Landscape Suicide

24.10.10

Illuminations #4

Three films by Nathaniel Dorsky screened in London earlier today: Hours for Jerome I & II (1966-70/1982), Compline (2009) and Aubade (2010), three of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Dorsky is understandably reluctant to distribute his work on anything other than 16mm, yet part of me wishes he would relent. These are images I'd like to screen every night to remind me why there might be a point to the next day's business of living; how to look in order to live. The prints were pristine, the colour and tone of the images overwhelming. Memory is resistant already, and once will have to do.

16.10.10

Forests #8

Cloud Forest by Fujiko Nakaya & Shiro Takatani. Installation at YCAM, 2010.

15.10.10

Illuminations #3

see the wind blow the trees; watch your shadow on the ground; watch the ant carry a grain across the miles of your feet; observe the eyes of your enemy or your friend; watch the kids skipping; watch the lights; watch yourself

11.10.10

Distance(s) #18

Moonlight - Ralph Albert Blakelock, c. 1886-1895, oil on canvas

In Titan's Goblet - Peter Hutton, 1991, 16mm

3.10.10

Des animaux #3

Dalla nube alla resistenza - Straub-Huillet, 1979, 35mm

Mark Fisher has written on Straub-Huillet for the new issue of Film Quarterly. The article isn't available online, but I've uploaded a pdf here. The following extract is particularly of note:

There is another example of a Straubian shot [in Sicilia!]: at one point during the railway carriage scene, the camera leaves the characters on the train to show instead the apparently empty landscape outside for several minutes. I say 'apparently' because it is important to question our unreflective assumption that such spaces are indeed empty. Deleuze maintains in Cinema II that, in Straub–Huillet’s films, an 'empty space, without characters [...] has a fullness in which there is nothing missing' (p.245). One has to learn to see such 'fullness,' which is not likely to be perceived by the casual viewer, who is more likely to find the Straubian shots frustrating and boring. How is Deleuze’s idea of fullness to be understood in this context? It is worth noting that Deleuze sees geology as continuous with politics. The idea of social 'stratification' is not just a vague metaphor in Deleuze’s work, but rather an expression of the way in which both human populations and the earth are shaped by vast impersonal processes. The unpeopled is therefore not the same as the empty.

2.10.10

We're just trying to document what's left #2

Get Out of the Car - Thom Andersen, 2010, 16mm

Via Andy — Get Out of the Car screens at REDCAT in Los Angeles next month alongside Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet's Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter [The Bridegroom, The Comedienne and the Pimp, 1968] and Fassbinder's Das kleine Chaos [The Little Chaos, 1967]. It's an intriguing pairing. Also, Andersen is interviewed by Vera Brunner-Sung in the new issue of Cinema Scope — on sound (p.20):

There's an impressionistic history of black jazz and rhythm and blues in Los Angeles, which is part of the city's heritage and should be better known. It has been forgotten, to a surprising extent. I think the history of music in Los Angeles is very important to the history of the city as a whole. It's kind of key. My conviction about the importance of music to films has intensified over the years. Bad music, bad soundtracks, have destroyed a lot of movies. The best filmmakers are always the ones with the best musical sense, like Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie, or even Stan Brakhage — when he has music in his films it's always good. One of the most significant advances in modern cinema was the abandonment of non-diegetic music.

Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter - Straub-Huillet, 1968, 35mm

29.9.10

An aside, or: we're just trying to document what's left

A striking and very moving moment in Thom Andersen's latest film Get Out of the Car: a few shots of weathered murals depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe (ten in total), an overgrown chain-link fence, a bold yellow sign. A testimony, or plea, is heard:

I think sometimes in these kinds of struggles we lose a bit of focus of what this really means for the community. It is as if... If I went to your community, and I took down your temple, if I took down your church, that's what we're talking about. These are sacred things. You're taking away our way of life.

The land beyond the fence used to be known as South Central Farm — one of the largest urban community gardens in the United States. It was developed on fourteen acres of land gifted to residents of Los Angeles in 1994, via a revocable permit held by the non-profit LA Regional Food Bank (for a more detailed history, see here). In 2006 it was sold by the City, for unspecified development, via a backroom deal. The farmers, who grew and provided food for 350 families, were evicted, and the land was bulldozed. There is a broadly sickening interview with Ralph Horowitz here, the property developer who demolished the site in the face of the Farmers' resistance. (I couldn't finish it.) The incident reminds me of a recent development closer to home, on a much smaller scale: Lewes Road. In Los Angeles, the farm was reclaimed by the City for a price; in Brighton, the guerrilla community garden was reclaimed by developers in the interest of (re)asserting its antithesis. Both were projects evicted in the face of ruthless corporate enterprise — an opposition to any conception of the land as common, and thus ground on which we can live outside of capitalism. As Andersen says of the (abridged) succession of shots above: "it is the one sequence of overt social criticism I left in the film, and the razor wire that surrounds it (also appearing in the three shots that follow) is the one thing I don’t like that appears." The rest of the film comprises an inventory of dilapidated public architecture, billboards, neon lights and corporate propaganda often subjected to the protest of graffiti, rust and decay — a document of what dominates our cities and their signs: profit motive, with little trace of the whispering wind.