Images want our sanity

What follows is a totally subjective riff only loosely inspired by a few W. J. T. Mitchell remarks, which very well could be totally misunderstood.

It is intriguing that Mitchell, the premiere current theoretician of the visual in the modern culture, the man who flirts with giving an image a voice (“What do pictures really want”?) at the same time unleashes an attack at the abstract as if wanting to lessen its cultural power.

In his lecture “Seeing madness. Insanity, media and visual culture” Mitchell presents a claim that, well ... we all may be mad. How come? He starts with Kant. Kant opens his Critique of Pure Reason with a chilling sentence: “Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”

So we are doomed to be dumb. At least we know that the tool we got for making sense of the world is insufficient for the task. Yet the human hubris prevails and the madness thrives. The madness resulting not from chaos and disorder, but rather from having birth in actions of pure reason. Both madness and pure reason as expressions of our minds are hard edged on logic, order, causality. It is just that somewhere early on in their reasoning a fatal step of a wrong assumption takes place and then there is no escape from disastrous results.

For Prof. Michell madness seems to be a cultural tool defined to a large and perhaps decisive degree by those who decide what’s the norm and what’s madness. Therefore it can easily become an instrument of politics. That was the case with the mathematical findings of John Nash’s principle of equilibrium, which in addition of getting him a Noble Prize was also the base for the cold war philosophy with its doctrine of Mutually Assured Distraction (M.A.D.) Madness is therefore the result of reductionistic tendencies of the flowed reason coupled with our insane strive for order and clear answers.

In a world where mathematics supports insanity, where pure reason has to fail by its own definition, where images are aloof and mysterious in their desires ("What pictures want in the last instance, then, is simply to be asked what they want, with the understanding that the answer may well be, nothing at all" - as Mitchell finishes one of his early drafts of the theme), the power goes back to the discerning eyes and the minds and the souls of you and I. It is you and I and everyone who wants to make an effort of being clear, present and honest that could and should stand up against madness. It is us who are capable of restoring sanity by embracing images in their totality and learning from them not to reduce them by logic, interpretation, agendas or our petty "visions". Images are saner than us. They show us how to be more human. Let's learn from them.

The fake cosmos, part 2

"The Three of Life"

written/directed by Terrence Malick

Before I continue the June "Melancholia" and "The Three of Life" post let me make one thing clear: I consider Terrence Malick a cinematic genius. What follows is not so much about his stylistic choices as about the current direction in visualizing the cosmos.

The opening quote of “The Three of Life”: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" telegraphs the upcoming film and at the same time sentences it to the unavoidable failure.

The answer to the Book of Job question is only one: “Dear God, thank you for singling me out and addressing me personally. As you know, I was not there. I have no clue how it looked like, what if felt like, why was it happening or even how to imagine it since the event you are referring to totally transcends my insignificant self, my ability to imagine, comprehend or visualize.” “ Yet, I will try, continues Terrence Malick (in making the film), I will try to sing a song of our human yearning to touch the divine, to see that which is impossible to see since we couldn’t have been there.” Hats off for this noble attempt.

Yet, 43 years after the Space Odyssey, after Kubrick, Tarkowsky, Lucas and NASA defined the way we envision the cosmos certain stylistic directions seem used up, not as fresh as they were decades ago. (The more splendid NASA photos are the more they reveal limitations in showing the totality of events they point to.)

We accept the (unavoidable) fakery of a “realistic” film language describing a typical psychological scene be it in a Mallick or a von Trier movie because a) we’ve been conditioned that it is the way things are (they are not!) and b) because we bring into the perception of such a scene a huge amount of our own references. We augment what we see on screen with our own personal experiences or cultural annotations beaten into us by education and culture. Things get more muddy when talking about the beginning of the world. The thin layer of existing iconography is clearly bogus, it does not represent the reality of things. We don’t have enough references to confirm or at least partially justify the reality of the existing canon of the cosmic imagery. How to make it more “real” for us? Whoever figures it out will be a new Leonardo.

For now however the stylistic path "Melancholia" and "The Three of Life" chose aims for the absolute visual truth in rendering the non-renderable. In this context, starting with the quotation from God himself only begs to close with a quote from the Lady Gaga Madison Square Garden HBO special in which the diva yells:

“do you know what’s the second thing after money I hate the most?.... the truth!... the absolute truth!.. instead give me a bucket of bullshit, anytime!”

Lawnswood Gardens

"Lawnswood Gardens"

directed by Pawel Kuczynski

written by Pawel and prof. Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska

Last night we had a premiere screening of “Lawnswood Gardens” - a documentary portrait of professor Zygmunt Bauman. The hero himself attended, which as normal in case of his public appearances, attracted a crowd eager to meet him. We felt bad that the theater management had to turn people away due to the safety regulations.

Earlier in the day "Gazeta Wyborcza", a leading Polish newspaper, run an announcement calling the film “a comprehensive and insightful portrait of an eminent scholar, who grants the camera an unusually close access.”

Prior, culture.pl, the official site of the cultural program of the polish EU presidency has published the following write up:

"Lawnswood Gardens" is a 53-minute film portrait of Bauman, who serves as one of the main representatives of Polish intellectual thought. The core of the film is based on Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska's brief visit to the Professor's home at Lawnswood Gardens in Leeds in the spring of 2010. The film includes archive materials and other interviews, exploring the links between Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust" and "Winter in the Morning", a diary from the Warsaw Ghetto written by the Professor's wife Janina Bauman, who passed away in December 2009.

The film also includes a conversation with artist Mirosław Bałka about his "How it is" exhibition at the Tate Modern and the Professor's response to Bałka's work, providing a sociologist's perspective on art.

The film also features the Professor's friends from Leeds: Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, as well as Aleksandra Jasińska-Kania, Nina Kraśko, Jerzy Wiatr and Vaclav Havel. Bauman's daughter, painter Lydia Bauman, served as the artistic consultant on the film.

The film was realized thanks to the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the National Centre for Culture and ZAiKS.

The full text of the write up is linked below (one correction in the director’s bio: my philosophy study lasted only one year)

culture.pl

The fake cosmos - part 1

"Melancholia", by Lars von Trier

Two strong and very impressive recent films: “Melancholia” and “The Three of Life” base their philosophizing and the artistic “umpf” on enveloping human stories in a grandiose perspective of the cosmos. The stories however resonate with us predominantly because they access our own human reference points, fears and concerns. Be it a complex relationship between two sisters (“Melancholia”) or dynamics of growing up (“The Three of Life”) the screen breaths vitality, genuineness and psychological insights - all convincingly presented.

Then comes the cosmos. Promoting “Melancholia” Lars von Trier talks about his decision to put the end of the story up front so that the viewers know from the very beginning the finale. The issue of how much of the ending in a given story its consumers want to know, should know, expect to know or suspect could in itself be a subject for another post or even a Ph.D. dissertation. :-)

For now let’s just stick to von Trier’s way of presenting the ending, that is to the computer generated clash of the planet called “Melancholia” into Earth. This clash, in what will become indisputable only later in the film, ends life as we know it in a spectacular bang.

The opening of the film situates the CGI clash image of the end of the world in the company of art inspired tableaux taking their cues from art (Ophelia) or stylizing them as a high brow art situations. The opening therefore does not represent reality as such but rather dives into the territory of the possible, the feared, the subconscious. In this company the earth crash does not announce the reality of the ending, it only shows the possibility or a fear of a terrible thing coming. That’s why I don’t think the opening puts the end up front, rather it telegraphs in a teasing way a potential of something bad. Which, in a way, is much more interesting than "the end at the beginning" maneuver.

Documentary hubris

Recently I’ve watched a few documentaries which did not impress me. Why do movies about fascinating events, people, problems often end up lame? Where does the lack of storytelling talent come from?

One of the working hypothesis is that it is generated by the inflated ego of the makers, who by not being able or not wanting to step aside, do not allow their subjects to fully shine. It’s plain hubris and the lack of humbleness on the part of those whose duties is to report, show, facilitate meetings between the audiences and their subjects.

Directors have “ideas”, present their own “insights”, are too impatient to think things through - and disasters strike.

Perhaps talent as the ability to step aside, to let things that are talked about in the particular piece of work come with full independence, bloom and their own reasons. On the other hand filmmakers can be paralyzed by the importance, statue, scope of their subjects and don’t seek interesting ways into the subject matters.

Clearly some balance must be achieved between the assertiveness of a storyteller who’s reporting what is and his skills to listen and watch. Without the assertiveness of a teller a film falls apart. So what is the role of the self in storytelling? What does it really mean: “a story cannot be told objectively, somebody has to tell it as there is no no objective reporting?”

Disturbing mirrors of a sci-fi thriller

"Source code", written by Ben Ripley,

directed by Duncan Jones

Early on in “Source code” its hero, confused with not understanding who and where he is, glances into a train bathroom mirror and jumps in shock seeing somebody’s else face as his own reflection. This potentially intriguing revelation, due to the genre of the film, is quickly dealt with a stock sci-fi explanation. Yet, seeing that we are not who we think we are, breaking the safe walls of our identity convention is one of the rarely touched domains of film, which seems to be the ideal medium for such explorations.

Another disturbing moment of the screening occurred, this time, outside of the screen. As the plot kept moving around a terrorist thread hidden in a car, a voice come through the movie theater speakers calling for the owner of a particular car left in a parking space to immediately return to the vehicle. A slight wave of nervousness rolled throughout the theater: was the car just blocking somebody wanting to get out or was it already surrounded by anti-terrorists suspecting a bomb and the shopping mall was to be evacuated? Were we in danger? Was the reality mirroring the film?

What do we attend dark movie theaters really for? Is it to come close (but never too close) to those questions that we are afraid to face in reality?

Are the screens acquiring some sort of artificial intelligence and perhaps start to reflect back to us that which we may not be ready to face?

Isn’t the constant strive for films to become current plain dangerous? In a very practical way the reality and its screen representation may get entangled in each other so much that we will lose the sense of who and where we are.

Another strange conclusion from “The source code” - once dead, the only way to stay alive for a short while longer is to assume the identity of a (more?) dead person. If you do it with heart and for the right reasons, it may grant you new (alternative) life!

All that is telegraphed, galloping with the requirements of a spectacle. Such films are as much intriguing, stimulating, entertaining as they are frustrating with their unrealized potentials. It seems that the genre is already nimble enough to deliver thrills without necessarily being contrived in their plots, issues and their solutions.

Original impulses

Technologies in music conducting and documentary filmmaking.

Kai Bumann, a German conductor working in Poland, when describing his method stresses the importance of understanding the original impulse for a given music composition. Before conducting a particular piece he wants to know how its composer saw the word. For Bumann music is closely connected with philosophy and theology. Finding the impulse that preceded a given score becomes the basis for the conductor's work. For example, sometimes during these searches he arrives at “deep layers of sorrow.”

Seeking the original impulse is a noble and elegant technology of any interpretive craft. Can the same be applied to a documentary filmmaking? Not always, seems to me.

I’ve made a few film portraits that indeed were based on what at that time I perceived were the initial impulses forming the lives of their heros. Among others, “Philosopher’s Paradise” was based on such approach, so was “Red with Black”. The latter was obvious and easy since Henryk Musiałowicz speaks straight about his artistic turmoils. “Philosopher’s Paradise” (although favorably received by critics and viewers and accepted by its hero) left me concerned because my approach forced a spiritual diagnosis of the inner core of a philosopher, who to many (including himself) is a hard core materialist. Was I really allowed to force my POV on an image of another person? To this day I remain hesitant about my directorial choice in this film.

The above reflections were perhaps one of the few reasons why my latest project - “Lawnswood Gardens” - purposely stays away from any kind of (be it metaphysical or historical) investigating of its hero, instead it focuses on an attempt to render emotions connected with my meeting with Zygmunt Bauman. Granted that the word “my” is dangerous in this above context. Yet, there seems to be a qualitative difference between uncovering somebody’s initial impulses and reporting one’s own reaction to this person.

Does it mean that a conductor could be more free exploring his “heros” (composers) than a filmmaker exploring his screen subjects? Perhaps we are approaching here a wall of a documentary filmmaking. The wall of humbleness toward one's own limited understanding of others and of respect toward their complexities and vastness. Another wall would be potential harm that a film could inflict upon its heros -one of the reasons Kieślowski abandoned the documentary form.

It’s possible that I am just splitting hair here. It’s possible that a certain arrogance (of vision) is necessary to make documentaries. Perhaps this never easy maneuvering between one’s own perception and understunding of its potential dangers is the hardest element in a documentary film directing.