Today a friend of mine challenges me to react to a discussion lead on the mailing list nettime (check their April archives), a highly recommended and refined place for intellectuals from all over the world to discuss and publish on very important issues.
Continue Reading »
My last movie at the bifff: Teknolust by Lynn Hershman with 4 times Tilda Swinton.
Fairy tale with 3 + 1 ladies: red, yellow and blue one, replicants of the biogenetics Rosetta Stone, who made her clones by a combination of her DNA and a mother board. She keeps her clones like oncomouses trapped in her laboratory, but dressed in colorful silk kimonos, being able to download from the internent and dvds whatever is necessary for their minds to become human. That’s the problem what is a human being: the movie tends to lead us to the conclusion: culture, heterosexual love and family defines what is human. So much imagination to arrive to that conclusion! That could have been more exciting threads to follow: could a human be virused by computer virus/bug (man contaminated by woman being the interface between flesh and code)? life should be patented? do clones exist really? do we learn love words from movies?
“(…)elle n’est pas sur une rampe de lancement pour la vraie vie, (…) elle-même est une vie, à consommer tout de suite comme les groseilles.” Sans Soleil, C. Marker.
Again at the biff: Suicide Club a film by Sono Sion. Why quote ‘Sans Soleil’ then, because as a spirit, as a sigh it was haunting me during the movie, sometimes, as well as Lain by Nakamura, where teenage girls bear a secret, maybe before blood is coming from them. The 1st scene is highly symbolic: 54 schoolgirls throw themselves under a train, launching, blowing a stream of blood on the machine, on the crowd, on the screen. Then a roll of regular stitched bits of skin is found on the crime scene. Do they loose their virginity on the road to another world?
In front of them, a bunch of policemen: embodying the father, the lover, the cynical, … But how could they understand the world of teenagers full of sweet pop groups, fans, copycats, mobile phones, websites, following a fashion one day and leaving it the day after: today suicide is in fashion, let’s die together.
Today death is in fashion: let’s sell it as song, as gadget, let’s use it as a setting for a rock’n roll star.
Today suicide is just an image, a fact in a landscape, a data on a webpage,a family routine…
When the film stays on facts, on crowds in subways, it could have this melancholy or this gore-humor, but when it enters imaginary, it comes with old clichés, and girls are the first victims of these clichés.
Designated victims or mighty mistresses of images, mass cossumption, and death, who is afraid of teenage girls?
Sad day, but lovely film yesterday night: Drive by Sabu. Also, beautiful website where you can drive along the movie. Asakura, Japanese salaryman, working for a pharmaceutical society, suffering from headaches, in love with a clumsy young woman with a red umbrella is taken as hostage by his fate, in his head and in his car. How you can fight your ghosts and your ancestors without blowing everyone’s head off.
“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men” (B. Kruger)
Today under sunny sky, better said within dark rooms: Aragami by Ryuhei Kitamura. Yesterday leaving before the end Tsukamoto’s movie, pursued or pursuing the imminence of death or life, I was wondering what we were looking for in cinema.
So what makes you go back to movies: 2 handsome guys and the promise of good sword fights…
So, a languorous semi-god, a sensual zombie (can’t die, can’t sleep, can’t dream) with red hair, sexy legs, glittering kimono, waiting for the one who will be able…(may i say that) to finally penetrate him with his sword, ‘ saves’ a pony-tailed young samourai.
Follow conversations with a glass of wine or vodka. When the rituals of good old friendship between guys are over, serious things, meaning sword duels, can begin. The whole of it accompanied with a light and repetitive soundtrack coming out of an American soap.
You asked me: ‘and you what did you think of it?’.Time to answer, but the way, what if temporarily we call this blog HUPOMNÊMATA (il s’agit non de poursuivre l’indicible, non de révéler le caché, non de dire le non-dit, mais de capter au contraire le déjà -dit; rassembler ce qu’on apu entendre ou lire.’) To go back to saturday morning http://www.arsmusica.be/agenda/15-1.htm, I had the feeling to assist to the remake of an historical moment when every instrument is explored, deconstructed. Where every musician give to hear every tone possible deconstructing their gesture, their instrument. We saw their relationship sometimes intimate to their instrument, could be also the sound of a voice for one woman. What was surprising and and the same time desappointing was that the experiences, the sounds were placed side by side, in place and time. They were playing their partition, not going very far in their intimate relation to their instrument, to the space avoinding us to become voyeurs or alone facing a solitary pleasure exhibited, even if we had pleasure looking at the light on a neck, a face, a decolleté, an arm, a face. This exercice of making hear, seems to make impossible to play together, to play against each other, to play with, to exagerate, to leave. What was the relation between each other, with the audience, with time? The only relation they seemed to have is to a notation.
