Long Sunday

Spinoza's Cubism

Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending Stairs

I say expressly that the mind does not have an adequate knowledge, of itself, its own body, and external bodies whenever it perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally - namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance - to regard this or that, and not when it is determined internally, through its regarding several things at the same time, to understand their agreement, differences, and their opposition. For whenever it is conditioned internally in this or another way, then it sees things clearly and distinctly, as I shall later show. (Ethica II, scholium to prop. 29)

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

poshlost'

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo–these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost' in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, mothmythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know..."

Or:

"A well-rounded, untranslatable whole made up of banality, vulgarity, and sham. It applies not only to obvious trash (verbal and animate), but also to spurious beauty, spurious importance, spurious cleverness"

–Vladimir Nabokov

King Kong.  Baudrillard.  Shopping Malls.  Disney Land.  MTV.  Dave Eggers. 

On some level one cannot help but recognize the sheer dominance of these forces.   Speaking generally, they are the air we breath.  This does not mean that they are natural.  Liberals (the politicians, not the ideals of any philosophy - which for many reasons, such as Capitalism, do not exist) would have more nuanced cooking shows, a slightly better quality of life for slightly more people for a slightly longer time.  A stronger, more gentle war on various emotional states.  Their prospects, of course, hinge on a fundamental delusion of sorts – namely a world where conservatives (at their current stage on the several-decades-developing road to fascism) simply do not exist.  Indeed, much of the liberal delusion consists of an elaborate maintainence of this snobbery.*  (And, to be fair, much of the conservative machine depends on exploiting the resentment springing from this impression.)  Those are all familiar enough complaints, to be sure.  And like everywhere, such generalizations are perhaps only useful up to a certain point.

If it is even worth mentioning (and I'm not convinced it is), this realm is nevertheless where a stupid film like Team America hits hardest.   
It "hits" in the sense that it literally performs a kind of violence on its audience (a violence for which we have very few words, yet – apart from the usual phrases, "beating over the head," "insulting the intelligence," "forced to consume," etc.)  Lenny Bruce's form of satire comes to mind (and yet, is it funny?  Really?).  That it panders equally to liberals and conservatives is perhaps worthy of a chuckle.  It's also of somewhat Zizekian topicality, in fact.  I wonder if he's seen it.  But to mistake this film for a "critique" of anything would surely be going too far (again recalling a certain Zizek). 

Having so warned against generalizations, I will now proceed to generalize.  I do think there is some wisdom in making an effort not to speak of the banal, or at least to do so carefully, and not in a manner that treats it with any more dignity than that with which it may handle us.

Look Now, Pay Later

For a time and  time and time and time and time and time of fear, he already had a few brave words:

Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won’t read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don’t pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.

Three Days of the Condor

Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?

Higgins: Are you crazy?

Turner: Am I?

Higgins: Look, Turner…

Turner: Do we have plans?

Higgins: No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.

Der Ister

It's about time. As you know, easy bootlegs of criminally over-priced DVD's are a horrible, horrible thing, and should never under any circumstances be spontaneously shared, and especially not with any members of well-deserving international group philosophy weblogs who just happen to reside in the United States.

Speaking From His Island

Vinterberg on Bergman:

“At film school, we did a Bergman course where we saw his first 12 films. Then, later on, I saw Fanny and Alexander and some of the more popular ones. I could tell this was a film-maker who was fantastically precise, with deep psychology, and that he was giving me insight into human beings I hadn't seen before. Some of those close-ups of those beautiful Swedish actresses have just stayed with me. He created female characters you fell in love with instantly and exposed their burning inner life in a way I have not seen before or since.

After I made Festen, I called him. He was very, very lively, speaking from his island. I was expecting to hear from a more bitter man. He said he would do no more work and now he would find the time to sit in a corner in his house and read some of those marvellous books he never got to read. He told me Festen was a masterpiece, which I was very happy about, but he talked about how silly and stupid Dogme was. We invited him once to do a Dogme film, but he didn't want to do it. I tried to explain why Dogme wasn't silly, but I very quickly gave in. He wasn't going to change his opinion, no matter what I said. I've only talked to him on one occasion. It was so uplifting. If I can feel like he does at that age, life isn't that bad.”

Though Bergman’s my favourite director I’m not sure I agree with him that Dogme was “silly”. I’m sure he knew how self-mockingly Puritan were its strictures about film-making. And he must have recognized in it the same back-to-basics aspiration that drove a Truffaut or a Godard. There’s something in the low-tech beauty of a film like Through a Glass Darkly that actually shares much in common with Dogme. But I’ll forgive him for the comment. And I’ll forgive him for his latest (and last?) film, Saraband, which is somewhat disappointing. But even Bergman’s bad films are good.

further animalia, this time without pictures

More utterly hilarious Cliché War fallout from "The March of the Penguins" here.  Penguins, yes, those deceptively difficult to caricature creatures in a savage land whose greatest feat is having mastered the cocktail party effect.  I've since updated my previous post, in case you only skimmed the horrendous bloglines version (many thanks to S. for pointing out that penguins don't actually "prune" themselves, as in spontaneously lop off their own limbs, so much as "preen," etc.)  What follows are a few more thoughts on 'the animal', patched together from a further reading of John Berger and then turning toward Agamben.  Apologies in advance for their somewhat scattered, well bloggish quality.  Any comments or criticisms more than welcome.

Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

Bärenhunger

A moment in Herzog’s latest film, Grizzly Man, where the director steps over the line he has carefully marked out for himself in his previous documentaries. Herzog has been careful not to judge Timothy Treadwell, whose last footage forms the substance of this strange film. His interjections have been limited to pointing up the inconsistencies in Treadwell’s eco-activist worldview, the inability to explain why his beloved animals would kill one another, his contradictory image as a loner when he has taken someone with him to his Alaskan wilderness, his breaking of his own rule on keeping a distance from the bears who would eventually kill him. Of course Herzog has also let many others speak on Timothy’s behalf, and it is these who the director must have known would damn him (and often themselves) in what makes for the film’s embarrassing humour. But all of a sudden, Herzog feels the need to give his “very different” view of nature than that to which Treadwell subscribes. For Herzog nature is not benevolent but “brutal and chaotic”. A strange hyperbolical interjection, and one which does not fully stand up. It seems a lapse on the director’s part, having already told us that Treadwell’s surviving footage tells us “as much about civilization as it does about nature”, since the social lens through which the “chaotic” and the “brutal” come into focus is left unexamined. The order that emerges out of individually random actions, and the moving line between brute and social animal is ignored. The dispassionate (though never uninterested) documentarist this author has come to admire from Land of Silence and Darkness to Ten Thousand Years Older has become - momentarily - an uncritical ideologue.

Otium Tibi Molestum Est

After having spent the entire afternoon in daydreams I opened a book and found this.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

                              

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle - a kind of gallery - is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

                                                                                                               

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them - to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea - whom we saved - cannot love us.

                            

- Giorgio Agamben, Profanations