Digressions on the photographic agony #3

I / II

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The future city was ruled by an authority able to make anybody disappear. When people from the past were found, a light was shone at them, and images were projected onto a screen — from the past, until their arrival in the future. Once those images appeared, the ghosts disappeared.

--Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010.

Nabua is only light and memory. There are natural illuminations from the sun and from fire. The lights seep through the doors and windows and burn the rice fields. There are artificial ones like fluorescent tubes and LED lights like dots of recollections. And there are simulated bolts of lightning that destroy the peaceful landscape and unearth the spirits.

--Apichatpong Weerasethakul, The Memory of Nabua (via), 18/02/2009.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - A.W., 2010, super 16mm

Des animaux #5

Viaggio in Italia - Roberto Rossellini, 1953, 35mm

Distance(s) #21, or: really existing capitalism

You and Me - Fritz Lang, 1938, 35mm

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Zorns Lemma - Hollis Frampton, 1970, 16mm

History Lesson(s) #4

Flowers - Andy Warhol, 1982, polaroid photograph

Illuminations #5

New York Portrait Pt. I - Peter Hutton, 1977, 16mm

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Having the luxury to behold the simplest things can often be a revelation in itself.

--Peter Hutton, interviewed in A Critical Cinema 3 (California UP, 1998), p.246.

In film nothing is deemed so holy that it might or ought to be safeguarded from being absorbed into the general flow of movement. Everything film shows is translated into movement and thereby profaned.

--Boris Groys, Art Power (MIT Press, 2008), p.71.

Yes, I've seen Empire a couple of times. It's an experience, there are many things that happen. At first, when watching the film with other people, everybody's sort of sceptical, they think: this will be so boring, that they will be leaving soon, but at least they have to see something... And then, as time goes by, they begin to relax, to enjoy, to just watch the screen when nothing really much happens. There's some dust, and then, one hour or so into the film, maybe an hour and a half, the light comes up! This huge, incredible event happens when the building lights up. So, of course, everybody applauds, it's a great moment. And then, again, you relax, and you watch, there's some light activity, the building is there, it becomes like a meditation. Those who stay until the end, they all say it is a very meditative, very relaxing, unique experience: just accept what's there, don't ask from it anything, because the activity is really the most, most minimal. There is nothing else like that in cinema.

--a new interview with Jonas Mekas about Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), WNYC, 18/02/2011.

Realism(s) #12, or: garments

Łódź Symphony - Peter Hutton, 1993, 16mm

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[Ryland asked me to contribute a little something to &review — here it is. This text is for a video extract, about the curtain above. Update — now in print!]

Too often nowadays, we receive movies in degraded form. We might get to see more, but what we see in them lacks light and weight — it's getting more difficult to talk about anything material. But sometimes objects retain something of their real mass. An instance here, in a shot at the end of a film by Peter Hutton. It's a third-hand encode, but for once, in the curl of fabric, there's a memory of ribboned film, the pastness of an event: '...for we see that everything grows less and seems to melt away with the lapse of time and withdraw its old age from our eyes. And yet we see no diminution in the sum of things' (Lucretius).

The film's about the city of Łódź, its everyday sights and sounds: streets, walls, industry, workers, vagabonds, monuments. Hutton's made many of these on 16mm, portraits of cities, rivers, the sea: always silent, without narrative, never minimalist. Occasionally they're projected at festivals or in galleries, but the rest of the time they circulate underground in this basest of forms — unspooling as variable bitrates, not shadowplays. What remains is a mutable image pointed to an opening between two rooms, a camera in one and open to the other. The surface of the screen is greyed, faint, veiled by analogue flickers and colour warp, functioning like gauze. A net curtain billows in the wind, once and twice: at last, a semblance of light, a bleached sheet, a ghost of movement, a travelling of atoms. Clothes, curtains, leaves, they're the only way you can see the wind in movies. And the only way we'll remember them too.

An aside, or: Itinerants

Study for Le Pont de l'Europe - Gustave Caillebotte, 1876, oil on canvas

Klassenverhältnisse - Straub-Huillet, 1984, 35mm

People sometimes assume that the films' Robinson came from Céline, whereas the name was suggested to me by Kafka’s Amerika, in which Robinson and Delamarche are a couple of itinerants who describe themselves as out-of-work mechanics. Paul Scofield once sent me a postcard of August Sander's photograph Itinerants (1929). In Paul’s absence, I had the idea that one of the two men it depicts slightly resembled him, and perhaps, even more slightly, Harun Farocki, who plays the character Delamarche in Klassenverhältnisse, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of the novel. In the film, Robinson is played by Manfred Blank, who I thought slightly resembles the other man in Sander’s photograph. In Kafka’s novel, another character says: ‘I don’t even believe that his name is Robinson, for no Irishman was ever called that since Ireland was Ireland.'

--Patrick Keiller, interviewed by Andrew Stevens, The Future of Landscape, July 2010.

Klassenverhältnisse - Straub-Huillet, 1984, 35mm

Juventude em Marcha -Pedro Costa, 2006, digital video

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The Rabbit Hunters - Pedro Costa, 2007, digital video

Juventude em Marcha -Pedro Costa, 2006, digital video

The water is grey and blue, wide as an inlet of the sea. A ray of white light, falling from high in the sky, obliterates this sham scene.

--Rimbaud's The Bridges, quoted in Patrick Keiller's London, 1994.

"Grasp the world," instead of extracting impressions from it; work with objects, characters, events, in reality, and not in impressions. Kill metaphor.

--Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minnesota UP), 1986, p.101.

Well, cinema is, or should be, the art of space. Even though a film exists only if that space is able to become time. But the basic work is space. As Mallarmé said: “Nothing will take place, but the place.”

--a new interview with Jean Marie-Straub: Speaking of Revolutions, October 2010.

Klassenverhältnisse - Straub-Huillet, 1984, 35mm

History Lesson(s) #3

By the end of the month, the price of oil had dropped below $125 a barrel. In the previous six months, the price of arable land had risen by 32% to nearly £14,500 a hectare. After increases in prices of agricultural commodities, the price of wheat had doubled in the year to March [2008]. There had been riots in Egypt and several other countries. In the UK there were 2.1 million hectares of wheat, a 14% increase in the previous year. Sample yields gave early indications of a record harvest.

Though cultivated in Britain for over 3000 years, field beans were grown in the UK mainly for animal feed. Field beans for human consumption were exported, mostly to Egypt, to be used in a variety of dishes, especially during Ramadan. Wheat has been domesticated for at least 10,000 years. It is the UK’s predominant crop, one of the world’s three major staples. In an average year, the UK grew about 15 million tonnes of wheat, of which about 25% was exported. About 40% of the crop was used as animal feed, much of it for cattle. Only the best wheat could be sold at a higher price for milling. Milling wheat was typically about a third of the total harvest.

Despite record yields with the falling price and steep increases in the costs of fertiliser and fuel, farmers would find it difficult to make much profit from their wheat, unless they could sell the grain for milling. The better-prepared had pre-sold part of their crop already, and prices were higher earlier in the year. If the wheat were harvested when damp, drying would add 15% to the cost of its production, and less would be sold as suitable for milling. In the middle of August, farmers began to cut their crops, despite there being no sign of any prolonged improvement in the weather.

At the end of August, the harvest was still only about half-complete. In some parts of the country it continued until the end of September.

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

Robinson in Ruins - Patrick Keiller, 2010, 35mm

From about late 2006, a lot of financial firms — banks and hedge funds and others — realised that there was really no more profit to be made in the US housing market, and they were looking for new avenues of investment. Commodities became one of the big ones: food, minerals, gold, oil. So you had more and more of this financial activity entering those markets, and you find that the price then starts rising. And once, of course, the price starts rising a little bit, then it becomes more and more profitable for others to enter. So what was a trickle in late 2006 becomes a flood from early 2007. You have a massive expansion. It sounds incredible, but world rice prices increased by 320% between January 2007 and June 2008. So in just 18 months you have tripling of world rice prices. World wheat prices go up by 240%, maize prices by 218%.

--Jayati Ghosh, 05/05/2010. Cited in WDM's The Great Hunger Lottery, July 2010.

The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 245 points in January, up 3% from December and the highest since July 2008, but still 11% below its peak in April 2008. The increase in January mostly reflected continuing increases in international prices of wheat and maize, amid tightening supplies, while rice prices fell slightly, as the timing coincides with the harvesting of main crops in major exporting countries.

--updated FAO Food Price Index, 03/02/2011.

World food prices surged to a fresh record high in January for the seventh consecutive month.The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome said its food price index averaged 230.7 points last month and was up 3.4% from December, marking the highest level since the organisation started measuring food prices in 1990. It topped the high of 224.1 hit in June 2008.

All food commodity prices showed strong gains last month, except meat, which remained unchanged. "The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating," said FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian. "These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come. High food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food."

He added: "The only encouraging factor so far stems from a number of countries, where – due to good harvests – domestic prices of some of the food staples remain low compared to world prices."

Cereal prices were up 3% from December and the highest since July 2008, but still 11% below their peak in April 2008. The recent rises in wheat prices are one factor that triggered the growing unrest in Egypt, and the recent protests in Tunisia. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer.

--The Guardian, 03/02/2011.

Since 1991, the year Egypt yoked itself to an IMF structural adjustment programme and embarked on a series of wide-ranging economic reforms, the country has been something of a poster child for neoliberal economists who point to its remarkable levels of annual GDP growth as proof that "Washington consensus" blueprints for the developing world can work. Coming on the back of an economic crisis precipitated partly by profligate government spending on arms sales (subsidised by US aid), the regime of President Hosni Mubarak signed up to an IMF loan that was conditional on economic liberalisation. Those conditions – relaxed price controls, reduced subsidies, an opening up of trade – were met with gleeful abandon.

Ever since, the country has been subject to successive waves of neoliberal reform. In 1996 a huge privatisation drive kicked off – resulting in sham sales to public banks and regime cronies, a rapid deterioration of working conditions and a wave of strikes so powerful that one analyst labelled it the largest social movement seen in the Middle East in half a century.

Then 2004 brought a new cabinet which swiftly cut the top rate of tax from 42% to 20%, leaving multimillionaires paying exactly the same proportion of their income into government coffers as those on an annual salary of less than £500. Special economic zones were created, foreign investment reached dizzying heights ($13bn in 2008) and, in the past three years, economic growth has clocked in at a consistently high 7%. The minimum wage, incidentally, has remained fixed at less than £4 a month throughout. The global business community applauded Mubarak's rule as "bold", "impressive" and "prudent".

So Egypt is now a glitzier, more prosperous land with pharaonic-style riches to match its pharaonic-style leader (now entering his 29th year in power). Except, as the GAFI report inconveniently points out, 90% of the country has yet to see any of the bounty. Foreign investment has been largely channelled into sectors like finance and gas which create few new jobs. While national resources like natural gas have been sold at subsidised rates to the tycoon owners of iron and fertiliser factories, the cost of ordinary commodities like bread and cooking oil has spiralled. In fact since the IMF began hauling Egypt's economy into modernity, Egyptians have got steadily and dramatically poorer: when structural adjustment began 20% of the population were living on less than (inflation-adjusted) $2 a day; today, that figure stands at 44%. In the past decade, when GDP growth was at its strongest, absolute poverty has climbed from 16.7% to almost 20%. Chomsky called neoliberalism "capitalism with the gloves off"; it's hard, looking at this jumble of statistics, to discern anything but a shameless hit-and-run job perpetrated by a tiny band of Egypt's business elite.

--Jack Shenker, The Guardian, 08/09/2009.

The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others – for the US, Israel, France and the UK – and as a state for the few – the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause.

--Juan Cole, Egypt's Class Struggle, 30/01/11.

Film socialisme - Jean-Luc Godard, 2010, digital video