Illuminations #7

-

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

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--Patrick Keiller, from the unedited transcript for this interview with Daniel Trilling, unpublished.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

-

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

-

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 poorly conducted 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

Film socialisme - JLG, 2010, digital video

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

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

-

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

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 and Resistance (Frederick Ungar, 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, 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, digital video

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 its peculiar brazenness and, in this case, wilful stupidity.