The Real WorldIn England, the movie theater was originally called "The Bioscope," because of its visual presentation of the actual movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios, a way of life). The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world In the chapter on The Wheel, the story was told of how the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in an attempt to photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for to set a series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the mechanical and the organic in a special way. In the medieval world, curiously the one static form for another, in sequence. They imagined the life of a flower as a kind of cinematic strip of phases for essences. The movie is the total realization of the medieval idea of change, in the form of an entertaining illusion. Physiologists had very much to do with the development of film, as they did with the telephone. On film the mechanical appears as organic, and the growth of a flower can be portrayed as easily and as freely as the movement of a horse. If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author's mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Cervantes devoted his Don Quixote entirely to this aspect of the printed word and its power to create what James Joyce throughout Finnegan's Wake designates as "the ABCED-minded," which can be taken as "ab-said" or "ab-sent," or just alphabetically controlled. The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness. Cervantes lived in a world in which print was as new as movies are in the West, and it seemed obvious to him that print, like the images now on the screen, had usurped the real world. The reader or spectator had become a dreamer under their spell, as Rene Clair said of film in 1926. Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement without syntax. In fact, however, like the print and the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate. Our literate acceptance of the mere movement of the camera eye as it follows or drops a figure from view is not acceptable to an African film audience, if somebody disappears off the side of the film, the African wants to know what happened to him. A literate audience however, accustomed to following printed imagery line by line without questioning the logic of lineality, will accept film sequence without protest. It was Rene Clair who pointed out that if two or three people were together on a stage, the dramatist must ceaselessly motivate or explain their being there at all. But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera turns to, the audience accepts. We are transported to another world. As Rene Clair observed, the screen opens its white door into a harem of beautiful visions and adolescent dreams, compared to which the loveliest real body seems defective. Yeats saw the movie as a world of Platonic ideals with the film projector playing "a spume upon a ghostly paradigm of things." This was the world that haunted Don Quixote, who found it through the folio door of the newly printed romances. The close relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form. Even the film industry regards all of its greatest achievements as derived from novels, nor is this unreasonable. Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture. All one need do is to imagine for a moment a film based on newspaper form in order to see how close film is to book. Theoretically, there is no reason why the camera should not be used to photograph complex groups of items and events in dateline configurations, just as they are presented on the page of a newspaper. Actually, poetry tends to do this configuring or bunching" more than prose. Symbolist poetry has much in common with the mosaic of the newspaper page, yet very few people can detach themselves from uniform and connected space sufficiently to grasp symbolist poems. Natives, on the other hand, who have very little contact with phonetic literacy and lineal print, have to learn to "see" photographs or film just as much as we have to learn our letters. In fact, after having tried for years to teach Africans their letters by film, John Wilson of London University's African Institute found it easier to teach them their letters as a means to film literacy. For even when natives have learned to "see" pictures, they cannot accept our ideas of time and space "illusions." On seeing Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp, the African audience concluded that Europeans were magicians who could restore life. They saw a character who survived a mighty blow on the head without any indication of being hurt. When the camera shifts, they think they see trees moving, and buildings growing or shrinking, because they cannot make the literate assumption that space is continuous and uniform. Nonliterate people simply don't get perspective or distancing effects of light and shade that we assume are innate human equipment. Literate people think of cause and effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another along by physical force. Nonliterate people register very little interest in this kind of "efficient" cause and effect, but are fascinated by hidden forms that produce magical results. Inner, rather than outer, causes interest the nonliterate and nonvisual cultures. And that is why the literate West sees the rest of the world as caught in the seamless web of superstition. Like the oral Russian, the African will not accept sight and sound together. The talkies were the doom of Russian filmmaking because, like any backward or oral culture, Russians have an irresistible need for participation that is defeated by the addition of sound to the visual image. Both Pudovkin and Eisenstein denounced the sound film but considered that if sound were used symbolically and contrapuntally, rather than realistically, there would result less harm to the visual image. The African insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films is wholly frustrated by sound track. Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual package as a mere consumer commodity. For with silent film we automatically provide sound for ourselves by way of "closure" or completion. And when it is filled in for us there is very much less participation in the work of the image. Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely literate and abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page. For those who thus fix their eyes, perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns and wordplay, even in sedate ads. In terms of other media such as the printed page, film has the power to store and to convey a great deal of information. In an instant it presents a scene of landscape with figures that would require several pages of prose to describe. In the next instant it repeats, and can go on repeating, this detailed information. The writer, on the other hand, has no means of holding a mass of detail before his reader in a large bloc or gestalt. As the photograph urged the painter in the direction of abstract, sculptural art, so the film has confirmed the writer in verbal economy and depth symbolism where the film cannot rival him. Another facet of the sheer quantity of data possible in a movie shot is exemplified in historical films like Henry V or Richard III Here extensive research went into the making of the sets and costumes that any six-year-old can now enjoy as readily as any adult. T. S. Eliot reported how, in the making of the film of his Murder in the Cathedral, it was not only necessary to have costumes of the period, but - so great is the precision and tyranny of the camera eye - these costumes had to be woven by the same techniques as those used in the twelfth century. Hollywood, amidst much illusion, had also to provide authentic scholarly replicas of many past scenes. The stage and TV can make do with very rough approximations, because they offer an image of low definition that evades detailed scrutiny. At first, however, it was the detailed realism of writers like Dickens that inspired movie pioneers like D. W. Griffiths, who carried a copy of a Dickens novel on location. The realistic novel, that arose with the newspaper form of communal cross-section and human-interest coverage in the eighteenth century, was a complete anticipation of film form. Even the poets took up the same panoramic style, with human interest vignettes and close-ups as variant. Gray's Elegy, Burns' The Cotter's Saturday Night, Wordsworth's Michael, and Byron's Childe Harold are all like shooting scripts for some contemporary documentary film. "The kettle began it. ..." Such is the opening of Dickens' Cricket and the Hearth. If the modern novel came out of Gogol's The Overcoat, the modern movie, says Eisenstein, boiled up out of that kettle. It should be plain that the American and even British approach to film is much lacking in that free interplay among the senses and the media that seems so natural to Eisenstein or Rene Clair. For the Russian, especially, it is easy to approach any situation structurally, which is to say, sculpturally. To Eisenstein, the overwhelming fact of film was that it is an "act of juxtaposition." But to a culture in an extreme reach of typographic conditioning, the juxtaposition must be one of uniform and connected characters and qualities. There must be no leaps from the unique space of the tea kettle to the unique space of the kitten or the boot. If such objects appear, they must be leveled off by some continuous narrative, or be "contained" in some uniform pictorial space. All that Salvador Dali had to do to create a furor was to allow the chest of drawers or the grand piano to exist in us own space against some Sahara or Alpine backdrop. Merely by releasing objects from the uniform continuous space of typography we got modern art and poetry. We can measure the psychic pressure of typography by the uproar generated by that release. For most people, their own ego image seems to have been typographically conditioned, so that the electric age with its return to inclusive experience threatens their idea of self. These are the fragmented ones, for whom specialist toil renders the mere prospect of leisure or jobless security a nightmare. Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality. The case of Charlie Chaplin films helps to illumine this problem. His Modern Times was taken to be a satire on the fragmented character of modern tasks. As clown, Chaplin presents the acrobatic feat in a mime of elaborate incompetence, for any specialist task leaves out most of our faculties. The clown reminds us of our fragmented state by tackling acrobatic or special jobs in the spirit of the whole or integral man. This is the formula for helpless incompetence. On the street, in social situations, on the assembly line, the worker continues his compulsive twitchings with an imaginary wrench. But the mime of this Chaplin film and others is precisely that of the robot, the mechanical doll whose deep pathos it is to approximate so closely to the condition of human life. Chaplin, in all his work, did a puppetlike ballet of the Cyrano de Bergerac kind. In order to capture this puppethke pathos, Chaplin (a devotee of ballet and personal mend of Pavlova) adopted from the first the foot postures of classical ballet. Thus he could have the aura of Spectre de la Rose shimmering around his clown getup. From the British music nail, his first training ground, with a sure touch of genius he took images like that of Mr. Charles Pooter, the haunting figure of a nobody. This shoddy-genteel image he invested with an envelope of fairy romance by means of adherence to the classic ballet postures. The new film form was perfectly adapted to this composite image, since film is itself a jerky mechanical ballet of flicks that yields a sheer dream world of romantic illusions. But the film form is not just a puppetlike dance of arrested still shots, for it manages to approximate and even to surpass real life by means of illusion. That is why Chaplin, in his silent pictures at least, was never tempted to abandon the Cyrano role of the puppet who could never really be a lover. In this stereotype Chaplin discovered the heart of the film illusion, and he manipulated that heart with easy mastery, as the key to the pathos of a mechanized civilization. A mechanized world is always in the process of getting ready to live, and to this end it brings to bear the most appalling pomp of skill and method and resourcefulness. The film pushed this mechanism to the utmost mechanical verge and beyond, into a surrealism of dreams that money can buy. Nothing is more congenial to the film form than this pathos of superabundance and power that is the dower of a puppet for whom they can never be real. This is the key to The Great Gatsby that reaches its moment of truth when Daisy breaks down in contemplating Gatsby's superb collection of shirts. Daisy and Gatsby live in a tinsel world that is both corrupted by power, yet innocently pastoral in its dreaming. The movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism, but paradoxically it offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. It is, therefore, not accidental that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor People roles of riches and power beyond the dreams of avarice. In the chapter on The Photograph, it was pointed out how the Press photo in particular had discouraged the really rich from the paths of conspicuous consumption. The life of display that the photo had taken from the rich, the movie gave to the poor with lavish hand: Oh, lucky, lucky me, I shall live in luxury, For I've got a pocketful of dreams. The Hollywood tycoons were not wrong in acting on the assumption that movies gave the American immigrant a means of self-fulfillment without any delay. This strategy, however deplorable in the light of the "absolute ideal good," was perfectly in accord with film form. It meant that in the 1920s the American way of life was exported to the entire world in cans. The world eagerly lined up to buy canned dreams. The film not only accompanied the first great consumer age, but was also incentive, advertisement and, in itself, a major commodity. Now in terms of media study it is clear that the power of film to store information in accessible form is unrivaled. Audio tape and video tape were to excel film eventually as information storehouses. But film remains a major information resource, a rival of the book whose technology it did so much to continue and also to surpass. At the present time, film is still in its manuscript phase, as it were; shortly it will, under TV pressure, go into its portable, accessible, printed-book phase. Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV to screen. This type of development is part of our present technological implosion. The present dissociation of projector and screen is a vestige of our older mechanical world of explosion and separation of functions that is now ending with the electrical implosion. Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams. The film viewer sits in psychological solitude like the silent book reader. This was not the case with the manuscript reader, nor is it true of the watcher of television. It is not pleasant to turn on TV just for oneself in a hotel room, nor even at home. The TV mosaic image demands social completion and dialogue. So with the manuscript before typography, since manuscript culture is oral and demands dialogue and debate, as the entire culture of the ancient and medieval worlds demonstrates. One of the major pressures of TV has been to encourage the "teaching machine." In fact, these devices are adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the principle that produced the names "wireless" and "horseless carriage" is another instance in that long list that illustrates how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature. Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry. When the magazine editors recently introduced film scenario procedures to the constructing of idea articles, the idea article supplanted the short story. The film is the rival of the book in that sense. (TV in turn is the rival of the magazine because of its mosaic power.) Ideas presented as a sequence of shots or materialized situations, almost in the manner of a teaching machine actually drove the short story out of the magazine field. Hollywood has fought TV mainly by becoming a subsidiary of TV Most of the film industry is now engaged in supplying TV programs. But one new strategy has been tried, namely the big-budget picture. The fact is that Technicolor is the closest the movie can get to the effect of the TV image. Technicolor greatly lowers photographic intensity and creates, in part, the visual conditions for participant viewing. Had Hollywood understood the reasons for Marty's success, TV might have given us a revolution in film. Marty was a TV show that got onto the screen in the form of low definition or low-intensity visual realism. It was not a success story, and it had no stars, because the low-intensity TV image is quite incompatible with the high-intensity star image. Marty, which in fact looked like an early silent movie or an old Russian picture, offered the film industry all the clues it needed for meeting the TV challenge. This kind of casual, cool realism has given the new British films easy ascendancy. Room at the Top features the new cool realism. Not only is it not a success story, it is as much an announcement of the end of the Cinderella package as Marilyn Monroe was the end of the star system. Room at the Top is the story of how the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his backside. The moral is that success is not only wicked but also the formula for misery. It is very hard for a hot medium like film to accept the cool message of TV. But the Peter Sellers movies I'm M Right, Jack and Only Two Can Play are perfectly in tune with the new temper created by the cool TV image. Such is also the meaning of the ambiguous success of Lolita. As a novel, its acceptance announced the antiheroic approach to romance. The film industry had long beaten out a royal road to romance in keeping with the crescendo of the success story. Lolita announced that the royal road was only a cowtrack, after all, and as for success it shouldn't happen to a dog. In the ancient world and in medieval times, the most popular of all stories were those dealing with The Falls of Princes. With the coming of the very hot print medium, the preference changed to a rising rhythm and to tales of success and sudden elevation in the world. It seemed possible to achieve anything by the new typographic method of minute, uniform segmentation of problems. It was by this method, eventually, that film was made Film was, as a form, the final fulfillment of the great potential of typographic fragmentation. But the electric implosion has now reversed the entire process of expansion by fragmentation. Electricity has brought back the cool, mosaic world of implosion, equilibrium, and stasis. In our electric age, the one-way expansion of the berserk individual on his way to the top now appears as a gruesome image of trampled lives and disrupted harmonies. Such is the subliminal message of the TV mosaic with its total field of simultaneous impulses. Film strip and sequence cannot but bow to this superior power. Our own youngsters have taken the TV message to heart in their beatnik rejection of consumer mores and of the private success story. Since the best way to get to the core of a form is to study its effect in some unfamiliar setting, let us note what President Sukarno of Indonesia announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives. He said that he regarded them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man's birthright. That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this In fact the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial giant. That it is being amputated by the TV image reflects a still greater revolution going on at the center of American life. It is natural that the ancient East should feel the political pull and industrial challenge of our movie industry. The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures. Its explosive force was significantly greater in silent pictures than in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already forecast the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical explosion. The silent pictures were immediately acceptable across language barriers as the talkies were not. Radio teamed up with film to give us the talkie and to carry us further on our present reverse course of implosion or re-integration after the mechanical age of explosion and expansion. The extreme form of this implosion or contraction is the image of the astronaut locked into his wee bit of wraparound space. Far from enlarging our world, he is announcing its contraction to village size. The rocket and the space capsule are ending the rule of the wheel and the machine, as much as did the wire services, radio, and TV . We may now consider a further instance of the films influence in a most conclusive aspect. In modern literature there is probably no more celebrated technique than that of the stream of consciousness or interior monologue. Whether in Proust, Joyce, or Eliot, this form of sequence permits the reader an extraordinary indentification with personalities of the utmost range and diversity. The stream of consciousness is really managed by the transfer of film technique to the printed page, where, in a deep sense it really originated; for as we have seen, the Gutenberg technology of movable types is quite indispensable to any industrial or film process. As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seemed to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the Chaplin ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. In 1911 Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution created a sensation by associating the thought process with the form of the movie. Just at the extreme point of mechanization represented by the factory, the film, and the press, men seemed by the stream of consciousness, or interior film to obtain release into a world of spontaneity, of dreams, and of unique personal experience. Dickens perhaps began it all with his Mr. Jingle in Pickwick Papers. Certainly in David Copperfield he made a great technical discovery, since for the first time the world unfolds realistically through the use of the eyes of a growing child as camera. Here was the stream of consciousness, perhaps, in its original form before it was adopted by Proust and Joyce and Eliot. It indicates how the enrichment of human experience can occur unexpectedly with the crossing and interplay of the life of media forms. The film imports of all nations, especially those from the United States, are very popular in Thailand, thanks in part to a deft Thai technique for getting round the foreign-language obstacle. In Bangkok, in place of subtitles, they use what is called "Adam-and-Eving." This takes the form of live Thai dialogue read through a loudspeaker by Thai actors concealed from the audience. Split-second timing and great endurance enable these actors to demand more than the best-paid movie stars of Thailand. Everyone has at some time wished he were equipped with his own sound system during a movie performance, in order to make appropriate comments. In Thailand, one might achieve great heights of interpretive interpolation during the inane exchanges of great stars. Marshall McLuhan/Understanding Media (The extensions of man)/ Movies: the Real World
0 Comments
by Therese Giraud After May '68, Godard gets down to a problem: how to make political films politically? How to integrate consistently within the film the question of where the images come from? And, step by step, to combat the effects of the dominant ideology in cinema as in politics. This was a philosophical reflection, too abstract, too theoretical. An overly intellectual working method, too Parisian. Godard journeyed back to the provinces: away from the head and towards the body. For Godard comes up against a problem. Beyond the issue of political commitment such as it was being expressed - both by himself and more generally - are other issues, unexplored and forgotten; issues that had created their fair share of disillusionment in post-'68 militant circles: interior issues - the family, the body, sexuality - neglected and left in enemy hands, those of television, sentimental drama, porn cinema. A change of direction: to start no longer from theory but from the man. Sex and politicsTake one: Tout va bien. A woman's hand on a man's penis. An image not from a porn movie but from a photograph. The photograph as an object of discussion and argument, a nucleus (one of several?) of the contradiction between the man and the woman who are otherwise addressing the problems of their own political commitment. A photograph of an erect penis grasped by a woman's hand; the photograph and the sex as an exhibit: this is. But a photograph within a film, alongside a film - another place, another time. Take two: Numero deux. The issue of political commitment is no longer addressed alongside that of sexuality; it is a commitment starting from and about sex. Addressing the issue of sexuality in political terms takes centre stage. Being neither a sex movie nor a political film but a shattering of the divisions imposed by media imagery; within the place where these images speak - the family. Speaking politically about the issue of sex; resituating sex in its social cell, the family. Starting from an imprisonment ... The family, as the product of sex, of sexual relationships (non-relationships), of conjugal love, a product which reproduces itself and is obliged endlessly to reproduce itself. Production and the relations of production. The family: where the children are taught that what happens when mother and father are alone in bed is the two sexes kissing, that this is love, this is how they learn to speak. This is what it is all about. But the children, despite this rote-learning, see only buggery, rape and deaf, dumb, blind violence. They see one who, from the outside, ejaculates and fills the other who receives within, absorbs and swells. Overproduction. It goes in from all sides and does not come out. Forced in, blocked. Blocked up as in buggered. Buggered by the sex, up the arse, in the mouth (the rote-learning), by the ears (the headphones). Starting from this imprisonment, therefore showing it as that of the family, of a woman. Starting from this imprisonment, therefore showing it as that of the family, of a woman. With the man's sex designated as the guilty party. Lacerating bourgeois forms of representation to talk about sex: didactic images, imposed by an absence of fiction, music, and drama. Images which are imprisoned by darkness and off-screen sound. Sublimation, escape, projection into a fictional elsewhere - all these are denied the spectator, who is forced to see things for real. In place of the love that is sublimated as much through pornography as through sentimental drama, to show instead bodies side-by-side, bodies that don't connect, that collide, that do each other harm. The reality of things in imposed, imposing images, but images without the possibility of transformation. An enclosed, hermetic, blocked up film. Here are images, a chain of images, just images. Locked up in the dark. Is this the darkness of ideology?And where do these images come from? This is the question to which Godard has always forced himself to respond and which finds a response here in the shots at the beginning and the end of the film, two shots that bracket the film, that are no longer just images, where the ideological darkness has vanished and they fill the screen.They are the relations of production: it's me, what's-his-name, master of my work, my equipment, my celluloid, who has made all this, who has organized it in space and time. It is I who manipulate the sounds and images. His image: of man. His image: of a woman. Placed at the center of the film. The dynamic of the contradiction between man and woman. It appears that a woman participated in making this film, in the construction of these images. It's a film by two people. This 'number two', who we see neither at the beginning nor the end of the film, is reduced to the status of raw material, like celluloid, like something to talk about. I'm speaking in her place, because she cannot speak yet, for lack of the means of production, of knowledge of the language of cinema. I'm speaking in her place, still ... Making speech for her; taking power for her, the power of cinema and its images. For the machine that allows him to speak, which he speaks from, is noc solely the one that we see, that he shows us (controlling the means of production), but is also the one that we don't see, being hidden by the other. His sex, concealed, unacknowledged, shameful. The film's centre, recalling Tout va bien, except that here all is far from well, the sex here is never erect, never wants to be erect. A refusal to function, a state of retention, a voluntary castration but one for which it seeks to revenge itself. Because it functions, all the same, it ejaculates elsewhere, in the images, in his speaking. It functions as the phallus. Castration and vengeance. A hermetic film, full, blocked, like the woman and his image of the woman. In the same way as the only sex worthy of the name is that of the man. A film congested with sex, just as Godard is congested by his own sex, like a man who discovers how it works but doesn't know what to do with it, either with his sex or with its discovery. So he shows it. He shows it and shoves it into us all over the place - in the mouth, up the arse, in the ears - redoubling reality, its reality. I say what I see. It is a film about phallocracy. He imposes it upon us again ... in sadistic impositions and initiatory rites, just as the worldly grandfather imposes on the little girl the headphones and Ferre's melancholy, just as the parencs impose their initiatory discourse on love, as Godard number one imposes the recital of A bout de souffle on the children of number two. For the man has the sex, a privilege which starts to weigh heavily on some, such as Godard (a consciousness whose origin is concealed, just as his partner is concealed, as finally is the origin of these images: is not the ideological darkness to be filled by the words of the woman, by her images, and would one thus see less sex?), but he has only this. But not only; he also has all that is permitted by his sex, all that resembles him - the desire for power, the problematic of power and impotence which he cannot get away from, the desire to possess, to crush, to enclose the other in a film, in a succession of words and images. The other: what, in the woman, he glimpses as different, as inaccessible to the law of his sex/phallus. This other which he reduces to his same. He mutilates the sex on the sole condition of mutilating the woman's body, of rigging it out in the same desires, the same functions: veneration of the penis, violence of the penis. Woman alone: congested (with sex), lamenting, or masturbatory violence, the search for liberating ejaculation, only the sex uncovered, its body absent, veiled. The woman's word - filled with his sex or around his sex, in masturbating it. The mutilated body of the woman. transformed into a penis, an extension of his that engorges no longer. Return of the same. We never speak of the violence on the banks that enclose the river. Me, I speak of it and it makes me understand your violence. Your violence, my violence: the phallus sees only itself. Perhaps women will never know how much men hate them. No doubt it was for this reason that Godard made his film (and not their film). To enclose them once again within the objectivity of his discourse on sex, in another image of woman, but one marked by a troubled male conscience, an image of death. To exclude the other, the unsexed other. the other words that for him don't exist, to which he refuses existence and life. His image of woman: bloated, congested by the sex, the eternal victim. Or the woman-penis. Because men hate women to such an extent that they would like them to hate them as much in return, in the same way, with the same weapons. This would perhaps be the war in which male violence could explode without shame or guilty conscience ... Is this sex war that men dream of more than women perhaps lying somewhere behind this film? But this would again be a form of sublimation, and that is excluded: the images are stopped before anything - the slightest element of fiction, of projection - can occur. Closing off any such opening; imprisoning it; a sealed, hermetic film. And facing it, facing his images, Godard imagines himself as the grandfather (as Ferre?) who, under the table, can no longer get it up, and above it no longer has the words with which to speak of his life and its struggles. Life, its struggles left behind him. The desire for solitude, for death. War or withdrawal; death, anyway. The impotency of the phallus facing life, the struggle for life. Dichotomies: The dichotomy of the retention of sex but its discharge nonetheless through the words and images. The dichotomy of the retention of music (sublimation), but its oozing through all the cracks in the film, bursting in liberation over the final image. The music of Ferre: glancing towards solitude. glancing towards death. A glance towards cinema. Withdrawal? The final image: hands, sick and hesitant, on the levers. Sick of these sounds and images, too unbearable, without hope of transformation. Hermetic images, sealed and closed; fine as a way of speaking about others, of speaking theoretically about theory and practice. But it's simply too much torture to speak of oneself, of one's melancholy and one's anguish. There is here the question of a limit; the limit of a cinema, the limit of a man's talking about himself, of truly saying I, of giving up just a little bit of power. Translated by Chris Darke CAHIERS DU CINEMA Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle Edited by David Wilson Introduction by Berenice Reynaud with Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana (Cahiers du Cinema 251-2, July-August 1974) Lacombe Lucien, The Night Porter, Les Chinois a Paris, Le Trio infernal, etc. These films, whose avowed aim is to rewrite history, are not an isolated phenomenon. They are themselves inscribed into a history, a history in progress; they have - as we are sometimes criticized for saying - a context. This context, in France, is the coming to power of a new bourgeoisie, of a fraction of the bourgeoisie along with its ideology (Giscard, president of all the French; a more-just-andcaring society etc.), its conception of France, and of history. What goes by the name of 'apres-gaullisme' is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to rid itself of a certain heroic, nationalist but also anti-Petainist and anti-fascist image, which was still reflected if not by Pompidou, at least by de Gaulle and Gaullism. Chaban's electoral defeat marks the end of this heroic, exaggerated and somewhat grotesque image (cf. Malraux) of recent French history. Something else is beginning to be written and represented: that France wasn't all that anti-fascist, that the French couldn't have cared less about Nazism, that anti-fascism and the Resistance were only ever, precisely, this derisory image of Gaullist 'grandeur' which is now showing its false nose. What is emerging is a cynical ideology: that of big business, of the multinational and technocratic culture that Giscard represents. The French, it is thought, are ripe for this cynicism (cynicism of the ruling class, disillusionment of the exploited classes): a cynicism illustrated, on the screen, by the phenomenon known as the 'retro style', i.e. the snobbish fetishism of period effects (costumes and settings) with little concern for history. This false archaeology of history had to be denounced in all its implications and all its effects. A true archaeology had to be - has to be - put in its place: the popular memory of struggles (of all forms of struggle) which has never really been able to speak - which has never had the power to do so - and which must be revived against all the forces which are constantly bent on stifling its on silencing it once and for all. No one was better placed to situate the guestion and to spell out its implications than Michel Foucault, whose work systematically uncovers what the official text represses, what lies forgotten in the damnable archives of the ruling class. We hope that the interview that follows may open up new avenues of research. P.B. and S. T. CAHIERS: Let's take as our starting point the journalistic phenomenon of the 'retro style', One might simply ask: How is it that films like Lacomhe Lucien or The Night Porter are possible today? Why are they so immensely popular? We think there are three levels that ought to be taken into account. First, the political conjuncture. Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new type of relation to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is being created, one that indicates very clearly - and in a way that is plain to everyone - the death of Gaullism. We therefore have to see, in so far as Gaullism remains very closely associated with the period of the Resistance, how this manifests itself in the films that are being made. Second, how can bourgeois ideology be mounting an attack in the breaches of orthodox Marxism - call it rigid, economistic, mechanistic , whatever you like - which for a very long time has provided the only grid for interpreting social phenomena? Finally, where do militants fit into all this, since militants are consumers and sometimes producers of films? What has happened since Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity is that the floodgates have opened. Something which until then had been completely suppressed, that is to say banned, is being openly voiced. Why? FOUCAULT: That can be explained, I think, by the fact that the history of the War and what happened before and after the War has never really been inscribed in anything other than wholly official histories. These official histories are basically centred on Gaullism which, on the one hand, Was the only way of writing that history in terms of an honourable nationalism and, on the other hand, was the only way of casting the Great Man, the man of the right and of outdated nineteenth-century nationalisms, in a historical role. It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, and on the other hand the right - and we all know how it behaved at the time of the War - found itself purified and sanctified by de Gaulle. Suddenly the right and France were reconciled in this way of making history: don't forget that nationalism was the climate in which nineteenth-century history (and especially its teaching) were born. What has never been described is what happened in the very depths of the country from 1936 on, and even from the end of the First World War to the Liberation. CAHIERS: So, what has perhaps been happening since The Sorrow and the Pity is that the truth is making its return into history. The question is whether it's really the truth. FOUCAULT: That has to be linked to the fact that the end of Gaullism has put a stop to this justification of the right by de Gaulle and the episode in question. The old Petainist right, the old collaborationist, Maurrasian and reactionary right which camouflaged itself as best it could behind de Gaulle, now considers itself entitled to produce a new version of its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been disenfranchised historically and politically, is coming to the fore again. It supported Giscard explicitly. It no longer needs to wear a mask, and so it can write its own history. And among the factors that explain Giscard's current acceptance by half the French (plus two hundred thousand), one mustn't forget films like those we're talking about - whatever the film-makers actually intended. The fact that all that has actually been shown has allowed the right to re-form along certain lines. In the same way that, inversely, it's the blurring of the distinctions between the nationalist right and the collaborationist right that has made these films possible. It's all part of the same thing. CAHIERS; This piece of history is therefore being rewritten both in the cinema and on television, with debates like those on Dossiers de I'ecran (which chose the theme of the French under the Occupation twice in two months). Film-makers considered to be more or less on the left are also apparently involved in this rewriting of history. That's something we have to investigate. FOUCAULT: I don't think things are that simple. What I was saying a moment ago was very schematic. Let me continue. There's a real battle going on. And what's at stake is what might be roughly called popular memory. It's absolutely true that ordinary people, I mean those who don't have the right to writing, the right to make books themselves, to compose their own history, these people nevertheless have a way of registering history, of remembering it, living it and using it. This popular history was, up to a point, more alive and even more clearly formulated in the nineteenth century when you had, for example, a whole tradition of struggles relived orally or in texts, songs, etc. But the fact is that a whole series of apparatuses has been established ('popular literature', cheap books, but also what is taught in school) to block this development of popular memory, and you could say that the project has been, relatively speaking, very successful. The historical knowledge that the working class has about itself is becoming less all the time. When you think, for example, about what the workers knew about their own history at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the tradition of trade unionism - using the term 'tradition' in its full sense - represented up until the First World War, it amounted to something pretty substantial. That has been gradually disappearing. It's disappearing all the time, although it hasn't actually been lost. Nowadays, cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema. And I think the whole effort has tended towards a recoding of popular memory which exists but has no way of formally expressing itself. People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been. Since memory is an important factor in struggle (indeed, it's within a kind of conscious dynamic of history that struggles develop), if you hold people's memory, you hold their dynamism. And you also hold their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. You make sure that they no longer know what the Resistance was actually about ... It's along some such lines, I think, that these films have to be understood. What they're saying, roughly, is that there has been no popular struggle in the twentieth century. This statement has been formulated twice, in two different ways. The first time immediately after the War , when the message was a simple one: 'The twentieth century, what a century of heroes! Churchill, de Gaulle, all those parachute landings, airborne missions, etc.' Which was a way of saying: 'There was no popular struggle, that was the true struggle: But no one, as yet, has said directly: 'There Was no popular struggle.' The other, more recent way - sceptical or cynical, as you wish - consists in opting for statement pure and simple: 'Well, just look at what happened. Did you see any struggles? Can you see anyone rebelling, taking up arms?' CAHIERS: There's a kind of rumour that's been going round since, perhaps, The Sarrow and the Pity. Namely: the people of France, in the main, didn't resist, they even accepted collaboration, they accepted the Germans, they swallowed the lot. The question is what that really means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is the popular struggle, or rather people's memory of it. FOUCAULT: Exactly. That memory has to be seized, governed, controlled, told what to remember. And when you see these films, you learn what to remember: 'Don't believe everything you were once told. There are no heroes. And if there are no heroes, that's because there's no Struggle.' Hence a kind of ambiguity: on the one hand, 'there are no heroes' positively debunks a whole mythology of the war hero in the Burt Lancaster mould. It's a way of saying: 'War isn't that at al1!' Hence an initial impression that historical untruths are being stripped away: finally we're going to be told why we don't all have to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen mission, etc. But hidden beneath the phrase 'There were no heroes' is another phrase which is the real message-'There was no struggle': That's how the process works. CAHIERS: There's something else that explains why these films are successful. They make use of the resentment felt by those who did indeed struggle against those who did not. For example, in The Sorrow and the Pity people active in the Resistance see the citizens of a town in central France doing nothing, and recognize this response for what it is. It's their resentment that comes across more than anything; they forget that they struggled. FOUCAULT: What's politically important, to my mind, more than this or that film, is the the fact that there's a series - the network that's made up of all these films and the place they 'occupy' (no pun intended). In other words, what is important is the question: 'Is it possible, at the present time, to make a film that's positive about the struggles of the Resistance?' And of course you realize that it isn't. The impression you have is that people would find it a bit of a joke, or else, quite simply, that no one would go and see it. I quite like The Sorrow and the Pity. I don't think it was a bad thing to have done. Perhaps I'm wrong, that's not what matters. What matters is that this series of films corresponds exactly to the fact that it is now impossible - as each of the films emphasizes - to make a film about the positive struggles that may have taken place in France around the time of the War and the Resistance. CAHIERS: Yes. It's the first thing they say if you criticize a film like Malle's. 'What would you have done instead?' is always the reply. And of course we don't have an answer. The left should be beginning to have a point of view on this, but in fact it has yet to be properly worked out. Then again, this raises the old problem of how to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero. FOUCAULT. The difficulties don't revolve around the hero so much as around the question of struggle. Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense? It's an old problem: how did history come to speak as it does and to recuperate the past, if not via a procedure which was that of the epic, that's to say, by telling its own story in the heroic mode? That's how the history of the French Revolution was written. The cinema proceeded in the same way. The strategy can always be ironically reversed: 'No, look, there are no heroes, we're all worthless, etc.' CAHIERS: Let's come back to the 'retro style'. The bourgeoisie has been relatively successful from its own point of view in focusing attention on a historical period (the 1940s) which highlights both its strong and its weak points. For on the one hand that's where the bourgeoisie is most easily unmasked (it laid the ground for Nazism and collaboration), and on the other hand that's where today it tries to justify, in the most cynical way possible, its historical attitude. The problem is: how can we produce a positive account of this same historical period? We - that is, the generation that took part in the struggles of 1968 or Lip. Is this the point on which we should go in and fight, with the idea of possibly, in some way or another, taking the ideological lead? For it's true that the bourgeoisie is on the offensive as well as on the defensive on this question of its recenc history. On the defensive strategically, on the offensive tactically since it has found its strong point, the thing that enables it best co manipulate the facts. But ought we simply - defensively - co be re-establishing the historical truth? Ought we not to be finding the point which, ideologically, would take us into the breach? Is this automatically the Resistance? Why not 1789 or 1968? FOUCAULT: As far as these films are concerned, I wonder whether something else couldn't be done on the same topic. And by 'topic' I don't mean showing struggles or showing that there were none. What I'm thinking is that its historically true that among ordinary French people there was, at the time of the War, a kind of refusal of war. Now where did that come from? From a whole series of episodes that no one talks about, neither the right because it wishes to hide them, nor the left because it does not want to compromise itself with anything that goes against 'national honour'. During the First World War, after all, some seven or eight million lads were conscripted. For four years they had a terrible life, they saw millions and millions of people dying around them. Back home in 1920, what did they have to look forward co? A right-wing government, total economic exploitation and finally, in 1932, an economic crisis and unemployment. How could these men, who had been packed into the trenches, still be in favour of war during the decades 1920-30 and 1930-40? In the case of the Germans, defeat rekindled their nationalist instincts, so that this distaste for war was overcome by the desire for revenge. But when all is said and done, people don't like fighting bourgeois wars, with the officers involved, for the gains involved. I believe that was an important phenom_ enon in the working class. And when, in 1940, you have men driving their bikes into a ditch and saying, 'I'm going home', you can't just say, 'What a bunch of cowards' and you can't hide it either. It has co be seen as part of the whole sequence. This disobeying of national orders has to be traced back to its roots. And what happened during the Resistance is the opposite of what we are shown: that's to say that the process of repoliticization, remobilization, the taste for struggle was gradually revived in the working class. It slowly began to revive after the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. What the films show is the reverse process: after the great dream of 1939, which was shattered in 1940, people just give up. This process did indeed take place, but within another much longer process which was moving in the opposite direction and which, beginning with the distaste for war, ended in the middle of the Occupation with the realization that there had to be a struggle. As for the theme 'There are no heroes, everyone's a coward', you have to ask yourself where it comes from and what it grows out of. After all, have there ever been any films about mutiny? CAHlERS: Yes. There was Kubrick's film (Paths of Glory), which was banned in France. FOUCAULT: I believe that this disobedience in the context of national armed struggles had a positive political meaning. The historical theme of Lacombe Lucien's family could be picked up again if taken back to Ypres and Douaumont ... CAHIERS: Which poses the problem of popular memory, of its own particular sense of time, which doesn't correspond at all to the timing of events like changes of government or declarations of war ... FOUCAULT: The aim of school history has always been to show how people got killed and how very heroic they were. Look what they did to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars ... CAHIERS: A certain number of films , Malle's and Cavani's included, tend to abandon any attempt to deal with Nazism and fascism historically or in terms of the struggle they provoked. Instead of this, or as well as this, they hold another discourse, usually a sexual one. What do you make of this other discourse? FOUCAULT: But isn't it quite different in Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter? Personally, I think that in Lacombe Lucien the erotic, passionate aspect has a function that's fairly easy to pinpoint. It's basically a way of reconciling the anti-hero, of saying that he's not as anti-heroic as all that. If all power relationships are indeed distorted by him, and if he renders them ineffective, by contrast, just when you think that for him all erotic relationships are similarly warped, a true relationship is discovered and he loves the girl. On the one hand there is the machinery of power which leads Lucien more and more, from the puncture onwards, towards a kind of madness. And on the other hand there is the machinery of love which seems to be following the same pattern, which seems to be distorted and which, on the contrary, works in the opposite direction and re-establishes Lucien at the end as the beautiful naked boy living in the fields with a girl. And so there's a kind of fairly facile antithesis between power and love. Whereas in The Night Porter the problem is - in general as in the present conjuncture - a very important one: it's that of the love of power. Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism. Which basically poses a serious problem: how can power be desirable? No one finds power desirable any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, the power of a ruler, no longer exists. The monarchy and its rituals were made to evoke this kind of erotic relation to power. The great apparatuses of Stalin, and even of Hider, were also created for that purpose. But this has all disintegrated and it's clear that one cannot love Brezhnev or Pompidou or Nixon. It was perhaps possible, at a pinch, to love de Gaulle or Kennedy or Churchill. But what's happening now? Are we not seeing the beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, developed at one derisory, pathetic extreme by the sex shops with Nazi emblems that you find in the United States, and (in a much more tolerable but equally derisory version) in Giscard d'Estaing's attitude when he says, 'We'll march along the streets in suits shaking people's hands, and the kids will have a half-day holiday.' There's no doubt that Giscard fought part of his electoral campaign not just on his physical presence but also on a certain eroticization of his personal self, his elegance. CAHIERS: That's how he projected himself in an election poster, the one where his daughter is facing him. FOUCAUlT: That's right. He is looking at France but she is looking at him. Power becomes seductive once again. CAHIERS: That's something that struck us during the election campaign, especially in the big television debate between Mitterrand and Giscard; they were on quite different territory. Mitterrand seemed like a politician of the old school, belonging to an old-fashioned left. He was trying to sell ideas, themselves dated and slightly quaint, and he did so with great dignity. Giscard on the other hand was selling the idea of power as if he were marketing a cheese. FOUCAULT: Even quite recently, you had to apologize for being in power. Power had to be erased and not show itself as such. That was, up to a point, how democratic republics functioned: the problem was to render power sufficiently insidious and invisible so that it became impossible to get a hold on what it did or where it was. Nowadays (and in this de Gaulle played a very important role), power is no longer hidden, it is proud to be there and actually says: 'Love me , because I am power.' CAHIERS: Perhaps we should speak about the fact that Marxist discourse, as it has been functioning for some time, is somehow unable satisfactorily to account for fascism. Historically speaking, Marxism has accounted for the Nazi phenomenon in an economistic, determinist way, completely ignor_ ing what was specific to the ideology of Nazism. You can't help wondering how someone like Malle, well enough in touch with developments on the left, can play on this weakness, fall into this gap. FOUCAULT: Marxism defined nazism and fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie'. This is a definition completely lacking in content, and one which lacks a whole series of articulations. What is missing in particular is the fact that Nazism and fascism were made possible only by the existence within the general population of a relatively large fraction willing to take on and be responsible for a certain number of state functions: repression, control, law and order. That, I think, is an important aspect of Nazism. The fact that it penetrated the general population so deeply and that some power was effectively delegated to certain people on the margins. That's where the word 'dictatorship' is both generally true and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime from the moment he joined the SS or became a Party member! He could actually kill his neighbour, appropriate his wife and his house! That's where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, because it shows that side well. The fact is that, contrary to what one usually understands by dictatorship, that's to say the power of one individual, in a regime like that the most detestable, but in a sense the most intoxicating, part of power was given to a large number of people. It was the SS man who had the power to kill and to rape ... CAHIERS: That's where orthodox Marxism breaks down. Because this implies that there has to be a discourse on desire. FOUCAULT: On desire and on power ... CAHIERS: That's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter are relatively 'strong'. They can handle a discourse on desire and power in a way that seems coherent. FOUCAULT: In The Night Porter it's interesting to see how, in Nazism, the power of one man was taken up by many people and put to work. That sort of mock tribunal they set up is fascinating. Because from one angle it begins to look like a psychotherapy group, but in fact its power structure is that of a secret society. It's basically an SS cell that has re-formed, that gives itself legal powers different from and in opposition to the power at the centre. We have to remember how power was dispersed, how it was invested within the population itself, we have to remember this impressive displacement of power that Nazism brought about in a society like German society. It is untrue to say that Nazism was the power of the big industrialists continued in another form. It wasn't the power of the top brass reinforced. It was that too, but only on a certain level. CAHIERS: Indeed, that's an interesting aspect of the film. But what seemed very questionable to us was that it seemed to be saying: 'If you're a typical SS man, that's how you behave. But if on top of that you have a certain "notion of expenditure", that's the formula for a great erotic adventure.' So the film never abandons the idea of seduction. FOUCAULT: Yes, it's like Lacombe Lucien in that respect. For Nazism never gave anyone a pound of butter, it never gave anything but power. You have to ask yourself, if this regime was nothing other than a bloody dictatorship, how on 3 May 1945 there were still Germans fighting on to the last drop of blood, if these people were not attached to power in some way. Of course, you have to take into account all the pressures, denunciations ... CAHIERS: But if there were denunciations and pressures, there must have been people to do the denouncing. How did people get caught up in it all? How were they ever conned by this redistribution of power in their favour? FOUCAULT: In Lacomhe Lucien, as in The Night Porter, this excessive power that is given to them is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of The Night Porter, with the recreation around Max, in his room, of a kind of concentration camp in miniature, where he is dying of hunger. There love has converted power, super-power, into total powerlessness. Roughly the same reconciliation occurs, in a sense, in Lacomhe Lucien, where love takes the excess of power by which it has been trapped and converts it inca a rural nakedness miles away from the Gestapo's shady hotel, miles away also from the farm where the pigs are being killed. CAHIERS: Are we then perhaps beginning to explain the problem you were posing earlier: how is it that Nazism, which was a puritanical, repressive system, is now universally eroticized? Some kind of displacement takes place: a problem which is central and which people don't wish to confront, the problem of power, is bypassed or rather completely displaced towards the sexual. So that this eroticization is really a displacement, a form of repression ... FOUCAULT: The problem is indeed a very difficult one and it has not perhaps been sufficiently studied, even by Reich. How is it that power is desirable and is actually desired? The procedures through which this eroticization is transmitted, reinforced, and so on, are clear enough. But for it to happen in the first place, the attachment co power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exercised, must already be erotic. CAHIERS: What makes it all the more difficult is that the representation of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle and Hitler weren't exactly attractive. FOUCAULT: That's right, and I wonder whether in Marxist analyses one doesn't sacrifice a little too much to the abstract character of the idea of freedom. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's quite clear that there's no freedom. But not having freedom doesn't mean that you don't have power. CAHIERS: It's on the level of the cinema and television, television being entirely controlled by power, that historical discourse has the greatest impact. Which implies a political responsibility. It seems to us that people are increasingly aware of it. For some years now, in the cinema, there has been more and more talk of history, politics, struggle ... FOUCAULT: There's a battle going on for history, around the history that's now in the making, and it is very interesting. People want to codify, to stifle What I have called 'popular memory', and also to propose, to impose a grid for interpreting the present. Until 1968 popular struggles had to do with folk tradition. For some they had no connection at all with anything going on in the present. After 1968 all popular struggles, whether in South America or in Africa, find an echo, a resonance. No longer can this separation, this sore of geographical cordon sanitaire, be established. Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set at a distance once again. How? Not by interpreting them directly - you would only lay yourself open to all the contradictions - but by proposing a historical interpretation of popular struggles from our own past, to show that in fact they never took place! Before 1968, it was: 'It won't happen, because it only happens elsewhere'; now it's: 'It won't happen, because it has never happened! Even something like the Resistance, the stuff of so many dreams, just look at it ... Nothing there. An empty shell, completely hollow!' Which is another way of saying: 'In Chile, don't worry, the peasants don't give a damn. In France too: a few troublemakers and their antics won't affect anything fundamental.' CAHIERS: For us, the important thing when one reacts to that, against that, is to realize that it's not enough to re-establish the truth, to say, about the Maquis for example, 'No, I was there, it didn't happen like that at all!' We believe that to conduct the ideological struggle effectively on the kind of terrain that these films lead into you have to have a wider, more comprehensive system of references - of positive references. For many people, for example, that consists in reappropriating the 'history of France'. It was against this background that we spent some time on Moi, Pierre Riviere . .. because we realized that in the end, and paradoxically, it helped us to explain Lacombe Lucien, that the comparison brought out a number of things. For example, one significant difference is that Pierre Riviere is a man who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. Malle's hero, on the other hand, is presented as a halfwit, as someone who goes through everything, history, the War, collaboration, without building on his experiences. And it's there that the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help us to make the distinction between someone, Pierre Riviere, who uses a language that is not his and is forced to kill to obtain the right to do so, and the character created by Malle and Modiano 8 who proves, precisely by not building on anything that happens to him, that there is nothing worth remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a Bolivian film, which was made for the speClfic purpose of providing an exhibit for a dossier. This film, which can be seen everywhere except in Bolivia, because of the regime, is played by those who actually took part in the real-life drama it recreates (a miners' strike and its bloody repression) - they undertake to represent themselves so that no one will forget. It's interesting to see that, on a minimum level, every film is a potential archive and that, in the context of a struggle, one can take this idea one step further: people put together a film intending it to be an exhibit. And you can analyse that in two radically different ways: either the film is about power or it represents the victims of that power, the exploited classes who, without the help of the cinematographic apparatus, with very little knowledge of how films are made and distributed, take on their own representation, give evidence for history. Rather as Pierre Riviere gave evidence, that's to say, began to write, knowing that sooner or later he would appear before a court and that everyone had to understand what he had to say. What's important in The Courage of the People is that the demand actually came from the people. It was through a survey that the director first learned of the demand, and it was those who had lived through the event who asked for it to be memorized. FOUCAULT: The people create their own archives. CAHIERS: The difference between Pierre Riviere and Lacombe Lucien is that Pierre Riviere does everything to enable us to discuss his history after his death. Whereas, even if Lacombe is a real character or one who might have existed, he is only ever the object of another's discourse. for purposes that are not his own. There are two things that are successful in the cinema now. On the one hand, historical documents, which have an important role to play. In Toute une vie, for example, they are very important. Or in films by Marcel Ophuls or Harris and Sedouy, when you see Duclos waving his arms about in 1936 and in 1939, these scenes from real life are moving. And on the other hand, fictional characters who, at a given moment in history, compress social relations, historical relations, into the smallest possible space. That's why Lacombe Lucien works so well. Lacombe is a Frenchman under the Occupation, someone very ordinary who stands in a concrete relationship to Nazism, to the countryside, to local government, etc. We have to be aware of this way of personifying history, of bringing it to life in a character, or a group of characters who, at a given moment, stand in a privileged relationship to power. There are lots of characters in the history of the workers' movement whom we don't know about: lots of heroes in the history of the working class who have been totally repressed. And I believe that something important is at stake here. Marxism doesn't need to make any more films about Lenin, there are more than enough already. FOUCAULT: What you are saying is important. It's a characteristic of many Marxists today. They don't know very much about history. They spend their time saying that history is being overlooked, but are only capable themselves of commenting on texts: 'What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?' But that is Marxism if not another way of analysing history itself? In my opinion, the left, France, is not very interested in history. It used to be. In the nineteenth century you could say that Michelet represented the left at a given moment. There was also Jaures, and then a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez etc.). Today that has virtually dried up. Whereas it could be an impressi"e movement of writers and film-makers. There was of course Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale, which is a very great historical novel. But it doesn't amount to much, if you think of what that could represent in a society whose intellectuals are, after all, more or less steeped in Marxism. CAHIERS: Film-making brings in something new again in this respect: 'live' history ... What relation do American people have to history, now that they see the Vietnam War every evening on television as they eat their supper? FOUCAULT: As soon as you begin to see images of war every evening, war becomes utterly accepted. In other words, extremely boring - you would certainly prefer to watch something else. But once it becomes boring, it's accepted. You don't even watch it. So what do you have to do for this news, as it appears on film, to be reactivated as news that is historically important? CAHIERS: Have you seen Les Camisards? FOUCAULT: Yes, I liked it a lot. Historically it's beyond reproach. It's a beautiful film, it's intelligent, it explains so much. CAHIERS: I think that's the direction film-makers should be taking. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning, another problem that must be mentioned is the confused response of the far left to certain aspects of Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter, the sexual aspect especially. How might the right take advantage of this confusion? FOUCAULT: On this subject of what you call the far left, I don't really know what to think. I'm not even sure whether it still exists. All the same, a huge balance sheet has to be drawn up for the activities of the far left since 1968: the conclusions are negative on the one side and positive on the other. It's true that the far left has been responsible for a whole lot of important ideas in a number of areas: sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, housing, medicine. It has also been responsible for the diffusion of modes of action-which continues to be important. The far left has been important in the kinds of action it has taken as well as in the themes it has pursued. But there is also a negative balance in terms of certain Stalinist, terrorist, organizational practices. And there is equally a misapprehension of certain currents running wide and deep which have just resulted in thirteen million votes for Mitterrand, and which have always been neglected on the pretext that that was just politicking, party politics. Any number of aspects have been neglected, notably the fact that the desire to defeat the right has for some years, some months, been a very important political factor among the masses. The far left didn't have this desire because its definition of the masses was wrong and because it didn't really understand what it means to want to win. To avoid the risk of having vicrory snatched away it prefers not to run the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be recuperated. Personally, I'm not so sure. Translated by Annwyl Williams Cahiers du Cinema /Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle/Anti-retro/Edited by David Wilson
by Serge Daney
Learning, retaining
May '68, as we know, confirmed Godard's suspicion that the cinema was, in every sense, a 'bad place', at once immoral and inadequate. A place for facile hysteria, for the eye's filthy roving, for voyeurism and magic. A place where, to use a metaphor that was once all the rage, one came to 'sleep in the picture bed' (dormir dans Ie plan lit), to get an eyeful and in fact to see nothing at all to see too much and to see it badly.
The doubts cast by May '68 on the 'viewing community' - a community that secretes more images and sounds that it can see and digest (the image flashes by and disappears) - reached the generation that had invested most in it, that of the self-taught cinephiles for whom the cinema had taken the place of school and family, the generation of the New Wave, brought up in the cinematheques. From 1968 Godard was to react by pulling out and retracing his steps: from the cinema to school, and then from school to the family. Regression? Why couldn't one say 'regressionism'?
In 1968, for the most radical - the most left-wing - element among film_ makers, one thing is certain: you have to learn to get away from the cinema (from cinephilia and obscurantism) or at least forge a link between the cinema and something else. And to learn you have to go to school. Not so much the 'school of life' as the school of film. That was how Godard and Gorin came to transform the scenographic cube into a classroom, the film dialogue into a recitation, the voice-off into a lecture, the shooting into a practical, the film topic into course headings ('revisionism', 'ideology') and the film-maker into a schoolmaster, tutor or supervisor. School thus becomes the 'good place', the place that gets you away from the cinema and closer to the 'real' (a real awaiting transformation, of course). It's the place which has brought us the films of the Dziga-Vertov group (and already, La Chinoise). In Tout va bien, Numiro deux and lci et ailleurs the family apartment has replaced the classroom (and television had taken the place of the cinema), but the essential remains. The essential: people giving each other lessons.
loading...
We need look no further to explain the extraordinary mixture of love and hatred, of rage and irritation, the moans and the groans that Godard's 'cinema' - pursuing a fairly tough Maoist line, initially - proceeded to unleash. Had Godard been 'recuperated by the system', people would have forgiven him a lot (even today, how many people are still indignant at the idea that he won't give them another Pierrot Ie fou?). Had he become totally marginalized, an underground figure happy with his underground status, they would have rendered him discreet homage. But what can they do with a Godard who continues to work, to teach and be taught, whether people come to see his films or not? There's something in Godard's pedagogy that the film world - the film world especially - won't tolerate: the fact that it is addressed to no one in particular.
Godard's pedagogy. School, as we were saying, is the 'good place' (the place where you make progress, the place you're bound to get out of) in contrast to the cinema (the 'bad place' where you regress and where your chances of getting out are nil). Let's take a closer look and pursue the analogy.
First, school is more than anywhere else the place where you are allowed, indeed encouraged, to confuse words and things/ to remain in ignorance about what links them, to postpone having to think about it until later (is there anything to vouch for the truth of what we are taught?). School means nominalism and dogmatism.
Now the sine qua non of Godard's pedagogy is this: you must never question the other's discourse, whatever it is. You must take it literally, unthinkingly. You must also take it word for word. Godard concerns himself only with things-already-said-by-others or things-already-said in the form of established statements (quotations, slogans and posters, jokes and stories, words on a blackboard, newspaper headlines, anything at all). Statement-objects, little monuments, words taken as things: learn them or not as you prefer, take it or leave it.
Things-said-by-others have the status of a fait accompli: whatever else, they exist, they consist of something. Their very existence rules out any attempt to reconstruct behind, before or around them the domain of their enunciation. Godard never asks any questions of the statements he receives - where they come from or what makes them possible, or what guarantees they offer. He never queries the desire they betray and at the same time conceal. His approach is anti-archaeological in the extreme. It consists in noting what is said (about which nothing can be done) and immediately looking for the other statement, the other sound, the other image which might counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image. 'Godard' would simply be the empty space, the black screen where images and sounds would co-exist, cancel each other out, recognize and point to each other - in short, struggle. More than 'who is right?' and 'who is wrong?', the real question is 'what could we oppose to that?' The devil's advocate.
Hence the malaise and 'confusion' with which Godard is often reproached. He always replies to what the other says (asserts, proclaims or recommends) by what another other says (asserts, proclaims or recommends). There is always a big unknown quantity in his pedagogy, and this is because the nature of the relation he entertains with his 'good' discourses (those he defends) is ultimately uncertain.
In Ici et ailleurs, for example, a 'film' based on images brought back from Jordan (1970-5), it's clear that the film's self-interrogation (the way in which it dissociates 'here' and 'elsewhere', images and sounds, 1970 and 1975) is possible and intelligible only because, early on, the syntagm 'Palestinian revolution' already functions as an axiom, as something that can be taken for granted (something already-said-by-orhers, in this case by Al Fatah), something in relation to which Godard doesn't have to define himself personally (and say not just 'I' but 'I'm on their side') or mark his position in the film. He doesn't have to make his position, his initial choice - for the Palestinians, against Israel acceptable, convincing or desirable. The logic of school, again.
Second, school is more than anywhere else the place where the master doesn't have to say where his knowledge and his certainties come from. And on the other hand it's the place where the pupil cannot reinscribe, use or Put to the test the knowledge imparted to him. Before the master's knowledge, and after the pupil's knowledge, is a blank, a no man's land, a question that Godard will have nothing to do with. the question of how knowledge is appropriated. He's only interested in (re)transmission.
And yet in every pedagogy there are values. positive contents, to be communicated. Godard's pedagogy is no exception. Every single one of the films made after 1968 latches on to (and distances itself from) what one might call with out any pejorative nuance - 'a correct discourse' [discours du manche]. Let's recapitulate: Marxist-Leninist politics (the Chinese positions) in Pravda and Vent d'est' Althusser's lesson on wrong notions of ideology in Lotte in Italia; Brecht's lesson on 'the role of intellectuals in the revolution' in Tout va bien and, more recently, snatches of feminist discourse (Germaine Greer) in Numero deux. Correct discourse is not a discourse in power, but it's a discourse that has power it is violent, assertive, provocative and fully constituted. Correct discours changes hands, so to speak, but it always comes from above and is quick to lay blame (things to be ashamed of, in turn: being a cinephile, being a revisionist being cut off from the masses, being a male chauvinist).
But Godard is not the conveyer - still less the originator - of these discourse which he asks us to believe in (and submit ourselves to). His role is more lik: that of a tutor [repetiteur]. A three-term structure is then established, a littl theatre a trois, where the master (who is after all only a tutor) and the pupil (who only repeats) meet up with what has to be repeated, the correct discourse to which master and pupils are subjected, if unequally, and which bullies them.
The screen, then, becomes the place where this bullying is experienced and the film its staging. But in this arrangement two questions are completely ignored: how the correct discourse is produced (in Maoist terms: where do correct ideas come from?) and how it is appropriated (in Maoist terms: what is the difference between true ideas and correct ideas?). School is not of course the place for these questions. The tutor appears as a modest and at the same time tyrannical figure: he makes the pupil learn a lesson which doesn't arouse his own curiosity, and to which he is himself subjected.
After 1968 this master-discourse is conveyed more or less systematically by a female voice. For Godard's pedagogy implies a division of roles and discourses according to sex. Man speaks but woman makes the speeches. The voice that reprimands, corrects, advises, teaches, explains, theorizes and even theorizes/terrorizes is always a woman's voice. And if this voice begins to speak about women's issues, precisely, it adopts the same assertive, faintly declamatory tone: the opposite of the naturalistic experience and concern. Godard doesn't film a revolt that can't speak for itself, that hasn't found its language, its style, its theory. In Tout va bien we see the character played by Jane Fonda move very quickly from dissatisfaction to a kind of theoretical explanation of her dissatisfaction (one that Montand doesn't understand). There is nothing at all before discourse, before things-said-by-others.
Third, for the master and for the pupils, each year brings with it ('back to school') a re-enactment, a repetition of the first time, a going back to the beginning. To the time when nothing was known, when the blackboard was empty. So that school - the place of the tabula rasa and the blackboard on which nothing remains for long, the gloomy place of permanent transition and waiting for things to happen - is an obsessional, non-linear place, closed in on itself.
From his very first films Godard has shown an extreme reluctance to 'tell a story', to say 'at the beginning, this happened' and 'at the end, that'. Getting away from the cinema was also getting away from this obligation, well formulated by old Fritz Lang in Le Mepris: 'You always have to finish what you begin: A basic difference between school and the cinema is that there's no need to please or to flatter schoolchildren because school is compulsory. The state insists on schooling for every child. Whereas in the cinema, to hold on to your public, you have to give them things to see and enjoy, tell a story (spin a yarn): hence the accumulation of images, the hysteria, the calculated effects, the retention and the discharge, the happy ending - the catharsis. The privilege of school is that it retains its pupils so that they retain what they are told; the master retains his knowledge (he doesn't say everything) and punishes the bad pupils with detention.
Keeping and giving back
School was therefore the 'good place' only because, as the place of endless deferral, it allowed you to retain the maximum number of things and people for the longest possible time. For 'to retain' means two things: 'to keep back' but also 'to delay', 'to defer'. You keep an audience of pupils to delay the moment when they might move too quickly from one image to another, from one sound to another, see too quickly, come to premature conclusions, think they're done with images and sounds when they have no idea of the complexity, the seriousness of what is involved in the ordering of these images and these sounds.
School allows you to turn cinephilia back against itself, to reverse it like a glove, taking all the time you need. This is why Godard's pedagogy consists in for ever coming back to images and sounds, pointing to them, matching them. commenting on them, putting images within images and sounds within sounds, criticizing them like so many insoluble enigmas: not losing them, keeping them in sight, keeping them.
A masturbatory pedagogy? No doubt. It has as its horizon, as its limit, the enigma of enigmas, the sphinx of the still photograph: it is what defies the intelligence that can never exhaust it, what holds the look and the meaning, what fixes the scopic desire: actively retains it.
For the place from which Godard speaks co us, from which he addresses us , is certainly not the secure place of a profession or even a personal project. It's somewhere in between, even a between-three, an impossible place that embraces the photograph (nineteenth century) and the cinema (twentieth century) and television (twenty-first century). The photo is what retains once and for all (the corpse to work on). The cinema is what retains for a moment only (death at work). Television is what retains nothing at all (a fatal spilling out:. a haemorrhaging of images).
Thus Godard's advance on other manipulators of images and sounds has to do with his complete disregard for any discourse on the 'specificity' of the cinema. You have to see how he finds a place on the cinema screen for both the still photo and the television image, how he quietly fits them in (the cinema's only specificity now consisting in - provisionally? - receiving images that Wet'e not made for it, in allowing itself to be taken over by them: Numero deux), to understand that Godard goes beyond any discourse on the specificity of the cinema, whether the spontaneous discourse of the spectator (that's what the cinema means to me), or that of those professionally involved (that's how you make films) or that of enlightened academics (that's how the cinema works).
The cinema, as we were saying at the outset, is a bad place, a place of crime and of magic. The crime: that images and sounds should be taken (torn removed, stolen, extorted) from living beings. The magic: that they should h; exhibited in another place (the film theatre) for the pleasure of those Who See them. The one who benefits from the transfer is the film-maker. That's Where the real pornography lies, in this change of scene: it's literally the ob-scene.
People will say: these are moral questions, of the sort addressed by Bazin and what's more, this type of symbolic debt can't be repaid. Indeed. But Godard's itinerary happens to poine to a very concrete, very historical question a question in crisis: that of the nature of what might be called the 'filmic contract' (filming/filmed). This question seemed to arise only for the militant or ethnographic cinema ('Ourselves and others'), but Godard tells us that it concerns the very act of filming. Is he exaggerating? One can't seriously think that this is one of those questions that can be resolved with good will and pious hopes (for the good cause - the artistic masterpiece or the correct militant action). It is going to arise and is bound to become more pressing as the traditional contract between the film-maker, the filmed and the film viewer, the contract established by the film industry (Hollywood), becomes ever more threadbare and the cinema, as 'a mass, family, popular and homogenizing art', reaches crisis point. Godard speaks to us already about this crisis; because it was this crisis that made him into a film-maker. But it's already a question of pornographic films (Exhibition) or militant films (Un simple exemple). A question of the future.
For Godard, retaining images and his audience, pinning them down in a sense (as butterflies are cruelly pinned down), is a despairing activity, and a hopeless one. All his pedagogy wins for him is a little more time. To the obscenity of appearing as the auteur (and the beneficiary of filmic surplus value) he has preferred that of displaying himself in the very act of retention.
The impossibility of moving on to a filmic contract of a new sort has therefore led him to keep (retain) images and sounds, not knowing who to give them back to. Godard's cinema is a painful meditation on the theme of restitution, or better of restoration. To restore is to give back the images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. It is also to commit them (a truly political commitment) to producing their own images and sounds. And so much the better if this forces the film-maker to change his way of working!
loading...
A film in which this restitution-restoration takes place, at least ideally, is lei et ailleurs. Who can these images of Palestinian men and women that Godard and Gorin (invited by the PLO) bring back from the Middle East, these images that Godard keeps to himself for five years, be given back to?
To the general public eager for sensation (Godard + Palestine = scoop)? To the politically aware anxious to be confirmed in its orthodoxy (Godard + Palestine = good cause + art)? To the PLO who invited him, allowed him to film and trusted him (Godard + Palestine:: weapon of propaganda)? No, not even the PLO. So what does that leave?
One day between 1970 and 1975 Godard realizes that the soundtrack has not been translated in its entirety - what the fedayeen say in the shots where they appear has not been translated from the Arabic. And he realizes that basically there would have been few complaints (everyone would have accepted the superimposition of a voice-over). Now, Godard tells us, these fedayeen whose speech has remained a dead letter are themselves awaiting death, as good as dead. They - or ocher fedayeen like them - died in 1970, assassinated by Hussein's troops.
Making the film ('You always have to finish what you begin') then amounts, quite simply, to translating the soundtrack, making sure that people can hear what is said; or better, that they listen to it. What is retained is then released, what is kept is given back, but it is too late. The images and the sounds are given back, just as tributes are paid, to those to whom they belong: to the dead.
Translated by Annwyl Williams
Cahiers du Cinema /Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle/Edited by David Wilson
loading...
by Timothy S. Murphy What you want is always something within a complex situation in (of) present time. We will provide the situation without which what you desire will remain a phantom… the situation the complex of contents or conditions —Alexander Trocchi, ‘Advt.’ (1972:81) The opening thesis of Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, the most sophisticated and influential document produced by the Situationist International (SI) in the course of its stormy 15-year existence, proposes that ‘[t]he whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (1967:12). Three years earlier, in his cutup novel Nova Express, William S. Burroughs wrote that ‘“Reality” is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as “reality” has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented toward total control’ (NE 53). The following year, in conversation with Conrad Knickerbocker of The Paris Review, Burroughs clarified that ‘[i]mplicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film’ (Knickerbocker 1965:70). What is the relationship between these two surprisingly similar claims, made by two of the most enigmatic figures to emerge from the global cultural ferment of the 1950s and 1960s? They never met or corresponded, as far as I have been able to determine, and they hardly make any direct reference to each other, yet they arrived at critical models of contemporary society that are remarkably congruent not only at the highest level of theoretical generality, but also at the more focused level of practical tactics for resistance. The key to this convergence, I would claim, lies not only in Burroughs’s and Debord’s parallel sensitivities to the postwar economy of the image, but also in the heretofore under-appreciated and unexamined role played by their common friend and ally Alexander Trocchi in translating between Debord’s primarily political analysis and Burroughs’s primarily aesthetic one and (perhaps) vice versa. Today, more than 30 years later, these critical models are still relevant to the extent that they retain their ability to dissect and displace the increasingly integrated economy of the image, whose global reach has only widened in the intervening decades. Despite the setbacks and even defeats they experienced, Burroughs and the Situationists continue to provide us with suggestive means to comprehend, and in so doing to resist, the spectacle of the present. I: A LOOSE CULTURAL VENTURELet us begin by examining Trocchi’s unacknowledged role as a conduit and translator between Burroughs and Debord. Glasgow-born Trocchi met Debord in Paris in 1955, while dividing his time between editing the avant-garde literary review Merlin and writing pseudonymous pornographic fiction for the Olympia Press (which would later publish Burroughs’s Naked Lunch). For the next eight years, even after his relocation to the US in 1956, Trocchi would move relatively freely between the discrete bohemian worlds of the Lettrist International (and after 1957 its successor, the Situationist International) on the one hand and the expatriate Anglophone literary community on the other (Marcus 1989:385–7). In his 1960 novel, Cain’s Book, which would soon bring him into contact and later friendship with Burroughs, Trocchi obliquely acknowledged his continuing involvement with Debord and company: late in the book, his junkie narrator writes: ‘Il vous faut construire les situations’ (Trocchi 1960:236). When Trocchi was arrested in the US that year on drug charges, his fellow Situationists published a resolution appointing Debord and others to ‘take immediate action on behalf of Alexander Trocchi’ and to ‘demand [his] setting free’ (IS 1997:160). Unsurprisingly, the years immediately following the publication of Cain’s Book would see Trocchi’s most ambitious attempt to participate in the articulation of the Situationist project—that is, to ‘construct situations’—an attempt that also involved Burroughs, whom he had gotten to know well during their scandalous joint attendance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival (Morgan 1988:332–41). This would be, in essence, an attempt to construct a practical conduit between his two bohemian worlds, to establish an alliance between two distinct but overlapping modes of cultural resistance. The opening move of Trocchi’s effort was the composition of ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, a manifesto for what can only be called a revolution in consciousness and at the same time a proposal for the foundation of a ‘limited liability company’, initially called ‘International Cultural Enterprises Ltd’, which would manage the economic exploitation of the work of countercultural artists working toward such a revolution (1963a:190). This company would be a first step toward the establishment of a ‘spontaneous university’ similar to Black Mountain College that would in turn act as the ‘detonator of the invisible insurrection’ of the title (Trocchi 1963a:186–8, 191). I will examine these linked notions further in Section III, below. ‘Invisible Insurrection’ was first published in French in Internationale Situationniste 8 (January 1963) under the title ‘Technique du coup du monde’, which may be translated as ‘Technique for World Takeover’—‘coup du monde’ in contrast to the ‘coup d’état of Trotsky and Lenin’ (IS 1997:346; see also Trocchi 1963a:177). Trocchi was also listed as a member of the journal’s editorial committee for that issue. Later that year, the essay appeared in English under its original title, and in the following year it was incorporated into Trocchi’s open-ended Sigma Portfolio, along with a further elaboration of the notion of a countercultural company and university entitled ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ (1964a; see also Trocchi 1964b, #2 and 3). A few months before the initial distribution of the Portfolio, Trocchi wrote Burroughs to invite him to join the board of directors of Sigma (as the countercultural company had been re-christened), which was apparently incorporated in London in the summer of 1963. ‘The bricks and mortar of our enormous factory’, he wrote, ‘are contingent upon the eventual assent of our nuclear cosmonauts to operate it’ (Trocchi 1963b:208). Trocchi hoped to raise capital for the Sigma ‘factory’ by signing up high-profile writers and artists, the ‘nuclear cosmonauts’ he mentions, as directors and clients of Sigma’s artist management service; in addition to Burroughs, Robert Creeley was invited to become a director, and Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, R. D. Laing, Timothy Leary and Michael McClure were named as ‘people interested’ in Sigma (Trocchi 1964b, #17). Along with the letter, Trocchi ‘enclose[d] a copy of the [“Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint”] essay to acquaint [Burroughs] with the methods we have already evolved’ (Trocchi 1963b:207); thus it seems fair to assume that Burroughs was at least superficially acquainted with Trocchi’s revolutionary ambitions and his Situationist perspectives by this time. There is no evidence that Burroughs was ever formally ‘registered as a director in the company’ as Trocchi wanted (Trocchi 1963b:208), but he did contribute a piece entitled ‘Martin’s Folly’ to the project, which was incorporated into a poster that became the first item in the Portfolio as it was originally distributed (Trocchi 1964b, #1). If we assume further that Burroughs later received a copy of the entire Portfolio, he would also have been able to read Trocchi’s translation/adaptation of the 1960 ‘Manifesto Situationniste’ that was included as well (for the original, see IS 1997:144–6; for Trocchi’s translation, see Trocchi 1964b, #18). Thus the conduit that Trocchi was trying to build between the Anglophone counterculture and the Situationist International began to take shape, although it would have little opportunity to function. All this work of independent but parallel practical organization did not go unnoticed by the leading members of the SI, who no doubt received copies of the Portfolio. In Internationale Situationniste 10 (March 1966), the editorial committee (headed by Debord and including the influential Situationists Michèle Bernstein, Mustapha Khayati and Raoul Vaneigem) published the following note of clarification regarding the group’s relationship with Trocchi: Upon the appearance in London in autumn 1964 of the first publications of the ‘Project Sigma’ initiated by Alexander Trocchi, it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in spite of the interest we have in dialogue with the most exigent individuals who may be contacted through it, notably in the United States and England. It is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander Trocchi has since developed an activity of which we fully approve of several aspects. (IS 1997:495; trans. Knabb 1989:373) Thus, despite the SI’s ‘interest in dialogue’ with his ‘exigent’ friends like Burroughs (whose Naked Lunch had appeared in French translation in the spring of 1964), Trocchi was effectively expelled from the group just as he was beginning to contribute to it, though in a kinder and gentler fashion than most of the others who were excluded earlier and later. Indeed, in Christopher Gray’s tabular summary of the SI’s membership, Trocchi is listed as one of 19 ‘mutually agreed’ ‘resignations’ (démissions) from the SI, rather than one of the 45 involuntary and rhetorically harsh ‘exclusions’ (Gray 1974:132–3). Debord’s recently published letters to Trocchi confirm this (Debord 2001:299–300, 309–10). In any case, cut off from one of his bohemian worlds, Trocchi was left without a strong political basis for his fundamentally artistic Project Sigma, which seems to have dissolved thereafter, along with his plans for another novel, into junkie recidivism. He spent the bulk of his remaining years dealing in used books, and died of pneumonia in 1984. II: RETAKE THE UNIVERSE If we accept the thesis that Trocchi did act as a conduit and translator between the SI’s milieu and Burroughs’s, then the first questions that follow from this are, what exactly did he translate or conduct, and in which direction? Pending a comprehensive investigation of still-unpublished archives (including Trocchi’s and Burroughs’s personal correspondence of the period, much of which is still in private hands), the evidence suggests that the direction of influence, if it indeed took place, was most often from the Situationists to Burroughs rather than the reverse. Most of the key statements of Situationist theory and method to which I will refer hereafter predate, sometimes by many years, the parallel texts by Burroughs that bear the closest similarities to those statements. However, the claim of direct or indirect influence must remain speculative until all the evidence becomes available, no matter how suggestive the similarities may be between Burroughs’s ideas and Debord’s. Nevertheless, a passage in one unpublished letter from Burroughs to his French translator Mary Beach does confirm some degree of recognition of their shared interests, strategies and tactics: Do you know of a French group called Situationist International— correspondence: B.P. 307-03 Paris? Seemingly a sophisticated anarchist group. I think they would be an excellent outlet for the short pieces I am writing now. Just read a very intelligent analysis of the Watt [sic] race riots by this group. (Burroughs 1967) This letter was written long after Burroughs’s brief involvement with Trocchi’s Project Sigma, during which time he presumably first learned about the SI, so his description of it as ‘a sophisticated anarchist group’ may be forgetful or ironic. His interest in the SI’s analysis of the Watts riots, however, is quite direct, and it will serve as our password into the extended comparison that follows. The convergence between Burroughs’s notion of the reality film and the Situationist theory of the spectacle manifests itself in a number of ways, some of which only become apparent when viewed through the lens of Trocchi’s Project Sigma. First of all, despite their common language of visuality, neither model is simply a critique of some perceived misuse of film, television or the mass media generally. As I noted above, for Burroughs, the very reality that the media claim to depict is ‘a more or less constant scanning pattern’ that ‘has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented toward total control’ (NE 53). Similarly, for Debord, ‘[t]he spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ (1967:12). It is a control system of which the media are only a subordinate part, for it is ‘the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence’ (Debord 1967:19). As Burroughs argues, to understand the present it is necessary to ‘[p]ostulate a biologic film running from the beginning to the end, from zero to zero as all biologic film run in any time universe—Call this film X1 and postulate further that there can be only one film with the quality X1 in any given time universe’ (NE 8 [note]). The issue of the film’s singularity connects it to Burroughs’s earlier and better-known theory of language as a totalitarian virus that people unwittingly internalize, expressed in Naked Lunch as follows: ‘The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement’ (NL 207). Although ‘[t]he word cannot be expressed direct’ (NL 105) in its totality, it is nevertheless the immediate condition of human reality. The reality film, like the Word or the spectacle, is a totality that is not so much a set of words that we speak or images that we watch as it is a general condition in which we are immersed, even and especially when we are apparently not focused on words or images. It is the material horizon of our existence in that ‘[t]he spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (Debord 1967:24). Despite the fact that we are allowed to make certain limited choices that are provided by that segment of the spectacle or film known as the market, we are not free because we are deprived of genuine activity. The spectacle imposes isolation and passivity as conditions of its control. This material reality of the spectacle thus constitutes a form of economic domination, but unlike earlier forms of domination, it is not organized so as to combat a fundamental scarcity of resources and a concomitant limit to production. Instead, the spectacular reality film produces and distributes scarcity as a subordinate component of a general economy of material abundance, which is the most significant consequence of the global mechanization of commodity production. Trocchi takes this shift for granted when he writes, in ‘Invisible Insurrection’, that ‘[c]learly, there is in principle no problem of production in the modern world. The urgent problem of the future is that of distribution which is presently (dis)ordered in terms of the economic system prevailing in this or that area’ (1963a:179). That is, the massive growth of production under global capitalism (understood in Debord’s terms as referring both to the Western capitalist nations of the ‘diffuse spectacle’ and to the Eastern-bloc socialist nations of the ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘concentrated spectacle’ [1967:41–3], an identification with which Burroughs agrees: ‘[T]he same old formulas’ define both sides [Job 72]) has resulted in a general situation of abundance that could in principle provide every living person with an acceptable standard of living— if a radical redistribution of consumption were carried out. Of course, it hasn’t been carried out, and instead scarcity and its correlates, poverty and passivity, are represented and reproduced through the spectacle itself. Even the struggle against poverty is determined by the logic of the spectacle, in that ‘reform’ (within the sphere of the diffuse spectacle) and ‘revolution’ (within the sphere of the concentrated spectacle) are equally denied the possibility of addressing the basic axioms of the system. Thus a new form of resistance is called for. Freedom now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time it is not poverty but material abundance which must be dominated according to new laws. Dominating abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but redefining its every orientation,superficial and profound alike. This is the first step of an immense struggle, infinite in its implications. (IS editorial committee 1965:156) For Trocchi as for Debord, the new focus of resistance is not the sphere of production but rather its dialectical mirror image: ‘[O]ur anonymous million [minds] can focus their attention on the problem of “leisure” ’ (Trocchi 1963a:180). Like the Frankfurt School Marxists, the Situationists recognized that leisure was not relief from work but its continuation in another form—‘[t]he forms that dominate [the worker’s] life are carried over into leisure which becomes more and more mechanized; thus he is equipped with machines to contend with leisure which machines have accorded him’ (Trocchi 1963a:180). And thus the spectacle spreads its unfreedom into all the corners of everyday life, colonizing leisure time as it previously colonized non-capitalist spaces. At the limit, then, our unfreedom is defined by the fact that we are not allowed to turn the spectacle of the reality film off or to step outside it, to take back the material reality of abundance and action from the controlling image of poverty and passivity. To do so would not only trigger a defensive reaction from the administrators of image-capital, it would also threaten the very structure of the spectator’s subjectivity. One of the most disturbing consequences of the domination of the spectacle is the isolation it imposes on the people subjected to it. The spectacle inserts itself into all relationships and alienates them by proposing itself as a necessary point of exchange and communication. As Debord notes, ‘[s]pectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another’ (1967:22). The result is, in fact, the very opposite of communication considered as an intersubjective or dialogical process of exchange, for in the spectacle ‘ “communication” is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration’ (Debord 1967:19–20). Burroughs had already recognized this in Naked Lunch when he satirized the fascistic ‘Senders’ who seek to establish control by means of ‘one-way telepathic broadcasts instructing the workers what to feel and when’ (NL 148). Thus even the emotional and psychological behavior of the individual is pre-programmed by the ubiquitous image: ‘The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him’ (Debord 1967:23) This insidious invasion of the subject’s consciousness (and unconscious) by the spectacle is thorough, but it is not complete. It can be successfully resisted, and has been for brief moments like the Watts riots of 1965 (to which the Situationist essay that Burroughs found so intelligent, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’ [IS editorial committee 1965], responds). What both civil rights leaders and institutional leftist organizations fail to realize about the Watts rioters is that, [b]y wanting to participate really and immediately in affluence, which is the official value of every American, they demand the egalitarian realization of the American spectacle of everyday life: they demand that the half-heavenly, half-terrestrial values of this spectacle be put to the test. (IS editorial committee 1965:157) It’s not a question of living up to the abstract political ideals of the US Constitution, as the civil rights leaders would have it, nor of controlling the means of production as the institutional left insists, but rather of attacking the arbitrary limits imposed on consumption and activity, and hence on life itself, by the hierarchical power of the spectacle. It is a matter of replacing the spectacular logic of mere survival with an affirmation of abundance and the active life that should correspond to it. As Burroughs said with regard to Black Power a few years later, ‘[f]ind out what they want and give it to them […] [W]ho has a better right to it?’ (E! 99). Chief among the tactics by means of which such resistance expresses itself is what the Situationists called ‘détournement’, which is quite similar to the practice of cut-ups that Burroughs carried on throughout the 1960s. Détournement, ‘the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality’ (IS editorial committee 1959:55–6), is the tactic of using the throwaway images of the spectacle against it by removing images or signs from their original or authorized spectacular contexts and placing them in completely different subversive contexts. Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed […] The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supercedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. (Debord and Wolman 1956:9) Drawing on Dadaist and Surrealist precedents, Situationist propaganda made extensive use of détournement in comic strips (the dialogue of which was replaced with dialectical aphorisms), advertising images (which were given ironic new juxtapositions and captions), and most importantly, films. ‘It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest efficacy, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:12). Cinematic détournement can operate effectively through the accumulation of small detourned elements, as in Debord’s famous film version of Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1973), which detourns a huge mass of pornographic photos, ads, journalistic images, scenes from Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October, Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture and Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, among other things. However, it can also function integrally in the détournement of entire existing works, like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which could in principle be detourned ‘as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:12). Onetime Situationist René Vienet’s film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? applies the process of integral détournement to an absolutely generic Chinese martial arts film, which by the total substitution of soundtracks becomes an amusing dramatization of worker revolt against the bureaucratic administration of the spectacle (Vienet 1973). Burroughs’s work with cut-ups, the method to which he was introduced in 1959 by his painter friend Brion Gysin, parallels virtually all of these points. As he wrote in ‘The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin’ (1961), ‘[t]he cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera’ (3M 29). He found precedents in the work of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the American modernists T. S. Eliot and John Dos Passos (Knickerbocker 1965:66). At first, Burroughs treated cut-ups as simply another poetic technique, but soon he realized that their implications went beyond mere aesthetics. By physically cutting printed texts, written by himself and by others, into pieces of various sizes and then reassembling them in random order, he had found a way to evade conscious and unconscious patterns of thought, association and choice that had been dictated by the binary structure of the Word and the reality film itself (see Murphy 1997:103–7). Cut-ups were a form of practical demystification and subversion that could uncover the ideology at work in the political lines of the media—for example, revealing the structural collusion between the police and the drug market in the US and UK (see NE 52–3). Ideology is a constantly repeated pre-recording, and as Burroughs writes in his unpunctuated essay ‘the invisible generation’ (1966), the ‘only way to break the inexorable down spiral of ugly uglier ugliest recording and playback is with counterrecording and playback’ (now in TE 217). Through this insight, Burroughs realized that ‘[c]ut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here right now. Not something to talk and argue about’ (3M 31). Cut-ups, like détournement, are directly subversive methods that can be practiced and engaged by everyone because they use the omnipresent material of the reality film against itself. Like the Situationists, Burroughs also applied his subversive methods to film. He too realized that cut-up recontextualization can function both on a local level, as in Nova Express (which cut together Shakespeare, Joyce, Rimbaud, Genet, Kafka, Conrad, pulp science fiction and other texts [Knickerbocker 1965:68–9]) and his films Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups (in Burroughs and Balch 1990), and also on an integral level, as he argued in ‘the invisible generation’: what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear you can verify this proposition by a simple experiment turn off the sound track on your television set and substitute an arbitrary sound track prerecorded on your tape recorder street sounds music conversation recordings of other television programs you will find that the arbitrary sound track seems to be appropriate and is in fact determining your interpretation of the film track […] (now in TE 205) The closest Burroughs came to realizing this integral form of the cut-up was in his short film collaboration with Antony Balch, Bill and Tony, in which the talking heads of Burroughs and Balch swap names and voices halfway through the film and in the process become one another (in Burroughs and Balch 1990; see also Murphy 1997:206–16). Though less immediately seductive than Vienet’s detourned martial arts film, Bill and Tony is nevertheless an accessible and indeed pedagogical example of the potentials of the cut-ups. For both Burroughs and the Situationists, the final goal of this systematic deployment of guerilla citation is the total transformation of everyday life. The Situationists called the ‘tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life’ ultra-détournement, and insisted that ‘when we have got to the stage of constructing situations, the ultimate goal of all our activity, it will be open to everyone to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:13–14). In the wake of a successful revolution, therefore, détournement would change its modality from being purely critical of the organization of the spectacle to being creative of new conditions of living. The result would then be the simultaneous realization and suppression of art: that is, the elimination of art as a particular sector in the social division of labor, access to which is limited to specialized producers (artists) and consumers (collectors and critics), at the same time that creative activity becomes the general condition of human life in all its aspects. As Trocchi put it, ‘[a]rt can have no existential significance for a civilization which draws a line between life and art and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence’; in contrast, ‘we envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative comportment’ (1963a:181). Such would be the revolution of everyday life made possible by the new economy of abundance. Burroughs too offers a model for this final goal of revolutionary theory, again as a consequence of his conception of the cut-ups. The cut-ups render visible or ‘make explicit a psycho-sensory process that is going on all the time anyway’ in every mind: ‘[A] juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking of’ (Knickerbocker 1965:67–8). Burroughs encourages his readers to experiment not only with the cutting-up of printed texts but also with the experiential cutting-up of everyday life, as in ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith’: Sit down in a café somewhere drink a coffee read the papers and listen don’t talk to yourself […] Note what you see and hear as you read what words and look at what picture. These are intersection points. Note these intersection points in the margin of your paper. Listen to what is being said around you and look at what is going on around you. (Burroughs 1966:28) The reality film operates to integrate all these elements as coherently as possible into a seamless whole and thus prevent the reader from imagining that there is something outside of it, some other principle of juxtaposition; this is its ideological function. But multimedia cut-ups can challenge this integration. In his own practice, Burroughs compiled elaborate collage scrapbooks of found juxtapositions between places visited, words read, sounds overheard, and images and objects seen, many of which served as source material for his novels (see the reproductions in BF 156–83 and Sobieszek 1996:38–53). These mixed-media collages, which ‘spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce’ (NL 207), do not simply resemble Debord and Asger Jorn’s collages in Mémoires (see the reproductions in Sussman 1989:128–9); rather, like Debord and Jorn’s assemblages, they point toward and demand a practice of everyday life that would realize art on a mass scale and suppress it as a specialized market niche. The key to the large-scale success of ultra-détournement and multimedia cut-ups is the reconceptualization and reconstruction of the human environment, especially the urban environment. The SI called this reconceptualization ‘unitary urbanism’, by which they meant ‘the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). To counter modern urban planning, the spectacular integration of the human environment around the production and distribution of economic scarcity, the SI proposed the total reorganization of lived space around patterns of human affect and association. This would be the ultimate realization and suppression of art and the triumph of life over mere economic survival. Although Burroughs never conceived such a comprehensive project of urban reorganization, he was consistently interested in the unevenness and alienating effects of modern urban space. As I have argued elsewhere (Murphy 1997:47–50), Burroughs’s first novel, Junky (1953), examines the heroin addict’s navigation of the economic organization of urban space, and demonstrates that his reliance on the underdetermination of that space converts what was intended as a productive spatial order into an intermittently anti-productive one. That is, the junkie gravitates toward those parts of the urban landscape that undergo only inconstant and predictable surveillance by the authorities, and there he carries on his economy of theft and fencing as a parodic mirror image of capitalist production and exchange. While this economy of anti-production is not strictly analogous to the Situationist concept of non-economic unitary urbanism, it does identify and criticize the link between capitalist control and the experiential organization of urban space. Given their small numbers and bohemian attitude toward the accumulation of capital, it’s not surprising that the members of the SI never managed to put their grandiose dreams of unitary urbanism into construction. They got only as far as the mapping of urban space according to contours of affect and association, a mapping that parallels Burroughs’s focus on derelict spaces of anti-production. Indeed, in his later works, Burroughs favored Trocchi’s description of them both as ‘cosmonauts of inner space’ and considered his job to be that of ‘a mapmaker […] an explorer of psychic areas. … And I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed’ (cited by Morgan 1988:338). Similarly, the Situationists called their program ‘psychogeography’, ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). Since most cities are organized into well-defined sectors, neighborhoods and quarters according to the demands of economic production, psychogeographical mapping sometimes involved ‘detourning’ or ‘cutting up’ city maps in order to defamiliarize the given economic landscape (for example, Debord’s psychogeographical map of Paris entitled Naked City [1957], reproduced in Sussman 1989:135 and on the cover of Knabb 1989). The theory of psychogeographical mapping was materialized by the Situationist practice of the dérive or ‘drift’ through a city. The dérive is ‘a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). Instead of following the planned lines of circulation through a metropolis, lines that are almost exclusively designed to smooth the turbulent flow of capital, commodities and their producers, the drifter would follow contours of personal affect, aesthetic juxtaposition, unplanned encounter and/or psychic association, and in the process discover an alternative city (or cities) within the spatial confines of the economically rationalized urban environment. Drifters would ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’ (Debord 1956:50). Clearly this notion of the dérivebears a striking resemblance to Burroughs’s advice to his readers for creating a multimedia experiential cut-up, including the clarification about the comparatively minor role that is played by chance. The dérive is also the nodal point of Trocchi’s understanding of the fundamental category of ‘situation’ as a kind of artistic ‘happening’. In his adaptation, the ‘Manifesto Situationiste’ (sic) included in the Sigma Portfolio, he insists that: ‘Within an experimentally constructed context, due attention paid to what we call “psychogeographic” factors, the situation is the gradual and spontaneous realization (articulation: happening) of a superior game in which each participating individual is vitally involved’ (Trocchi 1964b, #18/3). The other Situationists were, perhaps predictably, less inclined to see any genuine similarity between their covert, unspectacular dérives and the garish public spectacles of the professional (and thus integrative) artistic ‘happenings’ that proliferated throughout the 1960s: Our project has taken shape at the same time as the modern tendencies toward integration. There is thus not only a direct opposition but also an air of resemblance since the two sides are really contemporaneous. We have not paid enough attention to this aspect of things, even recently. Thus, it is not impossible to interpret Alexander Trocchi’s proposals in issue #8 of this journal as having some affinity—despite their obviously completely contrary spirit—with those poor attempts at a ‘psychodramatic’ salvaging of decomposed art […] (IS editorial committee 1964:136) In fact, the further development of this aspect of Trocchi’s interpretation of the Situationist project may have been the spur that led the other Situationists to expel him, rather gently, later that same year. Thus the SI’s concept of revolution as life taking control over the real production of abundance and eliminating the spectacular distribution of scarcity dovetails nicely with Trocchi’s demand for an ‘invisible insurrection’ of those trapped by their own commodified and spectacular leisure time and Burroughs’s appeal to the ‘invisible generation’ for a cut-up, detourned rebellion of ‘counterrecording and playback’ against the reality film’s insidious control: there was a grey veil between you and what you saw or more often did not see that grey veil was the prerecorded words of a control machine once that veil is removed you will see clearer and sharper than those who are behind the veil whatever you do you will do it better than those behind the veil this is the invisible generation it is the efficient generation (now in TE 209) Appropriately enough, and in confirmation of his intuition that the Situationist milieu would offer ‘an excellent outlet for the short pieces I am writing now’ (Burroughs 1967), Burroughs’s essay ‘Electronic Revolution’ (1971), the sequel to ‘The Invisible Generation’, was published in French in 1974 by Editions Champ Libre, the publishing house run by Debord’s close friend Gérard Lebovici that kept all the major Situationist texts in print through the 1970s and 1980s (now in Job). Burroughs’s rallying cries of ‘Total Exposure’, ‘Wise up all the marks everywhere’, ‘Show them the rigged wheel of Life-TimeFortune’, ‘Storm the Reality Studio’, and ‘retake the universe’ (NE 59) resonate with the Situationist-inspired slogan directing the reader to ‘[t]ake your desires for reality’ and thereby abolish the society of the spectacle (IS editorial committee 1969: 244). Only if we do so will we ever see ‘The Reality Film giving and buckling like a bulkhead under pressure’ (NE 59). III: SPONTANEOUS UNIVERSITY As noted above, the Watts riots offered the Situationists an example of the revolutionary interruption or realization of the spectacle that they sought, and so did the radical students’ takeover of the university quarter of Paris in May 1968. The Situationists had been attentive to the specific constraints faced by students for some time; indeed, they first attracted the attention of the mainstream mass media as a result of their collaboration with the militant students of the University of Strasbourg on a withering exposé of the ‘poverty of student life, considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual and especially intellectual aspects’ (IS et al. 1966:319). In that pamphlet they argued that the spectacle ‘allots everyone a specific role within a general passivity. The student is no exception to this rule. His is a provisional role, a rehearsal for his ultimate role as a conservative element in the functioning of the commodity system’ (IS et al. 1966:320). Consequently, ‘the student cannot revolt against anything without revolting against his studies’ first of all (IS et al. 1966:325) because ‘the suppression of alienation necessarily follows the same path as alienation’ (IS et al. 1966:319). Or, as Burroughs later put it, ‘[t]he way out is the way through’ (WB 82). The early, abortive efforts of the international student radical movements, according to the SI, constituted a confused but nonetheless real revolt against the whole social system based on hierarchy and the dictatorship of the economy and the state. By refusing to accept the business and institutional roles for which their specialized studies have been designed to prepare them, they are profoundly calling into question a system of production that alienates all activity and its products from their producers. (IS et al. 1966:328) Trocchi had anticipated the SI’s contemptuous analysis of student discontent two years earlier, when he insisted that ‘[w]e can write off existing universities’, which are ‘hopelessly geared and sprocketed to the cultural-economic axles of the status quo’, as ‘factories for the production of degreed technicians’ (1964a:197). But Trocchi was also more optimistic, indeed utopian, about the politics of education and university reorganization than his fellow Situationists, who lampooned the fictitious spectacular ‘politicization’ of students (IS et al. 1966: 324–5), and Burroughs came to share that utopian optimism, though somewhat belatedly. Trocchi recognized that his ‘invisible insurrection of a million minds’ would need a ‘detonator’, and in that role he cast the spontaneous university, which he conceived as ‘a vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also’ (1963a:186). Unlike the existing university, the spontaneous university would not reflect the alienating divisions of labor from consumption, of art from life, of living space from affect that characterize modern survival; rather, it would attack those divisions through Situationist methods of détournement and unitary urban reconstruction in order to bring creativity to everyday life. There would be no fixed departments, exams or career paths, but rather constant experimentation. ‘What is essential is a new conscious sense of community-as-art-of-living; the experimental situation (laboratory) with its “personnel” is itself to be regarded as an artefact, a continuous making, a creative process, a community enacting itself in its individual members’ (Trocchi 1964a:200). Instead of reflecting and reinforcing the hierarchical totality of the spectacle, ‘[t]he community which is the university must become a living model for society at large’ (1964a:201). Events would prove Trocchi right, to a certain extent. When the series of occupations and strikes that now go by the name of ‘May 1968’ broke out in Paris, the Situationists were quick to leap into the fray despite their distrust of the students’ inadequate politicization. These events were very complex and are too well known to be summarized here, but the Situationist interpretation of them is quite relevant to our inquiry (see also Vienet 1968). The ‘May movement was not a student movement’, according to the SI, but rather ‘a revolutionary proletarian movement’ that ‘was able to concretely express itself and take shape only on the very unfavorable terrainof a student revolt’ (IS editorial committee 1969:229). What this means is that while the student movement did not ultimately dominate or determine the significance of the events that occured, the student uprising did act as precisely the ‘detonator’ of insurrection that Trocchi had been looking for. The student occupation of the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter triggered the very first ‘wildcat general strike’ of industrial workers in history, and effectively though belatedly brought down the De Gaulle government (IS editorial committee 1969:225, 252). For the Situationists, this was ‘the complete verification of the revolutionary theory of our time and even here and there the beginning of its partial realization’ (IS editorial committee 1969:225), and by ‘the revolutionary theory of our time’ they of course meant their own conception of the spectacle and of the necessary means for its overcoming. ‘Situationist theory had a significant role in the origins of the generalized critique that produced the first incidents of the May crisis and that developed along with that crisis’ (IS editorial committee 1969:241). The strikes and university occupations constituted, they insisted, a ‘critique in acts of the spectacle of nonlife’ that corresponded to and dialectically realized Situationist theory (IS editorial committee 1969:226). Despite the high-profile presence of several Situationists at the Sorbonne during its occupation, they did not claim to have led any part of the revolt—neither the student struggles that detonated it, nor the workers’ strikes that gave it material force. All they claimed was the accuracy of their theory, which had been adopted in whole or part by a crucial subset of the rebels. ‘If many people did what we wrote, it was because we essentially wrote the negative that had been lived by us and by so many others before us’ (IS editorial committee 1969:227). Indeed, the Situationist interpretation of May 1968 downplayed its members’ activities during the occupation, and claimed that their only crucial contribution to its progress lay in their insistence upon mechanisms of direct democracy, in the form of students’ and workers’ councils, for all decision-making during the revolt. The refusal of delegation or political representation had always been a key element in Situationist models of radical organization, and in May they got a chance to practice it. Their dedication to radically democratic organization made them unreservedly hostile to all attempts to appropriate or reform existing non-democratic institutions, however. For example, although other factions of the student movement saw the Sorbonne occupation as an opportunity to create an autonomous popular university to replace the integrated spectacular university, the Situationists did not: ‘[I]n our eyes the Sorbonne was of interest only as a building seized by the revolutionary movement’ and not ‘as a university—albeit “autonomous and popular”—something we despise in any case’ (IS editorial committee 1969:250–1). For them, the university was an essential functional component of the spectacle and therefore not something that could be detached from the spectacle for relocation to a different position— that is, not an institution that could be detourned as a whole. Like the Situationists, Burroughs reacted affirmatively to the events of May 1968, and to the broader international cycle of struggles of which they were a part, but like Trocchi’s, his attitude toward the students was more generous. In an interview with French writer Daniel Odier just a few months after the riots and occupations of May, he called for ‘more riots and more violence’, which were justified because ‘[y]oung people in the West have been lied to, sold out and betrayed […] The student rebellion is now a worldwide movement. Never before in recorded history has established authority been so basically challenged on a worldwide scale’ (Job 81). Though he was more supportive of the students’ specific claims and objectives than the Situationists were, he did implicitly agree with the SI in seeing the student uprising as a symptom of a deeper conflict and as the detonator of a more far-reaching revolutionary offensive against the basic structure of the reality film. He noted that ‘the incidents that trigger student uprisings are often insignificant […] [for example,] a refusal to change the examination system’ (Job 81), but much more significant intersection points can be found in the universities. Perhaps the most crucial reason for all young people to rebel is the issue of top secret research carried on in universities or anywhere else. All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody […] A worldwide monopoly of knowledge and discoveries for counterrevolutionary purposes is the basic issue […] All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you. (Job 81–2) At that point, in the middle of the Cold War, universities constituted key links in the military-industrial complex just as today they act as research partners for private enterprise; in both cases, institutions supposedly dedicated to the non-partisan search for and humanitarian dissemination of knowledge restrict access to that knowledge according to the demands of the global image economy (as universities always have, of course, from their origins in the Middle Ages to the present). Contrary to this, Burroughs tried to convince the students to ask for the free and equal distribution of all knowledge, which is another way of formulating the Situationist demand for the freedom to live in place of the coercion of mere survival: ‘If you want the world you could have in terms of discoveries and resources now in existence be prepared to fight for that world. To fight for that world in the streets’ (Job 224). The street fighting soon stopped, at least in the US and France, but in the months following May 1968, Burroughs often revisited the issue of education and its role in stabilizing (or destabilizing) the order imposed by the reality film. He realized that training in conformity, the prefabrication of expectations and opinions, was essential to the continued functioning of the film, and so he began to theorize alternative educational institutions to counteract the conformist socialization inculcated by the existing universities instead of simply denouncing the latter as the Situationists did. He called these alternative institutions ‘academies’, and defined ‘academy training’ as ‘precisely decontrol of opinion […] The program proposed is essentially a disintoxication from inner fear and inner control, a liberation of thought and energy to prepare a new generation’ (Job 138). This program, which is essentially congruent with Trocchi’s model of the spontaneous university, would promote a new way of thinking that would correspond to a different, more critical apprehension of reality: Like a moving film the flow of thought seems to be continuous while actually the thoughts flow stop change and flow again. At the point where one flow stops there is a split-second hiatus. The new way of thinking grows in this hiatus between thoughts […] The new way of thinking is the thinking you would do if you didn’t have to think about any of the things you ordinarily think about if you had no work to do nothing to be afraid of no plans to make. (Job 91) One of the academies’ key elements is the negation of the division of labor that is embodied in the departmental structure of the traditional university. Students would be offered instruction in a variety of disciplines, ‘[a]ny one of [which] could become a way of life but […] [the] point is to apply what we have learned from one discipline to another and not get stuck in one way of doing things’ (Job 95). The ultimate goal of the new way of thinking and the academies that foster it would be the extinction of work along with fear and control, an extinction that the Situationists intended to implement through the simultaneous revolutionary realization and suppression of the spectacle. Thus the students would indeed be an ‘invisible generation’, with a different kind of consciousness and subjectivity than the spectator–participants of the reality film. Burroughs’s most important literary expression of his conception of radical education is to be found in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints. As I have argued elsewhere, Burroughs’s wild boys must be understood in part as a hyperbolic intensification of countercultural revolt (Murphy 1997:145–7). They represent a break with the reality film so profound that it requires a new calendar: ‘The wild boys have no sense of time and date the beginning from 1969 when the first wild boy groups were formed’ (POS 73). In this, they constitute a step beyond the radicals of 1968. They are the graduates of the academies that Burroughs theorized in his essays and interviews of the period in that they conform to no division of labor, no dominant model of public opinion, and no onerous work discipline. They copulate and consume at will, unfettered by the reality film’s iron logic of scarcity and passivity, work and leisure, and in the end they are the only ones who can carry out the electronic revolution. On the penultimate page of The Wild Boys, the narrator blows up the time barrier separating present time from the wild boys’ future, and in so doing ruptures the reality film. ‘The screen is exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots’ (WB 184), and then the film is done and everyone is invisible, unspeakable, free … IV: SWIRLS AND EDDIES AND TORNADOES OF IMAGEBut the invisible insurrection, the electronic revolution, the revolution of everyday life, did not take place—at least not according to the expectations of Trocchi, Burroughs and the Situationists. What did happen is well known, if still poorly understood. In the wake of the worldwide radical movements, the spectacle briefly lost its luster; the reality film momentarily slipped its sprockets; then the process of image circulation and accumulation incorporated the bulk of the movements and picked up where it had left off. Détournement and the cut-ups were taken up by advertising, to no one’s surprise, not even their authors’. Even in their first articulation of the method, the Situationists recognized that ‘it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples’ of détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956:10). By the mid-1960s, Burroughs too admitted that: ‘I’ve recently thought a great deal about advertising. After all, they’re doing the same sort of thing [I am]. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image’ (Knickerbocker 1965:76). Ultra-détournement and the dérive, the experiential cut-ups that Burroughs advocated, had to wait a little longer to be recuperated in the form of multimedia, computer games and virtual reality. No longer content to be even apparently external to its subjects, the spectacle drew them into its own representational substance—with their enthusiastic approval. The new media that form the cornerstone of the contemporary version of the spectacular reality film often lay claim to the educational imperatives of Trocchi’s and Burroughs’s utopian project as well as Burroughs’s cut-up methods and the psychogeography of the SI. In a recent report on the use of three-dimensional animation in advertising, video consultant Jeff Sauer profiles a media company that specializes in 3D: Reality Check Studios. One of their most impressive projects, from the spectacular point of view, is a multimedia CD-ROM designed for the telecommunications giant SBC (Southwestern Bell Communications). Sauer’s description is worth quoting in full: The CD-ROM starts with an amazing four-minute, high-speed flythrough of a fictitious future city. But the journey isn’t just for fun; SBC wanted to educate, too. So the fly-through stops at the metropolis’ movie theater to show the entertainment possibilities of broadband service. From there, viewers fly to a concert venue to learn about the music available on the Internet and to an animated shopping mall to learn about commerce on the Web. They can learn about home security and wired smart homes and, of course, how to sign up for DSL. (Sauer 2002) This fictitious city seems an unlikely example of unitary urbanism, though no doubt that concept too is subject to recuperation within the spectacle. And ‘education’ here is conceived exclusively as the most seductive method for informing the consumer of the choices the market has made (available) for her. Advertising is our academy and commodities our education, the only education we’ll ever need for life in the reality film. In the same piece, Sauer also discusses the perfect dialectical counterpart to this fictitious city: a ‘real’ cityscape that becomes just as fictitious, just as mediated, just as spectacular. It’s Times Square, of course, in which ‘any new construction’ must ‘have electronically lit signage with a size compensatory to the size of the building’, according to a recent New York City ordinance (Sauer 2002). While most buildings have simply been equipped with external billboards and giant pre-programmable TV monitors, the Lehman Brothers Corporation, an investment banking firm, went much further with its office tower, perhaps in an effort to literalize its motto, ‘Where vision gets built’. As Sauer notes, not content with simply displaying electronic signs, ‘the Lehman Brothers building is itself an electronic sign’ (Sauer 2002). And what a sign: The sign is a huge system of LEDs, 5340 by 736, that stretches vertically from the third floor to the fifth floor of the building. Horizontally, the sign wraps around the building from halfway down the 49th Street side across the entire length of the building facing Times Square, then halfway down the 50th Street side. (Sauer 2002) The images projected on this immense three-dimensional screen are not merely prefabricated ads, but real-time mixes of pre-constructed content with live images from the building’s environs. The Lehman Brothers sign content will be controlled by a database that runs on a schedule, but the sign also has the ability to be affected by external input. For example, if the weather in Times Square turns gray and rainy, the sign’s mode, color tone, or message may change to match or contrast with the dreariness. Similarly, if the financial markets are up or down on a given afternoon, that input could trigger the sign to change mood. (Sauer 2002) This is integrative unitary urbanism with a vengeance, and a tidy allegory for the recent mutations of the global economy of the image: a spectacular sign equipped with the resources to steal affect (‘mood’) from its environment and re-project it as its own. As such screens and images proliferate throughout the world, the functional control of the spectacle increases. Burroughs anticipated something like this in Nova Express, although he expected it to function as a critical cut-up rather than an integrative element of the reality film. In the novel’s concluding chapter, ‘Pay Color’, the Subliminal Kid (in collaboration with the ubiquitous Muslim heretic and revolutionary Hassan i Sabbah) deploys independent media technology against the controllers of the reality film in an effort to force them to ‘pay back’ the ‘stolen colors’ of human life (NE 149–50). In particular, he set up screens on the walls of his bars opposite mirrors and took and projected at arbitrary intervals shifted from one bar to the other mixing Western Gangster films of all times and places with word and image of the people in his cafés and on the streets his agents with movie camera and telescope lens poured images of the city back into his projector and camera array and nobody knew whether he was in a Western movie in Hong Kong or The Aztec Empire in Ancient Rome or Suburban America whether he was a bandit a commuter or a chariot driver whether he was firing a ‘real’ gun or watching a gangster movie and the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image […] (NE 148) The final clause suggests that the key to this sabotage of the reality film lies in its disordering of the carefully integrated images that give the film its consistency and predictability. However, the reality film of the twenty-first century can incorporate the turbulence of these ‘tornadoes of image’ into its own structure without thereby loosening its hold on the human landscape. After all, chaos theory has taught us that most disorder is only a differential of a higher integration of order. Indeed, to the extent that it more effectively seduces the eye and the other senses, the chaotic image in fact tightens its hold on the mind and body. Not only does the spectacle continue to seduce us into looking at it, thinking with it and living in it, but now it also looks back at us from a thousand different angles at once. The one-way communication that both Burroughs and the Situationists attacked as the reality film’s unilateral chain of command has given way to multidirectional surveillance that masquerades as democratic dialogue and informational collaboration. In a late essay, Gilles Deleuze argues that this shift demonstrates that ‘[c]ontrol societies are taking over from disciplinary societies [in Michel Foucault’s sense]. “Control” is the name proposed by Burroughs to characterize the new monster’ of technological monitoring (Deleuze 1990:178), and thus the society of control is a further development of, if not the direct successor to, the reality film or the society of the spectacle. Unlike modern discipline, which was long-term and discontinuous (as Burroughs showed with regard to urban space in Junky), ‘[c]ontrol is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded’ (Deleuze 1990:181). We have the security of holographic IDs, the convenience of credit cards, the amusement or edification of web surfing, and the spontaneity of e-mail and instant messaging, but all these forms of instantaneous information transfer leave a residue that is tirelessly collected by credit agencies, merchants, employers, police and the State in order to map our movements, plans, desires and affects. In the US, recent proposals to fully integrate all these presently separate collections of personal data in order to ‘mine’ it for purposes of national security (such as the joint Pentagon–FBI Total Information Awareness project) have provoked a backlash from civil libertarians, although no doubt such integration is already under way in less monumental and hence less visible enterprises, as the rising tide of personalized junk mail and telemarketing shows. Following Deleuze’s lead, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also note that in the contemporary global economy of the image, ‘the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control’ of the sort that Burroughs anatomized (Hardt and Negri 2000:216, 448, n14). They insist as well that like Burroughs’s theory, ‘Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle, more than thirty years after its composition, seems ever more apt and urgent’ right now (2000:188). In particular, the concept of the spectacle, like Burroughs’s notion of control, helps to explain the dematerialization of politics in the contemporary world. [The] spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish any inside from outside—the natural from the social, the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others, monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in the virtual spaces of the spectacle. The end of the outside is the end of liberal politics. (Hardt and Negri 2000:188–9) Liberal politics, the politics of delegation and representation, have been completely subsumed by the spectacle and in the process have lost their grounding in the populace. They have consequently been replaced by imperial politics, the spectacular politics of Empire. ‘Empire’ is Hardt and Negri’s term for the present global situation of decentralized, transnational capitalism, and should not be mistaken for a reference to classical nationalist imperialism of the British, Spanish or French sort. Empire, the society of control, began to manifest itself in 1968, the ‘beginning of an era’ as the Situationists put it (and Burroughs’s wild boys would agree). Empire is the rule of the spectacle, in that its ‘control operates through three global and absolute means: the bomb, money, and ether’ (Hardt and Negri 2000:345). All three of these means are directly spectacular—they define and orient the reality film. Thermonuclear weapons, which Burroughs called ‘Soul Killer[s]’ (WL 7), function as a standing threat of total annihilation whose deployment is both unthinkable and constantly expected. Imperial control uses their actual possession (for example, in American hands) as a nightmarish goad that overdetermines and subordinates all other conflicts, and their virtual possession (for example, in Iraqi hands) as a pretext for the direct and violent subordination of recalcitrant groups. Thermonuclear weapons are very real ‘tornadoes of image’ that destroy even when they aren’t actually used. The other two means are more like swirls and eddies of image, though that doesn’t mean they are insignificant. Money and its transnational flows have always been central means of control for the spectacle; after all, Debord did write that ‘[t]he spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (1967: 24). Burroughs too argued that human reality is being consumed and replaced by money as image: ‘the money machine […] eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity […] People want money to buy what the machine eats to shit money out. The more the machine eats the less remains’ (Job 73–4). Lastly, by ‘ether’, Hardt and Negri mean ‘the management of communication, the structuring of the education system, and the regulation of culture’; that is, the mass media and educational/creative institutions such as universities, which ‘cannot help submitting to the circulating society of the spectacle […] Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths’ (2000:346–7). Of the three, in fact, ‘[c]ommunication has become the central element that establishes the relations of production’ (2000:347–8), as Burroughs and the Situationists already knew, and it is communication that is most likely to provide opportunities of resistance, as, for example, the media-savvy Zapatistas showed in 1994 (Hardt and Negri 2000:54). Despite its acknowledged inability to provide tactics that could replace the now-recuperated techniques of détournement, cut-ups, unitary urbanism and the dérive, Hardt and Negri’s theory of Empire has been taken up by a wide range of groups currently engaged in contesting the globalization of capitalism—including the Tute Bianche and Ya Basta, who protested at Genoa, and many of the organizers of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, to name just two key sites of struggle (On Fire 2001:101–3)—and through it the Situationist critique of the spectacle and Burroughs’s subversion of the reality film’s control continue to provide critical leverage for the resistance to the present. As Burroughs wrote late in his career, ‘[m]aybe we lost. And this is what happens when you lose […] [Yet] there were moments of catastrophic defeat, and moments of triumph’ (WL 252–3). The Situationists too acknowledged that in the past century, ‘revolution has so far not been victorious anywhere, but the practical process through which its project manifests itself has already created at least ten revolutionary moments of an extreme historical importance that can appropriately be termed revolutions’ (IS editorial committee 1969:236). Those moments have continued to erupt, from Watts 1965 and Paris 1968 to Seattle 1999 and Genoa 2001, and there is no reason to expect them to cease so long as the spectacle retains control and the reality film remains unexposed. Once again it will be necessary, no doubt, to ‘Storm The Reality Studio’, and ‘retake the universe’ (NE 59). REFERENCESBurroughs, W. S. (1964) Le festin nu Kahane, E. trans. (Paris: Gallimard). — (1966) ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith’, IN Berner, J. ed., Astronauts of Inner-Space (San Francisco: Stolen Paper Review), pp. 28–9. — (1967) Letter to Mary Beach, 28 July 1967. Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas [MS 63 B:b:24]. —— (1974) Révolution electronique, Chopin, J. trans. (Paris: Editions Champ Libre). Burroughs, W. S., and Balch, A. (1990) Towers Open Fire and Other Short Films, Mystic Fire Video [video: VHS]. Debord, G. (1956) ‘Theory of the Dérive’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 50–4. — (1967) The Society of the Spectacle, Nicholson-Smith, D. trans. (New York: Zone, 1994). — (1973) La société du spectacle (Paris: Simar Films). — (2001) Correspondance vol.2: septembre 1960–décembre 1964 (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard). Debord, G., and Wolman, G. J. (1956) ‘Methods of Detournement’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 8–14. Deleuze, G. (1990) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, IN Joughin, M. trans. Negotiations 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 177–82. Gray, C. ed. (1974) Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998). Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). [IS] Internationale Situationniste, édition augmentée (1997) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard). Complete re-issue of the journal, 1958–69. IS editorial committee (including G. Debord) (1958) ‘Definitions’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 45–6. — (1959) ‘Detournement as Negation and Prelude’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 55–6. —— (1964) ‘Now, the S.I.’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 135–8. — (1965) ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 153–60. — (1969) ‘The Beginning of an Era’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 225–56. IS et al. (1966) ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 319–37. Knabb, K. ed. and trans. (1989) Situationist International Anthology (San Francisco: Bureau of Public Secrets). Knickerbocker, C. (1965) ‘White Junk’, IN Lotringer, S. ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997 (USA: Semiotext[e], 2001), pp. 60–81. Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Morgan, T. (1988) Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt). Murphy, T. S. (1997) Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press). On Fire: The Battle of Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (One-Off Press, 2001). Sauer, J. (2002) ‘New Dimensions’, IN Video Systems, 1 February 2002, videosystems.com/ar/video_new_dimensions/index.htm, 18 January 2003. Sobieszek, R. A. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art/Thames and Hudson). Sussman, E. ed. (1989) On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Trocchi, A. (1960) Cain’s Book (New York: Grove). —— (1963a) ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 177–91. —— (1963b) ‘Letter to William S. Burroughs’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 207–9. —— (1964a) ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 192–203. —— (1964b) Sigma Portfolio items #1–25 (London: privately duplicated). Cited copy is in the collection of the Lilly Library, Indiana University. — (1972) Man at Leisure (London: Calder and Boyars). Introduction by William S. Burroughs. — (1991) Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, Murray Scott, A. ed. (Edinburgh: Polygon). Vienet, R. (1968) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68 (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992). -- — (1973) La dialectique peut-il casser des bricques? (Paris: L’Oiseau de Minerve). Retaking the Universe(William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)/Part1:Theoretical Depositions/Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists/Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Gilles Deleuze Conversation with Gilbert Cabasso and Fabrice Revault d'Allonnes Cinema334 (December 18, 1985) A hundred years of cinema. . . and only now does a philosopher have the idea of setting out concepts specific to cinema. What should we make of this blind spot of philosophical reflection? It's true that philosophers haven't taken much notice of cinema, even though they go to cinemas. Yet it's an interesting coincidence that cinema appeared at the very time philosophy was trying to think motion. That might even explain why philosophy missed the importance of cinema: it was itself too involved in doing something analogous to what cinema wasdoing; it was trying to put motion into thought while cinema was putting it into images. The two projects developed independently before any encounter became possible. Yet cinema critics, the greatest critics anyway, became philosophers the moment they set out to formulate an aesthetics of cinema. They weren't trained as philosophers, but that's what they became. You see it already in Bazin. How do you see the place of film criticism these days-what role should it play ? Film criticism faces twin dangers: it shouldn't just describe films but nor should it apply to them concepts taken from outside film. The job of criticism is to form concepts that aren't of course "given" in films but nonetheless relate specifically to cinema, and to some specific genre of film, to some specific film or other. Concepts specific to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. They're not technical notions (like tracking, continuity, false continuity, 1depth or flatness offield, and so on), because technique only makes sense in relation to ends which it presupposes but doesn't explain. It's these ends that constitute the concepts of cinema. Cinema sets out to produce self-movement in images, auto temporalization even: that's the key thing, and it's these two aspects I've tried to study. But what exactly does cinema thereby show us about space and time that the other arts don't show? A tracking shot and a pan give two very different spaces. A tracking shot sometimes even stops tracing out space and plunges into time in Visconti, for instance. I've tried to analyse the space of Kurosawa's and Mizoguchi's films: in one it's an encompassing, in the other, a world-line. They're very different: what happens along a worldline isn't the same as what happens within an encompassing. Technical details are subordinate to these overall finalities. And that's the difficulty: you have to have monographs on auteurs, but then these have to be grafted onto differentiations, specific determinations, and reorganisations of concepts that force you to reconsider cinema as a whole. How can you exclude, from the problematic of body and thought that runs right through your reflection, psychoanalysis and its relation to cinema? Or linguistics for that matter. That is, "concepts taken from outside film"? It's the same problem again. The concepts philosophy introduces to deal with cinema must be specific, must relate specifically to the cinema. You can, of course, link framing to castratioIl, or close-ups to partial objects, but I don't see what that tells us about cinema. It's questionable whether the notion of "the imaginary, " even, has any bearing on cinema; cinema produces reality. It's all very well psychoanalysing Dreyer, but here as elsewhere, it doesn't tell us much. It makes more sense to compare Dreyer and Kierkegaard; because already for Kierkegaard, the problem was to "make" a movement, and he thought only "choice" could do this: then cinema's proper object becomes a spiritual choice. A comparative psychoanalysis of Kierkegaard and Dreyer won't help us with the philosophical-cinematic problem of how this spiritual dimension becomes the object of cinema. The problem returns in a very different form in Bresson, in Rohmer, and pervades their films, which aren't at all abstract but very moving, very engaging. It's the same with linguistics: it also provides only concepts applicable to cinema from outside, the "syntagm" for instance. But that immediately reduces the cinematic image to an utterance, and its essential characteristic, its motion, is left out of consideration. The narrative in cinema is like the imaginary: it's a very indirect product of motion and time, rather than the other way around. Cinema always narrates what the image's movements and times make it narrate. If l by a sensory-motor scheme, if it shows a character reacting to a situation, then you get a story. If the motion's governed, on the other hand, the sensory-motor scheme breaks down to leave disoriented and discordant movements, then you get other patterns, becomings rather than stories. That's the whole importance, which you examine in your book, of neorealism. A crucial break, obviously connected with the war (RnsseUini and Visconti in Italy, Ray in America). And yet Ozu before the war and then Welles present one taking too historicist an approach. . . Yes, if the major break comes at the end of the war, with neorealism, it's precise because neorealism registers the collapse of sensorimotor schemes: characters no longer "know" how to react to situations that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble...So a new type of character appears. But, more important, the possibility appears of temporalizing the cinematic image: pure time, little bit of time in its pure form, rather than motion. This cinematic revolution may have been foreshadowed in different contexts by Welles and, long before the war, by Ozu. In Welles there's a depth of time, coexisting layers of time, which the depth of field develops on a truly temporal scale. And if Ozu's famous still life are thoroughly cinematic, it's because they bring out the unchanging pattern of time in a world that's already lost its sensory-motor connections. But what are the principles behind these changes? How can we assess them, aesthetically or otherwise? In short: on what basis can we assess films? I think one particularly important principle is the biology of the brain, a microbiology. It's going through a complete transformation and coming up with extraordinary discoveries. It's not to psychoanalysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should look for principles, because it doesn't have the drawback, like the other two disciplines, of applying ready-made concepts. We can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-image or time-image trace out, or invent because the circuits aren't there, to begin with. Take Resnais's films, for example, a cinema of the brain, even though, once again, they can be very entertaining or very moving. The circuits into which Resnais's characters are drawn, the waves they ride, are cerebral circuits, brain waves. The whole of cinema can be assessed in terms of the cerebral circuits it establishes, simply because it's a moving image. Cerebral doesn't mean intellectual: the brain's emotive, impassioned too. . . You have to look at the richness, the complexity, the significance of these arrangements, these connections, disjunctions, circuits and short-circuits. Because of most cinematic production, with its arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism, reflects mental deficiency rather than any invention of new cerebral circuits. What happened with pop videos is pathetic: they could have become a really interesting new field of cinematic activity but were immediately taken over by organised mindlessness. Aesthetics can't be divorced from these complementary questions of cretinization and cerebralization. Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too. Cinema seems, on the face of it, more a part of civic life than does philosophy. How can we bridge that gap, what can we do about it? That may not be right. I don't think people like the Straubs, for example, even considered as political filmmakers, fit any more easily than philosophers into "civic life." Any creative activity has a political aspect and significance. The problem is that such activity isn't very compatible with circuits of information and communication, ready-made circuits that are compromised from the outset. All forms of creativity, including any creativity that might be possible on television, here face a common enemy. Once again it's a cerebral matter: the brain's the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most basic conditioned reflexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more creative tracings, less "probable" links. The brain's a spatiotemporal volume: it's up to art to trace through it the new paths open to us today. You might see continuities and false continuities as cinematic synapses-you get different links, and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The overall importance or significance of cinema seems to me to depend on this sort of problem. interview with Gilles Deleuze Conversation of September 13, 1983, with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni, asset down and amplified by the participants Cahiers du Cinema 352 (October 1983) Your book's presented, not as a history of cinema, but as a classification of images and signs, a taxonomy. In this respect, it follows on from some of your earlier works: for instance, you made a classification of signs when writing about Proust. But with The Movement-Image you've decided for the first time to tackle, not a philosophical problem or a particular body of work (that of Spinoza, Kafka, Bacon, or Proust, say),but the whole of a particular field, in this case cinema. And also, although you rule out producing a history of cinema, you deal with it historically. Well yes, in a way it's a history of cinema, but a "natural history." It aims to classify types of images and the corresponding signs, western, whole, as one classifies animals. The main genres, western, crime, period films, comedy, and soon, tell us nothing about different types of images or their intrinsic characteristics. The different sorts of shot, on the other hand-dose-up, long shot, and soon-do amount to different types of image, but there are lots of other factors, lighting, sound, time, which come in too. If I consider the field of nine whole, images, it's because it's all built upon the movement-image. That's how it's able to reveal or create a maximum of dpi images, and aboveall to combinethemwithone another through montage. I There are perception-images, action-images, affection-images, along with many other types. And in each case there are internal signs that characteristic extremely rich classification of signs, relatively independent linguistic model. It was particularly tempting to see whether the most matter introduced by cinema was going to require a new understanding of images and signs. In this sense, I've tried to produce book on logic, a logic of cinema. Isn't this just what you get in a filmmaker like Dreyer, who inspires some very fine passages in your book? I recently saw Gertrud again, which is going to be re-released after twenty years. It's a wonderful film, where the modulation between different levels of time reaches a subtlety only, sometimes, equalled in Mizoguchi's films (with the appearance and disappearance of the potter's wife, dead and alive, at the end of Ugetsu Monogatari, for instance). And Dreyer, in his essays, is constantly saying we should get rid of the third dimension, depth, and produce flat images, setting them in direct relation to a fourth and fifth dimension, to Time and spirit. When he discusses The Word, for example, whats so intriguing is his explanation that it's not a story about ghosts or madness, it's about a "profound relation between exact science and intuitive religion. " And he invokes Einstein. I quote: " Recent science, following upon Einstein's relativity has brought proofs of the existence outside the world of three dimensions which is that of our senses of a fourth dimension, that of time, and a fifth, the psychical. It has been shown that it is possible to experience events which have not yet taken place. New perspectives have been opened up which make us recognise a profound relation between exact science and intuitive religion. " . . . But let's return to the question of "the history of cinema. "You introduce an order of succession, you say a certain type of image appears at a certain moment, for instance after the war. So you're not just producing an abstract classification or even a natural history. You want to account for a historical development too. In the first place, the various types of image don't already exist, they have to be created. A flat image or, conversely, depth of field, always has to be created or re-created-signs, if you like, always imply a signature. So an analysis of images and signs has to include monographs on major auteurs. To take an example: I think expressionism conceives light in relation to darkness, and their relation is one of struggle. In the prewar French school it's quite different: there's no struggle, but alternation; not only is light itself motion, but there are two alternating lights, solar and lunar. It's very similar to the painter Delaunay. It's anti-expressionism. If an auteur like Rivette belongs these days to the French school, it's because he's rediscovered and completely reworked this theme of two kinds of light. He's done wonders with it. He's not only like Delaunay, but like Nerval in literature. He's the most Nervalian, the only Nervalian, filmmaker. There are of course historical and geographical factors in all this, running through cinema, bringing it into relation with other arts, subjecting it to influences and allowing it to exert them. There's a whole history. But this history of images doesn't seem to me to be developmental. I think all images combine the same elements, the same signs, differently. But not just any combination's possible at just any moment: a particular element can only be developed given certain conditions, without which it will remain atrophied, or secondary. So there are different levels of development, each of them perfectly coherent, rather than lines of descent or filiation. That's why one should talk of natural history rather than historical history. Still, your classification's an evaluation. It implies value judgments about the auteurs you deal with, and so about those you hardly notice, or don't mention. The book does, to be sure, point toward a sequel, leaving us on the threshold of a time-image that goes beyond the movement-image. But in this first volume you describe the breakdown of the action-image at the end of, and just after, the Second World War (Italian neorealism, then the French New Wave. . . ). Aren't some of the features by which you characterize the cinema of this crisis (a taking into account of reality as fragmentary and dispersive, a feeling that everythings become a cliche, constant permutations of what s central and peripheral, new articulations of sequences, a breakdown of the simple link between a given situation and a characters action) . . . isn't all that already there in two prewar films, The Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane, generally considered to be founding works of modern cinema, which you don't mention? I don't, first of all, claim to have discovered anyone, and all the auteurs I cite are well-known people I really admire. For example, on the monographic side, I consider Losey's world: I try to define it as a great sheer cliff dotted with huge birds, helicopters, and disturbing sculptures, towering over a little Victorian city at its foot. It's Losey's own way of recreating the naturalist framework. A framework of which you get different versions in Stroheim, in Bunuel. I take someone's work as a whole, I don't think there's anything bad in a great body of work: in Losey's case The Trout was disparaged, even by Cahiers, because people didn't take enough account of its place in his work as a whole: it's a reworking of Eva. Then you say there are gaps, Welles, Renoir, tremendously important auteurs. That's because I can't in this volume deal with their work as a whole. Renoir's work seems to me dominated by a certain relation between theater and life or, more precisely, between actual and virtual images. I think Welles was the first to construct a direct Time-image, a Time-image that's no longer just derived from movement. It's an amazing advance, later taken up by Resnais. But I couldn't discuss these things in the first volume, whereas I could discuss Naturalism as a whole. Even with neorealism and the New Wave, I only touch on their most superficial aspects, right at the very end. One gets the impression, all the same, that what really interests you is naturalism and spiritualism (say Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey on the one hand, Bresson and Dreyer on the other), that is, naturalism's descent and degradation, and the elan, the ascent of spirit, the fourth dimension. They're vertical motions. You don't seem so interested in horizontal motion, in the linking of actions, in American cinema for example. And when you come to neorealism and the New Wave, you talk sometimes about the action-image breaking down, and sometimes about the movement-image in general breaking down. Are you saying that at that point it's the movement-image as a whole that begins to break down, producing a situation where another type of image that goes beyond movement can appear; or just the action-image, leaving in place, or even reinforcing, the other two aspects of the movement-image: pure perceptions and affections? It's not enough just to say that modern cinema breaks with narrative. That's only an effect whose cause lies elsewhere. The cinema of action depicts sensory-motor situations: there are characters, in a certain situation, who act, perhaps very violently, according to how they perceive the situation. Actions are linked to perceptions and perceptions develop into actions. Now, suppose a character finds himself in a situation, however ordinary or extraordinary, that's beyond any possible action, or to which he can't react. It's too powerful, or too painful, too beautiful. The sensory-motor link's broken. He's no longer in a sensory-motor situation, but in a purely optical and aural situation. There's a new type of image. Take the foreign woman in Rosselini's Stromboli: she goes through the tuna-fishing, the tuna's agony, then the volcano's eruption. She doesn't know how to react, can't respond, it's too intense: "I've had it, I'm afraid, it's so strange, so beautiful, God . . . " Or the posh lady, seeing the factory in Europa 51 : 'They looked like convicts. . . " That, I think, is neorealism's great innovation: we no longer have much faith in being able to act upon situations or react to situations, but it doesn't make us at all passive, it allows us to catch or reveal something intolerable, unbearable, even i in the most everyday things. It's a Visionary cinema. As Robbe-Grillet , says, descriptions replace objects. Now, when we find ourselves in these purely optical and aural situations, not only does action and thus narrative break down, but the nature of perceptions and affecions changes, because they enter a completely different system, from the sensory-motor system of "classic" cinema. What's more, we're no longer in the same type of space: space, having lost its motor connections, becomes a disconnected or vacant space. Modern cinema constructs extraordinary spaces; sensory-motor signs have given way to "opsigns" and "sonsigns." There's still movement, of course. But the movement-image as a whole comes into question. And here again, obviously, the new optical and aural image involves external factors resulting from the war, if only half-demolished or derelict spaces, all the forms of "wandering" that take the place of action, and the rise, everywhere, of what is intolerable. An image never stands alone. The key thing's the relation between images. So when perception becomes purely optical and aural, with what does it come into relation, if not with action? An actual image, cut off from its motor development, comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image. I saw the factory, and they looked like convicts. . . Instead of a linear development, we get a circuit in which the two images are constantly chasing one another round a point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable. The actual image and its virtual image crystallize, so to speak. It's a crystal image, always double or duplicated, which we find already in Renoir, but in Ophuls too, and which reappears in a different form in Fellini. There are many ways images can crystallize, and many crystalline signs. But you always see something in the crystal. In the first place, you see Time, layers of time, a direct time-image. Not that movement's ceased, but the relation between movement and time's been inverted. Time no longer derives from the combination of movement-images (from montage), it's the other way round, movement now follows from time. Montage doesn't necessarily vanish, but it plays a different role, becomes what Lapoujade calls "montrage." Second, the image bears a new relation to its optical and aural elements: you might say that in its visionary aspect it becomes more "legible" than visible. So a whole pedagogy of the image, like Godard's, becomes possible. Finally, image becomes thought, is able to catch the mechanisms of thought, while the camera takes on various functions strictly comparable to propositional functions. It's in these three respects, I think, that we get be ond the movement-image. One might talk, in a classification, of "chronosigns", "lectosigns", and "noosigns." You're very critical of linguistics, and of theories of cinema inspired by that discipline. Yet you talk of images becoming "legible" rather than "visible." Now, the term legible as applied to cinema was all the rage when linguistics dominated film theory ("reading a film, " "readings" of films. . .). Isn't there a risk of confusion in your use of this word? Does your term legible image convey something different from that linguistic conception, or does it bring you back to it? No, I think not. It's catastrophic to try and apply linguistics to cinema. Of course, thinkers like Metz, or Pasolini, have done very important critical work. But their application of a linguistic model always ends up showing that cinema is something different, and that if it's a language, it's an analogical one, a language of modulation. This might lead one to think that applying a linguistic model is a detour that's better avoided. Among Bazin's finest pieces there's one where he explains that photography's a mold, a molding (you might saythat, in a different way,language too is a mold), whereas cinema is modulation through and through. Not just the voices but sounds, lights, and movements are being constantly modulated. These parameters of the image are subjected to variations, repetitions, alternations, recycling, and so on. Any recent advances relative to what we call classic cinema, which already went so far in this direction, have two aspects, evident in electronic images: an increasing number of parameters, and the generation of divergent series, where the classic image tended toward convergent series. This corresponds to a transition from visibility to legibility. The legibility of images relates to the independence of their parameters and the divergence of series. There's another aspect, too, which takes us back to an earlier remark. It's the question of verticality. Our visual world's determined in part by our vertical posture. An American critic, Leo Steinberg, explained that modern painting is defined less by a flat purely visual space than by ceasing to privilege the vertical: it's as though the window's replaced as a model by an opaque horizontal or tilting plane on which elements are inscribed. That's the sense of legibility, which doesn't imply a language but something like a diagram. As Beckett says, it's better to be sitting than standing, and better to be lying down than sitting. Modern ballet brings this out really well: sometimes the most dynamic movements take place on the ground, while upright the dancers stick to each other and give the impression they'd collapse if they moved apart. Maybe in cinema the screen retains only a purely nominal verticality and functions like a horizontal or tilting plane. Michael Snow has seriously questioned the dominance of verticality and has even constructed special equipment to explore the question. Cinema's great auteurs work like Varese in music: they have to work with what they've got, but they call forth new equipment, new instruments. These instruments produce nothing in the hands of second-rate auteurs, providing only a substitute for ideas. It's the ideas of great auteurs, rather, that call them forth. That's why I don't think cinema will die, and be replaced by TV or video. Great auteurs can adapt any new resource. Verticality may well beone of the great questions of modern cinema: it's at the heart of Glauber Rocha's latest film, The Age of the Earth, for example - a marvelous film containing unbelievable shots that really defy verticality. And yet, by considering cinema only from this "geometric, "spatial angle, aren't you missing an essentially dramatic dimension, which comes out for example in the problem of the l00k as handled by auteurs like Hitchcock and Lang? You do, in relation to Hitchcock, talk about a "demarque," which seems implicitly to relate to the look. But the notion of the look, the very word itself, doesn't once appear in your book. Is this deliberate? I'm not sure the notion's absolutely necessary. The eye's already there in things, it's part of the image, the image's visibility. Bergson shows how an image itself is luminous or visible, and needs only a "dark screen" to stop it tumbling around with other images, to stop its light diffusing, spreading in all directions, to reflect and refract the light. 'The light which, if it kept on spreading, would never be seen." The eye isn't the camera, it's the screen. As for the camera, with all its ropositional functions, it's a sort of third eye, the mind's eye. You cite Hitchcock: he does, it's true, bring the viewer into the film, as Truffaut and Douchet have shown. But that's nothing to do with the look. It's rather because he frames the action in a whole network of relations. Say the action's a crime. Then these relations are another dimension that allows the criminal to "give" his crime to someone else, to transfer or pass it on to someone else. Rohmer and Chabrol saw this really well. The relations aren't actions but symbolic acts that have a purely mental existence (gift, exchange, and so on). And they're what the camera reveals: framing and camera movement display mental relations. If Hitchcock's so English, it's because what interests him is the problem and the paradoxes of relation. The frame for him is like a tapestry frame: it holds within it the network of relations, while the action is just a thread moving in and out of the network. What Hitchcock thus brings into cinema is, then, the mental image. It's not a matter of the look, and if the camera's an eye, it's the mind's eye. So Hitchcock has a special place in cinema: he goes beyond the action-image to something deeper, mental relations, a kind of vision. Only, instead of seeing this as a breaking-down of the action image, and of the movement-image in general, he makes it a consummation, saturation, of that image. So you might equally well say he's the last of the classic directors, or the first of the moderns. You see Hitchcock as the prototypical filmmaker of relations, of what you call thirdness. Relations: is that what you mean by the whole ? It's a difficult bit of your book. You invoke Bergson, saying the whole isn't closed, it's rather the Open, something that's always open. It's particular sets of things that are closed, and one mustn't confuse the two . . . The Open is familiar as a key notion in Rilke's poetry. But it's a notion in Bergson's philosophy too. The key thing is to distinguish between particular sets of things and the whole. Once you confuse them, the whole makes no sense and you fall into the famous paradox of the set of all sets. A set of things may contain very diverse elements, but it's nonetheless closed, relatively closed or artificially limited. I say "artificially" because there's always some thread, however tenuous, linking the set to another larger set, to infinity. But the whole is of a different nature, it relates to time: it ranges over all sets of things, and it's precisely what stops them completely fulfilling their own tendency to become completely closed. Bergson's always saying that Time is the Open, is what changes-is constantly changing in nature-each moment. It's the whole, which isn't any set of things but the ceaseless passage from one set to another, the transformation of one set of things into another. It's very difficult to think about, this relation between time, the whole, and openness. But it's precisely cinema that makes it easier for us to do this. There are, as it were, three coexisting levels in cinematography: framing, which defines a provisional artificially limited set of things; cutting, which defines the distribution of movement or movements among the elements of the set; and then this movement reflects a change or variation in the whole, which is the realm of montage. The whole ranges over all sets and is precisely what stops them becoming "wholly" closed. By talking about off screen space, we're saying on the one hand that any given set of things is part of another larger two- or three-dimensional set, but we're also saying that all sets are embedded in a whole that's different in nature, a fourth or fifth dimension, constantly changing across all the sets (however large) over which it ranges. In the first case we have spatial and material extension, but in the other, the spiritual order we find in Dreyer or Bresson. The two aspects aren't mutually exclusive but complementary, mutually supportive, and sometimes one's dominant, sometimes the other. Cinema's always played upon these coexisting levels, each great auteur has his own way of conceiving and using them. In a great film, as in any work of art, there's always something open. And it always turns out to be time, the whole, as these appear in every different film in very different ways. Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972-1990 / part two CINEMAS/Gilles Deleuze : translated by Martin Joughin. Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Pourparlers @ 1990 by Les Editions de Minuit Translation copyright@ 1995 Columbia University Press interview with Gilles Deleuze Cahiers du Cinema has asked you for an interview, because you're a "Philosopher" and we wanted to do something philosophical, but more specifically because you like and admire Godard s work. What do you think of his recent TV programs? Like many people, I was moved, and it's a lasting emotion. Maybe I should explain my image of Godard. As someone who works a great deal, he must be a very solitary figure. But it's not just any solitude, it's an extra ordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies, and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative solitude. From the depths of this solitude Godard constitutes a force in his own right but also gets others to work as a team. He can deal as an equal with anyone, with official powers or organizations, as well as a cleaning lady, a worker, mad people. In the TV programs, Godard's questions always engage people directly. They disorient us, the viewers, but not whoever he's talking to. He talks to crazy people in a way that's no more that of a psychiatrist than of another madman, or of someone "playing the fool." He talks with workers not as a boss, or another worker, or an intellectual, or a director talking with actors. It's nothing to do with adopting their tone, in a wily sort of way, it's because his solitude gives him a great capacity, is so full. It's as though, in a way, he's always stammering. Not stammering in his words, but stammering in language itself. You can normally only be a foreigner in another language. But here it's a case of being a foreigner in one's own language. Proust said that fine books have to be written in a sort offoreign language. It's the same with Godard's programs; he's even perfected his Swiss accent to precisely this effect. It's this creative stammering, this solitude, which makes Godard a force. Because, as you know better than I do, he's always been alone. Godard's never had any popular success with his films, as those who say "he's changed, from such and such a point onward it's no good" would have us believe. They're often the very people who initially hated him. Godard was ahead of, and influenced, everyone, but not by being a success, rather by following his own line, a line of active flight, a repeatedly broken line zigzagging beneath the surface. Anyway,in cinema, they more or less managed to lock him into his solitude. They pinned him down. And now he's used the opportunity presented by the holidays, and a vague demand for creativity,to take over the TVfor six times two programs. It may be the sole case of someone not being duped byTV.You've usually lost from the outset. People wouldn't have minded him promoting his films, but they can't forgive him for making this series that changes so many things at the heart of TV (questioning people, making them talk, showing images from a variety of sources, and so on). Even now it's over, even if it's been stifled. Many groups and associations were bound to get annoyed: the statement from the Union of Photographic Journalists and Cameramen is a good example. Godard has at the very least stirred up hatred. But he's also shown that a differently "animated" TV is possible. You haven't answered our question. Say you had to give a "course" on these programs. . . What ideas did you see, or sense in them? How would you try to explain your enthusiasm? We can always talk about everything elseafterward, even ifit's what's most important. OK, but ideas, having an idea, isn't about ideology, it's a practical matter. Godard has a nice saying: not a just image, just an image. Philosophers ought also to say " not the just ideas, just ideas" and bear this out in their activity. Because the just ideas are always those that conform to accepted meanings or established precepts, they're always ideas that confirm something, even if it's something in the future, even if it's the future of the revolution. While "just ideas" is a becoming-present, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of questions that tend to confound any answers. Or you can present some simple thing that disrupts all the arguments. There are two ideas in Godard's programs that work this way,constantly encroaching on one another, getting mixed up and teased apart bit by bit. This is one reason why each program has two parts: as at primary school there are the two elements oflearning about things and learning about language. The first idea is to do with work. I think Godard's constantly bringing into question a vaguely Marxist scheme that has spread everywhere: there's supposed to be something pretty abstract called "labor" that one can buy or sell, in situations that either mark a basic social injustice or establish a little more socialjustice. But Godard asks very concrete questions, he presents images touching on what exactly is being bought and sold. What are some people prepared to buy, and others to sell, these not necessarily being the same thing? A young welder is prepared to sell his work as a welder, but not his sexuality by becoming an old woman's lover. A cleaning lady's happy to sell the time she spends cleaning but won't sell the moment she spends singing a bit of the "Internationale" why? Because she can't sing? But what, then, if one were to pay her for talking about not being able to sing? A specialist clockmaker, on the other hand, wants to get paid for his clockmaking efforts, but refuses to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his "hobby"; but the images show that the movements he makes in the two activities, the clockmaking sequence and the editing sequence, are so remarkably similar that you can mistake one for the other. But no, saysthe clockmaker, there's a great difference oflove and warmth in these movements, I don't want to be paid for my filmmaking. But then what about filmmakers and photographers who do get paid? What, furthermore, is a photographer himself prepared to pay for? He's sometimes prepared to pay his model. Sometimes the model pays him. But when he photographs torture or an execution, he pays neither the victim nor the executioner. And when he photographs children who are sick, wounded, or hungry, why doesn't he pay them? Guattari once suggested at a psychoanalytical congress that analysands should be paid as well as analysts, since the analyst isn't exactly providing a "service," it's more like a division of labor, two distinct kinds of work going on: there's the analyst's work of listening and sifting, but the analysand's unconscious is at work too. Nobody seems to have taken much notice of Guattari's suggestion. Godard's saying the same thing: why not pay the people who watch television, instead of making them pay, because they're engaged in real work and are themselves providing a public service? The social division of labor means it's not only work on the shop floor that gets paid but work in offices and research laboratories too. Otherwise we'd have to think about the workers themselves having to pay the people who design the things they make. I think all these questions and many others, all these images and many others, tear apart the notion of labor. In the first place, the very notion of labor arbitrarily sets one area of activity apart, cuts work off from its relation to love, to creativity, to production even. It makes work a kind of maintenance, the opposite of creating anything, because on this notion it's a matter of reproducing goods that are consumed and reproducing its own productive force, within a closed system of exchange. From this view point it doesn't much matter whether the exchange is fair or unfair, because there's always selective violence in an act of payment, and there's mystification in the very principle of talking in terms oflabor. It's to the extent that work might be distinguished from the productive pseudoforce of labor that very different flows of production, of many disparate kinds, might be brought into direct relation with flows of money, independently of any mediation by an abstract force. I'm even more confused than Godard. Just as I should be, since the key thing is the questions Godard asks and the images he presents and a chance of the spectator feeling that the notion of labor isn't innocent, isn't at all obvious-even, and particularly, from the viewpoint of social criticism. It's this, quite as much as the more obvious things, that explains the reactions of the Communist Party and some unions to Godard's programs: he's dared to question that sacrosanct notion of labor. . . And then there's the second idea, to do with information. Because here again, language is presented to us as basically informative, and information as basically an exchange. Once again, information is measured in abstract units. But it's doubtful whether the schoolmistress, explaining how something works or teaching spelling, is transmitting information. She's instructing, she's really delivering precepts. And children are supplied with syntax like workers being given tools, in order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings. We should take him quite literally when Godard sayschildren are political prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of conveying information. TV tells us: "Now we'll have a bit of entertainment, then the news. . . " We ought in fact to invert the scheme of information theory. The theory assumes a theoretical maximum of information, with pure noise, interference, at the other extreme; and in between there's redundancy, which reduces the information but allows it to overcome noise. But we should actually start with redundancy as the transmission and relaying of orders or instructions; next, there's information-always the minimum needed for the satisfactory reception of orders; then what? Well, then there's something like silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through underneath the redundancies and information, letting language slip through, and making itself heard, in spite of everything. To talk, even about yourself, is always to take the place of someone else in whose place you're claiming to speak and who's been denied the right to speak. Orders and precepts stream from seguy's open mouth.2 But the woman with the dead child is open-mouthed too. An image gets represented by a sound, like a worker by his representative. A sound takes over a series of images. So how can we manage to speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone, how can we get people without the right to speak, to speak; and how can we restore to sounds their part in the struggle against power? I suppose that's what it means to be like a foreigner in one's own language, to trace a sort of line of flight for words. That's "just" two ideas, but two ideas is a lot, it's massive, includes loads of things and other ideas. So Godard brings into question two everyday notions, those of labor and information. He doesn't saywe should give true information, nor that labor should be weUpaid (those would be the just ideas). He says these notions are very suspect. He writes FALSE beside them. He's been saying for ages that he'd like to be a production company rather than an auteur, and to run the television news rather than make films. He didn't of course mean he wanted to produce his own films, like Verneuil, or take over TV. But that he wanted to produce a mosaic of different work rather than measuring it all against some abstract productive force, and wanted to produce a sub-informational juxtaposition of all the open mouths instead of relating them all to some abstract information taken as a precept. If those are Godard's two ideas, do they correspond to the theme of "sounds and images" that constantly recurs in the programs? Images-learning from things-relating to work, and sounds-learning the language-relating to information? No, there's only a partial correspondence: there's always information in images, and something at work in sounds. Any set of terms can and should be divided up in various ways that correspond only partially. To try and articulate the relation between sounds and images as Godard understands it you'd have to tell a very abstract story, in several episodes, and then finally see that this abstract story corresponds to a single episode of something terribly simple and concrete. 1.There are images, things are themselves images, because images aren't in our head, in our brain. The brain's just one image among others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There's no difference at all between images, things, and motion. 2. But images also have an insideor certain images have an inside and are experienced from inside. They're subjects (Godard's remarks on Two or Three Things I Know About Her in Godard on Godard, pp. 239-42). And there's a gapbetween actions upon these images and the reactions they produce. It's this gap that enables them to store up other images, that is to perceive. But what they store is only what interests them in other images: perceiving issubtracting from an image what doesn't interest us, there's alwayslessin our perception. We're so full of images we no longer see those outside us for what they are. 3. There are also aural images, which don't seem to have any priority. Yet these aural images, or some of them, have an otherside you can call whatever you like, ideas, meaning, language, expressive aspects, and so on. Aural images are thus able to contract or capture other images or a series of other images. A voice takes over a set of images (the voice of Hitler, say). Ideas, acting as precepts, are embodied in aural images or sound waves and saywhat should interest us in other images: they dictate our perception. There's always a central "rubber stamp" normalizing images, subtracting what we're not supposed to see. So, given the earlier gap, we can trace out as it were two converse currents: one going from external images to perceptions, the other going from prevailing ideas to perceptions. 4. So we're caught in a chain of images, each of us in our own particular place, each ourself an image, and also in a network of ideas acting as precepts. And so what Godard's doing with his "words and images" goes in two directions at once. On the one hand he's restoring their fullness to external images, so we don't perceive something less, making perception equal to the image, giving back to images all that belongs to them-which is in itself a way of challenging this or that power and its rubber stamps. On the other hand, he's undoing the way language takes power, he's making it stammer in sound waves, taking apart any set of ideas purporting to be just ones and extracting from it just some ideas. These are perhaps two reasons among others why Godard makes such novel use of the staticshot. It' s rather like what some contemporary musicians do by introducing a fixed aural plane so that everything in music is heard. And when Godard puts a blackboard on the screen and writes on it, he's not making it something he can film but making the blackboard and writing into a new televisual resource, a sort of expressive material with its own particular current in relation to the other currents on the screen. This whole abstract story in four episodes sounds a bit like science fiction. But it's our social reality these days. The strange thing is that the story corresponds in various ways to what Bergson said in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Bergson's seen as a sedate old philosopher who's no longer of any interest. It would be good if cinema or television revived interest in him (he should be on the IDHEC syllabus, maybe he is). The first chapter of Matter and Memory develops an amazing conception of the relations between photography and cinematic motion, and things: "photography, if there is such a thing as photography, is caught from the outset in, drawn from the start right into the interior of things, and this at every point in space," and so on. That's not to say Godard's a Bergsonian. It's more the other way around; Godard's not even reviving Bergson, but finding bits of Bergson along his way as he revivifies television. But why does everything in Godard come in twos? You need two toget three. . . Fine, but what are these twos and threes all about ? Oh, come on, you know better than anyone it's not like that. Godard's not a dialectician. What counts with him isn't two or three or however many, it's AND, the conjunction AND. The key thing is Godard's use of AND. This is important, because all our thought's modeled, rather, on the verb "to be," IS. Philosophy's weighed down with discussions about attributive judgments (the sky is blue) and existential judgments (God is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing one to the other. But they all turn on the verb "to be." Even conjunctions are dealt with in terms of the verb "to be"-look at syllogisms. The English and the Americans are just about the only people who've set conjunctions free, by thinking about relations. But when you see relational judgments as autonomous, you realize that they creep in everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: AND isn't even a specific conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as many relations as ANDS, AND doesn't just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb. . . and so on. AND, "and. . . and . . . and . . . "is precisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb "to be." AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife isn't the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity are nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of "one more," "one more woman" ...) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of "one produces two, which then produces three"). Because in those cases it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple. When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there's morning and evening, he's not saying it's one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the "and," which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them. Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it's always in between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape. ''The strong people aren't the ones on one side or the other, power lies on the border." Giscard d'Estaing made a sad observation in the lecture on military geography he recently gave the army: the more that things become balanced at the level of the largest groups, between West and East, U.S.A. and USSR, with planetary consensus, link-ups in space, global policing, and so on, the more they become "destabilized" between North and South-Giscard cites Angola, the Near East, the Palestinian resistance, but also all the unrest that produces "a regional destabilization of security," airplane hijacking, Corsica. . . Between North and South we'll keep on finding lines that derail the big groups, an AND, AND, AND which each time marks a new threshold, a new direction of the broken line, a new course for the border. Godard's trying to "see borders," that is, to show the imperceptible. The convict and his wife. The mother and child. But also images and sounds. And the clockmaker's movements when he's in his clockmaking sequence and when he's at his editing table: an imperceptible border separates them, belonging to neither but carrying both forward in their disparate development, in a flight or in a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor where it's going. A whole micropolitics of borders, countering the macropolitics of large groups. At least we know that's where things come to pass, on the border between images and sounds, where images become too full and sounds too strident. That's what Godard's done in Six Times Two: made this active and creative line pass six times between them, made it visible, as it carries television forward. Cahiers du Cinema271 (November 1976) Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972-1990 / part two CINEMAS/Gilles Deleuze : translated by Martin Joughin. Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Pourparlers @ 1990 by Les Editions de Minuit Translation copyright@ 1995 Columbia University Press Given our critique of the affirmationist interpretation, and while Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) is Patton’s exemplar of something that approximates a Deleuzean ethico-political program, we should turn our attention to Godard’s 1965 sci-fi noir film Alphaville as the measure (and critique) of this affirmationist reading. Turning to Alphaville is crucial since it is the film where Godard achieves in cinema what Deleuze himself would only put down to paper towards the end of his life: the problem of how one makes revolution from within the contemporary paradigm of control societies. Not only were societies of control emerging as the latest form of capitalism’s ongoing globalization in Deleuze’s own life time; specific for our purposes here, what Deleuze understands as the technical and material conditions of control societies is precisely what Godard explores through the figure of an artificially intelligent computer (Alpha 60) that regulates the city of Alphaville as a whole with the aim of ensuring ‘civic order’ and dependable (i.e., predictable) citizenry. It is Alpha 60 who surveils, polices, and determines the guilt or innocence of the citizenry; that is, this AI form of governance is the perfect instance of those cybernetic machines at work in capitalist-control societies. Additionally, this emerging problem of control was a consequence of the shift from the ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image,’ as Deleuze notes. It is a shift to the paradigm that “registers the collapse of sensory-motor schemes: characters no longer “know” how to react to situations that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble…So a new type of character appears” (Negotiations, 59). However, what Deleuze leaves implicit and under theorized in his concept of the ‘time-image,’ is the following: after the second world war, where we see a shift from the ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image,’ there was a simultaneous shift in how nation-states began to conceive of the role of global strategies of governance. During and after the war, information theorists, scientists, and academics were employed by the American government to develop the technological means for establishing a certain degree of civic order in a world that has proven itself capable of succumbing to the ever looming threat of global war. It was this emerging group of scientists and academics that would construct the very means for actualizing societies of control (Deleuze) and were the real world correlates for the social function of Alpha 60 (Godard): “the very persons who made substantial contributions to the new means of communication and of data processing after the Second World War also laid the basis of that “science” that Wiener called “cybernetics.” A term that Ampère…had had the good idea of defining as the “science of government.” So we’re talking about an art of governing whose formative moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology, artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole surface of the globe […] As Norbert Wiener saw it, “We are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we make look forward as worthy of our dignity.” Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world and to ensure “enclaves of order,” of stability, and–who knows?–the perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained, transparent, and controllable circulation of information” (The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, p.107-9). In the last instance, whether we speak of the paradigm of control in contemporary modes of governmentality or Alpha 60 in Alphaville, both Deleuze and Godard are concerned with the possibilities for the radical transformation of social life from within this context of cybernetic governance. Thus, it is against the background of societies of control that Patton’s affirmationist interpretation, and the politics that logically follows, will be measured and tested; if only to underscore how the affirmationist’s Platonism demonstrates that the application of metaphysical and epistemic truths into the domain of politics culminates in a praxis that is impotent at best and reactionary at worst. I. AGAINST ALL FUTURE ACCIDENTS, or CINEMA IN THE AGE OF CYBERNETICSGodard’s 1965 sci-fi noir film, Alphaville, tells the story of secret agent Lemmy Caution, a resident of the ‘Outlands’ whose journey into the town of Alphaville (officially, he is on a government organized trip with the objective of tracking down a certain Dr. von Braun) and his encounter with the cities seemingly mindless and one-dimensional inhabitants. The citizens of Alphaville are individuals who have been made to feel contented in indulging their drug habits, who have been assigned the social task of providing ‘escort’ services (predominantly women) for business persons and citizens alike (who are predominantly men); or those who, and they appear to be relatively few in the film, were former secret agents (like Lemmy himself) but have succumbed to the demands of life in the city. It is a place where even something as trivial as the conventions surrounding everyday language accord to the following maxim: “No one ever says ‘why;’ one says ‘because’” (00:50:06-00:50:10). And as Lemmy’s former colleague (now ex-secret agent) Henri Dickinson, remarks: “Their ideal here, in Alphaville, is a technocracy, like that of termites and ants” (00:23:23-00:23:32). In Alphaville, the citizens are governed such that they are treated as parts of an organic whole, who require attention and support only to the extent that all individuals can fulfill their social function, much like a worker ant relative to its queen. Early into the film we learn alongside our main character the reason for this ideal of technocracy: Alpha 60, an artificially intelligent computer program, monitors Alphaville’s inhabitants with the aim of maintaining a certain order and stability in the city as a whole. Alpha 60 is the police, government, judge, and jury whose authority stems from its superhuman capacity for computational analysis. Regarding this form of cybernetic governance, Alpha 60’s sole interest lies in determining which individuals of the population are capable of being socialized into civil society and which individuals are unassimilable and therefore must be exterminated. If Alphaville has something in common with Deleuze’s concept of control societies it is with regard to the question of contemporary forms of governance whose means are becoming less those of confinement and more so those of ensuring the aggregation of information, its transparency, in order to better surveil and control populations. We can see Godard’s concern with the set of problems of control and governance, of resistance and ordered obedience, in the conversation between Lemmy Caution and Alpha 60 towards the end of the film: Alpha 60: You are a menace to the security of Alphaville. Lemmy Caution: I refuse to become what you call normal. Alpha 60: Those you call mutants form a race superior to ordinary men whom we have almost eliminated. Lemmy Caution: Unthinkable. An entire race cannot be destroyed. Alpha 60: I shall calculate so that failure is impossible. Lemmy Caution: I shall fight so that failure is possible. (01:17:45-01:18:32) In light of this final dialogue, two things are worth noting. First, the antagonism between Lemmy Caution and Alpha 60; between the symbol of liberation from cybernetic governance and the symbol of control societies; takes the form of a struggle over what is deemed as possible and impossible. That is to say, not only is it the case that cybernetic governance is a form of control since it seeks to pre-emptively foreclose the possibility of the radical transformation of society. More importantly, and regarding the relation between Deleuze and Godard, it is precisely in the domain of the existence or inexistence of possibility that Deleuze locates the radical potential of both cinema and political change. As Deleuze writes in his now oft cited passage, “Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: ‘something possible, otherwise I will suffocate.’ It is this belief that makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of the absurd” (C2, 170). If ‘belief’ is the concept that offers the potential for freeing ourselves from control societies, it must be understood in the terms of the debate between Lemmy and Alpha 60. Determining what is possible and impossible becomes the contested site of politics, where the revolutionary, reformist, or reactionary character of one’s politics is but to the tested and ultimately revealed. In terms of Alphaville, it is clear that Lemmy Caution is a symbol of belief; the one who struggles for what is calculated as an impossibility from the perspective of the society of control regulated by Alpha 60 itself. Second, and regarding the relationship between Alphaville and the emergence of cybernetics as form of governmentality in general, one cannot be faulted for thinking that Godard himself created Alpha 60 simply from the aims and ambitions of the marriage between cybernetics and government as outlined by the French Information theorist Abraham Moles: “We envision that one global society, one State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social mechanisms” (cited in ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis,’ Tiqqun). Given this situation of control as the dominant form of governance in both Alphaville and contemporary capitalism, of what use could we make of Patton’s affirmationist politics? Does Alphaville and the present control society violate his reading of a Deleuzean vitalist principle of the ‘inherent creative powers of life’ and obstruct the experience of joyous encounters? In other words, with control societies as well as Alphaville, do we encounter an organization of social life such that there is an obstruction/violation of the essential productivity that defines the nature and structure of reality as well as the highest virtue for living beings as such? For Patton, the answer is straightforwardly affirmative: whether we consider Alphaville or societies of control, what we can be certain of is the ongoing violation of the creative powers of individuals in society and an obstruction of the possibility of living a life defined by joy as opposed to sadness. And it is precisely in this affirmative response that we see how Patton’s reconstruction of Deleuze’s metaphysical and epistemic commitments undercut any possibility for an ethico-political paradigm that can make good on the aspiration of the fundamental transformation of capitalist society into full communism as such: when what is understood to be metaphysically true (inherent creativity/productivity of life) is then used as the socio-political means to resist capitalist control, one may very well end up with a politics that privileges affirmation and creativity but it would not be a politics that necessarily coheres with that of Deleuze. For example, as Deleuze and Guattari state in the very first pages of Anti-Oedipus, this vitalist principle of continuous productivity and creation may be metaphysically significant but cannot be blindly projected as a program for political intervention. As they write, “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together” (AO, 2). Or again: “Even within society, this characteristic man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship is responsible for the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, consumption. But in general this entire level of distinctions, examined from the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes (as Marx has demonstrated) not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an overall process. For the real truth of the matter [is]…everything is production” (AO, 3-4) Thus, and while it remains true at the level of the nature of flows and becomings that there is some creative capacity to which human society and economic production remains intractably subject to, it is clear that the simple valorization of creativity/productivity as such does not provide us with the means to discriminate between different political orientations. Patton’s affirmationist interpretation, which collapses its metaphysical claims into its political prescriptions, fails to account for Deleuze and Guattari’s own principle that everything is production; and this initial principle necessarily includes qualitatively different organizations of society (e.g., capitalism, communism, fascism, libertarian). By equating what is essential for ‘life as such’ with what is desirable in the domain of politics, Patton precludes any possibility of deciding between competing political alternatives to presently existing capitalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, every social organization of society is productive in its own manner just as power produces more than it represses a la Foucault. Thus, if the criteria for the affirmationist position is the ‘freeing up of productivity wherever it is stymied,’ then the politics that stems from this principle affirms any and all organizations of social life necessarily since every form of society must be said to be productive, necessarily, though in its own particular manner. Thus, one of the major consequences of such a position is that Patton subtracts our capacity for proposing alternative visions of the world in relation to present circumstances. In depriving ourselves of the capacity for proposing an alternative to our present, not only does Patton’s political position exacerbate the very problem Deleuze took as the problem posed to the project of revolutionary transformation; Patton’s position also appears as a deviation from the very category of creativity that Deleuze himself valorized in the domains of art, philosophy, and ultimately, politics: “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present…Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation” (WP, 108). If Deleuze retains some place in his political framework for the category of creativity, it must be understood not as the most general feature of reality and rather as the construction of an alternativeto the present. In order to create something that is against one’s present and one’s time, one requires the capacity of discriminating between alternatives and this is precisely what Patton’s interpretation forecloses from the outset. By ignoring this specific use of the category of creativity in the realm of politics, Patton affirms, by necessity, everything (since everything is productive) and therefore prescribes a politics devoid of content/prescriptions, and abandoned to the machinations of the present. In this case, not even a nostalgia of the past ‘creativity’ of May ’68 can save Patton since, as Guattari notes: “Capitalism can always arrange things and smooth them over locally, but for the most part and essentially, everything has become increasingly worse […] The response to many actions has been predicted organized and calculated by the machines of state power. I am convinced that all of the possible variants of another May 1968 have already been programmed on an IBM” (‘We Are All Groupuscules’). with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Nina Power [Note: this dialogue took place in 2012-13. It was due to be published by a film magazine, but fell through for reasons beyond the control of the authors. Thank you to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith for permission to publish it on https://ninapower.net in 2017] My Note: Thank you to Nina Power for permission to publish it on ONscenes magazine Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: Pasolini has often been described as a Catholic Marxist but his Marxism was always unorthodox and he was never a Catholic although brought up in an environment permeated by the imagery and values of Italian Catholicism. Like most people on the left in Italy in the 1950s he was strongly anti-clerical (not surprising given the profoundly reactionary role played by the Catholic Church in Italy in the period) and it is only in his poetry that another side of him appears—an identification with suffering as experienced by the oppressed and potentially embodied in the figure of Christ. Then in 1958 the election of Pope John XXIII was a massive force for change—in Italian society, in the Church, and in Pasolini himself. Catholicism became something to engage with—as myth (in the noble sense of the word), as culture, as ideology, as a political force that was not necessarily quite so reactionary as it had been or seemed to be throughout most of preceding Italian history. Out of this set of conflicting impulses there were to emerge two of Pasolini’s most remarkable films, very contrasting both in content and in tone. The first of these, in 1963, was La ricotta (“Curd-cheese”), an episode of a curious compilation film called RoGoPaG after the names of the directors—Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti—signed up by Pasolini’s producer Alfredo Bini to contribute to it. La ricotta is an exuberant film, part in color and part in black-and-white and mixing comedy and tragedy in an unnerving way. It is also quite savage in its attacks on various targets, notably the Italian film industry, and arguably disrespectful to say the least toward Catholic tradition if not Christianity itself. On first release its makers were the victims of a successful prosecution for “insulting the religion of the State,” earning Bini a substantial fine and Pasolini a suspended prison sentence. No such fate awaited the second film, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, released a year later in 1964, which is a very straightforward and at times even reverential telling of the Gospel story in the version attributed to the Apostle Matthew. (The standard English title of this film is The Gospel According to Saint Matthew but Pasolini was furious at the theologically inappropriate intrusion of the word “Saint” and it will be called The Gospel According to Matthew throughout this dialogue.) The striking contrast between the two films calls for explanation. Did Pasolini have a change of heart between the making of the two films? Was it a profound change or just an opportunistic one? He was certainly very shaken by the virulent response to La ricotta and it is at least arguable that the Gospel film was a response to his critics and that he deliberately made it as unlikely to cause offense as he possibly could. But this explanation, proffered at the time, does not stand up to scrutiny. For a start the Gospel film was already at an advanced stage of planning at the time the trial of La ricotta took place and there is no evidence that he made significant changes to his plans in response to his unexpected conviction. Moreover, the facts surrounding the trial suggest that the real target of the prosecution was not La ricotta at all but the much talked about Gospel, precisely because of the seriousness with which Pasolini was known to be approaching the task of making it. La ricotta did not outrage Catholic opinion, which was quite used to taking a bit of blasphemy in its stride, and the prosecution was mounted by state officials with no help from the Church. The Gospel According to Matthew was not widely objected to either, but was definitely thought to be threatening—though for reasons which were both political and, typically for Italy, quite arcane. Basically, they have to do with the highly charged political atmosphere of the period and the high stakes being played in a context dominated by the repercussions of Hungary in 1956 and John’s election in 1958. Hungary had profoundly shaken the Left and the election of John was to do the same and more to the Church and to the Right with which it was allied. From 1948 onward, Italian politics had been dominated by two opposing power blocs. On the one side there were big business, the Church, Christian Democracy, and the Atlantic Alliance, and on the other the workers’ movement, the secular and progressive forces emerging from the Resistance, and the left-wing political parties which were either neutralist or pro-Soviet in the Cold War. It is unlikely that the intricacies of Cold War politics were in the forefront of John’s mind when he paid his visit to the notorious Regina Coeli prison in Rome, famously declaring to the inmates, “You could not come to me, so I came to you” (echoing the words in Matthew XXV, “I was in prison and ye visited me not”). But the new stress on Jesus’ humane and social mission and sympathy toward the poor and the oppressed inaugurated by the new Pope and the Second Vatican Council, which he initiated and whose deliberations continued after his death in 1963, had profound implications for Italian politics. So, while Hungary had brought the Socialists into political alliance with Christian Democracy, isolating the Communists, John’s actions provoked a powerful current in a different direction, potentially bringing the Communists into dialogue with reforming elements within the Church and with the Catholic masses more widely. Many Christian Democrats (or those among them who were both Christians and democrats, which was by no means all of them) were ashamed of being aligned with the forces of reaction and afraid of losing credibility with the mass of the faithful, while the Communists, with an equal mixture of sincerity and calculation, were no less eager to present their policies as truer to the spirit of the Gospels than those of their nominally Christian opponents. What more natural, then, than for a well-known philo-Communist filmmaker and polemicist to want to make a film that opened up a dialogue between the two sides? Many Christian Democrats (or those among them who were both Christians and democrats, which was by no means all of them) were ashamed of being aligned with the forces of reaction and afraid of losing credibility with the mass of the faithful, while the Communists, with an equal mixture of sincerity and calculation, were no less eager to present their policies as truer to the spirit of the Gospels than those of their nominally Christian opponents. What more natural, then, than for a well-known philo-Communist filmmaker and polemicist to want to make a film that opened up a dialogue between the two sides? Nina Power: La ricotta has elements of slapstick, of course, but this bodily humor can also be seen as the flipside of the raw physicality in the shape of Stracci’s hunger (his name meaning “rags”). Is it a film “about” religion? Or is it a film about poverty and bourgeois hypocrisy? Or a film about the process and performance, the framing, of cinema itself? Is Pasolini not in fact mocking the whole rigmarole of filmmaking, including and perhaps especially, his own? Orson Welles, the director, “plays” Pasolini, at one point reading out one of Pasolini’s own poems to a hapless interviewer, claiming “My love lies only in tradition.” There are the repeated references to paintings and, beyond that, the painterly frame itself, which is undone throughout as extras laugh and stumble. The deliberate use of extras in La ricotta, as opposed to the peasant and working-class individuals carefully selected by Pasolini for roles in The Gospel According to Matthew, is key to understanding La ricotta (similarly, some “intellectuals” are chosen to play the wealthier disciples described in the Gospel). As Pasolini stated, rather bluntly, in a 1969 interview: “I never use extras in my films, because they are just hacks. Their faces are brutalised by living all their life at Cinecittà, surrounded by whores who are always hanging around there. When I shot The Gospel I went round and chose all the extras myself one by one from among the peasants and the people in the villages round where we were shooting. But when I made La Ricotta, where the characters are real extras, I used real extras” (Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack, Thames and Hudson, 1969, 40). Pasolini’s profound obsession with the face, and the authenticity of the face, so often the hallmark and the focus of his films, is thus deliberately undermined in La Ricotta. As Giorgio Agamben, one of Pasolini’s faces in The Gospel (he plays the Apostle Philip), writes in Means Without End: Notes on Politics: “appearance becomes a problem for human beings: it becomes the location of a struggle for truth” (trans Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 91). Agamben continues, in what could easily be a direct reflection on Pasolini: “the face is, above all, the passion of revelation, the passion of language … every human face, even the most noble and beautiful, is suspended on the edge of an abyss” (96). The abyssal qualities of the face, so central to Pasolini’s image of humanity, is deliberately toyed with and undone in La ricotta: extras are merely extras, and spend the film lolling around and messing about, while Stracci starves, eats, and dies. The unfathomability of the face, this struggle for truth on the edge of an abyss is central to Pasolini’s more serious project in The Gospel: to present authenticity without ground that undermines both bourgeois sensibility and religious mawkishness. In La ricotta when a hack journalist arrives and the bourgeois gawkers turn up at the end of the film (La ricotta being filmed just outside the gates of Rome), Pasolini reveals the myriad dimensions of the film process, breaking the painterly frame of a cinema that would pretend to have no outside—so we see the reviews in the process of being composed, the audience chattering and jockeying for position, the actors when not acting, and so on. In this sense he preempts Jean-Luc Godard’s famous letter to François Truffaut in which Godard states that he wants to make a film that would reveal all of the external dimensions of the film-making process. At the same time, the religious element allows Pasolini to point to what he finds absolutely lacking in the consumerism and desacralizing Italy he detests, without defending this religion as such. In this regard, La ricotta reminds me of Buñuel’s 1965 Simon of the Desert, where the martyr is suddenly transported to a 1960s club and all his suffering is muted out in the soft hedonism of the decade: the anachronism of religiosity in the age of bourgeois consumerism (Pasolini described this film in Pasolini on Pasolini as “stupendous, perhaps Buñuel’s finest” [140]). La ricotta seems to me to be above all a film about poverty, and the inability for this bourgeois class to understand it, except as the object of ridicule (the over-feeding scene of Stracci is accompanied by their laughter and cruel, brutalized faces). Was Pasolini’s prosecution for La ricotta motivated by a concern for the damage the more “serious” film, The Gospel, could do? This seems quite likely given how “straight” Pasolini plays it in the latter film, using lines taken directly from a Catholic version of the gospel. Pasolini noted that actually very few Catholics had read the gospel and there’s a case to be made for seeing Pasolini’s attempt here in a strange lineage of over-conformism (à la Savonarola) or subversive close reading (as with Thomas Paine’s reading of the Bible, where the dimensions of equality and revolutionary potential are brought out against the conformist invocation of religion as a supplement to a hierarchical and traditional social order, as in Edmund Burke, who Paine is responding to). Certainly the scenes where Jesus simply sweeps up people from their everyday lives and convinces them in an instant to follow him are images of what it might mean to radically break with habit; as are the anti-family elements: ““He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37) and the invocation to “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22), with the later Marxist echo of this phrase (from 1852’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content”). But it is true that Pasolini regretted the way he filmed the miracle scenes—“[t]here are some horrible moments I am ashamed of, which are almost Counter-Reformation Baroque, repellent—the miracles” (Pasolini on Pasolini, 87)—and some left-wing reviews of the film at the time were hostile because of the way it contributed to the “dialogue” between Catholicism and Communism, so if we accept the idea that the two major cultural forces in Italy at the time were Catholicism and Communism, and Pasolini was of necessity part of this dialogue, we are obviously asking a different question now with regard to its possible subversive qualities. I find the repeated use of Odetta’s “Motherless Child” on the soundtrack one of the more radical aspects. This spiritual can be read in the film as a comment on Jesus of course, albeit with the roles reversed—the virgin birth makes him a “fatherless child” in a human, though not divine, sense—but as a comment on slavery and the diasporic nature of the lives of black people kidnapped into work, Odetta’s refrain is stark, and the dissonance between the modernity of the recording and the historical legacy of slavery fused with the gospel is, to my mind, one of the most striking things about the film. So perhaps the context for Pasolini’s subversion is different today—does the contemporary subversive spectator continue to exist? Gabriele Pedulla’s recent In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema (Verso, 2012) looks at the way in which the decline of the cinematic experience and its replacement by other forms of viewing (TV, laptops, mobile phones even) has affected film criticism. The “countless varieties of image-consumption” (3) have made it possible to recognize a “golden age” of the picture house (1920s–70s, according to Pedulla) but also means the image of the spectator must be revised. Pedulla talks about “the prevalence of Pavlovian responses … [and] the impoverishment of empathy” (126). To watch Pasolini’s films without being able to understand the “existential contradictions” he wanted to portray in the Gospel and without experiencing the intensity that he sought to convey in all his films would render the films something quite different: “a series of aesthetic technologies that invite spectators to make themselves vulnerable only to a certain extent, and to behave as docile consumers of à la carte emotions. Exactly as with all of the other goods of contemporary capitalist society” (131), as Pedulla puts it. Was Pasolini prescient regarding consumerism and was his curious combination of peasant-centred communism and religiosity-without-religion a kind of solution, or rather the symptom of a last-ditch fetish for a vanishing world? Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: I think he was prescient regarding consumerism and that his general aversion to capitalist modernity would have extended to today’s cinema in general though not necessarily to every film thrown up by a culture industry which has never been a total monolith, even today. He would have looked sympathetically on any film or other work of art which seemed to him to express some sort of imaginative truth about some or other thing or rather the relationship between two things—as he himself did with sex and Fascism in Salò or Christianity and poverty as in the Gospel film. The problem was that by the end of his life he had run out of imaginative alternatives to the modernity he increasingly hated. The peasantry, with its closeness to the soil and the seasons and the rituals of death and resurgence, had disappeared as a class throughout the western world. The subproletariat had not disappeared but the pasty-faced junkies he saw haunting the ghettos of modern cities no longer had the aesthetic (and sexual) appeal of the young men in Accattone or Mamma Roma. The ambivalent power of Christianity—both comforting and repressive—was also waning and in any case he had only seen it as potentially liberatory for a brief period around the making of The Gospel. One thing I particularly like in The Gospel According to Matthew is that it really is the Gospel according to Matthew. That is, it is a film of a text, not a biopic of Jesus. Things that are not in that Gospel are not in the film. The famous version of the Annunciation with the Angel appearing to a virgin in a dream and saying “Blessed art thou among women” is not there. So no clichéd corny images of a Fra Angelico angel holding a lily. Instead you get a visibly pregnant woman and a puzzled, angry man being told by an angel not to reject her. But this literalness towards the text is not replicated in the settings, which have no historical specificity but are generically archaic (and therefore mythical), being simply locations which happened to still exist in southern Italy. Then at a third level there is the music, which is drawn from the entire later Christian tradition right up to negro spirituals and the Congolese Missa Luba. Neither the text nor the settings give any intimation that Christianity was going to develop into the world religion we know today. But the music does. It offers Bach’s protestant pietism, the baroque catholicism of Mozart, but also music from the Soviet Union, black America, and Africa. So Pasolini first liberates the story from later accretions, deliberately rejecting the iconography pilloried in La ricotta, and then he sneaks an alternative iconography in through the back door, on the soundtrack. Nina Power : With The Gospel and La ricotta in the mid-1960s, we have two sides of a not yet fully tarnished coin: it is still possible, iconoclastically perhaps, but possible, to show both real poverty, and the appearance of poverty, and real transcendence and the beauty of faces touched by the archaic, the spiritual, the historical. By 1975, very shortly before his death, Pasolini has indeed given up all hope in the possibility of cinema to reveal or depict these things: “I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies as much as Nazism did” (mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-lost-pasolini-interview), he says, manifesting his disgust with what has happened to these “bodies.” As Lorenzo Chiesa puts it: “Pasolini now believes that the hedonistic consumerism and sexual promiscuity imposed by the techno-fascist power of late-capitalism necessarily entails an anthropological genocide which is concomitant with a degeneration of all bodies, independently of their social class and geographical provenance” (“Pasolini and the Ugliness of Bodies,” in In Corpore: Bodies in Post-Unification Italy, ed. L. Polezzi and C. Ross, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007, 107) Pasolini’s quest for the authentic face and body is intimately tied up with his image of a declining, narrowing world, as the bourgeoisie become ever more dominant, even in their secularism and libertarianism, and the aspiration to become more like “them” merges into a cultural indifference that Pasolini feels he can read into the bodies of contemporary beings. As he says in the final interview: “Before … the difference between the middle and the working class was as marked as that between two races. Now it’s almost vanished. And the culture that has been destroyed the most is the rural one, that is, the peasants.” The peasants are preserved in Pasolini’s cinematic aspic, but the physiognomic communism that defines them is simultaneously being destroyed from the other side. As he says: “Marxists, too, have been anthropologically changed by the consumer revolution. They live differently, have a different lifestyle, different cultural models and their ideology changed as well.” Pasolini’s despair at the success of secularism and the co-optation of the left reveals a deep hatred of homogeneity in any form (fascist, consumerist), and perversely then, those cultural forces that he also hated start to appear as markers of the class and cultural difference he ultimately values so much (the Catholicism of the peasants). The death of dialect at the hands of the centralizing voices of mass media is perhaps prefigured in the endless parade of silent faces that tilt their heads to listen to Jesus in The Gospel: if they were to speak “contemporary” Italian, their beauty would be destroyed. In the mid-60s, Pasolini’s cinema attempts to preserve the last vestiges of a dying culture, even as the bourgeoisie busily nose their way in with their endless questions and hunger for spectacle, as in the end of La ricotta. But are Pasolini’s sentiments echoed in contemporary feeling, or do they remain specific to his responses to a highly particular period in Italian history? In a much more recent essay, written by an economist, we hear strange echoes of Pasolini’s observations, shifted from the face to the body as a whole. In Hervé Juvin’s The Coming of the Body we see an attempt to understand what it means for life expectancy to have doubled (albeit in certain parts of the world) over the course of a century and we hear Pasolini’s complaint once again, slightly shifted: “I used to know a rural Brittany where the peasants were worn out, broken by hard labour, at sixty. Let’s not even mention the women: after the age of thirty of thirty-five, what remained to them of what we call womanhood?” (trans. John Howe, Verso, 2010, viii–x). Pasolini’s love of faces as bearers of historical (rather than religious) grace is incompatible with contemporary, culturally dominant body worship in which longevity is projected into the future, not the past, and health and conventional attractiveness are the markers of success in the finite (yet almost infinitely extendable) realm. Juvin shares also Pasolini’s double-edged mourning for religion, but goes even further beyond Pasolini’s linking of consumerism with fascism towards a full-circle account in which the structure of religion becomes fused with the logic of the market, breaking all ties and leaving only the body: “Religion maintained a vertical connection between God and humans … and it regulated the horizontal links between humans. The market came to substitute its universal and accountable reason as rule, language and mode of exchange. It also linked what had never been linked before, connected those who had never thought that they had anything in common. That link is broken. The market still deals with the horizontal link but now it is the body that connects with other things, that establishes frontiers and reinvents separateness; because it is complete, and so long as it is complete, it becomes the face of God, of otherness, of the same and the other” (176). The body of Stracci, undone by a relation to poverty, hunger, and over-eating rooted in Italy’s past, would never survive in such a world, and Pasolini surely knew it. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: What you say about the historical body is important but I think it needs to be linked to the other side of Pasolini, which is a nostalgia for a state of being beyond history, beyond (or prior to) civilization. There is in the films a literal or metaphorical stripping-bare, a search for what lies beneath the trappings of civilization—any civilization, not just the present one. It is a search for the essence, for that beyond which there is nothing, or if something, only a mystery. Hence the obsessive shots of faces. Hence too, in the Gospel film, the focus on the text behind which there is … what? Just an itinerant preacher of uncertain parentage who clashes with Church and State and in the end is the victim of a sacrifice. The stripping-bare is most apparent in Theorem, where the collapse of the family leaves only a void and the last shot is of the father stark naked running along the barren slopes of a volcano. There is then the horrific vulnerability of the naked bodies in Salò which is to some extent historical because what is being imagined is a quasi-historical situation where there is Power but no social order. Pasolini associates this state of affairs with Fascism but it is fascism (small f) in an extended sense. The décor is authentic and the bodies are real but one is not to suppose that Sadean orgies really took place on the shores of Lake Garda in the last years of the World War II. Pasolini’s imagination was that of a poet but one who saw himself in his films as working with things rather than words (the “written language of reality,” in his own phrase). This means that his relationship with history-book history—Judaea in the first century AD, even Italy in 1944 or 1964—is always a bit elusive. At one level he allows his imagination to roam free but at another level there is always a hard-core, thing-like reality which he starts from and wants to explore. Salò and Theorem in particular are thought experiments in which a customary order is disturbed and just a nub of reality is left and the film elaborates on what might then happen. For its part, the Gospel film re-imagines a major world religion on the basis of a text, some faces, and a landscape. This re-imagining had great actuality when the film came out and it could well do so today when the Church is in rapid reverse gear away from the spirit of the Second Vatican Council which animated Pasolini’s film. Commenting on the disciplinary measures taken by the Vatican against a group of American nuns, Garry Wills wrote (New York Review of Books, June 7—20, 2012): “Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in ‘the social Gospel’ (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist).” That social Gospel (“which is the Gospel”) is what is laid out in stark black-and-white in Pasolini’s film from 1964. As a reading of the Gospel it is basically quite Puritan, in a historical sense, and links with the more generalized puritanism which he claimed to have been “consumed by” and which is most extreme in the articles he wrote towards the end of his life under the title “Lutheran Letters.” Nina Power: It seems then that Pasolini’s films have two major functions: the “stripping bare” you mention, and the disruption of order, the subversion that comes precisely from this stripping bare. The latter has become an often-repeated cinematic trope, where a household or a situation is disturbed by the intrusion of something unwanted or bizarre, which then proceeds to shake everything up and render everything new. We see this in, for example, in Dominik Moll’s 2005’s Lemming, where this animal arrives and seems to trigger all manner of transformations into the bourgeois household, or Nagisa Oshima’s 1986 Max mon amour, where Charlotte Rampling takes up with an ape, or the rat in François Ozon’s 1998 Sitcom that again triggers all manner of neurotic and taboo behavior (incest, suicide, sadism). But all of these homages to Pasolini perhaps with a dash of Buñuel, miss what you describe as “a hard-core, thing-like reality” at the heart of Theorem and Salò precisely because they make it too easy, too psychoanalytic, too simplistically subversive. These films are really about bourgeois repression in its farcical mode, not the unfathomable series of ruptures introduced by the Terence Stamp figure in Theorem, or the desperate and pointless structured cruelty of Salò. Pasolini succeeds in these films, and in The Gospel to introduce something truly extraordinary into cinema—a radically non-religious mysticism (although we might leave Salò to one side as the film that troubles all of Pasolini’s oeuvre). The early scenes of The Gospel, where Joseph is confused and angry by his very young-looking wife’s pregnancy, and the reassurance by the angel that this is to be accepted is played as simply as could be, as faithfully to the text as possible without decoration, and yet an eerie sense of unfathomability permeates the film even when Jesus is depicted as humanly, as realistically as could be imagined. Pasolini’s attempts to preserve the unknowable with the barest minimum of settings and structures is exposed in La ricotta but perhaps even more exposed in a way in The Gospel, where the indifferent backdrop and generic outfits only serve to illuminate the authenticity of the human face—an authenticity that nevertheless lacks ground. Religion and cinema itself mediate Pasolini’s desire to speak directly in the language of reality, but a reality that destabilizes the one that surrounds the film itself—the commercialization of all human life, and the destruction of the authentic face. Pasolini’s ultimate turn against bodies and their vicious punishment in Salò is perhaps ultimately retribution for the fleeting and obscure promise of the face: but Pasolini was the one to capture it best, nevertheless. This collusion between images and life, between the screen and daily life, can be experienced everyday in the most ordinary manner. Especially in America, not the least charm of which is that even outside the cinemas the whole country is cinematographic. You cross the desert as if in a western; the metropolis is a continual screen of signs and formulae. Life is a travelling shot, a kinetic, cinematic, cinematographic sweep. There is as much pleasure in this as in those Dutch or Italian towns where, upon leaving the museum, you rediscover a town in the very image of the paintings, as if it had stepped out of them. It is a kind of miracle which, even in a banal American way, gives rise to a sort of aesthetic form, to an ideal confusion which transfigures life, as in a dream. Here, cinema does not take on the exceptional form of a work of art, even a brilliant one, but invests the whole of life with a mythical ambience. Here it becomes truly exciting. This is why the idolatry of stars, the cult of Hollywood idols, is not a media pathology but a glorious form of the cinema, its mythical transfiguration, perhaps the last great myth of our modernity. Precisely to the extent that the idol no longer represents anything but reveals itself as a pure, impassioned, contagious image which effaces the difference between the real being and its assumption into the imaginary. All these considerations an· a hit wild, but that is because they correspond lo the· unrestrained film buff that I am and have always wished to remain -- that is in a sense uncultured and fascinated. There is a kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy in images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgements. It is because of this that I suggest they are immoral, and that their fundamental power lies in this immorality. This brute fascination for images, above and beyond all moral or social determination, is also not that of dreaming or the imaginary, understood in the traditional sense. Other images, such as those in painting, drawing, theatre or architecture, have been better able to make us dream or imagine; other modes of expression as well (undoubtedly language makes us dream better than the image). So there is something more than that which is peculiar to our modern media images: if they fascinate us so much it is not because they are sites of the production of meaning and representation -- this would not be new -- it is on the contrary because they are sites of the disappearance of meaning and representation, sites in which we are caught quite apart from any judgement of reality, thus sites of a fatal strategy of denegation of the real and of the reality principle. We have arrived at a paradox regarding the image, our images, those which unfurl upon and invade our daily life -- images whose proliferation, it should be noted, is potentially infinite, whereas the extension of meaning is always limited precisely by its end, by its finality: from the fact that images ultimately have no finality and proceed by total contiguity, infinitely multiplying themselves according to an irresistihle epidemic process which no one today can conLrnl, our world has become Lruly infinite, or rather exponential by means of images. It is caught up in a mad pursuit of images, in an ever greater fascination which is only accentuated by video and digital images. We have thus come to the paradox that these images describe the equal impossibility of the real and of the imaginary. For us the medium, the image medium, has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary, upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its own logic. I call this a fatal process in the sense that there is a definitive immanence of the image, without any possible transcendent meaning, without any possible dialectic of history -- fatal also in the sense not merely of an exponential, linear unfolding of images and messages but of an exponential enfolding of the medium around itself. The fatality lies in this endless enwrapping of images (literally: without end, without destination) which leaves images no other destiny than images. The same thing happens everywhere today, when production has no destiny apart from production overdetermination of production by itself -- when sex has no destiny other than sex -- sexual overdetermination of sexuality. This process may be found everywhere today, for better and for worse. In the absence of rules of the game, things become caught up in their own game: images become more real than the real; cinema itself becomes more cinema than cinema, in a kind of vertigo in which (to return to our initial problem, that of resemblance) it does no more than resemble itself and escape in its own logic, in the very perfection of its own model. I am thinking of those exact, scrupulous set pieces such as Chinatown. The Day of the Condor. Barry Lyndon, 1900. All the President Men, the very perfection of which is disturbing. It is as if we were dealing with p1·rfl'd remakes, with extraordinary montages which belong more to a combinatory process (or mosaic in the McLuhanesque sense), with large photo, kino or historic-synthetic machines, rather than with real films. Let us be clear: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that they leave us somehow totally indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show. You need only be sufficiently distracted, as I was, to see it as a 1950s original production: a good film of manners and the ambience of small town America, etc. A slight suspicion: it was a littll' too good, better adjusted, better than the others, without the sentimental, moral and psychologica I tics of the films of that period. Astonishment at the discovery that it is a 1970s film, perfectly nostalgic, brand new, retouched, a hyperrealist. restitution of a 50s film. There is talk of remaking silent films, doubtless better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvellous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema what it is. Most of those that we see today (the best) are already of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best example: no better has been made, no better will be made, but what exactly? Evocation? No, not even evocation but simulation. All the toxic· radiation has been filtered out, all the ingredients are present in precise doses, not in single mistake. Cool, cold pleasure which is not even aesthetic properly speaking: functional pleasure, equational pleasure, pleasure of machination. We need only think of Visconti (The Leopard, Senso, etc., which recall Barry Lyndon in certain respects) in order to grasp the difference, not only in style but in the cinematographic act. With Visconti, there is meaning, history, a sensual rhetoric, dead moments, a passionate game, not only in the historical content but in the direction. None of that with Kubrick, who controls his film like a chessboard, and makes history an operational scenario. Nor does this refer back to the old opposition between finesse and geometry: there meaning was still in play, meaning was at stake. Whereas we are entering into an era of films which no longer have meaning properly speaking, large synthetic machines with variable geometry. Is there already something of this in Sergio Leone's westerns? Perhaps. All registers tend in this direction. Chinatown is the detective story redesigned by laser. It is not really a question of perfection. Technical perfection can belong to the meaning, and in this case it is neither nostalgic nor hyperrealist; it is an effect of art. Here, it is an effect of model: it is one of the tactical reference values. In the absence of any real syntax of meaning there are only tactical values in a complex whole in which, for example, the CIA as an all-purpose mythological machine, Robert Redford as a polyvalent star, social relations as necessary references to history, and technical virtuosity as a necessary reference to cinema are all admirably combined. Cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and hyperrealistic. In its present endeavours cinema increasingly approaches, with ever incrc·asing perfection, absolute reality: in its banality, in its veracity, in its starkness, in its tedium. and al the same time in its pretentiousness, in its pretentiousness to be the real, the immediate, the unsignified, which is the maddest of enterprises (in the same way that the pretention of functionalist desig-n to designate, as the highest degree of the object, the form in which it coincides with its function, its use-value, is properly an insane enterprise). No culture has ever had this naive and paranoiac, this puritanical and terrorist vision of signs. Terrorism is always of the real. Simultaneous with this attempt at absolute coincidence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute coincidence with itself. This is not contradictory : it is the very definition of the hyperreal. Hypotyposis and specularity. Cinema plagiarises and copies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes silent films more perfect than the originals, de. All this is logical. Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a referential in perdition. Previously there was a living, dialectical, full and dramatic relationship between cinema and the imaginary (that is, novelistic, mythical unreallity, even down to the delirious use of its own technique). Today, there is an inverse negative relation between the cinema and reality: it's results from the loss of specificity which both have suffered. Cold collage, cool promiscuity, asexual engagement of two cold media which evolve in asymptotic line towards 0ne another : cinema attempting to abolish ilslelf in the absolute of reality, the real already long absorbed in cinematographic (or televised) hyperreality. THE EVIL DEMON OF IMAGES / Jean Baudrillard/Published by The Power Institute of Fine Arts /Printer Maxwell Printing 862 Elizabeth Street Waterloo 2017 Apropos the cinema and images in general (media images, technological images), I would like to conjure up the perversity of the relation between the image and it's referent, the supposed real; the virtual and irreversible confusion of the sphere of images and the sphere of a reality whose nature we are less and less able to grasp. There are many modalities of this absorption, this confusion, this diabolical seduction of images. Above all, it is the reference principle of images which must be doubted, this strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this is true. As simulacra, images precede the real to the extent that they invert the causal and logical order of the real and its reproduction. Benjamin, in his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', already pointed out strongly this modern revolution in the order of production (of reality, of meaning) by the precession, the anticipation of it's reproduction. It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical -and our technical images, whether they be from photography, cinema or television, are in the overwhelming majority much more 'figurative', 'realist', than all the images from past cultures. It is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and most perverse. The appearance of the mirror already introduced into the world of perception an ironical effect of "trompe-I'oeil, and we know what malefice was attached to the appearance of doubles. But this is also true of all the images which surround us: in general, they are analysed according· to their value as representations, as media of presence and meaning. The immense majority of present day photographic, cinematic and television images are thought to bear witness to the world with a naive resemblance and a touching fidelity. We have spontaneous confidence in their realism. We are wrong. They only seem to resemble things, to resemble reality, events, faces. Or rather, they really do conform, but their conformity itself is diabolical. We can find a sociological, historical and political equivalent to this diabolical conformity, to this evil demon of conformity, in the modern behaviour of the masses who are also very good at complying with the models offered to them, who are very good at reflecting the objectives imposed on them, thereby absorbing and annihilating them. There is in this conformity a force of seduction in the literal sense of the word, a force of diversion, distortion, capture and ironic fascination. There is a kind of fatal strategy of conformity. orA recent example may be found in Woody Allen's film, Zelig: in trying to be oneself, to cultivate difference and originality, one ends up resembling everyone and no longer seducing anyone. This is the logic of present day psychological conformity. Zelig, on the other hand, is launched on an adventure of total seduction, in an involuntary strategy of global seduction: he begins to resemble everything which approaches him, everything which surrounds him. Nor is this the mimetic violence of defiance or parody, it is mimetic non-violence of seduction. To begin to resemble the other, to take on their appearance, is to seduce them, since it is to make them enter the realm of metamorphosis despite themselves. This seductive force, this fatal strategy, is a kind of animal genie or talent - not simply that of the chameleon, which is only its anecdotal form. It is not the conformism of animals which delights us; on the contrary, animals are never conformist, they are seductive, they always appear to result from a metamorphosis. Precisely because they are not individuals, they pose the enigma of their resemblance. If an animal knows how to conform, it is not to its own being, its own individuality (banal strategy), but to appearances in the world. This is what Zelig does too with his animal genie -- he is polymorphous (but not perverse); he is incapable of functional adaptation to contexts, which is true conformism, our conformism, but able to seduce by the play of resemblance. Savages do no less when they put on the successive masks of their gods, when they 'become' their successive divinities -- this is also to seduce them. It is of course against this strategy of seduction that psychiatry struggles, and it is what gives rise to the magical infatuation of the crowds for Zelig (in German, Selig means 'blessed'). The remarkable thing about this film is that it leads astray all possible interpretations. There is thus also a seduction of interpretation, with the complicity of certain intellectuals, as well as a polymorphous montage technique which allows it to ironically adapt to all possibililities. More generally, the image is interesting not only in its role as reflection, mirror, representation of, or counterpart to, the real, but also when it begins to contaminate reality and to model it, when it only conforms to reality the better to distort it, or better still: when it appropriates reality for its own ends, when it anticipates it to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such. It is not only daily life which has become cinematographic and tele-visual, but war as well. It has been said that war is the continuation of politics by other means; we can also say that images, media images, are the continuation of war by other means. Take Apocalypse Now. Coppola made his film the same way the Americans conducted the war-in this sense, it is the best possible testimony -- with the same exaggeration, the same excessive means, the same monstrous candour ... and the same success. War as a trip, a technological and psychedelic fantasy; war as a succession of special effects, the war become film well before it was shot; war replaced by technological testing. For the Americans, it was above all the latter: a test site, an enormous field on which to test their weapons, their methods, their power. Coppola does the same thing: he tests the power of intervention of cinema, tests the impact of cinema become a vast machine of special effects. In this sense his film is very much the prolongation of war by other means, the completion of that incomplete war, its apotheosis. War becomes film, film becomes war, the two united by their mutual overflow of technology. The real war was conducted by Coppola in the manner of Westmoreland. Leaving aside the clever irony of napalming Philippino forests and villages to recreate the hell of South Vietnam, everything is replayed, begun again through cinema: the Molochian joy of the shoot, the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of such a holocaust of means, of so many difficulties, and the dazzling paranoia in the mind of the creator who, from the beginning, conceived this film as a world historical event for which the Vietnam war would have been no more than a pretext, would ultimately not have existed and we cannot deny it: 'in itself the Vietnam war never happened, perhaps it was only a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and the tropics, a psycho-tropic dream in which the issue was not politics or victory but the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolds, perhaps expecting nothing more than consecration by a superfilm, which perfects the war's function as a mass spectacle. No real distance, no critical direction, no desire for any 'raised consciousness' in relation to the war: in a sense this is the brutal quality of the film, not to be undermined by any anti-war moral psychology. Coppola may very well dress up his helicopter captain in a cavalry hat and have him wipe out a Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner - these are not critical, distant signs; they are immersed in the machinery, part of the special effect. Coppola makes films in the same manner, with the same nostalgic megalomania, with the same non-signifying fury, the same magnified Punch and Judy effect. One can ask, how is such a horror possible (not the war, properly speaking, but that of the film)? But there is no response, no possible judgement. The No real distance, no critical direction, no desire for any 'raised consciousness' in relation to the war: in a sense this is the brutal quality of the film, not to be undermined by any anti-war moral psychology. Coppola may very well dress up his helicopter captain in a cavalry hat and have him wipe out a Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner - these are not critical, distant signs; they are immersed in the machinery, part of the special effect. Coppola makes films in the same manner, with the same nostalgic megalomania, with the same non-signifying fury, the same magnified Punch and Judy effect. One can ask, how is such a horror possible (not the war, properly speaking, but that of the film)? But there is no response, no possible judgement. The Vietnam war and the film are cut from the same cloth, nothing separates them: this film is part of the war. If the Americans (apparently) lost the other, they have certainly won this one. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. It has a cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the military and industrial complexes, of the Pentagon and governments. Nothing is understood in relation to war or cinema (at least the latter) unless one has grasped this indistinguishability -- which is not the ideological or moral indistinguishability of good and evil, but that of the reversibility of destruction and production, of the immanence of something in its very revolution, of the organic metabolism of every technology, from carpet bombing to film stock ... As for the anticipation of reality by images, the precession of images and media in relation to events, such that the connection between cause and effect becomes scrambled and it becomes impossible to tell which is the effect of the other -what better example than the nuclear accident at Harrisburg, a 'real' incident which happened just after the release of The China Syndrome? This film is a fine example of the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which itself remains improbable and in some sense imaginary. Moreover, the film unintentionally shows this: it is the intrusion of TV into the reactor which as it were triggers the nuclear incident - because it is the anticipation and model of it in the day to day world: telefission of the real and of the real world -- because TV and information in general are a kind of catastrophe in Rene Thom's formal, topological sense: a radical, qualitative change in an entire system. Or rather, TV and nuclear power are of the same kind: behind the 'hot' and negentropic concepts of energy and information, they have the same dissuasive force as cold systems. TV is also a nuclear, chain-reactive process, but implosive: it cools and neutralises the meaning and energy of events. Thus, behind the presumed risk of explosion, that is, of hot catastrophe, the nuclear conceals a long, cold catastrophe - the universalation of a system of dissuasion, of deterrence. The homology between nuclear power and television can be read directly in the images. Nothing resembles the command and control centre of the reactor more than the TV studios, and the nuclear consoles share the same imaginary as the recording and broadcasting studios. Everything happens between these two poles: the other core, that of the reactor, in principal the real core of the affair, remains concealed from us, like the real; buried and indecipherable, ultimately of no importance. The drama is acted out on the screens and nowhere else. Harrisburg, Watergate and Network form the trilogy of The China Syndrome - an inextricable trilogy in which we cannot tell which is the effect or the symptom of the others: is the ideological argument (the Watergate effect) only the symptom of the nuclear (the Harrisburg effect) or the informational model (the Network effect)? -- is the real (Harrisburg) only the symptom of the imaginary (Network, The China Syndrome) or vice versa? Marvellous indistinguishability, ideal constellation of simulation. The conjunction of The China Syndrome and Harrisburg haunts us. But is it so involuntary? Without examining any magical links between simulacrum and reality, it is clear that The China Svndrome is not unrelated to the 'real' accident " at Harrisburg, not by a causal logic but by those relations of contagion and unspoken analogy which link the real, models and simulacra: the induction of the nuclear incident at Harrisburg by the film corresponds, with disquieting obviousness, to the induction of the incident by TV in the film. A strange precession of a film before the real, the most astonishing we have seen: reality corresponding point by point to the simulacra, even down to the suspensive, incomplete character of the catastrophe, which is essential from the point of view of dissuasion: the real so arranged itself, in the image of the film, as to produce a simulation of catastrophe. It is only a further step, which we should briskly take, to reverse our logical order and see The China Syndrome as the real event and Harrisburg its simulacrum. For it is by the same logic that the nuclear reality in the film follows from the television effect and Harrisburg in 'reality' follows from the cinema effect of The China Syndrome. But the latter is not the original prototype of Harrisburg; one is not the simulacrum and the other the reality: there are only simulacra, and Harrisburg is a kind of simulation in the second degree. There is indeed a chain reaction; but it is not the nuclear chain reaction but that of the simulacra and of the simulation in which all the energy of the real is effectively engulfed, not in a spectacular nuclear explosion but in a secret and continuous implosion, which is perhaps taking a more deadly turn than all the explosions which presently lull us. For an explosion is always a promise, it is our hope: see how much, in llw film as well as at Harrisburg, everyone cxpcepts it to go up, that destruction speak its nanw and deliver us from this unnameable panic, from this invisible nuclear panic of dissuasion. Let the 'core' of the reactor expose at last its glowing power of destruction, let it reassure us as to the admittedly catastrophic presence of energy and gratify us with its spectacle. For the problem is that there is no nuclear spectacle, no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is past): it is for this reason that it is rejected - it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to spectacle like earlier forms of energy. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial boost to our messianic libido. But that will never recur. What will happen will never be explosion but implosion. Never again will we see energy in its spectacular and pathetic form - all the romanticism of explosion which had so much charm, since it was also that of revolution - but only the cold energy of simulacra and its distillation in homeopathic doses into the cold systems of information. What else does the media dream of if not raising up events by its very presence? Everyone deplores it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra: no longer divine predestination, but the precession of models, which is no less inexorable. And it is for this reason that events no longer have any meaning: not because they are insignificant in themselves, but because they have been preceded by models with which their own process can only coincide. For some time now, in the dialectical relation between reality and images (that is, the relation that we wish to believe dialectical readable from the real to the image and vice versa), the image has taken over and imposed ils own immanent, ephemeral logic; an immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of' the extermination of its own referent, a logic of' the implosion of meaning- in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium. In this regard, we all remain incredibly naive : we always look for a good usage of the image, that is to say a moral, meaningful, pedagogic or informational usage, without seeing that the image in a sense revolts against this good usage, that it is the conductor neither of meaning nor good intentions, but on the contrary of an implosion, a denegation of meaning (of events, history, memory, etc.). I am reminded of Holocaust, the television series on the concentration camps ... Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself. That forgetting, however, is still too dangerous and must be replaced by an artificial memory (everywhere, today, it is artificial memories which obliterate people's memories, which obliterate people from memory). This artificial memory replays the extermination -but too late for it to profoundly unsettle anything, and above all it does so via a medium which is itself cold, radiating oblivion, dissuasion and extermination in an even more systematic manner, if this is possible, than the camps themselves. TV, the veritable final solution to the historicity of every event. The Jews are recycled not through the crematory ovens or the gas chambers but through the sound track and images, through the cathode tube and the microchip. Forgetting, annihilation thereby achieves at last an aesthetic dimension -- nostalgia gives them their final finish. Henceforth, " everyone knows". everyone has trembled before the extermination-- a sure sign that "it" will never happen again. But in effect what is thus exorcised so cheaply, at the cost of a few tears, will never recur because it is presently happening in the very form through which it is denounced, through the very medium of this supposed exorcism: television. The same process of forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, the same annihilation of memories and of history, the same inverse, implosive radiation, the same absorption without trace, the same black hole as Auschwitz. They want us to believe that TV will remove the mortgage of Auschwitz by raising collective consciousness, whereas it is the perpetuation of it in a different guise, under the auspices not of a site of annihilation but a medium of dissuasion. What everyone fails to understand is that Holocaust is above all (and exclusively) a televised event or rather object (McLuhan's fundamental rule which must not be forgotten). That is to say, it is an attempt to reheat a cold historical event - tragic but cold, the first great event of cold systems, those cooling systems of dissuasion and extermination which were subsequently deployed in other forms (including the Cold War, etc.) and in relation to the cold masses (the Jews no longer even concerned by their own death, eventually self-managing it, no longer even masses in revolt: dissuaded unto death, dissuaded even of their own death). To reheat this cold event via a cold medium, television, for masses who are themselves cold, who will only find in it the occasion for a tactile chill and a posthumous emotion, a dissuasive shiver, which sends them into oblivion with a kind of aesthetic good faith. The cold light of television is inoffensive to the imagination (even that of children) since it no longer carries any imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. In this sense the TV image has to he placed in opposition to the cinema, which still carries an intense imaginary. Although it is contaminated more and more by TV, the cinema is still an image - that means not only a screen and a visual form but a myth, something - that belongs to the sphere of the double, the phantasm, the mirror, the dream, etc... Nothing - of that in the TV image, which doesn't suggest anything and has a magnetic effect. The TV image is only a screen. More than that: a miniaturized terminal located in your head and you are the screen and the TV looks at you, goes through you like a magnetic tape - a tape, not an image. Thus, properly speaking it is Holocaust the television film which constitutes the definitive holocaust event. Likewise, with The Day After it is not the atomic conflict depicted in the film but the film itself which is the catastrophic event. Thus, properly speaking it is Holocaust the television film which constitutes the definitive holocaust event. Likewise, with The Day After it is not the atomic conflict depicted in the film but the film itself which is the catastrophic event. Is it a bad film? Certainly. But isn't it rather that all this is unimaginable? Isn't it rather that, in our imaginary, nuclear conflict is a total event, without appeal and with no tomorrow, whereaes, here it simply brings about a regression of the human race according- to the worst naive stereotypes of savagery'? But we already know that state, indeed we have barely left it. Our desire is rather for somdhing· which no longer takes place on a human scale, for some anterior or ulterior mystery: what wiil the earth be like when we are no longer on it? In a word, we dream of our disappearance, and of seeing the world in its inhuman purity (which is precisely not the state of nature). But these limits, these extreme:; that we imagine, this catastrophe - can it be metaphorised in images? It is not certain that its mythical evocation is possible, any more than that of our bio-molecular destiny or that of the genetic code, which is the other dimension, the corollary of the nuclear. We can no longer be affected by it -proof that we have already been irradiated! Already to our minds the catastrophe is no more than a comic strip. Its filmic projection is only a diversion from the real nuclearisation of our lives. The real nuclear catastrophe has already happened, it happens every day, and this film is part of it. It is it which is our catastrophe. It does not represent it, it does not evoke it, on the contrary it shows that it has already happened, that it is already here, since it is impossible to imagine. For all these reasons I do not believe in a pedagogy of images, nor of cinema, nor a fortiori in one of television. I do not believe in a dialectic between image and reality, nor therefore, in respect of images, in a pedagogy of message and meaning. The secret of the image (we are still speaking of contemporary, technical images) must not be sought in its differentiation from reality, and hence in its reprensentative value (aesthetic, critical or dialectical), but on the contrary in its 'telescoping' into reality, its shortcircuit with reality, and finally, in the implosion of image and reality. For us there is an increasingly definitive lack of differentiation between image and reality which no longer leaves room for representation as such. to be continued... THE EVIL DEMON OF IMAGES / Jean Baudrillard/Published by The Power Institute of Fine Arts /Printer Maxwell Printing 862 Elizabeth Street Waterloo 2017 Felix Guattari: What seems interesting to me with regard to this film, Badlands [1973, by Terence Malick], is that it shows us a story of amour iou, which is precisely what the critics did not see. I think that this makes people nervous. There are color elements, of blue, that are really agonizing throughout. It is a film about mad love and people refuse to accept these two dimensions of love and madness in combination. If there weren't all the murders, everything that makes one compare the film to Billy the Kid, The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde, etc., this would be an avant-garde film and it wouldn't get shown anywhere. In fact, the story is only there to support a schizophrenic journey. At every turn, we are on the edge of madness. It is this constant crossing of borders that seems perfectly conveyed to me. What the critics retained, in short, was the idea that this guy gets unhinged by dint of imitating James Dean. But things don't happen like that at all. The first thing that one has to realize is that the boy, Kit, should never be separated from the girl, Holly. They make up a sort of double arrangement. Certain behaviors of Holly belong to the schizo-process of Kit, although she herself is not schizophrenic. Conversely, certain behaviors of Kit belong to the completely avenge, normal world of Holly. Hence, it's absolutely impossible to separate the normal and the pathological. What is paradoxical is that the entire film is built around the idea that the guy is not really mad. The proof is that he goes to the electric chair. And yet, his madness, the fact that he has a screw loose, etc., is constantly alluded to. For her part, Holly is presented as a steady girl. For example, she says: ''I'll never let myself get carried away with another daredevil again." Second negation after madness: love. We are shown a love story which is totally beyond stereotypes, a kind of extraordinary schizo love. For example, when Kit has just lulled Holly's father, she says to him, "Don't worry," and gives him a small slap that is both nagging and reassuring. Or again when they flick for the first time, Kit pretends to smash his hand, a typical schizo act. She tells him: "You're making fun of me, you don't care how I feel." But his indifference is only apparent; one senses he is so sure of his love that it never occurs to him to doubt her. It is only at the end of the film, when she ends up leaving him, that there is this very beautiful scene in which he angrily threatens to shoot her. But finally, he makes an imaginary rendezvous with her knowing full well he'll not see her again. There are two ways of considering the world of schizo-desire: the infrapersonal level of desiring-machines-how the world is organized with systems of intensity of colors, impressions, appearances-and the suprapersonal level, in direct contact with the socius. I picked out several elements in these two categories. The moment when he hits a can of food in the street, the moment when he's in love, and the moment when he listens to seashells and sees Holly coming as a white form. All this remains sort of "normal." But there is also the moment when he shoots at the fish, or shoots at the balloon, or shoots at the tires, and a series of completely bizarre behaviors such as the theme of the stones that one finds throughout the film. There are also explicitly crazy acts, acts of agony: when he kills Holly's father and puts his body in the basement, he takes up a toaster that reappears several times in the film; when he puts Cato's body in a cool place and begins turning round and round in a sort of military march with completely discordant gestures; and finally, when he makes a record and then burns it. There are also scenes of schizo humor. At one moment he says: "We could have stopped the train by putting the car in front." And then there is this incredible scene when he locks up the two guys who come into Cato's house by accident. He shoots twice and says: "You think I got 'em? I don't want to know." Another high point of the film, in my opinion, is when, refering to the owner of a villa whom he has shut up with a deaf person, he says: "They were lucky, these two." At that point one realizes that, in fact, he remembers every detail, that he is not at all confused. Another very important theme is the loss of objects. It begins in the closed off family circle, and then assumes a cosmic perspective when some objects float toward the sky in a balloon, when he buries other objects in the ground so that they can be found a few hundred years later. When things begin to go badly for him, Kit looks at other objects that he has kept in a suitcase and says to someone: "You can take them." He keeps a children's book. At the end of the film, he gives away his pencil, his pen, etc. It is like an expanding universe. It goes in every direction, this really is a schizo thing. All the coordinates, all the values explode all over the place. This starts with the fire which is a kind of schizo jouissance as well, a desire for annihilation. Now, let us take some examples in the domain I called the suprapersonal level, in direct contact with the socius. The characters, for example, make reflections of the kind: "You see, we've made waves, the two of us." It is clear that what they are aiming at, then, is the stupidity of society, the stupidity of the police. It is the whole James Dean dimension, the whole paranoid dimension. He dumps on us all the trash about bounty hunters, the Commies, the atomic bomb ... Same thing when he reconstructs a camp, like one in Vietnam, when he speaks in the cassette recorder: one must follow the elders, etc. Completely reactionary ... Liberation: You say «he is schizo, "you say «he is reactionary. " Felix Guattari: Schizo or paranoid, its of little importance; he is reactionary as soon as he enters the field of dominant significations. At the level of intensities, where you don't know if you are man, woman, plant, or whatever, you stand directly in relations of desire, the relations of love with Holly. One no longer knows who is who, or who speaks to whom. Everything becomes an interrelational fabric-the eyes, the machines, the gestures. At the level of asignifYing connections that escape the everyday world, one identifies something, one says to oneself: "Here is a funny thing; yes, well, I didn't see it," and then one goes on to something else. At the level where significations solidifY-"l am a cop; I am a man; you are a woman, hence you do not drive; you are a cop, I shoot you face-to-face; you are a bounty hunter, I shoot you from behind" -there are double-entry tables that serve to classifY all people and roles. At this moment he is completely reactionary. He organizes his whole life in exact symmetry with the girl's father; he is as much of a bastard as the girl's father or the police. The schizo is an individual who can be in direct contact with the unconscious in the social field, but who can also function in a paranoid mode, openly seeing through the stupidity of the police: "You are so proud to have arrested me, you think you're heroes." He understands immediately. He is in the unconscious of others. He deciphers American society. Because in reality, he does not take himself at all for James Dean. It is the police, in fact ... Liberation: Yes, twice he is compared to James Dean. It is the girl at the beginning who says: "lliked him because he made me think of James Dean. " It is the cops in the end, after having arrested him, who say: «You are like James Dean. " Felix Guattari: Yes, his favorite hero is I don't remember who. Liberation: He wants to be Nat King Cole. It is not at all the same as James Dean. Felix Guattari: He wants to sing. That is the world of crystallized people. They are grimacing, like TV stars. But as soon as you go beyond that, then it is a marine or airy world, a world of intensities. One goes there because the air is purer; it is the sand, the colors, the caresses. They say (the critics) that he treats her like an animal. That's wrong, it's an absolutely marvellous love story. Liberation: There's another aspect of the film we have to talk about, the political aspect. The young cop who arrests him acts exactly like him. Felix Guattari: Exactly. He arrests him, then he shoots at him just to be mean, to scare him. Liberation: It's the same type of stupidity. At a given moment, society becomes completely crazy. Because they are on the run, sheriffi accompany the kids to school' troops guard the central bank because there are rumors that they were going to attack it. Holly says: 'It's as if we were Russians. )) It's a critique of American society. Felix Guattari: In Night of the Living Dead there was the same mass phenomenon. Good Americans all go out with their guns and end up shooting this poor black guy who had nothing to do with anything. Liberation: At first, one doesn't have to see this guy as being crazy. Felix Guattari: He is no more crazy at the beginning than at the end, or he is crazy all the time, it's just the way you look at it. Amour lou is madness no matter what. He says: "Me, I can lay all the girls, I have no problem, but you are something else"; or he says: "Besides, fucking, fucking, who cares? Yeah, yeah, it was very good." He doesn't give a shit for stories about fucking. No, it is really the story of a great love. A love that goes right through people. The father's on his back? Good, well, he shoots him. Too bad, he shouldn't have been there! Liberation: It's not like that, you're rigging the story a little. At the beginning, this guy is normal Felix Guattari: Absolutely not normal. Liberation: He's a poor bum, a garbage collector, and he is not so proud of it. Besides, when the girl asks him what he does, he says: 'Tm afraid to get up early in the morning, so 1 work as a garbage collector, " and then afterwards he's fired from his garbage job and works on a farm. He accepts the first job the employment agency offers him; he's the kind of guy who'll take anything, not a rebel in any way. He goes out with a girl and the father doesn't want him to go out with her because she shouldn't go out with a guy of his social class. Already there, society blunders. The father prevents him from seeing the girl. They see each other anyway. Then the father kills the girl's dog to punish her. This is the first act of madness in the film. It is the father who commits it. That's what the guy is up against. So what does he do, he goes to see the father and says to him: "Sir, I've a lot of respect for your daughter. 1 don't see why you won't let me see her, and if one day she no longer wants to see me, I'll let her go, 1 promise you, etc., " and the father tells him to piss off Then, at that point, he goes to see the girl. No one is home, he ends up entering the house, but really by chance ... Felix Guattari: No, not at all. He says: "I figured everything out." Liberation: He thinks the girl is there. Felix Guattari: He is armed, and he says, "I figured everything out." It triggers a kind of infernal machine of which he is the prisoner. It ends up going badly, but he already had figured it might go badly, because of taking the risk of entering the girl's house, of packing up and leaving and all that ... He doesn't improve. He goes to work and his boss tells him, "Youre fired! They all have guns in this film. That's where I really see the thing about American madness. There isn't a single guy who isn't armed. If he kills the fa ther, it's in self-defense, because the father says to him: "You entered my house. I'm handing you over to the police for armed robbery. " It's twenty years; he's got to kill the father. Felix Guattari: I'm sorry, I don't agree with you. Let's be precise. He's as crazy at the beginning as at the end, neither more nor less. Madness coincides with the schizo journey, with amour fou. From the moment he sees the girl, a machine of amour fou is triggered. He manages to get fired from his job. He wants to see her again, but because she tells him, "I don't hang out with garbage collectors," he comes back with a proper job. Liberation: He doesn't improve. He goes to work and his boss tells him, "Youre fired! Felix Guattari: Yes, but-you understand-it's one thing if the general framework unleashes behaviors of panic, of agony, of typical madness. It's a way of making clear what is already apparent from the beginning. Remember how he behaves at the beginning: "You want shoes? A dollar! You want to eat the dead dog? Give me a cigarette?" He says this to the guy with whom he picks garbage. Is all this nothing? Is it normal? All this is of no consequence. Remember, all of a sudden, he leaves: "Oh, shit. I've worked enough for today," etc. He is crazy all the time, if one looks closely. And Holly certainly knows it. Before agreeing to leave with him, she says to herself: "I love him, but he's totally crazy! How he treats me, he's weird. Liberation: Yes, she often says it. She says it to the rich guy; she says it to the girl he's going to kill ... Felix Guattari: At the beginning, all this is of no consequence because nobody's bothering him. When passion and repression come along, it's a catastrophe, it's as if he had been put in an asylum. You take a guy who is a bit mad, you put him in an asylum, either you or me, and he becomes completely crazy! Liberation: We are shown the kind of society that makes this guy totally crazy. He's crazy and he makes the society crazy, and at the same time, he's the perfect cop, he is respectful of the established orde Felix Guattari: There, I'm sorry, one must avoid a major misinterpretation. A paranoiac is not necessarily a reactionary. Liberation: Why is a paranoiac not a reactionary? Felix Guattari: Because a guy who starts talking to you about Hitler, Joan of Arc, or whoever, he borrows, let's say, semiotic elements in the social field. He is no more reactionary than a kid who says: 'TIl pull the head off my little brother," or "I'll kill mum," or who will do anything to annoy you. One cannot say that he is reactionary. The paranoiac-libido is so entangled in its molecular elements with the schizo-libido that it makes no sense to divide people into good or bad, reactionary or progressive. Kids in neighborhood gangs who wear Hitlerian insignia on their backs are not fascists; fascists are White Suprematists, they are structured organisms. It's a fact that representations of the socius, reactionary representations, are conveyed both in one and in the other. You find unconscious, reactionary elements of the socius in your dreams. Sometimes you also have disgusting dreams. You look for what is most rotten in the socius, but what you select are semiotic chains that are all put together outside. This does not mean that you are a fascist or that the dream is fascist, it proves nothing. Liberation: There is their madness, when one presses them. The father is not dead and the girl says: "Let's call the doctor. " Then he says: "No, forget it. " She says: "Yes, and I'll tell 'em what happened"-implying, of course, that if one tells what happened, nothing will happen, because when the others find out the way things happened, they'll realize he isn't guilty. And he replies: "That won't do, " i.e., in any case they won't believe it. It's the system; it doesn't quite fit your interpretation. Felix Guattari: Yes, but I was careful to say at the beginning ... Liberation: ... that the story was only there to make you accept the rest ... Felix Guattari: ...because there is something that doesn't fit. Kit, after all, is a guy who's pretty together. In various circumstances, he shows that he's an excellent organizer. He panics at the scene of the first murderthat of the father-because he'd planned everything in order to leave with the girl. He took a gun, but hadn't foreseen that it might turn out like that. But then later he thinks things out in detail. There is always a bit of improvisation, but as far as the essential is concerned, nothing is left to chance. It is there that, in my opinion, the film blunders. The way the character has been defined, it's not at all obvious that he would end up shooting guys around like this, systematically. The second time with Cato is still understandable, because he is scandalized that Cato talks nonsense to him (the story of gold pieces buried in the fields, etc.). He is terribly angry, a shot is fired as happened with Holly's father. He is infuriated by all the bullshit. The other murders seem really forced to fit the story. Liberation: You don't say it's a film about a schizo. You say it's a schizo film. Felix Guattari: It's a schizo film. I think critics don't tolerate things like this. They have to put this somewhere. Liberation: There is an interview with the author. Felix Guattari: An interview? Where? Liberation: Here, in Positif, I don't think he mentions the word "schizo" even once. Felix Guattari: There isn't a sentence where he says the guy is crazy? He doesn't realize it himself? Liberation: don't think so. He says: "1 thought of him and the girl as the sort of children you find in fairy tales; you see them in Huckleberry Finn, Swiss Family Robinson, and Treasure Island. They're lost in nature, they only know how to react to what is inside themselves. They do not communicate with the external world, they do not understand what others feel. Which doesn't mean they have no emotions, or that they are insensitive. " Felix Guattari: Yes, it's really stupid, it's terrible. (He takes Positif and glances through it.) Felix Guattari: This interview is really revolting. Yuk! It makes me puke! Félix Guattari - Chaosophy, Cinema Fou Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com The history of desire is inseparable from the history of its repression. Maybe one day a historian will try to write a history of "cinemas of desire" (the way one tells an audience who express their sentiments too excitedly to "stop their cinema"). But, at the very least, he would have to begin this history with classical antiquity! It could start with the opening of the first big theater of international renown, a theater for captive cinephiles: Plato's cave. It would have to describe the 2000 years or so of the Catholic church's monopoly of production and distribution, as well as the abortive attempts of dissident societies of production, such as the Cathar cinema of the 12th century, or the Jansenist cinema of the 17th, up to the triumph of the baroque monopoly. There would be color film in it: with 10th century stained-glass windows would be the silent cinema of the "bepowdered" and the Pierrots. A special place should be reserved for the big schools that transformed the economy of desire on a long-term basis, like that of courtly love, with its four hundred troubadours who managed to "launch" a new form of love and a new kind of woman. It would have to appreciate the devastating effects of the great consortia of romanticism and their promotion of an infantilization of love, while awaiting the saturation of the market by psychoanalytical racketeering with its standard shorts for miniaturized screens: the little cinema of transference, Oedipus, and castration. Power can only be maintained insofar as it relies on the semiologies of signification: "No one can ignore the law." This implies that no one can ignore the meaning of words. Linguists like Oswald Ducrot insist on the fact that language is not simply an instrument of communication, but also an instrument of power. 1 The law, as the culmination of sexual, ethnic, and class struggles, etc., crystallizes in language. The "reality" imposed by the powers-that-be is conveyed by a dominant semiology. Therefore, one should not go from a principled opposition between pleasure and reality, between a principle of desire and a principle of reality, but rather, from a principle of dominant reality and a principle of licit pleasure. Desire is forced to maintain itself, as well as can be expected, in this space between reality and pleasure, this frontier that power jealously controls with the help of innumerable frontier guards: in the family, at school, in the barracks, at the workshop, in psychiatric hospitals and, of course, at the movies. Thus, desire is so ruthlessly hunted down that it usually ends up renouncing its objects and investing itself and its guardians on these boundaries. The capitalist eros will turn into a passion for the boundary, it becomes the cop. While bumping on the all-too-explicit signs of the libido, it will take its pleasure from their hateful contemplation. "Look at this filth." It will become the gaze, the forbidden spectacle, the transgression, "without really getting into it." All the morals of asceticism and sublimation consist, in fact, of capturing the libido in order to identify and contain it within this system of limits. I don't mean, here, to oppose centralism with spontaneism, or the disciplines necessary for organizing the collectivity with the turbulence of the "natural" impulses; nor is it a matter of reducing this question to a simple case of morality or ideological strategy of dominant powers in order to better control the exploited ... The dualities morality/instinct, culture/nature, order! disorder, master/slave, centrality/democracy, etc., appear to us to be insufficient as a way of accounting for this eroticization of the limits, at least in its contemporary evolution. The development of productive forces in industrialized societies (it is true both for capitalism and bureaucratic socialism) involves an increasing liberation of the energy of desire. The capitalist system does not function simply by putting a flux of slaves to work. It depends on modelling individuals according to its preferences and, for this purpose, to propose and impose models of desire: it puts models of childhood, fatherhood, motherhood, and love in circulation. It launches these models the same way the automobile industry launches a new line of cars. The important thing is that these models always remain compatible with the axiomatic of capital: the object of love should always be an exclusive object participating in the system of private ownership. The fundamental equation is: enjoyment possession. Individuals are modelled to adapt, like a cog, to the capitalist machine. At the heart of their desire and in the exercise of their pleasure, they have to find private ownership. They have to invest it with ideality: "production for production's sake." They can only desire the objects that the market production proposes to them; they must not only submit to the hierarchy, but even more, love it as such. To conjure up the dangers of class struggle, capitalism has tried hard to introduce a bourgeois owner into the heart of each worker. It is the prerequisite of his integration. Traditional models that attached the worker to his job, to his quarter, to his moral values, indeed to his religion (even if it be socialism) have all collapsed. The paternalistic model of the boss is no longer compatible with production, no more than that of the paterfamilias with the education of children. One now needs a deterritorialized worker, someone who does not freeze into professional experience, but who follows the progress of technology, indeed, who develops a certain creativity, a certain participation. Moreover, one needs a consumer who adapts to the evolution of the market. For this reason, the problem raised is the transformation of traditional relations of production and other relations-familial, conjugal, educational, etc ... But if one relaxes the brakes too abruptly, then it is the machines of desire that risk flying off the handle, and breaking not only through the outdated frontiers but even the new ones the system wants to establish. The relations of production, formation, and reproduction oscillate between immobilist temptations and archaic fixations. The capitalist "solution" consists in pushing models that are at once adapted to its imperatives of standardization-i.e., that dismantle traditional territorialitiesand that reconstitute an artificial security; in other words, that modernize the archaisms and inject artificial ones. In conditions such as these, from the angle of production, the worker will be deterritorialized; from the angle of relations of production, formation, and reproduction, he will be reterritorialized. Cinema, television, and the press have become fundamental instruments of forming and imposing a dominant reality and dominant significations. Beyond being means of communication, of transmitting information, they are instruments of power. They not only handle messages, but, above all, libidinal energy. The themes of cinema-its models, its genres, its professional castes, its mandarins, its stars-are, whether they want to be or not, at the service of power. And not only insofar as they depend directly on the financial power machine, but first and foremost, because they participate in the elaboration and transmission of subjective models. Presently, the media, for the most part, functions in the service of repression. But they could become instruments of liberation of great importance. Commercial cinema, for example, entertains a latent racism in its Westerns; it can prevent the production of films about events like those of May '68 in France; but the Super-8 and the videotape recorder could be turned into means of writing that are much more direct and much more effective than discourses, pamphlets, and brochures. As such they could contribute greatly to foiling the tyranny of the savoir-ecrire that weighs not only on the bourgeois hierarchy but which operates also among the ranks of what is traditionally called the worker movement. Beyond the signifier, beyond the illusion of a permanent reality. It's not a speculative option, but an affirmation: all reality is dated, historically, and socially situated. The order of the real has nothing to do with destiny; one can change it. Let us consider three modern currents of thought, vehicles of three systems of signification: totalitarian systems, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. In each case, there is a certain keystone on which the organization of the dominant reality converges. A signifier dominates every statement of a totalitarian power, a leader, a church, or God. By right, all desire must converge upon it. No one can remain with impunity across "the line" or outside the church. But this type of libidinal economy centered on a transcendent object no longer corresponds exactly to the necessities of modern production, and it tends to be replaced by a more flexible system in developed capitalist countries. In order to form a worker, one must start in the cradle, discipline his Oedipal development within the family, follow him to school, to sports, to the cinema, and all the way to the juke-box. Psychoanalysis, while borrowing its own model from this traditional type of libidinal economy, has refined and "molecularized" it. It has put to task new types of less obvious objects-objects that anyone can buy, so to speak. These objects are supposed to overcode all the enonces of desire: the phallus and the partial objects-breast, shit, etc ... From then on, the despotism of the signifier no longer tends to concentrate on a leader or a God and to express itself on the massive scale of an empire or a church, but on that of the family itself reduced to a state of triangularity. The struggle between the sexes, generations, and social classes has been reduced to the scale of the family and the self. The machine of familial power, rectified by psychoanalysis, functions by means of two primary parts: the symbolic phallus and castration, instruments of the alienation of woman and child. One recalls the tyrannical interrogation of Little Hans by his father under the supervision of Professor Freud. But before that, the mother's resistance must be subdued, compelling her to submit to psychoanalytical dogma. In fact, it never crosses her mind to object to her son's coming to join her in bed whenever he wants. The mother becoming the agent of phallic power, the attack on childhood is concentrated on the question of masturbation. One does not accuse him directly of masturbating; one imposes upon him the good, "castrating" explanation with regard to this question. One forces him to incorporate a particular system of signification: "What you desire-we know this better than you-is to sleep with your mother and to kill your father." The importance of submitting the child to the Oedipian code-and this at an early age-does not result from a structural or signifying effect, separate from history or society. It depends on capitalism's inability to fi-nd other ways of providing the family with an artificial consistency. In archaic societies, the child was relatively free in his movements until his initiation. But in a capitalist society, initiation begins with the pacifier: the motherchild relationship tends to be more and more strictly controlled by psychologists, psychoanalysts, educators, etc. In its older formulation, power was maintained as a paradigmatic series-fatherboss-king, etc., culnlinating in a discernible, incarnate, and institutionalized God. In its present formulation, incarnation is deterritorialized and decentered. It is everywhere and nowhere, and it depends on family models to arrange a refuge for it. But in their turn, the diverse psychoanalytic models of Oedipal triangulation appear too territorialized with regard to parental images and partial objects. Much more abstract, much more mathematical models of the unconscious have to be proposed. Structuralism in psychoanalysis-as in other domains-can be thought of as an attempt to substitute a nameless God for the God of the church and the family. It proposes a transcendent model of subjectivity and desire that would be independent of history and real social struggle. From that moment, the conflict of ideas tends to be displaced anew. It leaves the psychoanalytical terrain of the family and the self for that of the semiotic and its applications in mass media. I cannot undertake here a critical analysis of structuralism; I only want to point out that, to my mind, such a critique should start by questioning the syncretic conception of the diverse modes of encoding. It seems to me indispensable, first of all, to avoid absorbing "natural" encodings, such as the genetic code, into human semiologies. One entertains the illusion that the "natural" order as well as that of the social arrangements (like structures of kinship) would be structured "like languages." Thus, one confuses the modes of encoding that I call asemiotic-like music, painting, mathematics, etc.-with those of speech and writing. Second, it seems necessary to distinguish between the presignifYing semiologies-for example, of archaic societies, the insane, and childrenand fully signifYing semiologies of modern societies that are all overcoded in the writing of social and economic laws. In primitive societies, one expresses oneself as much by speech as by gestures, dances, rituals, or signs marked on the body. In industrialized societies, this richness of expression is attenuated; all enonces have to be translatable to the language that encodes dominant meanings. It is also important to expose and insist on the independence of an asignifYing semiotics. It is this, in fact, that will allow us to understand what permits cinema to escape the semiologies of meaning and to participate in the collective arrangements of desire. If structuralism refuses to consider this independence, there can be no question of leaving the domain of signification-i.e., the signifier-signified duality. It tries, moreover, to systematically inject meaning into all signifying regimes that tend to escape it. (It will invent "relational significations" for science or, for the cinema, the unities of "iconomatic" significations, etc.) In putting the signifier and the signifying chains in the forefront, it substantiates the idea of keeping the contents at a secondary level. But, in fact, it secretly transfers the normalizing power of language onto the signifier. Hence, in masking the possible creativity of asignifying semiotic machines, structuralism plays into an order tied down to dominant significations. When it is exploited by capitalist and bureaucratic socialist powers to mold the collective imaginary, cinema topples over to the side of meaning. Yet, its own effectiveness continues to depend on its presignifying symbolic components as well as its asignifying ones: linkages, internal movements of visual images, colors, sounds, rhythms, gestures, speech, etc. But unlike the speech and writing that, for hundreds, indeed, thousands of years, has remained pretty much the same as a means of expression, cinema has, in a few decades, never ceased to enrich its technique. In this way, to catch up with these effects, the powers-that-be have tried to increase the control they exercise upon it. The more it enlarges its scale of aesthetic intensities, the more the systems of control and censure have tried to subjugate it to signifying semiologies. As an asignifying semiotic, how does cinema go beyond the structure of signifying semiologies? Christian Metz explains it better than I can; he shows that cinema is not a specialized language and that its matter of content3 is undefined: "the breadth of its semantic fabric is a consequence of two distinct causes whose effects are cumulative. On the one hand, cinema encompasses a code-language, in the talkies-whose presence itself would be enough to authorize semantic information of the most varied type. Second, other elements of the filmic text, for example, images, are themselves languages whose matter of content has no precise boundaries." Its matter of content extends so much more effectively beyond traditional encodings, since the semiotic alloy that composes its matter of expression is itself open to multiple systems of external intensities. Its matters of expression are not fixed. They go in different directions. Christian Metz enumerates some of them, emphasizing that each has an intrinsic system of pertinent features: 1) the phonic fabric of expression, that refers to spoken language (signifying semiology); 2) the sonorous but nonphonic fabric that refers to instrumental music (asignifying semiotic); 3) the visual and colored fabric that refers to painting (mixed, symbolic, and asignifying semiotic); 4) the noncolored, visual fabric that refers to black and white photography (mixed, symbolic, and asignifying semiotic); 5) the gestures and movements of the human body, etc. (symbolic semiologies). Umberto Eco had already pointed out that cinema does not bend to a system of double articulation, and that this had even led him to try to find a third articulation. But, doubtless, it is preferable to follow Metz who believes that cinema escapes all systems of double articulation, and, in my opinion, all elementary systems of significative encoding. The meanings in cinema are not directly encoded in a machine of intersecting syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes-they always come to it, secondarily, from external constraints that model it. If silent film, for example, had succeeded in expressing the intensities of desire in relation to the social field in a way that was much more immediate and authentic than that of the talkies, it was not because it was less expressive, but because the signifying script had not yet taken possession of the image and because, in these conditions, capitalism had not yet seized all the advantages it could take from it. The successive inventions of the talkies, of color, of television, etc., insofar as they enriched the possibilities of expressing desire, have led capitalism to take possession of cinema, and to use it as a privileged instrument of social control. It is interesting, in this respect, to consider the extent to which television has not only not absorbed cinema, but has even subjected itself to the formula of commercial film, whose power, for this very reason, has never been so strong. In these conditions, the stakes of liberalizing pornographic film seem secondary to me. One remains here at the level of a sort of "negotiation" with the contents that do not really threaten the established powers. On the contrary, these powers find it expedient to release the ballast on a terrain that does not threaten the foundations of established order. It would be completely different if the masses were at liberty to make the kind of film they wanted, whether pornographic or not. The miniaturization of material could become a determining factor in such an evolution.5 The creation of private television channels by cable should be a decisive test; in fact, nothing guarantees us that what will develop, from the standpoint of the economy of desire, will not be even more reactionary than what is broadcast by national television. Whatever it is, it seems to me that all that tends toward limiting micropolitical struggles of desire to an eros cut off from all context is a trap. And this doesn't just hold true for the cinema. The capitalist eros, we said, is always invested on the limit between a licit pleasure and a codified interdiction. It proliferates alongside the law; it makes itself the accomplice of what is forbidden; it channels the libido to the forbidden object that it only touches on superficially. This economy of transgression polarizes the desiring-production in a game of mirrors that cut it from all access to the real and catches it in phantasmic representations. In this way, desiring-production never ceases to be separated from social production. Fantasized desire and the capitalist real which convert desire to "useful" work involve, apparently, two different types of arrangements. In fact, they involve two politics of desire that are absolutely complementary: a politics of reenclosure on the person, the self, the appropriation of the other, hierarchy, exploitation, etc., and a politics of passive acceptance of the world such as it is. Against the notions of eros and eroticism, I would like to oppose those of desire and desiring-energy. Desire is not, like eros, tied down with the body, the person, and the law; it is no more dependent on the shameful body-with its hidden organs and its incestuous taboothan to a fascination with and to myths about the nude body, the all powerful phallus, and sublimation. Desire is constituted before the crystallization of the body and the organs, before the division of the sexes, before the separation between the familiarized self and the social field. It is enough to observe children, the insane, and the primitive without prejudice in order to understand that desire can make love with humans as well as with flowers, machines, or celebrations. It does not respect the ritual games of the war between the sexes: it is not sexual, it is transsexual. The struggle for the phallus, the threat of an imaginary castration, no more than the opposition between genitality and pregenitality, normality and perversion, fundamentally concern it. Nothing essential leads to the subjugation of the child, the woman, or the homosexual. In a word, it is not centered on dominant significations and values: it participates in open, asignifying semiotics, available for better or worse. Nothing depends here on destiny, but on collective arrangements in action. In conclusion, I must say of the cinema that it can be both the machine of eros, i.e., the interiorization of repression, and the machine of liberated desire. An action in favor of the liberty of expression should therefore not be centered a priori on erotic cinema, but on what I will call a cinema of desire. The real trap is the separation between erotic themes and social themes; all themes are at once social and transsexual. There is no political cinema on the one hand and an erotic cinema on the other. Cinema is political whatever its subject; each time it represents a man, a woman, a child, or an animal, it takes sides in the micro class struggle that concerns the reproduction of models of desire. The real repression of cinema is not centered on erotic images; it aims above all at imposing a respect for dominant representations and models used by the power to control and channel the desire of the masses. In every production, in every sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and produced according to the relations of production, or modelled on capitalist enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy of the system. Yet no theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this domain. One can make a film having life in a convent as its theme that puts the revolutionary libido in motion; one can make a film in defense of revolution that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In the last resort, what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant semiologies. Félix Guattari - Chaosophy, Cinema of Desire Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com “The cinema has always been the subject of everyday conversations and that reinforces its role as a form of ongoing, informal education” - Alain Badiou The cinema is for Badiou one that is interested in everybody, one that welcomes regular words as much as unpretentious bits of knowledge. In the event that the reality of the matter is that, as Badiou puts it, ‘philosophy doesn’t have to produce the thinking of the work of art, because art thinks by itself’ , then what is the place of the philosopher in this school for everybody? Is it accurate to say that he is an master or a follower? Does he address or tune in? What space does the talk of reasoning case for itself after entering the school? Remarking on André Bazin, Badiou figures a vague answer by asserting that there are great and awful explanations behind reasoning's current enthusiasm for film. While both reasons propose to the possibility of the philosopher as teacher,, they don't discount the likelihood of a philosophical apprenticeship through film. The terrible reason focuses to theory's requirement for intercession. Cinema is a piece of a common affair and in this manner offers itself unequivocally as a site of arrangement. At the end of the day, film helps by deciphering the ideas logicians make and work with. Film is consequently instrumental to reasoning. The great one communicates then again, a specific need at the heart of cinema. Rationality intercedes correctly on the grounds that silver screen is presently re-characterizing its own space; film does not have its own inquiries (123). As it were, the thinker either utilizes silver screen as a site for outlines or creates the reasoning that film can't do. In both cases the logician coaches silver screen as to its own particular potential outcomes, as though movies were unknowingly giving responses to inquiries they don't get it. In the essay ‘Can a film be spoken about?’ Badiou depicts his talk as aphoristic (restricted to the undefined judgment of ordinary discussions, additionally from the diacritical one of the film analyst) which intends to talk about a film qua film, with a specific end goal to sort out one's talk around “cinema’s subtractive (or defective) relation to one or several among the other arts”. In this entry the connection amongst cinema and philosophy appears to experience a reversal: so as to talk about a film, one must comprehend it qua film, one must give the peculiarity of a film a chance to uncover itself, through takes and cuts, with a specific end goal to“maintain the movement of defection, rather than the plenitude of its support”. It is through the mindful examination of silver screen's takes and slices that film's deficient connection to painting, music and theater is uncovered. In this manner from the “discourse of the master” we have moved to the talk of the understudy. The savant's place in this school for everybody appears to be fairly questionable, a development between the instructor's work area and the understudy's seat. This accumulation is an enlightening case of how this development educates the continuous experience amongst cinema and philosophy. With a specific end goal to comprehend this experience one should along these lines be mindful from one perspective to the course of a group of stars and on the other to a progression of dreams. In the section ‘Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation’, Badiou portrays film as having an advantaged relationship to reasoning. However this relationship experiences from the onset a procedure of duplication and produces two inquiries and two methodologies: “how does philosophy regard cinema?” and “how does cinema transform philosophy?” . One ought to dependably remember that the scholar poses the question ‘how to regard cinema’ from a particular reasonable star grouping, a profoundly explained outline. This minute – which could be said to identify with Badiou's ‘bad reason’ – can never be totally stifled in light of the fact that the philosophical direction unavoidably demands (a) philosophical personality communicated from inside logic through philosophical vocabulary. At the end of the day, the star grouping must be unmistakably characterized each time rationality goes through silver screen, regardless of whether this heavenly body is confirmed, conceded or tested by film. The heavenly body delimits the parameters of the experience. In Badiou’s constellation cinema is presented as a ‘defective art’. Cinema therefore can be categorized as one of the four conditions (art, science, love, politics) that Badiou comprehends as creating truths. The philosophical errand – constantly organized around the class of truth – is along these lines that of conveying a development between the movement of contentions and the presentation of points of confinement. This development then seizes truths, logical, political, imaginative and loving ones. . Philosophy, as the realization of this development is in this way, the site of thought at which (non philosophical) truths seize us and are seized as such” and can just arrange an "objectless subject, a subject open just to the truths that travel in its seizing and by which it is seized". As art cinema is accordingly on the double logic's condition and offense, since, as Badiou states, “philosophy is always gnawed at, wounded, indented by the evental and singular character of its conditions”. The misty brightness of art crosses philosophy and seizes it, but art does not become an object for philosophy. With the term inaesthetics Badiou illuminated exactly this thought: the philosopher does not transform art into a question for logic, but rather portrays the intraphilosophical impacts of artist as “the thinking of the thought that it itself is”. It is from inside the heavenly body externally laid out here then that Badiou can comment that the " relationship between philosophy and cinema is not one of knowledge, but one of transformation”. It stays to be perceived how, from inside Badiou's constellation, cinema transforms philosophy. A to begin with, hurried answer, can be endeavored: : cinema never transforms philosophy, however constantly just a philosophical constellation; the change practiced by film on reasoning must be seen from inside a particular philosophical signal, that is from inside the specificity of a heavenly body. This is for two reasons: it is constantly through the intervention of a specific constellation (or genre, or sequence, or concept) that the experience between the two happens. The constellation is not really an appropriate name, it could rather be characterized as a solitary setup of ideas and their introduction or better as the intervention between these two minutes. This course of action delivers a peculiarity that gives importance on to the experience by deciding the whys and hows of a philosophical look on film. Cinema can therefore transform the singular constellation, the likelihood of a particular method of considering. To state, for example, that film conveys philosophy to an end, would intend to reduce once again cinema to philosophy, as though cinema could be totally consumed by philosopohy; it implies besides that from one perspective cinema satisfies its assignment by conveying philosophy to one more end, while philosophy can then start once more, by and by. The second reason is maybe all the more illuminating: to say that cinema as such transforms philosophy as such, would dependably lessen the dialog to the vitality of both, thus either would be changed into an outright that drops another supreme and its own peculiarity. In other words this would mean from one perspective to request that of cinema distinguish what is fundamental about philosophy and after that change this pith, and then again to request that philosophy recognize what is basic about film and submit itself to the change this substance can create. The question subsequently is to be placed in these terms: what can be opened by and in cinema from inside a solitary star grouping that difficulties this specific game plan? What components and works of cinema, as distinguished by a particular constellation, create onthis constellation a muddling, a deafness, a blind side, the minute where eventually very constellation that has delivered this very understanding can't be straightforwardly watched any longer. Badiou gives a case by saying that film produces new blends: “if we are able to create philosophical concepts from cinema it is by changing the old philosophical syntheses by bringing them into contact with the new cinematic synthesis” For this situation cinema changes philosophy by caving in the resistance between developed time and unadulterated span, amongst progression and brokenness.Cinema in this manner delivers new worldly combinations. It is along these lines as a philosophical circumstance that cinemacan change philosophy, by grabbing the blends logic has made and acknowledged. Badiou then advances a second argument. Cinema transforms philosophy since it opens it to a difficulty, it shows this inconceivability by exhibiting it. The inconceivability identifies with the authority of sensible limitlessness. Cinema draws in a battle with the endless and fruitful movies prevail with regards to filtering the unending, by creating effortlessness out of everything there is. Out of this vastness Cinema develops with something new, something which may seize philosophy in a way that philosophy can't yet perceive, something which is both a condition and an offense. As Badiou expresses “while philosophy involves inventing new synthesis, I think that it hasn’t completely understood cinema yet”. Maybe here dwells the reasoning of cinema: an imperviousness to be seen, hence a tutoring and a future; atruth for everybody that philosophy can't yet educate. At any rate this is the thing that Badiou appears to let us know. From the 'Aliens' space marine to the polygamist patriarch of 'Big Love' Regardless of whether you knew him as the "Game over, man!" snort from Aliens, the perverted more seasoned sibling of Weird Science, the polygamist patriarch on HBO's Big Love or any of his many convincing cameos or grasp supporting parts, Bill Paxton was dependably a solid nearness – a Texas-conceived utility player who could go from unpleasant to thoughtful, giggling to ethically stable in seconds level. The news of the 61-year-old on-screen character's passing toward the beginning of today filled online networking encourages with fans citing lines and namedropping their own best Paxton minutes (who knew there were such a large number of Hatfields and McCoys advocates out there?); to be honest, coming down a rundown of his most basic motion picture and TV parts to a unimportant 10 is harder than you'd might suspect. We've singled out these past huge turns, nonetheless, as our top picks of the gone-much too early star. For an era of watchers raised on John Hughes' high schooler comedies, Paxton will dependably be Chet – the group cut–sporting, shotgun-toting more established sibling from hellfire. (The way that his impermanent residency as a discharge coverdd Jabba the Hut-like animal – a definitive comeuppance when you cross Kelly LeBrock, people – appears to be less odious than the kin in his human shape says a considerable measure in regards to this character.) The performing artist as of late told WTF podcast have Marc Maron that a large number of Chet's best lines were taken from Paxton's own particular past misfortunes, including his scandalous offer to cook our saints "a nice, greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray." Paxton made such an impression as a bombastic marine in James Cameron's touchy Alien continuation that decades later, at whatever point fans discuss that motion picture, the primary thing they quote is quite often his whiny announcement: "Game over, man! Game over!" Part entertainment and part plot-driver, his Private Hudson exemplified the blend of arrogance and frenzy of a savage military compel bulling its way into an unsafe circumstance. (Any likeness to certifiable parallels amid the Reagan Era were, normally, totally incidental.) Along with Weird Science, it's one the most punctual signs that the performing artist was more than willing to put on a show of being an alpha-male jokester if the part requested it. It's likewise an extraordinary Exhibit A for what a precious troupe MVP he was. Much sooner than she turned into the main female to win the Best Director Oscar, The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow gave activity awfulness fans one of the half breed class' best films – and talented Paxton with one of his most magnificently unhinged parts. As a major aspect of a family of vampires wandering the Southwest looking for casualties, he plays the film's inhabitant batshit bloodsucker, the kind of animal of the night who likes to play with his sustenance before tearing out its jugular. No one alive or undead can tear separated a redneck bar ("I hate it when they ain't shaved") with more hero panache, or pronounce that the Type O he's recently gulped up is "finger-licki' great" with more view biting fervor. Next drink's on us, Bill. Despite the fact that he exceeded expectations in an assortment of parts all through his profession, Paxton was getting it done at whatever point he was given a role as a not-as-basic as-he-appears to be little towner. In executive Carl Franklin's relaxed, southern-singed wrongdoing picture (co-composed by Tom Epperson an as yet youngster Billy Bob Thornton), the star put a deep turn on the character of an Arkansas police boss who find out about a band of brutal medication traffickers than the LAPD analysts working on it anticipate. His neighborhood lawman – nicknamed "Hurricane" – resembles a rendition of himself: a man whose aptitudes and astuteness are disparaged in light of his thick complement, expansive grin and amiable attitude. Paxton flexed his comedic side as a supporting part in this Arnold Schwarzenegger activity flick, playing the world's most obscene utilized auto businessperson – a mustachioed crawl who's been alluring spy sequestered from everything Ahnold's significant other, Jamie Lee Curtis. In one of the motion picture's most life-changing scenes, he happily describes how he's tempted a housewife, ignorant that Schwarzenegger is the "exhausting rascal" she's married to and bragging that she has an "ass like a 10-year-old boy." (Don't even ask him why Corvettes are a two-bit Casanova's vehicle of choice.) Although he has a littler part, it prompts to an essential kicker toward the finish of the film. While Tom Hanks was showing the ethics of quiet reasonability as genuine NASA space explorer Jim Lovell, Paxton's Fred Haise was remaining in for every other person – particularly, those group of onlookers individuals who'd be significantly more bothered in the event that they were stranded in space on a breaking down module. As grouchy as he is fit, the flight's shrewd architect turns into the human face of a mission gone astray, beefing at his collaborators noticeable all around and on the ground. (And keeping in mind that as yet completing his work, in spite of battling a fever.) He's his own sort of saint, without a moment's delay a helpful person and an ornery cuss. Without a doubt, this cutting edge fiasco motion picture about runaway tornadoes (and the general population who pursue them) is some primo Hollywood cheddar – however in the event that you required verification that Paxton could pull off a lead part and also his typical MVP supporting parts, look no further. As one portion of a storm–hunting couple gunning for some outrageous common calamities – and whose marriage is its own particular sort of shitstorm – the performing artist gives his scenes with costar Helen Hunt a feeling of battered mankind in the midst of the screeching guitar soundtrack and watch-out-for-that-flying-dairy animals set pieces. Paxton is the establishing power in a motion picture that is about grabbing garbage and throwing it through the air. He makes the sound and anger imply something. Paxton re-cooperated with his One False Move co-star Billy Bob Thornton for director Sam Raimi's astounding, underrated adjustment of Scott B. Smith's acclaimed thriller novel. In spite of the fact that they were playing Minnesotans rather than Southerners, the on-screen characters drew on their normal center American roots to convey life to the parts of two common laborers siblings who bumble onto a dead body – and a huge number of dollars. Paxton's Hank Mitchell is the more intelligent of the two kin, and the one with the more grounded inner voice, making this another impeccable part for him: a discreetly not too bad man of activity whose weaved forehead and insightful gaze uncover each stress and figuring. More individuals presumably got Paxton's Titanic turn (he's the contemporary fortune seeker who sets up the stretched out flashback to that critical voyage) in a solitary 1997 end of the week than saw his directorial make a big appearance amid the last's whole showy run. Be that as it may, his execution in this nerve-clanking outside the box thriller, about an adoring father who trusts God has charged him to wind up distinctly an avenging blessed messenger, is much more basic – and a practice in noble religious devotion run amuck. This is not your regular serial executioner, but rather a man who believes he's doing the Lord's work by dispatching miscreants, and who believes he's shielding his kids from Satan's grip each time he swings his hatchet. Given the film's multifaceted emotional, you wished he worked behind the camera more than he. Given the savagery with which he played this preposterous character, you wish Paxton's patriarchal insane person didn't frequent your fantasies to such an extent. One of Paxton's most perplexing parts, the patriarchal polygamist in HBO's distinction show discovered him straddling the holy and the debase – a banned Mormon endeavoring to steerage a business and keep running for open office while keeping his three spouses and dim past a mystery. The on-screen character assumed the part with incapacitating sympathy more than five seasons; he could both pitch you on his dedication to his confidence (and his supersized family) and make you feel frustrated about him as the arrangement heaved toward its heartrending finale. Bunuel's masterpiece "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" generally is considered a surrealist film - however, it seems that compared to the "Andalusian Dog", on which, as already known Buñuel worked with Dali, "The Discreet Charm" slightly deviates from the "typical "surrealistic forms (although surrealism difficult to attribute any typical and strictly defined form), or from what mainly distinguishes Surrealism. Andre Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto" Surrealism defined, among other things, as a free psychic automatism which aims to express the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of any control of reason, beyond all aesthetic and moral attitudes. " Two important factors are "the omnipotence of dream" and "disinterested play of thought." Although at first glance seems to be "discreet charm" fits in Breton's definition because of the element of dream and absurd situations that appear to be the product of anything else apart from the "disinterested play of thought," can not but let us not make that movie though something more than playing with surrealist sense. In the foreground of the film is an absurd situation that a group of wealthy bourgeois persistently interfere in order to have dinner, starting from the first scenes of the film. For these situations there is simply no adequate explanation - each of the following is more absurd than the last, and no matter how hard you try to find an explanation or meaning in each particular situation, it seems that there is not. They all look like raids, penetrating into finely decorated social groups bourgeois world - and it's dinner as a special form of the ceremony in the high society of the highest expression of this regulation, this well-structured order. They were the two main features of absurd situations - their individual unsubstantiality or inability to find their meaning in themselves, and in a well-decorated intrusiveness order - what an absurd situation constituted as Lacanian Real, as opposed to the Imaginary and the Symbolic, where all three elements of the structure of reality from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The text will try to constitutes this situation as real and that they, therefore, to find a place in the "reality" of the film. In addition, the film was a critical and ideological character dinners, taking into account the role of dinners in the life of the privileged class as a moment in which not only displays the grandeur of their privilege, but comes to manifestations of social identity that members of this class of share. However, under that identity, under this social mask, persona in the classical sense, there is another identity that is revealed only when their holders find themselves in absurd situations. Finally, the theme of dreams is unavoidable here, as well as their role in the life of this group of the bourgeoisie. So absurd situations such incursions Real, ideological character dinners and meaning of dreams are the three main points. "What is this supposed to mean?" The question that Francois Teven sets several times during the film, and the absurd situations - "What is that supposed to mean?" Or more precisely "what is the meaning of this?" - But highlights the city absurd situations in the film. The issue was first raised when a group of bourgeois, led Tevenoom, arrives at the home of Sénéchal at a dinner, but it turns out that the dinner arranged for the next day, although the ambassador Acosta convinced that the call was for tonight - here comes first absurdity, the first conflict between what is Acosta heard and what "is". Already we see that bourgeois act a little confused - they wonder why that is not set, but it has been eight; not sure whether to completely abandon the deal or to go to another place etc.. The unusual situation in which they find themselves violates their established relationships and behaviors, plans and arrangements, the only hint of the basic characteristics of absurd situations. Then they all head to the restaurant, but found that the restaurant owner had died and that his body inside the coffin, is located in the main room restaurant, but, despite that, the restaurant staff is willing to serve them, and the maitre their promises and excellent dinner , regardless of what is dead in the same room, although hidden from the eyes of the bourgeoisie screen. And here are the modes of conduct interfere unexpected inconveniences. The question is, why this situation is called absurd, inexplicable? In the case of a dead man in a restaurant, dotted with questions: where did it here, why funeral service did not come by his body, why the restaurant is open despite the unfortunate event? This question has no answer because the question itself is absurd, or at least no meaningful response. If we try to find him, it will be impossible and we will wrist in unsolvable contradictions. Similarly with subsequent situations - for example, the shortage of tea, coffee and milk in the cafe or by entering the military battalion in the house of Sénéchal, moment after dinner finally started or else the situation in which Teven finds his wife with Acosta. And there is a lower common questions that point to the absurdity and the inherent inability to sense and, so to speak, the logical answer: how is it that no tea, coffee and milk? How to guests whether all this go away? Or, what kind of military maneuvers taking place in the middle of France? What is the custom to colonel with the whole troop come over for dinner? Or: how to Teven so coolly and calmly react to the fact that his wife was with Acosta and goes to the waiting at the car? How so easily accept the excuse that if what he wants to show her "sursicks", although it does not exist? Take this inherent impossibility of meaningful, logical answer? What is essentially an attempt to respond to this question, attempts to find meaning in these intrusions? This question is, in contrast, can be answered, but to do that, is going to report on a three-part structure of reality from Lacanian perspective - the division of the imaginary, symbolic and real terms. This division is best illustrated by the example of any board game: the symbolic element of the structure of reality that demands to be rules, but the rules in general, not specific rules x or y (for that level will ensure symbolic, as will be discussed later). In this sense, the symbolic determines form, giving a form that must form the rules, whatever those rules - symbolic meets form content, specific rules x or y - that is, in the case of social games, the symbolic arrangement requires rules. Imaginary here are the names of figures and their physical form, but not only that - if we symbolically designated as an abstract form of rules, Imaginary for the content in all its forms. It is easy to imagine a game where there is regulation of the rules, but all the facilities replaced in relation to the previous content. Finally, the real is contingent here (on this I'll be back a little later) - Intelligence toy or some event that could disrupt the game or that is completely interrupted, therefore, something that does not belong to the symbolic order, but it is not imaginary. More abstract terms, the symbolic order of the reality which is symbolized, in which "everything has its place" in order and nothing he does not avoid, and where things through the mechanisms of the signifier and the signified caught in symbole network operators which govern your reality. Symbolic is primarily, but not only, linguistic categories, a question of language. The symbolic order consists of rules, and those who are aware of and which have not, and that we have to follow (just like the rules in board games) that we could not communicate with others, and that through this communication constitute as subjects (again, as as the figures in the social games constituted through rules). It is obvious that communication and communication rules represent something that is like a second nature for all of us, something without which we can not - in other words, and we are caught in the symbolic network, as well as all the other things that we accommodate. Ranking the "big Other" - it seems like we are, because we have to obey the rules in order to be recognized as entities subordinate to an agent that controls our actions. In the sense in which we determined that, we - the symbolic order as a great companion, which can be embodied, eg., In a God who sees everything and control everything. What is the difference between the symbolic and the symbolic, given that these two terms sound similar? Here is an interesting phenomenon first bishop in the film, which comes with Senshel's to become their gardener. Apart from the possible interpretation of subordination of the Church's most powerful, highest class, where it serves only to hoe the garden and take care of the lawn prosperous capitalist property, or capitalist order, not mired in the weeds and thorns, and the "immorality and sin," Bishop Bishop by symbolization, or symbolization, which is different from the symbolic order that we talked about earlier. While symbolic order includes symbols that are associated only with other symbols (requires an abstract form), symbolization of which we are talking, which is symbolic, in connection with the matters. Both bishops constituted his church robes and a cross around his neck - the time in which it appears in gardening overalls, Mr. Senechal roughly ejected from the house, but when he returns to his "law suit", recognizing him as a priest, although it comes a man of the same physical appearance. In this sense, one could say that the priest is not a priest because he has some essential traits that define him as a priest, but because it is so recognized by other entities. Hypothetically, if all operators stopped priestly robes recognized as belonging to the ranks of the Church, the priest is no longer a priest. In the film clearly "see" all three elements of the structure of reality - Symbolic are the rules by which the bourgeois behavior, their fine manners and etiquette, knowledge of food and drink and the ways in which they are most delicious, "most appropriate" consume, unlike simple consumption (what we see at Akostinog chauffeur); The symbol is also a place occupied in society - Acosta's ambassador, Sénéchal women's - free - Sénéchal women, Teven and Senechal are wealthy businessmen and so on. When not acting according to prescribed rules and not occupied and social functions, would not be what they are. On the other hand, their names, history, physical appearance or tone of voice that are imaginary, and we could imagine that they look completely different and have different names, but to again be a group of the bourgeoisie which has been trying to dinner but she does not succeed. However, Imaginary is not accidental, not arbitrarily, but, structurally speaking, determined Symbolic. What is the role of the Real in all this? Similar to absurd situations in the film is realistic, so to say, inexplicably, elusive, something that escapes symbolization and placement in the symbolic order - as absurd situation can not explain and elude placement in the "sense", as when Teven asks " what is the meaning of this? "but does not get the answer - but what is traumatic remainder, a surplus that could be symbolized. Lacan calls it Things, with a capital "T", but not in the sense in which it is Kantian thing-in-itself, transcendental, inaccessible to reason, devoid of attributes, non-produced, and on the other side of reality available to us. Realistically not something external symbolic order which is substantial and there is a positive, a tangible thing, but is in the middle of the order - what is his lack, it is also redundant in the sense that eludes symbolization, and lack of, in the sense that it is the result of incoherence , imperfections and shortcomings of the order itself. So real terms at the same time and produces or is produced - not only disturbs the symbolic order of the entries mentioned inconsistencies, irregularities and conflicts in it, but is the product of precisely these irregularities and conflicts, or the inability of symbolization. On this track, Realistically it could be qualified as "ekstimate" - external intimate - in the sense that the outside but it is also there, in a way, either here or there, it just adds explainable and the fleeting nature of the Real. This directly follows from a better perspective on the absurd situations. Although the situation is definitely absurd and have no explanation, do not fall from the sky and do not represent a "miracle" - not, each of these situations is produced by irregularities and cracks in the symbolic order: for example, a military troop that decline in house of Senechal (and while the use of marijuana, which only seems absurd thing) is that due to the maneuver being performed (which can not be represented as a gap in the standings after military exercises in the city are not usually part of the order) and also gets produced from incoherence in the symbolic order. At the same time, they distort reality Symbol subjects and also produced a series of consequences where do their decline (ie, where Realistically exercise its decline) - bourgeois again I can not have dinner because of the military or the mysterious disappearance Sénéchal's makes the brain because they think that the issue of police raids, thereby effectively abyssal yourself a chance for lunch. Thus, the ratio of the Real and Symbolic dialectical relationship - is realistic product Symbolic, because the very system deficiency causes the symbolization of the Real, but also causes symbolic because in turn becomes the cause of the failures. It should be noted another aspect of the absence of the Real - it does not have to happen, does not have to have it in any way other than as a cause of disorder in order. Like the traumatic event that is identified as traumatic only when the recognize as the cause of symptoms, Realistic retroactively recognized as real terms after distortion or repetition (such as repeated failure Dining) which entered into the symbolic order. So in the film, the situation does not define itself - we recognize them as absurd, and Lacanian Real, only the consequences they have. If we Realistically constituted at the same time as the deficit and as a surplus, it can not be without being reminded of the objet petit a: the same as real terms does not have to exist that would have consequences that would be effective, and objet petit a no, it is the lack, gaps in the symbolic order, a gap in which the symbolization missed. At the same time, it is a surplus, and this surplus jouissance. If we put an equal sign between the real and the absurd, it becomes clear that only the theory that handles concepts such as Real, objet petit and jousissance, the terms of which both are and are not, which are inherent to the seemingly absurd construction can adequately analyze and deal with absurd situations - but not so that it creates a new absurdity, as in the movie, but one gets a different kind of rationality. This is not a positivist rationality, which handles the formulas A = A and not-A = non-A, but dialectical rationality in which opposites pervade, whose elementary particles can not be reduced to mere identity to themselves and whose terms condition each other in seemingly, and only seemingly absurd circle. Cooking and ideology Since we founded explained the functioning of symbolic order, it is obvious that evening (taken in a broad sense, as ritual meals) has a very important place in the standings. It is no coincidence that just the bourgeoisie tries to dinner throughout the film - in the life of the upper classes, dinner is never just dinner. There is something about her which gives it special importance. When the bourgeoisie dinner, the food itself is not important - it's an opportunity to talk about many things more lucrative, business, political events, etc. The food here can also be viewed as a fetish - as a material object which itself is not essential and can take different form, but it is important what is '' behind the building, "a kind of" aura "that fetishized object possesses and that is actually what what is important, what interested fetishists - in this case, the bourgeoisie. Here it is advisable to refer to Levi-Strauss' semiotic triangle of food, or three ways of preparing food, which indicate the relationship between nature and culture: raw food as what it signifies nature, baked like what signifies culture and civilization, and cooked as a mediator between the two opposites. The whole attitude indicates opposition of nature and culture, nature and civilization, and nature as a non-produced and history as produced, in a certain sense. Since the relationship of nature and history of the subject almost every ideology (especially philosophy as the highest form of ideology, to use the words of Marx), we can conclude that every breakfast, every lunch and every evening a matter of ideology, that this rite, neatly placed in a symbolic order, by no means an ordinary, everyday thing. In this regard, when the bourgeoisie sit at the table to dine, then it enjoys one bourgeois meal that was knee-deep in ideology. The question is: where ideology? If you continue to follow Marx and confirm that the ruling ideas of a society in a period of ideas of its ruling class, it is clear that the dinner to his knees in the ruling ideology. Dinner has its own rules, and in this regard is entirely located within the symbolic order. Do not acquire you that impression directly from the film? When our group of bourgeois sits at the table, it selects with taste, very select field in an appropriate manner; When drinking a martini, drink it mouthful by mouthful, as appropriate. As I mentioned, Akostin chauffeur it works in a different way, and there we can see hints of class differences and class conflict that later justify the words of Ms. Senechal - "he is plain, uneducated man." In other words, in order to properly consume food and drink, it is education or treatment and lifestyle reserved only for the privileged. This dinner has the character of a ritual with clearly stipulated provisions, almost like a ceremony - for this purpose, it is interesting that the restaurant where the dead man's name "La sabretache", a word denotes a piece of uniform cavalry officer from Napoleon's time, as we can not recall nothing else except the ceremonially, solemnity. We can imagine that the bourgeois meet regularly in an attempt to have dinner and it becomes a kind of tradition, a tradition appears where there is a lack of institutions, the absence of legal regulation. Rituals are an attempt to compensate for the imperfections of this - as in the former Soviet bloc countries, and even here, where after the collapse of the institutions for the sake of the free flow of capital refreshed rituals - religious, secular, personal, etc. Not a movie, not far from that association - corruption Ambassador Acosta and his accomplices in the drug smuggling implies the absence of regulation, as well as military exercises in the middle of town, with the army that uninvited intrusion into the house, pushing free smoking marijuana. To this end, the bourgeoisie are trying to provide our rituals, here specifically ritual dinners, replacing the absence of institutions and defend their orderly lives from the onslaught of deregulation. As rituals and ideology are concerned, it is interesting to craft that Bunuel says in his film Phantom of Liberty, where guests sit at a table on the toilet seat, water pleasant, friendly conversation, and when they want to eat, ask the host for ''one room". In the same way, and contrary to the food industry is very ideological, which confirms that the symbolic order governs all that is like '' second nature '' entities, and to entities constituted within the system and through the order. Turning now to fetishism dinner. Fetish rule used to be the lack of compensation, something that is not there - it is a constant search for the true object of desire for objects that will never be able to be sustained. This begs the question is not: if a fetish used to cover a shortage, then he conceals the lack of - what? When played incursions in Real, when coming to the fore the cracks and incoherence in the symbolic order, and comes to cracks and incoherence in the Symbol in relation to the bourgeoisie - a fine, exemplary subjects of civil society bourgeois become confused, rejected their manners and behave differently than before. Maybe just this hides discreet charm of the bourgeoisie - must charm us with its ability to be indiscreet and inappropriate to pull out of every uncomfortable situation that would then regained her composure and continued business as usual - a discreet and appropriate. And just when we think, in the scene where the house fall into armed terrorists, that the bourgeoisie is over and that this time will not be able to avoid a dangerous encounter with the Real, it turns out that it was Akost's dream, after which everything returns to normal. Here we try to apply the concept of persona in the ancient sense. In ancient times, the term described the social role that the individual took on themselves; Eventually the term began to mean personality, personality, uniqueness and singularity of each of us, that is. person, how to read a literal translation. From the identification of social roles, the term began to mean a particular kind of individuality that came to the fore during the rise of the bourgeoisie of the city's ruling class. However, if we revive the notion of persona in the classic sense, we can say that during the intrusion of the Real in the symbolic order, the bourgeoisie is one of the mask of social roles and below it to see their "true essence" - hypocrisy, selfishness, greed (for example, when trying to Acosta grab a piece of meat off the table during the incursion of armed men) and so on. However, this is a false trail, because under the mask reveals positive existence, it is revealed that there is something which is in direct contradiction with the position that the bourgeois are trying to have dinner because dinner fetish that hides lack, because here reveals that there is no shortage. What's this about? As bourgeois as individuals are concerned, their change of behavior does not reveal anything to the incoherence in the symbolic order. However, a shortage remains. Fetish serves to mask the lack of - fetish is always a substitute for the original object of desire that is lost and that can not be undone, but despite this, the desire is not slowing down, and the search for the object of desire continues, as stated above. Therefore, bourgeois and persistently trying to have dinner, because they stimulate the desire for (unreachable) object of desire. However, dinner was impossible - the very cracks in the symbolic order creating the Real incursions and therefore, hypothetically, if the bourgeois attempt to dinner a hundred times, it'll be a hundred absurd situations. This can only mean one thing - that the lack of a fetish conceals a lack in the symbolic order, the lack of inherent order and that we fetish try to "forget" that the symbolic lack flawed. This dinner becomes a vicious circle - it is impossible, but it does not prevent the bourgeoisie to try to have dinner. In other words, a fetish is T or signifier missing in the Other, the signifier is not in the symbolic order, ie. the Big Other. He is also a signifier of objet petit a, the lack, gaps in the symbolic order. It is this lack of what products Real, it produces absurd; at the same time, real production shortfall, absurd produces its own inability to "de-absurdisation'' - more precisely, absurdity itself prevents the elimination of over symbolic order. The absurdity is necessary - the bourgeoisie can not be without it. In this way, it seems that the persistence with which the bourgeoisie try to have dinner in conjunction with its charming art of escape from every unpleasant situations - if the absurd is necessary, then it is necessary and this indiscreet charm of the draw from the situation; paradoxically, that would occur each subsequent absurdity, it is necessary that the bourgeoisie be able to return to the old, and they are able to do thanks to the indestructible Real that again and again penetrates the symbolic order. Symbolism of dreams Finally, it should take up the theme of dreams prevailing in, tentatively speaking, the second part of the film. The theme of dreams is not rare in surrealism and Buñuel her here dedicated due attention. Although it seems that dreams are meaningless as absurd situation, if there then the current line of thinking, we will see that the film has here a lot to tell us. The most interesting is the dream of Mr. Sénéchal, which is really a "dream within a dream" who dreaming Teven. The first thing we can observe is that Sénéchal's dream expresses fear of the bourgeoisie to be uncovered - even the food, the fetish, false because the butler on the floor turns out artificial chicken - in his final intentions and scams perpetrated over their "friends". When you raise a theater curtain and terminate them (again) in the evening, the most impressive moment is that when whisper tells them text to excuses. Prompter just plays the role of the big Other, symbolic order, which subjects what to say and what to do; On the other hand, the audience at the same time plays the role of the big Other - it is like a criteria before which we have to prove or experience the shame. Is not Sénéchal reaction - sweating, and confusion or fear of power at a deeper level - exactly what would happen to us tomorrow if we suddenly forgotten the language we speak and were disabled to communicate with others within the system? When individual bourgeois begin to leave and refuse to fulfill the assigned role, the public disapproves and rejects them - that are possible given a role in the symbolic order, we would have been rejected. If that were to happen, we ceased to be subjects - in other words, we ceased to be human. However, the embodiment of the second points to another feature of symbolic order - his vulnerability. The moment Other stops working through symbols, through words and control words and communication, but takes physical form, reminiscent of the spirit that takes the body - then the spirit bar can attack, if not destroyed. A good example of this is the recent revolution in Egypt - the moment when the government ceased to manage symbols and when she reached for individuals or for weapons and physical force, repression, gave a clear signal that it is in crisis. On the other hand, when the order of the hotel, can serve as a right-wing Jew fetishization (or Arab, black person, etc.) Who pulls all the strings and managed entities, because right-wingers of all backgrounds can not see the structure, they see relationships and connections, but the body they can point a finger. However, with regard to Surrealism and psychoanalysis, wants to talk about what is not allowed to talk, he wants to talk about the reasons due to which someone does not want to talk about the forbidden and that, in the indicated terms, Bunuel's film carries a subversive message, legitimate the right to write off this attempt fetishization. The right-wingers, in the case of forbidden speech, they do not want to talk about it, because it is important to maintain order, not to enter the confusion - in a sense, not create absurd, and we have already said that psychoanalytic theory only can analyze absurd, given that itself handled the seemingly absurd notions. After Senechal wakes, they goes to the gathering at the Colonel. It is immediately clear that the ambassador Acosta does not fit the environment, to the extent that the provocation Colonel responds by firing a pistol, killing the colonel. Soon after, it is revealed that Teven all dreamed of, even Senechal dream. What does this tell us? First, to Teven care that Acosta violently react and compromise himself, Senechal and the Teven and threaten drug trafficking which involves, what would they ruin everything. On the other hand, we can once again get back to the symbolic order and Real. If the army is understood as a reality, which is in accordance with absurd situations that we saw before the break, as something that is done intrusion in the symbolic order of the bourgeoisie, which is rich in rituals and traditions, we can say that the colonel as the embodiment of the military poses a threat to this order, which is why Acosta ventured the murder. The ratio of the Real and symbolic order remains the same as before - the internal contradictions of bourgeois society, and class antagonisms, themselves born army and militarism in general. Historically, the army was not afraid of coups and rebellions-translated from the language of Marxism to psychoanalysis, the contradictions of bourgeois society are cracks symbolic order that are born army that is Real and, from time to time, perform intrusion in order. On the other hand, the army maintains bourgeois society, and thus its contradictions, so again drawing the vicious circle of the Real and Symbolic. Source: Filmske radosti | Filmovi koji nas gledaju Author: Vuk Vukovic Translated by Dejan Stojkovski
I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.
They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left. It tells the story of John Nada. Nada, of course, in Spanish means nothing. A pure subject, deprived of all substantial content. A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around one day enters into an abandoned Church and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses. And when he put one of them on walking along the L.A. Streets he discovers something weird; that these glasses function like critique of ideology glasses. They allow you to see the real message beneath all the propaganda, publicity, posters and so on. You see a large publicity board telling you have a holiday of a lifetime and when you put the glasses on you see just on the white background; a grey inscription. We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are interpolated, that is to say, addressed by social authority not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasures. ‘Realise your true potential. Be yourself. Lead a satisfying life.’ When you put the glasses on you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order, which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the stand-up story of the invasion of the body snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens. "Hey buddy, you gonna pay for that or what? Look Buddy, I don’t want no hassle today; you either pay for it or put it back." According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses, which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite like you take off the glasses so that you can finally see the way things really are. This precisely and here, the pessimism of the film, of They Live, is well justified, this precisely is the ultimate illusion: ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology.
loading...
To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it. This is rendered in a wonderful way with a further scene in the film where John Nada tried to force his best friend John Armitage to also put the glasses on.
I don’t wanna fight ya.
I don’t wanna fight ya. Stop it No!
It’s the weirdest scene in the film. The fight is eight, nine minutes…
"Put on the glasses."
…It may appear irrational cause why does this guy reject so violently to put the glasses on? It is as if he is well aware that spontaneously he lives in a lie that the glasses will make him see the truth but that this truth can be painful. It can shatter many of your illusions.
This is a paradox we have to accept. Put the glasses on! Put em on! The extreme violence of liberation. You must be forced to be free. If you trust simply your spontaneous sense of well being for whatever you will never get free. Freedom hurts.
loading...
Full transcriptTHE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA PRESENTED BY PHILOSOPHER AND PSYCHOANALYSTS -Slavoj Zizek The problem for us is not, are our desires satisfied or not? The problem is, how do we know what we desire? There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire. Oh, I do like you, but it just isn’t good enough. Oh, I forgot. Your mother asked me up for supper. Okay. Bring some ice cream with you, will you? Sure. What kind do you want, chocolate or vanilla? What we get in this wonderful clip from Possessed is commentary on the magic art of cinema within a movie. We have an ordinary working-class girl, living in a drab, small provincial town. All of a sudden she finds herself in a situation where reality itself reproduces the magic cinematic experience. She approaches the rail, the train is passing, and it is as if what in reality is just a person standing near a slowly passing train turns into a viewer observing the magic of the screen. Have a drink? Oh, don’t go away. Looking in? Wrong way. Get in and look out. We get a very real, ordinary scene onto which the heroine’s inner space, as it were, her fantasy space is projected, so that, although all reality is simply there, the train, the girl, part of reality in her perception and in our viewer’s perception is, as it were, elevated to the magic level, becomes the screen of her dreams. This is cinematic art at its purest. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, the matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself. I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself. If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it. The first key to horror films is to say, “Let’s imagine the same story but without the horror element.” This gives us, I think, the background. We’re in the middle of Bodega Bay, where the action of Hitchcock’s Birds takes place. Birds is a film about a young, rich, socialite girl from San Francisco who falls in love with a guy, goes after him to Bodega Bay, where she discovers that he lives with his mother. Of course, it’s none of my business, but when you bring a girl like that… I think I can handle Melanie Daniels by myself. Well, as long as you know what you want, Mitch. I know exactly what I want. And then, there is the standard oedipal imbroglio of incestuous tension between mother and son, the son split between his possessive mother and the intrusive girl. What’s the matter with them? What’s the matter with all the birds? Hurry up with yours, Mitch. I’m sure Miss Daniels wants to be on her way. I think you ought to stay the night, Melanie. We have an extra room upstairs and everything. The big question about The Birds, of course, is the stupid, obvious one, Why do the birds attack? Mitch…It is not enough to say that the birds are part of the natural set-up of reality. It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes that literally tears apart reality. We humans are not naturally born into reality. In order for us to act as normal people who interact with other people who live in the space of social reality, many things should happen. Like, we should be properly installed within the symbolic order and so on. When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is disturbed, reality disintegrates. So, to propose the psychoanalytic formula, the violent attacks of the birds are obviously explosive outbursts of maternal superego, of the maternal figure preventing, trying to prevent sexual relationship. So the birds are raw, incestuous energy. What am I doing? I’m sorry, now I got it. My God, I’m thinking like Melanie. You know what I’m thinking now? I want to fuck Mitch. That’s what she was thinking. No. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I meant that I got this spontaneous confusion of directions. Mrs. Bates. We are in the cellar of the mother’s house from Psycho. What’s so interesting is that the very disposition of mother’s house… Events took place in it at three levels, first floor, ground floor, basement. It is as if they reproduce the three levels of human subjectivity. Ground floor is ego. Norman behaves there as a normal son, whatever remains of his normal ego taking over.Up there, it’s the superego.Maternal superego, because the dead mother is basically a figure of superego. No, Mother. I’m gonna bring something up. I am sorry, boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous No, I will not hide in the fruit cellar. You think I’m fruity, huh? And down in the cellar, it’s the id, the reservoir of these illicit drives. So we can then interpret the event in the middle of the film, when Norman carries the mother or, as we learn at the end, mother’s mummy, corpse, skeleton, from the first floor to the cellar. You won’t do it again. Not ever again. Now get out. I’ll carry you, Mother. It’s as if he is transposing her in his own mindas the psychic agency from superego to id. Put me down. Put me down. I can walk on my own… Of course, the lesson of it is the old lessone laborated already by Freud, that superego and id are deeply connected.The mother complains first, as a figure of authority, mother immediately turns into obscenity, Do you think I’m fruity? Superego is not an ethical agency. Superego is an obscene agency, bombarding us with impossible orders, laughing at us, when, of course, we cannot ever fulfil its demand. The more we obey it, the more it makes us guilty. There is always some aspect of an obscene madman in the agency of the superego. We often find references to psychoanalysis embodied in the very relations between persons. For example, the three Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo. It’s clear that Groucho, the most popular one, with his nervous hyper-activity, is superego. Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it. I hear they’re gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you’re standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t geta taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a half. You know you haven’t stopped talking since I came here? Chico, the rational guy, egotistic, calculating all the time, is ego. Chicolini, you’re charged with high treason,and if found guilty, you’ll be shot. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Objection sustained. And, the weirdest of them all, Harpo, the mute guy, he doesn’t talk. Freud said that drives are silent. He doesn’t talk. He, of course, is id. Who are you guys? What are you doing in my room? That’s my partner. But he no speak. He’s dumb and deaf. The id in all its radical ambiguity. Namely, what is so weird about the Harpo character is that he’s childishly innocent, just striving for pleasure, likes children, plays with children and so on. But, at the same time, possessed by some kind of primordial evil, aggressive all the time. And this unique combination of utter corruption and innocenceis what the id is about. Get off there. Get off that table. What do you think this is here, anyway? Put that down. Lunatic! Stop that, here! Here, let it alone. Yes, I’m Dr Klein. This is Dr Taney. I’m Sharon. Things have gotten worsesince I phoned you.I think you better come upstairs. Yeah, but they’ve gotten violent. Did you give her the medication?Voice is not an organic part of a human body. It’s coming from somewherein between your body. Mother, please! -Please, Mother, make it stop! What is it? What’s happening? It’s burning! It’s burning! Do something, Doctor. Please, help her! Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession. Let the enemy have no power over her. And the son of iniquity be powerless to harm her. You mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras, you faithless swine! Remember that at the beginning of the film, this was a beautiful young girl.H ow did she become a monster that we see? By being possessed, but who possessed her? A voice. A voice in its obscene dimensions. See the cross of the Lord. Begone, you hostile powers. The first big filmabout this traumatic dimension of the voice, the voice which freely floats aroundand is a traumatic presence, feared, the ultimate moment or object of anxiety which distorts reality, was in ’31 , in Germany, Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse. You and the woman will not leave this room alive. Monster! Stop, please! We do not see Mabuse till the end of the film. He is just a voice. You will not leave this room alive. And to redeem through your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,God, forever and ever. So, the problem is, which is why we have the two priests at her side, how to get rid of this intruder, of this alien intruder. It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien to repeat itself. As if we just wait for some terrifying, alien,evil-looking, small animal to jump out.There is a fundamental imbalance, gap, between our psychic energy, called by Freud “libido”, this endless undead energy which persists beyond life and death, and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies. This is not just the pathology of being possessed by ghosts. The lesson that we should learn and that the movies try to avoid is that we ourselves are the aliens. Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force, distorting, controlling our body. Nobody was as fully aware of the properly traumatic dimension of the human voice, the human voice not as the sublime, ethereal medium for expressing the depth of human subjectivity, but the human voice as a foreign intruder. Nobody was more aware of this than Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons, the good, small, Jewish barber and his evil double, Hynkel, dictator. Hitler, of course. He bit my finger. The Jewish barber, the tramp figure, is of course the figure of silent cinema. Silent figures are basically like figures in the cartoon. They don’t know death. They don’t know sexuality even. They don’t know suffering. They just go on in their oral, egotistic striving, like cats and mice in a cartoon. You cut them into pieces, they’re reconstituted. There is no finitude, no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of naive, good evil. You’re just egotistic, you want to eat, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper. What we get with sound is interiority, depth, guilt,culpability,in other words, the complex oedipal universe.Here you are.Get a Hynkel button. Get a Hynkel button. A fine sculpture with a hooey on each and every button. The problem of the film is not only the political problem, how to get rid of totalitarianism, of its terrible seductive power, but it’s also this more formal problem, how to get rid of this terrifying dimension of the voice. Or, since we can not simply get rid of it, how to domesticate it, how to transform this voice nonetheless into the means of expressing humanity, love and so on. German police grabs the poor tramp thinking this is Hitler and he has to address a large gathering. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible. Jew, gentile, black man, white,we all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. There, of course, he delivers his big speech about the need for love, understanding between people. But there is a catch, even a double catch. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite! People applaud exactly in the same way as they were applauding Hitler. The music that accompanies this great humanist finale, the overture to Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin,is the same music as the one we hear when Hitler is daydreaming about conquering the entire world and where he has a balloon in the shape of the globe. The music is the same. This can be read as the ultimate redemption of music, that the same music which served evil purposes can be redeemed to serve the good. Or it can be read, and I think it should be read,in a much more ambiguous way, that with music, we can not ever be sure. In so far as it externalises our inner passion, music is potentially always a threat. There is a short scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which takes place in the theatre where we are now, where behind the microphone a woman is singing, then out of exhaustion or whatever, she drops down. Surprisingly, the singing goes on. Immediately afterwards, it is explained. It was a playback. But for that couple of seconds when we are confused, we confront this nightmarish dimension of an autonomous partial object. Like in the well-known adventure of Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, where the cat disappears, the smile remains. You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself. And the mome raths outgrabe. The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”. Here, we have to be very careful. Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist striving for annihilation. I want to find eternal peace. I want… No. Death drive is almost the opposite. Death drive is the dimension of what in the Stephen King-like horror fiction is called the dimension of the undead, of living dead, of something which remains alive even after it is dead. And it’s, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself. It goes on, insists. You can not destroy it. The more you cut it, the more it insists, it goes on. This dimension, of a kind of diabolical undeadness, is what partial objects are about. The nicest example here for me, I think, is Michael Powell’s Red Shoes, about a ballerina. Her passion for dancing is materialised in her shoes taking over. The shoes are literally the undead object. Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial objectis the fist, or rather, the hand. This hand, raising up, that’s the whole point of the film. It’s not simply something foreign to him. It’s the very core of his personality out there. Security? I am Jack’s smirking revenge. What the hell are you doing? That hurt. Far from standing for some kind of perverted masochism or reactionary fantasy of violence, this scene is deeply liberating. I am here, as it were, on the side of the fist. I think this is what liberation means. In order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the shit out of yourself. To get rid, in yourself, of that which in yourself attaches you to the leader, to the conditions of slavery, and so on and so on. No, please stop! What are you doing? Oh, God, no, please! No! For some reason, I thought of my first fight, with Tyler. There is always this conflict between me and my double. Motherfucker! Well, Jesus. I’m sorry. No, that was perfect. It is as if the double embodies myself,but without the castrated dimension of myself. There is an episode in the wonderful British horror classic, Dead of Night… I knew you wouldn’t leave me, Hugo. I knew you’d come back…. in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who gets jealous of his puppet. Now don’t get excited, I was only joking. You know me. Maxwell! Maxwell. Maxwell! Take your hands off me!-Stop playing!-Maxwell! Here, you fool! Officer, quickly, open this door. Quickly. In an outburst of violence, he destroys the puppet, breaks down, then in the very last scene of the film we see him in the hospital, slowly regaining consciousness, coming back to himself. First his voice is stuck in the throat. Then, with great difficulty, finally, he is able to talk,but he talks with the distorted voice of the dummy. Why, hello, Sylvester. I’ve been waiting for you. And the lesson is clear. The only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become this object. Okay, I’m ready. Wait a minute. So that I don’t confuse them… Where is my key? My key is here. This one is here. Okay, any… You shout when. I’m standing on the very balcony where the murder, the traumatic murder scene, occurs in Conversation. The murder of the husband, observed through the stained glass in front of me by the private detective, Gene Hackman. The detective is in the nearby room. Significantly, just before he sees the murder, he observes the balcony through a crack in the glass wall. Whenever we have this famous, proverbial peeping Tom scene of somebody observing traumatic events through a crack, it’s never as if we are dealing with two parts on both sides of the wall of the same reality. Before seeing anything or imagining to see something, he tries to listen. He behaves as an eavesdropper,with all his private detective gadgets.What does this make him?Potentially, at least,it makes him into a fantasised, imagined entity. I can’t stand it.I can’t stand it anymore. You’re going to make me cry. I know, honey. I know. Me, too. No, don’t. I have no idea what you’re talking about. He doesn’t fantasise the scene of the murder. He fantasises himself as a witness to the murder. I love you. What he sees on that blurred window glass, which effectively functions as a kind of elementary screen, cinematic screen even, that should be perceived as a desperate attempt to visualise, hallucinate even, the bodily, material support of what he hears. Shut up! It’s “Daddy”, you shithead! Where’s my bourbon? Dorothy’s apartment is one of those hellish places which abound in David Lynch’s films. A places where all moral or social inhibitions seem to be suspended, where everything is possible. The lowest, masochistic sex, obscenities, the deepest level of our desires that we are not even ready to admit to ourselves, we are confronted with them in such places. Spread your legs. Wider. Now show it to me. Don’t you fucking look at me. From what perspective should we observe this scene? Imagine the scene as that of a small child, hidden in a closet or behind a door… Mommy…. witnessing the parental intercourse. He doesn’t yet know what sexuality is, how we do it.All he knows is what he hears, this strange deep breathing sound, and then he tries to imagine what goes on. At the very beginning of Blue Velvet, we see Jeffrey’s father having a heart attack, falling down. We have the eclipse of the normal, paternal authority. Mommy. Baby wants to fuck! It is as if Jeffrey fantasises this wild parental couple of Dorothy and Frankas kind of a fantasmatic supplement to the lack of the real paternal authority. Get ready to fuck, you fucker’s fucker! You fucker! Don’t you fucking look at me! Frank, not only obviously acts, but even overacts. It is as if his ridiculously excessive gesticulating, shouting and so on, are here to cover up something. The point is, of course, the elementary one, to convince the invisible observer that father is potent, to cover up father’s impotence. So the second way to read the scene would have been as a spectacle, a ridiculously violent spectacle, set up by the father to convince the son of his power, of his over-potency. The third way would have been to focus on Dorothy herself. Many feminists, of course, emphasise the brutality against women in this scene, the abuse, how the Dorothy character is abused. There is obviously this dimension in it. But I think one should risk a more shocking and obverse interpretation. What if the central, as it were, problem, of this entire scene is Dorothy’s passivity? Don’t you fucking look at me! So what if what Frank is doing is a kind of a desperate, ridiculous, but nonetheless effective attempt of trying to help Dorothy, to awaken her out of her lethargy, to bring her into life? So if Frank is anybody’s fantasy, maybe he is Dorothy’s fantasy. There is kind of a strange, mutual interlocking of fantasies. You stay alive, baby. It’s not only ambiguity, but oscillation between three focal points. This, I think, is what accounts for the strange reverberations of this scene. This brings us to our third and maybe crucial example, what is for me the most beautiful shot in the entire Vertigo. The shot in which we see Scottie in a position of a peeping Tom, observing through a crack. It is as if Madeleine is really there in common reality, while Scottie is peeping at her from some mysterious inter-space, from some obscure netherworld. This is the location of the imagined, fantasised gaze. Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot, from which the object looked upon returns the gaze. After suspecting that a murder is taking place in the nearby hotel room, Gene Hackman, playing the private detective, enters this room and inspects the toilet. The moment he approaches the toilet in the bathroom,it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory. It is clear that some kind of intense, implicit dialogue with Psycho is going on. In a very violent gesture, as if adopting the role of Norman Bates’mother, the murderer in Psycho, he opens up the curtain, inspects it in detail, looking for traces of blood there, even inspecting the gap, the hole,at the bottom of the sink. Which is precisely another of these focal objects, because in Psycho, the hole, through fade-out, the hole is morphed into the eye, returning the gaze. We say the eye is the window of the soul. But what if there is no soul behind the eye? What if the eye is a crack through which we can perceive just the abyss of a netherworld? When we look through these cracks, we see the dark, other side, where hidden forces run the show. It is as if Gene Hackman establishes, of fascination, the toilet bowl. “He flushes it,and then the terrible thing happens. In our most elementary experience, when we flush the toilet, excrements simply disappear out of our reality into another space, which we phenomenologically perceive as a kind of a netherworld, another reality, a chaotic, primordial reality. And the ultimate horror, of course, is if the flushing doesn’t work, if objects return, if remainders, excremental remainders, return from that dimension.The bathroom. Hitchcock is all the time playing with this threshold. Well, they’ve cleaned all this up now. Big difference. You should’ve seen the blood. The whole place was… Well, it’s too horrible to describe. Dreadful! The most effective for me and even the most touching scene of the entire Psycho, is after the shower murder, when Norman Bates tries to clean the bathroom. I remember clearly when in my adolescence I first saw the film, how deeply I was impressed not only by the length of the scene, it goes on almost for 10 minutes, details of cleansing and so on and so on, but also by the care, meticulousness, how it is done,and also by our spectator’s identification with it. I think that this tells us a lot about the satisfaction of work, of a job well done. Which is not so much to construct something new, but maybe human work at its most elementary, work, as it were, at the zero level, is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain. The work of erasing the stains, keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld, which threatens to explode at any time and engulf us.I think this is the fine sentiment that Hitchcock’s films evoke. It’s not simply that something horrible happens in reality. Something worse can happen which undermines the very fabric of what we experience as reality. I think it’s very important how the first attack of the birds occurs in the film. Precisely when Melanie crosses this bay. At first, we even don’t perceive it as a bird. As if some stain appeared within the frame. When a fantasy object, something imagined, an object from inner space, enters our ordinary realty, the texture of reality is twisted, distorted. This is how desire inscribes itself into reality,by distorting it. Desire is a wound of reality. The art of cinema consists in arousing desire, to play with desire. But, at the same time, keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it palpable. When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen… You remember, at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it’s a black, dark screen, and then light thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of a deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were? There was a young lady of Ongar who had an affair with a conger They said, “How does it feel to sleep with an eel?” Well, she said, “just like a man, only longer” usually, people read the lesson of Freudian psychoanalysis as if the secret meaning of everything is sexuality. But this is not what Freud wants to say. I think Freud wants to say the exact opposite. It’s not that everything is a metaphor for sexuality, that whatever we are doing, we are always thinking about that. The Freudian question is, but what are we thinking when we are doing that? If I may be a little bit impertinent and relate to an unfortunate experience, probably known to most of us, how it happens that while one is engaged in sexual activity, all of a sudden one feels stupid. One loses contact with it. As if, “My God, what am I doing here, doing these stupid repetitive movements?” And so on and so on. Nothing changes in reality, in these strange moments where I, as it were, disconnect. It’s just that I lose the fantasmatic support. In sexuality, it’s never only me and my partner, or more partners, whatever you are doing. It’s always… There has to be always some fantasmatic element. There has to be some third imagined element which enables me, to engage in sexuality. There is an irresistible power of fascination, at least for me, in this terrifying scene when Neo awakens from his sleep within the matrix and becomes aware of what he really is in that foetal container, floating in liquid, connected to virtual reality, where you are reduced to a totally passive object with your energy being sucked out of you. So why does the Matrix need our energy? I think the proper way to ask this question is to turn it around. Not why does the matrix need the energy, but why does the energy need the matrix? That is to say, since I think that the energy we are talking about is libido, is our pleasure, why does our libido need the virtual universe of fantasies? Why can’t we simply enjoy it directly,a sexual partner and so on? That’s the fundamental question. Why do we need this virtual supplement? Our libido needs an illusion in order to sustain itself. One of the most interesting motifs in science fiction is that of the id machine, an object which has the magic capacity of directly materialising, realising in front of us, our innermost dreams, desires, even guilt feelings. There is a long tradition of this in science fiction films, but of course the film about id machine is Andrei Tarkovsky’s, Solaris. Solaris is the story of Kelvin, a psychologist, who is sent by a rocket to a spaceship circulating around Solaris, a newly discovered planet. Strange things are reported from the spaceship. All the scientists there are going crazy, and then Kelvin discovers what is going on there. This planet has the magic ability to directly realise your deepest traumas, dreams, fears, desires. The innermost of your inner space. The hero of the film finds one morning his deceased wife, who made suicide years ago. So he realises not so much his desire, as his guilt feeling. When the hero is confronted with the spectral clone, as it were, of his deceased wife, although he appears to be deeply sympathetic, spiritual, reflecting and so on, his basic problem is how to get rid of her. What makes Solaris so touching is that, at least potentially, it confronts us with this tragic subjective position of the woman, his wife, who is aware that she has no consistency, no full being of her own. I don’t even know my own self. Who am I? As soon as I close my eyes I can’t recall what my face is like. For example, she has gaps in her memory because she knows only what he knows that she knows. Do you know who you are? All humans do. She is just his dream realised. And her true love for him is expressed in her desperate attempts to erase herself, to swallow poison or whatever, just to clear the space, because she guesses that he wants this. It’s horrifying, isn’t it? I’ll never get used to these constant resurrections! It’s relatively easy to get rid of a real person. You can abandon him or her, kill him or her, whatever. But a ghost, a spectral presence, is much more difficult to get rid of. It sticks to you as a kind of a shadowy presence. You’re lying! Stop it! I must be looking disgusting! What we get here is the lowest male mythology. This idea that woman doesn’t exist on her own. That a woman is merely a man’s dream realised or even, as radical, anti-feminists claim, the man’s guilt realised. Women exist because male desire got impure. If man cleanses his desire,gets rid of dirty material, fantasies, woman ceases to exist. At the end of the film, we get a kind of a Holy Communion, a reconciliation of him not with his wife, but with his father. Did you see Hitchcock’s Vertigo? Sorry, I don’t understand. Sorry. Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film. Alfred Hitchcock. I think it happened here, you know. Oh, you don’t know the scene, okay. Often things begin as a fake, inauthentic, artificial, but you get caught into your own game. And that is the true tragedy of Vertigo. It’s a story about two people who, each in his or her own way, get caught into their own game of appearances. For both of them, for Madeleine and for Scottie, appearances win over reality. What is the story of Vertigo? It’s a story about a retired policeman who has a pathological fear of heights because of an incident in his career, and then an old friend hires him to follow his beautiful wife, played by Kim Novak. The wife mysteriously possessed by the ghost of a past deceased Spanish beauty, Carlotta Valdes. The two fall in love. The wife kills herself. The first part of Vertigo, with Madeleine’s suicide, is not as shattering as it could have been, because it’s really a terrifying loss, but in this very loss, the ideal survives. The idea of the fatal woman possesses you totally. What, ultimately, this image, fascinating image of the fatal woman stands for is death. The fascination of beauty is always the veil which covers up a nightmare. Like the idea of a fascinating creature, but if you come too close to her, you see shit, decay, you see worms crawling everywhere. The ultimate abyss is not a physical abyss, but the abyss of the depth of another person. It’s what philosophers describe as the night of the world. Like when you see another person, into his or her eyes, you see the abyss. That’s the true spiral which is drawing us in. Scottie alone, broken down, cannot forget her, wanders around the city looking for a woman, a similar woman, something like the deceased woman, discovers an ordinary, rather vulgar, common girl. The douement of the story, of course,is along the lines of the Marx Brothers’ joke, This man is an idiot. “The newly found woman looks like Madeleine, acts like Madeleine, the fatal beauty. We discover she is Madeleine. What we learn is that Scottie’s friend, who hired Scottie, also hired this woman, Judy, to impersonate Madeleine in a devilish plot to kill the real Madeleine, his wife, and get her fortune. We could just see a lot of each other. Why? ‘ Cause I remind you of her? It’s not very complimentary. The profile shot in Vertigo is perhaps the key shot of the entire film. We have there Madeleine’s, or rather Judy’s, identity in all its tragic tension. It provides the dark background for the fascinating other profile of Madeleine in Ernie’s restaurant. Scottie is too ashamed, afraid to look at her directly. It is as if what he sees is the stuff of his dreams, more real in a way for him than the reality of the woman behind his back. That’s not very complimentary, either. I just want to be with you as much as I can, Judy. When we see a face, it’s basically always the half of it. A subject is a partial something, a face, something we see. Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness. And of course, we spontaneously tend to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies about the wealth of human personality, and so on. To see what is lacking in reality, to see it as that, there you see subjectivity. To confront subjectivity means to confront femininity. Woman is the subject. Masculinity is a fake. Masculinity is an escape from the most radical, nightmarish dimension of subjectivity. I’m trying to buy you a suit. But I love the second one she wore. And this one, it’s beautiful. No, no. They’re none of them right. I think I know the suit you mean. We had it some time ago. Let me go and see. We may still have that model. Thank you. You’re looking for the suit that she wore, for me. I know the kind of suit that would look well on you. No, I won’t do it! Judy.It can’t make that much difference to you. I just want to see what… No, I don’t want any clothes.I don’t want anything. Here we are.-Yes, that’s it. When Judy, refashioned as Madeleine, steps out of the door, it’s like fantasy realised. And, of course, we have a perfect name for fantasy realised. It’s called “nightmare”. Fantasy realised. What does this mean? Of course, it is always sustained by an extreme violence. The violence in this case of Scottie’s brutal refashioning of Judy, a real, common girl, into Madeleine. It’s truly a process of mortification, which also is the mortification of woman’s desire. It is as if in order to have her, to desire her, to have sexual intercourse with her, with the woman, Scottie has to mortify her, to change her into a dead woman. It’s as if, again, for the male libidinal economy, to paraphrase a well-known old saying, the only good woman is a dead woman. Scottie is not really fascinated by her, but by the entire scene, the staging. He is looking around, checking up, are the fantasmatic co-ordinates really here? At that point when the reality fully fits fantasy, Scottie is finally able to realise the long-postponed sexual intercourse. So the result of this violence is a perfect co-ordination between fantasy and reality. A kind of direct short-circuit. In Lynch’s films, darkness is really dark. Light is really unbearable, blinding light. Fire really hurts, it’s so hot. At those moments of sensual over-intensity, it is as if events on screen itself, threatens to overflow the screen and to grab us into it, to reach towards us. It’s again as if the fantasy-space, the fictional, narrative space, gets too intense and reaches out towards us spectators so that we lose our safe distance. This is the proper tension of the Lynchian universe. The beauty of Lynch, if you look closely, it’s never clear. Is it really the brutal real out there which disturbs us, or is it our fantasy? At the very beginning of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, we see an idyllic, American small town. What can be more normal than father of the family, in front of a white clean house, watering the lawn? But all of a sudden, father has a heart seizure, falls down to the grass. And then, instead of showing the family confused, calling for an ambulance, whatever, Lynch does something typically Lynchian. The camera moves extremely close to the grass, even penetrates the grass, and we see what is the real of this idyllic green lawn. We should not forget this, how this happens precisely when father has a seizure. That is to say when, symbolically, the paternal authority breaks down. I’ll send you straight to hell, fucker! In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you. The logic here is strictly Freudian, that is to say we escape into dream to avoid a deadlock in our real life. But then, what we encounter in the dream is even more horrible, so that at the end, we literally escape from the dream, back into reality. It starts with, dreams are for those who can not endure, who are not strong enough for reality. It ends with, reality is for those who are not strong enough to endure, to confront their dreams. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are two versions of the same film. What makes both films, especially Lost Highway, so interesting is how they posit the two dimensions, reality and fantasy, side by side, horizontally, as it were. It must be from a real estate agent. What we get in Lost Highway is the drab, grey,upper-middle-class suburban reality. Hero, married to Patricia Arquette, obviously terrorised by the enigma of his wife, who doesn’t respond properly to his advances. When they have sexual intercourse, he miserably fails. What he gets from her is a kind of a patronising pat on the shoulder. It’s okay. It’s okay. Total humiliation.It’s okay. After killing her in an act of frustration, the hero enters his fantasy-space, where he, as it were, reinvents not only himself, but his entire social environs. Captain, this is some spooky shit we got here. In what? In a kind of a universe which we usually found in film noir. The hero’s wife, who is a brunette, becomes a blonde. In reality, she’s restrained. Here, she praises the hero within the fantasy-space all the time for his sexual capacities and so on. So it seems as if the dream is the realisation of what he was looking for. In reality, the obstacle was inherent. Their sexual liaison simply didn’t function. Within the fantasy-space, the obstacle is externalised. It’s a beautiful day. Mr Eddy is the master of Patricia Arquette within the fantasy-space. He is the obstacle to sexual intercourse. If I ever found out somebody was making out with her, I’d take this and I’d shove it so far up his ass, it would come out his mouth. The properly uncanny moments are those when the second shift occurs, when the fantasy-space, the dreamscape, as it were, is already disintegrating, but we are not yet back into reality. This intermediate space, neither fantasy-space nor reality, this space of a kind of primordial violence, dispersion, onto logical confusion… This is the most subversive moment, the true horror of these films. Towards the end of this fantasy episode, when we get the sexual act, there the woman also avoids the hero. You’ll never have me. Whispering, “You will never have me.” And at that traumatic point, we are drawn back to reality, when the hero encounters exactly the same deadlock. What the film truly is about, its focal point, it’s not the hero, it’s of course the enigma of feminine desire. You’re a mystery. I like you very much. The enigma of feminine subjectivity in David Lynch’s films, it’s a gap between cause and effect. You do something to a woman, but you never know what the reaction will be. Jeffrey, don’t, please. My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian. I think they are disgusting. Just imagine. Aren’t these some kind of, how do you call it, vagina dentata, dental vaginas threatening to swallow you? I think that flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware what a horrible thing these flowers are? I mean, basically it’s an open invitation to all the insects and bees, Come and screw me, you know? I think that flowers should be forbidden to children. Suddenly I saw two figures jumping about on the rocks above us. They hid and peeped out occasionally. There are two boys looking at us, I said to her. Her name was Katarina. Well, let them look, she said,and turned on her back. It was such a strange feeling. I wanted to run out and put onmy costume, but I just lay still… On my belly with my bum in the air, totally unembarrassed, totally calm. We men, at least in our standard phallogocentric mode of sexuality, even when we are doing it with the real woman, we are effectively doing it with our fantasy. Woman is reduced to a masturbatory prop. Woman arouses us in so far as she enters our fantasy frame. With women, it’s different. The true enjoyment is not in doing it but in telling about it afterwards. Of course, women do enjoy sex immediately, but I hope I’m permitted as a man to propose a daring hypothesis, that maybe, while they are doing it, they already enact or incorporate this minimal narrative distance, so that they are already observing themselves and narrativising it. There is in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona a wonderful scene where Bibi Andersson tells to mute Liv Ullmann, a story about small orgy on a beach which took place years ago. This scene is so erotic precisely because Bergman successfully resisted the temptation of a flashback. No flashback. Just words. Probably one of the most erotic scenes in the entire history of cinema. Katarina unbuttoned his trousers and started playing with him. When he came she took him in her mouth. He bent down and started kissing her on the back She turned around, took his head in both hands and gave him her breast. The other boy got so excited, so he and I started again. It was as nice as the first time. Then we swam and parted. When I came back, Karl-Henrik had returned. We had dinner together and drank the red wine he had with him. Then we slept together. It’s never been as good, before or since. Can you understand that? Although sexuality seems to be about bodies,it’s not really about bodies. It is how bodily activity is reported in words. Well… I first saw him that morning in the lobby. He was… He was checking into the hotel and he was following the bellboy with his luggage to the elevator. He…He glanced at me as he walked past. Just a glance. Nothing more. But I could hardly move. Eyes Wide Shut is a film which has an incredibly precise lesson about fantasy. She tells him, not about herself effectively cheating him, but about fantasising about cheating him with some naval officer they met in a hotel and so on and so on. The entire film is his desperate attempt to catch up with her fantasy, which ends in a failure. Many people don’t like, in that mysterious rich people’s castle where they meet for their orgies, the big orgy. They complain, this orgy is aseptic, totally non-attractive, without erotic tension. But I think that’s the point. This utter impotence of male fantasising. The film is the story of how the male fantasy can not catch up with the feminine fantasy, of how there is too much of desire in feminine fantasy and how this is the threat to male identity. Isn’t it that in Vertigo, on the contrary, all of the activity is on the side of Scottie? But I think that precisely because of this, his activity is extremely brutal, mortifying. He has totally to erase the woman as a desiring entity. That’s for him the condition to desire. The other solution is, of course, the masochist solution, which is, of my inferiority. But I do love you. And you know there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible. What’s that? Fuck. It’s as if our inner psychic space is too wild and sometimes we have to make love, not to get the real thing but to escape from the real, from the excessive real that we encounter in our fantasising. The point is the fragile balance between reality and fantasy dimension in our sexual activity. Michael Haneke’s Piano Teacher is the story of an impossible love affair between a middle-aged, deeply traumatised woman and her young student. She’s in a way a person who is not yet sexually subjectivised. She lacks the fantasmatic co-ordinates of her desire. This accounts for a couple of very strange scenes in the film, like when she goes to a pornographic store and then watches in a closed, small room a scene from a hardcore film.The way she watches it, it’s not to get aroused,but she watches it as a pupil in a school. She simply watches it to get the co-ordinates of desiring, to learn how to do it, how to get excited. The notion of fantasy in psychoanalysis is very ambiguous. On the one hand,we have the pacifying aspect of fantasy. Piano Teacher plays with the opposite aspect of fantasy. Fantasy as the explosion of wild, unbearable desires. What we found in the middle of the film is probably, arguably, the most depressive sexual act in the entire history of cinema. As if to punish her for disclosing the fantasy in her letter to him, he literally enacts her fantasy in the way he makes love to her, which of course means that fantasy is lost for her. When fantasy disintegrates, you don’t get reality, you get some nightmarish real too traumatic to be experienced as ordinary reality. That would be another definition of nightmare. Hell is here. Paradise, at least this perverse paradise, is hell. Stop, please. One cannot here just throw out the dirty water, all these excessive, perverse fantasies and so on, and just keep the healthy, clean baby, normal, straight or even homosexual, whatever, but some kind of normal, politically correct sex. You cannot do that. What if we throw out the baby and keep just the dirty water? And put it as a problem: how to deal with dirty water. And put some order in the dirty water of fantasies. This is I think precisely what happens for example in Kieslowski’s Blue. During the … were you conscious? I’m sorry to have inform you… Do you know? Your husband…died in the accident. You must have been unconscious. Anna? Yes, your daughter, too. You can organise, people do it, your life in mourning the lost object. Julie, in Blue, discovers that her husband wasn’t what she thought he was. That he was cheating her, that he had a mistress who is pregnant. This is the most terrifying loss, where all the co-ordinates of your reality disintegrate. The problem is how to reconstitute yourself. In a wonderful short scene, the heroine of Blue, after returning home, finds there on the floor a group of newly-born mice, crawling around their mother. This scene terrifies her. She is too excessively exposed to life in its brutal meaninglessness. What she is able to do at the end is to acquire a proper distance towards reality. This is what happens in the famous circular shot where we pass from Julie’s face, while she is making love. This magical suspension of temporal and spatial limitations, this free floating in a fantasy-space, far from distancing us from reality… If I have not love… enables us to approach reality. I am nothing She is putting together the co-ordinates which enable her to experience her reality as meaningful again. As if the lesson is, not only for men but also for women, that you can sustain sexual intercourse, sexual relationship, only through the support of fantasy. The problem of course is, is this fantasy reconstituted? Is this the ultimate horizon of our experience? The function of music here is precisely that of a fetish, of some fascinating presence whose function it is to conceal the abyss of anxiety. Music is here what, according to Marx, religion is, a kind of opium for the people. Opium which should put us asleep, put us into a kind of a false beatitude, which allows us to avoid the abyss of unbearable anxiety. We see Julie crying, but through a glass. This glass stands for, I think, fantasy reconstituted. These are, I’m tempted to say, the tears of happiness.”I can mourn now because it no longer immediately affects me.” Blue proposes this mystical communion, reconstituted fantasy, as sustaining our relation to the world. But the price we pay is that some radically authentic moment of accepting the anxiety at the very foundation of human condition is lost there. If anything, anxiety at the vocal level is silence. It’s silence. It’s a silent scream. In Hitchcock’s The Birds, when the mother, of course who but the mother, finds the neighbour dead, his eyes picked out by the birds, she shouts, but the shout literally remains stuck in her throat. To return from cinema to so-called real life, the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that exactly the same goes for our real life experience, that emotions as such are deceiving. There are no specifically fake emotions because, as Freud puts it literally, the only emotion which doesn’t deceive is anxiety. All other emotions are fake. So, of course, the problem here is, are we able to encounter in cinema the emotion of anxiety, or is cinema as such a fake? Cinema, as the art of appearances, tells us something about reality itself. It tells us something about how reality constitutes itself. Ripley. Ripley, come on. Ripley, we’ve got no time for sightseeing here. Ripley, don’t. There is an old Gnostic theory that our world was not perfectly created, that the god who created our world was an idiot who bungled the job,so that our world is a half-finished creation. There are voids, openings, gaps. It’s not fully real, fully constituted. In the wonderful scene in the last instalment of the Alien saga, Alien Resurrection, when Ripley, the cloned Ripley, enters a mysterious room, she encounters the previous failed version of herself, of cloning herself. Just a horrified creature, a small foetus-like entity, then more developed forms. Finally, a creature which almost looks like her, but her limbs are like that of the monster. Kill me. This means that all the time our previous alternate embodiments, what we might have been but are not,that these alternate versions of ourselves are haunting us. That’s the ontological view of reality that we get here, as if it’s an unfinished universe. This is, I think, a very modern feeling. It is through such ontology of unfinished reality that cinema became a truly modern art. All modern films are ultimately films about the possibility or impossibility to make a film. Dogville was in the Rocky Mountains in the US of A, up here where the road came to its definitive end near the entrance to the old, abandoned silver mine. The residents of Dogville were good, honest folks and they liked their township. With von Trier, it’s not only the problem of belief in the sense of, do people generally still believe today the place of religion today, and so on. It’s also reflectively or allegorically the question of believing in cinema itself. How to make today people still believe in the magic of cinema? In Dogville, all of it is staged on a set. Okay, this is often the case in cinema, but here the set is seen as the set. The action takes place in Dogville, a small town, but there are no houses. There are just lines on the floor, signalling that this is the house, this is the street. The mysterious thing is that this does not prevent our identification. If anything, it makes us even more thrown into the tensions of the inner life. Have you seen Grace? She’s at my place. It’s not that naive belief is undermined, deconstructed through irony. Von Trier wants to be serious with the magic. Irony is put into service to make us believe. Yet again, Grace had made a miraculous escape from her pursuers with the aid of the people of Dogville. Everyone had covered up for her, including Chuck, who had to admit that it was probably Tom’s hat he’d mistakenly considered so suspicious. The mystery is that even if we know that it’s only staged, that it’s a fiction, it still fascinates us. That’s the fundamental magic of it. You witness a certain seductive scene, then you are shown that it’s just a fake, stage machinery behind, but you are still fascinated by it. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it. Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz! I said come back tomorrow! If you were really great and powerful, you’d keep your promises. Do you presume to criticise the great Oz? You ungrateful creatures! Think yourselves lucky that I’m giving you audience tomorrow instead of 20 years from now! The great Oz has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The great and… Oz has spoken. I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. What we can learn from a film like Wizard of Oz is how the logic of de-mystification is not enough. It’s not enough to say, “Okay, it’s just a big show spectacle to impress the people. What is behind is just a modest old guy, and so on and so on. It is that rather, in a way, there is more truth in this appearance. Appearance has an effectivity, a truth of its own. What about the heart that you promised Tin Man? Well…And the courage that you promised Cowardly Lion? -And Scarecrow’s brain?- And Scarecrow’s brain? Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity.Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got. A diploma! Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeeatume plurbis unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D. -That’s Doctor of Thinkology. The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh, joy, rapture! I’ve got a brain! And that’s the paradox of cinema, the paradox of belief. We don’t simply believe or do not believe. We always believe in a kind of a conditional mode. I know very well it’s a fake but, nonetheless, I let myself be emotionally affected. This strange status of belief accounts for the efficiency of one of the most interesting characters, not only in cinema, but also in theatre, in staging as such,the character of prologue. How do you do? Mr Carl Laemmle feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning. We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science, who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. Somebody tells us you have to experience horror, we do it. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to… Well, we’ve warned you.Ladies and gentlemen, young and old, this may seem an unusual procedure, speaking to you before the picture begins. But we have an unusual subject. Behind, not red, this is Hollywood, but black curtain, Cecil DeMille himself appears,giving us a lesson of how the story of Ten Commandments and Moses has great relevance today where we are fighting Communist, totalitarian danger and so on, giving us all the clues. Are men the property of the state? Or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today. This hidden master who controls the events can also be defined as ideology embodied, in the sense of the space which organises our desires. And your name? What the fuck is your name? In David Lynch’s Lost Highway, we have the Mystery Man, who stands for the very cinematographer, even director. Imagine somebody who has a direct access to your inner life, to your innermost fantasies, to what even you don’t want to know about yourself. We’ve met before, haven’t we? I don’t think so. Where was it that you think we met? At your house, don’t you remember? The best way to imagine what Mystery Man is, is to imagine somebody who doesn’t want anything from us. What do you mean? You’re where right now? At your house. That’s fucking crazy, man. Call me. That’s the true horror of this Mystery Man. Not any evil, demoniac intentions and so on. Just the fact that when he is in front of you, he, as it were, sees through you. I told you I was here. How’d you do that? Ask me.- How’d you get inside my house? It is not my custom to go where I’m not wanted. It’s like the court in Kafka’s novels, where the court, or the Law, only comes when you ask for it. Oh! Now, why would he do that? Most peculiar. What on Earth? Hitchcock was obsessed with this topic of manipulating emotions. His dream was even that once in the future, we would no longer have to shoot narratives, our brains will be directly connected to some machine and the director would only have to press different buttons there and the appropriate emotions will be awakened in our mind. They’re coming. They’re coming! What do directors like Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch have in common? A certain autonomy of cinematic form. Form is not here simply to express, articulate content. It has a message of its own. In Hitchcock, we have the motif of a person hanging from an abyss by the hand of another person. The first example, Saboteur. Rear Window. Then we have in To Catch a Thief. You’ve got a full house down there. Begin the performance. Then in North by Northwest. Then, of course, in Vertigo.So we see here the same visual motif repeating itself. I think it’s wrong to look for a common, deeper meaning. Some French theorists claimed that what we are dealing here with is the motif of fall and redemption. I think this is already saying too much. I think that what we are dealing with is with a kind of a cinematic materialism, that beneath the level of meaning, spiritual meaning but also simple narrative meaning, we get a more elementary level of forms themselves, communicating with each other, interacting, reverberating, echoing, morphing, transforming one into the other. And it is this background, this background of proto-reality, a real which is more dense, more fundamental than the narrative reality, the story that we observe. It is this that provides the proper density of the cinematic experience. It’s the gigantic tree where, in Vertigo, Madeleine and Scottie get together, almost embrace, where their erotic tension becomes unbearable. What is this tree? I think it’s another in the series of “Hitchcockian Big Things”, like the Mount Rushmore statues, or take another example, like Moby Dick. This tree is not simply a natural object. It is, within our mental space, what in psychoanalysis is called “the Thing”. It’s effectively as if this tree, in its very extra-large distortion, embodies something that comes out of our inner space, libido, the excessive energy of our mind. So here I think we can see how films and philosophy are coming together. How great cinematographers really enable us to think in visual terms. After the birds attack the city, there is a fire which breaks out at a gasoline station, where a guy throws a match on the gasoline. Hey, you! Look out! Don’t drop that match!Look out! Get out of there!-Mister, run! -Watch out! The first part of this short scene is the standard one. We get the standard exchange of shots of the fire and shots of the person, Melanie in this case, who looks at it. Then something strange happens. We cut to way above the city. We see the entire town. We automatically take this shot as a standard establishing shot. Like after details which perplex you, which prevent you from getting a clear orientation, you need a shot which enables you some kind of a cognitive mapping, that you know what’s going on. But then, precisely following that logic of the Thing from inner space which emerges from within you, first we hear these ominous sounds, which are sounds of the birds, then one bird enters, another bird enters… The shot which was taken as a neutral,God’s view shot,all of a sudden changes into an evil gaze. The gaze of the very birds attacking. And we are thrown into that position. And again, we can use here The Birds as the final instalment and read backwards other classical Hitchcock scenes in the same way. Isn’t exactly the same thing happening in what I consider the ultimate scene in Psycho, the second murder,the murder of the detective Arbogast? Hitchcock manipulates here in a very refined way the logic of so-called fetishist disavowal. The logic of, “I know very well, but…” We know very well some things, but we don’t really believe in them, so although we know they will happen, we are no less surprised when they happen. In this case, everything points towards the murder and, nonetheless, when it happens, the surprise is, if anything, stronger. It begins in a standard Hitchcockian way. He looks up the stairs. This exchange creates the Hitchcockian tension between the subject’s look and the stairs themselves, or rather the void on the top of the stairs returning the gaze, emanating some kind of a weird unfathomable threat. The camera then provides a kind of a geometrically clear God’s point of view shot image of the entire scene. It is as if here we pass from God as neutral creator, to God in his unbearable divine rage. This murderer is for us an unfathomable monster. We don’t know who he is, but because we are forced to assume the murderer’s position, in a way we don’t know who we are. As if we discover a terrifying dimension in ourselves. As if we are forced to act as a doll, as a tool of another evil divinity’s will. It’s not as classical metaphysics thinks, The truly horrible thing is to be immortal. Immortality is the true nightmare, not death. Lord Vader,can you hear me? We should remember the exact moment when the normal, everyday person, okay not quite everyday, but ordinary person of Anakin Skywalker changes into Darth Vader. This scene when the Emperor’s doctors are reconstituting him after heavy wounds into Darth Vader, that these scenes are inter-cut with the scenes of Princess Padm? Anakin’s wife, giving birth. Luke. So it is as if we are witnessing the transformation of Anakin into father. But what kind of father? A monster of a father who doesn’t want to be dead. His deep breathing is the sound of the father, the Freudian, primordial father, this obscene over-potent father,the father who doesn’t want to die. This, I think, is for all of us the most obscene threat that we witness. We don’t want our fathers alive. We want them dead. The ultimate object of anxiety is a living father. This brings us to what we should really be attentive about in David Lynch’s film. Namely, what is to be taken seriously and not seriously in his films. -Here’s to Ben.-Here’s to Ben.Here’s to Ben.-Here’s to Ben. -Be polite!Here’s to Ben. Frank is one of these terrifying, ridiculously obscene paternal figures. Apart from Frank in Blue Velvet, we have Baron Harkonnen in Dune, we have William Dafoe in Wild at Heart, we have Mr Eddy in Lost Highway. Don’t you ever fucking tailgate! Ever!-Tell him you won’t tailgate.-Ever!I won’t ever tailgate… Do you know how many fucking car length sit takes to stop a car at 35 miles an hour? Six fucking car lengths! That’s 1 06 fucking feet, mister! If I had to stop suddenly, you would have hit me! I want you to get a fucking driver’s manual and I want you to study that motherfucker! I want to spit once on your head. Just some spittle in your face. What a luxury. But I think that this very appearance of ridiculously violent comedy is deceiving. I think that these ridiculous paternal figures are the ethical focus, the topic of practically all David Lynch’s films. Let’s fuck! I’ll fuck anything that moves! A normal, paternal authority is an ordinary man who, as it were, wears phallus as an insignia. He has something which provides his symbolic authority. This is, in psychoanalytic theory, phallus. You are not phallus. You possess phallus. Phallus is something attached to you, like the King’s crown is his phallus. Something you put on and this gives you authority. So that when you talk it’s not simply you as a common person who is talking, it’s symbolic authority itself,the Law, the state, talking through you. So these excessively ridiculous paternal figures, it’s not simply that they possess phallus, that they have phallus as the insignia of their authority, in a way, they immediately are phallus. This is for, if they still exist, a normal male subject… This is the most terrorising experience you can imagine, to directly being the thing itself, to assume that I am a phallus. And the provocative greatness of these Lynchian, obscene, paternal figures, is that not only they don’t have any anxiety,not only they are not afraid of it, they fully enjoy being it. They are truly fearless entities beyond life and death, gladly assuming, as it were, their immortality, their non-castrated life energy. Okay.This is indicated in a very nice way in the scene towards the end of Wild at Heart where Bobby Peru is killed. Stop, you sons of bitches! This is the police! He accepts the mortal danger he is in with, kind of, exuberant vitality,and it’s truly that when his head explodes, it’s as if we see the head of the penis being torn apart. Oh, for Christ sakes. That poor bastard. And then at the end, these figures are sacrificed. Oh, Jeffrey. It’s all over, Jeffrey. Joseph Stalin’s favourite cinematic genre were musicals. Not only Hollywood musicals, but also Soviet musicals. There was a whole series of so-called kolkhoz musicals. Why? We should find this strange, Stalin who personifies communist austerity, terror and musicals.The answer again is the psychoanalytic notion of superego. Superego is not only excessive terror, unconditional injunction, demand of utter sacrifice, but at the same time, obscenity, laughter. And it is Sergei Eisenstein’s genius to guess at this link. In his last film, which is a coded portrait of the Stalin era, Ivan the Terrible: Part 2, which because of all this was immediately prohibited. In the unique scene towards the end of the film, we see the Czar, Ivan, throwing a party, amusing himself, with his so-called Oprichniki, his private guards, who were used to torture and kill his enemies, his, if you want, KGB, secret police, are seen performing a musical. An obscene musical, which tells precisely the story about killing the rich boyars, Ivan’s main enemies. Let the axes drop! So terror itself is staged as a musical. And the gates fell to the ground Now, what has all this to do with the reality of political terror? Isn’t this just art, imagination? No. Not only were the political show trials in Moscow in the mid- and late-1930's theatrical performances, we should not forget this, they were well staged, rehearsed and so on. Even more, there is, horrible as it may sound, something comical about them. The horror was so ruthless that the victims, those who had to confess and demand death penalty for themselves and so on, were deprived of the minimum of their dignity, so that they behaved as puppets, they engaged in dialogues which really sound like out of Alice in Wonderland. They behaved as persons from a cartoon. Public enemy number one. You’re on trial today for the crimes that you’ve committed. We’re gonna prove you’re guilty. Just try and get acquitted. In the mid-’30's, Walt Disney Studios produced an unbelievable cartoon called Pluto’s Judgement Day…Shut up!…in which the dog, well-known Pluto, falls asleep, and in his sleep is persecuted by, haunted by the dream of cats who were all in the past his victims, molested by him, dragging him to the court, where a proper, truly Stalinist political trial is in process against him. We’ve seen and heard enough. Jury, do your duty. Just watch us do our stuff We find the defendant guilty He’s guilty, he’s guilty Hooray! The Law is not only severe, ruthless, blind,at the same time, it mocks us. There is an obscene pleasure in practising the Law. Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It’s, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough.You think it’s just a game? It’s reality. It’s more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I’m a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person,and so on and so on. So this would be the naive reading.I want to appear stronger, more active, because in real life, I’m a weak person. But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I’m not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it’s only a game, it’s only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self. We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we truly are. Stalker is a film about a zone, a prohibited space where there are debris, remainders of aliens visiting us. And stalkers are people who specialised in smuggling foreigners who want to visit into this space where you get many magical objects. But the main among them is the room in the middle of this space, where it is claimed your desires will be realised. I know you’re going to get mad. Anyway, I must tell you…We are now…on the threshold…This is the most important moment in your life.You must know that.Your innermost wishes will be made real here.Your most sincere wish. Born of suffering. The contrast between Solaris and Stalker is clear.In Solaris, we get id-machine as an object which realises your nightmares, desires, fears,even before you ask for it, as it were. In Stalker it’s the opposite, a zone where your desires, deepest wishes get realised on condition that you are able to formulate them. Which, of course, you are never able,which is why everybody fails once you get there in the centre of the zone. You just make money, using our… anguish! It’s not even the money. You’re enjoying yourself here. You’re like God Almighty here. You, a hypocritical louse, decide who is to live and who is to die He deliberates! Now I see why you stalkers never enter the room yourselves.You revel in all that power,that mystery, your authority!What else is there to wish for?It’s not true! You… you’re mistaken Tarkovsky’s solution to this tension is that of religious obscurantism…. for the great day of His wrath has come,and who is able to stand? But I don’t think this is what makes Tarkovsky interesting. What makes him interesting is the very form of his films. Tarkovsky uses as this material element of pre-narrative density, time itself. All of a sudden we are made to feel this inertia, drabness of time.Time is not just a neutral, light medium within which things happen. We feel the density of time itself. Things that we see are more markers of time. He treats even humans in this way.If we look at the unique face of Stalker himself,it’s a face of somebody exposed to too much radiation and, as it were, rotting, falling apart alive. It is this disintegration of the very material texture of reality which provides the spiritual depth. Tarkovski an subjects, when they pray,they don’t look up, they look down. They even sometimes, as in Stalker,put their head directly onto the earth. Here, I think, Tarkovsky affects us at a level which is much deeper,much more crucial for our experience than all the standard, spiritual motives of elevating ourselves above material reality and so on.There is nothing specific about the zone.It’s purely a place where a certain limit is set. You set a limit, you put a certain zone off-limit,and although things remain exactly the way they were, it’s perceived as another place. Precisely as the place onto which you can project your beliefs, your fears, things from your inner space.In other words, the zone is ultimately the very whiteness of the cinematic screen. “To the people of this city we donate this monument; ’Peace and Prosperity’.” Chaplin’s City Lights is one of those masterpieces which are really too sophisticated for the sophisticated. It’s a deceptively simple movie. When we are enraptured by it, we tend to miss its complexity and extreme finesse. Already, the first scene of the movie provides the co-ordinates. It’s kind of a microcosm of Chaplin’s entire art. What’s the source of Chaplin’s comic genius? What’s the archetypal comic situation in Chaplin’s films? It’s being mistaken for somebody or functioning as a disturbing spot, as a disturbing stain. He distorts the vision. So he wants to erase himself, to get out of the picture. Or people don’t even note him, take note of him,so he wants to be noted. Or, if they perceive him, he’s misperceived, identified for what he is not. The tramp is wrongly identified, by a beautiful blind girl who is selling flowers on a street corner,as a millionaire.He accepts the game, helps her,even steals money to pay for her operation to restore her sight,then after he serves the punishment and returns, he tries to find her.And I think that this is the metaphor of our predicament. All too often, when we love somebody, we don’t accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her in so far as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence. There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal. In this case, love is always mortifying love. Here it’s not only the tramp as the figure within the film’s narrative exposing himself to his beloved girl, it’s at the same time Chaplin as actor/director exposing himself to us, the public. The true genius of Chaplin resides in the way he was able to stage this psychological moment of recognition at the level of form, music, visual aspect, and at the same time, at the level of acting. When the two hands meet,the girl finally recognises him for what he is. This moment is always extremely dangerous, pathetic. The beloved falls out of the frame of the idealised co-ordinates,finally there exposed in his psychological nakedness. Here I am as what I really am. And I don’t think we have to read it as a happy ending. We don’t know what will happen. We have the letters, “the end”, the black screen, but the singing goes on. As if the emotion is now too strong, it spills over the very frame. In order to understand today’s world, we need cinema, literally. It’s only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is in reality more real than reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction. THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA PRESENTED BY PHILOSOPHER AND PSYCHOANALYSTS -Slavoj Zizek taken from: On Dec. 14, 1984, David Lynch divulged a divisive 140-minute epic in view of Frank Herbert's science fiction exemplary, Dune, to blended outcomes in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter's unique survey is underneath: Rise is not the artful culmination its followers have sought after — however nor is it the fiasco its depreciators have asserted. Adjusted from Frank Herbert's science fiction religion exemplary and coordinated by the unusually skilled David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man), this grandiose $40 million purposeful anecdote of interplanetary uprising, long thought unfilmable, is without a moment's delay a work of practically visionary magnificence and shockingly routine experience. Fans wouldn't fret the exorbitant length and as well think pacing, and keeping in mind that those components could well render the photo's unending knowledge difficult to reach to certain different groups of onlookers, it is in any case a more sultry property than the mysteriously cool feet of its merchant, Universal, would appear to demonstrate. The time is A.D. 10191. The important setting is the red planet Arrakis, a parched no man's land underneath whose sands lies an existence supporting zest. Its extraction has constrained the enslavement of the planet's occupants, known as Fremen, into whose asylum comes Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), the child of a pariah duke. Gradually, the young fellow starts to expect his since quite a while ago forecasted part as the Fremen's savior — a fate that comes full circle in the oust of Arrakis' shrewd rulers and the rebuilding of widespread equity. The film has such a variety of characters, such a variety of unexplained or inadequate connections, thus many parallel strategies that it's occasionally a hurl up whether we're viewing a story, or only a get together of reflections on topics presented by the books (the movie is like a dream). Incidentally a striking picture will swim into view: The alien brain floating in brine, for instance, or our first look at the monster sand worms pushing through the leave. On the off chance that the primary look is striking, in any case, the motion picture's enhancements don't confront examination. The leaders of the sand worms start to look increasingly as though they left a similar production line that delivered Kermit the Frog (they have similar mouths). A detestable aristocrat glides through the air on directions very clearly controlled by wires. The spaceships in the movie are so shabby, so ailing in detail or measurement, that they look practically like those understudy movies where plastic models are shot against a tablecloth. If the movie's goal was to create, like the book, a world that felt totally outsider, then Lynch and his surreal style were the correct decision. With its unusual dream successions, overflowing with pictures of unborn babies and shining energies, and unsettling view like the modern damnation of the Harkonnen homeworld, the film's quite to Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey) than Lucas. It tries to put the watcher some place new while indicating at a more prominent, concealed story. A few scenes appear like mammoth WTFs: the Emperor's meeting with the society pilot (fundamentally a goliath mutant shelled nut gliding in a portable fish tank) and Paul Atreides experience with the jom gabbar, for instance. Yet, those arrangements additionally convey the feeling that something huge is happening just past our vision. Sci-fi is regularly about feeling quite recently the perfect measure of lost. The film's creation is marvelous in itself, and it synchronizes with the topics of the first storyverse. Set 10,000 years later on, everything looks suitably streamlined. Yet plenty of baroque remain, as though to represent, as Herbert does in his novel, that even as we advance, certain components of our reality will stay steady. Jodorowsky's new-age, splendid and awesome corrosive excursion take appeared to miss this point. The enhancements were not especially great from a specialized viewpoint, something faultfinders excitedly called attention to. Yet, the smaller than usual sets, made generally by Emilio Ruiz del Río, accomplish a stunning feeling of scale. Watch the scene where the Atreides armada withdraws for Arrakis. Many officially huge boats document into what resembles a lavish keyhole, right away predominating them in the watcher's eye and making a feeling of awkward movement fit for a huge interstellar space create. The novel's notorious sandworms feel likewise huge onscreen as they thunder out of the desolate abandon. There are outstanding omissions: Lynch coordinates his top pick cast into rather excessively numerous ominous whispers that exaggerate the story's legendary qualities, and his treatment of the huge activity successions is out and out to languid (a flabby score by Toto doesn't help). However, there's a daringly dynamic quality to a lot of Lynch's symbolism, and his distraction with surfaces — here abetted by a portion of the best generation values maker Raffaella De Laurentiis could purchase — sets the procedures into practically material alleviation. You don't just watch this film; you can practically feel it. Before his death in 1986, Herbert said that he was largely pleased with Lynch’s film's representation of his universe. You can comprehend why. While it's not really a durable affair, singular scenes are enlivened with striking force. Watching Dune today holds an indistinguishable delight from flipping through a showed adaptation of the novel. Considering the thickness and creative energy of Herbert's reality, that ought to consider something of an accomplishment. “What does it mean to have an idea in cinema? If one makes cinema, or if one wants to make cinema, what is it to have an idea, specifically at the moment that one says ‘I have an idea.'” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of the most original and influential thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was likewise one of the main thinkers to genuinely consider the nature, structures and significance of cinema. In his later years, Deleuze published two books on the theme, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, both of which now remain as focal messages in the Philosophy of Film. What is the Creative Act? I would also like to ask a few questions of my own. Ask you a few and ask myself a few. They would be of the type: What do you do exactly, when you do cinema? And what do I do when I do or hope to do philosophy? I could ask the question a different way. What does it mean to have an idea in cinema? If someone does or wants to do cinema, what does it mean to have an idea? What happens when you say: "Hey, I have an idea?" Because, on the one hand, everyone knows that having an idea is a rare event, it is a kind of celebration, not very common. And then, on the other hand, having an idea is not something general. No one has an idea in general. An idea─like the one who has the idea—is already dedicated to a particular field. Sometimes it is an idea in panting, or an idea in a novel, or an idea in philosophy or an idea in science. And obviously the same person won't have all of those ideas. Ideas have to be treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general. Depending on the techniques I am familiar with, I can have an idea in a certain domain, an idea in cinema or an idea in philosophy. I'll go back to the principle that I do philosophy and you do cinema. Once that is settled, it would be too easy to say that since philosophy is ready to think about anything, why couldn't it think about cinema? A stupid question. Philosophy is not made to think about anything. Treating philosophy as the power to "think about" seems to be giving it a great deal, but it in fact takes everything away from it. No one needs philosophy to think. The only people capable of thinking effectively about cinema are the filmmakers and film critics or those who love cinema. Those people don't need philosophy to think about film. The idea that mathematicians need philosophy to think about mathematics is comical. If philosophy had to be used to think about something, it would have no reason to exist. If philosophy exists, it is because it has its own content. It's very simple: philosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive, just as creative as any other discipline, and it consists in creating or inventing concepts, Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced. Of course, you can't just make them like that. You don't say one day, "Hey, I am going to invent this concept," no more than a painter says "Hey, I'm going to make a painting like this" or a filmmaker, "Hey, I'm going to make this film!" There has to be a necessity, in philosophy and elsewhere; otherwise there is nothing. A creator is not a preacher working for the fun of it. A creator only does what he or she absolutely needs to do. It remains to be said that this necessity─which is a very complex thing, if it exists─means that a philosopher (and here I at least know what they deal with) proposes to invent, to create concepts and not to get involved with thinking, even about cinema. I say that I do philosophy, that I try to invent concepts. If I ask, those of you who do cinema, what do you do? You do not invent concepts—that is not your concern—but blocks of movement / duration. Someone who makes a block of movement / duration might be doing cinema. This has nothing to do with invoking a story or rejecting it. Everything has a story. Philosophy also tells stories. Stories with concepts. Cinema tells stories with blocks of movement / duration. Painting invents an entirely different type of block. They are not blocks of concepts or blocks of movement / duration, but blocks of lines / colors. Music invents another type of blocks that are just as specific. And alongside all of that, science is no less creative. I do not see much opposition between the sciences and the arts. Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina The critical theorists continues to note that “everyone knows that to have an idea is a rare event, it occurs infrequently. To have an idea is a sort of celebration.” Watch below: The Handmaiden - 'At that moment one drop of insanity could cause someone to go completely mad'.1/31/2017 Park Chan-Wook’s “The Handmaiden” is a romantic tale, vindicate thriller and confuse film set in Japanese-involved Korea in the 1930s. It is attractively excellent, honestly sexual, once in a while unreasonable and horrendously fierce. Now and again its extremely presence feels peculiar. But the greater part of its divergent pieces are amassed with such care, and the characters composed and acted with such mental sharpness, that you once in a while feel as though the essayist chief is rubbing the gathering of people's nose in overabundance of some kind. This is a film made by a craftsman at the pinnacle of his forces: Park, a South Korean executive who began as a faultfinder, has numerous incredible or close extraordinary sort movies, including "Oldboy," "Sensitivity for Mr. Retaliation," "Woman Vengeance" and "Thirst," yet this one is so perplexing yet quick that it feels like the summation of his vocation to date. Park Chan-wook is an ace of present day silver screen with the greater part of his movies handling fundamentally unique material, as well as being undertakings that are all jaw-droppingly wonderful in various ways. The executive's latest movies—I'm A Cyborg, But That's Okay, Thirst, and Stoker—all display an advancing producer that is reinforcing his stranglehold of the medium. Park Chan-woo has picked up a great deal of reputation with his Vengeance Trilogy, yet The Handmaiden seemingly goes about as the last piece in his Lust and Temptation Trilogy that started in Thirst, was carried on in Stoker, and blooms a large number of its topics here. All the more particularly, these movies are vigorously intrigued by the delight of sensuality and freedom from sentiments of blame. The Handmaiden prevails in the perfection of these thoughts, additionally similarly as a deliberate story of suggestive control. It's My Fair Lady meets Audition. Set in a Japan-involved Korea in the 1930s, the story sees Count Fujiwara employing a pickpocket and criminal specialist, Sook-hee, to wind up distinctly the handmaiden of the monitored and delicate fancy woman, Lady Hideko. Sook-hee's employment is the greatest con of all with her main goal being to make Hideko succumb to Fujiwara, who can then drain the affluent lady dry. At last however, Sook-hee winds up getting to be distinctly charmed with Hideko herself and the majority of the characters in play slowly get to be distinctly required in a developing adoration polygon. Stop has adjusted the story from British creator Sarah Waters' novel, Fingersmith, however has sufficiently changed center ideas that Waters' novel is a greater amount of only a motivation here. Park Chan-wook positively plays into the substantial trickery that is lingering palpably. He transforms The Handmaiden into an account of control that is as mind boggling as the one on Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, as slow a part inversion as The Double, and trickling in almost the same number of sexual head recreations as Dangerous Liaisons. This is only an intensely deceptive motion picture when all is said in done where you should be suspicious of each line of discourse, as well as each smaller scale signal. ' Nothing here is real. The Handmaiden at Cannes Cannes Review: ‘The Handmaiden’ is a Sexy and Depraved Lesbian Revenge Story (From left) Actor Ha Jung-woo, actress Kim Min-hee, director Park Chan-wook, actress Kim Tae-ri and actor Cho Jin-woong pose for cameras after the premiere of “The Handmaiden” at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on Saturday at the 69th Cannes Film Festival. (CJ Entertainment) It's too simple to categorize Park's concentrate on realistic sex and sadomasochistic minutes as outlines of his reductive narrating strategies, which underscore his inclination for stun an incentive under the appearance of expound filmmaking systems. It's actual that his abundance on occasion veils the shrewder perceptions about class and sex permeating all through the material, at the end of the day it changes them into a women's activist retribution plot with a lot of cathartic minutes. And keeping in mind that it's far from "Blue is the Warmest Color," the itemized choreography of the sexual moments generates a shockingly captivating level of sentimentalism. Park’s a smarter director than his unsavory tactics might suggest, and while "The Handmaiden" isn’t his most cohesive work, it’s driven by a pointed ideological perspective. Rather than merely sensationalizing corruption, he uses it to give credence to his characters’ wavering moral compasses. No matter its overarching ridiculousness, "The Handmaiden" remains a hugely enjoyable dose of grotesque escapism from a master of the form. This film is an experience that can not be measured, because it was made according to the recipe of the past. It was made the language of the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, the universal language, but a language that is rarely applied. Cinematography today opens up various windows, watching movies on your phone, iPad .... and less in the theater. So hello, that film you generally needed, in which Monica Bellucci wrestles a terrible CG wind on a minefield as detonating sheep pour down all around while adjacent, 2-time Palme d'Or-winning chief Emir Kusturica, playing a milkman with a broken leg, is spared when his closest companion, a peregrine hawk, pecks out the correct eye of the rebel ex-armed force commando attempting to kill him, is here. Kusturica's "On the Milky Road" is a debilitating, heartburn initiating maximalist tall tale that is part Aesop, part Looney Tunes, part Danielle Steele, and all Kusturica — be careful with the term mysterious authenticity: there is nothing of this present reality here. Urgently overfull of knickknacks and knickknacks and messed foundation activity, and everything except drained of topicality, significance or understanding, the film has been in progress for a long time now — one envisions Kusturica tinkering with it interminably in the carport like a Sunday specialist. Disclosing time must come, yet with "On the Milky Road," Kusturica tosses back the sheet and we're confronted not with the impeccably reestablished vintage Rolls Royce we may have sought after, however with a banging, wheezing Rube Goldberg jalopy, all steam shrieks and perfect timing dials, reverse discharges and pounding its riggings, burping smoke, commotion and pointlessness. It does, in any case, have a totally breaking opening, when for only a couple of minutes, that loopy, folksy Kusturican goofiness completely works. In a modest group of homestead structures set in the beautiful Serbian wide open, sheep baa and dairy animals moo and a rush of woofing geese waddle by as two men drag a pig into a horse shelter for uproarious butcher, developing with cans of blood that they exhaust into a stranded bath. The geese, apparently mysteriously, hop into the shower and fold about, dousing themselves in gut, which all bodes well minutes after the fact when, in the midst of a great deal of other malarkey, we see a billow of flies slide, and the geese get the chance to nibble on them for elevenses. Treasure this snapshot of Old Macdonald clowning around, on the grounds that it's apparently the last time any of the contemplated wackiness of the human or creature conduct has a genuine explanation for it. As opposed to early introductions, we're not in some kind of rustic nineteenth century idyll — ambiguous helicopters thundering overhead and an adjacent civilian army station, at which fighters squabble and chatter, especially unconcerned by the blasts and gunfire pouring down all around, recommend that the film is really set in the '90s at some point amid the Yugoslav Wars, in light of the fact that it's set any genuine time by any stretch of the imagination. More than a conspicuous chronicled period we're in a dream Kusturicaville, that exists in such a perpetual condition of war that it has turned into the standard, and disobediently crackpot provincial life has developed in around it like weeds recovering a surrendered vehicle. On the Milky Road is inspired by Kusturica’s short film Our Life, and consists of three stories: the first story is about a soldier with a task to get milk in the nearby village and take it to fellow soldiers. The second is about a woman who gives him the milk, and the third is about an ex-soldier (now a monk) who, when he finishes all daily duties, climbs up the cliff with a bucket of rocks to empty it. The movie unfolds as a three part narrative following three challenging periods of this man’s life, both for him and his native land: on the difficult period while at war, on a blossoming time when he falls in love for a woman who is willing to sacrifice all to save him, and during his last days as a reclusive monk which looks back to his turbulent life. "On the milky road" is a great humanist and pacifist story with all the emotions that show the deep absurdity of the war in the former Yugoslavia. All wars in general. Film noir is . . . 1. A French expression signifying "black film," or film of the night, motivated by the Series Noir, a line of shabby soft cover books that interpreted hard-bubbled American crime authors and found a famous group of onlookers in France. 2. A motion picture which at no time misdirects you into intuition there will be an upbeat completion. 3. Areas that stink of the night, of shadows, of rear ways, of the secondary passages of favor spots, of loft structures with a high turnover rate, of cab drivers and barkeeps who have seen it all. 4. Cigarettes. Everyone in film noir is continually smoking, as though to state, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking motion picture ever is "Out of the Past," in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke angrily at each other. At a certain point, Mitchum goes into a room, Douglas expands a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking." 5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa. 6. For ladies: low neck areas, floppy caps, mascara, lipstick, changing areas, boudoirs, calling the concierge by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, blending drinks, having hoodlums as beaus, having weaknesses for alcoholic private detectives, needing a great deal of another person's ladies, sprawling dead on the floor with each appendage carefully masterminded and each hair set up. 7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby private lodgings with a neon sign squinting through the window, getting yourself a drink out of the workplace bottle, autos with running sheets, throughout the night coffee shops, securing kids who shouldn't play with the enormous folks, being on first-name terms with manslaughter cops, knowing many people whose depictions end in "ies, for example, bookies, newsies, addicts, alkys, racers and cabbies. 8. Films either shot in high contrast, or feeling like they were. 9. Relationships in which love is just the last flounder card in the poker session of death. 10. The most American film sort, in light of the fact that no general public could have made a world so loaded with fate, destiny, dread and selling out, unless it were basically credulous and idealistic.
Before the Rain brought a dream of "Balkan struggle" to the world that drummed up a buzz in the mid-1990s, winning the Golden Lion in Venice and an Academy Award selection. Five years of progressively horrendous news from the previous Yugoslavia, with wild battling and slaughters in Croatia and Bosnia, made Milcho Manchevski's singing yet expressive film convenient to a degree that couple of producers have ever accomplished. In any case, this is a long way from a narrative treatment of Balkan savagery, and the nation that Manchevski put on the guide—his local Macedonia—was in reality the main Balkan state around then not to have been overwhelmed by war or ethnic clash. Manchevski had not embarked to clarify the staggering arrangement of occasions that began in 1991, as government Yugoslavia broke down amid the year that saw the Soviet Union itself go into disrepair. Having experienced childhood in Skopje, he completed his film instruction in the United States, where he started to make a notoriety in music recordings amid the eighties. What's more, the capturing pictures and prodding emotional structure of Before the Rain draw something from this experience. Be that as it may, if Manchevski has a place with the era of movie producers who have grown up with the popular verse of music recordings as a major aspect of their normal vocabulary, his other motivation is without a doubt the western—an impression affirmed by his similarly aggressive second element, Dust (2001). Think about the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, elegiac tributes to a lifestyle being smashed by innovation. Then again of Sergio Leone, whose movies were once scornfully known as "spaghetti westerns" however were really ornate minor departure from the colossal American western custom, and impacted postsixties producers all over. Peckinpah and Leone managed in myth instead of history, and weren't hesitant to utilize extraordinary viciousness for both aesthetic and sensible impact. The savagery that tears through Before the Rain, on Macedonian slopes and in a London eatery, draws on such coaches for its effect. What's more, when Manchevski demands that his film is not "about" Macedonia, or even only the Balkans, he's definitely trying to that same all inclusiveness recently, extraordinary westerns, for example, Once Upon a Time in the West or The Wild Bunch. The assume that his legend, Aleksandar, cuts is now a sentimental one in London however turns out to be unquestionably a westerner back in Macedonia, as he comes back to his old town, just to be quickly gone up against by a weapon toting youth. The specifics in the film are precisely adjusted, not to incite a critical reaction ("more Balkan anarchy") yet to clarify this is a perpetual, repetitive process, as Muslim censures Christian thus incites striking back by Christian. The two outfitted packs we meet in the film's initial segment, both with their trigger-glad shooters, are in fact counterparts, however one cases to retaliate for Christian Macedonian respect and the other Muslim Albanian qualities. However, we ought to be evident that nor is intended to be normal of present day Macedonians, of the kind we see quickly when Aleksandar lands in Skopje, any more than they're average of the optimists and pioneers wherever that we call fear mongers today. Terrorism was certainly on Europe’s agenda when Manchevski first composed his layout for the film in 1991, in the wake of paying an arrival visit to Macedonia. In any case, bombs, deaths, and kidnappings were then more basic in Britain, Italy, and Germany, as we're reminded by the radio news Anne listens to in her photograph organization office amid the London scene. Irish republican bomb alarms were practically standard in England from the seventies to the finish of the nineties, which loans credibility and power to her separating with Aleksandar in a London burial ground. He's abandoning her in a London under fear based oppressor risk to do a reversal to "quiet" Macedonia. What is so striking about Manchevski's round frame, similar to a Borges story or an Alain Resnais film, is that Anne is viably seeing pictures from the future on her London light box. This is a world connected by savagery: quite a bit of it interceded by photography and news yet every last bit of it conceivably nearby and ridiculous, as both heroes will find so mercilessly. It was undoubtedly the feeling that Manchevski could recount a genuinely European story, instead of simply a Balkan one, that connected with his supporters. Simon Perry, the maker of more than twelve exceptional European movies while heading the state financial specialist British Screen, turned into a moving power behind the film; and Britain's European Co-creation Fund additionally contributed, as frenched makers and the Ministry of Culture of the still youthful Republic of Macedonia. For two decades, European governments and cross-outskirt bodies have been grappling with the issue of connecting their individual film ventures to end up distinctly more compelling and to recount stories that demonstrate the truth of a landmass where London and Skopje are just a couple of hours separated, with individuals continually going between them. Prior to the Rain drove the path for different midnineties movies that figured out how to do this, for example, Ken Loach's Land and Freedom (1995) and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996). Every one of the three of these were extensive film industry and also celebration and basic triumphs in various nations. And by and large intense, sincerely complex stories implanted in their scenes and characters' histories. However all were shot on shoestring spending plans quietly amassed from differing sources. What's more, Before the Rain about endured the sort of a minute ago calamity that is a recognizable element of European filmmaking, when one of its unique supporters, Channel Four Television, hauled out, leaving British Screen to spare the creation. One figure common to von Trier’s breakthrough film and to Before the Rain is Katrin Cartlidge, who died suddenly at the age of forty-one, in 2002. In the wake of getting her begin in TV cleanser musical drama and satire, Cartlidge developed in the mid nineties as a striking and bold performing artist. She made her presentation in Mike Leigh's Cannes victor Naked (1993), playing a divided out someone who is addicted in this grim parody of cutting edge behavior, then turned into the blurb picture for Manchevski's film, before going ahead to star in two further Leigh act of spontaneities, Career Girls (1997) and Topsy-Turvy (1999). She came back to the Balkans in Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2001), set amid the Bosnia-Herzegovina strife, playing a correspondent. Cartlidge was never charming in any routine way, however she conveyed nearness and conviction to every one of her parts in a grievously short vocation. In Before the Rain, she figures out how to connect the inlet between contemporary London and "ageless" Macedonia, between an advanced profession lady juggling employment and connections and a statuesque grieving figure in a classical scene. Rade Serbedzija, a recognized Croatian stage on-screen character and star of Yugoslav silver screen and TV, does likewise, in switch. He had lived estranged abroad like the photojournalist he plays, a fascinating figure in the film's focal London grouping, before he comes back to Macedonia and tries to get the strings of his previous lifestyle in a group that is currently dangerously energized. Aleksandar kicks the bucket attempting to safeguard the Muslim young lady we have seen toward the start of the film, when she is ensured by a blameless youthful minister, Aleksandar's nephew, touchingly played by the rising French on-screen character Grégoire Colin. Serbedzija's own life has reverberated his part in the film, as he has worked for peace and compromise in Bosnia, acting with Vanessa Redgrave in Sarajevo, while additionally seeking after a fruitful profession in Hollywood silver screen. Before the Rain brought a specific picture of the Balkans to an expansive gathering of people, and propelled both Macedonia and Manchevski on the world stage—and being the primary film shot (halfway) in Macedonian to be broadly observed universally. However, with over ten years of insight into the past, we may think about whether its prosperity was as much because of its opportuneness as to its inherent qualities. I had the uncommon experience of participating in a universal class dedicated to the film, held in Florence in 1999, at which specialists in numerous parts of its experience and setting talked more than two days. The way that the film could maintain such nitty gritty examination was at that point essential. Be that as it may, what likewise developed was the means by which well Manchevski's craving to make something that was not reportage or history or a political examination had prevailing with regards to leaving the film open to various understandings. Milcho Manchevski is a New York-based Macedonian-born film director, writer, photographer and artist. His Academy-award nominated film Before the Rain won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, FIPRESCI and Independent Spirit, along with 30 other awards. The New York Times included it on its "1,000 Best Films Ever Made" list. Manchevski has directed four other features - Bikini (2017, in post-production) Mothers (2010), Shadows (2007) and Dust (2001), an episode of HBO's The Wire and 50 short forms (including Thursday, which was part of the Venice Feature Reloaded (2013). He has won awards for his experimental films (1.73), music videos (MTV and Billboard for Tennessee) and commercials (Macedonia Timeless). His work had more than 250 festival screenings (including Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Stockholm, etc. His films have been distributed in more than 50 countries. He has published books of fiction (The Ghost of My Mother), essays (Truth and Fiction: Notes on Exceptional Faith in Art) and photographs (Street and Five Drops of Dream, books that accompany two exhibitions of photographs). Manchevski has staged performance art by himself and as a (founding) member of the group 1AM. His work has been included in the curricula of numerous universities and has been the subject of two academic conferences (in Firenza and Leipzig); he holds an Honorary Doctorate from Moscow's VGIK. Manchevski has taught and guest-lectured extensively: University of Cambridge, Columbia Univesity, VGIK, Filmuniversitat Babelsberg "Konard Wolf", University of Chicago, University of Tokyo,Yale University, The Arts University College at Bourenmouth, Carleton University in Ottawa, Baltic Film and Media School, Elon College, Mahidol University Interanational College - Bangkok , Minsk University, Southern Ilinois University, Union College, University of Bielefeld - Germany, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil, University of Central Florida, University of Washington, FDU - Belgrade, University of Texas in Austin, Cineteca di Bologna, University of Oklahoma, and most notably as Head of the Directing Studies at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' Graduate Film program. He is currently teaching directing at the Feristein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College. source: www.imdb.com |
|