For All Mankind

To celebrate the re-release on dvd of the documentary For All Mankind the Celluloid Liberation Front proudly welcomes a new collaborator to the blog, Colonel Muammar Gheddafi with his short story 'The Suicide of the Astronaut'.

"The suspicion dawned that Outer Space might be - dare one say it - boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn't very much to do there"

JG Ballard in One Dull Step For Man

After man had traveled in outer space so much that he had become overcome by dizziness, after government budgets could no longer support expensive space programs, after man landed on the moon and found nothing, after the two astronauts exposed the wild speculations of scientists concerning the existence of seas and oceans on the moon's surface and the arrogant "Great Powers" competed over owning and naming them, almost coming into conflict over dividing the moon's wealth - especially marine resources - and after approaching the members of the solar system, taking their pictures and despairing of ever finding or being able to sustain life, man returned to the earth, dizzy, nauseous, and fearing doom. In fact, it was simply the case that earth is the only known land, unique, a source of life. Life means water and food; the earth is the only place that provides us with these. The only true needs are bread, dates, milk, meat, and water. The only air necessary for life is that which surrounds the earth. And so, man returned to the earth from his adventure in outer space.

The astronaut removed his space suit and donned an ordinary one, so that he could resume his life upon the ground, having ended his mission in space. He began to look for earth-based work. He entered a carpenter's shop, but could not handle such simple tasks, since they were outside his area of specialization. The same went for his efforts at turnery, iron working, construction, and plumbing. He tried painting and white-washing as well, but had not studied drawing, or music, or knitting, since these were quite unconnected to his field of specialization. He left the industrial city scorned, a banished one (or, "rejected", a reference to Quaran, Sura 7, verse 18), and went to the countryside. He began to look for agricultural work, so that he could support himself and his family. A peasant asked him, "Do you know anything about tilling the good earth, son?" By asking this question, he was in fact asking if the astronaut liked farming.

The astronaut replied, "The earth's attraction decreases the higher we go, and our weight becomes gradually less until we reach the point of weightlessness. Then, we have freed ourselves of the earth's gravity, and eventually reach the gravitation of another planet, and our weight increases...and so forth and so on... I hope that I have answered your question."


The peasant looked as though he did not understand, as if he required further explanation. The astronaut went on, providing additional information, in the hope that he would gain employment on the land from the simple peasant.

"The earth's size is about 1,320 times less of that of Jupiter, while 12 earth-years equal one year on Jupiter. The red spot of Jupiter is big enough to contain the earth at its centre, while Saturn is 744 times bigger than Earth. Even so, Earth's mass is only 95 times less than that of Saturn. The earth's diameter is about 50 times greater than the moon's, while its size is about 80 times greater. The earth's gravity is six times greater than the moon's. The earth is about 150 million kilometres distant from the sun, whose light takes eight minutes to reach us, travelling at a speed of 300,000 kilometres a minute. The earth's size is about 1,303,800 time less than the sun, while its mass is about 332,958 times less. Its density is approximately 30 times less than the sun's while the earth is the third most distant body from the sun. Mercury is the closest planet, followed by Venus, and then the earth. Venus is about 42 million kilometres from the earth, while the earth is about 400,000 kilometres from the moon. If you went by car, travelling 100 kilometres per hour, you would reach the moon in 146 days. If you did not have a car, and went by foot, you would arrive in eight years and 100 days. I think that answers your question. As you can see, I have complete knowledge about the earth." When he said "earth", the peasant awoke and closed his mouth, which had been open throughout the astronaut's journey from planet to planet, which began upon earth and finally returned there. The peasant had understood nothing. In fact, he had become dizzy; he felt as if he had returned from a trip into space, throughout the entire solar system, but without any result for his farm. The distance that concerned him was that between one tree and another, and not between the earth and Jupiter. The weight that concerned him was the produce from his farm, and not of Mercury.

Perhaps he felt sorry for the poor astronaut, and left him. The astronaut then committed suicide, after he gave up on being able to find work on the ground that could sustain him.

Mullholland Drive (pt. 2)

CHAPTER I

AT THE CLUB SILENCIO (PART 1)
BETTY AND RITA,
THE UNBEARABLE MULTIPLE ATTRIBUTES
OF THE IMMANENT SINGULARITY

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil
F. Nietzsche

Desire is the actual essence of man
B. Spinoza

As we shall see, affirmation is itself essentially multiple and pluralist
G. Deleuze

‘No hay banda, there is no band, il n’y a pas d’orchestre… This is all a tape recording… No hay banda and yet, we hear the band’ shouts out loud Bondar from the stage of the Club Silencio in one of the most unforgettable and meaningful scenes of the film. Here, in the Club Silencio, are formulated at their best the two main concepts on which the idea of flux is grounded, as proposed by Heraclitus: the negation of duality and the negation of being.


In the first part of the film, Betty and Rita are presented as two very different and complementary girls: Betty as the blonde, solar, naïve, optimistic, wannabe actress, and Rita as the brunette, dark, mysterious, haunted by gangsters, Hollywood celebrity. They are two different persons or, at least, two different characters in the story of the film. However, they are ready to become one, to deny duality. As two different persons in their (cinematic) life, Betty and Rita initially meet each other, then get to know each other, and finally need each other and desire each other. Then, by means of their desire for each other, they cease to be two different persons and become two equal desiring-machines. Their desire, their joyful will to power, is what constitutes them as being desiring-machines . Their desire is therefore the constituent part of the film and, as it will be hereinafter evaluated, what enables them (and the film) to overcome duality and what constitutes them (and the film) as being singular multiplicities: the multiple attributes of the open Whole.

Indeed, their desire brings the two women to have sex. Here, they affirm the first negation of a primary duality, that of the difference between man and woman. In sex, in desire, in the will to power, and in particular in sex between two women, Mulholland Drive undermines the duality at the core of the patriarchal family, the duality of the sexes.

‘Because the synthesis constitutes local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering – men with women, women with men – into relations of production of desire that overturn the static order of the sexes’.

This negation of the duality is the first step towards the creation of the immanent singular multiplicities, one of the most striking and ambitious philosophical concepts produced by Mulholland Drive. With sex, Betty and Rita deny duality. With sex Betty and Rita declare the joyful power of the immanent singular multiplicities. Because:

‘Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as hundred thousand.’

As a matter of fact, in the same night, after having made love, Betty and Rita get even closer in terms of cinematic and aesthetic representation. Firstly, Rita dresses a blonde wig, becoming thus look-alike to Betty. Then, the two girls get on a cab and go to the Club Silencio. (Because they have to go there, they feel it, they want it. They desire it.) It is here, on the stalls of the theatre of the Club Silencio, witnessing the struggling singing performance of Rebecca Del Rio, that Rita and Betty - thanks also to Mary Sweeney’s masterful editing, that in a continuous play of alternations, superimpositions and dissolves draws up the two girls until the point of blending them in one – deny duality and become one girl. The one and the many girl.


The negation of duality, the philosophical condition for the creation of the plane of immanence, where the multiple attributes of the singularity are, has always been a recurrent theme in Lynch filmography. Since Blue Velvet , where Lumberton, the American small town that is the very protagonist of the film, is portrayed in being at the same time a sunny and morally just heaven and a dark and morally evil hell. On one side, at the beginning and at the end of the movie (therefore at the same time) Lumberton is a happy family reunion under a bright blue sky, some glowing red roses next to a shiny white picket fence, a waving fire-fighter riding down the street on a red fire engine with a Disney-like Dalmatian by its side. On the other side, half way through the movie (therefore at the beginning and at the end as well) Lumberton is a Dantean hell, a decadent portray of bizarre sex - under the guise of sadomasochistic and para-incestuous performances – a mass of violence, an abuse of drugs and the hiding place for the kidnapping of a little boy. The two sides of the small town appear to be different and complementary, like Betty and Rita. However, once more by the aesthetic means of the mise en scene, it is manifest that Lumberton is one, and thus many.


The sunny Lumberton, the depiction of the fantasy of the American Dream, is constantly haunted by two different (and thus equal) stains: at the beginning of the movie, hidden in the green shiny grass, there is a cut-off ear surrounded by bugs, in the conclusion the bug is still there, in the beak of a gracious robin on the family home windowsill. These dark stains that strike out from that Apollonian fantasy of happiness and perfection, become the core moments of the movie, they are like Dionysian symptoms that haunt the sick (of happiness) body of Lumberton’s American Dream. As a matter of fact, when the camera zooms towards a cut off ear hidden in the grass – ‘as being a labyrinth secret that leads to Dionysus’ - and then pans (fluctuating and wave-likely) on the ground pullulated by bugs (the hidden dirty life which lies beneath the clean hygienic surface), the aesthetic of the film states that the dark world in which the spectator is entering, is not the dialectical counterpart of the light, something other, different, but it is its constituent part.
Towards the end of the movie, when it may appear that Apollo - the fantasy of the American dream – succeeded in killing Dionysus – the nightmare of the American reality - the camera zooms on the bug in the robin’s beak as before it did with the ear. Here, where the film retrieves the eternal and constituent presence of the hidden life, the struggling and emotional soundtrack of Angelo Badalamenti reminds us that the dark stains are eternally stuck in the lightly body, that the light and the dark, Apollo and Dionysus, are not different from each other, not even the two sides of the same coins: they are the same. Like the yin-yang sphere, where the black moves towards the white (and vice versa) and the white is stuck in the black as its constituent part (and vice versa), so are the two Lumberton(s). As much as Lumberton’s dark side is pervaded by the most innocent (and thus perverse) human desire and the most tender (and thus unbearable) exchanges of love, all the same Lumberton’s sunny side is penetrated by violence and blood, as the mise en scene, by means of the bloody red roses on the white fence in the very last scene, constantly reminds. The two Lumberton(s), like Betty and Rita, are not two, they are one and many.


Furthermore, most critics found that there is no division whatsoever between the daytime kindness of Treves and the nighttime exploitation of the night porter that affect John Merrick in The Elephant Man . Both of them are parallel, speculative kinds of abuse, ‘where there is good and evil (…) regardless of their appearance.’ The day and the night, another basic dualistic concept in Western thoughts, are depicted once more as the yin and the yang, part of the one and the many. In Lost Highway Fred Mason (Bill Pullman) - who is the guy inside the house that answers the entry phone and hears the sentence ‘Dick Laurent is dead’ - turns to be Peter Dayton (Balthazar Getty) only to become again Fred Mason (Bill Pullman) – who is the guy outside the house that rings the entry phone and pronounces the sentence ‘Dick Laurent is dead.’ Moreover, the transformation from one character to the other (from Peter back to Fred in this case) happens by means of sex, like for Betty and Rita. In Inland Empire Nikki (Laura Dern), catches the gaze of Sue (Laura Dern) walking on the street, even if they are in different spatial and temporal positions: Hollywood at the present time and Poland in the past. It may therefore be argued (with a certain degree of recklessness and weirdness that tunes in well with Lynch’s surreal cinematic experience) that in the television series Twin Peaks , a tangle of doppelgangers where everything and everyone seem to have his/her/its own double, the main question is not anymore ‘who killed Laura Palmer?’ but becomes ‘why the FBI Special Agent Dave Cooper sees everywhere two persons (and two peaks) where there is only one person (and one peak?)’.


Mulholland Drive, like the rest of Lynch filmography, declares therefore to refuse any dialectic or dualistic philosophy and aligns itself with the ontological immanence of the Spinozian ‘pantheism’ - which claims for the one which becomes the many, for the one that is the many - and with the materialistic immanent thought of Mao Zedong, who - overcoming the philosophical problematic of Marx’s (Hegelian) dialectic and its teleological impasse - set straight that it is the one that becomes two and not vice-versa. On the stalls of the Club Silencio, Mulholland Drive carries the spectator back in the flux, before and against thousand of years of Western philosophy that searches for the one as different and separate from the two: for the one as a result of (i.e. the dialectical synthesis of) the two.


Before and against thousands of years of western philosophical assumptions grounded on dialectic and its consequent metaphysic: the division between man and woman, good and bad, organic and inorganic. What Nietzsche defined as:

‘The most grievous, protracted and dangerous (…) dogmatist’s error: Plato’s invention of pure spirit and of transcendental goodness.’

And what Deleuze called:

‘The degeneration of philosophy (…) if we define metaphysics by the distinction between two worlds, (…) between the true and the false (…) in the name of higher values: the Divine, the True, the Beautiful, the Good.’

Before and against thousand of years of Western philosophy, there is the flux, the road without beginning or end. In the state of flux of Mulholland Drive, duality is denied and replaced with singular multiplicities. Betty, the solar, naïve and optimistic blonde, and Rita, the dark, mysterious, tragic brunette, are the multiple attributes of the same girl. At the Club Silencio, also the mise en scene - the superimposition of the colors red and blue, as representative of flesh and spirit, earth and sky – helps Betty and Rita, after the joy of sex, to become the multiple attributes of the girl. That girl. The one and the many:

‘A being absolutely infinite-that is a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.’

Betty and Rita, the one and the many girl(s) become the multiple attributes of the open Whole - the girl - that is not a centralizer totality which encompasses everything, but is the peripheral totality, existing:

‘Alongside separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all these particular parts but does not unify them.’

Open Whole (the girl) that differs from the idealistic Hegelian concept of

‘Totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts’

Because it is not Rita who becomes Betty (or later Betty who becomes Diane). There is not a supreme character (or girl) that includes the others. There are many characters, many girls (Betty, Rita, Diane and Camilla) who are particular attributes of the girl – ‘here is the girl’ – who exists (if she exists) only inasmuch as all the girls exists in themselves, all together and each one for herself.

Before and against the judges, the priests, the scientists and the philosophers, holders of the transcendental truth, there is the subversive desire of the immanence of Mulholland Drive. What Nietzsche said about Heraclitus, he may have (and he probably had) said about Lynch:

‘He denied the duality of totally diverse world (…) He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable ‘indefinite’ (…) Everlastingly, a given quality contends against itself and separates into opposites; everlastingly these opposites seek to re-unite (…) Not a world of unity (…) But a world of eternal substantive multiplicities’

Tomorrow

Wallowing in the passive hope of a brighter TOMORROW, the Celluloid Liberation Front wish to wish a happy new year to whole (wo)mankind, human beings included!

Predictions for 2010: Everybody will talk about the weather...we won't!

BEKET

"All of old. Nothing else ever.
Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again. Fail again.
Fail better."

Samuel Beckett

Opening with the most reassuringly (mis)leading shadow boxing against film light one could ever expect (or wait for...), Beket is a magical reinterpretation, disguised as a medative road movie, of the Waiting for Godot. The Locarno independent critics awarded Davide Manuli's film at the 2008 edition, perhaps for its minimalist communicative urge that, amongst the black and white, finds a vibratile chromatic range of greys, which becomes a filmic signifier in its own right, pushing the original quiescence of the play towards a quixotic quest. A film that corageously speaks with the language of invention and not of phoney independence, Beket takes the spectator on a visionary trip via the existential space-ways of techno music to encounters with haunted route masters too busy to stop.
"This is how Beckett's dark plays are plays of light, where the desperate object created is witness to the ferocity of the wish to bear witness to the truth..." No other words could better describe this precious gem than Peter Brook's.

Mullholland Drive (pt. 1)

MULLHOLLAND DRIVE IS A ROAD

This desertion does not have place; it is the evacuation of the place of power!
M. Hardt and T. Negri

ABSTRACT

In this brief piece of writing I would like to introduce the main points of the following analysis on David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, a film that does not exhibit a clear set of meanings but an infinite potentiality of meaning. As it will be evaluated, Mulholland is neither matter nor spirit, but a ceaseless turmoil in which material and immaterial, organic and inorganic things shift place, exchange ontology. Therefore the only possible way to approach it is by means of a philosophy of immanence that thinks

‘The vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter which raises itself to a point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter.’

A philosophy that helps to perceive the film as a life that incessantly transforms itself, that ceaselessly becomes. A film-being that, takes the decision to evacuate, by means of desertion, the great simulacrum of late capitalism: Hollywood, the postmodern Inland Empire .


To stay in tune with the film, the introduction (overture) and the conclusion (finale) are (de)structured by means of a very fast editing in which are displayed, overlapped and superimposed all the concepts thereinafter (or before) evaluated in this writing. The result is a set of aphorisms that - far from being rhetoric or used for their own sake - are displayed in order to underline the ‘gaseous state’ of the film (and of the writing). Moreover, this writing begins and ends with the same words: ‘Mulholland Drive is a road.’ As it will be evaluated through the writing, Mulholland Drive represents (and it is represented by) the Heraclitean concept of the flux - that does not begin nor end - the Nietzschean eternal return – that foretells a return to the same place that is never the same again - and the Deleuzian plane of immanence – that goes beyond the human concepts of linear space and time. Therefore, for this writing on Mulholland Drive, it has been chosen not to begin and not to end. In other words, when this writing practically ends (the last page, but it can be any other page), it is in fact beginning again from the same/different point of start (the first page, but it can be any other page). This writing believes in the ‘eternal joy of becoming.’


POST SCRIPTUM:

Being Mulholland Drive (de)structured as a rhizome, this writing may consider that being linear is a betrayal of the concept of rhizome and thus, of the very film itself. Therefore, this writing decided (regardless of the intention of its author) to (de)structure itself and to develop rhizomatically: it may be read beginning from any chapter, the chapters themselves may be interchangeable, it may be read forwards or backwards – like Mulholland Drive. Given that the rhizome has been assimilated by Deleuze and Guattari to an intermezzo, the chapter dedicated to the concept of rhizome will be a brief intermezzo, like a break, or a gap, located in the middle (and thus at the beginning and at the end and everywhere else) of the writing.

OVERTURE

DRIVING ON MULHOLLAND DRIVE…

A ROAD WITH NO BEGINNING AND NO ENDS

Mulholland Drive is a road. A road, by its very definition, has to be traveled. Traveling means to move through space and time and to become something new. Every single step is a new becoming. Traveling is a creative act and, if traveling means to create life, it also means to do philosophy. If it is assumed that ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,’ therefore, Mulholland Drive, by means of traveling and inventing, does philosophy.


In Mulholland Drive as a film, it is possible to experience the road Mulholland Drive only as being an infinite and curving road. This road does not begin, it does not end. It presents itself as being open in space and in time. At every curve, it invents something, it creates something new, something that is already ready to become something equal and at the same time completely different. The very road of Mulholland Drive creates life, it is life that is present in its past, in its present and in its future. As a road, it can be traveled in both directions, forward or backward, through space and also through time; thus becoming the crystal image where:

‘The past is constituted not after the present but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past (…) it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past’

Mulholland Drive is life that cannot be perceived by means of its reduction to the concepts of space and time. Against these ‘spatial habits of representations which has evolved as an instrument of utility (this is what is meant by ‘the human condition’)’ , the only way to experience Mulholland Drive becomes that of going beyond the human condition and towards ‘the eternal joy of becoming’ , towards pure life, that is life in movement, that is a life:

‘A pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self.’


Mulholland Drive is a road in ‘pure ceaseless becoming’ , in a perpetual state of fluctuation, where and when, as in the Heraclitean flux:

‘Past and future are as perishable as any dream, but that the present is but the dimensionless and durationless borderline between the two. And that space is just like time, and that everything which coexists in space and time has but relative existence, that each thing exists through and for another like it, which is to say through and for an equally relative one.’

Film as a Subservient Art

Photo by Davide Ferrari

Slavishly prescribing to audiences the mode in which they are expected to consume and perceive cinema, film criticism has often relegated hermeneutical dissections to the academic arena, where the constitutive popularity of cinema is irremediably neglected and spectatorship becomes an analytical datum rather than an emotional factor. Cinematographic criticism essentially opposes what moving images ontologically imply: ‘the inhibition of reasoned response in favour of ‘gut-level' reaction', thus arguing out primaeval subversion in a very liberal fashion via the rationalisation of emotional impulses.


What a critical text-as-the-work-of-sublimation would ideally aspire to is an ethereal alienation of words from the objective luminescence of images which could liberate the reader from the cathedral shadow of both realms. The word and its signified voltage, through an adumbrating oscillatory movement, would usher the reader into a semiotic alterity that is neither light nor ink but eroticised spect-actorship where the critic's intentions in relation to the luminous object turn into yearning participation. The graphic signifier will offer itself linguistically via outpaced reminiscences as an interpretative contact with cinema without ever letting the normative ghost, resting uneasy behind any form of criticism, deter the destabilising urges of the desiring text.


As a unique example of an encyclopaedic cinema book where films are listed according to evocative themes rather than alphabetical titles, schools or directors and where selection is favoured over saturation, Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art is a fun-da-mental text for insurgent cinephiles and film practitioners alike ‘trafficking in scepticism towards all received wisdom (including its own).' Vogel's critical scansion of the cinematic underbelly is one lacking any ideological drive and characterised by a liberated look at the subversive potential of the moving image; concise and delved this book remains an invaluable guide to the affective agency of cinema going. Voluntarily too small to reproduce cinema in its wasted totality but big enough to contain a boundless idea of subversion intended in its emotive terms, galvanising rhythm and universal breadth, Film as a Subversive Art, unlike the Nouvelle Vague ‘angry' critics, did not set a canon and continues to stimulate rather than legislate the viewer's salacious gaze.


The idea of taking such text as the starting point for an exhibition sounds promising and its outcome by no means predetermined, or so one would assume...


Curated by the LUX (in collaboration with students from the Curating Programme of the Department of Art, Goldsmiths), Film as a Subversive Art set out to ‘examine the contemporary possibilities and limits of filmic subversion' during the Zoo Art Fair (16-19 October, 2009), one of the countless pseudo-events self-evidently feeding the obscene ghettoisation of art being adhibited to the docile middle-class infantry.


Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in public relation, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.


The LUX itself historically incarnates the inexorably pusillanimous parable of alternative British cinema, primarily represented by the London Filmmakers Co-operative, whose


principles of (direct) democracy, common ownership and open access [...] annulled themselves into a normalized hierarchical management structure as a condition of the move to the Lux.


As banal as it may sound, what this project seemed to explore best in those three days of the festival was the limitless impossibility of subverting the ingratiating system of falsity that detracts the means of perception from the cultural consumer who is essentially indifferent to his/her own aseptic environment as long as he/she is false-fed with reassuring guises. The audience – like any targeted indusium, subserviently accepting - are overwhelmingly pacified by appearances and do not enquire any further, let alone try to detonate the (in)sensitive regime of uniformed signs.

During the opening talk, and after having briefly introduced Vogel's book, the curators exposed the nature of the project, which, instead of proposing a pedestrian sequel of the book in the form of a screenings series that would have probably fitted the original bill, had decided to let artists respond to the book's impulses. It came as a surprise though when, from the audience, someone asked the two artists attending the introductory talk what exactly was the ‘role' the book played in their respective works – was it an inspiration, an influence, a frame of reference? They both quite nonchalantly admitted to having encountered Film as a Subversive Art not long before they were asked to take part in the exhibition (wasn't the latter supposed to be a response to the book?) – one delivering a clueless and lengthy non-reply, the other honestly alleging his work's essential extraneity to Vogel's text. Fair enough – to anti-heroically refuse the auratic heftiness of the ‘holy' book is a subversive act in itself. Or so one would assume... .


On day one, Ellen Cantor's work Pinochet Porn bluntly externalised the tragic incapacity within each and every one of us to push the limits of a communicative potentiality, a feature due to resurface later on, where the form is in fact coldly restrained to the codified areas of linguistic signification. That pornography is the nakedest of acts, where we ineluctably witness the coercive nature of human relations, is not the freshest of ideas but it surely is something one could speculate on. If the exploitative nature of pornography, though, is didactically aggravated by a gross characterisation of the protagonists – the perverted dictator having consensual (shouldn't it be abusive?) sex with his maid trapped between cold execution and repressed degustation – and a horde of predictably empty vignettes, the result will be aesthetically anaemic and poetically embarrassing (not the same embarrassment, I suppose, felt by the giggling spectators at the sight of fellatio...). The artist's explanatory article is filled with barely credible and irrelevant anecdotes. No clue emerges as to why a creative urge was felt and how it was subsequently ‘articulated'; the parallel slide show portraying two women engaging in simulated and repressed mutual auto-eroticisation testifies to the overall aimlessness of this quelled piece.


A sort of ‘conceptual coherence' (the term ‘subversion' would somehow be infelicitous) emerged on day two, with the exhibition by Rosa Barba, consisting of two pieces: the live, devolving 16mm loop demonstration One Way Out and the papyraceous reflections of the Printed Cinema Series. The first installation thought through the deteriorating aspect of the time-image: the film passes through a ventilation machine thus sabotaging the conventional projector stages while visually rendering the progressive impairment of filmic matter, matched by a soundtrack that progressively drones into distortion, accompanying the print's disintegrating fate.

The Printed Cinema Series explored, and to some extent expanded, the relational aesthetics of the image measured against a papery base whereby the gregarious nature of the latter is invested in an amplified probing quality engrained in its very materiality. In order to diagnose the dyslexia of montage or to describe the dérives of a drifting Swedish island, the artist found in the porous possibilities of cellulose a platform where the cinematographic image cognises a dialectical dimension freed from the descriptive burden of many auxiliary texts. It is precisely this being a syncretic object, bearer of visions and experiences, not merely a recipient of the content's forms but also of the very substance of expression, that confronts Barba's work with Vogel's book and its (successful) attempt to gatecrash the assertive/descriptive element of written texts. Here the gaze focuses on the medium's possibility of inter-semiotic transpositions, on the fields of signifying tension within the semiosphere, to modulate and organise meaning in the hand-to-hand between film and spectator. Through the narrative design of her own cinema, the artist offers the spectator/reader a third access to an experience in which comprehension is not the disclosing of a given signification. On the contrary, it is a dialectical negotiation based on the manifested datum and its perception. The textual suture between the logics of sense (narrative and figurative) and the logics of the sensitive (plastic and figural) is what makes the Printed Cinema Series a challenging attempt at the mise-en-form of the viewing experience.


Relying on the very process of creative reassemblage rather than pre-projecting a work halfway between a curatorial scheme and art 'n' paste, Disambiguation by Steve Reinke & James Richards ends up feeling like an important and programmatic declaration of non-intent. The semantic internment of this work seems to be a consequence, rather than the lucid exploration of, the English state of expressive constipation. If the aim was to render explicit the creative void behind much of today's art and the directionless drives animating its profit-making and sense-emptying logics, then yes, Disambiguation makes its point painfully visible. If though, as the context would suggest, this was even the faintest attempt at subversion, then I am left wondering what the subject matter was. To derive the insipid assimilation ‘anti-narrative equals non-narrative', to bypass the attack on dominant signification, thus opting for desperate masturbation instead of the reciprocal joy of a meaningful orgy, seemed to gratify the privileged arty punters blankly staring at an uncommunicative cascade of found footage.


The last day was dedicated to the apocryphal resurrection of repressed historical occurrences and their co-inspirational coincidences with Francisco Valdes' Reagan 1973, exploring the purifier arrogance of the US against its pagan enemies. Valdes observes the disquieting concurrence of the release of Friedkin's The Exorcist and the brutal invasion of Chile. He loops the graphite reproduction of a film's sequence in order to go beyond its deceiving surface. Like Hemming's character in Blow Up, the spectator is invited to produce thoughts able to ripple the perfunctory appearance of the image thus questioning its apparent truth. Unlike its glorious predecessor, The Exorciccio, by Ciccio Ingrassia – a para-situationist parody of the Hollywood movie – this interesting work is nonetheless highly cryptic to the ‘non-initiated'. In the Italian flick – in a quasi-Herzogian resurgence – evil is strategically anathematiseable. Its (il)logics beyond rationality and, most importantly, beyond the purifying will of the Exorciccio who will finally succumb to the malign magnitude of the devil after having replaced the Bible with Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. The pranksterist impression left by Ingrassia on Reagan 1973's also evokes a philosophical intuition that has partly predated Abel Ferrara's psycho-carnal reflections about western dependence on atrocious exhibitions, and manages to subvert ruling narratives through a mutual illumination of cinematic detonations.


In an era where the work of art is socially neutralised via its anti-perceptual insularity, dynamitesthetic ecstasy remains a lethal weapon against the occult persuasion of mass media but its ontological incompatibility with vocationally gated events and their institutionalised codas is perhaps something we need to face.

This article has been published on Mute.

GOTO

Tragedy of the absurdity and of derision rivalling the finest Stroheim, Goto affirms itself as a capital film of the 60s. ‘Cursed’ film, ignored outside France, madly anti-conformist in its own spectacular status that does not indulge a single moment on the petrifying freeze of the formalistic avant-garde.

In fact, Goto represents one of the highest and “impossible” syntheses in the history of cinema between the thunderous force of passion and the geometric rigour of the mise-en-scene, between flamboyant romanticism and the surgical incisiveness of the framing, between impressions of narrative reality and gleams of visionary invention: like in Conrad’s pages, where the adventurous experience shades into an impalpable resonance of allusiveness and a symbolic emotive magic.

Goto is composed by 800 framings circa: fixed planes, almost claustrophobic, denying any sense of depth whatsoever. The fortress where the diabolic ascension of Grozo takes place is never entirely shown, but always framed through mazy and restricted settings, disturbing foreshortenings, decorative details and complex furnishings evoking a dusty atmosphere. It is not casual that the instrument-fetish of the story is the binocular; we find it in each of the key moments: the spectacle is IN the film, and at the same time IS the film. Through ‘treacherous’ blowups – such is the use of the winding movement of the lenses – the teeming internal life of a secret world suddenly visualizes itself in all its charming horror. For the director a “total” vision of humanity is impossible: in the best case scenario one has to tag after the significant gestures and the animal motions pulsing underneath the (self)control of the codes.

The film is all situated in this continuum, impossible obsessive gaze, a chain of yearning impotencies defining the physical space and calibrating the moral conduct. Here the director is the sculptor of marked pulsions, amputating the literary references (Kafka in primis) in favour of a “call to life” that vibrates with the fantasising power of the cinematographic sign: it is the creative energy of the author that moulds forms and faces invested by the abstract thought of the protagonists. Despite the photographic specularity unfolding, “life” on the island of Goto is determined by a cluster of analogical choices operated by an invisible demiurge, that is, the director busy spying with his mind (in the camera) what the actors spy with their hearts (from their position within the frame). Poem on love, better still, apropos of love, Goto shows its suffocated and forced stirrings in fierce tragedies triggered by the lack of any horizon whatsoever but a devious and filmy rocky beach. These tragedies are nonetheless “observable”, reassuring, because nobody is authorized to forward besides the facts the comparison of a “real” and tangible world, guaranteed as “apt” to love.

Gono and Glossia secretly plot the evasion, but that little skiff jogged by billows can only offer itself as an oneiric, visceral and irrational matter soundtracking their erotic games, clandestine and jeopardous. Goto the third, ruler of that micro fragment of world, reigns through conformism, via the fear of the future and not through terror, the latter is a circumstance that infuses into the characters the suspect of a stubborn and atrocious resignation (how actual!).

Goto is primarily a fully sensual film. The eroticism here expressed has something savage and incoercible about it; it functions in first person as the only “life-giving” and sacrilegious datum against the corporate order. The film shows, perhaps better than Tinto Brass, how eroticism is connate to the very essence of the cinematographic language, when the universal components of physical attraction are unearthed from their descriptive phenomenology thus reacquiring their rhythmic, psychological and aesthetic form; we finally experience the visual expression of passion. If eroticism is reclaiming (in order to be such) a magical warping of reality, Borowczyk’s voyeurism “determines” the accidents and not merely registers them; it is the poetical will of the director who wants to imagine and invent the iconographic force of love, that is, the exact opposite of the ecstatic anonymity to which that term is usually associated.

“The insularity of Goto, its isolation and its spatial dimension are guarantees of its internal aperture: not only all the explored places are visible to each other, but also all the characters are replaceable, and indeed replaced: Goto the third by Grozo, Gonasta by Glossia, the old guardian by Grozo, etc.” (Positif, n. 105, May 1969).

A very choreographically “rich” film in spite of the despoliation of the ambiences, it is as if the director had cut fragments of reality to glue them in an animation style; the set of Goto is indeed composed by diverse and unconnected places like a stage theatre, apartments to be demolished and an abandoned factory. And yet the isle of Goto does exist, its substance of rocks and blood, dreams and tenderness, metallic and carnal, game and sickness, fairy and bestial functions as an emotive whole in relation to the spectators’ luxuriation.

Although calibrated upon intangible inner timings, the film concatenates its facts with the precision of an electronic device; inhabiting a sheer cinematic territory the film fuses the fictional and narrative effects according to its own legislated (il)logic.

Through extreme close ups Borowczyk confers to inanimate objects a sort of operative textuality. The ideal instruments for such “animation” from objective to living are - very (s)light zooms and the alternate montage - transmitting the impression of progressive oneirical inserts. Like the Dobermans, the pupils of Goto look alike, in their prisoner (or guardian?) uniforms, they are bound to repeat Grozo’s parable: to spy, to replace, to kill or to execute. Nonetheless the gloomy anti-dictatorial allegory cannot be exclusively read in its libertarian signification; in the central sequence of the film – when the rulers take a stroll by the sea – the moral doubt is reclaimed thus corroding with a blow of blind passion the previously suggested insurrectional ethic. The love and faith of the husband are not altered by the discovery of the skiff, rather, there is a breathlessness of melancholy in his remark: “someone is about to leave”. When later Goto falls in the water and the capsized skiff recedes amongst the swells, Glossia amorously dries the clothes, Handel’s music (Concerto II Op. 7) storms in followed by a very long and touching close up of the queen enhanced by an incredibly ambiguous eye game, all played out between the care for the husband and the raw pain for the wreckage nullifying the escape plans. It is here that Pierre Brasseur and Ligia Branice reach the peaks of their performances, every movement is followed by a forceful expressive furrow. Brasseur returns here to his “negative” profound magnitude (Le quai des Brumes) obscuring with chiaroscuros of tormented indecision the dark-Other side of his absolute command. The French actor’s facial features are swept by an echo of despairing moral sadness swiftly emerging in the most unexpected moments. The Polish actress Ligia Branice invents for “her” Glossia a charge of mortuary eroticism, a continuous quiver of sin, contradicted by her tameless demeanour. It is as if oriental clangors were being alternated by deafening hushes.

The colour exists in this film when the director’s attention allows it, or perhaps colours would exist but in that world they cannot thrive; such is the level of psycho-cultural alienation in an island where fantasy is banned for its sacrilegious and anti-social credentials. In the way Goto reveals those things that the utilitarian consuetude of daily routine conceals, this film resembles the sub-canvas of Magritte, in the syncopated rhythms of the films is not manifested the impossible, but a new sensible consistence of the known reality. The psychological references represent phosphoric coagulums simultaneously involving the subject and the object, spirit and matter, never descending into paperback “Film & Psychoanalysis”, always turning dreams into chemical substance manipulating poetry with implements.

The enigmatic finale emphasizes the extra (dis)ordinary ambiguity of the assumptive enunciate, Borowczyk does not seem to want to close a poetic perception into the cage of his own explanation. How sexy!

This article has been previously published on Filmint.