Distance(s) #19, or: the rhetoric of defamation

Deux fois cinquante ans de cinéma français - JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1995, video

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"An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy", The New York Times, 01.10.2010.

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'I am not writing this letter with the intention to make you reconsider your criticism — nothing is farther from my mind. I am merely writing this letter to point out to you that several times in your criticism you resort to what one calls in sports circles a "foul."'

--Ernst Lubitsch, letter to Mildred Martin (of The Philadelphia Inquirer), 25.08.1943.

Brody again skips over the gist of this densely argued article [Towards a Political Cinema, 1950] to get to what interests him: “We could not forget Hitler Youth Quex, certain passages of films by Leni Riefenstahl, several shocking newsreels from the Occupation, the maleficent ugliness of The Eternal Jew. It is not the first time art is born of constraint.” And he concludes that Godard “took all fanaticisms to be alike and to be equally beautiful. Without equating the far left and the far right politically, Godard equated them aesthetically.”

Sliced and diced like a package of subprime mortgages, Godard’s questing thought becomes what Brody needs it to be, and in the process we may not even notice that the person who’s equating communism and fascism politically, by calling them both “fanaticisms,” is Brody. That’s ideological simplification with a vengeance.

--Bill Krohn, "Kinbrody and the Ceejays: Richard Brody's Everything is Cinema", Cinema Scope 38, 2009.

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Richard Brody's recent biography is clearly still providing ammunition for those who wish to indict Godard as an anti-Semite, and the (ceejay) model for which they like to attack. The rest of Bill Krohn's article quoted above remains the most rigorous and forceful rebuttal to such unthinking, often malicious, slurs, and David Ehrenstein & Andy Rector have added their voice too. One more — Godard in Deux fois cinquante ans, 'I make film (hi)story by being a small part of it, no-one has ever told me what I was doing there...', final words to André Malraux:

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A: Contrôle de l'univers - JLG, 1998, video

L'espoir - André Malraux, 1945, 35mm

Forests #10

The Grounds of the Château Noir - Paul Cézanne, c. 1900-04, oil on canvas

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Cézanne: You can never be too scrupulous, too sincere, or too submissive to nature, while still remaining more or less in control of your subject and especially of your means of expression. You must adapt these to your motif. Not bending it your way but bowing to it. Allowing it to be born, to germinate within you. Painting what is in front of you and persevering in expressing yourself as logically as possible, but a natural logic, of course; I have never done anything else. You have no idea what discoveries await you then. You see, it's only through nature that you can make progress, and the eye educates itself by contact with nature. By dint of looking and working, it becomes concentric.

Myself: How do you mean, concentric?

Cézanne: I mean that on this orange I’m peeling or, indeed, on an apple, a ball, or a head, there is a culminating point, and despite tremendous effects – light, shade, colour sensations – this point is always the one nearest our eye. The edges of objects recede towards another placed on your horizon. Once you've understood that...

He smiled.

Oh well, you'd have to be a painter to understand. Good heavens, I've invented enough theories about it!

He took a piece of crumpled paper out of his pocket.

I’ve written to a painter who came to see me, someone you don't know, who does a bit of theorizing himself. I’ll sum up what I said to him in my letter.

He read in a drawling, timid but dogmatic voice:

'Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads toward a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. Now, nature, for us human beings, has more to do with depth than with surfaces, hence the need to introduce into our vibrations of light, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient quality of blue tints to create the impression of air.'

Yes... I make a better job of painting than writing, don't I? I'm not going to outdo Fromentin yet.

He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it away. When I picked it up, he shrugged his shoulders.

--Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, A Memoir with Conversations (written 1912-13, pub. 1921), trans. Christopher Pemberton (Thames & Hudson, 1991), p.162-164. [Note -- I haven't seen Jean Marie-Straub & Danièle Huillet's 1989 film yet, so will possibly return to this book...]

Des animaux #4

Skagafjördur - Peter Hutton, 2004, 16mm

Forests #9

August 2010.

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This week the coalition government announced plans to sell off half the land that is owned and protected by the Forestry Commission in the UK: for more info, see here and here, and a petition here. This proposal was to be expected: although the process of shallowing our deepwood forests for civilisation, begun around 4000 BC, was completed by the twentieth century and its wars, tree cover is still intensively cleared for plantation and development — Robert MacFarlane, in his book The Wild Places, refers to the period after 1945 as the "locust years," in which half of the remaining ancient semi-natural forest has been irrevocably lost. At present, the ruling class is embarking on the privatisation of the commons through "larceny and deception" in the name of deficit reduction, and a desperate short-term need for capital receipts to accompany the gutting of the welfare state. Updates to follow below.

23.12.10 — John Vidal's report in the Guardian points to this transcript, which states that the government want rid of all of the Forestry Commission's estate if they can pass legislation to do so. Why? In Jim Paice's words, opportunities to create a private sector monopoly of land on this scale "do not come very often":

"Part of our policy is clearly established: we wish to proceed with, to correctly use your word, very substantial disposal of public forest estate, which could go to the extent of all of it."

"The decision to move towards substantial, large-scale disposal of the forestry estate is based on a number of issues. First, there has been, as some of your Lordships have already implied, a view from some sectors that the Forestry Commission need not be owning all the public forestry estate. Secondly–and I am not going to avoid the issue–there is a need for capital receipts. It is a very substantial sum of public investment. Thirdly, we genuinely feel, and I feel very strongly, that it is nonsense to believe that the huge public benefits can only somehow be achieved under state ownership. We have some first class woodland charities – I name but one in the Woodland Trust, but there are others, particularly active in Scotland – who own large tracts of English woodland and manage it in a way that is just as good, and I would argue probably better, than the Forestry Commission. There is the concept of local community ownership for local woodlands. There is of course a huge interest in the private sector for amenity woodlands. We have seen over the past few years that a lot of small woodlands have been bought by private individuals who want to own prime, commonly semi-ancient, woodland of their own."

Ruling class perks, exploiting the scheme that encourages and maintains tree plantation in the first place, detailed in Private Eye:

The same issue exists in England, where the cost of regulating and dishing out funds to private forestry companies is likely to outweigh the money raised from land sales. Lorraine Adams, branch president for the scientists’ union, Prospect, which represents more than 200 researchers, cartographers, rangers and skilled Forestry Commission (FC) workers, has uncovered evidence of this since the FC already sells off land occasionally. When it recently flogged an area of woodland for £60,000, for example, the new landowner immediately applied for funds under the English Woodland Grant Scheme to grow and cut timber and was given assistance totalling £55,000.

The private landowner will also be able to come back and ask for more grants in future – as well as bidding for other environmental stewardship and rural development subsidies available to forest owners – while the government can only sell the land once.

28.1.11 — From The Independent:

Two very different forests show the varied categories the Government is using in addressing the sell-off, writes Josephine Forster. The New Forest in Hampshire is regarded as a "heritage" forest. It dates back to 1079, when William the Conqueror made it his personal hunting ground. The 145 square miles of ancient woodland, pasture and open heath are unique in southern England for their pristine condition.

The forest's ancient oaks are a national symbol; they were used to build Nelson's Trafalgar fleet and are still sustainably harvested today. The forest is also home to some 3,000 ponies.

By contrast, Kielder Forest in Northumberland is a "commercial" forest, its principal purpose being to produce wood. At 250 square miles, it is England's largest forest and timber producer, providing 25 per cent of our domestic timber, mainly from imported Sitka spruce and Norway spruce, which account for 84 per cent of the forest's trees.

While Kielder may seem appropriate for commercial categorisation, it will require painstaking management, as it is home to 70 per cent of the UK's endangered red squirrels, driven to extinction in most of southern England, and shelters recovering populations of otters, ospreys and goshawks.

18.2.11 — Mass sell-off abandoned, although the campaign's not quite over.

Illuminations #4

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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.

Forests #8

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

Illuminations #3

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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

Distance(s) #18

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

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