"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I always find Slavoj Zizek alternately (or simultaneously) enthralling and infuriating, and nowhere more so than in his new book Organs Without Bodies in which he takes on Gilles Deleuze.
I always find Slavoj Zizek alternately (or simultaneously) enthralling and infuriating, and nowhere more so than in his new book Organs Without Bodies in which he takes on Gilles Deleuze.
Continue reading “Zizek on Deleuze”
Peter Watts‘ Maelstrom is the sequel to his Starfish (which I discussed here). Maelstrom envisions the possible extinction of the human species, and indeed of all terrestrial life, due to the competition of a nanobacterium brought back from the deep oceans. But the book is much more sympathetic to Lenie Clarke, the woman (from Starfish) who is the (not entirely unwitting) vector of this infection, than it is to the “corpses” (people with power, money, and influence) who are trying to stop it. Emotionally, the book emphasizes victimization, on the one hand, and bitter revenge on the other: these seem to be the only alternatives – since rebellion is largely futile, and not much more than a fashion statement anyway – to craven collaboration with the dominant powers.
But the book’s larger vision is more technopolitical than psychological. It envisions a world in which travel restrictions and other suspensions of civil liberties are the norm, less for explicitly political reasons, than for environmental ones, in order to contain the various biomedical and chemical disasters that Watts presents as a regular feature of mid-21st-century life. (This also includes the control of refugees, who have fled to North America to escape environmental disasters in Asia and other parts of the world). Foucault showed how our ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and control arose, in part, out of efforts to contain things like plague; Watts envisions these technologies returning to their roots, as it were, as a result of our rapacious destruction of the environment (as well as of continued terrorism in a time of extreme technologies).
There’s also a lot about re-engineering the human body, not just to allow physical adaptations to extreme conditions, but also to control behavior; this ranges from the implantation of false memories (of things like having been abused as a child), to implanting triggers for violence and aggression (very useful for breeding and training assassins), to neurochemical manipulations of emotions like guilt. The novel asks us to consider what “free will” might mean under such conditions (and it doesn’t allow us any easy answers).
And then there is the book’s vision of Maelstrom itself, which is the mid-21st-century descendant of the Internet. Instantaneous, worldwide wireless communication is the norm; but cyberspace is infested by “wildlife”, rogue programs of all sorts that are the rapidly-evolved descendants of the spam and viruses and worms of today. There’s a whole online ecology in Maelstrom, and it isn’t pretty: it’s characterized by vicious Darwinian competition. This “wildlife” doesn’t stop people from using the Net for information or for social contact, so much as it insinuates itself within those human uses. blurring lines between fact, rumor, and innuendo, and making all communication rife with suspicion and conflict. (Not to mention Watts’ brilliant and wholly original take on the nature, and the possibilities, of “artificial intelligence”…).
What makes this all work is the way Watts grounds his overall vision of apocalyptic dread (or better, vengeful, don’t-give-a-fuck bitterness) within a wholly concrete framework of techno/bio/politics.
Peter Watts‘ Maelstrom is the sequel to his Starfish (which I discussed here). Maelstrom envisions the possible extinction of the human species, and indeed of all terrestrial life, due to the competition of a nanobacterium brought back from the deep oceans. But the book is much more sympathetic to Lenie Clarke, the woman (from Starfish) who is the (not entirely unwitting) vector of this infection, than it is to the “corpses” (people with power, money, and influence) who are trying to stop it. Emotionally, the book emphasizes victimization, on the one hand, and bitter revenge on the other: these seem to be the only alternatives – since rebellion is largely futile, and not much more than a fashion statement anyway – to craven collaboration with the dominant powers.
But the book’s larger vision is more technopolitical than psychological. It envisions a world in which travel restrictions and other suspensions of civil liberties are the norm, less for explicitly political reasons, than for environmental ones, in order to contain the various biomedical and chemical disasters that Watts presents as a regular feature of mid-21st-century life. (This also includes the control of refugees, who have fled to North America to escape environmental disasters in Asia and other parts of the world). Foucault showed how our ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and control arose, in part, out of efforts to contain things like plague; Watts envisions these technologies returning to their roots, as it were, as a result of our rapacious destruction of the environment (as well as of continued terrorism in a time of extreme technologies).
There’s also a lot about re-engineering the human body, not just to allow physical adaptations to extreme conditions, but also to control behavior; this ranges from the implantation of false memories (of things like having been abused as a child), to implanting triggers for violence and aggression (very useful for breeding and training assassins), to neurochemical manipulations of emotions like guilt. The novel asks us to consider what “free will” might mean under such conditions (and it doesn’t allow us any easy answers).
And then there is the book’s vision of Maelstrom itself, which is the mid-21st-century descendant of the Internet. Instantaneous, worldwide wireless communication is the norm; but cyberspace is infested by “wildlife”, rogue programs of all sorts that are the rapidly-evolved descendants of the spam and viruses and worms of today. There’s a whole online ecology in Maelstrom, and it isn’t pretty: it’s characterized by vicious Darwinian competition. This “wildlife” doesn’t stop people from using the Net for information or for social contact, so much as it insinuates itself within those human uses. blurring lines between fact, rumor, and innuendo, and making all communication rife with suspicion and conflict. (Not to mention Watts’ brilliant and wholly original take on the nature, and the possibilities, of “artificial intelligence”…).
What makes this all work is the way Watts grounds his overall vision of apocalyptic dread (or better, vengeful, don’t-give-a-fuck bitterness) within a wholly concrete framework of techno/bio/politics.
Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….
Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….
Windows and Mirrors : Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and my former colleague Diane Gromala (who left the University of Washington, where I still teach, for Georgia Tech, at least in part because of UW’s stupidity and failure to give her the recognition she deserved) is a book about rethinking the philosophy of web design. It’s a theoretically informed book, but one that is aimed at an audience of Web designers rather than theorists, and hence is lucid and highly accessible. The book’s main thesis is that the value of “transparency” in Web and interface design has been greatly exaggerated. The interface should not simply disappear, as if it were just a window through which we see naked data. Rather, the interface should also be valued for itself; this is what makes “interactivity” possible, as well as being where aesthetic pleasure resides. Web design should be pleasurable, rather than just nakedly utilitarian in the way “usability” experts like Jakob Nielsen have recommended. A good interface is one that oscillates between usability and reflectivity, between being a “window” and being a “mirror.”
I don’t think that Bolter and Gromala’s thesis is new, at least among people who are familiar with theory. But rarely has this sort of argument been presented so elegantly and at the same time so accessibly (in doing both, the book practices what it preaches). Taking off from analyses of art works displayed at SIGGRAPH 2000, Windows and Mirrors shows how self-consciousness and self-reflection are intrinsic dimensions of digital media (indeed, of all media), and how trying (never successfully) to eliminate them in favor of a supposedly unmediated and direct experience has disastrous consequences. Along the way, they Bolter and Gromala affirm the importance of embodiment in digital or virtual experience, debunk totalizing notions of media “convergence,” and look further at the consequences of “remediation” (the way new media take up and alter older media — this was the title and subject of a previous book by Bolter, written in collaboration with Richard Grusin).
Web designers should definitely read this book. Anyone else with an interest in digital media should find it interesting and informative, if only for the clarity and focus it brings to its themes.
Windows and Mirrors : Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and my former colleague Diane Gromala (who left the University of Washington, where I still teach, for Georgia Tech, at least in part because of UW’s stupidity and failure to give her the recognition she deserved) is a book about rethinking the philosophy of web design. It’s a theoretically informed book, but one that is aimed at an audience of Web designers rather than theorists, and hence is lucid and highly accessible. The book’s main thesis is that the value of “transparency” in Web and interface design has been greatly exaggerated. The interface should not simply disappear, as if it were just a window through which we see naked data. Rather, the interface should also be valued for itself; this is what makes “interactivity” possible, as well as being where aesthetic pleasure resides. Web design should be pleasurable, rather than just nakedly utilitarian in the way “usability” experts like Jakob Nielsen have recommended. A good interface is one that oscillates between usability and reflectivity, between being a “window” and being a “mirror.”
I don’t think that Bolter and Gromala’s thesis is new, at least among people who are familiar with theory. But rarely has this sort of argument been presented so elegantly and at the same time so accessibly (in doing both, the book practices what it preaches). Taking off from analyses of art works displayed at SIGGRAPH 2000, Windows and Mirrors shows how self-consciousness and self-reflection are intrinsic dimensions of digital media (indeed, of all media), and how trying (never successfully) to eliminate them in favor of a supposedly unmediated and direct experience has disastrous consequences. Along the way, they Bolter and Gromala affirm the importance of embodiment in digital or virtual experience, debunk totalizing notions of media “convergence,” and look further at the consequences of “remediation” (the way new media take up and alter older media — this was the title and subject of a previous book by Bolter, written in collaboration with Richard Grusin).
Web designers should definitely read this book. Anyone else with an interest in digital media should find it interesting and informative, if only for the clarity and focus it brings to its themes.
Raoul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence is an oddly disturbing film, creepy despite (as well as because of) its great degree of abstraction. In an icily haut-bourgeois Parisian home, a 9-year-old boy demands to be taken to the home of a complete stranger, telling his mother (Isabelle Huppert) that this other woman (Jeanne Balibar) is his real mother. An odd triangle develops, with the boy as the pivot and seeming instigator of a not-quite-conflict between the two women, equal parts underhanded seduction, implicit menace, and (if this is not an oxymoron, or – on second thought – even if it is) understated hysteria. Although Freudian overtones are suggested (the father is absent, on a business trip, while all this happens), and despite a (somewhat surprisingly for Ruiz) more or less coherent explanation of the mystery by the end, this is a film whose enigmas, and unsettling moods, are not so much psychological as ontological. Ruiz’s long tracking shots, explorations of empty deep space, insistent focusing upon odd details, and occasional defocusings, set against a deliberately over-formal acting style, make everything feel insecure because it is revealed as hollow. But the viewer’s emotional responses are not so much undermined by what I can only call an anti-revelation, as set curiously adrift.
I can perhaps explain this better by a few comparisons. When Godard calls attention to the fictionality of his films, he is actually affirming social reality as something that exists outside fictive representations; the result of undermining the film’s “reality-effect” is to reinforce the reality of the film as a social practice, and as a construction of images and sounds. But when Ruiz undermines his film’s reality-effect, the result is the corrosion, or de-solidification, of any sort of reality, that of the film, and that of the world as well. Again, when Bunuel, for instance, exhibits the hollowness of his bourgeois protagonists, the result is a kind of gleeful liberation into absurdity; Ruiz makes moves which on paper are equally “surreal,” but the effect is one of being sucked into metaphysical quicksand, rather than one of subversion and unconscious release through laughter. Ruiz is neither a Godardian constructivist, nor a Bunuelian surrealist, but (I’m reaching here) a queasily cerebral paradoxicalist, which is something far more unusual.
Raoul Ruiz’s Comedy of Innocence is an oddly disturbing film, creepy despite (as well as because of) its great degree of abstraction. In an icily haut-bourgeois Parisian home, a 9-year-old boy demands to be taken to the home of a complete stranger, telling his mother (Isabelle Huppert) that this other woman (Jeanne Balibar) is his real mother. An odd triangle develops, with the boy as the pivot and seeming instigator of a not-quite-conflict between the two women, equal parts underhanded seduction, implicit menace, and (if this is not an oxymoron, or – on second thought – even if it is) understated hysteria. Although Freudian overtones are suggested (the father is absent, on a business trip, while all this happens), and despite a (somewhat surprisingly for Ruiz) more or less coherent explanation of the mystery by the end, this is a film whose enigmas, and unsettling moods, are not so much psychological as ontological. Ruiz’s long tracking shots, explorations of empty deep space, insistent focusing upon odd details, and occasional defocusings, set against a deliberately over-formal acting style, make everything feel insecure because it is revealed as hollow. But the viewer’s emotional responses are not so much undermined by what I can only call an anti-revelation, as set curiously adrift.
I can perhaps explain this better by a few comparisons. When Godard calls attention to the fictionality of his films, he is actually affirming social reality as something that exists outside fictive representations; the result of undermining the film’s “reality-effect” is to reinforce the reality of the film as a social practice, and as a construction of images and sounds. But when Ruiz undermines his film’s reality-effect, the result is the corrosion, or de-solidification, of any sort of reality, that of the film, and that of the world as well. Again, when Bunuel, for instance, exhibits the hollowness of his bourgeois protagonists, the result is a kind of gleeful liberation into absurdity; Ruiz makes moves which on paper are equally “surreal,” but the effect is one of being sucked into metaphysical quicksand, rather than one of subversion and unconscious release through laughter. Ruiz is neither a Godardian constructivist, nor a Bunuelian surrealist, but (I’m reaching here) a queasily cerebral paradoxicalist, which is something far more unusual.
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important).
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself.
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important). And, how do we situate all these musical developments in the context of the larger McLuhanesque changes in sensibility that “electronic culture,” now in digital form, continues to bring us?
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself. Recent books and articles by Eshun, by Simon Reynolds, by Jonathan Sterne (from appearances – I haven’t read it yet), and by Alex Weheliye (warning: may not be accessible except through a college library or some other such gateway) have begun to tackle these questions, but there is still a lot of work to do – not to mention, of course, the continuing inventions by musicians themselves.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams is an indubitably powerful film in both form/style and content, even if I am not entirely sure how much substance there is behind its marvelous sleight-of-hand. Plus, I have to give it points for being the most relentlessly downbeat film to be given a major Hollywood release since at least Magnolia…
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams is an indubitably powerful film in both form/style and content, even if I am not entirely sure how much substance there is behind its marvelous sleight-of-hand. Plus, I have to give it points for being the most relentlessly downbeat film to be given a major Hollywood release since at least Magnolia.
The look of the film is quite impressive. It’s shot mostly in closeups or near-closeups with a restless, unable-to-be-still, handheld camera, in grungy and grotty locations, in various varieties of ugly lighting and color schemes. The chronology is thoroughly scrambled, with the scenes arranged in what’s almost a jigsaw puzzle of fragments. And it only becomes clear a good way into the film how the three major characters are related: Jack (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con who has become a Christian, and who is seriously trying to reform, but who kills a man and his two daughters in a hit-and-run; Cristina (Naomi Watts), the bereft wife and mother as a result of the hit and run; and Paul (Sean Penn), who receives the dead man’s heart in a transplant. The way the lives of these three come together might seem forced if the film unfolded in chronological order; but the tangled temporality is entirely appropriate to, and expressive of, the tangled nature of their relationships. The acting, of course, is great (I prefer Del Toro here to his Oscar-winning performance in Traffic; although Watts is excellent, she doesn’t equal – and couldn’t, given the nature of the part – her amazing performance in Mulholland Drive).
I can’t help feeling, in retrospect, that the film comes off a bit strained and pretentious: by which I mean that what it delivers is not quite up to the measure of its ambitions, which are vast. But moment by moment, 21 Grams is powerful and compelling, and – though I didn’t love it as much as I did Lost in Translation – I still have to say that few English-language films released this year come anywhere near it.
China Mieville’s The Tain is a novella, of 70 or so pages, most easily found in Peter Crowther’s anthology, Cities (UK only). It’s an eerie tale, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about the fauna of mirrors. The mirror people, Borges writes, used to be free, but when they invaded our earth they were imprisoned behind their mirrors, and forced by magic to imitate even the least of our gestures. One day, however, Borges continues, the magic will wear off, and the mirror people will escape the mirrors and invade our world…
Mieville’s novella imagines the aftermath of that invasion. It’s partly an uncanny account (reminiscent of a number of last-man science fiction texts) of the horror that ensues for the few human survivors; and partly a poetic meditation on what it might mean to lose resemblance. If we were to lose our reflections, what would become of us? And what would happen to the reflections, when they were no longer constrained to take our own forms upon themselves? On one side, it’s a story of self-alienation; on the other, of an otherness that offers us no common measure by which we could apprehend and describe it. Nonetheless, these two sides do communicate with one another. To say more would spoil the surprises of this beautifully luminous text. (I use the word luminous, even though – or rather precisely because – the tale is awash in strange descriptions of a “hard” light, a light that “was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth”, being without reflections;”no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights”).
China Mieville’s The Tain is a novella, of 70 or so pages, most easily found in Peter Crowther’s anthology, Cities (UK only). It’s an eerie tale, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about the fauna of mirrors. The mirror people, Borges writes, used to be free, but when they invaded our earth they were imprisoned behind their mirrors, and forced by magic to imitate even the least of our gestures. One day, however, Borges continues, the magic will wear off, and the mirror people will escape the mirrors and invade our world…
Mieville’s novella imagines the aftermath of that invasion. It’s partly an uncanny account (reminiscent of a number of last-man science fiction texts) of the horror that ensues for the few human survivors; and partly a poetic meditation on what it might mean to lose resemblance. If we were to lose our reflections, what would become of us? And what would happen to the reflections, when they were no longer constrained to take our own forms upon themselves? On one side, it’s a story of self-alienation; on the other, of an otherness that offers us no common measure by which we could apprehend and describe it. Nonetheless, these two sides do communicate with one another. To say more would spoil the surprises of this beautifully luminous text. (I use the word luminous, even though – or rather precisely because – the tale is awash in strange descriptions of a “hard” light, a light that “was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth”, being without reflections;”no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights”).
Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces.
Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces. I’m not sure I am grasping it rightly with this description, but “grasping” probably isn’t the right way to approach it. In any case, it’s gratifying to see genre filmmaking that is at once artistically ambitious and utterly unpretentious, in a way that you never see in American film anymore.
Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what it might mean. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event whose singularity is such that it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.
Claire Denis’ Friday Night is the story of a one-night stand. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens: a woman meets a man, they spend the night together, she leaves. The actors and characters are middle-aged and non-glamorous; as the film takes place mostly at night, and mostly in close-ups, there’s very little to see. (There are no establishing shots; the camera roves about restlessly, but always within a very constricted space; cuts to new angles tend to emphasize visual configurations that would be striking if only they were able to emerge more clearly from the darkness). There’s also very little dialog, though there is a nearly omnipresent musical score, which varies from techno abstraction to a tone of what is not quite melancholy or longing or excitement, but somehow a sparer analogue of such feelings.
Denis thus stylizes and abstracts things to the extreme, while at the same time she dwells relentlessly, and exclusively, on the banal, the ordinary and the everyday. It’s this (seeming) contradiction that accounts for the power of her films. You have to watch Friday Night with a kind of rapt concentration, if you are to watch it at all; precisely because there is so little to see. Your attention is focused on tiny details, and on emotions and sensations that are barely above the threshold of awareness. And you realize that there is nothing here but these tiny details. Watching the film is almost a kind of spiritual discipline – albeit one that is focused on the body, and not the soul. Bare flesh, mere flesh, is really all there is. A hand grips another hand, or moves down a thigh. A face is enigmatically lost in thought; or is it fantasy? The more we register the intensity of its expression, the less idea we have of what the person is actually thinking. Denis pushes to the limit of sexual feeling and desire: not a Bataillean limit of excess (that would more be the case with her previous film, Trouble Every Day, which I wrote about here), but a limit of near anonymity. Friday Night is a passionate film, but not an emotional one – I don’t mean that its passion is cold, but rather that it is so nearly anonymous, so impersonal or pre-personal, so nocturnal. Not the dream of an ultimate orgasm, or a life-shattering experience, but of an event that is so singular, and so evanescent, that it has no significance: it cannot be incorporated into your personality, your identity, your ongoing sense of yourself.