Horner's Corner

Not Penny Lane..Abbey Road

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Watching Avatar, I was continually reminded of Zizek’s observation in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, that the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth. “There’s no green there, they killed their mother,” we are solemnly informed at one point. Avatar is in some ways a reversal of Cameron’s Aliens. If the “bug-hunt” in Aliens was, as Virilio argued, a kind of rehearsal for the megamachinic slaughter of Gulf War 1, then Avatar is a heavyhanded eco-sermon and parable about US misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. (What’s remarkable about Avatar is how dated it looks. In the scenes of military engagement, it is as if 80s cyberpunk confronts something out of Roger Dean or the Myst videogames; Cameron’s vision of military technology has not moved on since Aliens) At the end of the film, it is the human corporate and military interests who are described as “aliens”. But this is a film without any trace of the alien. Like most CGI extravaganzas, it flares on the retina but leaves few traces in the memory. Greg Egan finds little to admire in Avatar, but he does defer to its technical achievements: “mostly, the accomplishments of the visual designers and the army of technicians who’ve brought their conception to the screen appear pixel-perfect, and hit the spot where the brain says ‘yes, this is real’.” The cost of this, though, is that it is very difficult to be immersed in the film as fiction. It is more akin to a themepark ride, a late-capitalist “experience”, than a film.

Read more on avatar here, from  k-punk.

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From THE NEW BABYLON (1929)-Soviet film about the Paris Commune of 1871

A Yuletide Wish.

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Slavoj Zizek has just given a lecture on apocalypticism -click here for the audio.(CH)

K-Punk on similar themes:

The standard tactic of capitalist realism in relation to eco-apocalypse is to work with the stupid ingenuity of the Symbolic. Here we might think of Lacan’s famous example of Holbein’s Ambassadors. Capitalist realism keeps attention on the ephemeral plenitude of wealth and social status, containing the nullity of ecological catastrophe as an anamorphic blot at the edge of vision. It has the advantage that such an operation is already routinely at the level of individual psychology in respect of death, whose repression no doubt one of the ‘falsities’ that, according to Nietzsche, is necessary for life.

So one tactic is to stop imagining eco-catastrophe and Realise it – which is not to say bring it about, but to act as if it has already happened. This is the intriguing suggestion from Jean-Pierre Dupuy which Zizek takes up, most recently in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. The only way to prevent the catastrophe, Zizek and Dupuy suggest, is to project ourselves into the post-apocalyptic situation and think what we would have done to have avoided it. In other words, we must act as if what is in fact the case – the inevitability of catastrophe – is the case. The simulation, the as-if, is necessary in part because the Real, here as elsewhere, cannot be confronted directly, and can only emerge in the form of a fiction. The shift to the question of ‘what would we have done’ has the benefit of circumventing the capitalist realist/ postmodernist foreclosure of the old modernist-Leninist question, ‘What is to be done.’ An anti-capitalism need not be imagined any more than the end of the world has to be: it is Realized in the encounter with the fictional-virtual-Real of inevitable apocalypse.

Here we can turn to a rather less august example of fictional apocalypse than either Children Of Men or Atwood’s novels – the much derided Terminator: Salvation.

more via k-punk.

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Michael Haneke’s new film is set in a north German village in 1913-4 : the last months of peace. The interiors  of the houses are still immersed in the dark heaviness of the 19th century, outside there is as yet no sound of automobiles. Yet everything is about to change. Haneke conveys the look and ‘feel’ of this world and the themes of the story through impressive cinematography (digital b&w that exaggerates the light /shadow contrasts), and mise en film (creaking doors, floors -everything is wood, hard, unyielding, in deep shadow or blinding light). If its  beautiful and horrifying tones and sounds remind me of anyone else it is the films of Bergman and Nykvist. And the acting is uniformly superb, utterly plausible.

This village is not a happy one. There is a  circuit of oppression and violence (actual and symbolic) that runs through the fibres of the place. Its most obvious source is the string of patriarchs : the pastor, the doctor, the baron, the tenant farmer and so on -but it runs all the way to the apparently weakest members,  the women and children, and then back round to the patriarchs again, and to the whole community. A series of apparently unmotivated acts of violence occur – the doctor is nearly killed out riding by a wire stretched between two trees, a barn is set alight, a “subnormal” child is tortured and so on. Among the leading male characters only the schoolteacher  is sympathetic: only he seems capable of love and a refusal to force his will on others. His voice is the framing narration, looking back at ‘those events’, and making a possibly too explicit link between them and certain events in the 20th century. I think we could have worked that out for ourselves.

We needn’t pursue the plot further here. Its clear that Haneke is making a point about the cruelty, emotional manipulation and hypocrisy of the father figures, and the way in which the enjoyment of this power  generates the current of cruelty and revenge that runs through everything. Behind, beneath, around the words of authority and command uttered by these men is an excessive, cruel enjoyment, violently sexualised behind the facades of unbending respectability and the formalities and rituals of hierarchy (Haneke captures this very well). They are  repressive, oppressive, sadistic, fucking with the minds and even the bodies of their own children. Its all about power: economic, sexual, psychological (via that old favourite of religion and ‘morality’: guilt). And one sees that it is known, at some level, to be all part of the same thing: the daylight, the ‘whiteness’ of purity has its night, the underside of oppression and torture. The purity has its high sounding platitudes and ‘moral’ window dressing; the pleasures of cruelty remain silent and in shadow.

But the question we need to ask is: why this film, now? Why this theatre of cruelty set nearly a century ago? If there is something to be said about disavowal and hypocrisy among the contemporary bourgeoisie, then Haneke has surely said it already in the great Hidden. If he thinks that our problem now is the Name-of-the-Father and  sexual repression, then surely he hasn’t noticed the compulsive, incontinent ‘enjoyment society’ of contemporary capitalism. The Protestant Victorian father figure, all deferred gratification and finger wagging  hypocrisy is a nightmare from history: gone for good.

Yet I think Haneke is aware of this. Hidden itself, let’s remember, historicized its themes. It was about history: the personal and the political were connected through the disavowed past of the all too comfortable protagonist. Haneke is certainly aware that the world has moved on from  Lutheran repression to the repressive desublimation of the 21st century. So how to understand The White Ribbon? Well, for one thing, we cannot grasp the present without a sense of where we’re from – the catastrophe of the mid 20th century still radiates its influence into our time, and its roots are entangled in the world we’re looking at in the film. The terms of oppression have changed; but what remains the same is the way in which truth and lie, guilt and innocence, our deepest fantasies and dreads, connect the public to the private worlds. The White Ribbon is about those connections, and is a way of understanding how, as Auden put it, ‘those to whom evil is done/do evil in return’. It’s about emotional fascism:  not something we’re done with, although it wears other masks these days.

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Slavoj Zizek

I. Through the Glasses Darkly (revisited, enlarged and re-edited)

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood Left, is a true lesson in critique of ideology. It is the story of John Nada – Spanish for “nothing”! -, a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site, but has no place to stay. One of the workers, Frank Armitage, takes him to spend the night at a local shantytown. While being shown around that night, he notices some odd behavior at a small church across the street. Investigating it the next day, he accidentally stumbles on several more boxes hidden in a secret compartment in a wall, full of sunglasses. When he later puts on a pair of the glasses for the first time, he notices that a publicity billboard now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard urges the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally he soon discovers that many people are actually aliens who, when they realize he can see them for what they are, the police suddenly arrive. Nada escapes and returns to the construction site to talk over what he has discovered with Armitage, who is initially uninterested in his story. The two fight as Nada attempts to convince and then force him to put on the sunglasses. When he does, Armitage joins Nada and they get in contact with the group from the church, organizing resistance. At the group’s meeting they learn that the alien’s primary method of control is a signal being sent out on television, which is why the general public cannot see the aliens for what they are. In the final battle, after destroying the broadcasting antenna, Nada is mortally wounded; as his last dying act, he gives the aliens the finger. With the signal now missing, people are startled to find the aliens in their midst.

more here

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Here’s an old review of Children of Men, which I urge you to see on DVD if you missed it at the Cinema

coffee bars and internment camps

I’ve finally seen Children of Men, on DVD, after missing it at the cinema. Watching it last week I asked myself, why is its rendering of apocalyspe so contemporary?

British cinema, for the last thirty years as chronically sterile as the issueless popluation in Children of Men, has not produced a version of the apocalypse that is even remotely as well realised as this. You would have to turn to television – to the last Quatermass serial or to Threads, almost certainly the most harrowing television programme ever broadcast on British TV – for a vision of British society in collapse that is as compelling. Yet the comparison between Children of Men and these two predecessors points to what is unique about the film; the final Quatermass serial and Threads still belonged to Nuttall’s bomb culture, but the anxieties with which Children of Men deals have nothing to do with nuclear war.

Children of Men reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential. It’s long since been evident that only someone outside the self-serving, self-pitying low gene pool of British cinema is capable of realising this potential, and Children of Men‘s director, Alfonso Cuarón, and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are both Mexican. Together they have produced a portrait of Grim Britannia that is like a film equivalent of the Burial LP (and the film’s excellent soundtrack features Burial’s mentor and label-mate, Kode9).

Lubezki’s cinematography is breathtaking. His photography seems to leech all organic and naturalistic vitality from the images, leaving them a washed-out grey-blue. The effect is something like a visual equivalent of the ‘muting’ about which Woebot speaks so eloquently in his latest broadcast. As David Edelstein put it in an insightful review in New York Magazine: ‘ The movie calls to mind an early description in Cormac McCarthy’s overwrought but gripping post-apocalypse novel The Road of gray days “like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”’ The lighting is masterly: it as if the whole film takes place in a permanent winter afternoon when even the sun is dying. White smoke, its source unspecified, curls ubiquitously.

Cuarón’s trick is to combine this despondent lyricism with a formal realism, achieved through the expert use of hand-held camera and long takes. Blood spatters onto the camera lens and goes unwiped. The gunfire is as oppressively tactile as it was in Saving Private Ryan. The meticulously choreographed long takes – technical feats of some magnitude – have justly been highly praised, and they are all the more remarkable because they go beyond the familiar role of simulating documentary realism to serve a political and artistic vision.

This brings us back, then, to my initial question, and I think that there are three reasons that Children of Men is so contemporary.

Firstly, the film is dominated by the sense that the damage has been done. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

Secondly, Children of Men is a dystopia that is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, V for Vendetta, which, incidentally, compares badly with Children of Men on every point).

Read more at:

k-punk: coffee bars and internment camps.

Zizek’s review on youtube is here.

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I went to see Jane Campion’s new film about Keats and Fanny Brawne with some misgivings: I generally don’t like biopics (or literary biographies) or costume dramas. To my surprise I found the film quite moving,and very beautiful. This is partly because it isn’t a biopic, really – it’s  about the brief relationship between the poet and Fanny Brawne, told mainly from the latter’s perspective. As for the costume drama bit, this film is a world away from the middle brow Merchant Ivory stuff we used to be plied with (all nice bone structure and period furniture). The film is perched between being a superior love film  and an art house movie. It may not be a great film, and it has flaws, but it is a very good one, well worth seeing. Anyway, how many truly great films are there?

Why is it so good? (1)It’s an extraordinarily beautiful film to look at – the cinematography is quite outstanding; (2) Campion has winnowed away all the unnecessary detail of people and places, focusing mainly on the domestic life of Keats, Brawne and a few others and this helps the film keep us focused on what matters – the impact Keats and Brawne have on each other; (3) the acting: good throughout, and in the case of Abbie Cornish (Fanny Brawne) quite outstandingly good; (4) period detail: really credible representation of life in the second decade of the 19th century.

The film’s scenes, the things it shows rather than tells – are the key to its success. They subtly express what Keats’ poetry is about: the transience of life and love, the thing of beauty that is a joy forever.

Keats (contemporary portrait)

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Nosferatu (1922)

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Hollywood Today:
Report from an Ideological Frontline
Slavoj Zizek

Ideology in Hollywood? Let’s begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001, scenario by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by Tom Jericho, a troubled working class mathematical genius who is back after a period of recuperation brought on by overwork and an unhappy love affair with Claire, the easygoing fatal beauty, which led to his psychic breakdown. Jericho immediately tries to see Claire again and finds she has mysteriously disappeared. He enlists the help of Claire’s housemate Hester to follow the trail of clues and learn what has happened to her; the two repeatedly break the rules of the Bletchley Park establishment and the law as their hunt gets more intense. Jericho is closely watched by Wigram, an upper class MI5 agent, who plays cat and mouse with him throughout the film. Jericho is tolerated at the Park, despite his transgressions, because of the brilliant plan he invents for uncovering the new key. Tom and Hester at the same time uncover a British government plot to bury the intelligence information of the Katyn massacre for fear it might weaken American willingness to remain in the war on the same side as the Soviet Union. This in turn leads to their discovery that a Polish cryptanalyst Jozef Pukowski was so incensed by his own learning of the massacre that he is prepared to betray Bletchley’s secrets to the Nazis in order to take revenge on Stalin. The fate of Clair remains unclear to the end: was she killed or just disappeared? All we learn is that she was in reality also a MI5 agent under Wigram’s control.

The film was criticized for its manipulation of historical facts:..

From Lacanian Ink. Read more here

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Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=TUwsHReqci4]

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From the original theatrical trailer: Subterranean Homesick Blues (n.b. Allen Ginsberg makes guest appearance):
Fast Tube by Casper">Don\’t Look Back

Dylan in 'Don't Look Back' (1965): One of the most imitated sequences in music videos

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Adam Curtis Films here:

Adam Curtis, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self and others….

(You might need to scroll down a little to find them)

All on Rewtube.

you can see his new film It felt like a kiss on his blog, here.

Adam Curtis

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I’ve just got back from seeing Antichrist, and that probably means I need a bit more time to reflect on  this remarkable film.  I couldn’t, in any case, top the excellent piece on the film posted by ‘infinite thought’ (and reblogged by me -see below).

It’s possible to say one or two things right away though:

1. It’s a serious film and nothing in it is silly or titillating (unlike a lot of the stuff some of its critics profess to like). From the kind of media/film types who hated it, I’d suspect VT has got something right.

2. It has amazing artistry. At every level: cinematography, soundtrack, acting -(William Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), CGI etc., etc.

3. Images and scenes will stay with a long time you after you see it. Here I don’t mean the much mentioned mutilation and death scenes. The film is disturbing because of the success it has in conveying its vision of nature as fallen, irredeemably malevolent, without transcendence. In this film ‘nature’ stands for ‘torture chamber’. IT is right: it’s a gnostic vision. I was reminded of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the blind Will, and of the suffering that runs through everything that lives.

4. You shouldn’t watch it if you are a bit depressed or (guys) worried about what your  GF or wife is doing with sharp implements.

5. I was gripped by it. Whatever it is, it isn’t boring (a claim made by some critics – people actually pay these people to watch films and write about them afterwards? wow.).

There’s some good stuff on Antichrist from ‘ads without products’ here and from ‘Alterletra’ here. Enjoy.

Fast Tube by Casper">Antichrist – trailer

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Here is  an excellent piece on the film from the blogger ‘Infinite Thought’. Click on the link at the bottom to read all of it.

[Warning: contains spoilers. Erm, pretty much all of them.]

Much has been made of von Trier’s recent deep unhappiness; even if you were unaware of this biographical detail, Antichrist is very obviously the product of a serious and prolonged depression of frankly theological proportions. Everything is wrong or We are already in hell: Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting indifferent monster it always was; human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything a malevolent deity could create in its worst dreams. If Antichrist IS a misogynist film – with the symbol for woman in the title, the ‘researcher on misogyny’ in the credits and Gainsbourg’s demented thesis on ‘gynocide’, her own self-hatred and the final utterly strange scene where blank-faced women swarm up a hill as Dafoe’s character looks on in bewilderment – it is so transcendentally misogynist that it fails to be applicable to any empirical woman that could ever exist, even Gainsbourg’s own character, with her already infamous self-mutilation, hyper-dependency and childlike cruelty. Indeed, it is hard not to sympathise in some small way with her character at points, as tangentially complicit as she is in the death of her own child as well as her own madness.

More here

infinite thØught.

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