[Marxism] Melies and Althusser

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 9
> Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:35:40 -0500
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Marxism] Bontoc Eulogy (Dir. Marlon Fuentes)
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Message-ID: <p05001903bc297a65ef0e@[140.254.113.189]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> _Bontoc Eulogy_ (Dir. Marlon Fuentes):
> <http://www.viewingrace.org/browse_sub.php?subject_id=40&film_id=313>,
> <http://www.cinemaguild.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TCGS&Product_Code=1335>,
> <http://www.itvs.org/external/bontoc/bontoc.index.html>,
> <http://www.naatanet.org/apatv/archives/BontocEulogy.html>
>
> obvious jumpcut precedes a puff of smoke. With this brief sequence,
> Fuentes reminds us of the ways cinema exploits our cognitive
> processes; by refusing to disguise the manipulation that produces the
> trick, he puts us on guard. (He also alludes to the trick photography
> tradition of George Méliès, whose earliest films date from the same
> era as many of the pseudo-documentary films excerpted in Bontoc
> Eulogy; Méliès himself called some of his films actualités
> reconstituées, or "reconstructed news films.")
>

This sounds like a fascinating artistic project (akin in some ways to the
marvelous *Female Perversions*, a thoroughly ambiguous adaptation of some
work by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick) but the questions regarding the
sociopolitical role of cinema are actually much better put here than in
Benjamin's still rather "unsteady" reflections on the medium.  I would go
one further than the author of this piece and say that cinema is a
profoundly troubling medium in that it really does not permit
"deconstruction of the gaze": the processes of film production and
distribution are really too selective to accomplish anything other than
privileging of the *auteur*'s vision, which however can cut a couple
different ways (and this is meant to sound critical, both of cinema and
the common prejudice against television, a fundamentally more popular
medium).  But in a historical note which I'm sure will resolve none of
this, the "keener-eyed" among you may have noticed that Althusser makes a
reference in *Reading Capital* to Melies' film "The Infernal Cakewalk".

And although it would be easy to remain at the level of imagining a young
*pied-noir* modeling his understanding of Marx on a youthful fancy, it's
really quite possible that the likeness between Melies and Marx was
already part of Melies' artistic conception (witness this comment) and
possibly even his reception: as readers of the fine book *The Yankee
International* will know, Marx was originally understood as something like
the 19th century Freud and a great number of reformers were associated
with the First International and Marxism in "thoroughly developed"
countries.  All these issues deserve far more serious scrutiny than they
have previously received, but I am unfortunately of the opinion that the
very fine film criticism which was wrested from the work of Lacan in the
19th century is too poorly known for its limitations in this respect to be
properly understood, and that the "critique" of the image is falling well
behind its role as a constitutive part of social processes political and
personal.  Really, if we are to have more than 56 channels and nothing on
we should be asking some serious questions about what it is we are
supposed to be watching rather than whether such things rot brain-teeth.




_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism