The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik (Film and Culture Series)
Christopher Pavsek
Language: English
Pages: 305
ISBN: B00APDGHM2
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Pavsek approaches Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge as thinkers first, situating their films within debates over social revolution, utopian ideals, and the unrealized potential of utopian thought and action. He replays the battle these artists waged against Hollywood interests, the seduction of other digital media, and the privileging of mass entertainment over cinema’s progressive, revolutionary roots. He discusses Godard’s early work, Alphaville (1965), against his later films, Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero (1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (1994), and conducts the first scholarly reading of Film Socialisme (2010) and its new form of utopian optimism. He considers Tahimik’s virtually unknown masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), along with his major works, Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1983), in which he calls on the anticolonial impulses of his native Philippines to resist Western commodity culture; and he constructs a dialogue between Kluge’s earliest films, Brutality in Stone (1961) and Yesterday Girl (1965), and his later The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985) and Fruits of Trust (2009), noting a utopianism deeply indebted to Marx and Adorno yet designed to appeal to modern sensibilities. In the thwarted ambitions, disappointed hopes, and thrilling experiments of these forward-thinking filmmakers, Pavsek reinforces an important chapter in the history of film and its relevance to political filmmaking today.
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Nuremberg Party Grounds that were the site of the notorious, massive Nazi party rallies, intercut liberally with stills of Hitler at work on architectural plans and sketches and models of various massive construction projects, as well as file footage from newsreels and educational documentaries from the Nazi period. The sound documents are equally diverse, consisting of a rather dry and sparsely informative voice-over, sound recordings from newsreels and films, readings from Auschwitz commandant.
Affiliations with fascism.164 The “life” (as Kluge calls it) of the materials, which must be respected, is not politically indifferent or inert. In other words, highly ambiguous and indeed ideologically dangerous ground must be tread in order to develop a redemptive understanding—and critique—of fascism and its ideology.165 It is crucial to note how Kluge’s redemptive approach toward fascism overlaps with his cinematic arrière-gardisme, his attempts specifically to redeem the history of cinema.
Essay, which he made during the momentous decade from 1981 to 1991 with his son, Kidlat de Guia. It opens with the landscape of Monument Valley in the American Southwest, familiar from so many John Ford films, rendered here not in Ford’s Technicolor but in Tahimik’s characteristically grainy and poorly exposed 16mm film (fig. 2.1). A dirt road with a car traveling along it stretches into the distance toward a horizon of buttes and mesas; the sky is leaden. A young boy enters the frame from below,.
Substance of the individual, his or her inorganic nature: it is not the beautiful and liberatory products of human labor—be they historically developed forms of thought or modern technical forces of production—that lie ready to hand, available for appropriation by human subjects. Instead, it is the waste, the forgotten and obsolete matter that stands as the marker of historical progress and where Tahimik turns to find the substance of a new subject. FIGURE 2.2–2.3 I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat.
It is too easy to “become the fascist enemy that you are fighting”;63 and he is also acutely sensitive to the fact that a lesson learned is not always the lesson taught, that an irreducible gap exists between a teacher’s intentions and a pupil’s desires and abilities. In portraying his own teaching, it also becomes clear that Tahimik is open to learning himself; he is a good post-1960s figure in that regard, unwilling to accept that teaching is a one-way process. In his essay on Perfumed.