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
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Review - Xperimental Eros: by OtherCinema DVD
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.
◊
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.
◊
Excerpt from the book Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back
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
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
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
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.]
◊
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.]
◊
Review - New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City
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
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
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