Landscape Suicide

No comment #5, or: Europa

2012-01-16T21:18:00.008Z

The system continues to unravel. With each turn of the spiral, the financial and political costs of an effective resolution increase. We have moved past the point where electorates and their representatives are willing to pay the ever-rising costs of repairing the system. Last week a couple of senior parliamentarians from the ruling CDU party, whom I had previously considered voices of moderation, argued that a Greek exit from the eurozone would not be such a big deal. Expectations are changing quickly, and so is the acceptance of a violent ending.

--Wolfgang Münchau, 15.01.2012.

For most of the first half of the sixteenth century relationships between the various components of this cosmopolitan ensemble were basically cooperative. Each "nation" specialised in a particular market niche defined by a merchandise (textiles for the English; alum, silver, and copper for the German; metal products for the Milanese; staples of various kind for the Lucchese) or by a predominant relationship of political exchange with one of the two most powerful territorialist organisations of the European world-economy (with France for the Florentine; and Spain for the Genoese). By pooling at fairs, as in Lyons, or in more continuous commodity and money exchanges, as in Antwerp, the promises of payment, the information, and the connections acquired in dealing with overlapping but distinct clienteles, the various "nations" cooperated with one another in attaining three main results.

First, they ensured that the largest possible number of promises of payment would offset one another directly or indirectly, thereby minimising the actual transport of currencies that the " nations" had to undertake. Second, they pooled a better knowledge of conditions affecting trends and fluctuations in exchange rates than they would have been able to acquire on their own. And third, they involved one another in profitable commercial or financial deals, such as the election of the emperor in 1519, which would have been too big or risky for the members of a single "nation" to undertake but not for a "multinational" joint venture. These outcomes of cooperation were the main reason for the various "nations" to converge in specific places at specific times and thus create and keep alive central marketplaces like Antwerp and Lyons. But as soon as these outcomes declined in importance for one or more of the core "nations," cooperation was displaced by competition and the centrality of cosmopolitan marketplaces like Antwerp and Lyons was progressively undermined and eventually destroyed.

A displacement of this kind began in the 1530s when the crowding out of German by American silver supplies destroyed the commercial foundations of the German "nation" and strengthened those of the Genoese "nation." It was also in the 1530s that the Genoese began to hold their own fairs in competition with the Lyons fairs, which were controlled by the Florentine "nation." In spite of these early signs of an escalation in inter-capitalist competition, relationships between the main "nations" remained basically cooperative through the 1540s and early 1550s.

The real escalation only began with the crisis of 1557-62. As previously noted, it was in the course of this crisis that German capital was crowded out of high finance by Genoese capital. More important, the Genoese introduced the system of the asientos — contracts with the Spanish government that gave the Genoese almost complete control over the supply of American silver in Seville in exchange for gold and other "good money" delivered in Antwerp, which was quickly becoming the main centre of operation of the Spanish Imperial army. At this point, the Genoese "nation" lost all interest in cooperating with the Florentine "nation" and began making aggressive use of the supply of American silver to divert Italian liquidity (gold and bills of exchange) from the Lyons fairs to its own "Bisenzone" fairs. Although these fairs still bore the Italian name of Besançon — from where they had been held initially — they were in fact mobile (held at Chambéry, Poligny, Trento, Coira, Rivoli, Ivrea, and Asti) to suit the Genoese.

By 1579, when the Bisenzone fairs settled at Piacenza in the Duchy of Parma, a tightly controlled and highly profitable triangle had been established through which the Genoese pumped American silver from Seville to northern Italy, where they exchanged it for gold and bills of exchange, which they delivered to the Spanish government in Antwerp in exchange for the asientos which gave them control over American silver in Seville. By the end of the 1580s, the progressive centralisation of the supply of American silver and northern Italian and bills of exchange within the Genoese triangle made the decline of Lyons as the central money market irreversible. Although Antwerp was one of the three corners of the Genoese triangle, its vitality as a central commodity and money market had been sapped much earlier. The crowding out of the Germans and the increasing exclusiveness of the Genoese-Iberian connection alienated the English who, in the late 1560s, returned home under Thomas Gresham's leadership to convince Elizabeth I of the importance of making England independent of foreigners not just in trade but in finance as well.

The consolidation of the system of the Piacenza fairs thus marked the end of the system of cooperating "nations" which had governed the capitalist engine of the European world-economy in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Genoese had won the day, but this early victory in the battle for supremacy in high finance was only the prelude to a much longer struggle. This was the war of Dutch independence, in which the Genoese let their Spanish partners do the actual fighting, while they profited behind the scenes by transforming silver delivered in Seville into gold and other "good money" delivered in Antwerp near the theatre of operations. Without this war there probably would have been no "age of the Genoese." But it was this same war that eventually dislodged the Genoese from the commanding heights of the capitalist world-economy.

--Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 1994/2010), p.133-5.

'10, '11

2012-01-08T02:32:00.007Z

A few words: late notes on 2010 at Ryland's and a pairing for the year just gone at Mubi's Notebook. Haven't seen many films from 2011 yet, but very good so far: Gina's Traveling Light, Christoph Hochhäusler's Unter dir die Stadt (a film of finance-capital that reminds me, above all, of La notte) and, reliably, Petzold's third of Dreileben, Etwas Besseres als den Tod.

History Lesson(s) #10

2011-12-31T01:42:00.003Z

Qu'ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerres I) - Sylvain George, 2007-10, DV

One 22-year-old, fleeing open-ended military service in Eritrea, drew a glowing metal rod from the embers and dragged it slowly across his fingertips, searing off his fingerprints. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, displaying hands yellow with scar tissue.

--NYT, 29.04.2008. Also.

At sea #8

2011-12-31T01:39:00.001Z

Qu'ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerres I) - Sylvain George, 2007-10, DV

Illuminations #9

2011-12-30T01:09:00.005Z

O Sangue - Pedro Costa, 1989, 35mm

History Lesson(s) #9

2011-11-30T21:09:00.005Z

Pure Red / Yellow / Blue Colour - Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1921, oil on canvas

I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting. These are the primary colours. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation.

--Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1939, cited in "The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde", Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October 37, 1986, p.44.

At sea #7

2011-11-23T18:06:00.006Z

From the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon - Robert Adams, 1991

At sea #6

2011-11-14T01:54:00.007Z

A little late posting this, but: Mubi's tribute to Raúl Ruiz, compiled by David Phelps: I, II, III, IV (inc. my brief contribution), V. Also late: the beautifully designed Lumière IV, and a video interview with Nathaniel Dorsky: I, II, III. More recently: Filming the Crisis: A Survey; Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs' Films; Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss; Redefining the Right Wing; Seize the Ponies (via). And Europa: as the unthinkable continues to unravel, a flashback — the prospects were always grave.

At sea #5

2011-11-14T01:47:00.006Z

Three Crowns of the Sailor - Raúl Ruiz, 1983, 35mm

At sea #4

2011-10-31T22:01:00.010Z

It is about a hundred years since the Demeter, a Russian schooner, arrived in Whitby harbour. Its fifty 'great wooden boxes of earth' were assigned to Mr. Samuel Billington, a Whitby solicitor, who had them sent on to Purfleet by train. Dracula was published in 1897. The bench in St. Mary's churchyard is first mentioned in Chapter IV, which ends with the first sighting of the Demeter. The ship is driven into the harbour during a terrible storm, deserted but for the captain's corpse lashed to the helm and a huge dog which leaps ashore and disappears. The boxes are its only cargo.

--narration from Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Space (1997) / annotation from the accompanying book (Reaktion, 1999), p.171. Image: Whitby harbour, earlier this month.

Illuminations #8

2011-10-13T01:21:00.002+01:00

At Sea - Peter Hutton, 2007, 16mm

At sea #3

2011-09-30T23:27:00.005+01:00

The crisis deepens. Ships are again laid up by the hundreds, manned by skeleton crews, or sent to the scrapyards of Bangladesh before their time. Ten percent of the world's fleet is idle. Shipyards are again in trouble as orders for new ships dry up. Riding high in the water, they carry only empties, with nowhere to go.

A ship is not an isolated thing, but a unit in a makeshift ensemble. Behind it all is backbreaking toil, and dockworkers' casual physical feats. The link between the ship, dock and city streets is seen in the Hong Kong street porters of the 1960s photographed by Ed van der Elsken, which show the physical definition of work: moving a mass, over a distance.

The Forgotten Space - Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, super 16mm

At sea #2

2011-09-29T23:51:00.006+01:00

The Forgotten Space - Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, super 16mm

We wanted to make an openly Marxist film, to really redeem, in the discourse of film, that critical way of looking at the world. The crash has put basic analyses of the crisis tendencies of capitalism back on the table in a way that they weren't previously, so it's strange that there are films that seem to have fallen into the crime genre in order to explain what has happened. I'm thinking of Inside Job, which takes the form of a kind of detective novel, presenting a rogue's gallery of criminal financiers. But at the same time it's a film that suggests, perhaps incorrectly, that there was a golden age of Keynesianism, as if a kind of Keynesian utopia has been destroyed by neoconservatives, none of which helps us understand the cycles of capitalism, or the intractability of the problem of crisis. So much as we might now want to see more Keynesian policies pursued, there's also a need to understand these things in a deeper way than the culture of the popular documentary film allows, even though it has opened itself up in a good way to current political problems. We felt the need to make a tougher film.

A problem with documentary is that there's this extraordinary need for embodiment, for telling the story. Our producers would ask us from time to time, in a nervous way: what are all the little stories that you want to tell? And while it's true that we have all these stories of individuals who work at different sites along the supply chain — or are excluded by it, caught in the interstices, jettisoned by society — my response was that what we're struggling with here is the big story. And no-one thinks they can tell the big story anymore. Everyone's given up. They're feeling hopeless, and of course I see that — I teach in an art school, so I know how difficult it can be for younger people to feel like they have the ability to tell this story. Perhaps it's similar, in a way, to the recent turn in economics away from macro- to microeconomics: tending your little garden while the whole earth is trembling...

--Allan Sekula, May 2011, via.

At sea #1

2011-09-29T21:31:00.016+01:00

Silver and copper chariots——
Steel and silver ship's bows——
Hammer the foam,——
Heave up stumps of brambles.
——The currents of the heath,
And the huge ruts of the ebb tide
Swirl toward the east,
Toward the pillars of the forest,——
Toward the timbers of the pier,
Whose angle is struck by whirlpools of light.

--Arthur Rimbaud, Seascape, Illuminations, trans. John Ashbery (Carcanet, 2011), p. 109.

Des animaux #7

2011-09-27T23:13:00.003+01:00

Douro, Faina Fluvial - Manoel de Oliveira, 1931, 35mm

An aside, or: digressions on the photographic agony #6

2011-09-19T13:28:00.015+01:00

We do not die twice. In this respect, a photograph does not have the power of film; it can only represent someone dying or a corpse, not the elusive passage from one state to the other. In the spring of 1949, you may have seen a haunting documentary about the anti-Communist crackdown in Shanghai in which Red 'spies' were executed with a revolver on the public square. At each screening, at the flick of a switch, these men came to life again and then the jerk of the same bullet jolted their necks. The film did not even leave out the gesture of the policeman who had to make two attempts with his jammed revolver, an intolerable sight not so much for its objective horror as for its ontological obscenity. Before cinema there was only the profanation of corpses and the desecration of tombs. Thanks to film, nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal dead-again of the cinema!

--André Bazin, 'Death Every Afternoon', in Rites of Realism, p.30-1.

Finding the criminal #3

2011-08-31T23:12:00.012+01:00

The time is too short / but never too long / to reach ahead / to project the image / which will in time / become a concrete dream.

--Wire, 'Lowdown', Pink Flag, 1977.

In Vanda's Room - Pedro Costa, 2000, DV

[On undramatic long-take art cinema today.]

I think there's this petty fascination with what people call an image. Artists like what they’re doing as artists, or supposed artists, but you never see a bricklayer contemplating his stone for half an hour then saying: ‘oh yeah, maybe I’ll add another stone.’ That does not happen.

A lot of people today, even filmmakers, have not seen what we called cinema, and are relatively unaware of its craft, its past. They don’t know it, and sometimes they despise it, saying: yeah, I don’t care, or I don’t have time to see that, times have changed, this is not the same world. But the work we’re doing, I feel, belongs to a certain reality and a world of work that has a past, and I can't escape it. And I think the only way to move forward is by not escaping it and instead confronting certain things. Not refusing Chaplin’s films is a way of moving forward, not dismissing them as bullshit, because they're about details, the way people move, where you place the camera (the height, the sound), etc. They're not about ideas, those everything-goes ideas that produce all those long shots, the contemplation of some void: a mountain, a street corner that could be in Hong Kong, Paris, anywhere...

You should see Ozu, or John Ford: their shots are much longer. Three seconds in John Ford is three thousand years. Any young video artist has to work very hard if they want to tell their story in three seconds. When I was making In Vanda's Room, I had a feeling — a normal feeling — that what I was seeing and what Vanda was doing was an attempt to tell fragments, particles, centimetres, inches, seconds of a very long moment. This moment could be ten minutes, an hour, and it took ten days, ten weeks. Because it’s like Proust, or Kafka: it takes a century to tell just one second. And that’s very hard work in film.

--Pedro Costa, in conversation with Craig Keller and Andy Rector, 2008, Finding the Criminal, 2010. Available via.

Finding the criminal #2

2011-08-31T23:09:00.002+01:00

Juventude em Marcha - Pedro Costa, 2006, DV

At the time, in the intelligentsia, people had been shaken by 1968. The delirium didn't last very long, about two years. During that time, we went pretty far with the idea that 'we won't be filmmakers', which was fine with us, as none of us was a born filmmaker, so we'd found a justification: we won't be filmmakers because there are much more important things to do! Which was to create a great Chinese-style cultural front with mass appeal, etc. But as soon as reality entered the picture, it fell apart. I'll only note that, without knowing whether it's to our honour or whether, on the contrary, it's a sign of absolute collective baseness, but we plunged politically collectively.

That enabled us not to belong to any group since we became our own group. We were quite naive, and took it to a point at which it almost became pathological, but we stopped in time. We didn't do anything base in relation to cinema. Which is to say that we never said anything good about, I don't know, an Elio Petri film, as all the leftists liked them. We always said good stuff about Straub and Godard and everyone told us off, because those films were considered indigestible by everyone, and they were indeed quite difficult films. We had absolute fidelity to our tastes in cinema, our Cahiers tastes, even if reduced to a very Jansenist base. Godard, at the time, was also very naive, very Maoist. He was more active than us; he did lots of stuff and we followed him a bit. As for Straub, he was a very important filmmaker to us, and is still very important to me — even if, well, we're all twenty years older. Back then, we went on, following a little minuscule line that should have broken a hundred times, but didn't, which just goes to show that it was solid after all.

--Serge Daney, on writing for Cahiers du cinéma during its militant phase in the early 1970s, Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils, 1992.

Finding the criminal #1

2011-08-31T02:19:00.004+01:00

Conviction, then form. One has to be just in what is shown, what is portrayed. Our generation is weak, we lack conviction. Our films are weak: they have three hundred ideas rather than one.

--notebook fragments from a talk by Pedro Costa, Ciné lumière, London, April 2008.

We shall not speak of a realistic manner of writing only when, for example, we can smell, taste and feel everything, when there is 'atmosphere' and when plots are so contrived that they lead to psychological analysis of character. Our concept of realism must be wide and political, sovereign over all conventions. 'Realistic' means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.

--Bertolt Brecht, 'Against Georg Lukács', Aesthetics & Politics (Verso, 1980), p. 82.

Our people are never characters: if a character is boring, it is because they want to be. Doing nothing is important, it's a discipline: hang out, get to know your characters, their lives. I already have Hollywood. I don't have the money, but I have everything else.

--notebook fragments from a talk by Pedro Costa, Ciné lumière, London, April 2008.

For Colossal Youth, I was accompanied [to Cannes] by my Cape Verdean actors, laughing about dining with the rich folks. It was funny because I'd follow them, and they spent the days talking to the hotel cleaning ladies who were from Cape Verde. All cousins of Ventura, et al. The second he set foot in Cannes, someone called out: "Ventura! What are you doing here?" It was a cousin of his, who was sweeping the streets of Nice. There are loads of Cape Verdeans in Nice. Ventura said, "I'm in a film," and his cousin just replied, "oh right..." He wasn't bothered.

--Pedro Costa, introducing a screening of The Rabbit Hunters, 2008.

When Ventura goes to the museum and we show paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt and Van Dyck, he's at home there, and he should be. He built the museum; it's his floor, it's his ground, his walls, his stones. He's just lucky they hung a Rubens there. Those are the kinds of meetings between famous men that I like. Like that beautiful book by Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I mean Ventura, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vanda... It's a beautiful thing with film, if you can abolish class and status, it's very utopian. You can still accomplish some revolutions in film, but not in life I'm afraid.

--Pedro Costa, interviewed in Art in America, 25.03.2010.

Juventude em Marcha - Pedro Costa, 2006, DV

History Lesson(s) #8

2011-08-18T00:43:00.000+01:00

Le Pont du Nord - Jacques Rivette, 1981, 16mm

Realism(s) #16, or: notes on mechanical reproduction

2011-08-18T00:35:00.022+01:00

The screen actor is conscious, all the while he is before the camera, that in the final analysis he is dealing with the audience: the audience of consumers who constitute the market.

--Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', from One-way Street and Other Writings, trans. J.A. Underwood (Penguin, 2009), p. 244.

Advertising has created, especially amongst young people, the idea that there’s a sphere, a realm of images, that's always a question of technique, of creativity (what a horrible word), of invention, of money, and people who pay for that. It’s a worthy conception — in fact, it exists throughout the history of the West: there are images that are sold, sold into prostitution, and there are some sublime ones. Only there’s not only that in cinema, painting or the other arts, there's also been something else: there are filmmakers who make images that don’t sell anything. For instance, a film by Rivette, maybe not the last one, but let’s say the films of his that no-one has seen... Rivette's a guy who lives outside of consumerism, as a sort of peripheral saint; a guy who observes, with an intense curiosity, the life of his contemporaries. He’s not angry at all, he’s a pure cinéphile, like what I said at the beginning: 'we’ll never be part of...' He's the purest example. When you see Le Pont du Nord, to take one of his most beautiful films, there isn’t a single shot in the film that could sell anything: one that could sell the actress who plays in it, the quality of the sun, nothing.

--Serge Daney, Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils, 1992. [h/t]

We could use this as a way to define political cinema: totally avoiding what keeps capitalism alive, such as inflation. If, at the aesthetic level, you practice the same inflation which fuels capitalist society as well as the world we live in, then there's no point; you're just grist for the mill. Elio Vittorini said this in Les Lettres françaises of June 27, 1947: 'This is how I first became politically aware, looking at the spectacle of the society I lived in. This gigantic lie, I knew it well enough. They were all talking about some pre-Fascistic morality — the very morality from which Fascism itself had sprung. They were all leading back to Fascism — or, at best, to moral stagnation and sterility. They were trying to heal the wounds, again and again. They never attacked the disease itself.'

--Jean-Marie Straub, in conversation with François Albera & Danièle Huillet, Sickle and Hammer, Cannons, Cannons, Dynamite!, 2001, published in the 2004 Viennale & Filmmuseum retrospective catalogue, p.42.

The corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it cannot be done. The technologies are designed to sow and foster distrust and that is the consequence of using them. The recent experience proves this, it seems to me. And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the end of the illusion of a marketplace in the financial sphere.

--James K. Galbraith, from a keynote lecture on post-Keynesian economics, 13.05.2011, via.

People in commercials are to cinema history what religious trinkets were to sacred art: a terminal stage before the renunciation of the image, or its effective replacement by automatons.

--Serge Daney, 'From Projector to Parade' (1989), Film Comment 38.4, 2002, p.39.

The lengthy discussions between well-dressed businessmen on the stock market floor include a great number of characters, between five and twenty, all arguing and gesticulating like puppets. It’s an early attempt at working on a crowd or group scene, a domain in which Griffith will excel until his final film (whereas the cinema, in 1909, was generally content with two or three actors in front of the camera). Except that, here, there is absolute commotion, with the actors entirely focused on themselves (among them, many names will become famous), without any explicit development or correspondence with regards to a particular idea. We can also read these manual frenzies as a way of looking down upon the conformity in the commotion of all these white-collared workers who hate each other, eat, drink gluttonously, and do nothing — in contrast to the proletarians, who no longer have anything to put in their mouths.

--Luc Moullet on D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1913), from 'Ah Yes! Griffith was a Marxist!', LOLA #1, trans. Ted Fendt.

Film's response to the shrivelling of aura is an artificial inflation of 'personality' outside the studio. The cult of stardom promoted by film capital preserves the personal magic that for years has lain solely in the rancid magic of its commodity character. When film capital sets the tone, no other revolutionary service can be ascribed to present-day films in general than that of furthering a revolutionary critique of traditional notions of art. in contrast to the proletarians, who no longer have anything to put in their mouths.

--Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', from One-way Street and Other Writings, trans. J.A. Underwood (Penguin, 2009), p. 245.

Le Pont du Nord - Jacques Rivette, 1981, 16mm

In other news: an astonishing fortnight, at its most intense when this and this were unfolding at precisely the same time — both outbursts of an expected, yet still unprecedented, systemic turmoil. Two links, in that spirit: Evan Calder Williams and Nick Shaxson on looting. And on riots: two excellent pieces by Owen Hatherley; James Meek in Hackney; Anthony Paul Smith — 'of course firebombing a local pub is an idiotic thing to do, but so is maintaining the status quo.' Full solidarity with all those facing the revenge of a flailing, sadistic neoliberal state — the current wave of sentences, like these, has left me speechless. As might where we're going.

Hackney, 08.08.11, via

Illuminations #7

2011-07-31T23:19:00.009+01:00

Just noticed: a new film by Nathaniel Dorsky, The Return. And prose: Letters from Nathaniel III, with thanks to Jon Jost (previously: I, II).

Digressions on the photographic agony #5

2011-07-31T03:39:00.006+01:00

I

London - Patrick Keiller, 1994, 35mm

II

Robinson once said that he believed that if he looked at the landscape hard enough, it would reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.

--Robinson in Ruins, narration by Patrick Keiller, 2010.

III

Robinson in Ruins - Patrick Keiller, 2010, 35mm

IV

I think the first long takes were probably rape fields; after Brize Norton there are those two shots of oil seed rape. What struck me is that they looked like a crowd of people, and they looked as if they were saying ‘no!’ There seemed to be something going on in this field, a combination of these interestingly structured plants, with the stalks moving in a very strange way, and the fact that when you get closer you see them slightly differently. I was very taken with this: it’s not so much a question of whether one wants to make a long take, it’s a question of whether you can bear to stop.

--Patrick Keiller, from the unedited transcript for this interview with Daniel Trilling, unpublished.

V

Robinson in Space - Patrick Keiller, 1997, 35mm

VI

As a cinematographer, Robinson was interested in opium. He often liked to quote Walter Benjamin: 'the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration...'

--Robinson in Ruins, narration by Patrick Keiller, 2010.

VII

The Old Place - Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999, video

VIII

Film offers a kind of permanence to subjectivity. On a bad day, or in a bad light, even the architecture of Gaudi might lose its immediate appeal, but in a film one's transitory experience of some ordinary, everyday detail as breathtaking, euphoric or disturbing — a doorway, perhaps, or the angle between a fragment of brickwork and a pavement — can be registered on photographic emulsion and relived every time the material is viewed. On the other hand, when actual extra-ordinary architecture is depicted in films it's often easy to conclude that something is missing, as if the camera has nothing sufficiently revelatory to add, and nothing to improve on a visit to the actual building.

--Patrick Keiller, 'Architectural Cinematography', This Is Not Architecture (Routledge, 2002), p. 43.

Realism(s) #15, or: this needle of the world

2011-07-20T23:11:00.007+01:00

A huge thunderstorm
rolled around in coils all afternoon above
the roof-tops before it broke in flashes and sheeted down.
I stared at the lines of cement and glass
that walled up screams and wounds and limbs
including mine, which I have survived. Warily, looking
now up at the roof-tiles doing battle, now at the dry page,
I listened to the word
of a poet perish or change
into another voice we no longer hear. The oppressed
are oppressed and quiet, quietly the oppressors
talk on the phone, hatred is polite, and even I
believe I no longer know who is to blame.

Write, I tell myself, hate
those who sweetly lead into nothingness
the men and women who walk beside you
and believe they do not know. Write your name too
among those of the enemy. The storm
has passed away with all its bluster. Nature
is far too feeble to mimic battles. Poetry
changes nothing. Nothing is certain, but write.

--Franco Fortini, Translating Brecht, written 1957-62. Trans. Paul Lawton.

An aside, or: sounds familiar

2011-07-13T21:24:00.003+01:00

In Nouvelle Vague or Puissance de la parole, he wrote maybe two or three lines, if that. He rarely reads entire books. He takes a few extracts, usually the best ones, but it's sometimes a bit random. He pecks at books like a hen in the garden.

--Luc Moullet on Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc selon Luc, 2005, video.

I ask about the significance of the llama and the donkey in Film socialisme... 'The truth is that they were in the field next to the petrol station in Switzerland where we shot the sequence. Voilà. No mystery. I use what I find.'

--from a compellingly awful interview with JLG in the Guardian, 12.07.2011.

Godard wrote nothing: what good is writing when so many things have already been written? Such is his motto.

--Luc Moullet, The Cosmic Film, 2005.

No comment #4

2011-07-13T21:22:00.008+01:00

Film socialisme - JLG, 2010, DV

I

It reminds me of an old syllogism that I learned at school. Epaminondas is a liar; and all the Greeks are liars; therefore Epaminondas is Greek. It did not get us very far.

--JLG, May 2010.

II

The logic of liberal media: need someone to interview Jean-Luc Godard about his new film? Send this guy.

Meanwhile...

Distance(s) #23

2011-07-05T16:15:00.001+01:00

Cœur fidèle - Jean Epstein, 1923, 35mm

Landscape (for Manon) - Peter Hutton, 1987, 16mm

In water, crystals grow, beautiful as Venus, born as she was, full of the most secret graces, symmetries, and correspondences. Games of heaven; thus, worlds fall...

--Jean Epstein, 1928, via.

An aside, or: a note on 'cinephilia'

2011-06-24T02:40:00.004+01:00

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

--#14 & #15 of Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. Ever valid.

Everything or Nothing #3

2011-06-24T00:35:00.021+01:00

The cinema aesthetic will be social, or the cinema will have to do without an aesthetic.

--André Bazin, 1943, from French Cinema of the Occupation & Resistance (1981), p.37.

Deflins: Politics again?
Godard: Yes, as modern democracies, by rendering politics a domain of separate thought, are predisposed to totalitarianism.
Deflins: IXE [Information Exchange for Economics] plus three equals one?
Godard: Not an Einstein-style formula — a metaphor at the apex and the roots of all montage. If financial, for example, it allows the current debt of Greece to be brought near the hordes of German tourists. In Montesquieu's phrase: when finance is privileged, the State is lost.

--Jean-Luc Godard, in conversation with 'Renaud Deflins', 15.04.2010, trans. Craig Keller.

Democracy and tragedy were married in Athens under Pericles and Sophocles. A single child — civil war...

--Film socialisme, JLG, 2010.

You call it austerity, I call it war.

--Liana Kanelli, Greek communist MP, February 2010.

Inevitably the stabilisation plan has been a disaster, missing just about all its original targets. The numbers are breathtaking. Under current policies, the EU/IMF/ECB (European Central Bank) 'troika' expects sovereign debt to rise to 200% of GDP in 2015, up from roughly 150% at present. Servicing the debt will cost 12% of GDP – vastly more than expenditure on health and education – while the government deficit will be 15% of GDP. The country will be unquestionably bankrupt. Fully aware of this, financial markets are refusing to advance a penny in new private loans. And since the troika had planned for Greece to return to the markets in 2011 on the back of the expected success of the stabilisation plan, the crisis has reached fever pitch.

The response of the troika reveals systemic failure at the heart of the eurozone. Greece will receive another large loan but must impose further austerity, including wage and pension cuts, perhaps 150,000 lost jobs in the civil service, more taxes, and sweeping privatisation. And what is likely to happen if the country accepts this? By the calculations of the troika, in 2015 sovereign debt will be 160% of GDP, servicing the debt will cost 10% of GDP, and the government deficit will be 8% of GDP. In short, Greece will still be bankrupt.

--Costas Lapavitsas, 21.06.2011.

It's less a tourist cruise than an international summit of bastards.

--Film Socialisme Annotated, translated by David Phelps, 07.06.2011.

This is how the FT explains it: 'Any bonds issued in future by the eurozone’s new €500bn rescue fund on behalf of Ireland, Greece or Portugal will not enjoy “preferred creditor status” — an alteration to the fund intended to help those nations return more swiftly to private capital markets.' For those who do not dabble much in sovereign debt, let me explain. Common to the whole of the international financial architecture/system for sovereign lending, there is one principle that overrides all others: that the IMF/World Bank are ‘preferred creditors’. Just as when a company goes bankrupt, the supplier that sold it widgets is ranked lower than the bank that provided the overdraft, so in international ‘law' taxpayer-backed lending from the IMF and World Bank is ‘preferred’ when it comes to repayment over all private commercial lending. And it is preferred because it is public money.

In other words, when the public cough up — via an international institution such as the IMF or the ECB — then the sovereign (e.g. Greece, Argentina, Rwanda) has to pay taxpayers back first. Yesterday, on behalf of EU taxpayers, EU finance ministers obliged private bankers by overturning that ‘principle’. Instead they agreed, effectively, that private bankers will get preference and will be repaid before taxpayers.

--Ann Pettifor, 21.06.2011.

Fraud and crime pay, if you can disable the police and regulatory agencies. So that has become the financial agenda, eagerly endorsed by academic spokesmen and media ideologues who applaud bank managers and subprime mortgage brokers, corporate raiders and their bondholders, and the new breed of privatizers, using the one-dimensional measure of how much revenue can be squeezed out and capitalized into debt service.

--Michael Hudson, 06.06.2011.

With billions of dollars of risk held in a myriad of banks in dozens of EU countries no one is immune from contagion effects. So if anyone gets wind of someone printing a new currency, for example, the whole thing unravels at light speed as investors try to liquidate ahead of the pack. Investors don’t want to do this in the main. Speculators aside, most bondholders want to ‘be made whole’ rather than blow up their portfolio. But if someone is going to shout fire in a crowded theater, then it pays to be close to the door.

--Mark Blyth, 18.01.2011.

The graffiti on the Greek Finance Ministry says: 'Police Murderers, German Informers'. Above it are the shatter marks of numerous projectiles.

--Paul Mason, 16.06.2011.

For the people gathered in Syntagma, the intense political manoeuvring in the corridors of parliament seems to matter little. Theirs is a mass mobilisation that draws a distinction between representational and grassroots politics. Political parties seem unlikely to come to a halt over developments in the upper echelons of power. For them, the Memorandum is not just a sum of persons or abhorrent policies, but a system of power that has misruled the country for 30 years, bringing it to the edge of collapse. It is a system of beliefs, values, expectations and political roles and identities that cannot be abolished simply by replacing the head or members of the government.

The people in the squares have started, again, to believe that they have the freedom and the responsibility to act; they are urging radical change through the creation of different personal and social relations. By now, the distance between the people and their representatives might seem unbridgeable; as the old system of government crumbles under the burden of sovereign debt, a new, grassroots system of politics is starting to make itself heard from the ground.

--Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis, 16.06.2011.

A pessimistic view was also heard in the assembly, that the parliament is very likely to vote in favour of the medium-term programme. The real question is what the movements do next, how they gain control of their lives despite that.

The pessimistic view may also be realistic, given European pressure not only on the government, but also on opposition parties, to support the massive austerity and privatisation plan… And if this happens, what next...?

--daily update from the Greek squares and people's assemblies, via Mute, 22.06.2011.

Méditerranée - Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963, 16mm

And the second angel poured his vial unto the sea;
and it became as the blood of a dead man

--Revelations 16:3.

Film socialisme - JLG, 2010, DV

The devil appears, saying that his name is 'legion': 'We are a legion of devils.' This story is fascinating, because what is expressed, bizarrely, is the possibility of multitude. That's not a bad introduction to temptation — a legion of devils! Above all, it is a way of affirming one's desire to possess all possible wealth, all possible virtues and powers. In the theory of angels, whether they are fallen or not, everything proceeds by legions: cherubim, seraphim, and dominations, the highest order of angels.

--Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri: In Conversation With Anne Dufourmantelle (Routledge, 2004), p.159.

---

It ends on a violent note: beyond the great European tragedy’s last turn, beyond what we could conveniently dismiss as Godard’s 'pessimism,' final judgment against the traitors is passed in the name of a justice that transcends the law.

--Kim West, "Sphinx", May Revue 5, 2010.

I don’t comment. The question of the ethic of art is not to be imperial. Desperation because operation is always something like imperial operation, because the law of operation is today imperial law.

--Alain Badiou, lecture on "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art", lacanian ink 23, 2004.

What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.

--Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970 (Continuum, 1997), p.19. [h/t]

The recent English translation by David Phelps of critical material on Film socialisme assembled by Arthur Mas, Martial Pisani, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Guillaume Bourgois, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Pauline Soulat for Independencia, later expanded for Lumière, is essential, revelatory work. That is, essential not just for anyone interested in Jean-Luc Godard's film, but also modern cinema's potential — be it aesthetic, or, dare we suggest, even revolutionary — today. The piece also offers a timely rejoinder and series of corrections to the 'Godard-as-anti-semite' brigade (previously given the time of day here, surfacing again in the American press — e.g.), whose level of commitment to this unfounded defamation is seemingly matched only by their peculiar brazenness and, in this case, wilful stupidity.

History Lesson(s) #7

2011-06-18T01:35:00.007+01:00

Robinson in Ruins - Patrick Keiller, 2010, 35mm

Towards the end of the film, not long after the near collapse of the banking system in October 2008, the camera arrives at the location of the 1596 Oxfordshire rising, which was to have been an armed insurrection against enclosing landlords. Although the rebels failed in their attempt to ‘knock down’ Oxfordshire gentlemen and march on London, their rising was not a failure: to avoid further threats to the fragile social order of the period, the government soon legislated against enclosure. In retelling this story in the context of the current 'revolution of the rich against the poor' — the rise of the super-rich in the UK in recent decades has been compared with that of the gentry in the late 16th and early 17th centuries — the film appears to endorse violent insurrection, especially against Oxfordshire gentlemen.

--Patrick Keiller, interviewed by Daniele Rugo, 15.06.2011.

An aside, or: production

2011-06-04T18:28:00.008+01:00

La Source - Ingres, c. 1820-1856 / Une visite au Louvre - Straub-Huillet, 2004, 35mm

By setting out to paint the ideal virgin, [Ingres] hasn’t painted a body at all. And it's not because he couldn't. Just think of his portraits and that Age of Gold that I like so much. It's because of the idea of a system. False system and false idea. David killed painting. They introduced the hackneyed formula. They wanted to paint the ideal foot, the ideal hand, the perfect face and body, the supreme being. They banished character. What marks out the great painter is the character he lends to everything he touches, impulse, movement, passion, for it’s possible to be both passionate and serene. They’re afraid of this, or rather they never dreamt of it. In reaction, perhaps, to all the passion, the tempests, the social brutality of their time.

--Paul Cézanne, in Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, A Memoir with Conversations (written 1912-13, pub. 1921; Thames & Hudson, 1991), p.178.

'He knows neither how to sing, nor how to philosophize', wrote Zola in praise of Manet. 'He knows how to paint, and that is all.' Some critics and artists went so far as to assert that sheer ignorance or lack of formal training were positive assets for the artist. Laforgue proposed that the academies should be shut; Courbet refused to set himself up as a professor, declaring that art could not be taught; Pissarro, in an unguarded moment, even suggested that they burn down the Louvre.

--Linda Nochlin, Realism (Penguin, 1971), p.36.

We went on to discuss Russian literary policy. I said, referring to Lukács, Gábor and Kurella: 'You can't put on an act with people like this.' Brecht: 'You might put on an Act but certainly not a whole play. They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. It cannot be trusted. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.'

--Walter Benjamin, with Bertolt Brecht, Aesthetics & Politics (Verso, 1980), p.96-97.

In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there, it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art, which has often been considered refractory to every relation with progress, can provide its true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences — where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn.

--Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 2002), p.474.

L'Origine du monde - Gustave Courbet, 1866, oil on canvas

Distance(s) #22, or: no matter without art, for Jean-Claude

2011-06-04T17:23:00.009+01:00

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