Chained to the Cinémathèque

a party

2012-01-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

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2011: A Year in Cinema

2012-01-02T03:28:00.000-08:00

Continuing the tradition, what follows is a list of films seen for the first time in 2011, or revisited and reconsidered, in rough order of preference. I also wrote some little things for year-end roundups at Vinyl Is Heavy and for the Mubi Notebook. I've got some other thoughts, but not sure they'll drift their way into print in the immediate... for now, let's just say these top 5 (and maybe 6) will be influencing me for a long, long time.

Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2011)
This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2010)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
Passeio com Johnny Guitar (João César Monteiro, 1996)
A King in New York (Charles Chaplin, 1957)
The Pinochet Case (Patricio Guzmán, 2001)
Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark (Al Jazeera documentary, 2011)
Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen, 1974)
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (William E. Jones, 1998)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011)
Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)
Salvador Allende (Patricio Guzmán, 2004)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
Dead Island: Official Announcement Trailer
Palestinian Chicken episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
A Village Fading Away (Patricio Guzmán, 1995)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
The Angel Wore Red (Nunnally Johnson, 1960)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
The Firm (Sydney Pollack, 1993)
Mister Softee episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)
"Hang With Me" (Max Vitali, 2010)
Get Out of the Car (Thom Andersen, 2010)
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010)
History Lessons (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1972)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986)
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)
Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorcese, 2011)
Tauw (Ousmane Sembene, 1970)
The Ace of Hearts (Wallace Worsley, 1921)
Bi-Sexual episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
Car Periscope episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)
Three on a Couch (Jerry Lewis, 1966)
Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011)
The Immortal Story (Orson Welles, 1968)
Bhopali (Max Carlson, 2011)
Goodbye, Michael episode of "The Office" (2011)
Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)
Cops (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1922)
Cabs Are Here! episode of "Jersey Shore" (2011)
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
The Trip [theatrical version] (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1920)
The Aristocrat (Greg Croteau, 2010)
Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)
Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011)
Dallas (Stuart Heisler, 1950)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)
The Wedding Night (King Vidor, 1935)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)
Cold Weather (Aaron Katz, 2010)
Notorious (George Tillman, Jr., 2009)
The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)
The Paleface (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1922)
The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)
Union Depot (Alfred E. Green, 1932)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)
British Agent (Michael Curtiz, 1934)
The 3 Rs (David Lynch, 2011)
Haiku (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)
Two & Two (Babak Anvari, 2010)
Raffles (George Fitzmaurice, 1930)
The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2009)
The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966)
House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990)
Along the Great Divide (Raoul Walsh, 1951)
All Blossoms Again: Pedro Costa, Director (Aurélien Gerbault, 2006)
Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)
Jumping (Osamu Tezuka, 1984)
Killed (William E. Jones, 2009)
Discrepancy (William E. Jones, 2008-2010)
Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010)
Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968)
Faust (Alexander Sokurov, 2011)
Fun on Mars (Sally Cruikshank, 1971)
Too Big to Fail (Curtis Hanson, 2011)
Cinema Verite (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2011)
Due Date (Todd Phillips, 2010)
Autumnal (Scott Nyerges, 2008)
Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) (William E. Jones, 2006)
Berlin Flash Frames (William E. Jones, 2010)
Punctured (William E. Jones, 2010)
Cop Out (Kevin Smith, 2010)

In loving memory

2011-12-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

طارق الطيب محمد البوعزيزي‎
Mohamed Bouazizi
March 29, 1984 – January 4, 2011

ideology

2011-12-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

"The unjust and oppressive, all those, in fact, who wrong others, are guilty, not only of the evil they do, but also of the perversion of mind they cause in those whom they offend." - I Promessi Sposi, Alessandro Manzoni

Pensée unique

2011-12-14T00:13:00.000-08:00

Monti to Parliament: no alternative

"Saying you have no choice cuts off all options, absolves responsibility and is the dream killer." - Seth Godin

Satyagraha

2011-12-06T23:14:00.000-08:00

“When righteousness
withers away
and evil
rules the land,
we come into being,
age after age,
and take physical shape,
and move,
a man among men,
for the protection of good,
thrusting back evil,
and setting virtue on her seat again.”
- Philip Glass #OWS

explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration

2011-11-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

“The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.”
- Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord

via

UC Davis / Four Perspectives

2011-11-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident, Four Perspectives by Andy Baio

UC Davis

2011-11-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

more photos

additional info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

professional relations

2011-11-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

"People who have an official, professional relation to other men’s sufferings, for instance, judges, police officers, doctors—in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this formal, soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one thing—time—in order to deprive an innocent man of all rights of property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on performing certain formalities for which the judge is paid his salary, and then—it is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and protection in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles from a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy—for instance, a verdict of acquittal—calls forth a perfect outburst of dissatisfied and revengeful feeling?"

- Anton Chekhov, from “Ward No 6," as cited in Was King Hammurabi a Commie? by Charles Simic

the main issue is in front of you

2011-11-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

a ding in the universe

2011-10-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

"It's more fun to be a pirate than join the Navy."

***

***

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

***

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

De Artificiali Perspectiva

2011-10-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

the lid taken off

2011-08-13T02:13:00.000-07:00

"Consumption is not, as one might generally imagine (which is why economic "science" is fundamentally averse to discussing it), an indeterminate marginal sector where an individual, elsewhere constrained by social rules, would finally recover, in the "private" sphere, a margin of freedom and personal play when left on his own. Consumption is a collective and active behavior, a constraint, a morality, and an institution. It is a complete system of values, with all that the term implies concerning group integration and social control.

We don't realize how much the current indoctrination into systematic and organized consumption is the equivalent and the extension, in the twentieth century, of the great indoctrination of rural populations into industrial labor, which occurred throughout the nineteenth century. The same process of rationalization of productive forces, which took place in the nineteenth century in the sector of production is accomplished, in the twentieth century, in the sector of consumption. Having socialized the masses into a labor force, the industrial system had to go further in order to fulfill itself and to socialize the masses (that is, to control them) into a force of consumption."
- Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society
(via Zeynep)

***

"The “bloody week,” as it was called, also involved an enormous destruction of property. The Communards, to be sure, were not enamored of the privileges of private property and were not averse to destroying hated symbols. The Vendôme Column—which Napoleon III had doted upon—was toppled in a grand ceremony on the May 16 to symbolize the end of authoritarian rule. The painter Courbet was later held responsible for this act, and condemned to pay for the reconstruction of the monument out of his own pocket. The Communards also decreed, but never carried out, the destruction of the Chapel of Expiation, by which Louis XVIII had sought to impress upon Parisians their guilt in executing his brother. And when Thiers had shown his true colors, the Communards took a certain delight in dismantling his Parisian residence, stone by stone, in a symbolic gesture that Goncourt felt had an “excellent bad effect." But the wholesale burning of Paris was another matter entirely."
- David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity

***

"We compile a new index that summarizes these variables, and then ask -- for every percentage cut in government spending, how much more instability should we expect? The data shows a clear link between the magnitude of expenditure cutbacks and increases in social unrest. With every additional percentage point of GDP in spending cuts, the risk of unrest increases."
- Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth, Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009 (pdf)

***

"Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as ‘aristocracy tempered by rioting’. In fact riots often combine the form of radical protest with reactionary content.
[...]
As well established as the riot tradition is reactive alarmism that the country is going to hell in a looted shopping trolley. Namier’s bon mot could be rewritten for our times as ‘plutocracy tempered by riot’. Consumerism holds up varnished designer tat as the sine qua non of civic respect. Its supporting ideology holds that monetary access to consumer goods flows from desert, the sort of thing stockpiled by politicians’ beloved ‘hard-working people and their families’. But everyone – not least Keele University cleaning staff, employed for over thirty years, who get up before six every morning to earn the minimum wage – knows that that is all balls. Acquisitiveness and arson are, as far as this goes, two sides of the same coin. Consumerism may be a mug’s game; but acting as though it efficiently metes out rewards according to desert is a mug’s game run by the mugs. Small wonder when the lid is taken off that those who know the system is a put-up job fill their boots."
- Glen Newey, "To Hell in a Looted Shopping Trolley"

Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark

2011-08-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

Lenin on auteurism

2011-07-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

"We must learn to combine the 'public meeting' democracy of the working people — turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood — with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work."
- The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government

(via)

Fathers and Sons

2011-06-19T00:00:00.004-07:00

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gabrielle and Jean, 1895

written in pencil in the sealed railway car

2011-06-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

written in pencil in the sealed railway car (Dan Pagis)

here in this carload
I am eve
with abel my son
if you see my older son
cain son of adam
tell him that I

2011-05-17T02:23:00.000-07:00

Plaque commemorating three Levellers shot by Oliver Cromwell in Burford
(Kaihsu Tai, 17 May 2008)

***

Profit motive and the whispering wind
(John Gianvito, 2007)

***

Toute révolution est un coup de dés
(Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, 1977)

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

2011-05-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

(via)

Mother's Day Proclamation (Julia Ward Howe, 1870)

2011-05-09T21:44:00.000-07:00

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

25 de Abril Sempre, Fascismo Nunca Mais

2011-04-25T02:19:00.000-07:00

A true militant cinema

2011-04-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

"Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups - they have the "mania of the All": each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject.

[...]

So the unification always happens on the basis of a kind of amnesia and the desire to nourish this amnesia with beautiful images (the red flags of 1900.) This amnesia is a paradoxical but important phenomenon in the lives of Franco-Italian intellectuals: these cultures imbued with Marxism are cultures where the history of the workers' movement is not well known, because it is the parties who write history.

On the other hand, for people haunted by writing like the CAHIERS, it's clear that writing divides, while images unify (through common fear or recognition.) Today, in France, in cinema, you have to divide. And it can only be done by making contemporary films (and not moving evocations.) For example, it's quite possible to make a Communist trade-unionist a fictional character; it's what Godard does in COMMENT CA VA. It's quite possible to film the suicide of a young person; it's what Bresson does in THE DEVIL, PROBABLY. But these are contemporary films, which do not surrender to the simulacrum of memory."

- Serge Daney

Farbkreis (Zur Farbenlehre)

2011-03-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

Image of the Day: Interior with Young Man Reading

2011-02-19T14:47:00.000-08:00

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading, 1898

yes

2011-02-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

Prostitute in Naples, Italy 1920

2011-02-13T23:40:00.000-08:00

source

a revelation

2011-01-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

***

False Consciousness

2011-01-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 2)

2011-01-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

Matthew Flanagan's contribution to The Daily Notebook's year-end feature, featuring a picture from London's Day X3 protests (December 9, 2010) against the rises in tuition fees:

NEW: Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)
OLD: History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1972)

WHY:

The Democratic organisations, on which he could still have leaned in the Autumn, were in ruins. The City had betrayed the little man according to all the rules of the art, except the one that prescribes that the victim shall not notice anything.
— the banker Mummlius Spicer, from Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.

To show, above all. To show the possible. That's all.
— JLG

Not so much a fantasy double bill as two films, and three filmmakers, that meant a lot to me this year. Looking back, it seems the year’s great films about the political and spatial decay of the present — Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins, Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car — could only be paired with films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. I’ve clung to these two for their clarity, their abstractions, and their hope.

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 1)

2011-01-09T02:57:00.000-08:00

Just published: The Daily Notebook's 3rd Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2010

My contribution:

NEW: The Social Network (David Fincher, USA)
OLD: The Night Cleaners (Part 1) (Marc Karlin & James Scott, 1975)

WHY: Two films that use the act of giving depositions as a means to explore the interactions of individual emotions and history: David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) uses deposition-based set pieces to showcase the personal grievances that help drive the creation of a new form of social interaction, a sort of computer-powered social efficiency engine. In The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (1975), the Berwick Street Film Collective uses interviews to show the human cost of daily underpaid drudgery and unfairness—the personal grievances that result from participation in an engine of grand economic efficiency.

Image of the Day: The Smoker (1891)

2011-01-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Paul Cézanne, The Smoker, 1891

2010: A Year in Cinema

2010-12-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

Films seen for the first time in 2010, or revisited and reconsidered, in rough order of preference:

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)
The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde, 1966)
L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonio, 1960)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (Pedro Costa, 2005)
I Can Feel the Sea Falling Over My Head (Matthew Swiezynski & Diane Granahan, 2010)
The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975)
Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne Miéville, 1976)
Sayat Nova (Sergei Parajanov, 1968)
Role Models (David Wain, 2008)
War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010)
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)
Runaway (Kanye West, 2010)
It Is Something Invisible (Matthew Swiezynski, 2010)
Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)
Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)
Black Knight (Gil Junger, 2001)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)
Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010)
The Meaning of Life (Don Hertzfeldt, 2005)
Framed (Andy DeEmmony, 2009)
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)
City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009)
L'auberge espagnole (Cédric Klapisch, 2002)

Happy Christmas!

2010-12-24T19:12:00.000-08:00

John Leech illustrations for the 1843 edition of A Christmas Carol (via).

"There's a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair. Is that true?"

2010-12-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

0:00 - 0:09 -- a shot of a wheelchair, static
0:09 -- camera whip pans left. a blur of yellow police jacket appears just to the left of the disabled protester, just out of what was previously the frame.
0:10 -- whip pan right, capturing another police officer running toward the wheelchair (and thus the first officer)
0:12 -- camera pans left again, following a woman's shout
0:16 -- next to the cameraman, a male voice says "over there, pushing forward"; the camera pans back right and searches for the frame to capture the action
0:19 -- the camera finds a view to the protester in a wheelchair, who is in the same location as 10 seconds previously, at this point being dragged out of the chair and pushed to the ground by 2 police officers. shouts of protest from the crowd.
0:22 -- police officer in riot gear stops a protester from intervening.
0:24 -- police officer in yellow jacket drags the disabled protester along the pavement by his arms.
0:28 -- disabled protester pushed to the ground by the same officer.
0:30 -- the man who was assisting the wheelchair tries to pull him back up into the chair. the police officer -- the same one who dragged him previously -- this time drags the disabled protester all the way to the curb, throwing him down at the end, twisting his body in order get full leverage on the throw.
0:39 -- other protesters begin to confront this officer.
0:44 -- confrontation begins to escalate verbally.
0:48 -- the other police officer involved in pushing the protester to the ground, as well as the officer dressed in riot gear, physically pull at the first officer to separate him from the protesters. he looks back at the crowd from which he's being pulled.

***

"Now these pictures APPEAR to show Jody McIntyre, 20-year-old fiscal activist and blogger, who suffers from cerebral palsy, being pulled out of his wheelchair and dragged across the road to the pavement."
[Emphasis as originally spoken by BBC presenter Ben Brown]

BBC Complaints - Homepage

Celestial, bodies

2010-12-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

But Mr. Hagelmayer. It's still not over.

***

bodies moving: social interactions, humans inside houses inside villages, attempted loves.

***

"György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony."

education or the factory

2010-12-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

(via)

Toast at the Democratic and Socialist Banquet (Félix Pyat, December 3, 1848)

2010-12-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

Citizens,

Amidst the enthusiasm that animates this gathering I can’t help but feel some sadness. A bitter thought, almost remorse, troubles me despite myself, poisons my joy in the same way that a drop of bile would poison our glasses. I find myself thinking that while we are sitting here, at this fraternal banquet, breaking bread and communing in a common spirit, I think with pain that there are men, brothers who are hungry and who will not eat today. (Movement) Yes, citizens, the tears of the ill and the blood of victims, this is the bile that now renders bitter all joy and all cups. This is the evil that troubles the present, which makes us sigh for a better republic, the true republic, the democratic and social republic, the only one that will finally realize the reign promised 20 centuries ago, the reign of God, the reign of daily bread for all humanity’s children. (Applause)

The republic means solidarity. (Movement) Republicans, we are all in solidarity with each other. And as long as one man lacks for bread we won’t have a republic. (That’s true! That’s true!) As long as the sovereign has the beggar’s rod and pouch as his mantle and scepter we won’t have the republic. (Bravos) As long as the necessities of some are the surplus of others, as long as the proletarian plants wheat and eats bran (Bravos), as long as the sons of the people are born for the poor house or prison, their daughters for prostitution or suicide, we won’t have the republic! (Applause) As long as man is unhappier than the brute, as long as we see what I saw when coming here, horses with hoods with sparkling knee boots and polished sabots and half-naked men sweeping the streets so that the horses not dirty their feet, we will be neither republicans, nor humans; we won’t have the republic! (Interruptions. Prolonged applause)

Son of the bourgeoisie, son of privilege, follow me into the house of the poor. It is night, it’s cold. Enter this sordid, filthy alley that offends sight and smell, all the senses at once. Climb that staircase, enter that humid and black cubbyhole, with its tiny, creviced garret that doesn’t let air enter, only the cold. Over there a little bit of coal smoking in the hearth, two little children in bed; the mother, after the day’s work washes their rags while they sleep. Poor pale woman, thin from fatigue and want, fighting to the death against poverty, stealing from her sleep and her life, and striking her dried out breast that can no longer nourish her children. (Movement)

Next door, in a mansard, a table and a lamp, a young girl working lets fall her needle, tears up a wretched letter and lights a coal furnace. (Renewed movement)

Elsewhere, at the hospital a man who is perhaps the father, a sick man, a number; there are so many that they don’t name them: at best they count them. A poor man, finally dying as he lived, for the profit of the rich, exploited by them even after death, for he belongs to them body and soul. He feeds them in peace, he defends them in war and he doesn’t even find repose in the grave, for science learns from him so as to cure the rich (profound sensation). No, we don’t have a republic!

We have a royalty less the name, an empire less the glory; a kind of republic out of Africa, with a policeman’s bonnet. (That’s true - Movement - Laughter) Sorry, I meant with a kepi. (Prolonged laughter), a mixed race head covering, neither military nor civil, a middle way between the policeman’s bonnet and the helmet, a bastard bonnet, just like the authorities, which have the drawbacks of monarchy without the advantages of liberty. We have the regime of force, the rule of chance, a chaos lacking in justice and order, where half of humanity eats the other; a world with neither faith nor law, full of vices and crimes, errors and misfortunes, a society selfish and rotten to the marrow, having the executioner as king and the golden calf as God. No, we don’t have a republic! (Applause)

For the republic means liberty, and he who doesn’t have this is a slave. It’s Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of pottage. (That’s true)

The republic means equality. And as the proverb says, everyone must live, an old, truly French proverb that truly contains the genius of our country, that in germ contains our entire revolution, for it denies privilege and affirms the right. He who dies of hunger is not the equal of he who dies of indigestion. (Movement)

Finally, the republic means fraternity. Love each other, they said to us at the Festival of the Constitution. (Movement) But how can we love those who kill us, since letting someone die also means killing them. (Yes, yes. Bravo!) The rich man is not the brother of the poor man who dies at his door. Or else this is the fraternity of Cain, and the voice of the people, the voice of God will one day ask: “What have you done to your brother?’ No, a thousand times no, we don’t have a republic! (Applause)

And we want it, in its entirety, without exclusion, without exception. This is why we want the right to live for all. Those who want to deny and repress that right and who call themselves honest and moderate have faith in force, in violence. They have made Paris a camp, France a barracks and the army a gendarmerie. (That’s true. Bravos) They imprison, they deport, they kill. And there they are again falling on the press, recommencing the old war of error against truth, in their madness mistaking the lighthouse for the reef, accusing barometers of causing storms because they announce them. (Yes, yes), not seeing that the light burns the bushel, that the storm comes from those who refuse the right and not those who call for it, for right is inalienable! (Yes, yes! Bravos) These blind men, not seeing that nothing is obtained through force, the republic no more than monarchy, that a principle isn’t founded through a contrary principle, liberty by a state of siege, equality by exile, fraternity by death (Very prolonged bravos) that order can’t be founded on cannon blows, but by institutions! (Very good! Bravos). We, on the contrary, extremists, Reds (Laughter), we have faith only in principle and right. We only want to found the republic on justice and satisfaction. We want to recognize and assure, forever and for all, the first of the rights of man, the right to life. (Yes, yes) And the right to life, and I said and proved this at another tribune, is the right to work! (Great movement. Applause)

And so, citizens, to the supreme right, to the right superior and prior to all the others; to the most sacred, the most legitimate, the most necessary of all rights, to the right proclaimed last so as to become the first: (Bravo, Bravo) To the president, the king, the master, the capital of the future: To Labor! (Prolonged applause)

(source)

History Lessons

2010-11-29T00:06:00.000-08:00

***

Both installments of my two-part series of Steven Soderbergh's Che have been published at Mubi:

HISTORY LESSONS (PT. 1): NOTES ON STEVEN SODERBERGH'S "CHE"

HISTORY LESSONS (PT. 2): NOTES ON STEVEN SODERBERGH'S "CHE"

***

A barricade on the Rue Soufflot, Paris, June 1848

2010-11-25T11:10:00.000-08:00

A barricade on the Rue Soufflot (with the Panthéon behind), Paris, June 1848, Horace Vernet

struggle

2010-11-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)

strategics

2010-11-21T15:31:00.001-08:00

"I think that Che is absolutely not about glorifying Che! I think it's not a biopic and I think it's hardly about Che Guevara. I think it's a movie about strategics. I think it's the one movie I can think of which actually does take the issues of strategy as its core theme. The way I see the film is you have a first part that describes how you win a revolutionary war, how you move from the swamps to the village, from the village to the small town. How you actually do win an urban guerilla battle and how ultimately you win the war and take over the country. And it goes into great detail in explaining the dynamics of it, the logic of it, and why, how and one thing leading to the other, ultimately you win. And then you have a second part, which explains exactly why you do not win because the terrain is not appropriate, because the local population is suspicious, because the legitimate politicians are too conflicted about your struggle, because the enemy has grown stronger."

- Olivier Assayas

on the mojito / Advice from Fidel, #1

2010-11-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)

fees protests

2010-11-12T09:12:00.000-08:00

this is excellent. all around. [as a document; as participation; as a film]

Two moments I love: the lingering on the silver table (as if to say: c'mon, lads, here's a weapon); the cut to black while the audio continues. in that moment, the protest seems to expand to take over the whole country.

danger, safety, conviction

2010-11-07T18:58:00.002-08:00

"Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man."

In honor of the political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, rightfully elected Prime Minister in the 1990 elections, whose National League for Democracy party refused to stand in today's "elections" in Burma.

"Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude."

For more on the situation in Burma, please see Burma Campaign UK or U.S. Campaign for Burma

before and after

2010-11-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

“Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”
- Wu Li

HERE. NOW.

2010-10-26T22:04:00.009-07:00

Outer Space

2010-10-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

(via)

Icarus also flew

2010-10-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

work, love, waiting

2010-10-05T00:44:00.003-07:00

"The first thing we have to learn is that love is an art, just as living is an art."
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"They heard me singing and they told me to stop /
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock"
- Régine Chassagne, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

"If we line up one hundred years of scenes of people leaving factories, we can imagine that the same shot had been taken over and over and over. Like a child who repeats its first word for one hundred years to immortalise its pleasure in that first spoken word. Or like Far Eastern artists who repeatedly paint the same picture until it is perfect, and the artist can enter the picture. When we could no longer believe in such perfection, film was invented."
--Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik, 1995. (via)

"perfectio propter imperfectionem"
- Lucilio Vanini, on Empedocles

"We used to wait for it... /
We used to wait for it..." - Win Butler, "We Used To Wait"

"In the Book of Jonah, God explains to Jonah that the essence of love is to labour for something and to make something grow, that love and labour are inseparable. One loves that for which one labours, and one labours for that which one loves."
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"I'm gonna write /
a letter to my true love, I'm gonna sign my name"
- Win Butler, "We Used To Wait"

"We watched the end of the century /
Compressed on a tiny screen /
A dead star collapsing and we could see /
That something was ending"
- Win Butler, "Deep Blue"

"Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small
that we can never get away from the sprawl"
- Régine Chassagne, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

a desire to begin again

2010-08-06T02:56:00.000-07:00

Francesco Hayez, The Kiss (1859)

2010-07-28T04:39:00.001-07:00

Francesco Hayez, The Kiss (1859)

BP Flange removal

2010-07-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

Home » Novelty Bets » Current Affairs » BP Specials » First to become extinct

2010-06-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

First to become extinct - BP Specials Betting

.

The presence of absence

2010-05-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

***
William Lubtchansky

26 October 1937 to 4 May 2010

When politics rises up

2010-05-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

the hill, the city, the past

2010-05-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peut-être qu'un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour
{The Eyes do not Want to be Closed at all times, or Possibly Rome will permit herself to choose in her turn}
{Othon}
(Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1969/1970)

Leaving the factory

2010-05-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sortie d'usine (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), 1895.

Striking workers, Hershey, Pennsylvania (date unknown)

connection

2010-04-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

"Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists --Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat."

- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Marina Abramović Made Me Cry

2010-04-28T18:04:00.002-07:00

http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com

Portraits taken during the MoMA's exhibit of performance artist "Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present".

Abramovic sits at a table in silence, and museum guests can sit across from her and stare.

Some people couldn't handle the heat.

(via)

LA LIBERTÉ COÛTE CHER

2010-04-21T21:25:00.003-07:00

***

***
http://filmsocialisme.com/

Fictitious Capital / Borrowed time

2010-04-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

"money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity" - David Harvey, in The Limits to Capital, on Marx's notion of fictitious capital

(via; see also)

CNN vs. Al Jazeera landing page. 17:20 GMT Monday April 4, 2010

2010-04-05T15:25:00.001-07:00

Collateral Murder

2010-04-05T10:46:00.002-07:00

Collateral Murder
Overview

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.
- Collateral Murder

Genealogies #1: "Rosie" / "Be my husband"

2010-02-20T15:24:00.002-08:00

"Rosie"

"Be my husband," Nina Simone

To Those Who Follow in Our Wake / An die Nachgeborenen

2010-02-13T16:44:00.002-08:00

I

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!
Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn
Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende
Hat die furchtbare Nachricht
Nur noch nicht empfangen.

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!
Der dort ruhig über die Straße geht
Ist wohl nicht mehr erreichbar für seine Freunde
Die in Not sind?

Es ist wahr: Ich verdiene nur noch meinen Unterhalt
Aber glaubt mir: das ist nur ein Zufall. Nichts
Von dem, was ich tue, berechtigt mich dazu, mich sattzuessen.
Zufällig bin ich verschont. (Wenn mein Glück aussetzt, bin ich verloren.)

Man sagt mir: Iß und trink du! Sei froh, daß du hast!
Aber wie kann ich essen und trinken, wenn
Ich dem Hungernden entreiße, was ich esse, und
Mein Glas Wasser einem Verdursteten fehlt?
Und doch esse und trinke ich.

Ich wäre gerne auch weise.
In den alten Büchern steht, was weise ist:
Sich aus dem Streit der Welt halten und die kurze Zeit
Ohne Furcht verbringen
Auch ohne Gewalt auskommen
Böses mit Gutem vergelten
Seine Wünsche nicht erfüllen, sondern vergessen
Gilt für weise.
Alles das kann ich nicht:
Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!

II

In die Städte kam ich zur Zeit der Unordnung
Als da Hunger herrschte.
Unter die Menschen kam ich zu der Zeit des Aufruhrs
Und ich empörte mich mit ihnen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Mein Essen aß ich zwischen den Schlachten
Schlafen legte ich mich unter die Mörder
Der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos
Und die Natur sah ich ohne Geduld.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Straßen führten in den Sumpf zu meiner Zeit.
Die Sprache verriet mich dem Schlächter.
Ich vermochte nur wenig. Aber die Herrschenden
Saßen ohne mich sicherer, das hoffte ich.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Die Kräfte waren gering. Das Ziel
Lag in großer Ferne
Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch für mich
Kaum zu erreichen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

III

Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut
In der wir untergegangen sind
Gedenkt
Wenn ihr von unseren Schwächen sprecht
Auch der finsteren Zeit
Der ihr entronnen seid.

Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe die Länder wechselnd
Durch die Kriege der Klassen, verzweifelt
Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine Empörung.

Dabei wissen wir doch:
Auch der Hass gegen die Niedrigkeit
Verzerrt die Züge.
Auch der Zorn über das Unrecht
Macht die Stimme heiser. Ach, wir
Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit
Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein.

Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird
Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist
Gedenkt unsrer
Mit Nachsicht.

I
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?

It is true: I work for a living
But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!
But how can I eat and drink
When I take what I eat from the starving
And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would happily be wise.
The old books teach us what wisdom is:
To retreat from the strife of the world
To live out the brief time that is your lot
Without fear
To make your way without violence
To repay evil with good –
The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires,
But to forget them.
But I cannot heed this:
Truly I live in dark times!

II

I came into the cities in a time of disorder
As hunger reigned.
I came among men in a time of turmoil
And I rose up with them.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.

I ate my food between slaughters.
I laid down to sleep among murderers.
I tended to love with abandon.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.

In my time streets led into a swamp.
My language betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers sat more securely, or so I hoped.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.

The powers were so limited. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It could clearly be seen although even I
Could hardly hope to reach it.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.

III

You, who shall resurface following the flood
In which we have perished,
Contemplate –
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also the dark time
That you have escaped.

For we went forth, changing our country more frequently than our shoes
Through the class warfare, despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

And yet we knew:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse. We
Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, when at last the time comes
That man can aid his fellow man,
Should think upon us
With leniency.

–Bertolt Brecht, An die Nachgeborenen first published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939) in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, pp. 722-25 (1967)(translation by Scott Horton, available here [via The Hat])

the meaning of life / not bad for 102

2010-02-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

via

[at the time it was taken, he was only 99].

backstage

2010-02-02T04:29:00.000-08:00

a way of throwing her head back / the poignancy of vanished things

2010-01-26T17:43:00.006-08:00

- Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

[via]

"All these batons might form, together, another human raft."

2010-01-15T11:37:00.001-08:00

Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland

all the Buddhas died,

and never heard what killed them.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, died on January 6th, aged 93

the real economy

2010-01-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

"10) "Shuttin' Detroit Down" John Rich. On matter of national crisis and national shame, as usual, country shoots first. That doesn't mean one likes the aim (cf. Keith comma Toby), but there's something remarkable about how quick is the draw. In mid-November of 2008, the CEOs of Chrysler and GM arrived in Washington to request bailout money — in private jets. By January, the dwarfier half of Big & Rich had recorded this song. The chord progression's pretty prêt-a-porter, but it's hard not to be captivated by a song that draws its lexicon equally from talk radio (Wall Street vs. Main Street, etc) and from political economy, from whence it conjures with impressive clarity the distance between "the real economy" and finance: "pardon me if I don't shed a tear," runs the leadup to the chorus, "they're selling make-believe, and we don't buy that here." It's a wonder he doesn't mention fictitious capital. And then the chorus:
Cause in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down
While the bossman takes his bonus pay and jets on outta town
DC's bailin' out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah while they're livin' it up on Wall Street in the New York City town,
Here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.
...and then it goes into the specifics of retirement accounts! Equally remarkable for its subtlety and strangeness is the transfer that goes on almost unannounced, wherein the "real economy" is equated with the farmer who works the land — a core assumption of the genre, one might say — against the fancies of New York City bankers, but the opposite of Manhattan turns out to be not some agricultural scene, rather Motown. These places turn out to be fully swappable, because they are both the negative of fictitious capital. It's like he totally gets it about where value comes from. I mean really."
- jane dark

[watch this video:]

A Year in Cinema, 2009

2009-12-31T10:01:00.001-08:00

The best films I saw for the first time in 2009, in rough order of preference:

Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009)
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)
Che (The Argentine and Guerrilla) (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)
Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934)
Inextinguishable Fire (Harun Farocki, 1967)
The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998)
Canary (Alejandro Adams, 2009)
Summertime (David Lean, 1955)
Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 2008)
Their Newspapers (Harun Farocki, 1968)
Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel, 2008)
Le Garcu (Maurice Pialat, 1995)
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (Robert Kramer, 1977)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
Touched in Head (Jacques Doillon, 1974)
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1968)
Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933)
Smorgasbord / Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)
L'intrus (Claire Denis, 2004)
Um Filme Falado (A Talking Picture) (Manoel de Oliveira, 2003)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki, 1992)
Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1973)
The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)
Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987)
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)
An American Tragedy (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)
Ne change rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Prison Images (Harun Farocki, 2000)
Rendez-vous de Juillet (Jacques Becker, 1949)
Dead End (William Wyler, 1937)
The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, 2009)
The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (John Gianvito, 2001)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki, 2009)
The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray, 1960)
Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, 1935)
Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen, 2007)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008)
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1988)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar, 2009)
The Inglorious Bastards (Enzo G. Castellari, 1978)
Respite (Harun Farocki, 2007)
Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)
An Image (Harun Farocki, 1983)
Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009)
El cant dels ocells (Albert Serra, 2008)
American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009)
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Red Letter Media, 2009)
Nathalie Granger (Marguerite Duras, 1972)
The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, 2006)
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Hara Kazuo, 1974)
Impolex (Alex Ross Perry, 2009)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett, 2008)
Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
Cours du soir (Nicolas Ribowski, 1967)
One P.M. (Jean-Luc Godard and D.A. Pennebaker, 1972)
Maneater (Timothy Busfield, 2009)
7 Women (John Ford, 1966)
In The Country (Robert Kramer, 1966)
Let's Get Started (Azazel Jacobs, 2008)
The Whirled (Ken Jacobs, 1956 - 1963 / 2004)
Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006)
Black Legion (Archie Mayo, 1937)
Night Nurse (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Crawford (David Modigliani, 2008)
Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)
No Greater Glory (Frank Borzage, 1934)
Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008)
The Taste of Life (Harun Farocki, 1979)
Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
The Pleasures of the Flesh (Oshima, 1965)
You Won't Miss Me (Ry Russo Young, 2009)
Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshida Yoshishige, 1969)
Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
Don't Let Me Drown (Cruz Angeles, 2009)
I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933)

"Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala"

2009-12-27T23:46:00.006-08:00

"Yazid is a transgressor, a drunkard, killer of innocent people and an open sinner. A person like me can never give allegiance to persons like him." - Husayn ibn Ali*

“I will kill, I will kill; he who has killed my brother!”
[a slogan, also, of the 1979 Islamic Revolution]

“I will kill, I will kill; he who has killed my brother!”

“I will kill, I will kill; he who has killed my brother!”

Non-violence:

“Velesh kon! Velesh kon!” -- “Let him go! Let him go!”

a wounded man. a seized police helmet. a protestor's blood. a burning police station.

"I never revolted in vain, as a rebel or as a tyrant, but I rose seeking reformation for the nation of my grandfather Muhammad. I intend to enjoin good and forbid evil, to act according to the traditions of my grandfather, and my father Ali ibn Abi Talib." - Husayn ibn Ali

"Oh people, the Messenger of God said: Whoever sees an aggressive tyrant that legalizes the forbiddens of God, breeches divine laws, opposes the tradition of the Prophet, oppresses the worshippers of God, and does not concede his opposition to God in word or in deed, surely Allah will place that tyrant (in the Hell) where he deserves." - Husayn ibn Ali

"Death with honor is better than a life of degradation." - Husayn ibn Ali

Ali Mousavi, nephew of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, killed on Dec 27, 2009.

People ask them 'why do you do this to your people?' and the riot guards ask for forgiveness, 'Bebakhshid' they can be heard to say.

'You are Yazid's - the Khalif against whom the Ashura uprising took place - forces', the woman shouts at them. One of the protesters then reassures them that they will not be beaten up, all they have to do is say Khamenei is a bastard. The woman can then be heard saying 'All you can do is kill your people is it?' and again they plead saying 'Please We are not killers'.

A reader adds:

What he leaves out is that the young woman who is heard towards the end yells "Are you only brave on your motorbike, you piece of shit?!" before apparently kicking him as a man tells her to stop.

"Those who were at the forefront of the struggle against Shah's regime, vividly remember the days of Ashoura in 1963, when even the Shah respected the sanctity of the holy day and only arrested the leaders of the opposition in the following days.
How is it that a regime born out of Ashura protests [like that of 1963] is now sending bunches of thugs to the streets and shedding people's blood on the day of Ashura? ...
I can only cry out Imam Hossein's cry [killed in the day of Ashura in 7th century]:
"Even if you don't have faith at least respect other's freedom!""
- Mehdi Karroubi

5 dead at least, confirmed in the English-language press -- as of now.

more:
Jon Jost
Revolutionary Road...
Andrew Sullivan
Iran News Now
Niusha Boghrati
GREENUNITY4IRAN
Jonbeshe Rahe Sabz
onlymehdi
The Lede

*Ashura is the day of remembrance of Husayn ibn Ali, slain by the forces of Yazid at the Battle of Karbala. Ashura, this year, fell on December 27, 2009. All images/text/video above, save the quotes from Husayn ibn Ali, from that same date.

a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way...

2009-12-27T23:37:00.000-08:00

"The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way..."
- The New York Times, October 1862
[via Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others]

Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa

2009-12-15T19:54:00.000-08:00

Letters from Fontainhas:
Three Films by Pedro Costa

We are still with you

2009-12-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

It's Hell Down Here

2009-11-25T17:23:00.003-08:00

human dignity

2009-11-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

"I'm a school photographer and will never forget the picture I took of a little girl with luekemia. This 10-year-old, came up to my camera sat down and whipped her wig off. I stood there in shock for a second. To this she responded "I want to be remembered as me. Not as the girl with the wig"

I went home a different person that day. I'm proud to say that picture was not airbrushed."

[via PostSecret, link currently inactive]

Welcome to the class system in action.

2009-11-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

Goldman, Fed, Citi Getting Preferential Allotments of H1N1 Vaccine

savings books and Sunday suits

2009-11-02T10:09:00.000-08:00

Buddha’s Example of the Burning House

Gothama, the Buddha, taught
The wheel of desire on which we are bound,
And bade us
Put off desire, and thus without it
Go into the Nothing that he called Nirvana,
And one day some disciples asked him:
Master, what is it like, this Nothing?
We all wish to put off desire, as you bade us, but tell us
If this Nothing, into which we go,
Is a kind of oneness with all creation,
As if a man lay in water, limbs at ease, at midday,
Empty of thought, lay lazy in water, or sank into sleep,
Scarce knowing if someone tucked a blanket round him, so deep was he under;
Tell us if it is a pleasant thing, this Nothing, a good thing,
Or if it is simply nothingness, cold, empty, without meaning.

The Buddha was a long time silent, then shrugged.
There is no answer to your question.

But in the evening when they were gone
Buddha sat under the breadfruit tree and gave to the others,
Those who had not asked, the following example:
Once I saw flames licking the roof of a house,
And when I went to it I saw that there were men inside.
I called to them that the roof was burning.
But they were in no hurry.
One, while the fire singed his very brows,
Asked me what it was like outside, If it was raining still,
And if the wind had stopped, if there was another house nearby
And suchlike things.
I did not answer him and came away.
Truly, my friends, to the indifferent who see no need for change
Have I nothing to say. Thus, Gothama, the Buddha.

And we too, no more concerned with the arts of patience,
Rather with the arts of impatience, of maniford means to improve man’s lot,
Teach him to life away his worldly suffering,
We too to those, who, when any day the bombs may fall upon the cities,
Ask us what savings books and Sunday suits will be like in the new society,
To them have we little to say.

- Bertolt Brecht
[The New Reasoner 3 1957-58]

Ulm 1592.

2009-11-01T14:53:00.003-08:00

Ulm 1592.

Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof –
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.

Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.

The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.

- Bertolt Brecht

[The New Reasoner 3 1957-58]
{Thanks Ben}

history

2009-10-25T08:08:00.003-07:00

like passing through a door

2009-10-21T14:39:00.004-07:00

"I want them to be conscious and feel a conscious light of vision, and not the dream-state that is often associated with film — I want them to consciously see. That is like passing through a door; some people cannot pass through that door to reach a conscious sense of vision in their seeing films, or seeing any image."
- Robert Beavers

to negate the cave, to disarm the gorgon

2009-10-17T11:33:00.002-07:00

from The Owl's Legacy (Chris Marker, 1989)

(via)

The Lovable

2009-10-07T06:37:00.002-07:00

"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."
- The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben

"There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it."

2009-09-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life

GOODBYE NEW YORK

2009-09-23T06:00:00.001-07:00

JONAS MEKAS, ON NEW YORK:
"Exciting! The word is exciting. To me, when I come back from any country — and I love Paris — but still when I come back, already driving from the airport I already am trembling with excitement!"
via Sophie Harris's love letter to New York.

“Those who didn't understand will never understand”: Whit Stillman’s "The Last Days of Disco"

Empire State Of Mind [Jay-Z + ...

Black Breakfast

2009-09-21T20:26:00.007-07:00

Interview with Zhangke Jia on "Black Breakfast"

As a sweet apple reddens

2009-09-14T15:54:00.003-07:00

As a sweet apple reddens
on a high branch

at the tip of the topmost bough
The apple-pickers missed it.

No, they didn't miss it:
They couldn't reach it.

- Sappho [Ψάπφω/Σαπφώ], translated by Jim Powell

A Candle (for Alexis and Nika) by John Gianvito

2009-09-12T09:39:00.001-07:00

A Candle (for Alexis and Nika) from Eric Gulliver on Vimeo.

the occupation of images

2009-09-09T12:13:00.002-07:00

"When I watch French television today, I think I know exactly how the French resistance felt during the German occupation."
- Jean-Luc Godard, Soft and Hard (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1986)

CINEMA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE ALEXIS TIOSECO + NIKA BOHINC

2009-09-09T09:06:00.002-07:00

CINEMA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE ALEXIS TIOSECO + NIKA BOHINC

finance is something too important to entrust to financiers

2009-09-08T10:42:00.002-07:00

"When I wanted to produce my first feature-length film, I didn’t have any money. So I was forced to rethink the economic system of production. In the end, it’s something fascinating. It’s generally thought that the economic side of filmmaking is a bloody nuisance for a filmmaker and that it doesn’t correspond to his ‘vocation.’ […] I think that finance is something too important to entrust to financiers."
- Luc Moullet

To Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819

2009-08-23T11:05:00.002-07:00

25 College Street

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else - The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you again[s]t the unpromising morning of my Life - My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving - I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love - You note came in just here - I cannot be happier away from you - 'T is richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love." I can do that no more - the pain would be too great - My Love is selfish - I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever
John Keats

''My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles and holes in them, in which everything is obvious, tend to be untrue."

2009-08-17T14:32:00.004-07:00

''Hamlet,'' the story of Andrzej Czajkowski, a Polish-born gay Jewish pianist who donates his skull to the theater, is the most fascinating, problematic and personally revealing story in Krall's collection. Although they never actually met, Czajkowski and Krall were contemporaries. She addresses him as ''you'' throughout, telling him, a little judgmentally, the story of his life as she sees it: grandparents, parents, his early childhood in the Warsaw ghetto. Czajkowski was smuggled out to the Aryan side with his grandmother, while his mother chose to stay with her lover in the ghetto and later was murdered in Treblinka. The boy grows up with an inner rage against his mother.

Then, unexpectedly, Krall adds: ''I shall tell you something now. I knew a certain girl. She was your age; she also had dark eyes like you and hair that was bleached with hydrogen peroxide. . . . I knew that little girl quite well, because I know what the Aryan side was for a child.'' It was, she continues, ''a window that you do not go near, even though no one is watching you. . . . A wardrobe that you enter at the sound of the doorbell. The Aryan side was loneliness and silence.'' Krall tells how this little girl and her mother were brought to a police station by a blackmailer. They had false Aryan papers, given to them by a seamstress named Maria Ostrowska, but the policeman insisted on hearing them recite a Catholic prayer. The mother could not, but the little girl did. While the grown-ups debated what exactly had persuaded the policeman to let them go, the little Jewish girl, Krall writes, had no doubt it was ''the addressee'' of the Christian prayer she had recited.

In the entry for Poland in the Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, published in 2004 by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, I came across an account, based in part on Krall's own testimony, of how one Maria Ostrowska-Ruszczynska, in the spring of 1943, saved the lives of Jadwiga Krall and her 6-year-old daughter, Hanna. Perhaps it is easier for an author to tell the stories of others. But when Hanna Krall writes her own story some day -- in the first person -- it will be hard to mistake it for fiction.

trailer for Manoel de Oliveira's Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura [Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl]

2009-08-11T20:10:00.002-07:00

I am so excited.

[I don't think there's a version with English subtitles as of yet...]

dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people

2009-07-24T18:44:00.003-07:00

subtitles in Farsi

the missing dead

2009-07-17T10:42:00.002-07:00

"Suspicions have been fuelled after one woman described seeing corpses piled on top of each other in a refrigeration depot while searching for a missing relative. Another woman was shown pictures of between 50 and 60 people, all said to have died, while searching for her son."

Crimen Falsi Redux, Part 2: Exemplum

2009-07-14T08:05:00.005-07:00

(via)

[Crimen Falsi Redux, Part 1: The Theory of the Image]

They removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information.

2009-06-16T18:02:00.003-07:00

They are saying: "Marg bar basiji" (down with the baisjis). A guy yells: "They have left. Don't throw stones any more". And then "Tireshoon tamoom shod" (They are out of bullets!) and then there are more shots. Somebody cries, "Don't run away." Then, "they have killed 5 people", and some body shouts at the militia, "what are you doing??" and somebody else,"They are not shooting blanks (they bullets are live)" some more shots and somebody says, "They are shooting for real, Look at the blood" and then the guy on the ground and someone yells, "Ya abolfazl" (Abolfazl is brother of Imam Hossein and a saint like figure) and "Na-mard-haa" (cowards) then,"I called the emergency", getting the reply, "Forget about the emergency, let's take him (the guy on the ground) with us."

***

"It's painful to watch what's happening.

I don't want anything to do with what has been said this far, as I neither have the strength nor the resilience to face all these unfathomable events.

I only want to speak about what I have witnessed. I am a medical student. There was chaos last night at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help--I'm sure it will even be worst tonight.

What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?

This issue is not about cheating(election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people. They've put a baton in the hand of every 13-14 year old to smash the faces of "the bunches who are less than dirt" (government is calling the people who are uprising dried-up torn and weeds) .

This is what sickens me from dealing with these issues. And from those who shut their eyes and close their ears and claim the riots are in opposition of the government and presidency!! No! The people's complaint is against the egregious injustices committed against the people."