Category Archives: cinema

The Non-Human Hunger Games

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In jet-lagged mode, you are always susceptible to odd feelings of paranoia. So it may not be totally advisable to watch The Hunger Games on the plane. Or perhaps it was. After all, its construct of a media-dominated society controlling dissent by spectacle is far from paranoid. On his legendary blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher compares the London Olympics to the Hunger Games:

The function of the Hunger Games is to suppress antagonism, via spectacle and terror. In the same way, London 2012– preceded and accompanied by the authoritarian lockdown and militarisation of the city– is being held up as the antidote to all discontent. The feelgood Olympics, we are being assured, will do everything from making good the damage done by last year’s riots to seeing off the “threat” of Scottish independence.

It would be interesting to discuss what the right parallel would be in the U. S. to suppress Occupy: is counterinsurgency and the endless threat of terror the Hunger Games? Or is politics, wildly divorced as it is from any actual needs that most people have, our version?

Here in Sydney where I have now arrived, I went like a good tourist first to the once legendary Acquarium. It’s been rebuilt to accomodate a zoo made into spectacle called Wildlife Sydney. Breathlessly promising “interactive adventure [and] encounter,” while advertising that the most dangerous animals in the world are found in Australia, it seems that  the real and present threat of the degenerating biosphere is transformed into bio-entertainment. Of course, what I’m seeing here is not about Australia, which I barely know, but the kind of spectacle that is so commonplace in the U. S. that I don’t usually even notice it. Think Sea World, and other marine “parks,” where the dolphins routinely commit suicide by drowning themselves.

As is all too common in zoos, the animals here are palpably distressed to be contained in small spaces designed so that they will be visible at all times. A wombat ran from one side to another of its small “outback” space, clearly looking to get out, as did a small nocturnal marsupial, whose name I can’t remember. The wallabies just sat, as if stunned to be so restrained. It’s not an interactive space for the non-humans, that’s for sure.

The star of this sad little show is Rex the crocodile, whose 25 foot long bulk extends all the way across his pool. In his case, it is clear that he is being held in prison. He was first captured after attacking domestic animals. Taken to a crocodile farm to breed, he responded by attacking female crocodiles brought to him (described as his “girlfriends”). So he was carted off to the Wildlife Spectacle as one guaranteed dangerous exhibit, fed a chicken a day. When they gave him a turkey for Christmas, he responded by splattering it all over not only his enclosure but the whole space. I would call that sending a message, wouldn’t you?

Zoos were created as a visible example of the “conquest of nature” as Hegelian naturalists and colonizers were happy to call it in the nineteenth century. With the rise of modern environmental consciousness, they changed their mission to preserving species that are otherwise being threatened with extinction. As there are up to 100,000 species becoming extinct a year, zoos are going to be very busy places in the decades ahead. Perhaps that’s why Wildlife Sydney never uses the word “zoo” anywhere.

I don’t want, however, to suggest that Australia is particularly to blame here. In fact, the front pages of Australia’s newspapers are full of discussions of the carbon tax that the Labor government has installed. I don’t know enough to say how good a policy it is, but at the very least the need to try and offset the damage done to life is being recognized. The damage to the ozone layer is a fact of daily life here, where hats and sunblock are year round necessities.

Of course, as a character points out in The Hunger Games, we could all stop watching the Olympics, going to zoos, or indeed the movies. But how would we occupy ourselves then?

 

Prometheus Falls

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If Prometheus is anything to go by, the cinematic age of production is well and truly over. This apparently endless film barely retains your attention, the means by which that mode of production created value. Instead, poorly-thought through and contradictory “ideas” lead lazily to a conclusion that simply sets up the inevitable sequel. In that sense, I suppose, the film represents the circulation of its own capital but if this is capital’s vision of its own future, it’s in bad trouble.

Prometheus

The Alien movies directed by Ridley Scott defined the fear of alterity for a generation. Their vision of the future as a damp, dismal and dangerous place visualized the neo-liberal collapse of the Jetsons’ future promised in the 1950s and 60s. Far from flying with individual skypacks, this future offered low-paying jobs hauling crap from the far edges of the universe on ships ironically named Nostromo, after Joseph Conrad’s novel. And much worse besides.

Prometheus takes some mediocre theology from 1970s pop theory like Eric von Daniken and blends it with the familiar Alien tropes from the evil Company to the seething eggs, stickly effluent and dark corridors with forbidding spiky things. I would call what comes next a spoiler normally but in this case I doubt it. Anyway, there’s an evocative opening in which a figure derived from Blake’s drawing of Newton breaks himself down to his DNA in order to animate a planet that we take to be Earth. This leads into some archaelogical movie stuff–see, all the ancient art forms depict the same alignment of planets!–and we’re off to The Planet.

Two twists to mention: the Prometheans, for reasons yet to be revealed, first decided to send proto-Aliens to earth to kill all the humans and then decided not to. And the Alien is a hybrid of Prometheus and their own nascent Alien weapon. So, because human DNA is, as we’ve seen, Promethean, that means the Alien is half-human. Ta da!

I can’t really be bothered to get into a critique of all this because the narrative, the ideas and the visualizations are so lame. The scientists want to know “where we come from, where we are going.”

Paul Gauguin, "Where do we come from? Where are we going?"

The colonial dimensions of this quest are reinforced by the fact that Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is the daughter of missionaries–her mother inevitably died young–and is a convinced Christian. Like a good Republican, Shaw wants to know “why they hate us,” a formula in which Prometheans stand in for Muslims. It’s too late, no-one really cares any more about this Bush-era formula. The sad retreat from Afghanistan that will be called a “victory” already seems to belong to a bygone era.

Cinema had its day as the visualization of capital and there was a certain exhilaration to it. Brecht once said he found himself supporting the cowboys in a Western despite himself. Now that’s all gone. At the end of the Roman Empire, they somehow forgot how to make classical sculpture and their art became odd, rounded figures seemingly made from clay. The empire has forgotten how to make films.

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

Occupy the Oscars: Our Top Hated Nominations!

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I spent the day on a plane from LA to New York reading the papers about the Oscars and watching films in the back of the seat in front. So it seems proper to offer a guide to Occupy The Oscars (OTO) with our top hated nominations! Let’s note: there is going to be an actual Occupy the Oscars action (or so I heard), so I respect their initiative. Also: we hated lots of non-nominated films and didn’t see many of the films released since September because of Occupy.

Here’s the opening monologue: the main reason OTO hates the Oscars is that the Hollywood film industry has somehow managed to generate an entire roster of nominations that makes not even the slightest allusion to the crisis that began in 2008. I don’t expect, or even want, Occupy: The Movie, or more Orientalist films about the Arab Spring.

But would it be too much to ask that the dominant culture industry–and one of the dominant industries period–in the US make some acknowledgement of the Depression? The one that’s happening now, that is, not the one in the 1930s? Or are we set for a repeat of the Tinseltown movies of the post-1929 crash in which everyone is just about to play tennis before heading off to the Copacabana? The mythology of liberal Hollywood turns out to be a slight preference for the left of centre, unwilling even to acknowledge one of the great social events of its time. So misty-eyed and nostalgic are the Oscars this year that they even brought back Billy Chrystal and, yes, I’m afraid he’s going to sing.

Which brings us to the first OTO most hated nomination: The Artist! Not because it’s much-touted photography is in fact mediocre; or even because the vamping and mugging that passes for silent-screen acting is such a bore. But because the afore-mentioned 1929 crash is reduced to a bit part in the predictable character development of Valentin, with a few picturesque Skid Row types thrown in as background color (I am also going to hate when he accepts the Oscar with a silent performance). So even the displacement of the Depression into the past cannot be fully acknowledged.

It’s traditional to have a few minor nominations next, so let’s note the OTO hated all the original scores and best songs as usual. And even the industry has noticed that the documentaries and foreign films categories are a joke–although one spot of non-hate is The Separation.

Next up: OTO hated Midnight in Paris! Although not hated as much as some of the other top hated nominations, the silly romanticization of a Paris where there are never any African diaspora people, let alone any hint of the radical politics of 1920s Paris made us tired. Mostly we hate Woody Allen movies these days because of his sad lusting after actresses like Scarlett Johansenn–it’s very bad for the Jews.

Moving on: OTO really hated War Horse! Here we can’t abide the way that all the lush photography, hyper-realistic period detail and swelling music renders aesthetic the obscenity of the First World War that the film is supposedly criticizing. This is not the trivial point that it may seem. The militarization of US culture throughout the military-industrial complex has depended on what Fanon called “an aesthetic of respect for the status quo.” This aesthetic is not directly about beauty so much as a sense that things are right, or as they should be, epitomized and embodied by the military trappings of uniform, flags and drill. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was also nominated in this category for perpetuating the 9-11 mythologies.

Next category: movies that OTO wished had thought it through a little better. First in this category: The Descendants! As much as I quite liked the film, the central drama of whether or not to sell the family land for a resort is far less compelling post-2008 than when Kaui Hart Hemmings novel was published in 2007. Present-day Hawai’i has seen a major decline in tourism following the recession, as well as a resurgence of the Native Sovereignty Movement. Also nominated here: Moneyball! This film wants to tell a story about small-town grit triumphing over the Big City but it doesn’t hang together. Billy Beane applies Ivy League neo-liberal economics to baseball to middling effect: it gets him out of the baseball basement but not into the World Series. In exactly the same way, a tech company (say) might rise quickly but to become hegemonic, it needs a deal with Google or Facebook.

And now: the moment you’ve all been waiting for: OTO‘s most-hated nomination of all: once again, in a cake walk, the nomination of Meryl Streep for best actress in The Iron Lady for playing Margaret Thatcher!! Maximum hate on all levels!!! Thatcher is portrayed by Streep as a modified feminist hero, battling against evil men, as if there had never been women in British politics before–let’s just remember Tony Benn’s mantra: The Diggers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes. Worse yet, the film airbrushes precisely the form of ruthless neo-liberal politics that have generated the present crisis. OTO did of course refuse to see this film but sat through the apparently endless trailer and is unanimous in awarding La Streep the most hated nomination of 2012!!

All opinions expressed in this commentary are not necessarily the opinion of Occupy Wall Street. If you experience anger or rage while reading them, please consult your bartender.

Please turn off the Oscars and watch almost anything else except Downtown bloody Abbey.