Digital Poetics

Iran Verite #2: Parallel Culture

Borrowing a term here used by Vaclav Havel, in Iran, perhaps, we are witnessing the visibility of a "parallel culture" which has emerged in relation to the "official culture" (i.e., those who sanction and direct the violence against the reformers and protesters). Here is what Havel wrote, in 1984, in "Six Asides About Culture":

"What exactly is a 'parallel culture'? Nothing more and nothing less than a culture which for various reasons will not, cannot reach out to the public through the media which fall under state control. . . . Even though the 'second' or 'parallel' culture represents an important fertile ground, a catalytic agent, and often even the sole bearer of the spiritual continuity of our cultural life, like it or not, it is the 'first' culture that remains the decisive sphere. . . . It will be in the 'first' culture that the decision will be made about the future climate of our lives; through it our citizens will have the first genuine, wide-scale chance to stand up straight and and liberate themselves."

Is Have'ls notion of parallel culture helpful in understanding the current crisis in Iran? I beliecve so. One difference is that, as the images and video below demonstrate, the parallel culture does indeed have access to the media, via cellphones, twitter, and other social networking tools that can never be completely controlled by the State. One of the features of digital culture is that it is insecure, with new holes, gaps, security breakdowns, and broken codes emerging all the time. It is not stable, and therefore is exploitable.

The video below, purportedly shot on July 9, shows bravery of an even different order from the early peaceful protests. For now the demonstrators know of the terrible fate that awaits them at the hands of the security apparatus. Here is the footage, followed by three screen grabs of human beings whose names I do not and will never know, but whose images haunt me in the deep and unfairly peaceful darkness of Michigan nights:

Iran Panopticon

As the NY Times puts it, the "withering gaze" in Iran, crushing the free human spirit by making it so self-conscious, so paranoid, that it polices itself. it seems as if, unfortunately, Michel Foucault's notion of the Panopticon is just as relevant as ever. Their eyes are watching. Will we forget?

The Mystery of the World

Despite reservations, I am obligated to post this latest communique from Ephraim P. Noble.

Logic be damned.

The Real Power of Digital Video

Iran: the power of digital video. But please remember, even beyond the images, which are disappearing in the face of atrocities by the theocratic tyrants who rule Iran and suppress those who dare to question their "divinely" sanctioned authority:

Public Enemies: The Four Failures

As a fan of many Michael Mann movies, as well as the Crime Story series, I wanted to like Public Enemies. Any of the FourFailures below could, in fact, be strengths, in another movie. So these are not meant to suggest that all movies with these features are failures, but rather they are failures in this particular movie:

1. The Expected. The movie is full of the Expected, but doesn't seem aware of it. Tough to overcome the fact that at some point the audience ceases to be forgiving of the so many piled-up re-worked set-pieces just because it's a Johnny Depp, etc. etc. At some point, truth will out. The movie must stand or fall on its own merits, not because it's a Michael Mann film, or a Johnny Depp picture. Worst instance: the race in Florida, where Dillinger's girlfriend Billie gets mad because she has been reminded Dillinger might die, and he simply says something to her like "Don't worry baby, the world's ours, I'm lookin' to the future" (I only saw it once and didn't take notes so that's not a real quote) and then suddenly she's happy again and seems suddenly to have forgotten that just a few seconds ago she was REALLY UPSET that he might die because he's the FBI's most wanted, etc. etc. etc.

2. Digital. Why digital, which is still a technology that calls attention to itself as a technology? It is not yet "invisible" and so still is loaded and over-coded with meanings that will, someday, be shed as the technology replaces analog as natural, inevitable. The choice--like the film--is incoherent. At times, it seems as if Mann is going for a sort of raw, Dogme 95 look, with the shaky camera, the occasional fast zoom. But these are sporadic, and mostly unmotivated. 

3. Too many characters. This criticism seems as absurd as Emperor Joseph's criticism of Mozart in Amadeus for writing music with "too many notes." On its face, this is a silly criticism. But at some point, the movie becomes not much more than groups of pasty-faced guys running around shooting each other, with little dramatic effect. There are simply TOO MANY of them. 

4. The Non-Angle: What is the movie about? What angle does it take? What is its general stance toward the subject matter? Some incoherent movies (thank you Robin Wood) are amazingly good, such as Taxi Driver or Dressed to Kill. But not Public Enemies (and who can deny that this is a very dull name for a film?) It doesn't really seem to be about Dillinger, who comes across as no more talented, brave, psychotic, greedy, maladjusted, or bored with conventional life as any of the other characters (with the exception of Baby Face Nelson). It doesn't seem to be about the so-called "fine line" between the good guys and the bad guys (a tired old approach to crime movies if ever there was one). It doesn't seem to be about how the Depression created the atmosphere for a sort of criminal that by-passed Capitalism and Communism and Fascism to accumulate wealth and fame. The movie sort of seems to be about Celebrity, but only in a few scenes. And it sort of seems to be the coming irrelevance of bank robbery in a era of electronic communication, but again, only in a few underdeveloped scenes.

I had to write this fairly quickly, before I completely forgot about this movie.

"Oh, honey"

Funny how things come around. Life confirms fiction. Fiction confirms life. Back to the Future. 1985. I'm a sophomore in college, my wife a freshman. We are young young young, and know what we want to do in a really big sense, but not a vocational sense. My wife loves numbers. I love words. I don't remember where we first saw Back to the Future, but I do remember the tremendous thrill of optimism it held. Even more, I never forgot the scene where the "happy" McFly opens the box with copies of his book inside. 

Yes, I thought, that is happiness. Of course it was just a movie. Several years later, in graduate school, I was taught to distrust all forms of narrative as ideological. I became suspicious of my own instincts, and temporarily disavowed "authorship." I think this was a good thing. And while I came to eventually reject the strident and thrilling militancy of graduate school, the deep skepticism remains with me today.

And today, a box came. Much like the box that came for McFly. Full of copies of my book. For a moment, unexpectedly, that scene from Back to the Future rushed into my head. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk turned out beautifully. A nice, thick, heavy volume, full of words sure to infuriate. 

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Biff enters with a box.

Biff: Mr McFly, Mr McFly, this just arrived! (to Marty) Oh hi Marty! (to George) I think it's your new book!

The box is opened. It is a book - A Match Made In Space by George McFly. On the cover are two teens, who look a bit like young George and Lorraine, and a spaceman who looks like Marty with his radiation suit on.

Lorraine: Oh honey, your first novel.

George: Like I always told you, if you put your mind to it you could accomplish anything.

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Iran: "The Power of the Powerless"

"The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised. In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self-justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, and the larger they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from the outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. 

It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts."

--Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," 1978

Cinema in the Digital Age review

Just learned from Wallflower Press of a very nice (four-star) review of Cinema in the Digital Age from the UK film magazine TOTAL Film:

"US academic Rombes syncs style and substance in his attempt to 'humanise' digital cinema. His pitch is that old-school film 'haunts the digital' via the teasing of imperfection and error into potentially over-slick images. INLAND EMPIRE and Planet Terror are presented as proof, the point being to open up the 'perfection' of digital to 'something intimate and human.' Rombes involvcs his reader too, scrambling linear structure in favor of alphabetically ordered themes so you can pause, skip and shuffle."--Kevin Harley

The review appears (for now) in the print version of the magazine.

Iran Vέritέ

Harry's comment (in the previous post) about the cinέma vέritέ elements of so much of the footage coming out of Iran is true, even as there is nothing intentionally cinematic about the videos. They of course are tragically real: sheer vέritέ, and to speak about them as belonging to the history of moving images is in no way intended to diminish the terrible human destruction they document.

Three frames from the video in the previous post. For me, the most haunting and unforgettable sequence occurs when a woman picks up a few pieces of concrete and hands then to the men walking bravely toward the sound of gunfire. If we watch until the end, we know there will be blood:

The whole world is watching.

Drag Me to Hell / Disfigured Realism

Not sure if disfigured realism is the best term: I also like avant-guard realism and CGI surrealism. But at the end of the day, disfigured realism captures best the profoundly disorienting images in films like Sam Raimi's recent Drag Me to Hell.

1. The Blazing Saddles Experience: I went to see Drag Me to Hell with my daughter the other evening, and we were running late, and so I had her bypass the ticket counter and go directly to the concessions counter. I followed (I'm slower) and stood in line by myself and said, "Two tickets to Drag Me to Hell." It was only later, upon returning home, when I showed the ticket stub to my wife (it's an old habit we have: whenever we talk about movies we've seen on the big screen we do so while holding forth with ticket stubs in our hand) that she realized that it said "student." Student! I immediately thought of that deeply funny and humanistic scene where Harvey Korman, near the end of both movies (the one we are watching, Blazing Saddles, and the one he is going to watch, Blazing Saddles) tries to buy a ticket as a student, and the smarmy ticket-lady looks at him and says, "Student? Are you kidding?" I didn't even have to fake it!

2. Disfigured Realism: This is tougher. There were only 7 or 8 other people in the audience, and that was a tremendous help in knowing when it was appropriate to laugh. My daughter had never seen a Sam Raimi movie, and was a little unprepared for the preposterous vitality of the whole enterprise, the elaborately over-extended mayhem sequences, the swelling and grandiose music. If there is one compelling reason why movies deserved to be seen on big screens with strangers, its name is Sam Raimi. 

But back to disfigured realism, which I've been avoiding. The talking goat sequence, let's take that. Really, in a different context, it's as radical as something out of a Bunuel film. Everything in Raimi's film is reality distended to its most extreme possibility. If this could happen, here is how it might look. And there is an uncanny terror in that. In fact, the most disturbing scene in the film for my daughter was not some CGI-horror scene, but the scene of the guy floating and dancing above the table near the end, like some puppet. Afterwards, she said that the guy looked obviously like he was on a harness. And he did. It was an old-school effect. He looked awkward, not smoothed out by CGI. And in his awkwardness--the disfigured realism of a guy really floating--was a source of dread mixed with humor. 

The dread of the real, that's it. Maybe that's why movies like the new Terminator never lodge in the brain: deep down, we don't believe any of it was real, in the sense of a camera actually capturing reality as it unfolds, rather than creating a model of reality in post-production.

This is brief, incomplete, flawed. More later.

In the meantime, I've tried to give my ticket stub away, as a gift, but no one will take it.

Well, here it is, for you: