“It cannot be overlooked that the assembly line, which plays a fundamental role in the process of production, is in a sense represented by the filmstrip in the process of consumption. Both came into being at roughly the same time. The social significance of the one cannot be fully understood without that of the other”
Walter Benjamin
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Film. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Film. Afficher tous les articles
lundi 21 juin 2010
jeudi 4 juin 2009
La Défense + Jacques Gréber
La Défense, the giant business center at the end of Paris’ grande axe stands as an iconic reflection of dream-image of postwar modernism. Initiated in the mid-1950’s by a state-controlled development agency, according to the 1933 Athens Charter, the master plan was designed for maximum density of office and residential use. The complex would be served by an extensive networks of roads meeting in a central roundabout laying beneath the main pedestrian esplanade. Thus direct access to the basements of the buildings would be assured.
This modernist wonder has connections to Ottawa own ambitious postwar urban planning. The first skyscraper constructed, as the ESSO Standard Building designed by French architect and planner Jacques Gréber and his son Pierre. .
And, like Ottawa’s own tragic urban renewal projects, such as LeBreton Flats, la Défense required extensive expropriation. In this case over 8,000 ‘sub-standard” dwellings were demolished.
The Esso Standard was a spectacle of modernism, which fittingly, was featured in Jacques Tati’s Play Time – a marvelous satiric critique of the dislocation and empty busyness of modern life.
The scale of the project was immense, and the master plan would later be adapted, under the approval of uber-modernist Jacques Pompidou, to allow for bigger and more individual buildings. Now exclusively office space la Défense would total a mind-boggling 1,500,000 m2.
This modernist wonder has connections to Ottawa own ambitious postwar urban planning. The first skyscraper constructed, as the ESSO Standard Building designed by French architect and planner Jacques Gréber and his son Pierre. .
And, like Ottawa’s own tragic urban renewal projects, such as LeBreton Flats, la Défense required extensive expropriation. In this case over 8,000 ‘sub-standard” dwellings were demolished.
The Esso Standard was a spectacle of modernism, which fittingly, was featured in Jacques Tati’s Play Time – a marvelous satiric critique of the dislocation and empty busyness of modern life.
The scale of the project was immense, and the master plan would later be adapted, under the approval of uber-modernist Jacques Pompidou, to allow for bigger and more individual buildings. Now exclusively office space la Défense would total a mind-boggling 1,500,000 m2.
mercredi 16 juillet 2008
Summer heat, movies and the great American dream
In the long, hot summer night, attention wanes, and sleep comes slowly. It demands a particular remedy: the visual phantagasmoria of the gangster movie and the political thriller. Both let us sweat out summer heat in the action-packed stories of deceit and deception and the guilty pleasures of voyeur luxury and success. However, more than a thrilling visual and guttural ride, these films are a glimpse into the true virtues of the great American dream. Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is not only a political philosophy of the neoliberal state, it is at the very core of that great American dream: power and success for all willing to sacrifice – even the most powerless. The gangster movie and political thriller are perfect genre from which to explore this recovery narrative. Fueled by ingenuity, charisma, street smarts, and more necessarily, hard work, and the occasional means-to-an-end trickery, the working-class hero is willing to sacrifice all in order to achieve what is rightfully theirs. They can but achieve that which they desire: power and money. But in the wake of this success love, friendship and family have been sacrificed, or forgotten.
However, this ride to power and success if often driven by an internal hate which is also a fatal flaw. True Colours, the story of two young law students who forge a friendship, pursue their career goals only to be faced with mutual betrayal, provides a glimpse into this realm. Peter Burton (played by John Cusack), the brash law-student is driven to succeed, and at all costs is willfully masking his lower-class upbringing in the deindustrialized decay of in the urban northeast to forge friendships with his political connected roommate. With hard work, Burton is able to get a summer internship on Capital Hill. His acumen, smarts and willingness to blur right and wrong, provides him with an initial steps to political office including a choice connection with a business-class campaign financiers. On his rise to the top Burton uses all the people around him including his best friend, his wife (and best friends ex), and his pre-dementia father-in-law (not that IS rotten!). Having used all, Burton gets his election victory. However, Burton’s business connections prove to be less than savoury, and the now Department of Justice lawyer best friend, comes in to help bring down the congressman-elect. Burton could rely on his bare knuckles and political smarts to win on election night, however, his lower-class background did not provide him with the right moral background to play the game. The only financing he could get was of a dubious nature. The lack of financial connections would prove to be his downfall. All can have power, but without the right combination of power AND money, success is fleeting. His strength and will to win would also be his downfall. In the search for success from the bottom, friends and family are burned, until, the mighty recovery becomes a downfall, sometimes fatal.
This narrative is the driving line to Brian DePalma’s remake of Scarface. Tony Montana, the equally brash, balsy, tough, edgy, street smart equipped, small time criminal Cuban refugee literally breaks out from an internment camp in Florida to rise to glorious wealth and power in Miami’s 1980’s drug trade. Like Burton, Montana uses powerful connections he makes to get the connections needed to supply his own power. Montana, working for an established drug kingpin carefully crafts a relationship with a powerful Columbian drug lord into his own drug empire. He discards his previous boss, marries his boss’ trophy girlfriend, and with his massive drug profits builds his odd to opulence, a tacky mansion featuring among other things an in bedroom sunk-in hot-tub and a lobby pool with his mantra, the “world is yours.” He gets all that he wants: power and more money than he can imagine. The world has become his. However, Montana, like Burton, becomes obsessed with his own aura of power and success. He recklessly botches a job to kill an international anti-drug trade crusader, and then knowing a full war is coming goes to find his long-time associate and fellow refugee. However, he finds his friend with his sister: a definite no-no according to Tony’s moral code. He callously kills his friend point blank. The stage is set for his undoing, but Tony is set up to go down swinging. Upset at the death Tony retreats to his office and snorts enourmous amount of cocaine from a huge pile on his desk just as the Columbians come to seek pay-back. He won’t be an easy target, though and from the balcony of his office takes on a mini-army. Despite his coked-up bravado and impressive stamina, even Tony’s street smarts cannot stall his undoing. His street smarts could only get him so far, and the well-heeled culturally sophisticated Colombia gets the better of him, just like the articulate and proper best friend got Burton.
The moral of summer films so far. The rise to success can be quick, but those who achieve, using dubious means, will fall fast. And justice prevails?
However, this ride to power and success if often driven by an internal hate which is also a fatal flaw. True Colours, the story of two young law students who forge a friendship, pursue their career goals only to be faced with mutual betrayal, provides a glimpse into this realm. Peter Burton (played by John Cusack), the brash law-student is driven to succeed, and at all costs is willfully masking his lower-class upbringing in the deindustrialized decay of in the urban northeast to forge friendships with his political connected roommate. With hard work, Burton is able to get a summer internship on Capital Hill. His acumen, smarts and willingness to blur right and wrong, provides him with an initial steps to political office including a choice connection with a business-class campaign financiers. On his rise to the top Burton uses all the people around him including his best friend, his wife (and best friends ex), and his pre-dementia father-in-law (not that IS rotten!). Having used all, Burton gets his election victory. However, Burton’s business connections prove to be less than savoury, and the now Department of Justice lawyer best friend, comes in to help bring down the congressman-elect. Burton could rely on his bare knuckles and political smarts to win on election night, however, his lower-class background did not provide him with the right moral background to play the game. The only financing he could get was of a dubious nature. The lack of financial connections would prove to be his downfall. All can have power, but without the right combination of power AND money, success is fleeting. His strength and will to win would also be his downfall. In the search for success from the bottom, friends and family are burned, until, the mighty recovery becomes a downfall, sometimes fatal.
This narrative is the driving line to Brian DePalma’s remake of Scarface. Tony Montana, the equally brash, balsy, tough, edgy, street smart equipped, small time criminal Cuban refugee literally breaks out from an internment camp in Florida to rise to glorious wealth and power in Miami’s 1980’s drug trade. Like Burton, Montana uses powerful connections he makes to get the connections needed to supply his own power. Montana, working for an established drug kingpin carefully crafts a relationship with a powerful Columbian drug lord into his own drug empire. He discards his previous boss, marries his boss’ trophy girlfriend, and with his massive drug profits builds his odd to opulence, a tacky mansion featuring among other things an in bedroom sunk-in hot-tub and a lobby pool with his mantra, the “world is yours.” He gets all that he wants: power and more money than he can imagine. The world has become his. However, Montana, like Burton, becomes obsessed with his own aura of power and success. He recklessly botches a job to kill an international anti-drug trade crusader, and then knowing a full war is coming goes to find his long-time associate and fellow refugee. However, he finds his friend with his sister: a definite no-no according to Tony’s moral code. He callously kills his friend point blank. The stage is set for his undoing, but Tony is set up to go down swinging. Upset at the death Tony retreats to his office and snorts enourmous amount of cocaine from a huge pile on his desk just as the Columbians come to seek pay-back. He won’t be an easy target, though and from the balcony of his office takes on a mini-army. Despite his coked-up bravado and impressive stamina, even Tony’s street smarts cannot stall his undoing. His street smarts could only get him so far, and the well-heeled culturally sophisticated Colombia gets the better of him, just like the articulate and proper best friend got Burton.
The moral of summer films so far. The rise to success can be quick, but those who achieve, using dubious means, will fall fast. And justice prevails?
samedi 13 octobre 2007
The Urban Growth Machine
Francesco Rosi’s 1963 classic, Le Mani sulla città, provides a fantastic visual exposé of the urban growth machine at work. The Italian director succeeds brilliantly in simultaneously portraying how key power brokers act both in the public and private realms to enclose and direct the city’s growth. Using marvelous scenes shot in the historic Naples council chambers, the back-rooms of bourgeois homes, the offices of the city’s ruling-class, and streets of rapidly expanding Naples, Hands Over the City follows the dirty politics postwar urban development. The polemical script follows the intimate relationship between developers and the ruling party, several of whom have interest in property development whilst also sitting on council.
Armed with these powerful connections and the ability to control City Hall, the governing party is able to rule the city, using its influence to overturn even the sacred city plan, and to overrun old districts to make way for porfitable development projects. The most notorious of land developers, Edoardo Nottola (pictured above), is also Commissioner of Building Standards, and he uses his power to expand his real estate empire with shoddy buildings for tidy profits. The governing party is more than willing to be complicit so long as Notalla is able to secure votes for them - until scandal erupts.
After one of Nottola’s buildings collapses, the media demands answers, a scandal ensues, and the various factions at city hall try to put their own stamp on the conflict. Nottola’s main protagonist is the fiery and combative leftist Councilor Da Vita. De Vita proves to be a worthy opponent for the governing coalition as he works tirelessly to expose corruption at City Hall, against a well-oiled corporate elite. The glorious oratory of the Rod Steiger (Nottola) and Carlo Fermarillo (Da Vita) plays out in the theater of City Hall Chambres.
Rosi provided a sophisticated portrayal of insular city politics and the urban growth machine. All the elements of a perfect city politics drama are there: political control over development, complicity between the political and economic elite, scandal, corruption, class politics, concrete, back-room dealings, cooptation of social movements. If the script is brillant, the real story of Hands Over the City is about the conflict and cooptation of interests.
In one of the key scenes, now hamstrung by public scrutiny, Nottola makes a visit to the home of an influential fellow councilor tos hore up his power. Now clearly inpublic view, Nottola argues for the need for his building project to move ahead despite the accident.
“Those buildings must come down but my name mustn’t come up,” Nottola notes.
“Just what do you want”
“No. It’s “What do we want?” Your interests and mine are identical,” Nottola rebukes.
The story of urban development and redevelopment is also the story of how the interests conflate and are easily co-opted. No one is above them, no matter how sincere their will. As the leftist Councilor De Vita notes during a riot as the residents are protesting their expropriation:
“There’s no choice, you must go. You brought this on yourselves. This is what you get for voting for them. You gave them power to do as they please. What have they done to you? Think you’ll live in those buildings? You’ll end up somewhere even worse, where you can’t even walk.”
Just as they voted against their interests, De Vita is willing to abandon them.
In both of these scenes, Rosi shows a sensitivity to the geography and the political economy of urban development. For anyone interested in urban politics it is a mesmerizing story played out in cities across the world, and a wonderful insight into power, politics, development, and the truly disturbing trend of voters voting against their own interests. Why, indeed, can’t they just keep their hands of our city? Rosi has asked a question for the ages, and provided an essential film for students and scholars of the city.
lundi 20 août 2007
Remembering State Violence in the Everyday
Henri Lefebvre's preface to his Critique of Everyday Life is a wonderful voyage into the veiled alienation of bourgeois urban life. In the first few pages, Lefebvre rails against those who were only willing to see “alienation on the speculative level” and
unwilling to see alienation “soiled by the confrontation with actual human reality, with everyday life.” The eternally humanist HL wants to connect alienation to everyday life and to anchor them in the materiality everyday life: to renew the critique of everyday life as a “base” that matters. Lefebvre successfully drew attention to the alienation of everyday life, and the techno-urban dream of modern of urban life.
In one of the more telling passages, Lefebvre, uploads the following quotation from L’Express of June 8 1956:
“Kitchens are becoming less like kitchens and more like works of art... The latest technique is the electronic oven... The intercom (a system of loudspeakers linking every room) is becoming a standard piece of equipment in the home, while everyone is talking about a personalized little television network which will enable the lady of the house to attend to her chores while keeping an eye on the children playing in another room or in the garden... The remarkable ubiquity of ‘do it itself,’ the latest craze for the American husband... includes all the household gadgets that go with it...”
These new found gadgets were in K. Ross’ (1996: 192) words, “an assemblage of standardized, interconnected components” of newly created “totality of use-values... adapted to capitalist mass production through the development of “design” : a functionalist aesthetic that would render the components uniform, or compatible, the stove-sink-refrigerator flowing together in a seamless, white-chrome unit...”
Lefebvre extended Marx into the every-day by connecting "alienation" with the everyday using the poets of contradictory modern life: Brecht and Chaplin.
Just as HL confronts actual human reality using the power of illusion to uveil his critique of everyday life (a critique in action), I want use these passages and this poetic inspiration to jump into a discussion of everyday life as portrayed in two films set close together, but produced decades apart: Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and the recent film Nuit Noire, 17 Octobre 1961.
First, Mon Oncle. In the earlier passage, HL could be describing one of the ridiculous scenes in which the Jacques Tati’s clown-like Mr. Hulot witnesses complete household automation with much surprise in various scenes of his 1958 spectacle of subdued hilarity. In the film, Hulot, played by Tati himself, makes several visits to the suburban home of his relatives, where every aspect of domestic life has been automated: the kitchen, the fountain, the garage door, the cooking, the watering, and even the childhood games. All is clean, modern, sparkling and automated. With his usual flair for the ridiculous, Tati plays hubris with this convenience of modern domestic life. The romantic and residual, Hulot - who continues to ride his bike and smoke his pipe - exposes the all too silly nature of automated domestic life. The juxtaposition of his simple life with that of this ultra-modern relatives provides opens up questions about the utter insanity of post-war consumption and materialist aspirations.
Hulot’s relatives are the model of the new French middle class and “the construction of the new French urban techno-couple” awash in the dream of the American Life. Tati pokes ridicule at the continued division of labour upon which this new habitus rests. Not only is home life industrialized, segregated but, as we find out, the husband/bread winner is engaged in an equally regimented and segmented quotidien. He is the “new man” of the modern bureaucratic capitalist modernization, running an efficient modern plant (in some hilarious scenes Hulot is a series of jobs in the factory but is completely unable to adapt to the assembly line). At home, his wife runs the efficient household. Together this “new couple” is the micro-level of technological society. They are manifestations of the urban revolution, and testaments of modern convenience and technical brilliance, but also of the hidden contradictions of this urban life. As Lefebvre notes in another passage of Critique (1991: 8)
“Manifestations of the brilliant advances in the ‘ideal home’ constitute sociological facts of the first importance, but they must not be allowed to conceal the contradictory character of the real social process beneath and accumulation of technological detail. These advances, along with their consequences, are provoking new structural conflicts within the concrete life of society. The same period which has witnessed a breathtaking development in the application of techniques of everyday life has also witnessed the no-less breathtaking degradation of everyday life for large masses of human beings. All around us, in France, in Paris itself, there are hundreds of thousands of children of youngsters, students, young couples, single people, families, living in conditions of undreamed-of by anyone who does not bring the sociologist’s interest to bear: furnished rooms (increasingly expensive and squalid), slums, overcrowded flats, attic rooms etc.”
What Lefebvre draws attention to here is the contradiction of the ideal suburban home of the upper cadres of French society. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” As K. Ross (1996) has argued, much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism was a central component the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes and to provide a new (domestic) market for capitalist expansion.
While the utopian habits of bourgeois spatial segregation portrayed in Mon Oncle are taking root, becoming the dream-image (model) of French society, an other suburbanization being forged remains silent and forgotten. Workers and labourers from le magreb are being solicited to migrate as the labour-power behind the massive expansion of post-war production and consumption: the very urban fabric which has become the ideal to the “new couple” is unaccommodating to the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian workers who can barely afford decent housing and continue to face racialized repression and segregation.
The alter-reality of this inner colonization, and violent repression has recently come to life in the film Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre 1961. The film recalls the events of the night known only a October 17, 1961, and the censored history of the "dead bodies the newspapers didn't mention, that we weren't supposed to know about." (KR, 2002) That night, the FLN organized its first protest to protest a curfew which prohibet Algerians from being on Parisian streets after 8:30pm. Recalling the brutal and forgotten repression of a peaceful pro-FLN march, the film shows in chilling detail how the between peaceful march of between 30-40 thousand men, woman and children was met with fierce violence, and fired upon almost immediately. More than a simple reaction of incompetance, the violence was planed with cold calculation. In the weeks proceeding the march, ex-parachustiste has visited Paris's commissariats and virtually given carte-blanche the police. Papon had told his troops to "Settle your afairs with the Algerians yourselves. Whatever happens, you're covered. For one blow, give ten back... Even if the Algerians are not armed you should think of them always as armed." (KR) The violence was sickening: urnarmed marches in their Sunday bests were shot, matraqué, tossed into the river. How many? To this day, the corpses remain uncounted.
This film has revisited not only the state-perpetrated violent event, but also has shown glimpses into the everyday life of the dangerous classes that are to be absorbed or excluded from the national ideal of mass consumerism. In several scenes, FLN organizers walk through les bidonvilles to attend to organizing meetings and in the process show glimpses of the everyday life in the working districts. It is a stark contrast with the clean, modern totality of the modern home portrayed in Mon Oncle. These fleeting images offer a significant contradiction not only for socio-economic reasons, but also as since they exposes the moment of inner colonization. They are counter-images which expose how - as Kristen Ross has brilliantly noted - France continues to hold “its colonial past to be an “exterior” experience.” A “France” she concludes which has “closed that chapter and moved on to bigger autoroutes, all-electric Kitchens, and the European Economic Community.” When les flics en masse are deployed to stop the march with not so ambiguous instructions the scene is set for a evocation of the urbacidle moment of the urban revolution. Empowered by the brutal French Interior minister, and the right-wing Gaullist government, les flics conduct their brutal repression in subsequent scenes. On that black night remembered on our screen with the relentless violence of our modern state: the willingness of authorities to exert maximum force, the momentum of massive police deployment; the almost inevitable scene of mast arrests and bloodshed; and the impeding quiet aftermath.
The question as always is what do we do with the silence?
Listen... carefully... the silence of state violence is here, today, everywhere, and especially, today, in Montebello... Remember.
unwilling to see alienation “soiled by the confrontation with actual human reality, with everyday life.” The eternally humanist HL wants to connect alienation to everyday life and to anchor them in the materiality everyday life: to renew the critique of everyday life as a “base” that matters. Lefebvre successfully drew attention to the alienation of everyday life, and the techno-urban dream of modern of urban life.
In one of the more telling passages, Lefebvre, uploads the following quotation from L’Express of June 8 1956:
“Kitchens are becoming less like kitchens and more like works of art... The latest technique is the electronic oven... The intercom (a system of loudspeakers linking every room) is becoming a standard piece of equipment in the home, while everyone is talking about a personalized little television network which will enable the lady of the house to attend to her chores while keeping an eye on the children playing in another room or in the garden... The remarkable ubiquity of ‘do it itself,’ the latest craze for the American husband... includes all the household gadgets that go with it...”
These new found gadgets were in K. Ross’ (1996: 192) words, “an assemblage of standardized, interconnected components” of newly created “totality of use-values... adapted to capitalist mass production through the development of “design” : a functionalist aesthetic that would render the components uniform, or compatible, the stove-sink-refrigerator flowing together in a seamless, white-chrome unit...”
Lefebvre extended Marx into the every-day by connecting "alienation" with the everyday using the poets of contradictory modern life: Brecht and Chaplin.
Just as HL confronts actual human reality using the power of illusion to uveil his critique of everyday life (a critique in action), I want use these passages and this poetic inspiration to jump into a discussion of everyday life as portrayed in two films set close together, but produced decades apart: Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and the recent film Nuit Noire, 17 Octobre 1961.
First, Mon Oncle. In the earlier passage, HL could be describing one of the ridiculous scenes in which the Jacques Tati’s clown-like Mr. Hulot witnesses complete household automation with much surprise in various scenes of his 1958 spectacle of subdued hilarity. In the film, Hulot, played by Tati himself, makes several visits to the suburban home of his relatives, where every aspect of domestic life has been automated: the kitchen, the fountain, the garage door, the cooking, the watering, and even the childhood games. All is clean, modern, sparkling and automated. With his usual flair for the ridiculous, Tati plays hubris with this convenience of modern domestic life. The romantic and residual, Hulot - who continues to ride his bike and smoke his pipe - exposes the all too silly nature of automated domestic life. The juxtaposition of his simple life with that of this ultra-modern relatives provides opens up questions about the utter insanity of post-war consumption and materialist aspirations.
Hulot’s relatives are the model of the new French middle class and “the construction of the new French urban techno-couple” awash in the dream of the American Life. Tati pokes ridicule at the continued division of labour upon which this new habitus rests. Not only is home life industrialized, segregated but, as we find out, the husband/bread winner is engaged in an equally regimented and segmented quotidien. He is the “new man” of the modern bureaucratic capitalist modernization, running an efficient modern plant (in some hilarious scenes Hulot is a series of jobs in the factory but is completely unable to adapt to the assembly line). At home, his wife runs the efficient household. Together this “new couple” is the micro-level of technological society. They are manifestations of the urban revolution, and testaments of modern convenience and technical brilliance, but also of the hidden contradictions of this urban life. As Lefebvre notes in another passage of Critique (1991: 8)
“Manifestations of the brilliant advances in the ‘ideal home’ constitute sociological facts of the first importance, but they must not be allowed to conceal the contradictory character of the real social process beneath and accumulation of technological detail. These advances, along with their consequences, are provoking new structural conflicts within the concrete life of society. The same period which has witnessed a breathtaking development in the application of techniques of everyday life has also witnessed the no-less breathtaking degradation of everyday life for large masses of human beings. All around us, in France, in Paris itself, there are hundreds of thousands of children of youngsters, students, young couples, single people, families, living in conditions of undreamed-of by anyone who does not bring the sociologist’s interest to bear: furnished rooms (increasingly expensive and squalid), slums, overcrowded flats, attic rooms etc.”
What Lefebvre draws attention to here is the contradiction of the ideal suburban home of the upper cadres of French society. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” As K. Ross (1996) has argued, much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism was a central component the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes and to provide a new (domestic) market for capitalist expansion.
While the utopian habits of bourgeois spatial segregation portrayed in Mon Oncle are taking root, becoming the dream-image (model) of French society, an other suburbanization being forged remains silent and forgotten. Workers and labourers from le magreb are being solicited to migrate as the labour-power behind the massive expansion of post-war production and consumption: the very urban fabric which has become the ideal to the “new couple” is unaccommodating to the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian workers who can barely afford decent housing and continue to face racialized repression and segregation.
The alter-reality of this inner colonization, and violent repression has recently come to life in the film Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre 1961. The film recalls the events of the night known only a October 17, 1961, and the censored history of the "dead bodies the newspapers didn't mention, that we weren't supposed to know about." (KR, 2002) That night, the FLN organized its first protest to protest a curfew which prohibet Algerians from being on Parisian streets after 8:30pm. Recalling the brutal and forgotten repression of a peaceful pro-FLN march, the film shows in chilling detail how the between peaceful march of between 30-40 thousand men, woman and children was met with fierce violence, and fired upon almost immediately. More than a simple reaction of incompetance, the violence was planed with cold calculation. In the weeks proceeding the march, ex-parachustiste has visited Paris's commissariats and virtually given carte-blanche the police. Papon had told his troops to "Settle your afairs with the Algerians yourselves. Whatever happens, you're covered. For one blow, give ten back... Even if the Algerians are not armed you should think of them always as armed." (KR) The violence was sickening: urnarmed marches in their Sunday bests were shot, matraqué, tossed into the river. How many? To this day, the corpses remain uncounted.
This film has revisited not only the state-perpetrated violent event, but also has shown glimpses into the everyday life of the dangerous classes that are to be absorbed or excluded from the national ideal of mass consumerism. In several scenes, FLN organizers walk through les bidonvilles to attend to organizing meetings and in the process show glimpses of the everyday life in the working districts. It is a stark contrast with the clean, modern totality of the modern home portrayed in Mon Oncle. These fleeting images offer a significant contradiction not only for socio-economic reasons, but also as since they exposes the moment of inner colonization. They are counter-images which expose how - as Kristen Ross has brilliantly noted - France continues to hold “its colonial past to be an “exterior” experience.” A “France” she concludes which has “closed that chapter and moved on to bigger autoroutes, all-electric Kitchens, and the European Economic Community.” When les flics en masse are deployed to stop the march with not so ambiguous instructions the scene is set for a evocation of the urbacidle moment of the urban revolution. Empowered by the brutal French Interior minister, and the right-wing Gaullist government, les flics conduct their brutal repression in subsequent scenes. On that black night remembered on our screen with the relentless violence of our modern state: the willingness of authorities to exert maximum force, the momentum of massive police deployment; the almost inevitable scene of mast arrests and bloodshed; and the impeding quiet aftermath.
The question as always is what do we do with the silence?
Listen... carefully... the silence of state violence is here, today, everywhere, and especially, today, in Montebello... Remember.
mercredi 8 août 2007
Flashdance Flashback: An Exchange on Urban Film
Hey Pittsburg,
For some reason I keep having images if you wearing leggings, dancing in your rusty warehouse space, flying out freely into the fire-escape, exploring abandoned factory spaces to an upbeat 80's soundtrack, and "dancin' like you never did before." Some kind words of advice: don't get too sweaty, avoid shady bars by the waterfront, and watch out for Richard Florida. (Hmm. I may be mixing metaphors here... I am prone to that).
Now that I've exhausted my knowledge of Pittsburgh I wish you best of luck. I was sad to miss your party, and a chance to see you before you leave. I am sure you new adventure will be fruitful. Look forward to seeing you sooner rather than later.
Un Canadien Errant
********
Hey C.E.,
Thanks for the well-researched email. I meant to write you earlier, but things slipped in the midst of my move. However, now I have an appropriate Flashdance story to tell you, which is that I recently brought my bike into the coffee shop that I go to and the theme song was playing on the radio when I entered. I think this is a sign, I mean, Jennifer Beals rides her bike to that song and she lives in Pittsburgh. I'm thinking about auditioning for the ballet or at least finding a wealthy benefactor to support me. I also wouldn't mind getting a mean looking dog.
Hopefully I will see you on one of my trips and please come visit any time. Take care and talk to you soon.
Pittsburg
jeudi 19 juillet 2007
Caché (Haneke)
Michael Haneke’s latest masterpiece Caché carefully but subtly unveils the tragedy of past(s) forgotten. Haneke’s succeeds in keeping the audience in suspense as to what exactly is hidden. At the same time, Haneke succeeds in reminding the viewer that near the placid surface of contemporary Parisian bourgeois intellectual life bubbles the threat of extreme violence (and that la République continues to suffer from a suppressed colonial moment)
The main protagonist in this unsettling tale is television host Georges Laurent played by Daniel Auteil. Laurent leads a seemingly idyllic life alongside his equally successful and cultured wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their son Pierre. In the opening sequence, the eerily placid shot of Parisian street is disrupted when we discover that the opening sequence was in fact a surveillance video of the couple’s chic-modern home at the heart of the old métropole. The quiet historic building where the family conducts its private affairs and their bourgeois comfort is quickly ruptured. Violence, or rather, the threat of violence, becomes the moment déclancheur which will keep the audience suspended, and sets the pace, and intellectual tour-de-force of the film. As the deeper layers of this thriller unfold, several encounters point to the frayed edges of the liberal mores of le nouveau régime de la République.
A sequence of video’s of their home, post-cards to George’s work and Pierre’s school indicate the voyeur is familiar with the Laurent family’s vie quotidiene.
In one such trangression the couple entertains their cosmopolitan guests in their book-adorned dining room, a third video arrives. This time the banal disruption of the smooth interior spaces strikes at the heart of la nation: its liberal intellectuals; its food; its salons; the very identity-foundations of La République. Puzzled, none seems able to explain this series threats to his interior safe-spaces: home, work, school.
Without full disclosure to his closest ally in the social contract, Anne, Laurent runs around trying to locate the author of this threat to modern life. It seems that George’s deep set memory has been tipped off by a bloody dream – giving him a hunch to search for a old childhood acquaintance in an HLM. At this moment we get a glimmer more than a the mere threat of violence to the private lives of a cast of the French intellectual bourgeoisie, but that what needs to uncovered it Laurent’s relationship to the “other” forgotten underclass. This becomes clearer in a key tête-a-tête with his ailing and distant mother.
Dialogue
When his mother speaks it is if time is suspended through the marvel of cinema. Time and space collapse and we are brought immediately to that colonial moment. A moment of clarity emerges from the fog. The deep-seated nature of his discomfort emerges: it is in the words of Kristin Ross about the inner colonization of everyday-life. For a fleeting moment the extreme violence associated with maintaining the security of home and la patrie is exposed.
This is again recalled when George makes another visit to the HLM exploding into the apartment with violent resolve. He wields his white-power privilège and threatens his "other" with his own unequivocal threats of violence. Yet, the massive racist, selfish rejection has o never seen by the self. Laurent, just like his class of upper cadres, failed in this instance as in every other, to understand why he is targeted. It seems completely illogical to them. Yet, it was a familar aller-retour of the violent colonization their class had perpetrated in Algeria and during their return to France as post-war planners. In this context, Georges rejection was part of inner colonization of everyday life that was dispersed and built into the urban fabric.
As Kristin Ross explained in her brilliant book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, the technocratic new French state’s incipient colonization of everyday life is in itself directly linked to the process of de-colonization. As Ross noted (1996: 77) "To evoke the colonial situation here is not gratuitous; I want to suggest that in the roughly ten-year period of the mid-1950’s to the mid-1960’s – the decade that saw both the end of the empire and the surge in French consumption and modernization – the colonies are in some sense “replaced” and the effort that once went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular “level” of metropolitian existence: every-day life (1996: 77)." The transfer of colonial political economy to the household what she calls “controlling domesticity,” is part of the dual process of modernization and decolonization. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” Much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism applies to the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes. The impenetrable membrane of domestic (home) and national (nation) modernization also denies colonialism and attempted to separate colonialism as extraneous force thus providing the basis for the “neo-racist conscensus of today.” As Ross argues this, “logic of exclusion has its basis in the ideology of capitalist modernization,” and the exteriorization of Algeria, the interiorization of life and the “cleansing” of French modernization.
Ross reminds us that the colonial moment exists at every moment; that our privilège and modern domestic comfort is built on an inner colonization that is completely ubiquitous to western liberal-capitalism.
The main protagonist in this unsettling tale is television host Georges Laurent played by Daniel Auteil. Laurent leads a seemingly idyllic life alongside his equally successful and cultured wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their son Pierre. In the opening sequence, the eerily placid shot of Parisian street is disrupted when we discover that the opening sequence was in fact a surveillance video of the couple’s chic-modern home at the heart of the old métropole. The quiet historic building where the family conducts its private affairs and their bourgeois comfort is quickly ruptured. Violence, or rather, the threat of violence, becomes the moment déclancheur which will keep the audience suspended, and sets the pace, and intellectual tour-de-force of the film. As the deeper layers of this thriller unfold, several encounters point to the frayed edges of the liberal mores of le nouveau régime de la République.
A sequence of video’s of their home, post-cards to George’s work and Pierre’s school indicate the voyeur is familiar with the Laurent family’s vie quotidiene.
In one such trangression the couple entertains their cosmopolitan guests in their book-adorned dining room, a third video arrives. This time the banal disruption of the smooth interior spaces strikes at the heart of la nation: its liberal intellectuals; its food; its salons; the very identity-foundations of La République. Puzzled, none seems able to explain this series threats to his interior safe-spaces: home, work, school.
Without full disclosure to his closest ally in the social contract, Anne, Laurent runs around trying to locate the author of this threat to modern life. It seems that George’s deep set memory has been tipped off by a bloody dream – giving him a hunch to search for a old childhood acquaintance in an HLM. At this moment we get a glimmer more than a the mere threat of violence to the private lives of a cast of the French intellectual bourgeoisie, but that what needs to uncovered it Laurent’s relationship to the “other” forgotten underclass. This becomes clearer in a key tête-a-tête with his ailing and distant mother.
Dialogue
When his mother speaks it is if time is suspended through the marvel of cinema. Time and space collapse and we are brought immediately to that colonial moment. A moment of clarity emerges from the fog. The deep-seated nature of his discomfort emerges: it is in the words of Kristin Ross about the inner colonization of everyday-life. For a fleeting moment the extreme violence associated with maintaining the security of home and la patrie is exposed.
This is again recalled when George makes another visit to the HLM exploding into the apartment with violent resolve. He wields his white-power privilège and threatens his "other" with his own unequivocal threats of violence. Yet, the massive racist, selfish rejection has o never seen by the self. Laurent, just like his class of upper cadres, failed in this instance as in every other, to understand why he is targeted. It seems completely illogical to them. Yet, it was a familar aller-retour of the violent colonization their class had perpetrated in Algeria and during their return to France as post-war planners. In this context, Georges rejection was part of inner colonization of everyday life that was dispersed and built into the urban fabric.
As Kristin Ross explained in her brilliant book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, the technocratic new French state’s incipient colonization of everyday life is in itself directly linked to the process of de-colonization. As Ross noted (1996: 77) "To evoke the colonial situation here is not gratuitous; I want to suggest that in the roughly ten-year period of the mid-1950’s to the mid-1960’s – the decade that saw both the end of the empire and the surge in French consumption and modernization – the colonies are in some sense “replaced” and the effort that once went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular “level” of metropolitian existence: every-day life (1996: 77)." The transfer of colonial political economy to the household what she calls “controlling domesticity,” is part of the dual process of modernization and decolonization. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” Much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism applies to the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes. The impenetrable membrane of domestic (home) and national (nation) modernization also denies colonialism and attempted to separate colonialism as extraneous force thus providing the basis for the “neo-racist conscensus of today.” As Ross argues this, “logic of exclusion has its basis in the ideology of capitalist modernization,” and the exteriorization of Algeria, the interiorization of life and the “cleansing” of French modernization.
Ross reminds us that the colonial moment exists at every moment; that our privilège and modern domestic comfort is built on an inner colonization that is completely ubiquitous to western liberal-capitalism.
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