Interstellar – A Charitable Appeal

Interstellar was made by Christopher Nolan of Batman fame. The film was okay to watch but was too ridden with necessary and partially controlling narrative features and symbolic placements. The film is sentimental in a properly gooey fashion and carries with it a message that does nothing other than make a statement of the current ideology. Technology is the only real saviour for the human race. Love may be the vector for human direction but it is only important because it is active in the survival of the technologist. Whilst he starts the film as a farmer he is a technical food producer. He wishes that he had never left his children behind once he realises that he is not going to be saving them. He saves the world only in the sense that he does eventually save them, or her at least. The rest of the world, which means human beings, dies. So whilst love is this vitally important force, its pursuit does not ensure its survival other than as a part of a technological package. Whilst the audience is sufficiently ironic to recognise the formulaic romantic story being enacted, nevertheless what we are left with is the basic story: love conquers all, machines will lead us out of this. What is the film precisely doing? Making that statement is nothing other than the voice of those people living within the technological world on which the material of the film depends upon. That we might be led out of the darkness does not exist in the material world of those in poverty other than as a religious myth. The poor may well believe in love and the conquering spirit, but they will not be transported to Paradise. Neither will we. Unless we sit in the seat of the spacecraft or pronounce the words Eureka for real. We are the trusting subjects of the space program.

That is the materiality of the programme, it is best understood rather as a charity letter received through the post, appealing for our continued support.

Gravity (the film)

Not exactly a well thought out review. I really didn’t like the film Gravity at all. It is four or five weeks since I went to see the film so my initial anger has subsided. In retrospect I can see the attraction of the visuals but at the time I was overwhelmed by the vacuous nature of the film.  It was not just that nothing happened it was that what happened was what had already happened in endless films before. Somebody succeeds against all the odds, in fact an impossible mission is achieved, and heroically they return home. The faithful horse replaced by the space vehicle. A cowboy film without any of the character which more finally worked cliché might have evoked. The metaphor of the vacuum can be extended, as well as being empty of meaning, the film sucked out all possible discussion by doing nothing other than repeating the trope that hope/faith/love conquers all. Where is the space for political analysis in such a greedy vacuous universe? One of my friends who is a documentary film maker with a particular interest in popularising complex scientific notions, found the film very satisfying because it took complex science and used it to make a film. In the sense that the film demonstrated the eventual impotence of science to affect the human subject I might agree. However the issue with science and with technological change in general is that it does change the subject. It is frustrating to see such great expense for so little return. I like the brave captain floated out into space early on and did not return.

12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave

Despite the fact that it seems mean mouthed of me to criticise this film I will do that anyway. I had read no reviews of this film at all. I only knew that it had been made by the Turner art prize winner and that a West Indian friend of mine had been so moved that he had stopped the film halfway through unable to continue. So I went there with very high expectations.

I was disappointed from the outset. For me the film felt as if the director was still learning how to construct a film and that the elements of “art” filming (a mixture of imagery and sound reminiscent of video installation) felt out of place even though they did carry some powerful juxtapositions of sound and visual elements.  The film however was quite watchable as a story and the narration of the events was well worth doing and I am pleased that I have seen this film as I will never forget the story it told. However I went to the film believing that I would see some new and more potent representation of slavery itself and this is where the film fell short.

It repeated the old tropes of slavery and I do not mean this in a derogatory fashion as slavery is represented elsewhere. It is more that I did not feel the film explored slavery beyond the confines of the old tropes. The character of slaves was not opened out at all for the audience. There was no sense of who the people were other than as people exploited finding, occasional, solace in song. Here I did not feel the film went beyond other representations of slavery. The evil of slave owners and/or the kind slave owner is well rehearsed. The pain and the whipping is well known. Lynchings we know about. However I do not know who these people actually were or how they related to each other.

There was a momentary scene when the captured free black Americans from the North were first taken to the slave markets of the South. The camera panned over a group of slaves and number of the men in the shot were scarred, their skins dry and flaking. In that brief shot I had some brief vision into something that was “other”, a view of a slave community that I only recognised with a painful shock of recognition. This is what I had hoped for in this film. Not as a voyeuristic experience but as something which gave a shocking reality rather than an acted form to this history.

I found the film very sentimental and even in places cloying. As I say this seems extremely unkind considering the subject matter of the film yet as the film has been so hyped I feel it is justified to criticise.

canonisation by drip feed

Sorry if this is mean but I find it annoying that so much is made of the death of David Frost. It’s not that I have anything against the man but for people who spent their lives on the screen why give them more screen time when they die? The broadcasting world is incestuous, one person’s death offering reasons to hear from others in the same business about their business and how good it is thanks to them via the dead ones good graces. It is canonisation by drip feed. God it gets on my nerves. Enough.

skyfall and ideological form

Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society.  This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all works, the form of which is accessible not by looking directly at representations but by looking at what those varied forms do, how they relate to the material world in which they have existence.

What is the ideological form of which Skyfall is the clothing or as my sister called it the lichen, morphing lichen?  So if I look at material conditions of the film, those events outside it that allow it to be, give it shape, what are they?  To take one; it is referring to Julian Assange as the baddy saying firstly that the world of real politics and death is the proper subject of a film.  It might be seen as saying that in the end death, war and destruction, torture are possibly also just elements of entertainment.  The work with Assange doesn’t fall into real politics and get dirty.  The baddy is like Assange, sexually ambivalent and potentially dangerous.  He has unresolved issues with mother and is a laugh at therapeutic roles and practice.  His downfall is that set of issues and not the meat of his crimes in themselves for which he is un-attackable,  he only loses through his personal weakness. His crimes stay free of any comment, only existing as the perfect geek’s unaccountable, impersonal actions.  His normal yet extreme complexes are his downfall and the final crime is his resolution of that complex of emotions.  These are the boring old ones of rejection, lack of love and punishment and betrayal.  This followed by torture which leads to bitterness.  So Assange is subsumed into entertainment, a sort of mainstream Woody Allen film where we laugh with the therapist.  So that’s one condition of the film: it takes the real events of war and our proximity to its truth through wikileaks and makes it pure entertainment based around the audience’s awareness of psychological categories.  The ideological shape is that this is what matters perhaps?  The ability to laugh at oneself, to allow the sacred (real death and war) to be turned to the service of an evening out.  This is the form we believe in.

amazing cave

This shop has opened up in an old building which backs onto the Don.  The owners are living above the shop with two balconies facing out over the river.  I’ve been driving past often and never had the opportunity to stop and look inside, the spot is well of the beaten track tucked in a corner of an old industrial area which has gentrified in spots but is still both small scale industrial and hosts a fair amount of sex workers.

The owner was sitting inside, his name is Aaron.  He was tired as he’d been down at a market inside the M25 and not slept.  He intends to sell classic guitars and amps as the speciality.  My reason to stop besides pure interest was that S had said ‘Give them that old radio’.  So I carried an old valve radio in and said ‘this is for you’.  ‘I don’t have that taste’ he said, so I explained I didn’t want to sell it but give it to him.  He accepted and we talked a while.

My daughter E wouldn’t come in because she was scared by the stuffed birds in the room, the taxidermy.  The shop has been building up (‘organic’ he called it fairly) for some two months or so.  I drove past early on with an artist friend who said ‘For an amazing cave its not very amazing’.  I thought that mean and born of jealousy.  The place thrilled me partly as its colours and taste took me back to so many places from the past.  Rather like a café in Attercliffe it recalled a site in Venice from the early 80s, by a canal, a dream of a sort, sleeping on a table after the bar closed.  Then maybe an Islington I never knew but Leytonstone High Road in the 60s and an unimagined taste born of class unconsciousness.  You were there M!  Stuffing falling out of the upholstery…

 

I also told Aaron about the design/production fashion company who were to occupy the old factory across the river; that I’d thought he may have taken the shop knowing that this was to come?  But he didn’t know although he was interested in the conversations of the old works locally.  He said many customers or passers by were prostitutes and that he hoped to be able sell guitars to the boys down at the skate park.

 

Good luck to Aaron.  To the Amazing Cave.

sharing fate

I found something unpleasant about the film Horton when I first saw it. My reaction may just have been to the character of the Kangaroo who reminded me of Tigger in the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, a translation I found very annoying.  Anyhow apart from my directly racist issues with the film I was struck by the religious content it offered.

The prime conceit of the film is that only the Who’s Mayor Ned (minute creature on a speck of dust) can hear Horton (the Elephant holding the speck of dust on a flower) and vice versa.  Both Ned and Horton are rendered ridiculous by their ability to hear each other while their peers can hear nothing.  Of course their knowledge (effectively drawing on faith in a voice that has no material body) gives them both the ability to save the other.  They are to each other God and to each other the Saviour, they share each other’s fate.

 

 

muppets the film

This is a film that starts with emotional retardation at it’s heart, a lack of passion, indeed it’s impossibility. The hero, Walter is an introvert as well as being a muppet who discovers his muppetness in the film and, of course, his happiness at the same time.

 

machete

My good friend Steve P got hold of this film.  It tells the story of Machete, the eponymous hero who, wielding said machete saves the day numerous times while bringing justice to bear against a set of corrupt politicians, police and drug barons all involved in a plan to use anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican sentiment to further their own ends.

adverts and integration

A few comments on the adverts which ran during Make Bradford British and how they both show the context in which we operate and operate to dilute the message of the programme.