either Hobbes or Celine to notice that life is often nasty, brutish and short.) It would certainly be possible to argue that there is an author-itarian aspect to the Godard the Maker, but when this construction is largely composed of quotations from cinema, painting and literature - what Brody refers to as Godard‘s “parasitism” (71) - than we have something closer to Foucault’s author function at work more than we have a Romantic, or at least pre-Lacan/Althusser concept of heroic artistic subjectivity. In other words, Godard the author-function does not in and of itself have rightist or conservative tendencies either necessarily (at the formal level) or in practice.

[1] Godard gets tarred by association quite a lot here. Brody also doesn’t entirely acknowledge that the practical political position of the Cahiers group is not quite as open and shut as he seems to think.

More coming soon!!

Random Catchment Area

For those of you who feel the need to purge themselves of the sense of wasted time after watching the Oscars last night (is it just me or are award shows just really badly produced? That "background" music they had playing all the time was really distracting; I'm amazed at how unprofessional it all seemed.), here's this treat to darken your Monday morning.

More Godard coming later this week.

When Toffs Strike Back

Alain de Botton responds to IT's castigation here. I should at this point out that I have enjoyed all of Botton's work up to and including How Proust Can Change Your Life, after which I find an unpleasant degree of self-regard and, well, all around smugness in The Consolations of Philosophy etc. that make him almost impossible to read without wanting to put a fist through the wall. (But then, I'm more of a Bernhard, Houellebecq type of guy, aren't I?) And the allusion to anti-Semitism is a little cheap on wee Alain's part, I think. But I do really like and recommend The Romantic Movement and On Love, and, prior to reading his Proust book, read In Search of Lost Time when I am in a state of general confusion as to the progression of my life.

Deeper into Movies 5

Friday the 13th (2009) - Why did I go see this movie?




It is a well-known fact that the whole Jason Vorhees franchise was a knock-off of John Carpenter's still outstanding Halloween, so I can hardly be expecting much going in to see this movie, can I? But even by the minimal standards of the slasher film, the new Friday is formally incoherent and, well, silly. Effectively, we get about three movies in one, a good five people are killed before the long, long opening credits, and oooooh the killing stakes. Obviously, girls who have sex (a lot of tit shots in this movie, including a gratuitous naked-in-the-lake-with-a-machete-through-her-head that can appeal only to the really discerning necrophile) get the chop/machete, antler (I kid you not) first. We then take care of the ethnic minorities (a nerdy Oriental, a competent African-American), and we are left with the unpleasant rich guy, his pseudo-girlfriend, and the brother-looking-for-his-sister (who turns out to be alive). You can guess how it ends.

The really odd thing about this movie is its humour and its horror. Its humour: firmly stuck somewhere in American Pie and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (the latter film I actually quite enjoyed) - lots of jokes about masturbation, sex dolls and pot smoking. The horror: by current standards, quite tame and uninventive. Something else we can, um, credit the Saw films with.

And yet this is still a better movie that Benjamin Button.

Meanwhile, Infinite Thought gives the insufferable prat a much-needed, and, all things considered, moderate castigation. Shall we begin a much needed Facebook group - Let's Castrate Alain De Botton??

Good to Know

Not apparently near 24 Sussex Drive. (Courtesy of I Cite)

And all the rest is cinema - Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Part 1

Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema is a monumental (600 pages plus notes) study of a figure whom, it must be said, is richly deserving of so detailed a study. Brody patiently goes through each of Godard’s films and even-handedly seeks to understand the whys and wherefores of their creation. It is to Brody’s credit that reading his book made me a) want to read it again, and again; b) go out and see all of Godard’s movies again (even the 1980s films like Passion and First Name: Carmen which have hitherto bored and frustrated me) and c) write an extremely long response. What follows is the latter.

Its difficult to know where to begin with so vast a study, so it might be useful to begin by comparing it to a similar study – specifically Colin MacCabe’s equally fantastic Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. In some ways, the comparison is inept; MacCabe’s work is a “portrait” and provides details about Godard’s background, including his affluent Swiss Protestant childhood, his stormy if bookish adolescence, his weird kleptomania, his utterly appalling treatment of Anna Karina. As the title of Brody’s book suggests, this pre-working life detail is not within his remit, and so, referring interested readers to MacCabe’s work, Brody begins his analysis more or less with the publication of “For a Political Cinema.”

The major difference between the two Godard biographies resides in their representation of the constellation of Culture, Cinema, Politics, History and France in Godard. As this is not meant to be a doctoral thesis, I’m not going to go into extended detail here, but the impression is that MacCabe is far more sympathetic to the Maoist phase of Godard’s career than is Brody; certainly, Brody consistently de-emphasizes the centrality of Brecht to Godard’s films, often to the point of failing to register it at all.

So MacCabe’s “Godard” is a Bazinian-turned-Brechtian whose career trajectory moves from the representation of politics in cinema to the politics of cinematic representation. (This is, admittedly, a gross over-simplification.) What are the outlines of Brody’s “Godard”? The term that Brody will use several times throughout his study is “cultural revolutionary” which is useful if perhaps one with too much potential baggage.[1] So what uses does Brody put this term to? In his preface, he paints a broad outline whose detail he will fill in later: the central premise to Godard in particular and the New Wave in general is, as the title suggests, “Everything is Cinema.” For Godard, this was as much a credo as it was an injunction; cinema not only could incorporate everything from the personal life of its creator(s) to the political, social, cultural and philosophical contexts of a particular film’s creation, but cinema had a duty to do so. As a result:

As the pace of social change outstripped his ability to invent new [cinematic] forms to engage it, Godard became increasingly hard on himself. Indeed, his pictures became public confessions and self-flagellations, but they were executed so effervescently, so inventively, so cleverly – with such a flamboyant and youthful sense of freedom – that they were often received by critics and viewers as virtuosic displays of experimental gamesmanship. …[Godard] spent the next few years [after Weekend] seemingly underground, working a frenzied yet sterile engagement with one of the doctrines of May 1968, a nominal Maoism. After years of intellectual woodshedding and a period of artistic and physical convalescence (following a serious motorcycle accident), he returned to the French film industry in 1979. (xviii)

One should pause here and note that Brody’s understanding of the postwar French intellectual scene as such bears the unmistakable imprint of Bernard-Henry Levy’s execrable Adventures on the Freedom Road.[2] Brody’s understanding of Godard’s commitment to Maoism is as unflattering as MacCabe’s is sympathetic.

But to return to Brody’s narrative outline:

…[N]o other director has striven so relentlessly to reflect in his work the great philosophical and political debates of the era: World War II and its political aftermath in France; the uses and abuses of existentialism in the postwar years; the structuralist revolution; the demise of Stalinism and the rise of the New Left; the growth of the modern consumer society and its political fallout in May 1968; the vast sea change and social heritage of the late 1960s; the hopes and disappointments of the Mitterand era; Holocaust consciousness and the recuperation of historical memory; new fronts of battle after the end of the Cold War; and the current era of big media and what might be called the American cultural occupation of Europe. But despite Godard’s ongoing attention to the crucial questions of the day, his approach to them has in recent years become so intricately interwoven with his advanced aesthetic methods, so rarified, Olympian and oblique, that many critics and viewers have instead rejected these last efforts outright, asserting that he has somehow grown detached from political reality.

In fact, Godard’s later work is marked by his obsession with living history. But this obsession has brought with it a set of idée fixes, notably regarding Jews and the United States. In recent years, Godard’s vast aesthetic embrace of the entire Western canon, from Greek mythology to New Testament prophesies to twentieth-century modernism, has gone hand in hand with his borrowing some of the prejudicial assumptions of that cultural aristocracy. Contemplating the contemporary world in light of lost traditions, Godard has adopted traditional attitudes as well, including several shared by some of the most discredited and dangerous ideologies of his times. (xiv)

Brody intends to argue that this sense of a lost cultural aristocracy is the core of Godard’s “analysis of the media, which is an integral part of his work…centred on what he considers their [sic] noxious effect on culture, on human relations, and particularly on the cinema” (xv). In effect, Godard engages in a series of manoeuvres: he identifies cinema as such with his own person and work by filtering its history through his personal life and vice versa. This cinema is then identified as being the highest of the high arts, being able to incorporate the histories of other visual arts (painting, sculpture), literature, music, history, politics and philosophy. From this “Olympian” perspective, Godard detaches “the cinema” as such from mass media, viewed as debased in its proximity to big business and big money as much by the an-aesthetic function of its entertainment value. The clear and unbridgeable distinction between “cinema” (standing as synecdoche for high cultural aspiration) and “media” (consumer culture culminating in television) is, Brody will argue, the source and effect of Godard’s “conservativism” that runs in contrast to the manifestly revolutionary aesthetics of his films.

More coming soon!!

[1]Anyone who lived in Ontario, Canada during the Mike Harris 1990s cringes at the memory of his “Conservative Revolution” which was basically part of the first wave of Market Stalinism in Canada after Ralph Klein’s intermittently sober regime in Alberta. A curse on both of them!

[2]A book which manages to be as nauseating as its title suggests, which is quite a feat, really. And indeed, Levy was interviewed a few times for this book. To be fair, Godard seems to have liked Levy for God(ard) knows what reasons.

Happy Birthday Gillian!

Put The Book Back on the Shelf 2

Reborn: Jounals and Notebooks 1947-1963 - Susan Sontag

The period of these notebooks stretches from the time that Susan Sontag was an extraordinarily precocious 14 year old to the time when she is 30 and on the verge of publishing the Against Interpretation essays that would cement her reputation as cultural arbiter. Edited by her son David Rieff, these notebooks are curious in a number of ways. Anyone, like myself, hoping for much by way of literary gossip will be pretty disappointed (beyond finding out that Allan Bloom was "disgusting", which is hardly news in and of itself); the lion's share of these notebooks tend to be little more than books sought, films seen and concerts attended. (The latter, curiously, not so much; music seems to have been an ambiguous pleasure for Sontag. In 1948, when she would have been 15, she writes that "Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts - it is the most abstract, the most pure - and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion embodied in this music." While this is hardly earth-shattering stuff, the profound discomfort with her body - not uncommon in teenagers in general and culturally sensitive queer teenagers in particular - would never entirely leave her. In this context, it occurs to me that I can't think of a single essay in which music appears to have any role whatsoever.)

David Reiff, in his introduction, states that he was determined to make as few editorial intrusions as possible, but in some cases, it might have helped as, during the period recorded in these journals, Sontag goes through a number of significant changes - moves to Berkeley, embarks on a lesbian relationship with "H", moves to Chicago, gets married to Phillip Rieff and helps write/edit his book on Freud, has a son, goes to Oxford on a fellowship, runs a way to Paris, moves back to the UD and works at Commentary, etc.... - to have had some sort of timeline. As we get into the late 50's, early 60's, the only way of knowing what city Sontag is writing in is by guesswork - she is buying books at a shop on Rue Fontaine (Paris), she is sitting in a restaurant on 83rd Steet (New York.)

Perhaps it is this vagueness of context that makes the journals here seem strangely distant, even when Sontag is exploring the emotional treacheries of her romantic relationships. Her marriage with Phillip is, for the most part, couched in aphorisms and abstract reflections on "Marriage" as such. (To be fair, David Rieff does note that the journals for her married years appear to have been destroyed.) We get greater emotional detail in her relationships with "H' and "I", which are at times heart-breaking; the first night she makes love with H, Sontag writes: "Everything that was so tight, that hurt so much in the pit of my stomach, was vanquished in the straining against her, the weight of her body on top of mine, the caress of her mouth and hands." These momentary evocations of happiness are all the more stark given that the remainder of the journal is beset with lacerating descriptions of feelings of sexual inadequacy and hopelessness, the profound fear of being alone and the (self-)disgust inherent in that fear. So while the journals are short on specifics and strangely unrevealing in some ways (no Kafka, she), we get a very clear picture of Sontag's need for self-transcendence, her desire to become the ego-ideal Susan Sontag and how this ego-ideal changed over time, and the wounded, pain-wracked self that it needed to be transcended at all costs.

One or Fewer Robots

Florian Schneider quits Kraftwerk!! Is Ralf Hutter really going to continue by himself? Just as New Order wasn't New Order after Gillian Gilbert hung up her sequencer, it is hard to imagine Kraftwerk without jolly old V-2 Schneider.

(Also, apparently some guy from the Stooges died. Oh well.)

"Such a cold winter/ With scenes as slow as..."

RIP Harold Pinter, friend to Samuel Beckett and Quentin Crisp, greatest English playwrite of the twentieth century, opponent of imperialism and force majeure. It is common in these circumstances to come up with some apt quopte from the recently deceased autho, but the extraordinary thing about Pinter's writing is that, unlike such a purported minimalist like Beckett, is that there simply are no purple passages to quote from to attach a spurious profundity to one's discourse. Pinter charted the abstract movement of forces (power, desire, language), especially attuned to their use and abuse, their potential for domination and violence. Now he is silent.

Random Catchment Area

And the quote of the week goes to ....Infinite Thought :

"When I look back at earlier episodes of my life, I always seem to think that each of them had been a slightly depressing period of time, which makes me wonder whether the whole thing hasn't been one big long slightly depressing period of time, although I do hope not."

Indeed!

Send and Receive V.10 - Part 1

Saturday 18 2008 - Vintage Futures

So Send + Receive is celebrating its 10th year this year and after a launch party

and a very pleasant afternoon’s workshop involving Dearraindrop, paint, homemade bricolage electronics, children and magic markers

the performances began at Ace Art. A low-tech night with almost no laptops in sight. Fletcher Pratt began manipulating tape sounds from conventional tape players and a small reel-to-reel through effect pedals. Pratt’s performance was interesting in a number of ways: as a performance, it was a success (for the most part) insofar as the audience could actually see the punctual origins of the sounds being produced as Pratt struck play buttons and cassette decks and twisted the reel to reel back and forth. A very physical performance, very different from the stereotyped “bald guy looking at laptop”. Sonically I really liked this project (Pratt is one of those artists with several different personae - this tape manipulation performance is called Mindgunk), reminding me as it did of the vintage Berio/Xennakis post-music concrete. Again, that sense of the mass of sound that a lot of older electronic work seems to maintain.

Next up were Dearraindrop of Virginia Beach. Oooh, trash aesthetic:


Its hard to know what to make of something like Dearraindrop - the trashy bricolage aesthetic (so Mudd Club, so B-52’s) is ok and everything, but it somehow tends to leave me somewhat unsatisfied. As with their performance (a lot of banging and crashing with some drones going on beneath) so with their visual art and video work - colours, images (abstract and kitschy) mashed together is a way that calls to mind the art bruit of Wolfson et al. Some of it is really funny. Some of it is lame. As with their set - some of it was fun and boisterous. But as I ducked the Double Bubble being thrown at me I was beginning to wonder why this was happening? What is Dearraindrop’s purpose? I still don’t know. And I don’t think I care enough to find out.

Keeping in theme with the retro-electronics we moved from reel-to-reel’s through 80’s sub-Dada to vinyl records with Vancouver’s Kenny Roux, who also sported Ironic Moustache No. 3:


The turntables are fitted with magnetic tape heads rather than styluses, the result being a surprisingly heterogeneous array of sounds that Roux clearly had worked through. Again, a performance qua performance with the sounds produced not in some interstitial cyberspace but by the physical work of the artist. Sonically it was a bit uneven (as was Fletcher Pratt) which might be a congenital part of any improv performance - some parts are going to be more interesting than others. But there was plenty there to be interested in. And yet….

Some nagging questions that I walked away with: Sound art as such seems to be moving away from the technocratic have-Powerbook-will-travel in a similar way in which electronic music as such moved from hardware to software in the 90’s. And this is just fine - there are always basement wierdos like Pratt and Roux tweaking old technologies to do things that they aren’t supposed to do. But certain questions emerge: what is the meaning of this return to low-tech? Has the tape cassette machine become something like an acoustic guitar or some sort of new folk instrument? There seems to be a theme of some kind of futurological atavism at work here - a Mad Max / Neuromancer situation in which the future is not sleek and clean but dusty with poorly connected terminals that need thumping from time to time. The deliberately low-tech see-the-input-cables aesthetic on offer this evening is perhaps addressing some kind of shadowy millennial anxiety about identity and autonomy. Bugs in the program, grit in the keys, grime through the amp say nothing as much as “I am Here” at a time when all the words in that statement are problematically functional at best.

So is this a way of pulling the breaks on the engine of digital data? A revolutionary gesture? Or the sound art equivalent of those dvd’s of fireplaces you can play during Xmas holidays?

Fatigue and Disgust

Well, I've been working onthe omnibus Joy Division post lately which is coming along very slowly indeed. But here are some notes that I took while watching the documentary. Hopefully these will shape up into something:


Find source of Marshall Berman quote.

Emphasis on Manchester psychogeography

The pre-birth

“They are rebuilding the city…yes, always”

Why was Deborah Curtis not interviewed?

“Things that Aren’t There”:
Electric Circus
Pips Disco
TJ Davidson’s Rehearsal Room
The Factory

Bernard claims to be the one who discovered Ka-Tzeknik

Tony Wilson and everything that involves

Rob Gretton’s notebooks – if only!

Revelation #1: Keep On Keepin On

THE DANCE

Why does Peter Saville look like such a dandy?

Ian’s glamour … & Ian’s awkwardness
(he does look like Mark E Smith sometimes)

The Disorder montage – great, and then shit

Psychogeography – Wozencroft - Interior Manchester landscape

“To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanging man. Where will it end?”

Annik speaks!

Genesis P Orridge looks really ill. And always inciteful. Poor old Gen, I hope s/he’s ok

Wozencroft and Ian’s “shamanism”

Trance --------------------- Possession

Revelation of Vulnerabilty

Epilepsy
Its stigma – Terry Mason seems very upset

Stephen Morris – inarticulate, sad, the only one whose memories haven’t become anecdotes

“Its surprising that no one would pay attention”
&Tony “Its art”---- “He really means it”

He had made his mind up

Hypnotic regression:
Just reading
A book about laws
28
I’ve been reading it for a couple of days
Going over it
Keeping notes
Something I do at night

Stephen’s anger
Regrets of Peter Hook
Paul Morley frozen

Their entry into RnR Fall of Hame and “vibrancy” Manchester

Sk8 boards and sneakers

Ian Curtis as reverse Sylvia Plath
“Perhaps its time we started facing the future. When will it end?”

Deeper Into Movies 4

A Few Notes on My Winnipeg

1) From the moment the film starts, you know that you are watching a Guy Maddin - the silent movie expressionism, the strange old ladies, the cod-noir cinematography, incest, great intertitles (“Passive Aggression!” being a favourite). He progresses by means of minimal difference (cf Tim Hecker post from last year). It seems that a lot of my favourite artists in just about all mediums do this - maybe is a comfort level factor, I don’t know. The trick for Maddin will be to avoid the Wes Anderson trap, when stylistic signature becomes stereotyped gesture. This trap seems to snare almost everybody eventually, but we can always keep our fingers crossed. Anyways, I think we have a lot of time left on that one anyways; Maddin’s material is so idiosyncratic and personal (sometimes watching his movies is a bit like eavesdropping on someone else’s psychoanalytic sessions, which as it turns out, are that of the Winnipeg’s collective unconscious) that he has a vast seam of material to mine.

2) Compare My Winnipeg to Noam Gonnick’s Stryker: different ideas of history. Maddin’s historical view of history is mythopoetic - a mixture of allegedly Aboriginal ideas about secret rivers converging under the Red and Assiniboine juncture; sommambulance through time and dream, time as dream, history the nightmare that we are trying to recapture. The “present day” shots of the MTS Centre, the Winnipeg Arena jar because they seem undigested detritus is the fluidly oneiric images that surround them. Even actual historical events and personages (the 1919 Strike, Steven Juba) semi-dissolve into the ghosts that keep the narrator trapped in Winnipeg, despite his repeated protests about his need to leave, to wake up from the dream. Even if Revolution Girl at the end of the movie (great, by the way) were to succeed in reversing the wound sustained by Maddin’s Winnipeg, the narrator seems to feel bereft: what is a place without ghosts. (More on Stryker at a later date)

3) I was initially going to end these brief notes by stating that this film wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not from Winnipeg. But the more I think about it, this film is as hauntological as you can get. Take note K-Punk!

Put the Book Back on the Shelf 1

Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (Rita Honegger)

… an Austrian writer, and anyway the name didn’t matter, the person didn’t matter, no writer’s person or biography ever mattered, his work was everything, the writer himself was nothing, despite the despicable vulgarity of all those who insisted upon confusing the writer’s person with his work. The general public had been corrupted by certain historical and literary processes of the first half of the nineteenth century into daring, with the shameless impertinence characteristic of them, to confuse the written work with the writer’s personal concerns, using the writer’s person to effect a viscous crippling of the writer’s work, always shuttling back and forth between the writer’s private person and his product, and so forth, all of which lead to a monstrous distortion of the entire culture, bringing into being a culture which was a monstrosity, and so forth…
- Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works

In 1989, Thomas Bernhard succumbed to the lung disease that had been plaguing him for almost all of his life, having scored a double “triumph” of sorts; his play Heldenplatz, had made him the most reviled (and most adored) literary figure in Austria, and his final will and testament had forbidden the publication and production of any of his published or unpublished works in Austria “however it defines itself” until the estate’s copywrite expires and the work enters into public domain. And this fits in with the image that even the most attentive reader might have cobbled together: the austere, solitary misanthropic author living in his farmhouse in Upper Austria preparing invective in his sparsely furnished rooms (all of which are painted black) with big bars on the window etc., occasionally to be found restlessly reading newspapers in Viennese café’s while diffidently giving interviews with more than a concealed level of hostility.

It’s a pretty picture taken from central casting. Sontag: “He (for the type is male of course) is a Jew or like a Jew; polycultural, restless, misogynistic; a collector; dedicated to self-transcendence, despising the instincts; weighed down by books and buoyed up by the euphoria of knowledge. His real task is to not to exercise his talent for explanation but, by being witness to the age, to set the largest, most edifying standards of despair.” Sontag groups Bernhard with Elias Cannetti and Walter Benjamin in this group, and certainly this He is one of the more enduring, not to say, compelling stock characters in European continental literature. The figure is European without a doubt, and the pathology is strictly that of central Europe, where the dead hand of even the most recent tradition hangs heavy. (It is apparently impossible to throw a brick in Prague without hitting some kitschy Kafka landmark.) Impossible to know what this He would make of New Europe’s MacDonalds, ID cards and Euros; the middle class do not exist for Him. All attention is focused on the (remains of the) past.

Rita Honegger’s book has two main purposes: to pour some cold water on the Bernhard myth sketched above (with some rather interesting results) and to situate Bernhard as not an anti-Austria figure, but as the most Austrian of them all, Austria “and all that comes with it.” The two purposes operate in tandem; Bernhard took some undeniable pleasure in presenting himself, of allowing himself to be presented, as the Scourge of Austria, dragging its skeletons from the closet – be they Nazism or a more generalized impulse towards brutality and depravity. Honnegger’s aim is to show that this is true, but up to a point. Yes, Berhard was absolutely a Nestbeschmutzer, but his attacks presupposed the permamnce, or at least the symbolic efficacy, of Austria-Europe’s past – Aristocracy, Church, Kultur.

Certainly Bernhard’s novels (I am not as familiar with his plays) are filled with black sheep deliberately (either through obsessive concentration on some intagible, impossible goal or with malice aforethought, usually both) ruining their illustrious heritage. And yet, Honnegger shows this heritage was not Bernhard’s by birth. Born out of wedlock (possibly the result of a date rape) and not exactly embraced lovingly by his eventual step-father, he found himself in the “oppressive” peasant atmosphere that informs his earlier novels such as Frost and Gargoyles. In these novels, the wonders of the Alpine forests are overshadowed by universal sickness and debility, madmen in locked attics and women dying painfully giving birth to damaged children, families committing joint suicide to avoid insanity.

All of this seems to change overnight – that is to say, the time when young Thomas moves to Salzburg to train as a singer while working as a court reporter (which always comes to mind whenever I read The Voice Imitator) is glossed over fairly quickly. Honegger does contextualize Bernhard’s participation in the Bohemian avant-garde scene, including, tantalizingly, the Vienna Gruppe scene, but, as frequently happens in biographies, the context sometimes overtakes the subject. The transformation of Bernhard the hick from the sticks to Thomas Bernhard the author and theater-maker is passed over rather quickly, but also constitutes one of the great surprises of the biography.

Honegger’s book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which has certain advantages, but one main disadvantage – it is hard to get a sense of the sequence of events. How, for example, was the publication of Woodcutters affected by and affected other events (e.g. Bernhard’s homosexual affairs, one of the BIG surprises that is almost entirely glossed over here, or the public reception of Heldenplatz at the Burgtheater.)* So rather mysteriously, we move from the unwanted child in very grim post-War circumstances (it is to Honegger’s credit that she doesn’t let Bernhard’s, shall we say, expressionistic versions of his childhood override the facts and details she pieced together through hard biographical slog – interviews, archival research etc.) before little Thomas gets out of Salzburg and heads to the big smoke/Vienna to seek fame and fortune as an actor at the Mozarteum. Again, a familiar narrative, a familiar set of characters:

His public image in those years, somewhat mythologized by himself as well as by former friends and colleagues, alternated between the raw peasant misfit who preferred driving a beer truck through the rough streets of Vienna to socializing with the city aesthetes, on the one hand, and the impeccably dressed, painfully shy poet, inhibited precisely by his outsider status and his lack of urban finesse, on the other.

How do you do this? (Underemployed aesthetes want to know!) Well, find a wealthy patron, of course! While in the Grafenhof tuberculosis sanatorium (described in Wittgenstein’s Nephew and Gathering Evidence) Thomas, who, it must be admitted, was a rather alarmingly attractive young man in a Germanic James Dean sort of way, meets the wealthy and 30 years older Hedwig Stavianicek. Honegger notes that the details of the relationship are difficult to determine due to Berhnard’s reticence on the one hand (although he does refer to her as his Liebensmensch, which is ambiguous enough) and some rather smutty gossip from the coffee-house chattering classes on the other (the campy overtones of Liebensmench and “Auntie”, the quasi-incestuous mother-son overtones). Buried in Honegger’s (vital) contextualizations and cultural histories is a clear picture of the relationship between Bernhard and Stavianicek, so essential to Berhanrd that he would describe her as “the woman who shares my life and to whom I have owed not just a great deal, but, frankly, more or less everything, since the moment when she first appeared at my side…. Without her, I would not be alive at all, or at any rate I would certainly not be the person I am today, so mad and so unhappy and yet at the same time happy.” This is strong praise indeed; unlike just about every other one of Bernhard’s friendships, there was to be no sudden rupture, definitive break or oscillation between affection and venomous derision.** In this biography, Bernhard overwhelms; as with his novels, women remain shadowy figures silently waiting in the periphery.

The dirt and grime of Bernhard’s life (no more or less dirty or grimy than yours or mine) are deemphasized so that Honegger can put forward her main thesis: Bernhard as echt Austrian, insofar as Austria in general and Vienna in particular are entirely constituted in performances whose veracity is subordinated to the degree to which they are convincing or even just plain novel. The care with which Honegger extricates the kaleidescope of performances of performances or performances (“the actor in the actor in the actor”) is impressive, although it does tend somewhat to blot out any other perspective. We could, for example, have stood for further exploration of the manner in which the works and legend of Wittgenstein gained the cultural prominence that they did among such people as Bachman, Bernhard and Handke. (We also could have learned more about the enmity between the last two, which is one of the funnier aspects of the book, for those who love literary gossip as I do.) Honegger more or less stops at noting the ways in which Ludwig and Paul Wittegenstein provided Bernhard with a useful repertory of masks (in Concrete and Correction in particular, which compare very favourably indeed to Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It believe you me). This is true as far as it goes, but surely there’s a bit more to it than that? In effect, there is something slightly monomaniacal about Honegger's determination to bend the life to the idea; in a way, she becomes a Bernhard character herself, as does everyone who spends too long in the vicinity of the man and/or his works. And it is precisely this danger that makes Bernhard’s work so endlessly compelling – the radioactivity of consciousness tuned to a feverish pitch that is so relentless in its destruction that no amount of pose-assumption or critical distance is even possible.

* Is it a sign of a successful biography to have to include a basic timeline which I needed to consult frequently while writing this piece in order to piece together what happened when? Its a shame that all of our lives aren't organized thematically; it would save a lot of the "what the hell am I doing with my life" moments that darken certain evenings.

** The publication of Woodcutters launched a libel suit from Gerhard Lampersberg, wealthy patron of the arts (and particularly young artistic men of pleasant mien, including Bernhard). While all of this took place before Thomas Bernhard became Thomas Bernhard, one wonders what on Earth they expected? Honegger suggests that for the Viennese, it was all very well when Bernhard was laying into someone else, but when the corrosive gaze turned your way, well, that was a different pile of schnitzle.

Deeper into Movies 3

What was all the Fuss About? - Death of a President

We watched the Mondo Cane "documentaries" where it was impossible to tell the fake newsreel footage of atrocities and executions from the real. And we rather liked it that way. Our willing complicity in this blurring of truth and reality in the Mondo Cane films alone make them possible and was taken up by the entire media landscape, by politicians and churchment.

- J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life

Death of a President is more of a technical achievement than the grand political statement it was cracked up to be. Manipulating footage to make Dick Cheney sound like he's giving GWP's eulogy (admittedly the phrase President Cheney sent shivers down my spine) was pretty impressive, and the overall tone managed to avoid any faux-ironic giveaways. But what really was all the fuss about? Is it really that much of a shock to learn that a person from Syria with some roughly unsavoury connections somewhere in his past would be more-or-less framed into being found guilty, to be scapegoated? That a Gulf War veteran suffering from PTSD would feel resentment, or, good heavens, even anger that his son(s) or daughter(s) died for oil a second time?

Or was it that the fictionalized documentary seemed so seamleesly done that, yes indeed, it looked real, the very definition of the simulacrum? But don't we know all about that already? Known it for sometime, almost bored stiff with the idea that "Reality" is nothing here but the recordings?

Beyond the undeniable jouissance of GWB getting his just desserts, and the wearily omniscient sense that, had George the Younger actually been assassinated, things would probably have been much, much worse than the film predicts, this movie doesn't really tell us anything particularly new or shocking. A technical masterpiece absolutely, but hollow - iin the same way that, at a different register, Borat was both funny and obvious at the same time (rednecks and fratboys have retrograde attitudes vis-a-vis women and ethnic minorities, crickey, who'd 've thought?!)

New Posts Forthcoming

New posts forthcoming. Sorry for the extended delay.
Upcoming: Thomas Bernhard biography review and notes on Death of a President and My Winnipeg
She's back, Gentle Readers

Temporary Service Interruption

Well, due to a number of factors - new job, dead computer, internet server problems - there may be a bit of a hiatus here at the New Ennui. Service will be back to normal before year end, at which time I will regail you with a review of the Thomas Bernhard biography, the completion of the Houellebecq post, as well as a cheerless year end review.

And if you've been trying to contact me, no I'm not avoiding people - I just haven't received your messages. (I'm typing this on a borrowed computer and was shocked by the number of messages I missed.)

Tom K.

Deeper into Movies 2

5 Points on Children of Men

1) One can develop a genre of film called “English Apocalyptic” which is characterized by the juxtaposition of ruin and the quotidian simultaneously, I.e. giant scorpions nestling around Stonehenge, Yeti sitting in a Tube Station toilet (to use one actor’s example), etc. Daily life continues, the buses are still running (how whistful that must seem post 7-11), there are places called Hackney; its just that the world’s going to end.* In film, at least, one could construct a genealogy that might start with (this is a little arbitrary) The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in which Rumpole of the Bailey sweats in his newspaper office while the planet grinds inexorably to a halt. Derek Jarman would deserve a chapter of his own in this history: Jubilee (which was brought to mind during Children’s scenes in London, with trash mounds piling around the caff which is then bombed, as well as the casual brutality of the police, though this may not be a purely filmic attribute) and The Last of England (the boat sailing into unknown waters), as well as other films, take a certain delirious, despairing jouissance in putting Little England under an aesthetic pressure cooker to see what comes out. (Pun not intended.) Children of Men adds to this genre (maybe so does 28 Days - I haven’t seen the sequel) by making the apocalypse a background issue, a given.

2) It was a stroke of genius on somebody’s part (I’m tended to point to the script writers - all four of them! - rather than P. D. James, but I haven’t read the book) to make the epidemic of planetary infertility and miscarriages without cause. Presumably, if we knew why it happened, we could know how to stop it. Here, instead, it is an assumed condition, again, a given, even if it is only eighteen years down the line.** The speech that the former obstetrician gives in the abandoned school is particularly moving; the end of the world comes incrementally, little by little until suddenly, poof!

3) The refugee camp is a particularly elegant synthesis of the last twenty years of biopolitics; in fact, that is what this whole movie is about, really.

4) Even though the boat Tomorrow does make an appearance at the end, there were a tense few minutes for me when it was unclear if the boat would ever arrive at all. This was compounded by the fact that, as Clive Owen’s character is dying, they actually seem to be moving further and further away from the buoy! And I need hardly point out, the boat never actually picks them up!

5) Great cinematic moments: Joshua Clover has pointed out the blood splatter on the lens during the tracking shots on the bus in the fugee camp; it is as great a formal innovation as whichever film it was in the 60’s or 70’s that had sunlight reflected into the lens, partially obscuring the shot. And hats off to Clive Owen! (All of the actors, really.) The scene where he is showing the girl how to comfort the baby by acting it out was astonishing, not the least for the look of hopeless joy on his face as he does so. (Tears welled up in this here viewer’s eyes.)

A word or two about Deeper Into Movies: Blog postings have been particularly irregular of late, for a number of reasons, and promised follow-ups never materialize, or are finished absurdly late. Part of the reason is my own laziness, sure, the other is that my tendency is to want to make some sort of definitive statement. (This is why what was supposed to be a two page set of reflections on Houellbecq is turning into a long, interminable essay.) So the intention here is to a create a number of series that will comprise of short or shortish reviews that make no claim to comprehensiveness (nor necessarily coherence.) Maybe just a way to get things off my chest, ok, but here’s a potential list. We’ll see how it goes:
Deeper into Movies: films, videos, dvd’s, reactions of articles or books about films. (Title cribbed from Pauline Kael by way of Yo La Tengo.)
My Life in Art: visual arts, galleries, etc. (A Mojave 3 song, I believe.)
Put the Book Back on the Shelf: fiction, poetry, philosophy, cultural and social theory. (Unseemly ripped from Belle and Sebastian, I’m afraid.)
Music Non Stop: records, gigs, etc. (Not a very original title, is it? Anyone who comes up with something better should let me know.)

* Has anyone read Shelia Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism? I have a hunch that it does more ideological work that Zizek give it credit for.
** But then again, we’ve only had 7 years of the War on Terror, and checking my carry-on luggage for sharp objects before boarding a plane has become second nature already. We might be all a little bored with the emphasis on micro politics, but it is never the less the case that, like it or not, ideology functions as much in the interstices of the quotidian as it does in the Event. And what’s great about Children of Men is that there is no apocalyptic event, only the possibility of a redemptive one. And just as we have no idea why children became globally extinct, we have no idea why this one West African girl (could be Dizzee Rascal’s sister) suddenly is able to get pregnant. (Yes, I know where babies come from.)

Deeper Into Movies 1

TCM Commits Treasonous Acts

Battle of Algiers: a more apt movie given the Iraq and soon-to-be Iran situation is hard to imagine. Brave of TCM to screen a film that is actually pro-Islamic terrorist, ending with Algerian independence, but not before we see French soldiers torturing possible FLN collaborators, fellow travelers, people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And the glorious ending, with the women’s ululations calling to mind the apocalyptic quality that attracted William Burroughs to jajouka musicians. The mass movement of spontaneous determination (Badiou’s fidelity to the Event? Agemben’s coming of the “whatever” being?) as stirring as the revolutionary surge of energy that closes I Am Cuba.

Pontecorvo’s fluid camera, panning and moving throughout the crowded Algerian streets. The streaming light after the last of the FLN core group are blown to pieces, along with the building in which they are hiding. (At least the French army had the good graces to evacuate the building before flattening it, unlike some armies we could mention…) Colonel Mathieu (played with reptilian grace by Jean Martin) as ultimate colonial enforcer, down to his open-secret admission that, yes, we are torturing people to get information out of them. (There’s even a waterboarding scene!!) And the independence movement triumphs over the occupiers!!!!!!

Bizarrely enough, apparently the film was screened at the Pentagon in 2003, although what that aggregate of criminals thought has not been made public.* Even more bizarrely, Danny de Vito chose it as part of the guest interviewees that TCM is having this month. And, even, even more bizarrely, it was followed by David Lean’s sark-fest Kwai Me a River, or something to that effect.

I am still working on the follow-up to the Houellbecq post, the first of which needs some heavy editing. A lot of it was written in a white heat - hence the MS Works inspired word surrealism in places. (I really, really hate predicative text.) And more on Inland Empire should be coming up soon too. Oh God, that bloody whistling song from Big British Soldiers Don't Kwai is coming on, so I better go change the freakin’ channel!

* According to the Wikipedia entry, Richard Clarke and Michael Sheehan discuss Algiers’s depiction of terrorism in the Criterion DVD, which is almost worth paying the $100 which seems to be the going rate for Criterion DVDs.