X-Posted and first published at 491

“Our clear and simple language-games are not preparatory studies for a future regimentation of language—as it were first approximations, ignoring friction and air-resistance.  The language-games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I

“Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human…It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape.”

-Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal

© 2010 Never Let Me Go

Humanism remains one of the few ideologies that appears to many like an unquestionable, natural phenomenon.  Humanism depends on the category of the human, which in turn relies on disturbances along its fault lines to make shocking announcements of its presence.  We cannot exactly draw these lines, but we feel them when the ground shakes.  Mark Romanek’s movie, Never Let Me Go, presents such a seismic disturbance and it enhances the unquestionable naturalness of humanity by dissembling its questionable source beneath answers to other questions—all related to the nature of the human—that it poses retroactively.  Busy seeking the questions to these answers, we more easily take for granted their precarious foundation.

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Karen Fiss: […]What are you doing with the [350 hours of]  film that wasn’t included in the final…

Lanzmann: With what is not in the film?  You want to know my deep wish?  My wish would be to destroy it[…]if I followed my inclination I would destroy it.  This, at least, would prove that Shoah is not a documentary.

-“Seminar With Claude Lanzmann 11 April 1990”, Claude Lanzmann, Ruth Larson and David Rodowick 

 © Outpost Films 2009

Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s documentary, Restrepo, follows the one-year deployment of a platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan and it concerns me.  It concerns me because the directors, the promoters, and many critics claim that Restrepo is an apolitical portal into the reality of war and, specifically, into the war in Afghanistan.  Restrepo may be nonpartisan, as the variety of responses to the movie show, but it is a far cry from apolitical.

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X-Posted at Plasma Pool

“For some time now, the accidental events on the street seem to the movie-goer just leaving the theater like the planned contingency of a film.  Between the mechanically assembled phrases taken from the language of daily life, the chasm yawns.”

 - “Trying to Understand Endgame” Theodor W. Adorno

© 2009 Avatar

Avatar entered wide-release last December and by now no one doubts that it has compelled many.  A CNN article reports on a largely internet-based community of people morbidly obsessed with the movie, offering the following post from one fan:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie,"  Elequin posted.

One reason Elequin may not have been able “to think that it’s just a movie” is that Avatar creates an extremely immersive experience for its viewers, especially when seen in 3-D in the theaters.  Reviewers like Kenneth Turan, John Podhoretz, and David Denby claim that the movie’s expensively-produced visual and auditory spectacle chiefly if not fully accounts for this intense immersion. Turan writes, “In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen.” And Denby suggests—without any real justification—that anyone “lingering over the irony that [Avatar’s] anti-technology message is delivered by an example of advanced technology that cost nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce” should realize that such consideration is a waste of time.  The sensory experience, he says, “is striking enough to make it irrelevant.”

© 2010 CNN.com

I disagree.

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In her directorial-debut, Women Without Men, visual artist Shirin Neshat brings us a heavily stylized page, illuminated by elements of magic realism, right out of Iran’s revolutionary history.  The movie takes place in the weeks just before and after a CIA-backed coup deposes Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, and ushers in a 36-year era of political oppression in the service of western powers. 

The movie, which Neshat based on a novel of the same name by Shahrnush Parsipur, focuses on four women, their interactions with men, and their relationships with one another.  Zarin, a lower-class prostitute, has begun to see men who are missing their faces.  Munis, an unmarried, middle-class woman, is oppressed by her conservative brother, commits suicide, and becomes the only female member of a communist faction (yes, in that order).  Faezeh, Munis’s chastity-obsessed friend, who is in love with Munis’ brother, is raped.  Finally, Farrokh, an upper-class socialite, begins conversing with an old, intellectual love interest just returned from the States, divorces her high-ranking military husband, and buys the orchard where the four women all eventually meet.

Parsipur titled the book as a response to Hemingway’s collection of short stories, Men without Women.  (The collection includes such well-know stories as “The Killers” and “Hills Like White Elephants”).  Accordingly, Women Without Men, by its title, promises an inversion; however, the inversion takes place aesthetically without ever taking place literally.  For example, it’s a contrivance of the narrative that, as film critic Daniel Montgomery claims, most of the men “are standard-issue examples of cultural chauvinism,” and that, in contrast, the female characters have some depth and development to them.  Farrokh ultimately becomes disillusioned of her old, intellectual flame and the western-educated intelligentsia he represents.  Faezeh eventually rejects Munis’s conservative brother and his traditionalist values.

But the literal, titular inversion never takes place.

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I predicate the writing in this blog on the idea that "it's just a movie" and "it's just a book" are two of the most insidious phrases in American culture. The narrative structures we apprehend in stories affect the way we structure our understanding of the world. We frequently tell the story of our life to ourselves and to others and we learn how to do this by example. Moreover, when a sympathetic character dies, when we recognize a reference to a painful historical moment, or when dramatic irony overwhelms our senses, the emotions we feel can distract us or direct us to act. Movies and books are not to be trifled with. They can be powerful and they can be dangerous. We should not, however, answer with ignorance, avoidance, or censorship. We should answer with discussion. Here, I will try to do my part.