Canto XLV

With Usura

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luz
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stonecutter is kept from his tone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand
and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usura
nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.
Not by usura St. Trophime
Not by usura Saint Hilaire,
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
                           CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

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First to become extinct - BP Specials Betting

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Fictitious Capital / Borrowed time

"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)

Welcome to the class system in action.

Goldman, Fed, Citi Getting Preferential Allotments of H1N1 Vaccine

Black Breakfast

Interview with Zhangke Jia on "Black Breakfast"

finance is something too important to entrust to financiers

"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

alienated (organ-harvesting) labor // Capitalism eats her young

You might be aware of this if you follow my Twitter, but I recently saw Alejandro Adams' film Canary, which utterly floored me. I'll be putting together more content on Canary soon, including some thoughts on the way that it offers a formal approach to capturing capitalism's relationship between indoctrination, oppression, and the complicity of the "Little Eichmanns"* who are also made it's victims.

* you probably first heard this phrase when used by Ward Churchill in his essay Some People Push Back from September 2001, but it originated in John Zerzan's 1995 essay "Whose Unabomber?"


Somewhat related: this excellent article from the New York Times Magazine by Matthew B. Crawford is an adaption of his new book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." It's the kind of piece that you expect to be some sort of mythologizing of the yeoman farmer à la Jefferson, that instead is a sly, intelligent critique of the relationship between alienated labor and suboptimal systemic and personal outcomes.

the ingenuity of the market

The Last Laugh - George Parr - Subprime - subtitulos
Uploaded by erioluk

[Don't be distracted by the humor - these are the actual facts of the subprime crisis, the first domino in our present situation. This is the closest thing to a nonideological analysis I've seen, presented with absolute clarity. Please share.]

Thanks to André Dias and Margarida Carvalho for passing this along.

rational(e)

I've been MIA from this blog for 3 reasons:
1. I'm obsessed with the financial crisis.
2. I have a film project that might be launching soon.
3. I have a new job.

If you follow my shared items feed then you already knew about #1.

Once I get a bit of free time... someday... I hope to write a big **FINANCIAL CRISIS!!** post. Until then, these links will have to do:


Sad Guys on Trading Floors

LOLFED

Enjoy.

"which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system"

"“Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.” The apparatus may reinforced—not threatened—by auteurists, who perpetuate the illusion of choice."

- Nick Rombes, in the comments to this post at The Auteurs' Notebook, citing Horkheimer and Adorno's The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in response to a critique levied by (the writer formerly known as) DPR.

A Kalahari Family (trailer)

Trailer for John Marshall's A Kalahari Family, a 6-hour documentary on the changes in Ju/'hoansi society in Nyae Nyae, shot from 1951 to 2001 (!).





"There are two kinds of films. Films that show us in skins are lies. Films that show the truth show us with cattle, with farms, with our own water, making our own plans." -Oma Tsamkxao

unbelievably horrible repercussions

Often corruption is just seen as a crime of theft. And the major point of the movie actually is that corruption is not a victimless crime. Corruption is actually one of the most violent crimes in the entire world, especially when the victims of this theft are amongst the poorest and most impoverished people in the world. You can't steal $2 billion from people who are hungry and don't have enough food to eat without there being unbelievably horrible repercussions. It's akin to war crimes, just in its scope and in its scale.
- Jason Kohn

Haymarket, May 4, 1886

"The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!"

- August Spies, November 11, 1887

Free Time

Apologies for the unplanned hiatus, but there's been some major uncertainty in my life of late. I've (temporarily) settled into a busy schedule of not working (which entails heavy amounts of trying to work mixed with bits of actual working). As for where I'll land, it's all unclear, but it's certain to be in the realm of moving pictures in the broader sense. I'm open to suggestions...

There Will Be Blood

American cinema offers a dual narrative of great men. American films are frequently about "America," an individualist ideal tied up with capital and personal liberties. These films are about the "great men" at the center of American history, even when these "great men" are unsympathetic. Some American films become "Great American Films," movies that capture the heart of America's meanings and contradictions by way of the stories of these "great men." The flip side to these stories are the filmmakers whose project is to explore the ambiguities of "America" the myth and the realities of America - the Great American Filmmakers (think: Griffith, Ford, Capra, Hawks, Welles). These filmmakers are frequently mirror images of their subjects - take Orson Welles, the great American showman, the overambitious entrepreneur, the man who achieves early greatness and chases it forever more. Or Griffith, whose self-mythologizing is at least as epic as his filmmaking.



With There Will be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a self-conscious bid to join the ranks of the Great American Filmmakers, choosing as his starting point the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! and adapting it very loosely for the screen. His protagonist, Daniel Plainview, is a silver prospector turned oil man who's introduced in dramatic form: a stunning, dialogue-free 20-minute opening sequence shows just how physical the hunt for wealth was in this older America. Daniel Day-Lewis offers another rich inhabitation of character to add to his intense reputation. His primary adversary is Paul Dano as Eli, a preacher who makes demands of Plainview for his own purposes. If Dano sometimes feels out of his depth, it seems that the level of religious fervor required is a bit beyond his grasp. Or perhaps it's something else that's missing - Dano's character, like Day-Lewis' Plainview, seems written without a full concern for cohesive character psychology and the relationship between character and events. Day-Lewis's performance is excellent, but Plainview's psychological wounds aren't explored so much as exposed through set-piece action. Plainview's development can be pieced together in retrospect, but Anderson does little to help this process, letting us infer motivation from action. Eli's strength and weakness seem intertwined, but it's not clear how, nor why each extends so far. It's telling that the one moment of subjective storytelling in the film uses subjectivity to explicate plot rather than bring the audience in to a character's psychology.





These characters, written without being truly observed, are a weakness of the film but also an odd strength that contributes to the complicated moods and resonances in There Will Be Blood. Anderson elides significant details that then are transmitted by hints and subtle clues. Some of these clues are ambiguous enough to include alternate possible readings, or to encourage the hint of other meanings that add richness to character. This ambiguity is a double-edged sword - what works on one level as artistic elision and metaphorical possibility also bleeds into unclarity (witness debates about whether Paul and Eli are twins or split-personalities; Anderson and Dano have always talked about them as brothers, and Dano was originally cast as Paul while another actor played Eli). This brother relationship, like the relationship between Plainview and his "brother," or Plainview and his adopted son H.W., hints at biblical themes in ways that seem almost accidental. The title comes from Exodus 7:19, which offers another confused resonance: Moses, adopted grandson of Pharaoh (or his adopted son, according to the Qur'an) is the one who calls plagues upon Egypt with the help of his brother. But in There Will Be Blood the father-son and brotherly relations don't work that way, the main conflict is religiously inspired but not familial, and the "blood" mentioned consists of violence between individuals. It's as if Anderson chose the line for these four words alone. Karina Longworth has nailed the reasons why these four words work so well: "Blood is oil, blood is family (and family is at worst a scam and at best an Achilles heel), but blood is also blood. If nothing else, the title is a spoiler for the final scene." She's right, but she doesn't address the Biblical significance of the passage because Anderson himself ignores it. While some Biblical resonances are important to the film, the parallels are oblique. It's more that the film has a sense of being "Biblical" in its epic conflicts (between religion and capitalism; between fathers and sons; between brothers or false brothers).

In short, Anderson's film seems largely like a series of ideas rather than a set of interwoven ones. Anderson's focus on visuality and tableau dims his characters' psychology. While there are moments of beauty aplenty in both the scenery and Daniel Day-Lewis' performance, Anderson's focus on them to the exclusion of character development overtakes both narrative tightness and dramatic observation. [Both Zach Campbell and Daniel Kasman speak to these flaws; Danny, like me, seems to find a positive side to some of them. Dan Sallitt takes a somewhat harsher view of Anderson's missteps in character development.]

The ambiguities in There Will Be Blood are one component of what makes it the best American film of the year*, and also what keeps it from truly being a Great American Film.

[* I've missed some highly-acclaimed American films this year. I'm still trying to catch up with some of them.]

There Will Be Blood strives to be a movie about America in a grand sense, a portrait of a nation with a frontier and frontiersmen. But Anderson's films fails to capture the essence of the frontier, the conflict between civilization/progress and the outlaw spirits who tame the wilderness to make it safe for development. It also fails in part because its ambiguities sometimes seem unintentional. Anderson's film isn't a deft enough in controlling the information and emotional trajectory that informs the viewer's experience. This isn't, in the long run, a criticism; unlike countless contemporary filmmakers, he is reenvisioning his methods of constructing movies. This return to the zero of his narrative approaches very nearly succeeds in There Will be Blood (so nearly, in fact, that on second viewing I wouldn't be surprised to find it holds up quite well). Anderson's quest to make an American masterpiece fails only because it is too ambitious for Anderson as a filmmaker at the present moment. It's ironic that Anderson's ambitions cause him to fall just short of success, as if he were a Great American Filmmaker already himself.

I've only seen the film once; I would like to see the film again to solidify (or change) these reactions. It is full of impressive elements and beautiful moments. The cinematography is impressive, and Day-Lewis delivers some of the most memorable lines in movie history. For all of its momentary glories and visual intensity, There Will Be Blood never makes it past the point of interesting project and failed reach for the title of Great American Film. It's a near-miss, but a miss nonetheless. For the time being it may look like a masterpiece, if only for the lack of ambition of other contemporary American filmmakers. But we shouldn't let this illusion get in the way of a more substantive truth: Paul Thomas Anderson might well have a Great American Film in him after all.

The Shock Doctrine

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