#it's this paradoxical thing where the artists makes something for the sake of art and THAT'S what makes it personal for the viewer

[chynandri]

Additional Thoughts About Ibara & Aesthetics

Using this image to indicate to you that I'm gonna be mentioning Rouge&Ruby a LOT.

Writing this post on Ibara and Tsumugi's dorm room, it reminded me of some more thoughts I’ve been microwaving in my brain for a while. From the dorm post we’ve pretty clearly established that Ibara… doesn’t express much of a personality in his sense of style 😂 he was born in a wet cardboard box all alone ok

HOWEVER… what I’ve found really intriguing about him (besides everything.) is that despite that lack of self expression in a personal space, he does have a strong sense for art and aesthetics in what he creates.

What tipped me off on this was actually his in-game office interaction with the whiteboard. He has the ‘good’ result of drawing a cute bird, saying he ‘knows a little about the arts’ (which probably means he knows a lot, he’s just being fake humble). When I first saw this, I was a little bit surprised.

So later on, when Rouge&Ruby confirmed that he does do costume designs and storyboards himself, I was pretty excited to see his artistic skills a little bit expanded upon.

And actually, he has said this interesting thing in relation to art:

Translation by Land of Zero

So clearly, Ibara has a sense for the value of art and thinks it’s important.

And it aligns with how he intended for Adam to focus on the art of performance (compared to Eve which is more popular and takes on more entertainment jobs).

What I’m trying to say is that while he obviously loves making money and business domination, he also has an understanding and skill for art and design. Business, art, aesthetics often come hand in hand I think, as having a good concept and attractive visuals is essential to selling anything...

Translation by Land of Zero

Considering he designed every part of Melting Rouge Soul + Ruby Love himself and contacted Hiyori for his connections to chocolate designers so that Eden's chocolates stand out, I feel his consideration for making something with 'artistic and financial value' really comes through in Rouge&Ruby.

Translation by Land of Zero

I think the whole point of that event is that within Ibara there is a passionate burning soul bursting with expression and creativity (even love) in pursuit of his ambitions, and it comes through so so much in those songs and his own performance. He’ll prove Eden’s superiority in every avenue possible, not just monetarily but also artistically.

Although all this is only applied to his work, which is what he’s most passionate about. To Ibara, his work IS him:

Translation by Land of Zero

Additionally, Rinne notes Ibara’s more 'poetic' (and nerdy 🤓) side with how the Minotaurs Labyrinth is designed in Ariadne (variety show Ibara traps Crazy:b in):

Not only do things have to look good, they have to be quite meaningful and conceptual too. I mean, this IS coming from the guy who bases his whole personality and image on one (1) book he read as a sad little kid (Art of War btw) and inserts very unsubtle Bible references everywhere.

And Ibara putting the most effort into his chocolates despite being annoyed at having to make chocolates past Valentine's Day and it having no relation to work:

Translation by Land of Zero. He loves to succeed and be impressive for the sake of it.

So where he doesn’t put much effort into his personal spaces or appearance outside of work, it’s all because Ibara’s personality is just one that’s extremely singularly focused on one thing - his passion and work. I think this creates another interesting and lovely paradox to his personality, just one of the many this guy has. It’s what makes Ibara so delightful as a character.

Tl;dr - Ibara is actually quite into art and aesthetics, and even artistically inclined himself.

[dylanlila]

Ok another thing!

I really like how... feminine Jack is. It's sort of an extension of his manic-pixie-dream-boy status. He's kind, soft-spoken and Rose generally makes him pretty nervous (though he's socially talented enough to work through that really well). This particularly stands out to me during their sex scene. I think it's my favourite sex scene of all time, actually. That may be a weird thing to have, but still. Rose is the one who initiates it ("Put your hands on me, Jack" is a GREAT line) and we immediately see Jack at the most nervous he's ever been. Then when they're done he's literally shaking so Rose asks if he's okay, and then SHE holds HIM as they (mostly Jack tho) calm down.

The movie is so conventional and so unconventional at the same time which speaks to its genius.

Reversal of gender roles isn't something that didn't exist before Titanic though. (and I KNOW that's not what you're saying here, but hear me out) LMA has done it in 1860s!!!!!!!! Greek mythology deals with gender themes (where do you think the term hermaphrodite came from?) In my opinion, Titanic didn't handle the concept in an innovative enough manner (and everybody knows I'm a BIG fan of that concept). It's cool! It's great! Blockbusters introduce the wider audience to great many things, but that doesn't mean they should be praised for every remotely unconventional idea that's a part of the story they're trying to tell. (making the already existing concept your own? that's another thing entirely and I LOVE IT!) What makes a good movie for me is taking what's already there and crowning it with your own unique perspective. What you're praising Titanic for is actually what I appreciate about Lady Bird (2017). It makes you think that it's all about tropes and cliches and everything that's stereotypically meant to speak to the female audience, but then it surprises you and does this fantastic spin on everything you've ever known without disregarding the tropes completely. But it's not just about simultaneously defying and celebrating the tropes (and here's the main difference), it's about this very personal viewpoint that Gerwig incorporated into the film. It's kinda like when you're adapting a book, you shouldn't try to make the movie resemble the source material (because that's NEVER gonna work, you simply can't meet everyone's expectations), you should make it resemble your own understanding of the source material. That's what makes it feel more personal to the viewer. Titanic didn't feel personal to me despite being meant to appeal to people. My point is: it's a movie that was made to be liked and appreciated which yes, isn't inherently a bad thing, but maybe I'm just too into modernism and avant-garde to appreciate that. It really is a personal preference! I like it better when the art I'm consuming doesn't make a big deal out of itself and ends up hitting the emotional mark without meaning to. (the main goal is usually to send some kind of message that tends to be controversial in some way) I don't like it when movie directors assume I'm going to relate to something because "everybody relates to it in some way". You CAN'T know that. (it puts a pressure on people, like you have to be a part of that specific circle or you're not human enough or whatever) This feels like that literature discussion about supposedly pointless overanalysing of motifs or claiming that classic lit is inherently difficult to read or whatever... Maybe it's not just propaganda coming from the male dominated world, maybe I LIKE long discussions on life and death and politics in my movies. (and just because something is problematic in one regard, it doesn't mean it has no significant value or worse, that it shouldn't be explored. you can always learn! from everything!) Which doesn't mean that I don't like a good coming of age story about a teenage girl. Or spend my time watching a teen soap. Or that somebody can't enjoy a romantic comedy if they love Dostoyevsky. Or that these art branches necessarily cancel each other out. (I'm referring to some of the points you made earlier, sorry for drifting away djsjdkkd)

What you can always do in film is present your own unique perspective and celebrate that uniqueness. That's something people can connect with, regardless of the topic. If it makes its way to the heart of ONE person, it's a winner. And Titanic is definitely a winner in that respect! It just didn't get to me. And that's fine too.

Also! The intention behind a certain line doesn't make the line itself good (same goes for film in general)!!!!!! "Put your hands on me, Jack" is just... it's funny. I laughed when I heard it. This movie is just... way better in theory. I LOVED what you had to say about the ideas that went into it, but I didn't really catch that on screen. Both the characters and their love story failed to be compelling in my eyes, the aesthetics got in the way of that even if it wasn't supposed to. That's what happened if you ask me. Oh and disliking traditionally feminine tropes and plot directions and things such as grand romantic gestures or melodramatic confessions of love doesn't immediately mean that you're sexist or have internalized misogyny? Society is responsible for giving those things a bad rep, but disliking them doesn't always have to go beyond disliking them.

I'm making a lot of points here and I'm not wearing my contacts, dear tumblr forgive me. (I don't need you to, I'm just trying to be polite dhjdjdi)

[apatheticfluorescence]

Someone brought up Serra's tilted arch at work yest and they had an interesting perspective. Well actually we both were kind of saying the same thing. It's funny how something can change depending on who you're explaining it to.

Like talking about it to a bunch of artists in art school who have collectively decided serra is someone to dislike (prob justified) you might have to argue if you liked the piece. But like, explaining it to a "non arts" person they thought it was really cool and interesting the way it disrupted everyday life and I think there's truth in that. And I kind of gave it a second chance as I was explaining it to them, like it made me realize how from an outside perspective it is kinda rad in a way, whereas within an art space we are more critical of art that finds itself more important than someones daily path to work.

Part of me finds it idealistic, like we live in a society where the most efficient path does matter. In a society where city efficiency doesn't matter as much there would be more of these architecturally disruptive decisions for the sake of art or meaning, and they'd be more acceptable therefore.

The paradox is in that society a the statement of a disruptive structure wouldn't be worth making, which to me proves it might have a worthy place in our world (some good concepts are edgy). So in a way that makes me like it, because it denies the current context and makes me think of some other society, so maybe it's forward thinking. In some way it's a brazen statement of wealth and success too though. I'm also just not remembering everything about it I guess but lemme stop before I give this too much space in my head.

[albapuella]

2020 Summary of Art

Well, I can't do the traditional "Art of the Year" summary thing since I'm not a visual artist, but I figured, why not do something similar with my writing? A paragraph I worked on or posted during each month. January: Time isn't the only problem, of course, or even the main one. Your powers of telekinesis are pitiful, too—the only thing saving you out on the field currently is your, admittedly, impressive physical strength, but you can't depend on that forever. The best Pushers don't rely on pure brute strength like you do. How can you ever hope to reach the level of your hero, Xultan Matzos, without the mental powers to match? February: It was his picture. That was Ciel's first thought. Then he realized it couldn't be him—the boy in the picture was older, yes, but what drew Ciel's attention was the boy's eyes: both were visible and clear. Which was impossible—the contract showed up in photos, and he was bound to Sebastian until the demon consumed his soul. Looking closer, peering over Dipper's shoulder, Ciel noticed something far more alarming: the part in the boy's hair was opposite to his own. March: Motherfuckin’ paydirt. “He better be happy to see me,” you say, although it’s hard to say whether he actually will be or not. You two are bros, and you get along fairly well when you’re both not going out of your ways to be dicks to each other (ironically!), but he can be unpredictable. You know he isn’t going to like how much danger you’ve put yourself in for his sake. His poor self-hating heart just can’t accept that other people actually give a damn about him. It’d make you cry if you weren’t such a stone cold bad ass. “Where is he?” April: Klink wasn’t sure if he was more amused by this display or infuriated. That the American could sit there and say such ridiculous things with a straight face... Either Hogan was being fanatically naïve, or he thought that Klink was fantastically stupid. His hand clenched around the damp handkerchief. More likely than not, it was the latter. He didn’t know why the thought stung so much—it wasn’t anything he didn’t already know. “Victory?” he echoed, allowing Hogan to hear his scorn for the notion. “You think this,” he threw his hand out to indicate the space around himself, “is a victory?” May: “Well you’re looking older and dumber,” Karkat returned hotly. He didn’t turn his back on the adult human, but he backed up to the door. “You’re not my Dave, and I’m not the Karkat you know, so this must be paradox space fucking with me once again, because the universe loves nothing more than shitting on Karkat Vantas.” June: When Karkat pulls down his pants, Dave finds all thoughts of heat stroke leaving his mind. What the hell... It's a fucking tentacle. It's all Dave can do not to break down in hysterical laughter. Oh God. He gets it: this is a hentai. His life has become a fucking anime. Karkat is the eldritch horror, and he is the Japanese school girl about to get tentacle fucked within an inch of her life. This is his fate. July: "yea like we're peak middle school up in here passing notes to each other," Dave is clearly gearing up for a ramble, and Karkat smiles despite himself, "do you like me or like like me but weve got to keep it on the downlow so the teacher doesnt notice and find our note because our reps will never survive if she reads it to the class and she will because thats how teachers roll" August: Dave is still frowning into the mirror, his hands coming up to trace the lines on his chest. He's muscular, but in a wiry way. Trim like Karkat isn't. Pale in a way that begs for a tan. He's beautiful. Karkat has thought this before, but seeing him like this makes the thought rise up again: Dave is beautiful even if he's glaring at himself in a way which reminds Karkat uncomfortably of similar looks Karkat has directed towards a mirror more than once. September: “That’s not how you say those?” He shrugged, watching with barely contained glee as Karkat’s face darkened. “It’s like I told you, Kitbit, I don’t do that boujee shit.” And now, for the piece of resistance: “I’m just here puttin' in the time, spittin' my rhymes. You know I do this on a dime. It ain't work for me; it's play the way the insults fly, leavin' you with l'esprit de l'escalier when I say goodbye.” Then he lifted up his glasses and winked, enjoying the view of Karkat realizing he’d been being played in full color. October: Karkat’s head is pounding from all the thinking he’s had to do to learn Davuh’s words, but it’s a good pain--the kind of pain that means something is growing stronger. He enjoys the warmth of the human next to him, feeling drowsy. He doesn’t always sleep well… he rarely sleeps well. But it’s different with Davuh there. There’s something in his belly, his head aches, and Davuh is warm. November: It was… Xefros doesn’t have the words to describe it. Joey, going around, treating trolls like… like they were the same as her. Like they would just return her kindness and trust because she gave it to them first. Kind of incredible how often she was right. And then she was wrong. Very wrong. December: “No!” The boy’s anger should be frightening what with his sharp teeth prominently displayed in a snarl, but the combination of the drying, cracking green slime coating and the pure offense in his tone makes his posturing more funny than threatening. “No, you don’t get to break into my hive, drag me out of my recuperacoon, feel me up, make weird ass concuspiant passes at me, *and* tell me I need to *chill*! I am the perfectly sane amount of chill for this situation!” Homestuck features pretty heavily this year :D

[the-art-of-animated-gifs]

Frederik Vanhoutte:  Creative Coder

I have featured a selection of gifs by Frederik Vanhoutte on Cross Connect, (the  link is here,  Also, see more of his work on his Twitter feed and Instagram page

Frederik’s gifs are compelling to watch.  The way he contrasts the black shape against dark grey with neon colored edges that are revealed as the shape expands and contracts is inspired and beautiful.  He uses easing in his motion to great effect as his little machines, or systems, expand and contract in front of you

Frederik was expansive in his answers to my questions about his work and I publish the full interview below:

-----

Who you are and where you are from?

I’m Frederik Vanhoutte, and I’m a creative coder. I’m based in Flanders, Belgium, and currently living in Bruges.

What do you do for a living?

Professionally I’m a medical radiation expert (MPE), active in the radiotherapy department of the Ghent university hospital. What this means is that together with a team of radiation oncologists, nurses, technologist and colleague MPEs I’m responsible for the treatment of people with cancer, using radiation generated by high-energy linear accelerators.

Do you have a background in art?

My background isn’t art, it’s physics, lots of physics. I have a master in acoustics and thermodynamics, a second master in medical physics and a PhD in solid state physics.

How did you start making gifs?

My interest in creative coding grew more or less naturally from toy models, simple physics simulations we set up to test ideas. These are oversimplified and not entirely rigorous, the simulation equivalent of back of the envelope calculations.

In 2003, I came across Processing, a coding framework/application/community aimed towards designers and artists wanting to use computers in their practice. For me, the approach was from a different direction. I was familiar with the rigorous logic of programming and started using Processing for my old toy models. But unlike their original purpose, this time round I started playing around with the models for estethics sake. I didn’t know it then, but these were my first generative systems. In an “about”, I’ll typically say that creative coding fuels my curiosity in physical, biological and computational systems. And that isn’t just a sound bite. For me it represents an important way of thinking about things, of answering questions. I haven’t run out of questions yet, so it doesn’t look like I’m stopping soon.

Do you think gifs are a unique art form?

We tend to talk about the intersection of art and science, two distinct areas that converge in a certain practice.  There is something to be said for the idea that that art, even when using technology and scientific terminology, isn’t science; and that science, even if pursued with passion, isn’t art. But the truth probably is that the idea of two distinct regions meeting at an intersection is the wrong metaphor, that instead there is a huge territory where these two quintessential human endeavors flow into each other, mediated by technology, neither art nor science. For me the true intersection is where we meet from different directions, from different backgrounds.

Why gifs, ate least in part of my work? Digital art has many niches but a common thread in generative systems is the emphasis on the system, the dynamics, rather than on the frozen image, the static. But the threshold to share something dynamic is higher than that of a still image. And the platforms to share it on aren’t very stable, Flash is gone, the days of java applets are past, replaced by webgl and javascript, to be replaced by…

The animated gif seems to stand the test of time better, its simplicity undoubtedly part of its success. My first reaction to the question “are gifs a unique art form” was that I don’t see animated gifs as an art form in itself, or even a goal, but as a robust, low-threshold materialization of  things which are hard to convey statically,a form of animation. But to be honest, having made more gifs lately, I need to reconsider. The medium of gifs introduces several constraints that impose themselves on the art, and in through those constraints, like any medium, shapes the art, adding its unique nature to it.

So yes, it is a unique medium, a unique art form. I find myself reducing my toy models to the bare essentials when writing them for gifs. Kill your darlings, purity, whatever you can call it, it invites a certain thoughtfulness that gets lost when presented with the basically unlimited possibilities we seem to have in digital art. I genuinely believe the restrictions make the art better.

What I strive to achieve is something architects call simplexity, a complex form that has an elegant, simple underlying structure. Simplicity without visual complexity can be rather dull. Raw, wild complexity is easy to achieve but impossible to control and can paradoxically end up dull. A pet peeve of mine is that generative art often prides itself on “infinite results, each unique”, yet somehow all looking, feeling the same. Simplexity represents the goldilocks zone, neither the dullness of predictability, nor the boredom of the purely random.

As a tool I mainly use Processing. And although tools undoubtedly influence the work, it really is about ideas and principles that can be embodied in various ways. Whether it’s Houdini or threejs, Processing or Excel, or pen and paper or computer, part of the art always transcends the medium.

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Frederik Vanhoutte’s Twitter feed and Instagram page

[legobiwan]

Master and Apprentice: An Overview of Themes

Okay, so as many of you may have surmised, I adored this book. There’s so much to talk about in it and the ramifications of some of the themes play all the way up to the Sequel Trilogy. 

To be honest, I’m not even sure where to start with everything I want to talk about, but I’m going start here with this basic outline of things I noticed and will dissemble from there over the next few days, weeks, whatever. 

Lineage

“You inherit your parents' trauma but you will never fully understand it.”

So I will preface this part by saying that I am a huge fan of Bojack Horseman and this theme comes up again and again and again in this show. (As does the difficulty, but possibility, of breaking that cycle.)

This book is heavy on the behaviors and prejudices and patterns that get passed on through generations, or in this case, lineages. Dooku’s preoccupation with prophecy touches Rael, which touches Qui-gon, which touches Obi-wan, and of course, ultimately plays a huge role in Anakin’s life. Not only that, but Dooku’s restrained, demanding manner seems to have  rubbed off on Qui-gon, who seemed to be constantly measuring up Obi-wan to an impossible metric and thinking it in his presence, which meant Obi-wan likely felt all of this and presto changeo we have a talented young Jedi who feels he is unworthy. This book really illustrates how Masters are as much parents as teachers, and how whatever issues the parent is dealing with gets passed down and processed, whether it be through rebellion, imitation, or a host of other reactions. Hell, the book mentions Yoda’s master (albeit not by name). I am *dying* to know who they were and what happened there. 

Performance Art

Okay, so one of the initial main culprits is a group of performers who end up being branded as terrorists. First of all, this made musician-me CACKLE, period. But beyond that, there is a running theme of a performative aspect to government, to ceremony (Fanry perfects this), even to the Jedi themselves with their rituals, with their idealistic Code versus reality. Sidious was perhaps the best performance artist of the entire GFFA. And prophecy, to a certain degree, requires performance, requires actors to ingest a script and accept it as truth, and finally meet its demands of life’s stage. Is it foretold because the events must happen or because the actors choose to make them happen?

Prophecy

Which leads me into the thorniest topic of this book. Dooku was obsessed with prophecies. Qui-gon became obsessed with prophecy, to the point of breaking a thousand laws to get Anakin to Coruscant. And then Obi-wan was so devoted to Qui-gon, despite everything, that he told himself he had to believe in the prophecy, for Qui-gon’s sake (back to family issues there.)

How many of these prophecies ended up being self-fulfilling because of the actors involved? (Namely, Qui-gon.) Even when Qui-gon realizes his mistake is trying to control the future instead of accepting it, he goes ahead years later to manipulate circumstances so Anakin can be a Jedi. That’s not accepting the future, he cheated at dice to change the future, to control it. And that action set off an avalanche of consequences I doubt Qui-gon prepared for. In short, Qui-gon is a very fallible character here and shows a fair amount of egotism in terms of his relationship with prophecy. 

I mean, the Force showed Qui-gon that he was “meant to misinterpret” his vision? I don’t even know where to start with the sheer audacity of that statement. Qui-gon doesn’t report his vision to the Council, because he thinks they won’t understand, thinks they’ll get mired in some minutiae of governance and not do anything substantial. And yes, the Council does dither, even Obi-wan notices it, but those controls are there for a reason and Qui-gon just runs roughshod over them, because he thinks he alone has the answers, that he alone can change the future. 

And it kind of comes back to this whole Lineage issue where Dooku had this attitude that he alone knew the truth. I mean, he defects to the Sith partially to rid the Republic of corruption, and look at his Padawans - Rael and Qui-gon, both iconoclasts, both skirting the edge of...something, and it’s almost laughable that Qui-gon gets so upset with Rael’s disregard of certain parts of the Code (the killing of his Padawan part, of course, but also the celibacy part) because Qui-gon lies and cheats and pulls cons across the galaxy and disregards swaths of the Code at will. And you have to wonder, is this because Dooku was too independent, and if Dooku was that independent, how did Yoda’s training of Dooku play into that? 

Then again, while family and upbringing play a huge part in a person’s actions and personality, they are not the only thing, they do not dictate the future. Nor do prophecies. And Qui-gon clings so much to these prophecies, just as Dooku did (and Dooku’s prophecy of choice, he who learns to conquer death will through his greatest student live again is just...it explains a lot as to why Dooku was so devoted to teaching, was so exacting on his students ((although I will never let go of the headcanon that Dooku actually enjoys teaching, because I feel that a personality like his needs someone to impart knowledge to)). 

Prophecy, more often than not, becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, which is an interesting paradox. Prophecies are read, believed to be true, and are enacted by the actions of the very people (beings) who read them in the first place. 

And thus they become prophecy. 

I mean, no wonder Yoda wanted to burn the “sacred texts” by the time The Last Jedi rolls around. Prophecy becomes a way to abnegate responsibility for one’s actions, to deny, whether it’s Dooku seeking to avoid death, Qui-gon proclaiming he is a vessel for the will of the Force, or even Obi-wan claiming Luke as the Chosen One in Twin Suns. (Although, I wonder about that last one, as Obi-wan is naturally skeptical of prophecy. I mean, the Jedi do have the Force and are granted visions, but then again, they make decisions. They choose to turn to the Dark Side, choose to bend to the will of a hazy future which claims no specific actors...and I feel like Obi-wan’s references to prophecy are more an expression of familial love, of tribute to Qui-gon rather than a true belief that Anakin was "the” Chosen One. Obi-wan believed in Anakin himself above all else, even his better judgment.)

The Jinn-Kenobi Express

So...what is going on with these two?

In many ways, this is more of a Qui-gon book than an Obi-wan book, although we get plenty of insight to Obi-wan’s character. And one of the things I really appreciate about Claudia Gray is the fact that she seems aware of the Jedi Apprentice series, the kind of dynamic that created, and weaves this story in a way that does justice to those interactions and the limited time we see Qui-gon and Obi-wan together on screen. 

And the thing is, Qui-gon is kind of a jerk to Obi-wan. From page two of this book, his is questioning Obi-wan, wondering why he hasn’t reached a certain point in his abilities yet (all while deliberately holding him back in areas like lightsaber combat, which is an astounding illustration of Qui-gon’s complete obliviousness to his own actions and ramifications of his actions). And, let’s be honest, Obi-wan is an empath - he wouldn’t be such a talented negotiator and diplomat if he weren’t (because, before anything else, you need to be able to read people, to know and feel their emotions in order to succeed at deals, treaties, and diplomacy). Obi-wan knew Qui-gon was questioning him, could feel it and this harkens back to those JA books where Qui-gon is kiiiind of a total douche, at times. And Obi-wan - rebellious, independent, self-esteem-lacking, so wanting someone’s approval Obi-wan...just falls right into this. It’s kind of an unhealthy dynamic, which resolves itself after Pijal, only to relapse all over again when Qui-gon finds Anakin and pulls his BS on Tatooine. 

Here’s the thing. Qui-gon is not a bad person. I don’t hate Qui-gon, he has good motivations, he wants to make things better. He cares about Obi-wan, seeks advice from his old Master (not knowing Dooku has fallen, my god), tries to free all the slaves he encounters, wants to buck every piece of Jedi and Republic law in order to make the galaxy right. And, you know, I get it. I really do. But there’s idealism and then there’s trying to do the right thing within the systems (no matter how terrible) we have created and inching forward to change because to do otherwise would be to fight yourself in a paper bag. 

Qui-gon is the living embodiment of the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

And Obi-wan knows this, knows Qui-gon is fallible, knows that his devotion to idealism, to prophecy is dangerous and yet he goes along with it anyway because Obi-wan’s greatest failing is his attachment. Obi-wan (the empath) cares too much and he can’t let go - not of Qui-gon, not of Satine, and certainly not of Anakin. 

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.“ I mean, I’m not a Kylo Ren-stan by any means, but he’s not wrong. At least, not in a broad sense, not in the way that might have allowed Obi-wan to make some clearer-headed decisions about everything from his relationship with Qui-gon to Anakin to the Council. 

In Conclusion

Dooku cared about his students but possibly feared death and thus possibly made his students his vessels to achieve the goal of immortality, despite enjoying teaching.

Qui-gon cared about Obi-wan as much as he did the betterment of the galaxy but was terrible at expressing it and put too much faith in himself, the Force, and prophecy. 

Obi-wan cared almost too much about everyone but himself, replacing self-esteem with rules and the Code, devoting himself to the memory of Qui-gon and his wishes in his guilt over his survival of the encounter at Theed.

And this writer cares waaaaaay too much about these characters and will most definitely be writing more about this book because, to quote Obi-wan flying a ship in the middle of a ship: AAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGGHHHH

[natalia-lafourcade]

Hi again, same person who asked you about TK and Land of the Free the other day. What do you make of the fact that Morrissey continues to have an absolutely huge Mexican/Mexican American (especially in California and the Southwest) fanbase? Who knows who planted the seed for the Morrissey tour sometime last year, but I think that was why Interpol agreed aside from the obvious financial benefit (even though it was hugely short sighted of them and assumes fans are monolithic in their views). 1/2

Paradoxically, Paul's response, while leaving A LOT to be desired, offers space for a diversity of viewpoints. There are a lot of people (POC obviously included) who are single issue voters or endorse fiscal conservatism and limited government. I think he's fully aware people are going to disagree with their decision and disagree strongly and that's their right. tl;dr I think they know they fucked up, we can hold them accountable to be better, and choose not to support their tour 2/3

Last main point I'll make is that they do still owe it to their fans to denounce Morrissey's racist statements, ESPECIALLY if he starts spouting shit on stage. Let's keep in mind as well that Morrissey is the devil we know, there's more celebs/musicians than you would even believe that are right wing and racist, but it just hasn't come out publicly yet. END

Hello again friend! I haven’t really had the chance offer my opinion on the whole Morrissey dilemma on here since I mainly stick to twitter to air out discourse. Either way, the news of them touring with Moz has been very much a punch in the gut, and waking up to Paul’s tweets today clarifying his thoughts on their decision hasn’t helped things. It seems every time the band members open their mouths about this, they make things a lot worse. 

I can’t really explain the whole phenomenon as to why Mexicans love Moz so much, even though I’m Mexican, I suppose it’s because I’m from the Northeast so things are a bit different here. I always assumed it was because of the melancholy lyrics or something, I don’t really know and as for the single voter issue, like I said I’m not from that part of the country so I can’t really respond to that. 

The fans on twitter have certainly been very divided. A lot of them have denounced Morrissey, while still remaining supportive of the band. I’m in this camp and I won’t be attending any dates with Morrissey, although I am seeing them in Vegas where they’re headling their own show without him on the bill. I still love their music but Paul’s comments saying that he respects conservative viewpoints leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. My personal political views don’t allow for conservative viewpoints to exist mostly because they usually restrict my rights in some way (haha, being a gay woman of color can be like that sometimes) and Paul saying he respects these views, understandably makes me uncomfortable. 

Clearly they know they’ve fucked up or else the band wouldn’t have responded that way and Paul wouldn’t have back-tracked on his statement (even though he just dug himself a deeper hole in the process). At the same time, they should have known considering Moz has been trash since forever and has said some truly horrible things about almost every vulnerable minority group out there. There really is no excuse at this point, and this whole “separate the art from the artist” argument that other people like Nick Cave have brought up is garbage when you’re talking about a man who is straight up sympathetic to the alt right movement and is just the most transparent unapologetic racist I’ve ever seen. 

Honestly, I’m still hurt by this and am kinda in denial (im making gifs of their glasto set as we speak for gods sake) and it’s clear we shouldn’t expect any sense of integrity from them at this point. They won’t say anything else about this situation for contractural reasons aka they want people to see the show. I’m not looking forward to when the tour actually starts and have to see Morrissey spewing his bullshit as always. The only solace in this is that they definitely know they fucked up big time and hopefully this informs their touring/professional decisions in the future. 

[doomedandstoned]

Doomed & Stoned in Iran with Roaring Empyrean

~By Billy Goate~

Photo Credit: Shahrokh Dabiri

It's fair to say that much of our view of the world is muddled by a cloud of politics, whether that comes from the strong opinions of family and friends, the news media, or our elected officials. When I heard such casual joking of bombing Iran during the 2008 US presidential elections, I cringed. Now more than 10 years later, the bluster of obstinate world leaders looms large once again, posturing with the weird flex of war. What most people are missing is real perspective on the people of Iran and, I would argue, the music of that country.

Hell, I was woefully uninformed myself, so when I started noticing more and more offerings from the heavy music community out of Tehran, I struck up a friendship with one doomedshinobi on Instagram, mastermind of the one-man band Roaring Empyrean, "a musical project aiming to create atmospheres where feelings in contrast meet, in a combination of funeral doom metal and New Age." Intrigued, I asked doomedshinobi for an interview and we exchanged words over oceans and breached the cultural divide for one of the more fascinating discussions about the joys and trials of being an artist I've encountered since starting Doomed & Stoned.

When I found doom, I was like someone who had reached his destination after a long journey.

What's it like being a heavy musician in Iran? Most of us have no clue about what's acceptable and not in the culture there.

When you are dealing with a radical ideological regime, you can't reason with them. All kinds of art are seen forbidden here, unless they preach Islam or government ideologies. Things get worse when you are dealing with some art that is Western in nature. Metal is, in nature, Western. And even there, it had its problems sometimes from church and common beliefs. Here, it doesn't matter what you make and what you sing. As long as you are metal, you are seen as Satanic!

I remember reading an article in some magazine about Metallica being black metal, just because they have an album called Black. The author claimed, "They are black metal artists and black metal is Satanic, so they are making music to take away our people from God and Path of Light." I remember reading somewhere that even Pink Floyd was labeled Satanic. So things are hard for you if you are an extreme musician, like metal. You are alone in the scene here. Producers and labels mostly refuse to work with you. Stores won't sell your physical releases and stages to perform are hard to get. There have been many cases when a band got a show and then right before the show or even in the middle of performance, it was forced to be canceled. Many musicians even get arrested afterwards.

In Iran, metalheads find interest more in death and black metal, as well as power and symphonic.

Now imagine you are a musician, a metal musician, a darker and extremer type of metal musician. You are mostly alone on your own to make your own studio, produce your music and release it. This leads to many Iranian bands using free social media to share their music and send the word mouth by mouth. Platforms like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube are blocked by the regime and someone like myself has to bypass filters in various ways to get access to these platforms. Due to the poor economy and fall of Iran Rial value, getting a full set of proper equipment costs a fortune. Many young musicians leave all they have to pursue musicianship.

The good thing, though, is people. They are welcoming metal and heavier musical styles more and more with each passing day -- especially the younger generation. But as is all over the world, heavy and extreme metal styles have less fans than most other genres. And if you are to be a heavy style musician, you have to accept this. You either want to pursue money and fame or do what you like for its own sake. There you have something like pop and hip-hop, and doom metal is scarce.

Monuments (Remastered) by Roaring Empyrean

What are you thoughts about the band Confess being imprisoned recently?

Confess is just one example known to the rest of the world of a band that has been imprisoned. I didn't know of them until I read that article, but the things that happened to them are not something new or uncommon among artists of all kinds, and it clearly is unfair. This happens in the extreme to artists pursuing foreign styles of art.

There are some charges that each time they face an opposing idea, they declare it upon the person. Like speech against Islam, against supreme leadership, and against national security! And these charges bring high punishments. I don't want to talk politics and stuff, as I am in Iran. I just wish every artist freedom to express their minds and souls, which is hard to come by. Years of prison for some art is what only a stone age ideology can decide is fair!

Song of the Seas (EP) by Roaring Empyrean

How did you first get into the darker, more expressive side of music? For example, what records have been most influential to you? When did you first start playing an instrument?

This is the most interesting question so far. As a child, I remember my father starting the day with some Pink Floyd, continue it with Metallica, sometimes going softer to Eagles or Eloy. This made me to not get into mainstream pop media even at an early age. He also listened to a lot of Kitaro and Enigma back then. And I got some Vangelis compilation from my uncle. Before 10, I was listening to rock and new age more than anything else, but I was always looking for the extremes in my life, in whatever aspect.

And so in music, I started listening to Linkin Park and System of A Down. They were fast, harsher, and wilder. But you know, there is always a loop. What is hotter than red? When you heat something, it turns red, then yellow and white. What's next? It turns blue! A cold color, but it’s even hotter. I liked to have this hotness of blue which is cold! So, instead of speed (red) I turned into slow (blue), which is more extreme.

I don't know if I make any sense at this point or not, but this is the real motivation for me to dig deeper in slower, heavier music. When I found doom, I was like someone who had reached his destination after a long journey. Doom is that hot blue. It is that extreme paradoxical matter to me. However, I didn't enter doom from the traditional door.

Many young musicians leave all they have to pursue musicianship.

In Iran, metalheads find interest more in death and black metal, as well as power and symphonic. It is hard to come by someone who started metal with stoner, sludge or psychedelic rock. Not impossible, but hard. I entered the doom from the gothic, folk, and death subgenres with acts like Empyrium and Saturnus. But now I appreciate every good metal, especially any doom I can find. That ache for extreme, however, made my primary taste to be funeral doom as we talk now.

Many records helped my musical imagination to go diverse. Vangelis' 'Direct' (1988) is amongst the most influential to me. Each track on that record is in a different style and different color. Vangelis has a diverse musical ground and his works have always been an inspiration to me. You can go right from electronic to orchestral and back to a more rockish sound all in one track! "Intergalactic Radio Station" is definitely my favorite track on that record.

On the metal side, I can't imagine anything more influential than Empyrium's LP, 'Songs of Moors and Misty Fields' (1997). The heaviness and agony in the sound, accompanying various folk and symphonic elements which lead to ever rising feel of the music. It's a rising agony. Truly a masterpiece. Many bands are cold and sad. Empyrium's music is warm and sad to me. This makes them unique. A folksy, symphonic, heavy doomy sound.

And it is not good of me to fail to mention Arvo Pärt, the Estonian classical composer. His minimal depressing compositions made me look at music from a whole new perspective. There is always that minimalist sadness in it, but a call is always moving you forth in his works. Then there is one sudden glorious, majestic rise and a tragic fall afterwards in most of his compositions. My more recent neoclassical elements are definitely due to his works.

Cosmic (EP) by Roaring Empyrean

How did you get inspired to start writing your own music?

I've always loved making music. Composing, rather than playing an instrument. And there was this other thing, called synesthesia. It is a kind of rare mental condition in which two or more of the five primary senses find a way to connect, which aren't connected normally. It has many types. I, however, can see the sounds. It makes me see every sound in my mind in terms of a shape, color, movement/direction, surface roughness, and brightness. I have had this condition since I can remember.

I don't see anything meaningful though, just some random shapes. Like the cello has a thick, dark green, rough line shape at lower notes and a bright, shining, thin green light at higher notes. So when I listened to music, there was a world of colors dancing in my mind and it fascinated me so much. I didn't know this was a thing until age 15.

You are alone in the scene here. Stores won't sell your physical releases and stages to perform are hard to get.

Being able to bring my own desired colors in music was something I wanted to do for a long time. I first started playing guitar back in high school, but that didn't give me the diversity I wanted. So I started creating instrumental tracks which were nowhere near metal -- mostly New Age music with synths. As time passed, my love for doom and heavier sounds found a way into my music. I used many instruments to paint my tracks: cello for green, piano for purple and blue, violin for yellow, sitar synths for shining red points, and guitar riffs for orange -- like a massive wall. My love for New Age and doom metal made me think of that paradoxical extreme once again. Why not try combining dark and heavy doom and funeral doom with bright atmospheric new age? This was when Roaring Empyrean came to life back in 2011.

As many New Age acts, I'd like my music to take the listener on a journey in their minds and make them think -- think about themselves and their existence. People today just follow what they are made to follow, and don't ask why. They don't think about why things are the way they are in this modern world. They lack thinking. They just obey and overfill themselves with whatever joys the unwritten rules are giving them.

What instruments, pedals, and amps do you have access to?

As for the gear, I'm afraid I rely so much on synthesizers and samplers -- not that I want to, but the poor economy here prevented me many times from getting the equipment and instruments I want. We don't produce any non-Iranian instruments, so everything is an imported product, and comparing the falling Rial to GBP or the US dollar, for someone like me, it is still impossible. But I have plans to leave Iran. Maybe then I can get the gear I want and make more lively sounds. But I can't keep quiet and not make music 'till then.

The Monarch (EP) by Roaring Empyrean

Have you had the opportunity to perform publicly?

No, never have I performed public. And I have no intention yet, unless I gather the gear I want. However, I've always liked to perform in a symphony once in my life. Maybe one day.

If you could play anywhere in the world, what would be your top scenes and would there any bands you'd love to be on the same bill with?

Interesting question! My doomy, metallic side likes to perform in the doomiest places. I'd like to perform in a sanctuary or a cave, as I have seen in some festivals like Doom Shall Rise, which is sadly is no longer going on. But there are many. Tokyo, London, and the US are generally places I'd like to perform. The other, non-metal side of me would like to perform at the Vienna Musikverein concert hall with a full orchestra and metal set together performing Roaring Empyrean.

These dreams surely seem impossible now, but there is this Persian saying: "Let the youth dream." I'd be honored to perform alongside Shape of Despair, Pantheist, Worship, Mournful Congregation, and Ankhagram more than others in the scene, but I'd be glad to play along any at all.

Mournful Congregation has a track called "The Rubaiyat" in which they sing translations of Hakim Omar Khayam's Rubaiyat -- short poems in a certain style. This makes them so respected in my heart, as I love Omar Khayam and we read those poems here as they are in native Old Persian. I'd like to play an opener for them.

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[essenceoffilm]

“Is She Real?” and Other Distant Dreams within Dreams: Fifteen Films Which Are Completely Their Own Thing

There are films which stick to one’s mind due to their greatness as well as those which do the same for their extreme inferiority. Mediocre films have a tendency to leave one’s mind like an uneventful day once the night falls. Then there are films which one keeps coming back to because they are completely their own thing. These are films which stay in memory due to their striking originality. They might be masterpieces, and thus greatness could be among the explanans for the phenomenon of preservation, but they do not have to be. In terms of quality or personal preference, these films might be somewhere in the middle. They elude the nightfall of oblivion on other grounds. Although their survival of the test of time can thus be explained by reference to uniqueness, it should be emphasized that uniqueness in this case does not mean any conventional weirdness or doing the extraordinary. The notion I am interested here is not what you might call in-your-face uniqueness (feel free to insert a list of contemporary “indie” directors). Rather, I am interested in the unique unique. I am talking about films which stay with you, but you can’t really point your finger at them and say why; they stay with you not because of quirkiness, of artistic mastery, of historical significance, of intricate story or peculiar characters, but because of an utterly original approach to cinematic discourse -- which might, of course, include all of these to altering degrees. Such originality might be less obvious, but it is there, it is real, and it is singular.

The following list of fifteen unique films will not include the obvious candidates from the first films which did this or that to the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird adventures. I have tried to resist the urge to go where the fence is lowest and make a list of “weird movies”; instead I have tried to focus on a more subtle notion of uniqueness. The challenge as well as the allure of list-making are the constant limitations one sets for oneself. That is also the reason why no director pops up twice in the list. Another yardstick for a unique film of this kind is that the film in question cannot really be compared to anything else. Or if it can, the comparison remains loose at best. Hence the absence of films from auteurs whose bodies of work form distinct unique wholes but precisely as wholes, not singular parts. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Rouch, Michelangelo Antonioni, you name it. All of them managed to craft an original cinematic discourse, but they developed the execution of that discourse in countless films that form an admirable whole of aesthetic consistency. 

So, here, I am not interested in cultural peculiarity, a director’s originality, or uniqueness within a genre. I am interested in a slightly different kind of personality with regard to cinematic discourse. Although each of the following fifteen films exemplifying this unique uniqueness obviously belong to a director’s oeuvre, I believe that all of them stick out in one way or another. They have not been listed in order of personal preference or quality but in terms of uniqueness (which is, of course, a notion difficult to define, and which is a notion not completely free from personal preference and quality, I’m sure). As such, they tell another story, perhaps unique by nature, about the enigma of the seventh art.

15. Cria cuervos (1976, Carlos Saura, SPAIN)

It is an indescribable delight to witness Carlos Saura’s magnum opus Cria cuervos (1976) unfold before you for the very first time. Since the film, which tells the story about a young girl and her two sisters who try to cope with growing up after the death of their parents, was released one year after Francisco Franco’s death, it has become something of a standard interpretation to watch Cria cuervos as an allegorical tale of "the children of Spain” coping with the loss of their patriarchal leader in a new social reality. Yet any serious spectator will tell you that this is just one side of the film’s multi-layered coin of meanings. Its ambiguous structure might tie in with the prevalent narrative tendencies of Saura’s generation of left-wing Spanish directors, but it also works as a metaphor for the vague human mind. Not only cutting but also panning between the present, the past, and an imagined future, the film unfolds as a poignant story about loss and longing, the desire to be somewhere else, something else, some other time.  One of the best films about childhood ever made, Cria cuervos denies romantic innocence without falling into the trap of naive pessimism. It embraces childhood as a part of being human, being mortal, being without something, being toward loss, being as always losing something.

The most famous scene from the film -- and an example of just this -- is definitely the scene where the young girl, played by the unforgettable Ana Torrent, listens to a pop song “Porque te vas” by Jeanette, a nostalgic love song about leaving that reminds the girl of her mother’s death.  A touching moment beyond words that can only happen in the cinema, this scene exemplifies beautifully the tendency of children to cling onto seemingly insignificant objects that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The images where the girl quietly moves her lips in synchronization with the song are breath-taking and heart-breaking. The way how Saura executes this brief scene, in one sequence shot, is just so original, so inimitable, and so Saura. The emotions are not clearly visible on the child’s face, most likely because she is unable to understand let alone express them, but they come from another place that lies somewhere in between of sound and image. The context for this scene is her frustration with her aunt, who she briefly impersonates (”turn down the music”), which further pushes the obvious meanings and the obvious feelings outside. Maybe it is just a random pop song? What is left is the ambiguity of meaning and feeling. And that resonates. Powerfully. I have never seen anything quite like it. These are unique images which speak loudly about the power of cinema. Some might say that what makes Cria cuervos as unique as it is are Ana Torrent’s dark button eyes, but, in reality, it is how Saura frames them, how he lights them, and how he cuts from them. Cria cuervos has no single detail which would exhaust Saura’s style; yet his sense of composition, his choice of shot scale, his sense of color, sound, and movement are in every second of the film; they are characterized by the subtlest nuances which distinguish an ordinary beautiful object from a true work of art.

14. Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Abbas Kiarostami, IRAN)

Abbas Kiarostami’s penchant for meta-cinematic discourse, which addresses enduring human themes through postmodern questioning of the possibilities of representation, reaches a peak in Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Close-Up). Based on true events, it tells the peculiar story about a poor Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian (played by himself, like all the performers in the film) who pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf for the Ahankas, an upper-class Iranian family to whom Sabzian told that he wanted to use them and their house for his next film. When Sabzian’s hoax was revealed, the Ahankha family sued him only to drop charges after Sabzian’s intentions proved out to be more complex than those of a traditional impostor. Kiarostami mixes documentary footage with staged scenes of what happened to the extent that it is impossible for the spectator to make a distinction. Not because of slyness, or Kiarostami’s talent to cover his tracks, but precisely because the distinction disappears: when the people involved are placed in front of the camera, acting out what has happened in the not-so-distant past, there is no longer a sense of staging but of being.

In a marvelous moment of poetic intuition and cinematic genius, Kiarostami’s camera picks up an empty spray can rolling downhill on asphalt. In the spirit of the “phenomenological realism” of the Italian neorealists, Kiarostami’s objets trouvés, like the empty spray can, are not symbols for something else. It might be juicy to see meaning written in the code of the empty spray can, say, in terms of the looming void behind the roles we all play, but Kiarostami’s camera uncovers it as a mere abandoned tool. Heidegger would call it Vorhanden, a being present-at-hand, whose factual existence is obvious to us after it has lost its functional purpose in its appropriate context, its primordial being as Zuhanden, a being ready-to-hand that one surrounds oneself with in the everyday reality of practical life. Even if this coarsely rolling empty spray can was the postmodern alternative to Sisyphus’ rock, it would be more a metonymy than a metaphor. It is a desolate, cast-off tool whose lonely mundane being paradoxically charms us in its banality. It is, what we might call in the spirit of anticipation, the taste of cherry.

Here, in the peculiar zone between metaphor and metonomy, meaning and the lack of it (or independent meaning), inhabited by empty spray cans, lies the uniqueness of Nema-ye Nazdik. There is nothing holy or sacred in Kiarostami’s images. The material density of the rough texture of the depicted reality drains from them. The close-ups of the film -- whether in actual shot scale or in narrative intimacy achieved by precisely restrictive framing and extensive use of the off-screen space -- startle us with this banality of the facticity of being and the phenomenal surface of reality. The final close-up of the film shows us Sabzian, looking down, holding a bouquet at the gate of the Ahanka residence where Makhmalbaf has taken him to make amends. One senses the Chaplinesque tragedy of life in close-up. It is tragic because there is no comfort from contextualization; there is a factual detail thrown at us in its strange existential disclosure. A rolling empty spray can or a structured identity at ruins -- revealed, stripped, naked. The human theme of longing coalesces with the meta-cinematic theme of the possibility of representation as one feels the unquenchable thirst for escape, the yearning to be someone else in this banal world of objects-at-present. Where else in the cinema does one find all of this? 

13. The Wrong Man (1956, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

Although Hitchcock is definitely a genre director, meaning that he really devoted his whole career to the genre of suspense (whether in thriller, horror, espionage, or adventure), he made a lot of films which pushed the limits of genre aesthetics, conventional narration, and classical style toward unexplored territories in the land of film. Hitchcock’s legacy is in fact constituted precisely by his relentless desire to look for new ways of cinematic expression. The most obvious example would probably be the “trilogy” in which Hitchcock tested -- and, perhaps to popular opinion, failed -- the slow aesthetics of the long take: Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), and Stage Fright (1950). Their uniqueness is admirable, and the two latter border on masterpiece, but the most unique of Hitchcock’s films is, I believe, The Wrong Man (1956).

If Hitchcock, the great manipulator of his audience whose “buttons” he loved to push, is placed in the group of directors who mastered formalist montage over realist mise-en-scène, following a heavily Bazinian distinction, we might conclude that The Wrong Man is the closest Hitchcock ever got to cinematic realism. Although the film does manipulate the spectator, guiding their gaze throughout rather than giving them the freedom of deep focus and multiplanar composition (the cardinal virtues of Bazin’s theory), its austere mise-en-scène, economic narration, and minimalist editing make it Hitchcock’s most Bressonian film. Interestingly enough, and this will bring us to the film’s uniqueness in a moment, Hitchcock’s biggest fan and André Bazin’s most famous disciple, François Truffaut first expressed great appreciation for The Wrong Man when it came out and later disowned the film in his famous interview book with Hitchcock [1].

The passage where Truffaut challenges Hitchcock, not in order to humiliate him but in order to get him to defend his artistic choices, is among the best parts of the whole interview book. Their discussion concerns the scene where the protagonist, played by Henry Fonda, is taken to his prison cell where he does not belong to because he really has not committed the crime he is being accused of committing. There is no dialogue or voice-over narration to tell us what the character is going through, but Hitchcock’s cinematic narration still visually focalizes into his internal, first-person point of view, while switching to an external, non-focalized third-person perspective in medium shots of the character in captivity. Hitchcock cuts between these medium close-ups of the character’s face as he is looking at something and point of view shots of the austere cell that serves as the object of his gaze. There is no music, no sound -- just stark images of a narrow, grey space. The calm cutting between these two types of shots manages to reflect the character’s inner life which becomes, so to speak, externalized by cinematic means. It is as though his mind extended to the space whose austerity became to articulate his experience of imprisonment, isolation, and, ultimately, loss of self. The non-subjective space turns subjective; its concrete features start to channel the character’s mental states in ways which contemporary directors like Lucrecia Martel have mastered.

The problem Truffaut has with the scene is its ending. The scene concludes with a medium shot where the protagonist leans against the wall of his cell, eyes closed, distraught, powerless. Suddenly, non-diegetic music starts playing on the soundtrack and the camera begins swirling in a circular loop around the character. As the movement of the camera accelerates, the music intensifies and finally reaches a crescendo coinciding with a fade-to-black to the next scene. Truffaut disliked this shot because it seemed to break with the Bressonian asceticism that Hitchcock had been practicing prior to it. It is also noteworthy to add that never again is there anything like this in the rest of the film (and thus the shot does break against the norm of consistency): The Wrong Man returns to its minimalist, Bressonian roots, letting go of the striking expressivity of such camera movement (which is not used to follow a character or reveal further details of narrative significance in the diegetic space). One might recall, for example, the unforgettable shot which dissolves the praying protagonist’s face with the “right man’s” face, and what a completely different feel that shot has to it -- it is something Bresson would never do, but it is something the Bressonian side of Hitchcock does.

Despite Truffaut’s challenge, Hitchcock refused to defend his film, disappointingly noticing that it was not that important to him. That might be the case, but it might also be that Hitchcock was not sure of his artistic choice, or he didn’t know how to explain his intuition, or he didn’t want to argue about such matters. Maybe he thought he had failed in his experiment. Either way, it is this moment which always gets me. It feels a little awkward, and it always pushes me just a little away from the film, to a strange borderline zone of cringe -- but, at the same time, it feels wonderful. It’s the moment where one can so clearly see Hitchcock’s legacy as an innovator and a re-generator, looking for new ways to make films -- and not always with success. It’s the moment when you realize that you are not watching Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped) but The Wrong Man. It goes against the realist style which avoids blatant and outspoken expression, but it goes so well with Hitchcock’s own style where a sudden cut to an extreme long shot from an extreme high-angle on the top of the United Nations building is completely natural. It’s also one of those moments, definitely alongside the great dissolve of the two faces, where one can sense the presence of cinematic uniqueness. Although I think Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is a better film, there is really nothing like The Wrong Man. From Hitchcock’s startling opening monologue to the inexplicable happy end, bordering on Sirkian irony, The Wrong Man is really its own idiosyncratic thing.

12. Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, FRANCE)

Master director Max Ophüls’ final film and cinematic legacy Lola Montès (1955) is the definitive cult film. It’s strange, it’s wild, and its off-the-rails uniqueness made it a massive flop. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of... the dreams in cult film land. A lavishly told story about a woman with hundreds of lovers, who is now presented to us as a circus attraction, did not resonate with contemporary audiences. With the exception of the new film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who were to define the cinema of the following decade, everybody hated the film. To those who understood the magic, however, it was wonderful. To those who still do, it is beyond divine. The combination of box-office and critical failure with a huge budget and an unprecedented desire to challenge convention from the 50-year-old director, who was soon to pass away, turned Ophüls into a martyr figure for the new generation of French filmmakers. Like Orson Welles, Ophüls was -- to them in their own land -- a misunderstood genius, a maestro who died two years after the release of his final film that found too few kindred spirits.

What makes the case of Ophüls’ martyrdom so fascinating is the fact that on paper Lola Montès sounds like everything Truffaut et co. hated. It is based on a novel, its script has other writers in addition to Ophüls, it has an all-star cast (and without the obvious choice, the Ophüls favorite of the 50′s, Danielle Darrieux!), and it has lavish production values backed by a big budget. Does this not sound like le cinéma de qualité par excellence?

The fact that Lola Montès sounds like dull quality cinema on paper, however, does not mean that it looks like it on celluloid. And that’s what makes it unique. Known for his penchant for sumptuously elaborate camera movement (to the extent that a camera which is not moving on tracks simply looks naked in the Ophüls universe), Ophüls went an extra mile to make his forward-tracking dolly shots work in a wide circus arena without revealing the tracks. Resonating with the width of the diegetic space and the volume brought to it by such cinematography, Ophüls also widened his film into color and the CinemaScope aspect ratio for the first time in his career. Unlike anyone prior to him and few after, during a time when CinemaScope had not been around for longer than two years, Ophüls made the unexpected decision to play with the aspect ratio. For most of the screen time, we see the events unfold in 2.55:1, but, every now and then, when mood or character identification so requires, Ophüls narrows the aspect ratio back to the Academy ratio by placing curtains on both sides of the lens. The peculiar technique of altering the aspect ratio within shots in itself is enough to make Lola Montès unique, but the way it connects to the theme of the theater -- not only as the circus milieu but also as the publicization of the private sphere -- and the surprising yet accurate (which never feel too much on-the-nose) choices Ophüls makes in using it turn Lola Montès into a bizarre marvel. 

11. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)

On paper, again, Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947) seems like nothing but a love triangle done to death. Joan Crawford plays a woman who is having an affair with a married man, played by the impeccable Dana Andrews, but in the middle of their troubled affair -- that would suffice to constitute a love triangle -- enters a returning war veteran, played by Henry Fonda (the only actor to appear twice on this list!), who also catches the woman’s eye. The film unfolds as a series of moments which push the female protagonist to the embrace of one man or the other. What makes the film so unique, however, is its original cinematic discourse, its use of style and narration. In his admirably insightful new book on 40′s Hollywood, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2018), professor of film studies, David Bordwell calls Daisy Kenyon “one of the most psychologically opaque films of 1940′s” [2]. Preminger’s cinematic narration is characteristically restrictive of narrative information. There is no voice-over, which would provide the spectator information about the characters’ inner motivations and feelings, but this is only made more ambiguous by the dialogue where the characters keep making contradictory statements about themselves and others. It is difficult to keep track of their mood swings as well as their cognitive discontinuities, and make any cohesive conception of their true motivations and feelings. This was yet to become the dominant characteristic of modern European cinema (mainly Antonioni, above all), but here it blends with classical Hollywood.

The film is filled with strange moments of peculiar, recurring pauses in dialogue which enhance an ambiguity that starts to feel bigger than the characters and their petty worries. Fonda’s character suddenly ends a moment of conversation with Crawford’s by saying “my wife’s dead” without receiving a response of any kind from his romantic interlocutor. Similarly, he nonchalantly proclaims his love to her -- “I love you” -- but gets no response in another passing moment of indifferent quietude. There are no typical responses nor are there typical initiatives. There are only words that try to grab onto something but most often miss their targets that perhaps never even existed.

The lack of conventional non-diegetic music, the use of deep-focus cinematography, deep space compositions, and lingering shots create a mood of emptiness and despair, which reflect a deeper difficulty in expressing oneself. This theme is articulated on the formal level of style and narration, but it also becomes knitted into the story world toward the end when the courtroom sequence plays with the ideas of illogical human behavior and the impossibilities of finding out what people have done and felt. When one of the two men and the Crawford character embrace one another in the film's final shot, it is equally impossible for the spectator to believe that this is the stable, happy end of a typical Hollywood romance. It is merely another dumbfounded pause, another pointless initiative, another unnoticed response, which will soon be followed by quietude, distance, and alienation.

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir, AUSTRALIA)

Australian director Peter Weir has made a lot of weak films (I am not a fan of the sentimental Dead Poets Society [1989] or the pseudo-intellectual The Truman Show [1998] -- though I do have a little thing for Fearless [1993]), but his breakthrough film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is a real treat. A fictional account of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during an all-girls boarding school’s picnic on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, Picnic at Hanging Rock begins with a quasi-documentary opening text and concludes with an extra-diegetic voice-over discussing the case, making it seem as if the story was true. More than fooling the audience, this device guides them into another world, where something like this might have happened, and into the hypnotic trance of a mystery, all of which is enhanced, of course, by the first images of a foggy landscape and the girl’s words in voice-over:

What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

Weir’s greatest film leaves a lasting impression with its unique, impressionist aesthetics of pale colors, quiet sounds, soft focus, lush cinematography, eerie panpipes music, and an often strictly limited field of focus. It is as if the film had been shot through lace or a veil, giving the effect of the faded fantasy image of the romantic belle époque. The final jaded slow-motion shots of the group before the disappearance have an otherworldly quality. They bear a resemblance to impressionist paintings, but the jaded pace of the visual stream of the images emphasizes their mechanic artificiality as though these were paintings made with the first motion picture cameras. Weir’s narrative structure is likewise closer to poetry or painting than to prose as the focalization of the narration is constantly switching, the characters remain a mystery with their inner world and their psychological motives left completely in the dark, the relations between the diegetic events are vague to say the least, and Weir cuts between them in an unconventional fashion. It is nothing short of cinematic uniqueness which stays with the spectator for the rest of their life. One of the most sensitive and clever mystery films of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps astonishing with its whimsical combination of mystery and reportage, impressionism and mystique, the fantastical and the real.

9. A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Made in the days of Capra’s wartime propaganda series Why We Fight (1942-1945), whose patriotic spirit spread across the Atlantic to films calling for Anglo-American solidarity, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) defies tired cliches and patriotic sentiments in its utterly unique rhythm and tone. Taking Chaucer’s classic as an inter-textual framework, A Canterbury Tale focuses on three characters who, on their way to Canterbury, stop at a small village where a mysterious “glue-man” is terrorizing young women who dare to date soldiers. In contrast to most of the wartime productions of the time, Powell and Pressburger’s film turns its gaze from the grandiose to the minuscule, a small village that is unafraid to show its quirky silliness but as such grows into a metaphor for western civilization.

One of the famous director duo’s biggest critical and commercial flops, A Canterbury Tale defies easy classifications. What makes the film unique in a timeless sense lies in its tone and rhythm that are hard to describe. The set-up could mark the beginning of a frivolous farce, and the film is definitely not lost on moments of genuine hilarity, but, as a whole, A Canterbury Tale develops toward the area of peculiar pathos, humanistic tenderness, and profound melancholy. The mythic and the mundane, the romantic and the realist, the everyday and the sublime, the eternal and the transient all find their strange fusion in the film’s rendez-vous of distinct tones, moods, and ideas. Classical studio artificiality gets mixed with on-location authenticity, which is characterized by historical uniqueness as the contemporary spectator realizes that these places are no longer there, creating a tone like no other. In terms of rhythm, the film is always flowing without a hurry, yet never too slowly to announce itself as different or weird. The film’s uniqueness seems so simple, encapsulated in the smallest of things (the co-presence of the past and the present, the smell of the countryside that is imagined through the images, the allure of the any-space-whatevers), but it is so difficult to describe let alone achieve. It must be seen to be believed...

8. Dong (1998, Tsai Ming-Liang, TAIWAN)

The late 1990′s attracted some filmmakers to imagine eschatological scenarios and project them on the big screen. The approaching arrival of the new millennium generated visions of both anxiety and hope, but man’s relentless tendency toward end-of-the-world nightmares drew him closer to the former. These cinematic efforts on the brink of the new millennium usually vary between downright awful (Armageddon, 1998; End of Days, 1999) and surprisingly tolerable (12 Monkeys, 1995), but Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s -- who had made a reputation for himself with the understated tale of eroticism Ai qing wan sui(1994, Vive L’Amour), whose final shot in itself might earn its own prize of uniqueness -- Dong (1998, The Hole) shows not only genuine originality and imagination before new times but also a unique tonal combination of both emotions associated with the historic transition: fear and hope.

These emotions are tied together in the film’s thematic nexus of encountering something new, a theme that is treated by Ming-Liang appropriately in an utterly novel fashion. The story takes place in a block of flats in the semi-urban outskirts of a Taiwanese city where people live in quarantine due to the lack of clean water, a problem that has some dire consequences, fitting for the new millennium: without water, people turn into cockroach-like entities that crawl in the dark spaces of moist dirt and dry trash. Two people, a man and a woman, who try to survive in this situation, are united when a hole appears on the man’s floor (being the woman’s roof) due to plumbing renovations. This hole, which is both physical and emotional -- concrete to the point that we can sense its material urgency and abstract to the point that words are not enough to express it -- begins to generate unprecedented intimacy between the two. The characters rarely communicate. At best, they might yell at each other when the woman, the neighbor beneath, finds her ceiling leaking. But there is a more tender connection, one that cannot be expressed by them. In a stroke of charming genius, Ming-Liang uses 50′s-style musical sequences, where well-dressed characters sing Grace Chang’s songs and perform dance numbers that convey the introverted characters silent feelings in a manner that obfuscates more than it clarifies (there is no aha-moment tailored for the spectator). As these musical sequences take place in the same desolate urban spaces where the characters exist, Ming-Liang’s realist aesthetics of the long take, deep space compositions, and a detailed naturalist mise-en-scène of faded colors and flickering lights are challenged by romantic artifice. The space, which turns into its own character, starts dreaming. It dreams of becoming something else, somewhere else, far and away, safe from the arrival of the new.

As the world prepares for never-before-seen destruction, the holes in the characters’ souls become tangible in the form of a narrow gap, not only the grey chasm between the two apartments but also the distinction between these two diegetic dimensions (the world of song and the world of silence). As the new both anxiety-inducing and hope-awakening millennium approaches, the two characters encounter love, something they had not expected, something they had forgotten, something that appears in a totally unprecedented form -- to them as well as to us, the audience. This unique story provides us with an interlude to reflect. Where are we going? New times are coming. We can always look back to the past. We can find solace in its embrace. What is collapsing? What can be recovered? What will the abyss of the hole engulf? And what will it bring about in times of chaos? A new connection, a new intimacy, a new cinema?

7. Herz aus Glas (1976, Werner Herzog, GERMANY)

Shot mainly in director Werner Herzog’s home environment of Bavaria, accompanied with gorgeous landscape shots from all over the world which still merge with the same central milieu, as well as Popol Vuh’s score, Swiss yodeling, and medieval music, Herz aus Glas (1976, Heart of Glass) is the shining ruby in Herzog’s prolific yet familiar oeuvre. Although Herzog is often celebrated as an eccentric filmmaker whose cinema constitutes an entirely unique thing of its own, his films are usually quite clearly connected to one another, and one knows what to expect from them (which is also a compliment to Herzog’s auteur caliber). Herz aus Glas, however, brings a breath of fresh air into a catalog that already seems to be as fresh as fresh can be. It is definitely the film that sticks out. No other Herzog film employs his unquenchable desire to pursue new profound images as strongly and startlingly.

The story concerns a Bavarian town in late 18th century whose main source of income comes from blowing a rare type of ruby glass. When the secret of the ruby glass passes away with the town’s deceased master, a prophetic seer from the hills descends to the townspeople and foresees their destruction. To anyone who has seen the film, it is quite clear that the story is secondary to the film’s strange, private discourse which might be better left unanalyzed since its mere verbal description seems to aggregate an insult at worst and a failure at best.

While there are certainly more than one factor which explain the film’s incomparable uniqueness (the presence of seemingly unrelated landscape shots as an additional level of discourse, the ambiguous story as well as its elusive structure, the extremely stylized mise-en-scène that creates a sense of alienation and distance), the raison d’être for the film’s reputation obviously derives from Herzog’s exceptional decision to shoot the whole film with the actors under hypnosis. Consequently, the film is rife with images of hypnotized people who stare very attentively at something in the off-screen space -- something, an object, a sight, an event, something that remains a mystery to the hopelessly unaware spectator. In the physical space, the actors are obviously looking at something Herzog the hypnotist has guided them to look at, but in the diegetic space, the characters are looking with great attention and focus on their pre-determined doom. Their focus is startling because, despite their attentiveness, they do nothing but walk towards their demise. This works because, though pre-determined, their doom is indeterminate in the sense that they cannot really make any sense out of it. A stroke of genius on Herzog’s part, this heavily stylized acting turns into a metaphorical framework for a community which is under collective hypnosis heading out to the horizon of destruction with a sense of blind determination.

The film is totally alienated from classical story-telling, and many of its scenes take place in spaces which we might see only once and whose relations to the rest of the spaces remain unclear. Mapmakers of fictive worlds, beware. They are places which Herzog remembers from his childhood, or places which he has imagined for his past or future. There are many elements which would annoy the regular movie-goer from the slowly developing cry of a woman as she witnesses two seemingly dead men on the ground to the inexplicable bursts of laughter from the old man. There are plenty of scenes which seem to serve no clear purpose. There is a scene where a painting falls from the wall behind a man after which he tries to lift it, fails, and then returns to his original posture as if nothing had happened. There is also a sequence shot of a glassblower making a glass horse out of the melt matter. This scene has no obvious meaning in the film, nor should it; the shot is just there. It is there for us to marvel at it and to reflect on the beauty of craftsmanship, the art of glassblowing.

If the quest of Herzog’s cinema is to always look for new images, then Herz aus Glas delivers more than any of his films. One of the many peculiarities of the film are the recurring landscape shots from all over the world which remind one of Herzog’s brilliant documentary Fata Morgana (1971). These landscapes might be the visions of the attentively looking townspeople or not. As such, they might be images of destruction, of the end, or of the beginning -- or not. They might be an imagined landscape of origins. My personal favorite is the shot, which has been done mechanically by a frame-by-frame technique, of a river of clouds on the top of a forest. There is an enchanting mystique to this hypnotic image. When we look at it, we might think that it is about something, but we should not make the mistake of trying to explain what that something is. Nor should we find an external point of reference to call it a metaphor for something else. We should embrace its mere cinematic aboutness.

6. The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford, USA)

John Ford, the man who made westerns, is to modern America what Homer is to ancient Greece. Beyond the genre of lonely travelers in the wild west, Ford took his cinematic myth-making to other worlds. They Were Expendable (1944) provided the first signs of Ford’s unadorned and unsung sensitivities beyond the desert, which, after initial opposition, he was able to appreciate (sort of) after Lindsay Anderson pressed him on the emotional depth of the film in his celebrated interview book. The real deal when it comes to Ford’s hidden personality, his artistic ambition, and his aesthetic sensitivity, however, is The Quiet Man (1952), a film like no other if there ever was one. It is a unique, poetic fable of pastoral idyll, understated modern anxieties, battling dialectics of reality and fantasy.

A classical love story where a man, Sean Thornton, played by Ford soulmate John Wayne, returns to Ireland from America where he falls in love with Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara, The Quiet Man is like an idyllic postcard, a tale of the fantastical countryside that is presented in an overly romanticized fashion. Its humor, varying between masculine slapstick and battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy, would make the advocates of the me-too era cringe. However, I believe that Peter von Bagh was right in seeing the film as greater than life. To him, its scenes of love carry “metaphysical might.” [3] There is more to them than the eye can see. When Sean pulls Mary away from the door opened by ferocious wind to kiss her for the first time, there is a sense of baroque awe as Mary’s hems bend against her rigid legs in a gust of divine wind. Perhaps telling of its uniqueness, the film’s closest kindred spirit seems to be a film that looks totally different, Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which carries similar “metaphysical might.” 

The Quiet Man was not received well during its initial release. Its fable-like illusions threw away all hopes of Ford’s return to the realist cinema of Hollywood he helped establish in the late 30′s and early 40′s. The far landscapes of the wild west were replaced by a postcard idyllic Irish village of Inisfree where trains are late, chores can be put on a halt to chit-chat, and traditions persevere. From the beginning locus amoreus of a boat by lakeside at dusk to pastoral iconography of a redhead shepherding sheep, a priest fooling fish, and drunkards playing the accordion, The Quiet Man is Irish pastoral of 50′s American optimism. Despite the film’s idyllic nature and the romantic mise-en-scène that gives birth to it, one would be making the mistake if one concluded that The Quiet Man was completely lost on realism. “Inisfree is far from heaven, Mr. Thornton!,” reminds one character. It is rather that in it Ford manages to find a totally unique combination of realism and romanticism, the modern and the traditional, the American and the Irish, in a fashion that reminds me of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Sean escapes America, the land of freedom and opportunities, to his home country of Ireland. Although never stated explicitly in the film, one can see a social undertone, as noticed by von Bagh: during the Korean War, which was still going on, disillusions scattered throughout America. Inisfree’s distance from heaven might be lost on Sean’s nostalgic eyes, but he seems to imply something about the looming vicinity of realism to us when, upon seeing Mary for the first time, his yet undiscovered love interest and wife-to-be, he states: “is she real?”

It is, in fact, this scene, this first encounter between the lovers-to-be, that always gets me. Its uniqueness escapes words. The scene begins with a long full shot of Mary amid sheep, which is motivated as Sean’s point of view shot as the scene progresses. There is a cut to a low-angle medium shot of Mary, which is followed by a reverse shot of Sean and then another low-angle medium shot of Mary, as she slowly vanishes beyond the frames of the screen space. A return to the long full shot of Mary amid sheep is followed by a medium shot of Sean. Dumbfounded, amazed, looking afar, and hopelessly in love, he says: “Is she real?” Ford’s brilliant choices in montage and shot scale articulate the distance between the characters, which will be a recurring theme in the film -- “There’ll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary Kate!” -- while also bringing them in close intimacy that still remains a mystery to both of them. There is a heavenly feeling to all of this. Where are we? The modern Sean, escaping the disillusions of 50′s American optimism, might be asking himself: “Is this -- Inisfree -- real?” We, the viewers, we, the lovers of the film, we, the lovers of cinema, might be asking ourselves: “Is this -- The Quiet Man -- real?”

5. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Sergei Parajanov, USSR/UKRAINE)

Ukraine-born director, Sergei Parajanov’s breakthrough film Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) is on fire. It is on fire like a mixture of jazz and opera, a blend of ancient epic and modernist poem, a mishmash of waltz and jitterbug that never, for some odd unfathomable reason, feels haphazard. It feels eternal, timeless, and archaic, but, at the same time, contemporary and modern. The truly marvelous thing about all this is the fact that the story itself is a fairly traditional love story. Ivan and Marichka, whose families are rivals by heart, fall in love at a young age. After Marichka drowns in an accident, Ivan falls into depression but then remarries. In his new life of work and dull everyday chores, he is tormented by the memory of his first love. In the end, he dies either due to a hit from a sorcerer, who has made passes at Ivan’s new wife, or due to his incurable loneliness in a void universe without love.

Such a classical romantic tale acquires an unprecedented energy from Parajanov’s cinematography that is characteristically free and mobile -- in stark contrast to that of Sayat Nova (1969, The Color of Pomegranates), the director’s best-known film. The handheld camera is always on the move. It does not shake in the sense that the contemporary spectator has become accustomed to identify “handheld camerawork;” in fact, it can be very steady at times, but it moves quickly and ferociously. It pans so fast from one place to another that the eye does not register the spaces between the two steady screen spaces before and after the pan. It can appear to be fixed on a spot, but then it starts gliding or flying as in the amazing shot of Ivan lying on the large raft on the river. Watching the film unfold on the big screen is like having your head dislocated in some strange non-physical sense. One might think that such energy is distracting and makes one pay too much attention to the cinematography. The effect, however, is the opposite. It’s hypnotic. Everything feels intuitive and natural. One simply feels bewildered before this film to the extent that one starts imagining new images to the film. It is as if the camera found freedom and was liberated from its physical ties, becoming a disembodied eye whose movements are impossible to be predicted. The spectator never knows where the camera is going to move next, what the next angle will be, or in which scale the next shot shall be.

As such, the camera turns into a lyrical speaker of a poem or a stream-of-consciousness narrator of prose who identifies with the characters’ experience that cannot be accessed unambiguously. The most obvious example is not surprisingly the use of point of view shot when Ivan’s father is axed to death: red blood fills the screen, which is followed by a strange image of red silhouettes of running horses. Less obviously subjectivized stylistic decisions, where the camera identifies with characters’ experience, include the beginning scene where there is a “point of view shot” from a falling tree’s perspective, which is followed by a hypnotic spin of the camera as though it detached from material reality after a character dies under the tree. During the first embrace of Ivan and Marichka, Parajanov’s camera keeps the characters in focus and in a tight medium close-up, but the intimacy is complicated by implied visual distance: the use of the telephoto lens coalesces multiple layers of tree branches and other flora as a soft, flat veil enfolding the lovers in their natural innocence as the camera encircles them in eternity. When Ivan falls into depression after Marichka’s death, not only are the colors replaced by a surprising shift to black-and-white but also the movement of the camera becomes significantly calmer and slower. When Ivan starts feeling the presence of the dead Marichka -- as a ghost, as a memory -- there is a series of jump cuts showing Marichka behind Ivan’s window, rather than a return to the previous stylistic program. All of these exemplify cinema’s ability to subjectivize without the use of point of view shot or voice-over. Parajanov realizes this potentiality beautifully and uses different cinematic means without restriction but never without a consistent vision.

There are shadows from the past which obstruct Ivan and Marichka’s innocent love, but there are also shadows from the new past which prevent Ivan from moving on with his life. In an unforgettable scene that is still unparalleled in film history, Marichka’s ghost entices the delirious Ivan, recently struck by the sorcerer, to death in a wintry forest. Both characters move toward each other, but they do not seem to be walking in the medium shots that only show their heads moving against the background of the white forest as their voices sing a song of love without their lips moving. There is a strange sense of movement and ceased time. There is a touching sense of the wonderful yet painful grip of love. There it is, unshadowed, unforgotten, now.

4. Sud pralad (2004, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, THAILAND)

In terms of mere structure, this film is bonkers. Hardly ever has a film dropped as many jaws as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breakthrough feature Sud pralad (2004, Tropical Malady) during its initial festival release. At first glance, it might be tedious, it might be irritating, it might be, well, just too mysterious. It might feel too private. As one allows the images and the sounds to sink in, however, this masterful, dualistically structured film starts to make sense like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Even more so than Lynch’s, I believe, Weerasethakul’s film is one of the best and most unique films ever made about love.

What begins as a love story between two men, a soldier and a country boy working at an ice factory, ending in an unexplained break-up, suddenly turns into a silent fable about a shape-shifting shaman and a soldier. The second part can be seen as an allegory for the first -- or vice versa. They comment on one another. They are co-dependent. They are lovers. There isn’t one without the other. What is more important than the logical connections between the two parts (one can either see them as flip sides of the same story or as a continuous story in the same fictive world) are their sensual and emotional resonances. Being a love story, the film’s English title (which is not a direct translation, one might add) already suggests a peculiar vision of love: not as a cure or as a utopia but as a malady, a sickness, something that consumes one’s body and soul. As the two men separate, they first devour each other. There is a sense of mystery in the air. What happened? Exactly. Who knows. Who’s to say?

Since their feelings -- both in initial infatuation and in the out-of-the-blue separation -- cannot be explained in words, they are articulated by the fable. The soldier is being consumed by the shaman, he is dying because of him, but he is also dependent on the shaman and must approach him. As the shaman shifts into a tiger, the aspect of consumption becomes poignantly discernible. Weerasethakul uses many lingering shots in the dark forest that suggest a fluctuation between the two characters. There is movement in the screen space, but is it the soldier or the tiger? They finally face each other in a bigger-than-life scene of intense stares that will haunt you for an eternity. The stare of the tiger occupies the screen space, dominating, hypnotizing the audience. There’s a strange sense of fear but also of lust; there’s an inexplicable desire to surrender as the malady takes over. Weerasethakul’s long take allows the tiger’s stare to sink in, to drill down to the spectator’s spine where its sensuous force begins to fester. The moment of devouring is at hand. This scene breaks hearts and sews them back together. 

Weerasethakul’s inimitable cinematic discourse, which operates on the immediate level of senses and sensations, uncovers animals and other natural entities in their own right, as they appear, rather than as conventional metaphors for something else. They are embraced as the Other. Indeed: Sud pralad is a film about primordial otherness of everything else beyond oneself, a theme that Weerasethakul tackles by telling a love story. Because in love one experiences otherness most intimately but also most painfully. One might be very close to the other, but one also experiences the growing distance. One must confront the insurmountable challenge to understand the other. There is one’s own mind to keep one company, and then there is the rest of the world. There is the man devouring one’s hand and then going away for good. There are street lights in the night. There is music in the air. There is a sense of heartrending wonder. There is the intensely staring tiger ready to devour the one. And there is the one ready to take the plunge.

3. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies, UK)

By its enigmatic title alone, Terence Davies’ heavily autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) invites expectations of originality, and those expectations are not disappointed to the slightest. The ambiguous title is rife with meaning, but at the most direct level it works as a structural point of reference since the film is distinctly divided into two separate parts. A story about a working-class family living in Liverpool, the film’s first part, “Distant Voices” focuses on the power the family’s father has on their co-existence in 1940′s, while the second part, “Still Lives” portrays the lives of the children in their early adulthood in the 1950′s -- away from the presence of the war but still far from the new youth culture that was about to emerge. Under the father’s abusive influence, they cried and sang in a bomb shelter; now, safe from heavy rain in a cinema, they cry as they watch Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). This is but one parallel in a film where things get entangled, where popular culture, communal singing, historical events, universal themes, and extremely personal memories fuse in an unprecedented network of cinematic thinking.

The peculiar two-part structure, made striking by the two-year gap in production and inevitable change in some of the crew, would be enough to mark the film as singular, but this narrative division is only one element in an idiosyncratic whole that constantly draws the spectator’s attention to the artificial nature of the cinematic representation in question. The film’s narration itself is self-aware to the extent that the spectator inevitably pays attention to it: the non-linear representation of past events in an order that seems associative at best is bound to make the spectator ponder representation. Davies thematizes representation or, more accurately put, memory, its mechanics, and the possibility of representing and remembering. On an immediately stylistic level, Davies employs heavy use of light coming from an off-screen source as well as over-exposed light in the screen space which, together with the pale and tainted colors that filter every image, give a peculiar, golden hue to the sepia-like, nostalgic mise-en-scène reminiscent of scuffed photographs. The cinematography, which varies between utter stillness and slow pans and dolly shots, often gives a strong impression of tableaux vivants from early cinema, which remind one of old family photographs. The same goes for the film’s strikingly exact and centralized compositions: never has a symmetrical two-shot felt this precise and powerful, static and dynamic at the same time -- artificial and proud of it.

On both levels of narration and style, Davies draws the spectator’s attention to the artificiality of everything: that all this has been “produced” -- structured and conditioned by a mind that is reminiscing something. That something belongs to a world that no longer is, and that never was just like this. It is an utterly unique world that is only here and now, in the moment one is watching this film and remembering it in their own mind. There is a sense of discipline and order which always leave something outside, making it absent, outside of memory’s reach, while encapsulating something, making it present, within memory’s constituted and conditioned sphere. On both levels, Davies’ film is strongly characterized by elements of distance and stillness as his filmic portrayal of family leaves his characters relatively distant, beyond our absolute reach, in picturesque mobile paintings that invite us to reflect what lies beyond their frames of stillness and distance, sight and sound.

2. Zerkalo (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR)

It’s nothing. Everything will be alright. Everything will be...

A monumental yet intimate masterpiece of memory, undoubtedly the best film on this list, if not simply the best film ever made, and one of the few films I have seen more than ten times, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal film Zerkalo (1975, Mirror) is beyond flawless. Like Bresson, Tarkovsky certainly has a very distinctive oeuvre that feels consistent in its stylistic unity, but there is something intensely singular about Zerkalo that elevates it above a body of six other masterpieces or fringe-masterpieces. Some directors have tried to follow Tarkovsky in creating their own mirrors, but none have achieved either the same level of quality or of uniqueness. The beautiful thing about the film is, and this is key to its uniqueness as well, that Tarkovsky manages to bring the private to the public (not only by juxtaposing his own experiences with Russian history but also by uncovering the universal structure in human experience) without ever coming close to sacrificing the innate privacy of some of his images at the altar of effortless intelligibility.

The first time viewer is bound to be confused by the enigma. In the course of repeated viewings, however, the fuzzy reflection begins to take shape. A dying poet recalls his life which unfolds in sequences that take place in three different time frames: his childhood in the early 30′s, his adolescence during WWII in the early 40′s, and his parenthood in the late 60′s. He ventures into the abyss of his suffering as well as that of his nation and humankind in general, but, in the midst of pain, a vague promise of peace is discovered. Mixing archival footage with traditional scenes of dialogue on different time frames, reciting poems and playing music, using oneiric images as well as concrete motifs of mirrors and fire, juxtaposing colors with sepia and black-and-white, Zerkalo coalesces the personal with the collective and the dreamlike with the material. It creates an unparalleled rhythm that has an eerie, otherworldly feel to it, which, nevertheless, feels so intimately tied to nature and sensation that one can almost touch it. But when you reach your hand toward the mirror, it once again reveals its elusive shape that escapes your grasp. 

In its stream of impressions and ideas, the poetically flowing narrative of Zerkalo works as a lucid parable of the human mind. The mere viewing experience of the film works as a cheap form of psychoanalysis for some. Film scholar and programmer Antti Alanen calls it “a space odyssey into the interior of the psyche” [4]. The ambiguously focalized narration flows in ways which resemble free association. There is an event and there is another; there is an image, then a sound; there are pauses and gaps, inexplicable connections of heart and soul, lines drawn by a tormented mind trying to comprehend and grasp something that, as he himself puts it, cannot be expressed by words. From grand sights such as the collapse of the house and the flight of a bird through a window to tender details of a human hand before a flame, a redhead with a blistered lip in the snow, and a cut from one gaze to another, the film’s narrative flow follows a logic of its own, a logic on a higher level, a logic that feels consistent but cannot be laid out in non-cinematic terms. To some, there is spiritual force in this, the power of both the subconscious and the Hegelian Weltgeist traversing across the images.

Zerkalo tackles questions that are no less than the biggest but also the simplest in life: What is human life? What is its meaning? What is its meaning to us as individuals and as mankind? Why and how is it experienced as meaningful? There are no answers, there is no great revelation, and how could there be, but there are little junctures of awe, touches with the world, small manifestations of fire before us. The protagonist’s ex-wife wonders why something like the burning bush never appeared to her. We might wonder the same. In Tarkovsky’s mind, it seems to me, this is due to the loss of connection to something transcendent to us and our petty affairs -- not necessarily to god but perhaps to nature, to values as such, to what really matter, to our primordial origin. Or, perhaps, more modestly, there is a loss of connection to the mirrors around us, manifesting as the inability to accept bewilderment and live in lack of comprehension. The film is full of moments of such transcendence: the bird landing on the boy’s head in a strikingly beautiful composition of Brueghelian proportions, the massive gust of wind blowing over the departing man on the serene field after a chance encounter, the mysterious fall of an oil lamp from the table on the wooden floor, and the disappearance of a faint ring stain on a table as the lady vanishes. What are these magical moments, these manifestations of burning bushes, other than Ereignisse that ask us to accept irrationality, to look into the mirror and marvel? The great revelation to the big questions might never come, but the reflection on the mirror keeps getting clearer only to be beclouded again and vice versa.

1. Sans soleil (1983, Chris Marker, FRANCE)

Contrarily to what people say, the use of the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: all I have to offer is myself. [5]

These are the words of Chris Marker. A private recluse, a documentarian, a poet and a reporter of the cinema, Marker escapes easy classification. The creator of the most unique short film La jétée (1962), Marker is also celebrated as the father of subjective documentary. After making what is most likely the best depiction of the political turmoil in the second half of the 20th century in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977, A Grin without a Cat), Marker turned inward -- or did he? -- in the pioneer piece of whatever you want to call it, poetic essay film or subjective documentary, Sans soleil (1983, Sunless). “I could tell you that the film intended to be,” Marker affirms, “and is nothing more than a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies.“ [6]

Anybody can make home movies, and everybody does in these pathetic days of YouTube vlogging, but only Marker can make home movies that are simultaneously ultimately his and ultimately ours. A home movie for the ages, Sans soleil tackles the perennial topic of French cinema (think of the whole oeuvre of Alain Resnais), the difficulty of memory, which has both individual and social implications for the representation of the past. In the beginning, there is an image of children in Iceland. Happiness signified. Is this a memory? Images signifying a happy childhood memory, any-memory-whatever. “How can you remember thirst,” asks the man behind the camera, whose letters the female voice-over, the alleged receiver of these letters with an alleged sender, another disembodied character like the man, reads out loud.

Marker’s Sans soleil does not develop ordinary motifs or conventional techniques in dealing with memory. No matter how innovative -- and groundbreaking -- Resnais’ methods are, they are no match for Marker’s meta-approach. Rather than thematizing memory with a device, Marker deals with the theme through itself, by trying to remember it, by trying to become conscious of itself. The man wonders how have people been able to remember anything without pictures. Pictures are the memory. Montage is the memory. Viewing the film is memory.

While timeless, Sans soleil is also absolutely a film of its time. It comes right out of the postmodern era when man’s relationship with history, time, memory, and space was challenged on all fronts of human thought and creativity. The history of the documentary film is filled with numerous travelogues -- from the ghost train films of early cinema to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) -- but Marker’s Sans soleil challenges the whole possibility and meaningfulness of the travelogue. In his mind, in the mind of Sans soleil, time and space cannot be conveyed over individual, experienced knowledge. The poetic narration of Sans soleil constantly turns to itself and challenges its representation. The film consists of shots, which are more or less separate from one another, that are organized by the letters read by the woman, letters that she has received from a man, the man behind the camera. Thus there is a double focalization, the word and the image. When the levels of the image and the words of the letters occasionally coincide, the spectator is tempted to think of the images as shot by the man from his point of view, but Marker’s film seems to escape such an easy way out of the puzzle. Marker takes man’s relationship with history and the past by dealing with the relation between real and reconstructed memory. Is there a difference? Is there a difference between our collective history and our personal histories? Is there a difference between a home movie and a movie? Is knowledge of the world possible?

We know little of Marker’s private life. His most private and personal film, Sans soleil, perhaps paradoxically, adds nothing to this lack of knowledge. In a strange way, it achieves an extremely intimate level by creating a peculiar distance. It hides behind images and words. We never see the central characters. We see reconstruction. We see implications. We see conclusions without premises. We see the end of the road but not the road.

There are no clichés in Sans soleil because it is beyond the definition of cliché and convention. The man behind the camera has seen so much that at the moment only banality interests him, as he states in a letter. The unique and the original have become dull. The banal is the new unique. He preys banality like a bounty hunter. In this quest, banality turns into something else -- or does it? In a synthesis of banal moments, the montage of images becomes its own living thing.

A filmic version of stream of consciousness, the only structure of Sans soleil is its lack of structure. There is fragmentation on both the level of the whole and the level of the part. The words stop and random notes put a pause on a flow that, for a moment, seemed to have a clear structure. “By the way, did I tell you that there are emus in the Île de France?” The images freeze, the words stop, the images continue, the images give rise to a continuation into an unprecedented series of separate images. Yet, despite all of this, the film has a rhythm like no other, and it never feels scattered. It is cohesive on another level. It follows the unknown logic of its private internal auteur. Sans soleil is not remembered for its words nor for its images, but for the synthesis of it all -- and, most importantly, the impressions and feelings that arise from this synthesis. We do not remember individual shots, individual sentences, or at least we do not think of them. We remember the film.

I remember the cut from the Japanese dancing to an emu. I remember the abrupt cuts from the serene desert to the chaotic Hong Kong. I remember the cats in the temple. I remember. I remember the electronic sounds accompanying swans in a lake. I remember the counterpoint. I remember the tension, the voltage, the trance of it all. I remember the lack and the absence. I remember the presence and the richness. I remember the unique, the one and only, Sans soleil, the distant voice that both fades and stays in memory.

Some runner-uppers, or the mandatory honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino apparatom (1929), Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987), Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986), Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930), Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952). Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Notes:

[1] Truffaut, François. 1984. Hitchcock. Revised Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, p. 239-243.

[2] Bordwell, David. 2018. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 220. 

[3] Bagh, Peter von. 1989. Elämää suuremmat elokuvat [Films Bigger Than Life]. Otava, p. 405. My own translation. 

[4] https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/785.

[5] https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/.

[6] Ibid.

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

Current Research Questions as first argued in the latest proposal.

How can Horror as an assumedly lesser genre of art within discourse exist in a high concept contemporary art based environment?

Is it even possible to elevate such a genre to that of a higher academic level within Fine Art practice?

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Notes:

The first things I have to mention are that I am entirely aware that these questions are quite general and lacking accurate definition, but it’s hard to think of greater questions than these. After all, my work seeks to challenge greater abmundane subjects and so making one question for the sake of a direct answer would be counterintuitive for my work. Especially given this collection and general project are based on an essay which muses horror, philosophy, paradoxes and allegory so trying to simplify any part of my work to have one solid and objective value at the end to judge by some kind of set metric would again not appeal or represent my work aims well enough. These questions are meant to challenge my own perspectives of my work, and to allow me to research into a subject which is less about the research concepts about my work, and is instead far more about the potential of my work and career overall. As to briefly answer these questions equally, I won’t know until my career is dead and I’m dead, because of how niche and underground my work is now I don’t know the larger impact it’s going to have. it’ll be my life long ambition to prove that I can continue these questions relevant, as I’ll always be trying to represent the alternative and taboo as something with the ability to be academic and as something greater than a lesser form of degeneracy, not too dissimilar to how the nazis typecasting the key artists of the 1930s in europe. Hitler famously believed that surrealism, dadaism, absurdism, expressionism, cubism etc, were all invalid and impossible to take seriously because they were concerned too dearly with how it could be crass or scatological and in turn lack value for a higher purpose to emblemise their art as something greater than gutter waste, yet we can’t avoid these artists now because all they could ever do was live to prove fascists wrong, as I and many of my other contemporaries also wish to do throughout our lives, but that means we’re going to have to work just as if not harder than the classically appealing and commonplace, it is our aim to prove our work has higher value and we can’t attempt to do anything else. I chose these questions because I can’t help but ask myself these same questions everytime I consider where my work is going and where I’m taking it, these questions have been born out of self doubt, and yet now they exist as a goal to prove others wrong, even if my work is still infantile in it’s current state and needs a little more refinement as I go, it’s still worth taking horror into the academic and bringing my supporting authors further into the contemporary art scene to create some really brain touring and expanding, contemplative and searching dialogues. I just know that I would find it hard to settle on a discourse that didn’t cause reactions and speak to darker taboos beyond satire and political bias, and fear and horror are certainly universal, it is only the severity of either that really becomes the challenge with audience experience and interrogation of the work and it’s intent, something I will naturally be studying the more my work has the chance to be seen of course.  

[eazyeez]

Summary, Reading I (Reading I: Discourse and Authorship in Design Practice) by Mihkali, 5 Oct 2020

Designer as Author, MICHAEL ROCK / 1996

Again highly challenging texts, teeming with complicated sentences, unfamiliar English expressions and references to unfamiliar topics.

I read this text after reading the texts of the courses readings 2 and 3. I believe all the texts have been chosen to form some sort of a continuum, the latter texts connecting to the previous ones. But it worked well in this order too. I saw connections to the other texts here as well. Designer as Author was a further element to the topic on the designer´s role as faceless facilitators in society.

The text viewed the designer´s role as author and compared designer authors to authors from other fields, like film and literature. In literature the concept of author is moderately easily defined, at least because the work of the author might need only one person, unlike in film projects, that usually have big work teams and it might be difficult to nominate one single author when the director, writer and cinematographer all have big roles in the projects. The same difficulty of appointing the author often applies to designers as well.

In the film industry there has been an attempt to set criteria that have to be met in order for a director to be entitled to authorship. These criteria can be technical expertise, stylistic signature and consistent vision through the works. The text suggests that a similar approach could be used for designers as well.

In the text it is asked what difference it makes who is the author? In my view this is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Humans are social beings and want reflection to things we do. I don’t much believe in the thought of doing things only for yourself. It is natural to want to get credit for a job well done. Maybe this is also at the core of designer´s frustration of being faceless facilitators.

The text concludes with thoughts that the designer´s role is difficult to demarcate within the role of author, because the designer´s role encompasses such a wide variety of different activities. The text suggests that designers could be seen as translators, performers, directors or simply just as designers.

 Chapter 2: Authority, ownership, originality , Andrew Bennett

This was a partly too overwhelming and partly highly interesting read. The text explained how authorship in literature has come to be what it is today.

In the analysis, Bennett goes all the way back to ancient Greece to lay a basis to how authorship has started to develop. The writer explains the concept of author in the ancient oral epic traditions, where an author is very difficult to pinpoint. The stories in oral epic traditions evolve as different singers add to the story each time they tell it. The original poem has started from something and first evolved to a certain point by being told by a number of singers and at some point found a more established form which then has continued to be told, but without as much variation as in the beginning of its forming. Bennett draws a connection between authors of ancient Greece and the romantic author of the 1700´s as well as the modern author in the way the true author is a figure separate from society and having divine qualities or a connection to god, who speaks through the author.

Next Bennett continues to explain how authorship has developed through medieval times. In the start of medieval centuries the role of the author was in a way insignificant. The book making authors were seen as someone who reproduces a text on a continuum, starting from simply copying the text and ending to the book maker who “writes both his own words and others, but others only for purpose of confirmation”. But at the same time the medieval author had a highly specialized, highly privileged identity. The medieval author´s or “auctor´s” role was to augment the knowledge and wisdom of humanity.

By later medieval ages, authorship started to develop more to the direction of authors being recognized as individuals.

The introduction of print publications came with new conceptions of authorship and originality. The ability to effectively make large amounts of copies of a text had a stabilizing effect on their nature. Printing lead to new kinds of property rights that came to be known as copyrights that further lead to an increase in prestige for authors. The uniformity of the book also lead to an increased need of unique, individual representation of one self as an author.

In the 1600´s print publication was seen as degrading to the art of poetry. Publication made a writer “common and vulgar” and was a degradation of one´s aristocratic status or aspirations to such a status. Printed texts associated with merchandising had less social authority.

Late in the 1600´s and 1700´s when the stigma of printed text being degraded started to fade and when writers started to be able to make a living from writing the modern sense of authorship occurred. After the English civil war demand for printed writing grew, as well as did literacy. Buying books could distance one from people who could not afford them and bring them closer to people who had been able to afford them for centuries. With newspapers and periodicals came a mass market of literature.

In the 1700´s laws on copyright brought a legal status to writers but at the same time as authorship became financially and legally viable a new aesthetic ideology of a transcendent and autonomous artistic author arose. This ideology valued a distance to commercial writing. The paradox in the ideology is that the mystificatory sense of the author as above commercial considerations was exactly what made the writings commercially viable.

This text was for me very challenging to get full grasp of, but what I found interesting was how a similar tone regarding authorship was detectable through all the observations on authorship in different times. It seems like authorship is wanted to be seen as something transcendent. An author should be an outsider of society, to whom financial matters don’t apply to. Some sort of source of original and independent knowledge or creations, possibly channeling wisdoms straight from god.

This is something I recognize in our time easily, which is not surprising considering it seems to be some sort of background ethos through in the different times Bennet inspects in his writing. As modern examples of authors meeting the previously mentioned criteria of a true author to my mind comes suffering artists like Curt Cobain, Kalervo Palsa and maybe also Lady Gaga (Kanye West is also doing his best to achieve this divine status). In the case of Lady Gaga, since she appears to me to have a massive marketing apparatus behind her, to my mind comes a thought if the music industry (and other industries as well) sometimes consciously uses the phenomenon to create appealing star figures.

Where does the appreciation for this sort of “pure” authorship or artistry well up from?

I also come to think of a well known and in my opinion very good comedian/ speaker, whos name I cant remember unfortunately. I remember him ranting on stage about musicians playing lame mainstream songs with superficial and meaningless lyrics and this comedian screaming “PLAY FROM YOUR HEART!!!! PLAY FROM YOUR HEART!!!!!!!”. It was funny, but also cool, because you could easily relate to his frustration with musicians making music from a somehow false base or false motivators. This somehow comes back to the conflict in being an author in some field and also making money from it. It seems like a base vibe the human masses have is that a true artist or author should not be interested in making money with his/her creations. The money aspect somehow pollutes the art, like the artist/ author is really doing what he/she does calculatingly.

But once again I come back to the thoughts that have emerged in my mind while reading most of the texts in this course, that our society is an unhealthy environment for humans. In our society everyone needs money to survive, including authors and artist. At the same time authors/ artists should create what they create only for the sake of creating without considering how it effects their ability to pay the rent. It is difficult to fit authorship/ artistry with the mechanisms of our society, especially if we really want truly pure independent creations. I wonder how the hunter gatherers solved this puzzle, if they did.

[equalityforher]

Artist Spotlight: Palesa Kgasane

Growing up, Palesa Kgasane saw the potential of an audience. With unapologetic confidence, she would entertain her family and friends as an outlet of expressing herself. Now a rising star in the buzzing South African creative fashion world, she is rewriting the history of women of color by documenting the many faces and facets that they behold on her  notable platform, Mzansi Moodboard. Inspired by her matriarchy and indelible African icons such as Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie, Palesa employs the flawless fashion sense of her elders to her creative direction and matchless fashion finesse. Unimpressed by labels and pop-boxes, Palesa is breaking the mould by leveraging her creative eye and expressing a hard-to-hear but necessary truth and visibility of creative WoC.

When did you realize that you were interested in fashion styling? What inspired your choice of film and photography to document your art?

I think I knew from a young age that I loved fashion, largely attributed to my mother’s great sense of style and all the glamorous women I would see when we watched TV. They seemed so confident. I think that’s what I liked about clothes, how they make people feel. Expressing myself was sort of second nature. When I was younger I just wanted to entertain, whether it was singing or writing, I always ended up taking part in things that involved entertaining people. Picking up a camera for the first time and documenting myself and my friends back in high school was something I did for fun. I remember how I insisted that we always take pictures. I edited them and put them on Facebook. That was the thing then. And now, I do it as a means of sharing my narrative with people and that of other black womyn.

What were the images of women of color that you saw growing up in South Africa? Did that observation inspire your art today?

I never saw enough images of women of colour. That was why I had to start creating them, for myself. I realised that history was not very accommodating of brown girls who aren’t thin and outspoken and who don’t fit in. Therefore, creating and writing was always an outlet for me. Solitude inspired me. That and strong womyn who also stuck it to the man; Brenda Fassie, Miriam Makeba and Lebo Mathosa.

The visual representation of queer and nonbinary femmes of color seems integral to your art. What motivates your choice of your subject matter? Why do you think it is important to create this content at this time?

The honest answer is that there isn’t enough out there. I don’t create having those labels in mind, I am not a fan of labels and boxes. I do what I do from a place of truth, I try to. But I used to try to hide who I am for a very long time, as a queer femme womyn. It has been really difficult coming to grips with my own truths, but I am grateful to have been able to be in spaces where I could come into my own. Creating is a means of surviving. It is important for me to be and exist beyond the impositions the world puts on me; whether it be as a black womyn, a queer womyn, or a ‘plus-size’ person. My subject matter is always going to be what is closest to home, intentional and also sometimes not. I’m always going to be black first and a womyn too, those are things that give me a certain primacy in the world. I hope to make something positive out of these realities.

In your direction, what are the key ingredients needed for a killer, relevant production?

Patience. I’m basically a one womyn show and the pressure to constantly be creating is overwhelming. Be patient with yourself and the people around you. Not everyone will get it but you just need to trust your gut. Be truthful and authentic. That goes with not doing things for the sake of doing them but knowing what you hope to achieve at the end of the day. For people to feel a sense of black joy and pride after engaging with my work is important for me. Nothing exists in isolation. And lastly, genuine love for what you do. That can be really difficult when you are a solo ranger like me but loving what you do is so important.

At the foundation of it all, artists create what they know; what does your art says about Palesa the person? How has your family upbringing, and your localization, influenced your views on the representation of WoC in the media?

I grew up in a small town. Home is where I return but leaving home was also the only way I was able to find myself after high-school. I went through a lot, both good and bad, which brought me to the person I am today. I owe a lot to my supportive mother, who never gave up on me and would fund every dream I had- whether it was going to record a demo for radio or taking a course guitar lessons or doing extra-curricular art classes, studying journalism – she believed in me refining my skills. And so I did. Being a South African womyn is beautiful and challenging. That story alone is one of survival, being a creative black womyn is filled with paradoxes and I’m learning to be patient with the process of coming into my own. I’m grateful for my upbringing, for being a moTswana girl, for the gift of writing, which to this day, appeases me.

Which are some of the fashion stables whose work you like? Who would you love to work with?

Locally, I love where African fashion is at right now. I have worked with some local desigenrs Imveli Designs and Merwe Mode. I would really love to do something with Anisa Mpungwa, ALC, Matte Nolim, Jenevieve Lyons and Oxosi. I also really love Imprint, Maxhosa and Droomer. Maybe they’ll read this and call me up ☺ .

How would you describe your personal style?

Comfortable, retro, easy.

How has being a native South African and being immersed in its rich and eclectic culture affected your styling direction?

I like to embrace being South African as much as I can, whether it’s wearing bangles or a head-wrap or a pair of earrings from a local designer. It’s been challenging sometimes wanting to buy local but not having enough of it around or it being unaffordable. My country is so beautiful and culturally rich and inspiring, I really want to work with more local designers. I really think they need more platforms and shows and stores. I am really proud of my Tswana, Sotho and Zulu heritage.

In Mzansi Moodboard, Taking it Black is a special space featuring iconic African forerunners. Who are your style icons?

My mom, obviously. Brenda Fassie and the womyn of the late 80s. I love the style back then and my family(mom, aunts and older cousins) have given me some amazing articles of clothing from back then that I wear now. I love Solange, and her style us an eclectic mix of Diana Ross meets Queen Patra. I think a lot of the black womyn that I grew up looking up to and listening to were inherently stylish; Letta Mbulu, Yvonne Chakachaka and Janet Jackson.

You’re well known for utilizing social media to document your process. How has social media been useful? Do you think it affects how people perceive your work?

Social media is a great tool if used properly. I sometimes overshare-in my personal capacity and that has been something I am learning to balance. Although a lot of the work that creatives do is very personal, letting emotions govern the things you put on social media can be really detrimental. This is also hard because you want to be truthful. With Mzansi Moodboard, I always think of what inspires me and what I would want to see from a platform like that. Although I really believe in harnessing the power of social media, it can also be laborious and the things we see can be redundant. However, there is also so much you can do; conversations to be part of, stories to share, voices to hear. Images are powerful, so can words and social media makes it that much easier to share with thousands of people. There’s a lot of negativity in the world, I want to be part of the happiness, the good stuff.

Going on to your seventh issue, what should we look forward to from Mzansi Moodboard?

Envelope breaking, non-binary content that is beautiful, powerful and truthful.

You describe yourself as a Creative Visual Expressionist. What fuels your creative intentions?

Being black. Learning to love my blackness, my queerness, my otherness. Womyn. Re-writing history. Visibility. Representation. Truth. Love. Beauty of the unknown, of the strange and unapologetic black girl magic.

What do you believe is the role of the modern day Black artist?

To tell your story, to share your thoughts, even when your voice trembles, even if people say it isn’t pleasant or pretty or wanted or comfortable hear. It is your duty to do everything you possibly can to live in your truth. And I would like to believe that after that you will by default inspire those who come after you.

[intheshadowofsignificance]

Two Words

Read on FFnet here.

He has lived in San Francisco eight years. There’s nothing, he thinks, like the anonymity of that city. It’s booming and progressive, the arts are alive. He’s not the only celebrity to sheath himself in the err of everyday people like it’s natural, and sometimes he can almost forget the way he missed it back in Domino or Duelist Kingdom. Things are always moving forward and that keeps him moving forward, too.

Most of the time, anyway.

People go there to advance careers, chase dreams. Some people follow broken hearts to the waters under the Golden Gate Bridge.  

He cries for them.

Of all the things he has to shed tears over, and more importantly, all the things he never allowed himself to cry over, strangers are the ones who draw sobs from his chest. Raw and heaving, broken in ways he never knew another person could be, before the gray printed name in the paper.

He thinks he keeps much stranger things than a collection of unknown obituaries.

He thinks he remembers them the same way he remembers the pain he caused so many people, back when he let himself believe his hurt had sharper teeth.

They are close to him, like a vow.

More than anything, he thinks that’s a little fucked up.

It takes him six years to find Café Sophia, and while most people shake their heads at the ego of a twenty-something plastering her name on her father’s, father’s, newly refinanced, ramshackle shop, Pegasus finds it endearing.

She has heart.

She also has mice, but people with dungeons don’t throw stones.

He takes a chance that becomes a routine that becomes a ritual. She calls him “foundering artist” after the first three months, when she realizes he likes the ‘atmosphere’ of worn wooden floors and a few old men ogling her behind the New York Times while he makes intervening conversation. She knows she won’t lose his business, and he knows even before he shows up to find a sick five month old in her arms, his business is all she wants.

At first.

He realizes a month later, when she tells him the story of the place beyond the books (a book) of sales; his own judgment can’t be trusted. It’s her father’s shop, her grandmother’s name; she works to pay off student loans from a failed stint at college that ended in pregnancy. She even says pregnancy, not forlornly, but as a truth hardened by the number of times it’s been thrown in her face. She kisses her daughter’s – Faith’s – head, and calls her a miracle, but somewhere behind the scent of rain on the pavement, the word echoes of failure.

Pegasus buys her a cup of coffee and waves off the look of offense, sliding his mug back from the baby’s curious fingers and tearing a napkin to ribbons to hear her laugh.

He comes the next week so she doesn’t think she’s scared him off, but skips the week after for his own sake. Blames the flu.

With no interest outside her being the only consistent contact he’s had with a person in…a decade, he’s already idealized her.

Made her out to be a bold, up-and-coming, supremely maternal woman with her life entirely together. Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t, the point is that he doesn’t really know her at all.

He’s dusting off bad habits and asking someone else to bear the brunt of them.

And maybe everyone constructs versions of people from who they really are, maybe everyone sees who they want to see, doesn’t make it right.

He really hasn’t been right since she died. Maybe he should go to therapy.

Within six months, “foundering artist” becomes “Mr. Art,” within eight months, just “Art.”

They never give their names and for some reason that’s comforting. He carries the obscurity of San Francisco and she lifts a mug to meet it like the tide rolling in to meet the shore.

A year after he first steps through the door, one of her regular old-timers steps out for good. He frets for all of a minute about chasing her business away – she relays his final words as something like “not needing the heckling” – before she dissolves into teary thanks behind the counter.

It’s the first time he wonders after her father, who owns the place and supposedly lets her live upstairs.

The first time he wonders how a few regular customers support the upkeep.

Looking is enough, mind you, but it’s the first time he wonders if old-timer number two, who has the audacity to slide his “friend’s” old chair close enough to prop his feet on in a show of not being run off, does more than just stare.

He misses a meeting to flip her open sign to closed, waiting with a patient smile as the old man shuffles out. Pegasus follows right behind him. It’s getting dark, and she’s dealt with more than enough of the wrong sort of male influence. It feels appropriate to go, but about halfway down the cobblestone strip he starts to think it was a mistake.

His entire being aches when he reads the obituary on Monday, tracing the unisex name on the page.

Her tears come back to him, their sheer brokenness an echo where Cecelia’s concertos used to be, and he wonders for a split second, almost potently enough to go back two days in a row, if it’s her.

He thinks about how he’d be forced to remember her, or she him.

Without a name.

He wonders if she still wants to be as such.

The following week he resolves to ask for it and doesn’t.

Neither of them can say why – and both of them notice – but the thirteenth month of knowing one another suddenly leaves him more aware.

Maybe it’s because he still hasn’t forgotten old-timer number one’s face, maybe it’s because it’s only gotten stronger with time, but Pegasus watches the windows for it while he nurses his coffee. And he notices. It’s embarrassing, really. He considers himself a perceptive man and for thirteen months he’s somehow genuinely missed the straying eyes lingering on his face through the door.

They don’t come in, but they watch. They know.

Once he leaves he camps out on a bench four shops down, face veiled by a book, confirming. It only takes twenty minutes for a swarm of customers to appear. Not old timer – he checks twice – but several men and women he’s nodded to as he passed them by. The place is fuller than he’s ever seen it.

He frowns, refolds the newspaper unevenly, and drives home with too many questions.

The fourteenth month gives him hope it hasn’t been this way the whole time. Faith is whining from the sling on her mother’s back, matching red curls matted to her sweaty forehead. He sings Pretty Woman and her mother does a little spin through the laughter. It gets a laugh out of Faith too, and her laugh is one of the best sounds he’s ever held onto.

When he gets up to leave, she catches his arm gently and tries to give him back half his tip.

“You always leave too much.” She says. “Coffee is only three dollars.”

And there’s a twenty in her hand, pressed to his suit sleeve like her determined glare can serve as adhesive. He looks down at her long fingers and as she pulls them away several moments later, rewarding his smile with a frustrated sigh, she lets one trail the label on his wrist.

Designer.

Pegasus’s tip is so meager in the scheme of his finances it’s embarrassing. But anything else would be insulting, and even the twenty, judging by her reaction, is toeing the line.

“Until next week.” He says, and neither of them knows it yet but her forgiving smile is a lie.

Pegasus arrives at the usual time, which in and of itself is a paradox since it changes every few months, and finds a crowd in the café. There are so many people he at first assumes the line is pressed to the door. But they’re just patrons carrying drinks, chatting with too much emotion to be random stop-ins.

An unfamiliar man is behind the counter, dark hair streaked with silver, and Pegasus swallows his anxiety to try and alleviate it. He doesn’t even have a name, like asking after half a person.

But before he even gets the nerve, most of the conversations stall, the shift in noise level is so jarring it lets the air out of his lungs. Things trickle back to normal in record time, but it’s far too late to mask that he’s the subject of too many people’s curiosity. He orders the usual, to go, and doesn’t feel bad about not lingering. He hears his name on the way out, likely from her father behind the counter, and can’t bring himself to face the pain of looking back to confirm it.

He knows he should at least call back for the man to keep the change, but continues walking. Briskly.

The obscurity of San Francisco goes up in smoke. Every pair of eyes trailing him is a knife drawing blood from different points, by the time he makes it to the car, claustrophobic and unable to breathe, the blades have shattered. Thousands of fragments slice him open and write her ownership into his vulnerability.

He wonders how long she’s known.

He wonders why she never gave her own name.

He wonders if he’s making treason of her kindness by feeling he’s owed it. Because whether this ruse was his first or hers, it was shared.

The words in his head are loud enough that he almost stays away, and he learns the following week that he should have.

It might not be betrayal, but it feels like it, and it isn’t her last.

The following week he steps into Café Sophia for the last time. But he doesn’t know it is an end and doesn’t mourn it fully. Like everything else, it slips from his grasp quick enough to be gone but too slowly to take the warmth of its presence with it.

It’s a little after two when he opens the door, eyes cast down, counting seams in the cobblestone path rather than the number of eyes making holes in his back. When he lifts them, one familiar face becomes two.

Tea Gardner eyes him with one part guilt and two parts determination, the rust stain of his past on her lips. Behind her, the eyes that leaked relief into the fabric of his suit jacket return to the inside of a coffee mug.

He understands everything, all at once.

Her father steps up to the register with a smile that might be tired, offers to take his order.

Pegasus thinks of the story of this place, wonders after its namesake, catches the note of failure on the word ‘pregnancy.’

He tries to smile and remembers the face of old man number one, the shame of reading the same paper he read, and the deeper shame of needing it for the obituaries. Like they were the only things he could feel completely. Like the rest of the world was stuck in grayscale at forty or fifty something percent.

He wants to know how much of his life was leaked without his permission – fucked up – but can’t ask that.

Because she won’t look at him.

Why won’t she look at him?

He wants to know if any part of this was real, if this man is her father, if Sophia is her grandmother, and strangely enough if she thought he looked her up, he had the resources to  – fucked up – and a little whisper asks where the baby is. He wants to know that too.  

His hands shake in anger and shame when Tea Gardner smiles at him and he can’t wonder if she’s well because that man is standing at the register, having offered to take his order.

That man never stood at the register while old timers one and two harassed her.

He never offered to take their orders – fucked up.

The hurt in his chest radiates, stealing his breath and making him light-headed. He doesn’t know how long he’s been standing here, but he knows that he needs to leave.

When he fumbles back to the car, he doesn’t hear her quiet whisper of his name, like she’s saying something she shouldn’t be.

He doesn’t cry for her, maybe because it would really be crying for himself. He doesn’t have the kind of past he’d want for his daughter if he had one.

Fucked up.

Fucked up.

Fucked up.

Fucked up.

And he knows now that it’s just an excuse but as he hugs the newspaper, thankful there are no suicides in the obituary, it crosses his mind.

He hasn’t been right since she died.

He wonders if it’s his pride that keeps him from going back, or if it’s the right thing to do. He’s never been great with social graces but he’s never felt this lost in them either.

Daily he thinks about leaving the city.

Sometimes he thinks about paying off her school loans, calling up anonymously and lifting the burden. She’d know it was him, but it wouldn’t matter.

Sometimes he thinks that’s crossing a line and sometimes he thinks he owes it to her for being a lifeline, even if she didn’t know it.

He finds a park to drink chain coffee in and a therapist who tells him to keep the obituaries if he needs them.

He wonders if it’d make a difference to say he prays every day they’re not hers.  

[mastcomm]

International Center of Photography Refocuses in a New Home

It’s not just your cellphone that’s a camera now. Your doorbell can take photographs, and so might your car, your refrigerator and your toothbrush. Camera-sporting athletes now do the work of sports photojournalists, and all New York City beat cops wear a body camera. War photography has gone from a specialist’s art to a citizen’s daily action, and the stupid selfie you uploaded yesterday has already been scraped into a database and could be sold to law enforcement agencies or a private detective. This is the paradox: the average photograph has never been more banal or irrelevant, yet photography as a medium has never mattered more.

In 2020 we are in desperate, desperate need of a richer discourse about this new, pervasive era of photography: how the lens-based image became a ubiquitous thing, and how any image or photographer can gain distinction in this flood of pictures. Cross your fingers that the International Center of Photography finds its way there soon.

Since its founding by Cornell Capa (brother of Robert Capa, the photojournalist who shot the most notorious picture of the Spanish Civil War), ICP has stuck up for photography as both an art form and a historical record, but it has bumbled in the time of the social photo. What should a photography museum do when photographs are just about everywhere? ICP has to answer that in a new home at Essex Crossing, the large new Lower East Side development, though its initial programming suggests it’s still not sure.

ICP started out in a Museum Mile townhouse in 1974, where it focused on the documentary tradition Capa called “concerned photography,” and moved in 2000 to Midtown, where it placed equal attention on photography as a fine art. Its rent-free Midtown lease expired in 2015, just as the cameraphone began to swallow photography whole, and you could almost see ICP’s confusion about its approach to the medium reflected in its real-estate peregrinations. Its collection was displaced to Jersey City, its school stayed in Midtown and its museum drifted to a low-ceilinged home on the Bowery.

The Center’s new Essex Crossing residence, a 40,000-square-foot interior space designed by Gensler within a new condo building by SHoP Architects, is nothing flashy but no worse for that. There are two floors of galleries, some with full-height windows and some convertible into black boxes, plus an old-is-new-again Pentagram logo embedded in the tiles. (Proper ceiling heights, too!) There’s also a ground-floor cafe for those who haven’t gorged at the Market Line food hall across the street.

Other good news: ICP’s school will soon move to Essex Crossing, placing education and exhibition programs under one roof for the first time in two decades. But the new site is still not large enough to bring ICP’s collection of some 200,000 prints, including many signal photographs by American midcentury photojournalists, back from Jersey exile.

The inaugural shows do at least include one exhibition drawn from its permanent collection. “The Lower East Side” has 40 black-and-white prints shot in ICP’s new neighborhood, when immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe and China moved in and food came not from bistros but pushcarts. The Hungarian-born photographer Arnold Eagle, in his “One Third of a Nation” series, captures children in tenements and rabbis at the yeshiva. Seven photographs by the Danish-American reformer Jacob Riis expose filthy SROs and overcrowded schools, though the curators slime him in the wall texts as a labor-hating conservative whose pictures “often rob people of their humanity and dignity.”

The other three shows range from underwhelming to vacuous. Worst is “Warriors,” a techy rasp by the Seattle-based artist James Coupe, which uses facial-scanning software to insert gallerygoers’ faces into a 1970s B-movie. Billed as a “deepfake,” or nearly undetectable edit, the videos in fact exhibit glaring disjunctions: the inserted flesh judders right off the jaw, and the faces have overly rouged, Kewpie-doll cheeks.

More troubling than the janky tech is the muffed rationale; artists’ reconstructions of traditional cinema were old hat 20 years ago (think of Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe). This is tech for tech’s sake, and ICP should expect artists to examine life as shaped by new photographic technologies, rather than simply announce new technologies exist.

The largest show at the new ICP is “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop.” It was first seen at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, and is curated by the journalist Vikki Tobak, who previously put together a book and an Instagram account of the same name. Amid nearly 40 years’ worth of photographs of rappers and singers, the niftiest materials are the many contact sheets, including Michael Lavine’s outtakes for the cover of OutKast’s album “Stankonia,” and Eric Johnson’s shots of the rapper Eve strutting through New York in a floor-length robe.

Yet there’s a touch of Madame Tussauds in the approach of “Contact High,” which sets aside visual analysis for an undemanding showcase of your favorite celebrities. The principal wall texts do not name a single photographer, instead offering dubious platitudes like “Hip-hop portraiture is about pausing to see the subjects for who they truly are.” A whole wall is given to fresh inkjet prints of 1990s stars — Tupac and Jay, Missy and Mary. It will be easy to walk out of this show having ignored the actual achievements of photographers like Janette Beckman, Barron Claiborne and Al Pereira, whose talents are subordinated to Public Enemy, the Notorious B.I.G. and Queen Latifah.

ICP’s most interesting inaugural exhibition, though not without its own problems, presents the work of Tyler Mitchell, a 24-year-old American fashion photographer who rocketed to prominence two years ago, when he shot Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue. Many of the photographs here, which are almost exclusively of black models, have appeared in such hip magazines as Document and Zeit Magazin, though you can see them too on his Instagram account, amid selfies. Here he has printed some pictures on fabric and hung them on clotheslines (a motif he used in his Beyoncé shoot), which feels like a dubious effort to pump up the digital photograph for a gallery exhibition, as does the astral music pumped in.

In real space or digital, Mr. Mitchell has a solid eye and a skill for lighting that makes him a natural at editorial photography. His half-length portraits are especially beautiful. But he overindulges the easy absorption of social-justice language into the realms of fashion and style, and his video works feel elementary when compared to his stills.

Consider the three-screen installation “Chasing Pink, Found Red,” whose willowy young subjects in chinos lounge barefoot in the grass, while his many social media fans recount experiences of racism and issues of identity in voice-over. This sweet-and-sour, one-plus-one-makes-two approach might suffice for a fashion editorial, but art takes more, and you can wonder what ICP might have been had it given its first major show here to an artist with more experience and fewer Instagram followers.

For it is a wounding mistake to think that reaching a broader and younger audience requires a lowering of ambitions, and I can name one institution that used to know that. It was at the International Center of Photography, back in Midtown, that the artist Coco Fusco and the curator Brian Wallis presented “Only Skin Deep,” their sprawling 2003 exhibition on the role of the camera in the construction of American racial categories. It was at ICP that Okwui Enwezor, the towering Nigerian curator, first mounted “Rise and Fall of Apartheid,” an impassioned and typically precise study of South African photography and history from 2012, which mixed fine art, photojournalism and bureaucratic documentation.

Artists like Ms. Fusco and curators like Mr. Enwezor taught me, when I was as young as the children now flocking to Essex Crossing, that the photograph had both an aesthetic and a moral dimension. (And that the photograph of the black body, in particular, required all our intellectual efforts to account for a crushing historical lineage.) It wasn’t enough to glance. You had to think hard, read deeply, and look both at the surface of the image and the rhetoric that framed it.

That photographic dispensation has been wiped out in the age of Instagram, where knowledge has given way to “influence,” and the critical spirit has been ceded to microdoses of “affirmation.” Maybe, decrepit 30-something that I am, I’m showing my age. But I’d have thought there was no better venue for countering the shallowness of the screen — no better place to teach young audiences to look closely and think seriously — than a museum.

International Center of Photography

All inaugural shows run through May 18; 79 Essex Street, Manhattan; 212-857-9700, icp.org.

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[andrewcrossley]

On breath-image and the terminality of sound

This is a text that accompanies my new piece breath-image, which will be performed next month in Vilnius, Lithuania by Ensemble Synaesthesis. ______________________________________ One of the main questions running through my recent work is that of emptiness and the radically unrepresentable, and how these categories can be mobilized through an experiential praxis in the field of aesthetics. Allow me a very brief primer now. We are living under a tyranny of representation, and a severe limiting of imagination and utopian thought. We are all of us, at bottom, utopians. We all have dreams for the future, and we all would like to see a world different from the one we have now. A better world, regardless of one’s particular political inclinations. However, to conceive of utopia means to conceive of something that is, by definition, radically unconceivable. Consider this: if we could imagine utopia, would it not instantly become a mere conceptualization, a representation of what we think utopia would look like? Would this representation not arise strictly from within the confines of what is, at present, imaginable? If this is so, such a conception of utopia would conform to what our current ideological or discursive moment defines as the limits of possibility, inherently negating its radical nature. This tyranny is effected on us not from without—not from some unseen “above” from which the “powers that be” control what can be thought. No, this tyranny arises from the very structure of logical thought itself. It is marked by a rupture at the very beginning of thought that permeates every subsequent thing with its primordial broken-ness. Consider the traditional rules of logic, as condensed by Bertrand Russell: the law of identity, or “whatever is, is”; the law of non-contradiction, or “nothing can both be and not be”; and the law of the excluded middle, or “everything must either be or not be.” Now consider the process of perception as it occurs in real time. Whenever an object—a sensation, a sound, an image—is perceived, it is first perceived just as it is. In that first moment of apprehension, there is no conceptualization, no naming, no categorizing, and no difference. The laws of logic have not arisen yet and what is apprehended both is and isn’t, at least in that very first moment. It is only later that the logical mind intervenes to counterpose the perception of the object against previous sense perceptions stored in the memory in order to identify it—this is, after all, the way in which we come to know that the color we are seeing is blue and not red. But, most crucially, it is at this moment that the distinction first arises between subject and object, between the seer and what is being seen. Why is this important? Allow me to be crude for the sake of brevity. It is entirely in the first moments of this operation of deliberative discrimination that the foundations are laid for all the suffering, injustice, and oppression that afflict us. Or rather, it is only in the moment that precedes conceptualization—what Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida calls “pure experience”—that true liberation can arise. Simply stated, the first decision—the decision to differentiate—solidifies and reifies conceptions of difference that are, in the deepest sense, mere mental constructs. Taking it, again quite crudely, into the realm of the everyday and the sociopolitical, isn’t it true that it becomes easier to oppress someone, to silence their voice, if one regards oneself as separate or different from them? True compassion can arise when this difference is pierced and seen as the illusion that it is. It is at this juncture that the work of critical thought is revealed, particularly as it relates to philosophy and art. Even at the surface level of specificity, we know that the role of critique is to prod at ideas and constructs that appear in everyday thought to be solid and unchangeable. As Marx famously wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.” Indeed, the rich tradition of critical theory inaugurated by Marx’s own thought is built on the idea that the first step towards emancipatory thought is to reveal the houses of cards upon which we build seemingly stable systems of ideas, from the philosophical to the interpersonal. This is where the most crucial work of philosophy can begin: to reveal the fluidity and ephemerality at the base of the gargantuan superstructure (to borrow Marx’s own terms) in order to more clearly see through the veils of ideology. To more clearly see things as they are. But the most radical of Marxist thinkers are not content with simply showing the illusory nature of most of our widely-held assumptions. For those who are willing to go ever further (I think here of people like Lefebvre, Rancière, Deleuze…) to open the door to true emancipation means opening the door to a complete deconstruction of even the most basic operations of thought—ultimately, to open the door to the unthinkable, that which resists conceptualization and representation, both verbal and aesthetic. This leads us back to that first ontological decision to constitute a subject that is separate from what it observes. Here is the true power of philosophy and critique: to follow the operations and lines of questioning that critical thought lays out in a thoroughly engaged, honest, and self-reflexive way means problematizing one’s position at every turn, and it must inevitably lead to the collapsing of the idea of a separate, fully constituted self in the name of radical liberation. Paradoxically, it is through logical thought that philosophy arrives at and actualizes the experience of non-dual awareness. As such, it could be thought of as an indirect path to it. Through progressively more profound questioning, philosophy opens up the possibility of, ultimately, doing away with conceptualization itself. But there is also a direct path to pure experience. In contemplative traditions, it takes the form of meditation—observing mental processes and expanding one’s awareness to fully encompass experience and perception before they enter into duality. But art, and music in particular, can accomplish the same thing. In a very real sense, the way in which meditative practices and aesthetic expression reveal pure experience is infinitely more powerful than the intellectual approach, precisely because the knowledge is apprehended existentially at the ground of being. It arises experientially, devoid of verbal associations or concepts. Pure sound, more than any other artistic medium due to its fundamentally non-discursive nature, is particularly well suited for opening these non-discursive and non-conceptual fissures in thought. Where deep listening is allowed to occur, deliberative discrimination necessarily ceases. breath-image is concerned with two primary questions. The title is taken from François Jullien’s book The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting. In his book, Jullien examines the idea of the nonobject, or the undifferentiated, through the lens of various classic treatises of Chinese painting, as well as the Tao Te Ching. He compares the dominant drive in Western art, that of individualization—the object that ‘reveals its essence as each motion of the brush specifies it […and] gradually eliminates all other possibilities of being until it makes the object appear as if that object could be nothing but itself’—with that of Chinese painting, which revels in the undifferentiated, the indistinct, and the evanescent. The concept of the breath-image, as Jullien writes, comes from the writings of Wang Wei. He writes: “When you contemplate painting, you must look first at the breath-image. […] Apprehension [...] proceeds from the more general-evanescent to the more tangible and rigid. Landscapes are great things. When we look at them, we must place ourselves at a distance to contemplate them. Then only do we perceive, in a single sweep, the breath-image emanating from the tension-forms of the landscape. […] At the lowest level are forms, the most tangible level but the most limited in effect. Then come the tensions that permeate them, conferring dynamism and vitality on them. Finally there is the breath-image emanating from it overall. The breath-image breaks free from the mire of forms and unfurls figuration beyond figuration, or rather upstream from it, opening it to the undifferentiated and making it available as the "great image.” The music follows the line of questioning arising from the idea of a breath-image. How and where does form emerge over time from the undifferentiated fount of pure sound? This question is asked not only in regard to large-scale form emerging over the span of the entire piece, but also of the smallest spaces within the sound itself—its “inbetween-ness”. Can forms emerge there? This is the spirit of the question asked in the final page of the piece: Where is the sound blooming? What about the locus of the unfolding of this sound? Where does it bloom from? This inbetween-ness—not only the spaces between the sounds, but the spaces within the sounds—is at the heart of the second line of questioning. Sound is a unique representation of the physical world in all of its impermanence. Every single sound is at once permeated with the seed of its own cessation: silence. Sound arises and passes away at every moment, and as Stewart Cox writes, ‘it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world.’ The fact that sound is constantly enveloped by silence constitutes its terminality, in the sense of a terminal disease. Eric Cazdyn describes terminality as a positioning  of the future as ‘that which is already included in the present, while maintaining it as that which is radically separate from the present.’ So indeed, while all sonic phenomena as they occur naturally present a fruitful opportunity to contemplate terminality and impermanence in their passage from audibility to silence, the provocation I wish to present is that we can contemplate the silence contained in sound already from its emergence. As such, breath-image revels in the idea of terminal sound—the fragile, the subtle, the barely audible—but also in the idea that terminality flashes through from within all sound, even—no, especially—that which seems at first most stable.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Lifespan of Bauhaus Utopianism

Erich Consemüller, “Woman in a B3 Club Chair by Marcel Breuer wearing a Mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a Dress by Lis Beyer” (1926) (© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin)

PARIS — L’Esprit du Bauhaus (“The Bauhaus Spirit”) is a serenely spirited show that reintroduces us to the many and enduring innovations of Walter Gropius’s German art school. As many of the things on view at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs could be mistaken for products from contemporary global retail chains, we need to work backwards to extract principles from the objects by revisiting the theoretical and political-utopian premises that shaped them.

Herbert Bayer, “Postcard for Bauhaus exhibition” (1923), lithography (© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / All rights reserved)

Operational from 1919 to 1933 (when it was forced to close under Nazi pressure), the Bauhaus’s functional spirit was adroit open-mindedness in diametric opposition to that of “art for art’s sake.” The Bauhaus faculty included some of the most innovative artists and thinkers of the day. The school embraced everything avant-garde: from Dada photomontage, Functionalism, and Expressionism, to De Stijl and Constructivism. As a result, this show is sumptuous, with more than 900 objects that include furniture, textiles, ceramics, metal work, stained glass, mural paintings, sculpture (in wood and stone), weaving, typography, advertising, architectural models, photography, theater design, drawings, and paintings. Most are products of the school’s curriculum, created in class workshops.

Gropius, who considered himself a follower of John Ruskin and adhered to the ideals of Ruskin’s sublime, developed the curriculum based on his ideal of art as gesamtkunstwerk (or total artwork), which Ruskin traced back as far as the Gothic period. However, Gropius theorized that his 20th-century version of unified art harmony was only possible under the direction of a creative leader, which for him was the architect. Paradoxically, the historical legitimization of this concept was rooted in the medieval communal anonymity of working for the church. Yet Gropius used the expression “cathedral of future freedom” interchangeably with his more prosaic phrase “unitary work of art” when promoting his total-artwork ideal. In his 1919 programmatic essay “Architecture in the People’s Free State,” he explicitly revealed this integrative function, which he determined for all the arts under gesamtkunstwerk principles, predicting that different art forms would break their isolation from each other in Gothic fashion. That is why L’Esprit du Bauhaus kicks off with a 15th-century sculpted oak lectern from St. Pierre church in Subligny (in the center of France) as an example of cathedral aesthetics. For Gropius, the supreme model for artists was the organization of the guilds that worked together to build medieval cathedrals. However, near the lectern are also examples of art from Asia and two movements indebted to the philosophical history of Romanticism: the British Arts & Crafts movement and the Viennese Wiener Werkstätte (or Vienna Secession).

Peter Behrens, “Three Drinking Glasses from the Wertheim Set” (ca 1902), blown glass (© Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Jean Tholance)

Gropius radicalized these movements’ Neo-Romantic ideas, making them the core of the Bauhaus’s pedagogy, drawing especially heavily from Henry Van de Velde’s Art Nouveau ambition to forge an alliance of industry and modern aesthetics. Van de Velde, a Gesamtkunstwerk-inspired designer, architect, and theorist, had earlier called for the unification of art into the space of the whole room (wallpapers, furniture, and paintings), and his Brussels company, the Société Van de Velde, created all the interior furnishings of his buildings, including rugs, metalwork, and, in one case, even a matching dress for the home’s owner. Van de Velde advocated in his tracts for the unification of all of the arts as an instrument of social reform and a rejection of historical forms. Living in Germany, he was associated with the rise of the Jugendstil (German Art Nouveau) and became an early member of the Deutscher Werkbund, which invited him to build a theater for its planned exhibition in Köln in 1914. His reappraisal of the status of the applied arts became a fundamental issue in the Sezessionist movement.

T. Lux Feininger, “The Weavers on the Bauhaus Stairway” (1927); from left, going up the stairs: Lena Bergner, Grete Reichardt; center top: Gunta Stölzl; next to her: Lijuba Monastirsky; coming down: Otti Berger, Lis Beyer; on her right: Elisabeth Mueller, Rosa Berger; Ruth Hollos behind Lisbeth Oestreicher in front (© Bauhaus Archiv Berlin)

Surpassing the goals of Van de Velde, Gropius envisioned his Bauhaus as an educational institution that would be concerned with industrial design in service of an architectural totality — where architecture would endow the arts and crafts with unifying ideals. He put into pragmatic operation the cooperative gesamtkunstwerk ideals that cantilevered out of German idealist and Neo-Platonic philosophy and 19th-century cultural utopian Romanticism. It is consequential here to recall that Romanticism’s ideals proved an inducement to historical research, which in turn aroused a new interest in art history and stimulated the Neo-Gothic Revival trend of the early 19th century, from which the gesamtkunstwerk ideal re-emerged in Europe.

To a large extent, modern Neoplatonist philosophy led the way for the avant-garde artists and artisans who taught in and supervised the Bauhaus workshops. Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers successively directed the school’s prerequisite course. Paul Klee taught art theory, Wassily Kandinsky mural painting, Oskar Schlemmer theater, Marcel Breuer furniture design, Theodor Bogler ceramics, Gunta Stölzl weaving, Marianne Brandt metalwork, Herbert Bayer graphic design, and Walter Peterhans photography. It is fascinating to discover some of the class materials here, such as Kandinsky’s “Nine Elements of the Chromatic Circle” (1922–33) placed near one of his explosive finished lithographs, “Kleine Welten I” (1922).

Wassily Kandinsky, “Nine Elements of the Chromatic Circle” (1922–33), painting on paper (photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat)

Gunta Stölzl, “Five Chöre” (1928), jacquard weaving, cotton, wool, rayon, and silk (© St Annen-Museum / Fotoarchiv der Hansestadt Lübeck)

The Bauhaus faculty’s collective theory was that new materials, made available by new technology, should be used in the design and creation of both art and utilitarian objects, which in turn would integrate with larger architectural designs. Within that context, I very much enjoyed the school studies in texture and materials, exercises in color, rhythm, and movement, architectural models, textile samples, and typographic experiments on view alongside finished pieces, like Gunta Stölzl’s remarkable “Five Chöre” (1928) Jacquard weaving, produced at the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop. I also loved Ruth Consemuller’s playful “Tapestry” (1926) and a preparatory gouache by Anni Albers titled “Study for unexecuted wall hanging” (1926), which makes superb use of the interpenetrating principle of the loom itself in its repetitive motifs. The exhibition also includes many of Theodor Bogler’s unique pottery creations designed for industrial production, such as the charming “Teapot with Handle” (1923). It’s also truly thrilling to see the original Breuer “Wassily Chair (Club B3)” (1927) and Josef Albers’s cool and smartly seductive “Stacking Tables” (1927).

Anni Albers, “Study for unexecuted wallhanging” (1926), gouache with pencil on photo offset paper (© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

T. Lux Feininger, “Mask for the Bauhaus Stage on the Roof of the Bauhaus School” (1928) (© Estate of T. Lux Feininger / Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin)

A great mass of diverse craft experimentation converged in the theater workshop that Schlemmer directed , as evidenced by some interesting photographs featured here. Marianne Brandt’s “Self-portrait reflected in a Globe in Bauhaus Atelier” (1928–29) and Erich Consemüller’s photo “Woman in a B3 Club Chair by Marcel Breuer wearing a Mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a Dress by Lis Beyer” (1926) are truly peculiar. As are Moholy-Nagy’s stereotypes and photograms, Schlemmer’s photo “Metalltanz or “’Dance in Metal’ (Carla Grosch) at the Bauhaus theatre in Dessau” (1929) and T. Lux Feininger’s photo “Mask for the Bauhaus Stage on the Roof of the Bauhaus School” (1928). Schlemmer’s presence is peppered throughout, as he was instrumental in the school’s many parties and frenetic celebrations, for which everyone participated in the creation of decorations, costumes, and invitation cards.

Marianne Brandt, “Self-portrait reflected in a Globe in Bauhaus Atelier” (1928–29) (© Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / A.D.A.G.P. 2016)

Unknown, “Life at the Bauhaus, students in front of the studio and seen from the Bauhaus balcony (Front: Anni Albers, Gunta Stölz; behind: Bruno Streiff, Shlomoh Ben-David (Georg Gross), Gerda Marx, standing: Max Bill)” (1927) (© Bauhaus Archiv Berlin)

I found visually sophisticated an unknown student’s photograph, “Life at the Bauhaus” (1927), which suggests something of the concept of aesthetic convergence as Schlemmer defined it: social synthesis in a new society. Of course, it was in theater where progressive, utopian, gesamtkunstwerk ideals could be put instantaneously into practice through the blending of the arts. Toward that end, in 1926, Gropius founded the Bauhaus Theater, in which many of the partly realized total-art ideas came to fruition in the work of Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and a number of the Bauhaus students whose ideas of total-theater consisted of an altered use of space. Moreover, in terms of the immersive gesamtkunstwerk, Gropius’s pivoting, 180-degree “Total Theater” design is consequential. It entailed a comprehensive, 180-degree stage design that included encompassing, movable architecture, a theater stage, and a cinema screen that united performers and audience in a rich, pluralistic synthesis. The spherical form of the theater situated the spectators around the edge of the rotund form, which, according to Gropius, set up a new perceptual rapport with the performance and enhanced the sense of immersion within the presentation of the spectacle. The term total was adapted by Gropius for this “Total Theater” (in spite of its limited version of the idea) so as to indicate that the viewer could see everything in its entirety. In his view, this totalizing use of physics, optics, and acoustics would produce a concentric field of view extending out in all directions. Gropius ideologically envisioned this new perceptual field as educating the masses and teaching a new way to think through the re-edification of the mass psyche.

Oskar Schlemmer, “Metalltanz” or ‘Dance in Metal’ (Carla Grosch) at the Bauhaus theater in Dessau” (1929), acetate film (© Bauhaus Archiv Berlin / Photography, Robert Binnermann)

Gropius’s ideal of total-architecture rejected the ideology of capitalistic profit, in which land was conceived of as a commodity, in favor of what he saw as a synthesis of the future. This overall visual effect was achieved by virtue of his latent Neo-Platonic sensibility, which shunned any form of decorative disguise and privileged the sleek, cool assurance with which good-looking and expensive materials are used to enrich the surfaces. That sleekness, in conjunction with Constructivism, eventually prompted Gropius to change the Bauhaus’s motto from “Art into Industry” to “Art and Technology, a New Unity.” Toward that end, in 1923, he organized the first Bauhaus exhibition around the Haus am Horn, a house designed by Georg Muche and executed by all the school’s workshops. In 1925, the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, into a new building illustrating Gropius’s ideology of unifying art and technology. The school’s campus included teachers’ houses, whose interiors and furniture were designed by Breuer. The Bauhaus continued in Dessau until 1932 when it had to close (due to the formation of a Communist student organization and a sex scandal) and move to Berlin. The school’s last director, the architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, decided to close the school in 1933. But here, the results of this largely utopian enterprise sit firmly before us, beautifully reminding us of what was and what might have been.

Marcel Breuer, “Wassily Chair (Club B3)” (1927), tubular chrome-plated steel structure, seat, back, and armrest in leather (© Ulrich Fiedler / Photographie, Martin Müller)

Josef Albers, “Tea Glass with Saucer and Stirrer” (1925), heat resistant glass, chrome-plated steel, ebony, and porcelain (© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Josef Albers, “Stacking Tables” (1927), ash veneer, black lacquer, painted glass (© The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn)

Marianne Brandt, “Teapot��� (ca 1924), silver and ebony (© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA / A.D.A.G.P. 2016)

Wilhelm Wagenfeld, “Bauhauslampe” (1923–24), glass and nickel, created in the Bauhaus school’s workshop (photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jean-Claude Planchet / A.D.A.G.P. 2016)

Vassily Kandinsky, “Kleine Welten I” (1922), color lithography (photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / all rights reserved)

Theodor Bogler, “Teapot with Handle” (1923), stoneware (© Klassik Stiftung)

Ruth Consemuller, “Tapestry” (1926), woven wool (© Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne)

Unknown, “Work of a student from the Bauhaus Dessau/Berlin” (1926–33) (Paris Centre Pompidou, © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / ADAGP / Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacques Faujour)

Dörte Helm, “Postcard from a set of 20 lithographies” (1923) (© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat)

L’Esprit du Bauhaus continues at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (107 Rue de Rivoli, 1st arrondissement, Paris, France) through February 26.

The post The Lifespan of Bauhaus Utopianism appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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