Fast Tube by Casper">Nosferatu – The Complete Film

.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Fast Tube by Casper">Deadline: Post- it Note Stop Motion

Isabelle Huppert’s new film is called ‘Home’ – directed by Ursula Meier, it’s a genre mixing movie about a family in a house next to a motorway. a kind of ‘anti road movie’ as it was described at the Q&A in the Renoir cinema, Bloomsbury, London with Meier and Huppert. I have been a long time admirer of Huppert – she is intelligent and brave in her choice of projects and she was pretty amazing in conversation after the film  – articulate, insightful and sophisticated. (I mean in the Q&A – not a one-to-one with me).

The film begins by depicting  a happy working class family in a house on the edge of a disused motorway section (don’t ask). I was impressed at the way the sheer labour and happiness of family life could be portrayed without voyeurism or sentimentalism or any kind of idealising. On the other hand the film didn’t lapse into dull naturalism either. By turns comic, surreal, realistic and emotionally charged, we see the motorway opened and the cars – one or two at first, then thousands – roaring by the door. This does not leave the family untouched, as you might imagine.

There’s another side to the film, though. It shows how the outside world can both disrupt and liberate a family; how children swap roles..the nature of information sharing and physicality in a family. All this in a consistently fresh and absorbing directorial style. The use of sound, for one thing, is superb – the noise the cars make, or don’t make, use of different genres of music (both  ‘exegetical’, ie produced within the mise-en-film, and  non- exegetical ‘soundtrack’.) But really this is a film that is misrepresented through being described like this, as it is full of suggestive, poetic effects rather than numbingly metonymic ‘first-this-and then-that’ story telling. I think there may be some issues about the politics, which are implicit rather than explicit; the film seems on the verge of something political. Perhaps the compressed family + motorway set up has to leave the articulation of that to us. So much is being said, or rather shown, here that it’ll take a while to unpack it all; the politics is in there, though – just dig a bit. As Huppert said, it’s a film that allows or invites multiple interpretations.

MARX AND MONTAGE

It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. [1]Capital, whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period. [2]Ulysses during much the same time and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capital project as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more like Eisenstein’s notes. Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s 1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyce’s

Many important intellectuals have—as it were, posthumously—endorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and of Deleuze’s unrealized Grandeur de Marx, along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world crisis (‘we are all socialists now’, etc.). Is Kluge’s new film a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one? And what would ‘being a Marxist’ mean today? The Anglo-American reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of Capital reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter: ‘The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousness’. [3] That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones, in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a reconstruction of ‘feelings’ (a key or technical term for him): this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as his Geschichte und Eigensinn—History and Obstinacy—written in collaboration with Oskar Negt.

More at:

New Left Review – Fredric Jameson: Marx and Montage.

Fast Tube by Casper">For Bastille Day: the French National Anthem beats the Nazis in \’Casablanca\’!

Fast Tube by Casper">First part of \’Night Mail\’

Fast Tube by Casper">Second Part

Fast Tube by Casper">Part Three

For some six months in 1935–6, W. H. Auden was employed by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit on a modest salary of £3 a week, even less than he had made in his previous job as a schoolmaster. (His friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood, by contrast, would soon be earning £200 a month working for Alexander Korda at Shepperton Studios.) For this whole period Auden would be intensively and productively engaged – as scriptwriter, assistant director, lecturer, writer and, on one occasion, in front of the camera, dressed as a department store Father Christmas. Harry Watt, the co-director of Night Mail, the most celebrated product of Auden’s time in the film industry, recalled him at work (in his memoir Don’t Look at the Camera): Auden sat down to write his verse . . . . He got a bare table at the end of a dark, smelly corridor. We were now bursting at the seams, and the last corner available was in what was inevitably called “the back passage”. It ran parallel with the theatre, where films were constantly being shown. At one end, a bunch of messenger boys played darts, wrestled, and brewed tea.

more  here.