At sea #7

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

At sea #6

-

A little late posting this, but: Mubi Notebook'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. And Europa: as the unthinkable continues to unravel, a flashback — the prospects were always grave.

At sea #5

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

At sea #4

-

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

At Sea - Peter Hutton, 2007, 16mm

At sea #3

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

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

-

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, from John Ashbery's new translation of Illuminations (Carcanet, 2011), p. 109.