AUDITOIRE

Note 4: Nonface, Interlude, Lav Diaz and Time

2015-08-15T16:13:00.002+08:00

The face withheld - a secret.

The Nonface in Class Picture¹

[This article was published in Kino Punch (Issue 3), U.P. Cinema's Film Critique Magazine. The magazine was successfully launched last March 28, 2015. The published form of this article has jumbled its footnote section, which is, to me, a curious result. I constructed the footnote section with its own politics. It stands as a threat to the main text, a supplement, inseparable yet removable from the text. The footnote section is the marginalized sector, the subaltern, the silenced, the underground. The dominance of the main text is, in many ways, threatened by the marginalization of the footnote. It is the main text's undoing. Hence, this online version will preserve this political relationship. It is a modified form of the printed text.]

The class picture.

In writing about Class Picture (2011), we begin, as in any experimental work, in the middle, the between. The between is a space of liminality, the space where the image resists to ground itself in any given time, in any predetermined space. In writing and in reading about Class Picture, we inhabit this space. And we proceed by saying: an experimental work is always on the verge of transformation, never arrested by space, never stopped by time. It is always speeding towards the future, taking the present and the past with it. The tenuous forces of becoming within its body - their very placement in this space of liminality - jettison various rules of representation by transforming the image of experimentation into an unreadable set of intensities. Each image is a new island, a place to be, a dangerous strip of time and space, a rupturing force of possibilities. Each experimental image is an object of a ‘question’ that ceases to ‘be’ (if ‘be’ stands for being). For each is always a ‘becoming’.

Capturing the image – this is the task of every critic. We capture the image with words. We use language to stop its ceaseless becoming. Language has mastered its mode of reinscribing life itself in its own way – a form of regulation. Writing, any form of writing, is a form of ‘colonialism’. Its apparatus of capture is made of various sets of predetermined concepts that man has mastered through time – the traditional, commonsensical, habitual expressions in dominant language. Film criticism, as a discourse-forming machine, is populated by ‘capturing devices.’ Phrases such as ‘beautiful shot,’ ‘ugly lighting,’ ‘tremendous intensity,’ ‘great frame composition’ circulate in film journalism as ‘catchphrases’ that hold various images in captive. These ‘catchphrases’ resituate the image in a new plane of existence – the realm of dominant language – in order to achieve meaning. Only during this moment of linguistic capture can the image produce meaning. Production of meaning is always a result of image-to-text transformation. Also, we can only interpret an image the moment it reaches language.

Why do we have to capture the image? The task of the critic, in writing criticism, or maybe in the act of writing itself, is to transmute² the image, to exteriorize it, to expedite its intensities from its cinematic enclosure. In criticism, we 'colonize'³ the image through language prior to its dissemination across various plateaus of knowledge.

Colonizing the image is not a passive operation; it is productive, a power struggle of forces. The process of capture via colonization works under the premise that the image is a foreign land, as all percepts are. An image is an affective chain of non-significations (asignification, according to Gilles Deleuze) or, in simpler terms, a chain of intensities irreducible to language. Given this premise, an image is an impersonal object, which, at first, is a set of intensities, a set of attenuated light from the screen prior to becoming a describable expression. Image-as-intensity is image in its pure state – an attenuated light.⁴The linguistic habit of description, in this sense, is language rendered as a photographic device. Description captures the image and, under various mechanisms, transforms the image into its legible form/s. The mind, the ally of language, is the colonizer, the conquistador, the dispositif, whose ruling power over the image is an exercise in juridical, spatio-temporal and territorial regulation - a biopolitics at work.

In the process of colonizing the image via the apparatus of capture, which I will conveniently call the cinema-brain machine (a machination inspired by Deleuze&Guattari’s machines), the asignifiying intensities of the image are converted to signifying blocs of legible sensations. Legible forms of the image venture further into the cinema-brain machine, reaching a gated passageway where value judgments serve as a filtering medium. This gated passageway separates the recognizable images from the nonrecognizable ones. The recognizable image is checked and balanced against stored visual memories in search of similarities and differences, parts-to-whole relations, and, at some point, topological and mathematical relations with the world prior to its embodiment in the brain’s deep conceptual networks. Whereas nonreconnizable images go directly to the imprinting machine where they are reinscribed and stored as events, suspended from the circulation of the recognizable. Nonrecognizable images like shock photographs and figures of trauma dampen the movement of time because of their sustained and complex emission of high-intensity signals. It takes time to process them, or to come to terms with them.

In this order, we return to Class Picture. In its traverse across the cinema-brain machine, Class Picture’s asignifying intensity disrupts the schema of categorizing recognizable from nonrecognizable images. It stops at this stage by breaking down the categorizing apparatus. As a demonstration, let us begin first with the image of the sea.

The image of the sea, its perplexing and ineluctable visibility, located at the first few frames of the film, creates a legible, recognizable sign similar to a given set of signs that says: ‘this is a sea like any other sea’. It is a generic image, a recognizable image. The horizontal sea, which sets the geographic index of the film, legibly contains recognizable surfaces. We cannot disentangle it from any representation system. Although for those who have not seen any representation of the sea, this image is a new affective construct, a nonrecognizable one. But for the greater part of perceiving human world, the sea is just like any other sea – a vapid body of water that traverses beyond the horizon. The pivoting image in Class Picture is not the sea, but the faceless figures (nonface) arranged in a ‘photo-op’ position. This nonface destroys the recognizant-nonrecognizant filtering apparatus by producing a shock to thought, a blinding signal. The nonface disarms the classifying machinery by rendering its recognizable form as ambiguous or obscure – an altered state.

This is where the image resists the capture of language. For only in this moment, upon rupture of the schema of visual classification between recognizable and nonrecognizable images that the notion of the ‘outside’ is at work. The outside is the between, the space of liminality, the gestural ambiguity of the body that suspends the linguistic inscription of the image. The presence of liminal bodies, as embodied by the nonface in the film, arranged as if emulating a class picture, shifts the temporal order of the film from linear time to surface time – a Flusserian rupture⁵. From a linear chronological model, a one-dimensional way of looking at the world taught to us by historians, developmental scientist and economists, the shock to thought in the presence of a nonface ‘redistributes the sensible’⁶ in a surface. As in any surface, the image invites us to look at it, along with its circumstantial movement, as a two-dimensional world. Surface thinking is a nonlinear way of looking at the world. It is anti-Cartesian, highly exploratory and always looking out on the edge of every image, every boundary, and every space in between. The Fluserian rupture of the nonface changes the temporal order of thinking because it (the nonface) stipulates a kind of anti-linear surface time where ‘disseminatory’ and exploratory [two-dimensional] thinking predominate over developmental, hierarchal and historical [one-dimensional] thinking.

The nonface: the void.

The nonface operates as a force without the constituted and visible identifying marks of ‘being’. It effaces language by undoing the representation of the face or the body. It is marked by a certain phantasmal gesture which plays with invisibility – a masking-at-work. Herein lays the anxiety of knowing. The ghostly presence of the nonface in Class Picture resists colonial grasp of the mind. It remains a foreign land, undiscovered, withheld, ‘unrationalized,’ unevaluated, an ‘outside’ of language. As a spectre, it introduces another lens of looking - the lens of incompleteness. Liminality, as a between-force, creates an incomplete figure. This force of incompleteness destabilizes the ‘wholeness’ of the figure by adding or subtracting a supplement.⁷ In Class Picture, the supplement to the image of a nonface is the degradation of the image itself. This chemical process supplements the face by replacing it with a new region, a vacuous one. Supplementation becomes a process of re-inscription, of re-circulation of intensities away from the schematic sorting of conventional forms towards the incomprehensible region where time is out of joint (Gilles Deleuze’s time-image haunts this writing). This may require us to rethink the idea of ambiguity of experimental images in spirit of haunting and invisibility.

Class Picture deserves a closer look to assess its disruptive forces, to disseminate its intensities, and to look at its relation to invisibility and haunting. We have already settled the presence of the sea as a generic image, a geographic index of the filmic event. But in the outwork, we are also a witness to the grand swift of nonbeings in the film – the nonface. A nonface resists identity. It robs us of the ‘future’ by disseminating ‘time’ in the surface. It haunts the crevices of language in a form of a suspended questioning: ‘who are we?’ implicating the ‘outside.’ Or, in a Deleuzian sense, it folds the ‘outside’ within it by transforming its image into an open space, its time into an open time.

NOTES

1. My interest in Class Picture (2011), an experimental film by Gym Lumbera and Timmy Harn, is strewn from a memory of haunting. In the last days of 2014, I was writing at length about another monstrosity – Raya Martin's Ars Colonia (2011). During my peripheral engagements with Martin’s complex figures, a thought came to me: the face of soldier in Ars Colonia is withheld just like in Class Picture. Consider this writing as a periphery, a writing ‘around and about’ my other essay on Ars Colonia appearing in La Furia Umana film journal on April 2015. Consider this writing a preface, a supplement, an outwork.

2. The original term is ‘transvaluation of values’ from Friedrich Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ. Arizona, USA: See Sharp Press, 1999, p. 13.

3. The author’s use of the words ‘colonialism’, ‘colonize’, ‘colonization’… is a self-conscious ‘misuse’, but it is nonetheless a strategic misuse – a reworking of a concept. The whole text is haunted by the predatory presence of the postcolonial discourse. As to why such a haunting persists, the reason shall be made unknown. ‘[I]t remains silent, secret and discreet like a tomb: oikesis’ as in Jacques Derrida’s essay “Difference.” Margins of Philosophy. Sussex, U.K.: The Harvester Press,1982, p. 4.

4. The phrasal remark “an attenuated light” attains a refrain. Therefore, it must be repeated. But the repetition doesn’t guarantee that the preservation of meaning from one sentence, which, in our case, the previous sentence, to the other.

5. Vilém Flusser. “Line and Surface” in Andreas Ströhl (ed.) Writings: Vilém Flusser. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 21.

6. Jacques Ranciere. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensibile. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, [2000] 2004, p. 12.

7. Jacques Derrida wrote: “But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-p lace-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient-lieuJ. As substitute… it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness…” Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 145.

* * * * * *

...The Interlude...

(or Can the body of Wolverine be a finalized unquestionable image?)

Two, which stands between one and three, is a gift - a gift of space - a space where one can inscribe residual thoughts, thoughts that remain a secret if undisclosed. This is a space of enchantment. Do not be fixed or settled. This is a temporary passage in the hypertext, a passage between the two main texts: the text prior and the text to come, serving as a bridge, bridging the 'between', servicing and serving as a text-bridge, or a bridging text between two different lands of interiority, 'outside' and never inside, an extro-bridge that extends to two territorialities: a territoriality of the past and a territoriality of the future.

This writing is a residue, a precipitate, an excess of thought from numerous engagements with other texts, images, gestures, residually escaping from the coding process of the brain. Residual thoughts are weak forces. It has a liminal spirit - part of a ruin but out of place, a remainder, a microscopic dust left underneath a productive machine. A residue can be an interlude, a peripheral malaise, just like this, just like the moment when I wrote this in an exchange:

"Minsan may legibility siya like in mainstream cinema, we have the abs of wolverine sa Days of Future Past. abs yun kahit anong gawin natin." [link]

The residue comes in a form of a question: is the body of Wolverine in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), as seen in the series of photographs on top, be a finalized unquestionable image, an image that cannot be undone, destroyed and rethought? Is the image perfect and enclosed? Will it, in the course of time, preserve its musculature - its dents, curvature, bulges - as a 'fully' inscribed image?

These questions are peripheral threats. They threaten the cleanliness of the finalized image. Dusts can be small, but their very smallness, their microscopic constituents, their dissemination across the field of question creates a peripheral mess, the very undoing of the main structure. We assume, in many ways, that the main structure - the apparent body of Wolverine - is more important than the residue - that which is folded in the image yet disembodied, undisclosed, a secret musculature beneath the musculature within which the residue arrives as wastage, as remnants of the violent process of hegemonic inscription, composing the marginalia of a central machine - the Hollywood machine. It acts as a subversive force, subverting the dominance of any text: an image, omnipresent in our society - the image of hegemony - the Hollywoodized, extrasexual image. This political gesture of residualizing, which is a form of questioning, also enacts a forward stance - an insistence that this image of Wolverine cannot be final, that it has, hidden beneath its affective structure, the very mechanism of its undoing.

The residual power of thinking participates in the image's undoing. To undo this finality, this capture of Hollywood, we have to rethink again of what the image is. Residual thoughts are ontological and, at the same time, ontogenetic. It offers the image a chance to live, and it opens our eyes to new ways of seeing, an image is always in co-evolution with its ontogenetic material. The image is self-positing, as Deleuze would say in What is Philosophy?. It is independent of its viewer or its creator. It has a 'life' on its own, preserved in blocs of sensation. An image is mobilized by sense i.e. seeing, proprioception, etc. not because it has an agent that controls the propagation of its affects, but it is self-positing. It is also independent of the viewer. Why? Because the viewer is no longer necessary in the life of the image, as in the case of Monalisa, its passage in time is not dependent on its viewer. It is, on its own, self-preserving and its life is preserved in the blocs of sensation that constitutes its body. But how do we undo this image? How can it escape the capture of language?

Affect escapes - it always escape language, confinement, and consolidation. Affect is what preserves the image of its vitality, its likeness, its morphology, its living 'body'. It is nonlinguistic, out of phase with matter, and it's where the image's emergence begins. This "escape of affect" is continuous, which gives the image an imperceptible layer - a residue, a shadow, an asymmetry. This imperceptible layer remains untranslatable: in looking at the body of Wolverine, one no longer seize words. One finds oneself at a breaking point of language. From the image of Wolverine's body, affect takes over the body. This is not a linguistic event that has means and ends, an objective with a determinable start to finish. It is an affective instantaneous flush. Contours of Wolverine's musculature are figures of intensities. We do not take them as is (a denotative 'is'), because it leaves us in a state of unease. The image slips, mutates and transforms in our minds. Our mind wishes to organize it, to perform a regulation of its intensities, but some of the intensities escape because the image does not reside in language. Some of its parts can be 'seen', 'perceived', but not spoken, written or described.

The image of Wolverine has its own harmonics - a vibrational character. It is in fact a harmonic string, positing its own music. Why is that? It releases an intensity transduced and attenuated by lenses of material excesses within an empirical field. But is this arousal or sexual response a bodily event localized in the body of the observer? The empirical field extends beyond the body. Let's look at this way: the image and the receiver's body are not the only participants of this transversal movement of intensities. The receiver's body is not the subject of intensity closed in on itself. When the body is aroused, it also releases an expressible set of intensity, which also affects the surrounding bodies within his periphery. His body might give off heat to the surrounding air, or he might give a laugh or a sneer, which is an aural affect, heard by himself and by other 'hearing' receivers around him. Transduction of affect is always within a field in which the interaction between the image and the body is not a binary relation, but rather a field relation, a relay of various signals across an array of sensible objects within an specific field.

The empirical field renders all images and expressions in a state of deconstitution or deconstruction, not finally inscribed or present. It does not impose the present or presence but rather it recomposes a past-future of the image. In the propagation of image within an empirical field, the present (or rather the presence) of the image deconstitute as it constitutes itself. It is an immanent body - not yet there but going there, in process, a becoming, still emerging, bulging out, emitting light particles of different quality. For the power of the image resides not it is perfection, but its ability to deconstitute, to produce a spectre - a haunting presence that would titillate the sensing body - the viewers - to their very ends.

Pornography works that way. A pornographic image is powerful not because it is perfect and finalized but because its power resides in its spectrality - it titillates the brain via erotic haunting - the brain is literally ruptured by the process of erotic haunting, sending shock waves across the geography of the body, transforming the body anew. During the haunting, the brain is at its height of creative process. It circulate the intensities from images of naked bodies on screen as a vortex of sensations. These intensities are disseminated and dissipated in every nerve ending across the body as a violent jolt. In this way, pornography becomes a form of incorporeal violence. This creative impulse is not a natural process. It is learned by multiple viewings and multiple 'performances' to oneself - a habituated pleasure. Masturbation is a creative act. It requires the brain and the body to co-produce and co-create network of signals, intensities and sensations: all of which moving at hyperspeed within an empirical field. This pleasurable moment is irreversible and infinite, the similar infinity one feels in a state of hallucination. It is asymmetrical, decentered, and subversive, with a temporal dimension out of phase from the dominant, linearized present time. Arousal is, in other words, a differance, a pleasurable differance, no longer of the present but a multitemporal event, differed and continuously differing from the present.

It can be said that the body achieves a creative evolution when undergoing a process of pleasure. Pleasure is emancipatory and radical. It brings the body to a place 'beyond' place, to an event 'beyond' the bodily event. Pleasure is a residue of the signification process, a remainder of stratification, neither outside nor inside the main text, but distributed across an empirical field. The image of Wolverine is not a finalized image, inscribed perfectly. It is not totally hegemonic. It rather contains a microscopic emancipatory potential because of its immanent and asymmetrical character. One more thing: the image of Wolverine does not have an interiority, because as all images are, it is always pointing outward. It is always exteriorizing itself. Nothing remains. Its base, which one cannot see, the 1/0 codes simulated by the digital machines of this website, runs in parallel to this extensity, this intensive extensity of the image. Its transmission from base to the empirical field is feed-forward.

Lav Diaz and Time: Emergence of the Open Image

[Writer’s Note: This article is based on a paper presented during Graduate Research Colloquium of College of Mass Communication, UP Diliman, last March 20, 2015, originally entitled ‘Lav Diaz and Time: A Cartographic Sketch of Critical Possibilities.’ It was recently published in KINO PUNCH (Issue 3). This text is written in conversational English as required in conferences.]

There is a great absence of theoretical writings that exhaustively deal with the temporal design of Lav Diaz’s cinema. As to why this has happened, one of the reasons can be attributed to a perspective I will illustrate as follows – in one of his promotional websites, they wrote something like this:

“He is especially notable for the length of his films, some of which run for up to eleven hours. That is because his films are not governed by time but by space and nature. His films are about the social and political struggles of his motherland…”¹

The claim ‘his films not governed by time but by space and nature’ stipulates a disavowal or rejection of time as a legitimate discourse - a discourse that can finally address the notion of passage and long take in Lav Diaz’s cinema. This is unacceptable, given that all his films, like all moving images, are governed and materialized by time. The last sentence also gives us a hint on how majority of the writings on Diaz are framed today: Diaz as a socially and politically engaged filmmaker. While this framing is important to a great extent, it is also important to return to the basic idea of time as a creative force in cinema.

Contrary to what they wrote in his website, I insist that Diaz’s cinema has created a new understanding of time. He created a new temporal condition of the film image by inscribing a new affective logic of time, space and body. He liberated the image from its preexisting structures by birthing to what I call an open image: an image that is perpetually present; an image that opens political and ethical dimension of time, space, bodies and sensations; an image that perpetually challenges existing regimes of power in society. This paper shall give a cartographic sketch of critical possibilities of the open image. I shall map its emergence, its operations and its critical potential as political and ethical force.

The Plane of Immanence²

We begin by opening a space for philosophy, specifically for the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his idea of the plane of immanence. In an attempt to simplify a complex idea, imagine a virtual plane ‘outside’ our material universe made-up only of forces with ‘open-ended trajectories, whose temporal nature is chance itself. The plane of immanence is chaotic, but also smooth. It is self-regulatory, unstructured and largely governed by flux and fluidity.’³

So what can we find in the plane of immanence? Well, one can find a lot of ‘nonstuff’: intensities, sensations, unformed atoms, unbounded molecules, unorganized thoughts, unorganized subjects, untapped energies. We can collectively call them potentialities. The plane of immanence is somewhat equivalent to a quantum mechanical space where all the conventional rules of physics breakdown, except that Deleuze’s idea of the plane is expansive enough to encompass fields outside physics: thought, force, energy and matter.

Our material world lies ‘below’ this plane of immanence. Deleuze calls this plane as the plane of organization. This particular plane is an actual plane where forces from the plane of immanence are stratified (or organized) into its materialized form. Different regimes of power, whether atomic, natural or man-made, regulate the stratification of this ‘nonstuff’ into ‘stuff.’ From a group of potentialities emerge different actualities: molecules, organism, the human body, solid objects, buildings, social classes, governments, and systems of concepts, or practically almost any form of material organization existing in this world. One way of saying this is that the whole material world we know of today emerges from and continuously emerging from this plane of immanence. The process of this perpetual emergence is creation. Creation is a process of actualizing forces from the plane of immanence. When Deleuze said in one of his essays “pure immanence: a life,” it only means that Deleuze insists that life is not only governed by materiality alone, but it is also intricately connected to potentialities, possibilities and chance.

So where can we find cinema and time? For Deleuze, pure movement and pure time reside in the plane of immanence as a virtual multiplicity.⁴ In this sense, we can conceive cinema as a regime of power that stratifies and regulates pure movement into actual movement by converting potential time into actual time. Cinema is, therefore, a form of actualized and lived time - a time rendered legible, felt, perceived through movement.

In his notable reworking of Henri Bergson’s philosophy,⁵Deleuze extended this idea of virtual-actual relationship to classify cinema’s method of ‘organizing’ time and movement into moving images. He came up with a taxonomy of cinematic images composed of eighteen signs divided into two major groups: the movement-image and the time-image. Movement-image organizes time by following the sensory-motor (or habitual) schema of the brain. Silent films and conventional films with linear plots are examples of movement-image. Time-images, on the other hand, disrupts the sensory-motor schema of the brain. It renders ‘time out of joint’ by rearranging and reforming the order of the past, present and future in a various creative ways. Flashbacks, irrational cuts, and dream sequences are examples of time-images. They provide a new dimension of sensing time. Most, if not all, of Lav Diaz’s lengthy films break the habitual process of watching movies. In Deleuze’s terms, his images can be conceived as a time-image. But it is a different kind of time-image. Let me illustrate.

The Open Image

(top) Century of Birthing (2011), (bottom) Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

The present in conventional cinema has always been seen and experienced in reference to its given past in order to predict future events in the film. On the other hand, because of their extremely long durations, Diaz’s films render a seemingly perpetual never-ending present where the past and the future disappear. When you are watching a long Lav Diaz film, especially when you are in the middle of a nine-hour film, your eye-brain system becomes exhausted rendering a feeling of forgetfulness. You forget the past events of the film, while the future events become unclear, indeterminate and almost muddy. This perpetual present characterizes Diaz’s open image, whose affective logic is to ‘trap’ the sensing body – the viewer – in an untimely and inescapable present. What Diaz assures us is that this perpetual present is not a passive synthesis of space, time and bodies, but an affirmative, active and political one.

An open image is a result of the dilation and expansion of the filmic image through time. Due to the durational length of its passage, the open image undergoes what I call a Flusserian rupture: from image-as-point in a chronological timeline, the image transforms into a surface. In his essay ‘Line and Surface,’ Czech-born philosopher Vilem Flusser theorized two modes of time in contemporary history: the linear time, which he associates with historical thinking, and surface time, which he associate with posthistorical thinking. We, as sensing bodies, learned and inhabited linear time in reading traditional texts (because we read texts in only one direction), in learning history (history follows a linear chronology), and in watching conventional films whose plots are linear. During the arrival of modern films, surface time is introduced. Surface time is nonlinear. Its movement is similar to looking at a photograph or a painting. By virtue of Flusserian rupture, the movement of the eye glides through the surface of the open image by contemplating on different regions of space in a singular present time.

The process of opening of an image in time also constitutes a process of abstraction. The image de-stratifies space and body by adding a region of indeterminacy and uncertainty, thereby causing a partial disintegration of spatial and bodily representations. From ‘geological’ or physical space, the space becomes ‘geopolitical’ – a space of relations. From ‘theatrical’, the human body becomes gestural and instinctive. The open image’s expansive grasp of its perpetual present allows Diaz to create a space for micropolitics. Diaz uses the durational power of the long take to inscribe complex discursive strands of relevant social, political and philosophical issues that he has been exploring his whole life.

The Nomadic Sight

A gift of nomadic sight lets us see the world anew.

(top) Melancholia (2008); (bottom) Batang West Side (2001)

The open image of Diaz also materializes what I call the nomadic sight, a new sight that we, sensing bodies (viewers), embody after the Flusserian event. The nomadic sight constitutes not only a return to surface. It also enacts instinctual exploration of unexplored terrains of life. It pushes our habits of looking to reach a certain ‘beyond’ – a ‘beyond’ space and body – to look at life’s minoritarian actualities and potentialities. Since its function is to glide through the surface of image, and thereby unhinging our habits of looking beyond our preexisting experiences, the open image takes us to a nomadic walk outside the dominant, majoritarian, commonsensical regimes of truth.

This nomadic sight becomes a materializing force of minoritarian discourses. It materializes subaltern spaces and bodies, most of which are silenced, displaced, decentered and absented from the visible layer of society. The gift of nomadic sight also creates a new ethical dimension of looking. It lets us see the world anew. The open image, because of its inescapable temporal design, lets the sensing body – the viewer – to participate in sense-making, in world-making, and in assessing the capacities of existing power relations in society. It is an ethical sight, a sight that can only see the geography of silence.

As a take-away, while it is still important to write about Diaz as socially and politically committed filmmaker, it is also important to return to the more basic and inescapable discourse of time. Giorgio Agamben once wrote:

“The original task of a genuine revolution… is never merely to ‘change the world,’ but also – and above all – to ‘change time.”⁶

Thank you!

NOTES

1. See Diaz’s biography in one of his websites retrieved from http://lavdiaz.com/about-lav-diaz/biography/

2. For further reading on the concept, see Gilles Deleuze’s essay 'Immanence: A Life'. His book with Felix Guattari 'A Thousand Plateaus' also discusses the relationship between plane of immanence (also known as plane of consistency) and plane of organization.

3. See Jean Hillier’s essay 'Strategic Navigation' which summarizes the differences between plane of immanence and plane of organization in relation to strategic planning retrieved from http://www.espacestemps.net/articles/strategic-navigation/

4. See Keith Ansell Pearson’s Chapter 1 of ‘Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the time of life.’

5. See Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Cinema 1: The Movement-Image’ and ‘Cinema 2: The Time-Image’.

6. See Agamben’s essay ‘Time and History: Critique of Instant and the Continuum’ in his book Infancy and History.

***

Note 3: Absence, Erogenous Zones and Shorthands

2014-09-10T13:15:00.000+08:00

'Love' and Motorcycle. (Top to Bottom) Wild Reeds (1994), Mauvais Sang (1986), Tropical Malady (2004), Three Times (2005) and Unknown Pleasures (2002)

For Chris Fajardo (1978 - 2014)

"Death does not fix an actual present, so numerous are the dead who haunt the sheets of past." - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2

Why do you have to go?

Zero. In a mind's eye, the number, when displayed alone, has no value. On the other hand, it gains a tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold... n-fold increase in value when place adjacent to any number, as in 10, 100, 1000, 10000. For me, zero is the Beginning, the Zero-field where the Chronos emerges. Zero is the Zeroth Law exhibited by the originary structure of a solid object. Zero is a special place where souls like yours belong. A zero is a return to the originary ruptures of life, which, for me, is never a transcendence but an eternal return. You return to the amorphous energy that created you. Within its confine, you live in another form - and to us, your form is a vanishing memory. But this is what we, the surviving pact of the living, can truly grasp - an expressible memory of you, vanishing and leaving us. Perhaps this is the eternal purpose of death - a creation of memories that die, that disappears in time, almost as if all your image leaves the world without a trace. This makes it difficult to memorialize you, because you are now an immemorial being. Your time is not our time. Your life is not our life. You have become a form of absence.

Jules et Jim (1962). I finally saw your favorite. Truffaut's best, they say. It is more complex than Les Quatre Cents Coup (1959). I'm curious which of the three main characters you love the most.

This is me making sense. I felt no destruction when I saw your lifeless form. I did not cry nor suffocate in sadness. During your wake, I consciously felt the passing of time. We were all there. Your death seemed like a long absence - quiet, only a passing - you, missing in action, for a long time in our lives. I looked at you; your body was in full form, but you were not there. Sometimes, I seemed to hold on to your photo more than your body. Your photograph was more real than your body. The photograph displayed stemmed from a life you have had, a life wherein we were all connected - you, me, Joseph, Queen, Princess, Epoy, Wendy, Joshell and the great circulation of people coming in and out of our webbed metropolis - your friends. It is so difficult to write this. I wanted to write about you, but I find it difficult to find value in this writing anymore. Can this mean anything to you? All these words are fragments of my thoughts about you. I wanted to make an expression of you, an expression of your passing. But I cannot seem to write it properly. The limit of language forces me to abandon the task of transforming the inexpressible experiences to unworthy sentences. That is my struggle - to make sense. Because now, we, the ones you have left, have to find ways to express your absence - through words or through a memory. How painful it is to express someone who had left us! It is painful because we start anew. We start from the beginning. There is always a process of invention that goes with it. But I want to remember the affect of your being. I want to remember your presence and absence. You were present in the picture but absent in your body. You were both absent and present at the same time, at the same place.

Now, a fabrication of a memory. I remember you now, faintly, almost like a glow. You were, in my memory, an intense person. Your passionate voice traveled through sheets of sensitivity, always welcoming, enthusiastic, and true. But I do remember seeing you subdued, quiet and shy, sitting by the corner, awkwardly poised, and waiting. You spoke of things with such restraint that I would look at you curiously. It is as if you have wanted to say more but only said a part of it, a small burst. You were like that, you had a habit of containing your emotions. I felt it always when we were together.

1.

A Path to Destruction of the Self

(Or the French guy trying to understand Last Year at Marienbad)

1961. Marker asked a Parisian salesman if he would watch Alain Resnais'

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) running on theaters that month of May.
Stills from Le Joli Mai (1963)

Here is a man confronting the complexities of Last Year at Marienbad (...Marienbad, 1961). He first expresses his imperceptible encounter with (the idea of) ...Marienbad. He stutters: 'A bit too...' in search of words to describe the film. We do not know whether he watched the film prior to Marker's interview for Le Joli Mai (1963) or somebody told him about it. But what we notice is his speechlessness, his apprehension, his incapacity to reduce ...Marienbad in simpler terms. 'A bit too...' is a typical response to films like ...Marienbad that defies language. It seems that, for this salesman, ...Marienbad has reached a certain limit, a certain Outside. 'A bit too...' is a fundamental response to any artistic creation that shatters identity, resist definition, labeling, and even description. The man stutters in search words to describe a film only to find himself positioning in light of this complexity.

He effaces the description of ...Marienbad and proceeds with a description of himself 'I am a simple man.' This shortchanged answer is interesting for one thing: upon reaching the imperceptible region of language (the 'A bit too...' region), he returns to a stable construction, a safe place in language where he finds his identity 'I am a simple man', ironing out his personal preferences.

This identification returns him to ...Mariendbad. With words to speak now, he proclaims (and yet another identification) that he 'won't rack [his] brains.' This straightforward positioning is a proclamation of temporary surrender: a surrender from 'too much thinking' or 'racking one's brain,' or simply a surrender from the cognitive complexities of ...Marienbad. He then exposes the arid terminus between high art and consumerism through his words: 'Why fork out money to figure things out?'

This man's apprehensive encounter with artistic complexities like ...Marienbad opens a pathway towards the destruction of a self. The destruction of the self is a movement from personal to impersonal, towards the 'A bit too...' region, the region where articulation is difficult, where language becomes non-language, where expression becomes inexpressible. The destruction of the self is a movement away from self-containment, self-imprisonment, dogmatism, stable constructions, and even identity in order to give way to 'life's creative flows.' The destruction of the self is a productive movement towards self-renewal and self-transformation by reaching a region without memories. 'Memory allows us to see our self-image,' writes Deleuze. The destruction of the self allows the self to germinate anew, to become 'other' than what is preconceived by oneself, others, and society. It breaks the self open; the crack becomes the site of apprehension which the man in Le Joli Mai encounters. The crack is where the thinking process (or 'racking one's brain') sits. And one of the most effective way to open cracks in the self is through modern cinema's reworking of time and its affective use of sensations, textures, shapes, foldings, layers, surfaces to produce a transformative machine that circulates vast elements across borders.

This classic reaction to art by a man on the street shows us the potential of modern cinema to usher the destruction of the self, and in turn, a route for self-renewal and transformation. But the man, our interest, returns to his own self. He returns to language and resisted the violent, unstable cracking of ...Marienbad. It is not, however, a good/bad thing. But what is important is his partial entry to that crack.

***

Notes on Wind and Stone (2005):
Erogenous Zones of a Garden

Wind and Stone by Masaaki Tachihara is a short novel of about one hundred and fifty pages. Yet it surpasses its textual limit by creating a complex emotional fabric, forcing its language to stutter. Primal forces shape its body giving it a raging pulse. Each word exudes pristine clearness and earnestness to show, elucidate, and create sheets of becoming, motivated by the voluptuous singularity of passion and reason. Each word emerges from the suffocation of feelings.

Wind and Stone is a novella borne from the careful handwork of a gifted writer. Tachihara forges within its tenuous collection of words an imagined space, an external field, intersecting with emotions. A shadow of force seeps within its textual layers. What I mean by a shadow of force is a force inanimate and invisible. It is the silent force that causes a movement of its internal atoms within the text. It is like a soul of a force, the enemy of movement. Pure force, by itself alone, can cause a wide disarray of elements in space. When a force hits a set of objects, all objects travel in various speeds and accelerations. The true physical force of a novel is its narrative. It propels the characters to their own destinies. It is also the physical force that unfolds the novel's ending.

The shadow of the force, on the other hand, emerge within the emotional crisscrosses of its narrative. The shadow of force in Wind and Stone stems primarily from the transformation of the garden into an erogenous zone - a garden becoming a genitalia of singularity: man-woman-nature intersecting at various points with a rhizomatic form. The garden, thoroughly described in the novel, is a site of transformation. It opens and closes the narrative. It lies within the surging forces of creation and destruction: Shiva, the goddess of destruction, dances within this garden, turning it into a geodesic dome of infernal reconstitution through which fertility and death entwines.

The garden is a site of tragic mutations. The gardener, Kase, is the artist, the agency of creation through which nature passes through. His hands eternally crafting the earth, stone, wind and water with a sensibility of a stubborn artist - true to his craft, true to nature. He constructs a garden attuned to the seasons, to the landscape, to the geographical space. Through this garden, he forms an extension of himself, that as he led a different life, the contours of the garden, as it passes through seasons, becomes him. The garden becomes an extension of his body, an external genitalia, a phallic figuration that provokes Mizue, the wife of Kase's client, to desire Kase. Through this mutation, the garden transforms into an erotic space. It seems at first, for Mizue, that the garden is a distant creature, making its way through time and space, undisturbed, free, and unconnected to her. Mizue channels through this distant creature from within. Her active virtual engagement with the garden, through her super-impositions of Kase and the garden, forms a great narrative tension.

Is this an emergence of temptation? What is temptation in this context? Temptation, as conjured by Tachihara in Wind and Stone, comes from a forming of bridges, a creation of possibilities within sites of emergence. The shadow of force vacillates within this figuration of temptation that, as readers, we feel the tenuous constrictions of these newly formed bridges. The site of emergence, the garden, is an active erogenous zone of transformation and renewal. Mizue seeks for renewal. Her body is queering against tradition that enslaves her sexual energy. She is both a mother and a wife. Patriarchal dominance and heteronormative oppression imprisons her in women-wife-mother triad. The garden, to which she opens to everyday, activates her senses. The garden forms a dialogue with her and asks her to seek for the source, the maker, the visionary, who sculpts this erogenous zone - Kase.

From 'genitalia to the Brain', Mizue seeks for the creator, the mental world behind the physical structure of the garden. This circuitry of Mizue towards Kase is a sensual pathway, an essential one that produces the powers of transformation for the erogenous zone. The erogenous zone, the garden, supplants both the image of Kase and Mizue's affair leading a pathway of the destruction of Mizue's family.

This is the tragic mutation of the garden, the erogenous zone, wedged within the singularity of fertility and destruction. The garden is a Shivian space, which was ultimately destroyed by Mizue's husband, Shida. It is both a witness and a victim of disintegration. Ruinous currents surged through it. In the words of Tachihara:

The garden at the Shida home had become rather odd looking. Returning from the plant at Atsugi one evening, Eiji Shida look at the garden he had destroyed and felt it symbolize the ruined relationship with his wife. There did not seem to be any they could return to their former way of life. He had realized from the outset that to destroy the garden would accomplish nothing. All that remained was a sense of futility. (p. 112)

But like other erogenous zones, an assaulted garden can never looked destroyed from an outsider's point of view. Destruction is an internal event, actualized within a close territory of signs. Destruction in Wind and Stone is localized within the intersecting strands of Kase, Shida and Mizue. The view of the garden as an exteriority, like the view of Shida's visitors unaware of the marital issue, provides us a grappling tension between two flights of consciousness in the novel. As witnesses of the struggle within this erogenous zone, we readers are exposed to a multiplicity of the ethical, territorial and aesthetic ramifications of this tension emerging from triad of worlds that Tachihara created: the unconscious region, the conscious region, and the in-between, all of which viewing the same garden.

This is where the shadow of force collects its migratory presence. As beings of in-between and witnesses of its unfolding, we readers contemplate about this garden, in light of the tenuous vacillation of emotions, affects and sensations emitted by the passage of the shadow of force through all regions of space, cleaving these regions into an active site of transformation. This migratory power of the shadow of force creates ripples internal to our consciousness, creating a multiplicity with us, enriching the virtual world of our past-future lives - the greatest prize one can derive from a work of fiction.

***

Two paintings by Nina Petrovna Valetova:

Dark Matter(top) and Untitled(bottom).

"The intriguing dual nature of her [Nina Petrovna Valetova] works continues with the dichotomy of visual movement that pervades each canvas. The work seem at once frenetic and active, yet frozen and almost incomprehensibly calm. Valetova experiments with dimension and composition, leadingto amazing results: paradoxical works of intended absurdity. In doing so, she produces works not only of stunning beauty and philosophical depth, but which comments on the unpredictability and irrationality of contemporary society. As unending wars are waged and beloved family members die, life continues on and as her paintings so poignantly articulate, when one thing stops another keeps going."

- Review from ArtisSpectrum Magazine [link]

***

\\\ Shorthand Thoughts #1 \\\

1 | In Sana Dati (2013), the power of touch surfaces in the scene where Andrea, in an act of remembering, caresses Denis' face against a bright afternoon sun. The image crystallizes as a singularity between two temporal regimes: the present, where Andrea must confront her wedding with Robert, and the past, where she must painfully confront the memory of her dead lover, Andrew. This gestural act forms a link between two different epochs. It forms a multiplicity in time. Andrea seeks to exhume the image of Andrew through Denis by tracing the curves of his skin, painfully remembering (and forgetting) the figure of Andrew - a love's loss. In a way, Andrea is making an ethical turn. She directly confronts the singularity of this event. She has to make a choice - a choice not preconditioned by moral codes, in fulfillment of her family's will or in fulfillment of the traditional, disciplinarian society. But this choice is an ethical one - a choice that cements her autonomy, that gives her the greatest transformation. She must reclaim her autonomy to speak for herself - the nearest the movie could get to the tenets of feminism.

Andrea's personal struggle to remember and forget Andrew forces her to confront a forgotten history - a love at its ruins. Any act of remembering is a (re)creation of memories. The act itself does not retrieve the exact experience from the mind. Instead, remembering fabricates a closest resemblance of a particular event. Denis, the brother of Andrew, appears as a phantom from the past. He propels the narrative towards a temporal fragmentation: past-present-future. He initiates a re-circulation of vast elements from Andrea's past, Robert's past, Andrew's past, and his own, forming an assemblage of memories. We take this assemblage at heart. Within this assemblage is a surging strength, a life affirming message that there is no death in love.

2 | Films like From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) have impermeable entry points. The same feeling emanates from the works of Hollis Frampton. I've only seen two Framptons: (nostalgia) (1971) and Zorn's Lemma (1970). Aside from permeating the first layer of language, a thick one, From the Clouds to the Resistance creates a departure from solitary contemplation through monologue and a departure from conversation through dialogue. Solitary contemplation and conversation are powerful dramatic devices used by narrative filmmakers to create characters: their expression and gestures. They can be as animated as characters from surrealist films or as realistic as characters from Italian Neorealism. In Straub-Huillet's From the Cloud to the Resistance, these narrative devices are reduced to their basic components approaching a theater-like performance. Solitary contemplation is reduced to monologue: the character becomes vessels of literary and political messages. Their strict and rigid monologues create a specific immobility in narrative flow giving rise to a site of resistance. These immobilizing techniques make the films impermeable. The audience, habituated by preconceive notions of narrative fluidity and sensational flow of affects, confronts this disabling anti-narrative style promoting a sense of loss and disorientation. The film's impermeability lies within these anti-narrative techniques.

3 | Some films are conscious of its techniques (style becomes visible) while some clothe these technicalities by occluding them within a grand narrative (style becomes invisible). The grand narrative encompasses these minute and microscopic stylistic impulses. Some films, on the other hand, proceed with a complete exposition of its stylistic dimension. To make this observation concrete, we must draw examples. Lav Diaz' Norte, The End of History (2013) and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) have subsumed the force of the long take within their grand narratives. There is an observable 'invisibility' of the long take in both films. In Norte... (2013), the long takes are calm and tenderly displayed. They fulfill the narrative's demand to situate all characters within its total mise-en-scene - the long take as totalizing style. This play between narrative and film technique rolls out easily in Jeanne Dielman... Akerman creates a single layer from which all events takes place. Narrative subsumes the stylistic demand of the long take. This makes the two films less demanding and 'easier' to watch than films using long takes disjointed from the narrative. One great example of a film with a long take disjointed from the narrative is Whammy Alcazaren's Colossal (2012). The long take in Colossal departs completely from its narrative. The narrative of the film can be found in its aural layer: the voice over. The voice over houses the message of the film. The visual layer of the film, on the other hand, takes a different route. It houses the long take. The challenge for the viewers is to negotiate this departure, this disjoint. This negotiation is agonizing mainly because one of the typical routes for thinking, given this situation, is to create a cognitive connection between this long take and the narrative. The gaping hole Alcazaren created is an experiment in thinking and experience. Through the surfacing of this disjoint narrative and stylistic device, Alcazaren poses a challenge to his viewers to subsume to this orientation in order for us to release thinking. Stylistically challenging films insist on reorientation and reordering of world view, which Alcazaren fulfilled.

||| Playlist #2: Dreamlands |||

Once Upon a Time (Lawrence Jordan / USA / 1974)

Cico Buff by Cocteau Twins [link]
[album] Nocturne by Wild Nothing [link]
Evangeline by Cocteau Twins [link]
Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun by M83 [link]
Kangaroo by This Mortal Coil [link]
Waves become Wings by This Mortal Coil [link]
Galaxies by Eyedress [link]
Sweetness and Light by Lush [link]
Water Music Study by Teiji Ito [link]
Earth by Third Ear Band [link]
Fire by Third Ear Band [link]
Air by Third Ear Band [link]
Water by Third Ear Band [link]

***

#11, Marey <-> Moire (Joost Rekveld / Netherlands / 1999)

Note 2: Fragments, Night, and Barthes

2014-01-25T22:04:00.001+08:00

Habit of reading in cinema: (Top to Bottom) Charulata (1964),

La Collectionneuse (1967) and Arising from the Surface (1980)

"Reading a book: happiness...going down an endless flight of stairs with no sense of hurry, finding a place to sit, lying down on the grass, resting your gaze on the sky, seeing the clouds move, closing your eyes, losing it, recovering, finally losing it."

- Richard Bolisay[link]

***

Continuities of darkness in cinema: (Top to Bottom) White Epilepsy (2012),

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2009),
Kinatay (2009), Los (2001), and On the Job (2013)

What is darkness?

An absence of light, a depth of a shadow. In cinema, darkness accentuates light from a movie projector. When light pierces through its continuous body, we see light's imminent trace, a emerging source of hope. We see light only in darkness. The stars wouldn't be stars without the wide emptiness of space. It remains, however, a mystery why objects in the dark are indistinguishable. When shrouded by darkness, objects become formless, nonexistent (or absent), and immutable; they lose their solidity. (Yet the human eye trains the body to adapt to this continuous, immeasurable blanket. A body must grasp objects, move in space, or find one's path, hence, the eye must adapt.)

In the city of desolation, darkness creeps evenly in structured spaces. It hides, reaches, and envelops movement permeating in every unguarded corner. Yet it remains shallow, often having a measurable depth, engulfing only small spaces, but light is its enemy. City lights purges this dissenting atmosphere darkness invades. Streetlights, exploding textual displays on bars and restaurants, colorful disco lights emanating from party places, and lights from high-rise buildings all punctuate the darkness. In the city at night, one can strongly feel the solidity of objects: the buildings, the avenues, the crevices... Darkness seems to function economically entombing aberrant human activities and crimes within its basking blackness. It becomes a distinguishable space.

In shadows of building, within dark rooms, in empty spaces at night, crime thrives like an underground vegetation, restricted in small spaces, unexposed, hidden, and destructive creeping sporadically at various entrances and exits of city life. Darkness has a thriving economy of consumption: one man stabbed to death on the dark aisle of the underpass, forgotten; the act of killing: quick and methodical; killer's emotional response: empty, mundane, 'this too shall pass'; killer's motive: money (poverty at its root), a procedural job, a disaffected life.

Travelling for almost two to three times a year from Manila to my province Sorsogon, I wonder if there is a difference between the the darkness I feel in the city and the darkness I feel in the provinces. In twelve-hour bus trips at night, one can experience the vast difference of these two worlds. Leaving the city at eight in the evening, a bus travels south of Manila along the boulevards of the city. EDSA remains alive at night. People walk along the sidewalks at their usual pace, only quicker as they would walk in daylight. As the bus enters the South Luzon Expressway, light from the streets began to dim slowly. Darkness creeps within the halls of the moving bus. Within three hours, as the bus reach the outskirts of Batangas province, darkness becomes unbearably deep, deeper than the darkness I feel in the city. Three hours more, deep within the Quezon province, darkness asphyxiates any man awake. There is no escape. The light that one can only see comes from the bus headlights. Witnessing this descent in almost every province-bound bus travel I had in my life makes me wonder further how deep this provincial darkness can be.

Darkness in the provinces is phenomenally expansive and deep. Unlike in the city invaded by light, night in the provinces engulfs light. Even the brightest lighting equipment cannot measure its depth. Provincial darkness stretches out in open fields, in jungles, in neighboring houses keeping almost everyone inside their houses. Even crime finds its place to hide. Night in the province starts as early as six in the evening. Jeepneys seize their operations at seven-thirty, but tricycles never sleep. They brave the twelve-hour darkness in service to wandering ghouls and lost travelers. At night in the province, the streets are almost empty, deserted. Night feels like an act of waiting, time's long passage.

Night and its arching darkness seems to puncture the hearts of men and women in the provinces. Its passage in time lengthens their patience as each awaits for sunrise. It deepens their scars, their delusions, their doubts.

Crimes in the provinces are, to me, committed with so much intensity and force, surfacing from very deep scars, very deep guilt. These crimes are not governed by some economic of consumption as they would play in the city. They surge within this pantheon of provincial darkness, seeping most of their power from this incomprehensible, limitless, and devouring negative space. For a crime, no matter how simple, committed within the premises of this provincial darkness involves so much passion, so much complexity, a crime beyond what one can commit in a city.

Fabian's bloodshed in Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (Norte, End of History, Lav Diaz, 2013), Hamin's cry of desolation in Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), Florentina's cry for help in Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), and Heremias' descent into darkness in Heremias Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess (2006), all these acts and gestures perpetuate the emanating darkness from the provinces, a darkness that engulfs light, pierces the heart, and transforms them into phantoms of the night: lost, indistinguishable, and immutable. In this darkness, their limiting figures arise: shaped by light but continuously dissolved by shadows. Each of them are entrenched within this void, society's ultimate space of nothingness --- the Black hole. Maybe this is why Lav Diaz gravitates towards the outskirts of provinces. He wanted to reach this Black hole history, politics, and natural space created. Darkness has always been a socio-political condition, aside from being a spatial experience. Each dark space emanates from both the restrictions of control societies and soul's tempestuous agony. It appears now that in places where progress lags, where progress creep slowly, darkness expands intensely it penetrates even the most strong-willed, the most brave, the meekest one. No one is spared; everyone is engulfed. No light, not even the strongest light, can gauge its depth. Only cinema can capture its depth.

***

Two Proun paintings by El Lissitzky: (Top to Bottom)

A Proun (1925) and Proun in 19D (1922)

"Proun (from Russian “Proekt utverzhdenia novoga” or “Design for the confirmation of the new”)... explored the existent relation between the formal concerns of the bidimensional paintings and the architectural construction."

- Álvaro[link]

---

"The PROUN opens up the creation of the future, encompassing in all directions the new creative collective: starting from the plane, it then crosses over into spatial modeling and further to the construction of every form of life in itself....

[...]The future life — this is the reinforced concrete slab for the communist foundation of the nations of the entire world. With the aid of the PROUN one can build a unified city-commune on that foundation, intended for the life of all mankind."

- from Theses on the PROUN: From painting to architecture [link]

***

|||| Playlist #1: Night||||

from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000): "Deep emotion pierces everyone.

They have escaped the weight of darkness." - Valuska

Cico Buff by Cocteau Twins [link]
Late Night by This Mortal Coil [link]
In Dreams by Roy Orbinson [link]
Rhythm of the Night by Corona [link]
Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes [link]
Snowstorm by Galaxie 500 [link]
Nature Trips by Eyedress [link]
Nightcall by Kavinsky [link]
Ghost of Love by David Lynch [link]
Providence by Godspeed You Black Emperor [link] - Epoy's suggestion
Valuska by Mihály Víg [link]
Unification of Europe by Zbigniew Preisner [link]
Kosmogonia by Krzysztof Penderecki [link]
Bonehead and Hellraiser by Naked City [link]
Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki [link]

***

Reflections on Roland Barthes'

The Photographic Message (1961)

Why even bother about Barthes?

I saw the book Image Music Text by Barthes lying on a bookshelf at home sandwiched between two novels by Michael Cunningham. I was drawn to its exterior mold. It has a thinness unusual for a book on critical theory with a cover page exhuming the image of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein's image, his films, and the many Soviet Montage films flashed back in my mind. I was invaded once again by memories of my early years in cinephilia.

I first approached it that way, through the act of looking, an act of remembering, a visual encounter, which seizes me to approach it almost without hesitation, as if I have encountered it in the past and now an artifact. This act of looking, this seizing moment came first before the act of thinking. This is a fundamental encounter, a productive one that urges me to produce some form of writing: a reflection, a series of notes, an anti-reflection, anything goes really. My desire for encounters, in this case a textual encounter with Roland Barthes' essay The Photographic Message (1961), stems from Gilles Deleuze's C for Culture response in L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze (1988-1989)...

...where he admonishes the idea of culture by moving towards the power of encounters. Encounters more than culture, and, in the words of Deleuze, to be always 'on the lookout' --- these were my initial thoughts when I first approached the surface of Barthes' essay collection.

I wonder why most people look after his works. In many bookshops I visit these days (2010 - present), from Bookay-Ukay at Maginhawa St., UP Diliman to online bookstores like Roel's Bookshop, Roland Barthes' presence is overwhelming. His books are almost omnipresent, at least in Manila, sprawling within the local cultural domain. Have his theories amalgamated within the local discourse on arts, culture, or cinema? One could think of a possible marriage - transnational, if I may say - French-Filipino thinking, in search of ways to 'understand' the assemblage of life in the Philippines. Barthes' entry to local bookstores is symptomatic of the bustling presence of European critical theory in the Philippines, amplified entirely by the thriving (anti)intellectual discourse in social media nowadays (though I haven't seen a Barthes meme frolicking over my Facebook newsfeed for the past few years. This is a good one though). This is why I wanted to read Barthes: out of curiosity. What is it with him that seems to be so elusive, so seductive for a 'theorist'?

I fairly do not have warm feelings for theory nowadays - film theory, for that matter. Some critics have announced its eminent death. This made me suspicious of its stability as a field. After discovering D.N. Rodowick and Gilles Deleuze last year, I bade goodbye to theory and move towards a more multiple region in critical inquiry: the cusp between cinema and philosophy, cine-philosophy, where one is forced to be nomadic. A nomad, who has no mother or father - an orphan, must learn how to squat, stare, and observe momentarily at books, texts, films, short stories, paintings, alleys, objects, subjects, benches, and/or open fields. A nomadic life is an active movement of one's body towards the world, an opening, a journey away from the traditions of home life - a journey of becoming. This is opposed to intellectualism, which forces one to sit, think, and contemplate of singular aspects of life typically displayed by the Thinking Man, a figure of contemplation. A nomad walks on the streets. He is out looking for encounters, not with people, but with objects, ideas, and forms. The street - its intersections, cul-de-sacs, and U-turns - is his home and his guide through life.

My engagement with critical theory came from a nomadic walk away from film theory. I was drawn to its uncanny body, its perturbations, and its transformations. This massive field opened itself to me and, in various entry points, I tried to wrestle with it in fragments. What attracts me perhaps is its massive effort to decentralize traditions. A large part of its task is to revolt against traditional thinking: common sense, common beliefs, common life. Critical theory is one of the pervasive mode of thinking in sociology, arts, and the humanities, created by Europeans to rethink their lives - the society and the culture they belong. Critical theory is a mid-20th century amalgamation of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and linguistics. Multitudinous transformations have occurred within and outside its domain symptomatic of its tempestuous relationship with history, and to some point, technology. I won't be discussing in detail the immanence of Critical theory or its transformations from the beginning. I would instead dwell on a microlevel: an encounter with critical texts, as excruciating as it might be. This is a self-inflicted torture - to confront each polemical text headlong.

Confronting the text headlong may leave some terminologies and concepts unclear. But like I said in a previous post, incomplete or unclear ideas can create new pathways of thinking. Hence, I won't be troubling myself with terminologies or their definitions because I might encounter them in the future in a different light.

The goal is to withstand the thrust of the text, to experience it, to read through it like I would read a novel or a short story, and allow the formation of feelings, affects, sensations, intensities. Emotions, affects, and feelings are usually set aside when reading such texts. I wanted to explore this region in critical inquiry: how does one respond emotionally, along with critical response, to academic texts? How does one deal with a strange jargon? What makes the the text inviting?

Each essay has a way of putting words into sentences. Each has its own system of organizing its ideas, and maybe eliciting some sensations: visual or experiential. Almost each one has its own of putting forward a stance, a world, a new concept. I shall approach each text aesthetically along with a crude critical assessment of some of its ideas. Screw me if you think I misconstrue and/or misjudge some elements and concepts from the text as I am not an expert in this area. The key phrase here is experience through encounter.

The Essay [link]

Roland Barthes' essay The Photographic Message opens with its object (a press photograph) followed by its guiding structure, an 'assemblage' in Barthes' words. He arranged it in a succession: a point of emission (the one who takes the photo), a channel of transmission (the newspaper), and a point of reception (the readers of the newspaper). This is the first image that one has to confront in the opening part of the essay. Barthes presents a pathway with a room in each stop.

Barthes' use of language is dry and cold. Semioticians write their theories formally with a sleight of hand. A semiotician's essay has this certain straightforwardness that makes a College Math book look more interesting. Yet Barthe's essay is few of the most lucid, most crystal-clear writing I've read in my life. In this crystal-clear text, there is, at times, no room for breathing. As Barthes elucidates the nuance of the photographic message, one feels an utter discomfort. One enters a tortuous structured pathway punctuated by large blocks of ideas to confront. At some point, the semiotic jargon seems too alienating for an everyman. Small parts builds on bigger parts. This is a typical touch of a structuralist text: order and control.

Semiotics runs together with the Structuralist movement. It sees the world as an amalgam of signs. While linguistics studies words, semiotics studies the non-words: images, sounds, three-dimensional objects (do they even study cross-linked artifacts like audiovisual displays?), and how they produce meanings. Semioticians also deal with their objects as if they have inherent structures in them. This is the world that one approaches when reading Barthes' The Photographic Message. A press photograph, his object of analysis, is wedged within this preordained world, examined at its limits.

One can find a press photograph in areas where communities thrive, in societies centered on information. For Barthes, this is the simplest visual object that one can encounter in such societies of control, apart from magazine advertisements, which he scrutinized intently in his essay Rhetoric of the Image. The Photographic Message is the critique of the press photograph.

It is interesting to note that Barthes version of the press photograph isn't only a photograph by itself. It is a photograph with a text like this...

Barthes proposes this as the basic structure of a press photograph: an image with a text. He says that each element, image and text, must be analyzed individually before analyzing their combined state.

The Photograph, a Paradox

When one looks at the picture above, of men and women all joined together to skate, one observes that the picture is a reduced three-dimensional reality. Barthes says this is mathematical transformation (from 3D to 2D) where the image (the photograph) becomes the analogon of the object. This process of 'copying' reality is denotation. He also added that this image is the message without a code primarily because it is a continuous imitation of reality. Aside from imitating reality, it must also be accounted that a photograph is also captured in some specific cultural landscape, a certain time and space, and therefore connoted.

Barthes positioning of the photograph as both a mathematical (or mechanical) and cultural object proves important and influential. There were only few theorist before who were interested in studying photographs. Through this essay, Barthes gives the basic framework on how to deal with photographs. If you are semantics student, this will make you happy.

A connotation procedure refers to the manner a photographer captures a photograph. For Barthes, this is the reason why a photograph has no objectivity. It is not created based on a 'universal symbolic order', but rather an object 'worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated with professional aesthetics'. It is therefore a message with a code. Barthes suggest that connotation allows the photograph to be read. It connects the photograph again to the world. There is once again noticeable bipolar relation between connotation-denotation, but their functions are far technical and must not be taken lightly. This conceptual tandem rift throughout the text exploring the nuances of the photograph message.

The presence of both messages, the analogon (message without a code) and the connoted message (message with a code), in one is the photographic paradox. Barthes continues his analysis by specifying the various ways connotation can be performed in a photograph. The reader enters an ossified field as Barthes provides a room for each. He identifies six ways: trick effects (i.e photoshop, faking a photograph), pose (i.e. stereotypical codes, a woman wears a skirt, a man wears pants), objects (i.e. artificial arrangement of objects, a old bookcase may signify an intellectual atmosphere of sorts), photogenia (i.e. embellishment of the photograph through lighting, exposure, and printing), aestheticism (i.e. photograph as a painting, painterly effects of landscapes, photography as art), syntax (i.e. putting two (un)related photographs side-by-side to produce a meaning).

This is perhaps what makes Barthes essay hard to grasp at first, at least for me. Each concept has its room: numbered paragraphs arranged from simplest to the most complex terms. The text forwards likes a process of enumeration, one element after the other, proceeding stately and carefully until reaching an end.

The Text

Barthes continues on. He focuses on the presence of the text, the caption, in a press photograph. Barthes says there are three functions of a text in a press photograph. One function of the text is to become a parasitic message to the photograph. The text quickens the connotation. This is, for Barthes, a historical reversal: 'the image no longer illustrates words, the words becomes a parasite to the image.' Text burdens the image with 'culture, moral, and imagination', Barthes continues. Second function would be duplication/non-duplication of the image. 'The closer the text to the image, the lesser its connotation'. And lastly, the text also amplifies (pro or anti-image) the connotations of the photograph.

One may find these procedural elucidation of the three functions difficult to understand, but Barthes sees to it that each of these categories returns back to reality by providing examples. In this way, the text has never left us. Examples jut out from various portions of the text surging towards us, connecting us to its difficult jargon. What is blocking us, of course, appreciating the text fully is the lack of connections with subject of semiotics and structuralism itself. As an outside of the field, I struggled through the essay for about a week and half, trying to somehow deal with it.

Is a Photograph of Pure Denotation possible?

Nevertheless, Barthes posed an intriguing question in the end, a staggering rift in the text: "Is...pure denotation...impossible?" He said that a photograph, through connotations, is always historical and cultural, never natural nor artificial. These historical and cultural connotations give the photograph a meaning. It allows us to read the photograph. The challenge is to find a way by which this meaning is blocked. In a way, Barthes is posing a question of limits by reaching a certain boundary: Is pure connotation possible? Is pure denotation possible? These inquiries lead us to think of an Outside, a certain Other apart the text.

To answer the question, Barthes says that pure denotation exist in absolutely traumatic images...

Traumatic Photographs (Top to Bottom): Victims of Napalm bomb during the Vietnam War,

Mass grave in Poland during the Holocaust, and the Mendiola Massacre 1987

"The trauma is a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning," he said. He added: "[...] the traumatic photograph is the photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock-photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold on the process instituting the signification."

A limit has been reached, and perhaps this is what I've always been looking for in critical texts. A desire exists in the limits, a desire that seizes one to think. And by virtue of encounters, a certain limit must always be reached: an ending that never ends, a beginning that seizes to begin.

***

Note 1: Hail Mary (1985)

2014-01-10T14:53:00.003+08:00

...and a sudden glimmer of hope that this blog may come back to life...

screenshot from Hail Mary (1985)

What can a blog do?

I can use it to write notes, of whatever kind. This is my way of confronting the fact that, for whatever excuse I might have in the past, to write about cinema, one has to put down one's thoughts into words, string these words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. Writing is an act of creation, an act of giving birth, of excreting shit, of ejaculating semen on another's face, of sweating in the midnight heat of a summer day. Writing is a life-affirming activity because it lets one move forward. It pushes one to think. Through thinking, one enriches his or her nested connections with the world. There is no other way to writing about cinema than to start here, to partake in transforming the act of seeing into an act of writing.

***

To write

Frag

men

ted

notes, one has to ride a hopping donkey as it will teach one to hop almost instinctively from one idea to another, from set to set, from film to film, from an archipelago to a landlocked country, from a lake to a sea, and vice versa.

***

As in

[another world] ---------------<---donkey-->---------------------------- [world X]

***

A cat has emerged between notes!

Be warned! More cats to come.

***

Each note shall be individual sets of ideas: with or without form, with or without an image. It can be an image on text, or a text on an image. It will be a zoo without cages. It can be poetic or sad. Only that, if it happens to be a technical one, or a philosophical fragment, away from one's comfort zone, it can draw the readers back to their shells. I shall therefore challenge readers to engage further with the note, go beyond their comfort zones, and think through the passages that might reawaken their senses.

***

Excerpts from The Story of the Hopping Donkey

by Ma Ehl Kah Mashadu

"I used to be a horse, but the faerie Queen of God said that being a Donkey is way cooler. So she turned me into a donkey. It's better to be a Donkey than Satan's Horse," said the green plastic hopping Donkey in an exclusive interview for the Sunday Times last May 1968 at rue de Passy, Paris, France. Labor Unions were out on strike that day. Sergei Eisenstein inspired him, he said.

***

On Hail Mary (1985)

Hail Mary (1985) or Virgin Mary or, in French, Je vous salue, Marie is a French film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard to end all pretentious cinema of the 1980s by being overtly pretentious in a good way. Several artsy cuts puncture its fabric.

Films are fabrics, they say, in a post-structuralist sense (see Ronald Bogue's Deleuzian Fabulation and Scars of History). They are visible, experiential fabrics, with troughs and crests, with hills and depressions. These fabrics vibrate according to various intensities generated from the onslaught of audiovisual images, of movements. Hail Mary's fabric resides in the hallucinogenia of forms: the plane of abstraction. Perhaps, the reason why Godard left the Cannes Film Festival of '85 with a cake on his face was because one audience, who may have traveled all the way from the Italy, where Hail Mary premiered and ruthlessly condemned by the religious, cannot fully comprehend this massive beautiful beast, which one can dismiss as pure pretentiousness.

***

Godard's cake face after the screening of Detective (1985)

[thanks popsugar!]

***
On a hindsight, aside from Godard's cake-face controversy,
another pressing issue plagued the festival of '85

A Pronouncement about European Cinema

from Cannes '85

"There's a real crisis in European cinema...There's no Germany, no Italy, and France is going down. Scandinavia is a zero. Poland has been silenced." - Tom Luddy [link]

Thoughts on the Pronouncement

Searching through the historical accounts of 1985 European film culture, I cannot help but wonder if this decline in European cinema was a result of the massive upheavals and political strife among states under USSR during the 1980s.

***

On Hail Mary (1985)...once again

On a rainy early morning, a field of grass gently sways with the wind. The sun has not yet risen, yet an imminent light shaped the surrounding meadow, giving a tree its form. A horizon emerges from a distant punctured by rows of trees, richly filling the middle and farthest plane of the virtual space. This is an image of solitude, a passing of time --- an opening image of one of Jean-Luc Godard's most controversial films, Hail Mary.

Various patches of green hues saturate the first image, followed by another image --- a puddle of water...

...rippling, disturbed by a stone thrown in. Light still persists as an image-shaping force, this time only brighter. Incongruous as both images seem, exhibiting no clear relation with each other, they shaped the opening of the film as an enigma. These images both flow in different streams under different gradations of light, yet they seem to tell us about the shape of the whole film --- jagged, incongruous, and disjointed.

At Hail Mary's surface, various streams of narratives intersect, with characters jutting in and out of its multi-layered world. Punctures and collisions composed Hail Mary's virtual world, emerging perhaps from Godard's preoccupation with time, history, and the emanating new ideas from the changing discourse on aesthetics during the 1980s in France.

[This is the part where my writing fails to metamorphose into something. The film is resistant to critique, to interpretation, or to explanation. To capture its uncanny movement from frame to frame requires patience. One can string together a series of associations with the bible. However, this approach can be preposterous and can lead to taking sides: pro or anti-Godard with respect to Catholic ethics. Its strength lies in its capacity to dispel the act of writing itself. One may find oneself at the foot of its ruins, ruptured, cut-off, dismembered, unable to move his pen, transfixed by the inexplicable enigma that runs within its colliding narratives. But I'd like to talk about something else other than how the film unfolds its supposed plot. I'd like to take the readers within its vortex, within its rhizomatic roots, until exhaustion fails me. But first, I have to jump] out of this bracket and return to the flow of life.

Hail Mary's vortex is shaped undoubtedly like a vibrant, pulsating, brown potato buried in the earth. It seeps nourishment from surrounding elements, anything of value: religion, contemporary life in France, extraterrestrials, Charles Darwin, Creationist theory, Godard's personal life. This potato isn't only succulent; it has also shape-shifting features prone to transformative forces puncturing its narrative. As a chimeric potato, it lives off from nested connections within its rhizomatic system transforming itself constantly without seeking a rigid shape or size.

There are various entry points to Hail Mary's eternally changing shape that one can penetrate. One can start with its primitive origins: the clash of images reminiscent of Dziga Vertov's mechanical films. Like the first two opening images I described above, Hail Mary builds its world within the collisions of ideas: biblical reference against artistic creation, without a presupposed direction, always unfolding itself into something. The film opens without introductions. No who's who, or a voice over to guide us through its porous layers. One is wedged, thrown, and propelled unto two enigmatic characters: a couple at a cafe talking and arguing. One might ask, "why are they arguing?"

In Godard's world, questions like this do not have a direct answer, nor do his movies end with these questions resolved. In Godard's films, one always confronts these enigmatic situations, especially in his latter works (1980s to present). It makes one feel uneasy, at best.

Tempered with uninviting and modular characters, Godard's latter works remain the most daunting works ever to permeate without avoiding a talk on aesthetics or philosophy. Most of his characters are usually poised like sirens, messengers, forever mercurial, often bursting from inexplicable emotional excesses. Their only prominent role in most of Godard's latter films is to appear, to move their bodies, and to express the message. It's a performance driven by the act of performing itself.

Godard's characters in his latter works neither have cinematic past lives nor future ones. They exist in the liminal cinematic space of the present. Although they can't fit the traditional idea of movie characters, they are not devoid of time. They have, within them, a figural past and a figural future, such that when one rolls out the 24 connected frames of a 1-second celluloid film depicting a certain movement of their bodies, let us say, a movement of a hand swaying from left to right, one can find an initial image (a hand on the left part of the frame, a figural past) and final one (the final position of the hand on the right, a figural future). These past and future images are rolled into one to display a movement as if happening in real time: a supposed 'figural present'. These mercurial phantoms haunt the interstices of Godard's latter works films, from Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) (1980) to Film Socialisme (2010), the leading cause of their ultimate death: obscurity.

In Hail Mary, mercurial as they can be, these characters have backbones. Full flesh and bones shaped their bodies. They have breasts, cocks, vaginas, nipples, hairs, eyes, mouths, noses.

They resemble full human beings in their most fertile states. Most of all, they are characters with faces. Faces are important visual elements in Godard's cinema (remember Anna Karina's face in Vivre Sa Vie [1962]). Aside from grounding his film to the human world, Godard's workings/re-workings of the face also shows how flexible it can be remodeled into something else other than a usual visual flare for character development.

The face in the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema (1997), for example (see above), presents Godard's most technocratic depiction of the face: a face without a life-source, sucked out from the archive of the dead, the archives of cinema's past, redressed, refashioned, and remodeled as robotic fissures, thrown into Godard's image-factory: to emerge as ghosts, as perpetual hauntings. These faces are machines of nostalgia. They draw us to remember a world annihilated by the slow passage of time. These faces, of all images in cinema, force us to come into terms with history, with our memories, with our connected lives. Aside from the body, the Face is also a window to the human core: a site of active affects for cinema.

The faces in Hail Mary construct the liminal figure of the body. The face gives the body a figurative design, an identity (or identifying marks) to hinge the audience to traditional cinema. Traditional cinema engages on character histories, role-playing, movement-images, as opposed to experimental cinema, which dwells on sketches of characters, most of the time, incomplete and unresolved. In Hail Mary, however, characterization is entwined between tradition and experimentation. The characters' faces linger as a site of affects, site of identities, yet they remain incomplete and caricatured in a state of becoming. One can decide, once and for all, that these characters are conceptual. They have faces and complete anatomical features of traditional movie characters, yet they only function as carriers of textual information and gestures. Like Godard's other characters, they inhabit within themselves voluminous referential information uttered, spoken, gestured, and transforming this information into movement.

Several provocative character-driven gestures puncture Hail Mary's movement from frame to frame, all acts gesturing to replay and re-encounter the famous biblical tale of Virgin Mary's immaculate conception in a small section of French society. Mary or Marie is high school girl, who plays volleyball and basketball at school. She has a boyfriend named Joseph, a taxi driver, who has some relationship with a girl named Juliette, Marie's classmate, and also a part of the volleyball and basketball team. Elsewhere, a girl named Eve (she prefers the name Eva) is having an adulterous relationship with an unnamed character, who has a wife and a kid. Joseph encounters Gabriel (reminiscent of the angel Gabriel) and an unnamed girl during his taxi rounds in an unnamed airport. Gabriel informs Marie of her virginal conception of the child. A divine intersession, he said. Upon knowing this event, Joseph, startled by the breadth of this news, encounters Marie in order to understand. The film settles in with the birth of the child, Jesus, and Marie, putting on a red lipstick.

Hail Mary's subversive route to deflate the already conflated moral tale of the Immaculate conception starts with Godard, forming germinal connections with the original material (Marie as Mother Mary, Joseph as St. Joseph, Marie's virginal conception of a child, the child as Jesus). From there, Godard forges a new path of becoming by allowing these germinal connections to take root from French contemporary society, defying the Catholic view of the Virgin Mary as universal, imaginary, and beyond the banality of life.

Godard is clearly aware of cinema's power to reshape mythical, political, or religious figures by confronting and destroying their dominant polemical forms and allowing the power of gesture to take over in the creation of new forms, new movements, and new fissures in time. Such is the majoritarian, conflated, and valorized image of the Virgin Mary shaped by two-thousand-years of Catholic traditional belief. Traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary, in sculptures, painting, moving pictures faithful to the bible, survives today as a towering figure beyond us: an angelic, covered, pristine, untouched Virgin of virgins.

Marie and Joseph as Mary and Joseph

Godard strips away these traditional figurations of Mary by gesturing towards a naked body, an exposure, taking away her clothes, her pristine image, and most of all, transforming her into a quotidian woman of conceptual roots and modular form. Several other characters, along with her, also gestured away from their traditional imagery, emanating in their own ways, within the colliding narratives of the film. Godard's exposure of Marie's body...

Godard, exposing Marie's body

... retrieves the Woman behind the valorized Catholic image of the Virgin Mary, the Body, which was once clothed by tradition, asphyxiated by morality. Naked and supple, shaped by light and shadow, the body of Marie opens a new crack, a new site of discourse urging us to look into the body-image of other religious figures in light of contemporary figurations of women, men, and other evocations, urging us further to inquire about how engendered movements of bodies go against tradition. Though this method of gesturing may not be uniquely invoked by Hail Mary, Godard contributed much to forwarding the stance against oppressive, traditional, body-conscious depiction of woman.

This creation of a figurative complex as a becoming, a site of discourse, achieved through gesturing of eliciting a movement through exposure, remains a vital force to combat the repressive, valorized figures of society. (Pier Paolo Passolini has so much to say about this exposure of the Body in his films.) What ensues further in Godard's entry to the 1990s is his effort to subvert not only habitual traditions and figures of European culture, but also tp forward cinema language itself.

Hail Mary's gestural style of rupturing traditions is just one of the various devices Godard uses in his latter works. Godard's digital experiments, especially his magnum opus Histoire(s) du Cinema, and later, Film Socialisme, inquire on the possibilities on how can cinema house its pulsating and mimetic histor(ies) and recent ruptures of wars against new and emerging neoliberal forces. Both films capture the tempestuous quality of the mechanized image and its veracity to emulate new worlds from Vertovian collisions. Their contrariety and resistance to interpretation make Godard's latter works central sites of discourse and inquiries about cinema's limits including the limits of interpretation. Godard's 1960s films are so much loved for their approachable air, their simplicity, their openness to interpretation. Godard's latter works, on the contrary, are somewhat ignored because of their intricate structures, labyrinthine narratives, and lack of sites for interpretation. The limits presented by Godard's latter works stress the need to forward the critical discourse on film, to adapt to this shift in image production. It must be a critical discourse of any sorts, beyond interpretation, as some films like Hail Mary and films from emerging directors present new limits. Film writing must reach these regions of new limits to progress, to transform.

****

Le Chat D'Appartement (Sarah Roper, 1998)

****

The Digital Archive 2014

2014-01-01T13:51:00.000+08:00

Cheers!

[from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)]

By mid-year last year, I changed the way I read books, watch films, and write notes. I became more instinctive with my choices. I dropped the Map and scurry through jungles and deserts like a nomad. I hopped from book to book (except for novels), from one film genre (or director) to another, and wrote aimlessly on my notebooks and journals about these encounters, guided only by the spirit of adventure and sense of 'connected-ness' with the world.

Emotional responses to anything visual, auditory, or textual triggered these instinctive drives. Instinct is a force that destroyed borders and limits within me: a total liberation. It also encouraged me to think differently. When I leave an incomplete idea I read from a book or an article, in order to move to another, I allow that unfinished idea to grow inside me, and 'finish' its form by myself, only to find out that, upon checking the material again, I diverged from the path of the writer making my own path.

These activities were, of course, influenced by the fan of the instinctual and nomadic: Gilles Deleuze. Instinct fuels productivity, he said. It's what drives civilizations to progress and allows the creation of new pathways, discoveries, new art. Instinct connects us to the world outside the 'systematic' flow of life. Some moments, revelations, and decisions in our lives came from our instinctual responses to the world. Instinct, on the contrary, is not spontaneous or natural. It is an empowered choice. It can be irrational (not all things in this world can be explained using rational thinking). Instinct is, most of all, a force opposite and against the oppressive, traditional, and conformist 'common sense'.

All the things that we grasp and feel instinctively are not individual objects outside us. They are not imaginary. They are real. They sit within the assemblage (or nested connections) of our lives. It's our eyes, our limited vision (fact: we cannot see the back of our heads or we cannot see the future) that prevents us to recognize these things, and in turn, give value to these events and objects. Instinct allows us to see (fact: we need a mirror to look at the back of our heads or we need to put our future selves into actualities to move forward) the things that we cannot see at present. It extends the range of our vision and our knowledge of the world. To live is to seek the things hidden or absent at present time. To live is to move to a future, to the hours that await us, by instinct.

The whole 'being-instinctive' activity didn't turn out that bad. It was actually enjoyable, even orgasmic. But the problem is I didn't keep track of the texts and books I've read for the past six-months. The films I've watched last year were logged here. But I didn't record the date when I watched them. Also, it's hard for me to somewhat recall who's who and who wrote this or that. They're all mixed up now.

This year, I will try to resolve the lack of documentation. Instinctive forces can be uncontrollable, but I'll try, as hard as possible, to capture these 'seen' objects, and maybe make sense of how they are connected to my life, by creating a digital archive. This archive is not styled in a 'stream of consciousness' fashion as far as modernist literature is concerned. It is a systematic and chronological machine in a list form, the one that you can see below. Although, like 'stream of consciousness,' it will involve a documentation of several notable encounters (anything visible, auditory, and/or textual) that I will be making this year.

Anyway, here goes the archive:

Books

January

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1/1-6/14) [The truth is I'm getting old, I say. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.]
Night, Again ed. by Linh Dinh (1/10 - 27/14) []
The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (next; re-read) - change of book, Wind and Stone by Masaaki Tachihara (1/11, 27 - 31/14)
New books: Mystic River by Denis Lehane (55php) and Long Day's Journey to the Night (play) by Eugene O'Neil (35php) [from a bookshop at UP Shopping Center Stall 1. For 8 years, I used to go there to buy books. Most of my Virginia Woolf books came from there. Awhile ago, while browsing the stacks, it felt rather empty having seen most of the books taken out. The woman said it's their last day because they cannot afford the rent. She said that if ever the owner of the stall agrees on the idea of putting up a computer shop within the bookstore, then it wouldn't be the last day of the bookshop. I left so many memories there. I hope they get the extension. Sad day.]; Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader edited by Grauerholz and Silverberg (150php) [purchased at Fullybooked The Fort before the Sana Dati screening] (1/11/14)
Recent Loot from blink: (1/23/14)
a. Down There on a Visit by Christopher Isherwood (200php)
b. The Berlin Stories. A Single Man. A Meeting by the River. by C. Isherwood (175php)
c. The World in the Evening by C. Isherwood (200php)
d. Four Novels by Marguerite Duras (250php)
e. Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. (225php)
Reading The Berlin Stories. A Single Man. A Meeting by the River. by C. Isherwood
a. Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1/31 - 2/28, 2014)
b. Goodbye to Berlin (2/28 - , 2014)
Reading The Beggar by NaguibMahfouz (2/28 - , 2014)

***

Writings

January

Having an Idea of Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet) (1998) by Gilles Deleuze trans. by Eleanor Kaufman (halfway; read 1/1-2/14) [text] [further info]
A glimpse of Alain Badiou's Cinema (2013) (1/4/14) [further info]
Reading the Figural's Chapter Six: A Genealogy of Time by D.N. Rodowick (2003) (reading since 1/1/14) [further info]
[I] a glimpse of Undocumenting History: An Interview with Filmmaker Jill Godmillow by Lynn C. Miller (1/5/14) [text] (for future reading)
A glimpse of Kill the Documentary as We Know It by Jill Godmillow (1/6/14) [link] (for future reading)
The Anatomy of a Marcos Apologist by Leiron Martija (1/6/14) [link]: It says: 'Listen to me, you blundering little kid. I am a child of democracy. I am aware of its limits, of its inconveniences, of its disadvantages and of what it requires from every one of us. I see you.' Is he truly aware of what he's saying?
A graphological study of Virginia Woolf's last letter before her suicide. [link] (1/7/14)
Book Review of Daniel Morgan's Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema by Codruta Morari. [link] (1/7/14)
Re-reading Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film by Benjamin Noys [link] (1/8/14) [The power of cinema, and the power of cinematic montage, is to free the image from its frozen state and transform it back into gesture. It can reveal the potential of the image, and release what has been frozen in the image. Montage is not simply a repetition of the identical, because in repetition this dynamic potential of the image is returned to us. On the other hand 'stoppage' in montage interrupts the stream of images. It brings the image to a stop and exhibits it as such, again as gesture. In this way these two opposing conditions, repetition and stoppage, both work to free the potential of the image and to return it to the movement of the gesture.]
Serge Daney's The T(h)errorized (Godardian Pedagogy) [link] (1/9/14) [The great suspicion cast by May '68 on the "society of the spectacle," a society which secrets more images than it can see and digest (the image runs past, recedes, runs away) affected the generation that had invested the most in it, the self-taught cinephiles for whom the movie theater had taken the place of both school and family - the generation of the New Wave, formed in the cinematheques. Beginning in 1968, Godard proceeds to pull out his stake and move in the opposite direction: from cinema to school, then from school to family. Regression? Why not say, instead, "regressivism"?]
A glimpse of The Total Film-maker by Jerry Lewis [link] (1/10/14): They say it's one of the best books on filmmaking.
[Obit] Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Offensive And Achingly Beautiful by Neda Ulaby [link] (1/10/14): [When asked if he has regrets on writing the 9/11 poem, he said: "No — I have regrets that they didn't pay me my money — cheap criminals. I have regrets about that. But I don't have regrets about writing the poem. Because the poem was true."]
Examining Violence: The Critical Potentials of Superiority and Mockery in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Cynthia Cynn, and Anonymous, 2012) [link]: Interesting assertions, but I need to watch The Act of Killing. (1/12/14)
A glimpse of Framer Framed Framing: A Critique on Porno (2013) by J. Pilapil Jacobo [link] (1/13/14) (for future reading)
A glimpse of Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Living the Questions by Maria Popova [link] (1/16/14): ["I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."]
from Destruction of Meaning by Simon Hardy Chapter 38: Post-Marxism (B) - Guattari and Deleuze - 'Communists like us' [link] (1/17/14)
Speculative Humbug's Thanatotropism, communism and desire in Anti-Oedipus [link] (1/17/14)
Kasama Project's 40 Helpful Tips for Anti-Communists [link] (1/17/14) [Laugh out loud satire of the right-wing movement]
A glimpse of Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx. [link] (1/17/14)
How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it by Nancy Fraser[link] (1/18/14): [what a weird conclusion. It seems to tell that the writer is not a leftist. I'm not sure.]
Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequence by Slavoj Zizek [link] (1/19/14) [a review in Amazon says: Most of the time Zizek is just spouting off (and it's not even the inspired kind of spouting that got him famous!)]
Chapter 3. Consciousness of the World and the World of Consciousness from A. Spirkin's Dialectical Materialism. [link] (1/22/14) [The basis of conscious action is termed LOGOS]
Film Quaterly's Polcats: Debating Chris Marker's 'A Grin Without A Cat' [link] (1/23/14)
What I owe to Chris Marker by Patricio Guzman [link] (1/23/14)
Some articles on Time in Cinema:

[Rhizomes.net] Feeling Time: Deleuze's Time-Image and Aesthetic Effect by Dyrk Ashton (2008)
[Screening the Past] Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time by Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis (2012)
[Cineosis] Cineosis Table by David Dreamer. (2010) [This guy blogged about Metro Manila (2013) using Deleuze theories.]
[Sense of Cinema] Antonioni's L'Avventura and Deleuze's Time-Image by Hamish Ford (2003)
[WebCache] Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Project Part 1 by Donato Totaru (1999) and Part 2.
[Film International] Andrei Takovsky's Mirror viewed Through Gilles Deleuze's Time-Image by Kierran Horner (2011)
[personal blog] Guide to Reading Deleuze's The Movement-Image, Part I: The Deleuzian Notion of the Image, or Worldslicing as Cinema Beyond the Human by Christopher Vitale (2011)
[MUBI] Deleuze's Theories on Cinema: The Time-Image
[Wig: Journal] The Dimensionality of Time in Cinema by Laura Ivins-Huley (2010)
[SSRN] Movement and Time in Cinema by Thomas Powell (2004)
E-Flux Newest Issues [link] (1/30/14) [I missed three issues.]

February

Additional articles on Time in Cinema:

[BLOG: networkologies] Guide to Reading Deleuze's Cinema II: Time-image, Part I Towards a Direct Imaging of Time in Crystal-Images by Christopher Vitale (2011)
[BLOG: Media Assemblages] Deleuze, Cinema, and Zen: Break the Motor by Amit S. Rai (2008)
How do we Recognize Structuralism? by Gilles Deleuze from his Desert Islands and Other texts [link] (2/7/14)
At Some Other Berkeley by Katy Fox-Hodess from Jacobin/A Magazine on Culture and Polemics [link] (2/11/14)
The Greatest Affirmation of Life by Naxos [link] (2/11/14)
Gilles Deleuze by Daniel Smith and John Protevi. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2012) [link] (2/13/14)
Happy Death of Deleuze by Finn Janning. [link] (2/12/14)
A Conversation with Nicole Brenez: 'Each film is a Laboratory' by Raul Arthuso and Victor Guimaraes [link] (mid-Feb 2014)

March

Top Ten Philosophical Issues of the 21st Century. [link] (3/2/14) [I'd add:
* Finding new modes of resistance in the age of control societies.
- Addressing Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control

* What is philosophy of the new media?
- extending D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural

* Who/What is the new enemy?
- ruptures from Negri's Empire

* Can emerging radical philosophy still be institutionalize by traditional educational institutions/publications?
- addressing the Sokal Affair

* What is 'memory' or 'remembering' today in the age of internet?

* Finding New Modes of Learning
- Addressing recent Educational Strikes against rising cost of education around the world
- Anthony Fontana's Multichronic Classroom
- Initiative of The Global Center for Advanced Studies

* What is accelerationism?
- implications of Virilio's writings
- (link)]
Reviewable Books. Invisible Culture. [link] (includes D.N. Rodowick's Elegy for Theory)
[Rhizomes.net] The War Machine and Capitalism: Notes Towards a Nomadology of the Imperceptible by Dr. Robert P. Marzec (3/27/14)
[Verso Books Blog] True Communism is the Foreignness of Tomorrow by Alain Badiou (3/30/14)

April

[Axon Journal] Naming the Ruins: Towards a Southeast Asian Poetics by Dinah Roma (4/6/14)

****

Images and Other Visual Ephemera

January

Beyonce x Frida Kahlo [link] (1/5/14): Chimeric. Pop art.
Frida Kahlo x Ripped Male Body [link; thru Teng Mangansakan's FB page] (1/5/14): Chimeric. Digital transformation. Queer. Pop art.
Negative of Jesus (look at the dot on the nose for 15 seconds) [link] (1/17/14)

****

Videos

January

Movement-Image and Time-Image in Deleuze's Philosophy of Cinema by Thomas McDonald [link] (1/4/14)
Prehistoric Megastorms: Hypercane from The History Channel [link] (1/6/14): Apocalyptic hurricanes from the old world re-imagined on screen for television.
Megastorm: World's Biggest Storm from Discovery Channel [link] (1/6/14): Featuring the wrath of Typhoon Haiyan
A talk on Giorgio Agamben. Gesture, or the Structure of Art from the European Graduate School. (2011) [link] (1/8/14)
A glimpse of Who are you, Anna Karina? [link] (1/8/14): A peculiar interview with Anna Karina, her origins, her initial career as a model.
The 400 Blow(job)s [link] (1/13/14): A spoof involving The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut
UCBerkeley Lecture Series: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Situating Feminism [link] (1/18/14)
Short Film: Brotherly (2008) [link] (1/22/14)
Docu: Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control [link] (1/26/14)

February

****

Sounds

January

Ikot-Ikot by Sarah Geronimo [check youtube]: Sang by a transgender on a jeepney. She sang it well. (1/5/14)
The Double Life of Veronique Soudtrack [link]: Musical works by Zbigniew Preisner interest me, especially his collaborations with Kieslowski's latter works. (1/6/14)
Gustav Mahler's Adagietto for Symphony No. 5 played by Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra [link] (1/8/14)
Hooray for Today! Medley [link] (1/10/14): Heard this at McDo Pantranco while I was reading the book Night, Day. It was catchy. I never thought it was a McDo Medley, until I search the lyrics online.
Recordings of Daniel Smith's Lecture Series (Sep 2009) [link] (1/13/14): Materials - Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men,” pp.139-271 and A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” pp. 351-423 + “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture,” pp. 424-473.
Audio Interview: Lav Diaz and Hazel Orencio [link] (1/14/14): This is actually the interview that gives authority for people to post Lav Diaz films on Karagarga.
Top 13 Circuit Tracks of 2013 by Tony Vuong [link] (1/23/14)
Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Animated) [link] (1/25/14) [I love this guy's illustrative videos on several avant-garde music of the 20th century]

****

Sites

January

Antonio Da Silva's notorious site. [link] [gay content, R-18] (1/3/14)
Kurt Kren: Structural and Action Films (1957-1995) [link] (1/6/14) (for future viewing)
Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan's site with Published Works and Unpublished Notebooks. [link] (1/9/14): I miss mathematics!
British film critic Raymond Durgnat resource site [link] (1/9/14)
French film critic Serge Daney in English resource site [link] (1/9/14)
The Third Persona [link] (1/10/14): A blog on movie characters facing away from the camera. It's a rather creepy and strange sight, but very intriguing.
50 of the World's Best Breakfast [link] (1/12/14): I need to cook this for my partner.
35 Famous People's Darkest secrets [link] (1/22/14): I couldn't believe that Mahatma Gandhi is an anti-semite (further proof). My doubts on his nonviolence campaign has doubled. This is unbelievable.

****

Others

January

NYTimes Blog: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout [link] (1/10/14)
ABS-CBS: The 4-minute Workout [link] (1/19/14)
Neila Rey Workouts [link] (1/23/14)

February

Baked Tomatoes and Eggs Recipe [link] (2/5/14)
Global Center for Advance Studies [link] (2/28/14)

****

Film Log 2014

2014-01-01T11:37:00.000+08:00

First film of the year: Hairy Mary by Jean-luc Godard.

I’ll make a detailed list this time indicating the date and place watched.

January

1/2: Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard / France / 1985) – 4/5 – bus on my way to Manila after my New Year’s stay in the provinces.

1/2: 10000 Hours (Bb. Joyce Bernal / Philippines / 2013) – 3.5/5 – SM North with Mike Geroche. Buddy date before parting ways again. – (NOM)

1/5: My Little Bossings (Marlon Rivera / Philippines / 2013) – 2/5 – SM North with Armando Dela Cruz. – (NOM)

1/6: Boy Golden (Chito Roño / Philippines / 2013) – 3/5 – SM Manila with Gisela Claveron. – (NOM)

1/7: Kimmy Dora: Ang Kiyemeng Prequel (Chris Martinez / Philippines / 2013) – 3/5 – SM North Edsa alone. – (NOM)

1/10: The Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik / Philippines / 1977) – 4.5/5 – [L]

1/11: Sana Dati (Jerrold Tarog / Philippines / 2013) – 4/5 – Fullybooked The Fort with Peter, Ann, Louise, and Peter’s officemate Tony -REWATCH

1/15: Badil (Chito Rono / Philippines / 2013) – 4/5 – UPFI with Ann

1/19: Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire / UK / 2001) – 3/5 – [L] – REWATCH

1/20: The Wolf of the Wall Street (Martin Scorsese / USA / 2013) – 3/5 – With Peter Eman at Glorietta Cinema 7.

1/27: Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem / Spain / 1998) – 5/5 – [L] – An ending that never ends.

1/27: Mumbai Love (Benito Bautista / Philippines / 2014) – 2.5/5 – Glorietta Cinema 5 with Peter Eman and Ann.

1/28: From the Clouds to the Resistance (Straub-Huillet / Italy / 1979) – 4.5/5 – [L]

1/30: What is a Rhizome? Kluge and Vogl on Deleuze and Guattari (Alexander Kluge / Germany / 2006) – 3/5 – [L]

February

2/12: Starting Over Again (Olivia M. Lamasan / Philippines / 2014) – 2.5 – Fishermall with Gisela Claveron.

2/13: Le Joli Mai (A Lovely Month of May / Chris Marker / France / 1963) – 5/5 – [L]
2/21: Chris and Don - A Love Story (Tina Mascara and Guido Santi / USA / 2007) - 3/5 - [L]

Cinemalibre February 2014

2/22: A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (Ben Russel and Ben Rivers / UK / 2013) - 5/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.
2/22: Goltzius and the Pelican Company (Peter Greenaway / UK / 2012) - 4/5 - - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.
2/22: Redemption (Miguel Gomes / Portugal / 2013) - 5/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others
2/22: A Watchful Gaze (Makoto Shinkai / Japan / 2013) - 4/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.
2/22: The Garden of Words (Makoto Shinkai / Japan / 2013) - 4/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.
2/22: Far from Vietnam (Various / France-Vietnam / 1967) - 5/5 - [L]
2/26: Unfriend (Joselito Altarejos / Philippines / 2014) - 4/5 - Robinsons Movieworld with Joseph, Archie and Epoy
2/28: The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman / Chile / 1975) - 5/5 - [L]
2/28: She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita / Japan / 1955) - 5/5 - [L]

March

3/1: The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak / India / 1960) - 5/5 - [L]
3/6: Zoopraxiscope (Hieronim Neuman / Poland / 2005) - 4.5/5 - [L]
3/6: The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (William E Jones / USA / 1998) - 4/5 - [L]
3/10: Klimt (Raul Ruiz / France / 2006) - 4/5 - [L]
3/10: Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer / France / 1998) - 4/5 - [L]
3/11: Modern Life (Raymond Depardon / France / 2008) - 5/5 - [L]
3/12: Goshu the Cellist (Isao Takahata / Japan / 1982) - 4/5 - [L]
3/13: Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa / Russia / 2006) - 5/5 - [L]
3/14: Telephone (Terry Montlick / USA / 2002) - 5/5 -[L]

Cinemalibre March 2014

3/15: The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax / France / 1991) - 5/5 - REWATCH - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.

3/15: Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel / France / 1967) - 5/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.

3/15: Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut / France / 1962) - 4/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with Epoy and others.

3/21: Divergent (Neil Burger / USA / 2014) - 4/5 - Fisher Mall at Cinema 2 with Pa.
3/24: Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Nagisa Oshima / Japan / 1967) - [L] - 4.5/5
3/24: Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman / USA / 1973) - [L] - 5/5

April

4/7: L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Pierre-André Boutang / France / 1996) - [L] - 4/5
4/12: Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche / France / 2013) - [L] - 4/5
4/18: The Ruins (Mrinal Sen / India / 1983) - [L] - 5/5
4/24: Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen / China / 2000) - [L] - 5/5

Cinemalibre April 2014

4/26: Pyaasa (Thirsty) (Guru Dutt / India / 1957) - 5/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with others.
4/26: Kaagaz Ze Phool (Paper Flowes) (Guru Dutt / India / 1959) - 4/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with others.
4/26: In Search of Guru Dutt (Nasheen Munni Kabir/ India, France / 1989) - 4/5 - UPFI Videotheque - Cinemalibre Screening with others.

May

5/2: Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell / USA, Suriname / 2009) - [L] - 5/5
5/3: Serge Daney: Journey of a 'Cine-Son' (Pierre-André Boutang, Dominique Rabourdin / France / 1992) - [L] - 4/5
5/3: Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima/ Japan / 1965) - [L] - 4/5
5/3: A Time to Live and A Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien/ Taiwan / 1986) - [L] - 5/5
5/6: Pripyat (Nikolaus Geyrhalter / Austria, Ukraine / 1999) - [L] - 4/5
5/11: Muscle (Hisayasu Sato/ Japan / 1989) - [L] - 4/5
5/11: Free Fall (Stephen Lacant / Germany / 2013) - [L] - 4/5
5/12: The Watch (Marco Berger / Argentina / 2008) - [L] - 4/5

********

Legend: (NOM) – Not on MUBI

[L] – laptop

Trails of a Cloud: A Journey to the Island of Wonders

2013-10-17T20:36:00.003+08:00

Archive of desires.

Histories.

Intensities.

Traumas, scars.

Virtualities.

Actualities.

Escapes.

Land-escapes.

City-escapes.

Stills.

---------------------

2013

Lukas Nino (John Torres/ Philippines)
A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (Ben Russell and Ben Rivers / Finland) *
Guerrilla is a Poet (Sari and Kiri Dalena / Philippines)
Maliw (Rob Jara / Philippines)
Before Midnight (Richard Linklater / USA)
Redemption (Miguel Gomes / Portugal) *
Pantomime for Figures Shrouded by Waves (Jon Lazam / Philippines)
Islands (Whammy Alcazaren / Philippines)
Ang Pagbabalat ng Ahas (Timmy Harn / Philippines)
Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen / Singapore) *
The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh / Cambodia) *

2012

Darna: A Stone is A Heart You Can't Swallow (Jon Lazam /Philippines)
Leviathan (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor / U.K.)
Colossal (Wyhammy Alcazaren / Philippines)
Jungle Love (Sherad Anthony Sanchez / Philippines)
Amour (Michael Haneke / Austria)
Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas / Mexico)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo / South Korea)
Holy Motors (Léos Carax / France)
Forever Loved (Christopher Gozum / Philippines)
Mondomanila (Khavn dela Cruz / Philippines)
What the Chicken Knows (Ramon Raquid / Philippines)
Maximalist (John Torres / Philippines)
Taglish (Gym Lumbera / Philippines)
Walang Kaluluwah (Jet Leyco / Philippines)
Mamay Umeng (Dwein Baltazar / Philippines)

2011

Of Skies and Earth (Mes De Guzman / Philippines)
The Moon is Not Ours (Jon Lazam /Philippines)
Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers / U.K.)
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo / South Korea)
Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz / Philippines)
Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin / Philippines, Spain)
Correspondenec: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin (José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas / Spain)
Hai, they recycle heartbreaks in Tokyo so nothing’s wasted (John Torres / Philippines)

2010

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán / Chile)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julián Hernández / Mexico) Q
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard / Switzerland, France)
Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (John Torres / Philippines)
Honey (Semih Kaplanoğlu / Germany, Turkey)
Stone is the Earth (Mes de Guzman / Philippines)

2009

Independencia (Raya Martin / France, Philippines)
Disorder (Huang Weikai / China)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues / Portugal) Q
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine / USA)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke / Germany)

Now Showing (Raya Martin / Philippines / 2008)

2008

Ah, Liberty! (Ben Rivers / U.K.)
Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly (Edwin / Indonesia)
A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux / France)
La Vie Moderne (Raymond Depardon / France) *
The Beaches of Agnes (Agnès Varda / France)
Now Showing (Raya Martin / Philippines)
Slideshow (Lara Acuin / Philippines)
Andalusian Bitch (Sasha Palomares / Philippines)

2007

Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz / Philippines)
At Sea (Peter Hutton / USA)
Silencio (François-Jacques Ossang / Portugal)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong / South Korea)
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin / Canada)
United Red Army (Kôji Wakamatsu / Japan)
Autohystoria (Raya Martin / Philippines)
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito / USA)
In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin / Spain) *
Quiet Chaos of Desire (Carl E. Brown / Canada)

2006

Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso / France)
Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (Lav Diaz /Philippines)
Inland Empire (David Lynch / USA)
Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin / Canada)
Todo Todo Teros (John Torres / Philippines)
Syndromes and A Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Austria)
Flanders (Bruno Dumont / France)
Blockade (Sergei Loznitsa / Ukraine) *

2005

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang / Taiwan)
A Short Film About Indio Nacional (Raya Martin / Philippines)
It Feels so Good to be Alive (Antoinette Jadaone / Philippines)
Instructions to the Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky / Austria)
Lunacy (Jan Švankmajer / Czechoslovakia)
Zoopraxiscope (Hieronim Neumann / Poland) *

2004

Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz / Philippines)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand) Q
The Sky Turns (Mercedes Álvarez / Spain)
A Tree in Tanjung Malim (Tan Chui Mui / Malaysia)
Light is Calling (Bill Morrison / USA)
Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene / Burkina Faso)
The Raspberry Reich (Bruce LaBruce / Canada) Q
The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker / France)

Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City (Robert Fenz / USA.)

2003

Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City (Robert Fenz / USA)
Mirror (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller / Germany)

2002

A New Life (Philippe Grandrieux / France)
The Hours (Stephen Daldry / U.K.)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami / France, Iran)
The Son (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne / Belgium)
Japon (Carlos Reygadas / Mexico)
On the Occasions of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-Soo / South Korea)
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan / Turkey)
Dream Work (Peter Tscherkassky / Austria)
Decasia (Bill Morrison / USA)

2001

Batang West Side (Lav Diaz / Philippines, USA)
Meditations on Revolution, Part III: Soledad (Robert Fenz / USA)
Remembrance of Things to Come (Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker / France)
Elsewhere (Nikolaus Geyrhalter / Austria)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis / Germany)
La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso / Argentina)
The Fourth Dimension (Trinh T. Minh-ha / USA, Vietnam)
Millennim Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien / France)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa / Japan)

2000

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo / South Korea)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr / Hungary)
O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues / Portugal) Q
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas / USA)
Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand)
The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda / France)
Platform (Jia Zhangke / China, France)
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama / France, Japan)
Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen / China) *
Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Edward Yang / Taiwan)

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambéty / Senegal / 1999)

1999

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambéty / Senegal)
Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne / Belgium)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)
Beau Travail (Claire Denis / France) Q
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky / Austria)

1998

The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang / Taiwan)
Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem / Spain) *
Histoire(s) du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard / Switzerland, France)

1997

White Funeral (Sari Dalena / Philippines)
Doctor Chance (François-Jacques Ossang / Chile)
Meditations on Revolution, Part II: The Space in Between (Robert Fenz / USA)
Finished (William E. Jones / USA) Q
Pensao Globo (Matthias Müller / Germany) Q
The River (Tsai Ming-liang / Taiwan) Q
Chile, Obstinate Memory (Patricio Guzman / Chile) *
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki / Japan)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai / Hong Kong) Q
The Story of the Cat and the Moon (Pedro Serrazina / Portugal)

A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf / Iran / 1996)

1996

Leila (Dariush Mehrjui / Iran)
A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf / Iran)
Crash (David Cronenberg / Canada)
Saint (Bavo Defurne / Belgium) Q
Le Recontre (Alain Cavalier / France)

1995

Antigravitation (Audrium Stonys / Lithuania)
Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes and Bridget Yearian / USA, Philippines)
Zone (Takashi Ito / Japan)

1994

Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang / Taiwan)
Wild Reeds (André Téchiné / France) Q
The Corridor (Sharunas Bartas / Lithuania)
What Happened Was... (Tom Noonan / U.S.)
End (Artavazd Peleshian / Armenia)
I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis / France)
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)
Chunking Express (Wong Kar-Wai / Hong Kong)
Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski / Poland, France)

1993

The Last Bolshevik (Chris Marker / Finland)
My Nightmare (Richard Kern / USA)
Blue (Derek Jarman / U.K.) Q
Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira / Portugal)
Death Train (Bill Morrison / USA)
Sleepy Haven (Matthias Müller and Dirk Schaefer / Germany) Q

1992

Kairat (Darezhan Omirbaev / Kazakhstan)
The Earth is Blind (Audrius Stonys / Lithuania)
Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujică / Austria)

1991

The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski / France)
Massilon (William E. Jones / USA) Q
Night and Day (Chantal Akerman / Belgium)
The Road to the Racetrack (Jang Sun-woo / South Korea)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang / Taiwan)
The Lovers on the Bridge (Léos Carax / France)
Life, and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)

Night Highway (Bill Morrison / USA / 1990)

1990

Sanctus (Barbara Hammer / USA) Q
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)
Begotten (E. Elias Merhige / USA)
Night Highway (Bill Morrison / USA)

1989

Orapronobis (Lino Brocka / Philippines)
Near Death (Frederick Wiseman / USA)
Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs / USA) Q
Route One/USA (Robert Kramer / U.K.)
Sweetie (Jane Campion / Austrailia, New Zealand)
The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski / Poland)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
Island of Flowers (Jorge Furtado / Brazil)
Image of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki / West Germany) *

1988

Landscape in the Mist (Theodoros Angelopoulos / Greece)
(Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes (Pipilotti Rist / Switzerland)
A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieślowski / Poland)

1987

Walls (Piotr Dumala / Poland)
Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)

1986

The Terrorizers (Edward Yang / Hong Kong, Taiwan)
The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer / France)
Landscape Suicide (James Benning / USA) *
New York, N.Y. (Raymond Depardon / France)
A Time to Live and A Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien / Taiwan) *

1985

Submit to Me (Richard Kern / USA)
Manufraktur (Peter Tscherkassky / Austria)

1984

Ghost (Takashi Ito / Japan)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki / Japan)
Shades of Fern (František Vlácil / Czechoslovakia)
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei German / USSR)

The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien / Taiwan 1983)

1983

El Sur (Victor Erice / Spain) *
The Ruins (Mrinal Sen / India) *
Videodrome (David Cronenberg / Canada)
The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien / Taiwan)
L'Argent (Robert Bresson / France)
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker / France)
City of Pirates (Raúl Ruiz / France)

1982

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder / France) Q
The Wind (Souleymane Cissé / Mali)
Dimension of Dialogue (Jan Švankmajer / Czechoslovakia)

1981

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski / France)
Orderly or Unorderly (Abbas Kiarostami / Iran) *

1980

The Falls (Peter Greenaway / U.K.)
Bomba Star (Joey Gosiengfiao / Philippines)
Temptation Island (Joey Gosiengfiao / Philippines) Q
Arising from the Surface (Mani Kaul / India)
Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh / West Germany) Q
The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha / Brazil)
Rapture (Izan Zulueta / Spain) Q
The Fly (Ferenc Rófusz / Hungary)

1979

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky / USSR)
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Raúl Ruiz / France)
From the Clouds to the Resistance (Daniele Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub / Italy) *

1978

Liquid Crystals (Jean Painlevé / France)
In A Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder / West Germany) Q
Gravida Sketch I (Raymonde Carasco / France)
A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of An Ornithologist (Peter Greenaway / U.K.)
Visions of a City (Larry Jordan / USA)
Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna (Chantal Akerman / Belgium)

1977

A Grin Without A Cat (Chris Marker / France)
Eraserhead (David Lynch / USA)
The Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik / Philippines) *

1976

Harvest: 3000 Years (Haile Gerima / Ethiopia)
The Wishing Tree (Tengiz Abuladze / USSR)
Bush Mama (Haile Gerima / USA)

1975

The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman / Chile) *
Welfare (Frederick Wiseman / USA)
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder / West Germany) Q
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, France)
The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky / USSR)
Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka / Philippines)
Salo, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini / France)
Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas / USA) *

Butterfly Dress Pledge (Shuji Terayama / Japan / 1974)

1974

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Shûji Terayama / Japan) Q
The Man Who Sleeps (Bernard Queysanne / Tunisia, France)
You Have Been Weighed but Found Wanting (Lino Brocka / Philippines)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder / West Germany)
Butterfly Dress Pledge (Shûji Terayama / Japan) Q

1973

Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi / Poland)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice / Spain)
Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman / 1973) *

1972

We Won't Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat / Italy)
Tout Va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Groupe Dziga Vertov / France)
Ballet Adagio (Norman McLaren / Canada)
Lucifer Rising (Kenneth Anger / U.K.) Q

1971

July '71 In San Francisco, Living At Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon (Peter Hutton / USA)
The Courage of the People (Jorge Sanjinés / Bolivia)
Throw Away Your Books, Rally on the Streets (Shûji Terayama / Japan) Q
Synchromy (Norman McLaren / Canada)
The Third Part of the Night (Andrzej Zulawski / Poland)
Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood / USA) Q

1970

This Transient Life (Akio Jissoji / Japan)
Adelheid (František Vlácil / Czechoslovakia)
Inhabitants (Artavazd Peleshian / USSR)
Zorn's Lemma (Hollis Frampton / USA)
Once Upon A Time There Was A Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani / USSR)
Spectator (Frans Zwartjes / Netherlands)

1969

Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumuto / Japan) * Q
Blind Beast (Yasuzo Masumura / Japan)
Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshishige Yoshida / Japan)
Antonio Das Mortes (Glauber Rocha / Brazil)
My Night At Maud's (Éric Rohmer / France)
Visual Training (Frans Zwartjes / Netherlands)

Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea / Cuba / 1968)

1968

Diatoms (Geneviève Hamon and Jean Painlevé / France)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea / Cuba)
Death by Hanging (Nagisa Ôshima / Japan)
The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas / Argentina)
L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat / France)
Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolino / Italy)
San Francisco (Anthony Stern / U.K.)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov / USSR)
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits / USA)
Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Susumu Hani / Japan)
La Revolution N'est Qu'un Debut. Continuons Le Combat (Pierre Clementi / France)

1967

Far from Vietnam (various / France, Vietnam) *
Warrendale (Allan King / Canada)
Scaterred Clouds (Mikio Naruse / Japan)
La Collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer / France)
The Young Girls of Rocherfort (Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda / France)
Entranced Earth (Glauder Rocha / Brazil)
Mouchette (Robert Bresson / France)
Wavelength (Michael Snow / USA)
Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel / France) *
La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard / France)
Playtime (Jacques Tati / France)
Beginning (Artavazd Peleshian / USSR)
Visa de Censure Numero X (Pierre Clementi / France)
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Nagisa Oshima / Japan) *

1966

Woman of the Lake (Yoshishige Yoshida / Japan)
The Golden Thread (Ritwik Ghatak / India)
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky / USSR)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman / Sweden)
Emotion (Nobuhiko Obayashi / Japan)

1965

Elegia (Zoltán Huszárik / Hungary)
I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli / Italy)

1964

Charulata (Satyajit Ray / India) *
Intentions of Murder (Shôhei Imamura / Japan)
Yearning (Mikio Naruse / Japan)
Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha / Brazil)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger / USA) Q
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard / France)
Men and Women (Walter Hugo Khouri / Brazil)
21-87 (Arthur Lipsett / Canada)
Ödenwaldstetten (Peter Nestler/ West Germany)
Window (Ken Jacobs / USA)

1963

The Big City (Satyajit Ray / India)
Joseph Kilian (Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt / Czechoslovakia)
The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad / Iran)
Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith / USA) Q
Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme / France) *
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage / USA)

1962

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni / France, Italy)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel / Mexico)
...A Valparaiso (Joris Ivens / France)
Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage / USA)
Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman / Sweden)
An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu / Japan)
Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard / France)

Very Nice, Very Nice (Arthur Lipsett / Canada / 1961)

1961

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais / France)
Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, Spain)
Very Nice, Very Nice (Arthur Lipsett / Canada)

1960

The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak / India) *
The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindô / Japan)

1959

Good Morning (Yasujirô Ozu / Japan)
The Astronauts (Chris Marker and Walerian Borowczyk / France)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson / France)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais / France)

1958

The Music Room (Satyajit Ray / India)
Somnambulists (Mieczyslaw Waskowski / Poland)*

1957

Kisses (Yasuzo Masumura / Japan)
Pyaasa (Guru Dutt / India) *
Yantra (James Whitney / USA)

1956

Child of Sorrow (Lamberto Avellana / Philippines)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson / France)

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais / France /1955)

1955

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais / France)
The Mechanics of Love (Willard Maas and Ben Moore / USA)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer / Denmark)
She was like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita / Japan) *
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton / USA)

1954

An Inn at Osaka (Heinosuke Gosho / Japan)
Inaugurations of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger / USA) Q

1953

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi / Japan)
Where Chimneys Are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho / Japan)

1952

The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi / Japan) *

1951

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson / France)

1950

Orpheus (Jean Cocteau / France)
A Song of Love (Jean Genet / France) Q
Afrique 50 (René Vautier / France)

1949

Late Spring (Yasujirô Ozu / Japan)

1948

1947

Fireworks (Kenneth Anger / USA) Q

1946

Ritual in Transfigured Time (Mayan Deren / USA)

1945

The Eye and the Ear (Franciszka Themerson & Stefan Themerson / U.K.)

1944

The Private Life of A Cat (Alexander Hammid / USA)
At Land (Maya Deren / USA)

1943

Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer / Denmark)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid / USA)

1942

1941

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges / USA)

1940

1939

1938

1937

1936

1935

The Goddess (Wu Yonggang / China / 1934)

1934

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo / France)
The Goddess (Wu Yonggang / China)

1933

Oramunde (Emlen Etting / USA)

1932

1931

Limite (Mário Peixoto / Brazil)
The Blood of A Poet (Jean Cocteau / France)

1930

Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko / Soviet Union / USSR)
L'Age D'Or (Luis Buñuel / France)

1929

The Pearl (Henri D'Ursel / Belgium)
Rain (Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken / Netherlands)

1928

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton / USA)

1927

1926

A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa / Japan)
The Sixth Part of the World (Dziga Vertov / USSR)

1925

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein / USSR)

1924

1923

Faithful Heart (Jean Epstein / France)

1922

Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty / USA)

1921

1920

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene / Germany)

1919

1918

1917

1916

1915

1914

1913

1912

1911

1910

1909

1908

Electric Hotel (Segundo de Chomón / France)
The Haunted House (Segundo de Chomón / France)

1907

1906

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Wallace McCutcheon and Edwin S. Porter / USA)

King of Dollars (Segundo de Chomón / France / 1905)

1905

King of Dollars (Segundo de Chomón / France)

1904

1903

1902

A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès / France)

1901

1900

1899

1898

1897

1896

Arrival of a Train (Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière / France)

1895

L'Arroseur Arrose (Louis Lumière / France)

------------------------

Note on the list: Above is a tight, trimmed, and concise compilation of my favorite films collected and sifted from the last six to seven years of cinephilia. This is a reformatted version of my favorites from MUBI.com.

------------------------

Cinema is X, X is Cinema

2013-06-09T22:29:00.000+08:00

...

Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami / Japan / 2012)

Rodowick's book The Virtual Life of Film is perhaps the last film book I'll be reading for this year before turning to the books of Deleuze particularly his "Guide to Non-fascist Way of Life" Anti-Oedipus (forgive me Mark Seem, but it is a Marx-Nietzsche-Freud synthesis leaning towards Marx --- everything that I ever wanted to read) and the sequel, A Thousand Plateaus. My goal is to get through these books before I can jump into his Cinema 1 and 2 series. Along with these readings, I'm also in the process of back reading Adrian Martin's sources of his newly published book on figural analysis, Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez. My initial readings include the essays of Auerbach, Figura and Mimesis.

Going back to Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film, after following Rodowick's enunciation of the concept 'medium' thru his analysis of Carroll's essay "Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts", it felt almost discomforting when he mentioned Carroll's five conditions or criteria for an object to be a moving picture:

"...something (x) is a moving picture:

Only if x is a detached display, that is, a visual array presenting an image whose space is discontinuous with the spectator's bodily orientation.

Only if x belongs to a class of things from which the impression of movement is technically possible,

Only if performance tokens of x are generated by a template that is a token; that is, the individual projection of a given 'movie' is inseparable from its presentation template (celluloid strip, videotape, MPEG-2 file). Nonetheless, the movie will also continue to exist as long as some token of it does, regardless of the physical basis of the template.

Only if performance tokens of x are not artworks in their own right. The performance of a play is an autonomous and unique interpretation that may be judged as an artwork in its own right. But a movie 'performance' is only the repeatable display of a record (film projection , playing a videotape), which is why Carroll insists "that motion picture are not object of artistic evaluation, whereas theatrical performances are... [motion] pictures are not a performing art --- i.e., they are not something whose performance is itself an art" ("Defining the Moving Image" 69). Another way of saying this is that for Carroll all aspects of movie creation (scenario writing, acting, direction, editing, etc.) are integrated into a final record from which they are not detachable. And we evaluate not the recording, but rather the artistic activities embodied and fixed within it.

Only if x is two-dimensional."

It seems complete yet there is something limiting in the way Carroll put it. I also wonder if there are other similar definitions of 'film' or 'cinema' (I can think of Thompson's definition in Breaking the Glass Armour) wherein the theorist or critic works on very specific a priori accounts to circumspect an object. Would it be too essentialist to do so? I wonder.

------------

Foucault on Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life

2013-06-04T16:40:00.001+08:00

...

Boy with Machine (Richard Linders, 1954)

I will quote from the Preface of Felix Guttari and Gilles Deleuze's first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. Foucault wrote:

"...one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchiza-tion.

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary or nomadic.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

Do not use thought to ground a political practice of Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

Do not become enamored of power."

----

Notes and Scribbles on Cinema: Film Log Feb 2013

2013-01-30T18:07:00.004+08:00

February is the month to be...

...just because Julie Delpy is the girl for ya!

from Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986)

I don't know what I'm getting at, but right now, my other film log has gone awry. And I'm practically pissed off every time I write on it for a day and a half just because it has some invisible bug hiding inside its HTML code. I've tried several xHTML mark up validators online to fix the code but all I got was an error message: "An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again." I cannot even save or preview the darn blog post. So shit.

Good thing, the month is ending. I have been planning to cut the previous film log into smaller segments. Instead of having one log for one whole year, I will cut it to one log per month because the previous one has gotten pretty long, which is great anyway. I still have that itchy writing bug somewhere inside me to continue this masturbatory activity. I've also been planning to write a set of articles for submission to different journals (in print and online) for the rest of the quarter. So let us see where that will take us. I still don't have a decent job though so that pretty much limits me to do extra shit around the metro. I stay home most of the time and wait for plants to grow between my armpits and crutch. I've been reading a lot though. I just finished the first part of Rodowick's Reading the Figural last night so expect some notes here in the next few days.

For the meantime folks, let's stop the Cybercrime law from happening. You don't want bugs and viruses floating around when you open Google or Facebook or even this blog. So let's be vigilant, shall we?

Jan 27:

The Fluffer (Wash West and Richard Glatzer / U.S./ 2001) - 3/5 - Wash West's depiction of the gay identity in The Fluffer is fractured by commodified fetishistic elements. The visionary, the omnipresent character Sean, is the body closest to the human artifice. His body double, a complete inversion of him, is a girl named Babylon, achieves the human artifice model. They are both channels of human emotions. The fetishistic body belongs to Johnny Rebel: the porn star, the hedonist, and the Antoine Dionel who will look into the camera at the end of the film. In a way, there is an observable dialectics between the commodified body and pure body in the film. We see it through Sean as he extends his affection to the object of his erotic desire, Johnny Rebel. But they are infusable bodies, impenetrable and unalike. Johnny's commodified body sits in an nonnegotiable narcissistic void which Sean and Babylon cannot enter. The visuality of this void is discursive somehow because it reflects the architecture of power in the porn industry and fractures the gay identity. The void, as the film would visualize, is mutually inclusive with capitalistic structure. Their only relationship is to benefit from each other. Sean suffers from this mutuality and began to question the validity of his feelings for Johnny. Babylon also suffers from Johnny's ultimate descent into the void. In the film, she became the element of social tragedy making her the most socially embedded character embodying motherhood, life, and the hope for change. The movement of bodies in the film resembles a ménage à trois: three bodies intertwined and restricted by their own virtuality. Their only synthesis in film can be found in the last montage wherein the finality of their own virtual existence is arranged in an intercut of shots. The film ends this way: dispersive and ambiguous, with ties broken.

Jan 29:

Near Death (Frederick Wiseman / U.S. / 1989) - 5/5 - Frederick Wiseman's heartbreaking documentary forces one to endure and mutate into the frames. It inhabits multitudes of reality and engages the audience in a dialectical exchange about ethics and physicality of death. Wiseman is so keen with human subjects that his film became an orchestra of human voices and figures in different emotional states. His camera is invisible, roaming through the complex interstices of Beth Israel Hospital, clothed from the frailties of its human inhabitants. The result is an astounding 6-hour plunge into the complexity of the human body on the verge of extinction. Like many of Wiseman's films, Near Death explores the body in relation to space. In Welfare (1975), Wiseman observes the architectural power design of a welfare institution in New York. In La Danse - Le Ballet de L'Opera de Paris (2009), Wiseman documents the perpetual cadence of the ballet dancer's mechanize body in a dance institution. In Blind (1987), Wiseman presents to us the struggle of blind people in a school for the blind. In Near Death, Wiseman audaciously commands the camera to capture the human drama behind the walls of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) --- a hospital space that can only be accessed mostly by doctors and relatives of patients. Wiseman unveils the architecture of this intense space and shows us a slice of the human condition in that particular environment. This particular space gravitates towards the human body in its generic form. This body holds the vessel of information that gives an ethnographic standpoint and aids the film to form nested causality about the human body as it reverberates within the principal notion of life and death.

||||||| THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY DAY: D.N. Rodowick summarizing Foucault's "postmodern" theory of power in a few sentences:

"Architecture itself tells us more about the potentiality of the body, the forces it affects and that affect it, than any other enterprise. It is the design of spaces to live and work in, to travel across, and to communicate through, in ways that limit certain movements and enable others, and, as such, is an exemplary expression of power. Foucault’s definition of how power encounters the body makes the point succinctly: divide in space; order in time; compose in space-time. An ‘‘architectural’’ theory of power thus diagrams forms of collectivity—distinct in their spatial and temporal organization—and demonstrates how movements of bodies and flows of information are both enabled and constrained." (Reading the Figural 42)

Jan 30:

||||||| Three videos: A Triptych

Jan 31:

Winnie The Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall / U.S. / 2011) - 4/5 - Deep into the hand-drawn frames of Winnie The Pooh, a liminal space exist where linguistic and visual elements collide in a figural interstice. In obvious instances, this "betweeness" becomes contingent to the storyline via audio narrator's perpetual manipulation of the visual and expressible elements of the film. The audio narrator takes the form of an omnipotent, omnipresent body visually "unseen" yet heard, an 'aural' godlike figure that deliberately tosses the textual elements into its visual counterparts. This conscious effort to devise such a play of visual and linguistic elements is well beyond what current Hollywood films are doing. Surely, there is some pedagogical vibe emancipated from those play of words and figures: jumbled letters falling in the virtual field of the story, Pooh hopping in paragraphs and sentences, and the letter-ladder used by the characters to climb out of the hole. It has some likeness with Broken Down Film (1985) and many Polish animators in terms of its manipulative plasticity of the animation frame, a method subversive enough to make the audience rethink of language itself. In the film, the "Back Soon" monster and its imaginary contours prompts the failure of words for self-identity --- meaning, words and phrases are highly contingent to context-based reasoning. It is not simply misinterpretation per se, but the natural characteristic of words to fail to achieve an identity independent of 'context' ---- self-identity. The visual look of the "Back Soon" soon never metastasized into a fully formed body. It remained a lingering by-product of delusion, anxiety, worry that haunts the characters until the end. It's figuration is a ghost, a chimera but only without a form, a body: an object of reification. The monster is magnified and feared in a collective sense --- an element of mass hysteria ordering and re-ordering narrative circumstances and displacing psychological states of the film. It only disappeared when Christopher Robin, the source of the ambiguous message, clarified the context of "Back Soon".

Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax / France / 1986) - 4/5 - Mauvais Sang has a lot to say about the French New Wave and the French film aesthetics of the 1980s. Its sinewy, colorful images and audacious spirit in film making --- at one point, Carax has to shoot in high altitudes using a plane --- shows the genius of Carax. Its ambitiousness and inventiveness in aesthetics is unique given the milieu of French filmmaking in the 1980s. Most of the French arthouse filmmakers at time: Agnes Varda, Maurice Pialat, Andre Techine, the older Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet have focused on banalities of French life. Some of them have engaged in minimalism and only a few, like Carax, had the balls to re-orient their aesthetics in new ways. Carax consciously attenuates his shots by putting them in different temporal modalities: fast-paced versus slow-pace, one-take versus multiple-angle takes. This made Mauvais Sang an intertextual film highly conscious of its temporal design. It provides layering and stiching of visual and expressible elements made possible by the improvement of the film technology in the 1980s. The camera has become more complex, more sensitive to time-rendered motion, and handy, which explains the freedom Carax in filming at high altitudes. A similar temporal modality has been explored in Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979). Carax has fully realized its function in Mauvais Sang. The architecture of space in Mauvais Sang is futuristic plagued with a pseudo-scientific anxiety: STBO epidemic --- a sexually transmitted disease among young people. Carax work around this main arch and inserted digressions with particular proximity to Nouvelle Vague especially Godard and his films A Bout de Souffle (1960), Bande A Part (1964), and Contempt (1963). Juliette Binoche and Michel Picoli are two obvious transgressive bodies cut-out from the Nouvelle Vague movement: the former resembling Anna Karina with the hair and the latter as 'Michel Picoli' himself in Contempt. The visuality of the film tells a lot also about Carax particularity in color homage. There were great and, at some point, overwhelming tinges of red, yellow, and blue splashed across the frames, similar to what Godard did in Pierrot La Fou (1965) and La Chinoise (1967).

Feb 2:

Re-watch of three films for a sleepover with friends: Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki / Japan / 1997), Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2006) and Zombadings I: Patayin sa Shokot Si Remington (Jade Castro / Philippines / 2010).

Feb 4:

Pusong Bato (Pam Miras / Philippines / 2012) - 3/5 - Pusong Bato comes from the visual tradition of recent crop of Filipino experimental filmmakers: digitized hand-processed films. This kind of film processing signals the two events in the history of film: the death of the photographic roots film and the digitization of the medium. Hand-processed films like Pusong Bato, Anak Araw (Gym Lumbera, 2012), Class Picture (Timmy Harn and Gym Lumbera, 2012), Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011) and digitized films shot in analog camera like Colossal (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012), Big Boy (Shireen Seno, 2011), and its early example A Short Film About Indio Nacional (Martin, 2005) have successfully attempted to emulate the photographic image --- the purest expression of cinema --- and brought the medium closest to the photographic truth. Their digitization as a post-production practice sutured a new visuality in cinema, the figural (a topic I will elaborate here in a few days), and also revealed the impossibility of today's film making to do everything in analogical terms. Economic limitations in analog film making in the Philippines have rendered that particular film technology obsolescent or as good as dead. Today's interface technology or the ones used to project films requires films in digital format complicating the return of the practice to its analogical temperament. Films like Pusong Bato commands the movement of the analog-sculpted images to the simulated and computer-aided virtual world of digital filmmaking. Its hybridized aesthetics dissolves the borders between the visual practices inherent in the analog practice and the digital manipulations applied during the post-production processing. Philippine's increasing output of hand-processed films for the past two to three years must be assessed as a unique and distinguishing visual trend --- probably the result of overriding influence of several key figures in local and international cinema: Ben Rivers and Raya Martin. Raya Martin's persistent exploration of the stylistics of the past open the doors for this tradition of shooting in 16mm, 8mm, and several other obsolescent formats. This aesthetic principle will continue to strengthen the identity of local experimental films in the years to come. Pam Miras's Pusong Bato is carved out from this tradition and the old tradition of Jean Epstein. Its images displays an uncanny silent film treatment with rhythmic editing with a romantic story arc overlay. Ethereal black-and-white images draws out an alternate world, far from the glossy aesthetics of other local independent films. Films like Pusong Bato reinforces the artistic sensibilities of the local independent films which eroded for the past few years. With the arrival of the hand-processed films from filmmakers (Lumbera, Miras, and Harn) and the analog-digital hybrids (Seno and Alcazaren) the separation of truly alternative films from independent films with commercial sensibilities has finally come.

Pascalina (Pam Miras / Philippines / 2012) - 3.5/5 - Pascalina's dark and dissolving images, a product of lo-fi digitization from a Harinezumi camera, can be retraced back to Raya Martin's digital pursuits in Now Showing (2008) and John Torres' Ang Ninanais (2010). However, the function of lo-fi digital register in Pam Miras' Pascalina has more sensorial, more visual-layering appeal than Martin's historical take on it and Torres' use for subversive political imagery. The resulting cinematographic effect is phenomenal, it unifies the incommensurable strangeness of its narrative. On top of this visual and narrative construction principles, it is interesting to ask the nature of the figural at work. Pascalina is a completely digitize character, a product of several technological ramifications dictated by the architectural space of the Harinezumi camera and other post-production computer programs. Unlike Pusong Bato, which is a hybrid between analog and digital, Pascalina is fully realized digital film that underwent numerous digital transformations before achieving its visuality. Hence, Pascalina's transfiguration into an aswang, a lower mythological creature in Philippine folklore, is mechanistic in all its contextual ambiguities. Pascalina is an object of reification, an incomplete image, with visual edges dissolving in the dark 'lo-finess' of its frames.

Feb 5:

Notes

I've been exhausted lately because of many things. I did a lot of stuff last week and I'm expecting a large workload in the next few weeks. I'm not keeping up with my pace. I don't know if I'll be writing on this notes but I feel a bit sick for some reason. I might need to take up a few food supplements.

Feb 15:

|||||||||||||||| Finished reading this:

Writers' Bodies. Writers' bodies are involved in their writing. Writing invites sexuality. Like kings and other people in power. As regards to men, it's as if they'd slept with our minds, penetrated our minds at the same time our bodies. There haven't been exception as far as I'm concerned. The same kind of fascination operated even with lovers who weren't intellectuals. As for a worker a woman who writes books ---- that's something he'll never had. It's like that all over the world, for all writers, men and women alike. They're sex objects par excellence. When I was still very young I was attracted to elderly men because they were writers. I've never been able to imagine sex without intelligence, or intelligence without a kind of absence from oneself. Lots of intellectuals are clumsy lovers - unadventurous, apprehensive, and absent-minded. It was all the same to me as long as when they weren't with me they were, as writers, just as absent from their own bodies. I've noticed that writers who are superb at making love are much more rarely great writers than those who are scared and not so good at it. Talent and genius evoke rape, just as they evoke death. Sham writers don't have these problems. They're sound and healthy and you can go with them quite safely. When both members of a couple are writers the wife says: 'My husband's a writer.' The husband says: 'My wife writes too.' The children says: 'My father writes books, and so does my mother, sometimes.'

------- an excerpt from MARGUERITE DURAS' PRACTICALITIES.

Feb 24:

||||||| Notes from an Ideological Insanity

I.

A few weeks ago, I finished reading an important chunk of D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural. It was astutely entitled Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media. I continued reading through Rodowick's book on Part II. Reading the Figural and got off before the section on The Figure and the Text. I realized that I am reading one of the most difficult books I have read in my entire life. I shut the door right then and there and started reading Rodowick's book, The Virtual Life of Film. I figure that, if I continue reading Rodowick's philosophical book Reading the Figural, i'll waste my time figuring its difficult philosophical reverberations. I wanted to focus more on film: its oddities, visualities, and historical determinants. It suddenly occurred to me that Rodowick has something great to say about film. He opens a lot of questions more than answers. Questions like: can film really be an artform? Why is film a very difficult medium? What happened when everyone turned digital? What is the future of film? Those questions have answers in the first few pages of Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film. The first part of the book fleshes out a lot of important (and neglected) fundamental visualities/textualities of the film form.

II.

But in just two weeks ago, I stopped reading film books. It's because I finally accepted a job offer I've been looking for more than a month now. It's a Chemical Engineering related job. A day job, from 9AM to 6PM with a lunchbreak between 1230ish to 130ish. All my office-mates and bosses are Chemical Engineering graduates, and some of them are licensed. I very much enjoy my job. I just sit and write reports, which is what I wanted. And the best thing about it actually is that we get to travel once a week to visit clients, have meetings, do seminars. The company is an environmental consultancy firm so it's very close to Chemical Engineering and maybe my springboard to an Environmental Engineering career in the future. I wish to go to Canada in the near future and continue my studies there. Hopefully, at U of T.

III.

I devised a new method on choosing my weekly line-up of movies. I have around 73 to-watch films (see list here) in my hard drive from KG and SMZ. I can't watch them all at once so I used random.org to produce a random number from 1 to 73. The first 10 random.org number will determine which film I will watch for the week. I already watch the first one, a short film by Karpo Godina. Here is the rest of my list.

DOC'S KINGDOM (Robert Kramer / Portugal / 1987) - 90 mins
HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2001) - 95 mins
THE UNSCRUPULOUS ONES (Ruy Guerra / Brazil / 1962) - 100 mins
JULY RAIN (Marlen Khutsiyev / USSR / 1966) - 107 Mins
OXHIDE (Liu Jiayin / China / 2005) - 110 mins
THE LAST BOLSHEVIK (Chris Marker / Finland-France / 1993) - 121 mins
BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Shohei Imamura / Japan / 1983) - 130 mins
THE HUNTERS (Theo Angelopoulos / Greece / 1977) - 168 mins
PROFOUND DESIRES OF THE GODS (Shohei Imamura / Japan / 1968) - 172 mins

Anyway, I have to sleep. I have work tomorrow.

Feb 27:

The Oscar Anti-Appreciation Post

Feb 28:

Backlog and Film logging

It's end of the month and I hate to say goodbye to February. Feb is a good month for me: new job and a revived habit of reading --- thanks the to long traffic jam at Nepa QMart, Cubao and EDSA Santolan, I finished three books. Though I wish I have more time to write for each of the film I saw. Don't have time for a round-up write-up either, I have a deadline tomorrow. Here's a summary of ratings for the films I've watched at latter part of the month

Watership Down (Martin Rosen / U.K. / 1978) - 4/5
The Way of the Dragon (Bruce Lee / H.K. / 1972) - 3/5
Pieta (Kim Ki-Duk / South Korea / 2012) - 3/5
Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii / Japan / 1985) - 4/5
Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos / Greece / 1988) - 5/5
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel / Mexico / 1962) - 5/5
A Grin Without A Cat (Chris Marker / France / 1977) - 5/5
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang / Taiwan / 2005) - 4.5/5
Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi / Poland / 1973) - 5/5
New York City Inferno (Jacque Scandelari / U.S. / 1978) - 3/5
The Corridor (Sharunas Bartas / Lithuania / 1994) - 5/5
Healthy People For Pastime (Karpo Ačimović-Godina / Yugoslavia / 1971) - 4/5
Doc's Kingdom (Robert Kramer / Portugal-France-U.S. / 1987) - 4/5
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell / U.S. / 2001) - 4/5

See you on March!

[more to come]
****

Notes and Scribbles on Cinema - Film Log January 2013

2013-01-07T15:19:00.001+08:00

...

from The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

End-of-the-year Hullabaloo

The last thing I did last year 2012 was perfecting the subtitles of a pre-code Hollywood film The Story of Temple Drake (1933). I was trying to be a good site member of this exclusive film forum which offers credits to members who can do subtitling for films especially those in language other than English. So that was it, just like that. I transcribed the audio, and with the help of my friend VisualSubSync, I produced the subtitle for just a day and a half. VSS is really wonderful. It is not as complex as Aegisub but it saves a lot of memory. Plus, you get to playback portions of the film in slow motion for hard-to-catch words. As with The Story of Temple Drake (1933), the film is a bomb! Well, it's not really the best film of all time, but I just love its humorous dialogues which made it fun to transcribe and Jack La Rue! Oh Jack La Rue, marry me, you sexy beast!

Now, with the project, I've thinking about doing a long film log (one blogpost can suffice for this one) where I can place some of the screenshots (maximum of three) of the films I will be watching for this year. Maybe I'll place short masturbatory reviews below each post. Nothing fancy or academic, nothing grand, just some blabber about the film. I successfully made a lighter one for 2012 --- just a list, nothing more --- at Mubi.com. So this is my second attempt, and an upgrade of the original plan I have in mind. I can't update this regularly, but I'll make sure I'll make it until the end of the year.

January 2013

Jan 1:

Je T'aime, Je T'aime (Alain Resnais/ France / 1968) - 4/5 - This film is the closest film to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2000). Strangely,they have a similar structure. Both are nonlinear, cognitive-based, and follows a romantic story arc of a man remembering his past love. In the film, Resnais explores the temporal element of memory: its vastness, its scope, its repetitive design, its density. Je T'aime, Je T'aime's shot-to-shot structure is like a hopscotch game, going forward and backward, with time. I had fun watching this maybe because it feels like an intermediate film between the Soviet Montage experiments of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov of the 1920s and Michel Gondry's film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of the 2000s. The stylistic tradition in editing, from its formation to its transformation(s), is clearly manifested along this line of movement: from its ideological origins to its permeation in art cinema to its entry in conventional and Hollywood filmmaking. Clearly, the structure of Cloud Atlas (2012) is near to this stylistic tradition.

Jan 2:

Massillon (William E. Jones / U.S. / 1991) - 5/5 - A completely forgotten film from the Queer New Wave, neglected and unknown, Massillon is William E. Jones' experimental and autobiographical film. The first half recounts his childhood days in a very conservative city of Massillon, Ohio. The second half examines the institutional oppression of several dominant Judeo-Christian communities in different states in the U.S. to homosexuals. The film has no pictorial aggrandizement of the male body, or even convolutions of it, unlike other Queer New Wave films which gave the male body image a sexopolitical layer. Its images are all external shots of spaces in rural and industrial Ohio. The film's narrative unfolds through the careful and vivid audio narration of William E. Jones himself. There maybe times that his images (see above) can be associated to the phallic figure, in all its diminutive forms. But the film's pictorial value manifested simply as it is: a record of places, an illustration of terrains, a geography of the self. This adds to the sincerity and simplicity of the film. It's quite a unique and relaxing experience.

Jan 6:

El Presidente (Mark Meily / Philippines / 2012) - 2/5 - A pseudo-historical farce, a parasitic revisionist film that tricks and misleads the audience, a propaganda disguised as a popular film. Those are some of the few descriptions that I can write about this film. And I can continue writing more and more. It was dull and aimless; full of artificiality and gimmicks; full of unnecessary digressions. It is devoid of emotional complexity with cardboard characters cut out from some alternate universe. The film has no sense of purpose except maybe to chronologically arrange the events surrounding Emilio Aguinaldo from Day 1. It appears like textbook lacking a soul. It turns itself page-by-page, lining up events that do not even seem to paint a rational picture of Aguinaldo. What the film does to Aguinaldo is to paint his skeletal system, a rotting portrait, a dead man. I can not even start talking about its sub-characters. It manages to demonize Antonio Luna, hell even Andres Bonifacio, to achieve a diametrical heroic image of Aguinaldo. This questionable subject positioning adds to the muddled historiography of El Presidente.

Jan 7:

Caravaggio (Derek Jarman / U.K. / 1986) - 4/5 - A film of textural depth, it approaches Caravaggio in dialectical terms: the object and its representation, the sacrilegious and the religious, the gaze and the eye, from past to present. Its figural images traverse between these binary poles creating an intertextual structure, a postmodern posturing. Jarman's use of poetic language in overtures completes the film's artistic vision. It deepens its taut exterior design, extends its dimensions, and replenishes its rather trite narrative. When I was watching it, it felt as if I was watching a costume drama in theater. The frames are immovable and pasted, as if they continuously imitate Caravaggio's paintings. The score in the ending credits, which he also used in the last memorable lines of Blue (1993), hints the melancholy of Jarman who was suffering the symptoms of HIV at that time (he was diagnosed with HIV December 1986).

Jan 8:

(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton / U.S. / 1971) - 3.5/5 - Not all avant-garde films work for me. Some of them have hits and misses. I have an ingrained prejudice towards avant-garde films. I see them as the key style towards unlocking cinema's power of subverting the hegemonic presence of pictorial and narrative conventions. It is a classic theory---very Amos Vogel--- and I work always within that framework. However, just last night, I was struck by a numbing feeling. This film, (nostalgia) by famous avant-gardist Hollis Frampton, came out rather a miss than a hit, at least, based on my initial gut feeling. I haven't read his biography online before I watched it, but it came to me void of other filmic elements. The film was lacking something else to achieve a totality, a completeness in filmic experience, which I find in most films by Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. Maybe it lacks some emotional chord, some sincerity, some truth, some grand connection to cinema or to life. (nostalgia)'s anachronistic style is very constricting for its simplicity: you have an audio narration and its pictorial equivalence. They are arranged in (nostalgia) in such a way that the audio narration precedes the picture it describes. There are twelve pictures (and twelve narrations) burnt using a hot pad. On each picture, Frampton builds its genealogy, its anecdotal founding, its significance or insignificance to his life. The film is a distillation of photographic memories without the sentimentality that usually goes with it. This is my first Hollis Frampton film. I do not know that, after reading a couple of write-ups about him, he's engaged in 'structural filmmaking', an avant-garde style that uses concepts from mathematics and science in making films. This is different from the cinema of Brakhage-Mekas-Hutton which derives subjects from concrete or automated experiential sources. The use of 'concept' in most of his write-ups interests me because this may have been the first time that a filmmaker was driven to do 'conceptual films'. Although some might say that Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were the ones who pioneered 'conceptual filmmaking', this one has no ideological component. Frampton uses concepts from the constrictive halls of the scientific academia and fits it to filmmaking. That is perhaps the most interesting thing I've learned from him. I am interested in watching some of his other films: his most famouse Zorn's Lemma (1970), Maxwell's Demons (1968), and his longest film Hapax Legomena (1971 - 1872) which spans 3 hours and 22 minutes.

Jan 9:

NEW BOOKS:

1. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin) - P75.00 ~ $1.50

2. F.F. Script of Reservoir Dogs (1992) - P115.00 ~ $2.10

I just had a lucky day. I found these two darlings in Booksale near my place here in Manila. I just passed by to run through their re-stocked shelves and, to my surprise, a Rosenbaum-Martin just popped out on one of the corners of the shop. Nobody's looking at it so I grabbed it and dashed to the counter and head back home to catch an article or two. I bought the Reservoir Dogs script for the screening of my film club on Saturday. I will be giving it out for raffle.

Senses of Cinema World Poll 2012 is out! Here's my entry [link]:

Colossal (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012)

Jungle Love (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012)

Nang Gabing Maging Sinlaki ng Puso ang Bato (Darna: A Stone is a Heart You Can't Swallow, Jon Lazam, 2012)

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012)

Da-reun na-ra-e-suh (In Another Country, Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Amour (Love, Michael Haneke, 2012)

Mamay Umeng (Dwein Baltazar, 2012)

Ang Prinsesa, Ang Prinsipe at si Marlborita (The Princess, the Prince and Marlborita, Carl Joseph Papa, 2012)

Kung Ano Ang Alam ng Manok (What the Chicken Knows (Or, The Eight Stages of Grief), Ramon Raquid, 2012)

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (Lav Diaz, 2012)

Diablo (Mes De Guzman, 2012)

Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (A Star's Journey into the Dark Night, Arnel M Mardoquio, 2012)

Anak Araw (Gym Lumbera, 2012)

The Great Cinema Party (Raya Martin, 2012)

Mater Dolorosa (Adolfo Alix Jr., 2012)

Hooray! I'll be writing about some of them soon --- in long form. A great year in Philippine cinema, I must say.

from An Inn at Osaka (1954)

RE-POSTED:

Chris' "Year-End List: Best Films I've Seen This 2012"

"I didn't see that many films, compared to last year. I've only seen a handful of 2012 films too. None made the list, and I have no year-end list of favorite films released this year either. The films are listed in a somewhat preferential order. In any other day, I'd probably consider a different order, but it's the first two films that really, really astonished me.'

Batang West Side (Lav Diaz, 2001)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo, 2000)
Where the Chimneys are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho, 1953)
What Happened Was... (Tom Noonan, 1994)
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004)
Intentions of Murder (Shōhei Imamura, 1964)
On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo, 2002)
An Inn at Osaka (Heinosuke Gosho, 1954)
Route One/USA (Robert Kramer, 1989)
Elsewhere (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2001)
The Long Darkness (Kei Kumai, 1972)
Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970)
Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, 2009)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
Goodbye, South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996)
Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Jan 10:

from Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007)

Currently Reading: Jean-Michel Fordon's Evenement: Abdel's Language and French Reality [Cahiers du Cinema, No. 629, Dec. 2012, link]

Jan 12:

La Vie Nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux / France / 2002) - 4.5/5 - Philippe Grandrieux's nightmarish film touches the linguistic soul of cinema, or particularly an age-old problem in appropriation. The film has several layers of linguistic interstices: the aural (or auditory), the figural, and the temporal. Each of these linguistic interstices vibrates within its own autonomous space, but also, with some emulsified force, these interstices transmits significations from its interiors to its exteriors and vice-versa in a dialectical flow. It was as though the inversions I initially have: the visible and the invisible, the point object and the non-point object, the audible and the inaudible, transmogrified into a multi-armed beast of sensations and psychical transformations. This is one of the films that resurrects the form and replenishes the figural void of contemporary cinema.

Notes: Looking Further into La Vie Nouvelle

"[...]Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to the body’s modernity – the modernity of Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name only a few – and thus returns the anthropological need for representation to a state of immanence. The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means descending, via the intermittent pathways of neuronal connection, down into the most shadowy depths of our sensory experiences, to the point of confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle)[...]"

---- The Body's Night: An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux by Nicole Breneze.

---- o o o ----

Tabu (Miguel Gomes / Portugal / 2012) - 4/5 - Tabu is simply likable because it rehashes the age-old theme of forbidden love in the most idiosyncratic way. A paradise and a paradise lost: Tabu's two-part description invokes Milton's works and the temporal binary of the founding and the fall of worlds. Tabu retraces character histories, relationships, and memories within this temporal binary in a new form with elements traversing between poles. Gomes' reinvention of the prosaic connection between the image and the sound, especially the pseudo-silent half of the film, presents to us the stylistic game (Gomes likes games apparently) he wants his audiences to play. He controls two layers of sound: non-diegetic and diegetic, often silencing the diegetic sound of the characters and allows the plasticity of the image to follow through. Gomes asks his audience to "fill-in-the-blanks", to invent, to suffice the void in diegesis. This is a good example of the application of constructive reification in cinema. In some ways La Vie Nouvelle (2002) involves also a process of reification, a matter of forming a complete picture with the help of other details. But what makes La Vie Nouvelle's reification different from Tabu is that in Tabu the reification completes easily. In La Vie Nouvelle, the reification renders somewhat incomplete, or even lost. This makes Tabu a more graspable film in terms of establishing narrative connections in a perceptual sense.

Jan 13:

CURRENTLY READING THIS: Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New Media by D.N. Rodowick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. A book review by Warwick Mules.

||| SHORT FILMS FOR SUNDAY:

from Once Upon a Time (Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica / Poland / 1957) - 3/5

[link]

and:

from Broken Down Film (Osamu Tezuka / Japan / 1985) - 4/5 - [link]

I have seen two animated films today over my stay at a friend's house: Once Upon a Time by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and Broken Down Film Osamu Tezuka. These two films have different types of animation and came from two different eras. Once Upon a Time is a cut-out animation and a fusion of the genius of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, two Polish animators from the Easter European animation scene. Borowczyk and Marker's animated film, Les Astronautes (1959), also a cut-out gem, is one of my favorite animated films ever. It's bizarre but humorous, a slapstick film but only animated. I have not seen any animation by Jan Lenica which makes this film a first time. In Once Upon a Time, Brorowczyk and Lenica achieves a different type cut-out animation: minimalist but self-conscious. We see a dark colored object (possibly as black potato) with arms and legs of the same shape and size detached from its body: an object of reification. The film follows this figure in its adventure to find its true form. The self-consciousness of the object as an abstraction is itself the comical subject of the film. It isn't only aware of its form, but also conscious of the immediate space in the animation canvass. The film felt like a parody of non-representational art during the 1950s fashioned as a game of figures.

On the other spectrum of animation, the plastic representational one, Broken Down Film remains to me one of the funniest ones I've seen. It also works as a paradoy of silent cinema. The film is created by Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese animator who created the famous animated film Astro Boy (1966). Tezuka's genius and mastery of the animated frames can be seen in Broken Down Film. The film is a series orchestrated gags on the limits of the cinematic frame. It consciously plays with the spatial limit of the frame and it comes from the traditional slapstick animated films of early Walt Disneys like Steamboat Willie (1928). Tezuka invents a new world within the interstices of cinematic frame. He fulfills the possibility of situating the body between borders. This play with abstraction of the frame is a bold and unique take of animation, an eye opener for me as to what type of construction principles Japanese animators have. During the era it was made, Studio Ghibli and other animation studios in Japan were producing essential animated films by Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki.

Jan 14:

Arena (João Salaviza / Portugal / 2009) - 3.5/5 - Arena is a film about the space perceived through the eyes Mauro played by Carloto Cotta, the Gian Luca of Tabu (2012). His body is withheld physically within the confines of his apartment: arrested in its interstices. He is under house arrest, apparently. He wears this alarm-triggering device around his ankle. The film has no grand conflict other than a bunch of kids bullying him and stealing his money. He then faced the leader of the kids at the latter part of the film claiming for retribution. Instead of plummeting into a fit of rage, Mauro laid down his body under the sun on the roof-deck of the building. But why? It seemed to me that the film has some political agenda. The spatial design hints that this is a portrait of a lower class urban neighborhood in Portugal. A societal space restricted by class conflicts. But it doesn't explicitly address that issue. It doesn't provide a clear-cut political message. It lingers in the elaborate moment of a body moving in deep space, in a field of reality. It may have been contemplative in a sense that the sparse dialogue and the ambiguous motivation of the character imbibe a sense of existential ennui. Or even perhaps the body being free, or its movement from its captured state to its free state: a Sartrian sense of freedom. There can be multitudes of significations that a reviewer or scholar might look into. I initially took it as a gay film to my mistake. The film won the Short Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009.

!!! AN OBLIGATORY PICTURE OF João Salaviza

João Salaviza winning the Golden Bear for Short Film last 62nd Berlin International Film Festival

Jan 15:

R.I.P. Nagisa Ôshima (1932 - 2013)

Jan 16:

Where Chimneys Are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho / Japan / 1953) - 5/5 - The film is, by narrative structure, a mapping of post-war Japan's economic milieu. It is a film about the working class. The film is so conscious of its sociopolitical dimension it creates a nested commercial environment touching different booming industries in Japan during the 1950s. The four chimneys of Tokyo, a gravitating element in the film, draws the attention of each character. It is the image that opens the film and closes the film, serving as a Foucauldian panopticon tower that observes its surrounding landscape. It seems to overpower each character's motivations, suggesting perhaps that their action must always be re-evaluated according to what they do, what they own, what they value, and what they remember. They are social figures moving within the most desolate working class neighborhood in Tokyo. The main conflict in the film, which came out gradually in the middle, is how two couples living in one roof (maybe a duplex) will deal with an abandoned baby. This subject positioning, of two couples subjected with societal problem of rearing a child that is not theirs, is fairly a different take on Japanese culture compared to what Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi conjured. Ozu's vision is ascetic and sparse with characters coming from the middle class; while Mizoguchi's vision is compassionate and refined with characters' psychology well-explored. Of the three, Gosho is the most lighthearted, most humorous. His characters have fairly simple and basic desires and street-smart philosophies. But they embody typical working class values: strong-willed, impenetrable, and self-sufficient. The three directors paint the spirit of postwar Japan with Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi), Tokyo Story (Ozu), and Where Chimneys are Seen (Gosho) mirroring a spirit of a nation rebuilding itself.

Life of Pi (Ang Lee / U.S. / 2012) - 3/5 - If there is one thing that I have learned from Life of Pi, it is that there are other better, more convincing films whose main agenda is to re-insinuates the presence of God or any higher power. The film's premise, its guiding principle, is to prove the idea of God to this Caucasian writer by listening to Pi's idiosyncratic story of survival. The members of the audience are immediately positioned in his place functioning as the listener and the doubter. There is no dialectical resonance developed between me and the film. Everything, like most Hollywood films --- except maybe for the one film that I admire, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001) ----is one way. Its significations are direct. Perhaps its artificiality, which has something to do with its visual design, hinders it to form connections with me. Its images seem to appear picture-perfect, wondrous, and expansive; but all of it felt machine-invented: less organic and less personal, that at one point it seemed manipulative, generating a less sincere spiritual message.

Jan 17:

Nobody said it was easy.
Writing tips by Max Sebald.
Just another light missing.

Jan 18:

CURRENTLY READING: T.w. Adorno: Cinema in Spite of Itself --- but Cinema All the Same by Nicole Brenez. [here]

(suggested by Paul Grant, USC M.A. Film Studies Head, in addition to Rodowick's book on Figural Analysis I mentioned above)

Also:

I was part of the judging committee (jury) for U.P. Cinemas' Piling Obrang Video (POV) 9 in the Documentary and Experimental Category together with hardworking Human Rights worker, Kristine Kintana, and independent filmmaker and director of Ex Press (2011), Jet Leyco. I also guested in DZUP CineChichiriya hosted Joni Gutierrez and Cenon Palomares. The topic was about CINEPHILES!. Thank you so much everyone! Hooray for a day filled with cinema!

Jan 20:

from Beau Travail (Claire Denis / France / 1999)

||| Of Bodies and the Fuzzy Figural Analysis

On page 6 of Rodowick's book, Reading the Figural, I felt a sense of security. It's one of the feelings when one encounters a difficult text that gives a great sense of trajectory that one will reach a great conclusion at the end of one's reading. Rodowick's confidence in writing is enlivening enough that it made me refill my coffee cup twice yesterday. So there I was on page 6, and I suddenly encountered the word indexicality, which Rodowick describes to as: "Every discourse is haunted by perspective in that in order to mean, it must refer." Rodowick continues through the bloody paragraph refining the term:

"Indexicality means that discourse is shot through the visible: the énoncé [def] must point beyond its borders to objects positioned in space with respect to it. It is plunged into a gestural space that surrounds it, and it is riddles from within by deictic [def] holes whose functions is to indicated positionality in space (here/there) and in time (now/then)."

Now, this set of sentences builds upon many concepts that play with each other. We have indexicality redefined by Rodowick, which, according to him, is different from the indexicality of Charles Sanders Peirce, a semiotic idea coming from different functionality. Rodowick gives indexicality a sense of space by proclaiming that it must be "shot through the visible". To my mind, upon re-reading online definitions of it, it came to me a very basic concept. Examples of indexicality are 'I' which refers to the speaker now, 'here' which refers to a certain space, 'now' which refers to a certain time. It seems reasonable enough that Rodowick associates it with the visible as some sort of a 'pointing' process to space. Rodowick identifies this space as 'gestural' which lead me to Catherine Grant's list of articles about figural analysis. I am particularly interested in Benjamin Noys' article Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film [link]. But instead of reading Noys article, I venture first into other articles. I read first William Routt's take on figural analysis, a two-part article For Criticism [part 1 and part 2] published in the journal Screening the Past. Reading through it, I encounter a surprising observation that shattered me. This one concerns about Brenez' omission of Rodowick's book Reading the Figural. Routt observes (and sorry for quoting a humongous paragraph):

"It may be that D. N. Rodowick's "Reading the figural" (1991) has also been omitted in Brenez's bibliography because, like Andrew's "Figuration", it is less interested in the manifold possibilities of the idea of the figural (in this case derived from certain writings of Foucault and Deleuze) than in its strategic deployment (in this case, as a tool for good, old-fashioned ideological analysis). By contrast, the absence of Jean-François Lyotard's Discours, figure (1971) may perhaps be accounted for by the crazy things perpetrated in its wake, difficult for any responsible person to condone. If Andrew's and Rodowick's varying applications of ideas of figuration prove a bit retro in practice, those who are sometimes nominated as Lyotard's disciples (Claudia Eizykman, Tom Conley, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumeir in a late incarnation) are the tropprovo close ups of these mean streets. They have found an impossible Situation for figural analysis at the crossroads of Desire Avenue and Délire Street, next to Heartbreak Hotel." [link]

I began to wonder late last night that maybe there are two or more paths to Figural analysis. Perhaps that of Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin, a pathway of ideas seamlessly narrated in Martin's new book Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez [link]; and that of Lyotard and Rodowick which seems to me a way of making philosophy adapt to the new media. So with this in mind, I was suddenly ripped apart, thinking maybe I should focus more on Brenez and follow Martin's pathway in his new book. Is this the right decision? To abandon Rodowick and focus on Brenez? I was almost suddenly put to a stop after reading another article in Catherine Grant's list by Karl Hansson, Screening the Figural and the New Art Media [link], which attempts to trace the two strands of figural analysis together in one text. It conjures Lyotard's book, Discours, figure, and also Brenez notion of the figural. It's a funny experience reading through it and encountering this line of thought:

"Nicole Brenez starts her discussion of the figural by saying that there is no method for figural analysis. In a strict sense she is of course right, these aspects are perhaps too vague and too ambiguous to be called a method, but that I would say, is a methodical standpoint, and I think she in her text, by establishing some principles of thinking for analysis is creating a method for figural analysis. Maybe it's more appropriate to call it simply a figural approach." [link]

The word 'approach' reminded me of my early affair with Kristin Thompson's Neoformalism, which also denies itself as a method, but considers itself as an approach. Neoformalism is of course very far from figural analysis because its origins and style of analysis do not follow the interpretative route most film theorists use today. Figural analysis, though still vague to me, has something to do with 'interpretation' or specifically the relationship of the text to the image beyond the current linguistic theories that we have. Hansson assimilates his thoughts on the figural as:

"The figural is perhaps something you primarily describe in terms of a process (not an object). It has to do with something that happens to the image as the image. This is linked to the focus on the image as presence, and not a form of representation, and as I see it this presence is nothing else that the presence of the material and different effects due to the plasticity and materiality of moving images." [link]

But waking up today, the whole idea of the figural suddenly erupted in a different way. I woke up remembering the set of links Ira Lastrilla sent me over Facebook about Brenez' idea of the body. I was also reading last night Adrian Martin's article/analysis on Claire Denis, which was also about bodies.

Lining up the set of texts here, I felt new surge of coming back, of re-orientation towards this difficult but promising idea of the figural. I will start with Benjamin Noys' article Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film [link] to maybe flesh out the link I had yesterday with indexicality and gestural space. Then move towards Brenez' two articles: Incomparable Bodies [Screening the Past, 2011, link] and For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema [Framework, Issue 502, link]. I'll be finishing off this textual adventure with Martin's article Ticket to Ride: Claire Denis and the Cinema of the Body [Screening the Past, Issue 20: 2000, link]. And after that, maybe arrive at some conclusion about figural analysis and how it is done. Of course, on the side, I'll be reading Rodowick's book as supplementary to these texts. Wish me luck guys!

Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien / U.S.A. / 1988) - 4/5 - Isaac Julien's film is a cinema of the libidinal body, a figural manifestation that morphs across many disciplines from the gender psychology to the socio-political issue of the racial discrimination. In the film, this libidinal body has a repetitive and omnipresent nature. It has a string of temporal functions that traverses through the manifold of history. It often encounters visual entities from the past and from an imagined present. The film moves around this body conjuring up approaches, re-imaginations, and associations to other visual elements without really appropriating a direct signification to it. There was never a moment in the film that the characters developed their own narrative functions. They were instead multitudes of significations embedded in small situations with incomplete consequences, intertwined with poetic overtures of James Baldwin. There was this sequence that looked like a reference from Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950) adding perhaps to its sculptural quality. The film is sculptural in a sense that it rebuilds the visual foundations of gay films: from Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950) to Frank Ripploh's Taxi Zum Klo (1980), and figurally mold a nonlinear effigy for the black American identity.

Jan 21:

The Troll Hunter (André Øvredal / Norway / 2010) - 3.5/5 - I would say I had fun. It was a different experience to the way a Hollywood film would feel. But I don't want to talk about Troll Hunter in terms of Hollywood versus non-Hollywood films. It would diminish its disposition as part of a burgeoning group of cult films in Scandinavian Cinema --- with a recent addition Thale (Aleksander Nordaas, 2012). I want to talk about the types of bodies developed within the temporal and visual design of the film. The bodies in The Troll Hunter have both morphological and plastic obscurities. They seemingly are on the verge of disappearance. The film functions as some proof of their existence. They are figural bodies exhumed from the void, from nothingness --- a basic premise of every found footage film in recent cinema history. Of course, without the textual disclosure in the beginning of the film about the found-footage, the mode of viewing might assume a neorealist take that might lead to a political subtext. But it is the textual introduction that establishes and emphasizes its 'founding'. This 'founding' is after all a for-cinema-only phenomenon, a similar feel perhaps to an archivist finding a lost film. But in Troll Hunter, the visual contours of the found-footage are a product of modern digital cameras and not an archival footage from the 1920s or 30s. Not only that this found-footage is a videography of a mundane world, it is also a found-footage of three students and their encounter with trolls in Norwegian wilderness. Their existence in the virtual world assumes some sort of realism; a 'virtual realism' created by a regime of figurations from both from the source of the image and the one the edits it. Hence, this 'virtual realism' is both the product of textual and image construction. The bodies formed in the visual membrane of film mutates as it progresses. They undergo either morphological transformation (as with the troll) or intensive transformation (as with the group of students). Interestingly, the figures of the students do not resemble as what Brenez would call a 'critical body': a figural element of documentary films which has ethnographic qualities, a reminder of our human complexity. They instead resemble the Other. Their realism is incomplete, a textual illusion, since they appeared in the film without an origin, without an ethnographic standpoint. They were instead mobilized in gestural space without key information of who they are. They are encrypted figures with unknown pasts (except perhaps of what we know about them: students of a certain university in Norway). This is also true to the troll hunter himself, whose figure is most elusive, most encrypted. As with the troll, it has a vegetal body, a morphological transformation of their human counterparts, and they were extinguished the fastest. Their appearances are only brief and they are the source of fear elicited by their gigantism and unpredictability. They are also the most plastic: they would zap into another form at a virtual instant. Their final morphological transformation is to become a stone or a pile of rubble, from vegetal to rigid material by breaking the bonds that form it: a figural process of death in the film.

Finished (William E. Jones / U.S.A. / 1997) - 5/5 - The most powerful aspect of the film is its immense distance to its subject that it provided no resignation in the end. It closes abruptly, leaving an empty bowl, devoid of continuity. Like Massillon (see above), Jones' perpetuation of the body is jagged and detached. He cannibalizes the figures and removes any signification from it. There were, in the process, two interweaving figural spaces: the one located in the regime of auditory space (narration of Jones), and the one in the regime of the visual field (pictorial arrangement). The auditory space pervades the whole film. It gives the film a structuring body. It is a body itself: only invisible, nonvisual, existing in the interstice of nonrepresentational and representational cinema. It follows a narrative of information and other expressible elements about a gay pornography actor, Adam Lambert. Adam Lambert's figural body is dismembered, transformed into an object of reification: we see his eyes, his hand, his head, his torso, his biceps, his legs, his half-body but never a whole. His image is incomplete: a mechanical body, Brenez would say. His body will appear and disappear, but often in stills, moving slowly. During its disappeared state another body will permeate the visual design. It is an absent-body: a spatial continuum with a pictorial grace. It can be shots of the highway in L.A., the valley, Montreal resembling the shots he did with Massillon. The two films are stylistically linked. But in Finished, Jones does not only narrate and criticize, he also exercise his mastery in detaching from the subject, in elucidating a subject by chopping its body thereby achieving a perfect tragic reified image of a young prolific male model who destroyed himself.

Jan 23:

Landed on this book via Brenez to Mubarak Ali

And oh:

Serge Daney (Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers du Cinema) in English

|||| 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam (2013)

Filipino Films to Catch at the Festival

How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from the Age of Zero to Five (Khavn de la Cruz / Philippines / 2013) - 5' [link]

Lukas the Strange (John Torres / Philippines / 2013) - 83' [link] [support]

Misericordia: The Last Mystery of Kristo Vampiro (Khavn de la Cruz / Philippines / 2013) - 70' [link]

Big Boy (Shireen Seno / Philippines / 2012/2013) - 89' [link][site]

Mater Dolorosa (Adolf Alix Jr. / Philippines / 2012) - 86' [link]

Kalayaan (Adolf Alix Jr. / Philippines / 2012) - 115' [link]

Not a Soul (Jet Leyco / Philippines / 2013) - 13' [link]

Steel is the Earth (Mes de Guzman / Philippines / 2013) - 114' [link]

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand / 2012)

Other Highly Recommended Films

11.25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate (Koji Wakamatsu / Japan / 2012) - 119' [link]

36 (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit / Thailand / 2012) - 68' [link]

Karaoke Girl (Visra Vichit Vadakan / Thailand / 2013) - 77' [link][site]

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul / Thailand / 2012) - 57' [link]

Overseas (Wichanon Somumjarn and Anocha Suwichakornpong / Thailand / 2012) - 16' [link]

When Night Falls (Ying Liang / China / 2012) - 70' [link]

Acrophobia 0.1. (Anahita Hekmat / Iran / 2013) - 9' [link]

Alone (Wang Bing / France-H.K. / 2012) - 89' [link]

The Complex (Hideo Nakata / Japan / 2013) - 106' [link]

Disappearing Landscape (Vladimir Todorovic / Serbia-Singapore / 2013) - 70' [link]

Going Home (Part 1-5) (Hirokazu Kore-eda / Japan / 2012) - 225' [link]

Going Home (Part 6-11) (Hirokazu Kore-eda / Japan / 2012) - 270' [link]

Inori (Pedro González-Rubio / Belgium-Japan / 2012) - 72' [link]

The Sky Turns (Mercedes Álvarez / Spain / 2004) - 5/5 - Álvarez' film is a contemplation on natural forms: a sky, a hill, a rock, a tree, a line of sight. It is also a contemplation of time: the past, the present, the future. In the film, each of these figural forms is all in process of decaying, disappearing, and undergoing metamorphosis. The images seemed to flow out from a regime of the natural order of things. They stately move in the ebb of real time. The bodies are wedged between realism and fiction, real and virtual. They embody a certain plasticity in the way Álvarez arranged them in the temporal design of the film. The absence of the auteur gave each character a fictional vibe. Their dialogues seemed to be created by some cinematic process. Nonetheless, this film is not about the characters in the village. It is about their impending disappearance in this world. They are almost ghost-like figures, critical bodies that carry some truth in them --- some truth like what Kiarostami conjured in Close-Up (1991) or The Wind will Carry Us (1999). It is in essence a personal map of Álvarez' birthplace, a documentary of a disappearing village in the face of modernity, of globalization.

Jan 24:

I attended this talk on Comedy given by film historian Nick Deocampo as UP Cinema's Alternative Classroom Learning Experience (ACLE). ACLE is a once-in-a-semester event at University of the Philippines-Diliman when classes are suspended and students are encouraged to join fun sessions hosted by organizations as an alternative to the usual classroom set-up. During my undergraduate days (yes, I just graduated two years ago), I rarely attended some of these ACLE sessions, but I remember, maybe during my first year in college, I attended one session where I splurged over chocolates and pastries. It was hosted by a certain organization from College of Home Economics. Such fun days at the university!

Nick Deocampo's talk is one of the funniest ACLE I've ever attended; and probably one of the most unforgettable lecture sessions I've attended all my life since my experience with Melania Abad's intense and transformative PI 100 class. Nick Deocampo is, in every way, a fabulous and flamboyant character. He wore this violet-colored pair of shoes that popped out to my eyes as soon as he entered the room. I bet he wore those shoes for the occasion. His spoken vocabulary is a mix of sward speak and sophisticated terms like 'historicity' and 'codify'. He's a natural comedian and a very effective teacher too. He showed us the richness of the Filipino Comedy genre: its origins from theater (vaudeville) and from Hollywood; its embedding in Philippine cinema after the WWII; its visual codes like sight gags. It is refreshing to re-learn these conventions again; most of these you can get from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art book. Kristin Thompson also discussed comedy in her essay on Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) from her book Breaking the Glass Armour. Some good old poetics. The talk ended well with Nick Deocampo problematizing the depiction of gay characters in Filipino comedy films. He admired Lino Brocka's take on the gay identity in Ang Tatay kong Nanay (1978) and proclaimed it as a meeting of two geniuses: Dolphy and Lino. He disliked the depiction in Jade Castro's Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (2011) and Wenn Deramas' Praybeyt Benjamin (2011) mainly for its subject positioning of the gay identity. But that is of course another serious topic to dig through.

Jan 26:

||||| The Fuzzy Figural - Part 2

from Ivan Zulueta's Rapture (Spain / 1980)

I had a headache reading some of the pages from Rodowick's book Reading the Figural, specifically the section Lyotard's Leap into the Void: The Aesthetic before the New Media where he discusses Lyotard's ideas in his book Discours, figure (1974). I was floating in numerous philosophical terms and relationships. As Rodowick progresses from what I discussed last Jan 20, 2013, the concepts like indexicality, which is an easy concept; I encountered more bizarre concepts like the term 'discourse' itself. Lyotard redefines discourse as:

'Discourse has this space along its edges, a space that gives its object an image; it also has this space at its heart, which governs its form. But do not be mistaken: the 'interiority' of figural space to discourse is not dialectical.' (Discours 52)

It is a bizarre definition. Or maybe the definition I have in mind of discourse is pretty much the false one: discourse being a 'verbal or textual interchange of ideas' or 'a formal and orderly and usually an extended expression of thought on a subject.' [def]. I don't know but maybe what Rodowick did was to locate it in the aesthetic field, to spatialize by looking at it in terms of its visuality and form. Lyotard continues:

'[...] visuality invades discourse as "a distance to be crossed that indicates the location where what I say is place as a horizon that opens ahead of words and pulls them to, the negativity that is the foundation of our spatial existence" (Discours 56)' (Reading the Figural 8)

Rodowick is in a way fleshing out the figural and its relationship with the discourse. Rodowick describes this relationship as such:

'The figural is the avatar of another order whose relation to space, no less than discourse, is vexed. The figural is unrepresentable, beneath or behind representation, because it operates in another space "that does not give itself to be seen or thought; it indicated in a lateral fashion, fugitive at the heart of discourse and perception, as that which troubles them. It is the proper space of desire, the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaselessly launched against the return of the Ego and the text." (135) ... The scandal of the figure is that it is both inside and outside discourse' (Reading the Figural 8-9)

This is a pretty hard text to digest. Figural is an 'avatar','unrepresentable', 'operates in another space', 'inside and outside discourse', 'a proper space of desire'. These terms are hard to take in. It comes from a highly theoretical space. There is no grounding in the text except maybe for the last part 'the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaseless launched against the return of the Ego and the text.' The text goes on and on wrestling with Lyotard's Discours, figurs. You'll start getting dizzy when you reached a certain topic called death drive.

Though I pretty much love how Rodowick differentiates "sense" and signification. He wrote:

"Every 'discourse,' whether linguistic or plastic, has both textual and figurative aspects that operates as two dimensions of meaning: signification and 'sense'... Where meaning is reduced in signification to a grid of differences systematically articulated as binary pairs, sense opens meaning to both spatiality and affect: direction, sensation, intuition."

Reading this passage from Rodowick's book made me to rethink the nature of avant-garde or experimental films where the image is the only thing that perpetuates the form like the works of Peter Hutton and Stan Brakhage. Pictorial films are rich in 'sense' than in 'significations', whereas narrative films achieve a strong regime of 'signification' more than 'sense'. Some films too are so masterly that they combine both 'sense' and signification like Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Yasujiro Ozu's films to form a visually and textually rich art object. Finally, and here is where I stopped reading the section, Rodowick expands the relation by quoting from Lyotard's book:

"[...]'sense is always presence as the absence of signification... Here is the death drive, which is always scheming with Eros-Logos. Constructing sense is nothing other than deconstructing signification. There is no model for this evasive figuration.' (19)" (Reading the Figural 11)

The section is indeed a wrestle with Lyotard's ideas. Reading the section felt as if I have to do preliminary readings of Freud and Deleuze, to go back to their battles with the idea of language. The section runs from page 4 to page 30. I skipped most part of it and focused more on a section grounded in history: Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media which focuses on the 'necessity of figural in the recent history of philosophy'. Browsing through it, I saw numerous references to film and several known theorists like Foucault and Derrida. It feels at home. I am now reading through page 32 of the section.

|||| Recent Readings

I finished reading Brenez' two articles: Incomparable Bodies [Screening the Past, 2011, link] and For an Insubordinate (or Rebellious) History of Cinema [Framework, Issue 502, link]. The former is a gem. I helped me rethink cinema in terms of bodies. But I have to reread it in paper to clarify other concepts. The latter is a defence of the current critical output of critics and filmmakers in the internet era. It lauded Alexis Tioseco's Critcine as a notable corpus of the new cinema from the Southeast Asia. She then listed a crop of filmmakers, most of them French and unknown to me, the best represent the subversive front of current history of cinema.

I recently acquired this film criticism book by Alex Clayton and Andrew Clevan with a title "Language and Style of Film Criticism" published last 2011. Reading through the introduction, it surely is an easy read --- not as difficult as Rodowick. I love how it encourages readers to think of the best film criticism as the one which 'deepens our interest in individual films, reveals new meanings and perspectives, expands our sense of the medium, confronts our assumptions about value, and sharpens our capacity to discriminate.' (Language 1). It advocates creative approaches to film criticisms mentioning examples like George Toles, Manny Farber, and Raymond Durgnat as film critics who explore film art leisurely without diminishing one's writing into journalistic means. I suggest you give this book a look.

Jan 27:

The Fluffer (Richard Glatzer and Wash West / U.S./ 2001) - 3/5

[more to come...]

****

Help me find these Books!

2013-01-02T15:28:00.001+08:00

...

from The Terrorizers (Edward Yang / Taiwan / 1986)

September 25, 2013

I've been reading a lot still, after a few months of writing about it here. A lot have changed. I have a job now so reading serves an even greater purpose of letting me escape from the banalities of life. So far, I've read twenty or so books, mostly fiction. I am currently reading two books side-by-side: Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf for leisure reading, and Nadine Boljkovak's Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethic of Cinema for a commissioned book review, which I shall have to finish in three weeks time. I'm also writing again somewhere for someone. Goodbye.

January 2, 2013:

I've been reading a lot lately. I am currently reading three books: Selected Stories by Jose Dalisay Jr., Beautiful Accidents by Ian Rosales Casocot, and Almanak ng Isang Aktibista by Roland Tolentino. I am also reading slowly and carefully two difficult texts: Deleuze's Wake: Tributes and Tributaries by Ronald Bogue and Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (the U.P. Centennial edition) by J. Neil Garcia. Both of them are theory-based so it is best if one reads and re-reads each of their sections thoroughly. Nothing is worse than misinterpreting concepts, arguments, and notions. But they say that difficult works have innate multiplicities --- meaning, what you've understand now maybe different entirely from what you will understand from it in your future re-readings --- so fuck it.

Anyway, I just want to list the books I've been dying to have. If you know where I can find these books in Metro Manila, or if someone has a copy, please let me know:

Philosophy and Critical Theory Books

~~Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Trans. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (1975)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
--------. L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. Archaeology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002)
--------. Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Trans. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. (Schocken; first Schocken paperback edition edition (January 13, 1969))
Brenez, Nicole. Abel Ferrera (Contemporary Film Directors) (2006). Trans. Adrian Martin.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. (1984) Trans. Christian Lenhardt. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
----------. Negative Dialectics. (1966) trans. E. B. Ashton, 1973
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. (1972)
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay (1975).
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (original - 1904 to 1905, translation - 1930)
Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle (1967) In English: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books (1995).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'étre et le néant (1943). In English: Being and Nothingness.
----------. Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). In English: Critique of Dialectical Reason. (1985)
----------. L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946). In English: Existentialism and Humanism.
~~Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. (1887)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. (1927)
Marcuse, Herman. One-Dimensional Man. (1964)
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. (1910)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. (1953)
[more to come...]

Novels, Short Stories, and Poems

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. (1946)
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. (1959)
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. (1939)
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. (1973)
Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics. (1965) Trans. William Weaver. (1968)
----------. If on a winter's night a traveler. (1979) Trans. William Weaver. (1981)
~~----------. The Watcher and Other Stories. (1975)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
Wright, Ernest Vincent. Gadsby: Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E". (1939)
Queneau, Raymond. Exercise in Style. (1947) Trans. Barbara Wright. (1958)
Mathews, Harry. The New Tourism. (2010)
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. (1941-42)
~~-----------. The Aleph. (1949)~~ (c/o Richard Bolisay)
~~Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. (1948)~~ (c/o Chris Eriz)
--------. The Dancing Girl of Izu. (1926)
--------. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. (1961)
Mishima, Yukio. The Sound of the Waves. (1954)
-------. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. (1959)
~~-------. The Temple of Dawn. (1970)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
Sōseki, Natsume. I Am a Cat. (1905)
Casocot, Ian. Sugar Land. (2008)
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. (1958)
Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness. (1936)
------. The Shadow Out of Time. (1936)
Lertwiwatwongsa, Wiwat. A Damaged Utopia. (2012)
----------. Alphaville Hotel. (2010)
Serafini, Luigi. Codex Seraphinianus. 1981 [wishful thinking]
Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. (1937. trans. 2010)
Casares, Adolfo Bioy. The Invention of Morel. (1940)
Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. (1987)
-----------. Infinite Jest. (1996)
-----------. The Pale King. (2011)
Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. (1967)
-----------. In Watermelon Sugar. (1968)
-----------. The Tokyo-Montana Express. (1980)
Sebald, W.G. Veritgo. (1990)
-----------. The Emigrants. (1992)
-----------. The Ring of Saturn. (1995)
-----------. Austerlitz. (2001)
Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. (1982)
-----------. City of the Beasts. (2002)
Krasznahorkai, László. Satantango. (2012) English Ed.
[more to come...]

Virginia Woolf [link]

(25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941)

Virginia Woolf Collection (updated Aug 2013)

NOVELS

Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. (1915)
---------. Night and Day. (1919)
---------. Jacob's Room. (1922)
~~---------.~~ Mrs Dalloway~~. (1925)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
---------. To the Lighthouse. (1927) [lost]
~~---------. Orlando. (1928)~~ [2 copies: c/o Eriz and Purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
~~---------. The Waves. (1931)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
---------. The Years. (1937)
---------. Between the Acts (1941)

BIOGRAPHIES

~~Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. (1933)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
---------. Roger Fry: A Biography. (1940)

NON-FICTION

Woolf, Virginia. Modern Fiction. (1919)
----------. The Common Reader. (1925)
~~----------. A Room of One's Own. (1929)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
----------. On Being Ill. (1930)
----------. The London Scene. (1931)
~~----------. The Common Reader: Second Series. (1932)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
~~----------. Three Guineas. (1938)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
----------. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. (1942)
----------. The Moment and Other Essays. (1947)
----------. The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays. (1950)
----------. Granite and Rainbow. (1958)
----------. Books and Portraits. (1978)
~~----------. Women And Writing. (1979)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
----------. Collected Essays (four volumes). (various)

DRAMA

Woolf, Virginia. Freshwater: A Comedy. (1976)

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary (1953)
-----------. Moments of Being (1976)
-----------. A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
-----------. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) (1915 to 1941)

Volume 1
~~Volume 2~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5

-----------. Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909 (1990)
-----------. Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993)
-----------. The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends. (2008)

LETTERS

Woolf, Virginia. Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)
-----------. The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888–1941 (six volumes, 1975–1980)
-----------. Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)

SUPPLEMENTAL

Bennett, Maxwell. Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry. (2013)
Nicolson, Nigel. Virginia Woolf. (2000)
~~Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. (1996)~~ (c/o Roel's Bookshop)
Sellers, Susan. "Vanessa and Virginia." (Harcourt, 2009)
Poole, Roger. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. (1978)
Rosenman, Ellen B. The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship. (1986)
Transue, Pamela J. Virginia Woolf and the politics of style. (1986)
Paul, Janis M. The Victorian heritage of Virginia Woolf: the external world in her novels. (1987)
Bloom, Harold. Virginia Woolf's To the lighthouse. (1988)
Miller, C. Ruth.Virginia Woolf: the frames of art and life. (1988)
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. (1989)
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. (1989)
Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. (1990)
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life. (1991)
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf and war. (1991)
Caramago, Thomas D. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. (1992)
King, James. Virginia Woolf. (1994)
Reid, Panthea. Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. (1996)
~~Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. (1997)~~ [purchased from U.P. Bookstore]
Leaska, Mitchell. Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf. (1998)
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. (2001)
Blair, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the nineteenth-century domestic novel. (2002)
Dalsimer, Katherin. Virginia Woolf: becoming a writer. (2002)
Gruber, Ruth. Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman. (2005)
Szasz, Thomas. My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf. (2006)
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. (2006)
Hall, Sarah M. The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. (2007)
Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. (2007)
Simons, Ilana. A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. (2007)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [link]

(born 24 February 1942)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Collection

ACADEMIC

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. (1987).
----------. Selected Subaltern Studies (edited with Ranajit Guha). (1988)
----------. The Post-Colonial Critic - Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. (1990)
----------. Outside in the Teaching Machine. (1993).
----------. The Spivak Reader (1995).
----------. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. (1999)
----------. Death of a Discipline. (2003)
----------. Other Asias. (2005).
----------. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. (2012).

LITERARY

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Imaginary Maps. (1994)
---------. Breast Stories. (1997)
---------. Old Women. (1999)
---------. Song for Kali: A Cycle. (2000)
---------. Chotti Munda and His Arrow. (2002)

Gilles Deleuze Collection

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983). Trans. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986).
--------. Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989).
--------. Difference and Repetition. (1968).
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What Is Philosophy? (1994)
--------. Anti-Oedipus. (1972)
--------. A Thousand Plateaus. (1980)
--------. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature (Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la Nature humaine selon Hume, 1953)
--------. Nietzsche and Philosophy (Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962)
--------. La Philosophie critique de Kant: Doctrine des facultés (1963)
--------. Proust and Signs. (Marcel Proust et les signes, 1964) (Title subsequently changed to Proust et les signes, additional chapters added in 1970 and 1976)
--------. Bergsonism. (Le Bergsonisme, 1966)
--------. Cruelty and Coldness ("Le froid et le cruel” in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, 1967)
--------. Difference and Repetition. (Différence et repetition, 1968)
--------. Spinoza and the Problem of Expression. (Spinoza et le problème de l’expression,1968)
--------. Logic of Sense (Logique du sens, 1969)
--------. Anti-Oedipus (Capitalism et schizophrénie tome 1: l’Ante-Oedipe, 1972) (with Félix Guattari)
--------. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, 1975) (with F. Guattari)
-------. Rhizome: Introduction (Rhizome: Introduction (with F. Guattari), 1976) (Printed in revised form in Mille plateaux)
------. Dialogues (1977) (with Claire Parnet)
1978: (14) Sovrapposizioni (with Carmelo Bene) (Translated into French as Superpositions in 1979)
1980: (15) Capitalism et schizophrénie tome 2: Mille plateaux (with F. Guattari)
1981: (16) Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Expanded reprint of material originally released in 1970)
1981: (17) Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation
1983: (18) Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement
1985: (19) Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps
1986: (20) Foucault
1988: (21) Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque
1990: (22) Pourparlers, 1972-1990
1991: (23) Qu-est-ce que la philosophie?
1993: (24) Critique et clinique
Books – English Translation*
1971: (6) Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (Reprinted by Zone Books in 1989)
1972: (4) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard
1977: (10) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
1983: (2) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
1983: (12) On the Line, trans. John Johnston
1984: (3) Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
1986: (18) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
1986: (11) Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
1987: (13) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (revised and expanded in 2002)
1987: (15) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
1988: (5) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
1988: (16) Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley
1988: (20) Foucault, trans. Sean Hand
1989: (19) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
1990: (8) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin
1990: (9) Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester w/Charles Stivale
1991: (1) Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas
1993: (21) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley
1994: (7) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
1994: (23) What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
1995: (22) Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin
1997: (24) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith
2004: (17) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith

A note on the list above:

I've been nursing this list for years now. It started six years ago when I was first year college. I took two philosophy subjects side-by-side and took another one the following semester. So most of the books from the philosophy section are personal recommendations from my teachers and classmates. My Philosophy major dormmate, Marvin Tamayao, also suggested some of the books here. I got some of the other recommendations from fellow cinephiles, artists, and literary friends. If you have anything to add to this list, let me know. I've recently added the books by and about Virginia Woolf. As you know, I'm a collector of her works. So if any of you would like to donate some of her works to me, or would offer leads, please inform me as soon as possible.

Ciao!

****

Some Notes and Writings

2012-08-19T00:52:00.002+08:00

for Amos, Alexis, and you.

Articles

2014

[Transit Journal] New Sites of Resistance in Art Slave (2014). [july]
[Sinekultura Journal] Without a Name, Without a Face: Films of Jon Lazam [jan, copy for request]

2012

MUBI: Raya Martin and His Visions of Post Colonial Realities [nov]

Thoughts

2012

Oms and other Fantastic Creatures in René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973) [mar]
Volumes of Light and Darkness: My Year with Cinema (2011 round-up) [jan]

2011

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978) [dec]
La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001) [nov]
My Bande Apart TOP 100 Poll Submission [nov]
The Truth Now Above All Else - a short reflection on Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) [oct]
I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil,1994): Network Lives and Non-Sensationalism [sept]
The Green Ray (1986): Conversations, Alienation and Love [sept]
Watch Films You Do Not Know Online [july]
Notes on Counter-Cinema Movement, Tree of Life and Taxi Zum Klo [july]
Top 100 Films 2010 - Bottom 50 [feb]
Wasak 1: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [jan]

2010

Film Deconstructed: Noob's Guide to Film Analysis (an abandoned project) [dec]
Anatomy of And I Love You So (2009) [nov]
Frame by Frame: Playtime (1967) [oct]
Manila by Night (1980): Interior and Exterior Aesthetics [july]
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000) [may]
My Top Films of the Year: Counting Down 2009 [jan]

2009

La Grande Illusion: A Note on Deep-Focus Cinematography [july]

Notes

Glauber Rocha and the Aesthetics of Hunger
Silence of the Frames
My Night at Maud's (1969)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Tarkovsky on Art
Au Revoir!
Pierrot Le Fou in stills...
The Consequence of Being Bela Tarr
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Philippine New Wave: This is Not A Film Movement
Socialisme (2010) by JLG
La Chinoise (1967) | Life in a Pause
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quia du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Confirmations
M. C. Escher and David Lynch
My Film Book Collection
Robin Wood. 1931 - 2009
Top Films of [a] Decade: None from Philippine Cinema
Mean Streets (1973)
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000)
"But...
Socialisme, Godard and Victor Scklovsky
Five Images for Rossellini...
120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Facets!
Engkwentro, District 9, Bertolucci and One Year of Cinephilia
Alexis Tioseco (1981 - 2009)
Happy Together (1997)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Casablanca (1942)

Film Reviews

Taxicab (2011)
Busong (2011)
Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (2010)
Now Showing (2008)
The King's Speech (2010)
Ars Colonia (2011)
Never Let Me Go (2010)
Honey (2010)

Support: Pasona: A Seven Day Countdown To The State of the Nation Address

2012-07-17T09:08:00.000+08:00

Maki-isa!

....

2012-06-21T01:49:00.000+08:00

Labyrinth of Dreams
Sogo Ishii

Japan
1997
90 minutes
Black and White
Japanese

...

The Project: Clocks [2007]

2012-05-12T05:30:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

CLOCKS

(John Philippe Carpio, Philippines, 2007) - 11'07''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"
* 2007
* Color
* Dance
* Mini DV
* TRT: 11:06 minutes

The film was edited from a documentation of a dance performance collaboration between Donna Miranda, Dancing Wounded Contemporary Dance Commune and other independent artists entitled "PROMISES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN", it was performed on two separate evenings in 2006 (November 9 and 11) at the Lumiere Café and Gallery along Makati Avenue. The long dance piece involved rehearsed and improvised sections as well as unrehearsed collaborations with the different audience members on each night.

"CLOCKS' is one portion of the entire piece.

CHOREOGRAPHY: Donna Miranda, Red Lasam, Dancing Wounded, Tess Jamias, Diego Maranan *PERFORMERS: Donna Miranda and Red Lasam *ALSO FEATURING: May Bayot, Jose Jay B. Cruz, Tess Jamias and Diego Maranan *PRODUCER, EDITOR, CAMERA OPERATOR: JP V. Carpio *PRODUCTION AND STAGE MANAGER: Issa Lopez *STILLS: Jed Escueta

a linao films and dancing wounded production

The film is part of an ongoing series of documentation work involving the Dancing Wounded Contemporary Dance Commune.

For screening and DVD copy requests please e-mail linaofilms@gmail.com

Festival Screenings:

Uncensored Bodies Film Program, Wi_fi Body 2: 2nd Independent Contemporary Dance Festival, July 2007

Indiemand V Film Festival, UP Pi Omicron Fraternity, University of the Philippines Diliman, 5 December 2008"

*****

The Project: Dung-Aw [1990]

2012-04-28T09:00:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Dung-Aw

(Mario Guzman, Philippines, 1990) - 4'13''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his yt]

"Dung-aw (Lament), 16mm. experimental short film on children of war produced by Goethe Institut was awarded Best Experimental Film, 1990 Gawad Urian (Filipino Film Critics Award) and 1st Place Experimental Film Category, 1990 CCP Gawad Para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video (Cultural Center of the Philippines' Award for Alternative Film and Video)."

*****

The Project: Zero [2011]

2012-04-23T12:53:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Zero

(Dodo Dayao, Philippines, 2011) - 4'42''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"Notes from the New Jersey screening of Zero: "Before embarking on a European tour, the Manila-based chamber pop supergroup Vigo, named after and subsequently haunted by the filmmaker, recorded three songs and issued an onus to all independent and underground filmmakers inclined to make music videos from them, as opposed to for them. The idea was for each piece to exist independently from the song as a singular work, the only caveat being that the song should its grist and be part of it. Fair enough. Roughly about a dozen videos were made. The elements that make up Zero were shot during the same two-day period of shooting the video I made. Of the three songs, I picked the ballad The Last Commandment, but rather than use it here as well, I used one specific element of it, making it in effect like a shadow of the original work, but one meant to have autonomy from it. Whenever I’m asked what Zero is exactly, I tell them it’s a ghost story. Also, a love story. And how they really are the same thing." with Carmina Cruz and Ligaya Leccio

music by Khavn de la Cruz and Vigo; director of photography Allan C. Balberona; produced and written and edited by Dodo Dayao"

*****

The Project: A White Balloon [2011]

2012-04-18T11:40:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

A White Balloon

(Nick Block, USA, 2011) - 5'52''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"For Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof

Credits: Actress: Nicole Cano

Editing: Darius Darque

Grip: Juan Flores"

*****

The Project: A Man With A Cheap Camera (2010)

2012-04-13T13:12:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

A Man With A Cheap Camera

(Epoy Deyto, Philippines, 2010) - 7'45''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"I liked the poetic sensibility of Man with a Cheap Camera, a movie really about nothing
- Jonas Mekas (Filmmaker; Jury: dotfest online short film festival)

My very first work. Shot entirely using a china-made mp4 player with a 3gp camera, explains the quality of the picture, it's from a months load of footages. I made the music with a guitar that is one string short and recorded with a headset microphone. Really crappy film-making, but it's one of my most acclaimed work so far. And I think it's just ok to say that I'm really proud of this work.

everything by me.

selected at the dotfest Online Film Festival - Experimental Category (dotfest.net/film_list?cat_id=29)"

*****

The Project: Estratto Matrimonio [2011]

2012-04-08T14:46:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Estratto Matrimonio

(Ilaria Pezone, Italy, 2011) - 12'30''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from her vimeo]

"Shooting and editing."

*****

The Project: Homo Sapiens Project (I) [2011]

2012-04-03T14:41:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Homo Sapiens Project (I)

(Rouzbeh Rashidi, Ireland, 2011) - 7'43''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi initiated in August 2011 for both online and screen context. They are highly experimental, part cryptic film diaries and part impressionistic portraits of places and people, and often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of horror cinema. From highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images, the restless creativity of this vision of life as a cinematic laboratory is never short of surprising. Encompassing everything from documentary monologues to found footage, Rashidi constantly strives to expand his filmmaking palette while putting his unmistakeable stamp on whatever footage passes through his hands." [for more info]

*****

The Project: Desinence II [2012]

2012-03-29T14:28:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Desinence II

(Carlo Labrador-Pangalangan, USA/Philippines, 2012) - 15'00''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his vimeo]

"No description."

*****

The Project: Declarations 1 [2008]

2012-03-24T14:17:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

****

Declarations 1

(Donal Foreman, Ireland/Paris, 2008-2009) - 2'55''

****

DESCRIPTION

[from his site]

"(2008 - 2009, miniDV / digital camera)

A series of twenty-five short personal documentaries, created every two weeks over a period of one year."

*****

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]: FILMS

2012-03-22T14:41:00.000+08:00

[New Avant-Garde Movement Project]
[intro] | [films]

Menilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, France, 1926)

****

Lesser#3 Meditation No. 3 (T.C. Chew, US, 2011) - 5'17''

The Island (Fred. L'Epee, Switzerland/Greece, 2011) - 4'50''

Declarations 1 (Donal Foreman, Ireland/Paris, 2008-2009) - 2'55''

Desinence II (Carlo Labrador-Pangalangan, USA/Philippines, 2012) - 15'00''

****

.