I appreciate all the examples of outsider artists (Darger, Adolf Wölfli or the efforts of Jean Dubuffet and others to highlight works by psychiatric patients) and independent directors, animators and young cinematographers going against all odds, against the aesthetic canon or against financial (sometimes from their former colonial masters) or formal limitations, or trying to not succumb to general precarious and exploitative conditions of cultural workers. At the same time what is completely lacking in this video is a sort of collective understanding of creativity or open culture and how exactly AIs or algos get trained on such bountiful public supplies put out by millions if not billions of us (not just artists) together.
A lot of the avant-garde abstract and intellectually challenging art or deemed non-commercial actually became not less monetized but more so with artworks, especially Western artworks that like coins tended towards greater and greater realms of abstraction. Instead of eschewing or making a virtue out of impoverishment or abstinence maybe there should have been some room for highlighting works that exemplify the economics of the art market in the 20th century .
I understand that such capitalist appropriation cannot be fought outside of the very copyright regime and IP rights it supposedly protects, but it somehow misses the point of such class or collective action lawsuits. Today there is more and more clear that artificial intelligence is grown fat on a privatizing large chunk of the general intellect, and the result is often neither artificial (being trained by human, or on human-derived materials), fair nor intelligent (because without humans supervision it is liable to make gross mistakes and reinforce systemic racism and red-lining). Even the works from the public domain are being used to train AIs.
Such edgelord exclusive focus on the outsider status or on the few that made it into the art canon (including heavies like Van Gogh) risks misunderstanding both old and new currents and ends up junking all the no-name fluctuations, crazy metamorphoses, and fan-economy phenomena. Everyone tends to lump all platforms together (Meta=FB=Tiktok), but since not only users, celebs and fans start to make distinctions and migrate from one to the other – but also geostrategic interests are involved, it is useless to just point at some vague faceless surveillance capitalism. We see this for example on banning Chinese ownership of the Tik Tok in the US and the intense bad press it got lately in correlation with its very success and popularity boost (not to mention other Chinese platforms that are somehow completely ignored by mainstay social platform analysis). How can you avail yourself of old financing structures while at the same time enthusiastically promoting new ones like crowd-funding or bitcoin (let us create monetization schemes based on fans – yeah, but how original is that I ask)?
Sorry for the rant, but this completely avoids the elephant in the room, what is happening with pop culture at this very moment – and how such paean to authenticity basically trash pop culture two times in a row: 1) by denying differences, attractions (even predatorial ones) or characteristics of the existing video platforms 2) by actually homogenizing, ignoring or pasting over and executing the very mechanisms of cultural homogenization it seeks to combat.
Goes witouth saying that I am a fan of Jonas Ceika (you can check his YT channel as well as his book ABOUT HOW TO PHILOSOPHIZE WITH A HAMMER AND SICKLE). Support his Patreon and his channel – his in-depth dive into various philosophers as well as historical revolutionary movements is a thing to keep posted about.
Getting across pesky copyright bots on YT is a feat in itself – and Jonas has struggled to keep this educative video online. I really wish that it will not get flagged again and again since it is such an incredible and sharp take on Total Recall, done in a way that does honor to PKD vision. I am really happy to have included this video in our Timisoara Indecis art space show dedicated to the historical xenogenesis of the SF. It is both a way to revisit a classic of mutant struggle on Mars and a way to discover theoretical contributions (Alison Landsberg). Following Landsberg, Ceika brings to bear how such widespread popular mass media products become widely available and non-exclusive memories, with a political progressive potential that was unavailable to older more exclusive forms. He also picks up on role of such memory implants in the work of PKD and Verhoeven’s 1990 classic.
Prosthetic Memory is a critical look at this Verhoeven classic as well as a good introduction to the modern/post-modern divide, without the usual misunderstandings or hate associated online with the so-called strawmen of “cultural Marxism”.
“One of the most acclaimed Eastern European directors of the late 1960s, Miklos Jancsó became known for his abstract long-take style which explored the intersections of power, politics, history, and myth. (“Radical form in the service of radical content,” as the Village Voice film critic, James Hoberman, put it back then.) Now that the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City is hosting a retrospective of six of his films (including Red Psalm, which won him the best director prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival), Red May has invited three film scholars–Eszter Polonyi, Zoran Samardzija, and Steven Shaviro—to discuss Jansco’s boldly stylized film language with Tommy Swenson, Film Curator of the Beacon Cinema“. (YT channel)
Among the films by Miklos Jancsó discussed:
The Round-Up (1965) The Red and the White (1967) The Confrontation (1968) Winter Wind (1969) Red Psalm (1971) Electra, My Love (1974) as well as many of his later (ignored by the Western film publics and critics) from the 80s and 90s.
short made on the occasion of the new 4K restorations of six films by the Hungarian master are touring select cities before coming to Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD.
As a person from the former East – I find it both satisfying at the same time – when one of the most important film directors to have come from Eastern Europe gets the due recognition and sparks such fruitious exchanges as the above (hosted by Red May red arts, red theory, and red politics show from Seattle) – and also frustrated by the fact that his movies are tough to find/watch on the net. I am also emboldened to post this here – as we live at a time where the East and West left seem irredeemably split around Russia’s aggression of Ukraine. There are many receptions of his Jancso’s films – both in the West (in France in particular) as well as different reception in the West than from his native Hungary (as Eszter Polonyi makes amply clear above). It is impossible to give due attention to all what’s been discussed above but here are are some attempts:
One cannot split Jancso’s oeuvre into his modernist middle works appreciated by Western film critics (roughly 60s and 70s) from his early more social realist documentaries (one would say ‘progagandist’ 1950s work). He is not anti-system but part of the system while still continuing the negative dialectics. Although it is about two different media (one is cinema and the other painting) and different historical periods I still see here a similarity with the late-reception of Hans Matthis-Teutsch work and the selection mechanism that has somehow frozen a canonic take of him. I think that the reappraisal of the work of avant-garde Hungarian-Romanian painter Hans Mattis-Teutsch by visual artist and researcher Szilárd Miklós during a show at Scena9 BRD and Lajos Kassák Museum in Budapest comes close to how commercial galleries and art collectors have tended to separate or recover (and sell): the avant-garde core. All the questions about a (red) modernist art that has been supported by the state institutions during the Socialist times put his work apart from his modernist peers in the West. The art cinema enclave of the West modernist directors worked against and outside the Hollywood system (Godard, Antonioni, etc.). There is also – the possibility that Jancso would not have the same reception at Cannes today – considering the fact that today’s art cinema has become a sort of globalized product in itself (Zoran Samardzija).
Miklos Jancsó’s work is not at all easy to place, even if influenced by Antonioni, it does stand on its own. It is doubly interesting because it is made not in a reactionary frame, but as a critique (Miklos Jancsó is a pessimist) from the LEFT of the Socialist project without renouncing critique by envisioning that a better or another world is possible.
Formally he is also unique (following the points made by Steven Shaviro and others on the panel). There is nothing comparable even if one can pick on contemporary work by Lazlo Nemes or Bela Tarr. In the way he combines the fluidity of time-space Miklos Jancsó where free rhythmicities exist (“the life of matter”) with being both rigid and formalist plus having a political power structure overlay, it is hard to find similarities or attach him any labels. With his long-take his cinema work appears related to the minimalist slow cinema – yet he is doing something completely different (from Chantal Ackerman in Jeanne Dielman) because there is a lot of going on, a lot of uncontrollable (documentarian? – as Eszter put it) elements, animals going in and out of the frame and basically a lot of things happening at the same time.
Some of Jancso’s work in Hungary comes close to the NSK/Laibach 1980s way that confronted the Yugoslav state not with its ‘humanistic’ or anti-nationalist side but with its nationalistic and authoritarian side (an edge that was later lost during the post-1989 Yugoslav wars). There is something even an ironic attitude similar to the post-modern use of irony in his later movies. These contradictions and refusal of easy closures (or synthesis) can be followed in his less known, Italian movies – that seem much less elaborate and low-budget than his Hungarian ones (La tenica del rito, Rome wants another Caesar).
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a 2021 American historical thriller film written and directed by Joel Coen and based on the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. It is the first film directed by one of the Coen brothers without the other’s involvement.
Leah Greenblatt wrote in Entertainment Weekly that the production designer Stefan Dechant “sets the idea of Sir William’s [sic] traditional Scottish moors against a kind of surreal Calvinist dream world of screaming birds and sharp geometries” (wiki)
Philosopher Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet, The Global Genome, After Life, Biomedia, Tentacles Longer Than Night and many more) wrote in 2016 for The Japan Times a series of Black Illumination introductory (5 min) texts. They are behind a paywall, but saving them in Pocket you can actually read them all. His investigation of Japanese modernist estrangement, inhumanism and existential & cosmic (both somehow gazing into each other) pessimism is both brief, synthetic without spoiling the potential of these Japanese authors mangakas, philosophers, mad suicidal writers (Junji Ito, Keiji Nishitani, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato) for limitless collapse and vacuousness. In the words of my friend Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu – Junji Ito won’t probably topple this one manga, it goes into regions far darker than those populated by Spirals and ambling arthropod sharks.
timespace coordinates: 1920’s (filmed over a period of about 3 years) – urban life in the Soviet cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa.
The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.
Man with a Movie Camera (Russian: Человек с кино-аппаратом, romanized: Chelovek s kino-apparatom) is an experimental 1929 Soviet Ukrainian silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Yelizaveta Svilova.
Man with a Movie Camera was largely dismissed upon its initial release; the work’s fast cutting, self-reflexivity, and emphasis on form over content were all subjects of criticism. In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, however, film critics voted it the 8th greatest film ever made, and it was later named the best documentary of all time in the same magazine. (wiki)
Thanks to Alin Răuțoiu from the excellent, unsparing and vital Dezarticast, and his quest for a quality copy of this gem. So, now you got to see it too, spreading it around as far and wide as possible. All my gratitude to Gabi ‘Pnea’, peripatetic chronicler and modern-day Naturphilosoph for sharing his treasures, for his tech support and for kindly providing invaluable input whenever his nudging managed to keep me busy.
In its portraiture and depiction of a contemporary city – Los Angeles Plays Itself remains to my knowledge unsurpassed. From Kiss Me Deadly noirs to Chinatown to Cassavetes to Who Killed Roger Rabbit(still acid drenched in my celluloid melting memories), it has got it all.
Made from the heart by Thom Andersen, patiently foraging & carefully embedding his suspenseful history within this W coast city, marking its architecture, its urban layout with close knit social textures via clips from the whole breath of cinema. To call it an exemplary critical theory essay or run of the mill ideological critique would sell it short. It is a sprawl (sprawling horizontally like the city Andersen would never shorten or reify), nearly capping at 3h long, its either full immersion or ur do ur own cuts – in your own time, anyway its a total treat. It is a well spent time and a tangible place to return to and revisit. It gives much needed context to what a city is and can be. How the city is much more than the sum of its movie roles or extras parts, even if Los Angeles does strike one like a readymade Map to the Stars. Even if being a snitch – as the narrator remarks, in dire times of the McCarthy era insured some famous name with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
The whole essay somehow builds up on the way Los Angeles works and doesn’t work as a set piece. It is sprouting out from an uncensored love for a SoCal megalopolis that feels much mistreated, much misrepresented and downright brutalized whenever it gets glamorized or held up against big spotlights. Los Angeles Plays Itself always mistrusts the floating subjectivity of the omniscient narrator, even as it discards one camera-eye after another, able to follow what has been left out, making its own route trough many takes, jumps and cuts, managing in the end to somehow operate at ground level assembling blueprints, inserting press clippings with working class histories that do not make it into the limelight. Floating from camera to camera does not make for an unwieldy collage or jumble, but an even match of cut to cut, criss-crossing incompossible temporal jumps & slices of a kaleidoscopic urbanity. A slippery city that slips trough the fingers of best documentarists or cinematographers. It never relinquishes Los Angeles to its celebrated (American or European, lowbrow or highbrow etc) author star/ film directors. You can simply also enjoy every sample and wanna see more of the original source material (see below). As moviegoers for sure we can never go into full popcorn mode. Neither does it spare the film moguls that have calibrated & celebrated and selectively repurposed a city to fit their own projections and openly espoused ideological political agendas or class interests. The city cannot exist just as a pure disconnected location, as there is no “simple location” (as Whitehead puts in Science in the Modern World). No sequence seems to exists on its own. All sequences somehow communicate and each movie cut seems to intervene or presuppose another one. Without such overlaps any movie taken in its isolated solid state tends to eclipse the city underneath and beyond, even when it purportedly wants you to discover it. The city as a hidden reality is one that needs to be materially traversed.
A cinematic city abstracts from – and conceals whenever it ‘reveals’ or try to sell a ticket to an audience that buys its promised demi-monde land, the mondo tour, the shocking underbelly, the sleaze or the dazzling cyberpunk rain-soaked future (a washed out unresolved dream twinkling in the eyes of the city planners) or get lost on the byways of Sunset Boulevard.
Los Angeles police LAPD in movies part is just amazing. It is some of the best analysis of cinematic representation of police I’ve seen – especially during such a consistent proof of US police misdemeanor, militarization, brutality and point blank murder of African America or Lantinx. From the idealized self-image of a smug cop, to the incredibly arrogant and full of contempt Dragnet policemen to the unwittingly self-ironic scare quotes of “serve & protect”.
There is always streets and corners to be cut and entire building blocks that got razed, redeveloped, gentrified and that do not get credit, but also do not go completly under the radar of film crews – the only ones caring enough and painfully aware of filming another reality mostly (to me) by unknown black directors who are coming from a particular class background or from racially divided and economically oppressed segments of the city. Theirs is a completely different city. What could be more telling than a thermodynamically skewed 1980s – 2019 Los Angeles future?
Modernism – as a style and legacy seems to get a bad rap in US movies and Andersen makes it painfully clear that somehow most villains, even the most cliché tabloid high corruption, bribery, ‘confidential’ supposed conspiracy – are framed within the most stark examples of modern architecture, against the aims and even the histories of these buildings. And this in an almost complete reversal of the aims of the entirety of such modernist architecture. Think of those wide un-decorated, egalitarian spacious living, defined by the geometry of clear lines that openly rejected the shackles of the past. An architecture of light and transparency (thinking here of the European Bauhaus impetus by Bruno Taut and further back to the Scheerbartian utopic potential of light), buildings that get recast in Hollywood as scandalous dens of vice. To me Anderson’s retrieval of modern architecture’s bad wrap in Hollywood movies echoes more recent anti-modernist or sort of pre-modernist revanchist Tartaria conspiracies (part of the QAnon conspiritual bouquet) amply discussed in recent article by Zach Mortice. Yes, the lost “Tartarian empire” has an awful lot of confusion, unfamiliarity and cultural dislocation & also suffers from something akin to the Mandela Effect. Yet as this video essay amply demonstrates there’s tremendous Hollywood overwriting and cinematic overcoding onto the very urban and architectural landmarks. These architectural landmarks have been imprinted into memory only after been rediscovered via location scouting, getting heritage status only after they were filmed in and retrospectively recognized as icons. Their whole existence risks being dependent on becoming part of skewed movie worlds. In retrospect and after so many past/present/future architectonic projections, buildings start acting like bona fide labyrinthine multiverse portals like the one from the OA series or the spiraling House of Leaves. As a response to Tartaria craze – to the perceived suddenness of modernist takeover, I would rather reserve the same feeling for something more close to home, i.e. how former forlorn monuments or Communist party buildings have achieved cosmist brutalist sublimity after the fact; an uneasy after-life for ex-Socialist architecture, only too quickly misconstrued or recast as lost civilizations – irretrievable end-of-history procedural.
In its incredible ambition to excavate the ‘real’ city from underneath the movie reels, Los Angeles Plays Itself plays particular attention to the cars – (like the view from the train cut by telegraph poles) sequentially open on all window sides to a sort of permanent TV diorama where Americana takes place (cars to watch road movies). The car is where everything is about individual freedom, post WWII consumerist boom and free expression. In the light of car ownership & peak oil it becomes paramount to see how car industry shapes a city that becomes unattainable on foot by definition, only to be traversed via motorized access or super highway. This is a cinematic story of dwindling infrastructure, of empty boulevards and public transport or lack of public transport, of non access and a public system that has endures steady degradation.
As much as human commuters, traffic and Lowrider car culture are part of iconic Los Angeles, there is no discussion in this ample video essay about the ATSAC (Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control) system of traffic control in Los Angeles that has been operating and continuously developed in the city for almost 30 years. I came across this man-machine assemblage trough an essay about New Media Pharmacology that adopts N. Katherine Hayles’s example of a nonconsious and distributed cognition that does not eliminate or completly circumvent human technical support (Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious 2017). This panspectron (a term proposed by Manuel deLanda) view from the control room looks like a spaceship and it is not driver-less. Looks like any NASA ground control or main deck of an USS Enterprise – wholly made up of divided & continuous surveillance screens of roads and continuous automotive traffic monitoring. It makes its own movie in a different way, yet I am not sure if the functioning or real footage from from ATSAC rooms got featured in any Lost Angeles movies (something tells me it did?). Being adaptive, evolutionary and flexible it is fitting all of Hayles’s criteria for a cognitive assemblage. It would be unthinkable without its human decisions and selectivity, bridging and bringing congruence to the various unconscious and conscious inputs that manage to connect and assemble the city of Los Angeles in a completely new post-cinematic way:
“Drawing input data from innumerable sensors, cameras, and detectors, processed by diverse algorithms, it is a massive technical system that requires various levels of human oversight and collaboration, from those who attend the complex computer output to individual drivers and pedestrians’ daily routines.“(Joseph Schneider). This self-correcting, machine-human learning traffic system sounds definitely closer to Chile’s pre-coup Project Cyberyn in that it serves the city and its residents with ‘no direct connection to market considerations’(Hayles 2017). Definitely one such rare example that does not have the in-built Coded Bias that is intrinsic to so much of today’s Algorithmic Capitalism. It feels that ATSAC subroutines even if not really prominent as a feature of the city or in our collective imagination, could subtend a lot of what gets registered either sensorially or cinematically recorded (think here of a drone camera perspective) as a nightly city grid – as blinking neural streams without any apparent behind-the-scenes, a false image of no -planning and of absent -invisibly, progressively evolving- large scale coordination.
Finally, Rotten Tomatoes makes certain that the critical consensus and appreciation for the tremendous effort and research that went into this essay is nearly universal: “A treat for cinephiles, this documentary is a comprehensive, academic, and enlightening film essay concerning Los Angeles and its depiction in the movies.”
TimeSpace Warps 