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Friday, September 23, 2011

ZIZEK: THE FILM AND THE MAN = THE DESERT OF THE REAL


Trailer from www.zeitgeistfilms.com
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/trailer.mov


All - yes -ALL- neo-liberals, liberals, and radicals are required to know who ZIZEK is. It would help if conservative and the religious right also knew. Keanu Reeves in The Matrix knew, why don't you.?

After Baudrillard comes Zizek!

Zizek on Belief
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/belief.mov







And for other radical films instead of Hollywood:


The fact that Zizek's film premiered at 2005 Toronto Films means that Cronenberg knows very well who Zizek is.



Sunday, September 18, 2011

Review: BUCK Reading Through Nietzsche and The Inscription of the Body

Here's Ebert's review which has committed the sin of entering the psychological swamp of interpretation, which misses the secret of the film and reduces it to just another warm and fuzzy documentary. Very ho hum review. If you still like a standard review try elsewhere. Google will help you.


Me, I'm in ecstasy over it. It is an enthralling film for the intelligent viewer. That means if you don't love it then you are probably stupid.

Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals traces the genealogy of torture and the Inscription of the Body, a crucial concept that Foucault ran with, but that Ayn Rand overlooked to her great loss. Cronenberg's long obsession with the body and its interfaces understands perfectly.

Reading through Nietzsche: Torture throughout history, and especially with early man, was the means to inscribe memory, to create a consciousness that can only come with a memory. Ghastly, but true.

How does one create a memory for the human animal?

How does one go about to impress anything on that partly dull, partly flighty human intelligence - that incarnation of forgetfulness - so as to make it stick? ... in fact, there is perhaps nothing more terrible in man's earliest history  than his mnemotechnics. "A thing is branded on the memory to make it stay there;  only what goes on hurting will stick" ... Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attended with torture, blood, sacrifice. ... the most repulsive mutilations, such as castration; the cruelest rituals in every religious cult (and all religions are at bottom systems of cruelty). (Nietzsche GOM 192-94)





If you have a level of unbelief here, then go ask a person about a particular tattoo they have. They will tell you when, why, how, what, who, in other words, all about it. They remember all theses things that are now Inscribed on their Memory. A voluntary and paid for acceptable torture.

Of course Nietzsche has been condemned for stating this, and ignored for his own hatred of it, while at the same time seeing its necessity for early man's consciousness to come into being. Our present hatred of this practice concerns female genital mutilation. If you bring your full understanding of Nietzsche with you when you consider this practice, you will become aware that it has nothing to do with human rights. It is a sacred practice to control the sexuality of women. (But the sexuality of the feminine will never be controlled, however they or we pretend that it is.) Middle eastern men will never give it up. It is the cornerstone of the fundamentalist Muslim adherents, much as confession is for the Catholic church.


First time director - Cindy Meehl
Back to Buck whose alcoholic father so abused him that a sports coach who forced him to take a shower saw the deep horrifying scars on his back and buttocks from being terrorized and beaten that was ongoing for years. The sports coach called the sheriff in and Buck went to a wise and wonderful foster home, that increased his understanding of what he needed in life and what horses need in life. Children and adults also. And even Buck himself, the Horse Whisperer so sensitively presented in this film, will say in it, that his horribly abusive childhood was the cornerstone of his perfect empathy with horses. And people BTW. 


"Your horse is a mirror to your soul. Sometimes you will like what you see and sometimes you won't." - Buck Brannaman





Torture and The Inscription of His Body - and always the Mind with it - created a consciousness in him, a memory that is now indelible. 


His horse training clinics for which he travels 40 weeks a year testifies to his mission in life. ($20 to watch) His clients speak about the effects changing their behavior in all other parts of their life and how they raise their children and interact with other people. This is the real beauty of his work. And we can extrapolate how certain humans were inscribed with a memory that was then communicated without the torture the first ones endured.


We need to be more mindful and appreciative of that lonely German genius Nietzsche, who has given us the rudimentary tools for this quality of understanding. We meet it again in Temple Grandin, who has designed slaughter house circular chutes that are now standard operating procedure in 50% of slaughter houses in North America. I keep wondering if the increase in autism is not an increase in a particular focussed intelligence to advance mankind. Temple Grandin does not think linearly. She thinks in discontinuous pictures like Alice Cullen. And since we are no longer in linear time.........Is this the new mind for humanity coming into being?





Robert Gordon - Deborah Butterfield
Hi Robert!
Deborah Butterfield
Deborah Butterfield has made sculptures all her artistic life on just horses, and she practices dressage with her own horses. She began with twigs and now casts. Some of Buck's clients have taken up the practice of dressage with cattle horses, saying that it is perfect for refining their skills, and they do not end up in a dead end practice for its own beauty, but apply it to their work with cattle.
Deborah Butterfield



Deborah Butterfield


Politically in this film we see people of great integrity, self-reliance, courage, intelligence, and desire for learning. We do not see people who are ever going to champion universal health care, universal government intervention in their personal lives, but not only that, they are not going to tolerate it in any form. Neo-liberals, watch out! 

I would like to say that the pictures of Buck in childhood, before his mother died, show a child with a beautiful sensitive mouth. The mouth of the man is still beautiful.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Review: Another Earth At the Moxie in Springfield MO

If you miss this you will be sorry. You may not know it until a few years have gone by, but you will know it. Trust me.
AND IT HAS BEST KISS EVER
 
Here's part of Roger Ebert's review:If she had not had too many beers. If she had been listening to a different radio station. If he had not been on the road in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fatal crash was the sum of an infinite series of "ifs," tracing back to if life had never evolved on Earth in the first place. In our lives, we surf the wave of chance.

Not as elegant as Nabokov but the same idea:


There are always at least two occasions when two persons, unwittingly, almost meet. Each time destiny seems to have prepared this meeting with the greatest care, attending first to one possibility, then another, ordering the tiniest detail and leaving nothing to chance. But each time some tiny, unattended eventuality intervenes to prevent the coming together, and the two lines diverge once again at a greater rate... But destiny is much too persistent to allow itself to be put off by a failure. It arrives at its ends, by such subtle machinations that not even a click is heard when at last the two persons are brought together. (Nabokov)(IE 81)


Read Ebert and then come back so plot is out of the way.

If you have not read Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, then read it. DeLillo dedicated Cosmopolis to Auster.

It arrived unheralded at Sundance 2011 and won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize as well as the Special Jury Prize. "Another Earth" was made on a low budget, Brit Marling and Mike Cahill wrote it, Marling acted in it, and Cahill shot and edited it himself.

Kind of like Rob Pattinson's impromptu music on youtube. Is anyone listening? Why does everything of value require slick production and reproduction? Because Walter Benjamin told us so almost 100 years ago now. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on another of my blogs.

And Baudrillard has told us recently: If time accelerates, then go infinitely slowly. So according to Socrates, if slick CGI is required, go hand held cameras and shoe string production values.

Another Earth is visually fictionalizing Baudrillardian theory. Does this mean his theory is disappearing. We can only hope so. This is how he meant it to happen. Theory is not intended to last for hundreds of years while white suits in labs perform endless experiments trying to disprove it and only ending up confirming it. Do I need to tell you why?

The above quote describes Destiny in the near death experience of Rhoda in Another EarthMore elaboration reading through Baudrillard on my blog on Cosmopolis.
We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)
 
Kenzaburo Oe in A Personal Matter  opts for a choice-centered cosmology, and puts this in the mouth of one of his characters:
Every time you stand at the crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you... 

Here is the woman known as Saw Lady who performed the sound track for Another Earth.
Natalia Paruz The Saw Lady Playing in the Subway
On the soundtrack of Another Earth.
She found me on twitter

Thank u for recommending Another Earth to ! (I played the saw on the soundtrack. This is me