David Cox Articles

Review - Experiments in Terror 2 DVD by Othercinema DVD

2008-06-05T14:48:00.001-07:00

Experiments in Terror 2

by David Cox

12 Oct 2007

(OTHERCINEMADVD, 2007)
Curated by Noel Lawrence, with assistance from Craig Baldwin

Experiments in Terror 2 is a DVD compilation of nine horror shorts which picks up where the volume one disc left off. The ensemble works beautifully as a total and very solid program of knowing, ironic, and trippy horror gems which go right for the jugular vein as well as the funny bone. Like a nightmare or seamy experience borne from a bout of very heavy indulgence, EiT2 will keep you guessing and re-living the experience for days after the fact.

J.X. Williams’ Psych-Burn is a typical sample. As all accounts would indicate, this film is an actual exhumed filmic corpse from the deep dark archives of an otherwise forgotten, or more likely, deliberately buried (like the monoliths in 2001) melding of the 1960s counter-culture with the otherwise sober and straight world of commercial mainstream television. And it is a queer duck indeed.

Here is an official release by J.X. Williams on the story behind the making of the 1968 16mm film Psych-Burn ...

Psych-Burn was what musicians call a ‘contract-breaker’. ABC had given us some coin to make a few short films for a TV pilot. Love-In Tonite was to be a psychedelic rock variety show with live performances, skits, and whatnot to cash in on the emerging hippie demographic. Even pre-Disney, the network was riddled with a bunch of out-of-touch, pencil-pushing buffoons, so I quickly realized the show would be a disaster. Imagine if Midnight Special was produced by Aaron Spelling. Then cast Charles Nelson Reilly as emcee. That would have been a far more lively show than Love-In Tonite. So I decided to deliver the suits a farewell kick-in-the-butt called Psych-Burn. The best part was that they presented my film sight unseen at a board meeting about the new Fall Season. I heard some heads rolled over that one.
—J.X. Williams from the forthcoming documentary The Big Footnote.
Damon Packard’s film Early 70s Horror Trailer beautifully evokes the sense of ethereal anxiety of the period. Digital effects masquerade as optical effects in this bad-trip treatment of the pure early ‘70s TV image, particularly the use of such (now clichéd ) period effects as lens flare, kaleidoscope prism type lenses, etc. Packard’s trailer is a deliberately apparently “drug-induced”--but digitally invoked-psychosis. The early 70s preoccupations of “New Age” mystery, horror, and far-out psychodrama is at this film’s stylistic and sentimental core. People on TV and film in the early 1970s often seemed unhinged by the implications of the cultural events which had just happened in the late 1960s. Producers were looking for formulas which would feed the appetites of suburban demographics which did not offend too much, but which did not altogether ignore the all-too-pervasive omnipresent evidence of the hippie counterculture in everyday life.

By 1973, commercial television producers had thus started to fully integrate aspects of such “underground” signifiers as “experimental film” into drama production, and the weird combination of commercial prime-time television, with its hot dog commercials, severe and authoritarian station IDs, and general white-bread mass-market appeal had fused strangely with elements of the drug- culture underground. Think for example of the dreamy in focus, then out of focus opening to the show Kung Fu, with its “natural” shots of David Carradine walking through landscapes of timeless pre-industrial America. This was hippie culture gone commercial suburban.

So there was a subtle whiff of Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow to every other Quinn Martin and Irwin Allen production when the script called for someone to have a bad-trip experience, or even just a nightmare. Films like The Omen and Burnt Offerings issued forth sequences of people going insane as pure horror, echoing the anxieties of many of the creative community that the excesses of the period were starting to spill over into the safe lawns and sober living rooms of mainstream USA. In England these soft-focus manias were the preserve of Hammer Horror films – social realism spilling into fantasy to say “THIS is what your excesses have given rise to!!! – We are SHOWING it!!”

The psychological destabilizing effect infecting the characters in these films is usually depicted as a demonic intruder. Packard’s work focuses entirely on this horror through going mad, depicted typically by scantily clad young women running in slow motion past downtown Los Angeles modernist architecture and plazas, through artificial fog, the camera zooming into agape mouths, flowing see-through gowns billowing against the streetscape.

This urban madness&mdashimages from classic horror and gothic melodrama fused with the notion of urban banal L.A. as home to the everyday intense occult imagination—is Packard’s stock-in-trade. He knows this landscape of 1970s TV Los Angeles horror—it is the “vacant”, shot-early-on-Sunday-morning streets of L.A. with Charlton Heston in sunglasses driving his red convertible in “The Omega Man”.

It is the look of a hundred anti-drug educational films from the period—delirium and confusion, headlights approaching as drugged teens freak out, badly acting kids grabbing disheveled hair in despair at what-the-drugs-are-doing-to-them. But it’s not the drugs driving people to the edge—its the general overall reality of a society spiraling further into a pointless land war in Asia. It is escalating gasoline prices tripling in cost. It is the steady collapse of the very idea of the American republic, in full view and in living color.

Vertigo then and now—deconstructing Wago Kreider’s Between 2 Deaths.

What is it about Vertigo which makes us want to revisit it over and over? This film seems to embody and transmit the anxiety and obsessions of its central character, and when Jimmy Stewart gets dizzy, we get dizzy. When his Scotty starts stalking the very image of a dead ideal woman, so do we. Its like a spell or a curse, and like all curses, they come back again and again, sometimes fifty years later.

Between 2 Deaths super-imposes views from Hitchcock’s Vertigo with the same locations today—mainly Mission Dolores. The shots of the various locations are painstainkingly matched in video, and both the original film and the re-shoots are slowed down to create a step-printed look. Frames slowly go by at something like five per second. The ease with which the 1958 Mission overlaps with the 2006 one is uncanny. The interior of the Mission and the cemetery outside have remained startlingly similar in the intervening fifty years.

Great lengths have been taken to match camera angle and lens types. The combined effect of seeing the familiar settings at once removed from the realm of myth and into reality, only makes the idea of these places all the more mysterious. I found watching this film profoundly moving. Denizens of the Mission District of San Francisco who know and love Vertigo tend to take the film and its use of this location very seriously. Vertigo is to those who live here more than a mere film. It is such a talismanic touchstone articulating a sense of the uncanny which enshrouds San Francisco. Mystery and weirdness are always just under the surface of this city. San Francisco bewilders its new arrivals in ways which defy coherent description. The fog, the sun, the worldly yet provincial libertarianism of its population somehow all fuse together.

Californian clichés of charlatanry and flakiness find direct expression in the hubris, cruelty, vanity, and opportunism of Vertigo’s villains, and the gullible and obsessive naiveté of its hapless hero. Hitchcock’s masterpiece is so much about the crisis of perception of its central characters because one suspects his own love affair with the Bay Area (also explored in The Birds) was similarly compromised by a visual and psychic landscape which defied coherent understanding. San Francisco seduces filmmakers, then forces them to come to terms with the implications of that process of seduction. Between 2 Deaths finds the ground zero for this situation in a place which has remained unchanged for fifty years, as it is the home of the dead—the Mission Dolores cemetery, resting place in the film of the doomed, childless, sad, mad, abandoned mythical mother-figure of the whole city herself: Carlotta.

As Slavoj Zizek notes in the brilliant Perverts’ Guide to Cinema, Vertigo packs such a powerful punch precisely because the act of watching it is to identify so closely with the obsession of the central Jimmy Stewart character. Scotty’s descent into madness is brought about by the disconnect between real and imagined. The city he inhabits ends up appearing like an accomplice in the crimes and deceptions because it is a place that conveys to all who occupy its streets the sense that what is really going on here is up for grabs. The reality of San Francisco is entirely provisional.

San Francisco can appear to offer up competing versions of itself to the visitor and long-term resident alike. To people who arrive here unprepared, the urban space and the people in it are experienced as if seen as many fragments broken into multiple instances as if filtered via prisms. There are so many San Franciscos. So many shattered illusions within her ever-shifting planes of provisional reality.

Back in the early 1990s, blood and gore goth-fests of zombied-up white kids pretending to gouge each other and drink blood and eat guts and videotaping it were all too common. “Hold My Scissors” is such a work, and I hope it is something of a parody of this most stupid of genres. The lurid colors of high- saturation digital video do little to embolden the puerile, undergraduate ‘shock’ effect of seeing Goths get it with sharp objects every which way. Would that these play-actors of the macabre were not going through their middle-class Halloween dress-up party, but actually really offing themselves on camera, leaving the equipment and tape stock to filmmakers with some real talent.

Amor Peligrosa by Michelle Silva is porn for the Day of the Dead. Two skeletons meet, fall in love, and fuck, then lie down together in their side-by-side graves. It’s a starkly black and white film, all high contrast, like a Mexican Day of the Dead woodcut. In a world where the dead leap out at us from all sides from wars, bombs, accidents, and just the folly of a world gone mad, we would do well to wish upon the recently departed, and exhumed, their chance at some frission and sexual thrill. This film wants the dead to have a good time and in doing so it’s, as the English say, “Dead sexy!”.

She Sank on Shallow Bank by C. Childree and N. Rollason is a powerful entry to the canon of Gothick Americana, but in the Eastern European Surrealist tradition of animators like Jan Svankmajer by way of the those Bostonian Europhiles the Brothers Quay. In mixing live-action with stop-motion, the terrain is familiar – girls, boats, riversides, mud, and death. Again the mythology of hapless girls who fall afoul of murderers by the creek is here extended as riff on the folk myths of Leadbelly and Nirvana’s haunting Where Did You Sleep Last Night. The murky depths of incest, rape, unwanted pregnancy, and other horrors befalling America’s rural poor have their own genre of songs, stories, and now films. This film is like a Bruce Conner installation like “The Black Dahlia” – all strong suggestions of fetid, putrid transgression, evidence of a struggle. The film seems to articulate a common theme in popular culture today – tawdry outcomes for a society unable to pay its debts to the greater promise of the Constitution. Something is definitely rotten in the USA, and like the poor girl as the subject of this film, the republic itself could be said to have been beaten, drugged, interfered with ,and dumped.

Curator Noel Lawrence will present the new OCD release of Experiments in Terror 2 on the 27th of October, 2007, at Other Cinema. The DVD is available for purchase at our store.

David Cox is a filmmaker and writer based in the Mission District of San Francisco. His blog is http://www.telescape.blogspot.com

Review - Xperimental Eros: by OtherCinema DVD

2008-06-05T14:47:00.001-07:00

Xperimental Eros: by OtherCinema DVD

by David Cox

15 Sep 2007

Sleaze International

In the early 1970s, when 16mm commercial porn production accelerated rapidly (for a sense of this period, see the commercial melodrama "Boogie Nights"), the genre was still largely considered by most people to be illicit and in terms of its effects on one's 'moral fiber', almost toxic. It was known widely that porn was financed by organized crime gangs. Porn was cheap and dangerous. The world of Times Square, of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle's endless urban inner-city torment of backstreet sleaze, addiction, and vice. Men (and it was almost exclusively men) had to go to a movie house (usually recycled newsreel cinemas from the 1940s) to see porn and had to be in a city to go to a movie house. There were no VCRs. No DVDs. No internet. No cell phones.

Porn theatres then assumed the patrons did not want to be seen going into them, offering secret back-alley doors to sneak in and out of. This was not the enlightened, middle-class professional class' idea of the body and sexuality as part of a healthy overall view of the world, as say, embodied in the "Good Vibrations" culture of female empowerment via well-informed masturbation. It was urban. It was lurid and sickly. There was little that was good-natured or even remotely glamorous about it. The people who made the films lived precarious lives. The subjects often suffered at the hands of sleazy cheating producers and their gangster backers. And the world of old men jacking-off in dark small theatres was a market, which had yet to get suburban and mainstream. Only then, when the eventual early 1980s VCR sales created what became really a totally new demand, the cheaply made home porn video, the 16mm porn film was relegated to oblivion.

In the intervening years, and most notably since the Reagan-led 1980s, organized crime and media production have long since gone completely mainstream and acceptable. Everything in the world is part of the media spectacle and little on sale today falls outside the aegis of that most crime-ridden entity; the major global corporation. Like Las Vegas going 'family-oriented', inviting the RV-driving elderly pensioners from the suburbs to displace the shady types who started the place to shake its image as a sleaze magnet, it's the same old shady hoods that run the show. The difference however, between the glitzy showbiz hoods and the official culture of governance they once had to work around, has evaporated. The gangsters got so big they ended up running the world. Tony Montana got what he wanted--the world. Al Capone is the president and his movie star Austrian bodyguard runs California. And Cheney is so far off the sleaze scale, a new paradigm of sleaze has to be created just for him.

Porn specializations proliferated in the 1980s to a point where any peculiar taste could be met as just another market in a boundless commercial empire spanning the world. Fat porn. Granny porn. Pee porn. Pregnant porn. Scat porn. Like the musclemen of the screen that decade, the appeal was seeing what the human body could do. It could get really fat. It could get really weird. It can bend this way and that. The body, like meaning itself, had lost its purchase on limits, de-regulated, like the world's economies. The body was post modern and busting at the seams with possibility like John Carpenter's "The Thing"; it could assume any shape, any size, and who knew what form it would take next?

Today every aspect of life seems to be mediated by intricate channels of media whose levels of specialization truly defy any known limits. The commercially distributed database of homegrown production that is YouTube, the endless archive that is Google, and the vast flea market that is eBay are but the iceberg tip of a tsunami of privately-run digitized meaning-systems which render anything made before the early 1980s as amazingly rare, distant and collectible. It's enough for a media artifact to simply have survived the nuke-attack of digitalism since 1990 to suddenly today become the subject of deep and lasting fascination.

Porn is today thus just another hue to the air we breathe. It is just another consumer choice to make at selection time on the cable TV remote, the website menu, or the arthouse calendar. It means nothing. It's just data.

Experimental Film - Lost in the Ghetto

The political and cultural openness which eventually led to porn's commercial normalization in culture paradoxically sealed the death-knell for any such similar outcome for experimental film, forever marginalized to ghettos arguably much more confining than those befalling porno at the same time. Those of the arthouse, the cinematheque, and as evidenced here, the specialist collectible media-archeological DVD.

Experimental film was like the one-of-a-kind insect specimen. It was like all things 'fine' --expensive, limited, hard to see easily, and tied too closely to institutions which have a vested interest in keeping themselves inaccessible.

Today the cultural appeal of the Seventies as a kind of 'lost paradise' of pre-globalized relative simplicity is embodied in the now twenty-year-old fascination and mis-representation of the period as a time of excess, of 'bad' taste and garish bravado. Much of the porn in "Xperimental Eros" is from this time. Millennial nostalgia and surface-image fetishism for the 70s means little to those like myself who actually experienced them directly as teenagers. I remember this period as a time of tender anxiety and considerable moral and economic confusion, tinged with the sense that one was caught precariously between more than one kind of amazing utopia. It was also a very liberating time, because the triumphs of the 1960s had yet to be so totally crushed, as they would soon be during the 1980s, a project which has continued to this day, when it arguably has reached a zenith.

This "1970s-disconnect" sensibility is perfectly evoked by Damon Packard's stunningly accurate and knowing re-creations of low-brow TV psycho-drama from the period. But that is a different DVD and I thus digress?

Underground experimental films once shared alongside porn an imposed outsider status, and it's comforting in a way to see the association between them made again, if only as a result of 40 years of found-footage production, animation, and Cultural Studies. Other Cinema's "Xperimental Eros" brings porn back alongside its once-upon-a-time fellow outlaw form, the experimental short. It's almost like a replay on the cliché view held by--say, bigots and conservatives in 1973--that "if you went to an underground movie, you might see naked ladies!"

The Kuleshov-Conner Effect

With this sensibility in mind, I decided that my favorite film on the "Xperimental Eros" DVD is "The Influence of Ocular Light Perception" by Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs. It utilizes the now-familiar post-1990s "found footage" collage-essay technique of juxtaposing archival shots of thematically related ideas visually. There are many mini-montages based on shot theme. Shots of men peering through scopes (each shot very short - maybe a second only). Shots of people taking off shoes. A collection of 'button pressing' and 'dial turning'. A glimpse of porn. An instructional film about-mouth-to-mouth. Another about applying pressure to a young female thigh. A film about archery (arrow hits target).

Sex is alluded to and graphically insinuated (much as it was clumsily in the heyday of 1940s and 1950s theatrical movies - e.g., the train rushing into the tunnel, the waves crashing onto the beach to indicate that "the couple fucked") rather than directly shown, and the sly innuendo which results, is hilarious. It is every editing student's primary lesson of continuity editing (shot A plus shot B gives rise to thought C)--the "Kuleshov Effect".

But this film also enacts what might be called the "Bruce Conner Effect" - the deliberate mining of shots for associated graphic matches and simpatico meanings in order to reveal something unseen between them. No matter how 'well' shots match up thematically, the differences between them formally, in terms of look and feel and overall inherent nature, give rise to a mysterious quality which might be described as a third element, separate from the shots themselves, born uniquely from their precise collision.

When pressed together shots thus explode like gunpowder under pressure. This is a chemistry of symbol exchange, and this movie is a power-keg.

We Really Appreciate Your Beauty

Tom Palazzolo's documentary "Sneakin' and Peekin" is about a zesty 16mm camera-toting guy sneaking into a summer mid-western country nudist contest event (getting lost in brambles as he does so), and asking the women there if he (along with dozens of other salivating men with cameras) can take movies of them. The filmmaker is only semi-embarrassed at the prospect of having to ask for shots of nudity, and the rather blasé women generally comply, some of them asking for copies for their own commercial needs.

This homegrown exchange of image production ("let me photograph you nude, please - oh, alright, but send me a copy") is a far cry from the counterculture idea of the body as "beyond" exchange, as the place where pleasure happens, not where it is to be photographed for private pleasure later. This is a 1970s rural blue-collar notion of the body as a commodity. And the process of recording and that of presenting it for display is an identifiable and thus quantifiable form of work.

The "Whitesploitation" realm of giant cars, red, white, & blue ribbons, lots of cameras, deck chairs, flatbed trucks , PA systems, resembles a rodeo. It's a kind of nudist camp combined with an outdoor beauty pageant meat-market, where the women assemble in lines and pull girly-magazine style poses for the gaze of the many surrounding men who exclaim things like "Oh baby!", and "You're doing a great job" (it's work!), and "We really appreciate your beauty", and "No crossin' of legs, now!". You almost expect George Kennedy and Burt Reynolds to come up to the camera and say how much they are enjoying themselves. Or Charlton Heston perhaps, bearing his ample back teeth?

More than the Sum of its Parts

Anais Nin's voice accompanies Mark Street's "Blue Movie" - a mesmerizing formal treatment of what appear to be 1930s or 1950s 16mm porn movies, whose original content has been optically zoomed into and then carefully augmented with color overlays and a post-production technique called step-printing. These detail the subtle facial expressions of the porn performers, rendering them languid and dreamily moving anonymous portraits from a forgotten time. The effect of the inter-frame flicker slowed down creates a kind of Burroughs 'dream-machine' effect, and here the sexuality lies not in the depiction of the act at all, but rather the rumination on the whole idea of blue movies and sex itself as something encoded via color and surface as illicit, contraband, and mysterious. It works like the very best of tender and well-remembered sexual experiences here in the real world, where a meta-language of the softly spoken word and the delicate physical dance of touch combine to form something close to pure all-encompassing spiritual and emotional bliss.

Candy Samples

The Washington-based porno collector and one-time Library of Congress official Ralph "King of Porn" Whittington is filmed by Jeff Krulik, showing off his vast homebound assembly of hoarded porno treasure before it is moved to the Museum of Modern Art. Whittington gives a guided tour of his collection, and explains in detail how it is categorized, indexed, and catalogued. Like all collectors, his lifelong obsession must constantly deal with its perpetual incompleteness. Porn has always accompanied (and even been responsible for) the rise and fall of personal media systems, Whittington's rare first-issue-on-video of "Deep Throat" must (of course) have its own dedicated Betamax (one of the first on the market) video player "It weighs up to forty or fifty pounds", says Whittington, proud that both media and player have been collected together. Another treasure is the "Candy Samples" love doll--the cheap lurid flesh-tone latex face pressed up against the five inch square transparent box lid says it all. This film begs a question as big as the proverbial elephant-on-the-couch: How could any porn collection be "complete"?! The idea that porn might somehow be a form with finite limits and thus require a policy of private semi-historical documentation is curious in itself, especially today.

Culture Gangsters Like Us

Film as fine art, as subtle statement, as personal view is today unlike porn, locked largely into the value-systems of official institutions. Academic historians, collectors, and critics are the among the few still examining actual 1970s and earlier porn today, and only then with the wistful, knowing ironic gaze of the educated professional, who can scoff from behind designer glasses and over select wines at the oh-so-vulgar excesses of a time when these curios on 16mm once flowed out of a production line that sat in close proximity to those also supplying heroin, illegal arms, prostitutes, and automatic weapons.

One cannot imagine, for example, a collector like Whittington doing what he does with experimental film, and if he did, he would not categorize the examples like merchandise on some big-box warehouse store, as this film depicts him doing. The status of the film, as art as evidence of the valuable essence-of-the-artist, would be unique by being one of a kind, not one among many, and on this basis, like a Sotheby's auction, attract high prices and invite hushed tones when talked about. Fine art is just not supposed to work in the way that porn works, because the people that run the fine-art racket make sure that dime-store porno values generally do not permeate the essentialism of their elitist country club of private screenings, discrete gatherings, and institutionally mediated events, complete with mailing lists, calendars and guest lists.

That Whittington's collection eventually 'makes' the Museum of Modern Art means that the Art Gallery has now met the librarian on common ground--where porn is understood as a media genre, and like all genres, it is best described as defining a type, a genus, an entire category of creative meaning-making, one which, due to the digital world in which we live, should attract more attention, more scrutiny, not less.

Xperimental Eros is available for purchase at our store.

David Cox is a writer, filmmaker and artist who lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. He is a regular contributor to Otherzine.
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Excerpt from the book Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back

2008-06-05T14:46:00.001-07:00

Excerpt from the book Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back

by David Cox

8 Sep 2005

Fensler, Lussenhop, Sanborn and Boyce: witty jams right in the face of the Terror

Death (like control) needs time for that it kills to grow in.—William Burroughs

Since the tragic, sudden and unprecedented attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, a new type of aesthetic can be said to have emerged in culture-jammer circles. Much of this work stems from the art underground of the city of Chicago, and particularly from the artists Doug Lussenhop and Eric Fensler.

This work is filled with camp burlesque and satirical humour, and is bitterly critical of authority and the various forms it takes, particularly the uniformed kind. It aims squarely at the hypocrisy of the current stupid-white-men-in-charge whose complete disregard for the views of other countries, let alone fellow citizens has sparked a worldwide counter-revolution fought out on the battle-zone of the media-scape.

[this] newer Chicago work [evokes] the banality of everyday life which conservative culture seeks to foster and develop in society, and out of which its own values grow.

This new work is not in-your-face overtly political in its delivery as say, Phil Patiris’s Iraq Campaign whose message is very much built around a solid political critique of war and media. Rather the newer Chicago work seeks to evoke something of the banality of everyday life which conservative culture seeks to foster and develop in society, and out of which its own values grow. Like mushrooms, right-wing values prosper in the dark, where people are expected to remain. This is the blithe ‘the-world-is-there-to-be-managed’ banality that motivational speakers exude while giving a pep talk to trucking employees. It is the banality of fixing a broken printer in an office building, and the banality of being told how to avoid danger by a cartoon action figure. These examples describe several of the low budget culture jammer films of Doug Lussenhop and Eric Fensler.

Doug Lussenhop and Eric Fensler

Eric Fensler’s most famous recent culture jammer work is the clever re-editing and post-voicing of G.I. Joe Public Service Announcements or PSAs. As the name suggests, PSAs normally work in the US as ways to inform the public on issues of public safety and what to do in an emergency. The original G.I. Joe public service announcements were cartoons using the popular boys’ action figure (known as ‘Action Man’ in the UK and Australia) warning about the dangers which might befall children during course of the day. These include playing rough with other children with a football (nosebleed), setting fire to the kitchen by not knowing how to use a stove, playing on thin sheets of river ice, burning yourself on the campfire while camping, and so on.

The original scenarios aired on television are short tableaux about common dangers facing children with G.I. Joe, or one of his sidekicks, stepping in just in time to correct the problem. The original spots were also ads for a toy riding on the back of supposed concern for ‘public safety’. Fensler adds his own new voice-overs to these scenes and makes them slightly menacing encounters between men and children, where kids faced with a dangerous situation have looming macho authority figures explain ways of solving the situation. These figures often lurch into the frame or hover nearby and often speak complete nonsense or berate the children for their stupidity, or panic worse than anyone else at the disaster unfolding before them. The children react in kind by confronting the strange adults with street language of their own.

Generational warfare between supposedly confident, safety-aware adults and not-as-dumb-as-they-look children is the central battleground in the G.I. Joe PSAs. This is a critique in many ways of the kind of moral currency being foistered upon the world by the likes of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their ‘old-world’ values. This top-down worldview sees the population essentially as children who need the absurdity of oil wars explained to them terms of a ‘Middle-East’ to make them feel secure – all delivered in the patronising fatherly tone normally reserved for warning children what happens if you are not careful with a box of matches.

G.I. Joe is a powerful shorthand signifier of the broader US military entertainment complex. The latter is that unique nexus between media, popular culture, and official foreign policy which is all too willing to have us believe that the interests of the US public lie in the actions of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how extreme such actions seem to get with each passing week.

The hapless G.I. Joe (indeed no stranger to the culture jammer’s deft hand since the Barbie Liberation Organization altered his voice-box), has his central authority as a military role model discredited. Progressive gender politics is driving the gestures to ‘out’ him as something less than a ‘macho man’ and/or a credible role model for kids that this stereotype represents. In the early 70s when I was but a small boy, I too liked to play with my Action Man but, of course, years later I realised that much of my accompanying taste for doll-mediated combat games was fuelled by fantasies which came with the doll free of charge, and are nothing if not compatible with the requirements of an authoritarian government. It does not have to be a conspiracy for it to work like one.

By playfully jibing the moralistic patriarchy propping up the G.I. Joe mythos, Fensler is indirectly attacking the parental myth that adult=authority=safety. This is the true understated power behind Eric Fensler’s work. It is willing to call the bluff of the dominant social order’s insistence that nothing else can or should be a ‘moral guardian’ for the population. G.I. Joe, thus, as symbolic guardian / soldier / authority figure, is exposed, in Fensler’s jams, as a slightly creepy, pervy weirdo. The cartoons are hilariously funny and in some Internet reports, entire rooms of people are claimed to have burst into peals of spontaneous laughter during their screening.

GI Joe Public Service Announcements – culture-jammed solider toy ads

The voices of the G.I. Joe characters are often aggressive, threatening, or generally uncanny. Two boys on BMX bikes are about to face a deadly electrical wire cut from its pole on an open road. They discuss what they will do with it:

Boy 1: Oh man, check out that thing, man?

Boy 2: What do you want to do with it?

Boy 1: Lets launch over it!

A black man in combat gear arrives in a jeep with a long pole-like implement

Black Man: Body Massage machine, (sings) Who wants a body massage?

Boy 1: What did he just say to us?

In scenes like this the danger faced by the boys is quickly eclipsed by the more vague but no less tormenting threat from the adults appearing in their midst. The adults are the people these kids have to defend themselves from by being aware, and more aware than the adults can be allowed to know: these kids keep the adults in their midst unaware of their private subculture, its language, its gestures and its behaviours. Popular culture references to drum and bass music and techno underground culture also form the basis of these reworked PSAs, with characters breaking into dub-type rapping, the children near them joining in instantly.

Keith Sanborn

New York-based Keith Sanborn’s film ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’ by Walter Benjamin as told to Keith Sanborn is a video artwork released in 1996. It is made up entirely of frame grabs of FBI warning signs that appear at the beginning of rented and bought videos and DVDs. The warnings are cut in time to some 1950s’ style rumba music, of the sort associated with early 1960s sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie. Eventually rather than cutting from one warning against copying to another, the warnings start to move slowly, almost dance around the screen. Bubbles float around with them. Sanborn is making these signs literally ‘float free’ from their intended purpose.

The FBI warnings, now the actual subject matter of a movie in their own right have been transformed. In becoming subjects of the viewer’s gaze rather than stand-ins for actual authority, they can be seen to have lost their power. This symbolic robbing of power of powerful signs was the basis of the controversy surrounding the 1960s’ paintings of Jasper Johns, who famously painted as fine art, iconic images like the US flag and archery targets.

By turning signs into things to be examined, the original ‘authority payload’ of a sign is thus ‘deflated’. Sanborn is being playful with FBI warning signs and inviting his audience to ‘take with a pinch of salt’ the warnings themselves. It is a nod and a wink to those who embrace the Situationist notion that ‘plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it’.

So why does Sanborn seek to playfully undermine an FBI copyright warning by making it dance the samba? He does so in order to invite the viewer to contemplate the idea that there is no such thing as ‘essential’ power, other than that which we in society agree to consensually. Take away the warning sign’s assumed inherent embodiment of authority to the viewer, and symbolically the entire authority system is thwarted and destabilised. Power and authority are thus inherently tentative, provisional and fragile, and must be agreed to by all in order to exist in a democracy.

Copyright warnings are, from the point of view of culture jamming, as worthless as the paper they are printed on, or the pixels which make them up on the screen. They are just bits of videotape, Sanborn is saying: let’s have some fun with these meaningless, obsolete, and impotent sign systems and show them up for what they are. This call to action frames the bigger issue: who has the right and who does not have the right to make use of ideas in general. Who is authorised and who has power?

Keith Sanborn ruminates on the famous 1963 Zapruder footage of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Texas.

Sanborn’s rumination on the famous Abraham Zapruder standard 8mm footage of John F Kennedy’s assassination ‘The Zapruder Footage: An Investigation of Consensual Hallucination’ (1999), plays and replays the Zapruder footage. The famous motorcade approaches, the limo with Kennedy waving goes behind the sign, it emerges from the sign with Kennedy clutching his neck. The car passes us, Kennedy leans forward and is shot in the head, blood mist clearly showing the fatal shot. Sanborn loops the footage and it is as if by repeating the sequence enough times, some kind of truth about the event it depicts can be divined. Alas, as Sanborn discusses in his interview with Peggy Nelson in Craig Baldwin’s online fanzine Otherzine, no number of viewings of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie does anything to demystify the killing it records. The more one watches, the less one knows.

There are copies of some of those frames in a book called 26 Seconds in Dallas. If you ever find it you should buy it, but it’s really hard to find. It’s a close reading of the Zapruder footage by this guy who was a philosophy professor at Haverford at the time. I can’t remember his name, but anyway, subsequent to that, he became a private detective in San Francisco, and he has a book out about that too! He says that most crimes have a kind of pattern where the details hang together and start to narrow. They start to solidify and they start to form a pattern. But, he says, the Kennedy assassination does not. The longer people go on about it the more diffuse it gets.

—Keith Sanborn interviewed in OTHERZINE by Peggy Nelson. ‘X Marks the Spot: Hunting for Buried Treasure with Keith Sanborn,’ Spring, 2002.

Images can thus reinforce the obfuscation that events leave behind them like so much cultural turbulence. This is in my view, also tragically true of the now iconic multi-angle video footage of the Twin Towers disaster of September 2001. No matter how many times you watch those planes collide with those buildings, and then watch the buildings collapse, the answers to fundamental questions that these images raise in the viewer dissolve along with the planes and buildings themselves: what exactly motivated this event? Why these targets exactly? Why this date, this time in history?

Sanborn culture jams Zapruder by obsessively, forensically rewinding, replaying the hauntingly slow parade (another Oliver Stone type question: just why did those cars slow down at just that point in the motorcade?). Watching his reworking of the footage becomes strangely peaceful and meditative. As soon as that huge black open limo turns the corner at the beginning of the shot the knowledge of what is about to happen frames the whole event of the filmed sequence as a kind of weird death-ritual; a parricidal ceremony, as entrancing-yet-horrifying as any recorded ritual slaughter of an animal by remote tribes-people, such as that controversially filmed for Apocalypse Now.

In the later part of the work, by overlaying blocks of digital squares and rectangles over the footage, it is as if Sanborn has decided to work with the footage, play with it, now resigned to its utter impenetrability. As evidence, home movie footage of momentous events collapses under scrutiny. It is as if the footage cannot deal with the expectations the viewer places upon it and says, through its very banal matter-of-factness: ‘I give up! All I did was record the event!’

Bryan Boyce

San Francisco-based Bryan Boyce’s ‘State of the Union video, 2001’, is a two minute digitally reworked CNN image of George W. Bush in the place of the laughing baby sun of the BBC children’s show ‘The Teletubbies’. As Bush, the sun king / baby king emerges over the horizon, the bunny rabbits of Telletubbyland frolic below him. Something is not right in Teletubbyland. As in a nightmare, the place we’re in seems familiar enough, but other media and other geographic features have imposed themselves upon the normally kid-safe wonderland usually inhabited by the now-strangely-absent cute TV-enhanced cuddly aliens. Oil-well towers dot the landscape. One by the one the furry rabbits which normally frolic happily in this storybook world suddenly explode violently as Bush-as-the-sun fires laser beams from his mouth at them. Eventually one rabbit is left. A laser beam is fired and the land fills with oil, until this last rabbit is itself blown up by the deadly Bush-sun.

The association of George W. Bush with infantilism rings true with those who see the man and his politics as being so simplistic as to be akin to kindergarten level language and ideas. ‘State of the Union’ offers up the world as the neo-cons might well themselves see it: one big oil well, with populations like children that need to be taught what’s good for them, or else.

David Cox, San Francisco.

Published by Pluto Press Australia

Review - DAS NETZ

2008-06-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

Das Netz review

by David Cox

25 Oct 2005

www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/
www.expolar.de/kybernetik/

Lutz Dammbeck’s film Das Netz (The Net) provocatively and methodically connects the dots which link the CIA, their covert mind-control LSD research, the anti-war LSD fuelled counterculture, the personal computer, and the Internet with Ted Kaszynski, the man many know as the “UNABOMBER.”

The filmmaker’s own fascination with this character is itself a curious thing – we see the filmmaker, detective-style, tracking down his leads until some kind of broad stroke picture can emerge of who this man is and what might have motivated his bomb campaign during the 1990s. The use of first person narrative – a hand drawing with a pen on paper a bunch of named circles and lines connecting them of who was who and who was connected to what – is interspersed with interviews with key people. This is a gripping and disturbing story and something of the Euro-sceptic flipside to the official California school of WIRED magazine’s breathless technological deterministic view of “tech” always being good, always making things better, and always representing the best that the USA has to offer.

Europeans, particularly the very highly educated ones, have long viewed the USA and its fascination with its own technology, mythology, and machinery with nothing if not an ambivalent scepticism, for no other reason that even Western Europe saw itself on the receiving end (like it or not) every day since 1945 of white goods, cars, machines, TV, radio, music, and culture in general.

Das Netz revisits very, very familiar ground for those historians and media archaeologists like myself who have a vested interest in keeping the story “clean,” in which the good guys (artists, philosophers like Leary, Brand, Weiner, Fuller) are on one side and the bad guys (the evil CIA, the US Military, project MK Ultra et al) are on the other.

This must have been particularly keenly felt in the Eastern Bloc countries, where not only was the evidence for the USA’s own relentless push to influence the West in most stark evidence by its absence in the East, but the view reinforced daily via Pravda and other official channels that the USA was corrupting Europe with its relentless technological advances in any way it could. Growing up in England I remember vividly the ambivalence which surrounded the very fact of US domination. We loved it and we hated it. We loved it because we hated it. And we hated it because we loved it. Like a stern mom, the USA was always there, always “on” and always would be.

And here within the USA’s own borders is the auto-sceptic, a man with a Polish name, Kaszynski, the loner, the isolated woodsman holed up in his distant rural cabin dispatching random and deadly pipe bombs in the form of booby-trapped parcels to unsuspecting scientists. Why did he do it? Because he was sick of seeing the world go to hell in a hand-basket at the hands of self-styled captains of techno-industry, science and technology, advocating their responsibility as scientists to prevent the world from losing its direction. Or something like that. Read the manifesto.

Kaszynski as an idea, more than the man himself appear to be a source of deep fascination for Dammbeck, almost an obsession. Men will travel all their lives to film themselves looking for other men with whom they see something to closely identify with. The obsessed goes in search of the obsessed. This double fascination (which becomes fascinating to outsiders like the viewers, which is to say, us) is met in equal measure by understandable revulsion and bitter resentment by his victims and those who know them when Dammbeck finally meets them and interviews them on miniDV. The laptop and the miniDV have allowed this type of essay-verite to happen at all and this fact alone is worth a mention.

It is almost embarrassing to see Dammbeck interview those who clearly are totally and utterly mystified and angered as to why anyone would reserve anything but total contempt for Kaszynski and his ‘tactics’. How can Dammbeck maintain anything like a level head as his interviewees squirm uncomfortably when asked about the subject?

Whatever Dammbeck’s motivation (to get just this sort of ‘edgy’ footage presumably), to ram this subject home to those most affected smacks of a kind of intellectual hubris, (if not outright sadism) akin to sensationalist TV reality shows masking the antics of urban police making arrests for the cameras. If he were an academic, as I am, I’d call into question his ethics. I don’t like watching it, and maybe that’s the point, I’m not supposed to. It is like the watch-me-no-turn-me-off double take of lurid explicit porn. It is like watching a filmed accident or assassination. It is like having your nose rubbed in your own worst home truths, and I think this latter point is really at the heart of Dammbeck’s modus operandi. He wants us to watch him doing this to those people. How answerable are these people anyway? All that links some of them to Kaszynski is the fact that they were mentioned in the New York Times about their work, and had their hands blown off by his bombs. These ones are at least still around to talk to cameras. Others were not so fortunate.

Dammbeck’s status as East German film-maker might partly explain this brand of interrogation as reportage. East Germany, like much of the Soviet Bloc for decades elevated its top scientists and thinkers via state backed programs and university postings, never thinking to separate an individual’s genius from the long-term goals and aims of the State. All states do this of course, but the Soviet bloc made totally official any gifted student’s role in the eventual planning and running of the Communist (state capitalist) regime.

Kaszynski, the ultimate once-upon-a-time showcase poster-boy mathematical intellectual turned woodsman and survivalist isolationist-killer was himself the bitter fruit of the US’s university elite trained cold war and space race military/intelligence system. Like many of his counterparts in the Eastern Bloc, his fate and his status as LSD guinea pig was kept top secret. His decline into a Conradian heart of darkness, that sovereign place so few emerge from once well on their way was also an official secret.

So many radical and cutting edge European technological developments found a fertile home with ample finances in the USA after world war two, and these included liquid fuel rocketry (Germany) which led to the US dominance of space, LSD (Switzerland) from migraine treatment to paradigm buster. Even the idea at least of the personal computer had some of its origins in Europe. The USA took them from Europe and developed them in the service of its own interests.

Dammbeck uncovers the ways in which the government and business tried to unravel the mysteries of what makes human beings become fascistic and how this project was linked ultimately to ideas surrounding cybernetics, distributed systems such as Buckminster Fuller’s engineering, and the work of those who developed ARPANET, now the Internet. Nice work if you can get it and you can still get it if you try. Look no further than Stanford, Harvard, and the many spin-off firms of Silicon Valley and the entire mind-set of Northern California. This place is not just a geographical place, it is an entire mindset which keeps defining the way the future ends up looking and feeling for better or worse, and much of it has to do with countless fortunes in the form of cold-war and space-race dollars pouring through the pockets of tripped out hippies, freaks, and weirdos. Today the military and the entertainment sectors are running the show. The military today, as Bruce Sterling puts it, was once run like General Motors, but is now run like Microsoft. Competitors are tokens, a joke, and it now can shape both planet earth and outer space itself in its image.

It is a genuine tragedy that Dammbeck has not ever experienced the acid tests of the 1960s. I often lament that I never could take Keysey’s bus into the other dimension and then build a world out of experiments in media to try to rectify what the military had done.

Every time I see the film (and I have seen it over and over again, fascinated by the very fact of its existence) I ask myself: how can a man make a film about a 1960s counterculture that he clearly has no direct experience of? Should someone like myself, so enamoured of that story and with so much invested in that story having a happy outcome let its telling be so easily equated with its ugly flipside? Cannot the separation – that art and experimentation are fundamentally at odds with the ways they get co-opted by the forces of evil be preserved? Should not all of us that have a stake in this story make sure that this is the official version? I am outraged that Dammbeck has made me have to rethink the whole narrative.

How can Dammbeck draw us into his pursuit of one man by reminding us of a time that was self-evidently needed and important (the 1960s counterculture) and then set himself up as so confidently a judge that set of relations by implying that he is willing to factor in at least some of the ideas of the Unabomber? Only Stewart Brand dares to concede that maybe technology can, as the Unabomber says in his Manifesto, “go too far.”

The nature / culture divide like that of the city vs. country has underpinned a long standing cultural “problem” in Germany since it became a state in the 1800s. Mensch / Natur / Technik is the triumvirate which haunts western Europe and yet holds out as its best hope.

The horrors of technology fused with skewed picturesque national folklore were more than evident during the period of the rise of Nazism. The Stuka and the cuckoo clock were fused in the minds of most pro-Nazi Germans as one and the same type of imagined techno-kitsch utopia. Technology was viewed by fascists as totally neutral when the pseudo-science behind its obscene genocidal uses were fully and wilfully applied.

This familiarity with the dark ease with which technology can become so easily fused with picturesque folklore is nothing if not characteristic of the ways in which “geeks,” “hippies,” and “cyberpunks” bandy about computers alongside fantasies of worlds populated by hobbits, goblins, and flying hackers like NEO in The Matrix. Is crypto-fascism at the heart of any kind of technological fetishism? I’d have to say no, in my experience, but there can often be detected the whiff of danger from places which seemed innocent enough in retrospect. Like the Apollo missions which so easily now have become the race to fill space with weapons and “rods from gods.” Like the proliferation of nuclear weapons which can now be carried in briefcases and which threaten whole cities and the trade of which brings organised crime and fanatical religious cults into the same trade arena.

Dammbeck reminds me of that East European (Polish?) one learns about on the “making of doco” on the DVD, who saw Easy Rider over and over again, making it nothing less than a personal philosophy, a crutch to hold oneself up on as one endured the misery of a life under bleak drab authoritarianism. Until the day they finally meet Dennis Hopper and declare this fact breathlessly to their hero, only having lived the best possibilities of the Californian techno-utopia through the filter of a story once-removed. In Europe we have all had to live the American dream by proxy, even those of us who get to one day actually get to live here, the answer to a dream, we can never have lived the Californian sea of possibilities like the locals have, and do everyday.

Like Wim Wenders and his depressing if accurate and empowering view in Paris Texas of the USA as a wasteland of lost aimless wanderers, only just barely keeping it together. Kaszynski is a bit like Wender’s own Ulysses character in that film played by Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton’s Travis wanders in the desert, lost, alienated from all, but somehow finally at ease with his outsider status, replete with ‘white-trash’ icon, the red baseball cap. One learns in the film during the ill-fated reunion between Travis and his ex-wife that in a moment of madness, he had chained her to their trailer home's bed before setting it alight and walking away, to prevent her ever leaving him.

Like John Wayne’s unhinged Ethan Edwards of the Searchers Kaszynski as Dammbeck paints him is the misunderstood ranter of truths told too strongly for the world to bear. He is that most popular of figures in Europe – the dark flipside to the American dream – the uprooted and self-exiled angel of death, who (like the dead Comanche Edwards shoots in both eyes to deny his passage to heaven) is condemned forever to ‘wander between the winds’.

I am fascinated by Das Netz for reasons I cannot explain. I love how Dammbeck carefully articulates the delicate cross-pollination of ideas which in the 60s and 70s and 80s spun off into counterculture forms like the amazing “acid tests” of Ken Kesey, the Whole Earth Catalog of Stewart Brand, the minimalist art and media movements of the late 1960s and 1970s and the fine art and experimental film and multimedia projects of Fluxus and others in New York and San Francisco later became reified into the big business model which dominates life as we know it today. I love this story partly because I see myself as having had a small role in it, being old enough to remember the time before the personal computer (my office at work is filled with mothballed Macs and PCs – I cannot bear to see them wasted) and the Internet, both played a crucial role in my development as an artist and as a filmmaker. But so did the myths of the 50s, 60s, and 70s anti-war- and anti-authority-driven countercultures. Where these two poles fuse and overlap and the points on the mind-map are many is where anyone who uses a computer and a camera should find a place for themselves, or risk living (in my view) outside of history.

When art and experimentation get big backing from the biggest players, the innocent art film, music, and computer freaks then have to leave town to let the big dogs piss all over where the artists once called their home. That once sacred place then reeks with the corrupted putrefaction of the purely commercially minded and Republican-backed military. That putrid reek now offends the whole world and has found its way into the cosmos itself.

If Kaszynski is not responsible for the horrors of a world gone mad with technological growth, he is painted by Dammbeck as that world’s most convenient scapegoat, the one who the whole time “told us so” whether or not we deserved to hear it, or indeed, risked getting killed by his bombs if we refused to. You don’t have to believe in technological determinism in order to condemn those who advocate its rapid and total removal in the violent way Kaszynski did. An utter impossibility anyway, as the hippies, the bushmen of the Kalahari, and the Amish alike have discovered. Better to forge an uneasy alliance and have your isolation with a bit of say, broadband, thrown in. Sacred isolation with a microwave oven. The Amish with his cell-phone (fact).

Seeing a film about the Kesey-led acid tests from someone who (I’m assuming) did not take part, and may in all fact have not fathomed the deeper, more subtle, cultural implications of this revolutionary set of gestures is like watching an up close and personal film about dolphins by someone who does not swim, nor sees the need to. It is thus based on a kind of bad faith that somehow this point does not matter, and most offensively to me, should not.

I think the film holds itself together extremely well as a film, is well made with a kind of knowing self-reflexivity (lots of shots of the laptop screen of QuickTime movies playing) and in parts very playful and deeply insightful as to the broader socio-cultural results of a lifetime of post-war technological changes which have led to the globalisation of Western Hegemony.

Das Netz revisits very, very familiar ground for those historians and media archaeologists like myself who have a vested interest in keeping the story “clean,” in which the good guys (artists, philosophers like Leary, Brand, Weiner, Fuller) are on one side and the bad guys (the evil CIA, the US Military, project MK Ultra et al) are on the other. Das Netz reveals that the truth could easily be that the two sides of the art-freak/CIA coin are really not so easily separated after all. Like the complementary opposites of the yin/yang, there's a piece of the dark side in the light, and vice versa. Better to understand this most bitter home-truth late than never.

What is ultimately most fascinating at the end of the day about Das Netz is the way in which it so carefully makes its connections between cold-war-space-race-LSD-cybernetics-ARPANET-counterculture, without ever claiming (as most US documentary filmmakers would) or declaring any emotional or political stakes in the views or aims of that 1960s counterculture. Most cyberpunks, freaks and computer geeks I know of my generation hold this period in such high esteem and know from deep inside something of this rich legacy to have already made these connections for themselves and to continue to do so to this day.

Others, like many I share Caltrain with in the bike car to Silicon Valley every day, could “totally give a shit” and read their Neal Stephenson novels and absolutely love money and the stock exchange and were right behind the dot-com period, and some even back the war in Iraq and willingly went to join the “war on terror.”

Maybe it is actually these people that need to see the film more than me, as it is their bad faith, which is today the problem and a very major one indeed, not Dammbeck’s and most certainly not mine.

David Cox, October 2005
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Film Review - Fahrenheit 9/11

2008-06-05T14:43:00.000-07:00

Fahrenheit 9/11

by David Cox

23 Sep 2004

Like most people who have seen Michael Moore's latest film I am impressed with the amazing skill with which he is able to construct a kind of vernacular argument out of fragments of film, videotape, music, and archival material. Moore's unique film method is that of a reformist, liberal, and mainstream incarnation of that time-proven doco approach, the 'collage essay'.

More esoteric but no less powerful film makers like Craig Baldwin in San Francisco have long used the technique, pioneered by the great beat-era film maker Bruce Conner, where film and video material is collected from a range of sources: archives, donated films, from stuff thrown out from schools and colleges, and mail order sources, to collections and libraries from around the country. The footage is painstakingly watched and material taken based on it's (a) strength visually (b) context narratively and (c) potential as a part in a mosaic.

Moore builds his mosaic up from the fragments to tell a story which goes something like this:

George W Bush forced himself into office by rigging the 2000 election with the help of his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. The willingness of the Democrats in the US senate with Al Gore at the helm to prevent the (largely people of colour) left out of the crucial Florida vote to have their voices heard only made matters worse. With long-standing decades-old big-dollar ties to the oil dynasties of Saudi Arabia, Bush and his cronies were looking for ways to invade oil rich regions of the world to further control oil prices and dominate the world with draconian neo-liberal foreign policy. When Bin Laden's radical Islamist Al Qaeda group staged the surprise attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 in 2001 they hit major symbolic buildings in the USA with planes as missiles. America had not been hit on its own soil since the British set Washington to the torch in early 19th Century to punish the independence movement.*

9/11 gave Bush the excuse he needed to implement draconian country-wide crackdowns on freedom of speech, and freedom of expression. Extreme right wing attacks on people of colour, of whom Arab Americans were the main targets started to proliferate. 9/11 gave Bush permission to 'manufacture consent' to attack Afghanistan, then Iraq, and suddenly America's own poorest found themselves dying in a war led by oil profit interests, and only now is America waking up to how they've been conned. The biggest opponents to the war are the warriors themselves, now wise to how they were sold a lemon, namely large scale business ventures dressed up to look like national defence.

We weave in and out of the ideas on the screen in a mesmeric cascade of events, scenes and commentary. Watching F9/11 is very entertaining and at times disturbing. The cries of the wounded GI screaming 'Save me! Save me!' are horrifying, as are the images of maimed babies and horribly scarred Iraqi children. Here's the truth of war. It is shit - now eat it!

The process of making 'found footage' films is that of collection, fused with the archivists intimate knowledge of actual media fragments and materials. There is formed a kind of 'conversation' with the media at hand. When footage arrives it is sifted through. Moore and his team have carefully examined films from the point of view of their relevance to support the argument and have probably also scoured them for ideas for projects which have not been thought of yet. Within any given 16mm or video sequence can there might be a set of shots that in the right place in the right film can work to reinforce that film's primary argument. Moore's use of materials is masterly, but there are some issues with his argument which irk me.

Why do not more US military personel, surely knowing something of the horrors which await them in Iraq, not simply up and leave for Canada? This was the driving force behind the anti-Vietnam war movement - potential draftees upping and leaving and voting with their feet. Why does not American now build a massive social movement, like the one which stopped the Vietnam war? Why is there not a huge carnival of popular protest to topple Bush and his corrupt oil bandits? I know there are restrictions these days governing the flow of people across places like the Canadian border, but you'd think there would be some sort of much more flamboyant expression of what is so clearly an untenable situation with each passing day.

Why does Moore insist that opposing the war in Iraq is not the same thing as opposing the troops themselves? Most people I know opposed the fact that Iraq was being invaded and had a major issue with Australia's involvement as well. If a war is wrong it should be opposed, whether you wear a uniform or not. The war machinery should be opposed. The tanks, the planes, the troops. This should be especially true in a republic like the United States which is supposed to be made up of the 'will of the people'. The population in republics are supposed to be inseparable from their governing bodies. We the people and all that. The troops themselves should be leading the revolt. In some stories on democracy now, there is the suggestion that this is happening. And Moore himself champions a lone black ex-soldier who refuses to go back to Iraq and 'fight other poor people'. Why cannot now the entire military population follow his lead? Am I being too naively optimistic here?

So the liberal view that 'the troops are people like us, who like us were misled' is the least convincing argument in the film, and it forms a major structural weakness. It is the entire hierarchical nature of the corrupt oil machine which is at fault and which by wearing the trappings of nation as its cloak, has led Australia, Britain, and the United States into the abyss along with a handful of other small countries which Moore points out in the film (though strangely not including Australia).

National pride and a sense of national service need to come into question as well during war, arguably more than at any other time as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out back during WWII, but Moore wants us to identify with those who 'love their country but not their government'. Fine, but is not the nationalistic impulse itself at least in part, also partly to blame here? Flags, anthems, marching bands and Fox TV - its all of a piece today with McDonnel Douglas, Boeing, Haliburton and the Carlyle Group. Surely opposing one is to oppose them all? Maybe not and I've yet to fully understand the true nature of national pride. But when it leads men and women to their deaths with such ruthless efficiency, something has to be wrong with it. Nation is big business; get it?

Found footage filmmaking is scholarly in that each film puts forward a certain argument or point of view, and reinforces that view by means of allusion, or direct illustration. Many of Michael Moore's films are actually illustrated, carefully scripted vocal narrations. You could very easily just listen to F9/11. It works as radio. The dense soundtrack is made up of different elements, notably music and narration, and the narration has been recorded based on written monologue which itself has been informed by the availability of film and video materials. What is not available is filmed, like interviews etc.

The narration guides the viewer's interpretation of the visual 'evidence'. It's a great approach, and I love his work, even if I don't agree with what I consider mainly to be his liberal, humanist middlebrow point of view. Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert say it much better and more honestly, if with fewer resources and a much smaller budget. But they are anarchists, not left-leaning Democrats.

*[Editor's note: On 26 February 1993 a van, packed with explosives enhanced with cyanide gas, exploded in the parking garage under the World Trade Center killing six people. The group responsible, led by Ramzi Yousef, intended the explosion to destroy both towers by toppling one into the other. It seems there is a national denial that this serious attack ever took place.]

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Review - New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City

2008-06-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City

A Review by David Cox

(Click here for printer-friendly version)

New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City by Iain Borden (Editor), Sandy McCreery (Editor) Paperback - 112 pages (August 10, 2001)

John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471499099

The book is a unique combination of essays and articles about the enduring influence of the Situationist International on contemporary ideas about urban planning and architecture. I am happy to see this publication, dovetailing as it does with my own research interests into electronically mediated urban space. At $61, its price tag is high, and it fits neatly into that category of book which is part coffee-table, part research document, part magazine which the Architecture and Design industries love to produce. These documents are made to feel valuable, and this one does.

The work is a timely and excellently thought out text, which is likely to enter the growing canon of key texts on the subject. Arguably the most important of these is Simon Sadler's "The Situationist City" which spent the first chapter apologizing for being academic, before declaring itself so; hoping to pre-empt the protests of the pro-situationists out there. The situationists of course themselves hoped to pre-empt any criticism of their movement as just another 'ism' by declaring "there is no such thing as Situationism".

I was most impressed with the reprinting of the original "New Babylon: An Urbanism of the Future" article in the 1964 issue of Architectural Design by the genius architect and visionary Constant Nieuwenhuys. Constant's relentless and breathless exaltations to a world of free play and creativity are evocative and compelling:

The Homo Ludens of the future Scotty will not have to make art, for he will be able to creative in the practice of his life. He will be able to create life itself and shape it to correspond with still unknown needs that will emerge only after he has obtained complete freedom.

The city proposal which Constant put forward as the physical expression of his utopia of free play bears striking resemblance in parts to representations of the Internet, (those mad tapered spaghetti lines pouring out of cities representing bandwidth and 'net traffic) in books such as "Mapping Cyberspace". Assembled using perspex and bike parts, the models Constant built and the diagrams for New Babylon reflect a desire to see the future city as a negotiable, plastic, ever changing carnival of celebration. A kind of leisure and good living festival which never ends. Connecting wires and poles suspend circular transparent layers, connected by ramps and walkways. New Babylon looks like a kind of organism of tensile delicacy. In Constant's own words:

The unfunctional character of this playground-like construction makes any logical division of the inner spaces senseless. We should rather think of a quite chaotic arrangement of small and bigger spaces that are constantly assembled and dissembles by means of standardized mobile construction elements like walls, floors and staircases. Thus the social space can be adapted to the ever-changing needs of an every changing population as it passes through the sector system.

He could have been talking about the world wide web. He could have been talking about the types of structures which emerge out of the anti-globalisation movement - provisional, functional, short term, but dedicated to social change and emblematic of ongoing struggle with the creative spirit as its engine. .All those large street puppets, bikes and buses retrofitted with media equipment, independent media and ideas fueling a new type of city; post industrial, post capitalist, post work.

This is city as collage, also celebrated by the much less politically motivated Archigram group in the UK, key members of which now design massive architectural features for megaband stadium concerts. In our era of continuous connectivity and onion-skin-like layering of urban culture with invisible digital sheets of communication, the need to understand the city as a place beyond work and production would appear more an issue than ever.

The book features also some superb anti capitalist collage by the General Lighting and Power group, whose slick mock-advertising images of soft focus female forms in leotards and computer graphics of office interiors and car accidents are intersected every-which -way by droll pseudo situationist aphorisms such as:

"Aerobics is necessary: progress implies it" ("I see you baby, shaking that ass")

and

"God is in the retailing"

This stuff reads like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger with a laugh track. It helps if you know something about the spirit of the Situationists and their love of reverse engineering the information environment to fully understand the wicked humour of this section.

Of particular interest is an essay on the similarities between the Situationist's idea of the 'derive' (essentially navigating a city for purposes other than those officially ascribed) and the experience of using the internet. In a first class comparison between S.I.'s project for a work free society and the world wide web, Colin Fournier, architect and educator makes some keen observations. It turns out that many of the characteristics of the web mirror attributes the S.I. Considered prerequisite for their utopia: an ephemeral, negotiable type of city, where uses were determined by the population, surfing the web is like the idea of drifting or deriving through a city. Both the situationist city and the web share the qualities of flexibility, dynamism. They are naturally and in keeping with their design open to use for play and social experiment.

Another essay covers the 'repurposing' of Berlin into a zone for free wandering. A man distributes maps to a formerly divided area of Berlin, and encourages participants and passers by to follow prescribed pathways on these maps, despite the fact that often the lines to be followed are barred by walls, gardens and other impediments. This is the diary of an Abstract Tour Operator. Like the old Surrealist idea of using a map of one city to find one's way around another, this project fuses two cities, or rather the multiple cities of Berlin in the minds of all who live there. It grabs people off the street, gives them a map and tells them to get lost. Literally.

The byline reads:

Paralells can be drawn between the manoeuvres or guided walking tours executed by the artist Tim Brennan and the derives or drifts of the situationist project. Similarly Brennan seeks to raise consciousness and 'speak' to his participants thought his tours, which combine highlights of 'ideologically unselfconscious phenomena' with 'bodies of preexisting information'.

A chapter written by Charles Rice looks at the massive billboard signs which are proliferating in major cities, arguing that "these spatial fantasies effectively deliver identification with the disant and the unattainable" to quote the byline.

These imposing wall-signs literally occupy the sides of skyscrapers, and in most cases offer ways to reimagine the city as re-scaled 'events'. One example is the side of a New York building which has been turned into a vast bookshelf. I'm not sure I buy Rice's flip observations about "The Space of the Image" - they sound too much like apologia for the design principles behind what are essentially ugly big ads, refusing to be ignored. These billboards represent the symbolic penetration of corporate culture to the city level, and in re-scaling massive buildings, seem to indicate that the playfulness which the Situationists assumed would fall into the population's hands, is now firmly in those of global commerce no hence longer playful, just banal and obvious.

I doubt SI themselves could have themselves produced this book, it takes too historical a view, and treats the movement of Guy Debord and Constant and the others way too much like a startlingly unlikely, but welcome curiosity of history. This said, the book does look vaguely like something the SI might have released. This is only relevant as the SI were well known for their self-published texts, such as Potlach and the Situationist International. The book has the look and feel of something being proposed, like a call-to-action style activist pamphlet on steroids. Part of me thinks of it as just a bit too slick, too overproduced, too radical chic. Debord would probably have dismissed its sensible well-designed Photoshop and Illustrator layout as haplessly specialist. Possibly even 'spectacular'. Then again he could have read every page front and back and put it up there with all the other successes he and his movement can claim for themselves.

These issues matter less and less, as one realises that no matter how many glossy attractive and expensive books come out based on S.I. ideas 'revisited", the Situationist International has successfully avoided having been too neatly encapsulated in history and academicism. It will be a while yet, though hopefully not too long, before those in a position to do so implement anything like the vision of New Babylon and the type of Permanent Autonomous Zone it embodies. A permanent 'Burning Man' festival. A paradise for the nomadic, an oasis of free play and the free imagination, unshackled from the drudgery of contemporary capitalism.

These ideas get inside your head, like psychic Palmolive (you know you're soaking in it!) I've been picking this book up and reading it for days now. It has become an addition to my daily routine. I recommend it highly for anyone interested in Situationism, Utopia, or the idea of society where work, rules and authority are a thing of the past. And given the times we live in, is not that just about everyone these days?

David Cox
Lecturer in Digital Screen Production At Griffith University
School of Film Media and Cultural Studies
email: d.cox@mailbox.gu.edu.au
personal web site: http;//www.netspace.net.au/~dcox/dcox.html

The Lens of Images

2008-06-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Lens of Images

by David Cox

Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking

Images are themselves a lens on the culture which makes them. Walter Benjamin was both right and wrong about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Right in that as images proliferate from spectacle, their overall value depreciates. Wrong in that manufactured images are worth less than their real world referent. As manufactured goods accelerate away from the decade in which they were made, they themselves gain a kind of new cultural value. Some commodities seem to accrue more cultural gravitas than others. The dodgiest of global trade in junk, the antique market bears testimony to the ways in which even the most trivial of manufactured items can become obscure objects of desire once made to enter the domain commodity relations.

Culture is what I say it is

If desire is expressed through the commodity, and the commodity is that which is supposed to stand in for desire, to desire an end to commodity society is the desire to embrace that which consumer society deems no longer useful or valuable. Alongside this is the desire to re-inscribe those things with new and unauthorised types of cult value. The culture hacker collects things which seem to have no value. She makes of the world around her a quilt of emblems of her own desire ultimately a world in which control and governance have shifted away from a surrogate type of economy to one of desire itself. The act of deciding what will become a cult item to oneself personally, is the first step toward emancipation from the Empire of Signs. Surely, others will come to see the significance of the enshrined emblems of personal liberty as self evident tokens of a broader idea of libertarian social and cultural possibility.

Desire is Free

The hacker society is one which values desire above commodities, it makes the search for pleasure the same as the rejection of the mainstream culture itself. It is anti-suburban, anti middle class and pro urban. It yearns for experiences, which affirm the centrality of the creative act as a social relation between people of like mind. Where ideas, pleasure and fun and mystery and desire fuel the work of the media hacker, his world is one of constant uncertainty. Intertextuality the migration of meanings from one context to another. The way in which meanings arrive on the back of shots and sounds as stowaways. You stow away with those meanings too, a refugee from the Society of the Spectacle.

Choose (a) life

In culture jammer cinema, it is the selection which makes the shot. It is both choosing and looking but not just the act of choosing, the decision to make choosing the centre of ones life. The decision to make looking for elements to make a life out of a hacker embraces the problems facing her with curiosity, a sense of experimentation. No barrier should be taken seriously. No limit to access to the principle of free expression. You find some old films, you make a new film out of them. You find some old cassettes, you chop up the bits and make a new work out of them. Old media are windows on the times they come from. Images are like lenses onto other times and other places.

History speaks while the guy holding it drinks a glass of water.

Media speak like the ventriloquist's doll of history. Looking at the sea of ancient images which constitute the western imagination, it is easy to see why so many museums are becoming theme parks. In a corporatised urban space, the notion of a civic use for cultural memory is potentially counterproductive. Implicit within the old school idea of the museum is that the centre of civic life lies with local governance. Sponsorship and theme-parking does away with such troublesome notions of government in the service of a population, for its own sake.

We must construct our own museums of cultural memory. If we don't remember the period before the Dark Times, nobody will. Bradbury at 451 degrees knows more than you do, honey. We're burning up to tell you like it was, like it is, like it may yet be.

The Worm Hole Theory of Collage

William Burroughs insisted that his cut-up works of writing had properties of prediction about them. Implicit within this idea is that collage is a kind of dimensional travel, where intended meanings become disrupted so radically that the act of reworking words in a newspaper article or shots in a film actually disrupts the time/space continuum. Try showing a collage work to anyone not up with radical postmodernism and just sit back and wait for the questions about authorship, ownership, copyright and other methods of psychological police torture in the service of the State and Capital.

Assembly Instructions - Read Carefully

Jamming is more than a sytlistic technique. It is more than a simple set of artistic practises. It is for its most central practitioners, an entire philosophy of life. It means looking at the world as a kit of parts. The beatnik sensibility is one in which only the relation between images and sounds makes sense, not the parts themselves. The relationships, the moment between notes, the silence in a jazz riff, the double splice and the katchink sound it makes as it moves through the projector. The distortion on the tape, the hiss, the crackle. The hole damn pop sensibility.

Text is picture is sound is authority is negotiable.

William Burroughs knew of the power of words as images. His ideas about the provisionality of meaning, and the dependence ideas have upon the cultural contexts in which they emerge have yet to be fully Understood, dealt with let alone let loose sufficiently widely enough to overthrow society!!!

The intensity of a shot well cut with a sound also well selected will rock audiences for a long time to come. Hacking is the spirit of play the spirit of letting the material speak to you. Listening and looking for patterns hidden in the material. COME ON BUBBA!!!! SQUEEZE THAT MONKEY!!! To quote Ren 'n' Stimpy before they went commercial.

Familiarity and Defamiliarisation through detournement of everyday experience

Encyclopaedias are often surrealistic juxtapositions of things organised alphabetically, imagine a film whose sequence of events matched that of the encyclopaedia. Aardvarks, to Zoetropes, that's all she wrote.

Jamming Retail: Shops as Museums of the Present

You search for things as if you were in the biggest thrift store in the world. The world is a bit thrift store. K-Mart is no longer a shop to buy things in. It is the museum of the present, for the archaeologist of the below $40 consumer item. Everything is on special, and in all but price itself, is free. You look at the world as if it were some other place at some other time. You turn your alienation into an asset. Suddenly the culture of the lower middle class becomes an urban toolkit of survival and of anti-boredom. Things on the street, in gutters, behind fences, thrown away packaging become the fuel for a free imagination, accumulating in the growing database of ways to be free, as well as on the mantelpiece at home: Price Check, aisle four, hardware, manchester and adult males!!! Store detectives are Too busy masturbating while looking at security camera monitors to really stop desire in its tracks.

Database vs Narrative: complementary philosophies of media

Database is about the connections between related but separated elements. Searches provide lists of elements. Narrative is about linearity, sequential series of events, it is about organic growth, root like from the bottom up, from the top down, any which way but loose-lipped.

A culture jammed event is a combination of database and narrative. Database provides the navigational basis for searching for things, indexing, cross indexing elements, while narrative provides the structural framework for those database philosophy inspired found elements. The web, search engines, videogames are databases of experience you navigate through.

Narrative, by contrast is about hearing events out, having them unfold in a predetermined sequence. When you combine the logic of database and apply them to narrative you have a potent combination of forces. Look at all the videotapes on your shelves. All the books. Go to your cd collection. Now imagine that they were all in a database and you were able to combine every track of every cd, every scene of every film, and every chapter of every book into new works, determined by say, your favorite bits of each type of media. As the entire lot is now able to be reworked into new combinations, cultural reworkings become not only possible, but necessary. As we move toward a database culture in which all texts are made available to all others, the empire of signs starts to crack as surely as the Berlin wall. T'was booting killed the beast.

To refine texts into fragments for later recombination is the philosophy and working approach of the idea hacker. To see all the world as a sea of samples is the privilege of the free. Academia tries hard enough, but is stymied by its own working methodology, its own beurocracy. A cultural studies department with no time tables in a permanent Burning Man would be the closest thing yet to New Babylon.

Database as non sequentialism for its own sake

Database offers the technological means as well as the methodological basis for searching, indexing, seeing patterns between media elements. Narrative offers the moral container within which those elements can be organised in such a way that they reinforce the broader moral standpoint. Hacker culture is about living ones life as if authority had already been done away with, as if ones own liberty were a birthright and access to all things were not only possible, but to be expected. The ultra rich and the ultra poor are both familiar with what it is to be on the outside of society. With a database, you know about ways in which search criteria can be applied, for example by key-word, by date, by numerical index and so on.

Database is a natural extension of the quality of computers, but only hackers can Redeem computers from the shackles of work, and all that goes with it. Where the provisionality of meaning proliferates, there you will find the possiblity of life beyond commercial society. The mainstream world expects meanings, like people themselves, to remain behind the counter, within boundaries, within their pre-determined cultural office dividers. In the early 1990s when a nightclub in Melbourne screened ultra-realistic ads warning people of the dangers of drink driving in the context of sado masochism, the shit hit the fan. Infuriated that their social realist ads depicting supposedly real traffic accidents were being detourned to satisfy the desire of a cultural minority.

Napsterising Everything, For All Time

Guy Debord insisted that plagiarism was a key to liberty. He even went so far as to to say that progress implies it. If the future of our world lies in the belief that all meanings should be stripped of any claim to authenticity then museums, universities, and the other last remaining bastions of modernist essentialism whould allow students to copy texts freely.

Copying music, films, books, indeed any type of media can only ultimately assist in the eventual devaluation of ideas as commercial entities. What if suddenly the Napsterisation of all ideas were made possible. All films, all music, all books, all texts became enterable within the realm of database?

Once made database elements, the constant generation and regeneration of meanings could technically at least, be enterable into a kind of Nelsonian Xanadu realm in which all films and all texts could be perpetually reworked and recombined. You might have noticed that when downloading files from Napster, you would often get cut off. This would result in most files being only partial songs, or sounds. We have a generation emerging who are quite happy to have only bits of songs, bits of films, bits of texts. The fragments are horny! They want to get it on and procreate.

All I am saying is give the pieces a chance!

DC

Cities of the Future

2008-06-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

"Cities of the Future 2000: V2.0"

by David Cox and Molly Hankwitz

Urban space today is a site of unparalelled change, alteration and dynamism. The impact of globalised systems of economic power, mediated by electronics, have lent the contemporary city a mutable aspect. Cities seem to seeth with the potential for self growth, grown organically from the material that is the media age. No-one it would seem has a strong handle on where contemporary cities are going. Gone are the heady days of certainty which thrust skyscrapers out of a landscape of mining and manufacturing. These are the fluid and liquid city days.

We are all makers of the landscape of the imagination. Confronted by political dissent, the powers that be are clinging to models of urbanism which do not fit those employed by often victorious protestors. Against the physicality of retail and point-of-sale, and the protectionism of a trade focused idea of the city as mall, is posited the playful theatricality of popular protest, connected by cellphone, uplinked to the internet, sharing its anti-globalist message with the world.

A realtime, streaming-media, internet-mediated city is emerging from the ashes of the traditional industrial model. The very idea of the city is itself up for grabs. The recent protests in Seattle, Washington and Melbourne were battles in many ways for the very function of urban space itself. Against a trouble-free paradise for shoppers policed by men dressed like black tranformer robots, the protesters proposed a concept of the city as a site for popular expression and political celebration on a scale not seen for decades.

Cities of the Future Quicktime Samples

Otherzone Trailer

David Cox

(1.9 MB)

Retropolis

Joe Gerhardt & Ruth Jarman

(1.9 MB)

It is communications and media technology which mediate these new often provisional spaces, the media of accessible camcorders,the internet and mobile phones as tools of organisation and mobilisation. The battle in Seattle and its recent Washington echo were partly struggles to attain a kind of 'city of the imagination' and a city of 'global liberty'. They are echoed in festival culture around the world, at provisional city events like "Burning Man", in squats and reclaimed spaces utilised by the rave and techno underground.

By ferrels, by artists, by culture jammers. reclaimed spaces utilised by the rave and techno underground. The quest for free space holds a special place in the popular imagination and has been depicted in different ways in many films over the years. Against the background of a tear gas and rubber bullet street conflict for the soul of the "real" city is a scrim of mainstream media sign making in the form of popular entertainment. In movies, and TV the contemporary screen city is a place where buildings can morph at will into transluscent jelly, can alter their physical dimensions in response to the emotions of those around them. These are cities which overlap seamlessly with the desires of their occupants. From New Babylon of the Situationists, through the 'plug-in' city of Archigram through to the architecture of contemporary urban protest - squats, share houses, artist collectives, micro cinemas, reclaimed land, altered and appropriated spaces. Here are new types of cities; bristling with cameras, obsessed with surveillance, power, and the absolute unquestionable soveriegnty of the affluent individual.

Films like "Contact", "Mission to Mars", "Falling Down", "Sliver", "Heat", "X-Men", and "The Matrix" depict structures and matter suffering a crisis of integrity. Computer graphics render solid surfaces transparent, fluid and mercurial. People in these spaces look at the world around them and their own bodies as completely made over. They are transformed for us by the changes around them, as we are by those around us. Flying cars are a reality today. Buildings made of foam and buildings made of information are now arguably as important as anything made out of concrete steel and glass. Soon buildings will be grown like plants.

New paradigms are needed for these cities of the future. Our architectural and design and cinematic present echoes a time prior when architects and designers were imagining a city of interchangable components alongside a constant climate of urban threat. Signage and billboards are programmable like computer screens, and every strategy of the streetwise is instantly appropriated by the commercial sector to target some new percieved demographic.

The ideas of contemporary designers and writers in film, the internet and new media are offering new insights into what the city of the future might be. And a corporate shell of clean and affluent living is the farthest thing from their minds. This is the future. Here are the cities.

Architect and Media critic Molly Hankwitz and film maker and academic David Cox present "Cities of the Future 2000" - a software upgrade to the hit show of 1999 with conceptual plugins and downloadable ideas for a wide range of media practitioners artists, and others who feel they'd like a stake in the look and feel of the streets around them.

Bringing you: Constant, Archigram, Debord, Lovink, Fuller, Bain, Cox, Wodiczko, MDVD, Independent Media Centre, Films: Contact, X-Men, Mission to Mars, Matrix, Archigram, Ads for Wireless, Heat, Falling Down, A Bout A Souffle, BIT, TRON, They Live!, Running Man, Robocop, Phantom Menace, Gladiator, Dreams May Come, Vertigo,

Sensurround Stardust in His Eyes - The Edgy Film Essays of Damon Packard.

2008-06-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Sensurround Stardust in his Eyes:

by David Cox

13 Mar 2008

Damon Packard has some major issues with the state of contemporary filmmaking. He is that rarest of creatures in today’s independent film scene, a talented and hard-working filmmaker with a solid understanding and knowledge of world cinema history. Packard’s is a brand of film critic-turned-maker which, like that in France 45 years ago, is borne of the Los Angeles Cinematheque, a childhood in front of the glowing TV––the film-buff as student of history.

The possibilities of filmmaking as they presented themselves to anyone wise enough to capitalize on them at the time (e.g. Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola et. al. ) were so obvious that the whole industry was ‘just there’ for the taking. All you needed was to seize the new portable cameras and recording gear, convince a few ‘hip’ producers you had what it took, borrow heavily from the Europeans, and make your film as if you were Godard or Visconti working in California instead of Paris or Rome. Lots of soft-focus, lots of inner monologue/dream sequences a la Bergman, lots of long takes like Bresson. Then you apply these techniques to ‘renovating’ old 1930s genres like Space Opera, and the Jungle Adventure.

In the intervening years, partly because of the initial success of these 1970s ‘pioneers’ (especially George Lucas), the entire contemporary media production industry is a vast and relentless ocean of vested commercial interests, concentrated imperial power, and complete top-down hierarchical control of every single aspect of mainstream entertainment.

Whatever vague liberal/left-wing agenda the likes of Gary Kurtz and Monte Hellman and Roger Corman were willing to give lip service to back in the early ‘70s, the successes this group gave witness to have all but extinguished that same hip libertarianism completely.

Rather, today the Indie spirit is in a kind of nexus between the angst of post-9/11 Pax Americana, mixed with the darker visions of the 1970s as talismanic set of signifiers––Mansonesque madness, bad trips, and Nixonian collapse of the body politic.

Makers can intensify the ‘feel’ of former periods, by using digital tools to revisit the mythology of those mythical times. Call it Psycho-Drama with Final Cut Pro. It’s like the band Stereolab recycling design-centered early 1970s Euro-Pop and updating for the era of Pro-Tools and mp3.

Packard’s filmic devices include the liberal uses of modern tools of movie distribution that in 1975 would have sounded like something from the mind of sci-fi scriptwriter Dan O’Bannan––a vast international system of storing movies, available to anyone connected to see them and contribute to them in turn. YouTube, Peer2Peer, and the sneakerware stealth-delivered DVD are Packard’s methods of getting his work seen, and it is slowly but surely working.

For Packard and the rest of us struggling Indie filmmakers with a brain, the stakes are high and the opponents strong.

For the overarching domination of today’s stupefying massive media empires extends into every aspect of life. This awesome power of vision, sound, and software is buttressed and defended by the most powerful institutions on Earth. The military-entertainment complex, for want of a better phrase, is no less that that which maintains a viciously protective force-field around any kind of production which might conceivably be converted into money and power. To make films which criticize this system is to invoke its merciless wrath, as Welles did with Citizen Kane when he took on William Randolph Hearst, and paid with his career from then on as a result.

Packard is very much like Welles. He is exiled from the studios which he honestly and justly believes he should be allowed into. He knows all about their modes of production and exploitation. Enough to easily occupy a seat of power were one somehow made available to him. He would be a kind of cross between Roger Corman, Orson Welles, Ed Wood, and John Waters were he to find himself one day in a position of director or producer.

But, as with Welles again, ironically, it is Packard’s very knowledge of the origins of modern cinema that are so dangerous to his career. He knows simply too much about how the tiny handful of people of once-upon-a-time-wannabes-in-the-early-1970s who run Hollywood got there. "Reflections of Evil" shows a young Steven Spielberg haplessly trying to get his old-fart crew to do as he says, an event that is well-chronicled in any Spielberg biography. As the young director throws stunt-dummies around to communicate what he wants, everyone just looks on, bemused, cast & crew alike. Just as it once was for the young wunderkind , Packard too now must endure the indifference of an establishment that he feels he has every right to join, which simply does not get his genius.

Packard’s appeal to us in the realm of "other" cinema, (his real audience), is enacted through performative gestures like the massive DVD give-away project of self-distribution which has all the hallmarks of a noble potlatch sacrifice. "Look at me" the gesture says; I can make films which chronicle the tragedy of their own lack of attention by the people who matter!!

Packard is once again really, actually, like that young Spielberg––desperately trying to convince all around him of his undeniable technical and cultural talent, but to the deaf and uninterested around him, he’s just an annoyance, something in the way, like a crazy person who talks to himself at bus stops. His character of Bob is confused at the fact that nobody wants to buy his cheap watches.

The watches are tainted objects, since Peter Fonda took his off in disgust in "Easy Rider", the marginal class in California has had little use for them, at least at the street level, where time is measured in periods between cheap meals, places to crash, avoidance of cops, fifths of booze, doses of crack, smack, meth, and tobacco.

Only those with any kind of purchase on their own lives need watches, so trying to sell them to the dispossessed and homeless of the areas around Hollywood is a pointless exercise. Bob naively keeps trying though, and keeps returning to his screen to gorge himself on sugar to keep his outrage and his blood pressure up.

It is as if the dreams of the immediate post-Counterculture period were washed ashore as so much flotsam and jetsam, along with the visible results of 40 years since of active campaigns by the right-wing in the USA, to destroy all traces of that period, all hints of the benefits the ‘70s brought with them, such as self-awareness, an understanding of the world as a place, the mind as a temple, of drugs as a means of enlightenment, of the American Republic as a site for public imagining.

Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes’ economic policies have turned the once-vibrant, happening inner-cities into wastelands of contained madmen, homeless, drug-addicts, and wanderers, whose only crime is to be alive, poor, and living in America. Packard’s Bob is the fat and borderline fool who, like ancient Rome’s stuttering Claudius, knows more than he lets on, and sees in overhead contrails, the lateness of depended-upon buses, and the constant assaults by the victims of the streets, evidence of his own spiritual and physical demise. These are the ‘reflections’ of an evil, which is as deliberate and intended as any planned for and funded freeway overpass. The myriad casualties of peace of modern urban life become in Bob’s mind interfused with the many characters from science-fiction set in Los Angeles. People mutter lines from Blade Runner, Logan’s Run. The streets themselves have the late-afternoon orange sun of many a disaster film. George Kennedy and Charlton Heston could appear at any moment to declare their moral outrage.

This is the Los Angeles of Mike Davis’ "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles”.

Wikipedia has this to say about this book:

"The book is a Marxist historical, economic, and cultural dissection of Los Angeles, its residents and their lifestyles and their interactions with real-estate developers. Davis contrasts the campaigners for ‘slow growth’ with the needs of minorities living on the margins and the never-ending growth of Los Angeles with environmental considerations."

Other Packard films, like his "Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary”, albeit about a Bay Area mogul, are no less critical for their condemnation of what he sees as the corruption of so much money being spent on so many people to make so mediocre a film as the episodes I through III of the digital-age “Star Wars” saga.

When pop culture ‘does’ the 1970s, it is more often than not to sneer knowingly and condescendingly at the supposed ‘excesses’ of style which predominated then. Hipsters swarming about the renovated downtowns of today, toting laptops and lattes, generally do not wear or espouse the culture that their equivalents did at the time; rather, they sport the cheesy slacks, wide lapels, big sunglasses and sideburns that were actually the realm of the straight world in, say, 1972.

The politically astute then made clothes, or found them, and generally avoided the polyester styling that was favored by those that purchased items from chain stores.

Similarly, the look of mainstream TV and cinema was also infused with the residual drip-down effects of the Counterculture. It was common for themes about drugs, sex, and leisure to predominate on the screens at the time.

Experimental film had infused most aspects of screen production with its telltale emblems – liberal use of lens filters (to suggest ‘trips’ or madness), shaky, handheld camera, allowing ‘mistakes’ like lens flare to create dreamlike effects on film. Hippies had opened the door for filmmakers to try anything, and, given the rapid and irreversible collapse of the traditional film-production studios, more and more experimentation was possible.

This is the world of filmmaking that Damon Packard seeks to evoke with his modern masterpieces, done today with a myriad of formats, and generally edited with Final Cut Pro. Packard ‘samples’ the period, borrowing fragments of camera style, actual snippets of audio and music, and creating an alternative cinema of the 1970s for today.

It matters not a toss to him what is copyright and what is not, for, like the Situationists, he knows that the pressures of today require drastic measures. Outright copying of Carpenters’ songs, THX sound effects, and just about everything else, is the only way to close the gap between oneself and the rapidly approaching missile of copyright, such that the destructive device will arm then explode itself before it reaches its target, not expecting that target to actually run toward it!

“Reflections of Evil” is, to me, Packard’s absolute masterwork. This unhinged and sad portrait of the city of light from the very depths of its broken streets, betrays a Diane Arbus’ like familiarity with its outcast subjects. It vividly evokes the mythos of Los Angeles filtered through a thousand movies, and a thousand actual walks and drifts through her streets.

"Reflections" also bespeaks a real insider’s knowledge of that city’s dense multi-layered patinas of myth, magic, and darkness. Packard walks where Jim Morrison once did, alongside Bruce Conner, and Rick Deckard from “Blade Runner”.

It’s fitting that his “Star Wars Mockumentary” tears such massive satirical shreds from the digital-film cult, which has taken over contemporary film production of sci-fi fantasy. Packard, like many of us, is enamored of Lucas’ early work, films like “THX1138”, which were directly inspired by the experimental photo-collage and audio collage films of Arthur Lipsett and Bruce Conner. All the more outrage he feels at the betrayal of Lucas, as bad as anything his Anakin Skywalker alto-ego ever pulled off, turning to the dark side away from the experimental underground and into the dead end of mainstream commercial shopping-mall mass entertainment.

Like many old enough to have seen the release of the first “Star Wars”, and to have known from the inside the links between this film and these earlier, more radical inspirations from which it emerged, I can harbor some resentment for Lucas and his decision to devote his life to building a monumental edifice of modern pop religion, rather than simply use the ‘Force’ and wing it with more and more experimentation. Instead of Lipsett-a-likes, we got “Howard the Duck” and “Jar Jar Binks”.

Thus, it is because the original “Star Wars” and “THX1138” were as close in spirit to the 1970s ‘golden age’ of experimentation, borrowing closely from the conventions of European hand-held verite , action-cutting of the sort associated with Godard’s “Breathless", that the fall from grace seems so total. Such once-stalwart supporters of experimentation like Lucas simply ended up commanding entire vast armies of digital specialists, turning the creative process into yet another mind-numbing industrial process of the sort the Zoetrope boys tried to overturn. This signals a betrayal so deep to Packard that only a broadside of the venom of “Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary” can come close to symbolically settling the moral score. This is how much Packard cares about this issue. He takes it hella seriously, dude.

In "Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary", Lucas is framed as the madman Colonel Kurtz in the jungles of contemporary film production, talking about digital characters that "you don’t have to stand there & shoot ... ". Packard and his friends insist to George (intercut into the DVD’s ‘making-of’ material of production meetings)––"we can’t do it for the budget, George!!", echoing stories that there were mass exoduses of staff following the crushing schedule which attended the pre-release of "Phantom of the Menace". Lucas’ staff grin and bear his demands for realism, and an intercut Packard and his colleagues grow impatient with the auteur, finally lashing out with "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT US TO DO????"

Back to the Future of “Reflections of Evil”: As in "Chinatown", the corruption runs so deep in LA that to hold out any hope for people’s good intentions is as fruitless as, say, trying to sell a cheap watch to a crack addict wielding a hatchet!

Packard’s Los Angeles, for all its brightly lit oppression, is somewhere, somehow, redeemed ultimately by all the films set there. Average people start talking about ‘Taffy Lewis’––a minor character from “Blade Runner”, others knowingly refer to Speilberg’s early days as a wannabe at Universal Studios, hopelessy trying to convince his older crew that he has what it takes.

“Reflections”––a film I could not stop thinking about for days after seeing (only “Taxi Driver” and “Eraserhead” had that effect on me prior) is about the strength it takes to just focus on any kind of meaningful activity at all when so much of the cultural landscape of the city of Los Angeles is so deeply and staunchly enmeshed in the countless iterations of its screen-based self. So many Los Angeles visions appear before the visitor, who has literally seen so much of the city on TV and film that it feels like home long before you step foot there.

Packard’s Bob is both the visitor from TV-viewing land, as well as the average Sunset Strip freak who is trying to get by with a scam like everyone else. Bob’s multiple earphones dangle about his head, as if no number of them could ever present the city’s true sound. Real movie directors listen to location sound as much as they lens the city in front of them with view-finders, so the headphone is more than an emblem of the Walkman/iPod-wearing citizen, it is the signifier of the director-on-the-loose. Packard is his own director, not knowing which set of headphones to listen to, as the soundtrack to the bedlam around him deafeningly obliterates any other audio cue which might give him purchase in his world. Waiting for the bus, like a never-appearing Godot, is as much a task as getting a film financed, seen, and appraised. Packard is the Aristotle of the LA film underground, wearing the truth of his philosophy like a cheap suit, proudly embodying the essence of a life made of film and of films made of life.

He is like Godard, Herzog, and Wood rolled into one.

“Reflections of Evil” occupies a similar terrain as David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”. In that starkly brutal appraisal of how American cities can stand in for the mindsets of the insane, the 1930s Deco bridges and brick Functionalist ex-factories combine in that film to externalize the steady nervous collapse of Henry Spencer. “Reflections” is also cut from the same cloth as the old Mack Sennett "Keystone Kops" shorts from the ‘30s, in which everyday L.A. is just ‘there’ in the background, while lunatic sped-up chaos unfolds all around. Authority, long gone, is left to catch up with itself amidst the dust and light of a city unwilling to give up its own secrets to just anybody.

Bob can only eat himself into submission under the pressure of simply dealing with what the streets have to offer. The sun-drenched inner-city Los Angeles offers only one insane person after another, each of whom have rejected everything. They happily smash their heads against the pavement, spew blood and bile, and are thrown about by the unseen forces that toss murderer, hooker, film producer, and homeless men into the same arena.

Michael Mann’s "Heat" showed us an amped-up, brightly-lit gunfight in the middle of the streets of LA, and as the shooters stumble about in an ocean of shell-casings and shot-up cars, that same sun beats down on skyscrapers and passers-by alike. Packard’s Bob would not be out of place during such scenes, attracted to violence and the product of it.

Excess, the sort that drives fat men to gorge themselves on massive bowls of cereal while watching 70s TV in an attempt to connect with a more creative time, takes its toll. Bob’s appeal is for them to buy a watch; after all, even a crazy person needs to tell the time. No they don’t. These people and the place they are in are really outside of time, as is Bob, stumbling about among them. His struggles with sanity match those of the history of mainstream TV and cinema, which is littered with the remains of those who made it, those who didn’t, and those who never cared.

Los Angeles is the brightly-lit oasis of fear which attracts and repels. Tinged with shit, piss, menace, and danger, the streets around Universal Studios can only be met with the opposite force both inside and outside its gates––we might call it Packard’s Sensurround Stardust Sensibility.

David Cox, March 8th 2008

David Cox is a writer, filmmaker, and artist who lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. He is a regular contributor to OtherZine.

Sell Me Myself

2008-06-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

Sell Me Myself -- Photo Booths for the New Millennium

by David Cox

New Devices for recording one's own image have cropped up in the city in the last few years. We are all familiar with the "photo-me booths" - those rather boxy tiny rooms with a curtain into which you place coins and a strip of photos is produced.

"Photo-me" booths date back to the late 1950s and early 1960s and were popularised by such films as La Dolce Vita in which the main character records various stages of her anguish in a series of photos which cartoon strip like show the tears about to come, then her crying and the final shot showing her with head in hands. An amazing sequence, summing up the effect of paparazzi upon the very famous and the very public. Perhaps even poignant in the wake of the untimely death of Princess Diana, whose own La Dolce Vita, was mediated so entirely by lens.

Another film featuring the photo me booth which comes to mind is the opening sequence of the Beatles film Hard Days Night directed by Richard Lester. A member of the fab four enters a booth at a railway station (I think it is Paul) and has his photo taken to evade the pursuit of hundreds of teeny boppers.

They were everywhere at one stage - particularly near where passports are processed, such as the post office (there is one near the General Post Office in Melbourne) and at railway stations - the little black and white or colour shots perfect for adorning the documents of officialdom with a little glue, tape or a paper clip. I needed one recently for my US visa, as the US government now digitises the photos and uses them as part of the visa itself - a low res dot matrixed image interwoven with complex lines like currency.

Photo me booths were usually used mainly for recreation - for those familiar images of young couples kissing, or kids pulling faces. But the construction and instructions and the mirror stuck on the outside usually connoted more officialdom than fun. The flashes going off, the curtain, the clunky sounds they made as they processed the film - all the internal pulleys and mechanisms dragging a piece of photosensitive paper through its innards. Someone had to come and replace the developer and fixer and water at regular intervals and photo-me booths were definitely the culmination of vending machines, amusement arcadia, and like cigarette machines, coke machines and public phones were places where people passed through, in transit. Places where a photo would offer a reminder to someone left behind, or otherwise assist with the complex demands society places on the importance of a portrait for the needs of identification and memory.

Digital technology and the games arcade has spawned a new variation on the phone-me booth, this time with recreation as its primary function. With names like Neoprint the machines, often lined up in rows of three or four create not photos in the sense of simple strips of wet paper with little portraits, but rather many tiny little photographs each about 1.5 cm across by 1cm high which are printed onto adhesive backed plastic sheets stamped into an array of four by four stickers. These machines use a built in video camera and digitiser to capture the users face, and by navigating a fairly simple computer screen interface, one can capture ones own portrait, retry if the first takes dont work, then choose different presentation formats for the total of 16 to a page stickers.

Options include having little captions underneath them which say such things as Thank You or For You or Congratulations or I Love You. Other options include black and white and wide screen to make the image look like a 35mm motion picture still (I particularly like this one!). Appealing directly to the narcissism of adolescents (like me), the devices are placed prominently near the doors to amusement arcades, and are decked out in bright pinks and iridescent sweet colours like lime green.

They are beautifully designed as objects and are as every bit late 90s as photo-me booths are early 1960s. Theyll look back on these the way we do the Edison Kinetoscope hand cranked movie viewers from the nineteen teens - fancy, overdesigned, arranged in rows in arcades called Nickleodeans and flattering the viewers own view of the world, with himself at that worlds centre.

Another type of coin operated self portrait device called Stampnomoto creates from a captured video image a kind of tiny silk screen stamp with its own ink supply. These resemble wicker baskets which can be decorated with a set of cutesy stickers which come with the thing in its little box. First, by following the onscreen instructions and diagrams you take the small cardboard box from a pop open bin. Inside the box is the blank stamp. You remove the lid off the blank stamp and you then slide this assembly into a slot. It takes a bit of pushing, but once in place the stamp is ready to receive your picture. You take your own photo, then choose a border to surround your face - perhaps your face as the head of a cartoon character riding a horse, or as shown here, your head on the paper coming out of a typewriter. Once complete, you can use the finished stamp to create a little colour monochrome portrait on anything flat.

I wonder in amazement at the cultural fact of these devices and as my image is scanned and presented back to me Japanified and made cute, I feel closer to the reality of life in the digital city. These images are ghostly, even phantasmagoric. At the Sony Center in San Francsico recently, my partner and I were able to have a hologram made of us kissing. The image of us turning and kissing moves as one angles the card on which it is mounted from side to side under a light. To take the hologram, a video camera on a kind of four foot long conveyor belt scanned our faces over a period of five seconds as we kissed. The resultant frames were then processed in an adjacent lab, which converted the digital frames into the reflective white light hologram moving image the size of a large postage stamp.

In a sense the technology of the space/time based arts like cinema and the space recording arts like photography have converged to enable moving holograms which record events, albeit short span ones, and to present those events in movie like images which can be seen in ordinary white light. I am happy to be able to buy my own image so directly, and in a way which somehow articulates the triviality with which this face can accompany the vast sea of images created in the name of a global culture of media triumph.

My image is just another image, and we worship not our own faces at these shrine like digital altars of being faceless, but the simple fact that personal identity is itself the commodity being sold here as everywhere else in the metropolis. We feel closer to being a part of the digital landscape when we can add our own professionally created image to the rest of them out there on the streets, the gun toting heroes of the movie posters, the ocean of pictures which the society of the spectacle places in our way. Even if our image is the size of a postage stamp, we can tell whoever sees the image If only for a brief period of time, "I was here"...

By David Cox

Site Unseen

2008-06-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Site Unseen
Seeing, Mapping, Communicating

David Cox

Demographs

Property has eyes. As John Berger in Ways of Seeing argued to see is to own, and conversely to own is to be able to see. Underscoring the particular privilege of the Renaissance man was always to be afforded the right to lay a claim to his own individual, private and unique point of view; to have a constant personal vanishing point. This Enlightenment legacy is still essentially the guiding principle behind economic rationalism, the idea that society is not the basis for human shared experience. Rather people are imagined and encouraged to view themselves as sovereign, discreet economic units. Advertising, urban planning and the nexus between the mainstream media and everyday life underscores the perpetually reinforced notion that the basic defining aspect of people is their personal purchasing power; consumption.

The notion that society can be broken down into socio-economic "demographics" ? literally 'people-pictures' reflects the idea that audiences are not pre-existent, but rather like maps, made. Popularized in the late 1960s, the process of making TV shows for assumed demographic sectors of society marked the rise in the importance of the advertisers in the development of popular culture. Executives were concerned to map and chart and infer the overall nature of their audiences as part of market research for advertisers.

Try To See It My Way ? Subliminals

Pierro De La Francesca, the famed Renaissance painter and architect built arcane secrets into his pictures. Trained in the then very new technique of perspective painting, Pierro integrated systems of Euclidean geometry into the formal composition of his paintings. He even included 'secret' messages into the subject matter, such as five sided pentangles and so on which to those in the know at the time related to the presumed relationship between man, God and the universe. In some pictures, only recently developed techniques have enabled scholars to unlock some of the secret messages embedded in his paintings. The pictures were ciphers ? cryptograms which referred back to the social conditions under which they were made in order to flatter those who could identify those codes. These conventions were considered part of what it meant to be an educated Renaissance artisan.

The cryptographic geometric and perspectival cosmologies integrated into his work and that of others around the same time ? Leonardo Da Vinci, and Giotto were those of high levels of mathematical abstraction, themselves at the time 'redeemed' from Greek antiquity. Using a system which would today be called 'ray tracing' and which would be done using 3D graphics software, Pierro was able to calculate the appearance of objects in 3D space by numerically transposing positions of say parts of a human head tilted at an angle. The extraordinary feat was to be able to mathematically conceptualize the body as a fluid dynamic system whose spatial and positional appearance on the canvas could be represented by numbers. The numbers then could be used, quite separate from their real life referent to calculate the appearance of the same subject from any angle.

Just as computers now are used as much as cameras to deliver moving pictures to our screens, the common conceptual link between the two technologies is that of the abstract 'plane' upon which the perspectival image is imagined to fall upon. One of Pierro's most famous images is that of a tilted head; a detail from his painting The Flagellation. The position of the head was one of many he could have settled on when he painted the picture, the subject of the picture was not present when it was painted. Rather the image of the subject had been abstractly transposed numerically by Pierro first into his memory, then onto paper and from paper onto canvas. A computer graphics artist can choose to show a 3D model of a dinosaur or space ship from any angle and because the computer 3D graphics rely on the centrality of the perspectival view of the universe, any graphic can be made to co-habit the perspectival domain of photography.

What seldom gets examined or analyzed as much as it could in contemporary popular culture is the legitimacy of that perspectival interpretation of reality. The Enlightenment and its giddy claims to the sole 'take' on the human condition are reinforced with every computer generated urban planning layout, every blockbuster movie ? particularly those with elaborate computer graphics and most other representations which seek to privilege the individual as a sovereign, isolated subject.

Encasement Wish

The myth of the encased fighter pilot, the completely technologically mediated man was the famous subject of the Roland Barthes "Mythologies" essay "The Jet Man". Barthes could easily have been writing about the hardcore aircraft fighter simulator freak, or the racing car simulation videogame enthiusiast. The often physically restrained VR encumbered shackled to his scuba like equipment resembles closely the look and feel of many S&M gear on sale in leather sex fetish shops the world over. The very British sexual thrill known as "encasement wish" finds expression in much of the language and apparel of virtual reality, and immersion fantasies of all kinds. A bit of BBC folklore has it that the men whose job it was to operate the Dalek robot machines in the "Dr Who" show were often reluctant to get out of their dalek outfits, so closely had they identified with the role...!

If Looks Could Kill

This insistence upon the film plane as evidence of events passed, found chilling expression in the 1990 Gulf War ? the 'Nintendo War" where 'the eye of the bomb' televised its trajectory to the world. The crossing line here showed that for US foreign policy as well as domestic that the gamble of the Gulf War paid off. As the bomb took the viewer with it into the side of the bunker, the fact of the bomb's technological/political trajectory was also carried across into political certainty on TV at home. No one could refute the meaning of that image, even if they had lost on its outcome. It spelled its message out loud and clear. The United States had the technological might and means to dominate world economics. Things had not always had been so deliberately unequivocal.

In the 1972 film Letter to Jane by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin the soundtrack's narrator deconstructs an image of Jane Fonda on a trip to North Vietnam cavorting with an 'enemy' artillery piece. During the Vietnam War images and sounds circulated freely from the war zone to the United States. The more images flowed the less meaning they seemed to convey.

In Letter to Jane another image shows Fonda being talked to by a North Vietnamese official. Fonda's expression is serious, concerned. As the film's soundtrack's deadpan narrator explains, the movie star (Fonda) is in focus, but the Vietnamese army troops behind her in the picture are distant and blurry. The film goes on to explain that in reality the purpose and role of the United States in Vietnam is, like the image of the Vietnamese troops, blurred. In reality however the aims and objectives of the Vietnamese themselves the narration continues is quite clear, and so the way a picture appears serves to convey the opposite of its literal appearance.

Sharp Cuts

Film montage emerged from a certain vantage point, a peculiarly 20th Century vantage point. The idea of disjointed clashing meanings was in common circulation in Europe in the early 20th Century. The political payload which accompanied the aesthetics of montage was powerful indeed. The photomontage images of John Heartfield in Germany in the 1920s were culture jams in the extreme. The proliferation of photographs in print publishing enabled political satire to find expression through the surgical cuts of scalpel on the photograph and to cut and paste and rework still images had its parallel in the development of film editing in Russia. The Eisenstienian technique was to make images clash up against each other and in colliding, give rise to combatant new images. This art of montage was the aesthetics of context migration. With film editing new meanings could be divined from the intersection where images collided in time. With photomontage the spatial field of the photograph itself rather was the terrain of a clash of opposites, where powerful hybrids of image with image could occur.

Planes Of Thought

Linking these technologies was the idea that spaces could be traversed without effort, or that technology could mediate space. Photography and cinema have the aim of placing the viewer somewhere other than where they actually are ? transporting them in fact. Cinema and photography both employ spatial fields of view; the Euclidean geometric breakdown of space into geometric forms. Inside a camera, light falls on the film plane, is recorded photochemically, by means of a mechanical shutter. The technology of limits capture. Adjustments of physical limits to effect chemical processes

Aircraft are similarly about the manipulation of forces, which in turn are therefore relatively simple to translate into code for the purposes of making a simulation. Variables like thrust, pitch, yaw, elevation, speed, flow represent the chaos of the movement of air over the wings, of the propeller through the air. Affording a view of the surroundings cartography mapping Empireâs make maps before invading. The British Empire's first step prior to setting up India as a giant cheap manufacturing and supply colony was to divide the country up into triangle shaped segments, the better to map it. Conceptual ownership longitude.

Getting High: Space Race And LSD

The Space Race and the Cold War represented the fusing of political and technological imperatives toward a unified Imperial assertion of Superpower supremacy. The quest for space took on a religious overtone in both the USA and the USSR; both elevated space exploration as the pinnacle expression of modernist progress; to boldly go and get "launch fever". It is no accident that Tom Wolfe should valorize the extremes of 1960s expansionism on both the left and right. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is essentially the same quest as that pursued by those with The Right Stuff; Americans going the furthest, one way or the other. Trajectories of superpower aerospace were largely ground oriented; the relationship of earth based bureaucracy running smoothly contrasted with counter-cultural claims to anti-bureaucracy. In actuality the counter-culture was often highly organized and operated under the auspices of a similar technology worship ? drugs ? "better living through chemistry" and later of course the personal computer revolution.

The central view predominated in the 1960s much as it had done since the Renaissance. The privileged point of view of the Medici-funded artist was paralleled 400 years later by the NASA or USSR backed astronaut. The prize brought back to civilization from the Space Race was that of the unique view the space photograph of the earth, the moon panorama taken from space suit or Lunar Module cockpit. Neil Armstrong as Michealangelo's David. Officialdom needs time and space measured, divided, controlled.

Light Hackers

Photography ? Joseph Nicephore Niepce (creator of the first fixed photo) was something of a photochemistry hacker as an experimenter using cameras, chemicals and surfaces. Exposure to light and the chemical fixing of the camera obscura's image was the aim of the first photographers. The very first 'fixed' photo was of his own courtyard. Niepce needed to leave the camera somewhere where it could be left.

Babbagea's Difference Engine (though it did not work) had already been built when the first fixed photo was made. Computers have long been closely linked to the conceptualisation of space ? Charles Babbage's famous unfinished prototype for a computer, the analytical engine developed in the 1830s was developed in response to a request from the British Government to generate better navigational charts for mercantile shipping. The Colossus computer developed in the UK to crack Nazi radio codes, found itself mainly decoding co-ordinate information of Atlantic submarine positions, and the like.

The miniaturization of electronic components which resulted in the development by counterculture hippies in the mid 1970s of the personal computer, was itself the result of the need by the military industrial complex for small parts for use in missile navigation and space travel. Mapping, architecture and urban planning also play a large role in the development of video games, whose elaborate labyrinths of play and dynamics in turn find eerie expression in the layout and appearance of the contemporary themed shopping precincts of our major cities.

Game Plans For Utopia

Strategy and games both require abstractions of space, and the dynamics, which take place within them. The Situationist International's project was that of reclaiming a rapidly modernizing Paris after its liberation in 1945 from the clutches of commercialization. Against sterile rationalist planning of inner city housing and retail areas they proposed radical alternative uses for cities, which emphasized a sense of free play, and which advocated a system of activities in art and architecture, film and writing which would ultimately render work and all forms of social control obsolete.

The mediascape as we may call it now dominates the public imagination. The mediascape or spectacle is that set of vectors defined by mainstream broadcast television, electronic systems of retail and police enforcement, expansionist freeway construction regimes, centrally owned commercial print publishing advertising, and public relations organisations.

In addition, to the S.I. a sister idea to the derive was the notion of detournment ? literally detourning ? signs, images, sounds, video, film. More contemporarily known as sampling and culture jamming ? detournment has enjoyed a solid place within contemporary art practice throughout the 20th Century.

It is the dream of many to live in a world where work itself has been abolished. This simple desire flies in the face of a world where public space is replaced by the leased holding. Where our "future dreaming is a shopping scheme" to quote Johnny Rotten.

Saucy Sorcery!

Early parlour toys dallied with sex and the licentious ? zoetropes and praxinoscopes and other visual tricks often were delivery mechanisms for lurid porn fantasies and devil images, rather like the proliferation of video recorders in the early 1980s. The boom in inititial VCR sales stemmed largely from the newly created home porn video market. The industrial revolution was starting to result in identifiable domestic scientific entertainment forms ? the home microscope ( a latter day home computer) offered views into other worlds ? the microscopic and the microphotographic. Microphotographs were tiny photos to be viewed through microscopes.

These images are ghostly, even phantasmagoric. At the Sony Center in San Francsico recently, my wife and I were able to have a hologram made of us kissing. The image of us turning and kissing moves as one angles the card on which it is mounted from side to side under a light. To take the hologram, a video camera on a kind of four foot long conveyor belt scanned our faces over a period of five seconds as we kissed. The resultant frames were then processed in an adjacent lab, which converted the digital frames into the reflective white light hologram moving image the size of a large postage stamp. In a sense the technology of the space/time based arts like cinema and the space recording arts like photography have converged to enable moving holograms which record events, albeit short span ones, and to present those events in movie like images which can be seen in ordinary white light.

C3 Command Control, Communication

Communications, military strategy, and the control of land and sky have always been intertwined. To this end the themes of secrecy and encryption have found expression in works whose message was often as hidden as explicit since the Renaissance. Then as now military power is synonymous with Imperial, national economic power. A recent TV documentary shown in Australia included an aboriginal woman's description of the Pine Gab base in northern Australia "It's the eyes of America" she said.

Alan Turing and his team of encryption experts helped build the "Collossus" device in England during World War II as well as other computers to decrypt enigma encrypted nazi radio signals. These encrypted morse code messages usually were co-ordinates on maps of locations and maneuvers of such things as Luftwaffe bombing targets and directions for fleets of U-boats to torpedo merchant shipping.

The Situationists often made use of guerrilla iconography in their artwork, the most famous of which is the "Naked City" image from the collage book by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. In this image, curved arrows link cut up maps of Paris to indicate those regions considered the most amenable to play and liberty. These were described as 'ambient unities'. The convention of the arrow on a map is, of course, strategic in origin. It shows the movement of artillery, personnel and so on ? the opening sequence of the early 1970s show set during WWII, "Dad's Army", parodied the direction of the arrows on a map of Europe.

Guy Debord's work included, toward the end of his life in 1994, a board game whose surface was a grid, and the pieces of which, were markers. The aim of the game was to roll a dice and to occupy space. The iconography of the symbolic re-taking of cultural space was thus 'detourned' from its origins in Imperialist wargame culture.

War games play a main role in the mindset of those whose job it is to conceptualize a videogame's possible set of outcomes. RPGers or Role Playing Game writers are usually deeply conversant in the syntax and conventions of military strategy. The premise for them is often 'we are always at war', a state of affairs no doubt shared by many who view themselves in opposition to mainstream life in general.

The 1990 Gulf war began not long after the finalization of the virtual mapping of the Persian Gulf region for use in the onboard memories of cruise missiles, pilotless, smart weapons which can find their targets within 5 meters over thousands of kilometers.

The abstraction of space and land and the making of maps seem inseparable from attendant notions of ownership and domination. The twin gestures of both looking and seeing are about controlling the cartographically consolidated, abstracted space.

The fact that the Internet was designed as the last lines of communication for besieged post-nuke war military brass is widely known. The network was a way of decentralizing control. The centralized nature of modern urbanism meant that if the Soviet Union were to nuke American cities, power would have to reside outside centralized locales of political and administrative institutions. Decentralization as a survival strategy found its way into the development of such innovations as Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. Embraced in the 1960s by both the counter-culture and the military, the famous geodesic dome was emblematic of, on the one hand the rationalist notion of maximizing efficiency with minimum resources, and, on the other "communal" self support, the efficiency of which was no less appealing.

Designed to withstand the devastating effects of nuclear war, the truism goes that the Internet "interprets censorship as damage and re-routes around it". Imperviousness to commercial co-optation may prove somewhat more difficult. In the relatively early days of the Internet, the early 1990s, to get on-line required something of a knowledge of the Unix operating system. True to the tenets of Unix, if you were unable or unwilling to teach yourself the language, it was assumed you had little interest in learning about the systems upon which it was based.

Gameplay ? The Abstraction Of Engagement

The various genres of games ? 'shoot-em-ups' which reward fast finger action, simulators which privilege the level of representational similarity to the real world system being simulated and role playing games all create for the player self ? contained cosmologies. The level of resemblance to the 'real' world matters less than the level of engagement for the player. This level of engagement is known in the trade as gameplay, and is so abstract a concept that defining it is less understood as felt. The prime test of a game's gameplay is of course the popularity of the game in the marketplace as an addictive experience.

The first web site I saw in 1992 was based at the same department and showed a 'virtual tour' of the corridors of that department. In those days most people understood the net as a primarily and uniquely public entity. Anything commercial at all was frowned upon as contrary to netiquette. To sell your CDs via email was considered inappropriate and to multiple send anonymous ads was considered so deeply offensive, that the sender was likely to have his or her 'Spam' returned in spades, the attempt to crash the server of the spammer.

If an imagined war-hungry Soviet Union were supposed to have been unable to overthrow the Internet's original purpose as a military communications channel, then supposedly years later the big corporations were expected not to have face the same type of restriction.

There are those who entertain a rather cryptic notion that the Internet has grown to such a size that it is conceivable that it may have developed characteristics of a sentient entity. Indeed for even those who know little about the Internet, using it successfully for the first time must echo the feelings of those who picked up the phone receiver when that invention was new. This eerie sense of telepresence ? being somewhere without going there ? continues to define the themes of the techno underground movement. Dance clubs and dance tracks often refer to contact with outer space, with other dimensions.

I met Erik Davis in San Francisco in 1999. He had just finished writing an article about pinball machines for Wired magazine. We talked about the philosophy underpinning many of the developments in electromagnetic technologies over the past century. He appears in Craig Baldwin's latest film Spectres of the Spectrum which in science fantasy form, dramatizes the overlap between the battle for control of the electromagnetic spectrum by corporate and government interest versus ordinary 'hacker' individuals. Nicola Tesla, the eccentric and superstitious inventor of radio control and alternating current power, and Philo T Farnsworth, the inventor of television, both met with an ill fate at the hands of the large organizations which essentially stole their ideas and left them with nothing.

Davis' book Techgnosis examines the inter-related themes of spiritualism and technology ? particularly that of electronics. The invisible energy source whose origins like in the magnetic nature of bodies in the universe resembles for many who have learned to benefit from it aspects of an imagined parallel dimension. In all of these types of inquiries, certain elements remain consistant. The seen and the unseen dance a complex waltz around those spaces where the body and the machine exchange faculties. The highly organised global systems of official entertainment has now joined that other age old official project, the command and control of earthly and outer space. With war as its natural fuel and starting point, the demands of commerce continue to shape what is seen, and what is left unseen. Our technological imperatives now stem directly from a kind of official curiosity whose manifestations can only increase in complexity, even if those same imperatives stem from the basest of human instincts ? to dominate, to subjegate and to control.

David Cox is a film maker and writer based in Brisbane, Australia. He currently lectures in digital screen production at Griffith University.

Speed Ramping

2008-06-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

Speed Ramping

David Cox

Many ads and feature films these days use a process described by industry insiders as "speed ramping" in which onscreen characters and events are shown to suddenly speed up and slow down. It is a "look" which for filmmakers and critics of my generation (over 35) is associated with experimental and avant-garde film, particularly the types of films made with Bolex and Arriflex 16mm cameras which enable real-time shutter speed manipulation while the camera is running. When you film someone at 24 frames per second, and then slow the frame rate down to 12 frames per second while the camera is running, two things happen. 1)The person appears to speed up (fewer frames to cover the same action means that at a constant frame playback rate of 24 fps the action appears faster); and 2) unless the aperture of the camera is altered to keep the exposure consistent with the frame rate, the film gets overexposed, as more light is allowed to land on the slowed down film.

Now computer based non-linear editing and post-production tools are used to manipulate the speed of the images, as well as the other spin-off effects associated with multiple speed coverage of shots. Computers can mimic many of the attributes of traditional film, including the familiar scratching-of-the-emulsion, various dust and light leak effects, when the material has in fact been shot on digital video. I've lost count of students who ask me how to make their miniDV sourced video material look as if it had been filmed on 35mm panavision, with 1:185 aspect ratio.

These now commonplace digital techniques are used to connote the "look and feel" of film and have often been developed to help blur the distinction between video and film material, or computer generated film material such as 3D computer graphics. The aim is to create a naturalistic sense that material has been photographed in the most analogue and traditional ways possible. There can almost be said to be a fetishism of the attributes of traditional film, with the details of the passage of film through a gate, sprockets, film grain speckles, flickering image quality and all the other attributes which have lent film its status as the domain of "true professionals". The fetishism of film is to some extent the fetishism of motion picture-making as a profession. 'If only I could make my material look like that of the professionals, then I too might have a chance at mainstream success...' What is seldom questioned however are the assumptions and values which lie behind the mainstream industry-- its use of budgets, its use of labour, and the crippling distribution system which not even the biggest mavericks of the (Hollywood) century have been able to crack, Coppolla, Lucas, Speilberg --none of them.

The much lauded and hyped George Lucas led broadband digital distribution model, in which high definition video is piped into auditoria via complex digital networks, still presumes the maintenance of relatively high budgets, and populist mainstream film material. Just because you can pipe your film to the mall instead of send prints via FedEx does not alter the basic social relations between the filmmaker and the audience (believe it or not once a key motivating factor behind those filmmakers now promoting digital distribution*).

The combination of the Internet, the laptop and the camcorder still represent the cheapest means to make films, and data-projectors and films-on-disk and the Internet itself are still the best way to distribute them. But the whir of the shutter through the gate is a mesmerising sound, and to capture the romance of photochemistry, if not its actual working means is enough for most young filmmakers. All power to them. Speed ramping, digital compositing and other tricks represent a dizzying array of potentialities which only digital production can offer at low cost. The choices of compositing, and altering every conceivable aspect of the audio-visual experience are so voluminous they often obscure for newcomers in particular the basic requirements of film: to encapsulate a worldview, to move, to entertain, and to provoke to action. A plug-in will not make a film engaging that is not interesting at the script stage.

Many filmmakers have exploited the dramatic potential of over-cranking and under-cranking movie cameras. For example, Martin Scorsese is famous for slowing action down mid-story to emphasize details of a character's clothing or jewelry, typically as they enter a room or get out of a car. This has the effect of cinematically underscoring the psychological effect the filmed person has on another character. For example, in the opening of the film Goodfellas (1990) the young mafia wannabe sees the subject of his idolization getting out of an enormous convertible car. We cut to a close up of the Mafioso's foot in slow motion hitting the pavement, then another close up shows the rings on the finger of the Wiseguy as he shuts the door of the car.

'Slow-mo' is in this sense used to indicate a fetishisation of the subject. A way of suggesting that the subject is able to hypnotize the viewer with his or her actions; we the audience see and experience a character through the eyes of another character. We therefore identify with the character doing the looking, in Goodfellas, 'we' are a young mafia wannabe, who ogles the rituals of gangster life as a ticket out of the banality of his working class existence.

Scorsese also seeks to capture the elaborate 'dance' of people as they position themselves in relation to other people as part of a complex set of social codes. Scorsese's concern with the "codes of movement of people in space" based on social conventions was largely learned by watching Powell and Pressburger films; especially The Red Shoes (1948) and The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (1943). The DVD of the latter includes a running commentary by Scorsese, in which he lovingly describes the meaning of tiny gestures of the hand or the body in codified social environments such as ballrooms and fencing halls. Knowledge of the psychology of motion of the camera and of actors through space is of course the bread and butter of the director's art. Blocking a scene, positioning actors and props to maximise dramatic effect is what a generation of directors have passed on as cinematic history.

Altering film speeds to emphasize a social detail is all part of the tricks of the trade for Scorsese, whose elaborately constructed interiors: bar-rooms, restaurants, cars, casinos etc., are privy to often dizzying camera moves, frame rates and ballet-like actor's movements. In Raging Bull(1980), the famous fight sequence in which De Niro is knocked around the ring at differing speeds, seeks to subjectively place the viewer in the boxer's place. With each blow, time seems to accelerate and decelerate as consciousness eases in and out with the shutter speed. Fast, then Slow in an Instant.

Today Scorcese's cinematic strategy has become the basis of advertising culture with many ads showing people getting in and out of cars, and environments suddenly speeding up and slowing down. "Flash frames" and other techniques are digitally added to these sequences, thus suggesting that the sequences have been shot on film (whether they have been or not) and the increased slowness of the film through the camera has overexposed that film as, simultaneously, its imagery speeds up. The flash frames have not been trimmed: we're watching rushes, camera original film, we are 'with' the filmmakers. We share their privileged position.

It is becoming a cliche, a kind of standard off-the-rack technique, the cultural origins of which actually can be traced to early film history.

The "shaky camera" look in commercials made their widespread appearance in the mid 1980s, and then with Hill Street Blues and similar TV programs. These 'cinema verite' have origins in both the French New Wave period of the 1950s and 1960s, and before then in the experimental oeuvre of filmmakers like the surrealist Renee Clair whose Entre Act gleefully celebrated a complete collapse of time/space relations. Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927) also cinematically celebrated Dada's deliberate undermining of conventional time and space. At around the same time in Russia the camera fetishist Dziga Vertov, whose Man With a Movie Camera (1929) toyed with frame rates as breathlessly as it did with camera platforms. It remains one of the few surviving artifacts of history which convey some sense of what it must have been like to be part of the Russian Revolution for a young artist: a sense of breathless abandon and willful experimentation. Watching it on DVD is thrilling.

Jean Cocteau's films Orpheus (1949) and Testament of Orpheus (1960) also experimented wildly with camera speed effects to suggest the passage from the world to hell and back. Given his politics in relation to the Nazi occupation, not surprising at all.

In mainstream film and video texts the "shaky camera" functions to connote a subjectivity of viewpoint--a fly-on-the-wall perspective on events. We are meant to conclude that these are not staged, rehearsed and scripted events, but rather natural ones to which we just so happen to be privy. When Roman Polanski introduced the handheld camera into contexts which in Hollywood terms were not 'motivated' as such in films like Chinatown (1974), the effect was to "Europeanise" American films, drawing them closer to the fine art formalist conventions of Europe.

Smaller lightweight Arriflex 16mm cameras had enabled film-critics-turned directors like Jean Luc Godard to literally run down the street with his camera to follow his subjects through the streets of Paris. Godard's films were greatly admired by many of todays most revered directors such as Coppolla, Lucas, Altman, and Scorese, and the documentary look in the 1970s was closely linked to notions of social justice, artistic credibility, and critical legitimacy. Today, the 'shaky cam' look is more likely to be a 'plug-in' for editing software than properly fully understood as long standing cinematic conventions which have a cultural history. Just another "look", in the digital grab bag of historical samples. Stripped of historical contexts, they float freely as postmodern fragments of the past, like bits of songs in a rap single: the "super 8 look", the "16mm black and white documentary" look, the "forensic record" look" etc. Fashion thus transforms cultural critique into stylistic gesture, and like most modes of gentrification, robs a place and a culture of its memory, in order to increase rents and make the place nicer for the middle class.

Selecting styles becomes a process of consumption, rather than a thought out praxis based on a familiarity with technology. When you choose to make video look like film by means of an adobe plug-in it is like using a piece of flight simulator software; you obtain the experience of flying but seldom actually source the knowledge of how to fly a real plane. You miss what it is like to handle film itself, to physically load a heavy film camera. You do not need to use a light meter, or understand the alchemy of knowing how to expose a photochemical surface, rather than an array charged couple devices. These somewhat arcane experiences have been left aside, done away with like the offending wallpaper in a soon-to-be renovated yuppie apartment, like the pool tables and juke boxes of renovated bars, and the radical politics which once went hand in hand with particular styles of film making. Something is gained, but more is lost.

The hand-held "shaky-cam" 'look' is linked to 'speed ramping': both privilege the dynamism of action within the frame as a means of dramatic emphasis. Both connote a measure of viewer subjectivity: I am watching from a documentary perspective. The ad warning about speeding on the roads, or selling life insurance must be *really happening* and time is going fast and slow, and this lets me see just how well the wheels on the Nissan really can grip the highway, and attract the attention of the "pretty girls"! So much for how the ad man himself imagines his audience. What is the broader meaning of this barrage of visual speed maneuvering in popular culture? What does speed manipulation suggest at a socio-economic level? Why is speed ramping being used in every other student film and every ad on TV? Why is it in every mainstream film from Run Lola Run to The Matrix?

The function(s) of time itself in contemporary culture has been radically altered by the role played by technology and communications. Time is represented in ways consistent with its effects on people in our society. Time is a fluid, changeable, negotiable entity. It is measured and chopped up and sold like every other commodity. We are living in Bourgeois time -- hence like commodities themselves, how time appears and is thought is available on the marketplace as well: some products offer fast time, others slow time, others both.

Time, in order to be of value to those who buy and sell commodities has to be demonstrated to be as fluid as onscreen space. Just as computers have enabled layering of elements in screenal space, non-linear editing and other computer plug-in culture elements have made time also able to be similarly chopped up and manipulated. Movement within the frame. Movement of the frame: Like the words in the software used to write the script, audiovisual elements can be reworked at will.

Production, pre-production, post production - meaningless today when the three stages of filmmaking collapse into each other, melting in the digital soup. Some of the highest paying jobs in the business are set aside for those with file-management skills.

Events can happen which defy measurement. How can the effect of a new technology like a Lexus or a Motorola phone be demonstrated in terms of ordinary time and ordinary space? These commodities are altering social relations between people; separating people from each other, making each person both the subject of analysis and the entity doing the analysis. Such products when shown in commercials have a supernatural effect on the lives of those who use them.

One may combine with this an observation about the perceived social relations in texts employing speed ramping. In commercials, the effect is often used to indicate that for those effected by the product, time operates at a different scale, or rate. Often a figure will be shown moving at slow motion while all around them the rest of the population is moving a lightening speed. An ad promoting the importance of flu immunization on Australian Television (as of May 2002) illustrates this well. To make a point about the relationship between catching the flu and the reduction in productivity to which the illness gives rise, the central figures (the ones whose lives will be at risk if they catch the flu) Move very slowly at a dream-like pace down escalators etc., while others move around them, a blur in the camera lens. In one of the few commercially released films out of the USA to overtly honour Guy Debord in its credits, Koyaanisquatsi, time lapsed urbanism indicated 'life out of balance' in the western world. That film was released in was the early 1980s and the idea then was rather fresh. Today it is more than commonplace. It is mainstream. The Spectacle outdoes itself.

In other ads, noticeably for cars, speed ramping is used to illustrate the effect the appearance of the car has on those watching it. Here speed ramping is an index of social desirability, where the speed of the subject usually a car moves quickly, then slowly, as it is being noticed by the 'right' people. The car, like the social space the owner is supposed to occupy, has been transformed into an object of desire, and that desire is represented in terms which associate attraction with kinetic dynamism. Social mobility in our post-industrial culture is often closely associated with spatial mobility, those who are in a state of constant movement, international, interstate travel are the decision makers, the executives, those who govern the economic and social status quo. When ads and films and other texts such as videogames indicate a suspension of the general laws of time and space, it can often be read as a dramatization of this idea of social-as-spatial mobility. In addition, the impact and nature of electronic communications augments this sense of dynamic transience, where lack of physical fixity, of geospatial specificity corresponds to notions of power and capital as non-fixed, virtual entities. If you have power in society, you use time in a different way from the non- decision makers; clocks and timetables do not apply (in the same way) to you, rather you are buffeted by the invisible winds of commerce, and globalised exchange. For you, time can move in both directions, and at varying rates of speed.

This is a myth of course, but one which over time has been symbolized and codified via an almost formulaic set of visual signifiers. In motion pictures such as Run Lola Run (1999) , Fight Club (1999), Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) , The Matrix(1999), characters are shown in a complex set of oppositions to the society around them. They are generally on the run, or in some other way alienated from the world around them.

For these put-upon, usually young and desperate anti-heroes and the audience who are invited to identify with them, kinesis and movement is strongly linked to a sense of personal liberty or freedom from the constraints of contemporary society. In contrast, those they work for, and those who pursue them can seldom fathom why the main characters wish to move out of their proscribed social constraints. At key moments in these films, the frame rate can rapidly alter to underscore the drama of the moment. Time is made to operate at a different scale momentarily in order to illustrate a single cinematic event. Someone is shot, the camera shows the bullet's trajectory in slow motion then - in an instant - goes back to normal speed (The Matrix). Someone is passed in the street, and we see a rapid series of photographs of that person's life as it has been influenced by that one encounter (Run Lola Run), or the act of passing them makes the whole of reality stop altogether (The Matrix).

These characters are influencing bourgeois time relations --they are interrupting the 'natural' social order, and penetrating the world masked by the clock, the boss, and the system. When ads use these same techniques, it is to achieve an inverse effect: to privilege the viewer-as-consumer and to invite contemplation of the 'magical' and supernatural effect a product has on the life of the owner. This car makes time slow down, and heads turn. This fruit juice will transform your social life, this expensive mobile phone will liberate you from alienation and win you a promotion.

The role of speed ramping thus represents a set of contemporary audio visual conventions in which screen time is no longer fixed, but like life itself in a digitized, networked society, is negotiable, up for grabs. One can read into speed ramping a visualized set of conventions which dramatise anxieties about the collapse of conventional modernist notions of time and space. In our globalised, economically rationalized digital economy, even time itself cannot escape the effects of capitalism gone haywire, no longer in anyone's control, like a phantom on the loose. As Marx alluded in Capital commodities go from being like a collection of wood on the floor to a seance table, to bounce around the room, quickly, and back to wood again in an instant.

--------------

* Back in the early 70s Lucas was making films such as THX-1138, that were damningly critical of a near-future sterilized shopping malled McWorld. Today his 'purely digital' Star Wars installments are both ideologically and technically, neat extensions of the logic of the mall as white, middle class sanctuary, and THX is now best known as Lucas' brand name of a global system of standardised sound playback.

References:

Biskind, Peter, Raging Bulls and Easy Riders: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Vertov, Dziga, Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929) (Man with a Movie Camera),
Scorsese, Martin, Goodfellas (1990)
Deren, Maya, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Cocteau, Jean, The Blood of a Poet, (1933) (USA)
Cocteau, Jean, Orpheus (1949)
Cocteau, Jean, Le Testament d'Orphe, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!, (1960)
Powell, Micheal, Pressburger, Emeric, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
Powell, Micheal, Pressburger, Emeric, The Red Shoes,
Polanski, Roman, Chinatown (1973)
Tykwer, Tom, Run Lola Run (1998)
Wachowski, Andy and Larry, The Matrix, (1999)
Fincher, David, Fight Club (1999)
Ritchie, Guy, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954.
Reggio, Godfrey, Fricke, Ron, Koyaanisquatsi (1983)

David Cox is a filmmaker, writer and lecturer in digital screen production at the school of Film Media and Cultural Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane. His films include Puppenhead(1990), and Otherzone (1998)

Media Meltdown - the films of Craig Baldwin

2008-06-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

Media Meltdown

Published in 21C Magazine in 1997

Deep within the South American jangles Che Guevara's toxic DNA has been

captured by aliens sponsored by US covert operations. Their plan; wholesale

destruction of the cow orate media structures. Their director-in-charge of

operations: Craig Baldwin.

by David Cox

FILMMAKER, TEACHER, SHOWMAN, anti-copyright activist, Craig Baldwin

is a hunter-gatherer of Images, sounds and ideas. Embracing and celebrating

satire and camp, his collage-essay films convey the sheer joy involved in the'-r

construction: the exhumation of post~war educational and training films from

their once rock-solid cultural contexts Imo feature-length satirical ammunition.

in the cult classic Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992),

Baldwin treats decades of CIA involvement in Central America as mock sci-fi,

while Sonic Outlaws (1995) exposes the standover tactics of major recording

publishers in policing theft ever tenuous grasp on media copyright.

A Champion of film and video activism, Baldwin has helped transform San

Francisco's Mission District into a dynamic cultural hub for the genre.- Collage is

the contemporary art," states Baldwin. "It is the most definitive. Yet it runs

absolutely against copyright laws. There are certain assumptions about the

usage of other people's material in order to make money from it. Collage artists

take a tiny little bit of something from your piece and put it together with a lot

of other pieces too and make a distinct whole. we’re not trying to steal your

audience. The copyright laws need to be updated in order to deal with fibs new

art form. People of my generation know what is going on with collage in the

different mediums: film, music, CD-ROMs." But if collage is a contemporary art,

it has been around since Modernist artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Pablo

Picasso- What makes it current is perhaps best explained by Greil Marcus -

"When it works, all collage is a shock."

A LIFELONG DENIZEN OF the Bay Area subcultural underground, Baldwin, 45,

once lived in a projectionist booth above a porn cinema. It was in these unlikely

surrounds that he had Us cultural epiphany. From the scraps of film left lying

around, Baldwin made Flick Skin, a Super-8 film. The formal qualities of the

film surface - with its patched-together, hand processed `(-rated film material

- were made obvious to the viewer, to highlight the mechanics of film as a

process in the service of an unjust economic system. So began a career concerned

with the politics of the Image, one in which humor and wit guided the choice of

Imagery into a carefully reworked mosaic. In Baldwin's hands, the Image is no

longer what it initially represented, yet somehow it reveals a truer identity.

Found footage is unmasked as an impostor, and made to perform roles for which it

was never intended. As Guy Debord declared, any image can be made to invoke

another meaning from the one it was intended to, even the opposite.

In keeping with his "grab the footage and run" philosophy, Baldwin's Stolen

Movie was constructed by literally charging in to mainstream cinemas and

stealing images off the screen by filming them on a super 8 camera, then rapidly exiting through the rear

door with the booty. Part guerrilla theatre, part performance art, this brand of media pranksterism was an

act of deliberate provocation and the result of a politics of the everyday.

Baldwin also acknowledges a debt to the Beatnik poets, some of whom, with

their post-war utopianism, helped identify the "peace and love counterculture"

as fundamentally positioned "outside" the mainstream- Embracing nomadism for

a while, Baldwin hitchhiked and "hopped freights," in his own words, "as a

cultural response to the middle-class lifestyle."

ONE OF THE biggest supporters of Baldwin `s work is the famous pyschotronic,

Z-grade film magazine Film Threat, which caters to splatter- and exploitation-

film aficionados. The Z-graders tend to be like-minded, entrepreneurial

hobbyists who are similarly forced to resourcefulness- There is an easy exchange

of ideas between them and the more politically motivated junk-film cutup frill

of "cinema povera. By dredging the depths of America's media past, Baldwin develops an

archeology of American ideology. The best place to exhume the corpses, it turns

out, is the world of ephemeral films. These are the forgotten trailers,

commercials, sponsored films and educational films that still transmit forgotten

signals from the Cold War and the Space Race. Now cast adrift from their

former contexts, these filmstrips still manage to reveal the disarming

forcefulness of America's once official culture, with its ubiquitously familiar,

authoritarian and paternalistic voice-overs.

In an era of ubiquitous digitization and Imagc manipulation, the use of the

relatively arcane film object as a field for artistic endeavor is rare- Cut,

manipulated, edited, blown up, shrunk down, stretch printed, scratched and

drawn on, the physicality of film is at the very core of found footage's aesthetic

appeal, the key to what makes appropriating and making fun of it so much,

well,, fun.

Despite a desperate artistic attempt to avoid the uniformity that shapes

capitalist culture in America, the culture-jammer look has been appropriated by

slacker punk bands like Nirvana, who used found footage in their film clips (e.g.

the sperm close-ups m Come as You Are") and by such mainstream directors as

Oliver Stone. The quick montages in Stone's JFK could well have been inspired by

a Baldwin movie - the use of rapidly intercut Super-8 with 16mm, and

intimately intermixing real with reconstructed footage. Nevertheless, while it

is the aesthetics of appropriation that Hollywood adopts rather than any

political form of media activism, Baldwin admits that he "got lucky" with

Tribulation's timing: "Oliver Stone released JFK a few months after mine- In a

lot of ways, my film was helped by Oliver Stone, because there was a lot of

interest in JEK - which is actually a very small part in my picture. But it is the

same kind of conspiratohal thinking, which quite obviously won't go away. It is

here to stay."

Even the themes of Baldwin's Tribulation 99 - paranoia, conspiracy and

government cover-up - are increasingly the subject of sanitized mainstream

media forms which use these as thematic settings for otherwise conventional

storytelling. Witiness the X-Files and Dark Skies or Independence Day.

Baldwin, in his own words, is trying to "negotiate an alternative pathway

toward some kind of understanding of American culture and cinema." Cinema

Povera means also a deliberate and consistent turning away from the offerings of

the mainstream, looking instead at the scraps of the past, or the work of

filmmakers themselves trying to negotiate a way out.

With its dryly narrated, whispering soundtrack told through 90 per cent "found"

footage, Baldwin's Tribulation 99 lets the audience in on a Notional Enquirer-

type conspiracy, in which invading aliens called Quetzals have come to take

over the minds of US decision makers in a battle for control of both Central

America and the Earth's core. Watching the film, you will recognise bits of

Earth vs tire Flying Saucers, Dr No, various Mexican B-grade movies, Tire

Creature From tire Block Lagoon and War of the Worlds. There are strange out-

takes from 1960s documentaries on plutonium waste-disposal and magnetism-

There are video clips from news coverage of the invasion of Grenada. Viewing

this wealth cf material, one imagines, generates the feelings that went into its

creation - ecstatic delirium mixed with moral panic and political outrage.

"It was curious the way that certain ideas were between the official, political
history and the very unofficial paranoiac version of things. There were often

these weird alignments. Sometimes it was easier to believe the UFO stuff than it
was to believe the CIA story that was used to justify our intervention in some

country. So I lined them up, superimposed them in a way. I tore out bits of paper
and taped them together. The material organized itseffi I took real, political

material and retrofitting with the fantastic, wacko literature."

"I was continuing my projects against US intervention in Latin Ametica," says

Baldwin.

"My other films have been a criticism of US foreign policy. what came

to a head here was the whole Iran-Contra Affair, Oliver North's trial, it was

the whole milieu - the center of the times. I wanted to make a statement that

was critical of the CIA and our meddling in foreign countries, and it seemed to be

a new use of this creative material, these paranoiac rants.

"I saw the CIA as being truly a conspiracy. I wanted to make a black comedy

instead of a Noam Chomsky kind of thing which is fine and great, but I dicin t

want to duplicate. Instead of making that kind of attack, I wanted to make one

that was satirical - one that would lacerate, tear apart, shred the CIA by

burlesquing them, by using these great materials."

IN 1995, BALDWIN RALLIED to the defense of fellow cultural samplers, the

satirical sound-collage band Negativland, who had fallen foul of the copyright

laws for appropriating a U2 song. The case was perhaps inevitable. For the best

part of a decade, bands had been lifting riffs from popular songs, and the record

companies set out to make an example of them.

Sonic Outlaws is Baldwin's political statement on the collaging and sampling

culture. More formal in structure than the typical Baldwin film, [[?]Soiiic

Outlaws is essentially a documentary constructed from interviews with numerous

proponents of culture jamming - media pranksters, artists and political groups

who take what's out there on the shelves of malnstream USA for artistic and

political ends. Negafiviand are interviewed at length about a battle between

their "anti-corporate" record company, SST, and Island, U2's label. Island sued

Negativiand for appropriating 20 seconds of the U2 song "I Still Maven't Found

What I'm Looking For" and using the letter "U" and the numeral "2" (next to

each other, just like the Lockheed spy plane's ID number upon which the Irish

band's name is based) on the cover of the record release~ The venom with which

Island's lawyers attacked Negativiand over the album, and the about-face SST

demonstrated to Negativiand, outraged many across the country-

"That happened to be a journalistic incident. It didn't have to be, but it became

closer to home because I could identify with it. At the same time, 2 Live Crew

was busted for their parody- They won their case because it had to do more with

parody, it wasn't so much a collage, it was a reuse of the same melody. It was

under protection from tffis clause in the copyright law called Fair Use.

For Baldwin, Negativland encapsulated the sheer scale of the problem - the

economically led protectionism of the global media industry does not

acknowledge the validity of borrowing or adapting sounds for use in collage

satire and parody. In the eyes of the mainstream, there is no such thing as a

"non-commercial" use- The accountants don't want to fathom collage. Copying can

only mean bootlegging. Ironlcaliy, U2's album Pop (1997) appropriates music

from underground culture, indicating both the mainstreaming of the samplmg

genre, the dilution of the political gesture, and the legal muscle available to

such uberpop groups.

Nevertheless, the SST/Island/Negativland incident served to galvunize the

resolve of Negativland, Baldwin and the whole cultrire-jammer community-

NothIng is quite as affirming as corporate pressure applied to an activist.

Craig Baldwin's found footage work is thus an extension of a whole culture: a

culture of community and collaboration; of people gathering in scenes, unified,

like the Beatniks and Yippies of the past; of deliberate self exile from the

mainstream, and active opposition to it- ~bs is the avant-garde everyone

thought had bitten the dust with modetnism. Instead, it lies dormant in the

heart of political unrest.

"OH, THAT'‘S STRONG!" BALDWIlN YELLS, as a certain image flickers on the

screen at ATA's basement. Notes are quickly taken in a pad, with a dimming

flasklight for illumination- The shot might find its way into his next work,

"Specters of the Spectrum."

Baldwin interprets everything- His cultural archeology combs the contemporary

urban landscape as careftilly as it does the detrihis of the industrial era - the

training film, the advertisement- Watching films with Baldwin is a unique

experience~ The most boring, turgid, insipid or blatantly tragic films become a

source of immense fun and wonder in his hands. The sheer vibrancy of images

from forgotren times which show flying saucers, monsters, strangeness is itseif a

fascinating entertainment.

Baldwin now has a modest studio. It amounts to a dark basement with shelving

filled with film cans, reel-to-reel winders, thousands of press clippings and

photos, stickers, flyers, a tinny radio. The Baldwin work space is seldom idle~

From the earliest hours to the latest, Baldwin does the rounds, methodkally

organizing notes, text, correspondence with other film programmers and

filinmakers. This flurry of relenfless activity makes the process of making found-

footage films a natural extension of a lived, everyday aesthetic of foraging,

collating, sifting, researching and playing with images, text, sound and

selection- This is a culture of ancient movie projectors and bit5 of editing

equipment which are lovingly maintained, of dark and damp basements with

dim lights and leaking earthquake-damaged roofing. It is a culture of canned

foods and cheap takeaway food. It is a world of moving images nil sounds which

are invoked, like ghosts from the grave of cultural history. This is nothing they

teach you in film school~ This is alchemy.

In an increasingly electronicaliy-mediated urban world, media archeology is the

most appropriate kind of search for truth among the ruins. Rick Prelinger on the

East Coast, whose ephemeral flims have been released on CD-ROM and find use

in mainstream television, finds himself an invaluable source of material for an

ever-widening group who are starting to realize the importance of media

arJbves~ Prelinger and Baldwin are colleagues and Baldwin's next film

will examine the battle for control of the electromagnetic spectrum over the decades.

By using the device of a Time Machine `scope' the flkn will literally frame early ephemeral

films in the context of a story about the history of media itself.

Like Prelinger's archive, Baldwin's collection is valuable not only as a

repository of films whose subject matter has been filtered into his own work, but

as a kind of snapshot of the flImic variation on the great American collage

tradition which includes Joseph Comeli, William Burroughs, Robert Nelson,

Jasper Johns end Robert Rauschenberg.

A cultural and economic climate of uncertainty and doubt has inftised the US

media with an urgency and a liveliness borne directly from familiarity with

decades of non-stop piped images and sounds. Culture-Jarnming is thus a form of

popular revolt - artists manipulatIng images as emblems of America's official

culture~ It is the equivalent in many ways of burning an effigy of US cultural

hegemony both at home and giobally.

Have a look at Craig Baldwin's OTHER CINEMA web site.

Copyright David Cox 1997. This article may be freely distributed on the condition this banner be included.

Fifth Element Review

2008-06-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Digital Vertigo - Spinning out while watching “The Fifth Element”

Review of “The Fifth Element” by Luc Besson, Columbia Pictures 1997.

By David Cox, published in "Satellite Dispatch" web site and "Real Time" magazine 1997

Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element” seems to be made on location which the French call “Future Prox”- near future. This place is very much a part of the popular French imagination via the comic book industry, in comics such as Rank Xerox, and Mobius legendary “Metal Hurlant” (Heavy Metal) magazine. Mobius’ style, much referred to in the work of Ridley Scott, (Alien, Blade Runner) is more often than not toned down in its baroque complexity - countless layers of elevated streets to cities, unfathomable scale of buildings and technology, multilayered cities teeming with people like ants.

Not so in “The Fifth Element”. Digital effects have enabled the producers to unplug all the stops in this unbelievably dense film - which investigates the themes of good versus evil and a battle of cosmic proportions for possession of four stones representing the elements - fire, earth, water and wind. The fifth element turns out to be life, represented by film’s central “La Femme Nikita” style cyberbabe. The film has its toungue placed firmly in its cheek, which is a blessing because playing this film straight would have certainly never worked. In parts, the camp appears a bit forced, and having the ordinarily superb Gary Oldman do a fake Southern drawl, was definitely a bad move in my book.The camp is in the same league as Batman returns - aggressive, sudden, bright in yer face and digitally enhanced.

What I enjoy most about the film is its design sensibility. There is a very Eurocentric aesthetic of joyful and meticulous embrace of old with the new - that particularly late 20th Century postmodern design feel first really investigated in “Max Headroom - 20 minutes into the Future” (one of William Gibson’s favourite films) and “Blade Runner”. The idea of deliberately confusing historical periods and making different design principles forecully, madly co-exsist. In 1982 the “Blade Runner” look was chic deco/modernist 1940s.

In “Blade Runner” Los Angeles was shown as Dark Manhattan - not sparse, bright, foggy and spread out as LA actually is, but towering and dark, like Gotham City. It was the Radiant City of the 1930s film “The Shape of Things to Come” immersed in abolute filth and moral decay. “The Fifth Element” looks like New York and importantly sounds like New York. The sound department has perfected the NYPD cop car
sirens effect of reverberating off buildings brilliantly. And digital sound lets them do that - position sound in 3D real estate to reproduce the sonic ambience of *already familiar* places - like NYC 1997.

In the aforementioned British “Max Headroom” pilot the aesthetic was similarly post apocalyptic, but infintely faster paced and the design aesthetic refreshingly campy and self depricating. In “The Fifth Element” the look is accelerated techno/rave, mixed with 18th Century dandyism - a kind of New Romantic look for the 1990s.

The costumes look like they were created in Paris fashion houses just last week. Some of the outfits and sets borrow strongly from David Lynch’s “Dune” - especially the use of neo classical elements in spacecraft interior design. The opera house aboard the paradise luxury liner was shot on location. One character actually introduces it to us as an exact replica of the Paris Opera - the joke being of course that being a location is is probably one of the few scenes in the film not filmed in an elaborate set.

Computers in can be safely said, enable film makers to visually create anything which can be imagined. Effects such as lighting, texture mapping and 3D design enable anything at all to be made and animated. Cities are no problem - the way cities are appear - big blocks covered with detail - is easily reproduced in a computer . Cars can be made to float and fly - in fact it is probably easier to show a car flying in a computer than it is to show it convincingly rolling along the ground. And the Fifth Element immerses us - drowns us in a city which has sped up to a rate which baffles us as 1990s New York would baffle our great grandparents. Camera moves can be mimicked with breath taking accuracy, and the camera motion of real cameras filming real events can be used to guide virtual cameras in exactly the same way.

I’ve got freinds who are into digital special effects in a big way who have seen this move five times
already. I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of audiovisual assault yet (and at $10.50 a time it sure adds up) but when the video comes out, the rewind and pause button will be put to damn good use. You see, my SPFX friend tells me earnestly, it costs *money* to pay Californians to animate computer generated cars, cities and spacecraft. A lot of money. In some ways, thinking about this films alleged 70 million dollar production costs makes me wince - one wonders if films can be made in America any more unless they can guarantee box office success.

William Gibson and Robert Longo were simply forbidden by the Hollywood system from spending anything less than 40 million on “Johnny Mnemonic”, when all they wanted was about 10 million to do a kind of latter day “Alphaville”. In that film, Jean Luc Godard had his main character drive around the present day (early 1960s) Paris as if it were some future city in some future time. In other words, why bother going to the trouble of showing the city, when the themes are all that matter? But try swinging that idea past the suits in La La Land. Block buster or nothing. No in betweens. Mass market or no market. And what a pity it is, really. When better films come often from an imperative to well, make better films...

And.... I’m still trying to imagine what the spinnoff products of this film will be if any - its central characters are cartoon like enough to be made into plastic figures, but the whole mindset of the film is so campy and knowing - in the tradition of “Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure” and “Robocop” that a chic Euro audience seems the films more likely merchendise destination.

Toys R Us inventory might apply automatically to Jurrassic Park type blockbusters, but the “Fifth Element” seems to belong to a different catagory altogether. On one level it is a good old chase/cliffhanger film a la “Total Recall” but like that film’s almost baroque intertwining themes of identity, responsibility and paranoia, the “Fifth Element” seems to belong more to the “anything goes” aesthetic of Mobius comics, the 1968 Batman TV series and Ren ‘n’ Stimpy. This is a film made by and for the contemporary 20 to 35 year old market, who know about techno music, know about computers, know about cyberpunk, love “Blade Runner”, 32 and 64 bit games platforms and japanese anime. Its fast and frenetic, like contemporary media capitalism. It celebrates the heady pace of the postmodern media zietgiest.

Digital cinema, like the one upon a time costly and rare sound film is rapidly becoming a normal, commonplace thing. The beachhead digital effects “siliwood” films like “Terminator 2”, “Jurrassic Park”, “True Lies” etc have laid the ground for films like the “Fifth Element” which draw fully upon the technical and aesthetic precedents of earlier cyberpunk cinema as cultural reference points. Fifteen years after its release, the commercially unsuccesful “Blade Runner” is far away enough in time from us now to itself to be a historical marker, just as once “Citizen Kane” was considered a masterpiece twenty years after its completion. Blade Runner is definitely the masthead filmic cultural hub around which “The Fifth Element” swings, but the whole film is basically a game for people in my age bracket (34 years old) of “spot the sci fi blockbuster reference”.

The future New York of the film appears fleetingly, through mainly chase sequences, where we the viewer see through the eyes of people being chased. The now familiar motif of flying cars enable chases to happen in full surround sound 3 dimensions - cars can hover, or dive directly up or down. Traffic resembles that in “Back to the Future Part 2” where “Jetsons” style, hover cars (even styled to resemble 30s deco ideas of future cars) keep to their aerial lanes. Traffic in 300 years has become a kind of of bloodstream - a 3D circulatory system. Indeed one of the filmÕs most impressive sequences is that where a whole human figure is assembled from a dna sample extracted from a creature which has has crash landed on the moon. A kind of medical operating table extends tiny arms to literally build up a figure from nothing, rapidly adding flesh to a skeleton like dicing beef in reverse. The sections which constitute the figure are slices, resembling those which were scanned of the condemned man and later posted on the internet and released on cd-rom as the ghoulish but groundbreaking “Visible Human” project.

Humanity, this sequence seems to propose has by means of computers totally lost its physical origins and bearings. But instead of being a hindrance, in 300 years from now people have reversed this ethical technical dillemma to manufacture its population from both sythetic materials and pure information. People know how to construct clones as if making Mcburgers. As jurassic era dinosaurs are in contemporary Hollywood, future real characters are made to order. The physicality of the body is an extension of the city state whose technology has made this high speed fast food frankenstien monster a possibility. The rapid flow of floating cars (and in one scene a floating chinese junk selling food) is just like the rapid pace of dextrous robot fingers which construct a human from information and artificial tissue alone. The flying cars like corpuscles flying around the body. The city and body are one. Hence the central character can leap off a building and crash into a car and nothing goes wrong - its just the body floating through another body and melding with other bodies.

I wished in many ways the film had stopped being a chase movie long enough to ponder this fascinating place. Having set the scene, the film forces the viewer only to speed through it. I’d be interested to know if the script changed much during the production, and what role storyboards played. If “Fifth Element” is techno hardcore, I want the ambient mix.

Offering the viewer a kind of a la cart theme park ride through the future, “The Fifth Element” reminded me an awful lot of the Paul Verhoeven megamovie “Total Recall”. Like that film, the action often tended to get in the way of the story. Just as soon as you were starting to get into the yarn, someone pulls out a gun a blasts everything in site. Then inevitably a huge chase ensues, and so we’re back to theme park ride land again. You sometimes want the ride to stop long enough to enjoy the view.

Check out the “Fifth Element” but be sure to laugh with the movie at its own often very stupid jokes, in order to better enjoy the spectacle of a future which is all too familiar as our own postmodern, accelerated, full on techno hardcore urban digital speedfreak Xstatic western capitalist media driven cybercity of right here, right now.

David Cox, June 1997.