Herzog: The Jungle Is Obscene - Rob Pattinson's Next Director; A Blessing

Herzog will direct Rob Pattinson (as Lawrence) in: Queen of the Desert

This is the director Rob Pattinson has been waiting for. 

This month’s issue of Harper’s features a fantastic collection of diary entries by German film director Werner Herzog. These entries are excerpted from the forthcoming book: 

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo. 


Released in 1982, Fitzcarraldo tells the story of a would-be rubber magnate who attempts to haul a steamship over a small mountain in Peru so that he can access an area rich in rubber trees. The infamous Klaus Kinski plays Fitzcarraldo, a European who pushes his crew to the breaking point in this mad quest; the semi-fictional plot was doubled in the real-life production disasters that plagued the movie. Fitzcarraldo dramatizes one of the oldest narrative conflicts, man vs. nature, in an earnest yet completely unromantic way. Fitzcarraldo, the opera-lover who brings ice to the natives, shatters any romantic illusions one might have about the power and majesty of nature in his mad schemes. This theme repeats throughout Herzog’s work, from the conquistador opus Aguirre, the Wrath of God to his outstanding 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Again and again, Herzog’s films ironize, disrupt, or otherwise show the folly of romanticizing nature. His diary entries from Conquest of the Useless lay these sentiments bare in ways both bleakly poetic and terribly funny.

Take this entry from December 8, 1980: “The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” Here, Herzog provides a succinct antithesis to Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage.” Herzog’s view of man—de-politicized, that is—seems more Hobbesian, actually. In an entry from April 6, 1981, he writes:

“This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight. I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army, but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, and I was left like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.”

Nature seems to nullify Herzog, to void any essential humanity he might have had. His repetition of “Nothing, nothing was there anymore” reminds me of King Lear’s famous lines “Never, never, never, never, never.” Although Lear is weeping over the body of his kind daughter Cordelia, the psychology of these lines surely reflect his own terrible experiences, his own nullified identity of homelessness on the wild heath.

For Herzog, nature is a war, nature will eat you. “Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker, a leafy plant like a slender hare’s ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite,” he observes. If Herzog is melancholy or mordant in these grim reckonings, he’s also very, very funny. Take this hilarious June 4^th entry concerning a giant albino turkey that’s been terrorizing the set:

“The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Three Musketeers films who go on to prettily cross swords, and then let the vain albino go. His feelings hurt, he trotted away, wiggling his rump but with his wings still spread in conceited display.”

And yet one senses that Herzog’s humor is a defense against the absurdity of nature, one that derives from an acute awareness that humanity is at once of and apart from nature, and at that by its own definition, its own choice. In a June 2^nd entry featuring his nemesis the albino turkey, Herzog details an incident that highlights the essential ugliness of a Darwinian world:

“Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The white turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, and used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position and making gurgling sounds while his bluish-red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.”

There we go. We get it all, all the order of nature. Food, sex, death, the whole deal, laid out keenly and with grim humor, neatly compacted into a single, grotesque episode. If these excerpts are any indication of the rest of the book’s trajectory, Conquest of the Useless promises to transcend standard making-of fare. Indeed, Herzog’s book seems nothing less than a profound meditation on the intersection of man, nature, terror, and mortality.

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo is available June 30th from HarperCollins.

Reposted from Biblioklept: http://biblioklept.org/2009/05/15/the-jungle-is-obscene-werner-herzogs-visceral-nature-writing/

"a suit of armor with no knight inside" is Lacan and Baudrillard. The suit of armor a "floating sign" asserting strength, a mask denying the emptiness of the signified, the knight inside is empty, weak, nothing.

And this is exactly what Kristen Stewart means when in LIttle White Lies Zine she said that celebrity charity is EMPTY! Herzog will love her.

“The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin.” 

Baudrillard's definition of obscenity:

When simulated reality will be total we will be in 

Virtual Reality

An Obscenity

Pornography is not obscene. 

Sex is now everywhere except in sex.

Since sex is everywhere, totalized, that is the obscenity. 

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Žižek – The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology - Zizek At TIFF Tonight 9/7/12 In Person

Žižek – The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Posted from Progressive Geographies

After the success of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 

director Sophie Fiennes and the only philosopher-

turned-film-star Slavoj Žižek return with 

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

, 

Tonight marks the premiere of the film at the TIFF

with both Žižek and Fiennes in attendance.

Bringing his unique style and “penetrating

insights” to popular and obscure cinema alike,

Žižek is at once captivating and clownish,

bringing unique knowledge and interpretation- as 

well as a deep love of cinema- to a host of films.

In this edition, Žižek examines film for a deeper

ideological implication, both obvious and 

undiscovered, and questions these outcomes for 

our own time.

Through skillful editing, Fiennes weaves Žižek into  

the narrative and histories of films as diverse as  

Jaws, The Triumph of Will, Brazil and The Sound

of Music.

Not many films can tackle capitalism, 

consumerism, left-wing radicalism and  

philosophy among other things. But ones with

Žižek certainly can.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology premieres Friday 

September 7th at 6pm at the

Toronto International 

Film Festival

. Tickets can be purchased here.

Also at VersoBooks

Review: Snow White and the Huntsman

Having read the original screenplay two years ago I have not bothered to see SWATH. yet understanding why Kristen Stewart chose Snow White to play an active, physical role was a good choice for her. I was not inclined to see it for that or for what I knew would be a fabulous Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen. Lately I don't go to a movie just to see one outstanding performance. I want to see excellence in all of its details. 

So I almost missed it on the big screen. Another example of a quick judgement based on little evidence almost ruined an astonishing experience for me. Why I went was to observe what influence Rupert Sanders as a director had on Kristen Stewart and I went to read that interaction. My disclosure. 

It is an absolutely beautiful and breathtaking film. Yes, I have read the bits of literal observations that reviewers have noticed and commented about. Me, I drop my brains in the chair next to me for a fantasy of this type.  I say YES  and I don't care if accents are off, if a sword appears in the wrong hand, or anything else as long as I stay inside the film. Mirror, Mirror had me packing up and leaving before  30 minutes had passed with its funny ironic cynicism and asides that were so boring to me, but required you to pay attention to to get it. 

I didn't expect much from Snow white and the Huntsman but after this furor I did want to see the dynamics of what a smitten director might draw forth from Stewart. Awesome. Snow White's script does not give her too much range, but more than usual in some past films. And it was by far so well directed, seen, and opulently lush that it pulled me in. The discount audience around me was hushed for the entire film, quite unusual in a fringe town growing to be a city on the fringe of the Ozarks.

Unbelievable!

There isn't a woman, child, man or any other actor that won't want to work with Sanders. He knows exactly how he wants a scene framed, how he wants an actor framed. Charlize has never, never been more lovely or more subtly evil. Stewart is absolutely beautiful in some frames, and utterly fierce in others while maintaining her beauty. She now knows how to be in a rage and be beautiful at the same moment. Not easy as we all well know how distorted our faces can get in rage. Of course Charlize knows how in her sleep. Chris Hemsworth is ruggedly handsome, and is not used as a prop. Sam Claflin's Prince has something off about him in his first adult scene. I felt as if he were ill cast, but not so. He just slightly smacks of some insincerity that is in his performance, not an acting discrepancy.

And that reminds me that this director is a genius in casting. Not an off one in the bunch and there are a lot of them. Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones for two.

Beautiful and Smart

Stewart has another film for a 


Love Letter in addition to Remember Me. Only it is a much bigger one, a lusher one, but perhaps not quite as subtle as Pattinson's fingerprints all over his film in the script. This love letter is all visual and musical. the music does not intrude and yet it enhances. 

It is a beautiful film that children will love and that adults will quite likely re-enter in a timeless zone of fantasy. Is it a great artistic film such as The Cronenberg is touted to make and doesn't deliver with Cosmopolis? No it isn't, but it's not meant to be, yet it still feels like art in a nostalgic way of recently earlier times. It is lovely.

At the end looking forward to a future film in the series, Kristen is crowned queen and her face is no longer innocent. She knows now that there are enemies in her court, and some very close to her who would kill her. Much as the young Elizabeth I knew when she was crowned queen. And who knows about the young Elizabeth II.

Fierce and lovely all at once

The Prince in Armor

 

Sam Claflin - The Prince Who Betrays Her Hmmmmm.

The Test and The Affirmation

The Troll 

Just before Snow White faces the Troll the Huntsman has showed her how to use her dagger. He tells her that before she kills she must look into their eyes to see their Soul. 

This is what she is doing with the Troll, looking into his eyes and seeing his Soul. She sees a monster who is frightened. Missed by all reviewers I have read. A nice touch too. I expect - hope? - that children will get it.

DeLillo's Yen and Cronenberg's Yuan in Cosmopolis - Reading Through Lacan

Las Meninas - Diego Valazquez

Cronenberg has gone for the literal by using DeLillo's exact words in his Cosmopolis dialogue. But then strangely Cronenberg eliminates Yen (Japanese currency), replacing it with Yuan (Chinese currency), destroying the Lacanian resonance with yen: a whim for something; an innocuous wanting; and when, "He didn't know what he wanted, then he knew,  he wanted a haircut." Actually this is not a want is it? Is it a yen turning into a want as he persists with his plan? And he will keep his Appointment in Samarra to get it. A yen. Packer then begins to yen (want?) for yen, a play on the verb and the noun.

Then Packer wants all the yen - yenning? - that there is, he wants to want, he wants to Desire, but having no Lack, cannot. He wants all the Rothkos (does he want the sudden break, the cut in his life as Rothko had?), in fact the entire chapel, a religious setting these paintings were painted for. He wants all the volts the stun gun has. "Make me feel something I don't know." Then he wants to LOSE all Elise's heritage. 

Rob has said, "I think he was searching for something. He wanted something."  Cronenberg shuts him up once again. The first time being "....the world will die" the resonating quote of Ayn Rand. Is this the time Cronenberg pats Rob on the head? Good boy.  Does Cronenberg just want to touch Rob's hair like all his fangirls want to? Is this why Cronenberg gave him a slicked down 1950's hairdo (an armoured helmet of hair as Diane Rubenstein might say), perfectly groomed, not looking at all as if he might want, have a yen for, a haircut? What is Cronenberg thinking here?

In a literal recognition of the present economic world prominence of China over Japan, Cronenberg replaces the Japanese currency of the yen with the Chinese currency of the yuan, thus revealing his complete ignorance of the importance in our thinking about our world given us by Lacan that DeLillo has mirrored. (This is an auteur filmmaker?)

Ah, but a Lacanian reading still triumphs. The word yuan in the mouth of a native English speaker does not have the same resonance as spoken by a Chinese. Yuan. Roll it in your mouth. Feel its sound. Feel all the resonance of yearning in the sound of this word, the yawning longing it draws from the native English speaking mouth. Cronenberg has concealed and revealed from himself, concealed and revealed himself to us. In wishing to dispose of yen, a very very mild and almost invisible want, he has substituted yuan, a yearning, a longing. For what Mr. Cronenberg? What are you masking  with this  "floating sign" to escape knowing something you don't want to know that you feel? What if we consider Zizek's terminology of  unknown knowns at this point? Is it Death?

"Money has lost its narrative. Money talks only to itself," says Vija Kinski.

"The New York City skyline of skyscrapers has lost its narrative," says Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism. The Twin Towers of totalitarian monolithic proportions faced each other saying that although we appear to be two, we really are one. They are mirror images reflecting each other into infinity saying, "There is no outside." How clairvoyant do you think DeLillo is now?

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," she said. "I grew up comfortably. took me awhile to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt instensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C 29)

Didi Fancher is talking about the loss of representation; the concrete feel of money. The signifier and the signified. Vija Kinski is talking about cyber-capital, Virtual Reality Capital, money as "floating sign", the signified and the signifier parted forever, money floating free as CODE (just air as Packer says)  in Virtual Reality.

Benno Levin:

"But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.....Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. (C 55)


The loss of representation so carefully elucidated by Foucault in The Order of Things in chapter one with Valazquez's Las Meninas. In the painting among the royal family of Philip IV,                                                                                                                                                               is the painter. The painter is looking at you. The canvas he is painting you cannot see, only its back. At the far end of the painting, among the shadowy paintings on the wall, a figure midway on stairs appears to be lit by the invisible source of the light that allows you to see the royal family and the painter himself  But it is not another painting, it is a mirror,  "It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied us, not only by the distant paintings but also by the light in the foreground with its ironic canvas." (TOT 7)

I attended Leo Steinberg's seminar on Valasquez and he spent an evening on this painting. He did not mention the faraway "painting" that upon a closer look betrayed itself as a mirror. In Barcelona at the Picasso Museum there are all the studies of Las Meninas that Picasso did. I wish I could take another look.

You are in the light that is lighting the painting. You are the invisible subject Velasquez is gazing at. Foucault then discusses the royal family in this painting that is a portrait of them.

These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visual, they prove supersably inadequate. 

Neither can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.( TOT 9)

And in this way Foucault gives us THE CUT with representation in the Dominating Discourse of painting paving the way to the modernist era with its lack of representation.

Review:Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises - Darren in Ireland at The M0vie Blog

The M0vie Blog 

I see no point in reproducing perfection so read Darren at his blog www.them0vieblog.com 

There are some things I wish to say about his review. 

Darren's awareness of the poignant absence of The Joker. Not even a throw away reference to him as Darren wishes.

 I agree with Nolan. The absence of The Joker is a void that is "Less Than Nothing" to steal from Zizek's book on Hegel. Nolan has invited Death as a presence in The Dark Knight Rises. The absence of The Joker resonates with the death of Heath Ledger, his irreplaceability, his singularity. Could there be any more beautiful memorial to Ledger than this film that mourns his non-being, depriving it of the focus that was his alone.

Darren has merged Bane and Wayne into an indivisible whole. As Babette Babich reminds us, each opposition includes its opposite. No division. Baudrillard will write an entire book on The Intelligence of Evil, how absolutely necessary evil is, which disappears in Simulated Reality. Ayn Rand tells us what evil is in her fictionalized character of Ellsworth Toohey, the man who would elevate mediocrity until our ability to perceive excellence disappears.  

Darren's recognition of masks, how they act as "floating signs" to affirm what they deny. How Wayne's mask and Bane's mask reflect each other in a mirror darkly. 

Nolan is teaching us our new world of simulation. He is addressing what DeLillo addressed in Cosmopolis, but what Cronenberg was afraid to touch. See here.

As Darren asserts, this is the first film to acknowledge the importance of Occupy, which Cronenberg misreads, thinking "they just want a piece of the pie."

Nolan plays on inversion which Darren recognizes. The mirror.

One discovers the same speculation in Baudrillard's concluding meditation on Borges' story of the 'mirror people', which prompts his suggestion that behind every reflection or representation 'a defeated enemy lies concealed'; a defeated 'singularity', which 'will one day rebel'. (Baudrillard in his The Perfect Crime quoted in Performance Research 1.3 - Richard Gough p.7)

Here begins the great revenge of otherness, of all the forms which subtly or violently deprived of their singularity,; henceforth pose an insoluble problem for the social order, and also for the political and biological orders.  

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off....shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. (Borges -T he Book of Imaginary Beings p. 67-8)

__________________________________________________________________________________
A postscript.

Darren emphasizes the fact that Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises has an ending, breaking the trope of comic hero stories. And ending signals DEATH and Death does not belong to this genre.  Another tribute to Ledger or perhaps Ledger lodged it in Nolan's mind.