#the politics and poetics of transgression
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— Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, as quoted in Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture by Christine L. Marran
#nonfiction#ophelias-post#peter stallybrass#allon white#the politics and poetics of transgression#poison woman: figuring female transgression in modern japanese culture#christine l. marran
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Our Lady of Radiance
Summary: A small story from my Solavellan writings taking place before the battle of the Arbor Wilds, 9:42 Dragon. The calm before the storm.
Pairing(s): Solas x femme elf Inquisitor Lavellan (My canon OC Orianna Edea Lavellan). Cullen x Unrequited Lavellan.
Warnings: Fluff, angst, some slightly poetic insinuations to smut.
As the Inquisition prepared its siege on Corypheus's forces in the wilds surrounding the ancient temple of Mythal, Inquisitor Orianna Lavellan and her companions had stayed in a local village near its outskirts.
As the sun went down, they prepared for thr battle the coming morning. A great feast had been prepared, but Orianna could not eat knowing that so many of her men would be lost.
She maintained a smile in their presence, not wishing to inspire upon them the doom she felt herself. She had made so many friends, human, dwarfen - even Qunari. Her world had grown so much bigger and now here was a battle to fight for it all.
She locked eyes with Cullen across the tavern, full of tenderness and fear. She could read upon his lips, the chant of light. He was praying for her safety.
On the second floor, Solas leant over the railing, watching her with an unreadable look on his face. Lost in thoughts, she was not sure he even knew she had noticed him.
"A night that might be our last" Dorian mused, having helped himself generously to the wine. "Who might you spend it with? I wonder."
Orianna chuckled, "Stop worrying about me and turn around instead" she gestured, "I see the way Ironbull has been looking at you, have''nt you?"
"-Nonsense." Dorian shook his head and swallowed the remaining wine all at once, "A fine 'Vint and a savage Qunari. Now that is something for the bards to sing about."
Cullen made his way across the tavern at last, and Orianna excused herself with a sigh.
"Inquisitor" he greeted her, and Orianna looked up to see that Solas had left his positioning. "Commander, anything to report?"
There was a pause, "I... yes. There is a matter i'd like to discuss with you, well... in private."
Orianna's eyes distractedly wandered the tavern for Solas's whereabouts, he was no longer anywhere to be seen.
"Sorry. Could you repeat that to me Commander?"
Cullen swallowed nervously, "With the battle ahead of us, I could not let it remain unsaid that I..."
Orianna felt a wave of sadness wash upon her, it was all weighing to much. She was frightened, truth to be told she did not know if she truly stood a chance to defeat Corypheus.
"I care for you Orianna. More than care, in fact." Cullen finally admitted, gazing down at her expetantly.
A single tear fell down her cheek, burning hot. "Cullen..", she whispered.
"My devotion to you, goes far beyond my commanding of your army. It is resolute love, it will stand no matter what."
Orianna's breath hitched as he came nearer, his lips inches of her.
She wanted to press herself forward, but backed away instead into a table.
"Forgive me, Inquisitor. I've.. transgressed." Cullen pulled himself back, but before she could answer, Solas had appeared by his side with an austare visage.
"Commander, if I could have a word with the Inquisitor." He requested politely, and Cullen puzzedly withdrew to leave them be. The bards song filled the tavern, Ironbull laughed at something brawingly.
Before she could say anything, Solas had taken her hand leading her up the stairs after him.
"We were... just talking." Orianna explained, "-And more if the Knight Commander were to have his way." Solas replied snarkily. His hand still gently around hers untill they found themselves in his chamber.
"You're actually jealous?" Orianna finaly braved herself to ask, and Solas turned to her smugly. "Of course I am jealous."
"-To stand in your presence before such a fateful battle. Emmasalin var suledin evanura."
"Ma melava haleni. We would not have made it this far otherwise."
Something glimmered in his eyes, "Vhenan. Vir Insalin."
"I hope so. I can't afford to loose, not now."
Solas smiled, "I believe in you. You are so radiant, you inspire us all."
His lips found hers, and fueled with passion sat her down on his bed.
She fell back, but he did not join her. His head lowered, locked beneath her in awe and in worship.
"-Solas" his name left her lips breathlessly, he could barely keep his hands, or his lips of her, but never let her return the favour.
Whenever she got too dangerously close to convince him otherwise - he would pull away, or otherwise distract her differently.
The sounds of drunken shanty' sung from the tavern downstairs drowned out her cries as she quivered and fell defeated in his bed. He lingered, looking up at her with twinkling clever eyes.
"Mythal enaste." Orianna whispered, "if you keep this up, then."
"-If we survive the coming battle, i'll show you the true extent of my devotion, Vhenan."
Her heart skipped a beat, "I want you Solas, why wait? Why not-"
His lips shut her up, "As much as I'd relish the idea.. we should get some rest. By dawn your army will march and you will need to guide them"
Orianna laid down upon his bed defiantly, "Fine. But i'm not leaving your chambers. I can't sleep without you."
Solas joined her, once again with an unreadable ennui upon his face as he gazed upon her before reaching for - and placing a kiss upon her anchored hand.
"I'll keep the nightmares away."
#solavellan#solas x lavellan#solas × Inquisitor#solavellan fic#dragon age inqusition#dragonage#solas#solas fluff#cullen × inquisitor#dai#da3#veiledvvitchwrites
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The first time it happened to Hannah, it lasted “just a few seconds.” Without warning, the man she’d met on a dating app and was now having casual sex with grabbed her neck and squeezed gently. Flustered, she swatted his hand away and tried to wipe the gesture from her mind. A year later, it happened again: Another dating-app match wrapped his fingers around her neck. Then this past May, a third time, when a man she’d just started seeing wordlessly placed a hand on her throat while they were hooking up. “Then I said ‘no,’ and he took it off,” she remembers. Each time, Hannah said, she had a basic conversation around sexual desires and preferences with these men before anything physical took place. But the partners never brought up choking outright, let alone asked her permission to do so.
“In all of these scenarios, the men otherwise seemed very sweet, conscientious, and well-informed, and I think that’s why it always comes as such a shock,” Hannah said. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s this coming from?’ It’s a pretty violent thing to come out of nowhere, especially from men who otherwise seem so vanilla.”
What does it mean, then, that this “pretty violent thing,” an out-of-nowhere chokehold during sex, is happening in the post–Me Too age of consent? Today’s straight, liberal men are assumed to be considerably more interested in centering women’s pleasure and safety — so what gives? For one, panicked reports of an anecdotal “rise in choking” during sex have been circulating online for years, growing in frequency since 2019 and often offering up the middling explanation that young people have simply picked up the habit from porn. This year both Business Insider and the New York Times warned of the “trend” among Gen Z and teenagers alike. And while choking is not a particularly transgressive kink — it’s not unheard of for women to enjoy, as psychotherapist Esther Perel puts it in Mating in Captivity, the “politically incorrect … poetics of sex” — these particular instances serve as evidence of something sex-positive feminists had hoped would lessen with time: the unrelenting dissatisfaction of casual sex.
Generations of us have been there. Nearly a decade ago, New York’s Rebecca Traister investigated what she labeled “male sexual entitlement,” the tolerated if not expected discomfort of heterosexual sex. And as sex writer Nona Willis Aronowitz observed in her 2022 memoir, Bad Sex: “Sex has never been more normalized, feminism has never been more popular, romantic relationships have never been more malleable — yet we still haven’t transcended the binds that make sex and love go bad.” Just last month, new research reported in the New York Times confirmed the obvious: The orgasm gap for straight women still persists.
But while the threat of a bad time has always been part of the packaged deal of sleeping with a stranger, those of us aspiring to operate as sexually free agents, ever the optimists, had hoped that with age and education, the quality of casual hookups would improve. Instead, the feeling of despair among young women engaging in casual sex has reached a fever pitch. Just take a scroll through TikTok for proof. The individuals I spoke to (most of whom, like Hannah, requested anonymity for the sake of their privacy) shared sexual encounters that ranged from awkward and annoying to harrowing and traumatic, from unexpected slapping and anal play to a hesitance to wear condoms when asked. The issue isn’t so much that the sex is always outright unenjoyable or ill-intentioned but that consent to casual sex still seems to be operating as a catch-all for anything men only assume women want.
For her part, Hannah doesn’t believe that her sexual partners were acting out of malice. If anything, it seems they were making an attempt at tending to her needs, however misinformed. “But of course, in considering women’s pleasure, the only way that some men can seem to conceive of is strangling,” she added. “It makes me sort of depressed if I really think about it. That instead of asking, ‘Hey, what do you like?’ or ‘Hey, do you like this?,’ they’re just going straight for the throat.”
Other women I spoke to had similarly jarring experiences during recent hookups. Tiana said she’d been slapped in the face on a few different occasions while performing oral sex, a “weird thing to do without consent” even when administered lightly, she says. She noted how common it was for “guys to try to eat or finger my ass without asking first.” Similarly, Ash says lots of anal play happens without her go-ahead — often a finger inserted into her anus in the middle of vaginal sex: “In doggy, it’s always a big ass thumb for some reason.” And much like Tiana, Nicky Josephine, a 33-year-old Brooklyn-based writer, recalled being slapped by a sexual partner without consent, to which she responded by slapping him back.
“I felt it was insulting more than anything,” Josephine said. “I like it as long as it’s not too hard, and it’s discussed beforehand. I was just super mad he didn’t ask or warn. That being said, I kept having sex with him.”
Alyssa, a 31-year-old Brooklynite, describes herself as practiced in BDSM and generally more open to experimenting during casual hookups. (That is, only after boundaries have been discussed.) She’s found that insecurity in beginners can sometimes breed aggression, a textbook sign of overcompensation. “I’m learning that men who have no experience in kink tend to completely overdo it on their first time and just be really, really rough and also not listen,” Alyssa tells me. There are echoes of the same sentiment on Reddit in r/TwoXChromosomes, where users point to the mainstreaming of BDSM as one of the factors producing “ill-informed ‘practitioners’” who don’t understand the negotiation of consent, let alone the practice of aftercare. In January, Alyssa found herself at the hands of one such man in his early 30s.
“I would have been fine with some choking in theory, but it ended up being more of a strangulation that I did not consent to,” she said. “He was shaking me by the neck like in a TV show or true-crime reenactment. It was like he was copying strangling someone as he’d seen in the movies.”
It’s no wonder hordes of young women are opting for celibacy instead. Celebrities like Julia Fox, once positioned as the apex of male desires, have sworn off fucking men altogether. Queer pop star Chappell Roan gave voice to her pleasure-less interactions with men in “Femininomenon” (“lying to your friends about / how he’s such a goddamn good lover … I don’t understand / why can’t any man / hit it like … ”), while former country star Maren Morris divorced her husband, came out as bisexual, and now seems to be taking pleasure in the bliss of sexual discovery: “Sittin’ on the fence / Feels good bеtween my legs.” Meanwhile, online, women are recording TikToks after horrific first dates as they search for solidarity, yearn for real love, and unpack their listlessness toward men. As someone who regularly requests to be choked, this inquiry made me pause to ask whether I really draw pleasure from the act or if I am subconsciously bending to the whims of the men under which I am pinned. Easier to stomach if I get ahead of it and convince myself I wanted it, anyway.
Curious about what exactly compels a man to go for the throat, I turned to Jake, a 28-year-old straight guy who lives in Manhattan and works in tech. He doesn’t often talk “explicitly” about sex when gearing up for a new hookup. Rather, he describes the whole process as a somewhat delicate “dance” that can’t really be taught, composed of subtle hints like “touching on the wrist, or touching on the forearm, or touching on the shoulder when we’re laughing.” When Jake does place a hand on a woman’s neck, he says he’ll either ask outright or gently place it there if it “feels like something [he] should do.” Besides, no one has ever told him they don’t like it.
When I ask why he wouldn’t initiate a conversation beforehand, Jake thinks for a moment. Talking about sex risks “removing the spontaneity of it” or might “feel like a sterilization when you put it into words.” He pauses again before musing that maybe it’s just something he’s seen in movies: that a man should be able to intuit what a woman finds pleasurable and when she wants it. “I understand it could be good to ask,” he adds. “But personally, there’s almost a sheepishness when it comes to discussing sex. I am scared of making an assumption and being wrong.”
Of course, men do talk about sex in other settings. Jake mentioned that both some of his friends and the male comedians, podcasters, and content creators he follows frequently boast about pleasuring women as a means of clout-chasing. “It’s now almost like a sense of pride to make a girl come in my own circle,” Jake said.
So it’s not that men are ignorant of — or worse, don’t care about — women’s pleasure; it’s who benefits from that pleasure that’s up for debate. Take, for example, Andrew Schulz’s bit about squirting (“We know it’s pee, ladies, we’re not stupid … but here’s the thing, we don’t give a fuck because we made you pee”). Or Mike Majlak describing his “process-driven” approach to foreplay on the Rawtalk podcast and his need to “spray in every nickel hooker.”
“This sounds bad,” Jake tells me, “but I think a lot of men are seeing women not necessarily more as people but more as sexual beings who also like sex. Things have changed a lot in the past decade, but I think that the pendulum has swung in a way that’s probably also not healthy.”
While casual sex is a two-way street, several of the women I spoke to expressed regret that they hadn’t been more clear in the midst of a hookup about what they did — and, more importantly, didn’t — like. Maybe they’d issued a curt “no” or pushed away a grazing hand, but they hadn’t articulated why a particular act made them uncomfortable or bothered them, the words caught in their throat. Hannah, for instance, doesn’t think it’s her job to close the systemic knowledge gap around consent and pleasure burdening men. Still, she wonders whether she could’ve stopped the cycle by educating her partners more clearly.
“It’s just another burden. It makes me feel like I’m gonna have to take this on myself,” she explains. “It’s just another responsibility that women have. I’m not doing a lot of work in terms of trying to make sure that they don’t do it again with someone else, but like, I’m exhausted.”
Willis Aronowitz writes of this feeling — of all we stand to lose when we express sexual discomfort: “Even the most sexually confident among us sometimes hesitate to talk about all this, because we don’t want to hurt our partners’ feelings or seem demanding, because we want to appear as horny as we initially advertised ourselves to be, because the length of time it takes us to orgasm will spoil the mood … because too much is at stake, because we’re simply not sure what we want.”
For Samentha Teah, a 25-year-old who lives in Virginia, taking a vow of celibacy seemed the only way to discover what she really wanted out of casual sex. After a particularly irksome on-again, off-again situationship with a man in 2021, she swore off sex, albeit unintentionally. But by February of the following year, Teah began actively identifying as celibate. For nearly a year and a half, they tried to unravel their attachment to penetrative sex and rethink the possibilities of physical connection. She needed to get to know herself “outside the expectations of hookup culture, because hookup culture is dependent on you having no boundaries.” Toward the end of last year, Teah decided they were ready to have sex again. Naturally, the hookup wasn’t great — her male partner repeatedly ignored her requests “to slow down, or to take it easy and be gentle.” “I feel like through sex, I can understand how a relationship is going to go,” Teah said, “And the way that he was with my body, I just didn’t want to interact with him anymore after that.”
While many women have documented the intense disappointment of breaking celibacy for milquetoast men (and renewing their vows immediately after), Teah had a different takeaway. She still engages in casual sex but is now “very, very selective,” prioritizing “fooling around” with men and women she already knows over vaginal intercourse with strangers or dating-app matches. Their new relationship to physical intimacy, they tell me, feels like “true liberation.” “I get to have sex when I feel like it. I get to take breaks when I feel like it. If I don’t like sex, I can walk away from a person. I can stop sex mid-act. I didn’t know that I really, truly could do these things … I was searching for autonomy.” Within herself, at long last, she’s found it.
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You talked about Crassus not getting his wealth in "traditional" manner, and it made me think of Plutarch taking about how Sulla's wealth was also viewed with suspicion because his father actually left him nothing so becoming wealthy was a subversion of his inheritance. I'm just ... having thoughts.
IT'S SO FUN there's such a specific kind of wound that digs into both of them happening there, Sulla's wealth is a mark of suspicion the way that Crassus' wealth is a permanent stain
it's not to the same degree, but there is something almost thematic about Crassus being brought up in a modest household and Sulla having lived in cheap lodgings (or to continue the almost: the way that there is a specific kind of familial absence in the early narratives of their respective biographies). the ways that they both gained wealth and power taking unconventional turns (whether the suspicion is warranted or not), even by the rapidly unraveling standards of the time.
it's not a perfect comparison!! but in a way it's poetic to me?? recognition in a reflection that doesn't line up so instead it's unbearable and grating. Sulla was the only Roman who could hold Crassus to the floor, and Crassus got up anyway. they both crawled up the Roman political ladder, ruthless in achieving their goals. its the mortifying ordeal of being known enough and not vibing with it.
A Year of One’s Own: Dating the Praetorship of Marcus Crassus, Martin Stone
like, Sulla knew Crassus well enough to know how to hurt him, and boy that sure feels like something.
Plutarch, Crassus, trans. Warner.
ANYWAY, I'm getting off topic. oh my god I have gotten so far off the original topic of this ask.
to wrap it up: something something Sulla keeping the company of actors and such, and this text comparing Crassus to an actor about to enter the stage of politics once more, Sulla's role in freezing Crassus out of the traditional avenues of political power.
A Life in Pieces, Plutarch, Crassus 12.1-16-8, James T Chlup
Many Things Are Weird About The Main Cast Of The Last Generations Of The Roman Republic. lots of subversions and transgressions happening all over the place.
heughghh to finish this off, I've been thinking about this a lot while I write other things, but uhhhh my thoughts are Not Particularly Coherent. I've been reading lately on the Rizal-Bonifacio relationship and what it means to conflict with someone who is partially responsible for making you what you are—
Decimation: Myth, Discipline, and Death in the Roman Republic, Michael J. Taylor
—and it's bleeding into all the other filing cabinets in my mind.
#maybe there's something else in the way Sulla zeroes in on Pompey#who inherited a crime#whose biography has talk of Fortune#like Sulla#Pompey and Crassus raised their respective armies that they led under Sulla in similar ways#it is. a triangle.#horrible terrible triangle#i also think about how Sulla tried to stamp out Caesar and it didn't work so Caesar like. ran Sulla's playbook even better#that's like stepping into someone else's body and saying 'nice try. my turn.'#so the sulla triangle continues anyway???? something like that.#ANYWAY. i am so sorry for this wall of words. I hope uhhhh that it makes sense. i have thoughts about Sulla's wealth#they are Not coherent. unfortunately. thankfully I write comics not academic papers#ask tag
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Gender transgression, militancy and sexual political violence
This type of violence against women, in a repressive context, is known as sexual political violence.
Feminist historian Francia Jamett (2012) [2] explains that this violence is not yet classified, therefore, it is not recognized as a crime under Chilean legislation. In this way, it was an instrument of state terrorism used against militant and revolutionary women. Lawyer Camila Maturana (2014) maintains that her practice “is used to humiliate the adversary. It is a message of mutilation and castration of the enemy, a battle of men fought in the bodies of women. Rape is used by both sides as a symbolic act, it is used to demoralize the other and, on many occasions, institutionalized through forced prostitution and sexual slavery in the hands of the military” [3] .
In that sense, the feminist of the collective “Women survivors, always resistant”, Beatriz Bataszew (2015), points out that the women who experienced these sexual tortures represented with their ideology and action “a double transgression. On the one hand, they questioned traditional social and political values and, on the other, they broke with the norms that governed the feminine condition that limited them to the private/domestic sphere” [4] .
Therefore, the rebellion of these women evidenced the gender relations of heteropatriarchal society, which meant that the military and repressors launched all their hatred and violence against their bodies and their lives. As Bunster and Taylor put it, “women's bodies – their vaginas, their uteruses, their breasts – linked to female identity as sexual objects, as wives and as mothers, were clear objects of sexual torture” [5] .
Presentation at the former El Morro detention and torture center. Photography by Rayén Traro.
In this way, Mildred Cáceres and Gloria Avilés (2017), from the communications area of the Cultural Center Por la Memoria La Monche, reflect and propose that sexual political violence “was constituted as a permanent and legitimized practice by the military dictatorship, that is, , in a policy against women institutionalized as a disciplinary and control strategy towards women who do not ascribe to its dictatorial and sexist model” [6] . This violence endures behind the walls of silence and intimacy of the former prisoners basically because of the little that has been written about it and, furthermore, because of the few testimonies that exist, although there are many survivors and resisters, a considerable number of them even participate. actively in the current women's and feminist movement, which shows the continuum and transformations of their political trajectories.
The imaginaries and stories of the protagonists: a look against oblivion from artistic practices
The production was prepared by a group of women former political prisoners of the dictatorship, horizontally twinned with young women artists, who came together in the creation of a collective dramaturgy and staging, which, from my perspective as a feminist, not only made visible and denounced the sexual political violence that the revolutionary women of Gran Concepción experienced, but also presented, through an aesthetic and poetic proposal, a problematization and reflection on the imaginaries and life projects of the women promoted by the militant culture of the left and revolutionary of the Popular Unity (UP) [7] .
The montage recounts, from documentary and testimonial language, the militant life they had as girls, young people and adults. In some way, we learned about fragments of the types of roles they played in their political practice, the interests and concerns of social history, and the political projects they had in revolutionary and counterrevolutionary contexts. These were closely related to those profiles and actions that strengthened the social and care fabrics of the various student, union and population communities where the organic insertion of these fighters and their peers was developed, in a Leninist key, before and during the dictatorship.
The dramaturgy was configured from living texts orchestrated by multiple voices that narrated from the individual to the collective and even generational. Through the crossing of the testimonies, archives and repertoires of its protagonists, from a perspective that replaces that of traditional political historiography with one focused on the daily militant experience among women, an artistic and political representation with meanings of protest was articulated. and contempt against the views that point out that opposition and political women did not have their own history within recent social history.
Artistic installation by Darling Maredi Andia Almendra in the former El Morro detention and torture center, Talcahuano. Photography by Rayén Traro.
Although the common thread of the montage linearly portrays one of the most horrifying, painful and traumatic experiences that a leftist revolutionary can live, it was possible to observe images and knowledge that expressed another of the meanings that, personally, moved me the most: the interweaving of historical experience with the current struggle of women. I interpreted this as an honest invitation to carry out an exercise in understanding how these women have reconstructed their biographies as political subjects and how they recognize themselves around the transformation of this neoliberal and patriarchal system - an authoritarian political, economic and cultural model, as permanently mentioned it - that never fell and whose crimes against humanity continue unpunished.
In that sense, the work offers us a range of possibilities to know how these militants experienced pain and treated trauma, in addition to exposing the updated political position to which they ascribe today; position that breaks with the idea of the victim and replaces it with that of the subversive and resistant, legitimizing experiences and imaginaries as a version with feminist logic that recovers and protects the memories of the dictatorship in Chile - especially those of Gran Concepción - from a dissident path to the hegemonic ones.
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This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women.
Kathy Acker - Punk Writer (Edition 1) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
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Carlos Leppe - Perchero (coat hangers), 1975 and El Perchero (the clothes rack)
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/perchero-clothes-rack
The early years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship of the 1970s generated some of the most militant artistic demonstrations in Latin American conceptual art. Carlos Leppe used the reference points of Conceptualism, such as its hermeticism and precariousness to demonstrate the absolute breakdown of human rights in an extremely repressive dictatorship.
based on a complex analysis of the contemporary situation using the body and theatrical settings.
The body used as a support for artistic expression was seen to be a powerful medium for political condemnation. In 1975 he created El perchero (The Clothes Rack), the original mounting of which consisted of three folded life-size photographs hung on a structure with three coat-hangers. The photographs depicted the artist’s body dressed in women’s clothing, exposing and concealing symbolically loaded body parts. The piece as a whole dared to confront the question of the representation of living flesh, in a clear reference to tortures used by the Chilean military regime.
Carlos Leppe’s art practice is political in its poetic tone and poetic in its political tone
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Dumplings [餃子] (2004)
At what specific degree of dermal tautness does the patriarchal hegemony deem the face of a Woman of a Certain Age (read: anything over 24.5 years or something, I dunno) to be acceptable or even beautiful? The burden of beauty in the world of Dumplings and beyond falls on women. Nothing Mrs Li can do will draw the attention of her husband for more than a passing moment; he’s too busy fucking other, younger women. And yet she feels a nigh-addictive drive to pursue that standard which will maintain his attention. This fixation pushes her into the arms of a woman whose appearance belies her years, all thanks to one secret (doctors hate her!). Unlike other films of this stripe, the essential ingredient of Aunt Mei’s dumplings is revealed almost immediately. In not beating around the bush, the film both comments slyly on the One-child policy of Mainland China and draws sharp socio-political lines. Mrs Li is a victim of a sexist double-standard, but her position of wealth and privilege allows her to literally prey on those less fortunate. The teenager brought to Aunt Mei as a last resort dies as a direct result of her mother’s desperation, her father’s monstrosity, Mrs Li’s obsession, and Aunt Mei’s greed. An entire lower class family obliterated for a few moments of fishy beauty. Even beyond its concept, this is horror, after all, so the film leans into crunchy, amped-up Foley in all of the eating scenes, emphasizing the transgression.
If a mirror is a symbol of beauty associated with femininity, Dumplings makes a meal of the motif. Aunt Mei’s flat is littered with cameo mirrors, allowing for moments of doubling and self-reflection as Mrs Li hovers at the threshold of this path of transgression. After she makes her final commitment beyond the pale we see her in frame reflected with Aunt Mei, two women against the grain. At her nadir, Mrs Li is presented with another sort of reflection of herself, seeing a rebroadcast of herself as a young, blossoming television star just as she despairs at the side-effects of her latest treatment. In this moment, it’s possible to see someone as amoral but also to understand on some level why they’re doing what they do through the lens of horror. The final frames bring this arc to a poetic close, Mrs Li doubled by the blade of the cleaver she holds, ready to make the first cut of her next treatment.
THE RULES
SIP
Someone says 'dumpling'.
Anyone eats a dumpling.
Reflection in a wall mirror.
Amazing trouser prints.
BIG DRINK
The tiffin tin appears in a scene.
Aunt Mei wants to sing for someone.
#drinking games#dumplings#fruit chan#miriam yeung#bai ling#hong kong cinema#horror#horror & thriller
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anyway i know i'm not saying anything new but i rly wish we lived in a culture with a greater emphasis on like... critical reading and poetic/metaphoric literacy?
idk i just don't think that every time i say lolita is one of my favorite books i should have to add the caveat of like "but i don't condone ____!" or have to clarify that i'm talking about metaphors when i say incest can be a really important theme worth exploring.
it's not just that it's annoying on a personal level but also that it's reductive on the level of a literary politic that uses taboo to deconstruct or reimagine power in really significant ways!
transgression is a tool! discomfort is a framework! roll in it, writhe in it, bask in its light!
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How Every Sign Will Be Affected by Saturn in Pisces
According to the top astrologer in Kolkata, Pisces is a water sign that can change and represents tenderness and sensitivity. By nature, Saturn is the opposite planet. As a result, the energy of these two is opposed when Saturn is in Pisces. What we end up with are challenges in setting limits and establishing order. Fantasy and reality blend, feelings and intuition trump logic, and spirituality becomes our obsession.
Aries:It's crucial to understand that you have served your time for the offence, even though you might want to punish yourself for past transgressions. Take a moment to yourself. Nobody is flawless, not even yourself.
Taurus:Your social circle is getting smaller as you discover who your real friends are. You're fine, even though you were used to hanging out with large groups of people, arguing that having a smaller social circle with close friends is preferable to be surrounded by acquaintances who are only there to make fake small talk.
Gemini:Right now, your coworkers more than your job may be the reason your career feels complicated. To keep your working relationship positive and moving forward, try to find a compromise that works for both of you.
Cancer: During Saturn's transit in Pisces, you might find yourself more likely to stand on your soapbox and lecture others. As long as you allow others to voice their opinions to feel as though they are important, there is nothing wrong with expressing your thoughts and feelings.
Leo:It's always crucial to set boundaries, particularly in relationships. Verify that you are not going beyond the boundaries that other people have set. In a similar vein, request the room necessary for you to make decisions that you are proud of and that you own.
Virgo:Giving and taking are fundamental to relationships. To make sure that no one feels taken advantage of, it's critical to preserve that dynamic at all times. Give people your undivided love and attention just because you want to, without anticipating anything in return, and then watch what happens, as predicted by the Best Astrologer in Kolkata.
Libra:Because your daily routine needs structure, this transit will make your chaotic schedule right. As a creature of comfort, routine adherence is crucial. This will facilitate regaining your rhythm and help you break free from your current state of funk.
Scorpio:You're dating, loving, and crushing on people with a more sophisticated attitude. You should have serious conversations about politics and other issues that affect everyone, not just you and your close friends, rather than flirting and trying to be cheeky.
Sagittarius:Since your heart is in your home, Sagittarius, you should take special care of your family members right now. You never know when they might need your assistance, so be ready to help them out when they do.
Capricorn:You are the only one who truly understands how hurtful words can be when used to convey bitter feelings. Thus, to build kinder and better relationships, you will spend the next 2.5 years holding back the harsh words and substituting them with flowery and poetic messages.
Aquarius:Since your bank account feels light, you might be worrying about money. You've been spending carelessly for the past few years, and now it's all catching up with you.
Pisces: According to the famous astrologer in Kolkata, the stakes and pressure may seem high at the moment because you are pushing yourself to be number one in all you do. Take a moment to reward yourself for your hard work and accomplishments at work rather than criticising yourself.
#best astrologer in world#top astrologer in kolkata#astrologer in kolkata#best astrologer india#famous astrologer
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Ok but what's your favourite parts about shadowgast, why does it scratch all the right places? 👀
It’sabouttheyearning.jpg
There’s so much to love. Clearly I have a TYPE, as my experience with choosing favorites went about like
Friend who got me to watch CR: So who’s your favorite so far?
Me: Shit how do I choose? They’re all great. Toss-up between Molly, Caleb, and Beau I think?
Caleb: *reveals his Tragic Backstory*
Me: never mind, that one, it’s that one
So I guess it was inevitable. Honestly? The BEST thing about it? Is that the talent behind Caleb ACTUALLY, PERSONALLY CONFIRMED THE ATTRACTION IS REAL. Multiple times. Not just in “nod nod wink wink say no more” encouragement to the fandom out of appreciation for his character’s popularity, but STRAIGHT UP SAID THIS MAN IS BISEXUAL AND ATTRACTED TO ESSEK IN MULTIPLE WAYS
Which means that if Liam ever nuts up there is a very real chance of it becoming canon. Like, not tinhatting, but an actual, real chance, and even if they never hook up, it is fucking canon that Caleb is into Essek. As badly as I’ve been burned by SPN and the MCU, and even to an extent Hannibal—gods know I love Bryan Fuller & co but as a frustrated queer man I’m allowed to be a little grumbly over (paraphrased) “they’re in love, it’s a love story, but not ~PHYSICALLY~”—my interest in Shadowgast was tentative at best until I reached that particular Talks Machina. And now they’re both escalating, manhandling each other, favoring each other, showing off for each other, like...this shit is real, and I’m reeling from it. This isn’t something queer people normally get to HAVE in media, especially queer men. But CR? CR puts blatant Shadowgast fanart on their official website and displays it in their fucking streams. I would say I have no words, but... *gestures at this post* ...clearly I fucking do, lol.
Normally we’re relegated to smirking subtext or established background couples that hold hands in the suburbs. There are countless stories in media of men who are, in subtext, very clearly bonded romantically, but textually “””really good friends””” or “””like brothers”””. Despite all our progress since the Hays Code, men in media by and large don’t get to have their attraction to each other treated as an explicit thing with real potential to be explored as a romance. They just don’t. It’s still too taboo. So for Liam to just casually say “Yes, the attraction is real” (again, paraphrased but only in terms of word order) is fucking monumental. So it gives me hope, something I’ve been short on for most of my life and that has not served me well in the past.
It has certainly helped to watch the rest of the cast’s /fucking faces/ during their Moments and know they ship it as hard as anyone.
But that’s all extradiegetic. Diegetically, I’m a sucker for narrative parallels, and Caleb has made the parallels of their trajectories explicit. I sat up and went 👀 the first time Caleb went out of his way to touch Essek, and they’ve been in orbit with each other ever since. So there’s an element of that “shared life experience” thing I love so much in Stucky: they understand each other in a way that no one else understands either of them; they mirror each other’s ambitions and transgressions, each other’s strengths and flaws. They have so much to offer each other even aside from their similarities as grown “gifted children” with tragic crimes in their pasts: an exchange of experience in culture and class; their forward-thinking imaginations; their loyalty, previously sworn to no one; their resources, both the disparate and dirty and desperate from Caleb, and the refined and academic and political from Essek; their power, in terms of magic and intellect and sheer will (power exchange joke goes here).
They are the sun and the moon and I ache for an eclipse.
All this, and the fact that they should by rights hate each other, but both are apostates in their own way; both long for change and are willing to break reality to achieve it. They could bring out the best in each other or the very worst. They are a volatile mix and I want to see what new molecule will come of their atoms bonding, as well as the explosive chemical reaction when it forms. They are a perfect match that should have been perfect nemeses, had things played out just a little different for them both. What’s more beautiful than that? What’s more powerful than that? To see these two men who are nuclear reactors, who are stars, spiral together through the dark, on track to crash together and leave nebulae in their wake. There is so much potential energy generated when they sway close and every week we come closer to it becoming kinetic.
I should temper my expectations. I’m not a prognosticator, as my history has clearly fucking shown time and again; I can’t know that it’s a WHEN and not an IF. But the odds, man. They’re the best goddamn odds I’ve ever had.
Now here at the end of this I should disclaim that I have drunk half a bottle of $4 strawberry wine so please excuse me drunkenly waxing poetic like the pretentious piece of shit I am. Thank you and good night
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Disgust always bears the imprint of desire.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
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Wild Frictions
The Politics and Poetics of Interruption
June 26 – August 22, 2021
Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption explores minor disruptions, surprising and unforeseen interventions, delays and repetitions and their potential to show alternative ways of existing and behaving. Rather than looking to heroic eloquent figures or stimulating united/ collective moments, this exhibition locates emancipation in subtle idiosyncratic forms of mischief-making, in the playful slippages or in the spaces in between sounds and syllables.
“…wildness as a provocation, a retreat from the conventional, an affront to the normal and the expected, and an environmental condition.” (Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire , 2020, p. 28)
The subversive artistic approaches/ actions/ acts simultaneously evoke feelings of alienation and loss of control, which in turn reflect anxieties and tensions associated with the pandemic and social uprisings of the past and this year – the personal gridlock, the numerous protests and repeated quarantines, as well as economic and social pauses. Through text, video, sound, installation, and performance, the artists of Wild Frictions employ strategies of interruption and blockage/ obstruction/ resistance to critique universal narratives, systems of oppression, and unconscious structural routines that characterize our everyday lives.
„Gesucht: die Lücke im Ablauf, das Andre in der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, das Stottern im sprachlosen Text, das Loch in der Ewigkeit, der vielleicht erlösende Fehler.“ (Heiner Müller, Shakespeare‘s Factory 1 , 1985, S. 13)
These disruptive artistic gestures may create discomfort or confusion, but simultaneously/ and therefore contain an immense potential: the ability to subvert and gently corrupt, to create cracks at the level of meaning and to open up new realities. Wild Frictions invites a poetic analysis and possible transgression of the boundaries that form universal modes of being, speaking and knowing today.
“When the facts change, I change my mind.” (Nora Turato, from the series “I’m on the verge of TOTAL VICTORY”, 2021)
Participating artists: Félicia Atkinson, Trisha Baga, Cameron Downey, Anna Ehrenstein, Nikita Gale, keyon gaskin, Birgit Hein, Steffani Jemison, Kahlil Joseph, Ani Kasten, Christine Sun Kim, Janette Laverrière, Ouecha, Laure Prouvost, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jimmy Robert, Pilvi Takala, Banu Çiçek Tülü, Nora Turato
Curators: Sandra Teitge and Amara Antilla Research and text editing: Linnéa Meiners, Jorinde Splettstößer Project management: Sofia Pfister Technical production: Kristoffer Holmelund Assistance: Dani Hasrouni, Markus Hemann Design: Louise Borinski
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien is an institution of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Council. Director: Stéphane Bauer
–The project is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Senate Department for Culture and Europe: the Fund for Municipal Galleries, and the Fund for Exhibition Payments for Visual Artists. –Wild Frictions is produced in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, where an iteration of the exhibition is on view April 9-September 19, 2021.
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most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?
so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS Jan 3, 2020 BY PHOEBE CHEN
EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.
This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.
Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.
Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.
Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).
Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.
One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.
WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.
But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.
In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.
Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”
Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.
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Week 1 Reading & Video Review
Reading #1
- Text 1 - Video Art / Characteristics, Origins, History, Famous Postmodernist Video Artists
- Video art is a new type of contemporary art, commonly seen as installation.
- Video technology and digital computer can manipulate film sequence.
-2 basic varieties: Single-Channel & Installations.
- Single Channel: Video is either screened, projected, shown in single series of image.
- Installations: Environment & Assemblage or Performance art of several distinct pieces.
- 1965 Sony released the Portapak, a portable recoding device.
- Using synthesizers to produce abstract work.
- Famous Video Artist: Andy Warhol, Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola.
- Text 2 - Busting the Tube
- Kate Horsfield described the history of video practices, from society oppression from gender biased exploitation to political oppression.
- In the 1950, Television was starting to get notice and becoming more popular, government would take control of the media and to only cast news that praised the good deed and hide the ugly truth.
- In 1965, Sony released the Portapak, a portable recording device.
- Artist saw the Portapak as a new undiscovered medium that allows the user to capture in the moment event, that has not been tampered with by the government.
- Artists use the Portapak as a way to communicate with the society outside the restriction of the mainstream news
- In the 70′s technology became more advance with better feature to show their work and thoughts. However it come with a high price to possess it.
- Artist help with AIDS activist to prevent hysteria
- Low funds supported to artist, lead to the release of Sony Cam Recorder 8, a cheap device with powerful feature.
Reading #2
- Text - Cinephile: The Voice Over
Voice Over in Romantic Comedy Today
- Dual Focus: Seeing both of the male and female train of thoughts, opinions, and feelings towards each other. Ultimately ending up together with all knowing viewpoints
- Single Focus: Seeing only from one side, male or female. Viewer shows more emotion and feel sympathy and other emotion towards the actor. Viewer are more likely to be anxious to know the ending. Male can be seen as more romantic.
What Does God Hear?
- Malick used voice-over in a variety of unconventional ways for a number of different effects.
- “Linda’s voiceover expresses a number of different views and serves multiple functions, leading us “to re-evaluate what we see and hear…to become conscious of the narrating agency’s presentation of the diegetic world, and perhaps to become suspicious of it””.
- Voice Over can set up a different multitude of sound perceptions.
- The voice over let the viewer to be in the position of god.
- The voice over allows the viewer to empathize with the character through hearing and grasp the bigger picture through seeing.
Native American Filmmakers Reclaiming Voices
- “Myriad of invisible storyteller”
- Use multiple off screen voice over actor as “invisible storyteller”
- Rule of synchronous sound: the match between the human body and the human voice appear seamless and result in the representation of a homogeneous thinking subject whose exteriority is congruent with its interiority.
- Voice over (almost always) allows the male subject to be superior with power and knowledge
The Voice Over as an Integrating Tool of Word and Image
- Voice over as a tool or device attempt to integrate words with images in manner of poetic techniques.
- Role of voice-over in alloying words and images in Asian films are more prominent, the variety of languages in which the written word takes on both aural and visual form.
- Japanese Benshi: A Japanese performer performs live narration for a silent film.
- Chinese calligraphy is a form of art.
- The mode of poetic expression in traditional Chinese poetry.
- “If we consider cinema as a poetic form, we might then say that words and images are juxtapositions in a metonymic flow”.
- The voice-over acts as a generic tool, carrying nuances of Chinese form and methodology of expression (the poetic modes of fu-bi-xing)
- Visual technique of dissolve acts as another generic tool, helping the natural flow of images be coordinated by words
Voice Over Narrative Agency and Oral Culture
- The god-like third-person cinematic narrator that recalls the autonomous narrator in some African oral performances, the griot.
- Oral performance informs a diverse range of African films, straddling the canon of Sembène.
- Borom Sarret achieves this transgression via its voice-over’s unstable situation within the heterogeneous soundtrack.
Reading #3
- Text - Mary Ann Doane
- Photogénie: supplement an object to enhance a photographic medium.
- Walter Benjamin: “the close-up was one of the significant entrance points to the optical unconscious, making visible what in daily life went unseen."
Reading #4
- Text - Exercise in Style
- 99 ways of retelling the same story
- With each way he adds in a little more of details
- Different style of writing with each way being told according to the expression.
WEEK 1 VIDEO REVIEW
- Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image -
- Showing the beauty of what under the war image.
- Unique concept to contextualise beauty.
- Soldier looking macho and expressive with their poses and actions, when being film, some stare down at the camera or having the eyes of not being wanted to film. Being really self-conscious.
- South Africa - Mohau Modisakeng - Passage - Venice Biennale 2017 -
- A 3-pannel projection showing the history of slavery towards the people that were in South Africa
- The water represent both the flow of life and death of many who have arrived or departed in the slave trade.
- All human beings are referred as “voyager” and all voyager has a beginning and an end.
- Exploring the dark past of South Africa history. that the present time usually doesn't pay attention to or simply went unnoticed.
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My point is not that the idiom of disgust is inherently more “radical” than a desire taken as a metaphor for “the pluralization of meaning by different means,” or that the agonistic emotion has better rather than simply different theoretical possibilities to offer. It is rather that with its tropes of semantic multiplicity, slippage, and flow, with its general logic of inclusivity and strong centripetal pull, the academically routinized concept of “desire” is simply more concordant, ideologically as well as aesthetically, with the aesthetic, cultural, and political pluralisms that have come to define the postmodern than an emotional idiom defined by its vehement exclusion of the intolerable. If, in the context of a hegemonic pluralism that willfully misidentifies multiplicity with commensurability, the risk of “desire” is that of devolving into a “convenient receptacle” or “friendly abyss” for any form of “literary heterogeneity” or perceived transgression of the symbolic status quo, disgust’s vulnerability as a poetics would seem to derive in part from pluralism’s ability to manipulate the rhetoric of consensus and inclusivity in order to reduce oppositional and exclusionary formations to “monolithic totalitarianism[s]” (Rooney, SR, 27). This has been the fate of Marxism in particular, [Ellen] Rooney points out, in the American public sphere, where the mainstream media repeatedly marshal the language of “consensus” to caricaturize late twentieth-century socialist movements as betrayals of pluralism. Hence, “political pluralism, ‘American-style,’ is nothing but the exclusion of marxisms, both in domestic politics and abroad” (Rooney, SR, 27). As Hal Foster similarly points out, “Somehow, to be an advocate of pluralism is to be democratic—is to resist the dominance of any one faction (nation, class or style). But this is no more true than the converse: that to be a critic of pluralism is to be authoritarian.”
Sianne Ngai on disgust in Ugly Feelings
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