Chris Marker
Yesterday I stumbled across Chris Marker's 'Le fond du l'air est Rouge', known in English as 'A Grin Without A Cat', a cinematic essay on the global run-up to '68 and its legacy (made in '77, updated in '92). An incredible film that tells its story more through allusion than a didactic narrative. Constructed only from old footage it's a bizarre mixture of fast cut-ups to long stretches of interviews/footage of Castro, Allende, businessmen, Stalinists talking (mercifully no third-rate comedians). Not a nostalgic revelling in throwing molotovs at police and more than a melancholic 'what could have been'. One scene that captures its attempt to hunt down the difficulties of the time is Castro's tortuous justification of the repression of the Czech uprising. i recommend it, if you can find it (not on DVD). I'd forgotten but I'd also seen his 'La Jetee', a science fiction film made up of stills that Gilliam's '12 Monkeys' was based on.
Some images
Some have suggested it's an interesting counterpoint to Curtis's The Trap, which had it's final excellent episode last night.
Although I confess I'm ultimately more excited by 300. All together now, in your best Brian Blessed voice: "Spaaarrrrtaaaa!"
Some images
Some have suggested it's an interesting counterpoint to Curtis's The Trap, which had it's final excellent episode last night.
Although I confess I'm ultimately more excited by 300. All together now, in your best Brian Blessed voice: "Spaaarrrrtaaaa!"
posted by Rowan Wilson at 7:40 am
5 Comments:
Sounds interesting - your last comment got me imagining a film of May 1968 with Brian Blessed playing J-P Sartre ... "DAMN YOUR ANGSTY EYES, CAPITALISM!!"
On The Trap, I fear I wasn't so convinced. I think it's great that a series seriously investigating the idea of freedom was both made and broadcast, and Curtis' Errol Morris influenced approach to visuals are fantastic (if problematic - see below). However, I thought that he relied too much on creating associations which were more rhetorical than substantial. In the first episode, for example, I thought the stuff on the Rand Corporation and systems management was great, and the stuff on Laing was interesting (although he possibly overplayed the influence of the latter). I can see that he was trying to show in concrete terms how the management of sanity was a manifestation of a specific political agenda; however, I felt he had to do some pretty fancy footwork (often achieved by the tendentious use of visuals) to crowbar Laing, John Nash and psychometric diagnoses of ADHD etc. into one overarching political scheme.
I missed the second episode, but I thought the third again pursued three or four interesting ideas, but forced the issue when tying them together. Specifically, I think he misrepresented Berlin in that Berlin's key point is precisely that negative concepts of freedom should never be treated as utopian: as soon as they are, they simply become ciphers for an entirely different political project. Curtis was spot on showing that Berlin has been used as a justification by egregious foreign policy-makers over the years, but I think he should have emphasised the extent to which this was a deliberate misuse. His stuff on Fanon was also interesting, but seemed to me to bear out Berlin's point absolutely - which is why his conclusion that we need to return to positive conceptions of freedom was a bit bemusing. He showed plenty of examples of positive freedom producing totalitarianism, and plenty of evidence of negative conceptions leadig to anomie. However, he didn't show any examples of positive conceptions producing anything more, er, positive than the thrill of revolutionary violence. Which, again, I thought made his concluding statement odd. It's like he was doing a John Gray for an hour, but then distinguishing himself from Gray's 'you're all DOOMED!' schtick by rather arbitrarily suggesting positive concepts of freedom are good after all.
I reckon he was at his strongest when discussing the impact of systems management-type thinking on freedom at a micro-level (though even then he was rather ahistorical in suggesting managed self-interest was a new idea - Bentham, anyone?). He was, I think, very persuasive in showing how the idea of the suspicious, rational, self-interested, but predictable individual had spread from different discursive sites to every level of bureaucratic and poltical management, and how it had done so under the cover of protecting liberty. For that reason - and because The Trap showed that there is a place for political philosophy on relatively prime-time TV - I thought it was compelling, but also sometimes flawed.
The whole "speculative fiction" genre really appeals to me - have not seen La Jetee, but after wiki-ing it, I would love to see a copy of this film, if anyone has one...I like the La Jetee/La J'etais pun - but why the sans soleil? Because it's post WW3??
Agreed: I was so bowled over by a television program that attempts an audacious synthesis of multiple themes that I just went 'Wow!' If a dog was to come up to me and recite poetry I would probably forget to evaluate the use of language and just be impressed that it was a talking dog.
There were a lot of dubious associations: one of the most unpleasant was dismissing Nash's work on game theory on the basis that he was a schizophrenic. And the Laing stuff was a little forced.
On episode three, to be fair Curtis did indicate that that was the irony of the implementation of Berlin's theory, that the negative theory of freedom was being given an absolutist agenda by the neo-cons - something that Berlin never intended.
But also agreed on the positive freedom aspect - it was a fairly fire and brimstone reading of this and it was odd that he didn't cite the ways in which this has worked. I suspect he would come up with some old labour extensions of the welfare state if pushed.
What I'd love him to do would be to extend his argument to the ideology of humanitarianism and how that his governed foreign policy and the complicity of NGOs in it. A recent book by a guy called Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers, looks good on that.
But three cheers for a dog that talks nonetheless!
But the clip of Berlin reminded me of the golden days when TV has more features like this? Programming designed to be good for you (humanitarian programming?) so you had interviews with Foucault and the South Bank Show wasn't on Elton John. An ongoing project of mine is to persuade my company to package these programs and sell them as DVDs.
La Jetee is available on DVD with Sans Soleil btw.
You're right, Curtis did make the point that Berlin's ideas had been misused - although he seemed to only do that half the time (that is, when he wasn't trying to show how Berlin's ideas dovetailed neatly into systems management!). You're also right that the dodgiest moment was the 'AND Nash was a NUTTER!' thesis. Definitely get those 'let's sit around a smoky room and chat about big ideas' DVDs released. I'd buy them all!
Have just discovered La Jetee and Sans Soleil on youtube.
Post a Comment
<< Home