Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and sound artist. Her debut collection of poems Negro League Baseball was published by Fence Books last year. Brian W. Rogers is an artist, writer, and musician whose work most recently appeared in the London group show “A Sunken Trembling Recalled Dimly.” Together they have teamed up to form État de Siege (ÉSP) a production house whose work encompasses text, music, the moving image, dance, design, architecture, and curatorial platforms. In this project, they have focused their attention on the 70′s cult horror film Ganja and Hess, about an archaelogist who gets stabbed in the heart and becomes a vampire. The video below includes poetry by Fred Moten, and is a preamble to their forthcoming re-imagined soundtrack for Ganja and Hess. Below that is an open letter to Bill Gunn, the director of the film, regarding certain propositions raised by his film, such as how one extreme of motion can lead to paralysis and what one must do to avoid this, such as enacting a bridge between classical myth and modal myth.

The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic… every disappearance is a record (between checking-out and checking-in)
{Ornette Coleman- To Whom Who Keeps a Record}

1. Are there some things you would like to say, but have not been able to, because no one asked you the right questions?
[Être - Nicolas Jaar]

2. What are the politics of being ready to die, and what do they have to do with the scandal of enjoyment?  Of any action as one way ticket to the end of health? ‘The love-recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is an ever refining self-fertilizing cycle wherein nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle,’ impregnating the place where memory flinches and (esp.) begins and at once slows down and accelerates the metabolism of that commons, into the decadent non-territory of the idea of an “other” as an ego-ideal whom the self  can achieve through devotion. In those moments of precise forgetting, did you find the traumas and excitements that express the need for a modal myth most acutely?
[Moodymann - I can't kick this feeling when it hits]

3. The statues in profile featured in the title sequence remind us of an experiment that Derrida proposes. Do you know it? ‘This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead?  It means that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the vessel as such means to see the vessel as it would be without me. If I were dead it would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object, means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense’ (Will you give up your death for me?) And so, if life is endless, why not try to relate in this way, what is the risk. What is the cost that we are not willing to pay? On the other hand what is the pleasure of mortality or so-called loss that we refuse to admit in order to keep it sacred and free from principal, free from the colony of false nobility?
[Rufus Harley - Queens]

4. If ultimately oblivion is abundant, one has reason to ask, ‘on what grounds does one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt of exclusion and the sense of social shipwreck one suffers from?’ Is it a form of suffering or a relief? Does our exclusivity relieve us? Are we absolved by a feigned turning against them—toward what? (‘I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty,’ Hess decrees)— And from this can it follow that philosophy is a prison, that it destroys the uncustomary things about us? That the frontier is a prison? That the route past nothingness is to accept nothing in particular? That the vehicle driving us toward abundance is extreme stillness just as the route to paralysis is frenzied motion?
[Julia Holter - Introduction]

5.  What tole does the yearning for ritual in a culture where trends often supress traditions, take/give in your film? Ideas of oblivion and tedium often unite in the sublime (transcendence of limits of the human condition) their inevitable destination, where they are turned into a solemn abundance that often shows up as ritual and the place where ritual and addiction meet and do not diverge (at once forgotten and remembered needs). Do you believe that ritual should engage variation deliberately in order to separate itself from addiction, bearing in mind that anything repetitive becomes a need no matter how sacred or pernicious? How do we improvise on a ritual and re-tell it to itself again and again ad infinitum, what role does the sacrifice play in that coiled and elastic dynamic, where does it enter its disappearance and reject it, live on? You can’t enter into this dynamic except in exhalted states, elevated states. How do we conjure those states while at the same time resisting their capture? What is the economy of survival in Ganja and Hess? How is an addict’s labor different from a worshiper’s?
[Monks of Bhutan - Silnyen played solo]

6. Is eternity an impervious horizon and do the acoustics of blood allow us to at once traverse and return to the forever that the blue myth of life eternal lures us across? Is the film a myth of/for black America, of/for America in general, the sole (soul/sold) myth retrieved as the ‘terror and terrible lure of vacuum?’ Voices from beyond the event horizon, trying to out-mode our oppressors, to translate our motion across that border? Creating an impossible space between origin and dream/out-dreamt origin, unoriginal dream, the lucid dream everyone wants to learn how to possess but is afraid to enter, a certain amount of traveling, deferred. Choreographer Alvin Ailey believes that movement is molecular revolution, ‘blood memory,’ future anterior, and that any black body in motion has experienced centuries of war and pain ‘no casual pleasure brought about those features.’ Hess says of Ganja, ‘Some great horde of peoples have had to suffer’ to bring about her beauty. In grappling with erotics of suffering (the does-my-distress-arouse-you rhetoric) what did you discover about our agency therein? What is peace in this context? What is justice?
[Julian Priester - Coincidence]

7. One of the things that we are trying to inquire toward is the role of aural hallucination in Ganja and Hess. The way in which sound abducts away from the optic towards a kind of blind transversality, plothole in the lightsickness of the past three hundred years. This is to say that it (the one way border the recording is a portal across) is one of the conditions for the choreography of syncope, of possession, of being possessed and dispossessed at the same time. 1976: Julian Jaynes puts forth the Bicameralist theory of mind. If his formulations are just, it can be said that we have inherited a memory of experiencing ourselves as ghosts. We are haunted by exteriority only inasmuch as we fear (because we know) that we are a focalized twist of that exteriority, to hear is to be unbound toward it, that we are laced by it, that the real trauma is that we experience ourselves only as ourselves, rather than being no one. It’s not that minds changed, it’s that we evicted the ghosts. Hallucinatory fugitivity and it’s rush toward eternity; endlessness; devotional erasure; ambivalent rapture; the audial smudge; a voice followed to the other side of the event horizon–
[Theo Parrish- Love is War for Miles]

One of the great moments in Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited and under-publicized two-and-a-half-hour film, is when high school student and protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) approaches Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), a well-meaning math teacher she had sex with, as he walks with a female colleague. Abruptly, Lisa tells the two teachers that she had an abortion. Mr. Aaron, who had given into young Lisa’s advances just a few weeks beforehand, tells her she should tell the father, whoever he is. Lisa says that it probably doesn’t matter, the guy is probably sorry. Mr. Aaron says that it doesn’t matter if he’s sorry, that doesn’t mean anything. The guy needs to own up to what he’s done.

The scene shows Lisa as a character in the mode of Hamlet. The story is about Lisa’s coming to terms with her sexuality and her thinking about culpability. Margaret has to make a big decision, and she goes about seeking the knowledge necessary to make this decision in a variety of ways. Approaching Mr. Aaron resembles Hamlet’s attempt to figure out if his stepfather is guilty of killing his father by staging a play and watching his reaction.

Margaret is the story of Upper West Side teenager Lisa Cohen who distracts MTA bus driver Gerry Marretti (Mark Ruffalo) by flirtatiously shouting to him about his cowboy hat as he drives a Manhattan bus. The driver runs a red light, accidentally killing Monica (Allison Janney), a middle-aged female pedestrian. Lisa lies to the police, covering up for the bus driver, and says that the light was green, when it was really red. As the film progresses, Lisa starts to think she made a mistake. She asks every person in her life who she respects whether or not she should go back to the police and tell them she lied. It is the best friend of the deceased—whose name Lisa got from making some phone calls—who eventually gets Lisa to revise her initial statement, saying it’s her responsibility to tell the truth.

Lisa does, and the film explores the question: Is it Lisa’s responsibility to tell the truth? Won’t she be hurting the bus driver, who has a family to raise and protect?

The film’s fidelity to exploring and ultimately answering these questions is one of its many strengths. It is a coming-of-age drama, but a sophisticated one. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan seems genuinely concerned with tracking Lisa’s consciousness, watching her as she considers the situation and learns.  Nearly every scene involving Lisa shows her worldview coming up against someone else’s and Lonergan writes each scene with both knowledge of his characters and real verve. The film’s characters are all intelligent and idiosyncratic. We do see the characters’ foibles through what they say, but one never gets the feeling that Lonergan feels anything but compassion for them.

Lonergan’s subtlety and cleverness as a writer is exemplified in one scene between Lisa’s single mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) and her love interest, Ramon (Jean Reno). The two go to an opera, at Ramon’s behest, and the show ends with tuxedoed audience members shouting “Bravi!” “Bravi!” On their walk out, Joan comments on how pretentious the Americans are who shout “Bravii!” Ramon explains that it is customary in Italy to shout “Bravi” because it is the plural of ‘bravo.’

JOAN:  It’s just so pretentious. “Bravi!” “Bravi!” Why can’t they just say bravo?

RAMON:  Well it’s the plural.

JOAN:  I know—

RAMON:  It’s the plural of “Bravo.” It’s what they say to acknowledge the ensemble.

JOAN:  No, I know it’s correct, it just—don’t you think there was something a little pretentious about those people?

RAMON:  Pretentious?

Here, Lonergan subtly dramatizes the new couple’s inability to connect. As one watches the film, it becomes more and more clear that, in addition to the expansion of Lisa’s consciousness, it’s the development of relationships that is driving the movie forward.

Lonergan imbues each of his characters with sparkling intelligence, particularly Lisa, and this makes for exciting and often combative interactions. So often in the film, we don’t know who to root for. When Lisa argues with her mother, Joan, or the deceased’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), with whom Lisa eventually partners to bring a lawsuit against the city, it’s difficult to say which of them is acting irrationally. Lonergan isn’t pursuing a simplistic idea of youth being wiser than adults, but he does show the messiness of relationships and the fallibility of people in general, no matter how intelligent they are.  Most effectively, he dramatizes how difficult it is for a child to sort through the varying worldviews held by the adults by whom she is surrounded.

Consider this interaction between Lisa and Emily, the executive of the deceased’s estate. Here, Lisa explains that when she held the dying Monica in her arms, the woman mistook her for her deceased daughter (coincidentally, also named Lisa).

LISA: But then when I found out her daughter was dead, ever since then I keep having this really strong feeling that some way, for those last five minutes I kind of was her daughter. You know? Like maybe that’s the reason I was there: Like in some weird way, this obviously amazing woman got to see her daughter again for a few minutes, right before she died.

EMILY (very dry): I see.  And is she still inhabiting your body? Or did she go right back to the spirit world after it was over?

LISA:  I didn’t mean she was literally inhabiting my body. I don’t believe in all that stuff at all.

EMILY: I don’t give a fuck what you believe in.

LISA:  Oh my god!  Why are you so mad at me!?

EMILY:  Because this is not an opera!

LISA (flushing): What? You think I think this is an opera?

EMILY:  Yes!

LISA:  You think I’m making this into a dramatic situation because I think it’s dramatic?!?

EMILY: I think you’re very young.

LISA:  What does that have to do with anything? If anything I think it means I care more than someone who’s older! Because this kind of thing has never happened to me before!

EMILY:  No, it means you care more easily! There’s a big difference! Except that it’s not you who it’s happening to!

LISA: Yes it is!  I know I’m not the one who was run over—

EMILY: That’s right, you weren’t. And you’re not the one who died of leukemia, and you’re not the one who just died in an earthquake in—Algeria!  But you will be. Do you understand me? You will be. And it’s not an opera and it’s not dramatic.

LISA:  I’m well aware of that!

EMILY:  And this first-blush phony deepness of yours is worth nothing.

The scene starts to wind down when Lisa tells Emily she’s being ‘strident.’ Lisa isn’t sure about her usage of the word—she claims that she didn’t know exactly what it meant, and that she must have misused it.  But Emily is being strident. She also has a point—Lisa does need to be aware that this situation is affecting others more than her, that she is not the center of the universe. But Emily could stand to work on her delivery. Lisa is forced to learn two things here: one of them is about herself, and the other is about Emily.

The brilliance of this film lies in that we sort through the moral dilemma with Lisa; we grow and learn with her.

It is a grueling, glorious and enlightening experience and, for my money, the best one offered in the cinema today.

Eric Rosenblum is the founder, editor and host of www.theartsinnyc.com.  Eric teaches writing and English at Pratt Institute. His writing has appeared in Guernica Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader and Playboy.com.

When I heard that Rooney Mara was to play Lisbeth Salander, the charming bad-ass from Steig Larsson’s best selling book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I was confused. Had the casting director read the books or seen the Swedish films? Lisbeth Salander is hardcore. Whereas Rooney Mara is most well-known for being from a football dynasty where her dad owned the Giants and her mom owned the Steelers, as well as playing the cute girl who broke up with Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. All-American, fresh-faced and sweet are what comes to mind when you think of her. However, these pictures from W Magazine show the epic hollywood makeover made to turn her from Wasp into a punk hottie. I’m always a fan of a good makeover and this one is awesome. Here’s to hoping they don’t destroy the movie.

Sunday night Jonathan Ames is hosting a free screening of his show, Bored to Death at Building-on-Bond at Pacific in Brooklyn. I remember before it was a restaurant it was a bodega that had a payphone outside that was guarded by thugs who used it as their office line. They would politely direct you to another payphone at the next corner. Now it is a cute little cafe with nice interior design that serves coffee and plays Band of Horses. So it goes. Much of the episode was filmed at the bar here and as anyone who has watched the show knows, the entire series is filmed in and around Brooklyn- the real Brooklyn, also. (Read: not Williamsburg.) The show centers around a writer who works as a private detective and conveys a somewhat realistic and crazy New York artist lifestyle. Kevin Bacon guests star this week alongside the ever more and more amazing Ted Danson with Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman. HBO is picking up the bar tab, so if even if you’ve never seen the show or don’t have HBO that’s a reason to check it out.

Building-on-Bond
112 Bond St
(between Pacific St & Atlantic Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
9pm

After finishing Chris Petit’s wonderfully dark 1993 novel Robinson – as wet, grim, and seedy depiction of London as I’ve come across – in which the title character attempts to make “the Citizin Kane of porno movies, I’ve begun to try to think of other works of fiction in which the author attempts to imagine an experimental cinema unlike anything actually existing, but the only two novels that come to mind are William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions. 

I read the following montage passage from Robinson, in which the book’s narrator searches through tapes of footage for the title character’s film, a dozen times:

I saw a woman swinging out her right arm.  William Blake walking down Poland Street, shadowed by a dog.  The gunmen waiting on the grassy knoll. I saw all the doors in my life (save those with her). Blind Borges wrote: I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London). I saw myself as a child standing at a window and the shadow of my mother, her voice saying, ‘Come away now’; Cookie and the sly look of the wild, feral girl. A moving walkway at Gatwick airport; tank manoeuvres in the desert. I saw the children I never had; Marlene Dietrich telling Orson Welles, ‘Your future’s all used up.’ Traffic lights changing in empty streets. Lee Marvin walking through LAX, his footsteps like gunshots. I watched a game show host position his guests on the camera mark. A Texaco station on a road out of Felixstowe, overhead a jet plane on its penultimate flight before crashing. I saw Germaine Greer Fuck Warren Beatty; Lotte and Iain on the sofa; a first edition of For Love and Hunger. I saw Princess Diana’s sideways look to her husband on her wedding night. Broken glass on the hard shoulder, train tracks running east to Poland. I saw a photograph of Rainer Werner Fassbinder directing Veronica Voss, watched George Best send a goalkeeper the wrong way. In the wake of a power cruiser, children run on Hampstead Heath. Test crash footage of wired-up dummies in cars. Brendan Behan drunk and roaring, ‘At least I don’t fuck my own dogs.’ The wall against which the Ceausescus were shot. Weeds on a building site; the rolling credits of a TV comedy (the last one); the slap of the Thames against London Bridge. Cars cruise high above the narrative. The pavement outside the Magdala Tavern. Robinson in Dresden. Dirk Bogarde shopping alone. A dropped glove. The only person not laughing in an audience. A tie my father wore. Engine oil stains and painted white lines on concrete. A line of poplars on Bredon Hill. A woman hoovers in a tower block. Shop dummies float in the Grand Caledonian canal. The hum of an empty refrigerator. Ruth Ellis’s botched hanging, the one that Pierrepoint wouldn’t talk about. A smile of invitation never followed up. A politician lying. Tweezers on a dressing table. I saw the false entries in Donald Crowhurst’s log. A line from a song: Much older now, with hat on, drinking wine. The white chalked outline of a body once mine on a pavement, from on high the chalk blurring in the rain.

Not just anyone can shack-up in the Hotel Chelsea. Reserved for the oddest, craziest, most brilliant cream of the creative crop, its rooms have housed everyone from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning to Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Bernhardt to Sid Vicious. So the fact that legendary manager and curator of residents, Stanley Bard, chose Sam Bassett as the artistic haven’s last permanent tenant is no doubt a testament to his evolving talents.

With long blond locks and a lackadaisical yet pensive demeanor, the 31-year old Bassett is some curious combination of a 90s skater-renegade and a sagely old-world philosopher. His unconventional portraits and fashion photography have been featured in publications like The New York Times and GQ. His geometric tape sculptures are stuck upon New York’s billboards, walls and windows, and his short films have been screened at festivals around the world. But his most recent endeavor, a series of seven feature films, is undoubtedly his greatest feat to date.

Bassett’s cinematic voyage began in 2006 whilst sitting in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. Approached by a charismatic “cowboy” who’s relationship with reality is still in question, Bassett was instantly struck by his quick-witted elocution, tangled beard and signature cowboy hat:

“The way he spoke, the way he formulated his sentences, his charm and his intellect, I found it very unique and very interesting,” said Bassett. So interesting that he chose the quirky New Yorker as the subject of his first feature-length film, Cowboy Stan. A comedic and disturbing journey through alcohol-induced meltdowns, endearing country-music sing-alongs, and  fleeting moments of prolific clarity, the film documents this native New York cowboy during the two weeks leading up to his birthday. While their time together was brief, the filmmaker hoped that it would be “enough to tell his story – or a story – to make people feel and to inspire people.”

Through infiltrating Cowboy Stan’s unlivable apartment, lonely existence and ultimately his psyche, Bassett’s beautifully raw filming techniques explore a realm of the human condition that most of us are unwilling to acknowledge.

Bassett’s Cowboy Stan experience spawned a series of six additional films, all of which fit together to explore uncovered truths, the intricacies of humanity and marginal histories that seemed destined to be forgotten. By combining pure documentary and choreographed metaphors, the films crack open and pay tribute to the lives of eccentric elders ranging from Stormé DeLarverié, a bi-racial civil rights leader who threw the first punch at the Stonewall Riots to a Hollywood conman who refers to himself exclusively as “Columbia.” Each character embarks on a journey. Each character gains something. And most importantly, each character experiences powerful realizations about their past, present and future. 

Bettina, the second film in the series, is perhaps the most extraordinary of the seven stories. After thirty years of seclusion, artist and Hotel Chelsea resident Bettina Bashyi undergoes a complete renaissance of mind, body and spirit via her friendship with Bassett. Formerly known as “the most beautiful woman to ever live in the Hotel Chelsea,” Bettina’s cluttered apartment has been deemed a fire hazard. Bassett tirelessly clears away more than a quarter-century of clutter and, in the process, discovers Bettina’s astounding works of art and truly amazing past. Brought together by what Bassett describes as “cosmic consciousness,” the filmmaker was attracted to Bettina’s “deep creative understanding,” mystical thinking and complex philosophies. And while due to snubs from the art world and personal demons, her life may not appear to be a conventional success, Bassett believes that it makes for a “more beautiful story.”

Constance, a tribute to Constance Colt Bassett, the filmmaker’s 94-year-old grandmother and muse, is another poetic highlight in the series:

“I wanted to show the legacy of this very great, very dignified, very centered  woman who has always been a great inspiration and love of my life as my grandmother and a friend,” revealed an emotive Bassett.

A refined pistol with a passion for horses and after-dinner drinks, Constance travels to her Geneseo, New York childhood estate and experiences an intense recollection of her former life as a young woman. We see her wisdom, worldliness and marvelously cutting wit as she takes a journey through time and experience. The film is an ode to storytelling and its elegant cinematography more than adequately celebrates the woman Bassett calls Granny. 

The series ends with Stanley Bard, a film that celebrates not only the iconic Hotel Chelsea, but the man who, for half a century, fostered the Hotel as a “creative ecosystem,” for some of the greatest minds of our time. Considering the Hotel’s essential role in this series of films, in Bassett’s artistic career and in the lives of many of his subjects, it’s only appropriate the series will be screened this week on the roof of the Hotel Chelsea.

When asked what common thread holds these philosophical films together, Bassett responded:

“Truth. Truth and love, I would say. And a journey. The journey of life. The journey of one’s spiritual understanding. All the films are different types of people but one can garner little bits of knowledge and perspective from all of them to be able to hopefully grow and learn and make the world a better place. “

It might sound cliché, but after experiencing the journeys of Bassett’s subjects, and more importantly, witnessing the artistic and personal evolution of Bassett himself, it’s difficult to walk away with an unaltered perspective.

To view the trailers, visit Bassett’s website.  The films will be screening for the next seven nights (July 20-26) on the roof of The Hotel Chelsea (222 W.23rd st.). Each screening opens with a cocktail reception from 8:00 to 9:00 PM. One film will be screened each evening starting at dusk or approximately 9:36 PM, A brief audience Q&A with the director and subject following the screening. To RSVP for the event, email alainasimone@sambassett.com and rsapla@groupsjr.com.

A winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and opening at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday the 26th, Afghan Star is an inspired glimpse into modern-day Afghanistan, a country ravaged and stripped down after 30 years of nearly constant war and psychological and territorial oppression. Set in Kabul, it follows eleven contestants battling for a chance for pop stardom in the country’s equivalent of American Idol. Although the setting is different, the well-franchised format is familiar. The film follows the whole cast, from the brave producers of the show, Tolo TV, to the contestants over the course of the tournament. Reserved personal views about the contest’s symbolic nature are revealed, and an insight into the various factions or tribes that still divide the country internally and who effectively rig the votes to support their own candidate. We see the pioneering spirit of the young TV channel, pushing an untested genre within a very young TV studio, and a fleeting look at the more passionate and vocal supporters, such as the Khan family, confident that the very existence of the show is the mark of real change.

The reforming and more modernising aspects of the contest, of women dancing and singing on TV, ends up demonstrating the boundaries surrounding Tolo TV’s venture into global pop culture. The fiery female finalist is expelled, disgraced and has to flee Kabul receiving death threats, the final stage of the contest is threatened by the Taliban, and a law preventing ‘music inspired body movement on screen’ is enforced. A frustrating reminder of what an exhausting parallel universe the Afghani people are being subjected to by what could be seen as an altogether effete political force.

Unavoidable are the comparisons to the $200 million dollar profit slam of Slumdog Millionaire or the glossy vampiric hyper-productions of American evening TV. The message here is more compelling though, and questions the reality of a ‘document’, leaving you wondering if the director, Havana Marking, is dealing with a subject bigger and more profound than her camera and journalistic skills can capture.

A poetic resonance of carefully considered images patiently moves across a rather harsh factual style, revealing the troubling reality of these people, still struggling through the strict divisions and sexual inequalities. There is a sense that the youth of Afghanistan no longer understand the quintessence of their beliefs and there is a suspicion that the nation has been misunderstood and forced into wars and an isolation that the majority of the population does not condone. The faces are so matured by war that you quickly forget the young subjects of this film are still in their early-twenties. Footage of the once vibrant and open city of Kabul in the late 1970s leaves you bewildered and defeated.

Afghan Star is part of a repertoire of thematic films travelling as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Look into My Eyes a examination of Anti-Semitism today by Naftaly Gilksberg, Pray the Devil Back to Hell a Liberian female activist movement story directed by Gini Reticker and Crude a moving documentary about the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ will all be part of this international festival visiting Toronto, San Francisco and New York in June and July.

Luke Myer and Andrew Neel’s New World Order opened at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday.  The film follows various so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ and activists as they pass out flyers outside Ground Zero, cover a Bilderberg Group meeting in Istanbul, and prepare for the imminent collapse of American Civilization in Idaho.  Without narration, New World Order allows the theorists and activists to speak for themselves, for better or for worse, and never attempts to debunk or counter their claims.  The result is disappointing. 

Part of the reason why the film is so underwhelming is that the filmmakers make the choice to not pass judgment, yet simply by grouping these individuals together they affectively classify them as conspiracy theorists, albeit in different shades.  As far as I can tell, there is no real thread linking the film’s subjects other than that most would consider them conspiracy theorists, as one doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to talk about the emergence of a New World Order – the term’s recent popularity come from a George Bush Sr speech in 1991 following the first Gulf War. The film attempts to humanize its subjects but its participants are essentially labeled cranks by association.  The result feels hypocritical and it would have been better if they took their subjects seriously enough to engage them in debate or juxtapose their pronouncements and arguments with those of equally passionate, and sometimes no less bizarre, mainstream commentators. 

Coming to a definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ is difficult.  The dictionary definition is: ‘1. a theory that explains an event as being the result of a plot by a covert group or organization; a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a group. 2. the idea that many important political events or economic and social trends are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.’ The first definition is neutral and could be used to characterize both something like the official 9.11 Commission Report (19 hijackers conspired with Bin Laden) and someone who thinks the events were orchestrated by Cheney from the White House.  The second definition is not really broad enough to cover the various theorists in New World Order.  Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy, claims that most conspiracy theory has three main principles: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything in connected.  He also differentiates between three types of conspiracy theory.  Event conspiracies, which seek to explain a single event by positing a conspiracy of some sort (JFK, 9.11); systemic conspiracies, which try to explain a series of important events by identify a certain group behind the scenes pulling the strings (Bilderberg, Jews, Masons); and super conspiracies, which see certain, sometimes shifting, organizations or cabals to be molding the development of history over a considerable period of time (Illuminati, reptilian humanoids). 

New World Order stars exponents of at least the first two of Barkun’s types.  Mike Edgarton, a 9.11 skeptic from Florida states in the film that he doesn’t care who shot JFK or whether or not NASA astronauts walked on the moon, but is adamant that 9.11 was an inside job. Timuçin Leflef (writer and director of the “cult classic” A.D) and Big Jim Tucker both focus on the Bilderberg Group’s control over recent history.  While some of New World Order’s participants may very well believe in super conspiracies, it is never revealed.  Alex Jones seems to come the closest as one gets the impression that there aren’t many theories of conspiracy he doesn’t buy into (or perhaps sell).

Alex Jones is the dominant presence in New World Order and is perhaps the biggest celebrity of the so-called ‘lunatic fringe.’  He has featured in two Richard Linklater films and through his radio show and Prison Planet and Infowars websites and films, sells books and dvds on everything from how Obama is here ‘to con the American people into accepting global slavery’ to the sex gods worshiped by the Illuminati. Alex Jones describes himself as a paleoconservative and wears a Ron Paul shirt for large portions of the film.  One of the highlights of the documentary is a single shot close up on Jones during his radio show where he does his Officer Jackboot routine to an audibly uncomfortable caller for what feels like three minutes. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of New World Order is that while it certainly achieves its goal of getting the audience to listen to many theorists that most people would dismiss outright, it never deals with many of the most pertinent questions surrounding conspiracy theory. Each participant is asked how they came to dedicate such a large portion of their lives to exposing power, but other than an espousal of a vague will to knowledge generated by a certain traumatic moment of awakening – for Alex Jones it was Waco, for Jack McLamb it was Ruby Ridge, while for others it was their encounter with alternate explanations for the 9.11 attacks like Loose Change – New World Order provides little insight into the origins of these activists and theorists’ positions. 

Christopher Hitchens has claimed that “Conspiracy theory becomes an ailment of democracy.  It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.  To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less.” Conspiracy theory is here not only associated with the vacuity of the public sphere or the distance of political elites from ‘ordinary’ citzens, but the rise in secrecy in all branches of life: as secrecy multiplies so does the fear of conspiracy. While conspiracy theory can obviously be found everywhere, conspiracy theory theorist Peter Knight theorizes that it can perhaps be felt stronger in the US because of American liberalism’s obsession with rugged individual agency and the fear of ‘big government’ and the state in general. I would suggest that it also has to do with the country’s size (both in terms of population and geography) and great disparities of wealth and power.

None of this is covered, never mind elucidated, by New World Order.  Furthermore, very little of the footage cannot be found elsewhere.  These activists are media savvy and a simple youtube search will reveal numerous instances of them saying more or less exactly what they say in the film.  Jon Ronson’s Secret Rulers of the World series on Channel 4 in England met with many of the same theorists (Alex Jones, Jim Tucker) and engaged them with considerable more nuance and humor (the episode David Icke: The Lizards and the Jews, for example, covered the links between conspiracy theory and anti-Semitism while also documenting what Jack Bratich has called ‘conspiracy panics’ was particularly excellent).  Ronson and Alex Jones, both with their own sets of film crews, tried to infiltrate the infamous Bohemian Grove gathering outside of San Francisco and the watching their respective programs is extraordinary.

Conspiracy theory is getting increased coverage as it gains more adherents (or vice versa) and as up to 36% of Americans believing in some government involvement in the 9.11 attacks, it is certainly no longer confined to the absolute margins.  As such, it deserves more seriously treatment than it gets in New World Order.  The trend of books, magazines, and television shows dedicated to debunking various conspiracy theories is probably a good thing, but much more has to be done to understand the attractiveness of these theories, their relation to scholarly standards of research (which is more complex than most people allow), and how one can balance a perspective that allows for the existence of really existing conspiracies within a larger systemic understanding. 

Utopia, of course, is a highly problematic concept, starting with the word itself which, as academics love to point out, is cobbled together from the Greek words for “not” and “place”, the knowing title of Sir Thomas More’s fictional description of an ideal society. The full implications of this wordplay, utopia as no place, might be said to only be fully realized in this past century, which reformulated More’s statement negatively in Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted pronouncement that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” As a riposte, Adorno’s statement is particularly apt in light of architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt’s description of Himmler’s plans for Auschwitz as not only the death camp for which it is now infamous, but “the jewel in his crown of the German East“, an unrealized National Socialist/IG Farben “racial utopia“, to be built with forced labor from the camp. As Michael Rothberg argues, these two “visions” of Auschwitz are not opposing but interrelated. It is this tension between utopia and dystopia, between idealistic aspiration towards an unrealizable goal and despondent realization that there is no goal left to aspire to, is the territory that Utopia in Four Movements attempts to navigate.

As its title suggests, there are four parts to Utopia. The first covers not only More’s neologism and its politically-charged conceptual deployment in the 20th century, but offers a roundabout examination of the same themes in its treatment of the “universal language”, Esperanto. Invented in the late 19th century by a Jewish Polish ophthalmologist in hopes of transcending nationalistic divisions by overcoming language barriers, the most widely spoken planned language becomes here an apolitical analogue for 20th-century revolutionary movements. The language retains a loyal following to this day, but not nearly as large as at its early-20th-century peak, before the xenophobia of World War II and the mutual suspicion of the Cold War chipped away at the optimism that necessarily undergirds its practice. Contemporary practitioners of the language, caught here at the annual World Congress of Esperanto, come across largely as sanguine but inconsequential, excited by the global reach of the language, but realistic about Esperanto’s niche status; a far cry from its utopian conception. Two scenes in particular tease out the hamartia of linguistic utopia: In the first, a Brazilian man plays a song, singing in Esperanto; the song is beautiful, but the words speak of sorrow and suffering. In the second scene, which closes out the segment, Green makes the connection explicit, noting that the brutal ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia occurred between ethnic groups who had little in the way of linguistic barriers.

If, in the end, a common tongue can just as easily amplify our antagonisms as erase them, what hope can there be for explicitly political utopian movements? Utopia‘s middle two movements explore the visions and limitations of modern political ideologies, starting with state communism in “The Revolution”, which surveys the left-wing movement’s legacy from the perspective of one of the few remaining countries with any realistic claim on it, Cuba. Much of the Cuban footage centers on Nehanda Abiodun, an African-American radical living in exile in Havana, wanted back home in connection with the robberies she and her comrades undertook to fund their revolutionary organization. Neither a Cuban citizen nor able to return home, Abiodun is, in a sense, permanently in limbo. She has made a life for herself in Havana, becoming a sort of matriarch to the burgeoning Cuban hip-hop scene, yet she makes clear in the film that hip-hop is more something she understands as a powerful, popular youth movement for encouraging social awareness than it is something she can identify with musically. The footage of her with headphones on, singing along eyes closed to a tape of ’70s Philadelphia soul is perhaps the most touching of the film: The revolutionary, trapped in amber.

In this sense, Abiodun is presented here as a microcosm of Cuba, a country whose “permanent revolution” also seems, at least to outside eyes, trapped in the past. We see, for example, the billboards that dot the roadside, advertising not commodities but the benefits of socialist government. One, in particular, claims that of the hundreds of millions of children in the world who will go to sleep homeless tonight, none of them will be Cuban. As Green notes, this is impressive, and probably true, but with the country’s limited access to the internet (most citizens can neither afford, nor are allowed to own computers) and the outside world, its outdated infrastructure and its authoritarian government, is this all we can hope for?

If capitalism is the offered alternative, then the third segment of Utopia, “The World’s Largest Shopping Mall”, suggests that the outlook is grim. As the title suggests, South China Mall, located in Guangdong province, is unbelievably vast but also unbelievably empty. Built in the heart of Chinese manufacturing territory and only accessible by car, the mall’s aspirations are completely out of sync with its populace, and its failure is at once tragic and comic. In the post-Cold War era, with even supposedly communist countries like China embracing many aspects of global capitalism, Green suggests that the mall is nothing less than our historical moment’s equivalent of utopia, and it is here, at long last, that the word’s Greek roots take their revenge, as the South China Mall might as well not exist for its customers. When we finally discover a pair of visitors, exactly the young, trendy couple that the mall intends to attract, we find out that they are not shopping, but instead mainly like to visit in order to be alone. Instead of shoppers, then, we get to see banners selling the idealized, Chinese version of the consumerist good life juxtaposed with shopkeepers doing their homework and falling asleep out of sheer boredom or, most absurdly of all, mall employees paid to dress up like Teletubbies and animal mascots, dancing and jigging around the empty corridors, ready to entertain customers who will never arrive.

The fantasy of the mall (a wall banner slogan reads “I Enjoy my Mall Life”) is also juxtaposed with the reality of Guangdong’s manufacturing economy and its Special Economic Zones, which are of course the two opposing facets of globalization: deeply interrelated, yet kept as separate as possible. This separation is not only divisive but untenable; factories cannot continue to build products for which there is no market indefinitely, and the sweatshop conditions of factory employment conspire to deprive the area of a middle class capable of filling the South China Mall with the upwardly mobile customers it so desperately needs. As the global recession continues apace, one can only imagine what straits the mall, its 2009 rebranding as the “New” South China Mall carrying more than a whiff of desperation about it, finds itself in today.

As goes the mall, so does the world, particularly in the age of globalization. While it seems likely right now that capitalism in its cyclical nature will once again somehow bounce back, the current economic crisis serves as a timely reminder that, as a political-economic system and in spite of post-Cold War rhetoric, it is far from utopian. Utopia‘s fourth movement, “Requiem for the 20th Century”, then, surveys this landscape from both the unrealized utopias of the past and the delayed millenarianism of our present moment; in so doing, it runs up against the same problematic that has troubled progressive intellectuals since at least the failed global student movements of 1968, if not Thomas More: How do you aim for (or even define) progress, when the goal itself is obviously unattainable? Green’s response is somber, realistic, and not to be spoiled here, as the film (actually a Keynote presentation accompanied by live narration from Green and others) really ought to be seen. Instead, perhaps now is the time to return to Adorno’s oft-misinterpreted statement; as Rothberg also points out, Adorno returned to and qualified this statement a number of times, writing for example in an essay, “Commitment”, “that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism.”

In a sense then, Adorno’s statment is not a moratorium, but a challenge to the entirety of the humanistic enterprise in the face of unbelievable odds. In intellectual terms, the 20th century is notorious, both in Adorno’s work and more generally, as being the graveyard of the Enlightenment, the death spasm of the rational argument on the altar of all-too-human foibles like greed, power and tribal identification. Yet standing here, now, knowing this, we can no more give up hope than we can abandon reason, and this is the challenge which is put to not only poetry but all art, politics, and, ultimately, history itself. Or, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Whether utopia may be a goal or an unending journey, however, Green’s Utopia is undoubtedly one step in the right direction.

I just found out that Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo opened in New York on Friday and since it probably won’t be out for long I’m rushing this post.  I’m not familiar with Sorrentino’s earlier work and I saw the film too long ago to review it properly.  This is intended as more of a primer of sorts that introduces some of the background that made the film so fascinating for me.

Il Divo’s working title was ‘Untitled Giulio Andreotti Biopic’ and it’s full Italian title ‘Il Divo: La straordinaria vita di Giulio Andreotti’.  Andreotti has been one of the most dominant figures in post-war Italian politics, prime minister and head of the Christian Democratic Party on multiple occasions, and is still politically active at the age of ninety.  He has also been the subject of numerous criminal investigations: everything from corruption to mafia ties to murder.  He unsurprisingly walked out on the film, which in one of its best scenes shows Andreotti kissing a mafia boss, and his comments can be read here.

I had no idea what to expect when I want to see the film and from the beginning it felt like a heavily stylized political thriller.  The opening sequences shows the deaths or murders of a dozen or so of Italy’s prominent politicians, bankers, and journalists set to that Cassius track “Toop Toop.” It is often too self-consciously ‘cool’ for its own good and the framing and camera movement fall victim to the “empty aestheticism” named by Deleuze in his Cinema 1. I imagine the extent to which this affects the viewer’s enjoyment of the film varies considerably. I found it slightly annoying but I didn’t hold it against the film as a whole, which I continue to think about months after seeing it. 

Il Divo is more of a biopic, although certainly not a traditional one, than a political thriller and what is most interesting about it is the way it tries to make sense of three tumultuous decades of Italian politics.  Despite making an attempt to provide the viewer with some historical context, is largely incomprehensible without at least a basic knowledge of post-war Italian history, particularly the so called anni di piombo (“years of lead”), called so because of the staggering level of political violence in the long decade that stretched from 1969-1980.  While terrorism was highly visible throughout Europe and the world over this period, in Italy the sheer number of terrorist attacks is shocking: over 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence during these years, with 1,926 attacks in 1977 followed by 2,379 in 1978, perpetrated by both extremes of the political spectrum – at times with the assistance of elements within the state, especially the secret services.  Victims – 356 dead and over 1,000 wounded in the two decades following 1969 – included not only civilians but judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, bankers, and even a Prime Minister in 1978.  There is great difficulty in getting at what was actually happening, as one has to sift through a myriad of texts that read either like conspiracy theories or state propaganda.  One account seems reliable enough until it claims that Antonio Negri is probably a CIA agent, another until it claims that the state is incapable of engaging in anything nefarious. Rather than summarizing this long decade and its myriad cast of characters, a collage of some of its more colorful highlights bits should amply demonstrate its character. 

·     On December 12, 1969 a series of coordinated bombs go off at the Bank of Agriculture in Milan’s Piazza Fontana and in Rome, killing thirteen and injuring just under a hundred.  Over four thousand people are arrested in total: many of them anarchists.  One, Giuseppe Pinelli, dies in police custody after he ‘jumps’ out of a fourth-story window.  After he dies in the hospital an hour later the police declare him guilty.  Another anarchist, Pietro Valpreda, is arrested and sentenced despite constantly proclaiming his innocence, only to be exonerated almost twenty years later.  The whole time many on the left suspect the fascists in league with the police or secret services as having perpetrated the attack (until 1974 most of the left believed the acts of terror were right/state provocations).  It later comes out these sentiments were at least half right as the extreme right is eventually held responsible.  Their rationale was to frame the left and provoke the state into wielding its repressive powers. 

·     A bombing during a union and anti-fascist protest in Brescia on May 28^th, 1974 kills eight and injures 94.  In August of the same year the bombing of the Italicus express train kills twelve and injures just over a hundred. 

·     On March 16^th, 1978 Christian Democrat Party leader Aldo Moro is kidnapped with “military precision” and held for over a month and a half by the Red Brigades.  The recent Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, then an academic at the University of Bologna, takes part in a séance during which the ghost of the recently deceased Christian Democrat politician Giorgio La Pira tells the group three locations where Moro is being held – one of which turned out to be a Red Brigade hideout but not Moro’s prison.  The powers that be (including Andreotti) refuse to negotiate for his release and Moro’s correspondence shows he feels increasingly isolated and betrayed by his former friends and colleagues.  Moro had been lobbying for a “historic compromise” that would bring the Communists into a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and was on his way to announce this coalition when he was kidnapped.  On May 9^th, 1978, Moro’s body is found in the boot of a car in Rome, halfway between the Christian Democrat and Communists party headquarters.  The police and government investigations before and after his murder are filled with inadequacies, blunders, and suspicious decisions.  Andreotti has been linked to playing a role in the kidnapping.

·     On August 2, 1980 the Bologna railway station is bombed, killing 85 and injuring over 200.  Far right group Ordine Nuovo is accused of the massacre. 

·     In 1981, a police raid on the office of Licio Gelli uncovers the existence of Propaganda Due, P2.  P2 is a clandestine Italian section of the world’s largest secret society, the Freemasons.  A membership list is found listing nearly one thousand names including cabinet ministers, MPs, army officers, bankers, industrialists, judges, Silvio Berlusconi, newspaper editors, civil servants, the leadership – including the heads – of the secret services, and politicians of all the major parties except the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the Radicals.  There were also known international, rightwing terrorists such as Stefano Delle Chiaie, who is connected to fascist bombings in Italy, as well as Operation Condor in South America.  Considered by many to be a “shadow cabinet”, “the real scope of the group was the creation of an organization, which would allow for the control of entire sectors of Italian life and the economy.”  It is linked to the control of newspapers, illegal arms and drug trafficking, Mafia hits, the corruption of magistrates (many of whom were members),  and many of the terror attacks mentioned above, among other things. Gelli, P2′s head, was invited to the inaugurations of Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

·     Roberto Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano, known as “God’s banker” because of his ties to the Vatican, is found dead, hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.  The police initially classify it as a suicide but later as a murder.  Considered by some to be P2’s financial arm, Calvi’s pockets were filled with five kilos of bricks and stones (i.e. masonry) and purportedly members of P2 refer to themselves as “black friars”.  His death has been linked not only to the Vatican, but the Mafia and P2.

·     In October 1990 Prime Minister Andreotti admits the existence of Operation Gladio, a so-called stay behind army created by NATO together with the CIA and MI6 in 1956 (the French version was called Rose des Vents).   Organized as a sleeper army of sorts that would spring into action only in the occurrence of a Soviet invasion, it was staffed largely with ex- and neo-fascists as their anti-Communists credentials made them to be considered trustworthy.  Gladio never really lay dormant and soon after its creation began targeting the left within Italy.  It is also linked with many of the terror attacks listed above. 

The two key concepts that need to be understood in order to build a narrative around these events are the “historic compromise” and the “strategy of tension”.  Italy had the largest communist party of any Western democracy but despite getting large percentages of the popular vote, up to thirty-four percent of the vote in 1976, they had never been part of a ruling government coalition.  In short, the historic compromise refers to the movement towards a coalition government in Italy between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party, meant to save Italy from the social, economic, and political crises of the 1970s.  Opposition to this move came from both extremes of the political spectrum, as well as from the United States.  In a sense the opposite of the historic compromise is the “strategy of tension,” the existence of which, long disputed as a construction of paranoid leftists, is now more or less universally acknowledged.  With the growth in power of the left and the possibility of the Communists joining the government, “military circles began to fear the new climate, and forged closer links with the extreme right.  The strategy was predicated on the basis of spreading a climate of fear (through indiscriminate terrorist attacks), to provide a perceived necessity for a restoration of public order, either through a coup or through the political consequences following from an awareness by politicians of preparations for a coup.”  There were two main phases of the strategy of tension.  The first involved cooperation between the secret services in the far right and was encouraged by Washington (Fun Fact: the CIA’s first assignment after its creation was to make sure the Communists, who were Soviet-funded, didn’t win the 1948 Italian election).  The second began in the mid-seventies when the notion of a coup and institution of a far-right government seemed less appealing to both Washington and many Italian elites and the secret services half-heartedly attempted to reign in the indiscriminate terror.  During this period the extreme right found sanctuary in P2 as a part of Gelli’s ‘Plan for Democratic Renewal’, which also tried to create the conditions that would make a coup seemingly necessary. 

While Moro, Gelli, and Calvi all have bit parts in Il Divo, which is mostly concerned with Andreotti’s links to the mafia, these stories and scandals are so coupled to Andreotti’s Italy (Moro’s execution in particular) that they’re constantly lurking in the background of the film’s main narrative.  Il Divo  – intentionally or not – frames the tremendous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of knowing the truth of Italian politics.  Its building a narrative around on individuals and their relations – as opposed to historical forces and largely without revealing motivations, other than a vague thirst for power/money – reminded me of Mark Lombardi’s graph  Inner Sanctum: The Pope and His Bankers Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and trying to merely follow Il Divo without a familiarity with Andreotti’s biography is like trying to understand the Calvi affair during the three minutes one has to study Lombardi’s graph at a gallery opening. Sorrentino’s film does not have the trapping of an expose and seems to be aware about the fact that it will not be able to reveal the truth of Andreotti’s life and relationships.  Dozens of books have been written and several trials have taken place and Andreotti still sits in the Italian senate.  The film succeeds in drawing the viewer’s attention to the lack of transparency (which almost sounds like a euphemism all things considered) in Italian politics. You get the feeling that things cannot be as fucked up at Sorrentino has made them out to be but quickly remember that what he focuses on is just the tip of the iceberg.