2373 – Gurdjieff in Armenia (documentary 2023)

The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann (who worked with Gurdjieff for nearly 30 years) with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and there is a French version here: (unavailable)

This documentary was posted a few months ago and it is really quite fortunate to have access to it. It follows the life of Gurdjieff much more systematically and in detail than I have been able to do in my review of Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is full of old photos and even recordings of Gurdjieff himself and some scenes with recordings of his movements/dances. It is full of quotes and extracts from his books. If you are interested in finding out more about one of the most interesting, rapscallion philosophers/characters of the 20th century please check out this documentary.

Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am

(The pantry in Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment. Photo courtesy of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York) As related in the movie such a place was also a place of meetings and counseling. Like a friend said: show your pantry to tell you who you are.

2066 – Hausu (1977 movie)

“House (Japanese: ハウス, Hepburn: Hausu) is a 1977 Japanese experimental comedy horror film directed and produced by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It stars mostly amateur actors, with only Kimiko Ikegami and Yōko Minamida having any notable previous acting experience. It is about a schoolgirl traveling with her six classmates to her ailing aunt’s country home, where they come face to face with supernatural events as the girls are, one by one, devoured by the home.”(wiki)

After writing about Josephine Decker’s last movie – The Sky is Everywhere and mentioning in passing the Japanese horror cult movie House – known as Hausu for all its fans (i feel indebted here to the artist-in-residence at Utopiana/Geneva that introduced me to this wonderful and delightful movie a few years ago). If you did not see it yet, watch it, it is a must! Needless to say I feel a lot of welcome aesthetic kinship here (to Decker’s recent movie), including hints of visual virtuosity and lack of inhibitions about employing varied animation techniques.

I am happy to recommend this piece of utter playfulness and I cannot express my sincere appreciation to everyone who participates in such cinematic transmedia explorations, especially weirdly horrific ones.

Without giving too much away, this is not a very ‘Japanese’ horror, none of the spirits, none of the yokai appear, or at least when they appear they seem perfectly Europeanized. That being said there is a lot of animation – parts frolicking around and objects having an agency of their own. As I have recently started reading an important new book by Sonam Kachru about other lives and different modes of being (including dreaming one) – inspired by a well-known Buddhist philosophy text from the V century (the Twenty Verses of Vasubandhu), I find a certain sensitivity here or disponibility to include more than just the waking life or just the ‘normative’ mindedness or normal touch/feel of what is considered typical of (human) lives and recognize the importance of thinking with very different and alongside less-than or more-than human creatures from very different (habitats) worlds than ours (such as the Buddhist hell worlds or the hungry ghosts – in Vasubandhu’s key thought experiments). I find this 1977 movie very helpful in imagining or including the life of quite different creatures (than ourselves) that stray from ‘our’ world and get housed in this delightful movie using these varied techniques.

On one side it is an anti-horror movie and on the other it shows how stuck we are in adopting the same settings or horror aestethics . The experimental wacky way in which it treats horror even body horror is unique – there is something both cartoonish, schematic, a touch of anime and also avantgarde and even ill-mannered dark psychedelia to it. After beheading human heads bite you in the ass, cats are fierce growling spirits with laser eyes, pianos are slaughterhouse machines. Overall it is a genre-defying movie in a category all of its own.

It is both colorful, baroque, gory, wonderfully kitschy and completely exaggerated screwball and gruesome at the same time. It is like a Grand Guignol turn of the 1900 decadent spectacle transformed into a movie. It goes to the origins of cinema in freak shows and gore theatres and also points to its future as a bastardized FX carnival of souls.

imdb Hausu

2065 – The Sky is Everywhere (2022 movie)

timespace coodinates: California 21st century

“The Sky Is Everywhere is a 2022 American coming-of-age romantic drama film directed by Josephine Decker and written by Jandy Nelson, based on her novel of the same name.” (wiki)

Suffice to say Josphine Decker (Butter on the Latch  2013, the erotic thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely 2014, the coming-of-age drama Madeline’s Madeline 2018, the semi-biographical thriller Shirley 2020) has made some of the most memorable and amazing movies to come out of the US lately. She keeps being higly experimental and refreshingly improvisational, without appealing to the usual cognitive estrangement devices typical to the modernist tradition. Her movies keep on being deeply involving and moving like no other director I know. She appears to be (a rare gift nowadays) uninhibited and unchained by production pressures from vested interests, rankings or audience approval. Josephine Decker is unique without the need to deliver a kind of identifiable signature, a recognizable handle – typical of many ‘male’ author cinematographers. Or at least I have not been able to find one other than her being always surprising each time around and this speaks to her advantage I think.

Her last movie is quite banal and complex at the same time, and i am willing to try and give you (without spoilers) hints of its overall contradictory effect on me or why I think it is as important as her previous ones even if completly at odds with her other work (pls take the following as disjointed notes on the margins of J. Decker’s last movie):

1. The way it foregrounds nature – this movie is not naturalistic in any conventional sense. You can almost see it as a very stylized version of a natural surroundings, full of magnificent trees and resplendent flower gardens. Here you have a specifically post-hippie Californian US West Coast enchanted forest – but one that is highly specific and situated. Its artifice is not so much flower power as Pre-Raphaelite painters (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti etc.). Californian high weirdness is a rich humus that has been nourishing both cyberfeminist Donna Harraway and sci-fi author Ursula K. LeGuin. The old growth redwood forest grove from The Sky is Everywhere may seem pretty far from the concerns of Silicon Valley Big Tech giants and its (annoying) bro-culture. This ‘natural’ surrounding is one that Erik Davis has been busy exploring in his Burning Shore series of Californian High Weirdness and at the same time one that somehow resurges even in the most mathematically abstract – quantum computing enviroments (such as the DEVS TV series directed by Alex Garland). There is a lot of animation involved – and all of the animated part, even genuinely disturbing imagery fits perfectly well with the rest (almost like the wonderful 1977 Hausu japanese horror extravangaza). There is also a kind of theatricality or even a puppet theatre feel to it – almost like Japanese No theatre – where Nature (capital N nature) is embodied by invisible or slightly visible dancer bodies (here dressed as flower beds, earth spirits?) that seem to animate, enhance or intensify the overall feelings expressed. All the time, the most absurd and zany events seem to contradict the overall ‘holiness'(sacred Grove) and the subvert the natural by introducing ‘unnatural’ aspects in these surroundings (‘wire fu’ floating flying while playin music or listing to it). Wind blows the messages and loveletters (to a dead sister) written on leaves makes everything feel a litle comedic, tragic, flipped out, full of unecessary bathos. If nature is animated as part of an ‘Animatic Apparatus’ (Deborah Levitt), kin relations are wonderfully biotech and still wrenching – the dead sister is the result of an IVF involving a presumably unknown sperm donor (I think this small detail is also part of this general postnaturalism of the movie).
2. There is no way I can explain (nor would I want to) the timing of this movie. It comes at a very disconcerting time – one could say that at no other time in the history of the human species have we been more aware of our disproportion, the disproportion of the tasks at hand & our abilities. Time seems to tick against us, and even our meager attempts at climate deadlines may keep the false impression that there’s still time or that we still haven’t got there (as in Mark Bould’s book “Anthropocene Unconscious”). We live at a time in which we can not deny any longer the disproportionate impacts we have on our enviroment in terms of both energy use or resource depletion and unequal distribution of costs. There’s no way we can ignore how disproportionately this has impacted those already at the brink, especially non-white, non-Western cultures (in comparison with the average Euroamerican – average – hiper consumer). It is overtly clear that no forecast, nor doomsday scenario comes as a suprise nowadayse. Climate reports, UN warnings fall on deaf ears, everything has been already said. All the previous modernist devices (the literary burgeois fiction tradition, the realist tradition etc) show their incapacity in front of the unbelievable realities confronting us and the disproportionate planetary issues at hand. These issues are no secrets, no conspiracy in this sense, they are common, yet there is no possiblity to have a coordinated effort or apply any common framework to address them. The world of early 21st seems to slide towards a myriad of isolated and detached private spaces (Conspirituality, QAnon, luxury bunkers being just a few of these) at the same time that there is talk of a new Cold War and nationalist economics (new economic and strategic blocs or the end of Globalization), especially when everything impacts everything else. Everybody else seems to be cought in fhe crossfire. There is this larger sense that nothing can be ignored, nothing can be detached, that nothing is easily disconnected or disentangled while people still hang on to their sadly dysfunctional worldview or consumer patterns(say online shopping) that are being daily contradicted by the fact that everything else depending on everything else. There is an incredible cost in loss of lives, both in terms of COVID 19 mortality and the fact that wars, both in Yemen and Ukraine have been either been ignored or suddenly made accute. The Sky is Everything comes at this particular juncture – and offeres no philosophy, nor easy answers, no redemption, yet it l somehow integrates immense personal loss and senseless death into everything, pulling everything together. On one level it is just a bland US coming of age -young adult (Grace Kaufman) mourning for her much beloved dead sister. On this level – everything seems selfish, indidualistic, very personal and quite detached from everything else happening in the world. One’s whimsical quest for love, or the misshaps of love – can easily appear as the most abnormal thing today – or really completly lost among these world changing events mentioned above.
3. It is a incredible anti-romantic movie – ‘romanticism’ (as a movement, a sensibility and philosophical current) is almost like a thing one needs to get vaccinated against and one is never immune to. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is referenced troughout this colorful and pleasantly unhinged movie. Iteself Wuthering Heights is a corny piece of literature (like this movie?) and this seems to be remarked on serveral times by Grace Kaufman’s character. It is corny because it is a pastiche of a pastiche in a sense influenced by both Gothic fiction and Romanticism. In a sense she’s the picaresque heroine of 18th century. To me The Sky is Everyhwere draws comparisions with the earlier Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published posthumously in 1817) that does not get mentioned in the movie so far as I know. It is almost like a parody of the Gothic genre and its 17 year old heroine Catherine Morland coming of age and even on the consumption of doom, withouth being a condemnation of frivolous anguish and pain. There is also a necrophiliac sensibility in the air that one should not ignore or condemn. There is in this movie a scene where the romantic literature and pathetic love – is all being ritually bannished, or even being faulted for all the uncessary tourmoil happening in the movie’s heroine’s soul or all the subsequent (female) generations. Is this a pun on the whole movie? Are there any larger aspects to consider here? It feels like this to me. What are we to make of this strangely empty stylised gesture – working perfectly to somehow underscore that one cannot detach or feel immune against the strange tugs and pulls that link a 21 st century teenager heart with the invisible strings of ‘older’ history of (Modern Western?!) affects or literary models.
4. Nothing is neutral. There is a sense where everything kind of sings or is part of a bigger coreography. All the loves and all the encounters are magical – everything is magick in a very corny yet effective way. I love actually the fact that one cannot eliminate or psychologize nothing in this movie. One cannot somehow debunk all the love interests in this movie as empty romance, basically an exagerated set-up, wishful thinking or the result of hallucinations or trauma. In fact this is one of the best recent movies about – that overall and coverall term “trauma”. It is a very difficult to approach because it has became so overused and emptied out as to basically say everything and nothing at the same time (almost the same as “creativity” or “innovation”). In some sense a new reality and new materiality vibrates (with unmistakable corny accents) and contradictory feelings that circulate and envelop everything that swirls around.
5. It is the first time I have seen a movie about death – and even afterlife, or let’s say the possiblity that death is not final that does not repelling, where the afterworld is coexisting or immanent with this one. It is not final in the metaphysical sense of why “perpetual perishing” offers (in AN Whithead organic philosphy) a porose boundary between subjective immediacy and objective immortality. For me, this movie does not find a place in Mark Fischer’s important distinction between the eerie and the weird, because it is neither weird nor eerie, even if it deals with things that should not be there or with familiar things that feel discomforting or uncanny. For Fisher, places of ruin or the eeriness of natural surroundings (think A Field in England) is where the outside stays outside, where an eerie empty cry echoes in a countryside that should be empty but is not. This is not a hauntological movie yet it deals with hauntings in a peculiar YA way – one that is very colored, entranced, intoxicating and almost suffocatingly over the top. Poltergeist and spiritualism – are an American species one might argue – yet it is one that is almost exclusively seen as distinct from the weepy dramas. Horror has to stay horror, it cannot join romance or melodrama. Yet as we know since William’s essay about body genre’s (pornography, horror, melodrama), they all appeal to affected and affecting bodies. This movie is not at all horrofic or dark in any sense. One could only characterize it as something necro-uplificting, as something fruitfully floridly putrid!
6. There is a peculiar tradition of communicating with the netherworld or the afterlife via mostly female mediums etc. Somehow mediums have been the early modern US feminist shamans. In the midst of rapid technological change and gaslight patriarichy, they appear to mediate between private worlds and also to somehow keep us in communion with relatives long gone or with presences that have been denied or excluded from official histories. It is typical that to communicate with the invisible or talk about the invisible, to give it presence and bring the potential and virtual into existence has been (in the artistic realm proper see Hilma af Klint) part of why patriachy has been denying the role of such women in the history of arts. The Sky is everywhere manages to not make an appeal to any traditional images of an afterworld or any kind of limbo. It is all happening in this one world. There is no communicating with spirits or departed dear ones that involves the usual trappings (oujia boards, ceremonials, rituals etc.) etc. At the same time there are plenty remains, residues of the dead in the living and part of the living. There is a sense in which agency is not clearly defined as ending with death. There is a lot of going on’s and free flow with the dead, their clothes, their perfome and even their lovers. Nothing stops at the threshold and everything overflows, engulfs in the most embarrassing & outrageous way.

1916 – Curing the Human Condition: On ‘Wild Wild Country’ (podcast 2021)

First much appreciation for both Phil Ford and J F Martel. I do not manage to listen to them as often as I could, but when I do, it is always a blast. That is why one needs friends (not friends-bosses or friend-unfriend dynamics as talked about in this piece. Friends to recommend and catch one looses trough a web cast to widely.

What I appreciate about their heady mix is first the way they never belittle and be dissmissive with their subjects, their topics (and their public) their humility and modesty in front of such vast subjects.

No matter how diverse or dispersed things are and rabbit holes go – they always manage to follow a certain waveform, play on certain motifs. They can combine high theory (Deleuze), avant-garde (Burroughs) with the most harrowing examples of heroin addict descriptions. They can both make a sociology of taste, follow on the strictures of Bourdieu, while at the same time catching a strong whiff of spirituality in Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, while at the same time finding religious (initial sin) groundings of Marxist critique of commodification, ideology and cultural superstructure. They can talk about the merits of secular society, while at the same time pointing towards the commodification behind new religions, prosperity gospel, as well as the sort of spiritualized practices, anthropotechnical hacks that are everywhere – from Silicon Valley to self-actualization corporate seminars. They decry the anxiety of cultural appropriation, its totalizing and too large terrain – while at the same time they weigh in on all the decontextualized, fetishized spiritualism, that leaves all the burden, the suffering out. They take the critique of Buddhism by Zizek, the Buddhist apparent integration of human universal suffering, while at the same time warning about the free style of new ironic class, the distinction proffered by hipster irony-non-irony thin line and the constant hard to learn code switching. One of my favorites is the part about friends – about Buddhas (and especially Osho’s speech on friendship!) sermon about the future master transforming into friend, never so true as in today’s corporate culture. Societies of control complete changed the rule of the game that went hand in hand with a changed definition of friendship, removed from the one inherited from Aristotle.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try.

REFERENCES

Chapman and Maclain Way (dirs), Wild Wild Country
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Peter Sloterdijk, German cultural theorist
Weird Studies, Episode 47, Machines of Loving Grace
Slavoj Žižek, On Western appropriation of Eastern religions
William Burroughs, American writer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Bhagwan Rajneesh/Osho, Speech on friendship
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
James Carse, The Finite and Infinite Games

1529 – The Midnight Gospel (TV Series 2020)

spacetime coordinates: Set in a dimension known as “The Chromatic Ribbon”, a spacecaster named Clancy owns an unlicensed multiverse simulator. Through it, he travels through worlds about to have their own apocalypses interviewing some of their residents for his spacecast. The interviews are derived from earlier episodes of Trussell’s podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. Special guests include Phil Hendrie, Stephen Root, Drew Pinsky, Trudy Goodman, Jason Louv, Caitlin Doughty, Michael Marcanio, Maria Bamford, Joey Diaz, David Nichtern, and Deneen Fendig.

The Midnight Gospel is an American adult animated web television series created by Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell. Released on Netflix on April 20, 2020, it is the first animated production from Ward for Netflix.

Throughout the episodes the series deals with different themes that explored through the interviews. During the first season, the guests interviewed covered topics such as magic, meditation, forgiveness, spiritualism, funerary rituals, death positivity, drug use, pain, moksha (transcendence) and existentialism. (wiki)

imdb   /   rt