Definitely of my favorite movies seen lately. While incredibly aesthetically pleasing, this poster of a movie – perfect sunsets, perfect waves, and palm trees waving in the end and traditional Polynesian dances, you name it! On the other hand it is a complete window to today’s containerized world, because you it starts with the unmanned – almost automatic container ports that are the conduits of capitalism on the high seas. Call it a “polycrisis” movie, call it “multipolar”, call it a “great power” struggle, or a brutal euphemism like 19th c the Great Game (watch the docu we’ve been covering over here), but paint it like the sky in this movie. Whatever one calls it – it has the Indo-Pacific at its center and DOLBY surround background.
Prove me wrong but this incredibly moving, funny and mysterious movie has some of the air of John le Carré’s stories and anti Bond ethos. It’s spooks somehow lost it or are slowly careening towards the deep end. The age of empires is not over and decolonization was never complete, nor was the role of sûreté- eclipsed after 1989. Spooks and imperial powers got busy and honed their skills while trying to stop and unveil imagined and real plots by anti imperialist exiles, unlikely nationalists and ll who were considered the scum of the earth. Unfortunately France is still mired in such situations. There are still a lot of territories that are a combination of sovereignty and depedence. There’s also the fact that all small nations (like Vanuatu) gave a vote in UN and both China and US are courting them.
IIn France’s case, such territorial dependencies and strategic positions have been renamed as an “overseas collectivity” to keep the bon ton (an attempt to dodge its semi-colonial anachronism? or still court French investments?). For some watching this movie, it may come as a surprise that France has more or less kept 121 atolls and islands (including Tahiti) under the label of French Polynesia. Europe not only fortified its borders and has employed both Lybian Coast Guard in order to intercept and surveill economic refugees and migrants or use Israeli drones to patrol its seas, it has also kept an interest in its ex-colonial “pacificitions”.
Pacifiction is the attempt of the Haute Commissaire (high commissioner played by a completely convincing Benoit Magimel) of the Republic of France in French Polynesia to wade new waters and avoid further atomic experiments and French military deployments in the region. He has got a lot on his hands, although I do not want to whitewash his position – a power broker in an unstable world, trying to protect the islanders, be a patron of thr arts and stay abreast of the mad power struggles happening all around. Trying to make sense of this movie is an impossible task because even its characters are lost – trying to piece together or anticipate what is going on.
The movie is build around a series of superb scenes. Landscapes and locations are not backdrops. This could range from loungy sleazy – paradisiac-hellish places – like clubs that ooze atmosphere and bizarre lassitude, violence or erotic charge all at once to the cheap but effective camp black light tiki aesthetics. These scenes are of tremendous beauty, but this beauty feels completely tinted (tainted?), made-up. The movie does not try to de-exoticize the “island Paradise” but brings all the various impending disasters to bear on it. Even the navy submarine is a complete ghost – we watch the swaggering but increasingly dumbfounded High Commissioners employing locals in order to spy on his government’s geostrategic move or the hidden will of its military establishment. Empty hotels, former investments, and abandoned resorts became the place of intrigue and cloak and dagger.
He watches what are presumedly sex workers that embark on a flimsy boat and go into the ocean who knows where to meet who knows who. Everything is only remotely seen, full of innuendos, and not really mediated by GPS or modern surveillance technologies. It’s all hearsay, some working lights, air strip being repaired. The commissioner can only enlist the locals, the shady club owners, or the local seductive & ambitious call girls such as Shannah (here played by a fabulous trans actress Pahoa Mahagafanau) in order to find out what an alcoholic mad French Admiral’s plans are (another highlight role). The supposed US interests are represented by very dubious guys, almost a complete caricature of CIA operatives – looking both unimpressive malicious in their weasel-ishness.
Everything seems a bit obsolete, because the notion of a New Cold War seems obsolete, and a sort of bankruptcy of the political imaginary. The atomic scare is not something overrated or just a part of post-atomic preparedness scenarios of the 1980s. Since the US saber-rattling with China and the several alarms at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Stationduring the Russian aggression on Ukraine, atomic fears are resurgence. Pharmacies all over Europe have been seen a ruge of iodine pills demands since Putin ordered the nuclear deterrence forces on high alert. This whole Great Game for the Indo-Pacific is quite unreal- quite fictitious since it takes place among such paradisiac, spectacular, insular surroundings.
A scene from the movie “Pacifiction.”
Some form of Military Keynsianism is at play all over the planet. NATO plays wargames and the EU sky seems to have became part of permanent war games. But before all of this – there where the French nuclear weapons tests in Moruroa between 1966 – 1996 causing international outcry (number of tests was between 175 and 181 respectively). Atomic energy has some revival in the age of climate emergency, yet it is inter-linked with military objectives and hard to avoid pollution. Pacifiction mentions the very real cancerous outcomes suffered by the local population as well as the long term ecological disasters of these military experiments. So the fallout of the Cold War kept raining. So the fears of the fictive white-dressed Haute Commissaire seem very real.
The exotica music plays an important part in the movie – and while there is not much violence and all the fears seem rather remote, there is a constant dark undertone from the club scenes to the paranoia of the Admiral to the hard-partying of the sailors. There is a feeling that all these highly ritualized happenings are all going to go terribly wrong. This fiction also becomes increasingly endearing as we follow the lonely figure of the administrative representative on his errands and realizing his authority is a very fragile. While everything is ridiculous, all the piecing together is done from the bushes on the beaches. The High Commissioner does his night-time search using help from his surfer friends. I loved how the boredom of the insular life is portrayed, or how the taxation issue is fluttered about concerning the casinos and the question of morals is settled with the church. All these are entirely fictional but also part of a sort of impossible-to-disentangle Pacific fictional machine. That being said – my point in making this movie a canvas of the so-called polycrisis (the overlap or rapid succession of different and distinct crisis – including aging former Empires and aging officials) is about stupefaction, about a conflation of various separate things and a sense of fuzzy target less search.
I was duly impressed when I watched my first Steven Seagal (in late 1980s) in his debut Above the Law. The combination of chops, poney tail sprinkled with Oriental mystique, and the fact that he was a 7 dan black belt in aikido made him impressive to a teenage kid grown on Van Damme, Stallone, Schwartzie, Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, and the like. Later on, it was not hard to deny that something was definitely wrong with his movies. Not only did he manage to kick and humiliate people that did not match his stature or strength but all this senseless violence combined transformed him into one of the most ridiculous action heroes ever. Also unknown to most, he is a supporter of Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, you got that right. He refers to Putin as “one of the great living world leaders” in one interview. He also has Russian and Serbian citizenship and in 2018 he was appointed special envoy to the US. In February 27, 2023, he received the Russian Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin. He is to be seen with some of the most horrific, anti-democratic, and authoritarian strong-men around, including Duterte of the Philipines. On May 30, 2021, the pro-Kremlin systemic opposition party A Just Russia — Patriots — For Truth announced that Seagal had received an official membership card to the party. In August 2022, he visited Olenivka in Donetsk Oblast, the site of the Olenivka prison massacre with Donetsk People’s Republic leader Denis Pushilin, who claimed that Seagal was filming a documentary about the war in Donbas. Seagal also met with Leonid Slutsky. Adam Curtis has been trying to transform Russian post-spectacle politics during Putin in a sort of post-modern political laboratory, where “non-linear warfare” is being forged. One can also say that unwittingly Seagal showed that post-modernity does not really cut in, and that straight-to-DVD or bad movies have a lot more to say about the current situation.
Also, it may come as no surprise that numerous women during 1996 – 2018 accused Segal of sexual harassment and assault.
And then there came a YT (hate?) channel basically practically dedicated to bashing him, showing how atrocious the scripts to his movies are or how hateful a character he manages to be, or how incredibly stupid all the other characters and scenes are. Anyway, it is not my call to say if he is or is not the most terrible human being alive, but I guarantee some well-earned laughs.
Under Siege is a 1992 American action thriller film directed by Andrew Davis, written by J. F. Lawton, and starring Steven Seagal as a former Navy SEAL who must intercept a group of mercenaries, led by Tommy Lee Jones, after they commandeer the U.S. Navy battleship Missouri. (wiki)
Cast Away is a 2000 American survival drama film directed and produced by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. Hanks plays a FedEx troubleshooter stranded on an uninhabited island after his plane crashes in the South Pacific, and the plot focuses on his desperate attempts to survive and return home. (wiki)
Farm house with windmill.
Media executive Lloyd Braun of ABC Studios first suggested the idea of a Cast Away–type television series at a dinner party in 2003. Thom Sherman later pitched the idea for Cast Away – The Series, but never developed the idea. The concept was later developed and pitched with the title Nowhere, which later turned into the ABC showLost.
It has been very hard to trace this series of documentaries, I really have not managed to find them anywhere. They are some of the fondest memories I have from childhood/adolescence TV, exactly at the cusp of 1988/1989 turmoil, screened by Soviet Perestroika era stations in Russian that we were able to tune into in the South of Romania. It had been a sort of revelation. It was the start of bush tucker documentaries, even a time of replicating bullroarers or spear throwers (atlatl) tools that I found fascinating as a kid in tow with Rahan bande desinee comics we had access to. Tools & technologies dating to upper Paleolithic had a special magic in the midst of the computer revolution. It is now speculated that the Mungo woman, child and man remains – the oldest paleo anthropological remains in Australia suffered from an atlatl elbow & that first migrants from Asia brought the bullroarer with them into the Americas. The 40.000+ yr lake Mungo remains are now protected by Aborigine custodians and also represent one of the oldest cremations we know of. This sort of hunter gather skills & reconstructions I guess is what we would call today paleo lifestyle or neo- anarko primitive ways. Alan Thorne was a non-indigenous archeologist from Australia that has made this incredible 11 episode series around his thesis of human settlements of the Pacific and regional continuity. However old or quaint from our perspective, this series promoted a long view of pre-European contact history, of continuous living across the whole Pacific. I find it very important in the case of aborigines & other native populations that have suffered so much and are still fighting against extractive industries and their first comer right to be there on their ancestral tribal grounds. Man (and woman) on the rim is almost a thesis of Pacific humanity, Homo maritimus of sorts spawning a myriad cultures developing not at a continental core but the largest water body on the planet – the Pacific Rim and the thousands of Islands that surround and dot it from one end to the other. More recently we’re being able to test another intriguing hypothesis – that the shellfish rich seas around South Africa’s coastaline have been the first examples of modern humans living off the sea as well a distinct stepping stone during a harsh period in our species history. Remains at Mossel bay in S Africa from 164.000-35.000 yr ago are proof of surving the so-called bottleneck of the Glacial Stage 6, revealed first by genetic evidence. Everybody now alive is descended from a small group of modern humans (maybe a few hundred), maybe even one ethnolinguistic group that spread outward afterwards & mingled with smaller bands it met along the way. It made it against all odds thanks to the mild paleoclimate & plenty of shellfish/geophyte energy rich bulbs of the fynbos – coastal refugia abounding along those coasts. This S African coastal region, growing & retreating with the sea level offers some of the the first proof regarding invisible cognitive enhancements to go with the anatomical modernity – such as lunar calendars to be able to follow ebb/flow, microlithic technologies, heat treated red ochre since at least 110.000 years ago and a special aesthetic value of seashells washed from the bottom of the sea to the shore. The tracking of shifting shoreline, the retreating or advancing oceanic waters during cooling & warming periods and a widening continental shelf speaks about the affordance of livingcclose to the ocean.
Man on the Rim offers an incredible vision of island jumping, of nautic travelers and nautic cultures, of boat makers, of boat people living most of their lives on the water. For me it was and is one of the most incredible and eye opening documentaries out there. Coming out of a period of isolation in Romania, a country that was politically closed down for much of the 80s, as well as the difficulty of having the means to travel right after 1989, you traveled on-board such documentaries. And what an occasion! Most of the time civilization (canonical version of history), settlement, human development, evolution has been always described as rising around big rivers, around big inland seas, or along fertile crescents. Here you can see the huge number of estuaries, coasts, rich mangrove swamps giving rise to new ways of life. Understanding the waters and living with countless fisherman tribes, villages and hunter-gatherer traditions fostered a wide array of boat designs – which are probably the most top notch sophisticated and accomplished pieces of design humanity has produces. These thalassocratic societies are explored in this documentary series. I guess the documentary also expresses a new confidence of the Asia Pacific economic Sphere, the Chinese coastal Special Economic Zones, cities like Singapore, HK or Shanghai on the rise or peninsular or insular powers South Korea and Japan being part of it. Australia was hoping to get more out of this regional hub, recognizing its role as more closely connected to Indonesia or China than say its remote British Atlantic progenitor. This account of regional prehistory is key to a larger role to be played by Asia-Pacific confluence, and Man on The Rim is coalescing around larger 80s- 90s economic, cultural & environmental coastal trends.
First episode introduces the first ever water Wallacea migrations and maritime existence, and also the first insular early relatives of humanity from a skullcap, tooth and tigh bone fossil of Java man(Homo erectus erectus)- the oldest hominid at the time discovered by Eugène Dubois at Trinil on the banks of Solo river in 1891-1892. In the meantime we also have the telling, more complex and enlightening case of the Homo florensis a small archaic distant relative, result from a possible very early migration & island effect plus a bounty of new human fossils found both in Indonesia (Sangiran dated to almost 1.7 mil yr) and China (discovered in these last 30 years). It is an incomplete and quaint documentary, some things have not aged well, still I think the circumpacific vision should stay with us – and it’s thesis is intriguing. I will always remember the bamboo rafts that have been considered as some of the first potential designs and transport from Southern China, Taiwan and SE Asia into the incredible diversity of island universes that lay in wait towards Australia during the last glaciations, where the waters retreated, land bridges opened and cross-overs became shorter with the next shore in reach. They kept tracking the changing shore with each new Glacial period or in between. We have to remember there were no maps, no actual image of what was out there, just the experience of previous shores and previous ways of being on the water. It is also an important documentary to establish migration and waves of migration like the numerous continuous waves of the oceans as important and fundamental part of humanities existence on this planet, in spite of all the borders, the walls and all the current national ethnostate-politics. The bamboo is almost the basis for a bamboo civilization across Asia Pacific region. The earliest evidence of humans in Australia are btw ~50.000 to ~65.000 yr ago, and are final proof of maritime cross over, since there was always a 80 – 100km sea gap in Late Pleistocene between Australia & New Guinea forming the Sahul continent and the other islands of the Wallacea, Timor and Southern Malukku that needed to be crossed. The subsequent Austronesian and Polynesian wave of migrations is a marvel of history.
Second episode recounts the incredible 40.000-50.000 yr continuous old history of the peopling of the island continent of Australia, a complete biogeographic isolate in a sense for millions of years, with its own very specific and variegated flora and fauna, including some of the most bizarre (from our mammalian boring perspective) beings to roam on this earth, with lots of ancient living fossils (some like the Wollemi pine being discovered quite recently). The Aborigines, those who have suffered the full impact of the white man’s exploitation, genocide and colonization are the first ancient waves of migration that came from Asia (and many waves since), that still keep alive traditions of mangrove life, a life that made possible the exploration of the whole Pacific in the end, of living off the land and of feeling at home along this extended Rim of salt water biomes, a familiar environment that stretched on every coast, every atoll and that offers, shellfish, mussels, fish, and plenty of other things to the ones in the know. The mangrove living, the cooking on the beach, in the ashes or embers or in the sand are still to be found here in the northern islands of Australia. The newcomers from Australasia spread out into the inner of the continent, into various and other very different inland ecosystems, diverging & remotely related to the initial coastal fisherman newcomers, finding during the next thousands of years a home from the billabong to savanna to the jungle in the north or the mountains in thr east.
Third episode features the Pacific NW, one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse & rich areas in the whole of the Americas. It also dwells into the ancient North American cultures such as the ancestral Puebloans/Anasazi or the Mound builder cultures of the indigenous pre-Columbian populations. I will focus on the native tribes of the NW living on the Pacific coasts for countless years, enjoying fishing & hunting while this coastal route of migration is one of the oldest. From the Aleutian islands in the north when the Beringia was a bridge btw continents, some of the first humans made their way, arriving from Asia trough an ice free corridor along the coasts & in between the mountains. Salmon runs, shells middens, plenty of mussles, Eulacheon fish grease trails, kelp forests, dense gigantic redwood temperate rainforests, humidity & continuous rain a year long, rivers rich with fish flowing from the Cascade mountains to the Pacific made these coasts, inlets and islands one densest inhabited areas in the world for non agricultural populations. Many had developed highly hierarchical societies, sophisticated designs, carvings & huge ocean going canoes, elaborate songs and famous totem poles. They were united by lavish and opulent feasts of excess and gift giving ceremonies called Potlatch – specific for the whole region, that have been studied at length by antropologist and that have become banned by government and subsequently reintroduced.
TimeSpace Warps 