TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY (1974,Michael Snow)
(one of the finest uses of youtube I've yet seen)

Une visite au Louvre (2004, Straub/Huillet)

(dead link)

I know of one incident wherein an opportunist selling Straub/Huillet bootlegs on ebay received a hand-written letter from the Straubs telling him to STOP NOW (he instantly tried to sell the note!). I also know that the Straubs held their film CEZANNE back from being subtitled so as to preserve the integrity of the paintings. My posting of this clip goes against the Straubs presumed wishes on both these counts.

I don't quite understand the intention of posting the first 7 minutes of a film on youtube. And, as if to really test the idea's utility, the same man who posted the first 7 minutes of Une visite au Louvre has also posted the first 14 minutes of OUT-1 (759 minutes to go)! At 7 min intervals ("parts") that would be 109 "parts". Paul Gallagher, the good fellow who posted these, has well over 100 clips posted on Youtube, many worth checking out (Foucault conversation with Chomsky, Dans le noir de temps by Godard, etc).

I post it here because it brought me so much pleasure to see a bit of this film again. Perhaps it's because it reminds me of sitting in a packed house in Vienna to watch two sucessive versions of it in a row (I counted 3 differences between the 2 versions: 1) a variation in the pan across the Louvre exterior, 2) a variation on an overhead shot of the Seine later in the film, and 3) a minutely but distinctly varied voice-over intonation)...

Even in seven minutes I think you can see some of the eventfulness of a single Straub/Huillet shot. The pan across the Seine and Louvre exterior has the quality of an act; an action taken, not simply taken in. You can see the level of minutae on which the Straubs are working.

In any case, listen to Cezanne (the voice-over):

"Look at that...the Victoire de Samothrace. She's an idea, she's a whole people, a heroic movement in the life of a people, yet the fabric clings to her legs, her wings flutter, her breasts swell. I don't need to see her head to imagine her look, because all the blood which beats, circulates, sings in her legs, her hips, throughout her body, has passed in torrents into my brain and has entered my heart. When the head is gone, so what, the marble has bled...While up there in the primitives, you can chop the necks of all those little martyrs with the executioner's sword and there's a little vermilion, a few drops of blood...They have already flown bloodless up to God. Souls can't be painted. And here, Victory's wings, you don't even see them, I don't see them anymore. We don't think about them anymore, the seem so natural. Her body doesn't need them to be able to fly away in full triumph. It has elan...Whereas the haloes of the virgins and saints surrounding Christ, one sees only them. They impose themselves on us. They embarrass me. What do you want? You can't paint souls. You paint bodies, and when bodies are well painted, then, damn it, the soul, if they have one, the soul radiates and shows through from everywhere.

(...) but I know nothing colder than his (David's) Marat! What a petty hero! A man who had been his friend, who had just been assasinated, whom he should have glorified for all of Paris, for all of France, for all posterity. Did he just toss that sheet over him and wash him off in his bathtub? He was thinking about what people would say about the painter and not what they would think about Marat. It's a bad painting. And he had the cadaver right in front of his eyes!".

This film is Huillet/Straub's blast against a certain alienatation from art -- painting -- and from the spirit of nature and life that inspired the paintings (which the Museum isn't helping). And since every Straub film is about the class struggle in some way (even if by implying that that which gets in the way of lived nature must be done away with) it reminds me of an incident I once read about:

In 1920, a Kapp (fascist) putsch sparked riots in Dresden and while the people of Dresden were fighting to defend democracy a stray bullet hit a Rubens painting in the Zwinger museum. Oskar Kokoschka issued a public statement in which he suggested, in all seriousness, that the fighting be moved out onto the heath outside of town or even replaced by single combat between political leaders of opposing camps. George Grosz, Spartacist as he was at the time, said:

"(we're) delighted that bullets flew into galleries and palaces, into Rubens masterpieces, and not into the houses of the poor. Workers! Every time that the artist paints something that the bourgeois can cling to and that dazzles you with illusions of beauty and happiness, that artist is strengthening the bourgeoisie and sabotaging your class consciousness, your will to power."

Everything must be kept in mind.

Quei loro incontri - Straub/Huillet 2006

"AFTER WORK" 1919-1920 George Grosz

Shocked by the arrogance and brutality of the current US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon, myself and Gabe Klinger have hammered out a screening of two films by Lebanese filmmakers whose work is of great interest. This Chicago screening is in solidarity with the Lebanese civilian population and all proceeds will go to medical and political organizations in need.

Wael Nourredine's film CA SERA BEAU (FROM BEYROUTH WITH LOVE, 2005) is part of the program and paints a complex, radically discordant view of Hariri's Beirut. What some call a brief period of peace after 30 years of civil war was completely shattered in July by massive Israeli strikes. But Wael's film is anything but sanguine about this period. This Beirut is the one fatigued by war's memory,with constant military presence, Starbucks, surveillance, drug-use, apathy, suicide, rage, picture postcards and religion. The film opens with the still burning wreckage of a car-bomb that killed the western-friendly Hariri and reflects the dissatisfaction of a society at war with intruding interests.

here is the press release for the screening:

RECENT FILM AND VIDEO WORKS FROM LEBANON - A screening to benefit Lebanese civilians in need of food, shelter and medical supplies. 

The program will consist of: 

"Ça cera beau. From Beirut with Love" by Waël Noureddine (30', 2005, Lebanon/France) U.S. Premiere. Mutilated, the city of Beirut shows its wounds from years of war. The architecture, along with the many bullet-holed walls and ruined buildings, affects the psychological health of its inhabitants. The strong military presence only adds to this void, which leaves young people to choose between drugs, the army, or religion. + a video interview with Noureddine (3') 

"Untitled Part 3b: (As If) Beauty Never Ends" by Jayce Salloum(11'22, 2003, Lebanon/Canada) Beauty persists even in the most desperate conditions: this video essay superimposes images of orchids in bloom over refugee camp conditions after the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in 1982. + a video introduction by/with Salloum (3')
The entire program will run approximately one hour. Suggested admission: $5.00. 

Two screening dates:FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 at 7:30 PM and SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 at 4:00 PM 

Location: Columbia College Ludington Building 1104 South Wabash Avenue Third Floor Auditorium (Room 302)

Proceeds go directly to the Lebanese Red Cross, Hamoud Hospital in South Lebanon, and Samidoun Coalition, which runs the Sanayeh Relief Center in Beirut (see websites below).

For more information, contact Gabe Klinger at gabe.klinger@sbcglobal.net or kinoslang@hotmail.com

Thank you for your support.

 ----- For details about the beneficiaries, please consult the websites of these organizations: 
Hamoud Hospital: http://www.hammoudhospital.com/war2006/relief.html Lebanese Red Cross: http://www.dm.net.lb/redcross/index.html http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList2/Help_the_ICRC? OpenDocument Samidoun: http://www.samidoun.org

From Tom Sutpen: "Today, were he still among us, would have been the 95th birthday of American Cinema's true poet of human failing, Nicholas Ray. We here at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger . . . would like all of our visitors to mark the occasion by carving out a few errant moments to reflect on a period when this neck of the medium was able to demonstrate a degree of compassion for our panoply of weakness, and not, as they do in this hour, simply cash in on it with bottomless contempt."

Thinking of Ray today brings a lump to my throat. When people cry on television all you see is the fangs of the camera and their competitors.But when Farley Granger leaves Cathy O'Donnell's arms for one last heist, and when Cathy O'Donnell looks up from Granger's corpse surrounded by cops (the cameras today would be trained on the cops) you don't see fangs, you see frail human souls. Even when there's blood, like in the bathtub of PARTY GIRL, or on the igloo wall of SAVAGE INNOCENTS, there is gravity and grace, there is thought; there were hearts that pumped that blood through those bodies, and we immediately think of that -- not the pseudo-scientific hustlers swarming the scene (CSI).

He filmed storms, always human, plus: fine sand, dust, snow, humidity and swamps, brisk asphalt cities, tired domestic air, architecture, culture, fabrics, hypocrisy, rock 'n roll...

And who else inserted a shot of a bird struggling human ways like he? Who cared to?

THE TROUBLEMAKERS

by Gilles Deleuze


Why would the Palestinians be “valid negotiators” since they don’t have a country? Why would they have a country, since theirs has been taken? They have never been given any other choice than to surrender unconditionally. They have been offered only death. In the war that opposes them to Israel, Israel’s actions are considered legitimate reprisals (even if they appear disproportionate), while those of the Palestinians are treated exclusively as terrorist crimes. And an Arab death has neither the same value nor the same weight as an Israeli death.

Since 1969 Israel has continuously bombed and shelled South Lebanon. Israel explicitly recognized that the recent invasion of that country was not a reprisal for the Tel Aviv commando action (thirty thousand soldiers against eleven terrorists), but the premeditated, crowning moment of a whole series of operations whose initiative Israel reserved to itself. For a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other states, with a variety of nuances and restrictions. The Palestinians, people with neither land nor state, are seen as obstacles by everyone. No matter how many weapons and how much money they have received from certain countries, they know what they’re saying when they declare that they are absolutely alone.

The Palestinian combatants also say that they have just won a certain victory. They had left only resistance groups in South Lebanon, groups which seem to have held up quite well. On the other hand, the Israeli invasion struck blindly at Palestinian refugees, Lebanese peasants, all the poor agricultural people. The destruction of villages and cities, massacres of civilians have been confirmed; the use of cluster bombs [bombes à billes] has been reported in several quarters. For several years this South Lebanese populace has been continuously fleeing and returning, in perpetual exodus, under Israeli blows that cannot very clearly be distinguished from terrorist acts. The current escalation has driven two hundred thousand people onto the roads without shelter. The state of Israel is applying to South Lebanon the method that proved itself in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is “palestining” South Lebanon.

The Palestinian combatants are drawn from the refugees. Israel claims to defeat the combatants only by turning thousand of others into refugees, among whom new combatants will be born.

It’s not only our relations with Lebanon that make us say that the state of Israel is murdering a fragile and complex country. There is also another aspect. The Israel-Palestine model is determinant in current problems of terrorism, even in Europe. The worldwide understanding among states and the organization of a world police force with worldwide jurisdiction, currently under way, necessarily lead to an expansion in which more and more people are classified as virtual “terrorists.” We find ourselves in a situation analogous to that of the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as the laboratory and experimentation for a still more terrible future.

Today, the state of Israel leads the experimentation. It is establishing a model of repression that will be converted in other countries, adapted by other countries. There is a great deal of continuity in its politics. Israel has always considered that the UN resolutions which verbally condemned it in fact proved it right. It transformed the invitation to withdraw from the occupied territories into the duty to establish colonies there. Currently it considers the deployment of the international force in South Lebanon an excellent idea…on the condition that this force is ordered to transform the region into a surveillance zone or a controlled desert. It’s an odd kind of blackmail, which the whole world will give up only if there is sufficient pressure to ensure that the Palestinians are finally recognized for what they are, “valid negotiators,” since they are in a state of war for which they are most certainly not responsible.

Translated by Timothy S. Murphy
(originally published in Le Monde, April 7, 1978)

stills of Kuhle Wampe (Dudow/Brecht, 1932, above), Le Pont du nord (Rivette, 1982, below), Puissance de la parole (Godard, 1988, below below)...thinking of this...

André Dias was kind enough to translate the Cinema Cinemas clip of Godard on Full Metal Jacket/79 Primaveras. Much obliged André.

« There it is! This is the slow motion we find in Peckinpah, if you will... It addresses the crowd of spectators only by exploiting something that it lacks. It seems like what Welles talked about: a gimmick, a trick, a gadget. Something that's now usual in all these American directors, even in Kubrick, who disappoints me because he has more talent than them. And this is just Peckinpah, if you will... with the exploitation of Vietnam. To his film I wouldn't go because I wouldn't see the Vietnamese, or God knows in which form. They were there. You just needed to go there... He doesn't see them. Something's missing. Kubrick's film misses what America also missed. They keep showing... In war films about Germany, there's not one big Hollywood actor that hasn't, sooner or later, played a German general. Here no one has played a [Vietnamese] general, cause they didn't know how to do it. That's their shame. To cover up this shame with a slow motion, whatever talent one has, it doesn't work... Let see the Alvarez slow motion. We see a crowd that cries. And we see each one cry without privilege, despite being privileged. The spectator can make his choice. This is what never occurred...Here is a war movie made by a Cuban. It's sufficient to see this to, when we show Kubrick's images see that they do not hold... To say good or bad things... I, (...), it wouldn’t come to my mind to make war; I've deserted in two countries. But it's necessary to watch. We see something in which we believe and there he [Kubrick] doesn't believe in films anymore. He forces himself to believe. And at a certain point it doesn't stand. There's a minimum of honesty... We see that the other [Alvarez’s], which is made of documentary, is so worked by a stylised fiction like this, that it gives back something. And there [Kubrick's] lacks the documentary approach. »

La Guerre des mondes / Les guerres d'un monde

The War of the Worlds /

The Wars of the World

This piece was written for the French magazine Panic, No. 3, Mar./April '06, as part of an ongoing series "Chronique cinéphile" conceived and collected by Nicole Brenez.

Amidst the wars of the world (just one world) I see CITY OF FEAR (Irving Lerner, 1959). This is going back a bit in what's called film history, but I've just seen the film for the first time. It rages on. The city and the fear.

It's a film that shows secrets, large and small. The secret lies and exaggerations of a police report about a dangerous criminal's prison break, critiqued by the escaped convict himself as the report streams from the car's radio. An image of two different sides of the story: official and sanctioned (radio/media), and the suffered and experienced (critique/action).

A vast State secret rumbles beneath the rest of the narrative: the canister the convict has stolen from prison just before escaping is not the $1 million worth of heroin that he thinks it is, that he needs to sell in order to live the good life. It's radioactive Cobalt that was in the prison, it's banally explained by the cops, for experimental use on the prisoners. Hoods for sale. This Mengele treatment of the incarcerated continues in US prisons to this day.

Thus we have Threatening Danger, Fear, then...Catastrophe. The ultimate goal of the State's radioactive experiment is efficient and contained annihilation. But of elsewhere! not here! in Los Angeles!

The final cinematographic scene of the film predicts 'zero': a shot of a radiation ridden corpse, draped with a black sheet, framed like a landscape, a "Caution: Radiation Area" sign placed against the static hilly form of his body. Dissolve to a panorama of the Los Angeles basin, flat and twinkling.

Why mention this film today? Apart from its surprising narrative and formal similarities to Godard's Breathless (made the same year, 1959, and as in that film you see: passenger-seat jump-cuts; jive digressions for their own sake; sweaty, drawn-out sequences in location-shot cafes; gas stations and rooms where women wait, and may rat; general anguish); apart from profound contrasts between Los Angeles location shots (usually alongside the crimey) and the stale air of the studio shot-sequences (usually with the police); apart from reminding oneself of the existence of CITY OF FEAR's director Irving Lerner and therefore of the Worker's Film and Photo League of which Lerner was an active member, and therefore of the existence and possibility, once upon a time in America, of an openly Communist Cinema Collective, whose founder said:

"the news-film is the important thing; that the capitalist class knows that there are certain things that it cannot afford to have shown. It is afraid of some pictures....we will equip our own cameramen and make our own films." (Samuel Brody)

...yes, apart from all that, I also mention this film today because it shows something people in the US do everyday but that's seldom shown in American films: citizens talking back to their radios and televisions. Refutations yelled at the machines by those who know the truth because they live in the consequences of it.

One has to marvel at one horrifying bond between cinema and radiation sickness posited by the poster advertising the film: Chills for millions. 

Like cinema itself, cinephilia is nothing unless it fabricates a bond with life. Across films, across continents, across thoughts, justices and injustices -- that's all.

The Greatest Cinema Blog I Can't Read

I stumbled upon an extremely interesting cinema blog while searching for references to Jean-Claude Rousseau. It is in Portuguese and seems to be a "discovery" type of blog, taking frequent note and quotation of Cinemateca Portuguesa screenings (though it's much more than that, for instance theoretical as hell, as a babelfish translation of a piece on video vs. film has just indicated to me). It is called Ainda não começámos a pensar and it looks to be run by someone called Andre Dias.

It is where I found the Cinema cinemas clip of Godard comparing Kubrick and Alvarez, Full Metal Jacket with 79 Primaveras (pictured above as it appears in dual-screen sequence on the blog).

Andre has also posted several beautiful videoclips on youtube (most of which have been put to use on his blog):

La cicatrice intérieure (Garrel)
Les enfants jouent à la Russie (Godard)
Le pays de la terre sans arbre (Perrault)
... and what I assume is just an excerpt from Andre Dias's own film
Destruição de uma casa de banho . Very disquieting film.

LA Pigs brutalize Anti-Minutemen, or, When They Crossed the Street, the State Came to Meet Them. (July 8th)

click here for youtube video of LAPD brutality against Anti-Minutemen

Two weeks ago, while walking home on Hollywood Boulevard I heard distant drums. As I passed Vine Street I found a demonstration and counter-demonstration in my path. The Minutemen were staging a rally for their racist anti-immigrant crusade. An organization like the KKK, but much more active, the Minutemen are a jingoist vigilante group tolerated if not encouraged by the State, as unaccountable civilian border police.

The Minutemen were on the east corner, on top of Jerry Lewis's star, while the counter-demonstrators were on the west corner, on top of Frank Borzage's star. The Minutemen were organized and about 150 strong, and were met with an equal number in opposition, impromtu though, chanting "down, down, down with the Minutemen!!" Both parties were pressed to edge of their respective curbs. The police were doing formations in the middle of the street between the two groups, however they always faced the opposition, the counter-demonstrators, batons drawn. Every 10 minutes or so the police would shift positions in maneuver-like fashion, lending the scene a theatrical air.

Someone from the counter-demonstration stepped down off of the curb accidentally and the pigs started clubbing us with all their strength. The victims were mainly women. Afterwards, as everyone on our side cursed the police and threw plastic bottles at them, I saw the physical consequences of the police clubbing on those at the very front: knees swollen the size of baseballs. In the now indignant atmosphere several young counter-demonstrators tried to cross the street in dispersion and were immediately sacked by multiple cop, with typical pig historionics: 2 or 3 corn-fed flat-foots pinned and ground one female counter-demonstrator into the asphalt. Several minutes later the police began beating a protester who had successfully crossed the street (see video by clicking above photo). They caught him by his shirt, dragged him around by it, and several different brutal pigs took turns with their batons. A young couple tried to shield the sacked protester from the baton blows, only to receive their own. The pigs cuffed the street-crosser, picked him up high and slammed his chest into the ramp of a truck unloading stage apparatus for the theatrical musical 'RENT'. In all this the pigs made a point to shout "resisting arrest" (for the crossing of the street).

I took the above picture from across the street with a disposable film camera. Note the title on the theatre marquee; the duty of the police in a capitalist state is to protect private property -- the duty of art in a capitalist state is to be private property! Proof: this theatre will certainly pay no mind to the theatre in the street or its casualties; it exclusively puts on Broadway superproductions about "getting better all the time."

Zach Campbell recently noted Pasolini's siding with the police during May '68 in France because the police are necessarily of the working class, batons and all. Here is a response to that troubling point of view:

"We saw that an essential characteristic of the state is the existence of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people. (...) The free Athenian considered police duty so degrading that he would rather be arrested by an armed slave than himself have any hand in such despicable work."

-Chapter V. of Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State by F. Engels.

In turn, the police must differentiate themselves from the State to gain any respect in these struggles.

Demonstrators might make the cop think twice about his/her job with formations and maneuvers of their own. At least a presentational aspect could be tried...?

True/False Passports

"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. "

-Herman Melville

Israel has displaced, as we have seen, those who flee by foot, by hoof, by bus, by Mercedes, by BMW, by Jeep, by French or American Helicopters, etc., They have not diplaced them equally and the US media is not afraid to risk capsizing the weight of their reports by doggedly focusing on the airlfting of those with the proper passports, all the while unilaterally labeling Israeli strikes as against Hezbollah targets. The vast majority of Israel's savage strikes have been against civilians and civilian infastructure.

As usual it will be the poor who will suffer the most for not being able to leave, it will be the poor who will also refuse to give up their homes to the Zionists, and as usual it will be (and has been thus far) the poor who will resist epically.

I needn't identify the nationality of this corpse; were she the "correct" nationality this would be one of the most famous pictures in the world.

The passports of bombs and rockets, however, are given a mistier treatment. For instance, a missle fired by Hezbollah is unfailingly referred to as "Iranian" whereas an Israeli shell is almost never identified as "American". Perhaps the massive number of Israeli bombs justifies their shrouded identity; well over 9,000 US made shells have been fired into Lebanon by the Israeli aggressors in just one week -- not to mention US missles, the US jets that carry them, and as yet unidentified American weapons of mass destruction being used on the civilian population in Gaza.

Robert Fisk (the British journalist who lives in Beirut and always provides valuable on-the- ground reports from the Middle East) has even stooped, in this degraded time, to begging for some sort of class/culturally based outrage over Israel's arrogance and boundless barbarism:

"It amazes me -- I mean, living here in Beirut, as I have for 30 years. Here are the Lebanese people, sophisticated, educated, cosmopolitan, people who don't look like the Arab world, they look like us; I mean, people who could be quite at home on the streets of Paris or New York and London, and some of them are; people who read, who are very well educated; people who speak English fluently, French beautifully, and fluent Arabic."

Indeed it is shocking, especially insofar as Europe has given up the ghost on its own visage in Lebanon, but no more so than the concurrent occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, and most critically, Gaza and the West Bank.

The left needs to unify its outrage in the face of the spurious 'clash of civilizations' mantra of the capitalists. If one has the suspicion that Chavez is right, that the capitalist/imperalist US (as it exists today, and has long before Bush) will NOT last another 100 years...then the left must focus on facilitating that fall...This requires mass solidarity with ALL who are oppressed and exploited by the US and its facilitators, across all supposed cultural lines. Class IS tied up with culture, we can't deny that: mass culture is inseperable from mass production and signification, but everyone on the planet is subject to the FACT that almost nothing is purely signification, that material conditions provide existence. Why be afraid of this knot (in the same stomach that must be filled from day to day)? I say we use it as a basis for renewed human solidarity and revolution. This requires signification; signification is not sinful; and this is where cinema comes back in...

                                                                                         

                                                                                              - a.r.