Filmmaking

So I’ve recently started pursuing a  film-making course piloted through the  ES Volunteer Centre.

1^st session  was full of very efficient and practically helpful  teaching, but – and this is more observation than criticism per se--  surprising how little in the way of thinking ‘about’ the effects film wants to create in terms of  providing an ethical  justification for ‘what’ to create.

Quite Ayerian, rather than metaphysical;  ‘ that of which teaching may speak ( itself maybe more Wittgenstein ) let it, and beyond that let such matters not intercede and soon. It’s left me thinking ‘how does society conceive the practice of film-making”.

As narrative expression, artistic experimentation  along a spectrum of possibilities, as ‘curative’ tp rectify the  excesses of market –driven utilitarianism in line with the directed or self-forming community arts activities more commonly associated with  heritage festivals, plastic arts,  town-music etc : there were a disproportionate number of ‘middle-aged’ people  there, using this not only as a sideline but, in anecdotal terms, as a sort of replenishment of their existential matter in some way; a shot at authenticity. 

More thoughts on this to follow

'WITCH 80S'

Rather than following the path of social dramas as resistance pieces -- vocalizing  the sufferings and alternative community aspirations,  self actualizing and seeking to  energize ( in Deleuzean terms,  becoming assemblages , behaving rhizomatic, creating planes of becoming)--- Horror under ‘ The Witch’ was appropriately furtive: oneiric,  shabby and certainly  elliptical.   Despite this, it contained all the violence of intent, regardless of any other cineaste qualities, and in the case of  Bernard Rose’s 1988 Paperhouse, the  transformative qualities one could hope for.

There we witness the inscrutable voiceless  Real ' Beyond:  half Zizek half Deleuzean ' difference in practice, which emerges from surrealism ducking from and contesting the Superego like the young.  The unnamed can be appropriated, but not recovered, (substantially,. ontologically) like the  underground  slums whose dusty artplaces Paperhouse’s baroque sawdust surrealism occupies.

The Paperhouse milieu -- that is, its texture and its heuristic, the topography to which its resounding weird internal world and the ghost gestalt   which glosses all the hyoles in the street and  subtexts, from the colour schemes to the schools, the very utterly historical ‘Mum’  and ‘Dad’ and the ‘shrink’ and  ‘I’ within -- is the Thatcherite community-halls.  These emerge from assembled, and assembling  ( objects  that ‘become’ along lines, as well as  what is, parallaxes along with lines towards castigating the witch, or father, or dialectical materialism, or biology catching up with your mentality) , scraps from uneven scissors in glue and the climate and  wind tunnels available to their social circumscription, endlessly reflexive  unto themselves and then  creating simulacra  of  the great Ur-Mother, the Ego horror in ‘Morrisseya nd the Exploited lyrics and  Loachean ghosts to rail against.

Paperhouse’s psychosystem is symptom, symptom without any pure Freudian or Jungian schemata to break it down; an endless encounter with a series of Rhizomatic rebellions but the nomadicness of the oneiric also replicates the tension of Deleuzean -traditionally speaking-- ambivalence towards a material critique  ( in its great One, rather than dialogical analysis) and its very real appropriations to  twin ghouls of manufactured pop and the Israeli Army academy attack strategy. 

Spice-post Spice and the Neocons are Thatch’s legacy, which are as rel and as nonsubstatial, and as cunning and non-sentient, as the product of the analysis of paperhouse and/or to the running Dream which is Paperhouse

As the product of a psyche which is singularly not fully one's own-- the fetishization of which soleness turns into madcap laughing shreds like  any Kundera laughter or your other common-lit Existentialists -- how surprising or not is it that the figure who pursue its own progenitor-- the metal pathogenically daughter—is Essentially pursuing herself: Tautology, No?

Walls are not just permeable but ontologically indeterminate; are they projections of the psyche ( they are, but not Just), places in which the psyche exists,  the product  of the perception of the psyche --as a virtualization-- whose fabric in practice seeps into comingles with the self like Roquentin in La Nausea? Or  born from a concurrent Sigmund urge to kill the art or heart that made it and them--  a twisted Elektra complex in this case.

A Mindmovie paean for the market-systems’s curious incestuization, a paean to the displacement, or ragged neuro-divergent  ( whether before the fact, or accursed by the personal politics of repression  and marginalization ) children of Thatcher.

 It evokes Ewa Hoffman’s languor of time in its long shots of endless tunnels and childhood Ballardian dystopia waiting—early Mcewan also at its margins--. Certainly Maggie  equals a dystopian future, so far as she is the source of meaning  giving rise to the flowers of sheet-and gravel Romance and chimerical visions here;  Also pervasive in the postwar streetscapes and the tang of  reductive psychodeterminism  ( divorce/sublimation) is a call to recognize within the spirit of Arendt’s banality of  evil, here in the lower-middle class milieu with its secret, unstated perversions, rendered obliquely since the attack comes from a language already prevaricatory and patriarchal, iddic, of a father - -or Mother in the displacement by father   (Thatcher being both).

  Each is re-simulated, or  virtualized, in each nook and iteration--scenario and mode-of -presence, by the feral-literate, native-Blakean, innocence: of the child, and of the darkness guarding innocence of the childhood/nascent teenage imagination here, with its floods of primordial burgeoning sublimated sexuality and a necessary retention of the disassociative  sublimatory rituals of quests and banishment.

The neo-Victorian vibes on the side of surrealism chime uneasily with the modern specificity ; yet  Thatcherism is a grotesque erasure of historical exigency; it never shows the blood, where the bodies are buried to bring up its few shoots of ferment in  its coterie’s gardens. Everyone is an entrepreneur; these two are individualists of their mindscape—seedy solipsists riffling against their own isolation but utterly, like Hegel's  ‘man -in history',  aware of their historical exigency,  even as they embrace  the  recurring images i.e. Jungian Tropes.

So, like the tales of the Uncanny under other dictators, of the Iberian or South American persuasion. Its grammar like the 'urban gibbetry' language profusion, stemming from the unconsciousnesses from dilapidated  suburban-urban class holes in modern Britain and their associated horrors; Heartless or, less directly, the St Matthew meets deep-dub jaja apocalypse vibes of South London MC Lionburn, or the idiomatics of Sassenach-- Moffat ...and so on.

Thatcher here is, to steal  Dumas on  De Palma, a species of the Political Invisible ( and invert that equation),  (self-allegorically) attempted to hide inside the primitivist, emotional topographies of its own  protagonist’s innocence and in the  Family breakdown trauma category, like a ragged woollen blanket over the political beast .  

Also of ‘some interest’ in this regard is Dream Demon (1988) ; is all decrepit old ‘horse’ money and  displaced Elektra dreams in a ruined  London Town  hall, the old order of which hies fresh-minted demons as well as new incantations of money for old horrors, in a class subtext of baroque and neoclassical formalism interwoven like the text and texte of Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty.  The mirror of the late Thatcherite  property owner, returned to her  inheritance, leads to  ghastly virtualizations,  actualized through the symbolic system of British horror sexual repression ( the virginal Diana here, and her unseen but present ‘Daddy’ ). Or  the menacing pseudo -reporters  ( Jimmy Nail and stalwart Tim Spall, playing class-awakward nightmare ala Leigh) :  with them the closeness of the person is the intrusion of the stranger, which , as in Zizek, leads to the abyss of the Other, echoing ironically Thatcher’s disparaging of communities and, more seriously, the  class-ridden rifts and the violence their birthed associated with the aftermath of this ideology  taking form, ‘becoming’ :  it’s fecund arch violence, with demons explicitly linked to our Iron Lady and her Junta like the monsters of any good fascist.  

The demons of the consciousness are removed responsibility- enjoyment of the repression and Symbolic sublimation of responsibility and the violation of the good practising social self into the obscene Id which is possible by conforming to the pure logic of the market place;  bankers  buy old shacks from the trauma  they have caused with their spectral money-shifting, like  ( say) De Lillo anti-heroes pursuiving, conveyancing the damned logic of airless, weightless modern and then being assaulted with a nameless earthy  dense Real which in De Lillo finds its correlative in the ever-further perpendicular assemblage  of postmodern terms and solipsism but here comes out as British post-hammer  ore, and in the ‘real’ that is, in our physical and phenomenal world, hides and causes mineral disasters and starvation, as well as providing the conditions by which crime  and anomie may escalate until it forms holes in the floor and blurred memories to hide the shame.

It’s the only horror flick that references the Falklands War, with its  heroine’s betrothed, an army buccaneer in Reich blonde, leading up to  a near-past colonial adventurer- nightmare.  Its English London is lit in New Romantic glacial hues-- white shimmering gloss- inviting speculation and a menacing deathly pallor as well as the epistemic obliteration signalled by a screen of all white. Which meets a blue-shaded  portal-like house; dreams of tea parties in  vortex blue, disorientation andsexulaity, and blue like the ‘Lady’.

As too is The transferable despair of  the 1982 adaptation of  Brimstone and Treacle, Dennis Potter's Seventies vision of  equivocal salavation from  obscenity, a Beckettian psosiras-body mutability nightmare shifted to the new 80’s, with its own fear of the body piolitic; slick speculators like old Martin here, and  Tom the respectable dada bringing the NF front  Home like the Tory party bringing in that scurvious  little pathology into its own  jingolella broad tent; white shirts and cleanshirt fascists alike.  Collectivity exists here, the old solidarity, but, for the antithatcherite, a mournful collection of souls united under despair being only to witness the play/film's horror, or analogously 'be sick together' as a sacrament in the face of what seemed like implacable harsh fate-- such collectivity in turn mediated by a medium innately discomfortable, like the good-terrible evil 'Martin' of the play-film, was a key pathology of the grime religion, the fatalistic bonding, which marks horror masochism and marks  Thatcher-horror’s apotheosis; it is analogous to the moral- nihilism contradiction of Gombrowicz, as articulated by Michael Goddard in his discussion about that writer/playwright’s  'anti-matter', his Deleuzean anti-creation, and negation, which, despite itself affirmed as total critique the presence of an ethical dimension, which has always present 'away from itself', created only as virtuality rather than from the unblinkingly harsh 'matter'  from which creation  arises, is liable to be like Witkany or Schultz's marionettes  too.

Beyond that, we  reach a pourri of late Hammerite Portmanteau’s, indifferent slashers, and so forth. Barker's Hellraiser and the sequel , for all their enclosed Colebroook like ‘Kingdom of inward-out” sensuous horrible Deleuzean  anti-matter, which connects To  Thatch, but , one suspects,  is as much a product of the Western Grotesque  which  would have emerged and could have emerged  under Mitterrand in France,  say, had Barker been transposed ( France, relatively less freemarket shock and awed has of course its own tradition of art-body horror, its last gestation falling under the New Extreme cinema banner, from its Diderot/De Sadeian Enlightenment genesis of transgression as  political act and intellectual enlightenment, which Hellraiser’s  ’pain as knowledge’ neo-conservative  thesis, like  De Sadeian ethics of derived from Aristocratic excesses--  insisting to the ‘end’ like Zizek’s ‘ thesis carried out to excess’ in Rand which  devours its own capitalist productive energy— turns to radicalism and repugnance against its demonic laughter or sacred-mad insistence .

We have sprinklings of the past colonial ( the origins)  and the Americans,  brought their own psychology of colonialism and trauma, as well as a vision of the  Thatcher-era spawned  vulgar aspiration  class literally selling- over others, dehumanizing them in a sick conurbation, creating a kind of  private hell, as well as the  baroque permutations of the classical asylum motif in the second movie ( which, although set in the US-- has the degenerate British come over in the form of the bad-father doctor) . Similarly,  ‘Underworld’ ( 1984)—also from the pen of Barker-- about mutants underground kept on the London, follows that underground mythos ( posited by films like Deathline in the 70s)  and reinterprets it ; these are outsiders kept below the fine surface, whose outsiderdom  has been concocted out of inhuman experiments undertaken by a  enterprising and ethically-deranged pioneer--a Thatcherite  striver. ‘The Sender' meanwhile, Quentin   Tarantino 's favourite film of  '82, sees nightmares from one mental patient, enclosed in a ravaged NHS, projected onto others, like the pathology of Thatcherism: nightmares shared amongst the innocent. 

 But it is in Paperhouse that we see the true apotheosis—the spell broken over  the father though and reduction of trauma to the domestic unit,  unfortunately  an indication of Thatcher’s legacy—an end whose finally is unsatisfactory y the conditions of that which has come before, an end which has unleashed too much for the neoliberal soul to ever recuperate the garden of normality without  time And crisis 

'ENJOY MY SYMPTOM (s)'

Hello 

After a few false starts with with this Blog, I will be-- updating  this thrice weekly

Polish Cinema and Scenescapes—Sex, Drugs, Philosophy, Crime  (like the rebl inc publishing manifesto),  Civil Society Film,  Iberian Cinema,  Selected New Releases, Festival Reports, Thematics and Musings. There will be more High Theory and  Hyperlinks, although probably on the hinterland between journalistic and journalic, and sometimes “how late it was, how late” .

I’m also for hire; prices start at light flattery and a moderate but committed average view-count (plus comps), to actual money if the assignment is sufficiently onerous. I further perform the practice and co-ordination of Applied Arts, in a manner of speaking, and am practiced in begging for cash to Trusts, so let me know of you have any worthy projects going—short of the Adam Smith Institute or the George Jackson Society, I’m more or less open to any lost cause or kink.

Start with a light word salad on Thatcher and Horror (with no facts or stats or social science, but lots of cross-melding of critical signs from Zizek to Badiou and unabashed abuse and uses of the term ‘fascist’ in an utterly critically unsubstantiated and unacademie, but mildly incantatory (suitably so) way.

COMING SOON'

Relaunching this evening....

“Basic Instincts and Other obscure objects of desire”

“Basic Instincts and Other obscure objects of desire”

Watching debuts at the Edinburgh Film Festival, made me ponder “what constitutes a bad film”, in cult terms, and what represents a trangressive, ‘Bizarre’, pleasure . The recent spate of what has dubiously been termed “torture-porn”  are excesses in cynical miserabalism masquerading as topical allegory, neither poetic nor pleasurable; slashed-up cornucopia of studio nonsense like the recent Babylon AD; then there are those which, like true cult, internally contain their own contradictions, being too weirdly uncontainable. “Classic” film philosophy splits on the axis of Bazinian and Eisenstein; cinema as Platonic truth composition, and cinema as language in and of itself montaging the imagination. Like the pure “spectacles” of the surrealists, couldn’t a virtually plot-less “event” movie be the new avant garde- the latest Eszterhas penned effort a satire gorging on its own camp extremity, a pharmakon re-awakening new modes of post-feminism with its deranged and masochistic Goddess with a knife/beckoning finger dichotomy. Here’s the radical part: there are finally the pleasures of the total-dream film.  Some movies, ranging from infamous McGregor/Judd flop Eye of the Beholder, through scream-camp Basic Instinct 2 to auteur of Euro-tic art Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, wilt under even such spurious, sociologizing to reveal a completely new metaphysical mad-dream. Pure art, if you like. Perverse cineastry.

A scorpion lingers in a pool like knotted flowers, a cloaked brunette walks through coloured chambers fluorescent sinking in pool-mirror Jean Cocteau surfaces, kites flying in the wind cast against white sunsets, mirage into blood flowing on windows, and then the Countess bores her charybdis-Baudelaire purple sex-eyes at the camera and it’s all terribly baroque. All these films like dreams but none more so than Vampryos, evoking early Sunday mornings tapings from Channel 4 then revisited late night viewings in Autumnal zones, alone within the house of memory; it exudes bleary-eyed embers  of night-time places,  saturated with a narcoleptic flu-laden cough-medicine stoned surrealism and faint oppressive swoon-like quality. But then the use of wide-angle pronounced shots, means everything is askew, everyone is literally about to swoon within this film. Basic Instinct 2 is a landscape of psychotropic motifs as Cronenbergian orgy scene geometries occur in tower skies presided over by Foster's phallic gherkin blocks clothed in glass refractions, and hyper-stylised underground dens. Virtually unchanged over ten years, time has abstract frozen for the eponymous “Eye”, whilst the constant disguise-life of quarry/beloved Judd symbolise what she is; celluloid idolic, a beautiful cipher, the essence of attraction unwithering,  Freud’s inscrutable woman. Christmas was when she left; and Christmas it continually is, time fossilised like pure crazy love, eating away at him and tempting him, like Cult cinema, from credibility and pay-checks into its  V.U/‘stripen-mistress’ game. Franco’s use of filters diffuse colours, natural and ambient light into intoxicating, exotic patterns; after all, as David Thomson says, the unique orange grove light shading is what makes Hollywood so scarily spell-ful. That greedy light admits Franco’s black-magic stealing of movie iconicism, its  phosphorescent hues and blinding sky-line as maudy as the drifting jazz-tones which recall Joronowky’s work on El Topo, when they aren’t psychedelic spy-film fusions. Spatial dislocations enticed by the editing style combine to make an abstract movie proceed with the elegiac movement of dream logic, lurching back and forth with a kind of controlled manic jazz.

Vampyros has a true jazz aficionado’s disregard for the niceties of linear development and narrative convention. Anarchy harnessed, the complex structure of jazz exists in his work as an appeal to improvise to the tune of an organ-heavy Manfred Hübler/Siegfried Schwab theme with electronically garbled, almost submarine vocals. Distorted voices merge over in a collage like ethereal raps. just as Vampyros requires the visual equivalent of a jazz ear to “tune into” its syncopated, math-jazz lounge rhythms and noises. Quentin Tarantino, someone who knows well enough about pure-obsession with film and who celebrates the grindhouse poetry, used V.L’s jazz strains as an influence for his Jackie Brown theme. The pleasure of a startling soundtrack -Eye of the Beholder had potential just as Bristolian merchants of Gothic-Soul Massive Attack were asked to score it. With sparse snippets of frozen, crystalline dialogue and the rumblings of a Mezzanine/Hundred Window, it could have fulfilled its latent destiny and launched into lush nightmare rather than puzzlement. Currently, it’s tantalisingly frustrating; a piecy ghost movie comprised of hums and clicks of camera lenses.. Basic Instinct is just neo-noir funk, parody shrill strings cum-hithers; shrink-talk dialogue between Dr Glass and Thewlis’s rabid London copper on the “scent of  Catherine Trammel’s pussy” is set up almost solely as a glissando tension before the dénouement of its portentous pay-off line- “It means…I smell blood”. BI:2 must be the thrill of cocaine sex materialised in a head-rush translation to a music score, car-crashing the arty psychological thriller compositions of Cronenberg perversities and the sanatorium formalism of his earlier movies with the absolute abasement of a cheap screw exploitation-video-thriller. Catherine Tramell’s exhibitionist drug-den fuck is metaphor for the movie’s self regard; shot through oblique camera angles fragmenting and re-metonymising Stone’s “look at me” like some post-modern Petrarch object of adoration and incredulity. BI:2 is a random event sexualisation; a kind of meta-porn, the exhibition of Sharon Stone’s ‘Mae-Davis’ aged starlet bared as flagrant greedy-postfeminist- narcissism trip, its ‘diegetic justification’ a joke of looping logic. The plots are just elisions, really. Eye of the Beholder’s about watching and perverse chastity but BI:2 is fetish; the entire movie logic working up the necessary time for arousal, deferment being conducive to pay-off, fermenting a series of puns, hints and sublimation teases delaying coupling until the second hour. Even then the censor symbolically has quantumed the game-play by censoring- like a deliberate conspiratorial pun- almost all the sex. BI:2 is the guilty seduction by something smart, alluring and ridiculous; like Catherine Tramell, unapologetically fixated on the minutiae of the carnality and the delirious Bataillean excesses of talent and time wasted on parody. Flouting banality and boredom, it drives itself onto giddy pleasures which threaten to engulf it in preposterousness, this film that drove respective critics into apoplexies of hate beneath which simmered a terrible guilty desire.

Oh, they’re temptingly Rubensian, gorged with text-inter-text these films; what they call scophilia runs riot alongside the deeper pleasures of the curios and archives section of culture, bad-art copulating with respectable works of art in phantom histories. Consider Joanna; she’s Eye’s idol like Cohen’s “Suzanne” is the Sophia-goddess of knowledge, like Leonard’s girl-deity she has “no love to give you”. To Know Judd is to know emptiness and the movie’s profound shallow swallow-ness. Still more, Jo Erris mirrors her name-sake goddess of discord who threw the golden apple ‘For the Fairest’ beginning the Trojan War. The Eye’s fading lost girl figure is like Don`t Look Now’s  lost child-dwarf leading him further finally through the abyss like Zarathustra. Eye saves Erris slo-mo angel on a motorbike, delivering her into the underworld like one of Orphee’s angels meets Kenneth Anger wild-pastiche parody trash. Free, sometimes even nonexistent, narration is associated with  that art cinema and testing, avant-garde experiments not concerned with Aristotelian unities and that jazz. Like a new Kurtz it goes beyond itself in search of the ‘Last Movie’/Last Movie and like Dennis Hopper’s Topo-like lysergic trip, it swallows up sense in the riff-poesy beatnik connections. Fermenting subjectivity is disruptive scrawl over bourgeois conventions. Eye of the Beholder and BI:2 both slaughter cod-psycho-analysis as archly as Hitchcock in Psycho by offering a plethora of hysterical explanations and visual equivalences; Glass is asked straight-face to play out his psycho-drama Marnie-aping cure-screw inside halls of mirrors- penetrating his own toned reflection within a monstrous build-phallus representing Psychiatric Law; snow-globes mimic and short-circuit Citizen Kane’s ‘Dime-store Freud’ before journeys to Alaska in Eye of the Beholder. Scientists in hyper-real techo-films use tarot cards, Doctors voodoo magic. All of which dissipate before the allure the female lead exerts. As psycho-tattle, it’s beyond creepy-mordant, the weird casting of old Judd with her edenic lips as boy McGregor’s surrogate daughter. Crashing her car in the desert, forced to inject heroin, poor evil Joanna is subjected to a murky Hitchcockian sadism reserved for his objects of obsession, utterly deserved. Tramell is a blonde parody of Hitch’s blondes fused with Joe E but Countess Karody is the real deal, all dark brooding eyelashes like a bride from the East, Romania, Spain, she blurs into one.

Vampyros, made by Jess Franco in 1970- lets pause to consider- Sorbonne surrealist, Welles AD Jess Franco. Shlock-meister, flesh-peddling cult ironist Jess Franco, crowned with sneering accolades of jaded filmic sybarites looking for the next shuddering frission of debasement to their finely tuned sensibilities. Every hagiography comes complete with - “he’s made some ba-ad movies”. And he has. Yet most “exploitation” film-makers came from reputed schools: Tinto Brass (‘where there’s muck, there’s Brass’) of Caligula infamy initially came from the Marxist experimentalists- akin to Godard’s Vertov collective. Maybe it’s the murkier end of a tendency within Sixties liberated film art; itself borne primordially from modernism- the coalescence of Freud, Jung, Lacan, Molly Bloom’s Monologue through to Finnegan’s womb-tongue. The Fin De Siecle all car-crash born-sexed into the ‘nightmare’ of  the Twentieth Century, those wet-dream deconstructive visions of L’age Dor, the visceral shock of the avant-garde with  Dali-esque unearthly alogical syntheses. The closest antecedent is Warhol’s anti-cinema-including of course “Blow-Job”- Factory-pieces evolving into Morrissey’s “Flesh for” features; dark shadows of glam-stars re-creating pieces from the cultural detritus of B movie monsters, as poly-sexual re-writes of the genre, writing against like, well, like Derrida, or Robbe-Grillet.. Franco’s school shares another feature with Warhol’s. Vampyryos luminescent, cosmopolitan Soledad Miranda whose shiversome beauty like autumn leaves; cheekbones like symmetry and eyes like sin resembled  a Factory Icon, intimately connect her to Eddie Sedgwick, Nico or Marianne; then dying at 27, that morbidly legendary age- Hendrix, Jones, Joplin, latterday “saint” Cobain. Druggy icons/images like drugs. The cult movie state is connected with the universe of ripping  against the conscious world; they’re like peyote. Nakedly subversive of genre, Vampyros knows  sixties light and dark drug-dreams were in colour freak-outs not Hammer creaks; spiders’ webs are ‘replaced’ by draped fishing nets; and the mysterious kite stands in for bats.  Floating in her Hockey Bel-Air meets Tangiers pool with a crimson scarf on, Miranda is-heiress in San Tropez-  Elle in a sea of liminality- somnubalist- predator, the embodiment of sex - a lizard-a star-fish-the scorpion- her own lover. Later she wears a fur hat and coat on the beach- pure aesthete. With sunglasses and silk scarf she is bound in by her glamour; the brutal gothic tragedy of her beauty  in the psychedelic inflected hedonism of the sixties sartorial style idiom spilling into film. Watch her pupils after half an hour and they’re speaking a deep, Kiedeggard talk- the sorrow of a beautiful woman, looking  like Jackie O, sensuous honeyed-moneyed decadence married with aloofness and haunted iris’s. Framed in the Countess’s psychedelic Sapphic boudoir of velvet lace, Linda chooses to curve time through drug trip temporal re-alignment for a limbo of potions and caresses.  Instead of being saved, at the end Linda willingly succumbs. Whilst going out into the desert, as the “trip” increases, Eye of the Beholder becomes like a pursuit Zabriskie Point, a continual trip into the maze, the desert being the space of psychedelic and solipsistic soul searching, meditation and mortality played out in canyon sized gestures. Eye acts out scenarios; pursuit, surveillance, asking her out in a Diner; as Joanna crashes in the chase scene that is not a chase scene this is American cinema married to the best and worst of the new-wave. Like BI:2 it follows the tropes of the US genre flick and deconstructs them by splicing them together like Bowie and Barthes’s cut up techniques.

At its worst these kind of films collapse; BI:2 has the ability to reduce critics to paralanguage not only over “awfulness” but the obliquity of its mise en scene ludus- Showgirls, on the other hand is high camp. Warsaw Dark, directed by uber- cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, filmed in Polish without a script and screened at Edinburgh was a maudy, metaphysical detective noir with girls, politics and ‘mind-fucks’. It could have been- sans irony- Eye of the Beholder. The difference between the two is a crystalline shine of composition as opposed to dim tone. Marrying elements belonging to the "great culture", and genres least recognized for their artistic values, such film makes its own history of cinema, eros and thanatos, good and bad, collapsed into the death of taste and its resurrection. Scopophilia, cinephilia, eye-candy

Spowrotem

I'm resurrecting this blog, but in conjunction with a series of videos detailing the progress of my research into Polish post-socilist cinema and its relationship to notions of civil society, along with musings on native cinema, film art, and 70's Euro surrealism as vehicle of radical critique. To start off iwth though I;m hosting an older pop-art piece of combustive post-Mulveyism on the ambivalent (product of) the gaze and carcrash cinema:

Some Notes on The Girlfriend Experience

Second in the series of Edinburgh FF related articles-- Sodenbergh's new digital guerilla affectless capitalism allegory done on the fly. In which instance, is it More Godard or Jess Franco?---or maybe that's a spurious dichotom in either sense.

Watching Steven Sodenberg's new 'Girlfriend Experience' at the EIFF I was struck how there are no other movies addressing sociologically or metaphorically the recent meltdown. This in turn has been intimately connected with another debate discussed at the festival- the speed of movie developments- past and future, and its artistic ramifications. From script to final cut, over the last 15 years it takes on average 22-24 months. Compare this to Godard movies made in the 60's addressing the Paris Riots-or mainstream serious entertainments ‘All the Presidents Men’ or the lightly fictionalised “Three Days of the Condor”.

An optimistic view of the status quo is that, compared to albums , poems or blog-lit - -- the time factors exacerbated by funding restriction procedures have created a self-regulating system avoiding statements about politics which are quickly anachronistic or ill-thought through. That movies have to either exist as pieces of art beyond the transient buffeting winds of political incident-where , as the saying goes, a week is a long-time, or indeed sociological trend--or that movies have to be viable financially, art or art, according to a set of conditions that go beyond immediate chords.

From an industry perspective, political cinema being so contemporaneous to its loci of causality- its inspiration, whilst coterminous with relatively high distribution, is a new and partly technologically-enabled phenomenon. ’The Girlfriend Experience’ not only has been released in double QuickTime through the standard sources, contravening the planning-editing and distribution two year cycle, but it’s also become available upon a multi-platform—cable, pay per view, DVD, Cinema release almost simultaneously. Has this enforced reflective resulted in considered political cinema- if politics then is defined as broader, longer-term trends-- rather than resorting to constant discourses on the pre-defined concepts and circular themes of endemic political corruption and 20th century phenomena like PAC money, panoptical-anxiety and technological espionage?

Perhaps we’re in an age of post-politics and necessarily post-political cinema in the strictest sense- the logic of standard dialectic subsumed by the rhetoric analysis of text-objects from Derrida and the pragmatists filtering into the waters. Certainly the film invites an analysis which is in itself both logical and eventually contingent-sort of eventually post-Kantian, and in this sense the phenomology of montage cinema writ large- in it’s foregrounding of its imposing and eventually inscrutable desire-beckoning epistemology of meaning-making. The Girlfriend Experience in some way touches upon the necessarily circular , even typological themes of objectification, of mercantile vs existential value-of the power relationships involved in all human-value as commodity transactions. The simulation of the girlfriend' for one thing is hardly a new phenomena- the anxiety at the heart of the broker’s relationships to romantic value given their power status-the question of what constitutes attraction, and the conflicting allegiances between categories of 'relationship' between Gray's personae and her clients/boyfriend simultaneously. All those we find in Godard's capitalist critiques-just in terms of explicitly cinematic treatment.

As Mark Cousin’s noted in his 2001 article, the tendency in mainstream cinema has been to the conservative-corporate; which is of course traditionally interpreted as politically neutral which, being so imbedded, elides explanation-’normative’ in its evasion of the material.Of course it’s not just the length between matiere and story which is affected by the tech. Democracy but also issues of funding, equity-all contingent previously on structures of marketing and other interests of the studios veering towards the mainstream(demographic) and then towards the conservative (personal)- an interlocked cycle which had to some extent directed the expectations of movies across the board- their prerogative to question-steadily towards a version of the right.

There’s a political dimension to all cinema. The past can be relevant not only for its own documentary purposes but also a form of myth or allegory to stand in for the future—born, like all allegory, out of a universalism paradigm of human behaviour. Arguably there’s a political cinema out there-and like all politics through the microscope these days it’s existence and reception comes with a number of caveats; the chance to see adult film-star Sasha Grey-of the demeaning as art-school-playing a Manhattan escort in some ready made analogue for capitalism but also frisson of excitement, Sodenberg to have one of his art-films reach a mainstream audience in the same way Oceans 11/12 or Erin Brock did-, and the unwieldy Che gain some Kudos for ambitious cinema in the way Sex, Lies and Videotape did in the early nineties.

The Girlfriend Experience, with its imitation of life and imitation of art, and the standard vocabulary of art-shots, is a quite conventional model- as conventional as Milk or Frost Nixon when it comes to political cinema. There’s even a sense of art as high-end money-shot, as a glorified exploitation movie of aphrodisiac surfaces. Which distinguishes it as phenomena is not Sodenberg's low-budget, high visibility status, not his formal techniques in of themselves but the alignment of everything else to a contemporary piquant-a literalising or at least epistemic blurring of political cinema—usually documenting the past with consideration, how it analyses and documents history before it concretizes- the camera script weaving in amidst the falling rubble of the new Great Crash. With its fragmentation aesthetics though it harks back to the classic age of paranoia, the seventies-and its psycho-analytical associative structure ordered films about conspiracies which found their equivalent in the aesthetic paranoia of meaning-over-determination and elision alike.

It’s interesting how the audience are not necessarily pushed forwards in a linear sense, but against the conventional narrative parameters of cinematic time and space into an aural dimension, an aural depth. It also clearly demonstrates Sonderbergh’s "Chrono-Logic"; the film has an internal narrative - the time span that the events on screen are occurring within - but also an external narrative of the duration of the film within its screening in the market’s continual cyclical collapse. He utilises time as a cyclical emblem, reinforcing his ideas around the unstoppable recycling of events.

Sondeberg's characters here very seldom link their situation into a particularised point in power relations. Merely that previous years –during which Grey's character first began working-- constituted a boom-time in the economy. Not that her profession and loss of clients is in any peculiar way an analogue for late-century capitalism. For most of the movie her job is glamorous- simulating Karina/ Deneuve icon shots rising from the bed mixed in with SoHo set loft and Chelsea Hotel cinematographical rises. Conversations on the niceties of symbolism-relationship deconstruction with an experienced journalist who sees her as the epitome of the modern condition come spliced in with half-ert irony. And then in the end-a 'happy ending' premature emotional betrayal ejaculation, hug and overspill with a corpulent sort-after her experiences with a loathsome reviewer-played by Premiere's Glen Kenny.

The Glamour vs the muck becomes an analogue for the psychological process of trading--the traders up on what looks like airforce 1 clinking crystal and Cristal, discussing Vegas-with the near- suicidal plummeting , the lifestyle and ulcers they experience in the course of the movie. The movie itself is cold- dispassionate-emotionally hemlocked, and simulating ennui, its non-judgement is a comment on the psychopathology of corporate life. The abuse which Grey takes onlike performance art an analogy for voting Republican-maschocism. A self-interest which genuinely deludes itself as believing in a ‘natural order’, in what it enacts as ‘love’.

The intimacy that he wishes for gets locked in-messed into his outfit-his opinions those of sad sack condemned by ironies of history (vote McCain etc)- the experience offered is a double-blind-the broken down body against her false intimacy facade-which in of itself from a neutrally involved perspective of the camera just becomes another emission, becomes a condemnation of both parties. Just like Ms Grey herself; her reputation would suggest TGE would be a quite different type of movie in its treatment of the theme; a notoriety frisson selling an experience which demonstrably offers very little aside from a re-iteration of herself as distance-from clients, from persona, from herself. Discussions occur all the time about a hidden/innate self which the client would like to see- a s the prized asset. Just as here suddenly the prized artefact asset is Grey-clothed—a revolution game played with her image, that she becomes a piquant curiosity-like the markets, torn between supreme control and contingent instability. The promise of a less mercantile connection of straightforward desires. But in the end this can become in the marketplace just another fetish if everything is blank. As Grey's Chelsea is an intelligent blankness.

Normally she trades in the degradation- the risk taking bravado art-performance of the market place; the high-wire theatrics, with money or other terms of values-transmuting meaning out of ‘nothings’ to engineer new values for itself like junk-bonds, like sub-primes. Grey herself described the culture in this movie as 'looking for bigger mirrors', her Chelsea included. There's an uneasy shift between body and abstracts- she abstracted into money, relationships into a series of digits and ciphers, and stocktraders in turn back into hard-bodies like in a Bret Easton Ellis revisitation. It's Ellis' type of alienation which this movie tributes. Sodenbergh’s plane-dwellers on their way to Vegas are filmed in a lo-budget light like those eighties free-for-all ‘dirty cams’-the low-budget entrepreneurial grainy self-made s-tape, in a dialogue wth Sasha Grey’s own pre-existent persona. Or Sodebergh’s vacillation between the ‘clean’ business of social cinema and the high-gloss Vegas ‘whore’ of his commercial work. Between the two poles of modern film-making—self-reflexively commented upon.

It took years to process 9/11 filmically and yet now, from stories of death and solidarity, New York occupies once again-and this time more moribund-the spectre of a ravaged city in the financial district. The enemy within is more nebulous than the interlopers through airports security and flight-schools, the homeland security threat itself overturned by the bond-securities downfall; the anxiety of the body politic-diffuse expectations of Grey’s body, of her client’s bodies turn on the treadmills and as objects of scrutiny and, most of all, the financial body politics’ integrity. It can’t be honed or cured-but at best present the illusion of a natural relationship to commodities, present a veneer of confidence.

A freedom to buy anything- has more or less always exited for the rich-but with this techno-view- this apparent free-market liberalism democracy of viewings available through the digitised camera, through social mobility-a class which was once ossified has sprung up as the theatricity -as roleplay detached from material production and yet with values and lives still in the balance-plays the excesses of the ancient regime- has less to curb its tastes or the manner, the extent of its fee domination. But they too are confused-like in technology, so too the soteriologies of being, everything is more or less in flux- the historical lessons, like the lessons henceforth of allegory, also in flux within movie method and message along with the environment which-in its one certainty- it articulates in this, all this, slippage.