tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85763658659632578092024-02-20T15:58:14.849-08:00A Shout In The StreetArt | Culture | PoliticsMadison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.comBlogger125125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-9200420634689945382016-11-15T10:46:00.002-08:002016-11-15T11:08:19.603-08:00And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead - Bob Kaufman, poet<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; font-size: 11pt;"><i>From introductory remarks I wrote for the Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA <a href="http://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/fall-2016/billy-woodberry-and-when-i-die-i-won-t-stay-dead/" target="_blank">screening</a> of Billy Woodberry's: </i>And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead<i>, Thursday, November 10, 2016.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thank you for joining us. There is a lot going on right now, and
it means a lot that you choose to be here for tonight’s screening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tonight, it is a great privilege to be able to share with you one
not only what I think is one of the best films of the past year, but perhaps one of the most
important as well. And over the past two days, its beauty, timeliness, and
import have only grown in my estimation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin writes “<i>Even the dead</i> will not be safe from the enemy if he wins… And this
enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That is to say, history is not fixed, it is in flux. And power has
a way of reshaping history to its own ends, such that even our memories of the
struggle are not secure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Therefore, remembering is a political necessity. As Thom Andersen
says, remembering becomes a crucial, necessary operation. </span><span style="font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; font-size: 11pt;">When we write history, especially when we write it in a new way,
such as Woodberry has done, we are not reshaping the past; we are forging a new
world and the consciousness it takes to bring that world about.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As Carrie Mae Weems said to Mickalene Thomas, “It is not about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">re</i>claiming; it is about claiming.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the end, that’s why I think this film is important. </span><span style="font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; font-size: 11pt;">Even though by some accounts Bob Kaufman is the person who coined
the term “Beat”, he has been all but excluded from its history. And this is not
just a loss for literature; we are all poorer for it.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that a successful work has the power
to teach its own lesson. And for me, Woodberry’s film is a work of that order. </span><i style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light";">And When I Die I Won’t Stay Dead</span></i><span style="font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; font-size: 11pt;"> is about the poetry of Bob Kaufman,
but it also teaches us how to live. It is about one man’s life and art, but it
is also about resistance to political oppression and racial discrimination; it
is about imagination as a powerful weapon, creativity as a liberatory force,
and the necessity of organization.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The dead are not safe, but they won’t stay dead. We cannot let
them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or as Kaufman himself wrote, “Let the voices of dead poets/Ring
louder in your ears… Listen to the music of centuries/Rising above the mushroom
time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "akzidenz-grotesk pro light"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So tonight, we learn from one poet of the past and another of
the present how to make a better future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-40866393171598087252016-10-06T10:12:00.002-07:002016-10-06T11:05:10.233-07:00Sandy Ding: Self Explosion of the Spirit<div class="p1">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhorDq7JXvgiLrbANSaIlLCUyApmVBncQmg62Pt9ZEhDN7zKfBfv9SuGc8gIokB-4m2Oi-aeMxo3cNa1teCdqNFqo9-RaxuVcEvBENrfxY-DRVxt3ZTu5HWbKiDHJK06QFD6dTfPjNOoyav/s1600/Night+Awake+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhorDq7JXvgiLrbANSaIlLCUyApmVBncQmg62Pt9ZEhDN7zKfBfv9SuGc8gIokB-4m2Oi-aeMxo3cNa1teCdqNFqo9-RaxuVcEvBENrfxY-DRVxt3ZTu5HWbKiDHJK06QFD6dTfPjNOoyav/s1600/Night+Awake+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sandy Ding is, so far as I can tell, a movement of one: trained in China and the United States, he is perhaps the only experimental filmmaker working in celluloid in the mainland. With his newest film, <i>Night Awake</i>, he has likewise made an experimental feature in a genre of one. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Call it transcendental materialism or else psychedelic concrete. Whatever it is, it breathes new life into dead things.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_OJRyT-Aj_Rfvolyfh6FW4JV_hIDs46VonJymFS0hIpeFTCQ2yKqR2Jz1ZdNHfnSXoCNC1-TSRgfkMXv0psa8GbUpP2zRSJ1ccFS2pstm6rB_AHBOHUC7XhA9ZlPTYYizUFxaINykot8/s1600/Night+Awake+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_OJRyT-Aj_Rfvolyfh6FW4JV_hIDs46VonJymFS0hIpeFTCQ2yKqR2Jz1ZdNHfnSXoCNC1-TSRgfkMXv0psa8GbUpP2zRSJ1ccFS2pstm6rB_AHBOHUC7XhA9ZlPTYYizUFxaINykot8/s640/Night+Awake+002.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It starts with a clock and a few electronic screeches. The clock doubles in superimposition and appears to move over itself before being smashed repeatedly in slow motion. “All you need for a movie” wrote Godard, “is a gun and a girl”; for Ding, we could say, it is a clock and a hammer. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The concept that the images give rise to is clear: destroy our mechanized understanding of clock-time so that a new kind of time can appear, “a little time in its pure state.”</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfHVL10CapsoAeVvoaTbMOZAV5IiiMH_YTh3ZQijvNiXbYJtcxAwUZt9h0yxc3SZwOP7lX_IhkfNmZDYloGX9NetndEV4SCE4_9QAi1yHLK9XJ_rJ5cKuOgLXJrL1OxWnMUXwuuYkgVrKp/s1600/Night+Awake+001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfHVL10CapsoAeVvoaTbMOZAV5IiiMH_YTh3ZQijvNiXbYJtcxAwUZt9h0yxc3SZwOP7lX_IhkfNmZDYloGX9NetndEV4SCE4_9QAi1yHLK9XJ_rJ5cKuOgLXJrL1OxWnMUXwuuYkgVrKp/s320/Night+Awake+001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Shot in the rainforests of Guatemala on extremely outdated film stock—Lucky brand, the only maker of 16mm film in China, produced primarily for military purposes—the degraded emulsion rarely coagulates into anything recognizable; the </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">de</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">composition of the image becomes primary. Streaks, anomalies, and rapidly shifting patterns of crystalline splotches dominate the screen. From behind this gray and white veil we catch brief glimpses of photographic imagery: in focus and out, recognizable and not, always primarily a play of light and shadow. Between them, we may detect a journey past mountains and streams, but are we ascending or descending? It is a floating world with image cells that surface and sink. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Scale shifts unexpectedly—a spider web waving in the wind has the same presence and grandeur as a majestic cliff—giving each shot a totemic quality. We then enter a prolonged, dreamy period in the abstract film-deterioration space, after which clear images of an ancient pyramid suddenly erupt out of the miasma. This comes as something of a shock, like a bell ringing at the end of a long silence, and signals the beginning of the end of the film, the completion of its occult ritual.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt5Sn7Xsp1MinmshppENDTuzhk3EjkPuD5B2A23eSUMa4uZFpFoUofqUT5jBorlWZogKNJRGMW_0nOc8ZWTJbp6LEGx_k855BFJx8yn8lnkLz5vLSe5-JcmEzJ6Zkj5MfZa1EURHB6WtGC/s1600/Night+Awake+008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt5Sn7Xsp1MinmshppENDTuzhk3EjkPuD5B2A23eSUMa4uZFpFoUofqUT5jBorlWZogKNJRGMW_0nOc8ZWTJbp6LEGx_k855BFJx8yn8lnkLz5vLSe5-JcmEzJ6Zkj5MfZa1EURHB6WtGC/s400/Night+Awake+008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSRBx9yZicmKVbYxadmBpeFDmm4y2Nek34z0uMNxnWYcSRIZ2-bJIePXQCoyJvszjeOcMqyc02xHuXh7euYl9ykWj8oAm6b-UekO-_XfmXotVXIBwJphMXywxlmcdAgK3V6SNbWyCFe4qH/s1600/Production+Photo-Night+Awake+01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></span></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In fact, the movie is a tripartite ritual. There was first a ritual to create it: prior to filming, Ding performed a ceremony to call a lunar deity into his camera, such that for </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">him the movie is “downloaded from the moon”; it records another, performed at the aforementioned pyramid; and it enacts a third in the screening room upon viewing. To watch </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">Night Awake</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> is to go into a trance; but, it is an uncanny trance, one in which you are always keenly aware of the material conditions of the medium inducing the experience. It is not medium specific so much as medium as medium: 16mm clairvoyance.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLED8aihdArdcHsolx5nCIdUhifj-07IVcr4sG2ey6KT6CIY8_27xSAcfvBGH9WdzdgH3M7-_MPiugFD9mIgBxwcJyXq2PAbsUuSSsPZTNJ55qpa9EiZ2raA7Hjqz1EVHstreYYphTNSwA/s1600/Night+Awake+003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLED8aihdArdcHsolx5nCIdUhifj-07IVcr4sG2ey6KT6CIY8_27xSAcfvBGH9WdzdgH3M7-_MPiugFD9mIgBxwcJyXq2PAbsUuSSsPZTNJ55qpa9EiZ2raA7Hjqz1EVHstreYYphTNSwA/s320/Night+Awake+003.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Some may note similarities with filmic projects of the 1960s, in particular raucous New American Cinema at the cusp of its transition into stately Structural Film. Very well. It should also be noted that there is a potentially related cultural and political awakening at present in China, resulting in an explosion of underground art, noise music, and audio-visual performance. “The reason may be different,” Ding writes, “but the outcome is similar: the spirit starts to expose itself… For China, it is the self explosion of the depressed spirit.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Dwelling overlong on these similarities, however, could distract us from other clear affinities: for while Ding’s project is both psychedelic and overtly spiritual—its explicit aim is to bring new consciousness into the world—it is perhaps a psychedelic spirituality derived less from utopian countercultural projects of the late 60s than their latter-day, libertarian, techno-infused brand of consciousness expansion typified by Silicon Valley’s nether side: Burning Man.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_OJRyT-Aj_Rfvolyfh6FW4JV_hIDs46VonJymFS0hIpeFTCQ2yKqR2Jz1ZdNHfnSXoCNC1-TSRgfkMXv0psa8GbUpP2zRSJ1ccFS2pstm6rB_AHBOHUC7XhA9ZlPTYYizUFxaINykot8/s1600/Night+Awake+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Why then filter this mystico-techno-positivism back through celluloid, a disappearing medium harkening more to cinema’s past than its present? The answer can only be that this is its very subject. It is </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">about</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> death, a funerary paean to film, a deep dive into the materiality of film itself in order to record, revel in, and grieve its passing. “In China, film is dead,” Ding told me. “I thought, if it is going to die, we should appreciate that process.” The deteriorated imagery is a picture of cinema’s advanced state of decomposition, or as Ding put it, “This is out of the graveyard.” An experimental zombie movie? Maybe, but it is </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">film itself</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> that has been reanimated.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzY7MFsBKDT0EEkx0lqbYqspHIEPvaJqsxmCrqD6_a9mxE9Z3REDL0aPA22Pj_Yi46zPKr5Yi1jriRDqsXWXM-RFCIPqSTc_lZEefxUfQgmC9Od7t-lzKcOA7aLDE0nZ7bts3laOYb22hU/s1600/Production+Photo-Night+Awake+01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzY7MFsBKDT0EEkx0lqbYqspHIEPvaJqsxmCrqD6_a9mxE9Z3REDL0aPA22Pj_Yi46zPKr5Yi1jriRDqsXWXM-RFCIPqSTc_lZEefxUfQgmC9Od7t-lzKcOA7aLDE0nZ7bts3laOYb22hU/s320/Production+Photo-Night+Awake+01.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Sandy Ding filming <i>Night Awake</i></td></tr>
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<i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"></i>
<i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">Unless otherwise noted, a</i><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">ll images are from Sandy Ding's </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Night Awake </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">(2016),</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">courtesy the artist.</i>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-19603977308817374582016-04-18T13:45:00.000-07:002016-08-26T17:47:01.339-07:00If It Doesn't Fit<br />
From introductory remarks to the <a href="http://www.lafilmforum.org/archive/summer-2015/jack-smith-the-whole-fantasy/">screening</a>, <i>Jack Smith: The Whole Fantasy</i><br />
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA<br />
July 9, 2015<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I think it’s fair to say that Jack Smith made difficult films. They were difficult for him to make and for many years difficult to see. We all owe a great debt to Jerry Tartaglia for his painstaking restorations of Smith’s work—and for discovering <i>Flaming Creatures</i> in the discard pile at a lab.<br />
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<i>Flaming Creatures </i>is perhaps the most famous American experimental film ever made. It’s been written about and discussed as much or more than any other experimental film, and yet remains difficult to pin down—the result is that more often than not, people end up talking more about what happened to the film than about what’s happening in the film itself. Or else they just talk about the sexy parts, because that’s fun. Or it might be due to the fact that the film is resistant to language. It is truly visual thinking, but I’ll say more on this later.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://67.media.tumblr.com/2c045535e4c253a8bb41c998fd29ddf4/tumblr_mki2ohY7pT1qe2f6oo1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://67.media.tumblr.com/2c045535e4c253a8bb41c998fd29ddf4/tumblr_mki2ohY7pT1qe2f6oo1_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack Smith, still from <i>Flaming Creatures</i></td></tr>
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There is something else that I find difficult to talk about, but feel a responsibility to address, especially as it is not often discussed. The famous orgy scene that occurs early on in <i>Flaming Creatures</i> is, among other things, a prolonged scene of sexual violence that is no less disturbing for being entirely unconvincing.</div>
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Perhaps Branden W. Joseph comes closest when he writes: "Smith’s vision of the erotic, …[like William] Burrough’s, is always tinged with violence" and goes on to link it with George Bataille’s darker form of Surrealism. </div>
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But even that doesn’t quite sit right. Or at least it doesn’t really explain anything. The only thing I can add is that, unlike almost every other film I know that features a graphic scene of sexual violence, there is no attempt to make it attractive. It isn’t sexy. And that is saying something in a film that Susan Sontag describes as "strictly a treat for the senses."</div>
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But it is not only the subject matter that makes Smith films difficult to talk about. In an essay on Simone Forti, Liz Kotz writes something that may very well pertain to Jack Smith:</div>
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Her work is both immediately accessible and yet very hard to grasp. It almost defies discourse. And amidst histories of 1960s art constructed around punctual successions of movements and styles, Forti’s project remains curiously unhinged.</blockquote>
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Smith similarly sits at the intersection of so many things, is important to so many artists and ideas, that he belongs to none of them and in many ways therefore remains obscure even for all that notoriety. It’s not that his work isn’t well know enough—he may very well be the most famous unheard of artist in America—but it challenges our very notions of not only what art can be, but how it comes to be.</div>
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Smith’s aesthetic—which was immensely influential on people like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Conrad, as well as Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson just to name a few—breaks down any neat narratives we may have about the linear succession of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism by troubling the distinctions between all three and adding an uneasy ad hoc admixture of queer, socialist, beat, freak anti-culture into the mix.</div>
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When Sontag wrote her famous defense of <i>Flaming Creatures</i> in The Nation, she identified it with Pop—and when you see the film, I think you’ll see just how much our notions of Pop have altered, and in many ways narrowed, since then. But there is also an important distinction between Smith’s aesthetic and the glossier, more marketable, and ultimately more successful objects that we usually associate with Pop, like what we see in the galleries above. For all its beauty, the trash aesthetic of Smith and Ken Jacobs—with whom he had an early, important collaboration—was fundamentally a rejection of capitalism and its values.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3fnS9hhng8d2akUTz1U-SDvi3KK0BJCxyD8927saH1xuMCvzBxdYEaMtLr4AtSn4kzM570Ph-wWqX5vJLV8RX6UxnB2MFd-pqyoBdPkCw_XcMB1UGGOQIvy412QukfOruyllpT59X8lEQ/s1600/jackfreestheslaves14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3fnS9hhng8d2akUTz1U-SDvi3KK0BJCxyD8927saH1xuMCvzBxdYEaMtLr4AtSn4kzM570Ph-wWqX5vJLV8RX6UxnB2MFd-pqyoBdPkCw_XcMB1UGGOQIvy412QukfOruyllpT59X8lEQ/s1600/jackfreestheslaves14.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack Smith in Ken Jacobs's <i>Star Spangled to Death</i></td></tr>
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Together, Smith and Jacobs developed an aggressively anarchic form of street theater in the mid-50s that from today’s perspective we might call Happenings, but at the time, and as they managed to capture on film more than once, was just called disturbing the peace. They learned early on that when Smith went out in public in non-gender-normative dress that cops would come and trouble the scene. It must have been an amazing thing for one’s existence to be against the law.<br />
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So it was overtly political, but not explicit in its message. It appealed to the intellect through the senses, and this makes it resistant to language and material success. In many ways, its failure was its success.</div>
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In an interview with Gerard Malanga, Smith was asked if he was worried about the subtleties in his work not being understood and he responded:</div>
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How can you not – you know – understand the movements and the gestures? The appeal is not to the understanding anyway.</blockquote>
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It is truly sensual work, not only because it is erotic, but because it is for the senses. The images do not signify, they are.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack Smith filming <i>Flaming Creatures</i>, photo by Norman Solomon</td></tr>
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The "film challenge," as he put it, is to use your eyes, that is, to apprehend through your eyes. This is how he watched films and what he appreciated about them. Over plot, quote-unquote good performances, over scripts, over anything really, Smith valued the richness of images—up to and including their incredulity or phoniness—"corniness is the other side of marvelousness," he said.<br />
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In support of this, he constructed an alternate film history that he referred to as "secret flix," including Vincent Minelli’s over-the-top musical <i>The Pirate</i>, horror films like <i>White Zombie</i> and Jaques Tourneur’s <i>I Walked with a Zombie</i>, Busby Berkeley musicals, Josef von Sternberg films, and, most importantly, any film starring Maria Montez.</div>
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His two great essays on cinema—"The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez" and "Belated Appreciation of V.S."—suggest that what Smith values most in cinema—whether from an actor or a director—is an ability to project one’s interior vision onto the world.</div>
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Of Montez, he wrote:<br />
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Her eye saw not just beauty, but incredible, delirious, drug-like hallucinatory beauty. </blockquote>
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The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into sets. But they achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and truth.</blockquote>
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The Montez thing was big enough, by the way, that when Smith was briefly sent to prison and then a mental hospital after shoplifting, he sent instructions to Tony Conrad on the maintenance of the Montez shrine he had erected in their apartment.</div>
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Other than their elevation of the visual above the literary what these films have in common, if anything, is a certain quality of light and space.<br />
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Remarkably, there is actually quite an overlap between Smith’s list and the films that Deleuze writes about in the section of <i>Cinema 1</i> devoted to what he terms the "affection image," meaning the image that imparts the affect on the film as a whole and on the viewer, otherwise known as the close-up. Deleuze writes of a type of film that is the opposite of Expressionism, in which "light no longer has to do with the darkness, but with the transparent, the translucent or the white." And he terms this lyrical abstraction.</div>
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The easiest way I know of to describe lyrical abstraction is if you think of Dreyer’s <i>Joan of Arc</i>, for instance, it is all affect, all close-ups in an abstract, fragmented white space. Or if you think of Sternberg, <i>Shanghai Gesture</i> or the <i>Scarlet Empress</i>, in which there are not only white spaces, but veils in front of them, white on white creating translucent layers.</div>
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Deleuze singles out Sternberg in particular for qualities that Smith seems to share. In Sternberg, he writes, "Everything happens between the light and the white." He continues, quoting Goethe:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Image result for jack smith flaming creatures" class="rg_i" data-src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2tH-s3lFO_45bLmu56vFHBhKtdANkHe50CTlvy3UASTNG_BK2Eg" data-sz="f" height="135" jsaction="load:str.tbn" name="Mwzu_O7l0aLjtM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2tH-s3lFO_45bLmu56vFHBhKtdANkHe50CTlvy3UASTNG_BK2Eg" style="height: 179px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: -5px; width: 265px;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from Jack Smith's <i>Flaming Creatures</i></td></tr>
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'between transparency and white opacity there exists an infinite number of degrees of cloudiness… One could call white the fortuitously opaque flash of pure transparency.'<br />
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This could be a description of <i>Flaming Creatures</i>. It is white on white, full of white spaces, which Deleuze calls affection spaces. And in those spaces we get pure potentiality.</div>
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As one of the characters in <i>Shanghai Gesture</i> puts it, "Anything can happen here, any moment."</div>
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Richard Foreman, describing Smith as a performer, wrote:</div>
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To watch Jack Smith perform was to watch human behavior turn into granular stasis, in which every moment of being seemed, somehow, to contain the seed of unthinkable possibility…</blockquote>
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That’s what I mean when I say potentiality—unthinkable possibility, limitlessness, a virtual out of which anything can be actualized, and that actualization doesn’t diminish the virtual, doesn’t lessen the possible.</div>
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And in the white spaces, full of affect, in which anything can happen at any moment, we get choice—a choice to be something beyond any fixed identity, to become something else, something other than normal.<br />
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This is the “Creatures” part of Flaming Creatures—fluid, unfixed, polymorphously perverse, and outside of or beyond or before identity. Joseph says it isn’t pre-Oedipal; it’s anti-Oedipal.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img data-rich-file-id="7849" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/bombmagazine/image/upload/v1412266969/jordan01_body.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
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<span class="caption" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: block; font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 1.33333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mario Montez and Frankie Francine (Frank Di Giovanni), black-and-white shooting sessions, early 1960's, published in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Beautiful Book</em>, by Jack Smith.</span></span></div>
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The vision that Smith proposes is more radical than just gay liberation, which Smith always saw as a ghetto. It’s much queerer than that. It is about freedom from the incarceration of identity. Better to project oneself outward, however corny or phony or freaky if for a moment truly. Because identity is just too constrictive a container for the human experience.</div>
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And this is Deleuze’s point: that in lyrical abstraction, there is not necessarily a conflict or a struggle, but there is a choice between modes of existence.<br />
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He writes, "Lyrical abstraction is defined by light’s adventure with the white." and "As soon as this light is reached it restores everything to us." "We have reached a spiritual space where what we choose is no longer distinguishable from the choice itself."</div>
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<span class="s1">Creature with plastic flower from Ouled Naiel series, from apartment sessions, ca. 1958, by Jack Smith</span></div>
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Maybe that is why <i>Flaming Creatures </i>ends with so much dancing. Maybe there is redemption after all. Maybe it’s in choosing choice—the freedom of instability and possibility over fixity and identity.</div>
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Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-85713793027755376912015-11-16T12:43:00.001-08:002015-11-16T12:43:32.973-08:00Your eye if you could use itMy essay on Jack Smith, Josef von Sternberg and Gilles Deleuze is <a href="http://moca.tumblr.com/post/132969637469/your-eye-if-you-could-use-it" target="_blank">now available on MOCA's tumblr</a>.<br />
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<br />Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-47411541613841888052015-09-11T21:42:00.002-07:002015-09-11T21:42:07.653-07:00Different Every Time<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Who has not watched the shifting, changing panorama of the streets? </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The hurrying to and from, the bustling crowd? And who has not said, </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“I would like to see this scene again, I would like to study its many interesting phases?”</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—1896 advertisement for the Jenkins Phantoscope (<span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">1)</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. </span></i><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—Gilles Deleuze (2)</span></div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjkWSDulN68scLtth6vtE4WjxWVr6zZwvWRK0ZFdgCN6wEygGr2LiwYe6SWlL6eVLLIIr3NrscEWdz9N2si9pRpPespR5DLJU0MbHdfNriH3L_jSLUAKrdN3EmJ9otggJiuc30fOPkERf2/s1600/Soft+Rain+Still.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #2d6e89; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjkWSDulN68scLtth6vtE4WjxWVr6zZwvWRK0ZFdgCN6wEygGr2LiwYe6SWlL6eVLLIIr3NrscEWdz9N2si9pRpPespR5DLJU0MbHdfNriH3L_jSLUAKrdN3EmJ9otggJiuc30fOPkERf2/s640/Soft+Rain+Still.jpg" style="border: none; padding: 0px;" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 10.4px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Ken Jacobs, still from </span><em style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; word-wrap: break-word;">Soft Rain</em><span style="line-height: 18px;">, 1968, 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes, courtesy of the artist</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In 1968, Gilles Deleuze published <i>Difference and Repetition</i>, a truly remarkable work with a cascade of ideas issuing from the confluence of two concepts: a pure difference and a complex repetition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In 1968, Ken Jacobs loaded a roll of motion picture film into his camera, mounted it on a tripod, and in one uninterrupted shot, photographed the scene outside his window. The resulting composition is stark—much of the frame is taken up by buildings and at times, though we know it isn’t possible, it appears that the buildings may be projecting the small patch of New York City street they frame <i>out towards</i> the audience. At the top of the frame, there is a black rectangle that appears to hang between two buildings and over the street, further complicating the impossibility of the space created. This piece of paper—we know it is paper because at one point it moves, ever so gently—completes the framing of the street and introduces another perceptual conundrum: the black rectangle is at once foremost in the foreground, in the middleground between the buildings but above the street, in the background behind the buildings (and the street?), and nowhere: a black hole. And then there is the street itself: the decentered center of our attention, with its colorful personae slowly moving on a tiny proscenium. (3) Everything in the frame is just what it is, as well as something else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Though beautiful and perplexing, this image alone may not have been all that remarkable, but for some reason, Jacobs decided to print the film three times and splice these together end to end, producing a perfectly repetitive film, <i>Soft Rain </i>(1968).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The effect—augmented by slowing the film down in the projector from 24 frames per second to 16—is of a gray day extending indefinitely, its chance occurrences eternally returning, its everyday movements becoming slow-motion dance. One can relate this to concurrent developments in post-modern choreography or experimental music composition (Yvonne Rainer and Terry Riley, for instance), but one can also see Jacobs’ investigations in another light: as a return some of cinema’s earliest concerns—to investigate the world visually in the medium of moving pictures, to wonder in the repetition of a scene, and to reveal what was secret, hidden, or unknown. (4) In short, to see and see again, and in seeing, learn. “Cinema is a form of thinking,” he has said. (5) In perceiving, we understand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Soft Rain.</i> An image that returns three times, returning to the beginning of cinema. Why? To change the past? To return us to another way of looking? Or to make a moment repeat itself, affecting and flattening and deepening time? In the Preface to<i>Difference and Repetition</i>, Deleuze writes, “The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal.” (6) Cinema is philosophy by other means.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The converse is also true: “Commentaries in the history of philosophy should represent a kind of slow motion,” writes Deleuze, </span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.3em; margin: 1em 20px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“a congelation or immobilization of the text: </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">not only</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> of the text which they relate, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">but also</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> of the text in which they are inserted – so much so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former text and the present text </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in one another</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.” </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Although Deleuze and Jacobs would not know of each other’s work until much later, this could nearly double as a description of Jacobs’ most famous film, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (1969)—a protean work that lovingly, obsessively investigates nearly every aspect of the cinematic experience by performatively rephotographing a 1905 comedy of the same name. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">At the beginning of Jacobs’ film and near its conclusion, the eponymous 1905 film runs in its entirety, literally achieving “the pure repetition” of the two films “in one another.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Compared to </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tom, Tom…</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Soft Rain</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> is a Lumière-like actuality, but one that actualizes cinema’s inherent qualities of repetition. (7) </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Soft Rain</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> may not be the first or only film to use repetition, yet it differs in kind from the others. Unlike the repeated sequences in Fernand Léger’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ballet Mécanique</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (1925), for instance, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Soft Rain</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">’s returns are distinctly non-mechanical. Neither montage nor mere reproduction (“repetition of the Same” or “representation of a concept” in Deleuze’s terms), they are something else entirely. Pure difference in a complex repetition. (8) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Three times we see the same scene again, the same hurrying to and from, the same gentle trembling of the black void between buildings. The first time through is not different from the third, it contains the third within it, “an 'other' repetition at the heart of the first.” (9) Three times through the same material, but together they “do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power.” (10)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Three times that do not feel like three times; together they are as one. As Jacobs said, “Once you see a film, it collects in your mind into a single image. It’s all there at once, which is what a painting is, it’s all there at once. … in a similar way for me, a film that you’ve seen and really taken into mind does become an image, a single shape and form and that separates from clock time.” (11)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Threes times the same image gathers into a single image of time. It separates from clock time and at the same time extends indefinitely. It repeats but is not the same; it returns and is not identical; it returns eternally, in order to become. There is no redundancy for there is no concept, just difference, pure difference in repetition. (12)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Soft Rain<i> screens on Thursday, May 14, as part of</i> <a href="http://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/spring-2015/los-angeles-filmforum-at-moca-presents-different-every-time/" style="color: #2d6e89; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Different Every Time</a><i>, a program of experimental films presented by Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA. Tickets are available at </i><a href="http://edu.moca.org/calendar/2015-05-14" style="color: #2d6e89; text-decoration: none;"><span class="s1"><i>moca.org</i></span></a><i>. Also on the program: Hollis Frampton</i>, Works and Days (1969);<i>Cauleen Smith</i>, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992); <i>Jill Godmilow</i>, What Farocki Taught (1997); <i>and Mariah Garnett</i>, Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin (2012).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="p1">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(1) 1896 advertising prospectus for the Jenkins Phantoscope, as quoted in Gunning, Tom. "TOM GUNNING on WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT." The Films of Jill Godmilow. April 8, 1999. Accessed April 16, 2015. https://www3.nd.edu/~jgodmilo/gunning.html.</span></div>
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<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(2) Gilles Deleuze, <i>Difference and Repetition</i>, trans. Paul Patton, p. 70. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Here, Deleuze is paraphrasing David Hume.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(3) “I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them.” <i>Ibid.</i>, xxi.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(4) See Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde", <i>Wide Angle</i>, Vol. 8, nos. 3 & 4 Fall, 1986. “What precisely is the cinema of attraction? First it is a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Léger celebrated: its ability to <i>show</i> something. … a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.”</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="s1">(5) </span>Ken Jacobs. “Film and the Creation of the Mind,” <i>Conversations with History</i>, University of California Television, 2001. <https: ss-csgf8="" youtu.be=""></https:><a href="https://youtu.be/CEVss-csGF8" style="color: #2d6e89; text-decoration: none;">https://youtu.be/CEVss-csGF8</a></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(6) Deleuze,<i> Op. Cit.</i>, xxi. The aim of the present writing is not to prove any direct connection between Deleuze and Jacobs, rather it is to show how thinking these works together can be productive of a double existence, a pure repetition of the two—one visual and one verbal—within one another, and thereby to demonstrate that cinema is thought.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(7) </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is interesting to note, however, that</span><span class="s1" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Soft Rain</i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> comes at the precipice of what would become an entire career dedicated to the repetition of sequences, shots, or even just two frames in order to dig into the image for the difference(s) between one thing and the next and the revelations—optical, aesthetic, political, moral—to be found there.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(8) Is not difference in <i>Soft Rain</i> not only in the literal repetition of the Same, but also in the original image as the doubling of each thing and its other that takes place as a result of the alienation we experience from the picture? A strangeness or distancing in/of the image produced, in part, by the picture being organized by a sensibility highly attuned to the ambiguities of pictorial space. Jacobs studied painting with Hans Hofmann while becoming a filmmaker, and Hofmann’s idea of push and pull on the picture plane, transferred to cinema—and here, stripped of its expressionism—changes, flattens, and intensifies the time. </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(9) <i>Ibid.</i>, p.25</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(10) <i>Ibid.</i>, 1</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(11) Jacobs, <i>Op. cit.</i></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20.8px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(12) “Repetition is difference without a concept.” Deleuze, <i>Op. Cit.</i>, 23. <i>Soft Rain </i>illustrates eternal return, not as philosophy, but as attraction—an avant-garde, optical poem. “The eternal return does not bring back 'the same', but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes.” <i>Ibid.</i>, 41.</span></div>
Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-73607259416879882682014-10-15T12:29:00.001-07:002015-09-12T06:54:15.221-07:00Interstices<div>
<i>What follows are a few fragments from an unfinished essay I wrote in 2007 for Thom Andersen's class on Deleuze. F</i><i>rom this distance, it</i><i> seems impossible and perhaps unnecessary to complete the essay; yet in re-reading it, I thought that it contained enough original scholarship that it could be of value to someone and so I have posted it here. I have cleaned up the footnotes and added embedded videos where appropriate, but for the most part, it remains untouched, a document of my thinking at the time.</i></div>
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<b>I<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="line-height: 150%;">Paraphrasing Pierre
Reverdy, Jean-Luc Godard repeatedly states that an image derives its emotional
and intellectual power from a juxtaposition that is distant and true.</span>[i]<span style="line-height: 150%;"> In
</span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Notre Musique</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">, he creates an
essay-film-within-a-film that analyzes his own method of accomplishing this. He
refers to it, perhaps with some irony, as “shot/counter-shot.” </span><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Addressing us,
the audience, at the same time that he addresses his audience within the film,
he holds up two still pictures: an example of shot/counter-shot from a Howard
Hawks film. But the images are not distant enough: there can be no truth, no
reconciliation of distant realities, “because the director is incapable of
seeing the difference between a man and a woman.”</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">[ii]</span><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> The rest of the self-reflexive essay is devoted to relating realities that </span><i style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">are</i><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> distant and true. One particularly
striking example is worth quoting at length:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“In 1938, Heisenberg and Bohr were walking in the Danish countryside talking about physics. They came to Elsinore castle. The German scientist said, ‘Oh, there’s nothing special about this castle!’ [realist painting of castle] The Danish physicist said, ‘Yes, but if you say “Hamlet’s castle,” [black] then it becomes extraordinary.’ [electronic, still image of castle shrouded in fog. cut to a lamp, swinging against a black background] Elsinore the real, Hamlet the imaginary. Shot and counter-shot. Imaginary: certitude. Reality: incertitude. The principle of cinema: go towards the light and shine it on our night. Our music.”[iii]</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/l_0jf4mEAvM" width="420"></iframe></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">In his book, </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Cinema II: The Time-Image,</i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> Gilles Deleuze
refers to this method of editing as </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">the
interstice</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">. He claims the interstice signifies the movement from a cinema
of Being to a cinema of becoming. “It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two
images’, which does away with all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND,
‘this and then that’, which does away with all cinema of Being = is.”</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><o:p></o:p>[iv]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
According to
Deleuze, the interstice is not a given, it must be induced. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Given one image, another image must be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as the mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as the physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new.[v]</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">While the interstice must be
induced, it is within cinema itself. There is already a gap in the image, but
some images are capable of illuminating that gap. Like the picture plane in
painting, the interstice must be both created and revealed, brought into being
and allowed to remain.</span>[vi]<span style="line-height: 150%;"> The interstice is, in effect, the film plane. It is the condition of cinema
revealed as such. It is the frame-line, the liminal within the image. It is the
in-between. Just as there is an invisible darkness inside of every image that
is the pre-condition of viewing, “the darkness, which always alternates
coequally with the light, on every motion picture screen,”</span>[vii] <span style="line-height: 150%;">so is there a </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">between</i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> inside of every
image and every cut. Some cuts close this distance (invisible editing) while
others announce it. Some cuts conceal this gap, while some shine light on the
night of the interstice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
The camera, almost
alchemically, converts the world into something other than it is, transforming
the evanescent into the material, transubstantiating light, time and space into
discrete frames on a strip of celluloid. The projector produces the illusion of
movement by eliding the interval between these frames. What Deleuze calls the
interstice is a result of the intermittent motion of the film itself; “Between
each frame, when the shutter closes over the lens as the strip of film is
repositioned, there is a moment of darkness, a fragment of time which is not
recorded.”<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[viii]</span> This absence has what Charles Pierce terms an index, a physical trace of its
existence: the frame-line. The frame-line is the avatar of the in-between that
is a necessary component of every image in cinema. It signifies an elision, the
imperceptible movement of the film from one frame to the next that will take
place in darkness. If it is perceptible, the projected film returns to
material. When the film jumps in the gate, we suddenly see it naked, vertical
streaks replacing the motion the projector had only recently restored to the
world. The projector has lost its loop and is no longer capable of sewing
frames together into the fabric of time and space.</div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
</div>
</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">In Ken
Jacobs’ </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">, we
are treated to this spectacle, and the effect is, at first, quite unnerving.
The illusion (of an anti-illusion) lasts long enough, however, that we can
appreciate seeing a strip of film in this new light. In fact, the magic of </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son</i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> is its ability
to oscillate between the material and representational aspects of cinema. In
wrenching rhythms reminiscent of Charles Mingus or Thelonius Monk,</span>[ix]<span style="line-height: 150%;"> we shift
from smooth spectacle to stuttering substance. Through almost every conceivable
means, we become aware of the two-dimensionality of both the picture plane and
the film plane.</span>[x] <span style="line-height: 150%;">The motion
of film from one frame to the next could be said to be the subject of Jacobs’
obsessive investigation: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Nothing has been actually slowed down, we’re just finding more time in that time. There’s much more time in that time than we ever imagined, in two frames. 16 or 18 or 24 frames per second, that’s infinite time, and infinite motion is taking place, infinite numbers of events are taking place and this begins to explore that. I’ve never exhausted the time bounded by two frames.[xi]</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
There is a
cut from frame to frame, a deeper cut from image to image, and a still deeper
cut between “differentiated” images, a distance between every frame, contiguous
or otherwise, without which cinema would cease to be. This distance can be
emphasized, or it can be elided, but it can never be erased. Peter Kulbelka
calls the cut from frame to frame within a shot “weak articulation” to call
attention to the fact that there is the potential for deep cuts between every
frame.<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[xii]</span> According to Kubelka, what we actually experience in the movement from shot to
shot is the last frame of one shot meeting the first frame of another. Half of
his work, which he calls his “metrical films,” makes explicit use of this
principle. In order to achieve what Deleuze refers to as the interstice,
however, Kubelka must use shots,<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[xiii]</span> for the interstice is not purely graphic. It is also metaphoric, or more
accurately, it is visual thinking that elides metaphors through direct
association. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
For this
reason, we could also say that Julie Murray’s films create interstices,
although of a very different character. Murray’s films create interstices by a
strange method: visual rhyme. By juxtaposing two images that share a single
characteristic<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¾</span></span>color,
texture, shape, motion or even number<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¾</span></span>she actually illuminates
everything that is different between them. As opposed to Godard’s image that is
the product of “two realities that are distant and true,” Murray creates an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">arbitrary</i> relationship that reveals the
deep differences between two images. Cutting from a map to a butterfly, we
notice certain repeated patterns between the two. Maps and butterflies are made
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kiss</i>; they are made to share a
point of contact, but only a point. They remain apart. In fact, like similar
poles of magnets, they are impossible to bring together.<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[xiv]</span>The chain of images continues and soon our associations and dissociations
become stranger and stranger as we attempt to reconcile each new
“differentiated” pair. This soon becomes a chain of alienation in which each
thing is connected and yet everything seems out of place. Murray’s films reveal
the arbitrariness of metaphor, yet they elevate everything to the plane of
metaphor. They illuminate the fact that the relationships produced by
consciousness can be arbitrary, yet her work is nothing but consciousness, a
chain of images as stream of consciousness.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Both Murray
and Kubelka edit their sound with as much dexterity and complexity as their
picture. Sounds can rhyme, not only with each other, but with the diegetic
sound that is implied by an image. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unsere
Afrikareise</i>, we see a crocodile violently splashing while we hear the sound
of a tape recording that speeds up as the machine shuts off. The effect is
stunning because the sound clearly does not emanate from the image, yet it
harmonizes with it. Both synchronous and non-diegetic, it has affinity with the
image, but refuses to join it. Here again, an interstice is introduced. There
is a space between sound and image where thought is possible. In effect, this
particular strain of editing allows one to hear and see multiply, communicating
simultaneously with multiple planes of consciousness as images and sounds
proliferate connections, forming webs of association that reach in several directions
at once, streams of consciousness running concurrently, only at times
confluently.<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[xv]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Ultimately,
this is what distinguishes Murray’s and Kubelka’s montage from that of Sergei
Eisenstein. Instead of positing dialectics, they spin webs, rhizomes. Deleuze: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If Eisenstein is a dialectician, it is because he
conceives of the violence of the shock in the form of opposition and the
thought of the whole in the form of opposition overcome, or of the
transformation of opposites: ‘From the shock of two factors a concept is born’…
he thinks that any other conception weakens the shock and leaves thought
optional.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">[xvi]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="line-height: 150%;">
But in both Murray and Kubelka
the lack of dialectics doesn’t leave thought optional; it makes it multiply.</div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
<b>II<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
In the past, I
believed that invisible editing was not just aesthetically outmoded, but
morally reprehensible. The classical continuity system, for me, signified
filmmakers’ attitudes of superiority to their audience. Refusing to reveal the
mechanism behind the magic, these filmmakers were like the magician in the<i> Wizard of Oz</i>, charlatans content to
lord it over their audiences with little more than smoke and mirrors. I
believed that films utilizing the techniques of classical continuity editing
were essentially endless parades of dumb tricks, celluloid legerdemain fit for
Vaudeville, not art. If cinema aspired to more than box-office receipts, I
believed it first had to pass through the rigors of modernism, revealing itself
as a medium. If painting was modern because it refused to deny the picture
plane, cinema had to acknowledge the film plane. To elide its inherent fissures
was to assure its provincial status in the world of art. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
In fact, I
believed cinema was inherently modern, that it had been corrupted by capitalism
and that the symptom of its money-disease was narrative. The critic in Federico
Fellini’s <i>8½ </i>chastises the
protagonist’s film as proof that cinema is fifty years behind all the other
arts. In fact, cinema, a mechanical medium demanded by and of modernity, was
born ahead of the other arts. The Lumieres’ actualities, far from regressively
realist, are post-impressionist, oscillating between representation and
abstraction<span style="line-height: normal; text-indent: -48px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">documentation
and fabrication</span><span style="line-height: normal; text-indent: -48px;">—</span><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">eliciting
reality as well as performance. When I learned that they often remade certain
actualities after printing the original negative into oblivion, I was convinced
of their visionary understanding of the mechanical multiplication of images. It
would be another sixty years before the ontological implications of mechanical
reproduction would become both the subject and form of Andy Warhol’s embodiment
of the all-surface, all-over explosion of images resulting in a “plastic
inevitable:” the machine-man’s camera-eye-consciousness.</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xvii]</span></span></span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
But,
proto-post-modernist projects such as the Lumieres’ Warholian camera rolls had
been abandoned for the cheap thrills of chase scenes. In short, I thought that
cinema was led astray by D. W. Griffith, who perfected and proselytized the new
religion of invisible editing and forever turned the cinema away from an
exploration of time to an exploitation of it. Cross-cutting induced suspense, I
thought, did not study time; it abused it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
Thanks to the
wisdom and patience of my teachers, Deleuze’s two books on cinema and the
syncopated wit of J. Hoberman, I no longer think of the continuity system as
evil incarnate. Now I appreciate and agree with the analysis that Deleuze
offers. His achronological narrative<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xviii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
proposes a transition from movement-image to time-image, from a cinema of the
One to a cinema of the AND, the between, the plus.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
For Deleuze, the
world-crisis of World War II produces an analogous crisis in cinema. No longer
can films assert that a situation can be changed by the action it demands of an
individual. Instead, it is replaced by a cinema that revolves around seers and
their visions. The new cinema is an episodic, circling cinema of walkers,
wanderers and their experiences as opposed to a straight-line cinema of actors
and actions. It is a nomad cinema, not an industrial one. Instead of arrows
(consequences, this leads to this) we get pluses (this and this and this and…).
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
But, the plus is
not simply an addition; it is a meditation on the possibility of addition. Not
just “this and this” but “what is this <i>and</i>?”
It is “a method which cinema must ponder at the same time as it uses it.”<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xx]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
The continuity system of the action image creates coherencies, heals cuts and
salves disruptions whereas the interstice of the time image creates spaces; it
opens the cut to reveal its depth.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xxi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
The interstice is a suspension, a hovering between, a falling from one image to
another, a leap. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: -48px;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;"> This is clearly
illustrated in the “Shake A Hand” sequence of Charles Burnett’s </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Killer of Sheep</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">. First, there is a leap
from the story to a tangential micro-narrative</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: normal;">—</span>or is it an actuality?
This special type of interruption will recur throughout </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Killer of Sheep</i><span style="line-height: 150%;">. There is an image of children leaping between two
buildings,</span><span style="text-indent: -48px;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"> filmed from below. We cannot see any part of their actions besides their leap, their suspension in air. There is only the leap, the gap, the dance with gravity. On the soundtrack we hear, “Shake a Hand,” sung by Faye Adams. Its lyrics might be </span></span><i style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: -48px;">Killer of Sheep</i><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: -48px;">’s credo: </span><i style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: -48px;">Just leave it to me/ Don’t ever be ashamed/ Just give me a chance/ I’ll take care of everything.// Your troubles I’ll share./ Let me know and I’ll be there./ I’ll take care of you./ Anyplace and anywhere.</i><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: -48px;"> Her voice is like crying, and rhymes with what might be a privileged moment in the film, where the difference between make-believe and actuality is blurriest. The cracks in her singing and the strength in her voice both reinforce and oppose the tears of a child that we see. Multiple leaps between sound and image. That is, they both leap multiply. The leap is not unidirectional, not even in time. For this scene foreshadows another crying child, whom we will meet in only a few more shots, while at the same time it references the very beginning of the film.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: -48px;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 24px; text-indent: -48px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Avrd4ArTLAo" width="560"></iframe></span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br />
A leap between the image and the music, and a further leap between the documentary
quality of the children’s play and the melodramatic action that follows: a man
bounds down a staircase with exaggerated movements, running and hiding from a
woman aiming a gun at him. Eventually, the protagonist appears, uniting the
fragmented spaces we have been hastily assembling in our minds, a final leap,
or fall, from the micro-narrative to the main story, or rather, from one
plateau to another. For, in truth, there is no grand narrative in <i>Killer of Sheep</i>, but rather a succession
of stories unified by characters and concerns. It is a
record of people and places more than actions. Like all cinema of the AND, it
has incidents, but not events. This is not a landscape that can be changed by a
single action or a single actor. Instead it must be seen, experienced. Not so
much diagnosed as understood. It is a reflection, a record that forms a
consciousness at the same time that it describes one. Therefore, it leaps
between stories as well as images. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
This stasis that is time itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div>
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<div id="edn1">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 3.5in 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> “In
King Lear (Godard, 1987), for instance, Professor Pluggy, the slapstick
character he portrays, states, ‘The image is a pure creation of the soul. It
cannot be born of a comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that
are more or less far apart. The more the connections between these two
realities are distant and true the stronger they need to be.’ Professor
Pluggy’s words echo those of Pierre Reverdy, who, writing in the second decade
of the twentieth century, had analysed the cinema in much the same terms.”<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;">Hayes,</span><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;">Kevin.</span><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> 2004. The body and the book in Contempt. </span><i><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;">Studies in European Cinema.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times-Roman","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: Times-Roman;"> 1 (1): 31-41.
<http: cookieset="1" doi="" pdf="" seci.1.1.31="" www.atypon-link.com="">
(2 May 2007).<o:p></o:p></http:></span></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> Godard,
Jean-Luc. <i>Notre Musique</i>. France.
2004. 35mm.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> <i>Ibid</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Deleuze, Gilles. <i>Cinema 2: The Time-Image</i>.
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985. p.180<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 179-80<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Hans Hoffmann: “The picture must always be complete. At the same time, you have
to know when it is finished.” as quoted in a lecture by Ken Jacobs attended by
the author.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Andersen, Thom. <i>Eadweard Muybridge,
Zoopraxographer.</i> United States. 1975. 16mm. also quoted in Doane, Mary Ann.
<i>The Emergence of Cinematic Time</i>.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 202<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn8">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> <i>Ibid.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn9">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
J. Hoberman uses almost the exact same description—<span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">Monk-like rhythms,
impressionist oscillation between representation and reality—</span><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">for
Oscar Micheaux in his article “Bad Movies”</span><i style="text-indent: -0.5in;">
</i><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">(reproduced in </span><i style="text-indent: -0.5in;">Vulgar Modernism</i><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">).
Indeed, there are many instructive affinities between the two filmmakers.
Perhaps Michaeux is the missing filmmaker behind Jacobs’s </span><i style="text-indent: -0.5in;">Perfect Film</i><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;"> (a brilliant piece of trash)?</span></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn10">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[x]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> “No
movement. No depth. No artifice. The sacred.” Godard, <i>op. cit.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn11">
<pre style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Times;">Jacobs, Ken and Flo. Interview by Tom Gunning and David Schwartz. <i>Films That Tell Time, A Ken Jacobs Retrospective.</i> American Museum of the Moving Image. 10 and 11 August, 1989. </span><o:p></o:p></pre>
</div>
<div id="edn12">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Sitney, P. Adams. The Graphic Cinema: European Perspectives. <i>Visionary Film</i>. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974. pp. 298-9.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn13">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Kubelka’s greatest achievement in creating interstices is <i>Unsere Afrikareise</i>. Interstices abound, between every shot, between
every sound and every image, even to the point of there being multiple interstices
articulated at once. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn14">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
And yet we cannot help but think them together. What if we decide to think of
butterfly wings as animal skins? What if we decide to think of animal skins as
maps? Julie Murray proposes the following in her description of the film:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 17.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
Hidden among
the pounding of animal hides,/ All tamed into maps, their shapes / Explicit
replicate butterfly wings,/ lie the motives of Lír./ The king who paid
improper attention to his children.// From that first fascination/ And it’s lascivious gaze,/ Came the gorged
desire for substance,/ Among the skins,/ Nets, shadows and milk bottles/ Pried
from the stomachs of metal fish,/ Steam, smoke and things that won’t
stay,/ Speared, dangled, measured, divined./ All dreamed through wallpaper, Or
dowsed from something they drowned in long ago. [Murray, Julie. <i>Deliquium. </i>2003.
<http: urray.html="" www.canyoncinema.com=""> (2 May 2007).].<o:p></o:p></http:></div>
</div>
<div id="edn15">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
This—that one of the projects of modernism is to speak to the multiple planes
of consciousness simultaneously—was pointed out to me by Ken Jacobs while he
was lecturing on Pablo Picasso’s cubist collages.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn16">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xvi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Deleuze. op cit. p. 158<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn17">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xvii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Educated in chaos, his maxims are headlines and his eyes are headlights. Note
Warhol’s long lasting affinity for newspapers: from early pencil-on-paper
reductionism, lending an element of the abstract to the front page, to
mechanically manufactured (literally: “hand-made”) repetitions of tabloid
imagery that renders the concrete abstract through sheer repetition. Warhol
observes—and then reproduces by other, illuminating means—what already exists.
It is a performance where he is a conduit, a radio/tv tower intercepting every
kind of communication and spitting them all back out, sometimes as a
stream-of-consciousness, sometimes as a skipping record, sometimes as a
mechanical mirror. Before Warhol, Weegee. In Weegee’s reportage, there is
already an element of the abstract (“woodcut-like starkness meant to arrest the
eye of a rushing pedestrian at a dozen paces”(Hoberman)) and the self-reflexive
(note his incorporation of headlines into his own work as well as his crowd
studies). His obsessive themes already suggest the endlessly repeatable. For
more on Weegee and tabloid lyricism in general, see Hoberman, J. Three American
Abstract Sensationalists. In <i>Vulgar
Moderism</i>. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. pp. 24-7 <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn18">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xviii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
For Deleuze, achronology is an important aspect of the cinema of the
time-image, but here I mean to suggest that his narrative of cinema itself is
achronological. The crisis of the action-image that he describes lasts into the
70’s in America and arguably continues today, even though the cinema of the
time-image began in the 40’s. The notion that time itself is multiple, running
in one direction—<i>forward</i>—but not along a single
course, has profound implications for cinema and thought.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn19">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>Alpha
60: “Once we know the
number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals
two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.” (Godard,
Jean-Luc. <i>Alphaville</i>. France. 1965.
35mm.) And Brian Massumi on the importance of Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s <i>A Thousand Plateaus</i>: “Nomad thought
replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = not y (I = I = not you)
with an open equation: … + y + z + a + … (… + arm + brick + window + …)”
(Massumi, Brian. 1987 Translator’s Foreward. In <i>A Thousand Plateaus,</i> p. xiii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.)<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
</div>
<div id="edn20">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xx]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
Deleuze, op. cit., p. 179<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn21">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">[xxi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span>
This is most clearly illustrated Godard’s lecture on shot/counter-shot in <i>Notre Musique</i>.</div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-50776648843643609942014-01-10T10:49:00.002-08:002014-01-10T10:49:57.206-08:00x<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Yo5cKRmJaf0" width="560"></iframe>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-78048289528802440222013-08-15T18:31:00.000-07:002013-09-20T16:38:33.047-07:00Toward a New Project<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Work in progress...</span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizsHA8yiMnp1deofNJakp4OQGy41008KBBTKaebBbSy33nfcIY_hHGXzdG3Lc6BOKj-YFOPxq5rfsL7svJha7BqHHJD6ewahop9adNP2ErQ216Z9Ira2yBTY37DSVIBnsII7rZO7smQed2/s1600/Missile-Drone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizsHA8yiMnp1deofNJakp4OQGy41008KBBTKaebBbSy33nfcIY_hHGXzdG3Lc6BOKj-YFOPxq5rfsL7svJha7BqHHJD6ewahop9adNP2ErQ216Z9Ira2yBTY37DSVIBnsII7rZO7smQed2/s320/Missile-Drone.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. </i>--Guy Debord, <i>Society of the Spectacle </i>(31)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For Debord, in the society of the spectacle the map has as much information as the world.
In the present society—which is both less social and more spectacular—it could
be said that the map contains even more information than the world itself.
Metadata—and the endless algorithms needed to interpret it and to make it
useful—is a supermap (or the wrapper that creates hyperspace, in Jameson’s
terms), a no-coordinates snapshop of the universe, n-dimensional and descriptive
to a fault.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
The weaponized drone zeroing in on a "suspected militant"—identified by
algorithms interpreting metadata, including patterns of phone calls, emails,
and web searches—is not an object moving through Cartesian space along a predictable trajectory toward a specific target, as a cannon
ball once was; the drone is a program electronically delivered through no-coordinates
space to execute an amount of information.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
The drone operates outside the confines of established law. The War on Terror is a postmodern, no-coordinates war and as such is beyond the rational system of rules deduced from principles established during the Enlightenment (including the Constitution). The drone knows no sovereignty, nor declaration, nor treaty, nor right. The drone</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">and its massive, accompanying infrastructure of surveillance, "intelligence," and analysis by algorithm</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">knows nothing; it is but a surfer on the world wide web of military omnipotence, searching and destroying. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Computer warfare is similarly unrestricted and exists outside the process of judicial review. The digital, however, is also not entirely immaterial; computer viruses become bombs, as in <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-01/world/35459494_1_nuclear-program-stuxnet-senior-iranian-officials" target="_blank">the release of the Stuxnet virus to destroy Iranian centrifuges</a>. The drone and the virus are one: weaponized programs, solely operated by and answerable to the executive branch.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The President, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> t</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">he executive,</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> says, "I is a fiction." The executioner is multiple. There is no author; authority now comes from the algorithm. No justice, no peace, just the algorithm unfurling unfathomable amounts of data, declaring, "There, in that place, there will be death." Or rather, patterns of information direct people to run their programs to execute tasks. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The myth of the "dithering" President, too Hamlet to start a real war, is misdirection. The President doesn't need to make the call. The algorithms send the drones. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The result is an explosion in Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or Iraq</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">but f</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">or the drone and its algorithms</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> those places do not exist any more than area codes exist for cell phones.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-30452654999685777392012-05-14T09:46:00.000-07:002012-05-14T09:55:11.078-07:00Pavement<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The bull Oficial, from the ranch of the Arribas brothers, fought in Cadiz the 5th of October, 1884, caught and gored a banderillero, jumped the barrera and gored the picador Chato three times, gored a civil-guard, broke the leg and three ribs of a municipal guard, and the arm of a night watchman. He would have been an ideal animal to turn loose when the police are clubbing manifestants in front of the city hall. Had he not been killed a strain of police-hating bulls might have been bred which would give the populace the advantage they lost in street fighting with the disappearance of the paving stone. A paving stone at short range is more effective than a club or sabre. The disappearance of cobble and paving stones has been more of a deterrent to the overthrowing of governments than machine guns, tear bombs and automatic pistols. For it is in the clashes when the government does not want to kill its citizens but to club, ride down and beat them into submission with the flat of a sabre that a government is overthrown. Any government that uses the machine guns once too often on its citizens will fall automatically. Regimes are kept in with the club and the blackjack, not the machine gun or bayonet, and while there were paving stones there was never an unarmed mob to club.</blockquote>
--Hemingway, Ernest. <i>Death in the Afternoon</i>. New York: Scribner, 1932. 111-112.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-51127494897014408252011-12-12T08:33:00.001-08:002011-12-12T11:27:22.293-08:00What Lies Beneath the Pavement?Revolution<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp8BJFH_ikRJIpjpCvIOOoE_1VQtZWbHdHdf6e-SQUkzX3xhDBFGZm0wE7iqc2a3HpXLBf0ojq4fLtJ7C5zyJxrF9lH-uwFxRLLbw7SAgJFrR7MHSNUPO6fEwOcpK3hpjrgrvGXW6vGcHS/s1600/la+live.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp8BJFH_ikRJIpjpCvIOOoE_1VQtZWbHdHdf6e-SQUkzX3xhDBFGZm0wE7iqc2a3HpXLBf0ojq4fLtJ7C5zyJxrF9lH-uwFxRLLbw7SAgJFrR7MHSNUPO6fEwOcpK3hpjrgrvGXW6vGcHS/s320/la+live.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685315244587671746" border="0" /></a> requires acts of imagination. In order to turn away from the world as-it-is, one must be able to envision, even if only in an inchoate way, that another world is possible and that this potentiality is, in and of itself, worth fighting for.<br /><br />During the 1968 Paris uprising, a popular spray-can dictum asserted "Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking." Another, more poetic, and ultimately more powerful, had it: "Beneath the pavement, the beach!" The sand--revealed by pulling up the paving stones to use as projectiles--suggested either another world, or another dimension to this one.<br /><br />If creativity is firepower in the contest of imagination, however, the first victory has gone not to the dissidents but to the bankers. For our current decade and its predicaments, we could update the slogan quoted above to: "<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083022">Beneath the wheat, the banks!</a>" It is the bankers--by which I mean any of the technocrats that constitute the financial sector--who have successfully re-imagined the world. They have effectively invented a new reality in which finance is separate from the actual economy (even commodities futures are now merely abstract financial instruments) and politics separate from the people (in a technocracy, the elected government is obsolete if not irrelevant).<br /><br />To win this contest it is necessary to turn again, to revolt against the bankers' revolution. We must be even more imaginative, even more inventive. Those that can dream the future will take power in the present. "Occupation" is a good start--to give significance again to everyday space and thereby everyday life--but it is only a beginning. We must demand of ourselves total acts of imagination and unprecedented poetry: works of living, feats of being. We must transform the very world, inside and out, with breathless displays of daredevil creativity.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9LTHILHkViIIYoZ_0D6omedGpgJuDQhUdUorZDG37zCjOqXw1Ua9uzYrXoNHdYkxHK6JFoHMMeeAOs6u5vQ1s6PJjwbLlOqaIbcF1sunvVPkJg60iK6az-VX5m6TaW9b1hMovysAwF-xj/s1600/448628.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9LTHILHkViIIYoZ_0D6omedGpgJuDQhUdUorZDG37zCjOqXw1Ua9uzYrXoNHdYkxHK6JFoHMMeeAOs6u5vQ1s6PJjwbLlOqaIbcF1sunvVPkJg60iK6az-VX5m6TaW9b1hMovysAwF-xj/s320/448628.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685317664575654306" border="0" /></a><br /><br />This creativity need not be bounded by works of art, even those that are situational, relational, or activist as the case may be. Acts in and of themselves can be creative. Every step, conceived and executed correctly, can be poetry. The street is a blank slate and our every movement can be a phoneme in a new language that will describe a new reality.<br /><br />Occupy the pavement and then dig deeper. The city is thin and its skin is penetrable. There is water underground.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-12897449660310112872011-09-07T12:08:00.000-07:002011-09-08T21:17:43.084-07:00Mark So Appreciations V: END ROAD WORK / NO PARKING / BOB LOVES BETTY (2011) for Liz<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZJVbTuI6YDx7ueldKjd1UPoQHX12WzKb9BUJ7lPY6TJlYFvvW5tFDELy92vaF6yXvZR8A9NKS7wzrZSvP1Fc29avzWxSCTVpdTnKlV1xqZd7FKSZ6sm54LWN_6mutZO8Lja-FIdQ-oL5d/s1600/DSC02593.JPG"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZJVbTuI6YDx7ueldKjd1UPoQHX12WzKb9BUJ7lPY6TJlYFvvW5tFDELy92vaF6yXvZR8A9NKS7wzrZSvP1Fc29avzWxSCTVpdTnKlV1xqZd7FKSZ6sm54LWN_6mutZO8Lja-FIdQ-oL5d/s400/DSC02593.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649709417340043730" border="0" /></a><br /><style>@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; </style>A tape plays in a room. The tape is mostly blank except for frequent, irregular interruptions--short spurts of recording.<br /><br />The sounds suggest that the tape was made while on a walk, pausing occasionally to hit the record button. The reason for turning on the tape player at a given point is unclear--why here and not there?--but there is an overall consistency to the experience. Though no rule as to its construction is easily discernible, a sense of limitlessness is produced by even the implied presence of limitations.<br /><br />As Mark So said of this work, "the field is always present;" it does not have to be created. It can be invoked with minimal gestures, such as interruptions--in this case, the sounds from the tape interrupt the sound of the room itself, thereby bringing it to awareness. Even a cut can elucidate the field. Akin to the "zips" in a Barnett Newman painting, the interruption provides a measure or a post against which to experience the expanse.<br /><br />This is negative time. Just as positive space in painting is complemented by negative space, So has found a way to use stripes of negative time to produce an awareness of the vastness of positive time. Put another way, by foregrounding the presence of nothing So produces an awareness of being.<br /><br />Other than the sounds themselves, the title is the only other information we have about the piece--<span style="font-style: italic;">END ROAD WORK / NO PARKING / BOB LOVES BETTY (2011) for Liz</span>. Just as the sound does, the title produces an image (an awareness, an idea) with great economy, by utilizing absence as a descriptive tool.<p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:10pt;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">***<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> The tape was created by So as a performance (or perhaps many performances) of his score <a href="http://uploaddownloadperform.net/MarkSo/NothingWhichCanBeUsedAsCloudsReappearAfterRains"><span style="font-style: italic;">nothing which can be used (As clouds reappear after rains) </span><i>[for Eileen Myles]</i></a>. All of the absences presented by the tape are present in the score as well. It is interesting that even without seeing the score, the listener can in a sense hear it in the work itself--as absence.<br /><br />Like the music it produces, the score is elegant and spare. Part of his ongoing Ashbery series, So places a pair of quotations from John Ashbery's poem, "The Thousand Islands", which double as both epigraph and performance instruction.<br /><blockquote>A promise of so much that is to come,<br />Extracted, accepted gladly<br />But within its narrow limits<br />No knowledge yet<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />But your<br />Idea is not continuing—a swift imperfect<br />Condensation of the indifference you feel<br />To be the worn fiber and bone which must surround you<br />For the permanence of what's already happened in you.</blockquote>The original poem--its language fragmented and decontextualized--is repurposed, swatches of Ashbery's words applied like torn paper in a collage: pieces of poem implying a whole.<br /><br />So's own instructions--"an impulsive recording of nothing—/brief and fleet/[maybe repeated"--are situated between and to the right of the two Ashbery passages. Visually, it is nearly in the interstice between them, turning the ellipsis itself into a tacit instruction. And there is one further elliptical collage: the title is pieced together from fragments. "nothing which can be used" completes the dangling "No knowledge yet". The logic of the score is constellar, nonlinear.<br /><br />Like the performance it is meant to prescribe, the score is a collection of ellipses, fragments and zips written with such economy that it makes a currency out of absence.<br /><p class="MsoNormal"></p>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-64033726861598584892011-08-01T08:09:00.000-07:002011-08-03T09:09:32.593-07:00Poetic Realty: The Films of Alexandra Cuesta<span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIvwTurgbkoI__OMRCWIPN4O1z88TgzuX1DiVTb-utEW-9iz7TtPs-QF8CEKpaHYQRt_GsOKsqXzcIRKEDNOTVhY0kXMroa5wfQQfLS_Y8WGYVPDAGGkxWl95EgIqDXwpdt0qelXwdgyU2/s1600/Cuesta_thunbnail.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 224px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIvwTurgbkoI__OMRCWIPN4O1z88TgzuX1DiVTb-utEW-9iz7TtPs-QF8CEKpaHYQRt_GsOKsqXzcIRKEDNOTVhY0kXMroa5wfQQfLS_Y8WGYVPDAGGkxWl95EgIqDXwpdt0qelXwdgyU2/s400/Cuesta_thunbnail.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635905516900926018" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">“The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born of a comparison, but from the bringing together of two more or less distant realities. The more distant and true the relationship between the two realities, the stronger the image will be and the more emotional power and poetic reality it will have.” —Pierre Reverdy. “L’Image,” <i>Nord-Sud</i></span></span><style>@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFooter, li.MsoFooter, div.MsoFooter { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; </style><span style="font-style: normal;font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" >. No.13. March, 1918.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />Diary-like, first-person footage made with a point-and-shoot camera chronicles a day in Beirut. Everyday occurrences—listening to music in a car, walking down the street—are thrown into sharp relief by a single cut. The explosion itself is not photographed, only its aftermath: a running crowd, billowing smoke, broken glass and, later, a television informing us that, in fact, this is the explosion that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The film ends with a truly simple image that, in context, is breathtaking: looking out the window of a small plane as it ascends, we see Beirut from a distance. The very ordinariness of the shot—its simple, even banal beauty—feels extraordinary in contrast to the events that precede it. It is literally transcendent.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />This is <a href="http://www.alexandracuesta.com/acuesta/home.html">Alexandra Cuesta</a>’s second film, <i>Beirut 2.14.05</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > (2008). Although it is in some ways the hardest of her three films to grasp, it is also the clearest illustration of a principle that runs through all her work. Cuesta cuts declarative images and concrete sounds together in such a way that they evoke an emotional response. Though her films are strictly observational, they construct a poetic reality that, while present in the camerawork itself, is largely accomplished in the editing.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />In her first film, <i>Recordando el Ayer</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > (2007), the images break cleanly from one composition to the next by way of hard cuts. Moving freely in and out of buildings, from shots of individuals to near-abstract depictions of light, with no overt motive besides the logic of feeling, a portrait of a neighborhood and its inhabitants comes slowly into focus. One senses that in this work, accuracy regarding a sense of place is paramount to any other documentary concerns.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />The sound, in contrast to the image, flows in a nearly unbroken wave from the beginning to the end of the film. As a listener, you begin to drift the way you might while listening to the freeway or the sea. Cuesta told me she wanted to make silence out of sound, something even quieter than silent film. In so doing, she reveals to us the beauty of things we thought we knew, things we ceased to notice because they are so common. It is the din of our everyday experience, foregrounded.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />The imagery in her films is equally attentive to what might otherwise go unnoticed: the play of light through the perforated steel of a bus pavilion or reflections falling from an elevated train. Likewise, she chooses to photograph in spaces that are underrepresented or otherwise overlooked: an Ecuadorian neighborhood in Queens, New York and a corridor of east/west space defined by public transportation in Los Angeles. Both films—<i>Recordando el Ayer</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > and </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><i>Piensa En Mi </i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" >(2009), respectively—illuminate and dignify their underprivileged subjects. Cuesta’s camera is respectful, at times even reverential; her portraits of individuals are intimate yet also reserved. There is an agreement, it seems, between subject and photographer—an unspoken bond whose presence is powerfully felt. </span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />Although these portraits are important, Cuesta’s cinema is not unique for its images of the underprivileged but for its evocation of the world in which they live, a world that is defined by a different sense of time. Failed systems and their attendant agony run parallel to the time that the affluent take for granted. Like the presence of the third-world within the first, interminable waiting and dysfunctional services coexist with the comparative instantaneity of the automobile, the internet and the iPhone. Cuesta’s strategy for her third film, <i>Piensa En Mi</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" >, makes this clear. The “space” she chooses to photograph is not a neighborhood, but a bus line running east to west and back again. The bus moves through the upper-class neighborhoods of western Los Angeles, but remains separate: two spaces coexisting without commingling.</span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />Space, or our experience of it, is defined by our relationship to time. The pedestrian and the bus-rider alike live in another reality defined by waiting. If you find yourself in the flats of Los Angeles—standing in the road, waiting for the bus’ silhouette to crest the horizon, able to see for more than a mile—you are in time, not moving through it. Cuesta’s films conjure the dream-like reality of just such a moment that stretches into the distance, where time and space are one. Her films are portraits of places where you can feel time. And so, for all of its documentary qualities, Cuesta’s work is eerily elusive—the effect of the films closer to reverie than reportage. Watching <i>Piensa En Mi</i></span><span style="font-style: normal;font-size:100%;" > is like daydreaming while looking out the bus window—at once, near and far, objective and abstract. </span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="georgia"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />Cuesta uses a cinematic form free from the strictures of description, where the cuts produce feeling in lieu of continuity. Mark Rothko once remarked that “feelings have different weights”; in Cuesta’s editing, the relative weight of one shot collides with the lightness of the next to produce not an idea, but an emotion. Cutting from a close-up to a wide open space, from a detail of light to a long shot, the contrast creates an opening</span><span style="font-size:100%;">—</span><span style="font-size:100%;">and in the interstice, a feeling can form. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: georgia;"> </p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />The differential between the two shots is generative: two realities, distant and true, coalescing in an image. Therein lies the strength, emotional power and poetic reality of these films.</span>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-38649218393740614892010-12-06T08:18:00.000-08:002010-12-10T12:06:27.978-08:00Tashi Wada: Alignment<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdBbOXe0yNIIjsco0QKedqlcTHd91yL758Q_Gf49ns9umffc8A4TitzW_Zo1DmHAuS-LAcxfH94XM7CD9ClG2aZ9UCbAL5NndX6jj_TiZmO4jRBhEJaa6om8R60KhFi8Gyqxt32XYGDVL/s1600/tashiwadaalignmentfront.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 398px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdBbOXe0yNIIjsco0QKedqlcTHd91yL758Q_Gf49ns9umffc8A4TitzW_Zo1DmHAuS-LAcxfH94XM7CD9ClG2aZ9UCbAL5NndX6jj_TiZmO4jRBhEJaa6om8R60KhFi8Gyqxt32XYGDVL/s400/tashiwadaalignmentfront.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548307287998772642" border="0" /></a>Tashi Wada’s greatest asset as a composer is his clarity. His best compositions are almost entirely transparent, so that even if you are unfamiliar with theories of just intonation or the history of experimental music composition, you can often perceive the shape and direction of a Wada piece from its inception. <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment</span>, Wada’s first LP, is no exception. There is a directness to its form that allows one to apprehend its shape in time almost immediately.<br /><br />James Tenney—a clear influence on Wada even more than La Monte Young or Tony Conrad—once said that in his own music you knew where it was going even if you didn’t know what it would sound like when you got there. This could be a description of <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment</span> itself, an 8 violin canon in just intonation whose movements through a dense, descending scale create a clear, compelling shape in time with a full sound that is at once organic and extraordinary. <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment</span> presents a tonal richness and complexity unlike any available to more traditionally tempered compositions. The scale structures the piece and the structure is the piece itself.<br /><br />The violins move sequentially through the first 128 pitches of the overtone series, transposed into a single octave. The result is a movement through harmony and dissonance that speaks to the physicality of sound—the music becomes audibly tighter, more tense, as the tiered movements through the scale cause certain frequencies to pull upon one another. It also relies upon and draws attention to the ability of the mind to perceive several planes of information simultaneously, for as the canon progresses, certain tones come into alignment with one another, while others simultaneously phase into dissonance, harmonies and their opposite sounding at the same time, existing in parallel and moving past one another as though on separate tracks.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjboqt7esAVftHvRcIoU5ISe7WLfbmDgXiz6fn4e-crSa1fPKUprttk25UNIw8Ghans24YmILu2njxA5F9jmNRA24esAQfvmbZojzKETNRDodjbqZS8K1Q7hXEfFogGyOdr4DANPXl335kc/s1600/tashiwadaalignmentback.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 397px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjboqt7esAVftHvRcIoU5ISe7WLfbmDgXiz6fn4e-crSa1fPKUprttk25UNIw8Ghans24YmILu2njxA5F9jmNRA24esAQfvmbZojzKETNRDodjbqZS8K1Q7hXEfFogGyOdr4DANPXl335kc/s400/tashiwadaalignmentback.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548307443294016770" border="0" /></a><br />As an object, the record itself is conceptually neat. The sides of the record, “Direct” and “Retrograde,” are inverse to one another and the act of flipping the record essentially reverses the action of the 8 violins, making them move out of the alignment they had only recently attained. The end of each side suggests the beginning of the next—a musical ouraboros both infinite and already complete. Though the recordings are essentially the same—only their ordering is different—the effect is astonishingly dissimilar, a study in the pyscho-sonic effect of ascending versus descending tones. What’s more, mastered at 45 rpm, it is essentially two records in one: for faithful reproduction it should be played at 45, but 33⅓ offers another, extended and altogether different listening experience.<br /><br />Any writing on <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment</span> would be incomplete without ample praise for Marc Sabat’s impeccable performance. Sabat is one of the foremost performers of experimental music in the 21st century; his renditions of Morton Feldman and James Tenney have made him legendary in the experimental music community. His mastery of microtonal violin music is in full evidence on <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment</span>, where he plays all 8 parts. Sabat’s control, stability and directness are integral to the dry, precise warmth of the recording, the effect of the sound inseparable from his performance.<br /><br />“Music should be as direct as possible,” Wada once told me. Clarity of composition, fullness of sound and the directness of effect make <span style="font-style: italic;">Alignment </span>as convincing a sonic argument for this dictum as one could ever imagine.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-39979221469909330452010-10-30T09:47:00.000-07:002010-10-30T09:55:06.954-07:00Sonic Youth: HalloweenClick <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpH-LVah8Sk&feature=player_embedded">here</a> for a video of Sonic Youth's ethereal masterpiece. Happy Halloween.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-47924166643548393542010-10-16T09:28:00.000-07:002012-12-16T20:49:20.218-08:00Uncommon Knowledge: Mark So’s Text ScoresMark So’s music comes out of a tradition, if it can be called that, of experimental music that sees the essential instability of words on a page as fertile soil in which to cultivate indeterminacy. This strategy of writing music with text, rather than traditional notation, leaves ample room for interpretation on the part of the performer. In fact, interpretation—usually an abstract concept somewhat anterior to the music itself—is absolutely integral to the performance of a text score. Music written with words does not end with interpretation; it begins with it. <br />
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Common knowledge tells us that a traditionally notated score is an ideal form to which every performance aspires. The interpretation of the text, in this case notes on a page, by the performer is a regrettable, if unavoidable consequence of the written notation turning into sound. The text, then, is sacred and the sound profane. Indeterminate text scores avoid this distinction between sacred and profane, taking the composition out of the realm of ideal forms and into the real by potentializing it, that is, by making it subject to the conditions under which it will be performed. This includes, but is not limited to, the will of the performer and of the listener. In effect, when speaking about the performance of an indeterminate text score, it is not entirely accurate to use the word interpretation anymore. Performing an indeterminate text score is not a simple act of reading, it is a creative act in and of itself. In a sense, the performer writes the text that will live in the world (the performance) as they read the text that lives on the page (the score). <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSmzzVGs61jw9sV_4A46Q7oSn1tsflaOBrrPCH-QW2QmFAsSx6VOxDUwyz03H1l_zTf8CnqbK8iOA_EnwG47IpVHmFKcnDWVIJsZSlAxM1A4lbwVhBII4f6Uwznmvd6HwoptZK2-fKuYOQ/s1600/IMG_0350.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528684502629208722" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSmzzVGs61jw9sV_4A46Q7oSn1tsflaOBrrPCH-QW2QmFAsSx6VOxDUwyz03H1l_zTf8CnqbK8iOA_EnwG47IpVHmFKcnDWVIJsZSlAxM1A4lbwVhBII4f6Uwznmvd6HwoptZK2-fKuYOQ/s400/IMG_0350.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 267px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 400px;" /></a>The difference between the two forms of notation is the difference between potential and potentiality. The traditionally notated score exists before it is performed: it is potential music on the page that becomes actual by being performed. The music that the text score makes possible, on the other hand, does not exist before it is performed: <span style="font-style: italic;">it can exist or not exist</span> and therefore has potentiality. It has the ability to be music, which means it could also not be music. The text score can remain not-music, whereas the traditional score is already music; <span style="font-style: italic;">it cannot be or not be</span> and therefore does not have potentiality. <br />
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So’s music has this ability to be or not be. He is certainly not alone in this endeavor—in fact, he told me he is often accused of borrowing too heavily from other composers—but over the course of a few years and a few hundred pieces (he is prolific beyond compare), he has aggressively pursued a line of inquiry only superficially similar to the others. Many of So’s influences have a spare style that makes use of ample silences and denies ornamentation. Like an international style building, the elegant lines of the structure are all the more visible because of its transparency. So’s music often goes beyond even this spare aesthetic, the lines of the music stretched so thin as to almost drift away. <br />
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To borrow an idea from Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s <span style="font-style: italic;">A Thousand Plateaus</span>, So creates rhizomes—in this case, listening situations that are non-hierarchical—often by distorting an extant strategy to the point that it is transformed. Speaking of Glenn Gould, Deleuze and Guattari write, “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines. When Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate.”[1] Just as Gould can stretch a score over a half-tempo (as in his performance of Schoernberg) or turn it into lines by playing it twice as fast (his Bach), So turns the previous composers’ structures into lines by stretching their strategies. In So’s hands, an otherwise stable structure can be stretched to the limit—beyond the limit—until it fundamentally transforms, like copper spun into cobwebs. <br />
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And this is audible in the music itself: for there are not just sounds and silences, the sounds are stretched over the silence, just barely there. They do not supercede the silence; they are parallel to it, moving along with it. And at times, impossibly, even the silence itself can be stretched too thin. The piece breaks and you are simply, profoundly in the room or in the environment. The tightrope snaps and you can no longer pretend to float above or beyond the world. There are often moments of great beauty in a So piece, but there are never moments of transcendence. As a listener, you are ineluctably in the present, wrestling with it. <br />
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Many of Mark So’s recent works derive from his insights while reading the poetry of John Ashbery. An Ashbery poem often elides logic while slipping gracefully between the erudite and the vernacular. In the slippage, an otherwise unattainable, unsayable truth can appear. In his few verbal statements on his work, Willem de Kooning often remarked on the importance of glimpsing and that his paintings were attempts to fix the act of a glimpse—in other words, to destabilize the static object of a painting by putting time back into it. He achieved this by covering and recovering the canvas quickly, scraping it down at the end of each day and starting from the traces, the stains, on the next. So’s scores, slippery as soap on vellum, also allow for this kind of glimpsing, but it is an aural/intellectual glimpsing as opposed to a visual/visceral one.[2] And So’s music destabilizes static perception; it is not enough to hear, not even enough to hear silence, you must begin to hear hearing, to glimpse your own glimpse, to experience yourself experiencing something, even if only for a moment. Sounds, silences and your experience of them overlap and interpenetrate.[3]<br />
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But this interpenetration is not harmonious; it is disjoint. John Cage made it his project to reveal that music could be any sounds in any order. This involves an equivalence—one thing is like another—that negates value judgment. So goes further: any sounds in any order, but instead of an equivalence between them, there is a radical disparity. Cage famously made an enemy of harmony, but in a sense, he used silence in all of his pieces after <span style="font-style: italic;">4’33”</span> as a kind of harmony—the sounds of the environment always “fit” inside a Cage piece. In So, the silences are dissonant. There are layers of silence and they are in contrast if not outright contest. <br />
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This involves a level of attunement on the part of the listener that few works require of their audience. One is keenly aware that one is uncomfortable, and the discomfort brings you closer to the world. Rather than hearing a cliché, even a clichéd silence, you actually hear. You begin to perceive hearing itself.<br />
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This is not about ascending to a higher level or attaining a reality that is beyond illusion. So’s music is all surface, but it is deeply involved with the surface. For the surface itself, his music reveals to its listener, is the given world. To look beyond the surface is already to be involved in a kind of romance, a transcendentalist game. For So, reality is not to be reached or attained; it is appearance. Reality is what appears during the performance. <br />
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Speaking of So’s music in terms of reality makes it sound heavy, but it is the opposite; it is gossamer. It is weightless. So’s music is a transparent skin stretched over the surface of the real. Like a stocking with a run in it, it reveals both skins as skin and as such, is both attractive and repellent, illusion and disillusion at once. The skins themselves are several—layers of tissue covering over layers of tissue ad infinitum. There is always something more that is out of sight, but it too is just tissue. There is no realer real, only layers upon layers of paper thin densities to be pulled apart until they drift away—layers of tissue covering the body of the world, itself no more than another accumulation of tissue. <br />
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Achieving the heightened attention required to discern these tissues of sound and silence from one another is a voluntary act on the part of the listener. The music presents the situation, but it does not “induce” this or that state of consciousness. It is not meditation. It is radical freedom: pure potentiality. The listener is presented with the choice to hear nothing or to hear hearing itself. She may choose not to hear at all (“there’s nothing happening”), or hear her ability to hear. So creates this situation out of tissue thin layers: taut, porous skins all stretched over one another at once and over time.<br />
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[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Thousand Plateaus</span>, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 8.<br />
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[2] de Kooning’s famous dictum “Paint so fast you can’t think” is a strategy for fixing the glimpse. So writes quickly as well, but it is not explosive. It is slippery without losing a certain precision and is more akin to Ashbery than de Kooning in this way. So’s music is not intellectual in the sense that it is not meant, first and foremost, to be heard; it is sensual, it is thinking through the senses. We might say, “Listen so slow you can’t think.” <br />
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[3] “…even with a thought/ The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,/As water is in water.” William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, (Barnes and Noble: New York) 1187.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">The image is from an ongoing</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> performance of Mark So's </span>The Casual Drift. <span style="font-style: italic;">It may be seen by appointment.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Email: mbrookshire [at] gmail.com</span>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-92046296142059776972010-09-16T08:03:00.000-07:002010-09-16T08:05:53.165-07:00poetry and truth 2"Oh, Death" by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Patton">Charlie Patton</a> in 1934:<br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ui92SXehjjM?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ui92SXehjjM?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-733703537795116002010-09-14T02:43:00.000-07:002010-09-16T08:07:18.722-07:00poetry and truth"The art of the superior artist is to restore, by means of conscious operations, the integrity of sensuality and the emotional power of things."<br /><br />(A quote on a <a href="http://joshuasanchez.net/?p=1014">poster</a> I saw in Toronto attributed to John Cassavetes; further investigation revealed it is actually from <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=3vWuM3tKsR4C&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=%22The+art+of+the+superior+artist+is+to+restore,+by+means+of+conscious+operations,+the+integrity+of+sensuality+and+the+emotional+power+of+things&source=bl&ots=AlKDD4V_YJ&sig=KKl8S9Vc0j9e14vyqUfDJRZ8vh8&hl=en&ei=MkSPTPjjIdCbnwfumfjTDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20art%20of%20the%20superior%20artist%20is%20to%20restore%2C%20by%20means%20of%20conscious%20operations%2C%20the%20integrity%20of%20sensuality%20and%20the%20emotional%20power%20of%20things&f=false">Valery</a>. Either way, it's damn fine.)Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-70643365928449166132010-08-29T08:50:00.000-07:002022-05-04T11:08:00.756-07:00Mark So Appreciations IV<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="469" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/690070055?h=cab95d0bd2" width="640"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/690070055">Performing marmarth (2010)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/dickybahto">Dicky Bahto</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Infinite flexibility would be a liability in an indeterminate score. For, as Robert Smithson once said, "all legitimate art deals with limits. Fraudulent art feels that it has no limits. The trick is to locate those illusive limits." The score is a dialectic: it is freedom created by the imposition of limits; infinity must be delimited to be infinite. And just as there are different orders of infinity for numbers, so it is with freedom itself. Mark So's scores represent a very special kind of freedom.
Openness in the score is visible/sensible as openness in the performance. This is not formlessness, but rather <span style="font-style: italic;">permeability as a form</span>. Porousness is the word that most often comes to mind when thinking of So's music. So writes the holes that make the music. Carl Andre once said, "a thing is a hole in a thing that it is not." And this is true; Smithson's <a href="http://www.robertsmithson.com/sculpture/nonsite_franklin_280.htm">non-sites</a> prove it. But this is dialectical: <span style="font-style: italic;">a is not non-a</span>. So writes holes within holes: <span style="font-style: italic;">N</span>-dimensional porousness. <span style="font-style: italic;">a is non-a is not a is not.</span>
So's score <a href="https://marksoscores.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/marmarth.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;">marmarth</span></a> is a good example. Most of the instructions are parenthetical, the only seemingly "solid" one being: "the Little Missouri River." And, both as an object and an instruction, it is itself fluid, unstable, mercurial while at the same time modest and specific--it is both "little" and located. The music, then, tends towards landscape, but the personalized landscape of a Polaroid, not a panorama.
So writes this muted, modest mutability so deeply and with such economy that the performance itself need not even be "musical" in the traditional sense for us to sense the openness in the form. The score imposes limits--the Little Missouri, not the Mississippi--but there is an order of infinitude within those limits. One can now have a musical experience that does not necessarily come out as music, that is, not necessarily as sound. Rick Bahto has made an extraordinary performance of <span style="font-style: italic;">marmarth</span> on super-8 film. The holes are there; the score is in tact. The music is open and beautiful and subtle as wind in the cottonwoods.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-73867821431946584362010-06-29T06:44:00.000-07:002010-06-29T11:33:42.364-07:00Mark So Appreciations III"I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the kind of eyes that we have. We’re always going to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It’s a consequence of what we are as organisms. Painting and drawing cannot disappear from serious art, cannot 'die,' as they say. They can go through all of the complex changes and developments that they have gone through because they are permanent. And therefore drawing is a kind of touchstone for all pictorial art, regardless, because it won’t and can’t be replaced with anything else. Painting as a medium and form can't change very much. So that makes it very interesting and very open too. If it were not so simple and flexible and beautiful, it would be changing technologically, but it’s too right just as it is to change, and so, it’s going to stay there. I’m very involved with painting, always have been and always will be, not particularly because I want to paint, but because it is the most sophisticated, ancient practice.<strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">" -- <a href="http://www.museomagazine.com/issue-0/jeff-wall">Jeff Wall</a><br /><br />And we will always have music, performed by people in front of other people, but it may not sound like music, it may not <span style="font-style: italic;">look</span> like music. But it will <span style="font-style: italic;">be</span> music because of its form and because of its effect. Music asks us to use our ears and our body differently than when we speak, when we read or when we watch a film. Music puts our ears in our body and allows sound to open directly onto the body, bypassing the verbal mechanisms in our brain--or if not bypassing, than amplifying them to the extent that they undergo a fundamental transformation. This is why, for instance, Bob Dylan's lyrics on a page are less powerful than they are in his songs. On the page they are only words, but as music, they are words that open onto the body.<br /><br /><object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8340745&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1"><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8340745&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" width="400"></embed></object><br /><br />Poetry is language approaching music, but there is a limit. And like a mathematical limit, it can be approached infinitely, but it cannot be surpassed. If it is too musical, it is not poetry. But what is the limit for music? Rhythm is not a limit. Harmony is not a limit. Even the intentional making of sounds is not a limit.<br /><br />Music is a listening situation, a situation where we listen, even to words, with our bodies. How far can that situation be extended? Can we listen with our eyes?<br /><br />I believe that in <a href="http://uploaddownloadperform.net/MarkSo/TheCasualDrift">some of his newest pieces</a>, Mark So is asking us to listen with our eyes. He is writing music, but it doesn't look like music. Just as painting, for Wall, is the only thing stable enough to register the changes of history without transforming as a medium, So's music is the only thing stable enough to register his radical changes. Mark So does not make installations or sound sculptures or happenings or any other hybrid art; he makes music. That is, he creates listening situations by having people perform in front of other people at an appointed time for a certain duration, etc. But the performance may not be the making of sounds, the performance may be a directing of attention to sound that is present, or to light or to sound and then light, sound and then sound--a stratification of perception, a musical experience of being.<br /><br />"The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is not an illustration of any system of philosophy." -- Sol LeWitt, in "<a href="http://www.tufts.edu/programs/mma/fah188/sol_lewitt/paragraphs%20on%20conceptual%20art.htm">paragraphs on conceptual art</a>"<br /></span></strong>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-78073364749613048032010-06-21T20:56:00.000-07:002010-06-29T07:26:26.534-07:00Mark So Appreciations II"I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness, and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful." -- <a href="http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/nauman/#">Bruce Nauman</a><br /><br />"between transparency and white opacity there exists an infinite number of degrees of cloudiness... One could call white the fortuitously opaque flash of pure transparency." -- Goethe,<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=TnBUoSwGsGsC&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=white+opacities+deleuze+cinema+I&source=bl&ots=SzUd2j_zIO&sig=RMwC0eOFDo7FO3IXIELwikA_uLQ&hl=en&ei=LzggTJD_LYronQes0cFu&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false"> </a><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=TnBUoSwGsGsC&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=white+opacities+deleuze+cinema+I&source=bl&ots=SzUd2j_zIO&sig=RMwC0eOFDo7FO3IXIELwikA_uLQ&hl=en&ei=LzggTJD_LYronQes0cFu&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">as quoted in Gilles Deleuze</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cinema I</span>, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986) 95.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-5355818313939124442010-06-07T08:57:00.001-07:002010-06-13T08:56:21.378-07:00Mark So AppreciationsI would like to write about <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/rebellion/mark_so/">Mark So</a>'s music, but I’m not sure how to do it. I have written and rewritten many things over the past two weeks, trying to find a final form for an essay I would like to give to him as a sort of gift, an appreciation. Mark's music is important to me, and I would like to tell other people about it, to start a conversation about what it does and how it might be doing it. I want to try to understand it without diminishing it. I want to elucidate my appreciation of what I have come to realize is an enormous accomplishment without closing the window on further thought.<br /><br />But like a backwards film of foot steps in the sand, I keep picking up my traces as I go. I am writing, rewriting and unwriting my appreciations and have little to show for it—and less to give to Mark.<br /><br />So, instead of a finished essay, I would like to present my appreciations as they evolve, to continue to change them but leave a trace of my meanderings as I wander through the gossamer labyrinth that is Mark So's music.<br /><br />Below is a letter that I wrote to Mark which I am putting here with his permission. It is the beginning of my thinking about his compositions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj08-1L6oJWHATFHDYcfdpwPvMqCejn4uevwUVzk3Elf43pMyFU5rzm9QcY0dQDqfLJYARnJm4c5IhaE4-KCExXdhPXHnIrnWpCBKYY8DMTZZ_jOlGhz5G3Ec2QeYenvZ1b1h9dRQ_kUyYa/s1600/lettertomarkso_1.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 290px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj08-1L6oJWHATFHDYcfdpwPvMqCejn4uevwUVzk3Elf43pMyFU5rzm9QcY0dQDqfLJYARnJm4c5IhaE4-KCExXdhPXHnIrnWpCBKYY8DMTZZ_jOlGhz5G3Ec2QeYenvZ1b1h9dRQ_kUyYa/s400/lettertomarkso_1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482286773153461378" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju51TDFe2OsEOuN_YCBsGy0m3GlIUObDOwLovrXGwN6Somz00lXoWGFHTxusUuHLuC3JhGPs_9LS4-qyOR7a0qpqfSBz9xcZ_21j-bPNWDOsF4Q98T-4fk_IrA99g0a-RoFRjACK469IjE/s1600/lettertomarkso_2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 291px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju51TDFe2OsEOuN_YCBsGy0m3GlIUObDOwLovrXGwN6Somz00lXoWGFHTxusUuHLuC3JhGPs_9LS4-qyOR7a0qpqfSBz9xcZ_21j-bPNWDOsF4Q98T-4fk_IrA99g0a-RoFRjACK469IjE/s400/lettertomarkso_2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482287214758939986" border="0" /></a>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-39311737096546668142010-05-30T12:48:00.000-07:002010-05-30T12:52:53.468-07:00Wasn't Born to FollowFor Dennis Hopper, who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30hopper.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fobituaries%2Findex.jsonp">died</a> on Saturday:<br /><br /><object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uygNtTB2Urc&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uygNtTB2Urc&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="640"></embed></object>Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-59743921735822230382010-05-06T13:11:00.000-07:002010-05-06T20:16:24.906-07:00William Lubtchansky<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/F6_K2NXLyFs&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/F6_K2NXLyFs&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />Arguably the greatest living cinematographer, who worked with Jacques Rivette, Straub/Huillet, Godard, Claude Lanzmann, and many more, William Lubtchansky has died at age 72. It's impossible to overlook the particularities of his work: he never shot a project too commercial and he was extremely adaptive. The inky black and white images for Philippe Garrel's <i>Regular Lovers</i> or Straub/Huillet's <i>Class Relations</i>; the lush, sun-baked color of Godard's <i>Nouvelle Vague</i>; the subtle, somber, desaturated <i>Shoah</i>; the theatrical, surrealist, and modernist touch to each of his collaborations with Rivette: Every shift to each maker distinct and elastic. Entirely the work of an author, facilitating the vision of his collaborators. <br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-QKEGGfQgu4&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-QKEGGfQgu4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="400" height="220"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11531371&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11531371&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="220"></embed></object><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/11531371">Tracking shot from Noroît</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1024086">Film Brain</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p><br /><br />Garrel <a href="http://www.theauteurs.com/cast_members/785">stated</a> that "we (William Lubtchansky) worked together like musicians, really: we had dialogues, like a jazz band that keeps improvising on what had been written. Whoever felt like playing, played first." This type of collaboration is all but lost in cinema. An immense loss of an idiosyncratic, irreplaceable figure. <br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3I0UU4JKxl8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3I0UU4JKxl8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lN7Brp11e28&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lN7Brp11e28&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>Michael Liebermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02584675617734748892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-75765924332674667862010-05-02T19:52:00.000-07:002010-05-15T23:47:18.354-07:00Los Angeles In Theory and PracticeMy <a href="http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/68/68LAplaysitself.php">essay on Thom Andersen's <span style="font-style: italic;">Los Angeles Plays Itself</span></a> is now online, in the May issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576365865963257809.post-49586218730134565982010-04-12T11:59:00.000-07:002010-05-04T15:10:16.968-07:00Maggie's Partially Buried Wood Farm<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzytFir2uSJ-MDLvX1feFSjkjR-uBnz-zGw9Nbxi6ZuDRdHTFv0asre_o1uv4VrEHnu8BiFHgGJ-ADxbWFBvgcyppy6cSWVHH-oDXeeRtDWDXSFBWatrP2jqmdiShqyIdFRcWbmxTpLqSG/s1600/GreenPartiallyBuriedWoodshedHand.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 327px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzytFir2uSJ-MDLvX1feFSjkjR-uBnz-zGw9Nbxi6ZuDRdHTFv0asre_o1uv4VrEHnu8BiFHgGJ-ADxbWFBvgcyppy6cSWVHH-oDXeeRtDWDXSFBWatrP2jqmdiShqyIdFRcWbmxTpLqSG/s400/GreenPartiallyBuriedWoodshedHand.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467539828426127874" border="0" /></a><br />Image: from Part One of <span style="font-style: italic;">Partially Buried in Three Parts</span>, by Renee Green, courtesy Renee Green<br /><br />"'History is thorough, and passes through many stages when she carries a worn-out form to burial. The last stage of a world-historical form is its <span style="font-style: italic;">comedy</span>. The gods of Greece, who had already been mortally wounded in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Prometheus Bound</span> of Aeschylus, had to yet die again--this time a comic death--in the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history follow this course? So that mankind may take leave of its past <span style="font-style: italic;">gaily</span>.' Karl Marx <span style="font-style: italic;">Der historiche Materialismus: Die Fruhschriften</span>, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig), vol. 1, pp. 268 ("Zur Kritik der Hegelschen <span style="font-style: italic;">Rechtsphilosophie</span>"). Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy." Walter Benjamin. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tdM9Hn7pzrsC&lpg=PT471&ots=XKbnJLGL8K&dq=marx%20benjamin%20arcades%20comedy&pg=PT470#v=onepage&q&f=false"><span style="font-style: italic;">Arcades Project</span></a>. [N5, a2] trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin, 1999.<br /><br />Bob Dylan is the death of Marxism as comedy.<br /><br /><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xcJVe8OF4sM&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xcJVe8OF4sM&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="480"></embed></object><br /><br />"But you see, the Dadaists, they're setting up their own religion. They think that everything's corrupted by commercialism and industry and bourgeois attitudes. I think it's time that we realize that there's no point in trying to transcend those realms. Industry, commercialism and the bourgeois are very much with us. This whole notion of trying to form a cult that transcends all this strikes me as a kind of religion-in-drag, you might say. I'm just bored with it, frankly. I think it's a desperate attempt. And then they try to transcend their own movements and all this sort of thing. So there's this kind of latent spiritualism at work in just about all of modernism. Each sect is claiming a higher transcendence, and they're all warring with each other in some sort of world. The art world is a world alienated from the larger world because it disdains its own work. There's this guilt even about being an artist. At the bottom, I see Duchamp basically as a kind of priest of a certain sort, who's turning urinals into baptismal fonts... "<br /><br />...<br /><br />"Communism doesn't interest me. Eventually China will become bourgeois."<br /><br />--Robert Smithson in conversation with Moira Roth, 1973<br /><br />Roth, Moira. "An Interview with Robert Smithson." <span style="font-style: italic;">Robert Smithson</span>. Eds. Butler, Cornelia and Tsai, Eugenie. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.Madison Brookshirehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01222288866738253272noreply@blogger.com0